Interview With The Vampire 


By 

Anne Rice 


" SENSUOUS, THRILLING, WONDERLUL " SENSUOUS, 
THRILLING, WONDERLUL! " Houston Chronicle 

" SENSATIONAL AND LANTASTIC... WOVEN WITH UNCANNY 
MAGIC . . . hypnotically poetic in tone, rich in sensory imagery and 
dense with the darkness that lies behind the veil of human thought. 

St. Luis Post-Dispatch 

" UNUSUALLY MOVING. " Miami Herald 

" Anne Rice is a writer who follows a hidden path... into an 
unfamiliar world. But if you surrender and go with her on her eerie 
journey, you will find that you have surrendered to enchantment, as if 
in a voluptuous dream. " The Boston Globe 

" A MASTERLUL SUSPENSE STORY... Prom the beginning we are 
seduced, hypnotized by the voice of the vampire .... plumbs the 
deepest recesses of human sensuality: " Chicago Tribune 

" A BONAPIDE BLOCKBUSTER . . . AUDACIOUS, EROTIC, 
AND UNFORGETTABLE . . . An unmitigated terror trip not meant 
for the weak of heart. Seldom before has this mythical being been so 
explored and exposed. The imaginative plot plunges you into the 
world of the undead and leads you on a journey that begins in the New 
Orleans of 200 years ago. The author's . . . vampire gives a first 
person account of his past. His ghastly initiation into the netherworld 
is as mesmeric as is the discovery he is not alone in the nightly search 
for warm fresh blood. " The Cincinnati Enquirer 



PARTI 


" I see . . said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked 
across the room towards the window. For a long time he stood there 
against the dim light from Divisadero Street and the passing beams of 
traffic. The boy could see the furnishings of the room more clearly 
now, the round oak table, the chairs. A wash basin hung on one wall 
with a mirror. He set his brief case on the table and waited. 

" But how much tape do you have with you? " asked the vampire, 
turning now so the boy could see his profile. " Enough for the story of 
a life? " 

" Sure, if it's a good life. Sometimes I interview as many as three or 
four people a night if I'm lucky. But it has to be a good story. That's 
only fair, isn't it? 

" Admirably fair," the vampire answered. " I would like to tell you 
the story of my life, then. I would like to do that very much. 

" Great," said the boy. And quickly he removed the small tape 
recorder from his brief case, making a check of the cassette and the 
batteries. " I'm really anxious to hear why you believe this, why you . . 

It 

" No," said the vampire abruptly. " We can't begin that way. Is your 
equipment ready? 

" Yes," said the boy. 

" Then sit down. I'm going to turn on the overhead light. 

" But I thought vampires didn't like light," said the boy. " If you 
think the dark adds to the atmosphere. 

" But then he stopped. The vampire was watching him with his back 
to the window. The boy could make out nothing of his face now, and 
something about the still figure there distracted him. He started to say 
something again but he said nothing. And then he sighed with relief 
when the vampire moved towards the table and reached for the 
overhead cord. At once the room was flooded with a harsh yellow 
light. And the boy, staring up at the vampire, could not repress a gasp. 
His fingers danced backwards on the table to grasp the edge. " Dear 
God! " he whispered, and then he gazed, speechless, at the vampire. 
The vampire was utterly white and smooth, as if he were sculpted from 
bleached bone, and his face was as seemingly inanimate as a statue, 
except for two brilliant green eyes that looked down at the boy intently 
like flames in a skull. But then the vampire smiled almost wistfully, 
and the smooth white substance of his face moved with the infinitely 
flexible but minimal lines of a cartoon. " Do you see? " he asked 
softly. The boy shuddered, lifting his hand as if to shield himself from 


1 



a powerful light. His eyes moved slowly over the finely tailored black 
coat he'd only glimpsed in the bar, the long folds of the cape, the black 
silk tie knotted at the throat, and the gleam of the white collar that was 
as white as the vampire's flesh. He stared at the vampire's full black 
hair, the waves that were combed back over the tips of the ears, the 
curls that barely touched the edge of the white collar. 

" Now, do you still want the interview? " the vampire asked. The 
boy's mouth was open before the sound came out. He was nodding. 
Then he said," Yes. " The vampire sat down slowly opposite him and, 
leaning forward, said gently, confidentially," Don't be afraid. Just 
start the tape. " And then he reached out over the length of the table. 
The boy recoiled, sweat running down the sides of his face. The 
vampire clamped a hand on the boy's shoulder and said," Believe me, 

I won't hurt you. I want this opportunity. It's more important to me 
than you can realize now. I want you to begin. " And he withdrew his 
hand and sat collected, waiting. It took a moment for the boy to wipe 
his forehead and his lips with a handkerchief, to stammer that the 
microphone was in the machine, to press the button, to say that the 
machine was on. 

" You weren't always a vampire, were you? " he began. 

" No," answered the vampire. " I was a twenty-five year-old man 
when I became a vampire, and the year was seventeen ninety-one. 

The boy was startled by the preciseness of the date and he repeated it 
before he asked," How did it come about? 

" There's a simple answer to that. I don't believe I want to give 
simple answers," said the vampire. " I think I want to tell the real 
story. . . 

" Yes," the boy said quickly. He was folding his handkerchief over 
and over and wiping his lips now with it again. 

" There was a tragedy..." the vampire started. " It was my 
younger brother .... He died. " And then he stopped, so that the 
boy cleared his throat and wiped at his face again before stuffing the 
handkerchief almost impatiently into his pocket. 

" It's not painful, is it? " he asked timidly. 

" Does it seem so? " asked the vampire. " No. " He shook his head. 
It's simply that I've only told this story to one other person. And that 
was so long ago. No, it's not pa' 

" We were living, in Louisiana then. We'd received a land grant and 
settled two indigo plantations on the Mississippi very near New 
Orleans . ... " 

" Ah, that's the accent..." the boy said softly. For a moment the 
vampire stared blankly. " I have an accent? " He began to laugh. And 


2 



the boy, flustered, answered quickly. " I noticed it in the bar when I 
asked you what you did for a living. It's just a slight sharpness to the 
consonants, that's all. I never guessed it was French. 

" It's all right," the vampire assured him. " ran not as shocked as I 
pretend to be. It's only that I forget it from time to time. But let me 
go on. . . . ' 

" Please . . " said the boy. 

" I was talking about the plantations. They had a great deal to do 
with it, really, my becoming a vampire. But I'll come to that. Our life 
there was both luxurious and primitive. And we ourselves found it 
extremely attractive. You see, we lived far better there than we could 
have ever lived in France. Perhaps the sheer wilderness of Louisiana 
only made it seem so, but seeming so, it was. I remember the 
imported furniture that cluttered the house. " The vampire smiled. 

" And the harpsichord; that was lovely. My sister used to play it. On 
summer evenings, she would sit at the keys with her back to the open 
French windows. And I can still remember that thin, rapid music and 
the vision of the swamp rising beyond her, the moss-hung cypresses 
floating against the sky. And there were the sounds of the swamp, a 
chorus of creatures, the cry of the birds. I think we loved it. It made 
the rosewood furniture all the more precious, the music more delicate 
and desirable. Even when the wisteria tore the shutters oft the attic 
windows and worked its tendrils right into the whitewashed brick in 
less than a year .... Yes, we loved it. All except my brother. I don't 
think I ever heard him complain of anything, but I knew how he felt. 
My father was dead then, and I was head of the family and I had to 
defend him constantly from my mother and sister. They wanted to 
take him visiting, and to New Orleans for parties, but he hated these 
things. I think he stopped going altogether before he was twelve: 
Prayer was what mattered to him, prayer and his leather-bound lives 
of the saints. 

" Finally I built him an oratory removed from the house, and he 
began to spend most of every day there and often the early evening. It 
was ironic, really. He was so different from us, so different from 
everyone, and I was so regular! There was nothing extraordinary 
about me whatsoever. " The vampire smiled. 

" Sometimes in the evening I would go out to him and find him in 
the garden near the oratory, sitting absolutely composed on a stone 
bench there, and I'd tell him my troubles, the difficulties I had with the 
slaves, how I distrusted the overseer or the weather or my brokers . . . 
all the problems that made up the length and breadth of my existence. 
And he would listen, making only a few comments, always 


3 



sympathetic, so that when I left him I had the distinct impression he 
bad solved everything for me. I didn't think I could deny him 
anything, and I vowed that no matter how it would break my heart to 
lose him, he could enter the priesthood when the time came. Of 
course, I was wrong. " The vampire stopped. For a moment the boy 
only gazed at him and then he started as if awakened from deep 
thought, and he floundered, as if he could not find the right words. 

Ali. he didn't want to be a priest? " the boy asked. The vampire 
studied him as if trying to discern the meaning of his expression. Then 
he said: 

" I meant that I was wrong about myself, about my not denying him 
anything. " His eyes moved over the far wall and fixed on the panes of 
the window. " He began to see visions. 

" Real visions? " the boy asked, but again there was hesitation, as if 
he were thinking of something else. 

" I didn't think so," the vampire answered. It happened when he was 
fifteen. He was very handsome then. He had the smoothest skin and 
the largest blue eyes. He was robust, not thin as I am now and was 
then . . . but his eyes ... it was as if when I looked into his eyes I 
was standing alone on the edge of the world ... on a windswept 
ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves. Well," 
he said, his eyes still fixed on the window panes," he began to see 
visions. He only hinted at this at first, and he stopped taking his meals 
altogether. He lived in the oratory. At any hour of day or night, I 
could find him on the bare flagstones kneeling before the altar. And 
the oratory itself was neglected. He stopped tending the candles or 
changing the altar cloths or even sweeping out the leaves. One night I 
became really alarmed when I stood in the rose arbor watching him for 
one solid hour, during which he never moved from his knees and 
never once lowered his arms, which he held outstretched in the form 
of a cross. The slaves all thought he was mad. " The vampire raised his 
eyebrows in wonder. " I was convinced that he was only. . . 
overzealous. That in his love for God, he had perhaps gone too far. 
Then he told me about the visions. Both St. Dominic and the Blessed 
Virgin Mary had come to him in the oratory. They had told him he 
was to sell all our property in Louisiana, everything we owned, and use 
the money to do God's work in France. My brother was to be a great 
religious leader, to return the country to its former fervor, to turn the 
tide against atheism and the Revolution. Of course, he had no money 
of his own. I was to sell the plantations and our town houses in New 
Orleans and give the money to him. " Again the vampire stopped. 

And the boy sat motionless regarding him, astonished. 


4 



" Ali. . . excuse me," he whispered. " What did you say? Did you 
sell the plantations? 

" No," said the vampire, his face calm as it had been from the start. 

I laughed at him. And he ... he became incensed. He insisted his 
command came from the Virgin herself. Who was I to disregard it? 
Who indeed? " he asked softly, as if he were thinking of this again. 
Who indeed? And the more he tried to convince me, the more I 
laughed. It was nonsense, I told him, the product of an immature and 
even morbid mind. The oratory was a mistake, I said to him; I would 
have it torn down at once. He would go to school in New Orleans and 
get such inane notions out of his head. I don't remember all that I 
said. But I remember the feeling. Behind all this contemptuous 
dismissal on my part was a smoldering anger and a disappointment. I 
was bitterly disappointed. I didn't believe him at all. 

" But that's understandable," said the boy quickly when the vampire 
paused, his expression of astonishment softening. " I mean, would 
anyone have believed him? 

" Is it so understandable? " The vampire looked at the boy. " I think 
perhaps it was vicious egotism. Let me explain. I loved my brother, as 
I told you, and at times I believed him to be a living saint. I 
encouraged him in his prayer and meditations, as I said, and I was 
willing to give him up to the priesthood. And if someone had told me 
of a saint in Arles or Lourdes who saw visions, I would have believed 
it. I was a Catholic; I believed in saints. I lit tapers before their marble 
statues in churches; I knew their pictures, their symbols, their names. 
But I didn't, couldn't believe my brother. Not only did I not believe he 
saw visions, I couldn't entertain the notion for a moment. Now, why? 
Because he was my brother. Holy he might be, peculiar most 
definitely; but Francis of Assisi, no. Not my brother. No brother of 
mine could be such. That is egotism. Do you see? " The boy thought 
about it before he answered and then he nodded and said that yes, he 
thought that he did. 

" Perhaps he saw the visions," said the vampire. 

" Then you . . . you don't claim to know . . . now . . . whether he 
did not? 

" No, but I do know that he never wavered in his conviction for a 
second. That I know now and knew then the night he left my room 
crazed and grieved. He never wavered for an instant. And within 
minutes, he was dead. 

" How? " the boy asked. 

" He simply w out of the French doors onto the gallery and stood for 
a moment at the head of the brick stairs. And then he fell. He was 


5 



dead when I reached the bottom, his neck broken. " The vampire 
shook his head in consternation, but his face was still serene. 

" 'Did you see him fall? " asked the boy. " Did he lose his footing? 

" No, but two of the servants saw it happen. They said that he had 
looked up as if he had just seen something in the air. Then his entire 
body moved forward as if being swept by a wind. One of them said he 
was about to say something when he fell. I thought that he was about 
to say something too, but it was at that moment I turned away from 
the window. My back was turned when I heard the noise. " He 
glanced at the tape recorder. " I could not forgive myself. I felt 
responsible for his death," he said. " And everyone else seemed to 
think I was responsible also. 

" But how could they? You said they saw him fall" 

" It wasn't a direct accusation. They simply knew that something had 
passed between us that was unpleasant. That we had argued minutes 
before the fall. 

" The servants had heard us, my mother had heard us. My mother 
would not stop asking me what had happened and why my brother, 
who was so quiet, had been shouting. Then my sister joined in, and of 
course I refused to say. I was so bitterly shocked and miserable that I 
had no patience with anyone, only the vague determination they 
would not know about his 'visions.' They would not know that he had 
become, finally, not a saint, but only a . . fanatic. My sister went to 
bed rather than face the funeral, and my mother told everyone in. the 
parish that something horrible had happened in my room which I 
would not reveal; and even the police questioned me, on the word of 
my own mother. Finally the priest came to see me and demanded to 
know what had gone on. I told no one. It was only a discussion, I 
said: I was not on the gallery when he fell, I protested, and they all 
stared at me as if rd killed him. And I felt that I'd killed him. I sat in 
the parlor beside his coffin for two days thinking, I have killed him. I 
stared at his face until spots appeared before my eyes and I nearly 
fainted. The back of his skull had been shattered on the pavement, 
and his head had the wrong shape on the pillow. I forced myself to 
stare at it, to study it simply because I could hardly endure the pain 
and the smell (r)f decay, and I was tempted over and over to try to 
open his eyes. All these were mad thoughts, mad impulses. The main 
thought was this: I had laughed at him; I had not believed him; I had 
not been kind to him. He had fallen because of me. 

" This really happened, didn't it? " the boy whispered. " You're 
telling me something . .that's true. 


6 



" Yes," said the vampire, looking at him without surprise. " I want to 
go on telling you. " But as his eyes passed over the boy and returned to 
the window, he showed only faint interest in the boy, who seemed 
engaged in some silent inner struggle. 

" But you said you didn't know about the visions, that you, a vampire 
. . . didn't know for certain whether . . 

" I want to take things in order," said the vampire," I want to go on 
telling you things as they happened. 

" No, I don't know about the visions. To this day. " And again he 
waited until the boy said. 

" Yes, please, please go on. 

" Well, I wanted to sell the plantations. I never wanted to see the 
house or the oratory again. I leased them finally to an agency which 
would work them for me and manage things so I need never go there, 
and I moved my mother and sister to one of the town houses in New 
Orleans. Of course, I did not escape my brother for a moment. I 
could think of nothing but his body rotting in the ground. He was 
buried in the St. Louis cemetery in New Orleans, and I did everything 
to avoid passing those gates; but still I thought of him constantly. . 
Drunk or sober, I saw his body rotting in the coin, and I couldn't bear 
it. Over and over I dreamed that he was at the head of the steps and I 
was holding his arm, talking kindly to him, urging him back into the 
bedroom, telling him gently that I did believe him, that he must pray 
for me to have faith. Meantime, the slaves on Pointe du Lac (that was 
my plantation) had begun to talk of seeing his ghost on the gallery, 
and the overseer couldn't keep order. People in society asked my sister 
offensive questions about the whole incident, and she became an 
hysteric. She wasn't really an hysteric. She simply thought she ought 
to react that way, so she did. I drank all the time and was at home as 
little as possible. I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no 
courage to do it himself. I walked black streets and alleys alone; I 
passed out in cabarets. I backed out of two duels more from apathy 
than cowardice and truly wished to be murdered. And then I was 
attacked. It might have been anyone-and my invitation was open to 
sailors, thieves, maniacs, anyone. But it was a vampire. He caught me 
lust a few steps from my door one night and left me for dead, or so I 
thought. 

" You mean ... he sucked your, blood? " the boy asked. 

" Yes," the vampire laughed. " He sucked my blood. That is the way 
it's done. 

" But you lived," said the young man. " You said he left you for 
dead. " 


7 



" Well, he drained me almost to the point of death, which was for 
him sufficient. I was put to bed as soon as I was found, confused and 
really unaware of what had happened to me. I suppose I thought that 
drink had finally caused a stroke. I expected to die now and had no 
interest in eating of drinking or talking to the doctor. My mother sent 
for the priest. I was feverish by then and I told the priest everything, 
all about my brother's visions and what I had done. I remember I 
clung to his arm, making him swear over and over he would tell no 
one. 'I know I didn't kill him,' I said to the priest finally. 'It's that I 
cannot live now that he's dead. Not after the way I treated him.' 

" 'That's ridiculous,' he answered me. 'Of course you can live. 

There's nothing wrong with you but self-indulgence. Your mother 
needs you, not to mention your sister. And as for this brother of 
yours, he was possessed of the devil.' I was so stunned when he said 
this I couldn't protest. The devil made the visions, he went on to 
explain. The devil was rampant. The entire country of France was 
under the influence of the devil, and. the Revolution had been his 
greatest triumph. Nothing would have saved my brother but 
exorcism, prayer, and fasting, men to hold him down while the devil 
raged in his body and tried to throw him about. 'The devil threw him 
down the steps; it’s perfectly obvious,’ he declared. 'You weren't 
talking to your brother in that room, you were talking to the devil.' 
Well, this enraged me. I believed before that I had been pushed to my 
limits, but I had not. He went on talking about the devil, about 
voodoo amongst the slaves and cases of possession in other parts of the 
world. And I went wild. I wrecked the room in the process of nearly 
killing him. 

" But your strength . . . the vampire . . .? " asked the boy. 

" I was out of my mind," the vampire explained. " I did things I 
could not have done in perfect health. The scene is confused, pale, 
fantastical now. But I do remember that I drove him out of the back 
doors of the house, across the courtyard, and against the brick wall of 
the kitchen, where I pounded his head until I nearly killed him. When 
I was subdued finally, and exhausted then almost to the point of death, 
they bled me. The fools. But I was going to say something else. It was 
then that I conceived of my own egotism. Perhaps I'd seen it reflected 
in the priest. His contemptuous attitude towards my brother reflected 
my own; his immediate and shallow carping about the devil; his refusal 
to even entertain the idea that sanctity had passed so close. 

" But he did believe in possession by the devil. 

" That is a much more mundane idea," said the vampire 
immediately. " People who cease to believe in God or goodness 


8 



altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed 
know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult. 
But you must understand, possession is really another way of saying 
someone is mad. I felt it was, for the priest. I'm sure he'd seen 
madness. Perhaps he had stood right over raving madness and 
pronounced it possession. You don't have to see Satan when he is 
exorcised. But to stand in the presence of a saint. . . To believe that 
the saint has seen a vision. No, it's egotism, our refusal to believe it 
could occur in our midst. 

" I never thought of it in that way," said the boy. " But what 
happened to you? You said they bled you to cure you, and that must 
have nearly killed you. " The vampire laughed. " Yes. It certainly did. 
But the vampire came back that night. You see, he wanted Pointe du 
Lac, my plantation. 

" It was very late, after my sister had fallen asleep. I can remember it 
as if it were yesterday. He came in from the courtyard, opening the 
French doors without a sound, a tall fair-skinned man with a mass of 
blond hair and a graceful, almost feline quality to his movements. 

And gently, he draped a shawl over my sister's eyes and lowered the 
wick of the lamp. She dozed there beside the basin and the cloth with 
which she'd bathed my forehead, and she ,never once stirred under 
that shawl until morning. But by that time I was greatly changed. 

" What was this change? " asked the boy. The vampire sighed. He 
leaned back against the chair and looked at the walls. 

" At first I thought he was another doctor, or someone summoned by 
the family to try to reason with me. But this suspicion was removed at 
once. He stepped close to my bed and leaned down so that his face 
was in the lamplight, and I saw that he was no ordinary man at all. His 
gray eyes burned with an incandescence, and the long white hands 
which hung by his sides were not those of a human being. I think I 
knew everything in that instant, and all that he told me was only 
aftermath. What I mean is, the moment I saw him, saw his 
extraordinary aura and knew him to be no creature I'd ever known, I 
was reduced to nothing. That ego which could not accept the presence 
of an extraordinary human being in its midst was crushed. All my 
conceptions, even my guilt and wish to die, seemed utterly 
unimportant. I completely forgot myself! " he said, now silently 
touching his breast with his fist. " I forgot myself totally. And in the 
same instant knew totally the meaning of possibility. From then on I 
experienced only increasing wonder. As he talked to me and told me 
of what I might become, of what his life had been and stood to be, my 
past shrank to embers. I saw my life as if I stood apart from it, the 


9 



vanity, the self-serving, the constant fleeing from one petty annoyance 
after another, the lip service to God and the Virgin and a host of saints 
whose names filled my prayer books, none of whom made the slightest 
difference in a narrow, materialistic, and selfish existence. I saw my 
real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in 
conformity. Cinders. " The boy's face was tense with a mixture of 
confusion and amazement. " And so you decided to become a 
vampire? " he asked. The vampire was silent for a moment. 

" Decided. It doesn't seem the right word. Yet I cannot say it was 
inevitable from the moment that he stepped into that room. No, 
indeed, it was not inevitable. Yet I can't say I decided. Let me say that 
when he'd finished speaking, no other decision was possible for me, 
and I pursued my course without a backward glance. Except for one. 

t! 

" Except for one? What? 

" My last sunrise," said the vampire. " That morning, I was not yet a 
vampire. And I saw my last sunrise. 

" I remember it completely; yet I do not think I remember any other 
sunrise before it. I remember the light came first to the tops of the 
French windows, a paling behind the lace curtains, and then a gleam 
growing brighter and brighter in patches among the leaves of the trees. 
Finally the sun came through the windows themselves and the lace lay 
in shadows on the stone floor, and all over the form of my sister, who 
was still sleeping, shadows of lace on the shawl over her shoulders and 
head. As soon as she was warm, she pushed the shawl away without 
awakening, and then the sun shone full on her eyes and she tightened 
her eyelids. Then it was gleaming on the table where she rested her 
head on her arms, and gleaming, blazing, in the water in the pitcher. 
And I could feel it on my hands on the counterpane and then on my 
face. I lay in the bed thinking about all the things the vampire had told 
me, and then it was that I said good-bye to the sunrise and went out to 
become a vampire. It was . . . the last sunrise. " The vampire was 
looking out the window again. And when he stopped, the silence was 
so sudden the boy seemed to hear it. Then he could hear the noises 
from the street. The sound of a truck was deafening. The light cord 
stirred with the vibration. Then the truck was gone. 

" Do you miss it? " he asked then in a small voice. 

" Not really," said the vampire. " There are so many other things. 

But where were we? You want to know how it happened, how I 
became a vampire. 

" Yes," said the boy. " How did you change, exactly? 


10 



" I can't tell you exactly," said the vampire. " I can tell you about it, 
enclose it with words that will make the value of it to me evident to 
you. But I can't tell you exactly, any more than I could tell you exactly 
what is the experience of sex if you have never had it. " The young 
man seemed struck suddenly with still another question, but before he 
could speak the vampire went on. " As I told you, this vampire Lestat, 
wanted the plantation. A mundane reason, surely, for granting me a 
life which will last until the end of the world; but he was not a very 
discriminating person. He didn't consider the world's small 
population of vampires as being a select club, I should say. He had 
human problems, a blind father who did not know his son was a 
vampire and must not find out. Living in New Orleans had become 
too difficult for him, considering his needs and the necessity to care 
for his father, and he wanted Pointe du Lac. 

"We went at once to the plantation the next evening, ensconced the 
blind father in the master bedroom, and I proceeded to make the 
change. I cannot say that it consisted in any one step really-though 
one, of course, was the step beyond which I could make no return. 

But there were several acts involved, and the first was the death of the 
overseer. Lestat took him in his sleep. I was to watch and to approve; 
that is, to witness the taking of a human life as proof of my 
commitment and part of my change. This proved without doubt the 
most difficult part for me. I've told you I had no fear regarding my 
own death, only a squeamishness about taking my life myself. But I 
had a most high regard for the life of others, and a horror of death 
most recently developed because of my brother. I had to watch the 
overseer awake with a start, try to throw oft Lestat with both hands, 
fail, then lie there struggling under Lestat's grasp, and finally go limp, 
drained of blood. And die. He did not die at once. We stood in his 
narrow bedroom for the better part of an hour watching him die. Part 
of my change, as I said. Lestat would never have stayed otherwise. 
Then it was necessary to get rid of the overseer's body. I was almost 
sick from this. Weak and feverish already, I had little reserve; and 
handling the dead body with such a purpose caused me nausea,. Lestat 
was laughing, telling me callously that I would feel so different once I 
was a vampire that I would laugh, too. He was wrong about that. I 
never laugh at death, no matter how often and regularly I am the cause 
of it. 

" But let me take things in order. We had to drive up the river road 
until we came to open fields and leave the overseer there. We tore his 
coat, stole his money, and saw to it his- lips were stained with liquor. I 
knew his wife, who lived in New Orleans, and knew the state of 


11 



desperation she would suffer when the body was discovered. But more 
than sorrow for her, I felt pain that she would never know what had 
happened, that her husband had not been found drunk on the road by 
robbers. As we beat the body, bruising the face and the shoulders, I 
became more and more aroused. Of course, you must realize that all 
this time the vampire Lestat was extraordinary. He was no more 
human to me than a biblical angel. But under this pressure, my 
enchantment with him was strained. I had seen my becoming a 
vampire in two lights: The first light was simply enchantment; Lestat 
had overwhelmed me on my deathbed. But the other light was my 
wish for self-destruction. My desire to be thoroughly damned. This 
was the open door through which Lestat had come on both the first 
and second occasion. Now I was not destroying myself but someone 
else. The overseer, his wife, his family. I recoiled and might have fled 
from Lestat, my sanity thoroughly shattered, had not he sensed with 
an infallible instinct what was happening. Infallible instinct. . . " The 
vampire mused. " Let me say the powerful instinct of a vampire to 
whom even the slightest change in a human's facial expression is as 
apparent as a gesture. Lestat had preternatural timing. He rushed me 
into the carriage and whipped the horses home. T want to die,' I 
began to murmur. 'This is unbearable. I want to die. You have it in 
your power to kill me. Let me die.' I refused to look at him, to be 
spellbound by the sheer beauty of his appearance. He spoke my name 
to me softly, laughing. As I said, he was determined to have the 
plantation. 

" But would he have let you go? " asked the boy. " Under any 
circumstances? 

" I don't know. Knowing Lestat as I do now, I would say he would 
have killed me rather than let me go. But this was what I wanted, you 
see. It didn't matter. No, this was what I thought I wanted. As soon 
as we reached the house, I jumped down out of the carriage and 
walked, a zombie, to the brick stairs where my brother had fallen. The 
house had been unoccupied for months now, the overseer having his 
own cottage, and the Louisiana heat and damp were already picking 
apart the steps. Every crevice was sprouting grass and even small 
wildflowers. I remember feeling the moisture which in the night was 
cool as I sat down on the lower steps and even rested my head against 
the brick and felt the little wax-stemmed wildflowers with my hands. I 
pulled a clump of them out of ,the easy dirt in one hand. 'I want to 
die; kill me. Kill me,' I said to the vampire. 'Now I am guilty of 
murder. I can’t live.' He sneered with the impatience of people 
listening to the obvious lies of others. And then in a flash he fastened 


12 



on me just as he had on my man. I thrashed against him wildly. I dug 
my boot into his chest and kicked him as fiercely as I could, his teeth 
stinging my throat, the fever pounding in my temples. And with a 
movement of his entire body, much too fast for me to see, he was 
suddenly standing disdainfully at the foot of the steps. 'I thought you 
wanted to die, Louis,’ he said. " The boy made a soft, abrupt sound 
when the vampire said his name which the vampire acknowledged 
with the quick statement," Yes, that is my name," and went on. 

" Well, I lay there helpless in the face of my own cowardice and 
fatuousness again," he said. " Perhaps so directly confronted with it, I 
might in time have gained the courage to truly take my life, not to 
whine and beg for others to take it. I saw myself turning on a knife 
then, languishing in a day-to-day suffering which I found as necessary 
as penance from the confessional, truly hoping death would find me 
unawares and render me ft for eternal pardon. And also I saw myself 
as if in a vision standing at the head of the stairs, just where my 
brother had stood, and then hurtling my body down on the bricks. 

" But there was no time for courage. Or shall I say, there was no time 
in Lestat’s plan for anything but his plan. 'Now listen to me, Louis,’ he 
said, and he lay down beside me now on the steps, his movement so 
graceful and so personal that at once it made me think of a lover. I 
recoiled. But he put his right arm around me and pulled me close to 
his chest. Never had I been this close to him before, and in the dim 
light I could see the magnificent radiance of his eye and the unnatural 
mask of his skin. As I tried to move, he ,pressed his right fingers 
against my lips and said, Be still. I am going to drain you now to the 
very threshold of death, and I want you to be quiet, so quiet that you 
can almost hear the flow of blood through your veins, so quiet that 
you can hear the flow of that same blood through mine. It is your 
consciousness, your will, which must keep you alive.’ I wanted to 
struggle, but he pressed so hard with his fingers that he held my entire 
prone body in check; and as soon as I stopped my abortive attempt at 
rebellion, he sank his teeth into my neck. " The boy’s eyes grew huge. 
He had drawn farther and farther back in his chair as the vampire 
spoke, and now his face was tense, his eyes narrow, as if he were 
preparing to weather a blow. 

" Have you ever lost a great amount of blood? " asked the vampire. 
Do you know the feeling? " The boy’s lips shaped the word no, but no 
sound came out. He cleared his throat. 

" No," he said. 

" Candles burned in the upstairs parlor, where we had planned the 
death of the overseer. An oil lantern swayed in the breeze on the 


13 



gallery. All of this light coalesced and began to shimmer, as though a 
golden presence hovered above me, suspended in the stairwell, softly 
entangled with the railings, curling and contracting like smoke. 

'Listen, keep your eyes wide,’ Lestat whispered to me, his lips moving 
against my neck. I remember that the movement of his lips raised the 
hair all over my body, sent a shock of sensation through my body that 
was not unlike the pleasure of passion. . . " He mused, his right 
fingers slightly curled beneath his chin, the first finger appearing to 
lightly stroke it. " The result was that within minutes I was weak to 
paralysis. Panic-stricken, I discovered I could not even will myself to 
speak. Lestat still held me, of course, and his arm was like the weight 
of an iron bar. I felt his teeth withdraw with such a keenness that the 
two puncture wounds seemed enormous, lined with pain. And now 
he bent over my helpless head and, taking his right hand off me, bit his 
own wrist. The blood flowed down upon my shirt and coat, and he 
watched it with a narrow, gleaming eye. It seemed an eternity that he 
watched it, and that shimmer of light now hung behind his head like 
the backdrop of an apparition. I think that I knew what he meant to 
do even before he did it, and I was waiting in my helplessness as if I'd 
been waiting for years. He pressed his bleeding wrist to my mouth, 
said firmly, a little impatiently,'Louis, drink.' And I did. 'Steady, 
Louis,' and 'Hurry,' he whispered to me a number of times. I drank, 
sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since 
infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused 
with the mind upon one vital source. Then something happened. 

The vampire sat back, a slight frown on his face. 

" How pathetic it is to describe these things which can't truly be 
described," he said, his voice loci almost to a whisper. The boy sat as 
if frozen. 

" I saw nothing but that light then as I drew blood. And then this 
next thing, this next thing was . . . sound. A dull roar at first and 
then a pounding like the pounding of a drum, growing louder and 
louder, as if some enormous creature were coming up on one slowly 
through a dark and alien forest, pounding as he came, a huge drum. 
And then there came the pounding of another drum, as if another 
giant were coming yards behind him, and each giant, intent on his 
own drum, gave no notice to the rhythm of the other. The sound grew 
louder and louder until it seemed to fill not just my hearing but all my 
senses, to be throbbing in my lips and fingers, in the flesh of my 
temples, in my veins. Above all, in my veins, drum and then the other 
drum; and then Lestat pulled his wrist free suddenly, and I opened my 
eyes and checked myself in a moment of reaching for his wrist, 


14 



grabbing it, forcing it back to my mouth at all costs; I checked myself 
because I realized that the drum was my heart, and the second drum 
had been his. " The vampire sighed. " Do you understand? " The boy 
began to speak, and then he shook his head. " No . . I mean, I do," he 
said. " I mean, I. . .' 

" Of course," said the vampire, looking away. 

" Wait, wait! " said the boy in a welter of excitement. " The tape is 
almost gone. I have to turn it over. " The vampire watched patiently 
as he changed it. 

" What happened then? " the boy asked. His face was moist, and he 
wiped it hurriedly with his handkerchief. 

" I saw as a- vampire," said -the vampire, his voice now slightly 
detached. It seemed almost distracted. Then he drew himself up. 
Lestat was standing again at the foot of the stairs, and I saw him as I 
could not possibly have seen him before. He had seemed white to me 
before, starkly white, so that in the night he was almost luminous; and 
now I saw him filled with his own life and own blood: he was radiant, 
not luminous. And then I saw that not only Lestat had changed, but 
all things had changed. 

" It was as if I had only just been able to see colors and shapes for the 
first time. I was so enthralled with the buttons on Lestat's black coat 
that I looked at nothing else for a long time. Then Lestat began to 
laugh, and I heard his laughter as I had never heard anything before. 
His heart I still heard like the beating of a drum, and now came this 
metallic laughter. It was confusing, each sound running into the next 
sound, like the mingling reverberations of bells, until I learned to 
separate the sounds, and then they overlapped, each soft but distinct, 
increasing but discrete, peals of laughter. " The vampire smiled with 
delight. " Peals of bells. 

" 'Stop looking at my buttons,’ Lestat said. 'Go out there into the 
trees. Rid yourself of all the human waste in your body, and don’t fall 
so madly in love with the night that you lose your ways’ 

" That, of course, was a wise command. When I saw the moon on 
the flagstones, I became so enamored with it that I must have spent an 
hour there. I passed my brother's oratory without so much as a 
thought of him, and standing among the cottonwood and oaks, I 
heard the night as if it were a chorus of whispering women, all 
beckoning me to their breasts. As for my body, it was not yet totally 
converted, and as soon as I became the least accustomed to the sounds 
and sights, it began to ache. All my human fluids were being forced 
out of me. I was dying as a human, yet completely alive as a vampire; 
and with my awakened senses, I had to preside over the death of my 


15 



body with a certain discomfort and then, finally, fear. I ran back up 
the steps to the parlor, where Lestat was already at work on the 
plantation papers, going over the expenses and profits for the last year. 
'You're a rich man,' he said to me when I came in. 'Something's 
happening to me,' I shouted. 

" 'You're dying, that's all; don't be a fool. Don't you have any oil 
lamps? All this money and you can't afford whale oil except for that 
lantern. Bring me that lantern.' 

" 'Dying!' I shouted. 'Dying!' 

" 'It happens to everyone,’ he persisted, refusing to help me. As I 
look back on this, I still despise him for it. Not because I was afraid, 
but because he might have drawn my attention to these changes with 
reverence. He might have calmed me and told me I might watch my 
death with the same fascination with which I had watched and felt the 
night. But he didn't. Lestat was never the vampire I am. Not at all. 
The vampire did not say this boastfully. He said it as if he would truly 
have had it otherwise. 

" Alors," he sighed. " I was dying fast, which meant that my capacity 
for fear was diminishing as rapidly. I simply regret I was not more 
attentive to the process. Lestat was being a perfect idiot. 'Oh, for the 
love of hell!’ he began shouting. 'Do you realize I've made no 
provision for you? What a fool I am.' I was tempted to say, 'Yes, you 
are,’ but I didn't. 'You'll have to bed down with me this morning. I 
haven't prepared you a coffin.' " The vampire laughed. " The coffin 
struck such a chord of terror in me I think it absorbed all the capacity 
for terror I had left. Then came only my mild alarm at having to share 
a coffin with Lestat. He was in his father's bedroom meantime, telling 
the old man good-bye, that he would return in the morning. But 
where do you go, why must you live by such a schedule!' the old man 
demanded, and Lestat became impatient. Before this, he'd been 
gracious to the old man, almost to the point of sickening one, but now 
he became a bully. 'I take care of you, don't I? I've put a better roof 
over your head than you ever put over mine! If I want to sleep all day 
and drink all night, I'll do it, damn you!' The old man started to 
whine. Only my peculiar state of emotions and most unusual feeling 
of exhaustion kept me from disapproving. I was watching the scene 
through the open door, enthralled with the colors of the counterpane 
and the positive riot of color in the old man's face. His blue veins 
pulsed beneath his pink and grayish flesh. I found even the yellow of 
his teeth appealing to me; and I became almost hypnotized by the 
quivering of his lip. 'Such a son, such a son,' he said, never suspecting, 
of course, the true nature of his son. 'All right, then, go. I know you 


16 



keep a woman somewhere; you go to see her as soon as her husband 
leaves in the morning. Give me my rosary. What's happened to my 
rosary?' Lestat said something blasphemous and gave him the rosary. 

It 

" But. . " the boy started. 

" Yes? " said the vampire. " I'm afraid I don't allow you to ask 
enough questions. 

" I was going to ask, rosaries have crosses on them, don't they? 

" Oh, the rumor about crosses! " the vampire laughed " You refer to 
our being afraid of crosses? 

" Unable to look on them, I thought;' said the boy. 

" Nonsense, my friend, sheer nonsense. I can look on anything I like. 
And I rather like looking on crucifixes in particular. 

" And what about the rumor about keyholes? That you can . . . 
become steam and go through them. 

" I wish I could," laughed the vampire. " How positively delightful. 

I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel 
the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No. " He shook his head. " That is, 
how would you say today . . . bullshit? " The boy laughed despite 
himself. Then his face grew serious. 

" You mustn't be so shy with me," the vampire said. " What is it? 

" The story about stakes through the heart," said the boy, his cheeks 
coloring slightly. 

" The same," said the vampire. " Bull-shit," he said, carefully 
articulating both syllables, so that the boy smiled. " No magical power 
whatsoever. Why don't you smoke one of your cigarettes? I see you 
have them in your shirt pocket. 

" Oh, thank you," the boy said, as if it were a marvelous suggestion. 
But once he had the cigarette to his lips, his hands were trembling so 
badly that he mangled the first fragile book match. 

" Allow me," said the vampire. And, taking the book, he quickly put 
a lighted match to the boy's cigarette. The boy inhaled, his eyes on the 
vampire's fingers. Now the vampire withdrew across the table with a 
soft rustling of garments. " There's an ashtray on the basin," he said, 
and the boy moved nervously to get it. He stared at the few butts in it 
for a moment, and then, seeing the small waste basket beneath, he 
emptied the ashtray and quickly set it on the table. His fingers left 
damp marks on the cigarette when he put it down. 

" Is this your room? " he asked. 

" No," answered the vampire. " Just a room. 

" What happened then? " the boy asked. The vampire appeared to 
be watching the smoke gather beneath the overhead bulb. 


17 



" Ah ... we went back to New Orleans posthaste," he said. " Lestat 
had his coffin in a miserable room near the ramparts. 

" And you did get into the coffin? 

" I had no choice. I begged Lestat to let me stay in the closet, but he 
laughed, astonished. 'Don't you know what you are?' he asked. 'But 
is it magical? Must it have this shape?' I pleaded. Only to hear him 
laugh again. I couldn't bear the idea; but as we argued, I realized I had 
no real fear. It was a strange realization. All my life I'd feared closed 
places. Born and bred in French houses with lofty ceilings and floor- 
length windows, I had a dread of being enclosed. I felt uncomfortable 
even in the confessional in church. It was a normal enough fear. And 
now I realized as I protested to Lestat, I did not actually feel this 
anymore. I was simply remembering it. Hanging on to it from habit, 
from a deficiency of ability to recognize my present and exhilarating 
freedom. 'You're carrying on badly,' Lestat said finally. 'And it's 
almost dawn. I should let you die. You will die, you know. The sun 
will destroy the blood I've given you, in every tissue, every vein. But 
you shouldn't be feeling this fear at all. I think you're like a man who 
loses an arm or a leg and keeps insisting that he can feel pain where the 
arm or leg used to be.' Well, that was positively the most intelligent 
and useful thing Lestat ever said in my presence, and it brought me 
around at once. 'Now, I’m getting into the coffin,' he finally said to 
me in his most disdainful tone, 'and you will get in on top of me if you 
know what’s good for you.' And I did. I lay face-down on him, utterly 
confused by my absence of dread and filled with a distaste for being so 
close to him, handsome and intriguing though he was. And he shut 
the lid. Then I asked him if I was .completely dead. My body was 
tingling and itching all over. 'No, you're not then,' he said. 'When 
you are, you'll only hear and see it changing and feel nothing. You 
should be dead by tonight. Go to sleep. 

" Was he right? Were you . . . dead when you woke up? 

" Yes, changed, I should say. As obviously I am alive. My body was 
dead. It was some time before it became absolutely cleansed of the 
fluids and matter it no longer needed, but it was dead. And with the 
realization of it came another stage in my divorce from human 
emotions. The first thing which became apparent to me, even while 
Lestat and I were loading the coffin into a hearse and stealing another 
coffin from a mortuary, was that I did not like Lestat at all. I was far 
from being his equal yet, but I was infinitely closer to him than I had 
been before the death of my body. I can't really make this clear to you 
for the obvious reason that you are now as I was before my body died. 
You cannot understand. But before I died, Lestat was absolutely the 


18 



most overwhelming experience I'd ever had. Your cigarette has 
become one long cylindrical ash. 

" Oh! " The boy quickly ground the filter into the glass. " You mean 
that when the gap was closed between you, he lost his . . . spell? " he 
asked, his eyes quickly fixed on the vampire, his hands now producing 
a cigarette and match much more easily than before. 

" Yes, that's correct," said the vampire with obvious pleasure. " The 
trip back to Pointe du Lac was thrilling. And the constant chatter of 
Lestat was positively the most boring and disheartening thing I 
experienced. Of course as I said, I was far from being his equal. I had 
my dead limbs to contend with ... to use his comparison. And I 
learned that on that very night, when I had to make my first kill. " The 
vampire reached across the table now and gently brushed an ash from 
the boy's lapel, and the boy stared at his withdrawing hand in alarm. 
Excuse me," said the vampire. " I didn't mean to frighten you. 

" Excuse me," said the boy. " I just got the impression suddenly that 
your arm was. . . abnormally long. You reach so far without 
moving! 

" No," said the vampire, resting his hands again on his crossed knees. 
" I moved forward much too fast for you to see. It was an illusion. 

" You moved forward? But you didn't. You were sitting just as you 
are now, with your back against the chair. 

" No," repeated the vampire firmly. " I moved forward as I told you. 
Here, I'll do it again. " And he did it again, and the boy stared with the 
same mixture of confusion and fear. " You still didn't see it," said the 
vampire. " But, you see, if you look at my outstretched arm now, it's 
really not remarkably long at all. " And he raised his arm, first finger 
pointing heavenward as if he were an angel about to give the Word of 
the Lord. " You have experienced a fundamental difference between 
the way you see and I see. My gesture appeared slow and somewhat 
languid to me. And the sound of my finger brushing your coat was 
quite audible. Well, I didn't mean to frighten you, I confess. But 
perhaps you can see from this that my return to Pointe du Lac was a 
feast of new experiences, the mere swaying of a tree branch in the wind 
a delight. 

" Yes," said the boy; but he was still visibly shaken. The vampire 
eyed him for a moment, and then he said," I was telling you ..." 

" About your first kill," said the boy. 

" Yes. I should say first, however, that the plantation was in a state of 
pandemonium. The overseer's body had been found and so had the 
blind old man in the master bedroom, and no one could explain the 
blind old man's presence. And no one had been able to find me in 


19 



New Orleans. My sister had contacted the police, and several of them 
were at Pointe du Lac when I arrived. It was already quite dark, 
naturally, and Lestat quickly explained to me that I must not let the 
police see me in even minimal light, especially not with my body in its 
present remarkable state; so I talked to them in the avenue of oaks 
before the plantation house, ignoring their requests that we go inside. 

I explained I'd been to Pointe du Lac the night before and the blind 
old man was my guest. As for the overseer, he had not been here, but 
had gone to New Orleans on business. 

" After that was settled, during which my new detachment served me 
admirably, I had the problem of the plantation itself. My slaves were 
in a state of complete confusion, and no work had been done all day. 
We had a large plant then for the making of the indigo dye, and the 
overseer's management had been most important. But I had several 
extremely intelligent slaves who might have done his job just as well a 
long time before, if I had recognized their intelligence and not feared 
their African appearance and manner. I studied them clearly now and 
gave the management of things over to them. To the best, I gave the 
overseer's house on a promise. Two of the young women were 
brought back into the house from the fields to care for Lestat's father, 
and I told them I wanted as much privacy as possible and they would 
all of them be rewarded not only for service but for leaving me and 
Lestat absolutely alone. I did not realize at the time that these slaves 
would be the first, and possibly the only ones, to ever suspect that 
Lestat and I were not ordinary creatures. I failed to realize that their 
experience with the supernatural was far greater than that of white 
men. In my own inexperience I still thought of them as childlike 
savages barely domesticated by slavery. I made a bad mistake. But let 
me keep to my story. I was going to tell you about my first kill. Lestat 
bungled it with his characteristic lack of common sense. 

" Bungled it? " asked the boy. 

" I should never have started with human beings. But this was 
something I had to learn by myself. Lestat had us plunge headlong 
into the swamps right after the police and the slaves were settled. It 
was very late, and the slave cabins were completely dark. Rye soon lost 
sight of the lights of Pointe du Lac altogether, and I became very 
agitated. It was the same thing again: remembered fears, confusion. 
Lestat, had he any native intelligence, might have explained things to 
me patiently and gently-that I had no need to fear the swamps, that ;o 
snakes and insects I was utterly invulnerable, and that I must 
concentrate on my new ability to see in total darkness. Instead, he 


20 



harassed me with condemnations. He was concerned only with our 
victims, with finishing my initiation and getting on with it. 

" And when we finally came upon our victims, he rushed me into 
action. They were a small camp of runaway slaves. Lestat had visited 
them before and picked off perhaps a fourth of their number by 
watching from the dark for one of them to leave the fire, or by taking 
them in their sleep. They knew absolutely nothing of Lestat's 
presence. We had to watch for well over an hour before one of the 
men, they were all men, finally left the clearing and came just a few 
paces into the trees. He unhooked his pants now and attended to an 
ordinary physical necessity, and as he turned to go, Lestat shook me 
and said, 'Take him,’" The vampire smiled at the boy’s wide eyes. " I 
think I was about as horrorstruck as you would be," he said. " But I 
didn't know then that I might kill animals instead of humans. I said 
quickly I could not possibly take him. And the slave heard me speak. 
He tamed, his back to the distant fire, and peered into the dark. Then 
quickly and silently, he drew a long knife out of his belt. He was naked 
except for the pants and the belt, a tall, strong-armed, sleek young 
man. He said something in the French patois, and then he stepped 
forward. I realized that, though I saw him clearly in the dark, he could 
not see us. Lestat stepped in back of him with a swiftness that baffled 
me and got a hold around his neck while he pinned his left arm. The 
slave cried out and tried to throw Lestat off. He sank his teeth now, 
and the slave froze as if from snakebite. He sank to his knees, and 
Lestat fed fast as the other slaves came running. 'You sicken me,’ he 
said when he got back to me. It was as if we were black insects utterly 
camouflaged in the night, watching the slaves move, oblivious to us, 
discover the wounded man, drag him back, fan out in the foliage 
searching for the attacker. 'Come on, we have to get another one 
before they all return to camp,’ he said. And quickly we set off after 
one man who was separated from the others. I was still terribly 
agitated, convinced I couldn't bring myself to attack and feeling no 
urge to do so. There were many things, as I mention, which Lestat 
might have said and done. He might have made the experience rich in 
so many ways. But he did not. 

" What could he have done? " the boy asked. " What do you mean? 

I! 

" Killing is no ordinary act," said the vampire. " One doesn't simply 
glut oneself on blood. " He shook his head. " It is the experience of 
another's life for certain, and often the experience of the loss of that 
life through the blood, slowly. It is again and again the experience of 
that loss of my own life, which I experienced when I sucked the blood 


21 



from Lestat's wrist and felt his heart pound with my heart. It is again 
and again a celebration of that experience; because for vampires that is 
the ultimate experience. " He said this most seriously, as if he were 
arguing with someone who held a different view. " I don't think Lestat 
ever appreciated that, though how he could not, I don't know. Let me 
say he appreciated something, but very little, I think, of what there is 
to know. In any event, he took no pains to remind me now of what I'd 
felt when I clamped onto his wrist for life itself and wouldn't let it go; 
or to pick and choose a place for me where I might experience my first 
kill with some measure of quiet and dignity. He rushed headlong 
through the encounter as if it were something to put behind us as 
quickly as possible, like so many yards of the road. Once he had 
caught the slave, he gagged him and held him, baring his neck. 'Do it,' 
he said. 'You can’t turn back now.’ Overcome with revulsion and 
weak with frustration, I obeyed. I knelt beside the bent, struggling 
man and, clamping both my hands on his shoulders, I went into his 
neck. My teeth had only just begun to change, and I had to tear his 
flesh, not puncture it; but once the wound was made, the blood 
flowed. And once that happened, once I was locked to it, drinking . . 

. all else vanished. 

" Lestat and the swamp and the noise of the distant camp meant 
nothing. Lestat might have been an insect, buzzing, lighting, then 
vanishing m significance. The sucking mesmerized me; the warm 
struggling of the man was. soothing to the tension of my hands; and 
there came the beating of the drum again, which was the drumbeat of 
his heart-only this time it beat in perfect rhythm with the drumbeat of 
my own heart, the two resounding in every fiber of my being, until the 
beat began to grow slower and slower, so that each was a soft rumble 
that threatened to go on without end. I was drowsing, falling into 
weightlessness; and then Lestat pulled me back. 'He’s dead, you idiot!’ 
he said with his characteristic charm and tact. 'You don’t drink after 
they're dead! Understand that!' I was in a frenzy for a moment, not 
myself, insisting to him that the man's heart still beat, and I was in an 
agony to clamp onto him again. I ran my hands over his chest, then 
grabbed at his wrists. I would have cut into his wrist if Lestat hadn't 
pulled me to my feet and slapped my face. This slap was astonishing. 

It was not painful in the ordinary way. It was a sensational shock of 
another sort, a rapping of the senses, so that I spun in confusion and 
found myself helpless and staring, my back against a cypress, the night 
pulsing with insects in my ears. 'You'll die if you do that,' Lestat was 
saying. 'He'll suck you right down into death with him if you cling to 
him in death. And now you've drunk too much, besides; you'll be ill.' 


22 



His voice grated on me. I had the urge to throw myself on him 
suddenly, but I was feeling just what he'd said. There was a grinding 
pain in my stomach, as if some whirlpool there were sucking my 
insides into itself. It was the blood passing too rapidly into my own 
blood, but I didn't know it. Lestat moved through the night now like a 
cat and I followed him, my head throbbing, this pain in my stomach 
no better when we reached the house of Pointe du Lac. 

" As we sat at the table in the parlor, Lestat dealing a game of solitaire 
on the polished wood, I sat there staring at him with contempt. He 
was mumbling nonsense. I would get used to killing, he said; it would 
be nothing. I must not allow myself to be shaken. I was reacting too 
much as if the 'mortal coil’ had not been shaken off. I would become 
accustomed to things all too quickly. 'Do you think so?' I asked him 
finally. I really had no interest in his answer. I understood now the 
difference between us. For me the experience of killing had been 
cataclysmic. So had that of sucking Lestat's wrist. These experiences 
so overwhelmed and so changed my view of everything around me, 
from the picture of my brother on the parlor wall to the sight of a 
single star in the topmost pane of the French window, that I could not 
imagine another vampire taking them for granted. I was altered, 
permanently; I knew it. And what I felt, most profoundly, for 
everything, even the sound of the playing cards being laid down one by 
one upon the shining rows of the solitaire, was respect. Lestat felt the 
opposite. Or he felt nothing. He was the sow's ear out of which 
nothing fine could be made. As boring as a mortal, as trivial and 
unhappy as a mortal, he chattered over the game, belittling my 
experience, utterly locked against the possibility of any experience of 
his own. By morning, I realized that I was his complete superior and I 
had been sadly cheated in having him for a teacher. He must guide me 
through the necessary lessons, if there were any more real lessons, and 
I must tolerate in him a frame of mind which was blasphemous to life 
itself. I felt cold towards him. I had no contempt in superiority. Only 
a hunger for new experience, for that which was beautiful and as 
devastating as my kill. And I saw that if I were to maximize every 
experience available to me, I must exert my own powers over my 
learning. Lestat was of no use. 

" It was well past midnight when I finally rose out of the chair and 
went out on the gallery. The moon was large over the cypresses, and 
the candlelight poured from the open doors. The thick plastered 
pillars and walls of the house had been freshly whitewashed, the 
floorboards freshly swept, and a summer rain had left the night clean 
and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of 


23 



the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew 
there in constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay 
before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to 
go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing 
which would take me best to another. What this meant, I wasn't sure 
myself. Do you understand me when I say I did not wish to rush 
headlong into experience, that what I'd felt as a vampire was far too 
powerful to be wasted? 

" Yes," said the boy eagerly. " It sounds as if it was like being in love. 

" The vampire's eyes gleamed. " That's correct. It is like love," he 
smiled. " And I tell you my frame of mind that night so you can know 
there are profound differences between vampires, and how I came to 
take a different approach from Lestat. You must understand I did not 
snub him because he did not appreciate his experience. I simply could 
not understand how such feelings could be wasted. But then Lestat 
did something which was to show me a way to go about my learning. 

" He had more than a casual appreciation of the wealth at Pointe du 
Lac. He'd been much pleased by the beauty of the china used for his 
father's supper; and he liked the feel of the velvet drapes, and he traced 
the patterns of the carpets with his toe. And now he took from one of 
the china closets a crystal glass and said, T do miss glasses.' Only he 
said this with an impish delight that caused me to study him with a 
hard eye. I disliked him intensely! T want to show you a little trick,' 
he said. 'That is, if you like glasses.’ And after setting it on the card 
table he came out on the gallery where I stood and changed his 
manner again into that of a stalking animal, eyes piercing the dark 
beyond the lights of the house, peering down under the arching 
branches of the oaks. In an instant, he had vaulted the railing and 
dropped softly on the dirt below, and then lunged into the blackness to 
catch something in both his hands. When he stood before me with it, 

I gasped to see it was a rat. 'Don’t be such a damned idiot,’ he said. 
'Haven't you ever seen a rat?' It was a huge, struggling field rat with a 
long tail. He held its neck so it couldn't bite. 'Rats can be quite nice,' 
he said. And he took the rat to the wine glass, slashed its throat, and 
filled the glass rapidly with blood. The rat then went hurtling over the 
gallery railing, and Lestat held the wine glass to the candle 
triumphantly. 'You may well have to live off rats from time to time, so 
wipe that expression off your face,' he said. 'Rats, chickens, cattle. 
Traveling by ship, you damn well better live off rats, if you don’t wish 
to cause such a panic on board that they search your coffin. You 
damn well better keep the ship clean of rats.’ And then he sipped the 


24 



blood as delicately as if it were burgundy. He made a slight face. 'It 
gets cold so fast.’ 

" 'Do you mean, then, we can live from animals?' I asked. 

" 'Yes.' He drank it all down and then casually threw the glass at the 
fireplace. I stared at the fragments. 'You don't mind, do you?' He 
gestured to the broken glass with a sarcastic smile. 'I surely hope you 
don't, because there's nothing much you can do about it if you do 
mind.' 

" 'I can throw you and your father out of Pointe du Lac, if I mind,' I 
said. I believe this was my first show of temper. 

" 'Why would you do that?' he asked with mock alarm. 'You don’t 
know everything yet... do you?' He was laughing then and walking 
slowly about the room. He ran his fingers over the satin finish of the 
spinet. 'Do you play?' he asked. 

" I said something like,'Don't touch it!' and he laughed at me. 'I'll 
touch it if I like!' he said. 'You don't know, for example, all the ways 
you can die. And dying now would be such a calamity, wouldn't it?' 

" 'There must be someone else in the world to teach me these things,’ 
I said. 'Certainly you're not the only vampire! And your father, he's 
perhaps seventy. You couldn't have been a vampire long, so someone 
must have instructed you. . . 

" 'And do you think you can find other vampires by yourself? They 
might see you coming, my friend, but you won’t see them. No, I don’t 
think you have much choice about things at this point, friend. I’m 
your teacher and you need me, and there isn’t much you can do about 
it either way. And we both have people to provide for. My father 
needs a doctor, and then there is the matter of your mother and sister. 
Don’t get any mortal notions about telling them you are a vampire. 
Just provide for them and for my father, which means that tomorrow 
night you had better kill fast and then attend to the business of your 
plantation. Now to bed. We both sleep in the same room; it makes 
for far less risk.’ 

" ’No, you secure the bedroom for yourself,’ I said. 'I've no intention 
of staying in the same room with you.' 

" He became furious. 'Don't do anything stupid, Louis. I warn you. 
There's nothing you can do to defend yourself once the sun rises, 
nothing. Separate rooms mean separate security. Double precautions 
and double chance of notice.' He then said a score of things to 
frighten me into complying, but he might as well have been talking to 
the walls. I watched him intently, but I didn't listen to him. He 
appeared frail and stupid to me, a man made of dried twigs with a 
thin, carping voice. 'I sleep alone,’ I said, and gently put my hand 


25 



around the candle flames one by one. 'It's almost morning!' he 
insisted. 

" 'So lock yourself in,' I said, embracing my coffin, hoisting it and 
carrying it down the brick stairs. I could hear the locks snapping on 
the French doors above, the swoosh of the drapes. The sky was pale 
but still sprinkled with stars, and another light rain blew now on the 
breeze from the river, speckling the flagstones. I opened the door of 
my brother's oratory, shoving hack the roses and thorns which had 
almost sealed it, and set the coffin on the stone floor before the 
priedieu. I could almost, make out the images of the saints on the 
walls. 'Paul,' I said softly, addressing my brother, 'for the first time in 
my life I feel nothing for you, nothing for your death; arid for the first 
time I feel everything for you, feel the sorrow of your loss as if I never 
before knew feeling.' You see . . . " The vampire tuned to the boy. 

For the first time now I was fully and completely a vampire. I shut the 
wood blinds flat upon the small barred windows and bolted the door. 
Then I climbed into the satin-lined coffin, barely able to see the gleam 
of cloth in the darkness, and locked myself in. That is how I became a 
vampire. 

And There You Were," said the boy after a pause," with another 
vampire you hated. 

" But I bad to stay with him," answered the vampire. " As I've told 
you, he had me at a great disadvantage. He hinted there was much I 
didn't know and must know and that he alone could tell me. But in 
fact, the main part of what he did teach me was practical and not so 
difficult to figure out for oneself. How we might travel, for instance, 
by ship, having our coffins transported for us as though they 
contained the remains of loved ones being sent here or there for burial; 
how no one would dare to epee such a coffin, and we might rise from 
it at night to clean the ship of rats-things of this nature, And then there 
were the shops and businessmen he knew who admitted us well after 
hours to outfit us in the finest Paris fashions, and those agents willing 
to transact financial matters in restaurants and cabarets. And in all of 
these mundane matters, Lestat was an adequate teacher. What 
manner of man he'd been in life, I couldn't tell and didn't care; but he 
was for all appearances of the same class now as myself, which meant 
little to me, except that it made our lives run a little more smoothly 
than they might have otherwise. He had impeccable taste, though my 
library to him was a 'pile of dust,’ and he seemed more than once to be 
infuriated by the sight of my reading a book or writing some 
observations in a journal. 'That mortal nonsense,’ he would say to me, 
while at the same time spending so much of my money to splendidly 


26 



furnish Pointe du Lac, that even I, who cared nothing for the money, 
was forced to wince. And in entertaining visitors at Pointe du Lac- 
those hapless travelers who came up the river road by horseback or 
carriage begging accommodations for the night, sporting letters of 
introduction from other planters or officials in New Orleans.-to these 
he was so gentle and polite that it made things far easier for me, who 
found myself hopelessly locked to him and jarred over and over by his 
viciousness. 

" But he didn't harm these men? " asked the boy. 

" Oh yes' often, he did. But I'll tell you a little secret if I may, which 
applies not only to vampires, but to generals, soldiers, and kings. Most 
of us would much rather see somebody die than be the object of 
rudeness under our roofs. Strange . . . yes. But very true, I assure 
you. That Lestat hunted for mortals every night, I knew. But had he 
been savage and ugly to my family, my guests, and my slaves, I 
couldn't have endured it. He was not. He seemed particularly to 
delight in the visitors. But he said we must spare no expense where 
our families were concerned. And he seemed to me to push luxury 
upon his father to an almost ludicrous point. The old blind man must 
be told constantly how fine and expensive were his bed jackets and 
robes and what imported draperies had just been fixed to his bed and 
what French and Spanish wines we had in the cellar and how much the 
plantation yielded even in bad years when the coast talked of 
abandoning the indigo production altogether and going into sugar. 

But then at other times he would bully the old man, as I mentioned. 

He would erupt into such rage that the old man whimpered like a 
child. 'Don't I take care of you in baronial splendor!' Lestat would 
shout at him. 'Don't I provide for your every want! Stop whining to 
me about going to church or old friends! Such nonsense. Your old 
friends are dead. Why don't you die and leave me and my bankroll in 
peace!' The old man would cry softly that these things meant so little 
to him in old age. He would have been content on his little farm 
forever. I wanted often to ask him later, 'Where wag this farm? From 
where did you come to Louisiana?' to get some clue to that place 
where Lestat might have known another vampire. But I didn't dare to 
bring these things up, lest the old man start crying and Lestat become 
enraged. But these fits were no more frequent than periods of near 
obsequious kindness when Lestat would bring his father supper on a 
tray and feed him patiently while talking of the weather and the New 
Orleans news and the activities of my mother and sister. It was 
obvious that a great gulf existed between father and son, both in 
education and refinement, but how it came about, I could not quite 


27 



guess. And from this whole matter, I achieved a somewhat consistent 
detachment. 

" Existence, as I've said, was possible. There was always the promise 
behind his mocking smile that he knew great things or terrible things, 
had commerce with levels of darkness I could not possibly guess at. 
And all the time, he belittled me and attacked me for my love of the 
senses, my reluctance to kill, and the near swoon which killing could 
produce in me. He laughed uproariously when I discovered that I 
could see myself in a mirror and that crosses had no effect upon me, 
and would taunt me with sealed lips when I asked about God or the 
devil. T'd like to meet the devil some night,' he said once with a 
malignant smile. T'd chase him from here to the wilds of the Pacific. I 
am the devil.' And when I was aghast at this, he went into peals of 
laughter. But what happened was simply that in my distaste for him I 
came to ignore and suspect him, and yet to study him with a detached 
fascination. Sometimes I'd find myself staring at his wrist from which 
rd drawn my vampire life, and I would fall into such a stillness that my 
mind seemed to leave my body or rather my body to become my 
mind; and then he would see me and stare at me with a stubborn 
ignorance of what I felt and longed to know and, reaching over, shake 
me roughly out of it. I bore this with an overt detachment unknown 
to me in mortal life and came to understand this as a part of vampire 
nature: that I might sit at home at Pointe du Lac and think for hours 
of my brother's mortal life and see it short and rounded in 
unfathomable darkness, understanding now the vain and senseless 
wasting passion with which rd mourned his loss and turned on other 
mortals like a maddened animal. All that confusion was then like 
dancers frenzied in a fog; and now, now in this strange vampire 
nature, I felt a profound sadness. But I did not brood over this. Let 
me not give you that impression, for brooding would have been to me 
the most terrible waste; but rather I looked around me at all the 
mortals that I knew and saw all life as precious, condemning all 
fruitless guilt and passion that would let it slip through the fingers like 
sand. It was only now as a vampire that I did come to know my sister, 
forbidding her the plantation for the city life which she so needed in 
order to know her own time of life and her own beauty and come to 
marry, not brood for our lost brother or my going away or become a 
nursemaid for our mother. And I provided for them all they might 
need or want, finding even the most trivial request worth my 
immediate attention. My sister laughed at the transformation in me 
when we would meet at night and I would take her from our flat out 
the narrow wooden streets to walk along the tree-lined levee in the 


28 



moonlight, savoring the orange blossoms and the caressing warmth, 
talking for hours of her most secret thoughts and dreams, those little 
fantasies she dared to tell no one and would even whisper to me when 
we sat in the dim lit parlor entirely alone. And I would see her sweet 
and palpable before me, a shimmering, precious creature soon to grow 
old, soon to die, soon to lose these moments that in their tangibility 
promised to us, wrongly . . . wrongly, an immortality. As if it were 
our very birthright, which we could not come to grasp the meaning of 
until this time of middle life when we looked on only as many years 
ahead as already lay behind us. When every moment, every moment 
must be first known and then savored. 

" It was detachment that made this possible, a sublime loneliness 
with which Lestat and I moved through the world of mortal men. And 
all material troubles passed from us. I should tell you the practical 
nature of it. 

" Lestat had always known how to steal from victims chosen for 
sumptuous dress and other promising signs of extravagance. But the 
great problems of shelter and secrecy had been for him a terrible 
struggle. I suspected that beneath his gentleman's veneer he was 
painfully ignorant of the most simple financial matters. But I was not. 
And so he could acquire cash at any moment and I could invest it. If 
he were not picking the pocket of a dead man in an alley, he was at the 
greatest gambling tables in the richest salons of the city, using his 
vampire keenness to suck gold and dollars and deeds of property from 
young planters' sons who found him deceptive in his friendship and 
alluring in his charm. But this had never given him the life he wanted, 
and so for that he had ushered me into the preternatural world that he 
might acquire an investor and manager for whom these skills of mortal 
life became most valuable in this life after. 

" But, let me describe New Orleans, as it was then, and as it was to 
become, so you can understand how simple our lives were. There was 
no city in America like New Orleans. It was filled not only with the 
French and Spanish of all classes who had formed in part its peculiar 
aristocracy, but later with immigrants of all kinds, the Irish and the 
German in particular. Then there were not only the black slaves, yet 
unhomogenized and fantastical in their different tribal garb and 
manners, but the great growing class of the free people of color, those 
marvelous people of our mixed blood and that of the islands, who 
produced a magnificent and unique caste of craftsmen, artists, poets, 
and renowned feminine beauty. And then there were the Indians, who 
covered the levee on summer days selling herbs and crafted wares. 

And drifting through all, through this medley of languages and colors, 


29 



were the people of the port, the sailors of ships, who came in great 
waves to spend their money in the cabarets, to buy for the night the 
beautiful women both dark and light, to dine on the best of Spanish 
and French cooking and drink the imported wines of the world. Then 
add to these, within years after my transformation, the Americans, 
who built the city up river from the old French Quarter with 
magnificent Grecian houses which gleamed in the moonlight like 
temples. And, of course, the planters, always the planters, coming to 
town with their families in shining landaus to buy evening gowns and 
silver and gems, to crowd the narrow streets on the way to the old 
French Opera House and the Theatre d'Orleans and the St. Louis 
Cathedral, from whose open doors came the chants of High Mass over 
the crowds of the Place d'Armes on Sundays, over the noise and 
bickering of the French Market, over the silent, ghostly drift of the 
ships along the raised waters of the Mississippi, which flowed against 
the levee above the ground of New Orleans itself, so that the ships 
appeared to float against the sky. 

" This was New Orleans, a magical and magnificent place to live. In 
which a vampire, richly dressed and gracefully walking through the 
pools of light of one gas lamp after another might attract no more 
notice in the evening than hundreds of other exotic creatures -if he 
attracted any at all, if anyone stopped to whisper behind a fan, 'That 
man . . . how pale, how he gleams . . . how he moves. It’s not 
natural!' A city in which a vampire might be gone before the words 
had even passed the lips, seeking out the alleys in which he could see 
like a cat, the darkened bars in which sailors slept with their heads on 
the table, great high-ceilinged hotel rooms where a lone figure might 
sit, her feet upon an embroidered cushion, her legs covered with a lace 
counterpane, her head bent under the tarnished light of a single 
candle, never seeing the great shadow move across the plaster flowers 
of the ceiling, never seeing the long white finger reached to press the 
fragile flame. 

" Remarkable, if for nothing else, because of this, that all of those 
men and women who stayed for any reason left behind them some 
monument, some structure of marble and brick and stone that still 
stands; so that even when the gas lamps went out and the planes came 
in and the office buildings crowded the blocks of Canal Street, 
something irreducible of beauty and romance remained; not in every 
street perhaps, but in so many that the landscape is for me the 
landscape of those times always, and walking now in the starlit streets 
of the Quarter or the Garden District I am in those times again. I 
suppose that is the nature of the monument. Be it a small house or a 


30 



mansion of Corinthian columns and wrought-iron lace. The 
monument does not say that this or that man walked here. No, that 
what he felt in one time in one spot continues. The moon that rose 
over New Orleans then still rises. As long as the monuments stand, it 
still rises. The feeling, at least here . . . and there ... it remains the 
same. " The vampire appeared sad. He sighed, as if he doubted what 
he had just said. 

" What was it? " he asked suddenly as if he were slightly tired. " Yes, 
money. Lestat and I had to make money. And I was telling you that 
he could steal. But it was investment afterwards that mattered. What 
we accumulated we must use. But I go ahead of myself. I killed 
animals. But I'll get to that in a moment. Lestat killed humans all the 
time, sometimes two or three a night, sometimes more. He would 
drink from one just enough to satisfy a momentary thirst, and then go 
on to another. The better the human, as he would say in his vulgar 
way, the more he liked it. A fresh young girl, that was his favorite food 
the first of the evening; but the triumphant kill for Lestat was a young 
man. A young man around your age would have appealed to him in 
particular. 

" Me? " the boy whispered. He had leaned forward on his elbows to 
peer into the vampire's eyes, and now he drew up. 

" Yes," the vampire went on, as if he hadn't observed the boy's 
change of expression. " You see, they represented the greatest loss to 
Lestat, because they stood on the threshold of the maximum 
possibility of life. Of course, Lestat didn't understand this himself. I 
came to understand it. Lestat understood nothing. 

" I shall give you a perfect example of what Lestat liked. Up the river 
from us was the Freniere plantation, a magnificent spread of land 
which had great hopes of making a fortune in sugar, just shortly after 
the refining process had been invented. I presume you know sugar 
was refined in Louisiana. There is something perfect and ironic about 
it, this land which I loved producing refined sugar. I mean this more 
unhappily than I think you know. This refined sugar is a poison. It 
was like the essence of life in New Orleans, so sweet that it can be fatal, 
so richly enticing that all other values are forgotten .... But as I was 
saying up river from us lived the Frenieres, a great old French family 
which had produced in this generation five young women and one 
young man. Now, three of the young women were destined not to 
marry, but two were young enough still and all depended upon the 
young man. He was to manage the plantation as I bad done for my 
mother and sister; he was to negotiate marriages, to put together 
dowries when the entire fortune of the place rode precariously on the 


31 



next year's sugar crop; he was to bargain, fight, and keep at a distance 
the entire material world for the world of Freniere. Lestat decided he 
wanted him. And when fate alone nearly cheated Lestat, he went wild. 
He risked his own life to get the Freniere boy, who had become 
involved in a duel. He had insulted a young Spanish Creole at a ball. 
The whole thing was nothing, really; but like most young Creoles this 
one was willing to die for nothing. They were both willing to die for 
nothing. The Freniere household was in an uproar. You must 
understand, Lestat knew this perfectly. Both of us had hunted the 
Freniere plantation, Lestat for slaves and chicken thieves and me for 
animals. 

" You were killing only animals? 

" Yes. But I'll come to that later, as I said. We both knew the 
plantation, and I had indulged in one of the greatest pleasures of a 
vampire, that of watching people unbeknownst to them. I knew the 
Freniere sisters as I knew the magnificent rose trees around my 
brother's oratory. They were a unique group of women. Each in her 
own way was as smart as the brother; and one of them, I shall call her 
Babette, was not only as smart as her brother, but far wiser. Yet none 
had been educated to care for the plantation; none understood even 
the simplest facts about its financial state. All were totally dependent 
upon young Freniere, and all knew it. And so, larded with their love 
for him, their passionate belief that he hung the moon and that any 
conjugal love they might ever know would only be a pale reflection of 
their love for him, larded with this was a desperation as strong as the 
will to survive. If Freniere died in the duel, the plantation would 
collapse. Its fragile economy, a life of splendor based on the perennial 
mortgaging of the next year's crop, was in his hands alone. So you can 
imagine the panic and misery in the Freniere household the night that 
the son went to town to fight the appointed duel. And now picture 
Lestat, gnashing his teeth like a comic-opera devil because he was not 
going to kill the young Freniere. 

" You mean then . . . that you felt for the Freniere women? 

" I felt for them totally," said the vampire. " Their position was 
agonizing. And I felt for the boy. That night he locked himself in his 
father's study and made a will. He knew full well that if he fell under 
the rapier at four A.M. the next morning, his family would fall with 
him. He deplored his situation and yet could do nothing to help it. 

To run out on the duel would not only mean social ruin for him, but 
would probably have been impossible. The other young man would 
have pursued him until he was forced to fight. When he left the 
plantation at midnight, he was staring into the face of death itself with 


32 



the character of a man who, having only one path to follow, has 
resolved to follow it with perfect courage. He would either kill the 
Spanish boy or die; it was unpredictable, despite all his skill. His face 
reflected a depth of feeling and wisdom I'd never seen on the face of 
any of Lestat's struggling victims. I had my first battle with Lestat then 
and there. I'd prevented him from killing the boy for months, and 
now he meant to kill him before the Spanish boy could. 

" We were on horseback, racing after the young Freniere towards 
New Orleans, Lestat bent on overtaking him, I bent on overtaking 
Lestat. Well, the duel, as I told you, was scheduled for four A.M. On 
the edge of the swamp just beyond the city's northern gate. And 
arriving there just shortly before four, we had precious little time to 
return to Pointe du Lac, which meant our-own lives were in danger: I 
was incensed at Lestat as never before, and he was determined to get 
the boy. 'Give him his chance!' I was insisting, getting hold of Lestat 
before he could approach the boy. It was midwinter, bitter-cold and 
damp in the swamps, one volley of icy rain after another sweeping the 
clearing where the duel was to be fought. Of course, I did not fear 
these elements in the sense that you might; they did not numb me, nor 
threaten me with mortal shivering or illness. But vampires feel cold as 
acutely as humans, and the blood of the kill is often the rich, sensual 
alleviation of that cold. But what concerned me that morning was not 
the pain I felt, but the excellent cover of darkness these elements 
provided, which made Freniere extremely vulnerable to Lestat's attack. 
All he need do would be step away from his two friends towards the 
swamp and Lestat might take him. And so I physically grappled with 
Lestat. I held him. 

" But towards all this you had detachment, distance? 

" Hmmm ..." the vampire sighed. " Yes. I had it, and with it a 
supremely resolute anger. To glut himself upon the life of an entire 
family was to me Lestat's supreme act of utter contempt and disregard 
for all he should have seen with a vampire's depth. So I held him in 
the dark, where he spit at me and cursed at me; and young Freniere 
took his rapier from his friend and second and went out on the slick, 
wet grass to meet his opponent. There was a brief conversation, then 
the duel commenced. In moments, it was over. Freniere had mortally 
wounded the other boy with a swift thrust to the chest. And he knelt 
in the grass, bleeding, dying, shouting something unintelligible at 
Freniere. The victor simply stood there. Everyone could see there was 
no sweetness in the victory. Freniere looked on death as if it were an 
abomination. His companions advanced with their lanterns, urging 
him to come away as soon as possible and leave the dying man to his 


33 



friends. Meantime, the wounded one would allow no one to touch 
him. And then, as Freniere's group turned to go, the three of them 
walking heavily towards their horses, the man on the ground drew a 
pistol. Perhaps I alone could see this in the powerful dark. But, in any 
event, I shouted to Freniere as I ran towards the gun. And this was all 
that Lestat needed. While I was lost in my clumsiness, distracting 
Freniere and going for the gun itself, Lestat, with his years of 
experience and superior speed, grabbed the young man and spirited 
him into the cypresses. I doubt his friends even knew what had 
happened. The pistol had gone off, the wounded man had collapsed, 
and I was tearing through the nearfrozen marshes shouting for Lestat. 

" Then I saw him. Freniere lay sprawled over the knobbed roots of a 
cypress, his boots deep in the murky water, and Lestat was still bent 
over him, one hand on the hand of Freniere that still held the foil. I 
went to pull Lestat off, and that right hand swung at me with such 
lightning speed I did not see it, did not know it had struck me until I 
found myself in the water also; and, of course, by the time I recovered, 
Freniere was dead. I saw him as he lay there, his eyes closed, his lips 
utterly still as if he were just sleeping. 'Damn you!' I began cursing 
Lestat. And then I started, for the body of Freniere had begun to slip 
down into the marsh. The water rose over his face and covered him 
completely. Lestat was jubilant; he reminded me tersely that we had 
less than an hour to get back to Pointe du Lac, and he swore revenge 
on me. 'If I didn't like the life of a Southern planter, rd finish you 
tonight. I know a way,' he threatened me. 'I ought to drive your horse 
into the swamps. You'd have to dig yourself a hole and smother!' He 
rode off. 

" Even over all these years, I feel that anger for him like a white-hot 
liquid filling my veins. I saw then what being a vampire meant to him. 

t! 

" He was just a killer," the boy said, his voice reflecting some of the 
vampire's emotion. " No regard for anything. 

" No. Being a vampire for him meant revenge. Revenge against life 
itself. Every time he took a life it was revenge. It was no wonder, then, 
that he appreciated nothing. The nuances of vampire existence 
weren't even available to him because he was focused with a maniacal 
vengeance upon the mortal life he'd left. Consumed with hatred, he 
looked back. Consumed with envy, nothing pleased him unless he 
could take it from others; and once having it, he grew cold and 
dissatisfied, not loving the thing for itself; and so he went after 
something else. Vengeance, blind and sterile and contemptible. 


34 



" But I've spoken to you about the Freniere sisters. It was almost half 
past five when I reached their plantation. Dawn would come shortly 
after six, but I was almost home. I slipped onto the upper gallery of 
their house and saw them all gathered in the parlor; they had never 
even dressed for bed. The candles burnt low, and they sat already as 
mourners, waiting for the word. They were all dressed in black, as was 
their at-home custom, and in the dark the, black shapes of their 
dresses massed together with their raven hair, so that in the glow of the 
candles their faces appeared as five soft, shimmering apparitions, each 
uniquely sad, each uniquely courageous. Babette's face alone appeared 
resolute. It was as if she had already made up her mind to take the 
burdens of Freniere if her brother died, and she had that same 
expression on her face now which had been on her brother's when he 
mounted to leave for the duel. What lay ahead of her was nearly 
impossible. What lay ahead was the final death of which Lestat was 
guilty. So I did something then which caused me great risk. I made 
myself known to her. I did this by playing the light. As you can see, 
my face is very white and has a smooth, highly reflective surface, rather 
like that of polished marble. 

" Yes," the boy nodded, and appeared flustered. " It's very . . . 
beautiful, actually," said the boy. " I wonder if. . . but what 
happened? 

" You wonder if I was a handsome man when I was alive," said the 
vampire. The boy nodded. " I was. Nothing structurally is changed in 
me. Only I never knew that I was handsome. Life whirled about me a 
wind of petty concerns, as I've said. I gazed at nothing, not even a 
mirror . . . especially not a mirror . . . with a free eye. But this is 
what happened. I stepped near to the pane of glass and let the light 
touch my face. And this I did at a moment when Babette's eyes were 
turned towards the panes. Then I appropriately vanished. 

" Within seconds all the sisters knew a 'strange creature' had been 
seen, a ghostlike creature, and the two slave maids steadfastly refused 
to investigate. I waited out these moments impatiently for just that 
which I wanted to happen: Babette finally took a candelabrum from a 
side table, lit the candles and, scorning everyone's fear, ventured out 
onto the cold gallery alone to see what was there, her sisters hovering 
in the door like great, black birds, one of them crying that the brother 
was dead and she had indeed seen his ghost. Of course,. you must 
understand that Babette, being as strong as she was, never once 
attributed what she saw to imagination or to ghosts. I let her come the 
length of the dark gallery before I spoke to her, and even then I let her 
see only the vague outline of my body beside one of the columns. 'Tell 


35 



your sisters to go back,' I whispered to her. 'I come to tell you of your 
brother. Do as I say.’ She was still for an instant, and then she turned 
to me and strained to see me in the dark. 'I have only a little time. I 
would not harm you for the -world,' I said. And she obeyed. Saying it 
was nothing, she told them to shut the door, and they obeyed as 
people obey who not only need a leader but are desperate for one. 

Then I stepped into the light of Babette's candles. " The boy's eyes 
were wide. He put his hand to his lips. " Did you look to her ... as 
you do to me? " he asked. 

" You ask that with such innocence," said the vampire. " Yes, I 
suppose I certainly did. Only, by candlelight I always had a less 
supernatural appearance. And I made no pretense with her of being 
an ordinary creature. T have only minutes,' I told her at once. 'But 
what I have to tell you is of the greatest importance. Your brother 
fought bravely and won the duel=but wait. . You must know now, he 
is dead. Death was proverbial with him, the thief in the night about 
which all his goodness or courage could do nothing. But this is not the 
principal thing which I came to tell you. It is this. You can rule the 
plantation and you can save it. All that is required is that you let no 
one convince you otherwise. You must assume his position despite 
any outcry, any talk of convention, any talk of propriety or common 
sense. You must listen to nothing. The same land is here now that 
was here yesterday, morning when your brother slept above. Nothing 
is changed. You must take his place. If you do not, the land is lost and 
the family is lost. You will be five women on a small pension doomed 
to live but half or less of what life could give you. Learn what you 
must know. Stop at nothing until you have the answers. And take my 
visitation to you to be your courage whenever you waver. You must 
take the reins of your own life. Your brother is dead.’ 

" I could see by her face that she had heard every word. She would 
have questioned me had there been time, but she believed me when I 
said there was not. Then I used all my skill to leave her so swiftly I 
appeared to vanish. From the garden I saw her face above in the glow 
of her candles. I saw her search the dark for me, turning around and 
around. And then I saw her make the Sign of the Crass and walk back 
to her sisters within. " The vampire smiled. " There was absolutely no 
talk on the river coast of any strange apparition to Babette Freniere, 
but after the first mourning and sad talk of the women left all alone, 
she became the scandal of the neighborhood because she chose to run 
the plantation on her own. She managed an immense dowry for her 
younger sister, and was married herself in another year. And Lestat 
and I almost never exchanged words. 


36 



" Did he go on living at Pointe du Lac? 

" Yes. I could not be certain he'd told me all I needed to know. And 
great pretense was necessary. My sister was married in my absence, for 
example, while I had a 'malarial chill,’ and something similar 
overcame me the morning of my mother's funeral. Meantime, Lestat 
and I sat down to dinner each night with the old man and made nice 
noises with our knives and forks, while he told us to eat everything on 
our plates and not to drink our wine too fast. With dozens of 
miserable headaches I would receive my sister in a darkened bedroom, 
the covers up to my chin, bid her and her husband bear with the dim 
light on account of the pain in my eyes, as I entrusted to them large 
amounts of money to invest for us all. Fortunately her husband was 
an idiot; a harmless one, but an idiot, the product of four generations 
of marriages between first cousins. 

" But though these things went well, we began to have our problems 
with the slaves. They were the suspicious ones; and, as I've indicated, 
Lestat killed anyone and everyone he chose. So there was always some 
talk of mysterious death on the part of the coast. But it was what they 
saw of us which began the talk, and I heard it one evening when I was 
playing a shadow about the slave cabins. 

" Now, let me explain first the character of these slaves. It was only 
about seventeen ninety-five, Lestat and I having lived there for four 
years in relative quiet, I investing the money which he acquired, 
increasing our lands, purchasing apartments and town houses in New 
Orleans which I rented, the work of the plantation itself producing 
little. . . more a cover for us than an investment. I say'our.' This is 
wrong. I never signed anything over to Lestat, and, as you realize, I 
was still legally alive. But in seventeen ninety-five these slaves did not 
have the character which you've seen in films and novels of the South. 
They were not soft-spoken, brown-skinned people in drab rags who 
spoke an English dialect. They were Africans. And they were 
islanders; that is, some of them had come from Santo Domingo. They 
were very black and totally foreign; they spoke in their African 
tongues, and they spoke the French patois; and when they sang, they 
sang African songs which made the fields exotic and strange, always 
frightening to me in my mortal life. They were superstitious and had 
their own secrets and traditions. In short, they had not yet been 
destroyed as Africans completely. Slavery was the curse of their 
existence; but they had not been robbed yet of that which had been 
characteristically theirs. They tolerated the baptism and modest 
garments imposed on there by the French Catholic laws; but in the 
evenings, they made their cheap fabrics into alluring costumes, made 


37 



jewelry of animal bones and bits of discarded metal which they 
polished to look like gold; and the slave cabins of Pointe du Lac were a 
foreign country, an African coast after dark, in which not even the 
coldest overseer would want to wander. No fear for the vampire. 

" Not until one summer evening when, passing for a shadow, I heard 
through the open doors of the black foreman's cottage a conversation 
which convinced me that Lestat and I slept is real danger. The slaves 
knew now we were not ordinary mortals. In hushed tones, the maids 
told of how, through a crack in the door, they had seen us dine on 
empty plates with empty silver, lifting empty glasses to our lips, 
laughing, our faces bleached and ghostly in the candlelight, the blind 
man a helpless fool in our power. Through keyholes they had seen 
Lestat's coffin, and once he had beaten one of them mercilessly for 
dawdling by the gallery windows of his room. 'There is no bed in 
there,’ they confided one to the other with nodding heads. 'He sleeps 
in the coffin, I know it.' They were convinced, on the best of grounds, 
of what we were. And as for me, they'd seen me evening after evening 
emerge from the oratory, which was now little more than a shapeless 
mass of brick and vine, layered with flowering wisteria in the spring, 
wild roses in summer, moss gleaming on the old unpainted shutters 
which had never been opened, spiders spinning in the stone arches. 

Of course, I'd pretended to visit it in memory of Paul, but it was clear 
by their speech they no longer believed such lies. And now they 
attributed to us not only the deaths of slaves found in the fields and 
swamps and also the dead cattle and occasional horses, but all other 
strange events; even floods and thunder were the weapons of God in a 
personal battle waged with Louis and Lestat. But worse still, they were 
not planning to run away. Vice were devils. Our power inescapable. 
No, we must be destroyed. And at this gathering, where I became an 
unseen member, were a number of the Freniere slaves. 

" This meant word would get to the entire coast. And though I 
firmly believed the entire coast to be impervious to a wave of hysteria, 

I did not intend to risk notice of any kind. I hurried back to the 
plantation house to tell Lestat our game of playing planter was over. 
He'd have to give up his slave whip and golden napkin ring and move 
into town. 

" He resisted, naturally. His father was gravely ill and might not live. 
Ire had no intention of running away from stupid slaves. 'I'll kill them 
all,' he said calmly, in threes and fours. Some will run away and that 
will be fine.' 

" 'You're talking madness. The fact is I want you gone from here.' 


38 



" 'You want me gone! You,' he sneered. He was building a card 
palace on the dining room table with a pack of very fine French cards. 
'You whining coward of a vampire who prowls the night killing alley 
cats and rats and staring for hours at candles as if they were people and 
standing in the rain like a zombie until your clothes are drenched and 
you smell like old wardrobe trunks in attics and have the look of a 
baffled idiot at the zoo.' 

" 'You've nothing more to tell me, and your insistence on 
recklessness has endangered us both. I might live in that oratory alone 
while this house fell to ruin. I don't care about it!' I told him. Because 
this was quite true. 'But you must have all the things you never had of 
life and make of immortality a junk shop in which both of us become 
grotesque. Now, go look at your father and tell me how long he has to 
live, for that's how long you stay, and only if the slaves don't rise up 
against us!' 

" He told me then to go look at his father myself, since I was the one 
who was always 'looking,' and I did. The old man was truly dying. I 
had been spared my mother's death, more or less, because she had 
died very suddenly on an afternoon. She'd been found with her 
sewing basket, seated quietly in the courtyard; she had died as one goes 
to sleep. But now I was seeing a natural death that was too slow with 
agony and with consciousness. And I'd always liked the old man; he 
was kindly and simple and made few demands. By day, he sat in the 
sun of the gallery dozing and listening to the birds; by night, any 
chatter on our part kept him company. He could play chess, carefully 
feeling each piece and remembering the entire state of the board with 
remarkable accuracy; and though Lestat would never play with him, I 
did often. Now he lay gasping for breath, his forehead hot and wet, 
the pillow around him stained with sweat. And as he moaned and 
prayed for death, Lestat in the other room began to play the spinet. I 
slammed it shut, barely missing his fingers. 'You won't play while he 
dies!' I said. 'The hell I won't!' he answered me. 'I'll play the drum if 
I like!' And taking a great sterling silver platter from a sideboard he 
slipped a finger through one of its handles and beat it with a spoon. 

" I told him to stop it, or I would make him stop it. And then we 
both ceased our noise because the old man was calling his name. He 
was saying that he must talk to Lestat now before he died. I told Lestat 
to go to him. The sound of his crying was terrible. 'Why should I? 

I’ve cared for him all these years. Isn't that enough?' And he drew 
from his pocket a nail file, and, seating himself on the foot of the old 
man's bed, he began to file his long nails. 


39 



" Meantime, I should tell you that I was aware of slaves about the 
house. They were watching and listening. I was truly hoping the old 
man would die within minutes. Once or twice before I'd dealt with 
suspicion or doubt on the part of several slaves, but never such a 
number. I immediately rang for Daniel, the slave to whom I'd given 
the overseer's house and position. But while I waited for him, I could 
hear the old man talking to Lestat; Lestat, who sat with his legs crossed, 
filing and filing, one eyebrow arched, his attention on his perfect nails. 
'It was the school,' the old man was saying. 'Oh, I know you 
remember . . . what can I say to you . . .’ he moaned. 

" 'You'd better say it,' Lestat said, 'because you're about to die.' The 
old man let out a terrible noise, and I suspect I made some sound of 
my own. I positively loathed Lestat. I had a mind now to get him out 
of the room. 'Well, you know that, don’t you? Even a fool like you 
knows that,' said Lestat. 'You'll never forgive me, will you? Not now, 
not even after I'm dead,' said the old man. 

" I don't know what you're talking about! " said Lestat. 

" My patience was becoming exhausted with him, and the old man 
was becoming more and more agitated. He was begging Lestat to 
listen to him with a warm heart. The whole thing was making me 
shudder. Meantime, Daniel had come, and I knew the moment I saw 
him that everything at Pointe du Lac was lost. Had I been more 
attentive I'd have seen signs of it before now. He looked at me with 
eyes of glass. I was a monster to him. 'Monsieur Lestat's father is very 
ill. Going,' I said, ignoring his expression. 'I want no noise tonight; 
the slaves must all stay within the cabins. A doctor is on his way.' He 
stared at me as if I were lying. And then his eyes moved curiously and 
coldly away from me towards the old man's door. His face underwent 
such a change that I rose at once and looked in the room. It was 
Lestat, slouched at the foot of the bed, his back to the bedpost, his nail 
file working furiously, grimacing in such a way that both his great 
teeth showed prominently. " The vampire stopped, his shoulders 
shaking with silent laughter. He was looking at the boy. And the boy 
looked shyly at the table. But he had already looked, and fixedly, at the 
vampire's mouth. He had seen that the lips were of a different texture 
from the vampire's skin, that they were silken and delicately lined like 
any person's lips, only deadly white; and he had glimpsed the white 
teeth. Only, the vampire had such a way of smiling that they were not 
completely revealed; and the boy had not even thought of such teeth 
until now. " You can imagine," said the vampire," what this meant. 

" I had to kill him. 

" You what? " said the boy. 


40 



" I had to kill him. He started to run. He would have alarmed 
everyone. Perhaps it might have been handled some other way, but I 
had no time. So I went after him, overpowering him. But then, 
finding myself in the act of doing what I had not done for four years, I 
stopped. This was a man. He had his bone-handle knife in his hand 
to defend himself. And I took it from him easily and slipped it into his 
heart. He sank to his knees at once, his fingers tightening on the blade, 
bleeding on it. And the sight of the blood, the aroma of it, maddened 
me. I believe I moaned aloud. But I did not reach for him, I would 
not. Then I remember seeing Lestat's figure emerge in the mirror over 
the sideboard. 'Why did you do this!' he demanded. I turned to face 
him, determined he would not see me in this weakened state. The old 
man was delirious, he went on, he could not understand what the old 
man was saying. 'The slaves, they know . . . you must go to the 
cabins and keep watch,’ I managed to say to him. 'I'll care for the old 
man.' 

" 'Kill him,' Lestat said. 

"'Are you mad!' I answered. 'He's your father!' 

" 'I know he's my father!' said Lestat. 'That's why you have to kill 
him. I can't kill him! If I could, I would have done it a long time ago, 
damn him!' He wrung his hands. 'We've got to get out of here. And 
look what you've done killing this one. There's no time to lose. His 
wife will be wailing up here in minutes ... or she'll send someone 
worse! "' The vampire sighed. " This was all true. Lestat was right. I 
could hear the slaves gathering around Daniel's cottage, waiting for 
him. Daniel had been brave enough to come into the haunted house 
alone. When he didn't return, the slaves would panic, become a mob. 

I told Lestat to calm them, to use all his power as a white master over 
them and not to alarm them with horror, and then I went into the 
bedroom and shut the door. I had then another shock in a night of 
shocks. Because I'd never seen Lestat's father as he was then. 

" He was sitting up now, leaning forward, talking to Lestat, begging 
Lestat to answer ham, telling him he understood his bitterness better 
than Lestat did himself. And he Was a living corpse. Nothing 
animated his sunken body but a fierce will: hence, his eyes for their 
gleam were all the more sunken in his skull, and his lips in their 
trembling made his old yellowed mouth more horrible. I sat at the 
foot of the bed, and, suffering to see him so, I gave him my hand. I 
cannot tell you how much his appearance had shaken me. For when I 
bring death, it is swift and consciousless, leaving the victim as if in 
enchanted sleep. But this was the slow decay, the body refusing to 
surrender to the vampire of time which had sucked upon it for years 


41 



on end. 'Lestat,' he said. 'Just for once, don't be hard with me. Just 
for once, be for me the boy you were. My son.' He said this over and 
over, the words, 'My son, my son'; and then he said something I could 
not hear about innocence and innocence destroyed. But I could see 
that he was not out of his mind, as Lestat thought, but in some terrible 
state of lucidity. The burden of the past Was on him with full force; 
and the present, which was only death, which he fought with all his 
will, could do nothing to soften that burden. But I knew I might 
deceive him if I used all my skill, and, bending close to him now, I 
whispered the word, 'Father.' It was not Lestat's voice, it was mine, a 
soft whisper. But he calmed at once and T thought then he might die. 
But he held my hand as if he were being pulled under by dark ocean 
waves and I alone could save him. He talked now of some country 
teacher, a name garbled, who. found in Lestat a brilliant pupil and 
begged to take him to a monastery for an education. He cursed 
himself for bringing Lestat home, for burning his books. 'You must 
forgive me, Lestat,’ he cried. 

" I pressed his hand tightly, hoping this might do for some answer, 
but he repeated this again. 'You have it all to live for, but you are as 
cold and brutal as I was then with the work always there and the cold 
and hunger! Lestat, you must remember. You were the gentlest of 
them all! God will forgive me if you forgive me.' 

" Well, at that moment, the real Esau came through the door. I 
gestured for quiet, but he wouldn't see that. So I had to get up quickly 
so the father wouldn't hear his voice from a distance. The slaves had 
run from him. 'But they're out there, they're gathered in the dark. I 
hear them,' said Lestat. And then he glared at the old man. 'Kill him, 
Louis!’ he said to me, his voice touched with the first pleading I'd ever 
heard in it. Then he bit down in rage. 'Do it!' 

" 'Lean over that pillow and tell him you forgive him all, forgive him 
for taking you out of school when you were a hoy! Tell him that now.' 

" 'For what!’ Lestat grimaced, so that his face looked like a skull. 
'Taking me out of school!’ He threw up his hands and let out a terrible 
roar of desperation. 'Damn him! Kill him ! 1 he said. 

" 'Nor' I said. 'You forgive him. Or you kill him yourself. Go on. 
Kill your own father.' 

" The old man begged to be told what we were saying. He called out, 
'Son, son,' and Lestat danced like the maddened Rumpelstiltskin. 
about to put his foot through the moor. I went to the lace curtains. I 
could see and hear the slaves surrounding the house of Pointe du Lao, 
forms woven in the shadows, drawing near. 'You were Joseph among 
your brothers,’ the old man said. 'The best of them, but how was I to 


42 



know? It was when you were gone I knew, when all those years passed 
and they could offer me no comfort, no solace. And then you came 
back to me and took me from the farm, but it wasn't you. It wasn't the 
same boy.' 

" I turned on Lestat now and veritably dragged him towards the bed. 
Never had I seen him so weak, and at the same time enraged. He 
shook me off and then knelt down near the pillow, glowering at me. I 
stood resolute, and whispered, 'Forgive!' 

" It's all right, Father. You must rest easy. I hold nothing against 
you," he said, his voice thin and strained over his anger. 

" The old man turned on the pillow, murmuring something soft with 
relief, but Lestat was already gone. He stopped short in the doorway, 
his hands over his ears. 'They're coming!' he whispered; and then, 
turning just so he could see me, he said, 'Take him. For God's sake' 

" The old man never even knew what happened. He never awoke 
from his stupor. I bled him just enough, opening the gash so he would 
then die without feeding my dark passion. That thought I couldn't 
bear. I knew now it wouldn't matter if the body was found in this 
manner, because I had had enough of Pointe du Lac and Lestat and all 
this identity of Pointe du Lac's prosperous master. I would torch the 
house, and turn to the wealth I'd held under many names, safe for just 
such a moment. 

" Meantime, Lestat was after the slaves. He would leave such-ruin 
and death behind him no one could make a story of that night at 
Pointe du Lac, and I went with him. As before, his ferocity was 
mysterious, but now I bared my fangs on the humans who fled from 
me, my steady advance overcoming their clumsy, pathetic speed as the 
veil of death descended, or the veil of madness. The power and the 
proof of the vampire was incontestable, so that the slaves scattered in 
all directions. And it was I who ran back up the steps to put the torch 
to Pointe du Lac. 

" Lestat came bounding after me. 'What are you doing!’ he shouted. 
'Are you mad!’ But there was no way to putout the flames. 'They're 
gone and you're destroying it, all of it.' He turned round and round in 
the magnificent parlor, amid his fragile splendor. 'Get your coffin out. 
You have three hours till dawn!’ I said. The house was a funeral pyre. 

t! 

" Could the fire have hurt you? " asked the boy. 

" Most definitely! " said the vampire. 

" Did you go back to the oratory? Was it safe? 

" No. Not at all. Some fifty-five slaves were scattered around the 
grounds. Many of them would not have desired the life of a runaway 


43 



and would most certainly go right to Freniere or south to the Bel 
Jardin plantation down river. I had no intention of staying there that 
night. But there was little time to go anywhere else. 

" The woman, Babette! " said the boy. The vampire smiled. " Yes, I 
went to Babette. She lived now at Freniere with her young husband. I 
had enough time to load my coffin into the carriage and go to her. 

" But what about Lestat? " The vampire sighed. " Lestat went with 
me. It was his intention to go on to New Orleans, and he was trying to 
persuade me to do just that. But when he saw 1 meant to hide at 
Freniere, he opted for that also. We might not have ever made it to 
New Orleans. It was growing light. Not so that mortal eyes would 
have seen it, but Lestat and I could see it. 

" Now, as for Babette, I had visited her once again. As I told you, she 
had scandalized the coast by remaining alone on the plantation 
without a man in the house, without even an older woman. Babette's 
greatest problem was that she might succeed financially only to suffer 
the isolation of social ostracism. She had such a sensibility that wealth 
itself mean nothing to her; family, a line . . . this meant something to 
Babette. Though she was able to hold the plantation together, the 
scandal was wearing on her. She was giving up inside. I came to her 
one night in the garden. Not permitting her to look on me, I told her 
in a most gentle voice that I was the same person she'd seen before. 
That I knew of her life and her suffering. 'Don't expect people to 
understand it,' I told her. 'They are fools. They want you to retire 
because of your brother's death. They would use your life as if it were 
merely oil for a proper lamp. You must defy them, but you must defy 
them with purity and confidence.' She was listening all the while in 
silence. I told her she was to give a ball for a cause. And the cause to 
be religious. She might pick a convent in New Orleans, any one, and 
plan for a philanthropic ball. She would invite her deceased mother's 
dearest friends to be chaperones and she would do all of this with 
perfect confidence. Above all, perfect confidence. It was confidence 
and purity which were all-important. 

" Well, Babette thought this to be a stroke of genius. 'I don’t know 
what you are, and you will not tell me,' she said. (This was true, I 
would not.) 'But I can only think that you are an angel.' And she 
begged to see my face. That is, she begged in the manner of such 
people as Babette, who are not given to truly begging anyone for 
anything. Not that Babette was proud. She was simply strong and 
honest, which in most cases makes begging ... I see you want to ask 
me a question. " The vampire stopped. 

" Oh, no," said the boy, who had meant to hide it. 


44 



" But you mustn't be afraid to ask me anything. If I held something 
too close ..." And when the vampire said this his face darkened for 
an instant. He frowned, and as his brows drew together a small well 
appeared in the flesh of his forehead over his left brow, as though 
someone had pressed it with a finger. It gave him a peculiar look of 
deep distress. " If I held something too close for you to ask about it, I 
would not bring it up in the first place," he said. The boy found 
himself staring at the vampire's eyes, at the eyelashes which were fine 
black wires in the tender flesh of the lids. 

" Ask me," he said to the boy. 

" Babette, the way you speak of her," said the boy. " As if your 
feeling was special. 

" Did I give you the impression I could not feel? " asked the vampire. 

" No, not at all. Obviously you felt for the old man. You stayed to 
comfort him when you were in danger. And what you felt for young 
Freniere when Lestat wanted to kill him ... all this you explained. 
But I was wondering . . . did you have a special feeling for Babette? 
Was it feeling for Babette all along that caused you to protect Freniere? 

I? 

" You mean love," said the vampire. " Why do you hesitate to say it? 

It 

" Because you spoke of detachment," said the boy. 

" Do you think that angels are detached? " asked the vampire. The 
boy thought for a moment. " Yes," he said. 

" But aren't angels capable of love? " asked the vampire. " Don't 
angels gaze upon the face of God with complete love? " The boy 
thought for a moment. " Love or adoration," he said. 

" What is the difference? " asked the vampire thoughtfully. " What is 
the difference? " It was clearly not a riddle for the boy. He was asking 
himself. 

" Angels feel love, and pride . . . the pride of The Fall. . . and 
hatred. The strong overpowering emotions of detached persons in 
whom emotion and will are one," he said finally. He stared at the 
table now, as though he were thinking this over, was not entirely 
satisfied with it. " I had for Babette ... a strong feeling. It is not the 
strongest I've ever known for a human being. " He looked up at the 
boy. " But it was very strong. Babette was to me in her own way an 
ideal human being. " He shifted in his chair, the cape moving softly 
about him, and turned his face to the windows. The boy bent forward 
and checked the tape. Then he took another cassette from his brief 
case and, begging the vampire's pardon, fitted it into place," I'm afraid 


45 



I did ask something too personal. I didn't mean ..." he said 
anxiously to the vampire. 

" You asked nothing of the sort," said the vampire, looking at him 
suddenly. " It is a question right to the point. I feel love, and I felt 
some measure of love for Babette, though not the greatest love I've 
ever felt. It was foreshadowed in Babette. 

" To return to my story, Babette's charity ball was a success and her 
re-entry in social life assured by it. Her money generously underwrote 
any doubts in the minds of her suitors' families, and she married. On 
summer nights, I used to visit her, never letting her see me or know 
that I was there. I came to see that she was happy, and seeing her 
happy I felt a happiness as the result. 

" And to Babette I came now with Lestat. He would have killed the 
Frenieres long ago if I hadn't stopped him, and he thought now that 
was what I meant to do. 'And what peace would that bring?’ I asked. 
'You call me the idiot, and you've been the idiot all along. Do you 
think I don't know why you made me a vampire? You couldn't live by 
yourself, you couldn't manage even the simplest things. For years 
now, I've managed everything while you sat about making a pretense 
of superiority. There's nothing left for you to tell me about life. I have 
no need of you and no use for you. It's you who need me, and if you 
touch but one of the Freniere slaves, I'll get rid of you. It will be a 
battle between us, and I needn't point out to you I have more wit to 
fare better in my little finger than you in your entire frame. Do as I 
say.' 

" Well, this startled him, though it shouldn't have; and he protested 
he had much to tell me, of things and types of people I might kill who 
would cause sudden death and places in the world I must never go and 
so forth and so on, nonsense that I could hardly endure. But I had no 
time for him. The overseer's lights were lit at Freniere; he was trying 
to quell the excitement of the runaway slaves and his own. And the 
fire of Pointe du Lac could be seen still against the sky. Babette was 
dressed and attending to business, having sent carriages to Pointe du 
Lac and slaves to help fight the blaze. The frightened runaways were 
kept away from the others, and at that point no one regarded their 
stories as any more than slave foolishness. Babette knew something 
dreadful had happened and suspected murder, never the supernatural. 
She was in the study making a note of the fire in the plantation diary 
when I found her. It was almost morning. I had only a few minutes to 
convince her she must help. I spoke to her at first, refusing to let her 
turn around, and calmly she listened. I told her I must have a room 
for the night, to rest. 'I've never brought you harm. I ask you now for 


46 



a key, and your promise that no one will try to enter that room until 
tonight. Then I'll tell you all' I was nearly desperate now. The sky was 
paling. Lestat was yards off in the orchard with the coffins. 'But why 
have you come to me tonight?’ she asked. 'And why not to you?' I 
replied. 'Did I not help you at the very moment when you most 
needed guidance, when you alone stood strong among those who are 
dependent and weak? Did I not twice offer you good counsel? And 
haven't I watched over your happiness ever since?' I could see the 
figure of Lestat at the window. He was in a panic. 'Give me the key to 
a room. Let no one come near it till nightfall. I swear to you I would 
never bring you harm.' 'And if I don't. . . if I believe you come from 
the devil!' she-said now, and meant to turn her head. I reached for 
the candle and put it out. She saw me standing with my back to the 
graying windows. 'If you don't, and if you believe me to be the devil, I 
shall die.' I said. 'Give me the key. I could kill you now if I chose, do 
you see?' And now I moved close to her and showed myself to her 
more completely, so that she gasped and drew back, holding to the 
arm of her chair. 'But I would not. I would die rather than kill you. I 
will die if you don't give me such a key as I ask.' 

" It was accomplished. What she thought, I don't know. But she 
gave me one of the ground-floor storage rooms where wine was aged, 
and I am sure she saw Lestat and me bringing the coffins. I not only 
locked the door but barricaded it. 

" Lestat was up the next evening when I awoke. 

" Then she kept her word. 

" Yes. Only she had gone a step further. She had not only respected 
our locked door; she had locked it again from without. 

" And the stories of the slaves . . . she'd heard them. 

" Yes, she had. Lestat was the first to discover we were locked in, 
however. He became furious. He had planned to get to New Orleans 
as fast as possible. He was now completely suspicious of me. 'I only 
needed you as long as my father lived,' he said, desperately trying to 
find some opening somewhere. The place was a dungeon. 

" 'Now I won't put up with anything from you, I warn you.' He 
didn't even wish to turn his back on me. I sat there straining to hear 
voices in the rooms above, wishing that he would shut up, not wishing 
to confide for a moment my feeling for Babette or my hopes. 

" I was also thinking something else. You ask me about feeling and 
detachment. One of its aspects, detachment with feeling, I should say, 
is that you can think of two things at the same time. You can think 
that you are not safe and may die, and you can think of something 
very abstract and remote. And this was definitely so with me. I was 


47 



thinking at that moment, wordlessly and rather deeply, how sublime 
friendship between Lestat and me might have been; how few 
impediments to it there would have been, and how much to be shared. 
Perhaps it was the closeness of Babette which caused me to feel it, for 
how could I truly ever come to know Babette, except, of course, 
through the one final way; to take her life, to become one with her in 
an embrace of death when my soul would become one with my heart 
and nourished with it. But my soul wanted to- know Babette without 
my need to kill, without robbing her of every breath of life, every drop 
of blood. But Lestat, how we might have known each other, had he 
been a man of character, a man of even a little thought. The old man's 
words came back to me; Lestat a brilliant pupil, a lover of books that 
had been burned. I knew only the Lestat who sneered at my library, 
called it a pile of dust, ridiculed relentlessly my reading, my 
meditations. 

" I became aware now that the house over our heads was quieting. 
Now and then feet moved and the boards creaked and the light in the 
cracks of the boards gave a faint, uneven illumination. I could see 
Lestat feeling along the brick walls, his hard enduring vampire face a 
twisted mask of human frustration. I was confident we must part ways 
at once, that I must if necessary put an ocean between us. And I 
realized that I'd tolerated him this long because of self-doubt. I'd 
fooled myself into believing I stayed for the old man, and for my sister 
and her husband. But I stayed with Lestat because I was afraid he did 
know essential secrets as a vampire which I could not discover alone 
and, more important, because he was the only one of my kind whom I 
knew. He had never told me how he had become a vampire or where I 
might find a single other member of our kind. This troubled me 
greatly then, as much as it had for four years. I hated ° and wanted to 
leave him; yet could I leave him? 

" Meantime, as all this passed through my thoughts, Lestat continued 
his diatribe: he didn't need me; he wasn't going to put up with 
anything, especially not any threat from the Frenieres. We had to be 
ready when that door opened. 'Remember!' he said to the finally. 
'Speed and strength; they cannot match us in that. And fear. 
Remember always, to strike fear. Don't be sentimental now! You'll 
cost us everything.' 

" 'You wish to be on your own after this?' I asked him. I wanted him 
to say it. I did not have the courage. Or, rather, I did not know my 
own feelings. 

"'I want to get to New Orleans!' he said. 'I was simply warning you 
I don’t need you. But to get out of here we need each other. You 


48 



don't begin to know how to use your powers! You have no innate 
sense of what you are! Use your persuasive powers with this woman if 
she comes. But if she comes with others, then be prepared to act like 
what you are.' 

" 'Which is what?' I asked him, because it had never seemed such a 
mystery to me as it did at that time. 'What am I?' He was openly 
disgusted. He threw up his hands. 

" 'Be prepared ... he said, now baring his magnificent teeth, 'to 
kill!’ He looked suddenly at the boards overhead. 'They're going to 
bed up there, do you hear them?' After a long silent time during which 
Lestat paced and I sat there musing, plumbing my mind for what I 
might do or say to Babette or, deeper still, for the answer to a harder 
question-what did I feel for Babette? After a long time, a light flared 
beneath the door. Lestat was poised to jump whoever should open it. 

It was Babette alone and she entered with a lamp, not seeing Lestat, 
who stood behind her, but looking directly at me. 

" I had never seen her as she looked then; her hair was down for bed, 
a mass of dark waves behind her white dressing gown; and her face was 
tight with worry and fear. This gave it a feverish radiance and made 
her large brown eyes all the more huge. As I have told you, I loved her 
strength and honesty, the greatness of her soul. And I did not feel 
passion for her as you would feel it. But I found her more alluring 
than any woman I'd known in mortal life. Even in the severe dressing 
gown, her arms and breasts were round and soft; and she seemed to 
me an intriguing soul clothed in rich, mysterious flesh. I who am hard 
and spare and dedicated to a purpose, felt drawn to her irresistibly; 
and, knowing it could only culminate in death, I turned away from her 
at once, wondering if when she gazed into my eyes she found them 
dead and soulless. 

" 'You are the one who came to me before,' she said now, as if she 
hadn't been sure. 'And you are the owner of Pointe du Lac. You argil' 

I knew as she spoke that she must have heard the wildest stories of last 
night, and there would be no convincing her of any lie. I had used my 
unnatural appearance twice to reach her, to speak to her; I could not 
hide it or minimize it now. 

" 'I mean you no harm.,' I said to her. 'I need only a carriage and 
horses . . . the horses I left last night in the pasture.' She didn't seem 
to hear my words; she drew closer, determined to catch me in the 
circle of her light. 

" And then I saw Lestat behind her, his shadow merging with her 
shadow on the brick wall; he was anxious and dangerous. 'You will 
give me the carriage?' I insisted. She was looking at me now, the lamp 


49 



raised; and just when I meant to look away, I saw her face change. It 
went still, blank, as if her soul were losing its consciousness. She 
closed her eyes and shook her head. It occurred to me that I had 
somehow caused her to go into a trance without any effort on my part. 
"What are you!' she whispered. 'You're from the devil. You were 
from the devil when you came to met' 

" 'The devil!' I answered her. This distressed me more than I 
thought I could be distressed. If she believed this, then she would 
think my counsel bad; she would question herself. Her life was rich 
and good, and I knew she mustn't do this. Like all strong people, she 
suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a 
secret infidel of a certain sort. And the balance by which she lived 
might be upset if she were to question her own goodness. She stared at 
me with undisguised horror. It was as if in horror she forgot her own 
vulnerable position. And now Lestat, who was drawn to weakness like 
a parched man to water, grabbed her wrist, and she screamed and 
dropped the lamp. The flames leaped in the splattered oil, and Lestat 
pulled her backwards towards the open door. 'You get the carriage!’ 
he said to her. 'Get it now, and the horses. You are in mortal danger; 
don't talk of devils!' 

" I stomped on the flames and went for Lestat, shouting at him to 
leave her. He had her by both wrists, and she was furious. 'You'll 
rouse the house if you don't shut up!' he said to me. 'And I'll kill her! 
Get the carriage . . . lead us. Talk to the stable boy!' he said to her, 
pushing her into the open air.. 

"We moved slowly across the dark court, my distress almost 
unbearable, Lestat ahead of me; and before us both Babette, who 
moved backwards, her eyes peering at us in the dark. Suddenly she 
stopped One dim light burned in the house above. 'I'll get you 
nothing!' she said. I reached for Lestat's arm and told him I must 
handle this. 'She'll reveal us to everyone unless you let me talk to her,' 

I whispered to him. 

"'Then get yourself in check,'he said disgustedly. 'Be strong. Don’t 
quibble with her.’ 

" 'You go as I talk ... go to the stables and get the carriage and the 
horses. But don't kill!' Whether he'd obey me or not I didn't know, 
but he darted away just as .1 stepped up to Babette. Her face was a 
mixture of fury and resolution. She said, 'Get thee behind me, Satan.’ 
And I stood there before her then, speechless, just holding her in my 
glance as surely as she held me. If she could hear Lestat in the night 
she gave no indication. Her hatred for me burned me like fire. 


50 



"'Why do you say this to me?' I asked. 'Was the counsel I gave you. 
bad? Did I do you harm? I came to help you, to give you strength. I 
thought only of you, when I had no need to think of you at all.' 

" She shook her head. 'But why, why do you talk to me like this?' 
she asked. 'I know what you've done at Pointe du Lac; you've lived 
there like a devil! The slaves are wild with stories! All day men have 
been on the river road on the way to Pointe du Lac; my husband was 
there! He saw the house in ruins, the bodies of slaves throughout the 
orchards, the fields. What are you! Why do you speak to me gently! 
What do you want of me?' She clung now to the pillars of the porch 
and was backing slowly to the staircase. Something moved above in 
the lighted window. 

" 'I cannot give you such answers now,' I said to her. 'Believe me 
when I tell you I came to you only to do you goad. And would not 
have brought worry and care to you last night for anything, had I the 
choice!’ " The vampire stopped. The boy sat forward, his eyes wide. 
The vampire was frozen, staring off, lost in his thoughts, his memory. 
And the boy looked down suddenly, as if this were the respectful thing 
to do. He glanced again at the vampire and then away, his own face as 
distressed as the vampire's; and then he started to say something, but 
he stopped. The vampire turned towards him and studied him, so that 
the boy flushed and looked away again anxiously. But then he raised 
his eyes and looked into the vampire's eyes. He swallowed, but he held 
the vampire's gaze. 

" Is this what you want? " the vampire whispered. " Is this what you 
wanted to hear? " He moved the chair back soundlessly and walked to 
the window. The boy sat as if stunned looking at his broad shoulders 
and the long mass of the cape. The vampire turned his head slightly. 
You don't answer me. I'm not giving you what you want, am I? You 
wanted an interview. Something to broadcast on the radio. 

" That doesn't matter. I'll throw the tapes away if you want! " The 
boy rose. " I can't say I understand all you're telling me. You'd know I 
was lying if I said I did. So how can I ask you to go on, except to say 
what I do understand . . . what I do understand is like nothing I've 
ever understood before. " He took a step towards the vampire. The 
vampire appeared to be looking down into Divisadero Street. Then he 
turned his head slowly and looked at the boy and smiled. His face was 
serene and almost affectionate. And the boy suddenly felt 
uncomfortable. He shoved his hands into his pockets and turned 
towards the table. Then he looked at the vampire tentatively and said. 

" Will you . . . please go on? " The vampire turned with folded arms 
and leaned against the window. " Why? " he asked. The boy was at a 


51 



loss. " Because I want to hear it. " He shrugged. " Because I want to 
know what happened. 

" All right," said the vampire, with the same smile playing on his lips. 
And he went back to the chair and sat opposite the boy and turned the 
recorder just a little and said," Marvelous contraption, really ... so 
let me go on. 

" You must understand that what I felt for Babette now was a desire 
for communication, stronger than any other desire I then felt. . . 
except for the physical desire for . . . blood. It was so strong in me, 
this desire, that it made me feel the depth of my capacity for loneliness. 
When I'd spoken to her before, there had been a brief but direct 
communication which was as simple and as satisfying as taking a 
person's hand. Clasping it. Letting it go gently. All this in a moment 
of great need and distress. But now we were at odds. To Babette, I was 
a monster; and I found it horrible to myself and would have done 
anything to overcome her feeling. I told her the counsel I'd given her 
was right, that no instrument of the devil could do right even if he 
chose. 

" T know!' she answered me. But by this she meant that she could 
no more trust me than the devil himself. I approached her and she 
moved back. I raised my hand and she shrank, clutching for the 
railing. 'All right, then,’ I said, feeling a terrible exasperation. 'Why 
did you protect me last night! Why have you come to me alone!’ 

What I saw in her face was cunning. She had a reason, but she would 
by no means reveal it to me. It was impossible for her to speak to me 
freely, openly, to give me the communication I desired. I felt weary 
looking at her. The night was already late, and I could see and hear 
that Lestat had stolen into the wine cellar and taken our caskets, and I 
had a need to get away; and other needs besides . . . the need to kill 
and drink. But it wasn't that which made me weary. It was something 
else, something far worse. It was as if this night were only one of 
thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to 
make a great arching line of which I couldn't see the end, a night in 
which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars. I think I turned 
away from her and put my hand to my eyes. I felt oppressed and weak 
suddenly. I think I was making some sound without my will. And 
then on this vast and desolate landscape of night, where I was standing 
alone and where Babette was only an illusion, I saw suddenly a 
possibility that I'd never considered before, a possibility from which 
I'd fled, rapt as I was with the world, fallen into the senses of the 
vampire, in love with color and shape and sound and singing and 
softness and infinite variation. Babette was moving, but I took no note 


52 



of it. She was taking something from her pocket; her great ring of 
household keys jingled there. She was moving up the steps. Let her go 
away, I was thinking. 'Creature of the devil!’ I whispered. 'Get thee 
behind me, Satan,’ I repeated. I turned to look at her now. She was 
frozen on the steps, with wide suspicious eyes. She’d reached the 
lantern which hung on the wall, and she held it in her hands just 
staring at me, holding it tight, like a valuable purse. 'You think I come 
from the devil?’ I asked her. 

" She quickly moved her left fingers around the hook of the lantern 
and with her right hand made the sign of the Cross, the Latin words 
barely audible to me; and her face blanched and her eyebrows rose 
when there was absolutely no change because of it. 'Did you expect 
me to go up in a puff of smoke?’ I asked her. I drew closer now, for I 
had gained detachment from her by virtue of my thoughts. 'And 
where would I go?’ I asked her. 'And where would I go, to hell, from 
whence I came? To the devil, from whom I came?’ I stood at the foot 
of the steps. 'Suppose I told you I know nothing of the devil. Suppose 
I told you that I do not even know if he exists!’ It was the devil I’d seen 
upon the landscape of my thoughts; it was the devil about whom I 
thought now. I turned away from her. She wasn't hearing me as you 
are now. She wasn't listening. I looked up at the stars. Lestat was 
ready, I knew it. It was as if he'd been ready there with the carriage for 
years; and she had stood upon the step for years. I had the sudden 
sensation my brother was there and had been there for ages also, and 
that he was talking to me low in an excited voice, and what he was 
saying was desperately important but it was going away from me as 
fast as he said it, like the rustle of rats in .the rafters of an immense 
house. There was a scraping sound and a burst of light. 'I don’t know 
whether I come from the devil or not! I don’t know what I am!’ I 
shouted at Babette, my voice deafening in my own sensitive ears. 'I am 
to live to the end of the world, and I do not even know what I am!' 

But the light flared before me; it was the lantern which she had lit with 
a match and held now so I couldn't see her face. For a moment I could 
see nothing but the light, and then the great weight of the lantern 
struck me full force in the chest and the glass shattered on the bricks 
anti the flames roared on my legs, in my face. Lestat was shouting 
from the darkness, 'Put it out, put it out, idiot. It will consume you!’ 
And I felt something thrashing me wildly in my blindness. It was 
Lestat’s jacket. I’d fallen helpless back against the pillar, helpless as 
much from the fire and the blow as from the knowledge that Babette 
meant to destroy me, as from, the knowledge that I did not know what 
I was. 


53 



" All this happened in a matter of seconds. The fire was out and I 
knelt in the dark with my hands on the bricks. Lestat at the top of the 
stairs had Babette again, and I flew up after him, grabbing him about 
the neck and pulling him backwards. He turned on me, enraged, and 
kicked me; but I clung to him and pulled him down on top of me to 
the bottom. Babette was petrified. I saw her dark outline against the 
sky and the glint of light in her eyes. 'Come on then!' Lestat said, 
scrambling to his feet. Babette was putting her hand to her throat. My 
injured eyes strained to gather the light to see her. Her throat bled. 
'Remember!' I said to her. I might have killed you! Or let him kill 
you! I did not. You called me devil. You are wrong.' 

" Then you'd stopped Lestat just in time," said the boy. 

"Yes. Lestat could kill and dank like a bolt of lightning. But I had 
saved only Babette's physical life. I was not to know that until later. 

" In an hour and a half Lestat and I were in New Orleans, the horses 
nearly dead from exhaustion, the carriage parked on a side street a 
block from a new Spanish hotel. Lestat had an old man by the arm 
and was putting fifty dollars into his hand. 'Get us a suite,’ he directed 
him, 'and order some champagne. Say it is for two gentlemen, and 
pay in advance. And when you come back I'll have another fifty for 
you. And I'll be watching for you, I wager.' Isis gleaming eyes held the 
man in thrall. I knew he'd kill him as soon as he returned with the 
hotel room keys, and he did. I sat in the carriage watching wearily as 
the man grew weaker and weaker and finally died, his body collapsing 
like a sack of rocks in a doorway as Lestat let him go. 'Good night, 
sweet prince,’ said Lestat 'and here's your fifty dollars.' And he shoved 
the money into his pocket as if it were a capital joke. 

" Now we slipped in the courtyard doors of the hotel and went up to 
the lavish parlor of our suite. Champagne glistened in a frosted 
bucket. Two glasses stood on the silver tray. I knew Lestat would fill 
one glass and sit there staring at the pale yellow color. And I, a man in 
a trance, lay on the settee staring at him as if nothing he could do 
mattered. I have to leave him or die, I thought. It would be sweet to 
die, I thought. Yes, die. I wanted to die before. Now I wish to die. I 
saw it with such sweet clarity, such dead calm. 

"'You're being morbid!' Lestat said suddenly. 'It's almost dawn.' 

He pulled the lace curtains back, and I could see the rooftops under 
the dark blue sky, and above, the great constellation Orion. 'Go kill!’ 
said Lestat, sliding up the glass. He stepped out of the sill, and I heard 
his feet land softly on the rooftop beside the hotel. He was going for 
the coffins, or at least one. My thirst rose in me like fever, and I 
followed him. My desire to die was constant, like a pure thought in 


54 



the mind, devoid of emotion. Yet I needed to feed. I've indicated to 
you I would not then kill people. I moved along the rooftop in search 
of rats. 

" But why. . . you've said Lestat shouldn't have made you start with 
people. Did you mean ... do you mean for you it was an aesthetic 
choice, not a moral one? 

" Had you asked me then, I would have told you it was aesthetic, that 
I wished to understand death in stages. That the death of an animal 
yielded such pleasure and experience to me that I had only begun to 
understand it, and wished to save the experience of human death for 
my mature understanding. But it was moral. Because all aesthetic 
decisions are moral, really. 

" I don't understand," said the boy. " I thought aesthetic decisions 
could be completely immoral. What about the cliche of the artist who 
leaves his wife and children so he can paint? Or Nero playing the harp 
while Rome burned? 

" Both were moral decisions. Both served a higher good, in the mind 
of the artist. The conflict lies between the morals of the artist and the 
morals of society, not between aesthetics and morality: But often this 
isn't understood; and here comes the waste, the tragedy. An artist, 
stealing paints from a store, for example, imagines himself to have 
made an inevitable but immoral decision, and then he sees ' self as 
fallen from grace; what follows is despair and petty irresponsibility, as 
if morality were a great glass world which can be utterly shattered by 
one act. But this was not my great concern then. I did not know these 
things then. I believed I killed animals for aesthetic reasons only, and I 
hedged against the great moral question of whether or mot by my very 
nature I was damned. 

" Because, you see, though Lestat had never said anything about 
devils or hell to me, I believed I was damned when I went over to him, 
just as Judas must have believed it when he put the noose around his 
neck. You understand? " The boy said nothing. He started to speak 
but didn't. The color burned for a moment in blotches on his cheeks. 

" Were you? " he whispered. The vampire only sat there, smiling, a 
small smile that played on his lips like the light. The boy was staring at 
him now as if he were just seeing him for the first time. 

" Perhaps ..." said the vampire drawing himself up and crossing 
his legs "... we should take things one at a time. Perhaps I should 
go on with my story. 

" Yes, please ..." said the boy. 

" I was agitated that night, as I told you. I had hedged against this 
question as a vampire and now it completely overwhelmed me, and in 


55 



that state I had no desire to live. Well, this produced in me, as it can in 
humans, a craving for that which will satisfy at least physical desire. I 
think I used it as an excuse. I have told you what the kill means to 
vampires; you can imagine from what I've said the difference between 
a rat and a man. 

" I went down into the street after Lestat and walked for blocks. The 
streets were muddy then, the actual blocks islands above the gutters, 
and the entire city so dark compared to the cities of today. The lights 
were as beacons in a black sea. Even with morning rising slowly, only 
the dormers and high porches of the houses were emerging from the 
dark, and to a mortal man the narrow streets I found were like pitch. 
Am I damned? Am I from the devil? Is my very nature that of a devil? 

I was asking myself over and over. And if it is, why then do I revolt 
against it, tremble when Babette hurls a flaming lantern at me, turn 
away in disgust when Lestat kills? What have I become in becoming a 
vampire? Where am I to go? And all the while, as the death wish 
caused me to neglect my thirst, my thirst grew hotter; my veins were 
veritable threads of pain in my flesh; my temples throbbed; and finally 
I could stand it no longer. Torn apart by the wish to take no action-to 
starve, to wither in thought on the one hand; and driven to kill on the 
other-I stood in an empty, desolate street and heard the sound of a 
child crying. 

" She was within. I drew close to the walls, trying in my habitual 
detachment only to understand the nature of her cry. She was weary 
and aching and utterly alone. She had been crying for so long now, 
that soon she would stop from sheer exhaustion. I slipped my hand 
up under the heavy wooden shutter and pulled it so the bolt slipped. 
There she sat in the dark room beside a dead woman, a woman who'd 
been dead for some days. The room itself was cluttered with trunks 
and packages as though a number of people had been packing to leave; 
but the mother lay half clothed, her body already in decay, and no one 
else was there but the child. It was moments before she saw me, but 
when she did she began to tell me that I must do something to help her 
mother. She was only five at- most, and very thin, and her face was 
stained with dirt and tears. She begged me to help. They had to take a 
ship, she said, before the plague came; their father was waiting. She 
began to shake her mother now and to cry in the most pathetic and 
desperate way; and then she looked at me again and burst into the 
greatest flow of tears. 

" You must understand that by now I was burning with physical need 
to drink. I could not have made it through another day without 
feeding. But there were alternatives: rats abounded in the streets, and 


56 



somewhere very near a dog was howling hopelessly. I might have Pied 
the room had I chosen and fed and gotten back easily. But the 
question pounded in me: Am I dammed? If so, why do I feel such pity 
for her, for her gaunt face? Why do I wish to touch her tiny, soft arms, 
hold her now on my knee as I am doing, feel her bend her head to my 
chest as I gently touch the satin hair? Why do I do this? If I am 
damned I must want to kill her, I must want to make her nothing but 
food for a cursed existence, because being damned I must hate her. 

" And when I thought of this, I saw Babette's face contorted with 
hatred when she had held the lantern waiting to light it, and I saw 
Lestat in my mind and hated him, and I felt, yes, damned and this is 
hell, and in that instant I had bent down and driven hard into her soft, 
small neck and, hearing her tiny cry, whispered even as I felt the hot 
blood on my lips, 'It's only for a moment and there'll be no more 
pain.' But she was locked to me, and I was soon incapable of saying 
anything. For four years I had not savored a human; for four years I 
hadn't really known; and now I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm, 
and such a heart not the heart of a man or an animal, but the rapid, 
tenacious heart of the child, beating harder and harder, refusing to die, 
beating like a tiny fist beating on a door, crying, 'I will not die, I will 
not die, I cannot die, I cannot die . . . .’ I think I rose to my feet still 
locked to her, the heart pulling my heart faster with no hope of cease, 
the rich blood rushing too fast for me, the room reeling, and then, 
despite myself, I was staring over her bent head, her open mouth, 
down through the gloom at the mother's face; and through the half- 
mast lids, her eyes gleamed at me as if they were alive! I threw the 
child down. She lay like a jointless doll. And turning in blind horror 
of the mother to flee, I saw the window filled with a familiar shape. It 
was Lestat, who backed away from it now laughing, his body bent as he 
danced in the mud street. 'Louis, Louis,’ he taunted me, and pointed a 
long, bone-thin finger at me, as if to say he'd caught me in the act. 

And now he bounded over the sill, brushing me aside, and grabbed the 
mother's stinking body from the bed and made to dance with her. 

" Good God! " whispered the boy. 

" Yes, I might have said the same," said the vampire. " He stumbled 
over the child as he pulled the mother along in widening circles, 
singing as he danced, her matted hair falling in her face, as her head 
snapped back and a black fluid poured out of her mouth. He threw 
her down. I was out of the window and running down the street, and 
he was running after me. 'Are you afraid of me, Louis?' he shouted. 
'Are you afraid? The child's alive, Louis, you left her breathing. Shall I 
go back and make her a vampire? We could use her, Louis, and think 


57 



of all the pretty dresses we could buy for her. Louis, wait, Louis! I'll 
go back for her if you say!' And so he ran after me all the way back to 
the hotel, all the way across the rooftops, where I hoped to lose him, 
until I leaped in the window of the parlor and turned in rage and 
slammed the window shut. He hit it, arms outstretched, like a bird 
who seeks to By through glass, and shook the frame. I was utterly out 
of my mind. I went round and round the room looking for some way 
to kill him. I pictured his body burned to a crisp on the roof below. 
Reason had altogether left me, so that I was consummate rage, and 
when he came through the broken glass, we fought as we'd never 
fought before. It was hell that stopped me, the thought of hell, of us 
being two souls in hell that grappled in hatred. I lost my confidence, 
my purpose, my grip. I was down on the floor then, and he was 
standing over me, his eyes cold, though his chest heaved. 'You're a 
fool, Louis,' he said. His voice was calm. It was so calm it brought me 
around. 'The sun's coming up,' he said, his chest heaving slightly from 
the struggle, his eyes narrow as he looked at the window. I'd never 
seen him quite like this. The fight had got the better of him in some 
way; or something had. 'Get in your coffin,' he said to me, without 
even the slightest anger. 'But tomorrow night. . . we talk.' 

" Well, I was more than slightly amazed. Lestat talk! I couldn't 
imagine this. Never had Lestat and I really talked. I think I have 
described to you with accuracy our sparring matches, our angry go- 
rounds. 

" He was desperate for the money, for your houses," said the boy. 

Or was it that he was as afraid to be alone as you were? 

" These questions occurred to me. It even occurred to me that Lestat 
meant to kill me, some way that I didn't know. You see, I wasn't sure 
then why I awoke each evening when I did, whether it was automatic 
when the deathlike sleep left me, and why it happened sometimes 
earlier than at other times. It was one of the things Lestat would not 
explain. And he was often up before me. He was my superior in all 
the mechanics, as I've indicated. And I shut the coin that morning 
with a kind of despair. 

" I should explain now, though, that the shutting of the coffin is 
always disturbing. It is rather like going under a modern anesthetic on 
an operating table. Even a casual mistake on the part of an intruder 
might mean death. 

" But how could he have killed you? He couldn't have exposed you 
to the light; he couldn't have stood it himself. 


58 



" This is true, but rising before me he might have nailed my coffin 
shut. Or set it afire. The principal thing was, I didn't know what he 
might do, what he might know that I still did not know. 

" But there was nothing to be done about it then, and with thoughts 
of the dead woman and child still in any brain, and the sun rising, I 
had no energy left to argue with him, and lay down to miserable 
dreams. 

" You do dream! " said the boy. 

" Often," said the vampire. " I wish sometimes that I did not. For 
such dreams, such long and clear dreams I never had as a mortal; and 
such twisted nightmares I never had either. In my early days, these 
dreams so absorbed me that often it seemed I fought waking as long as 
I could and lay sometimes for hours ' g of these dreams until the night 
was half gone; and dazed by them I often wandered about seeking to 
understand their meaning. They were in many ways as elusive as the 
dreams of mortals. I dreamed of my brother, for instance, that he was 
near me in some state between life and death, calling to me for help. 
And often I dreamed of Babette; and often-almost always-there was a 
great wasteland backdrop to my dreams, that wasteland of night rd 
seen when cursed by Babette as I've told you. It was as if all figures 
walked and talked on the desolate home of my damned soul. I don't 
remember what I dreamed that day, perhaps because I remember too 
well what Lestat and I discussed the following evening. I see you're 
anxious for that, too. 

" Well, as I've said, Lestat amazed me in his new calm, his 
thoughtfulness. But that evening I didn't wake to find him the same 
way, not at first. There were women in the parlor. The candles were a 
few, scattered on the small table and the carved buffet, and Lestat had 
his arm around one woman and was kissing her: She was very drunk 
and very beautiful, a great drugged doll of a woman with her careful 
coif falling slowly down on her bare shoulders and over her partially 
bared breasts. The other woman sat over a ruined supper table 
drinking a glass of wine. I could see that the three of them had dined 
(Lestat pretending to dine . . . you would be surprised how people do 
not notice that a vampire is only pretending to eat), and the woman at 
the table was bored. All this put me in a fit of agitation. I did not 
know what Lestat was up to. If I went into the room, the woman 
would turn her attentions to me. And what was to happen, I couldn't 
imagine, except that Lestat meant for us to kill them both. The 
woman on the settee with him was already teasing about his kisses, his 
coldness, his lack of desire for her. And tbe woman at the table 
watched with black almond eyes that seemed to be filled with 


59 



satisfaction; when Lestat rose and came to her, putting his hands on 
her bare white arms, she brightened. Bending now to kiss her, he saw 
me through the crack in the door. And his eyes just stared at me for a 
moment, and then he went on talking with the ladies. He bent down 
and blew out the candles on the table. 'It's too dark in here,' said the 
woman on the couch. 'Leave us alone,'said the other woman. Lestat 
sat down and beckoned her to sit in his lap. And she did, putting her 
left arm around his neck, her right hand smoothing back his yellow 
hair. 'Your skin's icy,' she said, recoiling slightly. 'Not always,' said 
Lestat; and then he buried his face in the flesh of her neck. I was 
watching all this with fascination. Lestat was masterfully clever and 
utterly vicious, but I didn't know how clever he was until he sank his 
teeth into her now, his thumb pressing down on her throat, his other 
arm locking her, tight, so that he drank his fill without the other 
woman even knowing. 'Your friend has no head for wine,' he said 
slipping out of the chair and seating the unconscious woman there, 
her arms folded under her face on the table. 'She's stupid,' said the 
other woman, who had gone to the window and had been looking out 
at the lights. New Orleans was then a city of many low buildings, as 
you probably know. And on such clear nights as this, the lamplit 
streets were beautiful from the high windows of this new Spanish 
hotel; and the stars of those days bung low over such dim light as they 
do at sea. 'I can warm that cold skin of yours better than she can.' She 
turned to Lestat, and I must confess I was feeling some relief that he 
would now take care of her as well. But he planned nothing so simple. 
'Do you think so?' he said to her. He took her hand, and she said, 
'Why, you're warm 

" You mean the blood had warmed him," said the boy. 

" Oh, yes," said the vampire. " After killing, a vampire is as warm as 
you are now. " And he started to resume; then, glancing at the boy, he 
smiled. " As I was saying . . . Lestat now held the woman's hand in 
his and said that the other had warmed him. Isis face, of course, was 
flushed; much altered. He drew her close now, and she kissed him, 
remarking through her laughter that he was a veritable furnace of 
passion. 

" 'Ah, but the price is high,' he said to her, affecting sadness. 'Your 
pretty friend . . : He shrugged his shoulders. 'I exhausted her.' And 
he stood back as if inviting the woman to walk to the table. And she 
did, a look of superiority on her small features. She bent down to see 
her friend, but then lost interest--until, she saw something. It was a 
napkin. It had caught the last drops of blood from the wound in the 
throat. She picked it up, straining to see it in the darkness. 'Take 


60 



down your hair,' said Lestat softly. And she dropped it, indifferent, 
and took down the last tresses, so that her hair fell blond and wavy 
down her back. 'Soft,'he said,'so soft. I picture you that way, lying 
on a bed of satin.' 

" 'Such things you say!' she scoffed and turned her back on him 
playfully. 

" 'Do you know what manner of bed?' he asked. And she laughed 
and said his bed, she could imagine. She looked back at him as he 
advanced; and, never once looking away from her, he gently tipped the 
body of her friend, so that it fell backwards from the chair and lay with 
staring eyes upon the floor. The woman gasped. She scrambled away 
from the corpse, nearly upsetting a small end table. The candle went 
over and went out. ' " Put out the light. . . and then put out the 
light,"' Lestat said softly. And then he took her into his arms like a 
struggling moth and sank his teeth into her. 

" But what were you thinking as you watched? " asked the boy. " Did 
you want to stop him the way you wanted to stop him from killing 
Freniere? 

" No," said the vampire. " I could not have stopped him. And you 
must understand I knew that he killed humans every night. Animals 
gave him no satisfaction whatsoever. Animals were to be banked on 
when all else failed, but never to be chosen. If I felt any sympathy for 
the women, it was buried deep in my own turmoil. I still felt in my 
chest the little hammer heart of that starving child; I still burned with 
the questions of my own divided nature. I was angry that Lestat had 
staged this show for me, waiting till I woke to kill the women; and I 
wondered again if I might somehow break loose from him and felt 
both hatred and my own weakness more than ever. 

" Meantime, he propped their lovely corpses at the table and went 
about the room lighting all the candles until it blazed as if for a 
wedding. 'Come in, Louis,'he said. 'I would have arranged an escort 
for you, but I know what a man you are about choosing your own. 

Pity Mademoiselle Freniere likes to hurl flaming lanterns. It makes a 
party unwieldy, don't you think? Especially for a hotel?' He seated the 
blond-haired girl so that her head lay to one side against the damask 
back of the chair, and the darker woman lay with her chin resting just 
above her breasts; this one had blanched, and her features had a rigid 
look to them already, as though she was one of those women in whom 
the fire of personality makes beauty. But the other looked only as if 
she slept; and I was not sure that she was even dead. Lestat had made 
two gashes, one in her throat and one above her left breast, and both 


61 



still bled freely. He lifted her wrist now, and slitting it with a knife, 
filled two wine glasses and bade me to sit down. 

" 'I'm leaving you,' I said to him at once. 'I wish to tell you that 
now.' 

" 'I thought as much,' he answered, sitting back in the chair, 'and I 
thought as well that you would make a flowery announcement. Tell 
me what a monster I am; what a vulgar fiend’ 

" 'I make no judgments upon you. I'm not interested in you. I am 
interested in my own nature now, and I've come to believe I can't trust 
you to tell me the truth about it. You use knowledge for personal 
power,' I told him. And I suppose, in the manner of many people 
making such an announcement, I was not looking to him at all. I was 
mainly listening to my own words. But now I saw that his face was 
once again the way it had been when he'd said we would talk. He was 
listening to me. I was suddenly at a loss. I felt that gulf between us as 
painfully as ever. 

" 'Why did you become a vampire?' I blurted out. 'And why such a 
vampire as you are! Vengeful and delighting in taking human life even 
when you have no need. This girl. . . why did you kill her when one 
would have done? And way did you frighten her so before you killed 
her? And why have you propped her here in some grotesque manner, 
as if tempting the gods to strike you down for your blasphemy?' 

" All this he listened to without speaking, and in the pause that 
followed I again felt at a loss. Lestat's eyes were large and thoughtful; 
I'd seen them that way before, but I couldn't remember when, 
certainly not when talking to me. 

" 'What do you think a vampire is?’ he asked me sincerely. 

" 'I don’t pretend to know. You pretend to know. What is it?’ I 
asked. And to this he answered nothing. It was as if he sensed the 
insincerity of it, the spite. He just sat there looking at me with the 
same still expression. Then I said, 'I know that after leaving you, I 
shall try to find out. I'll travel the world, if I have to, to find other 
vampires. I know they must exist; I don't know of any reasons why 
they shouldn't exist in great numbers. And I'm confident I shall find 
vampires who have more in common with me than I with you. 
Vampires who understand knowledge as I do and have used their 
superior vampire nature to learn secrets of which you don't even 
dream. If you haven't told me everything, I shall find things out for 
myself or from them, when I find them. 

" He shook his head. 'Louis!' he said. 'You are in love with your 
mortal nature! You chase after the phantoms of your former self. 
Freniere, his sister . . . these are images for you of what you were and 


62 



what you still long to be. And in your romance with mortal life, you're 
dead to your vampire nature!' 

" I objected to this at once. 'My vampire nature has been for me the 
greatest adventure of my life; ail that went before it was confused, 
clouded; I went through mortal life like a blind man groping from 
solid object to solid object. It was only when I became a vampire that I 
respected for the first time all of life. I never saw a living, pulsing 
human being until I was a vampire; I never knew what life was until it 
ran out in a red gush over my lips, my hands!' I found myself staring 
at the two women,. the darker one now turning a terrible shade of 
blue. The blonde was breathing. 'She's not dead!' I said to him 
suddenly. 

" 'I know. Let her alone,' he said. He lifted her wrist and made a new 
gash by the scab of the other and filled his glass. 'All that you say 
makes sense,’ he said to me, taking a drink. 'You are an intellect. I've 
never been. What I've learned I've learned from listening to men talk, 
not from books. I never went to school long enough. But I'm not 
stupid, and you must listen to me because you are in danger. You do 
not know your vampire nature. You are like an adult who, looking 
back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You 
cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, 
asking for the love and care to be showered on you again simply 
because now you know their worth. So it is with you and mortal 
nature. You've given it up. You no longer look " through a glass 
darkly. " But you cannot pass back to the world of human warmth 
with your new eyes' 

"'I know that well enough!' I said. 'But what is it that is our nature! 
If I can live from the blood of animals, why should I not live from the 
blood of animals rather than go through the world bringing misery 
and death to human creatures!' 

" 'Does it bring you happiness?' he asked. 'You wander through the 
night, feeding on rats like a pauper and then moon at Babette’s 
window, filled with care, yet helpless as the goddess who came by night 
to watch Endymion sleep and could not have him. And suppose you 
could hold her in your arms and she would look on you without 
horror or disgust, what then? A few short years to watch her suffer 
every prick of mortality and then die before your eyes? Does this give 
happiness? This is insanity, Louis. This is vain. And what truly lies 
before you is vampire nature, which is killing. For I guarantee you 
that if you walk the streets tonight and strike down a woman as rich 
and beautiful as Babbette and suck her blood until she drops at your 
feet you will have no hunger left for Babette’s profile in the candlelight 


63 



or for listening by the window for the sound of her voice. You will be 
filled, Louis, as you were meant to be, with all the life that you can 
hold; and you will have hunger when that's gone for the same, and the 
same, and the same. The red in this glass will be just as red; the roses 
on the wallpaper just as delicately drawn. And you'll see the moon the 
same way, and the same the flicker of a candle. And with that same 
sensibility that you cherish you will see death in all its beauty, life as it 
is only known on the very point of death. Don't you understand that, 
Louis? You alone of all creatures can see death that way with 
impunity. You . . . alone . . . under the rising moon . . . can strike 
like the hand of God!' 

" He sat back now and drained the glass, and his eyes moved over the 
unconscious woman. Her breasts heaved and her eyebrows knit as if 
she were coming around: A moan escaped her lips. He'd never spoken 
such words to me before, and I had not thought him capable of it. 
'Vampires are killers,'he said now. 'Predators. Whose all-seeing eyes 
were meant to give them detachment. The ability to see a human life 
in its entirety, not with any mawkish sorrow but with a thrilling 
satisfaction in being the end of that life, in having a hand in the divine 
plan.’ 

" 'That is how you see it!’ I protested. The girl moaned again; her 
face was very white. Her head rolled against the back of the chair. 

" 'That is the way it is,’ he answered. 'You talk of finding other 
vampires! Vampires are killers! They don't want you or your 
sensibility) They'll see you coming long before you see them, and 
they'll see your flaw; and, distrusting you, they'll seek to kill you. 
They'd seek to kill you even if you were like me. Because they are lone 
predators and seek for companionship no more than cats in the jungle. 
They're jealous of their secret and of their territory; and if you find one 
or more of them together it will be for safety only, and one will be the 
slave of the other, the way you are of me.' 

" 'I'm not your slave,' I said to him. But even as he spoke I realized 
I'd been his slave all along. 

" 'That's how vampires increase . . . through slavery. How else? 
he asked. He took the girl's wrist again, and she cried out as the knife 
cut. She opened her eyes slowly as he held her wrist over the glass. 

She blinked and strained to keep them open. It was as if a veil covered 
her eyes. 'You're tired, aren't you?' he asked her. She gazed at him as 
if she couldn't really see him. 'Tired!' he said, now leaning close and 
staring into her eyes. 'You want to sleep.' 'Yes . . : she moaned softly. 
And he picked, her up and took her into the bedroom. Our coffins 
rested on the carpet and against the wall; there was a velvet-draped 


64 



bed. Lestat did not put her on the bed; he lowered her slowly into his 
coffin. 'What are you doing?' I asked him, coming to the door sill. 

The girl was looking around like a terrified child. 'No . . : she was 
moaning. And then, as he closed the lid, she screamed. She continued 
to scream within the coffin. 

" 'Why do you do this, Lestat?’ I asked. 

"'I like to do it,’he said. 'I enjoy it.’ He looked at me. 'I don’t say 
that you have to enjoy it. Take your aesthete's tastes to purer things. 
Kill them swiftly if you will, but do it! Learn that you're a killer! Ah!' 
He threw up his hands in disgust. The girl had stopped screaming. 
Now he drew up a little curved-legged chair beside the coffin and, 
crossing his legs, he looked at the coffin lid. His was a black varnished 
coffin, not a pure rectangular box as they are now, but tapered at both 
ends and widest where the corpse might lay his hands upon his chest. 

It suggested the human form. It opened, and the girl sat up 
astonished, wild-eyed, her lips blue and trembling. 'Lie down, love,' 
he said to her, and pushed her back; and she lay, near-hysterical, 
staring up at him. 'You're dead, love,' he said to her; and she screamed 
and turned desperately in the coffin like a fish, as if her body could 
escape through the sides, through the bottom. 'It's a coffin, a coffin!' 
she cried. 'Let me out.’ 

" 'But we all must lie in cons, eventually,' he said to her. 'Lie still, 
love. This is your coffin. Most of us never get to know what it feels 
like. You know what it feels like!' he said to her. I couldn't tell 
whether she was listening or not, or just going wild. But she saw me in 
the doorway, and then she lay still, looking at Lestat and then at me. 
'Help me!’ she said to me. 

" Lestat looked at me. ’I expected you to feel these things 
instinctually, as I did,’ he said. When I gave you that first kill, I 
thought you would hunger for the next and the next, that you would 
go to each human life as if to a full cup, the way I had. But you didn't. 
And all this time I suppose I kept from straightening you out because 
you were best weaker. I'd watch you playing shadow in the night, 
staring at the falling rain, and I'd think, He's easy to manage, he's 
simple. But you're weak, Louis. You're a mark. For vampires and 
now for humans alike. This thing with Babette has exposed us both. 
It's as if you want us both to be destroyed.' 

" 'I can't stand to watch what you're doing,' I said, turning my back. 
The girl's eyes were burning into my flesh. She lay, all the time he 
spoke, staring at me. 

" You can stand it!' he said. 'I saw you last night with that child. 
You're a vampire, the same as I am!' 


65 



" He stood up and came towards me, but the girl rose again and he 
turned to shove her down. ' 13o you think we should make her a 
vampire? Share our lives with her?' he asked. Instantly I said,'No!' 

" 'Why, because she’s nothing but a whore?' he asked. 'A damned 
expensive whore at that,’ he said. 

" 'Can she live now? Or has she lost too much?’ I asked him. 

" 'Touching) " he said. 'She can’t live.' 

" 'Then kill her.' She began to scream. He just sat there. I turned 
around. He was smiling, and the girl had turned her face to the satin 
and was sobbing. Tier reason had almost entirely left her; she was 
crying and praying. She was praying to the Virgin to save her, her 
hands over her face now, now over her head, the wrist smearing blood 
in her hair and on the satin. I bent over the coffin. She was dying, it 
was true; her eyes were burning, but the tissue around them was 
already bluish and now she smiled. 'You won't let me die, will you?' 
she whispered. 'You'll save me.' Lestat reached over and took her 
wrist. 'But it's too late, love,' he said. 'Look at your wrist, your breast’ 
And then he touched the wound in her throat. She put her hands to 
her throat and gasped, her mouth open, the scream strangled. I stared 
at Lestat. I could not understand why he did this. His face was as 
smooth as mine is now, more animated for the blood, but cold and 
without emotion. 

" He did not leer like a stage villain, nor hunger for her suffering as if 
the cruelty fed him. He simply watched her. 'I never meant to be 
bad,' she was crying. 'I only did what I had to do. You won’t let this 
happen to me, You'll let me go. I can't die like this, I can't!' She was 
sobbing, the sobs dry and thin. 'You'll let me go. I have to go to the 
priest. You'll let me go.' "'But my friend is a priest,'said Lestat, 
smiling. As if he'd just thought of it as a joke. 'This is your funeral, 
dear. You see, you were at a dinner party and you died. But God has 
given you another chance to be absolved. Don’t you see? Tell him 
your sins' 

" She shook her head at first, and then she looked at me again with 
those pleading eyes. 'Is it true?' she whispered. 'Well,' said Lestat, 'I 
suppose you're not contrite, dear. I shall have to shut the lid!' 

" 'Stop this, Lestat!’ I shouted at him. The girl was screaming again, 
and I could not stand the sight of it any longer. I bent down to her 
and took her hand. 'I can’t remember my sins,' she said, just as I was 
looking at her wrist, resolved to kill her. 'You mustn't try. Tell God 
only that you are sorry,' I said, 'and then you'll die and it will be over.' 
She lay back, and her eyes shut. I sank my teeth into her wrist and 
began to suck her dry. She stirred once as if dreaming and said a 


66 



name; and then, when I felt her heartbeat reach that hypnotic 
slowness, I drew back from her, dizzy, confused for the moment, my 
hands reaching for the door frame. I saw her as if in a dream. The 
candles glared in the corner of my eye. I saw her lying utterly still. 

And Lestat sat composed beside her, like a mourner. Ibis face was still. 
'Louis,'he said to me. 'Don't you understand? Peace will only come 
to you when you can do this every night of your life. There is nothing 
else. But this is everything!' Isis voice was almost tender as he spoke, 
and he rose and put both his hands on my shoulders. I walked into 
the parlor, shying away from his touch but not resolute enough to 
push him off. 'Come with me, out into the streets. It’s late. You 
haven't drunk enough. Let me show you what you are. Really! 

Forgive me if I bungled it, left too much to nature. Come!' 

" 'I can’t bear it, Lestat,’ I said to him. 'You chose your companion 
badly.' 

" 'But Luis,' he said, 'you haven't tried!.' The vampire stopped. He 
was studying the boy. And the boy, astonished, said nothing. 

" It was true what he'd said. I had not drunk enough; and shaken by 
the girl's fear, I let him lead me out of the hotel, down the back stairs. 
People were coming now from the Conde Street ballroom, and the 
narrow street was jammed. There were supper parties in the hotels, 
and the planter families were lodged in town in great numbers and we 
passed through them like a nightmare. My agony was unbearable. 
Never since I was a human being had I felt such mental pain. It was 
because all of Lestat's words had made sense to me. I knew peace only 
when I killed, only for that minute; and there was no question in my 
mind that the killing of anything less than a human being brought 
nothing but a vague longing, the discontent which had brought me 
close to humans, to watch their lives through glass. I was no vampire. 
And in my pain, I asked irrationally, like a child, Could I not return? 
Could I not be human again? Even as the blood of that girl was warm 
in me and I felt that physical thrill and strength, I asked that question. 
The faces of humans passed me like candle flames in the night dancing 
on dark waves. I was sinking into the darkness. I was weary of 
longing. I was ° g around and around in the street, looking at the stars 
and thinking, Yes, it's true. I know what he is saying is true, that when 
I kill there is no longing; and I can't bear this truth, I can't bear it. 

" Suddenly there was one of those arresting moments. The street was 
utterly quiet. We had strayed far from the main part of the old town 
and were near the ramparts. There were no lights, only the fire in a 
window and the far-off sound of people laughing. But no one here. 

No one near us. I could feel the breeze suddenly from the river and 


67 



the hot air of the night rising and Lestat near me, so still he might have 
been made of stone. Over the long, low row of pointed roofs were the 
massive shapes of oak trees in the dark, great swaying forms of myriad 
sounds under the lowhung stars. The pain for the moment was gone; 
the confusion was gone. I closed my eyes and heard the wind and the 
sound of water flowing softly, swiftly in the river. It was enough, for 
one moment. And I knew that it would not endure, that it would fly 
away from me like something torn out of my arms, and I would By 
after it, more desperately lonely than any creature under God, to get it 
back. And then a voice beside e rumbled deep in the sound of the 
night, a drumbeat as the moment ended, saying, 'Do what it is your 
nature to do. This is but a taste of it. Do what it is your nature to do.' 
And the moment was gone. I stood like the girl in the parlor in the 
hotel, dazed and ready for the slightest suggestion. I was nodding at 
Lestat as he nodded at me. 'Pain is terrible for you,’ he said. 'You feel 
it like no other creature because you are a vampire. You don't want it 
to go on.' 

" 'No,' I answered him. 'I'll feel as I felt with her, wed to her and 
weightless, caught as if by a dance.' 

"'That and more.' His hand tightened on mine. 'Don't turn away 
from it, come with me.' 

" He led me quickly through the street, turning every time I 
hesitated, his hand out for mine, a smile on his lips, his presence as 
marvelous to me as the night he'd come in my mortal life and told me 
we would be vampires. 'Evil is a point of view,'he whispered now. 

We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that 
conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without 
regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest 
and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we 
are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the 
stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms. I 
want a child tonight. I am like a mother. . . I want a child! 

" I should have known what he meant. I did not. He had me 
mesmerized, enchanted. He was playing to me as he had when I was 
mortal; he was leading me. He was saying, 'Your pain will end.’ 

" We'd come to a street of lighted windows. It was a place of 
rooming houses, sailors, flatboat men. We entered a narrow door; and 
then, in a hollow stone passage in which I could hear my own breath 
like the wind, he crept along the wall until his shadow leapt out in the 
light of a doorway beside the shadow of another man, their heads bent 
together, their whispers like the rustling of dry leaves. 'What is it?' I 
drew near him as he came back, afraid suddenly this exhilaration in 


68 



me would die. I saw again that nightmare landscape I'd seen when I 
spoke With Babette; I felt the chill of loneliness, the chill of guilt. 

'She's there!' he said. 'Your wounded one. Your daughter.' 

" 'What do you say, what are you talking about!’ 

" 'You've saved her,' he whispered. I. knew it. You left the window 
wide on her and her dead mother, and people passing in the street 
brought her here.' 

" 'The child. The little girl!' I gasped. But he was already leading me 
through the door to stand at the end of the long ward of wooden beds, 
each with a child beneath a narrow white blanket, one candle at the 
end of the ward, where a nurse bent over a small desk. We walked 
down the aisle between the rows. 'Starving children, orphans,’ he said: 
'Children of plague and fever.' He stopped. I saw the little girl lying in 
the bed. And then the man was coming, and he was whispering with 
Lestat; such care for the sleeping little ones. Someone in another room 
was crying. The nurse rose and hurried away. 

" And now the doctor bent and wrapped the child in the blanket. 
Lestat had taken money from his pocket and set it on the foot of the 
bed. The doctor was saying how glad he was we'd come for her, how 
most of them were orphans; they came in on the ships, sometimes 
orphans too young even to tell which body was that of their mother. 

He thought Lestat was the father. 

" And in moments, Lestat was running through the streets with her, 
the white of the blanket gleaming against his dark coat and cape; and 
even to my expert vision, as I ran after him it seemed sometimes as if 
the blanket dew through the night with no one holding it, a shifting 
shape traveling on the wind like a leaf stood upright and sent scurrying 
along a passage, trying to gain the wind all the while and truly take 
flight. I caught him finally as we approached the lamps near the Place 
d'Armes. The child lay pale on his shoulder, her cheeks still full like 
plums, though she was drained and near death. She opened her eyes, 
or rather the lids slid back; and beneath the long curling lashes I saw a 
streak of white. 'Lestat, what are you doing? Where are you taking 
her?' I demanded. But I knew too well. He was heading for the hotel 
and meant to take her into our room. 

" The corpses were as we left them, one neatly set in the coffin as if an 
undertaker had already attended her, the other in her chair at the 
table. Lestat brushed past them as if he didn't see them, while I 
watched him in fascination. The candles had all burned down, and the 
only light was that of the moon and the street. I could see his iced and 
gleaming profile as he set the child down on the pillow. 'Come here, 
Louis, you haven't fed enough, I know you haven't,' he said with the 


69 



same calm, convincing voice he had used skillfully all evening. He 
held my hand in his, his own warm and tight. 'See her, Louis, how 
plump and sweet she looks, as if even death can’t take her freshness; 
the will to live is too strong! He might make a sculpture of her tiny 
lips and rounded hands, but he cannot her faded You remember, the 
way you wanted her when you saw her in that room.’ I resisted him. I 
didn't want to kill her. I hadn't wanted to last night. And then 
suddenly I remembered two conflicting things and was torn in agony: 

I remembered the powerful beating of her heart against mine and I 
hungered for it, hungered for it so badly I tamed my back on her in the 
bed and would have rushed out of the room had not Lestat held me 
fast; and I remembered her mother's face and that moment of horror 
when I'd dropped the child and he'd come into the room. But he 
wasn't mocking me now; he was confusing me. 'You want her, Louis. 
Don’t you see, once you've taken her, then you can take whomever 
you wish. You wanted her last night but you weakened, and that's why 
she's not dead.' I could feel it was true, what he said. I could feel again 
that ecstasy of being pressed to her, her little heart going and going. 
'She's too strong for me . . . her heart, it wouldn't give up,'I said to 
him. 'Is she so strong?' he smiled. He drew me close to him. 'Take 
her, Louis, I know you want her.' And I did. I drew close to the bed 
now and just watched her. Her chest barely moved with her breath, 
and one small hand was tangled in her long, gold hair. I couldn't bear 
it, looking at her, wanting her not to die and wanting her; and the 
more I looked at her, the more I could taste her skin, feel my arm 
sliding under her back and pulling her up to me, feeling her soft neck. 
Soft, soft, that's what she was, so soft. I tried to tell myself it was best 
for her to die--what was to become of her? but these were lying 
thoughts. I wanted her! And so I took her in my arms and held her, 
her burning cheek on mine, her hair ' down over my wrists and 
brushing my eyelids, the sweet perfume of a child strong and pulsing 
in spite of sickness and death. She moaned how, stirred in her sleep, 
and that was more than I could bear, rd kill her before rd let her wake 
and know it. I went into her throat and heard Lestat saying to me 
strangely, 'Just a little tear. It’s just a little throat.’ And I obeyed him. 

" I won't tell you again what it was like, except that it caught me up 
just as it had done before, and as killing always does, only more; so 
that my knees bent and I half lay on the bed, sucking her dry; that 
heart pounding again that would not slow, would not give up. And 
suddenly, as I went on and on, the instinctual part of me waiting, 
waiting for the slowing of the heart which would mean death, Lestat 
wrenched me from her. 'But she's not dead,' I whispered. But it was 


70 



over. The furniture of the room emerged from the darkness. I sat 
stunned, staring at her, too weak to move, my head rolling back 
against the headboard of the bed, my hands pressing down on the 
velvet spread. Lestat was snatching her up, talking to her, saying a 
name. 'Claudia, Claudia, listen to me, come round, Claudia.' He was 
carrying her now out of the bedroom into the parlor, and his voice was 
so soft I barely heard him. 'You're ill, do you hear me? You must do 
as I tell you to get well.' And then, in the pause that followed, I came 
to my senses. I realized what he was doing, that he had cut his wrist 
and given it to her and she was drinking. 'That's it dear; more,' he was 
saying to her. 'You must drink it to get well.’ 

"'Damn you!' I shouted, and he hissed at me with blazing eyes. He 
sat on the settee with her locked to his wrist. I saw her white hand 
clutching at his sleeve, and I could see his chest heaving for breath and 
his face contorted the way I'd never seen it. He let out a moan and 
whispered again to her to go on; and when I moved from the 
threshold, he glared at me again, as if to say, 'I'll kill you!' 

" 'But why, Lestat?’ I whispered to him. He was trying now to push 
her off, and she wouldn't let go. With her fingers locked around his 
fingers and arm she held the wrist to her mouth, a growl coming out 
of her. 'Stop, stop!' he said to her. He was clearly in pain. He pulled 
back from her and held her shoulders with both hands. She tried 
desperately to reach leis wrist with leer teeth, but she couldn't; and 
then she looked at him with the most innocent astonishment. He 
stood back, his hand out lest she move. Then he clapped a 
handkerchief on his wrist and backed away from her, toward the bell 
rope. He pulled it sharply, his eyes still fixed on her. 

" 'What have you done, Lestat?' I asked him. 'What have you done?’ 
I stared at her. She sat composed, revived, filled with life, no sign of 
pallor or weakness in her, her legs stretched out straight on the 
damask, her white gown soft and thin like an angel’s gown around her 
small form. She was looking at Lestat. 'Not me,’ he said to her, 'ever 
again. Do you understand? But I'll show you what to do!' When I 
tried to make him look at me and answer a as to what he was doing, he 
shook me off. a gave me such a blow with his arm that I hit the wall. 
Someone was knocking now. I knew what he meant to do. Once 
more I tried to reach out for ' but he spun so fast I didn't even see him 
hit me. When I did see ' I was sprawled in the chair and he was 
opening the door. 'Yes, come in, please, there’s been an accident,’ he 
said to the young slave boy. And then, shutting the door, he took him 
from behind, so that the boy never knew what happened. And even as 
he knelt over the body drinking, he beckoned for the child, who slid 


71 



from the couch and went down on her knees and took the wrist 
offered her, quickly pushing back the cuff of the shirt. She gnawed as 
if she meant to devour his flesh, and then Lestat showed her what to 
do. He sat back and let her have the rest, his eye on the boy's chest, so 
that when the ' came, he bent forward and said, 'No more, he’s dying . 

. . . You must never drink after the heart stops or you'll be sick again, 
sick to death. Do you understand?' But she'd had enough and she sat 
next to ' their backs against the legs of the settee, their legs stretched 
out on the floor. The boy died in seconds. I felt weary and sickened, 
as if the night had lasted a thousand years. I sat there watching them, 
the child drawing close to Lestat now, snuggling near him as he slipped 
his arm around her, though his indifferent eyes remained fixed on the 
corpse. Then he looked up at me. 

" 'Where is Mamma?' asked the child softly. She had a voice equal 
to her physical beauty; clear like a little silver bell. It was sensual. She 
was sensual. Her eyes were as wide and clear as Babette's. You 
understand that I was barely aware of what all this meant. I knew what 
it might mean, but I was aghast. Now Lestat stood up and scooped her 
from the floor and came towards me. 'She's our daughter,' he said. 
'You're going to live with us now.' He beamed at her, but his eyes 
were cold, as if it were all a horrible joke; then he looked at me, and his 
face had conviction. He pushed her towards me. I found her on my 
lap, my arms around her, feeling again how soft she was, how plump 
her skin was, like the skin of warm fruit, plums warmed by sunlight; 
her huge luminescent eyes were fixed on me with trusting curiosity. 
'This is Louis, and I am Lestat,’ he said to her, dropping down beside 
her. She looked about and said that it was a pretty room, very pretty, 
but she wanted her mamma. He had his comb out and was running it 
through her hair, holding the locks so as not to pull with the comb; her 
hair was untangling and becoming like satin. She was the most 
beautiful child I'd ever seen, and now she glowed with the cold fire of a 
vampire. Her eyes were a woman's eyes, I could see it already. She 
would become white and spare like us but not lose her shape. I 
understood now what Lestat had said about death, what he meant. I 
touched her neck where the two red puncture wounds were bleeding 
just a little. I took Lestat's handkerchief from the floor and touched it 
to her neck. 'Your mamma's left you with us. She wants you to be 
happy,' he was saying with that same immeasurable confidence. 'She 
knows we can make you very happy.' 

" 'I want some more,' she said, turning to the corpse on the floor. 

" 'No, not tonight; tomorrow night,’ said Lestat. And he went to take 
the lady out of his coffin. The child slid off my lap, and I followed her. 


72 



She stood watching as Lestat put the two ladies and the slave boy into 
the bed. He brought the covers up to their chin. 'Are they sick?' 
asked the child. 

" 'Yes, Claudia,’ he said. 'They're sick and they're dead. You see, 
they die when we drink from them.' He came towards her and swung 
her up into his arms again. We stood there with her between us. I was 
mesmerized by her, by her transformed, by her every gesture: She was 
not a child any longer, she was a vampire child. 'Now, Louis was 
going to leave us,' said Lestat, his eyes moving from my face to hers. 
'He was going to go away. But now he’s not. Because he wants to stay 
and take care of you and make you happy.' He looked at me. 'You're 
not going, are you, Louis?' 

" 'You bastard!’ I whispered to him. 'You fiend!' 

" 'Such language in front of your daughter,’ he said. 

" 'I'm not your daughter,' she said with the silvery voice. 'I'm my 
mamma's daughter.' 

" 'No, dear, not anymore,’ he said to her. He glanced at the window, 
and then he shut the bedroom door behind us and turned the key in 
the lock. 'You’re our daughter, Louis's daughter and my daughter, do 
you see? Now, whom should you sleep with? Louis or me?' And then 
looking at me, he said, 'Perhaps you should sleep with Louis. After all, 
when I’m tired . . . I’m not so kind. "' The Vampire Stopped. The 
boy said nothing. " A child vampire! " he whispered finally. The 
vampire glanced up suddenly as though startled, though his body 
made no movement. He glared at the tape recorder as if it were 
something monstrous. The boy saw that the tape was almost out. 
Quickly, he opened his brief case and drew out a new cassette, clumsily 
fitting it into place. He looked at the vampire as he pressed the record 
button. The vampire's face looked weary, drawn, his cheekbones more 
prominent and his brilliant green eyes enormous. They had begun at 
dark, which had come early on this San Francisco winter night, and 
now it was just before ten P.m. The vampire straightened and smiled 
and said calmly, 

"We are ready to go on? 

" He'd done this to the little girl just to keep you with him? " asked 
the boy. 

" That is difficult to say. It was a statement. I'm convinced that 
Lestat was a person who preferred not to think or talk about his 
motives or beliefs, even to himself. One of those people who must act. 
Such a person must be pushed considerably before he will open up 
and confess that there is method and thought to the way he lives. That 
is what had happened that night with Lestat. He'd been pushed to 


73 



where he had to discover even for himself why he lived as he did. 
Keeping me with him, that was undoubtedly part of what pushed him. 
But I think, in retrospect, that he himself wanted to know his own 
reasons for killing, wanted to examine his own life. He was 
discovering when he spoke what he did believe. But he did indeed 
want me to remain. He lived with me in a way he could never have 
lived alone. And, as I've told you, I was careful never to sign any 
property over to him, which maddened him. That, he could not 
persuade me to do. " The vampire laughed suddenly," Look at all the 
other things he persuaded me to do! How strange. He could persuade 
me to kill a child, but not to part with my money. " He shook his 
head. " But," he said," it wasn't greed, really, as you can see. It was 
fear of him that made me tight with him. 

" You speak of him as if he were dead. You say Lestat was this or was 
that. Is he dead? " asked the boy. 

" I don't know," said the vampire. " I think perhaps he is. But I'll 
come to that. We were talking of Claudia, weren't we? There was 
something else I wanted to say about Lestat's motives that night. 

Lestat trusted no one, as you see. He was like a cat, by his own 
admission, a lone predator. Yet he had communicated with me that 
night; he had to some extent exposed himself simply by telling the 
truth. He had dropped his mockery, his condescension. He had 
forgotten his perpetual anger for just a little while. And this for Lestat 
was exposure. When we stood, alone in that dark street, I felt in him a 
communion with another I hadn't felt since I died. I rather think that 
he ushered Claudia into vampirism for revenge " 

" Revenge, not only on you but on the world," suggested the boy. 

" Yes. As I said, Lestat's motives for everything revolved around 
revenge " 

" Was it all started with the father? With the school? 

" I don't know. I doubt it," said the vampire. " But I want to go on. 

t! 

" Oh, please go on. You have to go on! I mean, it's only ten o'clock. 

" The boy showed his watch. The vampire looked at it, and then he 
smiled at the boy. The boy's face changed. It was blank as if from 
some sort of shock. " Are you still afraid of me? " asked the vampire. 
The boy said nothing, but he shrank slightly from the edge of the table. 
His body elongated, his feet moved out over the bare boards and then 
contracted. 

" I should think you'd be very foolish if you weren't," said the 
vampire. " But don't be. Shall we go on? 


74 



" Please," said the boy. He gestured towards the machine. 'Well," 
the vampire began," our life was much changed with Mademoiselle 
Claudia, as you can imagine. Her body died, yet her senses awakened 
much as mine had. And I treasured in her the signs of this. But I was 
not aware for quite a few days how much I wanted her, wanted to talk 
with her and be with her. At first, I thought only of protecting her 
from Lestat. I gathered her into my coffin every morning and would 
not let her out of my sight with him if possible. This was what Lestat 
wanted, and he gave little suggestions that he might do her harm. 'A 
starving child is a frightful sight,' he said to me, 'a starving vampire 
even worse.' They'd hear her screams in Paris, he said, were he to lock 
her away to die. But all this was meant for me, to draw me close and 
keep me there. Afraid of fleeing alone, I would not conceive of risking 
it with Claudia. She was a child. She needed care. 

" And there was much pleasure in caring for her. She forgot her five 
years of mortal life at once, or so it seemed, for she was mysteriously 
quiet. And from time to time I even feared that she had lost all sense, 
that the illness of her mortal life, combined with the great vampire 
shock, might have robbed her of reason; but this proved hardly the 
case. She was simply unlike Lestat and me to such an extent I couldn't 
comprehend her; for little child she was, but also fierce killer now 
capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child's demanding. 
And though Lestat still threatened me with danger to her, he did not 
threaten her at all but was loving to her, proud of her beauty, anxious 
to teach her that we must kill to live and that we ourselves could never 
die. 

" The plague raged in the city then, as I've indicated, and he took her 
to the stinking cemeteries where the yellow fever and plague victims 
lay in heaps while the sounds of shovels never ceased all through the 
day and night. 'This is death,’ he told her, pointing to the decaying 
corpse of a woman, 'which we cannot suffer. Our bodies will stay 
always as they are, fresh and alive; but we must never hesitate to bring 
death, because it is how we live.' And Claudia gazed on this with 
inscrutable liquid eyes. 

" If there was not understanding in the early years, there was no 
smattering of fear. Mute and beautiful, she played with dolls, dressing, 
undressing them by the hour. Mute and beautiful, she killed. And I, 
transformed by Lestat's instruction, was now to seek out humans in 
much greater numbers. But it was not only the killing of them that 
soothed some pain in me which bad been constant in the dark, still 
nights on Pointe du Lac, when I sat with only the company of Lestat 
and the old man; it was their great, shifting numbers everywhere in 


75 



streets which never grew quiet, cabarets which never shut their doors, 
balls which lasted till dawn, the music and laughter streaming out of 
the open windows; people all around me now, my pulsing victims, not 
seen with that great love I'd felt for my sister and Babette, but with 
some new detachment and need. And I did kill them, kills infinitely 
varied and great distances apart, as I walked with the vampire's sight 
and light movement through this teeming, burgeoning city, my 
victims surrounding me, seducing me, inviting me to their supper 
tables, their carriages, their brothels. I lingered only a short while, 
long enough to take what I must have, soothed in my great melancholy 
that the town gave me an endless train of magnificent strangers. 

" For that was it. I fed on strangers. I drew only close enough to see 
the pulsing beauty, the unique expression, the new and passionate 
voice, then killed before those feelings of revulsion could be aroused in 
me, that fear, that sorrow. 

" Claudia and Lestat might hunt and seduce, stay long in the 
company of the doomed victim, enjoying the splendid humor in his 
unwitting friendship with death. But I still could not bear it. And so 
to me, the swelling population was a mercy, a forest in which I was 
lost, unable to stop myself, whirling too fast for thought or pain, 
accepting again and again the invitation to death rather than extending 
it. 

"We lived meantime in one of my new Spanish town houses in the 
Rue Royale, a long, lavish upstairs flat above a shop I rented to a tailor, 
a hidden garden court behind us, a well secure against the street, with 
fitted wooden shutters and a barred carriage door-a place of far greater 
luxury and security than Pointe du Lac. Our servants were free people 
of color who left us to solitude before dawn for their own homes, and 
Lestat bought the very latest imports from France and Spain: crystal 
chandeliers and Oriental carpets, silk screens with aimed birds of 
paradise, canaries singing in great do domed, golden cages, and 
delicate marble Grecian gods and beautifully painted Chinese vases. I 
did not need the luxury anymore than I had needed it before, but I 
found myself enthralled with the new flood of art and craft and design, 
could stare at the intricate pattern of the carpets for hours, or watch 
the gleam of the lamplight change the somber colors of a Dutch 
painting. 

" All this Claudia found wondrous, with the quiet awe of an 
unspoiled child, and marveled when Lestat hired a painter to make the 
walls of her room a magical forest of unicorns and golden birds and 
laden fruit trees over sparkling streams. 


76 



" An endless train of dressmakers and shoemakers and tailors came 
to our flat to outfit Claudia in the best of children's fashions, so that 
she was always a vision, not just of child beauty, with her curling lashes 
and her glorious yellow hair, but of the taste of finely trimmed bonnets 
and tiny lace gloves, flaring velvet coats and capes, and sheer white 
puffed-sleeve gowns with gleaming blue sashes. Lestat played with her 
as if she were a magnificent doll, and I played with her as if she were a 
magnificent doll; and it was her pleading that forced me to give up my 
rusty black for dandy jackets and silk ties and soft gray coats and 
gloves and black capes. Lestat thought the best color at all times for 
vampires was black, possibly the only aesthetic principle he steadfastly 
maintained, but he wasn't opposed to anything which smacked of style 
and excess. He loved the great figure we cut, the three of us in our box 
at the new French Opera House or the Theatre d'Orleans, to which we 
went as often as possible, Lestat having a passion for Shakespeare 
which surprised me, though he often dozed through the operas and 
woke just in time to invite some lovely lady to midnight supper, where 
he would use all his skill to make her love him totally, then dispatch 
her violently to heaven or hell and come home with her diamond ring 
to give to Claudia. 

" And all this time I was educating Claudia, whispering in her tiny 
seashell ear that our eternal life was useless to us if we did not see the 
beauty around us, the creation of mortals everywhere; I was constantly 
sounding the depth of her still gaze as she took the books I gave her, 
whispered the poetry I taught her, and played with a light but 
confident touch her own strange, coherent songs on the piano. She 
could fall for hours into the pictures in a book and listen to me read 
until she sat so still the sight of her jarred me, made me put the book 
down, and just stare back at her across the lighted room; then she'd 
move, a doll coming to life, and say in the softest voice that I must 
read some more. 

" And then strange things began to happen, for though she said little 
and was the chubby, round-fingered child still, I'd find her tucked in 
the arm of my chair reading the work of Aristotle or Boethius or a new 
novel just come over the Atlantic. Or pecking out the music of Mozart 
.we'd only heard the night before with an infallible ear and a 
concentration that made her ghostly as she sat there hour after hour 
discovering the music the melody, then the bass, and finally bringing it 
together. Claudia was mystery. It was not possible to know what she 
knew or did not know. And to watch her kill was chilling. She would 
sit alone in the dark square waiting for the kindly gentleman or 
woman to find her, her eyes more mindless than I had ever seen 


77 



Lestat's. Like a child numbed with fright she would whisper her plea 
for help to her gentle, admiring patrons, and as they carried her out of 
the square, her arms would fix about their necks, her tongue between 
her teeth, her vision glazed with consuming hunger. They found death 
fast in those first years, before she learned to play with them, to lead 
them to the doll shop or the cafe where they gave her steaming cups of 
chocolate or tea to ruddy her pale cheeks, cups she pushed away, 
waiting, waiting, as if feasting silently on their terrible kindness. 

" But when that was done, she was my companion, my pupil, her 
long hours spent with me consuming faster and faster the knowledge I 
gave her, sharing with me some quiet understanding which could not 
include Lestat. At dawn she lay with me, her heart beating against my 
heart, and many times when I looked at her-when she was at her music 
or painting and didn't know I stood in the room-I thought of that 
singular experience rd had with her and no other, that I had killed her, 
taken her life from her, had drunk all of her life's blood in that fatal 
embrace I'd lavished on so many others, others who lay now 
moldering in the damp earth. But she lived, she lived to put her arms 
around my neck and press her tiny cupid's bow to my lips and put her 
gleaming eye to nay eye until our lashes touched and, laughing, we 
reeled about the room as if to the wildest waltz. Father and Daughter. 
Lover and Lover. You can imagine how well it was Lestat did not envy 
us this, but only smiled on it from afar, waiting until she came to him. 
Then he would take her out into the street and they would wave to me 
beneath the window, off to share what they shared: the hunt, the 
seduction, the kill. 

" Years passed in this way. Years and years and years. Yet it wasn't 
until some time had passed that an obvious fact occurred to me about 
Claudia. I suppose from the expression on your face you've already 
guessed, and you wonder why I didn't guess. I can only tell you, time 
is not the same for me, nor was it for us then. Day did not link to day 
making a taut and jerking chain; rather, the moon rose over lapping 
waves. 

" Her body! " the boy said. " She was never to grow up. " The 
vampire nodded. " She was to be the demon child forever," he said, 
his voice soft as if he wondered at it. " Just as I am the young man I 
was when I died. And Lestat? The same. But her mind It was a 
vampire's mind. And I strained to know how she moved towards 
womanhood. She came to talk more, though she was never other than 
a reflective person and could listen to me patiently by the hour 
without interruption. Yet more and more her doll-like face seemed to 
possess two totally aware adult eyes, and innocence seemed lost 


78 



somewhere with neglected-toys and the loss of a certain patience. 

There was something dreadfully sensual about her lounging on the 
settee in a tiny nightgown of lace and stitched pearls; she became an 
eerie and powerful seductress, her voice as clear and sweet as ever, 
though it had a resonance which was womanish, a sharpness 
sometimes that proved shocking; After days of her usual quiet, she 
would scoff suddenly at Lestat's predictions about the war; or drinking 
blood from a crystal glass say that there were no books in the house, 
we must get more even if we had to steal them, and then coldly tell me 
of a library she'd heard of, in a palatial mansion in the Faubourg St.- 
Marie, a woman who collected books as if they were rocks or pressed 
butterflies. She asked if I might get her into the woman's bedroom. 

" I was aghast at such moments; her mind was unpredictable, 
unknowable. But then she would sit on my lap and put her fingers in 
my hair and doze there against my heart, whispering to me softly I 
should never be as grown up as she until I knew that killing was the 
more serious thing, not the books, the music. 'Always the music . . .’ 
she whispered. 'Doll, doll,’I called her. That's what she was. A magic 
doll. Laughter and infinite intellect and then the round-checked face, 
the bud mouth. 'Let me dress you, let me brush your hair,’ I would 
say to her out of old habit, aware of her smiling and watching me with 
the thin veil of boredom over her expression. 'Do as you like,' she 
breathed into my ear as I bent down to fasten her pearl buttons. 'Only 
kill with me tonight. You never let me see you kill, Louis!' 

" She wanted a coffin of her own now, which left me more wounded 
than I would let her see. I walked out after giving my gentlemanly 
consent; for how many years had I slept with her as if she were part of 
me I couldn't know. But then I found her near the Ursuline Convent, 
an orphan lost in the darkness, and she ran suddenly towards me and 
clutched at me with a human desperation. 'I don’t want it if it hurts 
you,’ she confided so softly that a human embracing us both could not 
have heard her or felt her breath. 'I’ll stay with you always. But I must 
see it, don’t you understand? A coin for a child.’ 

" We were to go to the coffinmaker’s. A play, a tragedy in one act: I 
to leave her in his little parlor and confide to him in the anteroom that 
she was to die. Talk of love, she must have the best, but she must not 
know; and the coffinmaker, shaken with the tragedy of it, must make it 
for her, picturing her laid there on the white satin, dabbing a tear from 
his eye despite all the years .... 

" 'But, why, Claudia . .’ I pleaded with her. I loathed to do it, 
loathed cat and mouse with the help less human. But hopelessly her 
lover, I took her there and set her on the sofa, where she sat with 


79 



folded hands in her lap, her tiny bonnet bent down, as if she didn't 
know what we whispered about her in the foyer. The undertaker was 
an old and greatly refined man of color who drew me swiftly aside lest 
'the baby’ should hear. 'But why must she die?' he begged me, as if I 
were God who ordained it. 'Her heart, she cannot live,’ I said, the 
words taking on for me a peculiar power, a disturbing resonance. The 
emotion in his narrow, heavily lined face disturbed me; something 
came to my mind, a quality of light, a gesture, the sound of something 
. a child crying in a stenchfilled room. Now he unlocked one after 
another of his long rooms and showed me the coffins, black lacquer 
and silver, she wanted that. And suddenly I found myself backing 
away from him out of the coffin-house, hurriedly taking her hand. 

'The order's been taken,'I said to her. 'It's driving me mad!' I 
breathed the fresh air of the street as though I'd been suffocated and 
then I saw her compassionless face studying mine. She slipped her 
small gloved hand back into my own. 'I want it, Louis,' she explained 
patiently. 

" And then one night she climbed the undertaker's stairs, Lestat 
beside her, for the con, and left the coffinmaker, unawares, dead across 
the dusty piles of papers on his desk. And there the coffin lay in our 
bedroom, where she watched it often by the hour when it was new, as 
if the thing were moving or alive or unfolded some mystery to her little 
by little, as things do which change. But she did not sleep in it. She 
slept with me. 

" There were other changes in her. I cannot date them or put them 
in order. She did not kill indiscriminately. She fell into demanding 
patterns. Poverty began to fascinate her; she begged Lestat or me to 
take a carriage out through the Faubourg St.-Marie to the riverfront 
places where the immigrants lived. She seemed obsessed with the 
women and children. These things Lestat told me with great 
amusement, for I was loath to go and would sometimes not be 
persuaded under any circumstance. But Claudia had a family there 
which she took one by one. And she had asked to enter the cemetery 
of the suburb city of Lafayette and there roam the high marble tombs 
in search of those desperate men who, having no place else to sleep, 
spend what little they have on a bottle of wine, and crawl into a rotting 
vault. Lestat was impressed, overcome. What a picture he made of 
her, the infant death, he called her. Sister death, and sweet death; and 
for me, mockingly, he had the term with a sweeping bow, Merciful 
Death! which he said like a woman clapping her hands and shouting 
out a word of exciting gossip: oh, merciful heavens! so that I wanted 
to strangle him. 


80 



" But there was no quarrelling. We kept to ourselves. We had our 
adjustments. Books filled our long flat from floor to ceiling in row 
after row of gleaming leather volumes, as Claudia and I pursued our 
natural tastes and Lestat went about his lavish acquisitions. Until she 
began to ask questions. " The vampire stopped. And the boy looked 
as anxious as before, as if patience took the greatest effort. But the 
vampire had brought his long, white fingers together as if to make a 
church steeple and then folded them and pressed his palms tight. It 
was as if he'd forgotten the boy altogether. " I should have known," he 
said," that it was inevitable, and I should have seen the signs of it 
coming. For I was so attuned to her; I loved her so completely; she 
was so much the companion of my every waking hour, the only 
companion that I had, other than death. I should have known. But 
something in me was conscious of an enormous gulf of darkness very 
close to us, as though we walked always near a sheer cliff and might see 
it suddenly but too late if we made the wrong turn or became too lost 
in our thoughts. Sometimes the physical world about me seemed 
insubstantial except for that darkness. As if a fault in the earth were 
about to open and I could see the great crack breaking down the Rue 
Royale, and all the buildings were falling to dust in the rumble. But 
worst of all, they were transparent, gossamer, like stage drops made of 
silk. Ah . . . I'm distracted. What do I say? That I ignored the signs 
in her, that I clung desperately to the happiness she'd given me. And 
still gave me; and ignored all else. 

" But these were the signs. She grew cold to Lestat. She fell to staring 
at him for hours. When he spoke, often she °'t answer him, and one 
could hardly tell if it was contempt or that she didn't hear. .And our 
fragile domestic tranquility erupted with his outrage. He did not have 
to be loved, but he would not be ignored; and once he even dew at her, 
shouting that he would slap her, and I found myself in the wretched 
position of fighting him as I'd done years before she'd come to us. 
'She's not a child any longer,' I whispered to him. 'I don't know what 
it is. She's a woman.' I urged him to take it lightly, and he affected 
disdain and ignored her in turn. But one evening he came in flustered 
and told me she'd followed him though she'd refused to go with him 
to kill, she'd followed him afterwards. 'What's the matter with her!' 
he flared at me, as though rd given birth to her and must know. 

" And then one night our servants vanished. Two of the best maids 
we'd ever retained, a mother and daughter. The coachman was sent to 
their house only to report they'd disappeared, and then the father was 
at our door, pounding the knocker. He stood back on the brick 
sidewalk regarding me with that grave suspicion that sooner or later 


81 



crept into the faces of all mortals who-knew us for any length of time, 
the forerunner of death, as pallor might be to a fatal fever; and I tried 
to explain to him they had not been here, mother or daughter, and we 
must begin some search. 

" 'It's she!' Lestat hissed from the shadows when I shut the gate. 
'She's done something to them and brought risk for us all. I'll make 
her tell me!' And he pounded up the spiral stairs from the courtyard. 

I knew that she'd gone, slipped out while I was at the gate, and I knew 
something else also: that a vague stench came across the courtyard 
from the shut, unused kitchen, a stench that mingled uneasily with the 
honeysuckle-the stench of graveyards. I heard Lestat coming down as 
I approached the warped shutters, locked with rust to the small brick 
building. No food was ever prepared there, no work ever done, so that 
it lay like an old brick vault under the tangles of honeysuckle. The 
shutters came loose, the nails having turned to dust, and I heard 
Lestat's gasp as we stepped into the reeking dark. There they lay on the 
bricks, mother and daughter together, the arm of the mother fastened 
around the waist of the daughter, the daughter's head bent against the 
mother's breast, both foul with feces and swarming with ' . A great 
cloud of gnats rose as the shutter fell back, and I waved them away 
from me in a convulsive disgust. Ants crawled undisturbed over the 
eyelids, the mouths of the dead pair, and in the moonlight I could see 
the endless map of silvery paths of snails. 'Damn her!' Lestat burst 
out, and I grabbed his arm and held him fast, pitting all my strength 
against him. 'What do you mean to do with her)'I insisted. 'What 
can you do? She’s not a child anymore that will do what we say simply 
because we say it. We must teach her.' 

" 'She knows!’ He stood back from me brushing his coat. 'She 
knows! She's known for years what to dot What can be risked and 
what cannot. I won't have her do this without my permission) I won't 
tolerate it.' 

" 'Then, are you master off us all? You didn't teach her that. Was 
she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience? I don't think 
so. She sees herself as equal to us now, and us as equal to each other. I 
tell you we must reason with her, instruct her to respect what is ours. 
As all of us should respect it.' 

" He stalked off, obviously absorbed in what rd said, though he 
would give no admission of it to me. And he took his vengeance to the 
city. Yet when he came home, fatigued and satiated, she was still not 
there. He sat against the velvet arm of the couch and stretched his 
long legs out on the length of it. 'Did you bury them?' he asked me. 


82 



" 'They're gone,' I said. I did not care to say even to myself that I had 
burned their remains in the old unused kitchen stove. 'But there is the 
father to deal with, and the brother,’ I said to him. I feared his temper. 
I wished at once to plan some way to quickly dispose of the whole 
problem. But he said now that the father and the brother were no 
more, that death had come to dinner in their small house near the 
ramparts and stayed to say grace when everyone was done. 'Wine,' he 
whispered now, running his finger on his lip. 'Both of them had 
drunk too much wine. I found myself tapping the fence posts with a 
stick to make a tune,’ he laughed. 'But I don’t like it, the dizziness. Do 
you like it?' And when he looked at me I had to smile at him because 
the wine was working in him and he was mellow; and in that moment 
when his face looked warm and reasonable, I leaned over and said, 'I 
hear Claudia's tap on the stairs. Be gentle with her. It's all done.' 

" She came in then, with her bonnet ribbons undone and her little 
boots caked with dirt. I watched them tensely, Lestat with a sneer on 
his lips, she as unconscious of him as if he weren't there. She had a 
bouquet of white chrysanthemums in her arms, such a large bouquet it 
made her all the more a small child. Her bonnet fell back now, hung 
on her shoulder for an instant, and then fell to the carpet. And all 
through her golden hair I saw the narrow petals of the 
chrysanthemums. 'Tomorrow is the Feast of All Saints,'she said. 'Do 
you know?’ 

" 'Yes,' I said to her. It is the day in New Orleans when all the 
faithful go to the cemeteries to care for the graves of their loved ones. 
They whitewash the plaster walls of the vaults, clean the names cut 
into the marble slabs. And finally they deck the tombs with flowers. 

In the St. Louis Cemetery, which was very near our house, in which all 
the great Louisiana families were buried, in which my own brother was 
buried, there were even little iron benches set before the graves where 
the families might sit to receive the other families who had come to the 
cemetery for the same purpose. It was a festival in New Orleans; a 
celebration of death, it might have seemed to tourists who didn't 
understand it, but it was a celebration of the life after. 'I bought this 
from one of the vendors,’ Claudia said. Her voice was soft and 
inscrutable. Her eyes opaque and without emotion. 

" ’For the two you left in the kitchen!’ Lestat said fiercely. She 
turned to him for the first time, but she said nothing. She stood there 
staring at him as if she'd never seen him before. And then she took 
several steps towards him and looked at him, still as if she were 
positively examining him. I moved forward. I could feel his anger. 


83 



Her coldness. And now she turned to me. And then, looking from 
one to the other of us, she asked: 

" 'Which of you did it? Which of you made me what I am?' 

" I could not have been more astonished at anything she might have 
said or done. And yet it was inevitable that her long silence would 
thus be broken. She seemed very little concerned with me, though. 
Her eyes fixed on Lestat. 'You speak of us as if we always existed as we 
are now,’ she said, her voice soft, measured, the child's tone rounded 
with the woman's seriousness. 'You speak of them out there as 
mortals, us as vampires. But it was not always so. Louis had a mortal 
sister, I remember her. And there is a picture of her in his trunk. I've 
seen him look at it! He was mortal the same as she; and so was I. Why 
else this size, this shape?' She opened her arms now and let the 
chrysanthemums fall to the floor. I whispered her name. I think I 
meant to distract her. It was impossible. The tide had turned. Lestat's 
eyes burned with a keen fascination, a malignant pleasure: 

" 'You made us what we are, didn't you?' she accused him. 

" He raised his eyebrows now in mock amazement. 'What you are?' 
he asked. 'And would you be something other than what you are!’ He 
drew up his knees and leaned forward, his eyes narrow. 'Do you know 
how long it’s been? Can you picture yourself? Must I find a hag to 
show you your mortal countenance now if I had let you alone?' 

" She turned away from him, stood for a moment as if she had no 
idea what she would do, and then she moved towards the chair beside 
the fireplace and, climbing on it, curled up like the most helpless child. 
She brought her knees up close to her, her velvet coat open, her silk 
dress tight around her knees, and she stared at the ashes in the hearth. 
But there was nothing helpless about her stare. Her eyes had 
independent life, as if the body were possessed. 

" 'You could be dead by now if you were mortal!' Lestat insisted to 
her, pricked by her silence. He drew his legs around and set his boots 
on the floor. 'Do you hear me? Why do you ask me this now? Why 
do you make such a thing of it? You've known all your life you're a 
vampire.' And so he went on in a tirade, saying much the same things 
he'd said to me many times over: know your nature, kill, be what you 
are. But all of this seemed strangely beside the point. For Claudia had 
no qualms about killing. She sat back now and let her head roll slowly 
to where she could see him across from her. She was studying him 
again, as if he were a puppet on strings. 'Did you do it to me? And 
how?' she asked, her eyes narrowing. 'How did you do it?' 

" 'And why should I tell you? It’s my power.’ 


84 



" 'Why yours alone?' she asked, her voice icy, her eyes heartless. 
'How was it done?' she demanded suddenly in rage. 

" It was electric. He rose from the couch, and I was on my feet 
immediately, facing him. 'Stop here' he said to me. He wrung his 
hands. 'Do something about her! I can't endure her?' And then he 
started for the door, but turned and, coming back, drew very close so 
that he towered over Claudia, putting- her in a deep shadow. She 
glared up at him fearlessly, her eyes moving back and forth over his 
face with total detachment. 'I can undo what I did. Both to you and 
to him,’ he said to her, his finger pointing at me across the room. 'Be 
glad I made you what you are,' he sneered. 'Or I'll break you in a 
thousand pieces! 

" Well, the peace of the house was destroyed, though there was quiet. 
Days passed and she asked no questions, though now she was deep 
into books of the occult, of witches and witchcraft, and of vampires. 
This was mostly fancy, you understand. Myth, tales, sometimes mere 
romantic horror tales. But she read it all. Till dawn she read, so that I 
had to go and collect her and bring her to bed. 

" Lestat, meantime, hired a butler and maid and had a team of 
workers in to make a great fountain in the courtyard with a stone 
nymph pouring water eternal from a widemouthed shell. He had 
goldfish brought and boxes of rooted water lilies set into the fountain 
so their blossoms rested upon the surface and shivered in the ever- 
moving water. 

" A woman had seen him kill on the Nyades Road, which ran to the 
town of Carrolton, and there were stories of it in the papers, 
associating him with a haunted house near Nyades and Melpomene, 
all of which delighted him. He was the Nyades Road ghost for some 
time, though it finally fell to the back pages; and then he performed 
another grisly murder in another public place and set the imagination 
of New Orleans to working. But all this had about it some quality of 
fear. He was pensive, suspicious, drew close to me constantly to ask 
where Claudia was, where she'd gone, and what she was doing. 

" 'She'll be all right,' I assured him, though I was estranged from her 
and in agony, as if she'd been my bride. She hardly saw me now, as 
she'd not seen Lestat before, and she might walk away while I spoke to 
her. 

" 'She had better be all right! " he said nastily. 

" 'And what will you do if she’s not?’ I asked, more in fear than 
accusation. 


85 



" He looked up at me, with his cold gray eyes. 'You take care of her, 
Louis. You talk to her!' he said. 'Everything was perfect, and now 
this. There’s no need for it’ 

" But it was my choice to let her come to me, and she did. It was 
early one evening when I’d just awakened. The house was dark. I saw 
her standing by the French windows; she wore puffed sleeves and a 
pink sash, and was watching with lowered lashes the evening rush in 
the Rue Royale. I could hear Lestat in his room, the sound of water 
splashing from his pitcher. The faint smell of his cologne came and 
went like the sound of music from the cafe two doors down from us. 
'He’ll tell me nothing,’ she said softly. I hadn't realized she knew that I 
had opened my eyes. I came towards her and knelt beside her. 'You'll 
tell me, won't you? How it was done.' 

" 'Is this what you truly want to know?' I asked, searching her face. 
'Or is it why it was done to you . . . and what you were before? I 
don’t understand what you mean by " how," for if you mean how was 
it done so that you in turn may do it. . . 

" 'I don’t even know what it is. What you're saying,' she said with a 
touch of coldness. Then she turned full around and put her hands on 
my face. 'Kill with me tonight,’ she whispered as sensuously as a lover. 
'And tell me all that you know. What are we? Why are we not like 
them?’ She looked down into the street. 

" 'I don’t know the answers to your questions,’ I said to her. Her face 
contorted suddenly, as if she were straining to hear me over a sudden 
noise. And then she shook her head. But I went on. 'I wonder the 
same things you wonder. I do not know. How I was made, I’ll tell you 
that. . . that Lestat did it to me. But the real" how " of it, I don't 
know!' Her face had that same look of strain. I was seeing in it the 
first traces of fear, or something worse and deeper than fear. 'Claudia,' 
I said to her, putting my hands over her hands and pressing them 
gently against my skin. 'Lestat has one wise thing to tell you. Don’t 
ask these questions. You've been my companion for countless years in 
my search for all that I could learn of mortal life and mortal creation. 
Don't be my companion now in this anxiety. He can't give us the 
answers. And I have none.' 

" I could see she could not accept this, but I hadn't expected the 
convulsive turning away, the violence with which she tore at her own 
hair for an instant and then stopped as if the gesture were useless, 
stupid. It filled me with apprehension. She was looking at the sky. It 
was smoky, starless, the clouds blowing fast from the direction of the 
river. She made a sudden movement of her lips as if she'd bitten into 
them, then she turned to me and, still whispering, she said, 'Then he 


86 



made me ... he did it. . . you did not!' There was something so 
dreadful about her expression, I'd left her before I meant to do it. I 
was standing before the fireplace lighting a single candle in front of the 
tall mirror. And there suddenly, I saw something which startled me, 
gathering out of the gloom first as a hideous mask, then becoming its 
three-dimensional reality: a weathered skull. I stared at it. It smelled 
faintly of the earth still, but had been scrubbed. 'Why don't you 
answer me?' she was asking. I heard Lestat's door open. He would go 
out to kill at once, at least to fund the kill. I would not. 

" I would let the first hours of the evening accumulate in quiet, as 
hunger accumulated in me, till the drive grew almost too strong, so 
that I might give myself to it all the more completely, blindly. I heard 
her question again clearly, as though it had been floating in the air like 
the reverberation of a bell. . . and felt my heart pounding. 'He did 
make me, of course! He said so himself. But you hide something from 
me. Something he hints at when I question him. He says that it could 
not have been done without you!' 

" I found myself staring at the skull, yet hearing her as if the words 
were lashing me, lashing me to make me tarn around and face the lash. 
The thought went through me more like a flash of cold than a thought, 
that nothing should remain of me now but such a skull. I turned 
around and saw in the light from the street her eyes, like two dark 
flames in her white face. A doll from whom someone had cruelly 
ripped the eyes and replaced them with a demonic fire. I found myself 
moving towards her, whispering her name, some thought forming on 
my lips, then dying, coming towards her, then away from her, fussing 
for her coat and her hat. I saw a tiny glove on the door which was 
phosphorescent in the shadows, and for just a moment I thought it a 
tiny, severed hand. 

" 'What's the matter with you . . .?' She drew nearer, looking up 
into my face. 'What has always been the matter? Why do you stare at 
the skull like that, at the glover She asked this gently, but. . . not 
gently enough. 

" There was a slight calculation in her voice, an unreachable 
detachment. 

" ’I need you,' I said to her, without wanting to say it. 'I cannot bear 
to lose you. You're the only companion I have in immortality.' 

" 'But surely there must be others! Surely we are not the only 
vampires on earths' I heard her saying it as I had said it, heard my own 
words coming back to me now on the tide of her self-awareness, her 
searching. But there's no pain, I thought suddenly. There's urgency, 


87 



heartless urgency. I looked down at her. 'Aren't you the same as I?' 
She looked at me. 'You've taught me all I know!' 

"'Lestat taught you to kill.' I fetched the glove, 'here, come . . . 
let’s go out. I want to go out. . . I was stammering, trying to force the 
gloves on her. I lifted the great curly mass of her hair and placed it 
gently over her coat. 'But you taught me to see!’ she said. 'You taught 
me the words vampire eyes,' she said. 'You taught me to drink the 
world, to hunger for more than . . 

" 'I never meant those words that way, vampire eyes,’ I said to her. 

'It has a different ring when you say it. . . .’ She was tugging at me, 
trying to make me look at her. 'Come,' I said to her, 'I've something 
to show you . . . .' And quickly I led her down the passage and down 
the spiral stairs through the dark courtyard. But I no more knew what 
I had to show her, really, than I knew where I was going. Only that I 
had to move toward it with a sublime and doomed instinct. 

"We rushed through the early evening city, the sky overhead a pale 
violet now that the clouds were gone, the stars small and faint, the air 
around us sultry and fragrant even as we moved away from the 
spacious gardens, towards those mean and narrow streets where the 
flowers erupt in the cracks of the stones, and the huge oleander shoots 
out thick, waxen stems of white and pink blooms, like a monstrous 
weed in the empty lots. I heard the staccato of Claudia's steps as she 
rushed beside me, never once asking me to slacken my pace; and she 
stood finally, her face infinitely patient, looking up at me in a dark and 
narrow sheet where a few old slope-roofed French houses remained 
among the Spanish facades, ancient little houses, the plaster blistered 
from the moldering brick beneath. I had found the house now by a 
blind effort, aware that I had always known where it was and avoided 
it, always turned before this dark lampless corner, not wishing to pass 
the low window where I'd first heard Claudia cry. The house was 
standing still. Sunk lower than it was in those days, the alley way 
crisscrossed with sagging cords of laundry, the weeds high along the 
low foundation, the two dormer windows broken and patched with 
cloth. I touched the shutters. 'It was here I first saw you,’ I said to her, 
thinking to tell it to her so she would understand, yet feeling now the 
chill of her gaze, the distance of her stare. 'I heard you crying. You 
were there in a room with your mother. And -your mother was dead. 
Dead for days, and you didn't know. You clung to her, whining . 
crying pitifully, your body white and feverish and hungry. You were 
trying to wake her from the dead, you were hugging her for warmth, 
for fear. It was almost morning and . . 


88 



" I put my hand to my temples. 'I opened the shutters . . I came 
into the room. I felt pity for you. Pity. But. . . something else.' 

" I saw her lips slack, her eyes wide. 'You . . . fed on me?' she 
whispered. 'I was your victim!' 

"'Yes!' I said to her. 'I did it.' 

" There was a moment so elastic and painful as to be unbearable. She 
stood stark-still in the shadows, her huge eyes gathering the light, the 
warm air rising suddenly with a soft noise. And then she turned. I 
heard the clicking of her slippers as she ran. And ran. And ran. I 
stood frozen, hearing the sound grow smaller and smaller; and then I 
turned,, the fear in me unraveling, growing huge and insurmountable, 
and I ran after her. It was unthinkable that I not catch her, that I not 
overtake her at once and tell her that I loved her, must have her, must 
keep her, and every second that I ran headlong down the dark street 
after her was like her slipping away from me drop by drop; my heart 
was pounding, unfed, pounding and rebelling against the strain. Until 
I came suddenly to a dead stop, She stood beneath a lamppost, staring 
mutely, as if she didn't know me. I took her small waist in both hand; 
and lifted her into the light. She studied me, her face contorted, her 
head turning as if she wouldn't give me her direct glance, as if she must 
deflect an overpowering feeling of revulsion. 'You killed me,’ she 
whispered 'You took my life!' 

" 'Yes,' I said to her, holding her so that I cook feel her heart 
pounding. 'Rather, I tried to take it. To drink it away. But you had a 
heart like no other hear I’ve ever felt, a heart that beat and beat until I 
had to let you go, had to cast you away from me lest you quickened my 
pulse till I would die. And it was Lestat who found me out; Louis the 
sentimentalist, the fool feasting on a golden-haired child, a Holy 
Innocent a little girl. He brought you back from the hospital where 
they’d put you, and I never knew what he mean to do except teach me 
my nature. " Take her, finish it," he said. And I felt that passion for 
you again (r)h, I know I've lost you now forever. I can see it ix your 
eyes! You look at me as you look at mortals from aloft, from some 
region of cold self-sufficiency 1 can't understand. But I did it. I felt it 
for you again, vile unsupportable hunger for your hammering heart 
this cheek, this skin. You were pink and fragrant a! mortal children 
are, sweet with the bite of salt and dust, I held you again, I took you 
again. And when I though your heart would kill me and I didn't care, 
he parted us and, gashing his own wrist, gave it to you to drink. And 
drink you did. And drink and drink until you nearly drained him and 
he was reeling. But you were a vampire then. And that very night you 
drank a human's blood and have every night thereafter.' 


89 



" Her face had not changed. The flesh was like the wax of ivory 
candles; only the eyes showed life. There was nothing more to say to 
her. I set her down. 'I took your life,' I said. 'He gave it back to you.' 

" 'And here it is,' she said under her breath. 'And I hate you both! 
The vampire stopped. 

" But why did you tell her? " asked the boy after a respectful pause. 

" How could I not tell her? " The vampire looked up in mild 
astonishment. " She had to know it. She had to weigh one thing 
against the other. It was not as if Lestat had taken her full from life as 
he had taken me; I had stricken her. She would have died! There 
would have been no mortal life for her. But what's the difference? For 
all of us it's a matter of years, dying! So what she saw more graphically 
then was what all men knew: that death will come inevitably, unless 
one chooses . . . this! " He opened his white hands now and looked 
at the palms. 

" And did you lose her? Did she go? 

" Go! Where would she have gone? She was a child no bigger than 
that. Who would have sheltered her? Would she have found some 
vault, like a mythical vampire, lying down with worms and ants by day 
and rising to haunt some small cemetery and its surroundings? But 
that's not why she didn't go. Something in her was as akin to me as 
anything in her could have been. That thing in Lestat was the same. 
We could not bear to live alone! We needed our little company! A 
wilderness of mortals surrounded us, groping, blind, preoccupied, and 
the brides and bridegrooms of death. 

" 'Locked together in hatred,' she said to me calmly afterwards. I 
found her by the empty hearth, picking the small blossoms from a long 
stem of lavender. I was so relieved to see her there that I would have 
done anything, said anything. And when I heard her ask me in a low 
voice if I would tell her all I knew, I did this gladly. For all the rest was 
nothing compared to that old secret, that I had claimed her life. I told 
her of myself as I've told you, of how Lestat came to me and what went 
on the night he carried her from the little hospital. She asked no 
questions and only occasionally looked up from her flowers. An then, 
when it was finished and I was sitting there, staring again at that 
wretched skull and listening to the soft slithering of the petals of the 
flowers on her dress and feeling a dull misery in my limbs and mind, 
she said to me,'I don't despise you!' I wakened. She slipped off the 
high, rounded damask cushion an came towards me, covered with the 
scent of flower, the petals in her hand. 'Is this the aroma of mortal 
child?' she whispered. 'Louis. Lover.’ I remember holding her and 
burying my head in her small chest, crushing her bird-shoulders, her 


90 



small hands working into my hair, soothing me, holding me. 'I was 
mortal b you,' she said, and when I lifted my eyes I saw he smiling; but 
the softness on her lips was evanescent and in a moment she was 
looking past me like some one listening for faint, important music. 
'You gave m your immortal kiss,' she said, though not to me, but to 
herself. 'You loved me with your vampire nature.' 

" 'I love you now with my human nature, if ever had it,’ I said to her. 

" 'Ah yes . . .’ she answered, still musing. 'Yes, and that’s your flaw, 
and why your face was miserable when I said as humans say," I hate 
you," and why you look at me as you do now. Human nature. I have 
no human nature. And no short story of a mother' corpse and hotel 
rooms where children learn monstrosity can give me one. I have none. 
Your eyes grow cold with fear when I say this to you. Yet I have you 
tongue. Your passion for the truth. Your need to drive the needle of 
the mind right to the heart of it all like the beak of the hummingbird, 
who beats so wild and fast that mortals might think he had no tiny feet 
could never set, just go from quest to quest, going again and again for 
the heart of it. I am your vampire self more than you are. And now 
the sleep of sixty five years has ended' 

" The sleep of sixty-five years hers ended! I heard he! say it, 
disbelieving, not wanting to believe she knee and meant precisely what 
she'd said. For it had beer, exactly that since the night I tried to leave 
Lestat and failed and, falling in love with her, forgot my teeming brain, 
my awful questions. And now she had the awful questions on her lips 
and must know. She'd strolled slowly to the center of the room and 
strewn the crumpled lavender all around her. She broke the brittle 
stem and touched it to her lips. And having heard the whole story 
said,'He made me then . . . to be your companion. No chains could 
have held you in your loneliness, and he could give you nothing. He 
gives me nothing .... I used to think him charming. I liked the way he 
walked, the way he tapped the flagstones with his walking stick and 
swung me in his arms. And the abandon with which he killed, which 
was as I felt. But I no longer find him charming. And you never have. 
And we've been his puppets, you and I; you remaining to take care of 
him, and I your saving companion. Now's time to end it, Louis. 

Now's time to leave him.' 

" Time to leave him. 

" I hadn't thought of it, dreamed of it in so long; I'd grown 
accustomed to him, as if he were a condition of life itself. I could hear 
a vague mingling of sounds now, which meant he had entered the 
carriage way, that he would soon be on the back stairs. And I thought 
of what I always felt when I heard him coming, a vague anxiety, a 


91 



vague need. And then the thought of being free of him forever rushed 
over me like water I'd forgotten, waves and waves of cool water. I was 
standing now, whispering to her that he was coming. 

" 'I know,' she smiled. 'I heard him when he turned the far corner.' 

" 'But he’ll never let us leave,' I whispered, though I'd caught the 
implication of her words; her vampire sense was keen. She stood en 
garde magnificently. 'But you don't know him if you think he'll let us 
leave,' I said to her, alarmed at her self-confidence. 'He will not let us 
g°-’ 

" And she, still smiling, said, 'Oh . . . really? 

" It was agreed then to make plans. At once. The following night my 
agent came with his usual complaints about doing business by the light 
of one wretched candle and took my explicit orders for an ocean 
crossing. Claudia and I would go to Europe, on the first available ship, 
regardless of what port we had to settle for. And paramount was that 
an important chest be shipped with us, a chest which might have to be 
fetched carefully from our house during the day and put on board, not 
in the freight but in our cabin. And then there were arrangements for 
Lestat. I had planned to leave him the rents for several shops and town 
houses and a small construction company operating in the Faubourg 
Marigny. I put my signature to these things readily. I wanted to buy 
our freedom: to convince Lestat we wanted only to take a. trip 
together and that he could remain in the style to which he was 
accustomed; he would have his own money and need come to me for 
nothing. For all these years, rd kept' dependent on me. Of course, he 
demanded his funds from me as if I were merely his banker, and 
thanked me with the most acrimonious words at his command; but he 
loathed his dependence. I hoped to deflect his suspicion by playing to 
his greed. And, convinced that he could read any emotion in my face, 

I was more than fearful. I did not believe it would be possible to 
escape him. Do you understand what that means? .1 acted as though I 
believed it, but I did not. 

" Claudia, meantime, was flirting with disaster, her equanimity 
overwhelming to me as she read her vampire books and asked Lestat 
questions. She remained undisturbed by his caustic outbursts, 
sometimes asking the same question over and over again in different 
ways and carefully considering what little information he might let 
escape in spite of himself. 'What vampire made you what you are?' 
she asked, without looking up from her book and keeping her lids 
lowered under his onslaught. 'Why do you never talk about him? she 


92 



went on, as if his fierce objections were thin air. She seemed immune 
to his irritation. 

" 'You're greedy, both of you!' he said the next night as he paced 
back and forth in the dark of the center of the room, turning a 
vengeful eye on Claudia, who was fitted into her corner, in the circle of 
her candle flame, her books in stacks about her. 'Immortality is not 
enough for you! No, you would look the Gift Horse of God in the 
mouth! I could offer it to any man out there in the street and he 
would jump for it..." 

" 'Did you jump for it?' she asked softly, her lips barely moving . . . 

. but you, you would know the reason for it. Do you want to end it? I 
can give you death more easily than I gave you life!' He turned to me, 
her fragile flame throwing his shadow across me. It made a halo 
around his blond hair and left his face, except for the gleaming 
cheekbone, dark. 'Do you want death’ 

" 'Consciousness is not death,' she whispered. 

" 'Answer me' Do you want death!' 

" 'And you give all these things. They proceed from you. Life and 
death,' she whispered, mocking him. 

" 'I have,' he said. 'I do.’ 

" 'You know nothing,' she said to him gravely, her voice so low that 
the slightest noise from the street interrupted it, might carry her words 
away, so that I found myself straining to hear her against myself as I 
lay with my head back against the chair. 'And suppose the vampire 
who made you knew nothing, and the vampire who made that 
vampire knew nothing, and the vampire before him knew nothing, 
and so it goes back and back, nothing proceeding from nothing, until 
there is nothing! And we must live with the knowledge that there is no 
knowledge.' 

" 'Yes!' he cried out suddenly, his hands out, his voice tinged with 
something other than anger. 

" He was silent. She was silent. He turned, slowly, as if I'd made 
some movement which alerted him, as if I were rising behind him. It 
reminded me of the way humans tarn when they feel my breath against 
them and know suddenly that where they thought themselves to be 
utterly alone . . . that moment of awful suspicion before they see my 
face and gasp. He was looking at me now, and I could barely see his 
lips moving. And then I sensed it. He was afraid. Lestat afraid. 

" And she was staring at him with the same level gaze, evincing no 
emotion, no thought. 

" 'You infected her with this . . .’ he whispered. 


93 



" He struck a match now with a sharp crackle and lit the mantel 
candles, lifted the smoky shades of the lamps, went around the room 
making light, until Claudia's small flame took on a solidity and he 
stood with his back to the marble mantel looking from light to light as 
if they restored some peace. 'I'm going out,' he said. 

" She rose the instant he had reached the street, and suddenly she 
stopped in the center of the room and stretched, her tiny back arched, 
her arms straight up into small fists, her eyes squeezed shut for a 
moment and then wide open as if she were waking to the room from a 
dream. There was something obscene about her gesture; the room 
seemed to shimmer with Lestat's fear, echo with his last response. It 
demanded her attention. I must have made some involuntary 
movement to turn away from her, because she was standing at the arm 
of my chair now and pressing her hand fiat upon my book, a book I 
hadn't been reading for hours. 'Come out with me.' 

" 'You were right. He knows nothing. There is nothing he can tell 
us,’ I said to her. 

" 'Did you ever really ° that he did?' she asked me in the same small 
voice. 'We'll find others of our kind,' she said. 'We'll find them in 
central Europe. That is where they live in such numbers that the 
stories, both fiction and fact, fill volumes. I'm convinced it was from 
there that all vampires came, if they came from any place at all. We've 
tarried too long with him. Come out. Let the flesh instruct the mind' 

" I think I felt a tremor of delight when she said these words, Let the 
flesh instruct the mind. 'Put books aside and kill,' she was whispering 
to me. I followed her down the stairs, across the courtyard and down 
a narrow alley to another street. Then she turned with outstretched 
arms for me to pick her up and carry her, though, of course, she was 
not tired; she wanted only to be rear my ear, to clutch my neck. 'I 
haven't told him my plan, about the voyage, the money,' I was saying 
to her, conscious of something about her that was beyond me as she 
rode my measured steps, weightless in my arms. 

" 'He killed the other vampire,' she said. 

" 'No, why do you say this?' I asked her. But it wasn't the saying of it 
that disturbed me, stirred my soul as if it were a pool of water longing 
to be -still. I felt as if she were moving me slowly towards something, 
as if she were the pilot of our slow walk through the dark street. 
'Because I know it now,' she said with authority. 'The vampire made a 
slave of him, and he would no more be a slave than I would be a slave, 
and so he killed- him. Killed him before he knew what he might 
know, and then in panic made a slave of you. And you've been his 
slave' 


94 



"'Never really . . ' I whispered to her. I felt the press of her cheek 
against my temple. She was cold and needed the kill. 'Not a slave. 

Just some sort of mindless accomplice,’ I confessed to her, confessed to 
myself. I could feel the fever for the kill rising in me, a knot of hunger 
in my insides, a throbbing in the temples, as if the veins were 
contracting and my body might become a map of tortured vessels. 

" ’No, slave,’ she persisted in her grave monotone, as though thinking 
aloud, the words revelations, pieces of a puzzle. 'And I shall free us 
both.’ 

" I stopped. Her hand pressed me, urged me on. We were walking 
down the long wide alley beside the cathedral, towards the lights of 
Jackson Square, the water rushing fast in the gutter down the center of 
the alley, silver in the moonlight. She said, ’I will kill him.’ 

" I stood still at the end of the alley. I felt her shift in my arm, move 
down as if she could accomplish being free of me without the awkward 
aid of my hands. I set her on the stone sidewalk. I said no to her, I 
shook my head. I had that feeling then which I described before, that 
the building around me--the Cabildo, the cathedral, the apartments 
along the square-all this was silk and illusion and would ripple 
suddenly in a horrific wind, and a chasm would open in the earth that 
was the reality. ’Claudia,’ I gasped, turning away from her. 

" 'And why not kill him!’ she said now, her voice rising, silvery and 
finally shrill. 'I have no use for him] I can get nothing from him! And 
he causes me pain, which I will not abide!’ 

"'And if he had so little use for us!’ I said to her. But the vehemence 
was false. Hopeless. She was at a distance from me now, small 
shoulders straight and determined, her pace rapid, like a little girl who, 
walking out on Sundays with her parents, wants to walk ahead and 
pretend she is all alone. 'Claudia!' I called after her, catching up with 
her in a stride. I reached for the small waist and felt her stiffen as if she 
had become iron. 'Claudia, you cannot kill him!' I whispered. She 
moved backwards, skipping, clicking on the stones, and moved out 
into the open street. A cabriolet rolled past us with a sudden surge of 
laughter and the clatter of horses and wooden wheels. The street was 
suddenly silent. I reached out for her and moved forward over an 
immense space and found her standing at the gate of Jackson Square, 
hands gripping the wrought-iron bars. I drew down close to her. 'I 
don’t care what you feel, what you say, you cannot mean to kill him,’ I 
said to her. 

" 'And why not? Do you think ham so strong!’ she said, her eyes on 
the statue in the square, two immense pools of light. 


95 



" 'He is stronger than you know! Stronger than you dream! How do 
you mean to kill him? You can't measure his skill. You don't know!' I 
pleaded with her but could see her utterly unmoved, like a child 
staring in fascination through the window of a toy shop. Her tongue 
moved suddenly between her teeth and touched her lower lip in a 
strange flicker that sent a mild shock through my body. I tasted blood. 
I felt something palpable and helpless in my hands. I wanted to kill. I 
could smell and hear humans on the paths of the square, moving 
about the market, along the levee. I was about to take her, making her 
look at me, shake her if I had to, to make her listen, when she turned 
to me with her great liquid eyes. 'I love you, Louis,'she said. 'Then 
listen to me, Claudia, I beg you,' I whispered, holding her, pricked 
suddenly by a nearby collection of whispers, the slow, rising 
articulation of human speech over the mingled sounds of the night. 
'He'll destroy you if you try to kill him. There is no way you can do 
such a thing for sure. You don't know how. And pitting yourself 
against him you'll lose everything. Claudia, I can't bear this.' 

" There was a barely perceptible smile on her lips. 'No, Louis,’ she 
whispered. 'I can kill him. And I want to tell you something else now, 
a secret between you and me.' 

" I shook my head but she pressed even closer to me, lowering her 
lids so that her rich lashes almost brushed the roundness of her cheeks. 
'The secret is, Louis, that I want to kill him. I will enjoy it!’ 

" I knelt beside her, speechless, her eyes studying me as they'd done 
so often in the past; and then she said, 'I kill humans every night. I 
seduce them, draw them close to me, with an insatiable hunger, a 
constant never-ending search for something . . . something, I don’t 
know what it is . . : She brought her fingers to her lips now and 
pressed her lips, her mouth partly open so I could see the gleam of her 
teeth. 'And I care nothing about them-where they came from, where 
they would go-if I did not meet them on the way. But I dislike him! I 
want him dead and will have him dead. I shall enjoy it.’ 

" 'But Claudia, he is not mortal. He’s immortal. No illness can 
touch him. Age has no power over him. You threaten a life which 
might endure to the end of the world!' 

" 'Ah, yes, that's it, precisely!' she said with reverential awe. 'A 
lifetime that might have endured for centuries. Such blood, such 
power. Do you think I’ll possess his power and my own power when I 
take him" 

" I was enraged now. I rose suddenly and turned away from her. I 
could hear the whispering of humans near me. They were whispering 


96 



of the father and the daughter, of some frequent sight of loving 
devotion. I realized they were talking of us. 

" 'It's not necessary,' I said to her. 'It goes beyond all need, all 
common sense, all. . 

"'What'Humanity? He's a killer!' she hissed. 'Lone predator!' She 
repeated his own term, mocking it. 'Don't interfere with me or seek to 
know the time I choose to do it, nor try to come between us. . She 
raised her hand now to hush me and caught mine in an iron grasp, her 
tiny fingers biting into my tight, tortured flesh. 'If you do, you will 
bring me destruction by your interference. I can’t be discouraged.’ 

" She was gone then in a flurry of bonnet ribbons and clicking 
slippers. I turned, paying no attention to where I went, wishing the 
city would swallow me, conscious now of the hunger rising to overtake 
reason. I was almost loath to put an end to it. I needed to let the lust, 
the excitement blot out all consciousness, and I thought of the kill over 
and over and over, walking slowly up this street and down the next, 
moving inexorably towards it, saying, It’s a string which is pulling me 
through the labyrinth. I am not pulling the string. The string is 
pulling me .... And then I stood in the Rue Conti listening to a dull 
thundering, a familiar sound. It was the fencers above in the salon, 
advancing on the hollow wooden floor, forward, back again, scuttling, 
and the silver zinging of the foils. I stood back against the wall, where 
I could see them through the high naked windows, the young men 
dueling late into the night, left ,arm poised like the arm of a dancer, 
grace advancing towards death, grace thrusting for the heart, images of 
the young Freniere now driving the silver blade forward, now being 
pulled by it towards hell. Someone had come down the narrow 
wooden steps to the street-a young boy, a boy so young he had the 
smooth, plump cheeks of a child; his face was pink and flushed from 
the fencing, and beneath his smart gray coat and ruffled shirt there was 
the sweet smell of cologne and salt. I could feel his heat as he emerged 
from the dim light of the stairwell. He was laughing to himself, talking 
almost inaudibly to himself, his brown hair falling down over his eyes 
as he went along, shaking his head, the whispers rising, then falling off. 
And then he stopped short, his eyes on me. He stared, and his eyelids 
quivered and he laughed quickly, nervously. 'Excuse me!' he said now 
in French. 'You gave me a start!' And then, just as he moved to make 
a ceremonial bow and perhaps go around me, he stood still, and the 
shock spread over his flushed face. I could see the heart beating in the 
pink flesh of his cheeks, smell the sudden sweat of his young, taut 
body. 


97 



" 'You saw-me in the lamplight,’ I said to him. 'And my face looked 
to you like the mask of death.’ 

" His lips parted and his teeth touched and involuntarily he nodded, 
his eyes dazed. 

"'Pass by!’ I said to him. 'Fast! " The vampire paused, then moved 
as if he meant to go on. But he stretched his long legs under the table 
and, leaning back, pressed his hands to his head as if exerting a great 
pressure on his temples. The boy, who had drawn himself up into a 
crouched position, his hands hugging his arms, unwound slowly. He 
glanced at the tapes and then back at the vampire. 

" But you killed someone that night," he said. 

" Every night," said the vampire. 

" Why did you let him go then? " asked the boy. 

" I don’t know," said the vampire, but it did not have the tone of 
truly I don’t know, but rather, let it be. " You look tired," said the 
vampire. " You look cold. 

" It doesn't matter," said the boy quickly. " The room's a little cold; I 
don't care about that. You're not cold, are you? 

" No. " The vampire smiled and then his shoulders moved with 
silent laughter. A moment passed in which the vampire seemed to be 
thinking and the boy to be studying the vampire's face. The vampire's 
eyes moved to the boy's watch. 

" She didn't succeed, did she? " the boy asked softly. 

" What do you honestly think? " asked the vampire. He had settled 
back in his chair. He looked at the boy intently. 

" That she was ... as you said, destroyed," said the boy; and he 
seemed to feel the words, so that he swallowed after he'd said the word 
destroyed. " Was she? " he asked. 

" Don't you think that she could do it? " asked the vampire. 

" But he was so powerful. You said yourself you never knew what 
powers he had, what secrets he knew. How could she even be sure 
how to kill him? How did she try? " The vampire looked at the boy for 
a long time, his expression unreadable to the boy, who found himself 
looking away, as though the vampire's eyes were burning lights. " Why 
don't you drink from that bottle in your pocket? " asked the vampire. 

" It will make you warm. 

" Oh, that. ..: ' said the boy. " I was going to. I just. . :' The 
vampire laughed. " You didn't think it was polite! " he said, and he 
suddenly slapped his thigh. 

" That's true," the boy shrugged, smiling now; and he took the small 
flask out of his jacket pocket, unscrewed the gold cap, and took a sip. 
He held the bottle, now looking at the vampire. 


98 



" No," the vampire smiled and raised his hand to wave away the 
offer. Then his face became serious again and, sitting back, he went 
on. 

" Lestat had a musician friend in the Rue Dumaine. We had seen 
him at a recital in the home of a Madame LeClair, who lived there also, 
which was at that time an extremely fashionable street; and this 
Madame LeClair, with whom Lestat was also occasionally amusing 
himself, had found the musician a room in another mansion nearby, 
where Lestat visited him often. I told you he played with his victims, 
made friends with them, seduced them into trusting and liking him, 
even loving him, before he killed. So he apparently played with this 
young boy, though it had gone on longer than any other such 
friendship I had ever observed. The young boy wrote good music, and 
often Lestat brought fresh sheets of it home and played the songs on 
the square grand in our parlor. The boy had a great talent, but you 
could tell that this music would not sell, because it was too disturbing. 
Lestat gave him money and spent evening after evening with him, 
often taking him to restaurants the boy could have never afforded, and 
he bought him all the paper and pens which he needed for the writing 
of his music. 

" As I said, it had gone on far longer than any such friendship Lestat 
had ever had. And I could not tell whether he had actually become 
fond of a mortal in spite of himself or was simply moving towards a 
particularly grand betrayal and cruelty. Several times he'd indicated to 
Claudia and me that he was headed out to kill the boy directly, but he 
had not. And, of course, I never asked him what he felt because it 
wasn't worth the great uproar my question would have produced. 
Lestat entranced with a mortal! He probably would have destroyed 
the parlor furniture in a rage. 

" The next night-after that which I just described to you-he jarred me 
miserably by asking me to go with him to the boy's flat. He was 
positively friendly, in one of those moods when he wanted my 
companionship. Enjoyment could bring that out of him. Wanting to 
see a good play, the regular opera, the ballet. He always wanted me, 
along. I think I must have seen Macbeth with him fifteen times. We 
went to every Performance, even those by amateurs, and Lestat would 
stride home afterwards, repeating the lines to me and even shouting 
out to passers-by with an Outstretched finger, 'Tomorrow and 
tomorrow and tomorrow!' until they skirted him as if he were drunk. 
But this effervescence was frenetic and likely to vanish in an instant; 
just a word or two of amiable feeling on my part, some suggestion that 
I found his companionship pleasant, could banish all such affairs for 


99 



months. Even years. But now he came to me in such a mood and 
asked me to go to the boy's room. He was not above pressing my arm 
as he urged me. And I, dull, catatonic, gave him some miserable 
excuse, thinking only of Claudia, of the agent, of imminent disaster. I 
could feel it and wondered that he did not feel it. And finally he 
picked up a book from the floor and threw it at me, shouting, 'Read 
your damn poems, then! Rot!’ And he bounded out. 

" This disturbed me. I cannot tell you how it disturbed me. I wished 
him cold, impassive, gone. I resolved to plead with Claudia to drop 
this. I felt powerless, and hopelessly fatigued. But her door had been 
locked until she left, and I had glimpsed her only for a second while 
Lestat was chattering, a vision of lace and loveliness as she slipped on 
her coat; puffed sleeves again and a violet ribbon on her breast, her 
white lace stockings showing beneath the hem of the little gown, and 
her white slippers immaculate. She cast a cold look at me as she went 
out. 

" When I returned later, satiated and for a while too sluggish for my 
own thoughts to bother me, I gradually began to sense that this was 
the night. She would try tonight. 

" I cannot tell you how I knew this. Things about the flat disturbed 
me, alerted me. Claudia moved in the back parlor behind closed 
doors. And I fancied I heard another voice there, a whisper. Claudia 
never brought anyone to our flat; no one did except Lestat, who 
brought his women of the streets. But I knew there was someone 
there, yet I got no strong scent, no proper sounds. And then there 
were aromas in the air of food and drink. And chrysanthemums stood 
in the silver vase on the square grand-flowers which, to Claudia, meant 
death. 

" Then Lestat came, singing something soft under his breath, his 
walking stick making a rat-tat-tat on the rails of the spiral stairs. He 
came down the long hall, his face flushed from the kill, his lips pink; 
and he set his music on the piano. 'Did I kill him or did I not kill 
him!' He Bashed the question at me now with a pointing finger.- 
'What's your guess?' 

" 'You did not,' I said numbly. Because you invited me to go with 
you, and would never have invited me to share that kill.' 

" 'Ah, but! Did I kill him in a rage because you would not go. with 
me!' he said and threw back the cover from the keys. I could see that 
he would be able to go on like this until dawn. He was exhilarated. I 
watched him flip through the music, thinking, Can he die? Can he 
actually die? And does she mean to do this? At one point, I wanted to 
go to her and tell her we must abandon everything, even the proposed 


100 



trip, and live as we had before. But I had the feeling now that there 
was no retreat. Since the day she'd begun to question him, this- 
whatever it was to be-was inevitable. And I felt a weight on me, 
holding me in the chair. 

" He pressed two chords with his hands. He had an immense reach 
and even in life could have been a fine pianist. But lie played without 
feeling; he was always outside the music, drawing it out of the piano as 
if by magic, by the virtuosity of his vampire senses and control; the 
music did not come through him, was not drawn through him by 
himself. 'Well, did I kill him?' he asked me again. 

" 'No, you did not,’ I said again, though I could just as easily have 
said the opposite. I was concentrating on keeping my face a mask. 

" 'You're right. I did not,' he said. 'It excites me to be close to him, 
to think over and over, I can kill him and I will kill him but not now. 
And then to leave him and find someone who looks as nearly like him 
as possible. If he had brothers . . . why, rd kill them one by one. The 
family would succumb to a mysterious fever which dried up the very 
blood in their bodies!’ he said, now mocking a barker's tone. 'Claudia 
has a taste for families. Speaking of families, I suppose you heard. The 
Freniere place is supposed to be haunted; they can’t keep an overseer 
and the slaves run away.’ 

" This was something I did not wish to hear in particular. Babette 
had died young, insane, restrained finally from wandering towards the 
ruins of Pointe du Lac, insisting she had seen the devil there and must 
find him; I'd heard of it in wisps of gossip. And then came the funeral 
notices: rd thought occasionally of going to her, of trying some way to 
rectify what I had done; and other times I thought it would all heal 
itself; and in my new life of nightly killing, I had grown far from the 
attachment rd felt for her or for my sister or any mortal. And I 
watched the tragedy finally as one might from a theater balcony, 
moved from time to time, but never sufficiently to jump the railing 
and join the players on the stage. 

" 'Don't talk of her,' I said. 

"'Very well. I was talking of the plantation. Not her. Her! Your 
lady love, your fancy.’ He smiled at me. 'You know, I had it all my 
way finally in the end, didn't I? But I was telling you about my young 
friend and how. . 

" I wish you .would play the music,' I said softly, unobtrusively, but 
as persuasively as possible. Sometimes this worked with Lestat. If I 
said something just right he found himself doing what I'd said. And 
now he did just that: with a little snarl, as if to say, 'You fool,’ he began 
playing the music. I heard the doors of the back parlor open and 


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Claudia's steps move down the hall. Don't come, Claudia, I was 
thinking, feeling; go away from it before we're all destroyed. But she 
came on steadily until she reached the hall mirror. I could hear her 
opening the small table drawer, and then the zinging of her hairbrush. 
She was wearing a floral perfume. I turned slowly to face her as she 
appeared in the door, still all in white, and moved across the carpet 
silently toward the piano. She stood at the end of the keyboard, her 
hands folded on the wood, her chin resting on her hands, her eyes 
fixed on Lestat. 

" I could see his profile and her small face beyond, looking up at him. 
'What is it now!' he said, turning the page and letting his hand drop to 
his thigh. 'You irritate me. Your very presence irritates me!' His eyes 
moved over the page. 

" 'Does it?' she said in her sweetest voice. 

" 'Yes, it does. And I'll tell you something else. I've met someone 
who would make a better vampire than you do.' 

" This stunned me. But I didn't have to urge him to go on. 'Do you 
get my meaning?’ he said to her. 

" 'Is it supposed to frighten me?' she asked. 

" 'You're spoiled because you're an only child,' he said. 'You need a 
brother. Or rather, I need a brother. I get weary of you both. Greedy, 
brooding vampires that haunt our own lives. I dislike it.' 

" 'I suppose we could people the world with vampires, the three of 
us,' she said. 

" 'You think so!' he said, smiling, his voice with a note of triumph. 
Do you think you could do it? I suppose Louis has told you how it was 
done or how he thinks it was done. You don't have the power. Either 
of you,' he said. 

" This seemed to disturb her. Something she had not accounted for. 
She was studying him. I could see she did not entirely believe him. 

" 'And what gave you the power?' she asked softly, but with a touch 
of sarcasm. 

" 'That, my dear, is one of those things which you may never know. 
For even the Erebus in which we live must have its aristocracy.' 

" 'You're a liar,' she said with a short laugh. And just as he touched 
his fingers to the keys again, she said, 'But you upset my plans.’ 

" 'Your plans?' he asked. 

" 'I came to make peace with you, even if you are the father of lies. 
You're my father,' she said. 'I want to make peace with you. I want 
things to be as they were.' 

" Now he was the one who did not believe. He threw a glance at me, 
then looked at her. 'That can be. Just stop asking me questions. Stop 


102 



following me. Stop searching in every alleyway for other vampires. 
There are no other vampires! And this is where you live and this is 
where you stay!' He looked confused for the moment, as if raising his 
own voice had confused him. T take care of you. You don't need 
anything.' 

" 'And you don't know anything, and that is why you detest my 
questions. All that's clear. So now let's have peace, because there's 
nothing else to be had. I have a present for you.' 

" 'And I hope it's a beautiful woman with endowments you'll never 
possess;' he said, looking her up and down. Her face changed when he 
did this. It was as if she almost lost some control I'd never seen her 
lose. But then she just shook her head and reached out one small, 
rounded arm and tugged at his sleeve. 

" 'I meant what I said. I'm weary of arguing with you. Hell is hatred, 
people living together in eternal hatred. We're not in hell. You can 
take the present or not, I don't care. It doesn't matter. Only let's have 
an end to all this. Before Louis, in disgust, leaves us both.' She was 
urging him now to leave the piano, bringing down the wooden cover 
again over the keys, turning him on the piano stool until his eyes 
followed her to the door. 

" 'You're serious. Present, what do you mean, present?' 

" 'You haven't fed enough, I can tell by your color, by your eyes. 
You've never fed enough at this hour. Let's say that I can give you a 
precious moment. Suffer the little children to come unto me;' she 
whispered, and was gone. He looked at me. I said nothing. I night as 
well have been drugged. I could see the curiosity in his face, the 
suspicion. He followed her down the hall. And then I heard him let 
out a long, conscious moan, a perfect mingling of hunger and lust' 

" When I reached the door, and I took my time, he was bending over 
the settee. Two small boys lay there, nestled among the soft velvet 
pillows, totally abandoned to sleep as children can be, their pink 
mouths open, their small round faces utterly smooth. Their skin was 
moist, radiant, the curls of the darker of the two damp and pressed to 
the forehead. I saw at once by their pitiful and identical clothes that 
they were orphans. And they had ravaged a meal set before them on 
our best china. The tablecloth was stained with wine, and a small 
bottle stood half full among the greasy plates and forks. But there was 
an aroma in the room I did not like. I moved closer, better to see the 
sleeping ones, and I could see their throats were bare but untouched. 
Lestat had sunk down beside the darker one; he was by far the more 
beautiful. He might have been lifted to the painted dome of a 
cathedral. No more than seven years old, he had that perfect beauty 


103 



that is of neither sex, but angelic. Lestat brought his hand down gently 
on the pale throat, and then he touched the silken lips. He let out a 
sigh which had again that longing, that sweet, painful anticipation. 
'Oh. . . Claudia. . : he sighed. 'You've outdone yourself. Where 
did you find them?' 

" She said nothing. She had receded to a dark armchair and sat back 
against two large pillows, her legs out straight on the rounded cushion, 
her ankles drooping so that you did not see the bottom of her white 
slippers but the curved insteps and the tight, delicate little straps. She 
was staring at Lestat. 'Drunk on brandy wine,' she said. 'A 
thimbleful!' and gestured to the table. 'I thought of you when I saw 
them ... I thought if I share this with him, even he will forgive.' 

" He was warmed by her flattery. He looked at her now and reached 
out and clutched her white lace ankle. 'Ducky!' he whispered to, her 
and laughed, but then he hushed, as if he didn't wish to wake the 
doomed children. He gestured to her, intimately, seductively, 'Come 
sit beside him. You take him, and I'll take this one. Come.' He 
embraced her as she passed and nestled beside the other boy. He 
stroked the boy's moist hair, he ran his fingers over the rounded lids 
and along the fringe of lashes. And then he put his whole softened 
hand across the boy's face and felt at the temples, cheeks, and jaw, 
massaging the unblemished flesh. He had forgotten I was there or she 
was there, but he withdrew his hand and sat still for a moment, as 
though his desire was making him dizzy. He glanced at the ceiling and 
then down at the perfect feast. He turned the boy's head slowly against 
the back of the couch, and the boy's eyebrows tensed for an instant 
and a moan escaped his lips. 

" Claudia's eyes were steady on Lestat, though now she raised her left 
hand and slowly undid the buttons of the child who lay beside her and 
reached inside the shabby little shirt and felt the bare flesh. Lestat did 
the same, but suddenly it was as if his hand had life itself and drew his 
arm into the shirt and around the boy's small chest in a. tight 
embrace; and Lestat slid down off the cushions of the couch to his 
knees on the floor, his arm locked to the boy's body. Pulling it up 
close to him so that his face was buried in the boy's neck. His lips 
moved over the neck and over the chest and over the tiny nipple of the 
chest and then, putting his other arm into the open shirt, so that the 
boy lay hopelessly wound in both arms, he drew the boy up tight and 
sank his teeth into his throat. The boy's head fell back, the curls loose 
as he was lifted, and again he let out a small moan and his eyelids 
fluttered-but never opened. And Lestat knelt, the boy pressed against 
him, sucking hard, his own back arched and rigid, his body rocking 


104 



back and forth carrying the boy, his long moans rising and falling in 
time with the slow rocking, until suddenly his whole body tensed, and 
his hands seemed to grope for some way to push the boy away, as if the 
boy himself in his helpless slumber were clinging to Lestat; and finally 
he embraced the boy again and moved slowly forward over him, 
letting him down among the pillows, the sucking softer, now almost 
inaudible. 

" He withdrew. His hands pressed the boy down. He knelt there, his 
head thrown back, so the wavy blond hair bung loose and disheveled. 
And then he slowly sank to the floor, turning, his back against the leg 
of the couch. 'Ah . . . God . . : he whispered, his head back, his lids 
half-mast. I could see the color rushing to his cheeks, rushing into his 
hands. One hand lay on his bent knee, fluttering, and then it lay still. 

" Claudia had not moved. She lay like a Botticelli angel beside the 
unharmed boy. The other's body already withered, the neck like a 
fractured stem, the heavy head falling now at an odd angle, the angle 
of death, into the pillow. 

" But something was wrong. Lestat was staring at the ceiling. I could 
see his tongue between his teeth. He lay too still, the tongue, as it 
were, trying to get out of the mouth, trying to move past the barrier of 
the teeth and touch the lip. He appeared to shiver, his shoulders 
convulsing . . . then relaxing heavily; yet he did not move. A veil had 
fallen over his clear gray eyes. He was peering at the ceiling. Then a 
sound came out of him. I stepped forward from the shadows of the 
hallway, but Claudia said in a sharp hiss, 'Go back!' 

"'Louis. . : he was saying. I could hear it now . . 'Louis. . . 

Louis. . .’ 

" 'Don’t you like it, Lestat?’ she asked him. 

" 'Something’s wrong with it,’ he gasped, and his eyes widened as if 
the mere speaking were a colossal effort. He could not move. I saw it. 
He could not move at all. 'Claudia!' He gasped again, and his eyes 
rolled towards her. 

" 'Don't you like the taste of children's blood . . . ?' she asked softly. 

"'Louis. . : he whispered, finally lifting his head just for an instant. 
It fell back on the couch. 'Louis, it’s . . . it’s absinthe! Too much 
absinthe!’ he gasped. 'She's poisoned them with it. She's poisoned 
me. Louis. . . : He tried to raise his hand. I drew nearer, the table 
between us. 

" 'Stay back!' she said again. And now she slid off the couch and 
approached him, peering down into his face as he had peered at the 
child. 'Absinthe, Father,’ she said, 'and laudanum!’ 


105 



"'Demon!' he said to her. 'Louis. . . put me in my coffin.’ He 
struggled to rise. 'Put me in my coffin!' His voice was hoarse, barely 
audible. The hand fluttered, lifted, and fell back. 

" 'I'll put you in your coffin, Father,' she said, as though she were 
soothing him. 'I'll put you in it forever.' And then, from beneath the 
pillows of the couch, she drew a kitchen knife. 

" 'Claudia! Don't do this thing!' I said to her. But she flashed at me 
a virulency I'd never seen in her face, and as I stood there paralyzed, 
she gashed his throat, and he let out a sharp, choking cry. 'God!' he 
shouted out. 'God!' 

" The blood poured out of him, down his shirt front, down his coat. 

It poured as it might never pour from a human being, all the blood 
with which he had filled himself before the child and from the child; 
and he kept turning his head, twisting, making the bubbling gash gape. 
She sank the knife into his chest now and he pitched forward, his 
mouth wide, his fangs exposed, both hands convulsively flying towards 
the knife, fluttering around its handle, slipping off its handle. He 
looked up at me, the hair falling down into his eyes. 'Louis! Louis!’ 

He let out one more gasp and fell sideways on the carpet. She stood 
looking down at him. The blood flowed everywhere like water. He 
was groaning, trying to raise himself, one arm pinned beneath his 
chest, the other shoving at the floor. And now, suddenly, she flew at 
him and clamping both arms about his neck, bit deep into him as he 
struggled. 'Louis, Louis!’ he gasped over and over, struggling, trying 
desperately to throw her off; but she rode him, her body lifted by his 
shoulder, hoisted and dropped, hoisted and dropped, until she pulled 
away; and, finding the floor quickly, she backed away from him, her 
hands to her lips, her eyes for the moment clouded, then clear. I 
turned away from her, my body convulsed by what I’d seen, unable to 
look any longer. 'Louis!' she said; but I only shook my head. Fora 
moment, the whole house seemed to sway. But she said, 'Look what's 
happening to him!' 

" He had ceased to move. He lay now on his back. And his entire 
body was shriveling, drying up, the skin thick and wrinkled, and so 
white that all the tiny veins showed through it. I gasped, but I could 
not take my eyes off it, even as the shape of the bones began to show 
through, his lips drawing back from his teeth, the flesh of his nose 
drying to two gaping holes. But his eyes, they remained the same, 
staring wildly at the ceiling, the irises dancing from side to side, even as 
the flesh cleaved to the bones, became nothing but a parchment 
wrapping for the bones, the clothes hollow and limp over the skeleton 
that remained. Finally the irises rolled to the top of his head, and the 


106 



whites of his eyes went dim. The thing lay still. A great mass of wavy 
blond hair, a coat, a pair of gleaming boots; and this horror that had 
been Lestat, and I staring helplessly at it. 

" For a long time, Claudia merely stood there. Blood had soaked the 
carpet, darkening the woven wreaths of flowers. It gleamed sticky and 
black on the floorboards. It stained her dress, her white shoes, her 
cheek. She wiped at it with a crumpled napkin, took a swipe at the 
impossible stains of the dress, and then she said, 'Louis, you must help 
me get him out of here!' 

" I said, 'Not' I'd turned my back on her, on the corpse at her feet. 

"'Are you mad, Louis? It can't remain here!' she said to me. 'And 
the boys. You must help met The other one's dead from the absinthe! 
Louis!' 

" I knew that this was true, necessary; and yet it seemed impossible. 

" She had to prod me then, almost lead me every step of the way. We 
found the kitchen stove still heaped with the bones of the mother and 
daughter she'd killed-a dangerous blunder, a stupidity. So she scraped 
them out now into a sack and dragged the sack across the courtyard 
stones to the carriage. I hitched the horse myself, shushing the groggy 
coachman, and drove the hearse out of the city, fast in the direction of 
the Bayou St. Jean, towards the dark swamp that stretched to Lake 
Pontchartrain. She sat beside me, silent, as we rode on and on until 
we'd passed the gas-lit gates of the few country houses, and the shell 
road narrowed and became rutted, the swamp rising on either side of 
us, a great wall of seemingly impenetrable cypress and vine. I could 
smell the stench of the muck, hear the rustling of the animals. 

" Claudia had wrapped Lestat's, body in a sheet before I would even 
touch it, and then, to my horror, she had sprinkled it over with the 
long-stemmed chrysanthemums. So it had a sweet, funereal smell as I 
lifted it last of all from the carriage. It was almost weightless, as limp 
as something made of knots and cords, as I put it over my shoulder 
and moved down into the dark water, the water rising and filling my 
boots, my feet seeking some path in the ooze beneath, away from 
where I'd laid the two boys. I went deeper and deeper in with Lestat's 
remains, though why, I did not know. And finally, when I could 
barely see the pale space of the road and the sky which was coming 
dangerously close to dawn, I let his body slip down out of my arms 
into the water. I stood there shaken, looking at the amorphous form 
of the white sheet beneath the slimy surface. The numbness which had 
protected me since the carriage left the Rue Royale threatened to lift 
and leave me flayed suddenly, staring, thinking: This is Lestat. This is 
all of transformation and mystery, dead, gone into eternal darkness. I 


107 



felt a pull suddenly, as if some force were urging me to go down with 
him, to descend into the dark water and never come back. It was so 
distinct and so strong that it made the articulation of voices seem only 
a murmur by comparison. It spoke without language, saying, 'You 
know what you must do. Come down into the darkness. Let it all go 
away.' 

" But at that moment I heard Claudia's voice. She was calling my 
name. I turned, and, through the tangled vines, I saw her distant and 
tiny, like a white flame on the faint luminescent shell road. 

" That morning, she wound her arms around me, pressed her head 
against my chest in the closeness of the coffin, whispering she loved 
me, that we were free now of Lestat forever. 'I love you, Louis,’ she 
said over and over as the darkness finally came down with the lid and 
mercifully blotted out all consciousness. 

" When I awoke, she was going through his things. It was a tirade, 
silent, controlled, but filled with a fierce anger. She pulled the 
contents from cabinets, emptied drawers onto the carpets, pulled one 
jacket after another from his armoires, turning the pockets inside out, 
throwing the coins and theater tickets and bits and pieces of paper 
away. I stood in the. door of his room, astonished, watching her. His 
coffin lay there, heaped with scarves and pieces of tapestry. I had the 
compulsion to open it. I had the wish to see him there. 'Nothing!' 
she finally said in disgust. .She wadded the clothes into the grate. 'Not 
a hint of where he came from, who made him!' she said. 'Not a scrap’ 
She looked to me as if for sympathy. I turned away from her. I was 
unable to look at her. I moved back into that bedroom which I kept 
for myself, that room filled with my own books and what things I'd 
saved from my mother and sister, and I sat on .the bed. I could hear 
her at the door, but I would not look at her. 'He deserved to die!' she 
said to me. 

" 'Then we deserve to die. The same way. Every night of our lives,’ I 
said back to her. 'Go away from me.' It was as if my words were my 
thoughts, my mind alone only formless confusion. 'I'll care for you 
because you can't care for yourself. But I don't want you near me. 
Sleep in that box you bought for yourself. Don't come near me.' 

" 'I told you I was going to do it. I told you . : ’ she said. Never had 
her voice sounded so fragile, so like a little silvery bell. I looked up at 
her, startled but unshaken. Her face seemed not her face. Never had 
anyone shaped such agitation into the features of a doll. 'Louis, I told 
you!' she said, her lips quivering. 'I did it for us. So we could be free.' 
I couldn't stand the sight of her. Her beauty, her seeming innocence, 
and this terrible agitation. I went past her, perhaps knocking her 


108 



backwards, I don't know. And I was almost to the railing of the steps 
when I heard a strange sound. 

" Never in all the years of our life together had I heard this sound. 
Never since the night long ago when I had first found her, a mortal 
child, clinging to her mother. She was crying! 

" It drew me back now against my will. Yet it sounded so 
unconscious, so hopeless, as though she meant no one to hear it, or 
didn't care if it were heard by the whole world. I found her lying on 
my bed in the place where I often sat to read, her knees drawn up, her 
whole frame shaking with her sobs. The sound of it was terrible. It 
was more heartfelt, more awful than her mortal crying had ever been. 

I sat down slowly, gently, beside her and put my hand on her shoulder. 
She lifted her head, startled, her eyes wide, her mouth trembling. Her 
face was stained with tears, tears that were tinted with blood. Her eyes 
brimmed with them, and the faint touch of red stained her tiny hand. 
She didn't seem to be conscious of this, to see it. She pushed her hair 
back from her forehead. Her body quivered then with a long, low, 
pleading sob. 

"'Louis. . . if I lose you, I have nothing,'she whispered. 'I would 
undo it to have you back. I can’t undo what I've done.' She put her 
arms around me, climbing up against me, sobbing against my heart. 
My hands were reluctant to touch her; and then they moved as if I 
couldn't stop them, to enfold her and hold her and stroke her hair. 'I 
can't live without you . . : she whispered. 'I would die rather than live 
without you. I would die the same way he died. I can't bear you to 
look at me the way you did. I cannot bear it if you do not love Mel' 
Her sobs grew worse, more bitter, until finally I bent and kissed her 
soft neck and' cheeks. Winter plums. Plums from an enchanted wood 
where the fruit never falls from the boughs. Where the flowers never 
wither and die. 'All right, my dear . . I said to her. 'All right, my love 
. . : And I rocked her slowly, gently in my arms, until she dozed, 
murmuring something about our being eternally happy, free of Lestat 
forever, beginning the, great adventure of our lives. 

" The great adventure of our lives. What does It mean to die when 
you can live until the end of the world? And what is 'the end of the 
world' except a phrase, because who knows even what is the world 
itself? I had now lived in two centuries, seen the illusions of one 
utterly shattered by the other, been eternally young and eternally 
ancient,. possessing no illusions, living moment to moment in a way 
that made me picture a silver clock ticking in a void: the, painted face, 
the delicately carved hands looked upon by no one, looking out at no 
one, illuminated by a light which was not a light, like the light by 


109 



which God made the world before He had made light. Ticking, 
ticking, ticking, the precision of the clock, in a room as vast as the 
universe. 

" I was walking the streets again, Claudia gone her way to kill, the 
perfume of her hair and dress lingering on my fingertips, on my coat, 
my eyes moving far ahead of me like the pale beam of a lantern. I 
found myself at the cathedral: What does it mean to die when you can 
live until the end of the world? I was thinking of my brother's death, 
of the incense and the rosary. I had the desire suddenly to be in that 
funeral room, listening to the sound of the women's voices rising and 
falling with the Aves, the clicking of the beads, the smell of the wax. I 
could remember the crying. It was palpable, as if it were just 
yesterday, just behind a door. I saw myself walking fast down a 
corridor and gently giving the door a shove. 

" The great facade of the cathedral rose in a dark mass opposite the 
square, but the doors were open and I could see a soft, flickering light 
within. It was Saturday evening early, and the people were going to 
confession for Sunday Mass and Communion. Candles burned dim in 
the chandeliers. At the far end of the nave the altar loomed out of the 
shadows, laden with white flowers. It was to the old church on this 
spot that they had brought my brother for the final service before the 
cemetery. And I realized suddenly that I hadn't been in this place 
since, never once come up the stone steps, crossed the porch, and 
passed through the open doors. 

" I had no fear. If anything, perhaps, I longed for something to 
happen, for the stones to tremble as I entered the shadowy foyer and 
saw the distant tabernacle on the altar. I remembered now that I had 
passed here once when the windows were ablaze and the sound of 
singing poured out into Jackson Square. I had hesitated then, 
wondering if there were some secret Lestat had never told me, 
something which might destroy me were I to enter. I'd felt compelled 
to enter, but I had pushed this out of my mind, breaking loose from 
the fascination of the open doors, the throng of people making one 
voice. I had, had something for Claudia, a doll I was taking to her, a 
bridal doll I'd lifted from a darkened toy shop window and placed in a 
great box with ribbons and tissue paper. A doll for Claudia. I 
remembered pressing on with it, hearing the heavy vibrations of the 
organ behind me, my eyes narrow from the great blaze of the candles. 

" Now I thought of that moment; that fear in me at the very sight of 
the altar, the sound of the Pange Lingua. And I thought again, 
persistently, of my brother. I could see the coin rolling along up the 
center aisle, the procession of mourners behind it. I felt no fear now. 


110 



As I said, I think if anything I felt a longing for some fear, for some 
reason for fear as I moved slowly along the dark, stone walls. The air 
was chill and damp in spite of summer. The thought of Claudia's doll 
came back to me. Where was that doll? For years Claudia had played 
with that doll. Suddenly I saw myself searching for the doll, in the 
relentless and meaningless manner one searches for something in a 
nightmare, coming on doors that won't open or drawers that won't 
shut, struggling over and over against the same meaningless thing, not 
knowing why the effort seems so desperate, why the sudden sight of a 
chair with a shawl thrown over it inspires the mind with horror. 

" I was in the cathedral. A woman stepped out of the confessional 
and passed the long line of those who waited. A man who should have 
stepped up neat did not move; and my eye, sensitive even in my 
vulnerable condition, noted this, and I turned to see him. He was 
staring at me. Quickly I turned my back on him. I heard him enter 
the confessional and shut the door. I walked up the aisle of the church 
and then, more from exhaustion than from any conviction, went into 
an empty pew and sat down. I had almost genuflected from old habit. 
My mind seemed as muddled and tortured as that of any human. I 
closed my eyes for a moment and tried to banish all thoughts. Hear 
and see, I said to myself. And with this act of will, my senses emerged 
from the torment. All around me in the gloom I heard the whisper of 
prayers, the tiny click of the rosary beads; soft the sighing of the 
woman who knelt now at the Twelfth Station. Rising from the sea of 
wooden pews came the scent of rats. A rat moving somewhere near 
the altar, a rat in the great woodcarved side altar of the Virgin Mary. 
The gold candlesticks shimmered on the altar; a rich white 
chrysanthemum bent suddenly on its stem, droplets glistening on the 
crowded petals, a sour fragrance rising from a score of vases, from 
altars and side altars, from statues of Virgins and Christs and saints. I 
stared at the statues; I became obsessed suddenly and completely with 
the lifeless profiles, the staring eyes, the empty hands, the frozen folds. 
Then my body convulsed with such violence that I found myself 
pitched forward, my hand on the pew before me. It was a cemetery of 
dead forms, of funereal effigy and stone angels. I looked up and saw 
myself in a most palpable vision ascending the altar steps, opening the 
tiny sacrosanct tabernacle, reaching with monstrous hands for the 
consecrated ciborium, and taking the Body of Christ and strewing Its 
white wafers all over the carpet; and walking then on the sacred wafers, 
walking up and down before the altar, giving Holy Communion to the 
dust. I rose up now in the pew and stood there staring at this vision. I 
knew full well the meaning of it. 


Ill 



" God did not live in this church; these statues gave an image to 
nothingness. 1 was the supernatural in this cathedral. I was the only 
supermortal thing that stood conscious under this roof! Loneliness. 
Loneliness to the point of madness. The cathedral crumbled in my 
vision; the saints listed and fell. Rats ate the Holy Eucharist and nested 
on the sills. A solitary rat with an enormous tail stood tugging and 
gnawing at the rotted altar cloth until the candlesticks fell and rolled 
on the slime-covered stones. And I remained standing. Untouched. 
Undead-reaching out suddenly for the plaster hand of the Virgin and 
seeing it break in my hand, so that I held the hand crumbling in my 
palm, the pressure of my thumb turning it to powder. 

" And then suddenly through the ruins, up through the open door 
through which I could see a wasteland in all directions, even the great 
river frozen over and stuck with the encrusted ruins of ships, up 
through these ruins now came a funeral procession, a band of pale, 
white men and women, monsters with gleaming eyes and flowing 
black clothes, the coffin rumbling on the wooden wheels, the rats 
scurrying across the broken and buckling marble, the procession 
advancing, so that I could see then Claudia in the procession, her eyes 
staring from behind a thin black veil, one gloved hand locked upon a 
black prayer book, the other on the coffin as it moved beside her. And 
there now in the coffin; beneath a glass cover, I saw to my horror the 
skeleton of Lestat, the wrinkled skin now pressed into the very texture 
of his bones, his eyes but sockets, his blond hair billowed on the white 
satin. 

" The procession stopped. The mourners moved out, filling the 
dusty pews without a sound, and Claudia, turning with her book, 
opened it and lifted the veil back from her face, her eyes fixed on me as 
her finger touched the page. 'And now art thou cursed from the 
earth,' she whispered, her whisper rising in echo in the ruins. 'And 
now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to 
receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the 
ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength. A fugitive 
and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth . . . and whoever slayeth 
thee, vengeance shall be taken on him seven-fold.' 

" I shouted at her, I screamed, the scream rising up out of the depths 
of my being like some great rolling black force that broke from my lips 
and sent my body reeling against my will. A terrible sighing rose from 
the mourners, a chorus growing louder and louder, as I turned to see 
them all about me, pushing me into the aisle against the very sides of 
the coffin, so that I turned to get my balance and found both my hands 
upon it. And I stood there staring down not at the remains of Lestat, 


112 



but at the body of my mortal brother. A quiet descended, as if a veil 
had fallen over all and made their forms dissolve beneath its soundless 
folds. There was my brother, blond and young and sweet as he had 
been in life, as real and warm to me now as he'd been years and years 
beyond which I could never have remembered him thus, so perfectly 
was he re-created, so perfectly in every detail. His blond hair brushed 
back from his forehead, his eyes closed as if he slept, his smooth 
fingers around the crucifix on his breast, his lips so pink and silken I 
could hardly bear to see them and not touch them. And as I reached 
out just to touch the softness of his skin, the vision ended. 

" I was sitting still in the Saturday night cathedral, the smell of the 
tapers thick in the motionless air, the woman of the stations gone and 
darkness gathering behind me, across from me, and now above me. A 
boy appeared in the black cassock of a lay brother, with a long 
extinguisher on a golden pole, putting its little funnel down upon one 
candle and then another and then another. I was stupefied He glanced 
at me and then away, as if not to disturb a man deep in prayer. And 
then, as he moved on up to the next chandelier, I felt a hand on my 
shoulder. 

" That two humans should pass this close to me without my hearing, 
without my even caring, registered somewhere within me that I was in 
danger, but I did not care. I looked up now and saw a gray-haired 
priest. 'You wish to go to confession?' he asked. 'I was about to lock 
up the church.' He narrowed his eyes behind his thick glasses. The 
only light now came from the racks of little red-glass candles which 
burned before the saints; and shadows leaped upon the towering walls. 
'You are troubled, aren't you? Can I help you?' 

" 'It's too late, too late,' I whispered to him, and rose to go. He 
backed away from me, still apparently unaware of anything about my 
appearance that should alarm him, and said kindly, to reassure me, 
'No, it’s still early. Do you want to come into the confessional?' 

" For a moment I just stared at him. I was tempted to smile. And 
then it occurred to me to do it. But even as I followed him down the 
aisle, in the shadows of the vestibule, I knew this would be nothing, 
that it. was madness. Nevertheless, I knelt down in the small wooden 
booth,, my hands folded on the priedieu as he sat in the booth beside 
it and slid back the panel to show me the dim outline of his profile. I 
stared at him for a moment. And then I said it, lifting my hand to 
make the Sign of the Cross. 'Bless me, father,, for I have sinned, 
sinned so often and so long I do not know how to change, nor how to 
confess before God what I've done.' 


113 



Son. God is infinite in His capacity to forgive,' he whispered to 
me. 'Tell Him in the best way you know how and from your heart.' 

" 'Murders, father, death after death. The woman who died two 
nights ago in Jackson Square, I killed her, and thousands of others 
before her, one and two a night, father, for seventy years. I have 
walked the streets of New Orleans like the Grim Reaper and fed on 
human life for my own existence. I am not mortal, father, but 
immortal and damned, like angels put in hell by God. I am a vampire.' 

" The priest turned. 'What is this, some sort of sport for you? Some 
joke? You take advantage of an old man!' he said. He slid the wooden 
panel back with a splat. Quickly I opened the door and stepped out to 
see him standing there. 'Young man, do you fear God at all? Do you 
know the meaning of sacrilege?' He glared at me. Now I moved closer 
to him, slowly, very slowly, and at first he merely stared at me, 
outraged. Then, confused, he took a step back. The church was 
hollow, empty, black, the sacristan gone and the candles throwing 
ghastly fight only on the distant altars. They made a wreath of soft, 
gold fibers about his gray head and face. 'Then there is no mercy!' I 
said to him and suddenly clamping my hands on his shoulders, I held 
him in a preternatural lock from which he couldn't hope to move and 
held him close beneath my face. His mouth fell open in horror. 'Do 
you see what I am! Why, if God exists, does He suffer me to exist!’ I 
said to him. 'You talk of sacrilege!’ He dug his nails into my hands, 
trying to free himself, his missal dropping to the floor, his rosary 
clattering in the folds of his cassock. He might as well have fought the 
animated statues of the saints. I drew my lips back and showed him 
my virulent teeth. 'Why does He suffer me to live?’ I said. His face 
infuriated me, his fear, his contempt, his rage. I saw in it all the hatred 
rd seen in Babette, and he hissed at me,'Let me go! Devil!' in sheer 
mortal panic. 

" I released him, watching with a sinister fascination as he 
floundered, moving up the center aisle as if he plowed through snow. 
And then I was after him, so swift that I surrounded him in an instant 
with my outstretched arms, my cape throwing him into darkness, his 
legs scrambling still. He was cursing me, calling on God at the altar. 
And then I grabbed him on the very steps to the Communion rail and 
pulled him down to face me there and sank my teeth into his neck. 

The vampire stopped. Sometime before, the boy had been about to 
light a cigarette. And he sat now with the match in one hand, the 
cigarette in the other, still as a store dummy, staring at the vampire. 
The vampire was looking at the floor. He turned suddenly, took the 
book of matches from the boy's hand, struck the match, and held it 


114 



out. The boy bent the cigarette to receive it. He inhaled and let the 
smoke out quickly. He uncapped the bottle and took a deep drink, his 
eyes always on the vampire. He was patient again, waiting until the 
vampire was ready to resume. 

" I didn't remember Europe from my childhood. Not even the 
voyage to America, -really. That I had been born there was an abstract 
idea. Yet it had a hold over me which was as powerful as the hold 
France can have on a colonial. I spoke French, read French, 
remembered waiting for the reports of the Revolution and reading the 
Paris newspaper accounts of Napoleon's victories. I remember the 
anger I felt when he sold the colony of Fouisiana to the United States. 
How long the mortal Frenchman lived in me I don't know. He was 
gone by this time, really, but there was in me that great desire to see 
Europe and to know it, which comes not only from the reading of all 
the literature and the philosophy, but from the feeling of having been 
shaped by Europe more deeply and keenly than the rest of Americans. 

I was a Creole who wanted to see where it had all begun. 

" And so I turned my mind to this now. To divesting my closets and 
trunks of everything that was not essential to me. And very little was 
essential to me, really. And much of that might remain in the town 
house, to which I was certain I would return sooner or later, if only to 
move my possessions to another similar one and start a new life in 
New Orleans. I couldn't conceive of leaving it forever. Wouldn't. But 
I fixed my mind and heart on Europe. 

" It began to penetrate for the first time that I might see the world if I 
wanted. That I was, as Claudia said, free. 

" Meantime, she made a plan. It was her idea most definitely that we 
must go first to central Europe, where the vampire seemed most 
prevalent. She was certain we could find something there that would 
instruct us, explain our origins. But she seemed anxious for more than 
answers: a communion with her own kind. She mentioned this over 
and over, 'My own kind,' and she said it with a different intonation 
than I might have used. She made me feel the gulf that separated us. 

In the first years of our life together, I had thought her like Eestat, 
imbibing his instinct to kill, though she shared my tastes in everything 
else. Now I knew her to be less human than either of us, less human 
than either of us might have dreamed. Not the faintest conception 
bound her to the sympathies of human existence. Perhaps this 
explained why-despite everything I had done or failed to do-she clung 
to me. I was not her own kind. Merely the closest thing to it. 


115 



" But wouldn't it have been possible," asked the boy suddenly," to 
instruct her in the ways of the human heart the way you'd instructed 
her in everything else? 

" To what avail? " asked the vampire frankly. " So she night suffer as 
I did? Oh, I'll grant you I should have taught her something to prevail 
against her desire to kill Lestat. For my own sake, I should have done 
that. But you see, I had no confidence in anything else. Once fallen 
from grace, I had confidence in nothing. " The boy nodded. " I didn't 
mean to interrupt you. You were coming to something," he., said. 

" Only to the point that it was possible to forget what had happened 
to Lestat by turning my mind to Europe. And the thought of the other 
vampires inspired me also. I had not been cynical for one moment 
about the existence of God. Only lost from it. Drifting, preternatural, 
through the natural world. 

" But we had another matter before we left for Europe. Oh, a great 
deal happened indeed. It began with the musician. He had called 
while I was gone that evening to the cathedral, and the next night he 
was to come again. I had dismissed the servants and went down to 
him myself. And his appearance startled me at once. 

" He was much thinner than rd remembered him and very pale, with 
a moist gleam about his face that suggested fever. And he was perfectly 
miserable. When I told him Lestat had gone away, he refused at first 
to believe me and began insisting Lestat would have left him some 
message, something. And then he went off up the Rue Royale, talking 
to himself about it, as if he had little awareness of anyone around him. 

I caught up with him under a gas lamp. 'He did leave you something,’ 

I said, quickly feeling for my wallet. I didn't know how much I had in 
it, but I planned to give it to him. It was several hundred dollars. I put 
it into his hands. They were so thin I could see the blue veins pulsing 
beneath the watery skin. Now he became exultant, and I sensed at 
once that the matter went beyond the money. 'Then he spoke of me, 
he told you to give this to me!' he said, holding onto it as though it 
were a relic. 'He must have said something else to you!' He stared at 
me with bulging, tortured eyes. I didn't answer him at once, because 
during these moments I had seen the puncture wounds in his neck. 
Two red scratch-like marks to the right, just above his soiled collar. 

The money flapped in his hand; he was oblivious to the evening traffic 
of the street, the people who pushed close around us. 'Put it away,' I 
whispered. 'He did speak of you, that it was important you go 'on 
with your music.' 

" He stared at me as if anticipating something else. 'Yes? Did he say 
anything else?’ he asked me. I didn't know what to tell him. I would 


116 



have made up anything if it would have given him comfort, and also 
kept him away. It was painful for me to speak of Lestat; the words 
evaporated on my lips. And the puncture wounds amazed me. I 
couldn't fathom this. I was saying nonsense to the boy finally-that 
Lestat wished him well, that he had to take a steamboat up to St. Louis, 
that he would be back, that war was imminent and he had business 
there. . . the boy hungering after every word, as if he couldn't 
possibly get enough and was pushing on with it for the thing he 
wanted. He was trembling; the sweat broke out fresh on his forehead 
as he stood there pressing me, and suddenly he bit his lip hard and 
said, 'But why did he go!' as if nothing had sufficed. 

" "What is it?' I asked him. 'What did you need from him? I’m sure 
he would want me to . . 

" 'He was my friend!' He turned on me suddenly, his voice dropping 
with repressed outrage. 

" 'You're not well,' I said to him. 'You need rest. There's something 
. . .' and now I pointed to it, attentive to his every move'. . . on 
your throat.' He didn't even know what I meant. His fingers searched 
for the place, found it., rubbed it. 

" 'What does it matter? I don't know. The insects, they're 
everywhere,' he said, turning away from me. 'Did he say anything 
else?' 

" For a long while I watched him move up the Rue Royale, a frantic, 
lanky figure in rusty black, for whom the bulk of the traffic made way. 

" I told Claudia at once about the wound on his throat. 

" It was our last night in New Orleans. We'd board the ship just 
before midnight tomorrow for an earlymorning departure. We had 
agreed to walk out together. She was being solicitous, and there was 
something remarkably sad in her face, something which had not left 
after she had cried. 'What could the marks mean?' she asked me now. 
'That he fed on the boy when the boy slept, that the boy allowed it? I 
can’t imagine . . .’ she said. 

" 'Yes, that must be what it is.' But I was uncertain. I remembered 
now Lestat's remark to Claudia that he knew a boy who would make a 
better vampire than she. Had he planned to do that? Planned to make 
another one of us? 

" 'It doesn't matter now, Louis,' she reminded me. We had to say 
our farewell to New Orleans. We were walking away from the crowds 
of the Rue Royale. My senses were keen to all around me, holding it 
close, reluctant to say this was the last night. 

" The old French city had been for the most part burned a long time 
ago, and the architecture of these days was as it is now, Spanish, which 


117 



meant that, as we walked slowly through the very narrow street where 
one cabriolet had to stop for another, we passed whitewashed walls 
and great courtyard gates that revealed distant lamplit courtyard 
paradises like our own, only each seemed to hold such promise, such 
sensual mystery. Great banana trees stroked the galleries of the inner 
courts, and masses of fern and flower crowded the mouth of the 
passage. Above, in the dark, figures sat on the balconies, their backs to 
the open doors, their hushed voices and the flapping of their fans 
barely audible above the soft river breeze; and over the walls grew 
wisteria and passiflora so thick that we could brush against it as we 
passed and stop occasionally at this place or that to pluck a 
luminescent rose or tendrils of honeysuckle. Through the high 
windows we saw again and again the play of candlelight on richly 
embossed plaster ceilings and often the bright iridescent wreath of a 
crystal chandelier. Occasionally a figure dressed for evening appeared 
at the railings, the glitter of jewels at her throat, her perfume adding a 
lush evanescent spice to the flowers in the air. 

" We had our favorite streets, gardens, corners, but inevitably we 
reached the outskirts of the old city and saw the rise of swamp. 
Carriage after carriage passed us coming in from the Bayou Road 
bound for the theater or the opera. But now the lights of the city lay 
behind us, and its mingled scents were drowned in the thick odor of 
swamp decay. The very sight of the tall, wavering trees, their limbs 
hung with moss, had sickened me, made me think of Lestat. I was 
thinking of him as I'd thought of my brother's body. I was seeing him 
sunk deep among the roots of cypress and oak, that hideous withered 
form folded in the white sheet. I wondered if the creatures of the dark 
shunned him, knowing instinctively the parched, crackling thing there 
was virulent, or whether they swarmed about him in the reeking water, 
picking his ancient dried flesh from the bones. 

" I turned away from the swamps, back to the heart of the old city, 
and felt the gentle press of Claudia's hand comforting. She had 
gathered a natural bouquet from all the garden walls, and she held it 
crushed to the bosom of her yellow dress, her face buried in its 
perfume. Now she said to me in such a whisper that I bent my ear to 
her, 'Louis, it troubles you. You know the remedy. Let the flesh . . . 
let the flesh instruct the mind.' She let my hand go, and I watched her 
move away from me, turning once to whisper the same command. 
'Forget him. Let the flesh instruct the mind. . . It brought back to me 
that book of poems I'd held in my hand when she first spoke these 
words to me, and I save the verse upon the page: Her lips were red, her 
looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as 


118 



leprosy, The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man's 
blood with cold. 

" She was smiling from the far corner, a bit of yellow silk visible for a 
moment in the narrowing dark, then gone. My companion, my 
companion forever. 

" I was turning into the Rue Dumaine, moving past darkened 
windows. A lamp died very slowly behind a broad scrim of heavy lace, 
the shadow of the pattern on the brick expanding, growing fainter, 
then vanishing into blackness. I moved on, nearing the house of 
Madame LeClair, hearing faint but shrill the violins from the upstairs 
parlor and then the thin metallic laughter of the guests. I stood across 
from the house in the shadows, seeing a small handful of them moving 
in the lighted room; from window to window to window moved one 
guest, a pale lemon-colored wine in his stem glass, his face turned 
towards the moon as if he sought something from a better vantage and 
found it finally at the last window, his hand on the dark drape. 

" Across from me a door stood open in the brick wall, and a light fell 
on the passage at the far end. I moved silently over the narrow street 
and met the thick aromas of the kitchen rising on the air past the gate. 
The slightly nauseating smell of cooking meat. I stepped into the 
passage. Someone had just walked fast across the courtyard and shut a 
rear door. But then I saw another figure. She stood by the kitchen 
fire, a lean black woman with a brilliant tignon around her head, her 
features delicately chiseled and gleaming in the light like a figure in 
diorite. She stirred the mixture in the kettle. I caught the sweet smell 
of the spices and the fresh green of marjoram and bay; and then in a 
wave came the horrid smell of the cooking meat, the blood and flesh 
decaying in the boiling fluids. I drew near and saw her set down her 
long iron spoon and stand with her hands on her generous, tapered 
hips, the white of her apron sash outlining her small, fine waist. The 
juices of the pot foamed on the lip and spit in the glowing coals below. 
Her dark odor came to me, her dusky spiced perfume, stronger than 
the curious mixture from the pot, tantalizing as I drew nearer and 
rested back against a wall of matted vine. Upstairs the thin violins 
began a waltz, and the floorboards groaned with the dancing couples. 
The jasmine of the wall enclosed me and then receded like water 
leaving the clean-swept beach; and again I sensed her salt perfume. 

She had moved to the kitchen door, her long black neck gracefully 
bent as she peered into the shadows beneath the lighted window. 
'Monsieur!' she said, and stepped out now into the shaft of yellow 
light. It fell on her great round breasts and long sleek silken arms and 


119 



now on the long cold beauty of her face. 'You're looking for the party, 
Monsieur?' she asked. 'The party's upstairs. . . 

" 'No, my dear, I wasn't looking for the party,' I said to her, moving 
forward out of the shadows. 'I was looking for you. 

" Everything was ready when I woke the neat evening: the wardrobe 
trunk on its way to the ship as well as chest which contained a coffin; 
the servants gone; the furnishings draped in white. The sight of the 
tickets and a collection of notes of credit and some other papers all 
placed together in a flat black wallet made the trip emerge into the 
bright fight of reality. I would have forgone killing had that been 
possible, and so I took care of this early, and perfunctorily, as did 
Claudia; and as it neared time for us to leave, I was alone in the flat, 
waiting for her. She had been gone too long for my nervous frame of 
mind. I feared for her-though she could bewitch almost anyone into 
assisting her if she found herself too far away from home, and had 
many times persuaded strangers to bring her to her very door, to her 
father, who thanked them profusely for returning his lost daughter. 

" When she came now she was running, and I fancied as I put my 
book down that she had forgotten the time. She thought it later than 
it was. By my pocket watch we had an hour. But the instant she 
reached the door, I knew that this was wrong. 'Louis, the doors!' she 
gasped, her chest heaving, her hand at her heart. She ran back down 
the passage with me behind her and, as she desperately signaled me, I 
shut up the doors to the gallery. 'What is it?’ I asked her. 'What’s 
come over you?' But she was moving to the front windows now, the 
long French windows which opened onto the narrow balconies over 
the street. She lifted the shade of the lamp and quickly blew out the 
fame. The room went dark, and then lightened gradually with the 
illumination of the street. She stood panting, her hand on her breast, 
and then she reached out for me and drew me close to her beside the 
window. 

" 'Someone followed me,’ she whispered now. °I could hear him 
block after block behind me. At first, I thought it was nothing!' She 
stopped for breath, her face blanched in the bluish light that came 
from the windows across the way. 'Louis, it was the musician,' she 
whispered. 

" But what does that matter? He must have seen you with Lestat.' 

" 'Louis, he's down there. Look out the window. Try to see him.' 

She seemed so shaken, almost afraid. As if she would not stand 
exposed on the threshold. I stepped out on the balcony, though I held 
her hand as she hovered by the drape; and she held me so tightly that it 
seemed she feared for me. It was eleven o'clock and the Rue Royale for 


120 



the moment was quiet: shops shut, the traffic of the theater just gone 
away. A door slammed somewhere to my right, and I saw a woman 
and a man emerge and hurry towards the corner, the woman's face 
hidden beneath an enormous white hat. Their steps died away. I 
could see no one, sense no one. I could hear Claudia's labored 
breathing. Something stirred in the house; I started, .then recognized 
it as the jingling and rustling of the birds. We'd forgotten the birds. 
But Claudia had started worse than I, and she pulled near to me. 

'There is no one, Claudia . . : I started to whisper to her. 

" Then I saw the musician. 

" He had been standing so still in the doorway of the furniture shop 
that I had been totally unaware of him, and he must have wanted this 
to be so. For now he turned his face upwards, towards me, and it 
shone from the dark like a white light. The frustration and care were 
utterly erased from his stark features; his great dark eyes peered at me 
from the white flesh. He had become a vampire. 

" 'I see him,’ I murmured to her, my lips as still as possible, my eyes 
holding his eyes. I felt her move closer, her hand trembling, a heart 
beating in the palm of her hand. She let out a gasp when she saw him 
now. But at that same moment, something chilled me even as I stared 
at him and he did not move. Because I heard a step in the lower 
passage. I heard the gate hinge groan. And then that step again, 
deliberate, loud, echoing under the arched ceiling of the carriage way, 
deliberate, familiar. That step advancing now up the spiral stairs. A 
thin scream rose from Claudia, and then she caught it at once with her 
hand. The vampire in the furniture shop door bad not moved. And I 
knew the step on the stairs. I knew the step on the porch. It was 
Lestat. Lestat pulling on the door, now pounding on it, now ripping at 
it, as if to tear it loose from the very wall. Claudia moved back into the 
corner of the room, her body bent, as if someone had struck her a 
sharp blow, her eyes moving frantically from the figure in the street to 
me. The pounding on the door grew louder. And then I heard his 
voice. 'Louis!' he called to me. 'Louis!' he roared against the door. 
And then came the smash of the back parlor window. And I could 
hear the latch turning from within. Quickly, I grabbed the lamp, 
struck a match hard and broke it in my frenzy, then got the flame as I 
wanted it and held the small vessel of kerosene poised in my hand 'Get 
away from the window. Shut it,' I told her. And she obeyed as if the 
sudden clear, spoken command released her from a paroxysm of fear. 
'And light the other lamps, now, at once.' I heard her crying as she 
struck the match. Lestat was coming down the hallway. 


121 



" And then he stood at the door. I let out a gasp, and, not meaning 
to, I must have taken several steps backwards when I saw him. I could 
hear Claudia's cry. It was Lestat beyond question, restored and intact 
as he hung in the doorway, his head thrust forward, his eyes bulging, 
as if he were drunk and needed the door jamb to keep him from 
plunging headlong into the room. His skin was a mass of scars, a 
hideous covering of injured flesh, as though every wrinkle of his 
'death' had left its mark upon him. He was seared and marked as if by 
the random strokes of a hot poker, and his once clear gray eyes were 
shot with hemorrhaged vessels. 

" 'Stay back . . . for the love of God . . : I whispered. 'I'll throw it 
at you. I'll burn you alive,' I said to him. And at the same moment I 
could hear a sound to my left, something scraping, scratching against 
the facade of the town house. It was the other one. I saw his hands 
now on the wrought-iron balcony. Claudia let out a piercing scream 
as he threw his weight against the glass doors. 

" I cannot tell you all that happened then. I cannot possibly recount 
it as it was. I remember heaving the lamp at Lestat; it smashed at his 
feet and the flames rose at once from the carpet. I had a torch then in 
my hands, a great tangle of sheet I'd pulled from the couch and ignited 
in the flames. But I was struggling with him before that, kicking and 
driving savagely at his great strength. And somewhere in the 
background were Claudia's panicked screams. And the other lamp 
was broken. And the drapes of the windows blazed. I remember that 
his clothes reeked of kerosene and that he was at one point smacking 
wildly at the flames. He was clumsy, sick, unable to keep his balance; 
but when he had me in his grip, I even tore at his fingers with my teeth 
to get him -off. There was noise rising in the street, shouts, the sound 
of a bell. The room itself had fast become an inferno, and I did see in 
one clear blast of light Claudia battling the fledgling vampire. He 
seemed unable to close his hands on her, like a clumsy human after a 
bird. I remember rolling over and over with Lestat in the flames, 
feeling the suffocating heat in my face, seeing the flames above his 
back when I rolled under him. And then Claudia rose up out of the 
confusion and was striking at him over and over with the poker until 
his grip broke and I scrambled loose from him. I saw the poker 
coming down again and again on him and could hear the snarls rising 
from Claudia in time with the poker, like the stress of an unconscious 
animal. Lestat was holding his hand, his face a grimace of pain. And 
there, sprawled on the smoldering carpet, lay the other one, blood 
flowing from his head. 


122 



" What happened then is not clear to me. I think I grabbed the poker 
from her and gave him one fine blow with it to the side of the head. I 
remember that he seemed unstoppable, invulnerable to the blows. 

The heat, by this time, was singeing my clothes, had caught Claudia's 
gossamer gown, so that I grabbed her up and ran down the passage 
trying to stifle the flames with my body. I remember taking off my 
coat and beating at the flames in the open sir, and men rushing up the 
stairs and past me. A great crowd swelled from the passage into the 
courtyard, and someone stood on the sloped roof of the brick kitchen. 

I had Claudia in my arms now and was rushing past them all, 
oblivious to the questions, thrusting a shoulder through them, making 
them divide. And then I was free with her, hearing her pant and sob in 
my ear, running blindly down the Rue Royale, down the first narrow 
street, running and running until there was no sound but the sound of 
any running. And her breath. And we stood there, the man and the 
child, scorched and breathing deep in the quiet of night. 


123 



PART II 


All night long I stood on the deck of the French ship Mariana, 
watching the gangplanks. The long levee was crowded, and parties 
lasted late in the lavish staterooms, the decks rumbling with passengers 
and guests. But finally, as the hours moved toward dawn, the parties 
were over one by one, and carriages left tile narrow riverfront streets. 

A few late passengers came aboard, a couple lingered for hours at the 
rail nearby. But Lestat and his apprentice, if they survived the fire 
(and I was convinced that they had) did not find their way to the ship. 
Our luggage had left the flat that day; and if anything had remained to 
let them know our destination, I was sure it had been destroyed. Yet 
still I watched. Claudia sat securely locked in our stateroom, her eyes 
fixed on the porthole. But Lestat did not come. 

" Finally, as I'd hoped, the commotion of putting ant commenced 
before daylight. A few people waved from the pier and the grassy 
hump of the levee as the great ship began first to shiver, then to jerk 
violently to one side, and then to slide out in one great majestic 
motion into the current of the Mississippi. 

" The lights of New Orleans grew small and dim until there appeared 
behind us only a pale phosphorescence against the lightening clouds. I 
was fatigued beyond my worst memory, yet I stood on the deck for as 
long as I could see that fight, knowing that I might never see it again. 

In moments we were carried downstream past the piers of Freniere 
and Pointe du Lac and then, as I could see the great wall of 
cottonwood and cypress growing green out of the darkness along the 
shore, I knew it was almost morning. Too perilously close. 

" And as I put the key into the lock of the cabin I felt the greatest 
exhaustion perhaps that I'd ever known. Never in all the years I'd lived 
in our select family had I known the fear I'd experienced tonight, the 
vulnerability, the sheer terror. And there was to be no sudden relief 
from it. No sudden sense of safety. Only that relief which weariness at 
last imposes, when neither mind nor body can endure the terror any 
longer. For though Lestat was now miles away from us, he had in his 
resurrection awakened in me a tangle of complex fears which I could 
not escape. Even as Claudia said to me, 'We're safe, Louis, safe,' and I 
whispered the word yes to her, I could see Lestat hanging in the 
doorway, see those bulbous eyes, that scarred flesh. How had he come 
back, how had he triumphed over death? How could any creature 
have survived that shriveled ruin he'd become? Whatever the answer, 
what did it mean-not only for him, but for Claudia, for me? Safe from 
him we were, but safe from ourselves? 


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" The ship was struck by a strange 'fever.' It was amazingly clean of 
vermin, however, though occasionally their bodies might be found, 
weightless and dry, as if the creatures had been dead for days. Yet 
there was this fever. It struck a passenger first in the form of weakness 
and a soreness about the throat; occasionally there were marks there, 
and occasionally the marks were someplace else; or sometimes there 
were no recognizable marks at all, though an old wound was reopened 
and painful again. And sometimes the passenger who fell to sleeping 
more and more as the voyage progressed and the fever progressed died 
in his sleep. So there were burials at sea on several occasions as we 
crossed the Atlantic. Naturally afraid of fever, I shunned the 
passengers, did not wish to join them in the smoking room, get to 
know their stories, hear their dreams and expectations. I took my 
'meals' alone. But Claudia liked to watch the passengers, to stand on 
deck and see them come and go in the early evening, to say softly to 
me later as I sat at the porthole, 'I think she'll fall prey . ' 

" I would put the book down and look out the porthole, feeling the 
gentle rocking of the sea, seeing the stars, more clear and brilliant than 
they had ever been on land, dipping down to touch the waves. It 
seemed at moments, when I sat alone in the dark stateroom, that the 
sky had come down to meet the sea and that some great secret was to 
be revealed in that meeting, some great gulf miraculously closed 
forever. But who was to make this revelation when the sky and sea 
became indistinguishable and neither any longer was chaos? God? Or 
Satan? It struck me suddenly what consolation it would be to know 
Satan, to look upon his face, no matter how terrible that countenance 
was, to know that I belonged to him totally, and thus put to rest 
forever the torment of this ignorance. To step through some veil that 
would forever separate me from all that I called human nature. 

" I felt the ship moving closer and closer to this secret. There was no 
visible end to the firmament; it closed about us with breathtaking 
beauty and silence. But then the words put to rest became horrible. 
Because there would be no rest in damnation, could be no rest; and 
what was this torment compared to the restless fires of hell? The sea 
rocking beneath those constant stars-those stars themselves-what had 
this to do with Satan? And those images which sound so static to us in 
childhood when we are all so taken up with mortal frenzy that we can 
scarce imagine them desirable: seraphim gazing forever upon the face 
of God-and the face of God itself-this was rest eternal, of which this 
gentle, cradling sea was only the faintest promise. 

" But even in these moments, when the ship slept and all the world 
slept, neither heaven nor hell seemed more than a tormenting fancy. 


125 



To know, to believe, in one or the other . . . that was perhaps the only 
salvation for which I could dream. 

" Claudia, with Lestat's liking for light, lit the lamps when she rose. 
She had a marvelous pack of playing cards, acquired from a lady on 
board; the picture cards were in the fashion of Marie Antoinette, and 
the backs of the cards bore gold fleurs-de-lis on gleaming violet. She 
played a game of solitaire in which the cards made the numbers of a 
clock. And she asked me until I finally began to answer her, how 
Lestat had accomplished it. She was no longer shaken. If she 
remembered her screams in the fire she did not care to dwell on them. 
If she remembered that, before the fire, she had wept real tears in my 
arms, it made no change in her; she was, as always in the past, a person 
of little indecision, a person for whom habitual quiet did not mean 
anxiety or regret. 

" 'We should have burned him,’ she said. ’We were fools to think 
from his appearance that he was dead.’ 

" 'But how could he have survived?' I asked her. 'You saw him, you 
know what became of him.' I had no taste for it, really. I would have 
gladly pushed it to the back of my mind, but my mind would not allow 
me to. And it was she who gave me the answers now, for the dialogue 
was really with herself. 'Suppose, though, he had ceased to fight us,’ 
she explained, 'that he was still living, locked in that helpless dried 
corpse, conscious and calculating. . . 

" 'Conscious in that state!’ I whispered. 

" 'And suppose, when he reached the swamp waters and heard the 
sounds of our carriage going away, that he had strength enough to 
propel those limbs to move. There were creatures all around him in 
the dark. I saw him once rip the head of a small garden lizard and 
watch the blood run down into a glass. Can you imagine the tenacity 
of the will to live in him, his hands groping in that water for anything 
that moved?' 

" 'The will to live? Tenacity?' I murmured. 'Suppose it was 
something else . . . .’ 

" 'And then, when he'd felt the resuscitation of his strength, just 
enough perhaps to have sustained him to the road, somewhere along 
that road he found someone. Perhaps he crouched, waiting for a 
passing carriage; perhaps he crept, gathering still what blood he could 
until he came to the shacks of those immigrants or those scattered 
country houses. And what a spectacle he must have been!' She gazed 
at the hanging lamp, her eyes narrow, her voice muted, without 
emotion. 'And then what did he do? It's clear to me. If he could not 
have gotten back to New Orleans in time, he could most definitely 


126 



have reached the Old Bayou cemetery. The charity hospital feeds it 
fresh coffins every day. And I can see him clawing his way through the 
moist earth for such a coffin, dumping the fresh contents out in the 
swamps, and securing himself until the next nightfall in that shallow 
grave where no manner of man would be wont to disturb him. Yes . . 

. that is what he did, I'm certain.' 

" I thought of this for a long time, picturing it, seeing that it must 
have happened. And then I heard her add thoughtfully, as she laid 
down her card and looked at the oval face of a white-coiffed king, T 
could have done it. 

" 'And why do you look that way at me?' she asked, gathering up her 
cards, her small fingers struggling to make a neat pack of them and 
then to shuffle them. 

" 'But you do believe . . . that had we burned his remains he would 
have died?' I asked. 

" 'Of course I believe it. If there is nothing to rise, there is nothing to 
rise. What are you driving at?’ She was dealing out the cards now, 
dealing a hand for me on the small oak table. I looked at the cards, but 
I did not touch them. 

" 'I don’t know . . : I whispered to her. 'Only that perhaps there was 
no will to live, no tenacity . . . because very simply there was no need 
of either.' 

" Her eyes gazed at me steadily, giving no hint of her thoughts or that 
she understood mine. 

" 'Because perhaps he was incapable of dying . . . perhaps he is, and 
we are . . . truly immortal?' 

" For a longtime she sat there looking at me. 

" 'Consciousness in that state . . : I finally added, as I looked away 
from her. 'If it were so, then mightn't there be consciousness in any 
other? Fire, sunlight. . . what does it matter?' 

" 'Louis,' she said, her voice soft. 'You're afraid. You don't stand en 
garde against fear. You don't understand the danger of fear itself. 

We'll know these answers when we find those who can tell us, those 
who've possessed knowledge for centuries, for however long creatures 
such as ourselves have walked the earth. That knowledge was our 
birthright, and he deprived us. He earned his death.' 

" 'But he didn't die . . .' I said. 

" 'He's dead,' she said. 'No one could have escaped that house unless 
they’d run with us, at our very side. No. He’s dead, and so is that 
trembling aesthete, his friend. Consciousness, what does it matter?' 

" She gathered up the cards and put them aside, gesturing for me to 
hand her the books from the table beside the bunk, those books which 


127 



she'd unpacked immediately on board, the few select records of 
vampire lore which she'd taken to be her guides. They included no 
wild romances from England, no stories of Edgar Allan Poe, no fancy. 
Only those few accounts of the vampires of eastern Europe, which had 
become for her a sort of Bible. In those countries indeed they did 
burn the remains of the vampire when they found him, and the heart 
was staked and the head severed. She would read these now for hours, 
these ancient books which had been read and reread before they ever 
found their way across the Atlantic; they were travelers' tales, the 
accounts of priests and scholars. And she would plan our trip, not 
with the need of any pen or paper, only in her mind. A trip that would 
take us at once away from the glittering capitals of Europe towards the 
Black Sea, where we would dock at Varna and begin that search in the 
rural countryside of the Carpathians. 

" For me it was a grim prospect, bound as I was to it, for there were 
longings in me for other places and other knowledge which Claudia 
did not begin to comprehend. Seeds of these longings had been 
planted in me years ago, seeds which came to bitter flower as our ship 
passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the waters of the 
Mediterranean Sea. 

" I wanted those waters to be blue. And they were not. They were 
the nighttime waters, and how I suffered then, straining to remember 
the seas that a young man's untutored senses had taken for granted, 
that an undisciplined memory had let slip away for eternity. The 
Mediterranean was black, black off the coast of Italy, black off the 
coast of Greece, black always, black when in the small cold hours 
before dawn, as even Claudia slept, weary of her books and the meager 
fare that caution allowed her vampire hunger, I lowered a lantern 
down, down through the rising vapor until the fire blazed right over 
the lapping waters; and nothing came to light on that heaving surface 
but the light itself, the reflection of that beam traveling constant with 
me, a steady eye which seemed to fix on me from the depths and say, 
'Louis, your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The 
myths of men are not your myths. Men's treasures are not yours.' 

" But oh, how the quest for the Old World vampires filled me with 
bitterness in those moments, a bitterness I could all but taste, as if the 
very air had lost its freshness. For what secrets, what truths had those 
monstrous creatures of night to give us? What, of necessity, must be 
their terrible limits, if indeed we were to find them at all? What can 
the damned really say to the damned? 

" I never stepped ashore at Piraeus. Yet in my mind I roamed the 
Acropolis at Athens, watching the moon rise through the open roof of 


128 



the Parthenon, measuring my height by the grandeur of those 
columns, walking the streets of those Greeks who died at Marathon, 
listening to the sound of wind in the ancient olives. These were the 
monuments of men who could not die, not the stones of the living 
dead; here the secrets that had endured the passage of time, which I 
had only dimly begun to understand. And yet nothing turned me 
from our quest and nothing could, turn me, but over and over, 
committed as I was, I pondered the great risk of our questions, the risk 
of any question that is truthfully asked; for the answer must carry an 
incalculable price, a tragic danger. Who knew that better than I, who 
had presided over the death of my own body, seeing all I called human 
wither and die only to form an unbreakable chain which held me fast 
to this world yet made me forever its exile, a specter with a beating 
heart? 

" The sea lulled me to bad dreams, to sharp remembrances. A winter 
night in New Orleans when I wandered through the St. Louis cemetery 
and saw my sister, old and bent, a bouquet of white roses in her arms, 
the thorns carefully bound in an old parchment, her gray head bowed, 
her steps carrying her steadily along through the perilous dark to the 
grave where the stone of her brother Louis was set, side by side with 
that of his younger brother. . Louis, who had died in the fire of Pointe 
du Lac leaving a generous legacy to a godchild and namesake she never 
knew. Those flowers were for Louis, as if it had not been half a 
century since his death, as if her memory, like Louis's memory, left her 
no peace. Sorrow sharpened her ashen beauty, sorrow bent her 
narrow back. And what I would not have given, as I watched her, to 
touch her silver hair, to whisper love to her, if love would not have 
loosed on her remaining years a horror worse than grief. I left her 
with grief. Over and over and over. 

" And I dreamed now too much. I dreamed too long, in the prison 
of this ship, in the prison of my body, attuned as it was to the rise of 
every sun as no mortal body had ever been. And my heart beat faster 
for the mountains of eastern Europe, finally, beat faster for the one 
hope that somewhere we might find in that primitive countryside the 
answer to why under God this suffering was allowed to exist why 
under God it was allowed to begin, and how under God it might be 
ended. I had not the courage to end it, I knew, without that answer. 
And in time the waters of the Mediterranean became, in fact, the 
waters of the Black Sea " 


129 



The vampire sighed. The boy was resting on his elbow, his face 
cradled in his right palm; and his avid expression was incongruous 
with the redness of his eyes. 

" Do you think I'm playing with you? " the vampire asked, his fine 
dark eyebrows knitted for an instant. 

" No," the boy said quickly. " I know better than to ask you any 
more questions. You'll tell me everything in your own time. " And his 
mouth settled, and he looked at the vampire as though he were ready 
for him to begin again. There was a sound then from far off. It came 
from somewhere in the old Victorian building around them, the first 
such sound they'd heard. The boy looked up towards the hallway 
door. It was as if he'd forgotten the building existed. Someone walked 
heavily on the old boards. But the vampire was undisturbed. He 
looked away as if he were again disengaging himself from the present. 

" That village. I can't tell you the name of it; the name's gone. I 
remember it was miles from the coast, however, and we'd been 
traveling alone by carriage. And such a carriage! It was Claudia's 
doing, that carriage, and I should have expected it; but then, things are 
always taking me unawares. From the first moment we. arrived in 
Varna, I had perceived certain changes in her which made me at once 
aware she was Lestat's daughter as well as my own. From me she had 
learned the value of money, but from Lestat she had inherited a 
passion for spending it; and she wasn't to leave without the most 
luxurious black coach we could manage, outfitted with leather seats 
that might have accommodated a band of travelers, let alone a man 
and a child who used the magnificent compartment only for the 
transportation of an ornately carved oak chest. To the back were 
strapped two trunks of the finest clothes the shops there could 
provide; and we went speeding along, those light enormous wheels 
and fine springs carrying that bulk with a frightening ease over the 
mountain roads. There was a thrill to that when there was nothing 
else in this strange country, those horses at a gallop and the gentle 
listing of that carriage. 

" And it was strange country. Lonely, dark, as rural country is. 
always dark, its castles and ruins often obscured when the moon 
passed behind the clouds, so that I felt an anxiety during those hours 
I'd never quite experienced in New Orleans. And the people 
themselves were no relief. We were naked and lost in their tiny 
hamlets, and conscious always that amongst them we were in grave 
danger. 

" Never in New Orleans had the kill to be disguised. The ravages of 
fever, plague, crime--these things competed with us always there, and 


130 



outdid us. But here we had to go to great lengths to make the kill 
unnoticed. Because these simple country people, who might have 
found the crowded streets of New Orleans terrifying, believed 
completely that the dead did walk and did drink the blood of the 
living. They knew our names: vampire, devil. And we, who were on 
the lookout for the slightest rumor, wanted under no circumstances to 
create rumor ourselves. 

"We traveled alone and fast and lavishly amongst them, struggling to 
be safe within our ostentation, finding talk of vampires all too cheap 
by the inn fires, where, my daughter sleeping peacefully against my 
chest, I invariably found someone amongst the peasants or guests who 
spoke enough German or, at times, even French to discuss with me the 
familiar legends. 

" But finally we came to that village which was to be the turning 
point in our travels. I savor nothing about that journey, not the 
freshness of the air, the coolness of the nights. I don't talk of it 
without a vague tremor even now. 

"We had been at a farmhouse the night before, and so no news 
prepared us---only the desolate appearance of the place: because it 
wasn't late when we reached it, not late enough for all the shutters of 
the little street to be bolted or for a darkened lantern to be swinging 
from the broad archway of the inn. 

" Refuse was collected in the doorways. And there were other signs 
that something was wrong. A small box of withered flowers beneath a 
shuttered shop window. A barrel rolling back and forth in the center 
of the inn yard. The place had the aspect of a town under siege by the 
plague. 

" But even as I was setting Claudia down on the packed earth beside 
the carriage, I saw the crack of light beneath the inn door. 'Put the 
hood of your cape up,' she said quickly. 'They're coming.' Someone 
inside was pulling back the latch. 

" At first all I saw was the light behind the figure in the very narrow 
margin she allowed. Then the light from the carriage lanterns glinted 
in her eye. 

" 'A room for the night!' I said in German. 'And my horses need 
tending, badly!' 

" 'The night's no time for traveling . . .' she said to me in a peculiar, 
flat voice. 'And with a child.' As she said this, I noticed others in the 
room behind her. I could hear their murmurings and see the 
flickering of a fire. From what I could see there were mostly peasants 
gathered around it, except for one man who was dressed much like 
myself in a tailored coat, with an overcoat over his shoulders; but his 


131 



clothes were neglected and shabby. His red hair gleamed in the 
firelight. He was a foreigner, like ourselves, and he was the only one 
not looking at us. His head wagged slightly as if he were drunk. 

" 'My daughter's tired,' I said to the woman, 'we've no place to stay 
but here' And now I took Claudia into my arms. She turned her face 
towards me, and I heard her whisper, 'Louis, the garlic, the crucifix 
above the doom' 

" I had not seen these things. It was a small crucifix, with the body of 
Christ in bronze fixed to the wood, and the garlic was wreathed 
around it, a fresh garland entwined with an old one, in which the buds 
were withered and dried. The woman's eye followed my eyes, and 
then she looked at me sharply and I could see how exhausted she was, 
how red were her pupils, and how the hand which clutched at the 
shawl at her breast trembled. Her black hair was completely 
disheveled. I pressed nearer until I was almost at the threshold, and 
she opened the door wide suddenly as if she'd only just decided to let 
us in. She said a prayer as I passed her, I was sure of it, though I 
couldn't understand the Slavic words. 

" The small, low-beamed room was filled with people, men and 
women along the rough, paneled walls, on benches and even on the 
floor. It was as if the entire village were gathered there. A child slept 
in a woman's lap and another slept on the staircase, bundled in 
blankets, his knees tucked in against one step, his arms making a 
pillow for his head on the next. And everywhere there was the garlic 
hanging from nails and hooks, along with the cooking pots and 
flagons. The fire was the only light, and it threw distorting shadows on 
the still faces as they watched us. 

"No one motioned for us to sit or offered us anything, and finally 
the woman told me in German I might take the horses into the stable 
if I liked. She was staring at me with those slightly wild, red-rimmed 
eyes, and then her face softened. She told me she'd stand at the inn 
door for me with a lantern, but I must hurry and leave the child here. 

" But something else had distracted me, a scent I detected beneath 
the heavy fragrance of burning wood and the wine. It was the scent of 
death. I could feel Claudia's hand press my chest, and I saw her tiny 
finger pointing to a door at the foot of the stairs. The scent came from 
there. 

" The woman had a cup of wine waiting when I returned, and a bowl 
of broth. I sat down, Claudia on my knee, her head turned away from 
the fire towards that mysterious door. All eyes were fixed on us as 
before, except for the foreigner. I could see his profile now clearly. He 
was much younger than I'd thought, his haggard appearance 


132 



stemming from emotion. He had a lean but very pleasant face 
actually, his light, freckled skin making him seem like a boy. His wide, 
blue eyes were fixed on the fire as though he were talking to it, and his 
eyelashes and eyebrows were golden in the light, which gave him a very 
innocent, open expression. But he was miserable, disturbed, drunk. 
Suddenly he turned to me, and I saw he'd been crying. 'Do you speak 
English?' he said, his voice booming in the silence. 

" 'Yes, I do,’ I said to him. And he glanced at the others, 
triumphantly. They stared at him stonily. 

" 'You speak English!’ he cried, his lips stretching into a bitter smile, 
his eyes moving around the ceiling and then fixing on mine. 'Get out 
of this country,’he said. 'Get out of it now. Tales your carriage, your 
horses, drive them till they drop, but get out of it!’ Then his shoulders 
convulsed as if he were sick. He put his hand to his mouth. The 
woman who stood against the wall now, her arms folded over her 
soiled apron, said calmly in German, 'At dawn you can go. At dawn.' 

" 'But what is it?' I whispered to her; and then I looked to him. He 
was watching me, his eyes glassy and red. No one spoke. A log fell 
heavily in the fire. 

"'Won't you tell me?' I asked the Englishman gently. He stood up. 
For a moment I thought he was going to fall. He loomed over me, a 
much taller man than myself, his head pitching forward, then 
backward, before he righted himself and put his hands on the edge of 
the table. His black coat was stained with wine, and so was his shirt 
cuff. 'You want to see?' he gasped as he peered into my eyes. 'Do you 
want to see for yourself?’ There was a soft, pathetic tone to his voice as 
he spoke these words. 

" ’Leave the child!’ said the woman abruptly, with a quick, imperious 
gesture. 

" 'She’s sleeping,’ I said. And, rising, I followed the Englishman to 
the door at the foot of the stairs. 

" There was a slight commotion as those nearest the door moved 
away from it. And we entered a small parlor together. 

" Only one candle burned on the sideboard, and the first thing I saw 
was a row of delicately painted plates on a shelf. There were curtains 
on the small,window, and a gleaming picture of the Virgin Mary and 
Christ child on the wall. But the walls and chairs barely enclosed a 
great oak table, and on that table lay the body of a young woman, her 
white hands folded on her breast, her auburn hair mussed and tucked 
about her thin, white throat and under her shoulders. Her pretty face 
was already hard with death. Amber rosary beads gleamed around her 
wrist and down the side of her dark wool skirt. And beside her lay a 


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very pretty red felt hat with a wide, soft brim and a 'veil, and a pair of 
dark gloves. It was all laid there as if she would very soon rise and put 
these things on. And the Englishman patted the hat carefully now as 
he drew close to her. He was on the verge of breaking down 
altogether. He'd drawn a large handkerchief out of his coat, and he 
had put it to his face. 'Do you know what they want to do with her?' 
he whispered as he looked at me. 'Do you have any idea?’ 

" The woman came in behind us and reached for his arm, but he 
roughly shook her off. 'Do you know?' he demanded of me with his 
eyes fierce. 'Savages!' 

" 'You stop now! she said under her breath. 

" He clenched his teeth and shook his head, so that a shock of his red 
hair loosened in his eyes. 'You get away from me,’ he said to the 
woman in German. 'Get away from me.' Someone was whispering in 
the other room. The Englishman looked again at the young woman, 
and his eyes filled with tears. 'So innocent,’ he said softly; and then he 
glanced at the ceiling and, making a fist with his right hand, he gasped, 
'Damn you. . . God! Damn you!' 

" 'Lord,' the woman whispered, and quickly she made the Sign of the 
Cross. 

" 'Do you see this?’ he asked me. And he pried very carefully at the 
lace of the dead woman's throat, as though he could not, did not wish 
to actually touch the hardening flesh. Thereon her throat, 
unmistakable, were the two puncture wounds, as I'd seen them a 
thousand times upon a thousand, engraved in the yellowing skin. The 
man drew his hands up to his face, his tall, lean body rocking on the 
balls of his feet. 'I think I'm going mad!' he said. 

" 'Come now,' said the woman, holding onto him as he struggled, 
her face suddenly flushed. 

" 'Let him be,' I said to her. 'Just let him be. I'll take care of him.' 

" Her mouth contorted. 'I'll throw you all out of here, out into that 
dark, if you don't stop.' She was too weary for this, too close to some 
breaking point herself. But then she turned her back on us, drawing 
her shawl tight around her, and padded softly out, the men who'd 
gathered at the door making way for her. 

" The Englishman was crying. 

" I could see what I must do, but it wasn't only that I wanted so 
much to learn from him, my heart pounding with silent excitement. It 
was heartrending to see him this way. Fate brought me too mercilessly 
close to him. 

" 'I'll stay with you,' I offered. And I brought two chairs up beside 
the table. He sat down heavily, his eyes on the flickering candle at his 


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side. I shut the door, and the walls seemed to recede and the circle of 
the candle to grow brighter around his bowed head. He leaned back 
against the sideboard and wiped his face with his handkerchief. Then 
he drew a leatherbound flask from his pocket and offered it to me, and 
I said no. 

" 'Do you want to tell me what happened?' 

" He nodded. " 'Perhaps you can bring some sanity to this place,’ he 
said. 'You’re a Frenchman, aren't you? You know, I'm English.' 

" 'Yes,' I nodded. 

" And then, pressing my hand fervently, the liquor so dulling his 
senses that he never felt the coldness of it, he told me his name was 
Morgan and he needed me desperately, more than he'd ever needed 
anyone in his life. And at that moment, holding that hand, feeling the 
fever of it, I did a strange thing. I told him my name, which I confided 
to almost no one. But he was looking at the dead woman as if he 
hadn't heard me, his lips forming what appeared to be the faintest 
smile, the tears standing in his eyes. His expression would have moved 
any human being; it might have been more than some could bear. 

"'I did this,'he said, nodding. 'I brought her here.' And he raised 
his eyebrows as if wondering at it. 

" 'No,' I said quickly. 'You didn't do it. Tell me who did.' 

" But then he seemed confused, lost in thought. 'I'd never been out 
of England,' he started. 'I was painting, you see . . . as if it mattered 
now . . . the paintings, the book! I thought it all so quaint! So 
picturesque!’ His eyes moved over the room, his voice trailing off. For 
a long time he looked at her again, and then softly he said to her, 
'Emily,' and I felt I'd glimpsed something precious he held to his heart. 

" Gradually, then, the story began to come. A honeymoon journey, 
through Germany, into this country, wherever the regular coaches 
would carry them, wherever Morgan found scenes to paint. And 
they'd come to this remote place finally because there was a ruined 
monastery nearby which was said to be a very well reserved place. 

" But Morgan and Emily had never reached that monastery. Tragedy 
had been waiting for them here. 

" It turned out the regular coaches did not come this way, and 
Morgan had paid a farmer to bring them by cart. But the afternoon 
they arrived, there was a great commotion in the cemetery outside of 
town. The farmer, taking one look, refused to leave his cart to see 
further. 

" 'It was some kind of procession, it seemed,' Morgan said, 'with all 
the people outfitted in their best, and some with flowers; and the truth 
was I thought it quite fascinating. I wanted to see it. I was so eager I 


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had the fellow leave us, bags and all. We could see the village just up 
ahead. Actually it was I more than Emily, of course, but she was so 
agreeable, you see. I left her, finally, seated on our suitcases, and I 
went on up the hill without her. Did you see it when you were 
coming, the cemetery? No, of course you didn't. Thank God that 
carriage of yours brought you here safe and sound. Though, if you'd 
driven on, no matter how bad off your horses were . . ' He stopped. 

" 'What's the danger?' I urged him, gently. 

"'Ah. . . danger! Barbarians!' he murmured. And he glanced at 
the door. Then he took another drink from his flask and capped it. 

" Well, it was no procession. I saw that right off,' he said. 'The 
people wouldn't even speak to me when I came up-you know what 
they are; but they had no objection to letting me watch. The truth 
was, you wouldn't have thought I was standing there at all. You won't 
believe me when I tell you what I saw, but you must believe me; 
because if you don't, I'm mad, I know it.' 

" 'I will believe you, go on,' I said. 

" 'Well, the cemetery was full of fresh graves, I saw that at once, some 
of them with new wooden crosses and some of them just mounds of 
earth with flowers still fresh; and the peasants there, they were holding 
flowers, a few of them, as though they meant to be trimming these 
graves; but all of them were standing stock-still, their eyes on these two 
fellows who had a white horse by the bridle-and what an animal that 
was! It was pawing and stomping and shying to one side, as if it 
wanted no part of the place; a beautiful thing it was, though, a 
splendid animal-a stallion, and pure white. Well, at some point-and I 
couldn't tell you how they agreed upon it, because not a one of them 
said a word-one fellow, the leader, I think, gave the horse a 
tremendous whack with the handle of a shovel,, and it took off up the 
hill, just wild. You can imagine, I thought that was the last we'd see of 
that horse for a while for sure. But I was wrong. In a minute it had 
slowed to a gallop, and it was turning around amongst the old graves 
and coming back down the hill towards the newer ones. And the 
people all stood there watching it. No one made a sound. And here it 
came trotting right over the mounds, right through the flowers, and 
no one made a move to get hold of the bridle. And then suddenly it 
came to a stop, right on one of the graves' 

" He wiped at his eyes, but the tears were almost gone. He seemed 
fascinated with his tale, as I was. 

" 'Well, here's what happened,' he continued. 'The animal just stood 
there. And suddenly a cry went up from the crowd. No, it wasn't a 
cry, it was as though they were all gasping and moaning, and then 


136 



everything went quiet. And the horse was just standing there, tossing 
its head; and finally this fellow who was the leader burst forward and 
shouted to several of the others; and one of the women-she screamed, 
and threw herself on the grave almost under the horse's hooves. I 
came up then as close as I could. I could see the stone with the 
deceased's name on it; it was a young woman, dead only six months, 
the dates carved right there, and there was this miserable woman on 
her knees in the dirt, with her arms around the stone now, as if she 
meant to pull it right up out of the earth. And these fellows trying to 
pick her up and get her away. 

" 'Now I almost turned back, but I couldn't, not until I saw what they 
meant to do. And, of course, Emily was quite safe, and none of these 
people took the slightest notice of either of us. Well, two of them 
finally did have that woman up, and then the other had come with 
shovels and had begun to dig right into the grave. Pretty soon one of 
them was down in the grave, and everyone was so still you could hear 
the slightest sound, that shovel digging in there and the earth thrown 
up in a heap. I can't tell you what it was like. Here was the sun high 
above us and not a cloud in the sky, and all of them standing around, 
holding onto one another now, and even that pathetic woman . . .' 

He stopped now, because his eyes had fallen on Emily. I just sat there 
waiting for him. I could hear the whiskey when he lifted the flask 
again, and I felt glad for him that there was so much there, that he 
could drink it and deaden this pain. 'It might as well have been 
midnight on that hill,' he said, looking at me, his voice very low. 

'That's how it felt. And then I could hear this fellow in the grave. He 
was cracking the coffin lid with his shovel! Then out came the broken 
boards. He was just tossing them out, right and left. And suddenly he 
let out an awful cry. The other fellows drew up close, and all at once 
there was a rush to the grave; and then they all fell back like a wave, all 
of them crying out, and some of them turning and trying to push 
away. And the poor woman, she was wild, bending her knees, and 
trying to get free of those men that were holding onto her. Well, I 
couldn't help but go up. I don't suppose anything could have kept me 
away; and I'll tell you that's the first time I've ever done such a thing, 
and, God help me, it's to be the last. Now, you must believe me, you 
must! But there, right there in that coffin, with that fellow standing on 
the broken boards over her feet, was the dead woman, and I tell you . . 

. I tell you she was as fresh, as pink =his voice cracked, and he sat 
there, his eyes wide, his hand poised as if he held something invisible 
in his fingers, pleading with me to believe him-'as pink as if she were 


137 



alive! Buried six months! And there she lay! The shroud was thrown 
back off her, and her hands lay on her breast just as if she were asleep.' 

" He sighed. His hand dropped to his leg and he shook his head, and 
for a moment he just sat staring. T swear to you!' he said. 'And then 
this fellow who was in the grave, he bent down and lifted the dead 
woman's hand. I tell you that arm moved as freely as my arm! And he 
held her hand out as if he were looking at her nails. Then he shouted; 
and that woman beside the grave, she was kicking at those fellows and 
shoving at the earth with her foot, so it fell right down in the corpse's 
face and hair. And oh, she was so pretty, that dead woman; oh, if you 
could have seen her, and what they did then!' 

" 'Tell me what they did,' I said to him softly. But I knew before he 
said it. 

" 'I tell you . . .’ he said. 'We don’t know the meaning of something 
like that until we see it!’ And he looked at me, his eyebrow arched as if 
he were confiding a terrible secret. 'We just don't know.' 

" 'No, we don't,’ I said. 

" 'I'll tell you. They took a stake, a wooden stake, mind you; and this 
one in the grave, he took -the stake with a hammer and he put it right 
to her breast. I didn't believe it! And then with one great blow he 
drove it right into her. I tell you, I couldn't have moved even if I'd 
wanted to; I was rooted there. And then that fellow, that beastly 
fellow, he reached up for his shovel and with both his arms he drove it 
sharp, right into the dead woman's throat. The head was off like that' 
He shut his eyes, his face contorted, and put his head to the side. 

" I looked at him, but I wasn't seeing him at all. I was seeing this 
woman in her grave with the head severed, and I was feeling the most 
keen revulsion inside myself, as if a hand were pressing on my throat 
and my insides were coming up inside me and I couldn't breathe. 

Then I felt Claudia's lip against my wrist She was staring at Morgan, 
and apparently she had been for some time. 

" Slowly Morgan looked up at me, his eyes wild. 'It's what they want 
to do with her,' he said. 'With Emily! Well I won't let them.' He 
shook his head adamantly. 'I won’t let them. You've got to help me, 
Louis.' His lips were trembling, and his face so distorted now by his 
sudden desperation that I might have recoiled from it despite myself. 
'The same blood flows in our veins, you and I. I mean, French, 
English, we're civilized men, Louis. They're savages!' 

" 'Try to be calm now, Morgan,’ I said, reaching out for him. 'I want 
you to tell me what happened then. You and Emily. 

" He was struggling for his bottle. I drew it out of his pocket, and he 
took off the cap. 'That’s a fellow, Louis; that's a friend,' he said 


138 



emphatically. 'You see, I took her away fast. They were going to burn 
that corpse right there in the cemetery; and Emily was not to see that, 
not while I. . .' He shook his head There wasn't a carriage to be 
found that would take us out of here; not a single one of them would 
leave now for the two days' drive to get us to a decent place!' 

" 'But how did they explain it to you, Morgan?' insisted. I could see 
he did not have much time left. 

" 'Vampires!' he burst out, the whiskey sloshing on his hand. 
'Vampires, Louis. Can you believe that!' And he gestured to the door 
with the bottle. 'A plague of vampires! All this in whispers, as if the 
devil himself were listening at the door! Of course, God have mercy, 
they put a stop to it. That unfortunate woman in the cemetery, they'd 
stopped her from clawing her way up nightly to feed on the rest of us!' 
He put the bottle to his lips. 'Oh . . . God . . .' he moaned. 

" I watched him drink, patiently waiting. 

" 'And Emily. . : he continued. 'She thought it fascinating. What 
with the fire out there and a decent dinner and a proper glass of wine. 
She hadn't seen that woman! She hadn't seen what they'd done,' he 
said desperately. 'Oh, I wanted to get out of here; I offered them 
money. " If it's over," I kept saying to them, 

" one of you ought to want this money, a small fortune just to drive 
us out of here. 

" But it wasn't over . . ' I whispered. 

" And I could see the tears gathering in his eyes, his mouth twisting 
with pain. 

" 'How did it happen to her?' I asked him. 

" 'I don’t know,' he gasped, shaking his head, the flask pressed to his 
forehead as if it were something cool, refreshing, when it was not. 

" 'It came into the inn?' 

" 'They said she went out to it,’ he confessed, the tears coursing down 
his cheeks. 'Everything was locked! They saw to that. Doors, 
windows! Then it was morning and they were all shouting, and she 
was gone. The window stood wide open, and she wasn't there. I 
didn't even take time for my robe. I was running. I came to a dead 
halt over her, out there, behind the inn. My foot all but came down on 
her . . . she was just lying there under the peach trees. She held an 
empty cup. Clinging to it, an empty cup! They said it lured her . . . 
she was trying to give it water. . . 

" The flask slipped from his hands. He clapped his hands over his 
ears, his body bent, his head bowed. 

" For a long time I sat there watching him; I had no words to say to 
him. And when he cried softly that they wanted to desecrate her, that 


139 



they said she, Emily, was now a vampire, I assured him softly, though I 
don't think he ever heard me, that she was not. 

" He moved forward finally, as if he might fall. He appeared to be 
reaching for the candle, and before his arm rested on the buffet, his 
finger touched it so the hot wax extinguished the tiny bit that was left 
of the wick. We were in darkness then, and his head had fallen on his 
arm. 

" All of the light of the room seemed gathered now in Claudia's eyes. 
But as the silence lengthened and I sat there, wondering, hoping 
Morgan wouldn't lift his head again, the woman came to the door. 

Her candle illuminated him, drunk, asleep. 

" 'You go now,’ she said to me. Dark figures crowded around her, 
and the old wooden inn was alive with the shuffling of men and 
women. 'Go by the fire!' 

" 'What are you going to do!' I demanded of her, rising and holding 
Claudia. 'I want to know what you propose to do!' 

" 'Go by the fire,' she commanded. 

" 'No, don't do this,' I said. But she narrowed her eyes and bared her 
teeth. 'You go!' she growled. 

" 'Morgan,' I said to him; but he didn't hear me, he couldn't hear me. 

" 'Leave him be,’ said the woman fiercely. 

" 'But it's stupid, what you're doing; don't you understand? This 
woman's dead!' I pleaded with her. 

" 'Louis,' Claudia whispered, so that they couldn't hear her, her arm 
tightening around my neck beneath the fur of my hood. 'Let these 
people alone.' 

" The others were moving into the room now, encircling the table, 
their faces grim as they looked at us. 

" 'But where do these vampires come from!' I whispered. 'You've 
searched your cemetery! If it's vampires, where do they hide from 
you? This woman can't do you harm. Hunt your vampires if you 
must' 

" 'By day,' she said gravely, winking her eye and slowly nodding her 
head. 'By day. We get them, by day-.’ 

" 'Where, out there in the graveyard, digging up the graves of your 
own villagers?' 

" She shook her head. 'The ruins,'she said. 'It was always the ruins. 
We were wrong. In my grandfather's time it was the ruins, and it is the 
ruins again. We'll take them down stone by stone if we have to. But 
you . . . you go now. Because if you don't go, we'll drive you out 
there into that dark now!' 


140 



" And then out from behind her apron she drew her clenched fist 
with the stake in it and held it up in the flickering light of the candle. 
'You hear me, you go!' she said; and the men pressed in close behind 
her, their mouths set, their eyes blazing in the light. 

" 'Yes . . : I said to her. 'Out there. I would prefer that. Out there.' 
And I swept past her, almost throwing her aside, seeing them scuttle 
back to make way. I had my hand on the latch of the inn door and slid 
it back with one quick gesture. 

"'No!' cried the woman in her guttural German. 'You're mad!' And 
she rushed up to me and then stared at the latch, dumbfounded. She 
threw her hands up against the rough boards of the door. 'Do you 
know what you do!’ 

"'Where are the ruins?' I asked her calmly. 'How far? Do they lie to 
the left of the road, or to the right?’ 

" 'No, no’ She shook her head violently. I pried the door back and 
felt the cold blast of sir on my face. One of the women said something 
sharp and angry from the wall, and one of the children moaned in its 
sleep. 'I'm going. I want one thing from you. Tell me where the ruins 
lie, so I may stay clear of them. Tell me.' 

" 'You don't know, you don't know,' she said; and then I laid my 
hand on her warm wrist and drew her slowly through the door, her 
feet scraping on the boards, her eyes wild. The men moved nearer but, 
as she stepped out against her will into the night, they stopped. She 
tossed her head, her hair falling down into her eyes, her eyes glaring at 
my hand and at my face. 'Tell me . . ’ I said. 

" I could see she was staring not at me but at Claudia. Claudia had 
turned towards her, and the light from the fire was on her face. The 
woman did not see the rounded cheeks nor the pursed lips, I knew, 
but Claudia's eyes, which were gazing at her with a dark, demonic 
intelligence. The woman's teeth bit down into the flesh of her lip. 

" 'To the north or south?’ 

"To the north... ’ she whispered. 

" 'To the left or the right?’ 

" 'The left.’ 

" 'And how far?’ 

" Her hand struggled desperately. 'Three miles,' she gasped. And I 
released her, so that she fell back against the door, her eyes wide with 
fear and confusion. I had turned to go, but suddenly behind me she 
cried out for me to wait. I turned to see she'd ripped the crucifix from 
the beam over her head, and she had it thrust out towards me now. 
And out of the dark nightmare landscape of my memory I saw Babette 
gazing at me as she had so many years ago, saying those words, 'Get 


141 





thee behind me, Satan.' But the woman's face was desperate. 'Take it, 
please, in the name of God,' she said. 'And ride fast' And the door 
shut, leaving Claudia and me in total darkness. 

" In minutes the tunnel of the night closed upon the weak lanterns of 
our carriage, as if the village had never existed. We lurched forward, 
around a bend, the springs creaking, the dim moon revealing for an 
instant the pale outline of the mountains beyond the pines. I could 
not stop thinking of Morgan, stop hearing his voice. It was all tangled 
with my own horrified anticipation of meeting the thing which had 
killed Emily, the thing which was unquestionably one of our own. But 
Claudia was in a frenzy. If she could have driven the horses herself, 
she would have taken the reins. Again and again she urged me to use 
the whip. She struck savagely at the few low branches that dipped 
suddenly into the lamps before our faces; and the arm that clung to my 
waist on the rocking bench was as firm as iron. 

" I remember the road turning sharply, the lanterns clattering, and 
Claudia calling out over the wind: 'There, Louis, do you see it?' And I 
jerked hard on the reins. 

" She was on her knees, pressed against me, and the carnage was 
swaying like a ship at sea. 

" A great fleecy cloud had released the moon, and high above us 
loomed the dark outline of the tower. One long window showed the 
pale sky beyond it. I sat there, clutching the bench, trying to steady a 
motion that continued in my head as the carriage settled on its springs. 
One of the horses whinnied. Then everything was still. 

" Claudia was saying, 'Louis, come ....' 

" I whispered something, a swift irrational negation. I had the 
distinct and terrifying impression that Morgan was near to me, talking 
to me in that low, impassioned way he'd pleaded with me in the inn. 
Not a living creature stirred in the night around us. There was only 
the wind and the soft rustling of the leaves. 

" 'Do you think he knows we're coming?' I asked, my voice 
unfamiliar to me over this wind. I was in that little parlor, as if there 
were no escape from it, as if this dense forest were not real. I think I 
shuddered. And then I felt Claudia's hand very gently touch the hand 
I- lifted to my eyes. The thin pines were billowing behind her and the 
rustle of the leaves grew louder, as if a great mouth sucked the breeze 
and began a whirlwind. 'They'll bury her at the crossroads? Is that 
what they'll do? An Englishwoman!' I whispered. 

"'Would that I had your size . . ’ Claudia was saying. 'And would 
that you had my heart. Oh, Louis. . .' And her head inclined to me 
now, so like the attitude of the vampire bending to kiss that I shrank 


142 



back from her; but her lips only gently pressed my own, finding a part 
there to suck the breath and let it flow back into me as my arms 
enclosed her. 'Let me lead you . . 'she pleaded. 'There's no turning 
back now. Take me in your arms,' she said, 'and let me down, on the 
road’ 

" But it seemed an eternity that I just sat there feeling her lips on my 
face and on my eyelids. Then she moved, the softness of her small 
body suddenly snatched from me, in a movement so graceful and swift 
that she seemed now poised in the air beside the carriage, her hand 
clutching mine for an instant, then letting it go. And then I looked 
down to see her looking up at me, standing on the road in the 
shuddering pool of light beneath the lantern. She beckoned to me, as 
she stepped backwards, one small boot behind the other. 'Louis, come 
down . . ' until she threatened to vanish into the darkness. And in a 
second I'd unfastened the lamp from its hook, and I stood beside her 
in the tall grass. 

" 'Don't you sense the danger?' I whispered to her. 'Can't you 
breathe it like the air?' One of those quick, elusive smiles played on 
her lips, as she turned towards the slope. The lantern pitched a 
pathway through the rising forest. One small, white hand drew the 
wool of her cape close, and she moved forward. 

" 'Wait only for a moment. . .' 

" 'Fear's your enemy. . .' she answered, but she did not stop. 

" She proceeded ahead of the light, feet sure, even as the tall grass 
gave way gradually to low heaps of rubble, and the forest thickened, 
and the distant tower vanished with the fading of the moon and the 
great weaving of the branches overhead. Soon the sound and scent of 
the horses died on the low wind. 'Be en garde,' Claudia whispered, as 
she moved, relentlessly, pausing only now and again where the tangled 
vines and rock made it seem for moments there was a shelter. But the 
ruins were ancient. Whether plague or fire or a foreign enemy had 
ravaged the town, we couldn't know. Only the monastery truly 
remained. 

" Now something whispered in the dark that was like the wind and 
the leaves, but it was neither. I saw Claudia's back straighten, saw the 
flash of her white palm as she slowed her step. Then I knew it was 
water, winding its way slowly down the mountain, and I saw it far 
ahead through the black trunks, a straight, moonlit waterfall 
descending to a boiling pool below. Claudia emerged silhouetted 
against the fall, her hand clutching a bare root in the moist earth 
beside it; and now I saw her climbing hand over hand up the 
overgrown cliff, her arm trembling ever so slightly, her small boots 


143 



dangling, then digging in to hold, then swinging free again. The water 
was cold, and it made the air fragrant and light all around it, so that 
for a moment I rested. Nothing stirred around me in the forest. I 
listened, senses quietly separating the tune of the leaves, but nothing 
else stirred. And then it struck me gradually, like a chill coming over 
my arms and my throat and finally my face, that the night was too 
desolate, too lifeless. It was as if even the birds had shunned this place, 
as well as all the myriad creatures that should have been moving about 
the banks of this stream. But Claudia, above me on the ledge, was 
reaching for the lantern, her cape brushing my face. I lifted it, so that 
suddenly she sprang into light, like an eerie cherub. She put her hand 
out for me as if, despite her small size, she could help me up the 
embankment. In a moment we were moving on again, over the 
stream, up the mountain. 'Do you sense it?' I whispered. 'It's too 
still.' 

" But her hand tightened on mine, as if to say, 'Quiet.' The hill was 
growing steeper, and the quiet was unnerving. I tried to stare at the 
limits of the light, to see each new bark as it loomed before us. 
Something did move, and I reached for Claudia, almost pulling her 
sharply near to me. But it was only a reptile, shooting through the 
leaves with a whip of his tail. The leaves settled. But Claudia moved 
back against me, under the folds of my cape, a hand firmly clasping the 
cloth of my coat; and she seemed to propel me forward, my cape 
falling over the loose fabric of her own. 

" Soon the scent of the water was gone, and when the moon shone 
clear for an instant I could see right ahead of us what appeared to be a 
break in the woods. Claudia firmly clasped the lantern and shut its 
metal door. I moved to stop this, my hand struggling with hers; but 
then she said to me quietly, 'Close your eyes for an instant, and then 
open them slowly. And when you do, you will see it.’ 

" A chill rose over me as I did this, during which I held fast to her- 
shoulder. But then I opened my eyes and saw beyond the distant bark 
of the trees the long, low walls of the monastery and the high square 
top of the massive tower. Far beyond it, above an immense black 
valley, gleamed the snow-capped peaks of the mountains. ’Come,’ she 
said to me, 'quiet, as if your body has no weight.' And she started 
without hesitation right towards those walls, right towards whatever 
might have been waiting in their shelter. 

" In moments we had found the gap that would admit us, the great 
opening that was blacker still than the walls around it, the vines 
encrusting its edges as if to hold the stones in place. High above, 
through the open room, the damp smell of the stones strong in my 


144 



nostrils, I saw, beyond the streaks of clouds, a faint sprinkling of stars. 
A great staircase moved upward, from corner to corner, all the way to 
the narrow windows that looked out upon the valley. And beneath the 
first rise of the stair, out of the gloom emerged the vast, dark opening 
to the monastery's remaining rooms. 

" Claudia was still now, as if she had become the stones. In the damp 
enclosure not even the soft tendrils of her hair moved. She was 
listening. And then I was listening with her. There was only the low 
backdrop of the wind. She moved, slowly, deliberately, and with one 
pointed foot gradually cleared a space in the moist earth in front of 
her. I could see a flat stone there, and it sounded hollow as she gently 
tapped it with her heel. Then I could see the broad size of it and how 
it rose at one distant corner; and an image came to mind, dreadful in 
its sharpness, of that band of men and women from the village 
surrounding the stone, raising it with a giant lever. Claudia's eyes 
moved over the staircase and then fixed on the crumbling doorway 
beneath it. The moon shone for an instant through a lofty window. 
Then Claudia moved, so suddenly that she stood beside me without 
having made a sound. 'Do you hear it?' she whispered. 'Listen.' 

" It was so low no mortal could have heard it. And it did not come 
from the ruins. It came from far off, not the long, meandering way 
that we had come up the slope, but another way, up the spine of the 
hill, directly from the village. Just a rustling now, a scraping, but it was 
steady; and then slowly the round tramping of a foot began to 
distinguish itself. Claudia's hand tightened on mine, and with a gentle 
pressure she moved me silently beneath the slope of the stairway. I 
could see the folds of her dress heave slightly beneath the edge of her 
cape. The tramp of the feet grew louder, and I began to sense that one 
step preceded the other very sharply, the second dragging slowly across 
the earth. It was a limping step, drawing nearer and nearer over the 
low whistling of the wind. My own heart beat hard against my chest, 
and I felt the veins in my temples tighten, a tremor passing through 
my limbs, so that I could feel the fabric of my shirt against me, the stiff 
cut of the collar, the very scraping of the buttons against my cape. 

" Then a faint scent came with the wind. It was the scent of blood, at 
once arousing me, against my will, the warm, sweet scent of human 
blood, blood that was spilling, flowing and then I sensed the smell of 
living flesh and I heard in time with the feet a dry, hoarse breathing. 
But with it came another sound, faint and intermingled with the first, 
as the feet tramped closer and closer to the walls, the sound of yet 
another creature's halting, strained breath. And I could hear the heart 
of that creature, beating irregularly, a fearful throbbing; but beneath 


145 



that was another heart, a steady, pulsing heart growing louder and 
louder, a heart as strong as my own? Then, in the jagged gap through 
which we'd come, I saw him. 'His great, huge shoulder emerged first 
and one long, loose arm and hand, the fingers curved; then I saw his 
head. Over his other shoulder he was carrying a body. In the broken 
doorway he straightened and shifted the weight and stared directly 
into the darkness towards us. Every muscle in me became iron as I 
looked at him, saw the outline of his head looming there against the 
sky. But nothing of his face was visible except the barest glint of the 
moon on his eye as if it were a fragment of glass. Then I saw it glint on 
his buttons and heard them rustle as his arm swung free again and one 
long leg bent as he moved forward and proceeded into the tower right 
towards us. 

" I held fast to Claudia, ready in an instant to shove her behind me, 
to step forward to meet him. But then I saw with astonishment that 
his eyes did not see me as I saw him, and he was trudging under the 
weight of the body he carried towards the monastery door. The moon 
fell now on his bowed head, on a mass of wavy black hair that touched 
his bent shoulder, and on the full black sleeve of his coat. I saw 
something about his coat; the flap of it was badly torn and the sleeve 
appeared to be ripped from the seam. I almost fancied I could see his 
flesh through the shoulder. The human in his arms stirred now, and 
moaned miserably. And the figure stopped for a moment and 
appeared to stroke the human with his hand. And at that moment I 
stepped forward from the wall and went towards him. 

" No words passed my lips: I knew none to say. I only knew that I 
moved into the light of the moon before him and that his dark, wavy 
head rose with a jerk, and that I saw his eyes. 

" For one full instant he looked at me, and I saw the light shining in 
those eyes and then glinting on two sharp canine teeth; and then a low 
strangled cry seemed to rise from the depths of his throat which, for a 
second, I thought to be my own. The human crashed to the stones, a 
shuddering moan escaping his lips. And the vampire lunged at me, 
that strangled cry rising again as the stench of fetid breath rose in my 
nostrils and the clawlike fingers cut into the very fur of my cape. I fell 
backwards, my head cracking against the wall, my hands grabbing at 
his head, clutching a mass of tangled filth that was his hair. At once 
the wet, rotting fabric of his coat ripped in my grasp, but the arm that 
held me was like iron; and, as I struggled to pull the head backwards, 
the fangs touched the flesh of my throat. Claudia screamed behind 
him. Something hit his head hard, which stopped him suddenly; and 
then he was hit again. He turned as if to strike her a blow, and I sent 


146 



my fist against his face as powerfully as I could. Again a stone struck 
him as she darted away, and I threw my full weight against him and 
felt his crippled leg buckling. I remember pounding his head over and 
over, my fingers all but pulling that filthy hair out by the roots, his 
fangs projected towards me, his hands scratching, clawing at me. We 
rolled over and over, until I pinned him down again and the moon 
shone full on his face. And I realized, through my frantic sobbing 
breaths, what it was I held in my arms. The two huge eyes bulged 
from naked sockets and two small, hideous holes made up his nose; 
only a putrid, leathery flesh enclosed his skull, and the rank, rotting 
rags that covered his frame were thick with earth and slime and blood. 

I was battling a mindless, animated corpse. But no more. 

" From above him, a sharp stone fell full on his forehead, and a fount 
of blood gushed from between his eyes. He struggled, but another 
stone crashed with such force I heard the bones shatter. Blood seeped 
out beneath the matted hair, soaking into the stones and grass. The 
chest throbbed beneath me, but the arms shuddered and grew still. I 
drew up, my throat knotted, my heart burning, every fiber of my body 
aching from the struggle. For a moment the great tower seemed to tilt, 
but then it righted itself. I lay against the wall, staring at the thing, the 
blood rushing in my ears. Gradually I realized that Claudia knelt on 
his chest, that she was probing the mass of hair and bone that had been 
his head. She was scattering the fragments of his skull. We had met 
the European vampire, the creature of the Old World. He was dead " 

" For a long time I lay on the broad stairway, oblivious to the thick 
earth that covered it, my head feeling very cool against the earth, just 
looking at him. Claudia stood at his feet, hands hanging limply at her 
sides. I saw her eyes close for an instant, two tiny lids that made her 
face like a small, moonlit white statue as she stood there. And then her 
body began to rock very slowly. 'Claudia,' I called to her. She 
awakened. She was gaunt such as I had seldom seen her. She pointed 
to the human who lay far across the floor of the tower near the wall. 

He was still motionless, but I knew that he was not dead. I'd forgotten 
him completely, my body aching as it was, my senses still clouded with 
the stench of the bleeding corpse. But now I saw the man. And in 
some part of my mind I knew what his fate would be, and I cared 
nothing for it. I knew it was only an hour at most before dawn. 

" 'He's moving,' she said to me. And I tried to rise off the steps. 

Better that he not wake, better that he never wake at all, I wanted to 
say; she was walking towards him, passing indifferently the dead thing 
that had nearly killed us both. I saw her back and the man stirring in 
front of her, his foot twisting in the grass. I don't know what I 


147 



expected to see as I drew nearer, what terrified peasant or farmer, what 
miserable wretch that had already seen the face of that thing that had 
brought it here. And for a moment I did not realize who it was that lay 
there, that it was Morgan, whose pale face showed now in the moon, 
the marks of the vampire on his throat, his blue eyes staring mute and 
expressionless before him. 

" Suddenly they widened as I drew close to him. 'Louis!' he 
whispered in astonishment, his lips moving as if he were trying to 
frame words but could not. 'Louis. . .' he said again; and then I saw 
he was smiling. A dry, rasping sound came from him as he struggled 
to his knees, and he reached out for me. His blanched, contorted face 
strained as the sound died in his throat, and he nodded desperately, 
his red hair loose and disheveled, falling into his eyes. I turned and 
ran from him. Claudia shot past me, gripping me by the arm. 'Do 
you see the color of the sky!’ she hissed at me. Morgan fell forward on 
his hands behind her. 'Louis,' he called out again, the light gleaming 
in his eyes. He seemed blind to the ruins, blind to the night, blind to 
everything but a face he recognized, that one word again issuing from 
his lips. I put my hands to my ears, backing away from him. His hand 
was bloody now as he lifted it. I could smell the blood as well as see it. 
And Claudia could smell it, too. 

" Swiftly she descended on him, pushing him down against the 
stones, her white fingers moving through his red hair. He tried to raise 
his head. His outstretched hands made a frame about her face, and 
then suddenly he began to stroke her yellow curls. She sank her teeth, 
and the hands dropped helpless at his side. 

" I was at the edge of the forest when she caught up with me. 'You 
must go to him, take him,’ she commanded. I could smell the blood 
on her lips, see the warmth in her cheeks. Her wrist burned against 
me, yet I did not move. 'Listen to me, Louis,' she said, her voice at 
once desperate and angry. 'I left him for you, but he's dying . . . 
there's no time.' 

" I swung her up into my arms and started the long descent. No 
need for caution, no need for stealth, no preternatural host waiting. 
The door to the secrets of eastern Europe was shut against us. I was 
plowing through the dark to the road. 'Will you listen to me,’ she 
cried out. But I went on in spite of her, her hands clutching at my 
coat, my hair. 'Do you see the sky; do you see it!’ she railed. 

" She was all but sobbing against my breast as I splashed through the 
icy stream and ran headlong in search of the lantern at the road. 

" The sky was a dark blue when I found the carriage. :Give me the 
crucifix,' I shouted to Claudia as I cracked the whip. 'There's only one 


148 



place to go.' She was thrown against me as the carriage rocked into its 
turn and headed for the village. 

" I had the eeriest feeling then as I could see the mist rising amongst 
the dark brown trees. The air was cold and fresh and the birds had 
begun. It was as if the sun were rising. Yet I did not care. And yet I 
knew that it was not rising, that there was still time. It was a 
marvelous, quieting feeling. The scrapes and cuts burned my flesh and 
my heart ached with hunger, but my head felt marvelously light. Until 
I saw the gray shapes of the inn and the steeple of the church; they 
were too clear. And the stars above were fading fast. 

" In a moment I was hammering on the door of the inn. As it 
opened, I put my hood up around my face tightly and held Claudia 
beneath my cape in a bundle. 'Your village is rid of the vampire!' I 
said to the woman, who stared at me in astonishment. I was clutching 
the crucifix which she'd given me. 'Thanks be to God he’s dead. 

You'll find the remains in the tower. Tell this to your people at once.' 

I pushed past her into the inn. 

" The gathering was roused into commotion instantly, but I insisted 
that I was tired beyond endurance. I must pray and rest. They were- 
to get my chest from the carriage and bring it to a decent room where I 
might sleep. But a message was to come for me from the bishop at 
Varna and for this, and this only, was I to be awakened. 'Tell the good 
father when he arrives that the vampire is dead, and then give him 
food and drink and have him wait for me,' I said. The woman was 
crossing herself. 'You understand,’ I said to her, as I hurried towards 
the stairs, 'I couldn't reveal my mission to you until after the vampire 
had been. . . 'Yes, yes,'she said to me. 'But you are not a priest. . . 
the child!' 'No, only too well-versed in these matters. The Unholy 
One is no match for me,’ I said to her. I stopped. The door of the 
little parlor stood open, with nothing but a white square of cloth on 
the oak table. 'Your friend,’ she said to me, and she looked at the 
floor. 'He rushed out into the night... he was mad.’ I only nodded. 

" I could hear them shouting when I shut the door of the room. 

They seemed to be running in all directions; and then came the sharp 
sound of the church bell in the rapid peal of alarm. Claudia had 
slipped down from my arms, and she was staring at me gravely as I 
bolted the door. Very slowly I unlatched the shutter of the window. 

An icy light seeped into the room. Still she watched me. Then I felt 
her at my side. I looked down to see she was holding out her hand to 
me. 'Here,' she said. She must have seen I was confused. I felt so 
weak that her face was shimmering as I looked at it, the blue of her 
eyes dancing on her white cheeks. 


149 



" 'Drink,' she whispered, drawing nearer. 'Drink.' And she held the 
soft, tender flesh of the wrist towards me. 'No, I know what to do; 
haven't I done it in the past?' I said to her. It was she who bolted the 
window tight, latched the heavy door. I remember kneeling by the 
small grate and feeling the ancient paneling. It was rotten behind the 
varnished surface, and it gave under my fingers. Suddenly I saw my 
fist go through it and felt the sharp jab of splinter in my wrist. And 
then I remember feeling in the dark and catching hold of something 
warm and pulsing. A rush of cold, damp air hit my face and I saw a 
darkness rising about me, cool and damp as if this air were a silent 
water that seeped through the broken wall and filled the room. The 
room was gone. I was drinking from a never-ending stream of warm 
blood that flowed down my throat and through my pulsing heart and 
through my veins, so that my skin warmed against this cool, dark 
water. And now the pulse of the blood I drank slackened, and all my 
body cried out for it not to slacken, my heart pounding, trying to 
make that heart pound with it. I felt myself rising, as if I were floating 
in the darkness, and then the darkness, like the heartbeat, began to 
fade.. Something glimmered in my swoon; it shivered ever so slightly 
with the pounding of feet on the stairs, on the floorboards, the rolling 
of wheels and horses' hooves on the earth, and it gave off a tinkling 
sound as it shivered. It had a small wooden frame around it, and in 
that frame there emerged, through the glimmer, the figure of a man. 
He was familiar. I knew his long, slender build, his black, wavy hair. 
Then I saw that his green eyes were gazing at me. And in his teeth, in 
his teeth, he was clutching something huge and soft and brown, which 
he pressed tightly with both his hands. It was a rat. A great loathsome 
brown rat he held, its feet poised, its mouth agape, its great curved tail 
frozen in the air. Crying out, he threw it down and stared aghast, 
blood flowing from his open mouth. 

" A searing light hit my eyes. I struggled to open them against it, and 
the entire room was glowing. Claudia was right in front of me. She 
was not a tiny child, but someone much larger who drew me forward 
towards her with both hands. She was on her knees, and my arms 
encircled her waist. Then darkness descended, and I had her folded 
against me. The lock slid into place. Numbness carne over my limbs, 
and then the paralysis of oblivion. " And that was how it was 
throughout Transylvania and Hungary and Bulgaria, and through all 
those countries where the peasants know that the living dead walk, and 
the legends of the vampires abound. In every village where we did 
encounter the vampire, it was the same. 

" A mindless corpse? " the boy asked. 


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" Always," said the vampire. " When we found these creatures at all. 

I remember a handful at most. Sometimes we only watched them 
from a distance, all too familiar with their wagging, bovine heads, their 
haggard shoulders, their rotted, ragged clothing. In one hamlet it was 
a woman, only dead for perhaps a few months; the villagers had 
glimpsed her and knew her by name. It was she who gave us the only 
hope we were to experience after the monster in Transylvania, and that 
hope came to nothing. She fled from us through the forest and we ran 
after her, reaching out for her long, black hair. Her white burial gown 
was soaked with dried blood, her fingers caked with the dirt of the 
grave. And her eyes . . . they were mindless, two pools that reflected 
the moon. No secrets, no truths, only despair. 

" But what were these creatures? Why were they like this? " asked 
the boy, his lips grimacing with disgust. " I don't understand. How 
could they be so different from you and Claudia, yet exist? 

" I had my theories. So did Claudia. But the main thing which I had 
then was despair. And in despair the recurring fear that we had killed 
the only other vampire like us, Lestat. Yet it seemed unthinkable. Had 
he possessed the wisdom of a sorcerer, the powers of a. witch ... I 
might have come to understand that he had somehow managed to 
wrest a conscious life from the same forces that governed these 
monsters. But he was only Lestat, as I've described him to you: devoid 
of mystery, finally, his limits as familiar to me in those months in 
eastern Europe as. his charms. I wanted to forget -him, and yet it 
seemed I thought of him always. It was as if the empty nights were 
made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly 
aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of 
his voice were still there. And somehow there was a disturbing 
comfort in that, and, despite myself, I'd envision his face-not as it had 
been the last night in the fire, but on other nights, that last evening he 
spent with us at home, his hand playing idly with the keys of the 
spinet, his head tilted to one side. A sickness rose in me more 
wretched than anguish when I saw what my dreams were doing. I 
wanted him alive! In the dark nights of eastern Europe, Lestat was the 
only vampire I'd found. 

" But Claudia's waking thoughts were of afar more practical nature. 
Over and over, she had me recount that night in the hotel in New 
Orleans when she'd become a vampire, and over and over she searched 
the process for some clue to why these things we met in the country 
graveyards had no mind. What if, after Lestat's infusion of blood, 
she'd been put in a grave, closed up in it until the preternatural drive 
for blood caused her to break the stone door of the vault that held her, 


151 



what then would her mind have been, starved, as it were, to the 
breaking point? Her body might have saved itself when no mind 
remained. And through the world she would have blundered, 
ravaging where she could, as we saw these creatures do. That was how 
she explained them. But what had fathered them, how had they 
begun? That was what she couldn't explain and what gave her hope of 
discovery when I, from sheer exhaustion, had none. 'They spawn their 
own kind, it's obvious, but where does it begin?' she asked. And then, 
somewhere near the outskirts of Vienna, she put the question to me 
which had never before passed her lips. Why could I not do what 
Lestat had done with both of us? Why could I not make another 
vampire? I don't know why at first I didn't even understand her, 
except that in loathing what I was with every impulse in me I had a 
particular fear of that question, which was almost worse than any 
other. You see, I didn't understand something strong in myself. 
Loneliness had caused me to think on that very possibility years 
before, when I had fallen under the spell of Babette Freniere. But I 
held it locked inside of me like an unclean passion. I shunned mortal 
life after her. I killed strangers. And the Englishman Morgan, because 
I knew him, was as safe from my fatal embrace as Babette had been. 
They both caused me too much pain. Death I couldn't think of giving 
them. Life in death-it was monstrous. I turned away from Claudia. I 
wouldn't answer her. But angry as she was, wretched as was her 
impatience, she could not stand this turning away. And she drew near 
to me, comforting me with her hands and her eyes as if she were my 
loving daughter. 

" 'Don't think on it, Louis,' she said later, when we were comfortably 
situated in a small suburban hotel. I was standing at the window, 
looking at the distant glow of Vienna, so eager for that city, its 
civilization, its sheer size. The night was clear and the haze of the city 
was on the sky. 'Let me put your conscience at ease, though I'll never 
know precisely what it is,' she said into my ear, her hand stroking my 
hair. 

" 'Do that, Claudia,’ I answered her. 'Put it at ease. Tell me that 
you'll never speak to me of making vampires again.' 

" 'I want no orphans such as ourselves!' she said, all too quickly. My 
words annoyed her. My feeling annoyed her. 'I want answers, 
knowledge, she said. But tell me, Louis, what makes you so certain 
that you've never done this without your knowing it?' 

" Again there was that deliberate obtuseness in me. I must look at 
her as if I didn't know the meaning of her words. I wanted her to be 
silent and to be near me, and for us to be in Vienna. I drew her hair 


152 



back and let my fingertips touch her long lashes and looked away at 
the light. 

" 'After all, what does it take to make those creatures?' she went on. 
'Those vagabond monsters? How many drops of your blood 
intermingled with a man's blood . . . and what kind of heart to 
survive that first attack?' 

" I could feel her watching my face, and I stood there, my arms 
folded, my back to the side of the window, looking out. 

" 'That pale-faced Emily, that miserable Englishman . . .’ she said, 
oblivious to the flicker of pain in my face. 'Their hearts were nothing, 
and it was the fear of death as much as the drawing of blood that killed 
them. The idea killed them. But what of the hearts that survive? Are 
you sure you haven't fathered a league of monsters who, from time to 
time, struggled vainly and instinctively to follow in your footsteps? 
What was their life span; these orphans you left behind you-a day 
there, a week here, before the sun burnt them to ashes or some mortal 
victim cut them down?' 

" 'Stop it,’ I begged her. ’If you knew how completely I envision 
everything you describe, you would not describe it. I tell you it’s never 
happened! Lestat drained me to the point of death to make me a 
vampire. And gave back all that blood mingled with his own. That is 
how it was done!' 

" She looked away from me, and then it seemed she was looking 
down at her hands. I think I heard her sigh, but I wasn't certain. And 
then her eyes moved over me, slowly, up and down, before they finally 
met mine. Then it seemed she smiled. 'Don't be frightened of my 
fancy,' she said softly. 'After all, the final decision will always rest with 
you. Is that not so?' 

" 'I don’t understand,' I said. And a cold laughter erupted from her 
as she turned away. 

" 'Can you picture it?' she said, so softly I scarcely heard. BA coven 
of children? That is all I could provide. . 

" 'Claudia,' I murmured. 

" 'Rest easy,' she said abruptly, her voice still low. 'I tell you that as 
much as I hated Lestat. . ’ She stopped. 

" 'Yes . . ' I whispered. 'Yes. . . .' 

" 'As much as I hated him, with him we were . . . complete.' She 
looked at me, her eyelids quivering, as if the slight rise in her voice had 
disturbed her even as it had disturbed me. 

" 'No, only you were complete . . .' I said to her. 'Because there 
were two of us, one on either side of you, from the beginning.' 


153 



" I thought I saw her smile then, but I was not certain. She bowed 
her head, but I could see her eyes moving beneath the lashes, back and 
forth, back and forth. Then she said, 'The two of you at my side. Do 
you picture that as you say it, as you picture everything else?' 

" One night, long gone by, was as material to me as if I were in it still, 
but I didn't tell her. She was desperate in that night, running away 
from Lestat, who had urged her to kill a woman in the street from 
whom she'd backed off, clearly alarmed. I was sure the woman had 
resembled her mother. Finally she'd escaped us entirely, but I'd found 
her in the armoire, beneath the jackets and coats, clinging to her doll. 
And, carrying her to her crib, I sat beside her and sang to her, and she 
stared at me as she clung to that doll, as if trying blindly and 
mysteriously to calm a pain she herself did not begin to understand. 
Can you picture it, this splendid domesticity, dim lamps, the vampire 
father singing to the vampire daughter? Only the doll had a human 
face, only the doll. 

" 'But we must get away from here!’ said the present Claudia 
suddenly, as though the thought had just taken shape in her mind with 
a special urgency. She had her hand to her ear, as if clutching it 
against some awful sound. 'From the roads behind us, from what I see 
in your eyes now, because I give voice to thoughts which are nothing 
more to me than plain considerations . . 

" 'Forgive me,’ I said as gently as I could, withdrawing slowly from 
that long-ago room, that ruffled crib, that frightened monster child 
and monster voice. And Lestat, where was Lestat? A match striking in 
the other room, a shadow leaping suddenly into life, as light and dark 
come alive where there was only darkness. 

" 'No, you forgive me . . .’ she was saying to me now, in this little 
hotel room near the first capital of western Europe. 'No, we forgive 
each other. But we don’t forgive him; and, without him, you see what 
things are between us: 

" 'Only now because we are tired, and things are dreary . . ’ I said to 
her and to myself, because there was no one else in the world to whom 
I could speak. 

" 'Ah, yes; and that is what must end. I tell you, I begin to 
understand that we have done it all wrong from the start. We must 
bypass Vienna. We need our language, our people. I want to go 
directly now to Paris.' 


154 



PART III 


" 1 think the very name of Paris brought a rush of pleasure to me that 
was extraordinary, a relief so near to well-being that I was amazed, not 
only that I could feel it, but that I'd so nearly forgotten it. 

" I wonder if you can understand what it meant. My expression can't 
convey, it now, for what Paris means to me is very different from what 
it meant then, in those days, at that hour; but still, even now, to think 
of it, I feel something akin to that happiness. And I've more reason 
now than ever to say that happiness is not what I will ever know, or 
will ever deserve to know. I am not so much in love with happiness. 
Yet the name Paris makes me feel it. 

" Mortal beauty often makes me ache, and mortal grandeur can fill 
me with that longing I felt so hopelessly in the Mediterranean Sea. But 
Paris, Paris drew me close to her heart, so I forgot myself entirely. 
Forgot the damned and questing preternatural thing that doted on 
mortal skin and mortal clothing. Paris overwhelmed, and lightened 
and rewarded more richly than any promise. 

" It was the mother of New Orleans, understand that first; it had 
given New Orleans its life, its first populace; and it was what New 
Orleans had for so long tried to be. But New Orleans, though 
beautiful and desperately alive, was desperately fragile. There was 
something forever savage and primitive there, something that 
threatened the exotic and sophisticated life both from within and 
without. Not an inch of those wooden streets nor a brick of the 
crowded Spanish houses had not been bought from the fierce 
wilderness that forever surrounded the city, ready to engulf it. 
Hurricanes, floods, fevers, the plague-and the damp of the Louisiana 
climate itself worked tirelessly on every hewn plank or stone facade, so 
that New Orleans seemed at all times like a dream in the imagination 
of her striving populace, a dream held intact at every second by a 
tenacious, though unconscious, collective will. 

" But Paris, Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, 
hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of 
Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her 
grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets-as vast and 
indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile 
and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, 
giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, 
frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her 
were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what 
was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the 


155 



majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to 
her--and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they 
wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by 
blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become 
Paris. 

"We were alive again. We were in love, and so euphoric was I after 
those hopeless nights of wandering in eastern Europe that I yielded 
completely when Claudia moved us into the Hotel Saint-Gabriel on 
the Boulevard des Capucines. It was rumored to be one of the largest 
hotels in Europe, its immense rooms dwarfing the memory of our old 
town house, while at the same time recalling it with a comfortable 
splendor. We were to have one of the finest suites. Our windows 
looked out over the gas-lit boulevard itself where, in the early evening, 
the asphalt sidewalks teemed with strollers and an endless stream of 
carriages flowed past, taking lavishly dressed ladies and their 
gentlemen to the Opera or the Opera Comique, the ballet, the theaters, 
the balls and receptions without end at the Tuileries. 

" Claudia put her reasons for expense to me gently and logically, but 
I could see that she became impatient ordering everything through me; 
it was wearing for her. The hotel, she said, quietly afforded us 
complete freedom, our nocturnal habits going unnoticed in the 
continual press of European tourists, our rooms immaculately 
maintained by an anonymous staff, while the immense price we paid 
guaranteed our privacy and our security. But there was more to it 
than that. There was a feverish purpose to her buying. 

" 'This is my world,’ she explained to me as she sat in a small velvet 
chair before the open balcony, watching the long row of broughams 
stopping one by one before the hotel doors. 'I must have it as I like,’ 
she said, as if speaking to herself. And so it was as she liked, stunning 
wallpaper of rose and gold, an abundance of damask and velvet 
furniture, embroidered pillows and silk trappings for the fourposter 
bed. Dozens of roses appeared daily for the marble .mantels and the 
inlaid tables, crowding the curtained alcove of her dressing room, 
reflected endlessly in tilted mirrors. And finally she crowded the high 
French windows with a veritable garden of camellia and fern. 'I miss 
the flowers; more than anything else I miss the flowers,’ she mused. 
And sought after them even in the paintings which we brought from 
the shops and the galleries, magnificent canvases such as I’d never seen 
in New Orleans-from the classically executed lifelike bouquets, 
tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional 
tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to 
blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, 


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to make a vision like to those states when I'm nearest my delirium and 
flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps. 

Paris flowed into these rooms. 

" I found myself at home there, again forsaking dreams of ethereal 
simplicity for what another's gentle insistence had given me, because 
the air was sweet like the air of our courtyard in the Rue Royale, and 
all was alive with a shocking profusion of gas light that rendered even 
the ornate lofty ceilings devoid of shadows. The light raced on the gilt 
curlicues, flickered in the baubles of the chandeliers. Darkness did not 
exist. Vampires did not exist. 

" And even bent as I was on my quest,' it was sweet to think that, for 
an hour, father and daughter climbed into the cabriolet from such 
civilized luxury only to ride along the banks of the Seine, over the 
bridge into the Latin Quarter to roam those darker, narrower streets in 
search of history, not victims. And then to return to the ticking clock 
and the brass andirons and the playing cards laid out upon the table. 
Books of poets, the program from a play, and all around the soft 
humming of the vast hotel, distant violins, a woman talking in a rapid, 
animated voice above the zinging of a hairbrush, and a man high 
above on the top floor repeating over and over to the night air, T 
understand, I am just beginning, I am just beginning to understand. . 

. 'Is it as you would have it?' Claudia asked, perhaps just to let me 
know she hadn't forgotten me, for she was quiet now for hours; no talk 
of vampires. But something was wrong. It was not the old serenity, 
the pensiveness that was recollection. There was a brooding there, a 
smoldering dissatisfaction. And though it would vanish from her eyes 
when I would call to her or answer her, anger seemed to settle very 
near the surface. 

" 'Oh, you know how I would have it,’ I answered, persisting in the 
myth of my own will. 'Some garret near the Sorbonne, near enough to 
the noise of the Rue St. Michel, far enough away. But I would mainly 
have it as you would have it’ And I could see her warmed, but looking 
past me, as if to say, 'You have no remedy; don’t draw too near; don’t 
ask of me what I ask of you: are you content?' 

" My memory is too clear; too sharp; things should wear at the edges, 
and what is unresolved should soften. So, scenes are near my heart 
like pictures in lockets, yet monstrous pictures no artist or camera 
would ever catch; and over and over I would see Claudia at the piano's 
edge that last night when Lestat was playing, preparing to die, her face 
when he was taunting her, that contortion that at once became a mask; 
attention might have saved his life, if, in fact, he were dead at all. 


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" Something was collecting in Claudia, revealing itself slowly to the 
most unwilling witness in the world. She had a new passion for rings 
and bracelets children did not wear. Her jaunty, straight-backed walk 
was not a child's, and often she entered small boutiques ahead of me 
and pointed a commanding finger at the perfume or the gloves she 
would then pay for herself. I was never far away, and always 
uncomfortable--not because I feared anything in this vast city, but 
because I feared her. She'd always been the 'lost child’ to her victims, 
the 'orphan,' and now it seemed she would be something else, 
something wicked and shocking to the passers-by who succumbed to 
her. But this was often private; I was left for an hour haunting the 
carved edifices of Notre-Dame, or sitting at the edge of a park in the 
carriage. 

" And then one night, when I awoke on the lavish bed in the suite of 
the hotel, my book crunched uncomfortably under me, I found her 
gone altogether. I didn't dare ask the attendants if they'd seen her. It 
was our practice to spirit past them; we had no name. I searched the 
corridors for her, the side streets, even the ballroom, where some 
almost inexplicable dread came over me at the thought of her there 
alone. But then I finally saw her coming through the side doors of the 
lobby, her hair beneath her bonnet brim sparkling from the light rain, 
the child rushing as if on a mischievous escapade, lighting the faces of 
doting men and women as she mounted the grand staircase and passed 
me, as if she hadn't seen me at all. An impossibility, a strange graceful 
slight. 

" I shut the door behind me just as she was taking off her cape, and, 
in a flurry of golden raindrops, she shook it, shook her hair. The 
ribbons crushed from the bonnet fell loose and I felt a palpable relief 
to see the childish dress, those ribbons, and something wonderfully 
comforting in her arms, a small china doll. Still she said nothing to 
me; she was fussing with the doll. Jointed somehow with hooks or 
wire beneath its flouncing dress, its tiny feet tinkled like a bell, 'it's a 
lady, doll,'she said, looking up at me. 'See? A lady doll.’ She put it on 
the dresser. 

" ’So it is,’ I whispered. 

" 'A woman made it,' she said. 'She makes baby dolls, all the same, 
baby dolls, a shop of baby dolls, until I said to her," I want a lady doll. 

?» f 

" It was taunting, mysterious. She sat there now with the wet strands 
of hair streaking her high forehead, intent on that doll. 'Do you know 
why she made it for me?' she asked. I was wishing now the room had 
shadows, that I could retreat from the warm circle of the superfluous 


158 



fire into some darkness, that I wasn't sitting on the bed as if on a 
lighted stage, seeing her before me and in her mirrors, puffed sleeves 
and puffed sleeves. 

" 'Because you are a beautiful child and she wanted to make you 
happy,’ I said, my voice small and foreign to myself. 

" She was laughing soundlessly. 'A beautiful child,' she said glancing 
up at me. 'Is that what you still think I am?' And her face went dark as 
again she played with the doll, her fingers pushing the tiny crocheted 
neckline down toward the china breasts. 'Yes, I resemble her baby 
dolls, I am her baby dolls. You should see her working in that shop; 
bent on her dolls, each with the same face, lips.' Her finger touched 
her own lip. Something seemed to shift suddenly, something within 
the very walls of the room itself, and the mirrors trembled with her 
image as if the earth had sighed beneath the foundations. Carriages 
rumbled in the streets; but they were too far away. And then I saw 
what her still childish figure was doing: in one hand she held the doll, 
the other to her lips; and the hand that held the doll was crushing it, 
crushing it and popping it so it bobbed and broke in a heap of glass 
that fell now from her open, bloody hand onto the carpet. She wrung 
the tiny dress to make a shower of littering particles as I averted my 
eyes, only to see her in the tilted mirror over the fire, see her eyes 
scanning me from my feet to the top of my head. She moved through 
that mirror towards me and drew close on the bed. 

" 'Why do you look away, why don’t you look at me?' she asked, her 
voice very smooth, very like a silver bell. But then she laughed softly, a 
woman's laugh, and said, 'Did you think I'd be your daughter forever? 
Are you the father of fools, the fool of fathers?' 

" 'Your tone is unkind with me,’ I answered. 

" 'Hmmm . . . unkind.' I think she nodded. She was a blaze in the 
corner of my eye, blue flames, golden flames. 

" 'And what do they think of you,' I asked as gently as I could, 'out 
there?' I gestured to the open window. 

" 'Many things.’ She smiled. 'Many things. Men are marvelous at 
explanations: Have you see the " little people " in the parks, the 
circuses, the freaks that men pay money to laugh at?’ 

" ’I was a sorcerer's apprentice only!' I burst out suddenly, despite 
myself. 'Apprentice!' I said. I wanted to touch her, to stroke her hair, 
but I sat there afraid of her, her anger like a match about to kindle. 

" Again she smiled, and then she drew my hand into her lap and 
covered it as best she could with her own. 'Apprentice, yes,' she 
laughed. 'But tell me one thing, one thing from that lofty height. 

What was it like . . . making love?' 


159 



" I was walking away from her before I meant to, I was searching like 
a dim-wilted mortal man for cape and gloves. 'You don’t remember?’ 
she asked with perfect calm, as I put my hand on the brass door 
handle. 

" I stopped, feeling her eyes on my back, ashamed, and then I turned 
around and made as if to think, Where am I going, what shall I do, 
why do I stand here? 

" 'It was something hurried,’ I said, trying now to meet her eyes. 

How perfectly, coldly blue they were. How earnest. 'And ... it was 
seldom savored . . . something acute that was quickly lost. I think 
that it was the pale shadow of killing.’ 

" ’Ahhh . . .’ she said. 'Like hurting you as I do now . . . that is 
also the pale shadow of killing.’ 

" ’Yes, madam,’ I said to her. 'I am inclined to believe that is correct.’ 
And bowing swiftly, I bade her good-night. 

" It was a long time after I’d left her that I slowed my pace. I’d 
crossed the Seine. I wanted darkness. To hide from her and the 
feelings that welled up in me, and the great consuming fear that I was 
utterly inadequate to make her happy, or to make myself happy by 
pleasing her. 

" I would have given the world to please her; the world we now 
possessed, which seemed at once empty and eternal. Yet I was injured 
by her words and by her eyes, and no amount of explanations to her 
which passed through and through my mind now, even forming on 
my lips in desperate whispers as I left the Rue St. Michel and went 
deeper and deeper into the older, darker streets of the Latin Quarter- 
no amount of explanations seemed to soothe what I imagined to be 
her grave dissatisfaction, or my own pain. 

" Finally I left off words except for a strange chant. I was in the black 
silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, 
comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any 
moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under the 
indifferent stars like a seam. 'I cannot make her happy, I do not make 
her happy; and her unhappiness increases every day.’ This was my 
chant, which I repeated like a rosary, a charm to change the facts, her 
inevitable disillusionment with our quest, which left us in this limbo 
where I felt her drawing away from me, dwarfing me with her 
enormous need. I even conceived a savage jealousy of the dollmaker 
to whom she’d confided her request for that tinkling diminutive lady, 
because that dollmaker had for a moment given her something which 
she held close to herself in my presence as if I were not there at all. 

" What did it amount to, where could it lead? 


160 



" Never since I'd come to Paris months before did I so completely 
feel the city's immense size, how I might pass from this twisting, blind 
street of my choice into a world of delights, and never had I so keenly 
felt its uselessness. Uselessness to her if she could not abide this anger, 
if she could not somehow grasp the limits of which she seemed so 
angrily, bitterly aware. I was helpless. She was helpless. But she was 
stronger than I. And I knew, had known even at the moment when I 
turned away from her in the hotel, that behind her eyes there was for 
me her continuing love. 

" And dizzy and weary and now comfortably lost, I became aware 
with a vampire's inextinguishable senses that I was being followed. 

" my first thought was irrational. She'd come out after me. And, 
cleverer than I, had tracked me at a great distance. But as surely as this 
came to mind, another thought presented itself, a rather cruel thought 
in light of all that had passed between us. The steps were too heavy for 
hers. It was just some mortal walking in this same alley, walking 
unwarily towards death. 

" So I continued on, almost ready to fall into my pain again because I 
deserved it, when my mind said, You are a fool; listen. And it dawned 
on me that these steps, echoing as they were at a great distance behind 
me, were in perfect time with my own. An accident. Because if mortal 
they were, they were too far off for mortal hearing. But as I stopped 
now to consider that, they stopped. And as I turned saying, Louis, you 
deceive yourself, and started up, they started up. Footfall with my 
footfall, gaining-speed now as I gained speed. And then something 
remarkable, undeniable occurred. En garde as I was for the steps that 
were behind me, I tripped on a fallen roof tile and was pitched against 
the wall. And behind me, those steps echoed to perfection the sharp 
shuffling rhythm of my fall. 

" I was astonished. And in a state of alarm well beyond fear. To the 
right and left of me the street was dark. Not even a tarnished light 
shone in a garret window. And the only safety afforded me, the great 
distance between myself and these steps, was as I said the guarantee 
that they were not human. I was at a complete loss as to what I might 
do. I had the nearirresistible desire to call out to this being and 
welcome it, to let it know as quickly and as completely as possible that 
I awaited it, had been searching for it, would confront it. Yet I was 
afraid. What seemed sensible was to resume walking, waiting for it to 
gain on me; and as I did so I was again mocked by my own pace, and 
the distance between us remained the same. The tension mounted in 
me, the dark around me becoming more and more menacing; and I 


161 



said over and over, measuring these steps, Why do you track me, why 
do you let me know you are there? 

" Then I rounded a sharp turn in the street, and a gleam of light 
showed ahead of me at the next corner. The street sloped up towards 
it, and I moved on very slowly, my heart deafening in my ears, 
reluctant to eventually reveal myself in that light. 

" And as I hesitated-stopped, in fact right before the turn; something 
rumbled and clattered above, as if the roof of the house beside me had 
all but collapsed. I jumped back just in time, before a load of tiles 
crashed into the street, one of them brushing my shoulder. All was 
quiet now. I stared at the tiles, listening, waiting. And then slowly I 
edged around the turn into the light, only to see there looming over 
me at the top of the street beneath the gas lamp the unmistakable 
figure of another vampire. 

" He was enormous in height though gaunt as myself, his long, white 
face very bright under the lamp, his large, black eyes staring .at me in 
what seemed undisguised wonder. His right leg was slightly bent as 
though he'd just come to a halt in mid-step. And then suddenly I 
realized that not only was his black hair long and full and combed 
precisely like my own, and not only was he dressed in identical coat 
and cape to my own, but he stood imitating my stance and facial 
expression to perfection. I swallowed and let my eyes pass over him 
slowly, while I struggled t(r) hide from him the rapid pace of my pulse 
as his eyes in. like manner passed over me. And when I saw him blink 
I realized I had just blinked, and as I drew my arms up and folded 
them across my chest he slowly did the same. It was maddening. 
Worse than maddening. Because, as I barely moved my lips, he barely 
moved his lips, and I found the words dead and I couldn't make other 
words to confront this, to stop it. And all the while, there was that 
height and those sharp black eyes and that powerful attention which 
was, of course, perfect mockery, but nevertheless riveted to myself. He 
was the vampire; I seemed the mirror. 

" 'Clever,' I said to him shortly and desperately, and, of course, he 
echoed that word as fast as I said it. And maddened as I was more by 
that than anything else, I found myself yielding to a slow smile, defying 
the sweat which had broken from every pore and the violent tremor in 
my legs. He also smiled, but his -eyes had a ferocity that was animal, 
unlike my own, and the smile was sinister in its sheer mechanical 
quality. 

" Now I took a step forward and so did he; and when I,stopped 
short, staring, so did he. But then he slowly, very slowly, lifted his 
right arm, though mine remained poised and gathering his fingers into 


162 



a fist, he now struck at his chest in quickening time to mock my 
heartbeat. Laughter erupted from him. He threw back his head, 
showing his canine teeth, and the laughter seemed to fill the alleyway. 

I loathed him. Completely. 

" 'You mean me harm?' I asked, only to hear the words mockingly 
obliterated. 

" 'Trickster!' I said sharply. Buffoon!' 

" That word stopped him. Died on his lips even as he was saying it, 
and his face went hard. 

" What I did then was impulse. I turned my back on him and started 
away, perhaps to make him come after me and demand to know who I 
was. But in a movement so swiff I couldn't possibly have seen it, he 
stood before me again, as if he had materialized there. Again I turned 
my back on him-only to face him under the lamp again, the settling of 
his dark, wavy hair the only indication that he had in fact moved. 

"'I've been looking for you! I've come to Paris looking for you!' I 
forced myself to say the words, seeing that he didn't echo them or 
move, only stood staring at me. 

" Now he moved forward slowly, gracefully, and I saw his own body 
and his own manner had regained possession of him and, extending 
his hand as if he meant to ask for mine, he very suddenly pushed me 
backwards, off-balance. I could feel my shirt drenched and sticking to 
my flesh as I righted myself, my hand grimed from the damp wall. 

" And as I turned to confront him, he threw me completely down. 

" I wish I could describe to you his power. You would know, if I 
were to attack you, to deal you a sharp blow with an arm you never 
saw move towards you. 

" But something in me said, Show him your own power; and I rose 
up fast, going right for him with both arms out. And I hit the night, 
the empty night swirling beneath that lamppost, and stood there 
looking about me, alone and a complete fool. This was a test of some 
sort, I knew it then, though consciously I fixed my attention of the 
dark street, the recesses of the doorways, anyplace he might have 
hidden. I wanted no part of this test, but saw no way out of it. And I 
was contemplating some way to disdainfully make that clear when 
suddenly he appeared again, jerking me around and flinging me down 
the sloping cobblestones where I'd fallen before. I felt his boot against 
my ribs. And, enraged, I grabbed hold of his leg, scarcely believing it 
when I felt the cloth and the bone. He'd fallen against the stone wall 
opposite and let out a snarl of unrepressed anger. 

" What happened then was pure confusion. I held tight to that leg, 
though the boot strained to get at me. And at some point, after he'd 


163 



toppled over me and pulled loose from me, I was lifted into the air by 
strong hands. What might have happened I can well imagine. He 
could have flung me several yards from himself, he was easily that 
strong. And battered, severely injured, I might have lost 
consciousness. It was violently disturbing to me even in that melee 
that I didn't know whether I could lose consciousness. But it was 
never put to a test. For, confused as I was, I was certain someone else 
had come between us, someone who was battling him decisively, 
forcing him to relinquish his hold. 

" When I looked up, I was in the street, and I saw two figures only for 
an instant, like the flicker of an image after the eye is shut. Then there 
was only a swirling of black garments, a boot striking the stones, and 
the night was empty. I sat, panting, the sweat pouring down my face, 
staring around me and then up at the narrow ribbon of faint sky. 
Slowly, only because my eye was totally concentrated upon it now, a 
figure emerged from the darkness of the wall above me. Crouched on 
the jutting stones of the lintel, it turned so that I saw the barest gleam 
of light on the hair and then the stark, white face. A strange face, 
broader and not so gaunt as the other, a large dark eye that was 
holding me steadily. A whisper came from the lips, though they never 
appeared to move. 'You are all right.’ 

" I was more than all right. I was on my feet, ready to attack. But the 
figure remained crouched, as if it were part of the wall. I could see a 
white hand working in what appeared to be a waistcoat pocket. A card 
appeared, white as the fingers that extended it to me. I didn't move to 
take it. 'Come to us, tomorrow night,’ said that same whisper from 
the smooth, expressionless face, which still showed only one eye to the 
light. 'I won’t harm you,'he said,'And neither will that other. I won’t 
allow it.’ And his hand did that thing which vampires can make 
happen; that is, it seemed to leave his body in the dark to deposit the 
card in my hand, the purple script immediately shining in the light. 
And the figure, moving upwards like a cat on the wall, vanished fast 
between the garret gables overhead. 

" I knew I was alone now, could feel it. And the pounding of my 
heart seemed to fill the empty little street as I stood under the lamp 
reading that card. The address I knew well enough, because I had been 
to theaters along that street more than once. But the name was 
astonishing: 'Theatre des Vampires,’ and the time noted, nine P.m. 

" I turned it over and discovered written there the note, 'Bring the 
petite beauty with you. You are most welcome. Armand! 

" There was no doubt that the figure who’d given it to me had 
written this message. And I had only a very short time to get to the 


164 



hotel and to tell Claudia of these things before dawn. I was running 
fast, so that even the people I passed on the boulevards did not actually 
see the shadow that brushed them. " The Theatre des Vampires was by 
invitation only, and the next night the doorman inspected my card for 
a moment while the rain fell softly all around us: on the man and the 
woman stopped at the shut-up box office; on the crinkling posters of 
penny-dreadful vampires with their outstretched arms and cloaks 
resembling bat wings ready to close on the naked shoulders of a mortal 
victim; on the couple that pressed past us into the packed lobby, where 
I could easily perceive that the crowd was all human, no vampires 
among them, not even this boy who admitted us finally into the press 
of conversation and damp wool and ladies' gloved fingers fumbling 
with felt-brimmed hats and wet curls. I pressed for the shadows in a 
feverish excitement. We had fed earlier only so that in the bustling 
street of this theater our skin would not be too white, our eyes too 
unclouded. And that taste of blood which I had not enjoyed had left 
me all the more uneasy; but I had no time for it. This was no night for 
killing. This was to be a night of revelations, no matter how it ended. 

I was certain. 

" Yet here we stood with this all too human crowd, the doors 
opening now on the auditorium, and a young boy pushing towards us, 
beckoning, pointing above the shoulders of the crowd to the stairs. 
Ours was a box, one of the best in the house, and if the blood had not 
dimmed my skin completely nor made Claudia into a human child as 
she rode in my arms, this usher did not seem at all to notice it nor to 
care. In fact, he smiled all too readily as he drew back the curtain for 
us on two chairs before the brass rail. 

" 'Would you put it past them to have human slaves?' Claudia 
whispered. 

" 'But Lestat never trusted human slaves,' I answered. I watched the 
seats fill, watched the marvelously flowered hats navigating below me 
through the rows of silk chairs. White shoulders gleamed in the deep 
curve of the balcony spreading out from us; diamonds glittered in the 
gas light. 'Remember, be sly for once,' came Claudia's whisper from 
beneath her bowed blond head. 'You're too much of a gentleman.' 

" The lights were going out, first in the balcony, and then along the 
walls of the main floor. A knot of musicians had gathered in the pit 
below the stage, and at the foot of the long, green velvet curtain the gas 
flickered, then brightened, and the audience receded as if enveloped by 
a gray cloud through which only the diamonds sparkled, on wrists, on 
throats, on fingers. And a hush descended like that gray cloud until all 
the sound was collected in one echoing persistent cough. Then silence. 


165 



And the slow, rhythmical beating of a tambourine. Added to that was 
the thin melody of a wooden flute, which seemed to pick up the sharp 
metallic tink of the bells of the tambourine, winding them into a 
haunting melody that was medieval in sound. Then the strumming of 
strings that emphasized the tambourine. And the flute rose, in that 
melody singing of something melancholy, sad. It had a charm to it, 
this music, and the whole audience seemed stilled and united by it, as 
if the music of that flute were a luminous ribbon unfurling slowly in 
the dark. Not even the rising curtain broke the silence with the 
slightest sound. The lights brightened, and it seemed the stage was not 
the stage but a thickly wooded place, the light glittering on the 
roughened tree trunks and the thick clusters of leaves beneath the arch 
of darkness above; and through the trees could be seen what appeared 
the low, stone bank of a river and above that, beyond that, the 
glittering waters of the river itself, this whole three-dimensional world 
produced in painting upon a fine silk scrim that shivered only slightly 
in a faint draft. 

" A sprinkling of applause greeted the illusion, gathering adherents 
from all parts of the auditorium until it reached its short crescendo 
and died away. A dark, draped figure was moving on the stage from 
tree trunk to tree trunk, so fast that as he stepped into the lights he 
seemed to appear magically in the center, one arm flashing out from 
his cloak to show a silver scythe and the other to hold a mask on a 
slender stick before the invisible face, a mask which showed the 
gleaming countenance of Death, a painted skull. 

" There were gasps from the crowd. It was Death standing before the 
audience, the scythe poised, Death at the edge of a dark wood. And 
something in me was responding now as the audience responded, not 
in fear, but in some human way, to the magic of that fragile painted 
set, the mystery of the lighted world there, the world in which this 
figure moved in his billowing black cloak, back and forth before the 
audience with the grace of a great panther, drawing forth, as it were, 
those gasps, those sighs, those reverent murmurs. 

" And now, behind this figure, whose very gestures seemed to have a 
captivating power like the rhythm of the music to which it moved, 
came other figures from the wings. First an old woman, very stooped 
and bent, her gray hair like moss, her arm hanging down with the 
weight of a great basket of flowers. Her shuttling steps scraped on the 
stage, and her head bobbed with the rhythm of the music and the 
darting steps of the Grim Reaper. And then she started back as she 
laid eyes on him and, slowly setting down her basket, made her hands 
into the attitude of prayer. She was tired; her head leaned now on her 


166 



hands as if in sleep, and she reached out for him, supplicating. But as 
he came towards her, he bent to look directly into her face, which was 
all shadows to us beneath her hair, and started back then, waving his 
hand as if to freshen the air. Laughter erupted uncertainly from the 
audience. But as the old woman rose and took after Death, the 
laughter took over. 

" The music broke into a jig with their running, as round and round 
the stage the old woman pursued Death, until he finally flattened 
himself into the dark of a tree trunk, bowing his masked face under his 
wing like a bird. And the old woman, lost, defeated, gathered up her 
basket as the music softened and slowed to her pace, and made her 
way off the stage. I did not like it. I did not like the laughter. I could 
see the other figures moving in now, the music orchestrating their 
gestures, cripples on crutches and beggars with rags the color of ash, all 
reaching out for Death, who whirled, escaping this one with a sudden 
arching of the back, fleeing from that one with an effeminate gesture 
of disgust, waving them all away finally in a foppish display of 
weariness and boredom. 

" It was then I realized that the languid, white hand that made these 
comic arcs was not painted white. It was a vampire hand which wrung 
laughter from the crowd. A vampire hand lifted now to the grinning 
skull, as the stage was finally clear, as if stifling a yawn. And then this 
vampire, still holding the mask before his face, adopted marvelously 
the attitude of resting his weight against a painted silken tree, as if he 
were falling gently to sleep. The music twittered like birds, rippled like 
the flowing of the water; and the spotlight, which encircled him in a 
yellow pool, grew dim, all but fading away as he slept. 

" And another spot pierced the scrim, seeming to melt it altogether, 
to reveal a young woman standing alone far upstage. She was 
majestically tall and all but enshrined by a voluminous mane of golden 
blond hair. I could feel the awe of the audience as she seemed to 
founder in the spotlight, the dark forest rising on the perimeter, so 
that she seemed to be lost in the trees. And she was lost; and not a 
vampire. The soil on her mean blouse and skirt was not stage paint, 
and nothing had touched her perfect face, which gazed into the light 
now, as beautiful and finely chiseled as the face of a marble Virgin, that 
hair her haloed veil. She could not see in the light, though all could 
see her. And the moan which escaped her lips as she floundered 
seemed to echo over the thin, romantic singing of the flute, which was 
a tribute to that beauty. The figure of Death woke with a start in his 
pale spotlight and turned to see her as the audience had seen her, and 
to throw up his free hand in tribute, in awe. 


167 



" The twitter of laughter died before it became real. She was too 
beautiful, her gray eyes too distressed. The performance too perfect. 
And then the skull mask was thrown suddenly into the wings and 
Death showed a beaming white face to the audience, his hurried hands 
stroking his handsome black hair, straightening a waistcoat, brushing 
imaginary dust from his lapels. Death in love. And clapping rose for 
the luminous countenance, the gleaming cheekbones, the winking 
black eye, as if it were all masterful illusion when in fact it was merely 
and certainly the face of a vampire, the vampire who had accosted me 
in the Latin Quarter, that leering, grinning vampire, harshly 
illuminated by the yellow spot. 

" My hand reached for Claudia's in the dark and pressed it tightly. 
But she sat still, as if enrapt. The forest of the stage, through which 
that helpless mortal girl stared blindly towards the laughter, divided in 
two phantom halves, moving away from the center, freeing the 
vampire to close in on her. 

" And she who had been advancing towards the foot lights, saw him 
suddenly and came to a halt, making a moan like a child. Indeed, she 
was very like a child, though clearly a full-grown woman. Only a slight 
wrinkling of the tender flesh around her eyes betrayed her age. Her 
breasts though small were beautifully shaped beneath her blouse, and 
her hips though narrow gave her long, dusty skirt a sharp, sensual 
angularity. As she moved back from the vampire, I saw the tears 
standing in her eyes like glass in the flicker of the lights, and I felt my 
spirit contract in fear for her, and in longing. Her beauty was 
heartbreaking. 

" Behind her, a number of painted skulls suddenly moved against the 
blackness, the figures that carried the masks invisible in their black 
clothes, except for free white hands that clasped the edge of a cape, the 
folds of a skirt. Vampire women were there, moving in with the men 
towards the victim, and now they all, one by one, thrust the masks 
away -so they fell in an artful pile, the sticks like bones, the skulls 
grinning into the darkness above. And there they stood, seven 
vampires, the women vampires three in number, their molded white 
breasts shining over the tight black bodices of their gowns, their hard 
luminescent faces staring with dark eyes beneath curls of black hair. 
Starkly beautiful, as they seemed to float close around that florid 
human figure, yet pale and cold compared to that sparkling golden 
hair, that petal-pink skin. I could hear the breath of the audience, the 
halting, the soft sighs. It was a spectacle, that circle of white faces 
pressing closer and closer, and that leading figure, that Gentleman 
Death, turning to the audience now with his hands crossed over his 


168 



heart, his head bent in longing to elicit their sympathy: was she not 
irresistible! A murmur of accenting laughter, of sighs. 

" But it was she who broke the magic silence. 

" 'I don't want to die . . : she whispered. Her voice was like a bell. 

" 'We are death,' he answered her; and from around her came the 
whisper, 'Death.' She turned, tossing her hair so it became a veritable 
shower of gold, a rich and living thing over the dust off her poor 
clothing. 'Help me?' she cried out softly, as if afraid even to raise her 
voice. 'Someone. . .' she said to the crowd she knew must tae there. 
A soft laughter cane from Claudia. The girl on stage only vaguely 
understood where she was, what was happening, but knew infinitely 
more than this house of people that gaped at her. 

"'I don't want to die! I don't want to!' Her delicate voice broke, her 
eyes fixed on the tall, malevolent leader vampire, that demon trickster 
who now stepped out of the circle of the others towards her. 

" 'We all die,' he answered her. 'The one thing you share with every 
mortal is death.’ His hand took in the orchestra, the distant faces of 
the balcony, the boxes. 

" 'No,' she protested in disbelief. 'I have so many years, so many . . . 
.’ Her voice was light, lilting in her pain. It made her irresistible, just 
as did the movement of her naked throat and the hand that fluttered 
there. 

" 'Years!' said the master vampire. 'How do you know you have so 
many years? Death is no respecter of age! There could be a sickness in 
your body now, already devouring you from within, or, outside, a 
man might be waiting to kill you simply for your yellow hair!' And his 
fingers reached for it, the sound of his deep, preternatural voice 
sonorous. 'Need I tell what fate may have in store for you?' 

" 'I don’t care . . . I'm not afraid,' she protested, her clarion voice so 
fragile after him. 'I would take my chance. . . 

" 'And if you do take that chance and live, live for years, what would 
be your heritage? The humpbacked, toothless visage of old age?' And 
now he lifted her hair behind her back, exposing her pale throat. And 
slowly he drew the string from the loose gathers of her blouse. The 
cheap fabric opened, the sleeves slipping off her narrow, pink 
shoulders; and she clasped it, only to have him take her wrists and 
thrust them sharply away. The audience seemed to sigh in a body, the 
women behind their opera glasses, the men leaning forward in their 
chairs. I could see the cloth falling, see the pale, flawless skin pulsing 
with her heart and the tiny nipples letting the cloth slip precariously, 
the vampire holding her right wrist tightly at her side, the tears 
coarsing down her blushing cheeks, her teeth biting into the flesh of 


169 



her lip. 'Just as sure as this flesh is pink, it will turn gray, wrinkled 
with age,' he said. 

" 'Let me live, please,’ she begged, her face turning away from him. 'I 
don't care ... I don't care.' 

" 'But then, why should you care if you die now? If these things 
don't frighten you . . . these horrors?' 

" She shook her head, baffled, outsmarted, helpless. I felt the anger 
in my veins, as sure as the passion. With a bowed head she bore the 
whole responsibility for defending life, and it was unfair, monstrously 
unfair that she should have to pit logic against his for what was 
obvious and sacred and so beautifully embodied in her. But he made 
her speechless, made her overwhelming instinct seem petty, confused. 

I could feel her dying inside, weakening, and I hated him. 

" The blouse slipped to her waist. A murmur moved through the 
titillated crowd as her small, round breasts stood exposed. She 
struggled to free her wrist, but he held it fast. 

" 'And suppose we were to let you go . . . suppose the Grim Reaper 
had a heart that could resist your beauty ... to whom would he turn 
his passion? Someone must die in your place. Would you pick the 
person for us? The person to stand here and suffer as yoga suffer 
now?' He gestured to the audience. Her confusion was terrible. 'Have 
you a sister ... a mother... a child?' 

" 'No,' she gasped. 'No . . : shaking the mane of hair. 

" 'Surely someone could take your place, a friend? Choose!’ 

" 'I can't. I wouldn't. . . : She writhed in his tight grasp. The 
vampires around her looked on, still, their faces evincing no emotion, 
as if the preternatural flesh were masks. 'Can't you do it?' he taunted 
her. And I knew, if she said she could, how he would only condemn 
her, say she was as evil as he for marking someone for death, say that 
she deserved her fate. 

" 'Death waits for you everywhere,' he sighed now as if he were 
suddenly frustrated. The audience could not perceive it, I could. I 
could see the muscles of his smooth face tightening. He was trying to 
keep her gray eyes on his eyes, but she looked desperately, hopefully 
away from him. On the warm, rising air I could smell the dust and 
perfume of her skin, hear the soft beating of her heart. 'Unconscious 
death . . . the fate of all mortals.’ He bent closer to her, musing, 
infatuated with her, but struggling. 'Hmmm. . . . but we are 
conscious death! That would make you a bride. Do you know what it 
means to be loved by Death?’ He all but kissed her face, the brilliant 
stain of her tears. 'Do you know what it means to have Death know 
your name?' 


170 



" She looked at him, overcome with fear. And then her eyes seemed 
to mist over, her lips to go slack. She was staring past him at the figure 
of another vampire who had emerged slowly from the shadows. For a 
long time he had stood on the periphery of the gathering, his hands 
clasped, his large, dark eyes very still. His attitude was not the attitude 
of hunger. He did not appear rapt. But she was looking into his eyes 
row, and her pain bathed her in a beauteous light, a light which made 
her irresistibly alluring. It was 'his that held the jaded audience, this 
terrible pain. I could feel her skin, feel the small, pointed breasts, feel 
my arms caressing her. I shut my eyes against it and saw her starkly 
against that private darkness. It was what they felt all around her, this 
community of vampires. She had no chance. 

" And, looking up again, I saw her shimmering in the smoky light of 
the footlamps, saw her tears like gold as soft from that other vampire 
who stood at a distance came the words . . . 'No pain.' 

" I could see the trickster stiffen, but no one else would see it. They 
would see only the girl's smooth, childlike face, those parted lips, slack 
with innocent wonder as she gazed at that distant vampire, hear her 
soft voice repeat after him, 'No pain?' 

" 'Your beauty is a gift to us.' Iris rich voice effortlessly filled the 
house, seemed to fix and subdue the mounting wave of excitement. 
And slightly, almost imperceptibly, his hand moved. The trickster was 
receding, becoming one of those patient, white faces, whose hunger 
and equanimity were strangely one. And slowly, gracefully, the other 
moved towards her. She was languid, her nakedness forgotten, those 
lids fluttering, a sigh escaping her moist lips. 'No pain,' she accented. 

I could hardly bear it, the sight of her yearning towards him, seeing her 
dying now, under this vampire's power. I wanted to cry out to her, to 
break her swoon. And I wanted her. Wanted her, as he was moving in 
on her, his hand out now for the drawstring of her skirt as she inclined 
towards him, her head back, the black cloth slipping over her hips, 
over the golden gleam of the hair between her legs-a child's down, that 
delicate curl-the skirt dropping to her feet. And this vampire opened 
his arms, his back to the flickering footlights, his auburn hair seeming 
to tremble as the gold of her hair fell around his black coat. 'No pain . 

. . no pain . . .' he was whispering to her, and she was giving herself 
over. 

" And now, turning her slowly to the side so that they could all see 
her serene face, he was lifting her, her back arching as her naked 
breasts touched his buttons, her pale arms enfolded his neck. She 
stiffened, cried out as he sank his teeth, and her face was still as the 
dark theater reverberated with shared passion. Isis white hand shone 


171 



on her florid buttocks, her hair dusting it, stroking it. He lifted her off 
the boards as he drank, her throat gleaming against his white cheek. I 
felt weak, dazed, hunger rising in me, knotting my heart, my veins. I 
felt my hand gripping the brass bar of the box, tighter, until I could 
feel the metal creaking in its joints. And that soft, wrenching sound 
which none of those mortals might hear seemed somehow to hook me 
to the solid place where I was. 

" I bowed my head; I wanted to shut my eyes. The air seemed 
fragrant with her salted skin, and close and hot and sweet. Around her 
the other vampires drew in, the white hand that held her tight 
quivered, and the auburn-haired vampire let her go, turning her, 
displaying her, her head fallen back as he gave her over, one of those 
starkly beautiful vampire women rising behind her, cradling her, 
stroking her as she bent to drink. They were all about her now, as she 
was passed from one to another and to another, before the enthralled 
crowd, her head thrown forward over the shoulder of a vampire man, 
the nape of her neck as enticing as the small buttocks or the flawless 
skin of her long thighs, the tender creases behind her limply bent 
knees. 

" I was sitting back in the chair, my mouth full of the taste of her, my 
veins in torment. And in the corner of my eyes was that auburn¬ 
haired vampire who had conquered her, standing apart as he had been 
before, his dark eyes seeming to pick me from the darkness, seeming to 
fix on me over the currents of warm air. 

" One by one the vampires were withdrawing. The painted forest 
came back, sliding soundlessly into place. Until the mortal girl, frail 
and very white, lay naked in that mysterious wood, nestled in the silk 
of a black bier as if on the floor of the forest itself; and the music had 
begun again, eerie and alarming, growing louder as the lights grew 
dimmer. All the vampires were gone, except the trickster, who had 
gathered his scythe from the shadows and also his hand-held mask. 
And he crouched near the sleeping girl as the lights slowly faded, and 
the music alone had power and force in the enclosing dark. And then 
that died also. 

" For a moment, the entire crowd was utterly still. 

" Then applause began here and there and suddenly united everyone 
around us. The lights rose in the sconces on the walls and heads 
turned to one another, conversation erupting all round. A woman 
rising in the middle of a row to pull her fox fur sharply from the .chair, 
though no one had yet made way for her; someone else pushing out 
quickly to the carpeted aisle; and the whole body was on its feet as if 
driven to the exits. 


172 



" But then the hum became the comfortable, jaded hum of the 
sophisticated and perfumed crowd that had filled the lobby and the 
vault of the theater before. The spell was broken. The doors were 
flung open on the fragrant rain, the clop of horses' hooves, and voices 
calling for taxis. Down in the sea of slightly askew chairs, a white glove 
gleamed on a green sill cushion. 

" I sat watching, listening, one hand shielding my lowered face from 
anyone and no one, my elbow resting on the rail, the passion in me 
subsiding, the taste of the girl on my lips. It was as though on the 
smell of the rain came her perfume still, and in the empty theater I 
could hear the throb of her beating heart. I sucked in my breath, 
tasted the rain, and glimpsed Claudia sitting infinitely still, her gloved 
hands in her lap. 

" There was a bitter taste in my mouth, and confusion. And then I 
saw a lone usher moving on the aisle below, righting the chairs, 
reaching for the scattered programs that littered the carpet. I was 
aware that this ache in me, this confusion, this blinding passion which 
only let me go with a stubborn slowness would be obliterated if I were 
to drop down to one of those curtained archways beside him and draw 
him up fast in the darkness and take him as that girl was taken. I 
wanted to do it, and I wanted nothing. Claudia said near my bowed 
ear, 'Patience, Louis. Patience’ 

" I opened my eyes. Someone was near, on the periphery of my 
vision; someone who had outsmarted my hearing, my keen 
anticipation, which penetrated like a sharp antenna even this 
distraction, or so I thought. But there he was, soundless, beyond the 
curtained entrance of the box, that vampire with the auburn hair, that 
detached one; standing on the carpeted stairway looking at us. I knew 
him now to be, as I’d suspected, the vampire who had given me the 
card admitting us to the theater. Armand. 

" He would have startled me, except for his stillness, the remote 
dreamy quality of his expression. It seemed he'd been standing against 
that wall for the longest time, and betrayed no sign of change as we 
looked at him, then came towards him. Had he not so completely 
absorbed me, I would have been relieved he was not the tall, black¬ 
haired one; but I didn't think of this. Now his eyes moved languidly 
over Claudia with no tribute whatsoever to the human habit of 
disguising the stare. I placed my hand on Claudia's shoulder. 'We've 
been searching for you a very long time,' I said to him, my heart 
growing calmer, as if his calm were drawing off my trepidation, my 
care, like the sea drawing something into itself from the land. I cannot 
exaggerate this quality in him. Yet I can't describe it and couldn't 


173 



then; and the fact that my mind sought to describe it even to myself 
unsettled me. He gave me the very feeling that he knew what I was 
doing, and his still posture and his deep, brown eyes seemed to say 
there was no use in what I was thinking, or particularly the words I 
was struggling to form now. Claudia said nothing. 

" He moved away from the wall and began to walk down the stairs, 
while at the same time he made a gesture that welcomed us and bade 
us follow; but all this was fluid and fast. My gestures were the 
caricature of human gestures compared to his. He opened a door in 
the lower wall and admitted us to the rooms below the theater, his feet 
only brushing the stone stairway as we descended, his back to us with 
complete trust. 

" And now we entered what appeared to be a vast subterranean 
ballroom, carved, as it were, out of a cellar more ancient than the 
building overhead. Above us, the door that he had opened fell shut, 
and the light died away before I could get a fair impression of the 
room. I heard the rustle of his garments in the dark and then the 
sharp explosion of a match. His face appeared like a great flame over 
the match. And then a figure moved into the light beside him, a young 
boy, who brought him a candle. The sight of the boy brought back to 
me in a shock the teasing pleasure of the naked woman on the stage, 
her prone body, the pulsing blood. And he turned and gazed at me 
now, much in the manner of the auburn-haired vampire, who had lit 
the candle and whispered to him, 'Go.' The light expanded to the 
distant walls, and the vampire held the light up and moved along the 
wall, beckoning us both to follow. 

" I could see a world of frescoes and murals surrounded us, their 
colors deep and vibrant above the dancing flame, and gradually the 
theme and content beside us came clear. It was the terrible 'Triumph 
of Death’ by Breughel, painted on such a massive scale that all the 
multitude of ghastly figures towered over us in the gloom, those 
ruthless skeletons ferrying the helpless dead in a fetid moat or pulling a 
cart of human skulls, beheading an outstretched corpse or hanging 
humans from the gallows. A bell tolled over the endless hell of 
scorched and smoking land, towards which great armies of men came 
with the hideous, mindless march of soldiers to a massacre. I turned 
away, but the auburn-haired one touched my hand and led me further 
along the wall to see 'The Fall of the Angels' slowly materializing with 
the damned being driven from the celestial heights into a lurid chaos 
of feasting monsters. So vivid, so perfect was it, I shuddered. The 
hand that had touched me did the same again, and I stood still despite 
it, deliberately looking above to the very height of the mural, where I 


174 



could make out of the shadows two beautiful angels with trumpets to 
their lips. And for a second the spell was broken. I had the strong 
sense of the first evening I had entered Notre-Dame, but then that was 
gore, like something gossamer and precious snatched away from me. 

" The candle rose. And horrors rose all around me: the dumbly 
passive and, degraded damned of Bosch, the bloated coned corpses of 
Traini, the monstrous horsemen of Durer, and blown out of all 
endurable scale a promenade of medieval woodcut, emblem, and 
engraving. The very ceiling writhed with skeletons and moldering 
dead, with demons and the instruments of pain, as if this were the 
cathedral of death itself. 

" Where we stood finally in the center of the room, the candle 
seemed to pull the images to life everywhere around us. Delirium 
threatened, that awful shifting of the room began, that sense of falling. 

I reached out for Claudia's hand. She stood musing, her face passive, 
her eyes distant when I looked to her, as if she'd have me let her alone; 
and then her feet shot off from me with a rapid tapping on the stone 
floor that echoed all along the walls, like fingers tapping on my 
temples, on my skull. I held my temples, staring dumbly at the floor in 
search of shelter, as if to lift my eyes would force me to look on some 
wretched suffering I would not, could not endure. Then again I saw 
the vampire's face floating in his flame, his ageless eyes circled in dark 
lashes. His lips were very still, but as I stared at him he seemed to 
smile without making even the slightest movement. I watched him all 
the harder, convinced it was some powerful illusion I could penetrate 
with keen attention; and the more I watched, the more he seemed to 
smile and finally to be animated with a soundless whispering, musing, 
singing. I could hear it like something curling in the dark, as 
wallpaper curls in the blast of a fire or paint peels from the face of a 
burning doll. I had the urge to reach for him, to shake him violently 
so that his still face would move, admit to this soft singing; and 
suddenly I found him pressed against me, his arm around my chest, 
his lashes so close I could see them matted and gleaming above the 
incandescent orb of his eye, his soft, tasteless breath against my skin. 

It was delirium. 

" I moved to get away from him, and yet I was drawn to him and I 
didn't move at all, his arm exerting its firm pressure, his candle blazing 
now against my eye, so that I felt the warmth of it; all my cold flesh 
yearned for that warmth, but suddenly I waved to snuff it but couldn't 
find it, and all I saw was his radiant face, as I had never seen Lestat's 
face, white and poreless and sinewy and male. The other vampire. All 
other vampires. An infinite procession of my own kind. 


175 



" The moment ended. 

" I found myself with my hand outstretched, touching his face; but 
he was a distance away from me, as if he'd never moved near me, 
making no attempt to brush my hand away. I drew back, flushed, 
stunned. 

" Far away in the Paris night a bell chimed, the dull, golden circles of 
sound seeming to penetrate the walls, the timbers that carried that 
sound down into the earth like great organ pipes. Again came that 
whispering, that inarticulate singing. And through the gloom I saw 
that mortal boy watching me, and I smelled the hot aroma of his flesh. 
The vampire's facile hand beckoned him, and he came towards me, his 
eyes fearless and exciting, and he drew up to me in the candlelight and 
put his arms around my shoulders. 

" Never had I felt this, never had I experienced it, this yielding of a 
conscious mortal. But before I could push him away for his own sake, 

I saw the bluish bruise on his tender neck. He was offering it to me. 

He was pressing the length of his body against me now, and I felt the 
hard strength of his sex beneath his clothes pressing against my leg. A 
wretched gasp escaped my lips, but he bent close, his lips on what 
must have been so cold, so lifeless for him; and I sank my teeth into his 
skin, my body rigid, that hard sex driving against me, and I lifted him 
in passion off the floor. Wave after wave of his beating heart passed 
into me as, weightless, I rocked with him, devouring him, his ecstasy, 
his conscious pleasure. 

" Then, weak and gasping, I saw him at a distance from me, my arms 
empty, my mouth still flooded with the taste of his blood. He lay 
against that auburnhaired vampire, his arm about the vampire's waist, 
and he gazed at me in that same pacific manner of the vampire, his 
eyes misted over and weak from the loss of life. I remember moving 
mutely forward, drawn to him and seemingly unable to control it, that 
gaze taunting me, that conscious life defying me; he should die and 
would not die; he would live on, comprehending, surviving that 
intimacy! I turned. The host of vampires moved in the shadows, their 
candles whipped and fleeting on the cool air; and above them loomed 
a great broadcast of ink-drawn figures: the sleeping corpse of a woman 
ravaged by a vulture with a human face; a naked man bound hand and 
foot to a tree, beside him hanging the torso of another, his severed 
arms tied still to another branch, and on a spike this dead man's 
staring head. 

" Me singing came again, that thin, ethereal singing. Slowly the 
hunger in me subsided, obeyed, but my head throbbed and the flames 
of the candles seemed to merge in burnished circles of light. Someone 


176 



touched me suddenly, pushed me roughly, so that I almost lost my 
balance, and when I straitened I saw the thin, angular face of the 
trickster vampire I despised. He reached out for me with his white 
hands. But the other one, the distant one, moved forward suddenly 
and stood between us. It seemed he struck the other vampire, that I 
saw him move, and then again I did not see him move; both stood still 
like statues, eyes fixed on one another, and time passed like wave after 
wave of water rolling back from a still beach. I cannot say how long 
we stood there, the three of us in those shadows, and how utterly still 
they seemed to me, only the shimmering flames seeming to have life 
behind them. Then I remember floundering along the wall and 
finding a large oak chair into which I all but collapsed. It seemed 
Claudia was near and speaking to someone in a hushed but sweet 
voice. My forehead teemed with blood, with heat. 

" 'Come with me,’ said the auburn-haired vampire. I was searching 
his face for the movement of his lips that must have preceded the 
sound, yet it was so hopelessly long after the sound. And then we were 
walking, the three of us, down a long stone stairway deeper beneath 
the city, Claudia ahead of us, her shadow long against the wall. The air 
grew cool and refreshing with the fragrance of water, and I could see 
the droplets bleeding through the stones like beads of gold in the light 
of the vampire's candle. 

" It was a small chamber we entered, a fire burning in a deep 
fireplace cut into the stone wall. A bed lay at the other end, fitted into 
the rock and enclosed with two brass gates. At first I saw these things 
clearly, and saw the long wall of books opposite the fireplace and the 
wooden desk that was against it, and the coffin to the other side. But 
then the room began to waver, and the auburn-haired vampire put his 
hands on my shoulders and guided me down into a leather chair. The 
fire was intensely hot against my legs, but this felt good to me, sharp 
and clear, something to draw me out of this confusion. I sat back, my 
eyes only half open, and tried to see again what was about me. It was 
as if that distant bed were a stage and on the linen pillows of the little 
stage lay that boy, his black hair parted in the middle and curling 
about his ears, so that he looked now in his dreamy, fevered state like 
one of those lithe androgynous creatures of a Botticelli painting; and 
beside him, nestled against him, her tiny white hand stark against his 
ruddy flesh, lay Claudia, her face buried in his neck. The masterful 
auburn-haired vampire looked on, his hands clasped in front of him; 
and when Claudia rose now, the boy shuddered. The vampire picked 
her up, gently, as I might pick her up, her hands finding a hold on his 
neck, her eyes half shut with the swoon, her lips rouged with blood. 


177 



He set her gently on the desk, and she lay back against the 
leatherbound books, her hands falling gracefully into the lap of her 
lavender dress. The gates closed on the boy and, burying his face in 
the pillows, he slept. 

" There was something disturbing to me in the room, and g didn't 
know what it was. I didn't in truth know what was wrong with me, 
only that I'd been drawn forcefully either by myself or someone else 
from two fierce, consuming states: an absorption with those grim 
paintings, and the kill to which I'd abandoned myself, obscenely, in 
the eyes of others. 

" I didn't know what it was that threatened me now, what it was that 
my mind sought escape from. I kept looking at Claudia, the way she 
lay against the books, the way she sat amongst the objects of the desk, 
the polished white skull, the candle-holder, the open parchment book 
whose hand-painted script gleamed in the light; and then above her 
there emerged into focus the lacquered and shimmering painting of a 
medieval devil, horned and hoofed, his bestial figure looming over a 
coven of worshipping witches. Her head was just beneath it, the loose 
curling strands of her hair just stroking it; and she watched the brown¬ 
eyed vampire with wide, wondering eyes. I wanted to pick her up 
suddenly, and frightfully, horribly, I saw her in my kindled 
imagination flopping like a doll. I was gazing at the devil, that 
monstrous face preferable to the sight of her in her eerie stillness. 

" 'You won't awaken the boy if you speak,' said the brown-eyed 
vampire. 'You've come from so far, you've traveled so long.' And 
gradually my confusion subsided, as if smoke were rising and moving 
away on a current of fresh air. And I lay awake and very calm, looking 
at him as he sat in the opposite chair. Claudia, too, looked at him. 

And he looked from one to the other of us, his smooth face and pacific 
eyes very like they'd been all along, as though there had never been any 
change in him at all. 

" 'My name is Armand,' he said. 'I sent Santiago to give you the 
invitation. I know your names. I welcome you to my house' 

" I gathered my strength to speak, my voice sounding strange to me 
when I told him that we had feared we were alone. 

" But how did you come into existence?' he asked. Claudia's hand 
rose ever so slightly from her lap, her eyes moving mechanically from 
his face to mine. I saw this and knew that he must have seen it, and yet 
he gave no sign. I knew at once what she meant to tell me. 'You don't 
want to answer,' said Armand, his voice low and even more measured 
than Claudia's voice, far less human than my own. I sensed myself 


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slipping away again into contemplation of that voice and those eyes, 
from which I had to draw myself up with great effort. 

" 'Are you the leader of this group?’ I asked him. 

" 'Not in the way you mean leader,’ he answered. But if there were a 
leader here, I would be that one.’ 

"’I haven't come . . . you'll forgive me . . . to talk of how I came 
into being. Because that's no mystery to me, it presents no question. 

So if you have no power to which I might be required to render 
respect, I don't wish to talk of those things: 

" 'If I told you I did have such power, would you respect it?' he 
asked. 

" I wish I could describe his manner of speaking, how each time he 
spoke he seemed to arise out of a state of contemplation very like that 
state into which I felt I was drifting, from which it took so much to 
wrench myself; and yet he never moved, and seemed at all times alert. 
This distracted me while at the same time I was powerfully attracted by 
it, as I was by this room, its simplicity, its rich, w combination of 
essentials: the books, the desk, the two chairs by the fire, the coffin, the 
pictures. The luxury of those rooms in the hotel seemed vulgar, but 
more than that, meaningless, beside this room. I understood all of it 
except for the mortal boy, the sleeping boy, whom I didn't understand 
at all. 

" 'I'm not certain,' I said, unable to keep my eyes off that awful 
medieval Satan. 'I would have to know from what. . . from whom it 
comes. Whether it came from other vampires ... or elsewhere' 

" 'Elsewhere . . ' he said. 'What is elsewhere? 

" 'That?' I pointed to the medieval picture. 

" 'That is a picture,' he said. 

" 'Nothing more?' 

" 'Nothing more.' 

" 'Then Satan . . . some Satanic power doesn't give you your power 
here, either as leader or as vampire?' 

" 'No,' he said calmly, so calmly it was impossible for me to know 
what he thought of my questions, if he thought of them at all in the 
manner which I knew to be thinking. 

" 'And the other vampires?' 

No,' he said. 

"'Then we are not. . .' I sat forward. '. . . the children of Satan?' 

" 'How could we be the children of Satan?' he asked. 'Do you 
believe that Satan made this world around you?' 

" 'No, I believe that God made it, if anyone made it. But He also 
must have made Satan, and I want to know if we are his children!' 


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" 'Exactly, and consequently if you believe God made Satan, you 
must realize that all Satan's power comes from God and that Satan is 
simply God's child, and that we are God's children also. There are no 
children of Satan, really.' 

" I couldn't disguise my feelings at this. I sat back against the leather, 
looking at that small woodcut of the devil, released for the moment 
from any sense of obligation to Armand's presence, lost in my 
thoughts, in the undeniable implications of his simple logic. 

" 'But why does this concern you? Surely what I say doesn't surprise 
you,' he said. 'Why do you let it affect you?’ 

" ’Let me explain,' I began. 'I know that you're a master vampire. I 
respect you. But I'm incapable of your detachment. I know what it is, 
and I do not possess it and I doubt that I ever will. I accept this.' 

" 'I understand,’ he nodded. 'I saw you in the theater, your suffering, 
your sympathy with that girl. I saw your sympathy for Denis when I 
offered him to you; you die when you kill, as if you feel that you 
deserve to die, and you stint on nothing. But why, with this passion 
and this sense of justice, do you wish to call yourself the child of 
Satan!’ 

" 'I’m evil, evil as any vampire who ever lived! I've killed over and 
over and will do it again. I took that boy, Denis, when you gave him to 
me, though I was incapable of knowing whether he would survive or 
not.' 

" 'Why does that make you as evil as any vampire? Aren't there 
gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with 
the first sin, plummeting to the depth?' 

" 'Yes, I think it is,’ I said to him. 'It's not logical, as you would make 
it sound. But it's that dark, that empty. And it is without consolation.' 

" 'But you're not being fair,' he said with the first glimmer of 
expression in his voice. 'Surely you attribute great degrees and 
variations to goodness. There is the goodness of the child which is 
innocence, and then there is the goodness of the monk who has given 
up everything to others and lives a life of self-deprivation and service. 
The goodness of saints, the goodness of good housewives. Are all these 
the same?' 

" 'No. But equally and infinitely different from evil.' I answered. 

" I didn't know I thought these things. I spoke them now as my 
thoughts. And they were my most profound feelings taking a shape 
they could never have taken had I not spoken them, had I not thought 
them out this way in conversation with another. I thought myself then 
possessed of a passive mind, in a sense. I mean that my mind could 
only pull itself together, formulate thought out of the muddle of 


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longing and pain, when it was touched by another mind; fertilized by 
it; deeply excited by that other mind and driven to form conclusions. I 
felt now the rarest, most acute alleviation of loneliness. I could easily 
visualize and suffer that moment years before in another century, 
when I had stood at the foot of Babette's stairway, and feel the 
perpetual metallic frustration of years with Lestat; and then that 
passionate and doomed affection for Claudia which made loneliness 
retreat behind the soft indulgence of the senses, the same senses that 
longed for the kill. And I saw the desolate mountaintop in eastern 
Europe where I had confronted that mindless vampire and killed him 
in the monastery ruins. And it was as if the great feminine longing of 
my mind were being awakened again to be satisfied. And this I felt 
despite my own words: 'But it's that dark, that empty. And it is 
without consolation.' 

" I looked at Armand, at his large brown eyes in that taut, timeless 
face, watching me again like a painting; and I felt the slow shifting of 
the physical world I'd felt in the painted ballroom, the pull of my old 
delirium, the wakening of a need so terrible that the very promise of its 
fulfillment contained the unbearable possibility of disappointment. 
And yet there was the question, the awful, ancient, hounding question 
of evil. 

" I think I put my hands to my head as mortals do when so deeply 
troubled that they instinctively cover the face, reach for the brain as if 
they could reach through the skull and massage the living organ out of 
its agony. 

"'And how is this evil achieved?' he asked. 'How does one fall from 
grace and become in one instant as evil as the snob tribunal of the 
Revolution or the most cruel of the Roman emperors? Does one 
merely have to miss Mass on Sunday, or bite down on the 
Communion Host? (r)r steal a loaf of bread . . . or sleep with a 
neighbor's wife?' 

" 'No . . . .' I shook my head. 'No.' 

" 'But if evil is without gradation, and it does exist, this state of evil, 
then only one sin is needed. Isn’t that what you are saying? That God 
exists and. . . 

" 'I don't know if God exists,' I said. 'And for all I do know . . . He 
doesn't exist.' 

" 'Then no sin matters,' he said. 'No sin. achieves evil.' 

" 'That's not true. Because if God doesn't exist we are the creatures 
of highest consciousness in the universe. We alone understand the 
passage of time and the value off every minute of human life. And 
what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. 


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Whether a man would have died tomorrow or the day after or 
eventually ... it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, this 
life . . . every second of it. . . is all we have.' 

" He sat back, as if for the moment stopped, his large eyes narrowing, 
then fixing on the depths of the fire. This was the first time since he 
had come for me that he had looked away from me, and I found 
myself looking at him unwatched. For a long time he sat in this 
manner and I could all but feel his thoughts, as if they were palpable in 
the air like smoke. Not read them, you understand, but feel the power 
of them. It seemed he possessed an aura and even though his face was 
very young, which I knew meant nothing, he appeared infinitely old, 
wise. I could not define it, because I could not explain how the 
youthful lines of his face, how his eyes expressed innocence and this 
age and experience at the same time. 

" He rose now and looked at Claudia, his hands loosely clasped 
behind his back. Her silence all this time had been understandable to 
me. These were not her questions, yet she was fascinated with him and 
was waiting for him and no doubt learning from him all the while that 
he spoke to me. But I understood something else now as they looked 
at each other. He had moved to his feet with a body totally at his 
command, devoid of the habit of human gesture, gesture rooted in 
necessity, ritual, fluctuation of mind; and his stillness now was 
unearthly. And she, as I'd never seen before, possessed the same 
stillness. And they were gazing at each other with a preternatural 
understanding from which I was simply excluded. 

" I was something whirling and vibrating to them, as mortals were to 
me. And I knew when he turned towards me again that he'd come to 
understand she did not believe or share my concept of evil. 

" His speech commenced without the slightest warning. 'This is the 
only real evil left,’ he said to the flames. 

" 'Yes,' I answered, feeling that all-consuming subject alive again, 
obliterating all concerns as it always had for me. 

" 'It's true,' he said, shocking me, deepening my sadness, my despair. 

" 'Then God does not exist. . . you have no knowledge of His 
existence?' 

" 'None,' he said. 

" 'No knowledge!' I said it again, unafraid of my simplicity, my 
miserable human pain. 

" 'None.' 

" 'And no vampire here has discourse with God or with the devil!' 


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" 'No vampire that I've ever known,' he said, musing, the fire 
dancing in his eyes. 'And as far as I know today, after four hundred 
years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.’ 

" I stared at him, astonished. 

" Then it began to sink in. It was as I'd always feared, and it was as 
lonely, it was as totally without hope. Things would go on as they had 
before, on and on. My search was over. I sat back listlessly watching 
those licking flames. 

" It was futile to leave him to continue it, futile to travel the world 
only to hear again the same story. 'Four hundred years'-I think I 
repeated the words 'four hundred years.' I remember staring at the 
fire. There was a log falling very slowly in the fire, drifting downwards 
in a process that would take it the night, and it was pitted with tiny 
holes where some substance that had larded it through and through 
had burned away fast, and in each of these tiny holes there danced a 
flame amid the larger flames: and all of these tiny flames with their 
black mouths seemed to me faces that made a chorus; and the chorus 
sang without singing. The chorus had no need of singing; in one 
breath in the fire, which was continuous, it made its soundless song. 

" All at once Armand moved in a loud rustling of garments, a descent 
of crackling shadow and light that left him kneeling at my feet, his 
hands outstretched holding my head, his eyes burning. 

" 'This evil, this concept, it comes from disappointment, from 
bitterness! Don't you see? Children of Satan! Children of God! Is this 
the only question you bring to me, is this the only power that obsesses 
you, so that you must make us gods and devils yourself when the only 
power that exists is inside ourselves? How could you believe in these 
old fantastical lies, these myths, these emblems of the supernatural?' 

He snatched the devil from above Claudia's still countenance so swiftly 
that I couldn't see the gesture, only the demon leering before me and 
then crackling in the flames. 

" Something was broken inside me when he said this; something 
ripped aside, so that a torrent of feeling became one with my muscles 
in every limb. I was on my feet now, backing away from him. 

" 'Are you mad?' I asked, astonished at my own anger, my own 
despair. 'We stand here, the two of us, immortal, ageless, rising 
nightly to feed that immortality on human blood; and there on your 
desk against the knowledge of the ages sits a flawless child as demonic 
as ourselves; and you ask me how I could believe I would find a 
meaning in the supernatural! I tell you, after seeing what I have 
become, I could damn well believe anything! Couldn't you? And 


183 



believing thus, being thus confounded, I can now accept the most 
fantastical truth of all: that there is no meaning to any of this!' 

" I backed towards the door, away from his astonished face, his hand 
hovering before his lips, the finger curling to dig into his palm. 'Don't! 
Come back . . : he whispered. 

" 'No, not now. Let me go. Just a while ... let me go. . . . 
Nothing's changed; it's all the same. Let that sink into me . . . just let 
me go.' 

" I looked back before I shut the door. Claudia's face was turned 
towards me, though she sat as before, her hands clasped on her knee. 
She made a gesture then, subtle as her smile, which was tinged with the 
faintest sadness, that I was to go on. 

" It was my desire to escape the theater then entirely, to find the 
streets of Paris and wander, letting the vast accumulation of shocks 
gradually wear away. But, as I groped along the stone passage of the 
lower cellar, I became confused. I was perhaps incapable of exerting 
my own will. It seemed more than ever absurd to me that Lestat 
should have died, if in fact he had; and looking back on him, as it 
seemed I was always doing, I saw him more kindly than before. Lost 
like the rest of us. Not the jealous protector of any knowledge he was 
afraid to share. He -knew nothing. There was nothing to know. 

" Only, that was not quite the thought that was gradually coming 
clear to me. I had hated him for all the wrong reasons; yes, that was 
true. But I did not fully understand it yet. Confounded, I found 
myself sitting finally on those dark steps, the light from the ballroom 
throwing my own shadow on the rough floor, my hands holding my 
head, a weariness overcoming me. My mind said, Sleep. But more 
profoundly, my mind said, Bream. And yet I made no move to return 
to the Hotel Saint-Gabriel, which seemed a very secure and airy place 
to me now, a place of subtle and luxurious mortal consolation where I 
might lie in a chair of puce velvet, put one foot on an ottoman and 
watch the fire lick the marble tile, looking for all the world to myself in 
the long mirrors like a thoughtful human. Flee to that, I thought, flee 
all that is pulling you. And again came that thought: I have wronged 
Lestat, I have hated him for all the wrong reasons. I whispered it now, 
trying to withdraw it from the dark, inarticulate pool of my mind, and 
the whispering made a scratching sound in the stone vault of the stairs. 

" But then a voice came softly to me on the air, too faint for mortals: 
'How is this so? How did you wrong him?' 

" I turned round so sharp that my breath left me. A vampire sat near 
me, so near as to almost brush my shoulder with the tip of his boot, 
his legs drawn up close to him, his hands clasped around them. For -a 


184 



moment I thought my eyes deceived me. It was the trickster vampire, 
whom Armand had called Santiago. 

" Yet nothing in his manner indicated his former self, that devilish, 
hateful self that I had seen, even only a few hours ago when he had 
reached out for me and Armand had struck him. He was staring at me 
over his drawn-up knees, his hair disheveled, his mouth slack and 
without cunning. 

" 'It makes no difference to anyone else,' I said to him, the fear in me 
subsiding. 

" 'But you said a name; I heard you say a name,’ he said. 

" 'A name I don’t want to say again,' I answered, looking away from 
him. I could see now how he'd fooled me, why his shadow had not 
fallen over mine; he crouched in my shadow. The vision of him 
slithering down those stone stairs to sit behind me was slightly 
disturbing. Everything about him was disturbing, and I reminded 
myself that he could in no way be trusted. It seemed to me then that 
Armand, with his hypnotic power, aimed in some way for the 
maximum truth in presentation of himself: he lead drawn out of me 
without words my state of mind. But this vampire was a liar. And I 
could feel his power, a crude, pounding power that was almost as 
strong as Arm,-,P-Xs. 

" 'You come to Paris in search of us, and then you sit alone on. the 
stairs . . : he said, in a conciliatory tone. 'Why don’t you come up 
with us? Why don't you speak to us and talk to us of this person 
whose name you spoke; I know who it was, I know the name.' 

" 'You don’t know, couldn't know. It was a mortal,' I said now, more 
front instinct than conviction. Time thought of Lestat disturbed me, 
the thought that this creature should know of Lestat's death. 

" 'You care here to ponder mortals, justice done to mortals?’ he 
asked; but there was no reproach or mockery in his tone. 

" 'I came to be alone, let me not offend you. It’s a fact,’ I murmured. 

" 'But alone in this frame of mind, when you don't even hear my 
steps. . . I like you. I want you to come upstairs' And as he said this, 
he slowly pulled me to my feet beside him. 

" At that moment the door of Armand's cell threw a long light into 
the passage. I heard him conning, and Santiago let me go. I was 
standing there baffled. Armand appeared at the foot of the steps, with 
Claudia in lids arms. She had that same dull expression on her face 
which she'd had all during my talk with Armand. It was as if she were 
deep in her own considerations and saw nothing around her; and I 
remember noting this, though not knowing what to think of it, that it 
persisted even now. I took her quickly from Armand, and felt her soft 


185 



limbs against me as if we were both in. the coffin, yielding to that 
paralytic sleep. 

" And then, with a powerful thrust of his arm, Armand pushed 
Santiago away. It seemed he fell backwards, but was up again only to 
have Armand gull him towards the head of the steps, all of this 
happening so swiftly I could only see the blur of their garments and 
hear the scratching of their boots. Then Armand stood alone at the 
head of the steps, and I went upward towards him. 

" 'You cannot safely leave the theater tonight,' he whispered to me. 
'He is suspicious of you. And my having brought you here, he feels 
that it is his right to know you better. Our security depends on it.' He 
guided me slowly into the ballroom. But then he turned to me and 
pressed his lips almost to my ear: T must warn you. Answer no 
questions. Ask and you open one bud of truth for yourself after 
another. But give nothing, nothing, especially concerning your origin.' 

" He moved away from us now, but beckoning for us to follow ' into 
the gloom where the others were gathered, clustered like remote 
marble statues, their faces and hands all too like our own. I had the 
strong sense then of how we were all made from the same material, a 
thought which had only occurred to me occasionally in all the long 
years in New Orleans; and it disturbed me, particularly when I saw one 
or more of the others reflected in the long mirrors that broke the 
density of those awful murals. 

" Claudia seemed to awaken as I found one of the carved oak chairs 
and settled into it. She leaned towards me and said something 
strangely incoherent, which seemed to mean that I must do as Armand 
said: say nothing of our origin. I wanted to talk with her now, but I 
could see that tall vampire, Santiago, watching us, his eyes moving 
slowly from us to Armand. Several women vampires had gathered 
around Armand, and I felt a tumult of feeling as I saw them put their 
arms around his waist. And what appalled me as I watched was not 
their exquisite form, their delicate features and graceful hands made 
hard as glass by vampire nature, or their bewitching eyes which fixed 
on me now in a sudden silence; what appalled me was my own fierce 
jealousy. I was afraid when I saw them so close to him, afraid when he 
turned and kissed them each. And, as he brought them near to me 
now, I was unsure and confused. 

" Estelle and Celeste are the names I remember, porcelain beauties, 
who fondled Claudia with the license of the blind, running their hands 
over her radiant hair, touching even her lips, while she, her eyes still 
misty and distant, tolerated it all, knowing what I also knew and what 
they seemed unable to grasp: that a woman's mind as sharp and 


186 



distinct as their own lived within that small body. It made me wonder 
as I watched her turning about for them, holding out her lavender 
skirts and smiling coldly at their adoration, how many times I must 
have forgotten, spoken to her as if she were the child, fondled her too 
freely, brought her into my arms with an adult's abandon. My mind 
went in three directions: that last night in the Hotel Saint-Gabriel, 
which seemed a year ago, when she talked of love with rancor; my 
reverberating shock at Armand's revelations or lack of them; and a 
quiet absorption of the vampires around me, who whispered in the 
dark beneath the grotesque murals. For I could learn much from the 
vampires without ever asking a question, and vampire life in Paris was 
all that I'd feared it to be, all that the little stage in the theater above 
had indicated it was. 

" 'The dim lights of the house were mandatory, and the paintings 
appreciated in full, added to almost nightly when some vampire 
brought a new engraving or picture by a contemporary artist into the 
house. Celeste, with her cold hand on my arm, spoke with contempt 
of men as the originators of these pictures, and Estelle, who now held 
Claudia on her lap, emphasized to me, the naive colonial, that 
vampires had not made such horrors themselves but merely collected 
them, confirming over and over that men were capable of far greater 
evil than vampires. 

" 'There is evil in making such paintings?' Claudia asked softly in her 
toneless voice. 

" Celeste threw back her black curls and laughed. 

" 'What can be imagined can be done,' slue answered quickly, but her 
eyes reflected a certain contained hostility. 'Of course, we strive to 
rival men in kills of all kinds, do we riot!- Sloe leaned forward arid 
touched Claudia's knee. But Claudia merely looked at her, watching 
her laugh nervously and continue. Santiago drew near, to bring up the 
subject of our rooms in the Hotel Saint-Gabriel; frightfully unsafe, he 
said, with an exaggerated stage gesture of the hands. And he showed a 
knowledge of those rooms which was amazing. He knew the chest in 
which we slept; it struck him as vulgar. 'Come here!' he said to me, 
with that near childlike simplicity he had evinced on the steps. 'Live 
with us and such disguise is unnecessary. We have our guards. And 
tell me, where do you come from!’ he said, dropping to his knees, his 
hand on the arm of my chair. 'Your voice, I know that accent; speak 
again.' 

" I was vaguely horrified at the thought of having an accent to my 
French, but this wasn't my immediate concern. He was strong-willed 
and blatantly possessive, throwing back at me an image of that 


187 



possessiveness which was flowering in me more fully every moment. 
And meanwhile, the vampires around us talked on, Estelle explaining 
that black was the color for a vampire's clothes, that Claudia's lovely 
pastel dress was beautiful but tasteless. 'We blend with the night,' she 
said. 'We have a funereal gleam.' And now, bending her cheek next to 
Claudia's cheek, she laughed to soften her criticism; and Celeste 
laughed, and Santiago laughed, and the whole room seemed alive with 
unearthly tinkling laughter, preternatural voices echoing against the 
painted walls, rippling the feeble candle flames. 'Ah, but to cover up 
such curls,’ said Celeste, now playing with Claudia's golden hair. And 
I realized what must have been obvious: that all of them had dyed their 
hair black, but for Armand; and it was that, along with the black 
clothes, that added to the disturbing impression that we were statues 
from the same chisel and paint brush. I cannot emphasize too much 
how disturbed I was by that impression. It seemed to stir something 
in me deep inside, something I couldn't fully grasp. 

" I found myself wandering away from them to one of the narrow 
mirrors and watching them all over my shoulder. Claudia gleamed 
like a jewel in their midst; so would that mortal boy who slept below. 
The realization was coming to me that I found them dull in some 
awful way: dull, dull everywhere that I looked, their sparkling vampire 
eyes repetitious, their wit like a dull, brass bell. 

" Only the knowledge I needed distracted me from these thoughts. 
'The vampires of eastern Europe . . Claudia was saying. 'Monstrous 
creatures, what have they to do with us?' 

" 'Revenants,' Armand answered softly over the distance that 
separated them, playing on faultless preternatural ears to hear what 
was more muted than a whisper. The room fell silent. 'Their blood is 
different, vile. They increase as we do but without skill or care. In the 
old days-' Abruptly he stopped. I could see his face in the mirror. It 
was strangely rigid. 

" 'Oh, but tell us about the old days,’ said Celeste, her voice shrill, at 
human pitch. There was something vicious in her tone. 

" And now Santiago took up the same baiting manner. 'Yes, tell us 
of the covens, and the herbs that would render us invisible.’ He 
smiled. 'And the burnings at the stake!’ 

" Armand fixed his eyes on Claudia. 'Beware those monsters,’ he 
said, and calculatedly his eyes passed over Santiago and then Celeste. 
'Those revenants. They will attack you as if you were human’ 

" Celeste shuddered, uttering something in contempt, an aristocrat 
speaking of vulgar cousins who bear the same name. But I was 


188 



watching Claudia because it seemed her eyes were misted again as 
before. She looked away from Armand suddenly. 

" The voices of the others rose again, affected party voices, as they 
conferred with one another on the night's kills, describing this or that 
encounter without a smattering of emotion, challenges to cruelty 
erupting from time to time like flashes of white lightning: a tall, thin 
vampire being accosted in one corner for a needless romanticizing of 
mortal life, a lack of spirit, a refusal to do the most entertaining thing 
at the moment it was available to him. He was simple, shrugging, stow 
at words, and would fall for long periods into a stupefied silence, as if, 
near-choked with blood, he would as soon have gone to his coffin as 
remained here. And yet he remained, held by the pressure of this 
unnatural group who had made of immortality a conformist's club. 
How would Lestat have found it? Had he been here? What had caused 
him to leave? No one had dictated to Lestat he was master of his small 
circle; but how they would have praised his inventiveness, his catlike 
toying with his victims. And waste . . . that word, that value which 
had been all-important to me as a fledgling vampire; was spoken of 
often. You 'wasted' the opportunity to kill this child. You 'wasted' the 
opportunity to frighten this poor woman or drive that man to 
madness, which only a little prestidigitation Would have 
accomplished. 

" My head was spinning. A common mortal headache. I longed to 
get away from these vampires, and only the distant figure of Armand 
held me, despite his warnings. He seemed remote from the others 
now, though he nodded often enough and uttered a few words here 
and there so that he seemed a part of them, his hand only occasionally 
rising from the lion's paw of his chair. And my heart expanded when I 
saw him this way, saw that no one amongst the small throng caught his 
glance as I caught his glance, and no one held it from time to time as I 
held it. Yet he remained aloof from me, his eyes alone returning to 
me. His warning echoed in my ears, yet I disregarded it. I longed to 
get away from the theater altogether and stood listlessly, garnering 
information at last that was useless and infinitely dull. 

" 'But is there no crime amongst you, no cardinal crime?' Claudia 
asked. Her violet eyes seemed fixed on me, even in the mirror, as I 
stood with my back to her. 

" 'Crime! Boredom!' cried out Estelle, and she pointed a white 
finger at Armand. He laughed softly with her from his distant position 
at the end of the room. 'Boredom is death!' she cried and bared her 
vampire fangs, so that Armand put a languid hand to his forehead in a 
stage gesture of fear and falling. 


189 



" But Santiago, who was watching with his hands behind his back, 
intervened. 'Crime!' he said. 'Yes, there is a crime. A crime for which 
we would hunt another vampire down until we destroyed him. Can 
you guess what that is?' He glanced from Claudia to me and back 
again to her masklike face. 'You should know, who are so secretive 
about the vampire that made you.' 

" 'And why is that?’ she asked, her eyes widening ever so slightly, her 
hands resting still in her lap. 

" A hush fell over the room, gradually then completely, all those 
white faces turned to face Santiago as he stood there, one foot forward, 
his hands clasped behind his back, towering over Claudia. His eyes 
gleamed as he saw he had the floor. And then he broke away and crept 
up behind me, putting his hand on my shoulder. 'Can you guess what 
that crime is? Didn't your vampire master tell you?' 

" And drawing me slowly around with those invading familiar hands, 
he tapped my heart lightly in time with its quickening pace. 

" 'It is the crime that means death to any vampire anywhere who 
commits it. It is to kill your own kind!' 

"'Aaaaah!' Claudia cried out, and lapsed into peals of laughter. She 
was walking across the floor now with swirling lavender silk and crisp 
resounding steps. Taking my hand, she said, 'I was so afraid it was to 
be born like Venus out of the foam, as we were! Master vampire! 
Come, Louis, let’s go!’ she beckoned, as she pulled me away. 

" Armand was laughing. Santiago was still. And it was Armand who 
rose when we reached the door. 'You're welcome tomorrow night,' he 
said. 'And the night after.’ 

" I don’t think I caught my breath until rd reached the street. The 
rain was still falling, and all of the street seemed sodden and desolate 
in the rain, but beautiful. A few scattered bits of paper blowing in the 
wind, a gleaming carriage passing slowly with the thick, rhythmic clop 
of the horse. The sky was pale violet. I sped fast, with Claudia beside 
me leading the way, then finally frustrated with the length of my stride, 
riding in my arms. 

" 'I don’t like them,’ she said to me with a steel fury as we neared the 
Hotel Saint-Gabriel. Even its immense, brightly lit lobby was still in 
the pre-dawn hour. I spirited past the sleepy clerks, the long faces at 
the desk. 'I've searched for them the world over, and I despise them!' 
She threw off her cape and walked into the center of the room. A 
volley of rain hit the French windows. I found myself turning up the 
lights one by one and lifting the candelabrum to the gas flames as if I 
were Lestat or Claudia. And then, seeking the puce velvet chair I'd 
envisioned in that cellar, I slipped down into it, exhausted. It seemed 


190 



for the moment as if the room blazed about me; as my eyes fixed on a 
gilt-framed painting of pastel trees and serene waters, the vampire 
spell was broken. They couldn't touch us here, and yet I knew this to 
be a lie, a foolish lie. 

" T am in danger, danger,' Claudia said with that smoldering wrath. 

" But how can they know what we did to him? Besides, we are in 
danger! Do you think for a moment I don't acknowledge my own 
guilt! And if you wire the only one . . : I reached out for her now as 
she drew near, but her fierce eyes settled on me and I let my hands 
drop back limp. 'Do you think I would leave you in danger?' 

" She was smiling. For a moment I didn't believe my eyes. 'No, you 
would not, Louis. You would not. Danger holds you to me. . . 

" 'Love holds me to you,' I said softly. 

" 'Love?' she mused. 'What do you mean by love?’ And then, as if 
she could see the pain in my face, she came close and put her hands on 
my cheek. She was cold, unsatisfied, as I was cold and unsatisfied, 
teased by that mortal boy but unsatisfied. 

" 'That you take my love for granted always,’ I said to her. 'That we 
are wed. . . ' But even as I said these words I felt my old conviction 
waver; I felt that torment I'd felt last night when she had taunted me 
about mortal passion. I turned away from her. 

" 'You would leave me for Armand if he beckoned to you .... 

" 'Never . . : I said to her. 

" 'You would leave me, and he wants you as you want him. He’s 
been waiting for you. . . 

" 'Never. . . .’ I rose now and made my way to that chest. The 
doors were locked, but they would not keep those vampires out. Only 
we could keep them out by rising as early as the light would let us. I 
turned to her and told her to come. And she was at my side. I wanted 
to bury my face in her hair, I wanted to beg her forgiveness. Because, 
in truth, she was right; and yet I loved her, loved her as always. And 
now, as I drew her in close to me, she said 'Do you know what it was 
that he told me over and over without ever speaking a word; do you 
know what was the kernel of the trance he put me in so my eyes could 
only look at him, so that he pulled me as if my heart were on a string?' 

"'So you felt it. . : I whispered. 'So it was the same.' 

"'He rendered me powerless!' she said. I saw the image of her 
against those books above his desk, her limp neck, her dead hands. 

" 'But what are you saying? That he spoke to you, that he . . .’ 

" 'Without words!’ she repeated. I could see the gaslights going dim, 
the candle flames too solid in their stillness. The rain beat on the 


191 



panes. 'Do you know what he said . . . that I should die!’ she 
whispered. 'That I should let you go.' 

" I shook my head, and yet in my monstrous heart I felt a surge of 
excitement. She spoke the truth as she believed it. There was a film in 
her eyes, glassy and silver. 'He draws life out of me into himself,' she 
said, her lovely lips trembling so, I couldn't bear it. I held her tight, 
but the tears stood in her eyes. 'Life out of the boy who is his slave, life 
out of me whom he would make his slave. He loves you. He loves 
you. He would have you, and he would not have me stand in the way.' 

" 'You don’t understand him!’ I fought it, kissing her; I wanted to 
shower her with kisses, her cheek, her lips. 

" 'No, I understand him only too well,’ she whispered to my lips, 
even as they kissed her. 'It is you who don’t understand him. Love's 
blinded you, your fascination with his knowledge, his power. If you 
knew how he drinks death you'd hate him more than you ever hated 
Lestat. Louis, you must never return to him. I tell you, I'm in danger!' 

t! 

" Early the next night, I left her, convinced that Armand alone 
among the vampires of the theater could be trusted. She let me go 
reluctantly, and I was troubled, deeply, by the expression in her eyes. 
Weakness was unknown to her, and yet I saw fear and something 
beaten even now as she let me go. And I hurried on my mission, 
waiting outside the theater until the last of the patrons had gone and 
the doormen were tending to the locks. 

" What they thought I was, I wasn't certain. An actor, like the others, 
who did not take off his paint? It didn't matter. What mattered was 
that they let me through, and I passed them and the few vampires in 
the ballroom, unaccosted, to stand at last at Armand's open door. He 
saw me immediately, no doubt had heard my step a long way off, and 
he welcomed me at once and asked me to sit down. He was busy with 
his human boy, who was dining at the desk on a silver plate of meats 
and fish. A decanter of white wine stood next to him, and though he 
was feverish and weak from last night, his skin was florid and his heat 
and fragrance were a torment to me. Tot apparently to Armand, who 
sat in the leather chair by the fire opposite me, turned to the human, 
his arms folded on the leather arm. The boy filled his glass and held it 
up now in a salute. 'My master,' he said, his eyes flashing on me as he 
smiled; but the toast was to Armand. 

" 'Your slave,’ Armand whispered with a deep intake of breath that 
was passionate. And he watched, as the boy drank deeply. I could see 
him savoring the wet lips, the mobile flesh of the throat as the wine 
went down. And now the boy took a morsel of white meat, making 


192 



that same salute, and consumed it slowly, his eyes fixed on Armand. It 
was as though Armand feasted upon the feast, drinking in that part of 
life which he could not share any longer except with his eyes. And lost 
though he seemed to it, it was calculated; not that torture I'd felt years 
ago when I stood outside Babette's window longing for her human life. 

" When the boy had finished, he knelt with his arms around 
Armand's neck as if he actually savored the icy flesh. And I could 
remember the night Lestat first came to me, how his eyes seemed to 
burn, how his white face gleamed. You know what I am to you now. 

" Finally, it was finished. He was to sleep, and Armand locked the 
brass gates against him. And in minutes, heavy with his meal, he was 
dozing, and Armand sat opposite me, his large, beautiful eyes tranquil 
and seemingly innocent. When I felt them pull me towards him, I 
dropped my eyes, wished for a fire in the grate, but there were only 
ashes. 

" 'You told me to say nothing of my origin, why was this?’ I asked, 
looking up at him. It was as if he could sense my holding back, yet 
wasn't offended, only regarding me with a slight wonder. But I was 
weak, too weak for his wonder, and again I looked away from him. 

" 'Did you kill this vampire who made you? Is that why you are here 
without him, why you won’t say his name? Santiago thinks that you 
did.’ 

" 'And if this is true, or if we can’t convince you otherwise, you 
would try to destroy us?' I asked. 

" 'I would not try to do anything to you,' he said, calmly. 'But as I 
told you, I am not the leader here in the sense that you asked.’ 

" 'Yet they believe you to be the leader, don’t they? And Santiago, 
you shoved him away from me twice.' 

" 'I'm more powerful than Santiago, older. Santiago is younger than 
you are,' he said. His voice was simple, devoid of pride. These were 
facts. 

" 'We want no quarrel with you.' 

"'It's begun,'he said. 'But not with me. With those above.' 

" 'But what reason has he to suspect us?’ 

" He seemed to be thinking now, his eyes cast down, his chin resting 
on his closed fist. After a while which seemed interminable, he looked 
up. 'I could give you reasons,' he said. 'That you are too silent. That 
the vampires of the world are a small number and live in terror of 
strife amongst themselves and choose their fledglings with great care, 
making certain that they respect the other vampires mightily. There 
are fifteen vampires in this house, and the number is jealously 
guarded. And weak vampires are feared; I should say this also. That 


193 



you are flawed is obvious to them: you feel too much, you think too 
much. As you said yourself, vampire detachment is not of great value 
to you. And then there is this mysterious child: a child who can never 
grow, never be self-sufficient. I would not make a vampire of that boy 
there now if his life, which is so precious to me, were in serious 
danger, because he is too young, his limbs not strong enough, his 
mortal cup barely tasted: yet you bring with you this child. What 
manner of vampire made her, they ask; did you make her? So, you see, 
you bring with you these flaws and this mystery and yet you are 
completely silent. And so you cannot be trusted. And Santiago looks 
for an excuse. But there is another reason closer to the truth than all 
those things which I've just said to you. And that is simply this: that 
when you first encountered Santiago in the Latin Quarter you . . . 
unfortunately . . . called him a buffoon.' 

" 'Aaaaah.' I sat back. 

" 'It would perhaps have been better all around if you had said 
nothing.' And he smiled to see that I understood with him the irony 
of this. 

" I sat reflecting upon what he'd said, and what weighed as heavily 
upon me through all of it were Claudia's strange admonitions, that 
this gentle-eyed young man had said to her, 'Die,' and beyond that my 
slowly accumulating disgust with the vampires in the ballroom above. 

" I felt an overwhelming desire to speak to him of these things. Of 
her fear, no, not yet, though I couldn't believe when I looked into his 
eyes that he'd tried to wield this power over her: his eyes said, Live. 

His eyes said, Learn. And oh, how much I wanted to confide to him 
the breadth of what I didn't understand; how, searching all these years, 
I'd been astonished to discover those vampires above had made of 
immortality a club of fads and cheap conformity. And yet through 
this sadness, this confusion, came the clear realization: Why should it 
be otherwise? What had I expected? What right had I to be so bitterly 
disappointed in Lestat that I would let him diet Because he wouldn't 
show me what I must find in myself? Armand's words, what had they 
been? The only power that exists is inside ourselves .... 

" 'Listen to me,' he said now. 'You must stay away from them. Your 
face hides nothing. You would yield to me now were I to question 
you. Look into my eyes’ 

" I didn't do this. I fined my eyes firmly on one of those small 
paintings above his desk until it ceased to be the Madonna and Child 
and became a harmony of line and color. Because I knew what he was 
saying to me was true. 


194 



" 'Stop them if you will, advise them that we don’t mean any harm. 
Why can’t you do this? You say yourself we’re not your enemies, no 
matter what we’ve done. . . 

" I could hear him sigh, faintly. 'I have stopped them for the time 
being,’ he said. 'But I don’t want such power over them as would be 
necessary to stop them entirely. Because if I exercise such power, then 
I must protect it. I will make enemies. And I would have forever to 
deal with my enemies when all I want here as a certain space, a certain 
peace. Or not to be here at all. I accept the scepter of sorts they've 
given me, but not to rule over them, only to keep them at a distance.' 

" 'I should have known,’ I said, my eyes still fired on that painting. 

" 'Then, you must stay away. Celeste has a great deal of power, being 
one of the oldest, and she is jealous of the child's beauty. And 
Santiago, as you can see, is only waiting for a shred of proof that you're 
outlaws.' 

" I turned slowly and looked at him again where he sat with that eerie 
vampire stillness, as if he were in fact not alive at all. The moment 
lengthened. I heard his words just as if he were speaking them again: 
'All I want here is a certain space, a certain peace. (r)r not to be here at 
all.’ And I felt a longing for him so strong that it took all my strength 
to contain it, merely to sit there gazing at him, fighting it. I wanted it 
to be this way: Claudia safe amongst these vampires somehow, guilty 
of no crime they might ever discover from her or anyone else, so that I 
might be free, free to remain forever in this cell as long as I could be 
welcome, even tolerated, allowed here on any condition whatsoever. 

" I could see that mortal boy again as if he were not asleep on the bed 
but kneeling at Armand’s side with his arms around Armand’s neck. It 
was an icon for me of love. The love I felt. Not physical love, you 
must understand. I don’t speak of that at all, though Armand was 
beautiful and simple, and no intimacy with him would ever have been 
repellent. For vampires, physical love culminates and is satisfied in 
one thing, the kill. I speak of another kind of love which drew me to 
him completely as the teacher which Lestat had never been. 

Knowledge would never be withheld by Armand, I knew it. I would 
pass through him as through a pane of glass so that I might bask in it 
and absorb it and grow. I shut my eyes. And I thought I heard him 
speak, so faintly I wasn't certain. It seemed he said, 'Bo you know why 
I am here?’ 

" I looked up at him again, wondering if he knew my thoughts, could 
actually read them, if such could conceivably be the extent of that 
power. Now after all these years I could forgive Lestat for being 
nothing but an ordinary creature who could riot show me the uses of 


195 



my powers; and yet I still longed for this, could fall into it without 
resistance. A sadness pervaded it all, sadness for my own weakness 
and my own awful dilemma. Claudia waited for me. Claudia, who 
was my daughter and my love. 

" 'What am I to do?' I whispered. 'Go away from them, go away 
from you? After all these years . . 

" 'They don't matter to you,' he said 

" I smiled and nodded. 

" 'What is it you want to do?' he asked. And his voice assumed the 
most gentle, sympathetic tone. 

" 'Don't you know, don't you have that power?' I asked. 'Can't you 
read my thoughts as if they were words?' 

" He shook his head. 'Not the way you mean. I only know the 
danger to you and the child is real because it's real to you. And I know 
your loneliness even with her love is almost more terrible than you can 
bear.' 

" I stood up then. It would seem a simple thing to do, to rise, to go 
to the door, to hurry quickly down that passage; and yet it took every 
ounce of strength, every smattering of that curious thing I've called my 
detachment. 

" 'I ask you to keep them away from us,' I said at the door; but I 
couldn't look back at him, didn't even want the soft intrusion of his 
voice. 

" 'Don't go,' he said. 

" 'I have no choice.' 

" I was in the passage when I heard him so close to me that I started. 
He stood beside me, eye level with my eye, and in his hand he held a 
key which he pressed into mine. 

" 'There is a door there,' he said, gesturing to the dark end, which I'd 
thought to be merely a wall. 'And a stairs to the side street which no 
one uses but myself. Go this way now, so you can avoid the others. 
You are anxious and they will see it’ I turned around to go at once, 
though every part of my being wanted to remain there. 'But let me tell 
you this,' he said, and lightly he pressed the back of his hand against 
my heart. 'Use the power inside you. Don't abhor it anymore. Use 
that power! And when they see you in the streets above, use that 
power to make your face a mask and think as you gaze on them as on 
anyone: beware. Take that word as if it were an amulet rd given you to 
wear about your neck. And when your eyes meet Santiago's eyes, or 
the eyes of any other vampire, speak to them politely what you will, 
but think of that word and that word only. Remember what I say. I 


196 



speak to you simply because you respect what is simple. You 
understand this. That's your strength.' 

" I took the key from him, and I don't remember actually putting it 
into the lock or going up the steps. Or where he was or what he'd 
done. Except that, as I was stepping into the dark side street behind 
the theater, I heard ham say very softly to me from someplace close to 
me: 'Come here, to me, when you can.' I looked around for him but 
was not surprised that I couldn't see him. He had told me also 
sometime or other that I must not leave the Hotel Saint-Gabriel, that I 
must not give the others the shred of evidence of guilt they wanted. 
'You see,' he said, 'killing other vampires is very exciting; that is why it 
is forbidden under penalty of death.’ 

" And . then I seemed to awake. To the Paris street sharing with 
rain, to the tall, narrow buildings on either side of me, to the fact that 
the door had shut to make a solid dark wall behind me and that 
Armand was no longer there. 

" And though I knew Claudia waited for me, though I passed her in 
the hotel window above the gas lamps, a tiny figure standing among 
waxen petaled flowers, I moved away from the boulevard, letting the 
darker streets swallow me, as so often the streets of New Orleans had 
done. 

" It was not that I did not love her; rather, it was that I knew I loved 
her only too well, that the passion for her was as great as the passion 
for Armand. And I fled them both now, letting the desire for the kill 
rise in me like a welcome fever, threatening consciousness, threatening 
pain. 

" Out of the mist which had followed the rain, a man was walking 
towards me. I can remember him as roaming on the landscape of a 
dream, because the night around me was dark and unreal. The hill 
might have been anywhere in the world, and the soft lights of Paris 
were an amorphous shimmering in the fog. And sharp-eyed and 
drunk, he was walking blindly into the arms of death itself, his pulsing 
fingers reaching out to touch the very bones of my face. 

" I was not crazed yet, not desperate. I might have said to him, 'Pass 
by.' I believe my lips did form the word Armand had given me, 
'Beware.' Yet I let him slip his bold, drunken arm around my waist; I 
yielded to his adoring eyes, to the voice that begged to paint me now 
and spoke of warmth, to the rich, sweet smell of the oils that streaked 
his loose shirt. I was following him, through Montmartre, and I 
whispered to him, 'You are not a member of the dead.’ He was leading 
me through an overgrown garden, through the sweet, wet grasses, and 
he was laughing as I said, 'Alive, alive,' his hand touching my cheek, 


197 



stroking my face, clasping finally my chin as he guided me into the 
light of the low doorway, his reddened face brilliantly illuminated by 
the oil lamps, the warmth seeping about, us as the door closed. 

" I saw the great sparkling orbs of his eyes, the tiny red veins that 
reached for the dark centers, that warm hand burning my cold hunger 
as he guided me to a chair. And then all around me I saw faces 
blazing, faces rising in the smoke of the lamps, in the shimmer of the 
burning stove, a wonderland of colors on canvases surrounding us 
beneath the small, sloped roof, a blaze of beauty that pulsed and 
throbbed. 'Sit down, sit down . . ’ he said to me, those feverish hands 
against my chest, clasped by my hands, yet sliding away, my hunger 
rising in waves. 

" And now I saw him at a distance, eyes intent, the palette in his 
hand, the huge canvas obscuring the arm that moved. And mindless 
and helpless, I sat there drifting with his paintings, drifting with those 
adoring eyes, letting it go on and on till Arm and's eyes were gone and 
Claudia was running down that stone passage with clicking heels away 
from me, away from me. 

" 'You are alive . . : I whispered. 'Bones,' he answered me. 'Bones . 

. .' And I saw them in heaps, taken from those shallow graves in New 
Orleans as they are and put in chambers behind the sepulcher so that 
another can be laid in that narrow plot. I felt my eyes close; I felt my 
hunger become agony, my heart crying out for a living heart; and then 
I felt him moving forward, hands out to right my face-that fatal step, 
that fatal lurch. A sigh escaped my lips. 'Save yourself,’ I whispered to 
him. 'Beware.' 

" And then something happened in the moist radiance of his face, 
something drained the broken vessels of his fragile skin. He backed 
away from me, the . brush falling from ills hands. And I rose over 
him, feeling my teeth against my lip, feeling my eyes fill with the colors 
of his face, my ears fill with his struggling cry, my hands fill with that 
strong, fighting flesh until I drew him up to me, helpless, and tore that 
flesh and had the blood that gave it life. 'Die,' I whispered when I held 
him loose now, his head bowed against my coat, 'die,' and felt him 
struggle to look up at. me. And again I drank and again he fought, 
until at last he slipped, limp and shocked and near to death, on the 
floor. Yet his eyes did not close. 

" I settled before his canvas, weak, at peace, gazing down at him, at 
his vague, graying eyes, my own hands florid, my skin so luxuriously 
warm. 'I am mortal again,' I whispered to him. 'I am alive. With 
your blood I am alive.’ His eyes closed. I sank back against the wall 
and found myself gazing at my own face. 


198 



" A sketch was all he'd done, a series of bold black lines that 
nevertheless made up my face and shoulders perfectly, and the color 
was already begun in dabs and splashes: the green of my eyes, the 
white of my cheek. But the horror, the horror of seeing my 
expression! For he had captured it perfectly, and there was nothing of 
horror in it. Those green eyes gazed at me from out of that loosely 
drawn shape with a mindless innocence, the expressionless wonder of 
that overpowering craving which he had not understood. Louis of a 
hundred years ago lost in listening to the sermon of the priest at Mass, 
lips parted and slack, hair careless, a hand curved in the lap and limp. 

A mortal Louis. I believe I was laughing, putting my hands to my face 
and laughing so that the tears nearly rose in my eyes; and when I took 
my fingers down, there was the stain of the tears, tinged with mortal 
blood. And already there was begun in me the tingling of the monster 
that had killed, and would kill again, who was gathering up the 
painting now and starting to flee with it from the small house. 

" When suddenly, up from the floor, the man rose with an animal 
groan and clutched at my boot, his hands sliding off the leather. With 
some colossal spirit that defied me, he reached up for the painting and 
held fast to it with his whitening hands. 'Give it back!' he growled at 
me. 'Give it back!’ And we held fast, the two of us, I staring at him 
and at my own hands that held so easily what he sought so desperately 
to rescue, as if he would take it to heaven or hell; I the thing that his 
blood could not make human, he the man that my evil had not 
overcome. And then, as if I were not myself, I tore the painting loose 
from him and, wrenching him up to my lips with one arm, gashed his 
throat in rage. 

" Entering the rooms of the Hotel Saint-Gabriel, I set the picture on 
the mantel above the fire and looked at it a long time. Claudia was 
somewhere in the rooms, and some other presence intruded, as 
though on one of the balconies above a woman or a man stood near, 
giving off an unmistakable personal perfume. I didn't know why I had 
taken the picture, why I'd fought for it so that it shamed me now 
worse than the death, and why I still held onto it at the marble mantel, 
my head bowed, my hands visibly trembling. And then slowly I turned 
my head. I wanted the rooms to take shape around me; I wanted the 
flowers, the velvet, the candles in their sconces. To be mortal and 
trivial and safe. And then, as if in a mist, I saw a woman there. 

" She was seated calmly at that lavish table where Claudia attended to 
her hair; and so still she sat, so utterly without fear, her green taffeta 
sleeves reflected in the tilted mirrors, her skirts reflected, that she was 
not one still woman but a gathering of women. Her dark-red hair was 


199 



parted in the middle and drawn back to her ears, though a dozen little 
ringlets escaped to make a frame for her pale face. And she was 
looking at me with two calm, violet eyes and a child's mouth that 
seemed almost obdurately soft, obdurately the cupid's bow unsullied 
by paint or personality; and the mouth smiled now and said, as those 
eyes seemed to fire: 'Yes, he’s as you said he would be, and I love him 
already. He's as you said.' She rose now, gently lifting that abundance 
of dark taffeta, and the three small mirrors emptied at once. 

" And utterly baffled and almost incapable of speech, I turned to see 
Claudia far off on the immense bed, her small face rigidly calm, 
though she clung to the silk curtain with a tight fist. 'Madeleine,' she 
said under her breath, 'Louis is shy.' And she watched with cold eyes 
as Madeleine only smiled when she said this and, drawing closer to me, 
put both of her hands to the lace fringe around her throat, moving it 
back so I could see the two small marks there. Then the smile died on 
her lips, and they became at once sullen and sensual as her eyes 
narrowed and she breathed the word, 'Drink.' 

" I turned away from her, my fist rising in a consternation for which 
I couldn't find words. But then Claudia had hold of that fist and was 
looking up at me with relentless eyes. 'Do it, Louis,’ she commanded. 
'Because I cannot do it.’ Her voice was painfully calm, all the emotion 
under the hard, measured tone. 'I haven't the size, I haven't the 
strength! You saw to that when you made me! Do it!' 

" I broke away from her, clutching my wrist as if she'd burned it. I 
could see the door, and it seemed to me the better part of wisdom to 
leave by it at once. I could feel Claudia's strength, her will, and the 
mortal woman's eyes seemed afire with that same will. But Claudia 
held me, not with a gentle pleading, a miserable coaxing that would 
have dissipated that power, making me feel pity for her as I gathered 
my own forces. She held me with the emotion her eyes had evinced 
even through her coldness and the way that she turned away from me 
now, almost as if she'd been instantly defeated. I did not understand 
the manner in which she sank back on the bed, her head bowed, her 
lips moving feverishly, her eyes rising only to scan the walls. I wanted 
to touch her and say to her that what she asked was impossible; I 
wanted to soothe that fire that seemed to be consuming her from 
within. 

" And the soft, mortal woman had settled into one of the velvet 
chairs by the fire, with the rustling and iridescence of her taffeta dress 
surrounding her like part of the mystery of her, of her dispassionate 
eyes which watched us now, the fever of her pale face. I remember 
turning to her, spurred on by that childish, pouting mouth set against 


200 



the fragile face. The vampire kiss had left no visible trace except the 
wound, no inalterable change on the pale pink flesh. 'How do we 
appear to you?' I asked, seeing her eyes on Claudia. She seemed 
excited by the diminutive beauty, the awful woman's-passion knotted 
in the small dimpled hands. 

" She broke her gaze and looked up at me. 'I ask you . . . how do 
we appear? Do you think us beautiful, magical, our white skin, our 
fierce eyes? (r)h, I remember perfectly what mortal vision was, the 
dimness of it, and how the vampire's beauty burned through that veil, 
so powerfully alluring, so utterly deceiving! Drink, you tell me. You 
haven't the vaguest conception under God of what you ask!' 

" But Claudia rose from the bed and came towards me. 'How dare 
you!' she whispered. 'How dare you make this decision for both of us! 
Do you know how I despise you! Do you know that I despise you with 
a passion that eats at me like a canker!’ Her small form trembled, her 
hands hovering over the pleated bodice of her yellow gown. 'Don't 
you look away from me! I am sick at heart with your looking away, 
with your suffering. You understand nothing. Your evil is that you 
cannot be evil, and I must suffer for it. I tell you, I will suffer no 
longer!' Her fingers bit into the flesh of my wrist; I twisted, stepping 
back from her, foundering in the face of the hatred, the rage rising like 
some dormant beast in her, looking out through her eyes. 'Snatching 
me from mortal hands like two grim monsters in a nightmare fairy 
tale, you idle, blind parents! Fathers!’ She spat the word. 'Let tears 
gather in your eyes. You haven't tears enough for what you've done to 
me. Six more mortal years, seven, eight. . I might have had that 
shape!' Her pointed finger flew at Madeleine, whose hands had risen 
to her face, whose eyes were clouded over. Her moan was almost 
Claudia's name. But Claudia did not hear her. 'Yes, that shape, I 
might have known what it was to walk at your side. Monsters! To give 
me immortality in this hopeless guise, this helpless form!' The tears 
stood in her eyes. The words had died away, drawn in, as it were, on 
her breast. 

" 'Now, you give her to met’ she said, her head bowing, her curls 
tumbling down to make a concealing veil. 'You give her to me. You 
do this, or you finish what you did to me that night in the hotel in 
New Orleans. I will not live with this hatred any longer, I will not live 
with this rage! I cannot. I will not abide it!' And tossing her hair, she 
put her hands to her ears as if to stop the sound of her own words, her 
breath, drawn in rapid gasps, the tears seeming to scald her cheeks. 

" I had sunk to my knees at her side, and my arms were outstretched 
as if to enfold her. Yet I dared not touch her, dared not even say her 


201 



name, lest my own pain break from me with the first syllable in a 
monstrous outpouring of hopelessly inarticulate cries. 'Oooh.' She 
shook her head now, squeezing the tears out onto her cheeks, her teeth 
clenched tight together. 'I love you still, that’s the torment of it. Lestat 
I never loved. But you! The measure of my hatred is that love. They 
are the same! Do you know now how much I hate you!’ She flashed at 
me through the red film that covered her eyes. 

" 'Yes,' I whispered. I bowed my head. But she was gone from me 
into the arms of Madeleine, who enfolded her desperately, as if she 
might protect Claudia from me-the irony of it, the pathetic irony- 
protect Claudia from herself. She ,was whispering to Claudia, 'Don't 
cry, don't cry?' her hands stroking Claudia's face and hair with a 
fierceness that would have bruised a human child. 

" But Claudia seemed lost against her breast suddenly, her eyes 
closed, her face smooth, as if all passion were drained away from her, 
her arm sliding up around Madeleine's neck, her head falling against 
the taffeta and lace. She lay still, the tears staining her cheeks, as if all 
this that had risen to the surface had left her weak and desperate for 
oblivion, as if the room around her, as if I, were not there. 

" And there they were together, a tender mortal crying unstintingly 
now, her warm arms holding what she could not possibly understand, 
this white and fierce and unnatural child thing she believed she loved. 
And if I had not felt for her, this mad and reckless woman flirting with 
the damned, if I had not felt all the sorrow for her I felt for my mortal 
self, I would have wrested the demon thing from her arms, held it tight 
to me, denying over and over the words I'd just heard. But I knelt 
there still, thinking only, The love is equal to the hatred; gathering that 
selfishly to my own breast, holding onto that as I sank back against the 
bed. 

" A long time before Madeleine was to know it, Claudia had ceased 
crying and sat still as a statue on Madeleine's lap, her liquid eyes fixed 
on me, oblivious to the soft, red hair that fell around her or the 
woman's hand that still stroked her. And I sat slumped against the 
bedpost, staring back at those vampire eyes, unable and unwilling to 
speak in my defense. Madeleine was whispering into Claudia's ear, she 
was letting her tears fall into Claudia's tresses. And then gently, 
Claudia said to her, 'Leave us.' 

" 'No.' She shook her head, holding fight to Claudia. And then she 
shut her eyes and trembled all over with some terrible vexation, some 
awful torment. But Claudia was leading her from the chair, and she 
was now pliant and shocked and white-faced, the green taffeta 
ballooning around the' small yellow silk dress. 


202 



" In the archway of the parlor they stopped, and Madeleine stood as 
if confused, her hand at her throat, beating like a wing, then going still. 
She looked about her like that hapless victim on the stage of the 
Theatre des Vampires who did not know where she was. But Claudia 
had gone for something. And I saw her emerge from the shadows with 
what appeared to be a large doll. I rose on my knees to look at it. It 
was a doll, the doll of a little girl with raven hair and green eyes, 
adorned with lace and ribbons, sweet-faced and wide-eyed, its 
porcelain feet tinkling as Claudia put it into Madeleine's arms. And 
Madeleine's eyes appeared to harden as she held the doll, and her Lips 
drew back from her teeth in a grimace as she stroked its hair. She was 
laughing low under her breath. 'Lie down,' Claudia said to her; and 
together they appeared to sink into the cushions of the couch, the 
green taffeta rustling and giving way as Claudia lay with her and put 
her arms around her neck. I saw the doll sliding, dropping to the 
floor, yet Madeleine's hand moped for it and held it dangling, her own 
head thrown back, her eyes shut tight, and Claudia's curls stroking her 
face. 

" I settled back on the floor and leaned against the soft siding of the 
bed. Claudia was speaking now in a low voice, barely above a whisper, 
telling Madeleine to be patient, to be still, I dreaded the sound of her 
step on the carpet; the sound of the doors sliding closed to shut 
Madeleine away from us, and the hatred that lay between us like a 
killing vapor. 

" But when I looked up to her, Claudia was standing there as if 
transfixed and lost in thought, all rancor and bitterness gone from her 
face, so that she had the blank expression of that doll. 

" 'All you've said to me is true,' I said to her. 'I deserve your hatred. 
I’ve deserved it from those first moments when Lestat put you in my 
arms.' 

" She seemed unaware of me, and her eyes were infused with a soft 
light. Her beauty burned into my soul so that I could hardly stand it, 
and then she said, wondering, 'You could have killed me then, despite 
him. You could have done it.’ Then her eyes rested on me calmly. 

'Do you wish to do it now?' 

" 'Do it now!' I put my arm around her, moved her close to me, 
warmed by her softened voice. 'Are you mad, to say such things to 
me? Do I want to do it now! 

" 'I want you to do it,’ she said. 'Bend down now as you did then, 
draw the blood out of me drop by drop, all you have the strength for; 
push my heart to the brink. I am small, you can take me. I won’t 
resist you, I am something frail you can crush like a flower.’ 


203 



" 'You mean these things? You mean what you say to me?' I asked. 
'Why don't you place the knife here, why don't you turn it?' 

" 'Would you die with me?' she asked, with a sly, mocking smile. 
'Would you in fact die with me?' she pressed. 'Don't you understand 
what is happening to me? That he's killing me, that master vampire 
who has you in thrall, that he won't share your love with me, not a 
drop of it? I see his power in your eyes. I sea your misery, your 
distress, the love for him you can't hide. Turn around, I'll make you 
look at me with those eyes that want him, I'll make you listen' 

" 'Don't anymore, don't... I won't leave you. I've sworn to you, 
don't you see? I cannot give you that woman' 

" 'But I’m fighting for my life! Give her to me so she can care for me, 
complete the guise I must have to live! And be can have you then! I 
am fighting for my life!’ 

" I all but shoved her off. 'No, no, it's madness, it's witchery,' I said, 
trying to defy her. 'It's you who will not share me with him, it's you 
who want every drop of that love. H not from me, from her. He 
overpowers you, he disregards you, and it's you who wish him dead 
the way that you killed Lestat. Well, you won't make me a party to this 
death, I tell you, not this death! I will not make her one of us, I will 
not damn the legions of mortals who'll die at her hands if I dot Your 
power over me is broken. I will not!' 

" Oh, if she could only have understood! 

" Not for a moment could I truly believe her words against Armand, 
that out of that detachment which was beyond revenge he could 
selfishly wish for her death. But that was nothing to me now; 
something far more terrible than I could grasp was happening, 
something I was only beginning to understand, against which my 
anger was nothing but a mockery, a hollow attempt to oppose her 
tenacious will. She hated me, she loathed me, as she herself had 
confessed, and my heart shriveled inside me, as if, in depriving me of 
that love which 'had sustained me a lifetime, she had dealt me a mortal 
blow. The knife was there. I was dying for her, dying for that love as I 
was that very first night when Lestat gave her to me, turned her eyes to 
me, and told her my name; that love which had warmed me in my self- 
hatred, allowed me to exist. Oh, how Lestat had understood it, and 
now at last his plan was undone. 

" But it went beyond that, in some region from which I was 
shrinking as I strode back and forth, back and forth, my hands 
opening and closing at my sides, feeling not only that hatred in her 
liquid eyes: It was her pain. She had shown me her pain! To give me 
immortality in this hopeless guise, this helpless form. I put my hands 


204 



to my ears, as if she spoke the words yet, and the tears flowed. For all 
these years I had depended utterly upon her cruelty, her absolute lack 
of pain! And pain was what she showed to me, undeniable pain. Oh, 
how Lestat would have laughed at us. That was why she had put the 
knife to him, because he would have laughed. To destroy me utterly 
she need only show me that pain. The child I made a vampire 
suffered. Tier agony was as my own. 

" There was a coffin in that other room, a bed for Madeleine, to 
which Claudia retreated to leave me alone with what I could not abide. 
I welcomed the silence. And sometime during the few hours that 
remained of the night I found myself at the open window, feeling the 
slow mist of the rain. It glistened on the fronds of the ferns, on sweet 
white flowers that listed, bowed, and finally broke from their stems. A 
carpet of flowers littering the little balcony, the petals pounded softly 
by the rain. I felt weak now, and utterly alone. What had passed 
between us tonight could never be undone, and what had been done to 
Claudia by me could never be undone. 

" But I was somehow, to my own bewilderment, empty of all regret. 
Perhaps it was the night, the starless sky, the gas lamps frozen in the 
mist that gave some strange comfort for which I never asked and 
didn't know how, in this emptiness and aloneness, to receive. I am 
alone, I was thinking. I am alone. It seemed dust, perfectly, and so to 
have a pleasing, inevitable form. And I pictured myself then forever 
alone, as if on gaining that vampire strength the night of my death I 
had left Lestat and never looked back for him, as I had moved on away 
from him, beyond the need of him and anyone else. As if the might 
had said to me, 'You are the night and the night alone understands 
you and enfolds you in its arms.' One with the shadows. Without 
nightmare. An inexplicable peace. 

" Yet I could feel, the end of this peace as surely as td felt my brief 
surrender to it, and it was breaking like the dark clouds. The urgent 
pain of Claudia's loss pressed in on me, behind me, like a shape 
gathered from the corners of this cluttered and oddly alien room. But 
outside, even as the night seemed to dissolve in a fierce driving wind, I 
could feel something calling to me, something inanimate which I'd 
never known. And a power within me seemed to answer that power, 
not with resistance but with an inscrutable, chilling strength. 

" I moved silently through the rooms, gently dividing the doors until 
I saw, in the dim light cast by the flickering gas flames behind me, that 
sleeping woman lying in my shadow on the couch, the doll limp 
against her breast. Sometime before I knelt at her side I saw her eyes 


205 



open, and I could feel beyond her in the collected dark those other 
eyes watching me, that breathless tiny vampire face waiting. 

" 'Will you care for her, Madeleine?' I saw her hands clutch at the 
doll, turning its face against her breast. And my own hand went out 
for it, though I did not know why, even as .she was answering me. 

" 'Yes!' She repeated it again desperately. 

" 'Is this what you believe her to be, a doll?’ I asked her, my hand 
closing on the doll's head, only to feel her snatch it away from me, see 
her teeth clenched as she glared at me. 

" 'A child who can’t die! That’s what she is,’ she said, as if she were 
pronouncing a curse. 

" 'Aaaaah . . .’ I whispered. 

" 'I’ve done with dolls,' she said, shoving it away from her into the 
cushions of the couch. She was fumbling with something on her 
breast, something she wanted me to see and not to see, her fingers 
catching hold of it and closing over it. I mew what it was, had noticed 
it before. A locket fixed with a gold pin. I wish I could describe the 
passion that infected her round features, how her soft baby mouth was 
distorted. 

" 'And the child who did die?’ I guessed, watching her. I was 
picturing a doll shop, dolls with the same face. She shook her head, 
her hand pulling hard on the locket so the pin ripped the taffeta. It 
was fear I saw in her now, a consuming panic: And her hand bled as 
she opened it from the broken pin. I took the locket from her fingers. 
'My daughter,' she whispered, her lip trembling. 

" It was a doll's face on the small fragment of porcelain, Claudia's 
face, a baby face, a saccharine, sweet mockery of innocence an artist 
had painted there, a child with raven hair like the doll. And the 
mother, terrified, was staring at the darkness an front of her. 

"'Grief. . .’ I said gently. 

" 'I've done with grief,' she said, her eyes narrowing as .she looked up 
at me. 'If you knew how I long to have your power; I’m ready for it, I 
hunger for it.’ And she turned to me, breathing deeply, so that her 
breast seemed to swell under her dress. 

" A violent frustration rent her face then. She turned away from me, 
shaking her head, her curls. 'If you were a mortal man; man and 
monster!' she said angrily. 'If I could only show you my power . . : 
and she smiled malignantly, defiantly at me'. . . I could make you 
want me, desire me! But you're unnatural!’ Her mouth went down at 
the corners. 'What can I give you! What can I do to make you give 
me what you have!' Her hand hovered over her breasts, seeming to 
caress them like a man's hand. 


206 



" It was strange, that moment; strange because I could never have 
predicted the feeling her words incited in me, the way that I saw her 
now with that small enticing waist, saw the round, plump curve of her 
breasts and those delicate, pouting lips. She never dreamed what the 
mortal man in me was, how tormented I was by the blood I'd only just 
drunk. Desire her I did, more than she knew; because she didn't 
understand the nature of the kill. And with a man's pride I wanted to 
prove that to her, to humiliate her for what she had said to me, for the 
cheap vanity of her provocation and the eyes that looked away from 
me now in disgust. But this was madness. These were not the reasons 
to grant eternal life. 

" And cruelly, surely, I said to her, 'Did you love this child?' 

" I will never forget her face then, the violence in her, the absolute 
hatred. 'Yes.' She all but hissed the words at me. 'How dare you!' 

She reached for the locket even as I clutched it. It was guilt that was 
consuming her, not love. It was guilt-that shop of dolls Claudia had 
described to me, shelves and shelves of the effigy of that dead child. 

But guilt that absolutely understood the finality of death. There was 
something as hard in her as the evil in myself, something as powerful. 
She had her hand out towards me. She touched my waistcoat and 
opened her fingers there, pressing them against my chest. And I was 
on my knees, drawing close to her, her hair brushing my face. 

" 'Hold fast to me when I take you,’ I said to her, seeing her eyes 
grow wide, her mouth open. 'And when the swoon is strongest, listen 
all the harder for the beating of my heart. Hold and say over and over, 
" I will live. " ’ 

" 'Yes, yes,' she was nodding, her heart pounding with her 
excitement. 

" Her hands burned on my neck, fingers forcing their way into my 
collar. 'Look beyond me at that distant light; don’t take your eyes off 
of it, not for a second, and say over and over," I will live. 

" She gasped as I broke the flesh, the warm current coming into me, 
her breasts crushed against me, her body arching up, helpless, from the 
couch. And I could see her eyes, even as I shut my own, see that 
taunting, provocative mouth. I was drawing on her, hard, lifting her, 
and I could feel her weakening, her hands dropping limp at her sides. 
'Tight, tight,’ I whispered over the hot stream of. her blood, her heart 
thundering in my ears, her blood swelling my satiated veins. 'The 
lamp,’ I whispered, ’look at it!’ Her heart was slowing, stopping, and 
her head dropped back from me on the velvet, her eyes dull to the 
point of death. It seemed dying for her, dying for that love as I was 
that very first night when Lestat gave her to me, turned her eyes to me, 


207 



and told her my name; that love which had warmed me in my self- 
hatred, allowed me to exist. Oh, how Lestat had understood it, and 
now at last his plan was undone. 

" But it went beyond that, in some region from which I was 
shrinking as I strode back and forth, back and forth, my hands 
opening and closing at my silos, feeling not only that hatred in her 
liquid eyes: It was her pain. She had shown me her pain! To give me 
immortality in this hopeless guise, this helpless form. I put my hands 
to my ears, as if she spoke the words yet, and the tears flowed. For all 
these years I had depended utterly upon her cruelty, her absolute lack 
of pain! And pain was what she showed to me, undeniable pain. Oh, 
how Lestat would have laughed at us. That was why she had put the 
knife to him, because he would have laughed. To destroy me utterly 
she need only show me that pain. The child I made a vampire 
suffered. Her agony was as my own. 

" There was a coffin in that other room, a bed for Madeleine, to 
which Claudia retreated to leave me alone with what I could not abide. 
I welcomed the silence. And sometime during the few hours that 
remained of the night I found myself at the open window, feeling the 
slow mist of the rain. It glistened on the fronds of the ferns, on sweet 
white flowers that listed, bowed, and finally broke from their stems. A 
carpet of flowers littering the little balcony, the petals pounded softly 
by the rain. I felt weak now, and utterly alone. What had passed 
between us tonight could never he undone, and what had been done 
to Claudia by me could never be undone. 

" But I was somehow, to my own bewilderment, empty of all regret. 
Perhaps it was the night, the starless sky, the gas lamps frozen in the 
mist that gave some strange comfort for which I never asked and 
didn't know how, in this emptiness and aloneness, to receive. I am 
alone, I was thinking. I am alone. It seemed dust, perfectly, and so to 
have a pleasing, inevitable form. And I pictured myself then forever 
alone, as if on gaining that vampire strength the night of my death I 
had left Lestat and never looked back for him, as if I had moved on 
away from him, beyond the need of him and anyone else. As if the 
night had said to me, 'You are the night and the night alone 
understands you and enfolds you in its arms.' One with the shadow. 
Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace. 

" Yet I could feel, the end of this peace as surely as I'd felt my brief 
surrender to it, and it was breaking like the dark clouds. The urgent 
pain of Claudia's loss pressed in on me, behind me, like a shape 
gathered from the corners of this cluttered and oddly alien room. But 
outside, even as the night seemed to dissolve in a fierce driving wind, I 


208 



could feel something calling to me, something inanimate which rd 
never known. And a power within me seemed to answer that power, 
not with resistance but with an inscrutable, chilling strength. 

" I moved silently through the rooms, gently dividing the doors until 
I saw, in the dim light cast by the flickering gas flames behind me, that 
sleeping woman lying in my shadow on the couch, the doll lung 
against her breast. Sometime before I knelt at her side I saw her eyes 
open, and I could feel beyond her in the collected dark those other 
eyes watching me, that breathless tiny vampire face waiting. 

" 'Will you care for her, Madeleine?' I saw her hands clutch at the 
doll, turning its face against her breast. And my own hand went out 
for it, though I did not know why, even as she was answering me. 

" 'Yes!' She repeated it again desperately. 

" 'Is this what you believe her to be, a doll?’ I asked her, my hand 
closing on the doll's head, only to feel her snatch it away from me, see 
her teeth clenched as she glared at me. 

" 'A child who can’t die! That's what she is,' she said, as if she were 
pronouncing a curse. 

" 'Aaaaah . . .' I whispered. 

" 'I've done with dolls,' she said, shoving it away from her into the 
cushions of the couch. She was fumbling with something on her 
breast, something she wanted me to see and not to see, her fingers 
catching hold of it and closing over it. I knew what it was, had noticed 
it before. A locket fixed with a gold pin. I wish I could describe the 
passion that infected her round features, how her soft baby mouth was 
distorted. 

" 'And the .child who did die?' I guessed, watching her. I was 
picturing a doll shop, dolls with the same face. She shook her head, 
her hand pulling hard on the locket so the pin ripped the taffeta. It 
was fear I saw in her now, a consuming panic: And her hand bled as 
she opened it from the broken pin. I took the locket from her fingers. 
'My daughter,' she whispered, her lip trembling. 

" It was a doll's face on the small fragment of porcelain, Claudia's 
face, a baby face, a saccharine, sweet mockery of innocence an artist 
had painted there, a child with raven hair like the doll. And the 
mother, terrified, was staring at the darkness in front of her. 

"'Grief. . .’ I said gently. 

" 'I've done with grief,' she said, her eyes narrowing as -she looked up 
at me. 'If you knew how I long to have your power; I’m ready for it, I 
hunger for it’ And she turned to me, breathing deeply, so that her 
breast seemed to swell under her dress. 


209 



" A violent frustration sent her face then. She turned away from me, 
shaking her head, her curls. 'If you were a mortal man; man tend 
monster!' she said angrily. 'If I could only show you my power . . : 
and she smiled malignantly, defiantly at me'. . . I could make you 
want me, desire me! But you're unnatural!' Her mouth went down at 
the corners, 'what can I give you! What can I do to make you give me 
what you have!’ Her hand hovered over her breasts, seeming to caress 
them like a man’s hand. 

" It was strange, that moment; strange because I could never have 
predicted the feeling her words incited in me, the way that I saw her 
now with that small enticing waist, saw the round, plump curve of her 
breasts and those delicate, pouting lips. She never dreamed what the 
mortal man in me was, how tormented I was by the blood I'd only just 
drunk. Desire her I did, more than she knew; because she didn't 
understand the nature of the kill. And with a man's pride I wanted to 
prove that to her, to humiliate her for what she had said to me, for the 
cheap vanity of her provocation and the eyes that looked away from 
me now in disgust. But this was madness. These were not the reasons 
to grant eternal life. 

" And cruelly, surely, I said to leer, 'Did you love this child?' 

" I will never forget her face then, the violence in her, the absolute 
hatred. 'Yes.' She all but hissed the words at me. 'How dare you!' 

She reached for the locket even as I clutched it. It was guilt that was 
consuming her, not love. It was guilt-that shop of dolls Claudia had 
described to me, shelves and shelves of the effigy of that dead child. 

But guilt that absolutely understood the finality of death. There was 
something as hard in her as the evil in myself, something as powerful. 
She had her hand out towards me. She touched my waistcoat and 
opened her fingers there, pressing them against my chest. And I was 
on my knees, drawing close to her, her hair brushing my face. 

" 'Hold fast to me when I take you,’ I said to her, seeing her eyes 
grow wide, her mouth open. 'And when the swoon is strongest, listen 
all the harder for the beating of my heart. Hold and say over and over, 
" I will live. " ’ 

" 'Yes, yes,' she was nodding, her heart pounding with her 
excitement. 

" Her hands burned on my neck, fingers forcing their way into my 
collar. 'Look beyond me at that distant light; don't take your eyes off 
of it, not for a second, and say over and over," I will live. 

" She gasped as I broke the flesh, the warn current coming into me, 
her breasts crushed against me, her body arching up, helpless, from the 
couch. And I could see her eyes, even as I shut my own, see that 


210 



taunting, provocative mouth. I was drawing on her, hard, lifting her, 
and I could feel her weakening, her hands dropping limp at her sides. 
'Tight, tight,’ I whispered over the hot stream of her blood, her heart 
thundering in my ears, her blood swelling my satiated veins. 'The 
lamp,’ I whispered, 'look at it!’ Her heart was slowing, stopping, and 
her head dropped back from me on the velvet, her eyes dull to the 
point of death. It seemed for a moment I couldn't move, yet I knew I 
had to, that someone else was lifting my wrist to my mouth as the 
room turned round and round, that I was focusing on that light as I 
had told her to do, as I tasted my own blood from my own wrist, and 
then forced it into her mouth. 'Drink it. Drink,’I said to her. But she 
lay as if dead. I gathered her close to me, the blood pouring over her 
lips. Then she opened her eyes, and I felt the gentle pressure of her 
mouth, and then her hands closing tight on the arm as she began to 
suck. I was rocking her, whispering to her, trying desperately to break 
my swoon; and then I felt her powerful pull. Every blood vessel felt it. 

I was threaded through and through with her pulling, my hand 
holding fast to the couch now, her heart beating fierce against my 
heart, her fingers digging deep into my arm, my outstretched palm. It 
was cutting me, scoring me, so I all but cried out as it went on and on, 
and I was hacking away from her, yet pulling her with me, my life 
passing through my arm, her moaning breath in time with her pulling. 
And those strings which were my veins, those searing wires pulled at 
my very heart harder and harder until, without will or direction, I had 
wrenched free of her and fallen away from her, clutching that bleeding 
wrist tight with my own hand. 

" She was staring at me, the blood staining her open mouth. An 
eternity seemed to pass as she stared. She doubled and tripled in my 
blurred vision, then collapsed into one trembling shape. , Her hand 
moved to her mouth, yet her eyes did not move but grew large in her 
face as she stared. And then she rose slowly, not as if by her own 
power but as if lifted from the couch bodily by some invisible force 
which held her now, staring as she turned round and round, her 
massive skirt moving stiff as if she were all of a piece, turning like some 
great calved ornament on a music box that dances helplessly round 
and round to the music. And suddenly she was staring down at the 
taffeta, grabbing hold of it, pressing it between her fingers so it zinged 
and rustled, and she let it fall, quickly covering her ears, her eyes shut 
tight, then opened wide again. And then it seemed she saw the lamp, 
the distant, low gas lamp of the other room that gave a fragile light 
through the double doors. And she ran to it and stood beside it, 
watching it as if it were alive. 'Don’t touch it. . Claudia said to her, 


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and gently guided her away. But Madeleine had seen the flowers on 
the balcony and she was drawing close to them now, her outstretched 
palms brushing the petals and then pressing the droplets of rain to her 
face. 

" I was hovering on the fringes of the room, watching her every 
move, how she took the flowers and crushed them in her hands and let 
the petals fall all around her and how she pressed her fingertips to the 
mirror and stared into her own eyes. My own pain had ceased, a 
handkerchief bound the wound, and I was waiting, waiting, seeing 
now that Claudia had no knowledge from memory of what was to 
come nest. They were dancing together, as Madeleine's skin grew 
paler and paler in the unsteady golden light. She scooped Claudia into 
her arms, and Claudia rode round in circles with her, her own small 
face alert and wary behind her smile. 

" And then Madeleine weakened. She stepped backwards and 
seemed to- lose her balance. But quickly she righted herself and let 
Claudia go gently down to the ground. On tiptoe, Claudia embraced 
her. 'Louis.' She signaled to me under her breath. 'Louis. . . 

" I beckoned for her to come away. And Madeleine, not seeming 
even to see us, was staring at her own outstretched hands. Her face 
was blanched and drawn, and suddenly she was scratching at her lips 
and staring at the dark stains on her fingertips. 'No, no!’ I cautioned 
her gently, taking Claudia's hand and holding her close to my side. A 
long moan escaped Madeleine's lips. 

" 'Louis,' Claudia whispered in that preternatural voice which 
Madeleine could not yet hear. 

" 'She is dying, which your child's mind can't remember. You were 
spared it, it left no mark on you,' I whispered to her, brushing the hair 
beak from her ear, my eyes never leaving Madeleine, who was 
wandering from mirror to mirror, the tears flowing freely now, the 
body giving up its life. 

" 'But, Louis, if she dies. . .’ Clauda cried. 

" 'No.' I knelt down, seeing the distress in her small face. 'The blood 
was strong enough, she will live. But she will be afraid, terribly afraid.’ 
And gently, firmly, I pressed Claudia's hand and kissed her cheek. She 
looked at me then with mingled wonder and fear. And she watched 
me with that same expression as I wandered closer to Madeleine, 
drawn by her cries. She reeled now, her hands out, and I caught her 
and held her close. Her eyes already burned with unnatural light, a 
violet ire reflected in her tears. 

" 'It's mortal death, only mortal death,' I said to her gently. 'Do you 
see the sky? We must leave it now and you must hold tight to me, lie 


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by my side. A sleep as heavy as death will come over my limbs, and I 
won't be able to solace you. And you will lie there and you will 
struggle with it. But you hold tight to. me in the darkness, do you 
hear? You hold tight to my hands, which will hold your hands as long 
as I have feeling.' 

" She seemed lost for the moment in my gaze, and I sensed the 
wonder that surrounded her, how the radiance of my eyes was the 
radiance of all colors and how all those colors were all the more 
reflected for her in my eyes. I guided her gently to the coffin, telling 
her again not to be afraid. 'When you arise, you will be immortal,' I 
said. 'No natural cause of death can harm you. Come, lie down.' I 
could see her fear of it, see her shrink from the narrow boa, its satin no 
comfort. Already her skin began to glisten, to have that brilliance that 
Claudia and I shared. I knew now she would not surrender until I lay 
with her. 

" I held her and looked across the long vista of the room to where 
Claudia stood, with that strange coffin, watching me. Her eyes were 
still but dark with an undefined suspicion, a cool distrust. I set 
Madeleine down beside her bed and moved towards those eyes. And, 
kneeling calmly beside her, I gathered Claudia in my arms. 'Don't you 
recognize me?' I asked her. 'Don't you know who I am?' 

" She looked at me. 'No.' she said. 

" I smiled. I nodded. 'Bear me no ill will,' I said. 'We are even . 1 

" At that she moved her head to one side and studied me carefully, 
then seemed to smile despite herself and to nod in assent. 

" 'For you see,' I said to her in that same calm voice, 'what died 
tonight an this room was not that woman. It will take her many nights 
to die, perhaps years. What has died in this room tonight is the last 
vestige is me of what was human' 

" A shadow fell over her face; clear, as if the composure were rent like 
a veil. And her lips parted, but only with a short intake of breath. 

Then she said, 'Well, then you are right. Indeed. We axe even. 

" 'I want to burn the doll shop!' 

" Madeleine told us this. She was feeding to the fire in the grate the 
folded dresses of that dead daughter, white lace and beige linen, 
crinkled shoes, bonnets that smelled of camphor balls and sachet. 'It 
means nothing now, any of it’ She stood back watching the fire blaze. 
And she looked at Claudia with triumphant, fiercely devoted eyes. 

" I did not believe her, so certain I was-even though night after night 
I had to lead her away from men and women she could no longer 
drain dry, so satiated was she with the blood of earlier kills, often 
lifting her victims off their feet in her passion, crushing their throats 


213 



with her ivory fingers as surely as she drank their blood-so certain I 
was that sooner or later this mad intensity must abate, and she would 
take hold of the trappings of this nightmare, her own luminescent 
flesh, these lavish rooms of the Hotel Saint-Gabriel, and cry out to be 
awakened; to be free. She did not understand it was no experiment; 
showing her fledgling teeth to the gilt-edged mirrors, she was mad. 

" But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to 
dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed 
reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding her spinning wheel with the 
reeds of the world so she might make her own weblike universe. 

" I was just beginning to understand her avarice, her magic. 

" She had a dollmaker's craft from making with her old lover over 
and over the replica of her dead child, which I was to understand 
crowded the shelves of this shop we were soon to visit. Added to that 
was a vampire's skill and a vampire's intensity, so that in the space of 
one night when I had turned her away from killing, she, with that 
same insatiable need, created out of a few sticks of wood, with her 
chisel and knife, a perfect rocking chair, so shaped and proportioned 
for Claudia that seated in it by the fire, she appeared a woman. To 
that must be added, as the nights passed, a table of the same scale; and 
from a toy shop a tiny oil lamp, a china cup and saucer; and from a 
lady's purse a little leather-bound book for notes which in Claudia's 
hands became a large volume. The world crumbled and ceased to exist 
at the boundary of the small space which soon became the length and 
breadth of Claudia's dressing room: a bed whose posters reached only 
to my breast buttons, and small mirrors that reflected only the legs of 
an unwieldy giant when I found myself lost among them; paintings 
hung low for Claudia's eye; and finally, upon her little vanity table, 
black evening gloves for tiny fingers, a woman's low-cut gown of 
midnight velvet, a tiara from a child's masked ball. And Claudia, the 
crowning jewel, a fairy queen with bare white shoulders wandering 
with her sleek tresses among the rich items of her tiny world while I 
watched from the doorway, spellbound, ungainly, stretched out on the 
carpet so I could lean my head on my elbow and gaze up into my 
paramour's eyes, seeing them mysteriously softened for the time being 
by the perfection of this sanctuary. How beautiful she was in black 
lace, a cold, flaxen-haired woman with a kewpie doll's face and liquid 
eyes which gazed at me so serenely and so long that, surely, I must 
have been forgotten; the eyes must be seeing something other than me 
as I lay there on the floor dreaming; something other than the clumsy 
universe surrounding me, which was now marked off and nullified by 
someone who had suffered in it, someone who had suffered always, 


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but who was not seeming to suffer now, listening as it were to the 
tinkling of a toy music box, putting a hand on the toy clock. I saw a 
vision of shortened hours and little golden minutes. I felt I was mad. 

" I put my hands under my head and gazed at the chandelier; it was 
hard to disengage myself from one world and enter the other. And 
Madeleine, on the couch, was working with that regular passion, as if 
immortality could not conceivably mean rest, sewing cream lace to 
lavender satin for the small bed, only stopping occasionally to blot the 
moisture tinged with blood from her white forehead. 

" I wondered, if I shut my eyes, would this realm of tiny things 
consume the rooms around me, and would I, like Gulliver, awake to 
discover myself bound hand and foot, an unwelcome giant? I had a 
vision of houses made for Claudia in whose garden mice would be 
monsters, and tiny carriages, and flowery shrubbery become trees. 
Mortals would be so entranced, and drop to their knees to look into 
the small windows. Like the spider's web, it would attract. 

" I was bound hand and foot here. Not only by that fairy beauty-that 
exquisite secret of Claudia's white shoulders and the rich luster of 
pearls, bewitching languor, a tiny bottle of perfume, now a decanter, 
from which a spell is released that promises Eden-I was bound by fear. 
That outside these rooms, where I supposedly presided over the 
education of Madeleine -erratic conversations about killing and 
vampire nature in which Claudia could have instructed so much more 
easily than I, if she had ever showed the desire to take the lead-that 
outside these rooms, where nightly I was reassured with soft kisses and 
contented looks that the hateful passion which Claudia had shown 
once and once only would not return that outside these rooms, I 
would find that I was, according to my own hasty admission, truly 
changed: the mortal part of me was that part which had loved, I was 
certain. So what did I feel then for Armand, the creature for whom I'd 
transformed Madeleine, the creature for whom I had wanted to be 
free? A curious and disturbing distance? A dull pain? A nameless 
tremor? Even in this worldly clutter, I saw Armand in his monkish 
cell, saw his dark-brown eyes, and felt that eerie magnetism. 

" And yet I did not move to go to him. I did not dare discover the 
extent of what I might have lost. Nor try to separate that loss from 
some other oppressive realization: that in Europe I'd found no truths 
to lessen loneliness, transform despair. Rather, I'd found only the 
inner workings of my own small soul, the pain of Claudia's, and a 
passion for a vampire who was perhaps more evil than Lestat, for 
whom I became as evil as Lestat, but in whom I saw the only promise 
of good in evil of which I could conceive. 


215 



" It was all beyond me, finally. And so the clock ticked on the 
mantel; and Madeleine begged to see the performances of the Theatres 
des Vampires and swore to defend Claudia against any vampire who 
dared insult her; and Claudia spoke of strategy and said, 'Not yet, not 
now,’ and I lay back observing with some measure of relief Madeleine's 
love for Claudia; her blind covetous passion. Oh, I have so little 
compassion in my heart or memory for Madeleine. I thought she had 
only seen the first vein of suffering, she had no understanding of 
death. She was so easily sharpened, so easily driven to wanton 
violence. I supposed in my colossal conceit and self-deception that my 
own grief for my dead brother was the only true emotion. I allowed 
myself to forget how totally I had fallen in love with Lestat's iridescent 
eyes, that I'd sold my soul for a many-colored and luminescent thing, 
thinking that a highly reflective surface conveyed the power to walk on 
water. 

" What would Christ need have done to make me follow him like 
Matthew or Peter? Dress well, to begin with. And have a luxurious 
head of pampered yellow hair. 

" I hated myself. And it seemed, lulled half to sleep as I was so often 
by their conversation-Claudia whispering of killing and speed and 
vampire craft, Madeleine bent over her singing needle-it seemed then 
the only emotion of which I was still capable: hatred of self. I love 
them. I hate them. I do not care if they are there. Claudia puts her 
hands on my hair as if she wants to tell me with the old familiarity that 
her heart's at peace. I do not care. And there is the apparition of 
Armand, that power, that heartbreaking clarity. Beyond a glass, it 
seems. And g Claudia's playful hand, I understand for the first time in 
any life what she feels when she forgives me for being myself whom 
she says she hates and loves: she feels almost nothing. 

" It was a week before we accompanied Madeleine on her errand, to 
torch a universe of dolls behind a plate-glass window. I remember 
wandering up the street away from it, round a turn into a narrow 
cavern of darkness where the falling rain was the only sound. But then 
I saw the red glare against the clouds. Bells clanged and men shouted, 
and Claudia beside me was talking softly of the nature of fire. The 
thick smoke rising in that dickering glare unnerved me. I was feeling 
fear. Not a wild, mortal fear, but something cold like a hook in may 
side. ' fear-it was the old town house burning in the Rue Royale, Lestat 
in the attitude of sleep on the burning floor. 

" 'Fire purifies . . : Claudia said. And I said, 'No, fire merely 
destroys . . . .’ 


216 



" Madeleine had gone past us and was roaming at the top of the 
street, a phantom in the rain, her white hands whipping the air, 
beckoning to us, white arcs, of white fireflies. And I remember 
Claudia leaving me for her. The sight of wilted, writhing yellow hair as 
she told me to follow. A ribbon fallen underfoot, flapping and floating 
in a swirl of black water. It seemed they were gone. And I bent to 
retrieve that ribbon. But another hand reached out for it. It was 
Armand who gave it to me now. 

" I was shocked to see him there, so near, the figure of Gentleman 
Death in a doorway, marvelously real in his black cape and silk tie, yet 
ethereal as the shadows in his stillness. There was the faintest glimmer 
of the fire in his eyes, red warming the blackness there to the richer 
brown. 

" And I woke suddenly as if rd been dreaming, woke to the sense of 
him, to his hand enclosing mine, to his head inclined as if to let me 
know he wanted me to follow-awoke to my own excited experience of 
his presence, which consumed me as surely as it had consumed me in 
his cell. We were walking together now, fast, nearing the Seine, 
moving so swiftly and artfully through a gathering of men that they 
scarce saw us, that we scarce saw them. That I could keep up with him 
easily amazed me. He was forcing me into some acknowledgment of 
my powers, that the paths I'd normally chosen were human paths I no 
longer need follow. 

" I wanted desperately to talk to him, to stop him with both my 
hands on his shoulders, merely to look into his eyes again as I'd done 
that last night, to fix him in some time and place, so that I could deal 
with the excitement inside me. There was so much I wanted to tell 
him, so much I wanted to explain. And yet 1 didn't know what to say 
or why I would say it, only that the fullness of the feeling continued to 
relieve me almost to tears. This was what I'd feared lost. 

" I didn't knew where we were now, only that in my wanderings I'd 
passed here before: a street of ancient mansions, of garden walls and 
carriage doors grad towers overhead and windows of leaded glass 
beneath stone arches. Houses of other centuries, gnarled trees, that 
sudden thick and silent tranquility which means that the masses are 
shut out; a handful of mortals inhabit this vast region of highceilinged 
rooms; stone absorbs the sound of breathing, the space of whole lives. 

" Armand was step a wall now, his arm against the overhanging 
bough of a tree, his hand reaching for me; and in ors instant I stood 
beside him, tire wet foliage brushing any face. Above, I could see story 
after story rising to a lone tower that barely emerged from the dark, 


217 



teeming rain. 'Listen to me; we are going to climb to the tower,' 
Armand was saying. 

" 'I cannot. . it’s impassible ... I’ 

" 'You don’t begin to know your own powers. You can climb easily. 
Remember, if you fall you will not be injured. Do as I do. But note 
this. The inhabitants of this house have known me far a hundred years 
and think me a spirit; so if by chance they see you, or you see them 
through those windows, remember what they believe you to be and 
show no consciousness of them lest you disappoint them or confuse 
them. Do you hear? You are perfectly safe.’ 

" I wasn't sure what frightened me more, the climb itself or the 
notion of being seen as a ghost; but I had no time for comforting 
witticisms, even to myself. Armand had begun, his boots finding the 
crack between the stones, his hands sure as claws in the crevices; and I 
was moving after him, tight to the wall, not daring to look down, 
clinging for a moment's rest to the thick, carved arch over a window, 
glimpsing inside, over a licking fire, a dark shoulder, a hand stroking 
with a poker, some figure that moved completely without knowledge 
that it was watched. Gone. Higher and higher we climbed, until we 
had reached the window of the tower itself, which Armand quickly 
wrenched open, his long legs disappearing over the sill; and I rose up 
after him, feeling his arm out around my shoulders. 

" I sighed despite myself, as I stood in the room, rubbing the backs of 
my arms, looking around this wet, strange place. The rooftops were 
silver below, turrets rising here and there through the huge, rustling 
treetops; and far off glimmered the broken chain of a lighted 
boulevard. The room seemed as damp as the night outside. Armand 
was making a fire. 

" From a molding pile of furniture he was picking chairs, breaking 
them into wood easily despite the thickness of their rungs. There was 
something grotesque about him, sharpened by his grace and the 
imperturbable calm of his white face. He did what any vampire could 
do, cracking these thick pieces of wood into splinters, yet he did what 
only a vampire could do. And there seemed nothing human about 
him; even his handsome features and dark hair became the attributes 
of a terrible angel who shared with the rest of us only a superficial 
resemblance. The tailored coat was a mirage. And though I felt drawn 
to him, more strongly perhaps than I'd ever been drawn to any living 
creature save Claudia, he excited me in other ways which resembled 
fear. I was not surprised that, when he finished, he set a heavy oak 
chair down for me, but retired himself to the marble mantelpiece and 


218 



sat there warming his hands over the fire, the flames throwing red 
shadows into his face. 

" 'I can hear the inhabitants of the house,' I said to him. The warmth 
was good. I could feel the leather of my boots drying, feel the warmth 
in my fingers. 

" 'Then you know that I can hear them,' he said softly; and though 
this didn't contain a hint of reproach, I realized the implications of my 
own words. 

" 'And if they comet’ I insisted, studying him. 

" ’Can’t you tell by my manner that they won’t come? he asked. 'We 
could sit here all night, and never speak of them. I want you to know 
that if we speak of them it is because you want to do so.’ And when I 
said nothing, whey perhaps I looked a little defeated, he said gently 
that they had long ago sealed off this tower and left it undisturbed; and 
if in fact they saw the smoke from the chimney or the light in the 
window, none of them would venture up until tomorrow. 

" I could see now there were several shelves of books at one side of 
the fireplace, and a writing table. The pages on top were wilted, but 
there was an inkstand and several pens. I could imagine the room a 
very comfortable place when it was not storming, as it was now, or 
after the fire had dried out the air. 

" 'You see,’ Armand said, 'you really have no need of the rooms you 
have at the hotel. You really have need of very little. But each of us 
mast decide how much he wants. These people in this house have a 
name for me; encounters with me cause talk for twenty years. They 
are only isolated instants in my time which mean nothing. They 
cannot hurt me, and I use their house to be alone. No one of the 
Theatre des Vampires knows of my coming here. This is my secret.’ 

" I had watched him intently as he was speaking, and thoughts which 
had occurred to me in the cell at the theater occurred to me again. 
Vampires do not age, and I wondered how his youthful face and 
manner might differ now from what he had been a century before or a 
century before that; for his face, though not deepened by the lessons of 
maturity, was certainly no mask. It seemed powerfully expressive as 
was his unobtrusive voice, and I was at a loss finally to fully anatomize 
why. I knew only I was as powerfully drawn to him as before; and to 
some extent the words I spoke now were a subterfuge. 'But what holds 
you to ’the Theatre des Vampires?’ I asked. 

" 'A need, naturally. But I’ve found what I need,’ he said. 'Why do 
you shun me?’ 


219 



" 'I never shunned you,' I said, trying to hide the excitement these 
words produced in me. 'You understand I have to protect Claudia, 
that she has no one but me. Or at least she had no one until. . 

" 'Until Madeleine came to live with you. . . 

" 'Yes . . .' I said. 

" But now Claudia has released you, yet still yon stay with her, and 
stay bound to her as your paramour,' he said. 

" 'No, she’s no paramour of mine; you don’t understand,' I said. 
'Rather, she's my child, and I don't know that she can release me. . . 
These were thoughts I'd gone over and over in my mind. 'I don’t 
knew if the child possesses the power to release the parent. I don't 
know that I won't be bound to her for as long as she ' 

" I stopped. I was gong to say, 'for as long as she lives.’ But I realized 
it was a hollow mortal clicle6. She would live forever, as I would live 
forever. But wasn't it so for mortal fathers? Their daughters live 
forever because these fathers die first. I was at a loss suddenly; but 
conscious all the while of how Armand listened: that he listened in the 
way that we dream of others listening, his face seeming to reflect on 
every thing said. He did not start forward to seize on my slightest 
pause, to assert an understanding of something before the thought was 
finished, or to argue with a swift, irresistible impulse-the things which 
often make dialogue impossible. 

" And after a long interval he said, 'I want you. I want you more 
than anything in the world.' 

" For a moment I doubted what I'd heard. It struck me as 
unbelievable. And I was hopelessly disarmed by it, and the wordless 
vision of our living together expanded and obliterated every other 
consideration in my mind. 

" 'I said that I want you. I want you more than anything in the 
world,’ he repeated, with only a subtle change of expression. And then 
he sat waiting, watching. His face was as tranquil as always, his 
smooth, white forehead beneath the shock of his auburn hair without 
a trace of care, his large eyes reflecting on me, his lips still. 

" 'You want this of me, yet you don’t come to me,’ he said: 'There are 
things you want to know, and you don’t ask. You see Claudia slipping 
away from you, yet you seem powerless to prevent it, and then you 
would hasten it, and yet you do nothing.! 

" ’I don't understand my own feelings. Perhaps they are clearer to 
you than they are to me. . . 

" 'You don’t begin to know what a mystery you are!' he said. 

" 'But at least you know yourself thoroughly. I can’t claim that,’ I 
said. 'I love her, yet I am not close to her. I mean that when I am with 


220 



you as I am now, I know that I know nothing of her, nothing of 
anyone.' 

" 'She's an era for you, an era of your life. If and when you break 
with her, you break with the only one alive who has shared that time 
with you. You fear that, the isolation of it, the burden, the scope of 
eternal life.' 

" 'Yes, that's true, but that's only a small part of it. The era, it doesn't 
mean much to me. She made it mean something. Other vampires 
must experience this and survive it, the passing of a hundred eras.' 

" 'But they don't survive it,' he said. 'The world would be choked 
with vampires if they survived it. How do you think I come to be the 
eldest here or anywhere?' he asked. 

" I thought about this. And then I ventured, 'They die by violence?’ 

" 'No, almost never. It isn’t necessary. How many vampires do you 
think have the stamina for immortality? They have the cost dismal 
notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they 
want all the forms of their life to be fined as they are and incorruptible: 
carriages made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut 
which suited their prime, men attired and speaking in the manner they 
have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change 
except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to 
constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, 
and often even with the most flexible mind, this immortality becomes 
a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are 
hopelessly unintelligible and without value. One evening a vampire 
rises and realizes what he has feared perhaps for decades, that he 
simply wants no more of life at any cost. That whatever style or 
fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to him has 
been swept off the face of the earth. And nothing remains to offer 
freedom from despair except the act of killing. And that vampire goes 
out to die. No one will find his remains. No one will know where he 
has gone. And often no one around him-should he still seek the 
company of other vampires--no one will know that he is in despair. 

He will have ceased long ago to speak- of himself or of anything. He 
will vanish.’ 

" I sat back impressed by the obvious truth of it, and yet at the same 
time, everything in me revolted against that prospect. I became aware 
of the depth of my hope and my terror; how very different those 
feelings were from the alienation that he described, how very different 
from that awful wasting despair. There was something outrageous and 
repulsive in that despair suddenly. I couldn't accept it. 


221 



" 'But you wouldn't allow such a state of mind in yourself. Look at 
you,' I found myself answering. 'If there weren't one single work of art 
left in this world . . . and there are thousands ... if there weren't a 
single natural beauty ... if the world were reduced to one empty cell 
and one fragile candle, I can't help but see you studying that candle, 
absorbed in the flicker of its light, the change of its colors . . . how 
long could that sustain you . . . what possibilities would it create? 

Am I wrong? Am I such a crazed idealist?' 

" 'No,' he said. There was a brief smile on his lips, an evanescent 
flush of pleasure. But then he went on simply. 'But you feel an 
obligation to a world you love because that world for you is still intact. 
It is conceivable your own sensitivity might become the instrument of 
madness. You speak of works of art and natural beauty. I wish I had 
the artist's power to bring alive for you the Venice of the fifteenth 
century, my master's palace there, the love I felt for him when I was a 
mortal boy, and the love he felt for me when he made me a vampire. 
Oh, if I could make those times come alive for either you or me . . . 
for only an instant! What would that be worth? And what a sadness it 
is to me that time doesn't dim the memory of that period, that it 
becomes all the richer and more magical in light of the world I see 
today.' 

" 'Love?' I asked. 'There was love between you and the vampire who 
made you?’ I leaned forward. 

" 'Yes,' he said. 'A love so strong he couldn't allow me to grow old 
and die. A love that waited patiently until I was strong enough to be 
born to darkness. Do you mean to tell me there was no bond of love 
between you and the vampire who made you?' 

" 'None,' I said quickly. I couldn't repress a bitter smile. 

" He studied me. 'Why then did he give you these powers?’ he 
asked. 

"I sat back. 'You see these powers as a gift!’ I said. 'Of course you 
do. Forgive me, but it amazes me, how in your complexity you are so 
profoundly simple.' I laughed. 

" 'Should I be insulted? " he smiled. And his whole manner only 
confirmed me in what rd just said. He seemed so innocent. I was only 
beginning to understand him. 

" 'No, not by me,’ I said, my pulse quickening as I looked at him. 
'You're everything I dreamed of when I became a vampire. You see 
these powers as a gift!' I repeated it. 'But tell me. . . do you now feel 
love for this vampire who gave you eternal life? Do you feel this now?' 

" He appeared to be thinking, and then he sand slowly, 'Why does 
this matter?' But went on: 'I don't think I've been fortunate in feeling 


222 



love for many people or many things. But yes, I love him. Perhaps I 
do not love him as you mean. It seems you confuse me, rather 
effortlessly. You are a mystery. I do not need him, this vampire, 
anymore.' 

" 'I was gifted with eternal life, with heightened perception, and with 
the need to kill,' I quickly explained, 'because the vampire who made 
me wanted the house I owned and my money. Do you understand 
such a thing?' I asked. 'Ah, but there is so much else behind what I 
say. It makes itself known to me so slowly, so incompletely! You see, 
it’s as if you've cracked a door for me, and light is streaming from that 
door and I'm yearning to get to it, to push it back, to enter the region 
you say exists beyond it! When, in fact, I don't believe it! The vampire 
who made me was everything that I truly believed evil to be: he was as 
dismal, as literal, as barren, as inevitably eternally disappointing as I 
believed evil had to be! I know that now. But you, you are something 
totally beyond that conception! Open the door for me, push it back all 
the way. Tell me about this palace in Venice, this love affair with 
damnation. I want to understand it' 

" 'You trick yourself. The palace means nothing to you,’ he said. 

'The doorway you see leads to me, now. To your coming to live with 
me as I am. I am evil with infinite gradations and without guilt.' 

" 'Yes, exactly,' I murmured. 

" 'Arid this makes you unhappy,’ he said. 'You, who came to me in 
my cell and said there was only one sin left, the willful taking of an 
innocent human life.' 

"'Yes. . I said. 'How you must have been laughing at me. . . 

" 'I never laughed at you,' he said. 'I cannot afford to laugh at you. 

It is through you that I can save myself from the despair which I've 
described to you as our death. It is through you that I must make my 
link with this nineteenth century and come to understand it in a way 
that will revitalize me, which I so desperately need It is for you that I've 
been waiting at the Theatre des Vampires. If I knew a mortal of that 
sensitivity, that pain, that focus, I would make him a vampire in an 
instant. But such can rarely be done. No, I've had to wait and watch 
for you. And now I'll fight for you. Do you see how ruthless I am in 
love? Is this what you meant by love?' 

" 'Oh, but you'd be making a terrible mistake,' I said, looking him in 
the eyes. His words were only slowly sinking in. Never had I felt my 
all-consuming frustration to be so clear. I could not conceivably 
satisfy him. I could not satisfy Claudia. I'd never been able to satisfy 
Lestat. And my own mortal brother, Paul: how dismally, mortally I 
had disappointed him! 


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" 'No. I must make contact with the age,’ he said to me calmly. 'And 
I can do this through you . . . not to learn things from you which I 
can see in a moment in an art gallery or read in an hour in the thickest 
books . . . you are the spirit, you are the heart,' he persisted. 

" 'No, no.' I threw up my hands. I was on the point of a bitter, 
hysterical laughter. 'Don't you see? I'm not the spirit of any age. I'm 
at odds with everything and always have been! I have never belonged 
anywhere with anyone at any time!' It was too painful, too perfectly 
true. 

" But his face only brightened with an irresistible smile. He seemed 
on the verge of laughing at .me, and then his shoulders began to move 
with this laughter, 'lout Louis,’ he said softly. 'This is the very spirit of 
your age. Don't you see that? 'Everyone else feels as you feel. Your 
fall from grace and faith has been the fall of a century.' 

" I was so stunned by this, that for a long time I sat there staring into 
the fire. It had all but consumed the wood and was a wasteland of 
smoldering ash, a gray and red landscape that would have collapsed at 
the touch of the poker. Yet it was very warm, and still gave off 
powerful light. I saw my life in complete perspective 

" 'And the vampires of the Theatre . . : I asked softly. 

" 'They reflect the age in cynicism which cannot comprehend the 
death of possibilities, fatuous sophisticated indulgence in the parody 
of the miraculous, decadence whose last refuge is self-ridicule, a 
mannered helplessness. You saw them; you've known them all your 
life. You reflect your age differently. You reflect its broken heart.' 

" 'This is unhappiness. Unhappiness you don't begin to understand.' 

" 'I don’t doubt it. Tell me what you feel now, what makes you 
unhappy. Tell me why for a period of seven days you haven't come to 
me, though you were burning to come. Tell me what holds you still to 
Claudia and the other woman.' 

" I shook my head. 'You don't know what you ask. You see, it was 
immensely difficult for me to perform the act of making Madeleine 
into a vampire. I broke a promise to myself that I would never do this, 
that my own loneliness would never drive me to do it. I don't see our 
life as powers and gifts. I see it as a curse. I haven't the courage to die. 
But to make another vampire! To bring this suffering on another, and 
to condemn to death all those men and women whom that vampire 
must subsequently kill! I broke a grave promise. And in so doing . . 

"'But if it's any consolation to you . . . surely you realize I had a 
hand in it.' 

" 'That I did it to be free of Claudia, to be free to come to you . . . 
yes, I realize that. But the ultimate responsibility lies with me!’ I said. 


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" 'No. I mean, directly. I made you do it! I was near you the night 
you did it. I exerted my strongest power to persuade you to do it. 
Didn't you know this?' Woe. 

" I bowed my head. 

" 'I would have made this woman a vampire,' he said softly. 'But I 
thought it best you have a hand in it. Otherwise you would not give 
Claudia up. You must know you wanted it. . . 

" 'I loathe what I did!' I said. 

" 'Then loathe me, not yourself.' 

" 'No. You don't understand. You nearly destroyed the thing you 
value in me when this happened! I resisted you with all my power 
when I didn't even know it was your force which was working on me. 
Something nearly died in me! Passion nearly died in me! I was all but 
destroyed when Madeleine was created!' 

" 'But that thing is no longer dead, that passion, that humanity, 
whatever you wish to name it. If it were not alive there wouldn't be 
tears in your eyes now. There wouldn't be rage in your voice,' he said. 

" For the moment, I couldn't answer. I only nodded. Then I 
struggled to speak again. 'You must never force me to do something 
against my will! You must never exert such power . . ’ I stammered. 

" 'No,' he said at once. 'I must not. My power stops somewhere 
inside you, at some threshold. There I am powerless, however . . . 
this creation of Madeleine is done. You are free.' 

" 'And you are satisfied,’ I said, gaining control of myself. 'I don’t 
mean to be harsh. You have me. I love you. But I'm mystified. 

You're satisfied?' 

" 'How could I not be?' he asked. 'I am satisfied, of course.’ 

" I stood up and went to the window. The last embers were dying. 
The light came from the gray sky. I heard Armand follow me to the 
window ledge. I could feel him beside me now, my eyes growing more 
and more accustomed to the luminosity of the sky, so that now I could 
see his profile and his eye on the falling rain. The sound of the rain 
was everywhere and different: flowing in the gutter along the roof, 
tapping the shingles, falling softly through the shimmering layers of 
tree branches, splattering on the sloped stone sill in front of my hands. 
A soft intermingling of sounds that drenched and colored all of the 
night. 

" To you forgive me . . . for forcing you with the woman?’ he 
asked. 

" 'You don’t need my forgiveness' 

" 'You need it,’ he said. 'Therefore, I need it.’ Ids face was as always 
utterly calm. 


225 



" 'Will she care for Claudia? Will she endure?' I asked. 

" 'She is perfect. Mad; but for these days that is perfect. She will care 
for Claudia. She has never lived a moment of life alone; it is natural to 
her that she be devoted to her companions. She need not have 
particular reasons for loving Claudia. Yet, in addition to her needs, 
she does have particular reasons. Claudia's beautiful surface, Claudia's 
quiet, Claudia's dominance and control. They are perfect together. 

But I think . . . that as soon as possible they should leave Paris: 

" 'Why?' 

" 'You know why. Because Santiago and the other vampires watch 
them with suspicion. All the vampires have sees Madeleine. They fear 
her because she knows about them and they don't know her. They 
don't let others alone who know about them' 

" 'And the boy, Denis? What do you plan to do with him?' 

" 'He's dead,' he answered. 

" I was astonished. Both at his words and his calm. 'You killed him?' 
I gasped. 

" He nodded. And said nothing. But his large, dark eyes seemed 
entranced with me, with the emotion, the shock I didn't try to conceal. 
His soft, subtle smile seemed to draw me close to him; his hand closed 
over mine on the wet window sill and I felt my body turning to face 
him, drawing nearer to him, as though I were being moved not by 
myself but by him. 'It was best,'he conceded to me gently. And then 
said, 'We must go now. . . : And he glanced at the street below. 

" 'Armand,' I said. 'I can’t...’ 

" 'Louis, come after me,’ he whispered. And then on the ledge, he 
stopped. 'Been if you were to fall on the cobblestones there,’ he said, 
'you would only be hurt for a while. You would heal so rapidly and so 
perfectly that in days you would show no sign of it, your bones healing 
as your skin heals; so let this knowledge free you to do what you can so 
easily do already. Climb down, now.’ 

" 'What can kill me?’ I asked. 

" Again he stopped. 'The destruction of your remains,’ he said. 
'Don’t you know this? Fire, dismemberment. . . the heat of the sun. 
Nothing else. You can be scarred, yes; but you are resilient. You are 
immortal.' 

" I was looking down through the quiet silver rain into darkness. 
Then .a light flickered beneath the shifting tree limbs, and the pale 
beams of the light made the street appear. Wet cobblestones, the iron 
hook of the carriage-house bell, the vines clinging to the top off the 
wall. The huge black hulk of a carriage brushed the vines, and then the 
light grew weak, the street went from yellow to silver and vanished 


226 



altogether, as if the dark trees had swallowed it up. Or, rather, as if it 
had all been subtracted from the dark. I felt dizzy. I felt the building 
move. Armand was seated on the window sill looking down at me. 

" 'Louis, come with me tonight,' he whispered suddenly, with an 
urgent inflection. 

"'No,'I said gently. 'It's too soon. I can't leave them yet' 

" I watched him turn away and look at the dark sky. He appeared to 
sigh, but I didn't hear it. I felt his hand close on mine on the window 
sill. 'Very well. . .’ he said. 

" 'A little more time . . ’ I said. And he nodded and patted my hand 
as if to say it was all right. Then he swung his legs over and 
disappeared. For only a moment I hesitated, mocked by the pounding 
of my heart. But then I climbed over the sill and commenced to hurry 
after him, never daring to look down. 

" It was very near dawn when I put my key into the lock at the hotel. 
The gas light flared along the walls. And Madeleine, her needle and 
thread in her hands, had fallen asleep by the grate. Claudia stood still, 
looking at me from among the ferns at the window, in shadow. She 
had her hairbrush in her hands. Her hair was gleaming. 

" I stood there absorbing some shock, as if all the sensual pleasures 
and confusions of these rooms were passing over me like waves and 
my body were being permeated with these things, so different from the 
spell of Armand and the tower room where we'd been. There was 
something comforting here, and it was disturbing. I was looking for 
my chair. I was sitting in it with my hands on my temples. And then I 
felt Claudia near me, and I felt her dips against my forehead. 

" 'You've been with Armand,' she said. 'You want to go with him.' 

" I looked up at her. How soft and beautiful her face was, and, 
suddenly, so much mine. I felt no compunction in yielding to my urge 
to touch her cheeks, to lightly touch her eyelids---familiarities, liberties 
I hadn't taken with her since the night of our quarrel. 'I'll see you 
again; not here, in other places. Always I'll know where you are!' I 
said. 

" She put her arms around my neck. She held me tight, and I closed 
my eyes and buried my face in her hair. I was covering her neck with 
my kisses. I had hold of her round, firm little arms. I was kissing 
them, kissing the soft indentation of the flesh in the crooks of her 
arms, her wrists, her open palms. I felt her forgers stroking my hair, 
my face. 'Whatever you wish,' she vowed. 'Whatever you wish.’ 

" 'Are you happy? Do you have what you want?’ I begged her. 

" 'Yes, Louis.' She held me against her dress, her fingers clasping the 
back of my neck. 'I have all that I want' But do you truly know what 


227 



you want?' She was lifting my face so I had to look into her eyes. 'It's 
you I fear for, you who might be making the mistake. Why don't you 
leave Paris with us!' the said suddenly. 'We have the world, come with 
us!’ 

" 'No.' I drew back from her. 'You want it to as it was with Lestat. It 
can’t be that way again, ever. It won't be.' 

" 'It will be something new and different with Madoleine. I don't ask 
for that again. It was I who put an end to that,' she said. 'But do you 
truly understand what you are choosing in Armand?' 

" I tanned away from her. There was something stubborn and 
mysterious inn her dislike of him, in her failure to understand him. 

She would say again that he wished her death, which I did not believe. 
She didn't realize what I realized: he could not want her death, because 
I didn't want it. But how could I explain this to her without sounding 
pompous and blind in my love of him. 'It's meant to be. It's almost 
that sort of direction,' I said, as if it were just coming clear to me under 
the pressure of her doubts. 'He alone can give me the strength to be 
what I am. I can't continue to live divided and consumed with misery. 
Either I go with him, or I die,' I said. 'And it's something else, which is 
irrational and unexplainable and which satisfies only me. . . 

" 'Which is?' she asked. 

" 'That I love him,’ I said. 

" 'No doubt you do,’ she mused. 'But then, you could love even me.' 

" 'Claudia, Claudia.’ I held her close to me, and felt her weight on 
my knee. She drew up close to my chest. 

" 'T only hope that when you have need of me, you can find me . . .’ 
she whispered. 'That I can get back to you . . . I’ve hurt you so often, 
I’ve caused you so much pain.’ Her words trailed off. She was resting 
still against me. I felt her weight, thinking, In a little while, I won't 
have her anymore. I want now simply to hold her. There has always 
been such pleasure in that simple thing. Her weight against me, this 
hand resting against my neck. 

" It seemed a lamp died somewhere. That from the cool, damp air 
that much light was suddenly, soundlessly subtracted. I was sitting on 
the verge of dream. Had I been mortal I would have been content to 
sleep there. And in that drowsy, comfortable state I had a strange, 
habitual mortal feeling, that the sun would wake me gently later and I 
would have that rich, habitual vision of the ferns in the sunshine and 
the sunshine an the droplets of rain. I indulged that feeling. I half 
closed my eyes. 

" Often afterwards I tried to remember those moments. Tried over 
and over to recall just what it was in those rooms as we rested there, 


228 



that began to disturb me, should have disturbed me. How, being off 
my guard, I was somehow insensible to the subtle changes which must 
have been taking place there. Long after, bruised and robbed and 
embittered beyond my wildest dreams, I sifted through those 
moments, those drowsy quiet early-hour moments when the clock 
ticked almost imperceptibly on the mantelpiece, and the sky grew 
paler and paler; and all I could remember-despite the desperation with 
which I lengthened and fixed that time, in which I held out my hands 
to stop the clock-all I could remember was the soft changing of tight. 

" On guard, I would never have let it pass. Deluded with larger 
concerns, I made no note of it. A lamp gone out, a candle 
extinguished by the shiver of its own hot pool of wax. My eyes half 
shut, I had the sense then, of impending darkness, of being shut up in 
darkness. 

" And then I opened my eyes, not thinking of lamps or candles. And 
it was too late. I remember standing upright, Claudia's hand slipping 
on my arm, and the vision of a host of black-dressed men and women 
moving through the rooms, their garments seeming to garner light 
from every gilt edge or lacquered surface, seeming to drain all light 
away. I shouted out against them, shouted for Madeleine, saw her 
wake with a start, terrified fledgling, clinging to the arm of the couch, 
then down on her knees as they reached out for her. There was 
Santiago and Celeste coming towards us, and behind them, Estelle and 
others whose names I didn't know filling the mirrors and crowding 
together to make walls of shifting, menacing shadow. I was shouting 
to Claudia to run, having pulled back the door. I was shoving her 
through it and then was stretched across it, kicking out at Santiago as 
he came. 

" That weak defensive position rd held against him in the Latin 
Quarter was nothing compared to my strength now. I was too flawed 
perhaps to ever fight with conviction for my own protection. But the 
instinct to protect Madeleine and Claudia was overpowering. I 
remember kicking Santiago backwards and then striking out at that 
powerful, beautiful Celeste, who sought to get by me. Claudia's feet 
sounded on the distant marble stairway. Celeste was reeling, clawing 
at me, catching hold of me and scratching my face so the blood ran 
down over my collar. I could see it blazing in the comer of my eye. I 
was on Santiago now, turning with him, aware of the awful strength of 
the arms that held me, the hands that sought to get a hold on my 
throat. 'Fight them, Madeleine,' I was shouting to her. But all I could 
hear was her sobbing. Then I saw her in the whirl, a fixed, frightened 
thing, surrounded by other vampires. They were laughing that hollow 


229 



vampire laughter which is like tinsel or silverbells. Santiago was 
clutching at his face. My teeth had drawn blood there. I struck at his 
chest, at his head, the pain searing through my arm, something 
enclosing my chest like two arms, which I shook off, hearing the crash 
of broken glass behind me. But something else, someone else had hold 
of my arm with two arms and was pulling me with tenacious strength. 

" I don't remember weakening. I don't remember any turning point 
when anyone's strength overcame my own. I remember simply being 
outnumbered. Hopelessly, by sheer numbers and persistence, I was 
stilled, surrounded, and forced out of the rooms. In a press of 
vampires, I was being forced along the passageway, and then I was 
falling down the steps, free for a moment before the narrow back 
doors of the hotel, only to be surrounded again and held tight. I could 
see Celeste's face very near me and, if I could have, I would have 
wounded her with my teeth. I was bleeding badly, and one of my 
wrists was held so tightly that there was no feeling in that hand. 
Madeleine was next to me sobbing still. And all of us were pressed 
into a carnage. Over and over I was struck, and still I did not lose 
consciousness. I remember clinging tenaciously to consciousness, 
feeling these blows on the back of my head, feeling the back of my 
head wet with blood that trickled down my neck as I lay on the 
carriage floor. I was thinking only, I can feel the carnage moving; I am 
alive; I am conscious. 

" And as soon as we were dragged into the Theatre des Vampires, I 
was crying out for Armand. 

" I was let go, only to stagger on the cellar steps, the horde of them 
behind me and in front of me, pushing me with menacing hands. At 
one point I got hold of Celeste, and she screamed and someone struck 
me from behind. 

" And then I saw Lestat- the blow that was more crippling than any 
blow. Lestat, standing there in the center of the ballroom, erect, his 
gray eyes sharp and focused, his mouth lengthening in a cunning 
smile. Impeccably dressed he was, as always, and as splendid an his 
rich black cloak and fine linen. But those scars still scored every inch 
of his white flesh. And how they distorted the taut, handsome face, the 
fine, hard threads cutting the delicate skin above his lip, the lids of his 
eyes, the smooth rise of his forehead. And the eyes, they burned with a 
silent rage that seemed infused with vanity, an awful relentless vanity 
that said, 'See what I am.’ 

" 'This is the one?' said Santiago, thrusting me forward. 

" But Lestat turned sharply to him and said in a harsh low voice, 'I 
told you I wanted Claudia, the child! She was the one!’ And now I saw 


230 



his head moving involuntarily with his outburst, and his hand 
reaching out as if for the arm of a chair only to close as he drew 
himself up again, eyes to me. 

" 'Lestat,' I began, seeing now the few straws left to me. 'You are 
alive! You have your life! Tell them how you treated us. . . 

" 'No,' he shook his head furiously. 'You come back to me, Louis,’ 
he said. 

" For a moment I could not believe my ears. Some saner, more 
desperate part of me said, Reason with him, even as the sinister 
laughter erupted from my lips. 'Are you mad!' 

" 'I'll give you back your life!' he said, his eyelids quivering with the 
stress of his words, his chest heaving, that hand going out again and 
closing impotently in the dark. 'You promised me,’ he said to 
Santiago, 'I could take him back with me to New Orleans.’ And then, 
as he looked from one to the other of them as they surrounded us, his 
breath became frantic, and he burst out, ’Claudia, where is she? She’s 
the one who did it to me, I told you!' 

" 'By and by,' said Santiago. And when he reached out for Lestat, 
Lestat drew back and almost lost his balance. He had found the chair 
arm he needed and stood holding fast to it, his eyes closed, regaining 
his control. 

" 'But he helped her, aided her . . ’ said Santiago, drawing nearer to 
him. Lestat looked up. 

" ’No,' he said. 'Louis, you must come back to me. There's 
something I must tell you . . . about that night in the swamp.' But 
then he stopped and looked about again, as though he were caged, 
wounded, desperate. 

" 'Listen to me, Lestat,’ I began now. 'You let her go, you free her . . 

. and I will. . . I’ll return to you,' I said, the words sounding hollow, 
metallic. I tried to take a step towards him, to make my eyes hard and 
unreadable, to feel my power emanating from them like two beams of 
light. He was looking at me, studying me, struggling all the while 
against his own fragility. And Celeste had her hand on my wrist. 'You 
must tell them,' I went on, 'how you treated us, that we didn't know 
the laws, that she didn't know of other vampires,' I said. And I was 
thinking steadily, as that mechanical voice came out of me: Armand 
must return tonight, Armand must come back. He will stop this, he 
won't let it go on. 

" 'There was a sound then of something dragging across the floor. I 
could hear Madeleine's exhausted crying. I looked around and saw her 
in a chair, and when she saw my eyes on her, her terror seemed to 


231 



increase. She tried to rise but they stopped her. 'Lestat,'I said. "What 
do you want of me? I'll give it to you. . . 

" And then I saw the thing that was making the noise. And Lestat 
had seen it too. It was a coffin with large iron locks on it that was 
being dragged into the room. I understood at once. 'Where is 
Armand?' I said desperately. 

" 'She did it to me, Louis. She did it to me. You didn't! She has to 
dies' said Lestat, his voice becoming thin, rasping, as if it were an effort 
for him to speak. 'Get that thing away from here, he's coming home 
with me,' he said furiously to Santiago. And Santiago only laughed, 
and Celeste laughed, and the laughter seemed to infect them all. 

" 'You promised me,’ said Lestat to them. 

" 'I promised you nothing,' said Santiago. 

" 'They've made a fool of you,' I said to him bitterly as they were 
opening the coffin. 'A fool of you! You must reach Armand, Armand 
13 the leader here,' I burst out. But he didn't seem to understand. 

" What happened then was desperate axed clouded and miserable, 
my kicking at them, struggling to free my arms, raging against them 
that Armand would stop what they were doing, that they dare not hurt 
Claudia. Yet they forced me down into the coffin, my frantic efforts 
serving no purpose against them except to take my mind off the sound 
of Madeleine's cries, her awful wailing cries, and the fear that at any 
moment Claudia's cries might be added to them. I remember rising 
against the crushing lid, holding it at bay for an instant before it was 
forced shut on me and the locks were being shut with the grinding of 
metal and keys. Words of long ago came back to me, a strident and 
smiling Lestat in that faraway, trouble-free place where the three of us 
had, quarreled together: 'A starving child is a frightful sight... a 
starving vampire even worse. They'd hear her screams in Paris.' And 
my wet and trembling body went limp in the suffocating coffin, and I 
said, Armand will not let it happen; there isn't a place secure enough 
for them to place us. 

" The coffin was lifted, there was the scraping of boots, the swinging 
from side to side; my arms braced against the sides of the box, my eyes 
shut perhaps for a moment, I was uncertain. I told myself not to reach 
out for the sides, not to feel the thin margin of air between my face 
and the lid; and I felt the coffin swing and tilt as their steps found the 
stairs. Vainly I tried to make out Madeleine's cries, for it seemed that 
she was crying for Claudia, calling out to her as if she could help us all. 
Call for Armand; he must come home this night, I thought 
desperately. And only the thought of the awful humiliation of hearing 


232 



my own cry closed in with me, flooding my ears, yet locked in with 
me, prevented me from calling out. 

" But another thought had come over me even as I'd phrased those 
words: What if he did not come? What if somewhere in that mansion 
he had a coffin hidden to which he returned . . . B And then it 
seemed my body broke suddenly, without warning, from the control 
of my mind, and I flailed at the wood around me, struggling to turn 
over and pit the strength of my back against the coffin lid. Yet I could 
not: it was too close; and my head fell back on the boards, and the 
sweat poured down my back and sides. 

" Madeleine's cries were gone. All I heard were the boots, and my 
own breathing. Then, tomorrow night he will come-yes, tomorrow 
night and they will tell him, and he will find us and release us. The 
coffin swayed. The smell of water filled my nostrils, its coolness 
palpable through the close heat of the coffin; and then with the smell 
of the water was the smell of the deep earth. The coffin was set down 
roughly, and my limbs ached and I rubbed the backs of my arms with 
my hands, struggling not to touch the coffin lid, not to sense how close 
it was, afraid of my own feat rising to panic, to terror. 

" I thought they would leave me now, but they did not. They were 
near at hand and bogy, and another odor came to my nostrils which 
was raw and not known to me. But then, as I lay very still, I realized 
they were laying bricks and that the odor came from the mortar. 
Slowly, carefully, I brought my hand up to wipe my face. All right, 
then, tomorrow night, I reasoned with myself, even as my shoulders 
seemed to grow large against the coffin walls. All right, then, 
tomorrow night he will come; and until then this is merely the 
confines of my own coffin, the price I've paid for all of this, night after 
night after night. 'But the tears were welling in my eyes, and I could 
see myself flailing again at the wood; and y head was turning from side 
to side, my mind rushing on to tomorrow and the night after and the 
night after that. And then, as if to distract myself from this madness, I 
thought of Claudia-only to feel her arms around me in the dim light of 
those rooms in the Hotel Saint-Gabriel, only to see the curve of her 
cheek in the light, the soft, languid flutter of her eyelashes, the silky 
touch of her lip. My body stiffened, my feet kicked at the boards. The 
sound of the bricks was gone, and the muffled steps were gone. And I 
cried out for her, ’Claudia,’ until my neck was twisted with pain as I 
tossed, and my nails had dug into my palms; and slowly, like an icy 
stream, the paralysis of sleep came over me. I tried to call out to 
Armand-foolishly, desperately, only dimly aware as my lids grew heavy 
and my hands lay limp that the sleep was on him too somewhere, that 


233 



he lay still in his resting place. One last time I struggled. My eyes saw 
the dark, my hands felt the wood. But I was weak. And then there was 
nothing. 

" I awoke to a voice. It was distant but distinct. It said my name 
twice. For an instant I didn't know where I was. I'd been dreaming, 
something desperate which was threatening to vanish completely 
without the slightest clue to what it had been, and something terrible 
which I was eager, willing to let go. Then I opened my eyes and felt 
the top of the coffin. I knew where I was at the same instant that, 
mercifully, I knew it was Armand who was calling me. I answered 
him, but my voice was locked in with me and it was deafening. In a 
moment of terror, I thought, He's searching for me, and I can't tell 
him that I am here. But then I heard him speaking to me, telling me 
not to be afraid. And I heard a loud noise. And another. And there 
was a cracking sound, and then the thunderous falling of the bricks. It 
seemed several of them struck the coffin. And then I heard them lifted 
off one by one. It sounded as though he were pulling off the locks by 
the nails. 

" The hard wood of the top creaked. A pinpoint of light sparkled 
before my eyes. I drew breath from it, and felt the sweat break out on 
my face. The lid creaked open and for an instant I was blinded; then I 
was sitting up, seeing the bright light of a lamp through my fingers. 

" 'Hurry,' he said to me. 'Don't make a sound' 

" 'But where are we going?’ I asked. I could see a passage of rough 
bricks stretching out from the doorway he'd broken down. And all 
along that passage were doors which were sealed, as this door had 
been. I had a vision at once of coffins behind those bricks, of vampires 
starved and decayed there. But Armand was pulling me up, telling me 
again to make no sound; we were creeping along the passage. He 
stopped at a wooden door, and then he extinguished the lamp. It was 
completely black for an instant until the seam of light beneath the 
door brightened. He opened the door so gently the hinges did not 
make a sound. I could hear my own breathing now, and I tried to stop 
it. We were entering that lower passageway which led to his cell. But 
as I raced along behind him I became aware of one awful truth. He 
was rescuing me, but me alone. I put out my hand to stop him, but he 
only pulled me after him. Only when we stood in the alleyway beside 
the Theatre des Vampires was I able to make him stop. And even then, 
he was on the verge of going on. He began shaking his head even 
before I spoke. 

" 'I can’t save her!’ he said. 


234 



" 'You don’t honestly expect me to leave without her! They have her 
in there!’ I was horrified. ’Armand, you must save her! You have no 
choice!’ 

" 'Why do you say this?’ he answered. 'I don’t have the power, you 
must understand. They'll rise against me. There is no reason why they 
should not. Louis, I tell you, I cannot save her. I will only risk losing 
you. You can't go back.' 

" I refused to admit this could be true. I had no hope other than 
Armand. But I can truthfully say that I was beyond being afraid. I 
knew only that I had to get Claudia back or die in the effort. It was 
really very simple; not a matter of courage at all. And I knew also, 
could tell in everything about Armand's passivity, the manner in 
which he spoke, that he would follow me if I returned, that he would 
not try to prevent me. 

" I was right. I was rushing back into the passage and he was just 
behind me, heading for the stairway to the ballroom. I could hear the 
ether vampires. I could hear all manner of sounds. The Paris traffic. 
What sounded very much like a congregation in the vault of the 
theater above. And then, as I reached the top of the steps, I saw 
Celeste in the door of the ballroom. She held one of those stage masks 
in her hand. She was merely looking at me. She did not appear 
alarmed. In fact, she appeared strangely indifferent. 

" If she had rushed at me, if she had sounded a general alarm, these 
things I could have understood. But she did nothing. She stepped 
backwards into the ballroom; she turned, seeming to enjoy the subtle 
movement of her skirts, seeming to turn for the love of making her 
skirts flare out, and she drifted in a widening circle to the center of the 
room. She put the mask to her face, and said softly behind the painted 
skull,'Lestat. . . it is your friend Louis come calling. Look sharp, 
Lestat!’ She dropped the mask, and there was a ripple of laughter from 
somewhere. I saw they were all about the room, shadowy things, 
seated here and there, standing together. And Lestat, in an armchair, 
sat with his shoulders hunched and his face turned away from me. It 
seemed he was working something with his hands, something I 
couldn't see; and slowly he looked up, his full yellow hair falling into 
his eyes. There was fear in them. It was undeniable. Now he was 
looking at Armand. And Armand was moving silently through the 
room with slow, steady steps, and all of the vampires moved back away 
from him, watching him. 'Bonsoir, Monsieur,' Celeste bowed to him 
as he passed her, that mask in her hand like a scepter. He did not look 
at her in particular. He looked down at Lestat. 'Are you satisfied?' he 
asked him. 


235 



" Lestat's gray eyes seemed to regard Armand with wonder, and his 
lips straggled to form a word. I could see that his eyes were filling with 
tears. 'Yes . . : he whispered now, his hand struggling with the thing 
he concealed beneath his black cloak. But then he looked at me, and 
the tears spilled down his face. 'Louis,' he said, his voice deep and rich 
now with what seemed an unbearable struggle. 'Please, you must 
listen to me. You must come back. . . .' And then, bowing his head, 
he grimaced with shame. 

" Santiago was laughing somewhere. Armand was saying softly to 
Lestat that he must get out, leave Paris; he was outcast. 

" And Lestat sat there with his eyes closed, his face transfigured with 
his pain. It seemed the double of Lestat, some wounded, feeling 
creature I'd never known. 'Please,' he said, the voice eloquent and 
gentle as he implored me. 

" 'I can’t talk to you here! I can’t make you understand. You'll come 
with me . . . for only a little while . . . until I am myself again?' 

" 'This is madness! . . .' I said, my hands rising suddenly to my 
temples. 'Where is she! Where is she!' I looked about me, at their 
still, passive faces, those inscrutable smiles. 'Lestat ’ I turned him now, 
grabbing at the black wool of his lapels: 

" And then I’ saw the think in his hands. I knew what it was. And in 
an instant rd ripped it from him and was staring at it, at the fragile 
silken thing that it was-Claudia’s yellow dress. His hand rose to his 
lips, his face turned away. And the soft, subdued sops broke from him 
as he sat back while I stared at him, while I stared at the dress. My 
fingers moved slowly over the tears in it, the stains of blood; my hands 
closing, trembling as I crushed it against my chest. 

" For a long moment it seemed I simply stood there; time had no 
bearing upon me nor upon those shifting vampires with their light, 
ethereal laughter filling my ears. I remember thinking that I wanted to 
put my hands over my ears, but I wouldn't let go of the dress, couldn't 
stop trying to make it so small that it was hidden within my hands. I 
remember a row of candles burning, an uneven row coming to light 
one by one against the painted walls. A door stood open to the rain, 
and all the candies spluttered and blew on the wind as if the flames 
were being lifted from the wicks. But they clung to the wicks and were 
all right. I knew that Claudia was through the doorway. The candles 
moved. The vampires had hold of them. Santiago had a candle and 
was bowing to me and gesturing for me to pass through the door. I 
was barely aware of him. I didn't care about him or the others at all. 
Something in me said, If you care about them you will go mad. And 
they don't matter, really. She matters. Where is she? Find her. And 


236 



their laughter was remote, and it seemed to have a color and a shape 
but to be part of nothing. 

" Then I saw something through the open doorway which was 
something I'd seen before, a long, long time ago. No one knew of this 
thing I'd seen years before except myself. No. Lestat knew. But it 
didn't matter. He wouldn't know now or understand. That he and I 
had seen this thing, standing at the door of that brick kitchen in the 
Rue Royale, two wet shriveled things that had been alive, mother and 
daughter in one another's arms, the murdered pair on the kitchen 
floor. But these two lying under the gentle rain were Madeleine and 
Claudia, and Madeleine's lovely red hair mingled with the gold of 
Claudia's hair, which stirred and glistened in the wind that sucked 
through the open doorway. Only that which was living had been 
burnt away-not the hair, not the long, empty velvet dress, not the 
small bloodstained chemise with its eyelets of white lace. And the 
blackened, burnt, and drawn thing that was Madeleine -still bore the 
stamp of her living face, and the hand that clutched at the child was 
whole like a mummy's hand. But the child, the ancient one, my 
Claudia, was ashes. 

" A cry rose in me, a wild, consuming cry that came from the bowels 
of my being, rising up like the wind in that narrow place, the wind that 
swirled the rains teeming on those ashes, beating at the trace of a tiny 
hand against the bricks, that golden hair lifting, those loose strands 
rising, flying upwards. And a blow struck me even as I cried out; and I 
had hold of something that I believed to be Santiago, and I was 
pounding, against him, destroying him, twisting that grinning white 
face around with hands from which he couldn't free himself, hands 
against which he railed, crying out, his cries mingling with my cries, 
his boots coming down into those ashes, as I threw him backwards 
away from them, my own eyes blinded with the rain, with my tears, 
until he lay back away from me, and I was reaching out for him even 
as he held out his hand. And the one I was struggling against was 
Armand. Armand, who was forcing me out of the tiny graveyard into 
the whirling colors of the ballroom, the cries, the mingling voices, that 
searing, silver laughter. 

" And Lestat was calling out, 'Louis, wait for me; Louis, I must talk to 
you!' 

" I could see Armand's rich, brown eye close to mine, and I felt weak 
all over and vaguely aware that Madeleine and Claudia were dead, his 
voice saying softly, perhaps soundlessly, 'I could not prevent it, I could 
not prevent it. . : And they were dead, simply dead. And I was losing 
consciousness. Santiago was near them somewhere there where they 


237 



were still, that hair lifted on the wind, swept across those bricks, 
unraveling locks. But I was losing consciousness. 

" I could not-gather their bodies up with me, could not take them 
out. Armand had his arm around my back, his hand under my arm, 
and he, was all but carrying me through some hollow wooden echoing 
place, and the smells of the street were rising, the fresh smell of the 
horses and the leather, and there were the gleaming carriages stopped 
there. And I could see myself clearly running down the Boulevard des 
Capucines with a small coffin under my arm and the people making 
way for me and dozens of people rising around the crowded tables of 
the open cafe and a man lifting his arm. It seemed I stumbled then, 
the Louis whom Armand held in his arm, and again I saw his brown 
eyes looking at me, and felt that drowsiness, that sinking. And yet I 
walked, I moved, I saw the gleam of my own boots on the pavement. 
'Is he mad, that he says these things to me?' I was asking of Lestat, my 
voice shrill and angry, even the sound of it giving me some comfort. I 
was laughing, laughing loudly. 'He's stark-raving mad to speak to me 
in this manned Did you hear him?' I demanded. And Armand's eye 
said, Sleep. I wanted to say something about Madeleine and Claudia, 
that we could not leave them there, and I felt that cry again rising 
inside of me, that cry that pushed everything else out of its way, my 
teeth clenched to keep it in, because it was so loud and so full it would 
destroy me if I let it go. 

" And then I conceived of everything too clearly. We were walking 
now, a belligerent, blind sort of walking that men do when they are 
wildly drunk and filled with hatred for others, while at the same time 
they feel invincible. I was walking in such a manner through New 
Orleans the night I'd first encountered Lestat, that drunken walking 
which is a battering against things, which is miraculously sure-footed 
and finds its path. I saw a drunken man's hands fumbling 
miraculously with a match. Flame touched to the pipe, the smoke 
drawn in. I was standing at a cafe window. The man was drawing on 
his pipe. He was not at all drunk. Armand stood beside me waiting, 
and we were in the crowded Boulevard des Capucines. Or was it the 
Boulevard do Temple? I wasn't sure. I was outraged that their bodies 
remained there in that vile place. I saw Santiago's foot touching the 
blackened burned thing that had been my child! I was crying out 
through clenched teeth, and the man had risen from his table and 
steam spread out on the glass in front of his face. 'Get away from me,' 
I was saying to Armand. 'Damn you into hell, don't come near me. I 
warn you, don't come near me.' I was walking away from him up the 


238 



boulevard, and I could see a man and a woman stepping aside for me, 
the man with his arm out to protect the woman. 

" Then I was running. People saw me running. I wondered how it 
appeared to them, what wild, white thing they saw that moved too fast 
for their eyes. I remember that by the time I stopped, I was weak and 
sick, and my veins were burning as if I were starved. I thought of 
killing, and the thought filled me with revulsion. I was sitting on the 
stone steps beside a church, at one of those small side doors, carved 
into the stone, which was bolted and locked for the night. The rain 
had abated. Or so it seemed. And the street was dreary and quiet, 
though a man passed a long way off with a bright, black umbrella. 
Armand stood at a distance under the trees. Behind him it seemed 
there was a great expanse of trees and wet grasses and moist rising as if 
the ground were warm. 

" By thinking of only one thing, the sickness in my stomach and head 
and the tightening in my throat, was I able to return to a state of calm. 
By the time these things had died away and I was feeling clear again, I 
was aware of all that had happened, the great distance we'd come from 
the theater, and that the remains of Madeleine and Claudia were still 
there. Victims of a holocaust in each other's arms. And I felt resolute 
and very near to my own destruction. 

" T could not prevent it,' Armand said softly to me. And I looked up 
to see his face unutterably sad. He looked away from me as if he felt it 
was futile to try to convince me of this, and I could feel his 
overwhelming sadness, his near defeat. I had the feeling that if I were 
to vent all my anger on him he would do little to resist me. And I 
could feel that detachment, that passivity in him as something 
pervasive which was at the root of what he insisted to me again, T 
could not have prevented it.' 

"'Oh, but you could have prevented it!' I said softly. 'You know full 
well that you could have. You were the leader! You were the only one 
who knew the limits of your own power. They didn't know. They 
didn't understand. Your understanding surpassed theirs.' 

" He looked away still. But I could see the effect of my words on 
him. I could see the weariness in his face, the dull lusterless sadness of 
his eyes. 

"'You held sway over them. They feared you!' I went on. 'You 
could have stopped them if you’d been willing to use that power even 
beyond your own selfprescribed limits. It was your sense of yourself 
you would not violate. Your own precious conception of truth! I 
understand you perfectly. I see in you the reflection of myself!’ 


239 



" His eyes moved gently to engage mine. But he said nothing. The 
pain of his face was terrible. It was softened and desperate with pain 
and on the verge of some terrible explicit emotion he would not be 
able to control. He was in fear of that emotion. I was not. He was 
feeling my pain with that great spellbinding power of his which 
surpassed mine. I was not feeling his pain. It did not matter to me. 

" 'I understand you only too well. . .' I said. 'That passivity in me 
has been the core of it all, the real evil. That weakness, that refusal to 
compromise a fractured and stupid morality, that awful pride! For 
that, I let myself become the thing I am, when I knew it was wrong. 

For that, I let Claudia become the vampire she became, when I knew it 
was wrong. For that, I stood by and let her kill Lestat, when 1 knew 
that was wrong, the very thing that was her undoing. I lifted not a 
finger to prevent it. And Madeleine, Madeleine, I let her come to that, 
when I should never have made her a creature like ourselves. I knew 
that was wrong! Well, I tell you I am no longer that passive, weak 
creature that has spun evil from evil till the web is vast and thick while 
I remain its stultified victim. It's over! I know now what I must do. 
And I warn you, for whatever mercy you've shown me in digging me 
out of that grave tonight where I would have died: Do not seek your 
cell in the Theatre des Vampires again. Do not go near it. 

" I didn't wait to hear his answer. Perhaps he never attempted one. I 
don't know. I left him without looking back. If he followed me I was 
not conscious of it. I did not seek to know. I did not care. 

" It was to the cemetery in Montmartre that I retreated. Why that 
place, I'm not certain, except that it wasn't far from the Boulevard des 
Capucines, and Montmartre was countryfied then, and dark and 
peaceful compared to the metropolis. Wandering among the low 
houses with their kitchen gardens, I killed without the slightest 
measure of satisfaction, and then sought out the coffin where I was to 
lie by day in the cemetery. I scraped the remains out of it with my bare 
hands and lay down to a bed of foulness, of damp, of the stench of 
death. I cannot say this gave me comfort. Rather, it gave me what I 
wanted. Closeted in that dark, smelling the earth, away from all 
humans and all living human forms, I gave myself over to everything 
that invaded and stifled my senses. And, in so doing, gave myself over 
to my grief. 

" But that was short. 

" When the cold, gray winter sun had set the next night, I was awake, 
feeling the tingling numbness leave me soon, as it does in winter, 
feeling the dark, living things that inhabited the coffin scurrying 
around me, fleeing my resurrection. I emerged slowly under the faint 


240 



moon, savoring the coldness, the utter smoothness of the marble slab I 
shifted to escape. And, wandering out of the graves and out of the 
cemetery, I went over a plan in my mind, a plan on which I was willing 
to gamble my life with the powerful freedom of a being who truly does 
not care for that life, who has the extraordinary strength of being 
willing to die. 

" In a kitchen garden I saw something, something that had only been 
vague in my thoughts until I had my hands on it. It was a small scythe, 
its sharp curved blade still caked with green weeds from the last 
mowing. And once I'd wiped it clean and run my finger along the 
sharp blade, it was as if my plan came clear to me and I could move 
fast to my other errands: the getting of a carriage and a driver who 
could do my bidding for days-dazzled by the cash I gave him and the 
promises of more; the removing of my chest from the Hotel Saint- 
Gabriel to the inside of that carriage; and the procuring of all the other 
things which I needed. And then there were the long hours of the 
night, when I could pretend to drink with my driver and talk with him 
and obtain his expensive cooperation in driving me at dawn from 
Paris to Fontainebleau. I slept within the carriage, where my delicate 
health required I not be disturbed under any circumstances -this 
privacy being so important that I was more than willing ,to add a 
generous sum to the amount I was already paying him simply for his 
not touching even the door handle of the carriage until I emerged 
from it. 

" And when I was convinced he was in agreement and quite drank 
enough to be oblivious to almost everything but the gathering up of 
the reins for the journey for Fountainebleau, we drove slowly, 
cautiously, into the street of the Theatre des Vampires and waited 
some distance away for the sky to begin to grow light. 

" The theater was shut up and locked against the coming day. I crept 
towards it when the air and the light told me I had at most fifteen 
minutes to execute my plan. I knew that, closeted far within, the 
vampires of the theater were in their coffins already. And that even if 
one late vampire lingered on the verge of going to bed, he would not 
hear these first preparations. Quickly I put pieces of wood against the 
bolted doors. Quickly I drove in the nails, which then locked these 
doors from the outside. A passer-by took some note of what I did but 
went on, believing me perhaps to be boarding up the establishment 
with the authority of the owner. I didn't know. I did know, however, 
that before I was finished I might encounter those ticket-sellers, those 
ushers, those men who swept up after, and might well remain inside to 
guard the vampires in their daily sleep. 


241 



" It was of those men I was thinking as I led the carriage up to 
Armand's alley and left it there, taking with me two small barrels of 
kerosene to Armand's door. 

" The key admitted me easily as rd hoped, and once inside the lower 
passage, I opened the door of his cell to find he was not there. The 
coffin was gone. In fact, everything was gone but the furnishings, 
including the dead boy's enclosed bed. Hastily I opened one barrel 
and, rolling the other before me towards the stairs, I hurried along, 
splashing the exposed beams with kerosene and flinging it on the 
wooden doors of the other cells. The smell of it was strong, stronger 
and more powerful than any sound I might have made to alert anyone. 
And, though I stood stark still at the stairs with the barrels and the 
scythe, listening, I heard nothing, nothing of those guards I presumed 
to be there, nothing of the vampires themselves. And clutching the 
handle of the scythe I ventured slowly upwards until I stood in the 
door of the ballroom. No one was there to see me splash the kerosene 
on the horsehair chairs or on the draperies' or to see me hesitate just 
for an instant at that doorway of the small yard where Madeleine and 
Claudia had been killed. Oh, how I wanted to open that door. It so 
tempted me that for a minute I almost forgot my plan. I almost 
dropped the barrels and turned the knob. But I could see the light 
through the cracks of the old wood of the door. And I knew I had to 
go on. Madeleine and Claudia were not there. They were dead. And 
what would I have done had I opened that doorway, had I been 
confronted again with those remains, that matted, disheveled golden 
hair? There was no time, no purpose. I was running through dark 
corridors I hadn't explored before, bathing old wooden doors with the 
kerosene, certain that the vampires lay closeted within, rushing on cat 
feet into the theater itself, where a cold, gray light, seeping from the 
bolted front entrance, sped me on to fling a dark -stain across the great 
velvet stage curtain, the padded chairs, the draperies of the lobby 
doors. 

" And finally the barrel was empty and thrown away, and I was 
pulling out the crude torch I'd made, putting my match to its 
kerosene-drenched rags, and setting the chairs alight, the flames 
licking their thick silk and padding as I ran towards the stage and sent 
the fire rushing up that dark curtain into a cold, sucking draff. 

" In seconds the theater blazed as with the light of day, and the whole 
frame of it seemed to creak and groan as the fire roared up the walls, 
licking the great proscenium arch, the plaster curlicues of the 
overhanging boxes. But I had no time to admire it, to savor the smell 
and the sound of it, the sight of the nooks and crannies coming to light 


242 



in the fierce illumination that would soon consume them. I was 
geeing to the lower floor again, thrusting the torch into the horsehair 
couch of the ballroom, into the curtains, into anything that would 
burn. 

" Someone thundered on the boards above-in rooms I'd never seen. 
And then I heard the unmistakable opening of a door. But it was too 
late, I told myself, gripping both the scythe and the torch. The 
building was alight. They would be destroyed. I ran for the stairs, a 
distant cry rising over the crackling and roaring of the flames, my 
torch scraping the kerosene-soaked rafters above me, the flames 
enveloping the old wood, curling against the damp ceiling. It was 
Santiago's cry, I was sure of it; and then, as I hit the lower floor, I saw 
him above, behind me, coming down the stairs, the smoke filling the 
stairwell around him, his eyes watering, his throat thickened with his 
choking, his hand out towards me as he stammered, 'You . . .you . . . 
damn you!' And I froze, narrowing my eyes against the smoke, feeling 
the water rising in them, burning in them, but never letting go of his 
image for an instant, the vampire using all his power now to fly at me 
with such speed that he would become invisible. And as the dark thing 
that was his clothes rushed down, I swung the scythe and saw it strike 
his neck and felt the weight of his neck and saw him fall sideways, both 
hands reaching for the appalling wound. The air was full of cries, of 
screams, and a white face loomed above Santiago, a mask of terror. 
Some other vampire ran through the passage ahead of me towards that 
secret alleyway door. But I stood there poised, staring at Santiago, 
seeing him rise despite the wound. And I swung the scythe again, 
catching him easily. And there was no wound. Just two hands groping 
for a head that was no longer there. 

" And the head, blood coursing from the torn neck, the eyes staring 
wild under the flaming rafters, the dark silky hair matted and wet with 
blood, fell at my feet. I struck it hard with my boot, I sent it flying 
along the passage. And I ran after it; the torch and the scythe thrown 
aside as my arms went up to protect me from the blaze of white light 
that flooded the stairs to the alley. 

" The rain descended in shimmering needles into my eyes, eyes that 
squinted to see the dark outline of the carriage flicker against the sky. 
The slumped driver straightened at my hoarse command, his clumsy 
hand going instinctively for the whip, and the carriage lurched as I 
pulled open the door, the horses driving forward fast as I grappled 
with the lid of the chest, my body thrown roughly to one side, my 
burnt hands slipping down into the cold protecting silk, the lid 
coming down into concealing darkness. 


243 



" The pace of the horses increased driving away from the corner of 
the burning building. Yet I could still smell the smoke; it choked me; 
it burnt my eyes and my lungs, even as my hands were burnt and my 
forehead was burnt from the first diffused light of the sun. 

" But we were driving on, away from the smoke and the cries. We 
were leaving Paris. I had done it. The Theatre des Vampires was 
burning to the ground, 

" And as I felt my head fall back, I saw Claudia and Madeleine again 
in one another's arms in that grin yard, and I said to them softly, 
bending down to the soft heads of hair that glistened in the 
candlelight, T couldn't take you away. I couldn't take you. But they 
will lie ruined and dead all around you. If the fire doesn't consume 
them, it will be the sun. If they are not burnt out, then it will be the 
people who will come to fight the fire who will find them and expose 
them to the light of day. But I promise you, they will all die as you 
have died, everyone who was closeted there this dawn will die. And 
they are the only deaths I have caused in my long life which are both 
exquisite and good.' " Two nights later I returned. I had to see that 
rain-flooded cellar where every brick was scorched, crumbling, where 
a few skeletal rafters jabbed at the sky like stakes. Those monstrous 
murals that once enclosed the ballroom were blasted fragments in the 
rubble, a painted face here, a patch of angel's wing there, the only 
identifiable things that remained. 

" With the evening newspapers, I pushed my way to the back of a 
crowded little theater cafe across the street; and there, under the cover 
of the dim gas lamps and thick cigarsmoke, I read the accounts of the 
holocaust. Few bodies were found in the burnt-out theater, but 
clothing and costumes had been scattered everywhere, as though the 
famous vampire mummers had in fact vacated the theater in haste 
long before the fire. In other words, only the younger vampire had left 
their bones; the ancient ones had suffered total obliteration. No 
mention of an eye-witness or a surviving victim. How could there 
have been? 

" Yet something bothered me considerably. I did not fear any 
vampires who had escaped. I had no desire to hunt them out if they 
had. That most of the crew had died I was certain. But why had there 
been no human guards? I was certain Santiago had mentioned guards, 
and I'd supposed them to be the ushers and doormen who staffed the 
theater before the performance. And I had even been prepared to 
encounter them with my scythe. But they had not been there. It was 
strange. And my mind was not entirely comfortable with the 
strangeness. 


244 



" But, finally, when I put the papers aside and sat thinking these 
things over, the strangeness of it didn't matter. What mattered was 
that I was more utterly alone in the world than I had ever been in all 
my life. That Claudia was gone beyond reprieve. And I had less 
reason to live than I'd ever had, and less desire. 

" And yet my sorrow, did not overwhelm me, did not actually visit 
me, did not make of me the wracked and desperate creature I might 
have expected to become. Perhaps it was not possible to sustain the 
torment I'd experienced when I saw Claudia's burnt remains. Perhaps 
it was not possible to know that and exist over any period of time. I 
wondered vaguely, as the hours passed, as the smoke of the cafe grew 
thicker and the faded curtain of the little lamplit stage rose and fell, 
and robust women sang there, the light glittering on their paste jewels, 
their rich, soft voices often plaintive, exquisitely sad-I wondered 
vaguely what it would be to feel this loss, this outrage, and be justified 
in it, be deserving of sympathy, of solace. I would not have told my 
woe to a living creature. My own tears meant nothing to me. 

" Where to go then, if not to die? It was strange how the answer 
came to me. Strange how I wandered out of the cafe then, circling the 
ruined theater, wandering finally towards the broad Avenue Napoleon 
and following it towards the palace of the Louvre. It was as if that 
place called to me, and yet I had never been inside its walls. I'd passed 
its long facade a thousand times, wishing that I could live as a mortal 
man for one day to move through those many rooms and see those 
many magnificent paintings. I was bent on it now, possessed only of 
some vague notion that in works of art I could find some solace while 
bringing nothing of death to what was inanimate and yet 
magnificently possessed of the spirit of life itself. 

" Somewhere along the Avenue Napoleon, I heard the step behind 
me which I knew to be Armand's. He was signaling, letting me know 
that he was near. Yet I did nothing other than slow my pace and let 
him fall into step with me, and for a long while we walked, saying 
nothing. I dared not look at him. Of course, I'd been thinking of him 
all the while, and how if we were men and Claudia had been my love I 
might have fallen helpless in his arms finally, the need to share some 
common grief so strong, so consuming. The dam threatened to break 
now; and yet it did not break. I was numbed and I walked as one 
numbed. 

" 'You know what I've done,' I said finally. We had turned off the 
avenue and I could see ahead of me the long row of double columns 
on the facade of the Royal Museum. 'You removed your coffin as I 
warned you. 


245 



" 'Yes,' he answered. There was a sudden, unmistakable comfort in 
the sound of his voice. It weakened me. But I was simply too remote 
from pain, too tired. 

" 'And yet you are here with me now. Do you mean to avenge them?' 

" 'No,' he said. 

" 'They were your fellows, you were their leader,' I said. 'Yet you 
didn't warn them I was out for them, as I warned you?' 

" 'No,' he said. 

" 'But surely you despise me for it. Surely you respect some rule, 
some allegiance to your own kind.’ 

" 'No,' he said softly. 

" It was amazing to me how logical his response was, even though I 
couldn't explain it or understand it. 

" And something came clear to me out of the remote regions of my 
own relentless considerations. 'There were guards; there were those 
ushers who slept in the theater. Why weren't they there when I 
entered? Why weren't they there to protect the sleeping vampires?' 

" 'Because they were in my employ and I discharged them. I sent 
them away,' Armand said. 

" I stopped. He showed no concern at my facing him, and as soon as 
our eyes met I wished the world were not one black empty ruin of 
ashes and death. I wished it were fresh and beautiful, and that we were 
both living and had love to give each other. 'You did this, knowing 
what I planned to do? 

" 'Yes,' he said. 

" 'But you were their leader! They trusted you. They believed in 
you. They lived with you!' I said. 'I don't understand you . . . why. 

. .?' 

" 'Think of any answer you like,' he said calmly and sensitively, as if 
he didn't wish to bruise me with any accusation or disdain, but wanted 
me merely to consider this literally. 'I can think of many. Think of the 
one you need and believe it. It’s as likely as any other. I shall give you 
the real reason for what I did, which is the least true: I was leaving 
Paris. The theater belonged to me. So I discharged them.' 

" 'But with what you knew . . .' 

" 'I told you, it was the actual reason and it was the least true,' he said 
patiently. 

" 'Would you destroy me as easily as you let them be destroyed?’ I 
demanded. 

" 'Why should I?' he asked. 

" 'My God,’ I whispered. 


246 



" 'You're much changed,' he said. 'But in a way, you are much the 
same.' 

" I walked on for a while and then, before the entrance to the Louvre, 
I stopped. At first it seemed to me that its many windows were dark 
and silver with the moonlight and the thin rain. But then I thought I 
saw a faint light moving within, as though a guard walked among the 
treasures. I envied him completely. And I fixed my thoughts an him 
obdurately, that guard, calculating how a vampire might get to him, 
how take his life and his lantern and his keys. The plan was confusion. 
I was incapable of plans. I had made only one real plan in my life, and 
it was finished. 

" And then finally I surrendered. I turned to Armand again and let 
my eyes penetrate his eyes, and let him draw close to me as if he meant 
to make me his victim, and I bowed my head and felt his firm arm 
around my shoulder. And, remembering suddenly and keenly 
Claudia's words, what were very nearly her last. words -that 
admission that she knew that I could love Armand because I had been 
able to love even her-those words struck me as rich and ironical, more 
filled with meaning than she could have guessed. 

" 'Yes,' I said softly to him, 'that is the crowning evil, that we can 
even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would 
show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who 
else, knowing us as we know each other, could do anything but destroy 
us? Yet we can love each other.’ 

" And for a long moment, he stood there looking at me, drawing 
nearer, his head gradually inclining to one side, his lips parted as if he 
meant to speak. But then he only smiled and shook his head gently to 
confess he didn't understand. 

" But I wasn't thinking of him anymore. I had one of those rare 
moments when it seemed I thought of nothing. My mind had no 
shape. I saw that the rain had stopped. I saw that the air was clear and 
cold. That the street was luminous. And I wanted to enter the Louvre. 
I formed words to tell Armand this, to ask him if he might help me do 
what was necessary to have the Louvre till dawn. 

" He thought it a very simple request. He said only he wondered why 
I had waited so long. 

"We left Paris very soon after that. I told Armand that I wanted to 
return to the Mediterranean-not to Greece, as I had so long dreamed. 

I wanted to go to Egypt. I wanted to see the desert there and, more 
importantly, I wanted to see the pyramids and the graves of the kings. 

I wanted to make contact with those grave-thieves who know snore of 
the graves than do scholars, and I wanted to go down into the graves 


247 



yet unopened and see the kings as they were buried, see those 
furnishings and works of art stored with them, and the paintings on 
their walls. Armand was more than willing. And we took leave of 
Paris early one evening by carriage without the slightest hint of 
ceremony. 

" I had done one thing which I should note. I had gone back to my 
rooms in the hotel Saint-Gabriel. It was my purpose to take up some 
things of Claudia and Madeleine and put them into coffins and have 
graves prepared for them in the cemetery of Montmartre. I did not do 
this. I stayed a short while in the rooms, where all was neat and put 
right by the staff, so that it seemed Madeleine and Claudia might 
return at any time. Madeleine's embroidery ring lay with her bundles 
of thread on a chair-side table. I looked at that and at everything else, 
and my task seemed meaningless. So I left. 

" But something had occurred to me there; or, rather, something I 
had already been aware of merely became clearer. I had gone to the 
Louvre that night to lay down my soul, to find some transcendent 
pleasure that would obliterate pain and make me utterly forget ever! 
myself. I'd been upheld in this. As I stood on the sidewalk before the 
doors of the hotel waiting for the carriage that would take me to meet 
Armand, I saw the people who walked there-the restless boulevard 
crowd of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, the hawkers of papers, the 
carriers of luggage, the drivers of carriages-all these in a new light. 
Before, all art had held for me the promise of a deeper understanding 
of the human heart. Now the human heart meant nothing. I did not 
denigrate it. I simply forgot it. The magnificent paintings of the 
Louvre were not for me intimately connected with the hands that had 
painted them. They were cut loose and dead like children turned to 
stone. Like Claudia, severed from her mother, preserved for decades 
in pearl and hammered gold. Like Madeleine's dolls. And of course, 
like Claudia and Madeleine and myself, they could all be reduced to 
ashes. 


248 



PART IV 


" And that is the end of the story, really. 

" Of course, I know you wonder what happened to us afterwards. 
What became of Armand? Where did I go? What did I do? But I tell 
you nothing really happened. Nothing that wasn't merely inevitable. 
And my journey through the Louvre that last night I've described to 
you, that was merely prophetic. 

" I never changed after that. I sought for nothing in the one great 
source of change which is humanity. And even in my love and 
absorption with the beauty of the world, I sought to learn nothing that 
could be given back to humanity. I drank of the beauty of the world as 
a vampire drinks. I was satisfied. I was filled to the brim. But I was 
dead. And I was changeless. The story ended in Paris, as I've said. 

" For a long time I thought that Claudia's death had been the cause 
of the end of things. That if I had seen Madeleine and Claudia leave 
Paris safely, things might have been different with me and Armand. I 
might have loved again and desired again, and sought some semblance 
of mortal life which would have been rich and varied, though 
unnatural. But now I have come to see that was false. Even if Claudia 
had not died, even if I had not despised Armand for letting her die, it 
would have all turned out the same. Coming slowly to know his evil, 
or being catapulted into it. . . was all the same. I wanted none of it 
finally. And, deserving nothing better, I closed up like a spider in the 
flame of a match. And even Armand who was my constant 
companion, and my only companion, existed at a great distance from 
me, beyond that veil which separated me from all living things, a veil 
which was a form of shroud. 

" But I know you are eager to hear what became of Armand. And the 
night is almost ended. I want to tell you this because it is very 
important. The story is incomplete without it. 

" We traveled the world after we left Paris, as I've told you; first 
Egypt, then Greece, then Italy, Asia Minor-wherever I chose to lead us, 
really, and wherever my pursuit of art led me. Time ceased to exist on 
any meaningful basis during these years, and I was often absorbed in 
very simple things-a painting in a museum, a cathedral window, one 
single beautiful statue-for long periods of time. 

" But all during these years I had a vague but persistent desire to 
return to New Orleans. I never forgot New Orleans. And when we 
were in tropical places and places of those flowers and trees that grow 
in Louisiana, I would think of it acutely and I would feel for my home 
the only glimmer of desire I felt for anything outside my endless 


249 



pursuit of art. And, from time to time, Armand would ask me to take 
him there. And I, being aware in a gentlemanly manner that I did little 
to please him and often went for long periods without really speaking 
to him or seeking him out, wanted to do this because he asked me. It 
seemed his asking caused me to forget some vague fear that I might 
feel pain in New Orleans, that I might experience again the pale 
shadow of my former unhappiness and longing. But I put it off. 
Perhaps the fear was stronger than I knew. We came to America and 
lived in New York for a long time. I continued to put it off. Then, 
finally, Armand urged me in another way. He told me something he'd 
concealed from me since the time we were in Paris. 

" Lestat had not died in the Theatre des Vampires. I had believed 
him to be dead, and when I asked Armand about those vampires, he 
told me they all had perished. But he told me now that this wasn't so. 
Lestat had left the theater the night I had run away from Armand and 
sought out the cemetery in Montmartre. Two vampires who had been 
made with Lestat by the same master had assisted him in booking 
passage to New Orleans. 

" I cannot convey to you the feeling that came over me when I heard 
this. Of course, Armand told me he had protected me from this 
knowledge, hoping that I would not undertake a long journey merely 
for revenge, a journey that would have caused me pain and grief at the 
time. But I didn't really care. I hadn't thought of Lestat at all the night 
I'd torched the theater. I'd thought of Santiago and Celeste and the 
others who had destroyed Claudia. Lestat, in fact, had aroused in me 
feelings which I hadn't wished to confide in anyone, feelings I'd wished 
to forget, despite Claudia's death. Hatred had not been one of them. 

" But when I heard this now from Armand it was as if the veil that 
protected me were thin and transparent, and though it still hung 
between me and the world of feeling, I perceived through it Lestat, and 
that I wanted to see him again. And with that spurring me on, we 
returned to New Orleans. 

" It was late spring of this year. And as soon as I emerged from the 
railway station, I knew that I had indeed come home. It was as if the 
very air were perfumed and peculiar there, and I felt an extraordinary 
ease walking on those warm, flat pavements, under those familiar oaks, 
and listening to the ceaseless vibrant living sounds of the night. 

" Of course, New Orleans was changed. But far from lamenting 
those changes, I was grateful for what seemed still the same. I could 
find in the uptown Garden District, which had been in my time the 
Faubourg St: Marie, one of the stately old mansions that dated back to 
those times, so removed from the quiet brick street that, walking out 


250 



in the moonlight under its magnolia trees, I knew the same sweetness 
and peace I'd known in the old days; not only in the dark, narrow 
streets of the Vieux Carre but in the wilderness of Pointe du Lac. 

There were the honeysuckle and the roses, and the glimpse of 
Corinthian columns against the stars; and outside the gate were 
dreamy streets, other mansions ... it was a citadel of grace. 

" In the Rue Royale, where I took Armand past tourists and antique 
shops and the bright-lit entrances of fashionable restaurants, I was 
astonished to discover the town house where Lestat and Claudia and I 
had made our home, the facade little changed by fresh plaster and 
whatever repairs had been done within. Its two French windows still 
opened onto the small balconies over the shop below, and I could see 
in the soft brilliance of the electric chandeliers an elegant wallpaper 
that would not have been unfamiliar in those days before the war. I 
had a strong sense of Lestat there, more of a sense of him than of 
Claudia, and I felt certain, though he was nowhere near this town 
house, that I'd find him in New Orleans. 

" And I felt something else; it was a sadness that came over me then, 
after Armand had gone on his way. But this sadness was not painful, 
nor was it passionate. It was something rich, however, and almost 
sweet, like the fragrance of the jasmine and the roses that crowded the 
old courtyard garden which I saw through the iron gates. And this 
sadness gave a subtle satisfaction and held me a long time in that spot; 
arid it held me to the city; and it didn't really leave me that night when 
I went away. 

" I wonder now what might have come of this sadness, what it might 
have engendered in me that could have become stronger than itself. 
But I jump ahead of my story. 

" Because shortly after that I saw a vampire in New Orleans, a sleek 
white-faced young man walking alone on the broad sidewalks of St. 
Charles Avenue in the early hours before dawn. And I was at once 
convinced that if Lestat still lived here that vampire might know him 
and might even lead me to him. Of course, the vampire didn't see me. 
I had long ago learned to spot my own kind in large cities without 
their having a chance to see me. Armand, in his brief visits with 
vampires in London and Rome, had learned that the burning of the 
Theatre des Vampires was known throughout the world, and that both 
of us were considered outcasts. Battles over this meant nothing to me, 
and I have avoided them to this day. But I began to watch for this 
vampire in New Orleans and to follow him, though often he led me 
merely to theaters or other pastimes in which I had no interest. But 
one night, finally, things changed. 


251 



" It was a very warts evening, and I could tell as soon as I saw him on 
St. Charles that he had someplace to go. He was not only walking fast, 
but he seemed a little distressed. And when he turned off St. Charles 
finally on a narrow street which became at once shabby and dark, I felt 
sure he was headed for something that would interest me. 

" But then he entered one side of a small wooden duplex and brought 
death to a woman there. This he did very fast, without a trace of 
pleasure; and after he was finished, he gathered her child up from the 
bassinet, wrapped it gently in a blue wool blanket, and came out again 
into the street. 

" Only a block or two after that, he stopped before a vine-covered 
iron fence that enclosed a large overgrown yard. I could see an old 
house beyond the trees, dark, the paint peeling, the ornate iron railings 
of its long upper and lower galleries caked with orange rust. It seemed 
a doomed house, stranded here among the numerous small wooden 
houses, its high empty windows looking out on what must have been a 
dismal clutter of low roofs, a comer grocery, and a small adjacent bar.. 
But the broad, dark grounds protected the house somewhat from these 
things, and I had to move along the fence quite a few feet before I 
finally spotted a faint glimmer in one of the lower windows through 
the thick branches of the trees. The vampire had gone through the 
gate. I could hear the baby wailing, and then nothing. And I followed, 
easily mounting the old fence and dropping down into the garden and 
coming up quietly onto the long front porch. 

" It was an amazing sight I saw when I crept up to one of the long, 
floor-length windows. For despite the heat of this breezeless evening 
when the gallery, even with its warped and broken boards, might have 
been the only tolerable place for human or vampire, a fire blazed in 
the grate of the parlor and all its windows were shut, and the young 
vampire sat by that fire talking to another vampire who hovered very 
near it, his slippered feet right up against the hot grate, his trembling 
fingers pulling over and over at the lapels of his shabby blue robe. 

And, though a frayed electric cord dangled from a plaster wreath of 
roses in the ceiling, only an oil lamp added its dim light to the fire, an 
oil lamp which stood by the wailing child on a nearby table. 

" My eyes widened as I studied this stooped and shivering vampire 
whose rich blond hair hung down in loose waves covering his face. I 
longed to wipe away the dust on the window glass which would not let 
me be certain of what I suspected. 'You all leave me!’ he whined now 
in a thin, high-pitched voice. 

" 'You can’t keep us with you! said the stiff young vampire sharply. 
He sat with his legs crossed, his arms folded on his narrow chest, his 


252 



eyes looking around the dusty, empty room disdainfully. 'Oh, hush!’ 
he said to the baby, who let out a sharp cry. 'Stop it, stop it.’ 

" 'The wood, the wood,' said the blond vampire feebly, and, as he 
motioned to the other to hand him the fuel by his chair, I saw clearly, 
unmistakably, the profile of Lestat, that smooth skin now devoid of 
even the faintest trace of his old scars. 

" 'If you'd just go out,' said the other angrily, heaving the chunk of 
wood into the blaze. 'If you'd just hunt something other than these 
miserable animals . . . :And he looked about himself in disgust. I saw 
then, in the shadows, the small furry bodies of several cats, lying 
helter-skelter in the dust. A most remarkable thing, because a vampire 
can no more endure to be near his dead victims than any mammal can 
remain near any place where he has left his waste. 'Do you know that 
it's summer?' demanded the young one. Lestat merely rubbed his 
hands. The baby's howling cued off, yet the young vampire added, 

'Get on with it, take it so you'll be warm.' 

" 'You might have brought me something else!’ said Lestat bitterly. 
And, as he looked at the baby, I saw his eyes squinting against the dull 
light of the smoky lamp. I felt a shock of recognition at those eyes, 
even at the expression beneath the shadow of the deep wave of his 
yellow hair. And yet to hear that whining voice, to see that bent and 
quivering back! Almost without thinking I rapped hard on the glass. 
The young vampire was up at once affecting a hard, vicious 
expression; but I merely motioned for him to turn the latch. And 
Lestat, clutching his bathrobe to his throat, rose from the chair. 

"'It’s Louis! Louis!' he said. 'Let him in'And he gestured 
frantically, like an invalid, for the young 'nurse' to obey. 

" As soon as the window opened I breathed the stench of the room 
and its sweltering heat. The swarming of the insects on the rotted 
animals scratched at my senses so that I recoiled despite myself, 
despite Lestat's desperate pleas for me to come to him. There, in the 
far corner, was the coffin where he slept, the lacquer peeling from the 
wood, half covered with piles of yellow newspapers. And bones lay in 
the corners, picked clean except for bits and tufts of fur. But Lestat 
had his dry hands on mine now, drawing me towards him and towards 
the warmth, and I could see the tears welling in his eyes; and only 
when his mouth was stretched in a strange smile of desperate 
happiness that was near to pain did I see the faint traces of the old 
scars. How baffling and awful it was, this smoothfaced, shimmering 
immortal man bent and rattled and whining like a crone. 

" 'Yes, Lestat,’ I said softly. 'I've come to see you' I pushed his hand 
gently, slowly away and moved towards the baby, who was crying 


253 



desperately now from fear as well as hunger. As soon as I lifted it up 
and loosened the covers, it quieted a little, and then I patted it and 
rocked it. Lestat was whispering to me now in quick, half-articulated 
words I couldn't understand, the tears streaming down his cheeks, the 
young vampire at the open window with a look of disgust on his face 
and one hand (r)n the window latch, as if he meant at any minute to 
bolt. 

" 'So you're Louis,' said the young vampire. This seemed to increase 
Lestat's inexpressible, excitement, and he wiped frantically at his tears 
with the hem of his robe. 

" A fly lit on the baby's forehead, and involuntarily I gasped as I 
pressed it between two fingers and dropped it dead to the floor. The 
child was no longer crying. It was looking up at me with extraordinary 
blue eyes, dark-blue eyes, its round face glistening from the heat, and a 
smile played on its lips, a smile that grew brighter like a flame. I had 
never brought death to anything so young, so innocent, and I was 
aware of this now as I held the child with an odd feeling of sorrow, 
stronger even than that feeling which had come over me in the Rue 
Royale. And, rocking the child gently, I pulled the young vampire's 
chair to the fire and sat down. 

" 'Don't try to speak . . . it's all right,' I said to Lestat, who dropped 
down gratefully into his chair and reached out to stroke the lapels of 
my coat with both hands. 

" 'But I’m so glad to see you,' he stammered through his tears. 'I've 
dreamed of your coming . . . coming. . ' he said. And then he 
grimaced, as if he were feeling a pain he couldn't identify, and again 
the fine map of scars appeared for an instant. He was looking off, his 
hand up to his ear, as if he meant to cover it to defend himself from 
some terrible sound. 'I didn't. . ' he started; and then he shook his 
head, his eyes clouding as he opened them wide, strained to focus 
them. 'I didn't mean to let them do it, Louis ... I mean that 
Santiago . . . that one, you know, he didn't tell me what they planned 
to do.' 

" 'That's all past, Lestat,' I said. 

"'Yes, yes,'he nodded vigorously. 'Past. She should never . . . why, 
Louis, you know. . . ' And he was shaking his head, his voice seeming 
to gain in strength, to gain a little in resonance with his effort. 'She 
should have never been one of us, Louis.’ And he rapped his sunken 
chest with his fist as he said 'Us' again softly. 

" She. It seemed then that she had never existed That she had been 
some illogical, fantastical dream that, was too precious and too 
personal for me ever to confide in anyone. And too long gone. I 


254 



looked at him. I stared at him. And tried to think, Yes, the three of us 
together. 

" 'Don't fear me, Lestat,' I said, as though talking to myself. 'I bring 
you no harm.’ 

" 'You've come back to me, Louis,' he whispered in that thin, high- 
pitched voice. 'You've come home again to me, Louis, haven't you?' 
And again he bit his lip and looked at me desperately. 

" 'No, Lestat.' I shook my head. He was frantic for a moment, and 
again he commenced one gesture and then another and finally sat 
there with his hands over his face in a paroxysm of distress. The other 
vampire, who was studying me coldly, asked: 

" 'Are you . . . have you come back to him?' 

" 'No, of course not,’ I answered. And he smirked, as if this was as he 
expected, that everything fell to him again, and he walked out onto the 
porch. I could hear him there very near, waiting. 

" 'I only wanted to see you, Lestat,’ I said. But Lestat didn't seem to 
hear me. Something else had distracted him. And he was gazing off, 
his eyes wide, his hands hovering near his ears. Then I heard it also. It 
was a siren. And as it grew louder, his eyes shut tight against it and his 
fingers covered his ears. And it grew louder and louder, coming up 
the street from downtown. 'Lestat!' I said to him, over the baby's 
cries, which rose now in the same terrible fear of the siren. But his 
agony obliterated me. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a 
terrible grimace of pain. 'Lestat, it's only a siren!' I said to him 
stupidly. And then he came forward out of the chair and took hold of 
me and held tight to me, and, despite myself, I took his hand. He bent 
down, pressing his head against my chest and holding my hand so 
tight that he caused me pain. The room was filled with the flashing 
red light of the siren, and then it was going away. 

" 'Louis, I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,' he growled through his tears. 
'Help me, Louis, stay with me.' 

" 'But why are you afraid?' I asked. 'Don't you know what these 
things are?' And as I looked down at him, as I saw his yellow hair 
pressed against my coat, I had a vision of him from long ago, that tall, 
stately gentleman in the swirling black cape, with his head thrown 
back, his rich, flawless voice singing the lilting air of the opera from 
which we'd only just come, his walking stick tapping the cobblestones 
in time with the music, his large, sparkling eye catching the young 
woman who stood by, enrapt, so that a smile spread over his face as 
the song died on his lips; and for one moment, that one moment when 
his eye met hers, all evil seemed obliterated in that flush of pleasure, 
that passion for merely being alive. 


255 



" Was this the price of that involvement? A sensibility shocked by 
change, shriveling from fear? I thought quietly of all' the things I 
might say to him, how I might remind him that he was immortal, that 
nothing condemned him to this retreat save himself, and that he was 
surrounded with the unmistakable signs of inevitable death. But I did 
not say these things, and I knew that I would not. 

" It seemed the silence of the room rushed back around us, like a 
dark sea that the siren had driven away. The flies swarmed on the 
festering body of a rat, and the child looked quietly up at me as though 
my eyes were bright baubles, and its dimpled hand closed on the finger 
that I poised above its tiny petal mouth. 

" Lestat had risen, straightened, but only to bend over and slink into 
the chair. 'You won't stay with me,' he sighed. But then he looked 
away and seemed suddenly absorbed. 

" 'I wanted to talk to you so much,’ he said. 'That night I came home 
in the Rue Royale I only wanted to talk to you!’ He shuddered 
violently, eyes closed, his throat seeming to contract. It was as if the 
blows I'd struck him then were falling now. He stared blindly ahead, 
his tongue moistening his lip, his voice low, almost natural. 'I went to 
Paris after you. . . 

" 'What was it you wanted to tell me?' I asked. 'What was it you 
wanted to talk about?’ 

" I could well remember his mad insistence in the Theatre des 
Vampires. I hadn't thought of it in years. No, I had never thought of 
it. And I was aware that I spoke of it now with great reluctance. 

" But he only .smiled at me, and insipid, near apologetic smile. And 
shook his head. I watched his eyes fill with a soft, bleary despair. 

" I felt a profound, undeniable relief. 

"'But you will stay!' he insisted. 

" 'No,' I answered. 

" 'And neither will I!' said that young vampire from the darkness 
outside. And he stood for a second in the open window looking at us. 
Lestat looked up at him and then sheepishly away, and his lower lip 
seemed to thicken and tremble. 'Close it, close it,’ he said, waving his 
finger at the window. Then a sob burst from him and, covering his 
mouth with his hand, he put his head down and cried. 

" The young vampire was gone. I heard his steps moving fast on the 
walk, heard the heavy chink of the iron gate. And I was alone with 
Lestat, and he was crying. It seemed a long time before he stopped, 
and during all that time I merely watched him. I was thinking of all 
the things that had passed between us. I was remembering things 
which I supposed I had completely forgotten. And I was conscious 


256 



then of that same overwhelming sadness which I'd felt when I saw the 
place in the Rue Royale where we had lived. Only, it didn't seem to me 
to be a sadness for Lestat, for that smart, gay vampire who used to live 
there then. It seemed a sadness for something else, something beyond 
Lestat that only included him and' was part of the great awful sadness 
of all the things I'd ever lost or loved or known. It seemed then I was 
in a different place, a different time. And this different place and time 
was very real, and it was a room where the insects had hummed as they 
were humming here and the air had been close and thick with death 
and with the spring perfume. And I was on the verge of knowing that 
place and knowing with it a terrible pain, a pain so terrible that my 
mind veered away from it, said, No, don't take me back to that place- 
and suddenly it was receding, and I was with Lestat here now. 
Astonished, I saw my own tear fall onto the face of the child. I saw it 
glisten on the child's cheek, and I saw the cheek become very plump 
with the child's smile. It must have been seeing the fight in the tears. I 
put my hand to my face and wiped at the tears that were in fact there 
and looked at them in amazement. 

"'But Louis . . .’ Lestat was saying softly. 'How can you be as you 
are, how can you stand it?' He was looking up at me, his mouth in 
that same grimace, his face wet with tears. 'Tell me, Louis, help me to 
understand! How can you understand it all, how can you endure?' 

And I could see by the desperation in his eyes and the deeper tone 
which his voice had taken that he, too; was pushing himself towards 
something that for him was very painful, towards a place where he 
hadn't ventured in a long time. But then, even as I looked at him, his 
eyes appeared to become misty, confused. And he pulled the robe up 
tight, and shaking his head, he looked at the fire. A shudder passed 
through him and he moaned. 

" 'I have to go now, Lestat,’ I said to him. I felt weary, weary of him 
and weary of this sadness. And I longed again for the stillness outside, 
that perfect quiet to which I’d become so completely accustomed. But 
I realized, as I rose to my feet, that I was taking the little baby with me. 

" Lestat looked up at me now with his large, agonized eyes and his 
smooth, ageless face. 'But you'll come back . . . you'll come to visit 
me . . . Louis?' he said. 

" I turned away from him, hearing him calling after me, and quietly 
left the house. When I reached the street, I looked back and I could 
see him hovering at the window as if he were afraid to go out. I 
realized he had not gone out for a long, long time, and it occurred to 
me then that perhaps he would never go out again. 


257 



" I returned to the small house from which the vampire had taken 
the child, and left it there in its crib. 

" Not very long after that I told Armand I'd seen Lestat. Perhaps it 
was a month, I'm not certain. Time meant little to me then, as it 
means little to me now. But it meant a great deal to Armand. He was 
amazed that I hadn't mentioned this before. 

"We were walking that night uptown where the city gives way to the 
Audubon Park and the levee is a deserted, grassy slope that descends to 
a muddy beach heaped here and there with driftwood, going out to the 
lapping waves of the river. On the far bank were the very dim lights of 
industries and river-front companies, pinpoints of green or red that 
flickered in the distance like stars. And the moon showed the broad, 
strong current moving fast between the two shores; and even the 
summer heat was gone here, with the cool breeze coming off the water 
and gently lifting the moss that hung from the twisted oak where we 
sat. I was picking at the grass, and tasting it, though the taste was 
bitter and unnatural. The gesture seemed natural. I was feeling almost 
that I might never leave New Orleans. But then, what are such 
thoughts when you can live forever? Never leave New Orleans 'again?' 
Again seemed a human word. 

" 'But didn't you feel any desire for revenge?' Armand asked. He lay 
on the grass beside me, his weight on his elbow, his eyes fixed on me. 

" 'Why?' I asked calmly. I was wishing, as I often wished, that he was 
not there, that I was alone. Alone with this powerful and cool river 
under the dim moon. 'He's met with his own perfect revenge. He's 
dying, dying of rigidity, of fear. His mind cannot accept this time. 
Nothing as serene and graceful as that vampire death you once 
described to me in Paris. I think he is dying as clumsily and 
grotesquely as humans often die in this century ... of old age.' 

" 'But you . . . what did you feel?’ he insisted softly. And I was 
struck by the personal quality of that question, and how long it had 
been since either of us bad spoken to the other in that way. I had a 
strong sense of him then, the separate being that he was, the calm and 
collected creature with the straight auburn hair and the large, 
sometimes melancholy eyes, eyes that seemed often to be seeing 
nothing but their own thoughts. Tonight they were lit with a dull fire 
that was unusual. 

" 'Nothing,' I answered. 

" 'Nothing one way or the other?' 

" I answered no. I remembered palpably that sorrow. It was as if the 
sorrow hadn't left me suddenly, but had been near me all this time, 
hovering, saying, 'Come.' But I wouldn't tell this to Armand, wouldn't 


258 



reveal this. And I had the strangest sensation of feeling his need for 
me to tell him this . . this, or something ... a need strangely akin to 
the need for living blood. 

" 'But did he tell you anything, anything that made you feel the old 
hatred . . .' he murmured. And it was at this point that I became 
keenly aware of how distressed he was. 

" 'What is it, Armand? Why do you ask this?' I said. 

" But he lay back on the steep levee then, and for a long time he 
appeared to be looking at the stars. The stars brought back to me 
something far too specific, the ship that had carried Claudia and me to 
Europe, and those nights at sea when it seemed the stars came down to 
touch the waves. 

" 'I thought perhaps he would tell you something about Paris . .' 
Armand said. 

" 'What should he say about Paris? That he didn't want Claudia to 
die?' I asked. Claudia again; the name sounded strange. Claudia 
spreading out that game of solitaire on the table that shifted with the 
shifting of the sea, the lantern creaking on its hook, the black porthole 
full of the stars. She had her head bent, her fingers poised above her 
ear as if about to loosen strands of her hair. And I had the most 
disconcerting sensation: that in my memory she would look up from 
that game of solitaire, and the sockets of her eyes would be empty. 

" 'You could have told me anything you wanted about Paris, 
Armand,’ I said. 'Long before now. It wouldn't have mattered.' 

" 'Even that it was I who . . ?' 

" I turned to him as he lay there looking at the sky. And I saw the 
extraordinary pain in his face, in his eyes. It seemed his eyes were 
huge, too huge, and the white face that framed them too gaunt. 'That 
it was you who killed her? Who forced her out into that yard and 
locked her there?' I asked. I smiled. 'Don't tell me you have been 
feeling pain for it all these years, not you.' 

" And then he closed his eyes and turned his face away, his hand 
resting on his chest as if I'd struck him an awful, sudden blow. 

" 'You can’t convince me you care about this,’ I said to him coldly. 
And I looked out towards the water, and again that feeling came over 
me . . . that I wished to be alone. In a little while I knew I would get 
up and go off by myself. That is, if he didn't leave me first. Because I 
would have liked to remain there actually. It was a quiet, secluded 
place. 

" 'You care about nothing . . .' he was saying. And then he sat up 
slowly and turned to me so again I could see that dark fire in his eyes. 

'I thought you would at least care about that. I thought you would feel 


259 



the old passion, the old anger if you were to see him again. I thought 
something would quicken and come alive in you if you saw him ... if 
you returned to this place.' 

" 'That I would come back to life?' I said softly. And I felt the cold 
metallic hardness of my words as I spoke, the modulation, the control. 
It was as if I were cold all over, made of metal, and he were fragile 
suddenly; fragile, as he had been, actually, for a long time. 

" 'Yes!' he cried out. 'Yes, back to life!’ And then he seemed 
puzzled, positively confused. And a strange thing occurred. He 
bowed his head at that moment as if he were defeated. And something 
in the way that he felt that defeat, something in the way his smooth 
white face reflected it only for an instant, reminded me of someone 
else I'd seen defeated in just that way. And it was amazing to me that it 
took me such a long moment to see Claudia's face in that attitude; 
Claudia, as she stood by the bed in the room at the Hotel Saint-Gabriel 
pleading with me to transform Madeleine into one of us. That same 
helpless look, that defeat which seemed to be so heartfelt that 
everything beyond it was forgotten. And then he, like Claudia, seemed 
to rally, to pull on some reserve of strength. But he said softly to the 
air, 'I am dying!' 

" And I, watching him, hearing him, the only creature under God 
who heard him, knowing completely that it was true, said nothing. 

" A long sigh escaped his lips. His head was' bowed. His right hand 
lay limp beside him in the grass. 'Hatred. . . that is passion,' he said 
'Revenge, that is passion.. ’ 

" 'Not from me . . ' I murmured softly. 'Not now.’ 

" And then his eyes fixed on me and his face seemed very calm. 'I 
used to believe you would get over it, that when the pain of all of it left 
you, you would grow warm again and filled with love, and filled with 
that wild and insatiable curiosity with which you first came to me, that 
inveterate conscience, and that hunger for knowledge that brought 
you all the way to Paris to my cell. I thought it was a part of you that 
couldn't die. And I thought that when the pain was gone you would 
forgive me for what part I played in her death. She never loved you, 
you know. Not in the way that I loved you, and the way that you loved 
us both. I knew this! I understood it! And I believed I would gather 
you to me and hold you. And time would open to us, and we would 
be the teachers of one another. All the things that gave you happiness 
would give me happiness; and I would be the protector of your pain. 
My power would be your power. My strength the same. But you're 
dead inside to me, you're cold and beyond my reach! It is as if I'm not 
here, beside you. And, not being here with you, I have the dreadful 


260 



feeling that I don't exist at all. And you are as cold and distant from 
me as those strange modern paintings of lines and hard forms that I 
cannot love or comprehend, as alien as those hard mechanical 
sculptures of this age which have no human form. I shudder when I'm 
near you. I look into your eyes and my reflection isn't there . . . .' 

" "What you asked was impossible!' I said quickly. 'Don't you see? 
What I asked was impossible, too, from the start.' 

" He protested, the negation barely forming on his lips, his hand 
rising as if to thrust it away. 

" 'I wanted love and goodness in this which is living death,’ I said. 'It 
was impossible from the beginning, because you cannot have love and 
goodness when you do what you know to be evil, what you know to be 
wrong. You can only have the desperate confusion and longing and 
the chasing of phantom goodness in its human form. I knew the real 
answer to my quest before I ever reached Paris. I knew it when I first 
took a human life to feed my craving. It was my death. And yet I 
would not accept it, could not accept it, because like all creatures I 
don't wish to die! And so I sought for other vampires, for Cod, for the 
devil, for a hundred things under a hundred names. And it was all the 
same, all evil. And all wrong. Because no one could in any guise 
convince me of what I myself knew to be true, that I was damned in 
my own mind and soul. And when I came to Paris I thought you were 
powerful and beautiful and without regret, and I wanted that 
desperately. But you were a destroyer just as I was a destroyer, more 
ruthless and cunning even than I. You showed me the only thing that 
I could really hope to become, what depth of evil, what degree of 
coldness I would have to attain to end my pain. And I accepted that. 
And so that passion, that love you saw in me, was extinguished. And 
you see now simply a mirror of yourself.' 

" A very long time passed before he spoke. He'd risen to his feet, and 
he stood with his back to me looking down the river, head bowed as 
before, his hands at his sides. I was looking at the river also. I was 
thinking quietly, There is nothing more I can say, nothing more I can 
do. 

" 'Louis,' he said now, lifting his head, his voice very thick and unlike 
itself. 

" 'Yes, Armand,' I said. 

" 'Is there anything else you want of me, anything else you require?’ 

" 'No,' I said. 'What do you mean?' 

" He didn't answer this. He began to slowly walk away. I think at 
first I thought he only meant to walk a few paces, perhaps to wander 
by himself along the muddy beach below. And by the time I realized 


261 



that he was leaving me, he was a mere speck down there against the 
occasional flickering in the water under the moon. I never saw him 
again. 

" Of course, it was several nights later before I realized he was gone. 
His coffin remained. But he did not return to it. And it was several 
months before I had that coffin taken to the St. Louis cemetery and 
put into the crypt beside my own. The grave, long neglected because 
my family was gone, received the only thing he'd left behind. But then 
I began to be uncomfortable with that. I thought of it on waking, and 
again at dawn right before I closed my eyes. And I went downtown 
one night and took the coffin out, and broke it into pieces and left it in 
the narrow aisle of the cemetery in the tall grass. 

" That vampire who was Lestat's latest child accosted me one evening 
not long after. He begged me to tell him all I knew of the world, to 
become his companion and his teacher. I remember telling him that 
what I chiefly knew was that I'd destroy him if I ever saw him again. 
'You see, someone must die every night that I walk, until I've the 
courage to end it,' I told him. 'And you're an admirable choice for 
that victim, a killer as evil as myself.' 

" And I left New Orleans the next night because the sorrow wasn't 
leaving me. And I didn't want to think of that old house where Lestat 
was dying. Or that sharp, modem vampire who'd fled me. Or of 
Armand. 

" I wanted to be where there was nothing familiar to me. And 
nothing mattered. 

" And that's the end of it. There's nothing else. " The boy sat mute, 
staring at the vampire. And the vampire sat collected, his hands folded 
on the table, his narrow, red-rimmed eyes fixed on the turning tapes. 
His face was so gaunt now that the veins of his temples showed as if 
carved out of stone. And he sat so still that only his green eyes evinced 
life, and that life was a dull fascination with the turning of the tapes. 
Then the boy drew back and ran the fingers of his right hand loosely 
through his hair. " No," he said with a short intake of breath. Then 
he said it again louder, 

" No! "' The vampire didn't appear to bear him. His eyes moved 
away from the tapes towards the window, towards the dark, gray sky. 

" It didn't have to end like that! " said the boy, leaning forward. The 
vampire, who continued to look at the sky, uttered a short, dry laugh. 

" All the things you felt in Paris! " said the boy, his voice increasing 
in volume. " The love of Claudia, the feeling, even the feeling for 
Lestat! It didn't have to end, not in this, not in despair! Because that's 
what it is, isn't it? Despair! 


262 



" Stop," said the vampire abruptly, lifting his right hand. His eyes 
shifted almost mechanically to the boy's face. " I tell you and I have 
told you, that it could not have ended any other way. 

" I don't accept it," said the boy, and he folded his arms across his 
chest, shaking his head emphatically. " I can't! " And the emotion 
seemed to build in him, so that without meaning to, he scraped his 
chair back on the bare boards and rose to pace the floor. But then, 
when he turned and looked at the vampire's face again, the words he 
was about to speak died in his throat. The vampire was merely staring 
at him, and his face had that long drawn expression of both outrage 
and bitter amusement. 

" Don't you see how you made it sound? It was an adventure like I'll 
never know in my whole life! You talk about passion, you talk about 
longing! You talk about things that millions of us won't ever taste or 
come to understand. And then you tell me it ends like that. I tell you . 

. . " And he stood over the vampire now, his hands outstretched 
before him. " If you were to give me that power! The power to see and 
feel and live forever! " The vampire's eyes slowly began to widen, his 
lips parting. " What! " he demanded softly. " What! 

" Give it to me! " said the boy, his right hand tightening in a fist, the 
fist pounding his chest. " Make me a vampire now! " he said as the 
vampire stared aghast. What happened then was swift and confused, 
but it ended abruptly with the vampire on his feet holding the boy by 
the shoulders, the boy's moist face contorted with fear, the vampire 
glaring at him in rage. " This is what you want? " he whispered, his 
pale lips manifesting only the barest trace of movement. " This . . . 
after all I've told you ... is what you ask for? " A small cry escaped 
the boy's lips, and he began to tremble all over, the sweat breaking out 
on his forehead and on the skin above his upper lip. His hand reached 
gingerly for the vampire's arm. " You don't know what human life is 
like!. " he said, on the edge of breaking into tears. " You've forgotten. 
You don't even understand the meaning of your own story, what it 
means to a human being like me. " And then a choked sob interrupted 
his words, and his fingers clung to the vampire's arm. 

" God," the vampire uttered and, turning away from him, almost 
pushed the boy off-balance against the wall. Ire stood with his back to 
the boy, staring at the gray window. 

" I beg you . . . give it all one more chance. One more chance in 
me! " said the boy. The vampire turned to him, his face as twisted 
with anger as before. And then, gradually, it began to become smooth. 
The lids came down slowly over his eyes and his lips lengthened in a 


263 



smile. He looked again at the boy. " I've failed," he sighed, smiling 
still. " I have completely failed. . 

" No ..." the boy protested. 

" Don't say any more," said the vampire emphatically. " I have but 
one chance left. Do you see the reels? They still turn. I have but one 
way to show you the meaning of what I've said. " And then he reached 
out for the boy so fast that the boy found himself grasping for 
something, pushing against something that was not there, so his hand 
was outstretched still when the vampire had him pressed to his chest, 
the boy's neck bent beneath his lips. " Do you see? " whispered the 
vampire, and the long, silky lips drew up over his teeth and two long 
fangs came down into the boy's flesh. The boy stuttered, a low 
guttural sound coming out of his throat, his hand struggling to close 
on something, his eyes widening only to become dull and gray as the 
vampire drank. And the vampire meantime looked as tranquil as 
someone in sleep. His narrow chest heaved so subtly with his sigh that 
he seemed to be rising slowly from the floor and then settling again 
with that same somnambulistic grace. There was a whine coming 
from the boy, and when the vampire let him go he held him out with 
both hands and looked at the damp white face, the limp hands, the 
eyes half closed. The boy was moaning, his lower lip loose and 
trembling as if in nausea. He moaned again louder, and his head fell 
back and his eyes rolled up into his head. The vampire set him down 
gently in the chair. The boy was straggling to speak, and the tears 
which sprang now to his eyes seemed to come as much from that effort 
to speak as from anything . else. His head fell forward, heavily, 
drunkenly, and his hand rested on the table. The vampire stood 
looking down at him, and his white skin became a soft luminous pink. 
It was as if a pink light were shining on him and his entire being 
seemed to give back that light. The flesh of his lips was dark, almost 
rose in color, and the veins of his temples and his hands were mere 
traces on his skin, and his face was youthful and smooth. 

" Will I. . . die? " the boy whispered as he looked up slowly, his 
mouth wet and slack. " Will I die? " he groaned, his lip trembling. 

" I don't know," the vampire said, and he smiled. The boy seemed 
on the verge of saying something more, but the hand that rested on the 
table slid forward on the boards, and his head lay down beside it as he 
lost consciousness. When next he opened his eyes, the boy saw the 
sun. It filled the dirty, undressed window and was hot on the side of 
his face and his hand. For a moment, he lay there, his face against the 
table and then with a great effort, he straightened, took a long deep 
breath and closing his eyes, pressed his hand to that place where the 


264 



vampire had drawn blood. When his other hand accidentally touched 
a band of metal on the top of the tape recorder, he let out a sudden cry 
because the metal was hot. Then he rose, moving clumsily, almost 
falling, until he rested both his hands on the white wash basin. 

Quickly he turned on the tap, splashed his face with cold water, and 
wiped it with a soiled towel that hung there on a nail. He was 
breathing regularly now and he stood still, looking into the mirror 
without any support. Then he looked at his watch. It was as if the 
watch shocked him, brought him more to life than the sun or the 
water. And he made a quick search of the room, of the hallway, and, 
finding nothing and no one, he settled again into the chair. Then, 
drawing a small white pad out of his pocket, and a pen, he set these on 
the table and touched the button of the recorder. The tape spun fast 
backwards until he shut it off. When he heard the vampire's voice, he 
leaned forward, listening very carefully, then hit the button again for 
another place, and, hearing that, still another. But then at last his face 
brightened, as the reels turned and the voice spoke in an even 
modulated tone:" It was a very warm evening, and I could tell as soon 
as I saw him on St. Charles that he had someplace to go . . .' " And 
quickly the boy noted: 

" Lestat. . . off St. Charles Avenue. Old house crumbling . . . 
shabby neighborhood. Look for rusted railings. " And then, stuffing 
the notebook quickly in his pocket, he gathered the tapes into his brief 
case, along with the small recorder, and hurried down the long hallway 
and down the stairs to the street, where in front of the corner bar his 
car was parked. 


265 

1

John Knowles

A Separate Peace

2

1

I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before. It seemed more sedate than I remembered it, more perpendicular and strait-laced, with narrower windows and shinier woodwork, as though a coat of varnish had been put over everything for better preservation. But, of course, fifteen years before there had been a war going on. Perhaps the school wasn't as well kept up in those days; perhaps varnish, along with everything else, had gone to war.

 

I didn't entirely like this glossy new surface, because it made the school look like a museum, and that's exactly what it was to me, and what I did not want it to be. In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day I entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.

 

Now here it was after all, preserved by some considerate hand with varnish and wax. Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn't even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence.

 

Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

 

I felt fear's echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky.

 

There were a couple of places now which I wanted to see. Both were fearful sites, and that was why I wanted to see them. So after lunch at the Devon Inn I walked back toward the school. It was a raw, nondescript time of year, toward the end of November, the kind of wet, self-pitying November day when every speck of dirt stands out clearly. Devon luckily had very little of such weather—the icy clamp of winter, or the radiant New Hampshire summers, were more characteristic of it—but this day it blew wet, moody gusts all around me.

 

I walked along Gilman Street, the best street in town. The houses were as handsome and as unusual as I remembered. Clever modernizations of old Colonial manses, extensions in Victorian wood, capacious Greek Revival temples lined the street, as impressive and just as forbidding as ever. I had rarely seen anyone go into one of them, or anyone playing on a lawn, or even an open window. Today with their failing ivy and stripped, moaning trees the houses looked both more elegant and more lifeless than ever.

3

Like all old, good schools, Devon did not stand isolated behind walls and gates but emerged naturally from the town which had produced it. So there was no sudden moment of encounter as I approached it; the houses along Gilman Street began to look more defensive, which meant that I was near the school, and then more exhausted, which meant that I was in it.

 

It was early afternoon and the grounds and buildings were deserted, since everyone was at sports. There was nothing to distract me as I made my way across a wide yard, called the Far Commons, and up to a building as red brick and balanced as the other major buildings, but with a large cupola and a bell and a clock and Latin over the doorway—the First Academy Building.

 

In through swinging doors I reached a marble foyer, and stopped at the foot of a long white marble flight of stairs. Although they were old stairs, the worn moons in the middle of each step were not very deep. The marble must be unusually hard. That seemed very likely, only too likely, although with all my thought about these stairs this exceptional hardness had not occurred to me. It was surprising that I had overlooked that, that crucial fact.

 

There was nothing else to notice; they of course were the same stairs I had walked up and down at least once every day of my Devon life. They were the same as ever. And I? Well, I naturally felt older—I began at that point the emotional examination to note how far my convalescence had gone—I was taller, bigger generally in relation to these stairs. I had more money and success and "security" than in the days when specters seemed to go up and down them with me.

 

I turned away and went back outside. The Far Common was still empty, and I walked alone down the wide gravel paths among those most Republican, bankerish of trees, New England elms, toward the far side of the school.

 

Devon is sometimes considered the most beautiful school in New England, and even on this dismal afternoon its power was asserted. It is the beauty of small areas of order—a large yard, a group of trees, three similar dormitories, a circle of old houses—living together in contentious harmony. You felt that an argument might begin again any time; in fact it had: out of the Dean's Residence, a pure and authentic Colonial house, there now sprouted an ell with a big bare picture window. Some day the Dean would probably live entirely encased in a house of glass and be happy as a sandpiper. Everything at Devon slowly changed and slowly harmonized with what had gone before. So it was logical to hope that since the buildings and the Deans and the curriculum could achieve this, I could achieve, perhaps unknowingly already had achieved, this growth and harmony myself.

 

I would know more about that when I had seen the second place I had come to see. So I roamed on past the balanced red brick dormitories with webs of leafless ivy clinging to them, through a ramshackle salient of the town which invaded the school for a hundred yards, past the solid gymnasium, full of students at this hour but silent as a monument on the outside, past the Field House, called The Cage—I remembered now what a mystery references to "The Cage" had been during my first weeks at Devon, I had thought it must be a place of severe punishment—and I reached the huge open sweep of ground known as the Playing Fields.

4

Devon was both scholarly and very athletic, so the playing fields were vast and, except at such a time of year, constantly in use. Now they reached soggily and emptily away from me, forlorn tennis courts on the left, enormous football and soccer and lacrosse fields in the center, woods on the right, and at the far end a small river detectable from this distance by the few bare trees along its banks. It was such a gray and misty day that I could not see the other side of the river, where there was a small stadium.

 

I started the long trudge across the fields and had gone some distance before I paid any attention to the soft and muddy ground, which was dooming my city shoes. I didn't stop. Near the center of the fields there were thin lakes of muddy water which I had to make my way around, my unrecognizable shoes making obscene noises as I lifted them out of the mire. With nothing to block it the wind flung wet gusts at me; at any other time I would have felt like a fool slogging through mud and rain, only to look at a tree.

 

A little fog hung over the river so that as I neared it I felt myself becoming isolated from everything except the river and the few trees beside it. The wind was blowing more steadily here, and I was beginning to feel cold. I never wore a hat, and had forgotten gloves. There were several trees bleakly reaching into the fog. Any one of them might have been the one I was looking for. Unbelievable that there were other trees which looked like it here. It had loomed in my memory as a huge lone spike dominating the riverbank, forbidding as an artillery piece, high as the beanstalk. Yet here was a scattered grove of trees, none of them of any particular grandeur.

 

Moving through the soaked, coarse grass I began to examine each one closely, and finally identified the tree I was looking for by means of certain small scars rising along its trunk, and by a limb extending over the river, and another thinner limb growing near it. This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pigmies while you were looking the other way.

 

The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary from age, enfeebled, dry. I was thankful, very thankful that I had seen it. So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all--plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.

 

Changed, I headed back through the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come in out of the rain.

The tree was tremendous, an irate, steely black steeple beside the river. I was damned if I'd climb it. The hell with it. No one but Phineas could think up such a crazy idea.

 

He of course saw nothing the slightest bit intimidating about it. He wouldn't, or wouldn't admit it if he did. Not Phineas.

5

"What I like best about this tree," he said in that voice of his, the equivalent in sound of a hypnotist's eyes, "what I like is that it's such a cinch!" He opened his green eyes wider and gave us his maniac look, and only the smirk on his wide mouth with its droll, slightly protruding upper lip reassured us that he wasn't completely goofy.

 

"Is that what you like best?" I said sarcastically. I said a lot of things sarcastically that summer; that was my sarcastic summer, 1942.

 

"Aey-uh," he said. This weird New England affirmative—maybe it is spelled "aie-huh"— always made me laugh, as Finny knew, so I had to laugh, which made me feel less sarcastic and less scared.

 

There were three others with us—Phineas in those days almost always moved in groups the size of a hockey team—and they stood with me looking with masked apprehension from him to the tree. Its soaring black trunk was set with rough wooden pegs leading up to a substantial limb which extended farther toward the water. Standing on this limb, you could by a prodigious effort jump far enough out into the river for safety. So we had heard. At least the seventeen-year-old bunch could do it; but they had a crucial year's advantage over us. No Upper Middler, which was the name for our class in the Devon School, had ever tried. Naturally Finny was going to be the first to try, and just as naturally he was going to inveigle others, us, into trying it with him.

 

We were not even Upper Middler exactly. For this was the Summer Session, just established to keep up with the pace of the war. We were in shaky transit that summer from the groveling status of Lower Middlers to the near-respectability of Upper Middlers. The class above, seniors, draft-bait, practically soldiers, rushed ahead of us toward the war. They were caught up in accelerated courses and first-aid programs and a physical hardening regimen, which included jumping from this tree. We were still calmly, numbly reading Virgil and playing tag in the river farther downstream. Until Finny thought of the tree.

 

We stood looking up at it, four looks of consternation, one of excitement. "Do you want to go first?" Finny asked us, rhetorically. We just looked quietly back at him, and so he began taking off his clothes, stripping down to his underpants. For such an extraordinary athlete— even as a Lower Middler Phineas had been the best athlete in the school—he was not spectacularly built. He was my height—five feet eight and a half inches (I had been claiming five feet nine inches before he became my roommate, but he had said in public with that simple, shocking self-acceptance of his, "No, you're the same height I am, five-eight and a half. We're on the short side"). He weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, a galling ten pounds more than I did, which flowed from his legs to torso around shoulders to arms and full strong neck in an uninterrupted, unemphatic unity of strength.

 

He began scrambling up the wooden pegs nailed to the side of the tree, his back muscles working like a panther's. The pegs didn't seem strong enough to hold his weight. At last he stepped onto the branch which reached a little farther toward the water. "Is this the one they jump from?" None of us knew. "If I do it, you're all going to do it, aren't you?" We didn't say anything very clearly. "Well," he cried out, "here's my contribution to the war effort!" and he

6

sprang out, fell through the tops of some lower branches, and smashed into the water.

 

"Great!" he said, bobbing instantly to the surface again, his wet hair plastered in droll bangs on his forehead. "That's the most fun I've had this week. Who's next?"

 

I was. This tree flooded me with a sensation of alarm all the way to my tingling fingers. My head began to feel unnaturally light, and the vague rustling sounds from the nearby woods came to me as though muffled and filtered. I must have been entering a mild state of shock. Insulated by this, I took off my clothes and started to climb the pegs. I don't remember saying anything. The branch he had jumped from was slenderer than it looked from the ground and much higher. It was impossible to walk out on it far enough to be well over the river. I would have to spring far out or risk falling into the shallow water next to the bank. "Come on," drawled Finny from below, "stop standing there showing off." I recognized with automatic tenseness that the view was very impressive from here. "When they torpedo the troopship," he shouted, "you can't stand around admiring the view. Jump!"

 

What was I doing up here anyway? Why did I let Finny talk me into stupid things like this?

 

Was he getting some kind of hold over me?

 

"Jump!"

 

With the sensation that I was throwing my life away, I jumped into space. Some tips of branches snapped past me and then I crashed into the water. My legs hit the soft mud of the bottom, and immediately I was on the surface being congratulated. I felt fine.

 

"I think that was better than Finny's," said Elwin—better known as Leper—Lepellier, who was bidding for an ally in the dispute he foresaw.

 

"All right, pal," Finny spoke in his cordial, penetrating voice, that reverberant instrument in his chest, "don't start awarding prizes until you've passed the course. The tree is waiting."

 

Leper closed his mouth as though forever. He didn't argue or refuse. He didn't back away. He became inanimate. But the other two, Chet Douglass and Bobby Zane, were vocal enough, complaining shrilly about school regulations, the danger of stomach cramps, physical disabilities they had never mentioned before.

 

"It's you, pal," Finny said to me at last, "just you and me." He and I started back across the fields, preceding the others like two seigneurs.

 

We were the best of friends at that moment.

 

"You were very good," said Finny good-humoredly, "once I shamed you into it."

 

"You didn't shame anybody into anything."

 

"Oh yes I did. I'm good for you that way. You have a tendency to back away from things otherwise."

 

"I never backed away from anything in my life!" I cried, my indignation at this charge

7

naturally stronger because it was so true. "You're goofy!"

 

Phineas just walked serenely on, or rather flowed on, rolling forward in his white sneakers with such unthinking unity of movement that "walk" didn't describe it.

 

I went along beside him across the enormous playing fields toward the gym. Underfoot the healthy green turf was brushed with dew, and ahead of us we could see a faint green haze hanging above the grass, shot through with the twilight sun. Phineas stopped talking for once, so that now I could hear cricket noises and bird cries of dusk, a gymnasium truck gunning along an empty athletic road a quarter of a mile away, a burst of faint, isolated laughter carried to us from the back door of the gym, and then over all, cool and matriarchal, the six o'clock bell from the Academy Building cupola, the calmest, most carrying bell toll in the world, civilized, calm, invincible, and final.

 

The toll sailed over the expansive tops of all the elms, the great slanting roofs and formidable chimneys of the dormitories, the narrow and brittle old housetops, across the open New Hampshire sky to us coming back from the river. "We'd better hurry or we'll be late for dinner," I said, breaking into what Finny called my "West Point stride." Phineas didn't really dislike West Point in particular or authority in general, but just considered authority the necessary evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction, the backboard which returned all the insults he threw at it. My "West Point stride" was intolerable; his right foot flashed into the middle of my fast walk and I went pitching forward into the grass. "Get those hundred and fifty pounds off me!" I shouted, because he was sitting on my back. Finny got up, patted my head genially, and moved on across the field, not deigning to glance around for my counterattack, but relying on his extrasensory ears, his ability to feel in the air someone coming on him from behind. As I sprang at him he side-stepped easily, but I just managed to kick him as I shot past. He caught my leg and there was a brief wrestling match on the turf which he won. "Better hurry," he said, "or they'll put you in the guardhouse." We were walking again, faster; Bobby and Leper and Chet were urging us from ahead for God's sake to hurry up, and then Finny trapped me again in his strongest trap, that is, I suddenly became his collaborator. As we walked rapidly along I abruptly resented the bell and my West Point stride and hurrying and conforming. Finny was right. And there was only one way to show him this. I threw my hip against his, catching him by surprise, and he was instantly down, definitely pleased. This was why he liked me so much. When I jumped on top of him, my knees on his chest, he couldn't ask for anything better. We struggled in some equality for a while, and then when we were sure we were too late for dinner, we broke off.

 

He and I passed the gym and came on toward the first group of dormitories, which were dark and silent. There were only two hundred of us at Devon in the summer, not enough to fill most of the school. We passed the sprawling Headmaster's house—empty, he was doing something for the government in Washington; past the Chapel—empty again, used only for a short time in the mornings; past the First Academy Building, where there were some dim lights shining from a few of its many windows, Masters at work in their classrooms there; down a short slope into the broad and well clipped Common, on which light fell from the big surrounding Georgian buildings. A dozen boys were loafing there on the grass after dinner, and

8

a kitchen rattle from the wing of one of the buildings accompanied their talk. The sky was darkening steadily, which brought up the lights in the dormitories and the old houses; a loud phonograph a long way off played Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree, rejected that and played They're Either Too Young or Too Old, grew more ambitious with The Warsaw Concerto, mellower with The Nutcracker Suite, and then stopped.

 

Finny and I went to our room. Under the yellow study lights we read our Hardy assignments; I was halfway through Tess of the D'Urbervilles, he carried on his baffled struggle with Far from the Madding Crowd, amused that there should be people named Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene. Our illegal radio, turned too low to be intelligible, was broadcasting the news. Outside there was a rustling early summer movement of the wind; the seniors, allowed out later than we were, came fairly quietly back as the bell sounded ten stately times. Boys ambled past our door toward the bathroom, and there was a period of steadily pouring shower water. Then lights began to snap out all over the school. We undressed, and I put on some pajamas, but Phineas, who had heard they were unmilitary, didn't; there was the silence in which it was understood we were saying some prayers, and then that summer school day came to an end.

9

2

Our absence from dinner had been noticed. The following morning—the clean-washed shine of summer mornings in the north country—Mr. Prud'homme stopped at our door. He was broad-shouldered, grave, and he wore a gray business suit. He did not have the careless, almost British look of most of the Devon Masters, because he was a substitute for the summer. He enforced such rules as he knew; missing dinner was one of them.

 

We had been swimming in the river, Finny explained; then there had been a wrestling match, then there was that sunset that anybody would want to watch, then there'd been several friends we had to see on business—he rambled on, his voice soaring and plunging in its vibrant sound box, his eyes now and then widening to fire a flash of green across the room. Standing in the shadows, with the bright window behind him, he blazed with sunburned health. As Mr. Prud'homme looked at him and listened to the scatterbrained eloquence of his explanation, he could be seen rapidly losing his grip on sternness.

 

"If you hadn't already missed nine meals in the last two weeks . . ." he broke in.

 

But Finny pressed his advantage. Not because he wanted to be forgiven for missing the meal —that didn't interest him at all, he might have rather enjoyed the punishment if it was done in some novel and unknown way. He pressed his advantage because he saw that Mr. Prud'homme was pleased, won over in spite of himself. The Master was slipping from his official position momentarily, and it was just possible, if Phineas pressed hard enough, that there might be a flow of simple, unregulated friendliness between them, and such flows were one of Finny's reasons for living.

 

"The real reason, sir, was that we just had to jump out of that tree. You know that tree . . ." I knew, Mr. Prud'homme must have known, Finny knew, if he stopped to think, that jumping out of the tree was even more forbidden than missing a meal. "We had to do that, naturally," he went on, "because we're all getting ready for the war. What if they lower the draft age to seventeen? Gene and I are both going to be seventeen at the end of the summer, which is a very convenient time since it's the start of the academic year and there's never any doubt about which class you should be in. Leper Lepellier is already seventeen, and if I'm not mistaken he will be draftable before the end of this next academic year, and so conceivably he ought to have been in the class ahead, he ought to have been a senior now, if you see what I mean, so that he would have been graduated and been all set to be drafted. But we're all right, Gene and I are perfectly all right. There isn't any question that we are conforming in every possible way to everything that's happening and everything that's going to happen. It's all a question of birthdays, unless you want to be more specific and look at it from the sexual point of view, which I have never cared to do myself, since it's a question of my mother and my father, and I have never felt I wanted to think about their sexual lives too much." Everything he said was

10

true and sincere; Finny always said what he happened to be thinking, and if this stunned people then he was surprised.

 

Mr. Prud'homme released his breath with a sort of amazed laugh, stared at Finny for a while, and that was all there was to it.

 

This was the way the Masters tended to treat us that summer. They seemed to be modifying their usual attitude of floating, chronic disapproval. During the winter most of them regarded anything unexpected in a student with suspicion, seeming to feel that anything we said or did was potentially illegal. Now on these clear June days in New Hampshire they appeared to uncoil, they seemed to believe that we were with them about half the time, and only spent the other half trying to make fools of them. A streak of tolerance was detectable; Finny decided that they were beginning to show commendable signs of maturity.

 

It was partly his doing. The Devon faculty had never before experienced a student who combined a calm ignorance of the rules with a winning urge to be good, who seemed to love the school truly and deeply, and never more than when he was breaking the regulations, a model boy who was most comfortable in the truant's corner. The faculty threw up its hands over Phineas, and so loosened its grip on all of us.

 

But there was another reason. I think we reminded them of what peace was like, we boys of sixteen. We were registered with no draft board, we had taken no physical examinations. No one had ever tested us for hernia or color blindness. Trick knees and punctured eardrums were minor complaints and not yet disabilities which would separate a few from the fate of the rest. We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve. Anyway, they were more indulgent toward us than at any other time; they snapped at the heels of the seniors, driving and molding and arming them for the war. They noticed our games tolerantly. We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction.

 

Phineas was the essence of this careless peace. Not that he was unconcerned about the war. After Mr. Prud'homme left he began to dress, that is he began reaching for whatever clothes were nearest, some of them mine. Then he stopped to consider, and went over to the dresser. Out of one of the drawers he lifted a finely woven broadcloth shirt, carefully cut, and very pink.

 

"What's that thing?"

 

"This is a tablecloth," he said out of the side of his mouth.

 

"No, cut it out. What is it?"

 

"This," he then answered with some pride, "is going to be my emblem. Ma sent it up last week. Did you ever see stuff like this, and a color like this? It doesn't even button all the way down. You have to pull it over your head, like this."

 

"Over your head? Pink! It makes you look like a fairy!"

11

"Does it?" He used this preoccupied tone when he was thinking of something more interesting than what you had said. But his mind always recorded what was said and played it back to him when there was time, so as he was buttoning the high collar in front of the mirror he said mildly, "I wonder what would happen if I looked like a fairy to everyone."

 

"You're nuts."

 

"Well, in case suitors begin clamoring at the door, you can tell them I'm wearing this as an emblem." He turned around to let me admire it. "I was reading in the paper that we bombed Central Europe for the first time the other day." Only someone who knew Phineas as well as I did could realize that he was not changing the subject. I waited quietly for him to make whatever fantastic connection there might be between this and his shirt. "Well, we've got to do something to celebrate. We haven't got a flag, we can't float Old Glory proudly out the window. So I'm going to wear this, as an emblem."

 

He did wear it. No one else in the school could have done so without some risk of having it torn from his back. When the sternest of the Summer Sessions Masters, old Mr. Patch-Withers, came up to him after history class and asked about it, I watched his drawn but pink face become pinker with amusement as Finny politely explained the meaning of the shirt.

 

It was hypnotism. I was beginning to see that Phineas could get away with anything. I couldn't help envying him that a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little.

 

In the afternoon Mr. Patch-Withers, who was substitute Headmaster for the summer, offered the traditional term tea to the Upper Middle class. It was held in the deserted Headmaster's house, and Mr. Patch-Withers' wife trembled at every cup tinkle. We were in a kind of sun porch and conservatory combined, spacious and damp and without many plants. Those there were had large nonflowering stalks, with big barbaric leaves. The chocolate brown wicker furniture shot out menacing twigs, and three dozen of us stood tensely teetering our cups amid the wicker and leaves, trying hard not to sound as inane in our conversation with the four present Masters and their wives as they sounded to us.

 

Phineas had soaked and brushed his hair for the occasion. This gave his head a sleek look, which was contradicted by the surprised, honest expression which he wore on his face. His ears, I had never noticed before, were fairly small and set close to his head, and combined with his plastered hair they now gave his bold nose and cheekbones the sharp look of a prow.

 

He alone talked easily. He discussed the bombing of Central Europe. No one else happened to have seen the story, and since Phineas could not recall exactly what target in which country had been hit, or whether it was the American, British, or even Russian air force which had hit it, or what day he read it in which newspaper, the discussion was one-sided.

 

That didn't matter. It was the event which counted. But after a while Finny felt he should carry the discussion to others. "I think we ought to bomb the daylights out of them, as long as we don't hit any women or children or old people, don't you?" he was saying to Mrs. Patch-

12

Withers, perched nervously behind her urn. "Or hospitals," he went on. "And naturally no schools. Or churches."

 

"We must also be careful about works of art," she put in, "if they are of permanent value."

 

"A lot of nonsense," Mr. Patch-Withers grumbled, with a flushed face. "How do you expect our boys to be as precise as that thousands of feet up with bombs weighing tons! Look at what the Germans did to Amsterdam! Look at what they did to Coventry!"

 

"The Germans aren't the Central Europeans, dear," his wife said very gently.

 

He didn't like being brought up short. But he seemed to be just able to bear it, from his wife. After a temperamental pause he said gruffly, "There isn't any 'permanent art' in Central Europe anyway."

 

Finny was enjoying this. He unbuttoned his seersucker jacket, as though he needed greater body freedom for the discussion. Mrs. Patch-Withers' glance then happened to fall on his belt. In a tentative voice she said, "Isn't that the . . . our . . ." Her husband looked; I panicked. In his haste that morning Finny had not unexpectedly used a tie for a belt. But this morning the first tie at hand had been the Devon School tie.

 

This time he wasn't going to get away with it. I could feel myself becoming unexpectedly excited at that. Mr. Patch-Withers' face was reaching a brilliant shade, and his wife's head fell as though before the guillotine. Even Finny seemed to color a little, unless it was the reflection from his pink shirt. But his expression was composed, and he said in his resonant voice, "I wore this, you see, because it goes with the shirt and it all ties in together—I didn't mean that to be a pun, I don't think they're very funny, especially in polite company, do you?—it all ties in together with what we've been talking about, this bombing in Central Europe, because when you come right down to it the school is involved in everything that happens in the war, it's all the same war and the same world, and I think Devon ought to be included. I don't know whether you think the way I do on that."

 

Mr. Patch-Withers' face had been shifting expressions and changing colors continuously, and now it settled into fixed surprise. "I never heard anything so illogical as that in my life!" He didn't sound very indignant, though. "That's probably the strangest tribute this school has had in a hundred and sixty years." He seemed pleased or amused in some unknown corner of his mind. Phineas was going to get away with even this.

 

His eyes gave their wider, magical gleam and his voice continued on a more compelling level, "Although I have to admit I didn't think of that when I put it on this morning." He smiled pleasantly after supplying this interesting additional information. Mr. Patch-Withers settled into a hearty silence at this, and so Finny added, "I'm glad I put on something for a belt! I certainly would hate the embarrassment of having my pants fall down at the Headmaster's tea. Of course he isn't here. But it would be just as embarrassing in front of you and Mrs. Patch-Withers," and he smiled politely down at her.

 

Mr. Patch-Withers' laughter surprised us all, including himself. His face, whose shades we

13

had often labeled, now achieved a new one. Phineas was very happy; sour and stern Mr. Patch-Withers had been given a good laugh for once, and he had done it! He broke into the charmed, thoughtless grin of a man fulfilled.

 

He had gotten away with everything. I felt a sudden stab of disappointment. That was because I just wanted to see some more excitement; that must have been it.

 

We left the party, both of us feeling fine. I laughed along with Finny, my best friend, and also unique, able to get away with anything at all. And not because he was a conniver either; I was sure of that. He got away with everything because of the extraordinary kind of person he was. It was quite a compliment to me, as a matter of fact, to have such a person choose me for his best friend.

 

Finny never left anything alone, not when it was well enough, not when it was perfect. "Let's go jump in the river," he said under his breath as we went out of the sun porch. He forced compliance by leaning against me as we walked along, changing my direction; like a police car squeezing me to the side of the road, he directed me unwillingly toward the gym and the river. "We need to clear our heads of that party," he said, "all that talk!"

 

"Yes. It sure was boring. Who did most of the talking anyway?"

 

Finny concentrated. "Mr. Patch-Withers was pretty gassy, and his wife, and . . ."

 

"Yeah. And?"

 

Turning a look of mock shock on me, "You don't mean to infer that I talked too much!"

 

Returning, with interest, his gaping shock, "You? Talk too much? How can you accuse me of accusing you of that!" As I said, this was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.

 

We walked along through the shining afternoon to the river. "I don't really believe we bombed Central Europe, do you?" said Finny thoughtfully. The dormitories we passed were massive and almost anonymous behind their thick layers of ivy, big, old-looking leaves you would have thought stayed there winter and summer, permanent hanging gardens in New Hampshire. Between the buildings, elms curved so high that you ceased to remember their height until you looked above the familiar trunks and the lowest umbrellas of leaves and took in the lofty complex they held high above, branches and branches of branches, a world of branches with an infinity of leaves. They too seemed permanent and never-changing, an untouched, unreachable world high in space, like the ornamental towers and spires of a great church, too high to be enjoyed, too high for anything, great and remote and never useful. "No, I don't think I believe it either," I answered.

 

Far ahead of us four boys, looking like white flags on the endless green playing fields, crossed toward the tennis courts. To the right of them the gym meditated behind its gray walls, the high, wide, oval-topped windows shining back at the sun. Beyond the gym and the fields began the woods, our, the Devon School's woods, which in my imagination were the beginning

14

of the great northern forests. I thought that, from the Devon Woods, trees reached in an unbroken, widening corridor so far to the north that no one had ever seen the other end, somewhere up in the far unorganized tips of Canada. We seemed to be playing on the tame fringe of the last and greatest wilderness. I never found out whether this is so and perhaps it is.

 

Bombs in Central Europe were completely unreal to us here, not because we couldn't imagine it—a thousand newspaper photographs and newsreels had given us a pretty accurate idea of such a sight—but because our place here was too fair for us to accept something like that. We spent that summer in complete selfishness, I'm happy to say. The people in the world who could be selfish in the summer of 1942 were a small band, and I'm glad we took advantage of it.

 

"The first person who says anything unpleasant will get a swift kick in the ass," said Finny reflectively as we came to the river.

 

"All right."

 

"Are you still afraid to jump out of the tree?"

 

There's something unpleasant about that question, isn't there?"

 

"That question? No, of course not. It depends on how you answer it."

 

"Afraid to jump out of that tree? I expect it'll be a very pleasant jump."

 

After we had swum around in the water for a while Finny said, "Will you do me the pleasure of jumping out of the tree first?'

 

"My pleasure."

 

Rigid, I began climbing the rungs, slightly reassured by having Finny right behind me. "We'll jump together to cement our partnership," he said. "We'll form a suicide society, and the membership requirement is one jump out of this tree."

 

"A suicide society," I said stiffly. "The Suicide Society of the Summer Session."

 

"Good! The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session! How's that?"

 

"That's fine, that's okay."

 

We were standing on a limb, I a little farther out than Finny. I turned to say something else, some stalling remark, something to delay even a few seconds more, and then I realized that in turning I had begun to lose my balance. There was a moment of total, impersonal panic, and then Finny's hand shot out and grabbed my arm, and with my balance restored, the panic immediately disappeared. I turned back toward the river, moved a few more steps along the limb, sprang far out and fell into the deep water. Finny also made a good jump, and the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session was officially established.

 

It was only after dinner, when I was on my way alone to the library, that the full danger I

15

had brushed on the limb shook me again. If Finny hadn't come up right behind me . . . if he hadn't been there . . . I could have fallen on the bank and broken my back! if I had fallen awkwardly enough I could have been killed. Finny had practically saved my life.

16

3

Yes, he had practically saved my life. He had also practically lost it for me. I wouldn't have been on that damn limb except for him. I wouldn't have turned around, and so lost my balance, if he hadn't been there. I didn't need to feel any tremendous rush of gratitude toward Phineas.

 

The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session was a success from the start. That night Finny began to talk abstractedly about it, as though it were a venerable, entrenched institution of the Devon School. The half-dozen friends who were there in our room listening began to bring up small questions on details without ever quite saying that they had never heard of such a club. Schools are supposed to be catacombed with secret societies and underground brotherhoods, and as far as they knew here was one which had just come to the surface. They signed up as "trainees" on the spot.

 

We began to meet every night to initiate them. The Charter Members, he and I, had to open every meeting by jumping ourselves. This was the first of the many rules which Finny created without notice during the summer. I hated it. I never got inured to the jumping. At every meeting the limb seemed higher, thinner, the deeper water harder to reach. Every time, when I got myself into position to jump, I felt a flash of disbelief that I was doing anything so perilous. But I always jumped. Otherwise I would have lost face with Phineas, and that would have been unthinkable.

 

We met every night, because Finny's life was ruled by inspiration and anarchy, and so he prized a set of rules. His own, not those imposed on him by other people, such as the faculty of the Devon School. The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session was a club; clubs by definition met regularly; we met every night. Nothing could be more regular than that. To meet once a week seemed to him much less regular, entirely too haphazard, bordering on carelessness.

 

I went along; I never missed a meeting. At that time it would never have occurred to me to say, "I don't feel like it tonight," which was the plain truth every night. I was subject to the dictates of my mind, which gave me the maneuverability of a strait jacket. "We're off, pal," Finny would call out, and acting against every instinct of my nature, I went without a thought of protest.

 

As we drifted on through the summer, with this one inflexible appointment every day— classes could be cut, meals missed, Chapel skipped—I noticed something about Finny's own mind, which was such an opposite from mine. It wasn't completely unleashed after all. I noticed that he did abide by certain rules, which he seemed to cast in the form of Commandments. "Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half" was the first one I encountered. Another was, "Always say some prayers at night because it might turn out that there is a God."

17

But the one which had the most urgent influence in his life was, "You always win at sports." This "you" was collective. Everyone always won at sports. When you played a game you won, in the same way as when you sat down to a meal you ate it. It inevitably and naturally followed. Finny never permitted himself to realize that when you won they lost. That would have destroyed the perfect beauty which was sport. Nothing bad ever happened in sports; they were the absolute good.

 

He was disgusted with that summer's athletic program—a little tennis, some swimming, clumsy softball games, badminton. "Badminton!" he exploded the day it entered the schedule. He said nothing else, but the shocked, outraged, despairing note of anguish in the word said all the rest. "Badminton!"

 

"At least it's not as bad as the seniors," I said, handing him the fragile racquet and the fey shuttlecock. "They're doing calisthenics."

 

"What are they trying to do?" He swatted the shuttlecock the length of the locker room. "Destroy us?" Humor infiltrated the outrage in his voice, which meant that he was thinking of a way out.

 

We went outside into the cordial afternoon sunshine. The playing fields were optimistically green and empty before us. The tennis courts were full. The softball diamond was busy. A pattern of badminton nets swayed sensually in the breeze. Finny eyed them with quiet astonishment. Far down the fields toward the river there was a wooden tower about ten feet high where the instructor had stood to direct the senior calisthenics. It was empty now. The seniors had been trotted off to the improvised obstacle course in the woods, or to have their blood pressure taken again, or to undergo an insidious exercise in The Cage which consisted in stepping up on a box and down again in rapid rhythm for five minutes. They were off somewhere, shaping up for the war. All of the fields were ours.

 

Finny began to walk slowly in the direction of the tower. Perhaps he was thinking that we might carry it the rest of the way to the river and throw it in; perhaps he was just interested in looking at it, as he was in everything. Whatever he thought, he forgot it when we reached the tower. Beside it someone had left a large and heavy leather-covered ball, a medicine ball.

 

He picked it up. "Now this, you see, is everything in the world you need for sports. When they discovered the circle they created sports. As for this thing," embracing the medicine ball in his left arm he held up the shuttlecock, contaminated, in his outstretched right, "this idiot tickler, the only thing it's good for is eeny-meeny-miney-mo." He dropped the ball and proceeded to pick the feathers out of the shuttlecock, distastefully, as though removing ticks from a dog. The remaining rubber plug he then threw out of sight down the field, with a single lunge ending in a powerful downward thrust of his wrist. Badminton was gone.

 

He stood balancing the medicine ball, enjoying the feel of it. "All you really need is a round ball."

 

Although he was rarely conscious of it, Phineas was always being watched, like the weather.

18

Up the field the others at badminton sensed a shift in the wind; their voices carried down to us, calling us. When we didn't come, they began gradually to come down to us.

 

"I think it's about time we started to get a little exercise around here, don't you?" he said, cocking his head at me. Then he slowly looked around at the others with the expression of dazed determination he used when the object was to carry people along with his latest idea. He blinked twice, and then said, "We can always start with this ball."

 

"Let's make it have something to do with the war," suggested Bobby Zane. "Like a blitzkrieg or something."

 

"Blitzkrieg," repeated Finny doubtfully.

 

"We could figure out some kind of blitzkrieg baseball," I said.

 

"We'll call it blitzkrieg ball," said Bobby.

 

"Or just blitzball," reflected Finny. "Yes, blitzball." Then, with an expectant glance around, "Well, let's get started," he threw the big, heavy ball at me. I grasped it against my chest with both arms. "Well, run!" ordered Finny. "No, not that way! Toward the river! Run!" I headed toward the river surrounded by the others in a hesitant herd; they sensed that in all probability they were my adversaries in blitzball. "Don't hog it!" Finny yelled. "Throw it to somebody else. Otherwise, naturally," he talked steadily as he ran along beside me, "now that we've got you surrounded, one of us will knock you down."

 

"Do what!" I veered away from him, hanging on to the clumsy ball. "What kind of a game is that?"

 

"Blitzball!" Chet Douglass shouted, throwing himself around my legs, knocking me down.

 

"That naturally was completely illegal," said Finny. "You don't use your arms when you knock the ball carrier down."

 

"You don't?" mumbled Chet from on top of me.

 

"No. You keep your arms crossed like this on your chest, and you just butt the ball carrier. No elbowing allowed either. All right, Gene, start again."

 

I began quickly, "Wouldn't somebody else have possession of the ball after—"

 

"Not when you've been knocked down illegally. The ball carrier retains possession in a case like that. So it's perfectly okay, you still have the ball. Go ahead."

 

There was nothing to do but start running again, with the others trampling with stronger will around me. "Throw it!" ordered Phineas. Bobby Zane was more or less in the clear and so I threw it at him; it was so heavy that he had to scoop my throw up from the ground. "Perfectly okay," commented Finny, running forward at top speed, "perfectly okay for the ball to touch the ground when it is being passed." Bobby doubled back closer to me for protection. "Knock him down," Finny yelled at me.

19

"Knock him down! Are you crazy? He's on my team!"

 

"There aren't any teams in blitzball," he yelled somewhat irritably, "we're all enemies. Knock him down!"

 

I knocked him down. "All right," said Finny as he disentangled us. "Now you have possession again." He handed the leaden ball to me.

 

"I would have thought that possession passed—"

 

"Naturally you gained possession of the ball when you knocked him down. Run."

 

So I began running again. Leper Lepellier was loping along outside my perimeter, not noticing the game, taggling along without reason, like a porpoise escorting a passing ship. "Leper!" I threw the ball past a few heads at him.

 

Taken by surprise, Leper looked up in anguish, shrank away from the ball, and voiced his first thought, a typical one. "I don't want it!"

 

"Stop, stop!" cried Finny in a referee's tone. Everybody halted, and Finny retrieved the ball; he talked better holding it. "Now Leper has just brought out a really important fine point of the game. The receiver can refuse a pass if he happens to choose to. Since we're all enemies, we can and will turn on each other all the time. We call that the Lepellier Refusal." We all nodded without speaking. "Here, Gene, the ball is of course still yours."

 

"Still mine? Nobody else has had the ball but me, for God sakes!"

 

"They'll get their chance. Now if you are refused three times in the course of running from the tower to the river, you go all the way back to the tower and start over. Naturally."

 

Blitzball was the surprise of the summer. Everybody played it; I believe a form of it is still popular at Devon. But nobody can be playing it as it was played by Phineas. He had unconsciously invented a game which brought his own athletic gifts to their highest pitch. The odds were tremendously against the ball carrier, so that Phineas was driven to exceed himself practically every day when he carried the ball. To escape the wolf pack which all the other players became he created reverses and deceptions and acts of sheer mass hypnotism which were so extraordinary that they surprised even him; after some of these plays I would notice him chuckling quietly to himself, in a kind of happy disbelief. In such a nonstop game he also had the natural advantage of a flow of energy which I never saw interrupted. I never saw him tired, never really winded, never overcharged and never restless. At dawn, all day long, and at midnight, Phineas always had a steady and formidable flow of usable energy.

 

Right from the start, it was clear that no one had ever been better adapted to a sport than Finny was to blitzball. I saw that right away. Why not? He had made it up, hadn't he? It needn't be surprising that he was sensationally good at it, and that the rest of us were more or less bumblers in our different ways. I suppose it served us right for letting him do all the planning. I didn't really think about it myself. What difference did it make? It was just a game. It was good

20

that Finny could shine at it. He could also shine at many other things, with people for instance, the others in our dormitory, the faculty; in fact, if you stopped to think about it, Finny could shine with everyone, he attracted everyone he met. I was glad of that too. Naturally. He was my roommate and my best friend.

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.

 

For me, this moment—four years is a moment in history—was the war. The war was and is reality for me, I still instinctively live and think in its atmosphere. These are some of its characteristics: Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the President of the United States, and he always has been. The other two eternal world leaders are Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. America is not, never has been, and never will be what the songs and poems call it, a land of plenty. Nylon, meat, gasoline, and steel are rare. There are too many jobs and not enough workers. Money is very easy to earn but rather hard to spend, because there isn't very much to buy. Trains are always late and always crowded with "servicemen." The war will always be fought very far from America and it will never end. Nothing in America stands still for very long, including the people, who are always either leaving or on leave. People in America cry often. Sixteen is the key and crucial and natural age for a human being to be, and people of all other ages are ranged in an orderly manner ahead of and behind you as a harmonious setting for the sixteen-year-olds of this world. When you are sixteen, adults are slightly impressed and almost intimidated by you. This is a puzzle, finally solved by the realization that they foresee your military future, fighting for them. You do not foresee it. To waste anything in America is immoral. String and tinfoil are treasures. Newspapers are always crowded with strange maps and names of towns, and every few months the earth seems to lurch from its path when you see something in the newspapers, such as the time Mussolini, who had almost seemed one of the eternal leaders, is photographed hanging upside down on a meathook. Everyone listens to news broadcasts five or six times every day. All pleasurable things, all travel and sports and entertainment and good food and fine clothes, are in the very shortest supply, always were and always will be. There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them. All foreign lands are inaccessible except to servicemen; they are vague, distant, and sealed off as though behind a curtain of plastic. The prevailing color of life in America is a dull, dark green called olive drab. That color is always respectable and always important. Most other colors risk being unpatriotic.

 

It is this special America, a very untypical one I guess, an unfamiliar transitional blur in the memories of most people, which is the real America for me. In that short-lived and special country we spent this summer at Devon when Finny achieved certain feats as an athlete. In such a period no one notices or rewards any achievements involving the body unless the result is to kill it or save it on the battlefield, so that there were only a few of us to applaud and

21

wonder at what he was able to do.

 

One day he broke the school swimming record. He and I were fooling around in the pool, near a big bronze plaque marked with events for which the school kept records—50 yards, 100 yards, 220 yards. Under each was a slot with a marker fitted into it, showing the name of the record-holder, his year, and his time. Under "100 Yards Free Style" there was "A. Hopkins Parker—1940-53.0 seconds."

 

"A. Hopkins Parker?" Finny squinted up at the name. "I don't remember any A. Hopkins Parker."

 

"He graduated before we got here."

 

"You mean that record has been up there the whole time we've been at Devon and nobody's busted it yet?" It was an insult to the class, and Finny had tremendous loyalty to the class, as he did to any group he belonged to, beginning with him and me and radiating outward past the limits of humanity toward spirits and clouds and stars.

 

No one else happened to be in the pool. Around us gleamed white tile and glass brick; the green, artificial-looking water rocked gently in it shining basin, releasing vague chemical smells and a sense of many pipes and filters; even Finny's voice, trapped in this closed, high-ceilinged room, lost its special resonance and blurred into a general well of noise gathered up toward the ceiling. He said blurringly, "I have a feeling I can swim faster than A. Hopkins Parker."

 

We found a stop watch in the office. He mounted a starting box, leaned forward from the waist as he had seen racing swimmers do but never had occasion to do himself—I noticed a preparatory looseness coming into his shoulders and arms, a controlled ease about his stance which was unexpected in anyone trying to break a record. I said, "On your mark—Go!" There was a complex moment when his body uncoiled and shot forward with sudden metallic tension. He planed up the pool, his shoulders dominating the water while his legs and feet rode so low that I couldn't distinguish them; a wake rippled hurriedly by him and then at the end of the pool his position broke, he relaxed, dived, an instant's confusion and then his suddenly and metallically tense body shot back toward the other end of the pool. Another turn and up the pool again—I noticed no particular slackening of his pace—another turn, down the pool again, his hand touched the end, and he looked up at me with a composed, interested expression. "Well, how did I do?" I looked at the watch; he had broken A. Hopkins Parker's record by .7 second.

 

"My God! So I really did it. You know what? I thought I was going to do it. It felt as though I had that stop watch in my head and I could hear myself going just a little bit faster than A. Hopkins Parker."

 

"The worst thing is there weren't any witnesses. And I'm no official timekeeper. I don't think it will count."

 

"Well of course it won't count."

22

"You can try it again and break it again. Tomorrow. We'll get the coach in here, and all the official timekeepers and I'll call up The Devonian to send a reporter and a photographer—"

 

He climbed out of the pool. "I'm not going to do it again," he said quietly.

 

"Of course you are!"

 

"No, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Now I know. But I don't want to do it in public." Some other swimmers drifted in through the door. Finny glanced sharply at them. "By the way," he said in an even more subdued voice, "we aren't going to talk about this. It's just between you and me. Don't say anything about it, to . . . anyone."

 

"Not say anything about it! When you broke the school record!"

 

"Sh-h-h-h-h!" He shot a blazing, agitated glance at me.

 

I stopped and looked at him up and down. He didn't look directly back at me. "You're too good to be true," I said after a while.

 

He glanced at me, and then said, "Thanks a lot" in a somewhat expressionless voice.

 

Was he trying to impress me or something? Not tell anybody? When he had broken a school record without a day of practice? I knew he was serious about it, so I didn't tell anybody. Perhaps for that reason his accomplishment took root in my mind and grew rapidly in the darkness where I was forced to hide it. The Devon School record books contained a mistake, a lie, and nobody knew it but Finny and me. A. Hopkins Parker was living in a fool's paradise, wherever he was. His defeated name remained in bronze on the school record plaque, while Finny deliberately evaded an athletic honor. It was true that he had many already—the Winslow Galbraith Memorial Football Trophy for having brought the most Christian sportsmanship to the game during the 1941-1942 season, the Margaret Duke Bonaventura ribbon and prize for the student who conducted himself at hockey most like the way her son had done, the Devon School Contact Sport Award, Presented Each Year to That Student Who in the Opinion of the Athletic Advisors Excels His Fellows in the Sportsmanlike Performance of Any Game Involving Bodily Contact. But these were in the past, and they were prizes, not school records. The sports Finny played officially—football, hockey, baseball, lacrosse—didn't have school records. To switch to a new sport suddenly, just for a day, and immediately break a record in it—that was about as neat a trick, as dazzling a reversal as I could, to be perfectly honest, possibly imagine. There was something inebriating in the suppleness of this feat. When I thought about it my head felt a little dizzy and my stomach began to tingle. It had, in one word, glamour, absolute schoolboy glamour. When I looked down at that stop watch and realized a split second before I permitted my face to show it or my voice to announce it that Finny had broken a school record, I had experienced a feeling that also can be described in one word—shock.

 

To keep silent about this amazing happening deepened the shock for me. It made Finny seem too unusual for—not friendship, but too unusual for rivalry. And there were few relationships among us at Devon not based on rivalry.

23

"Swimming in pools is screwy anyway," he said after a long, unusual silence as we walked toward the dormitory. "The only real swimming is in the ocean." Then in the everyday, mediocre tone he used when he was proposing something really outrageous, he added, "Let's go to the beach."

 

The beach was hours away by bicycle, forbidden, completely out of all bounds. Going there risked expulsion, destroyed the studying I was going to do for an important test the next morning, blasted the reasonable amount of order I wanted to maintain in my life, and it also involved the kind of long, labored bicycle ride I hated. "All right," I said.

 

We got our bikes and slipped away from Devon along a back road. Having invited me Finny now felt he had to keep me entertained. He told long, wild stories about his childhood; as I pumped panting up steep hills he glided along beside me, joking steadily. He analyzed my character, and he insisted on knowing what I disliked most about him ("You're too conventional," I said). He rode backward with no hands, he rode on his own handlebars, he jumped off and back on his moving bike as he had seen trick horseback riders do in the movies. He sang. Despite the steady musical undertone in his speaking voice Finny couldn't carry a tune, and he couldn't remember the melody or the words to any song. But he loved listening to music, any music, and he liked to sing.

 

We reached the beach late in the afternoon. The tide was high and the surf was heavy. I dived in and rode a couple of waves, but they had reached that stage of power in which you could feel the whole strength of the ocean in them. The second wave, as it tore toward the beach with me, spewed me a little ahead of it, encroaching rapidly; suddenly it was immeasurably bigger than I was, it rushed me from the control of gravity and took control of me itself; the wave threw me down in a primitive plunge without a bottom, then there was a bottom, grinding sand, and I skidded onto the shore. The wave hesitated, balanced there, and then hissed back toward the deep water, its tentacles not quite interested enough in me to drag me with it.

 

I made my way up on the beach and lay down. Finny came, ceremoniously took my pulse, and then went back into the ocean. He stayed in an hour, breaking off every few minutes to come back to me and talk. The sand was so hot from the all-day sunshine that I had to brush the top layer away in order to lie down on it, and Finny's progress across the beach became a series of high, startled leaps.

 

The ocean, throwing up foaming sun-sprays across some nearby rocks, was winter cold. This kind of sunshine and ocean, with the accumulating roar of the surf and the salty, adventurous, flirting wind from the sea, always intoxicated Phineas. He was everywhere, he enjoyed himself hugely, he laughed out loud at passing sea gulls. And he did everything he could think of for me.

 

We had dinner at a hot dog stand, with our backs to the ocean and its now cooler wind, our faces toward the heat of the cooking range. Then we walked on toward the center of the beach, where there was a subdued New England strip of honky-tonks. The Boardwalk lights against the deepening blue sky gained an ideal, starry beauty and the lights from the belt of honky-

24

tonks and shooting galleries and beer gardens gleamed with a quiet purity in the clear twilight.

 

Finny and I went along the Boardwalk in our sneakers and white slacks, Finny in a light blue polo shirt and I in a T-shirt. I noticed that people were looking fixedly at him, so I took a look myself to see why. His skin radiated a reddish copper glow of tan, his brown hair had been a little bleached by the sun, and I noticed that the tan made his eyes shine with a cool blue-green fire.

 

"Everybody's staring at you," he suddenly said to me. "It's because of that movie-star tan you picked up this afternoon . . . showing off again."

 

Enough broken rules were enough that night. Neither of us suggested going into any of the honky-tonks or beer gardens. We did have one glass of beer each at a fairly respectable -looking bar, convincing, or seeming to convince the bartender that we were old enough by a show of forged draft cards. Then we found a good spot among some sand dunes at the lonely end of the beach, and there we settled down to sleep for the night. The last words of Finny's usual nighttime monologue were, "I hope you're having a pretty good time here. I know I kind of dragged you away at the point of a gun, but after all you can't come to the shore with just anybody and you can't come by yourself, and at this teen-age period in life the proper person is your best pal." He hesitated and then added, "which is what you are," and there was silence on his dune.

 

It was a courageous thing to say. Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

25

4

The next morning I saw dawn for the first time. It began not as the gorgeous fanfare over the ocean I had expected, but as a strange gray thing, like sunshine seen through burlap. I looked over to see if Phineas was awake. He was still asleep, although in this drained light he looked more dead than asleep. The ocean looked dead too, dead gray waves hissing mordantly along the beach, which was gray and dead-looking itself.

 

I turned over and tried to sleep again but couldn't, and so lay on my back looking at this gray burlap sky. Very gradually, like one instrument after another being tentatively rehearsed, beacons of color began to pierce the sky. The ocean perked up a little from the reflection of these colored slivers in the sky. Bright high lights shone on the tips of waves, and beneath its gray surface I could see lurking a deep midnight green. The beach shed its deadness and became a spectral gray-white, then more white than gray, and finally it was totally white and stainless, as pure as the shores of Eden. Phineas, still asleep on his dune, made me think of Lazarus, brought back to life by the touch of God.

 

I didn't contemplate this transformation for long. Inside my head, for as long as I could remember, there had always been a sense of time ticking steadily. I looked at the sky and the ocean and knew that it was around six-thirty. The ride back to Devon would take three hours at least. My important test, trigonometry, was going to be held at ten o'clock.

 

Phineas woke up talking. "That was one of the best night's sleep I ever had."

 

"When did you ever have a bad one?"

 

"The time I broke my ankle in football. I like the way this beach looks now. Shall we have a morning swim?"

 

"Are you crazy? It's too late for that."

 

"What time is it anyway?" Finny knew I was a walking clock.

 

"It's going on seven o'clock."

 

"There's time for just a short swim," and before I could say anything he was trotting down the beach, shedding clothes as he went, and into the ocean. I waited for him where I was. He came back after a while full of chilly glow and energy and talk. I didn't have much to say. "Do you have the money?" I asked once, suddenly suspecting that he had lost our joint seventy-five cents during the night. There was a search, a hopeless one, in the sand, and so we set off on the long ride back without any breakfast, and got to Devon just in time for my test. I flunked it; I knew I was going to as soon as I looked at the test problems. It was the first test I had ever flunked.

26

But Finny gave me little time to worry about that. Eight after lunch there was a game of blitzball which took most of the afternoon, and right after dinner there was the meeting of the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session.

 

That night in our room, even though I was worn out from all the exercise, I tried to catch up to what had been happening in trigonometry.

 

"You work too hard," Finny said, sitting opposite me at the table where we read. The study lamp cast a round yellow pool between us. "You know all about History and English and French and everything else. What good will Trigonometry do you?"

 

"I'll have to pass it to graduate, for one thing."

 

"Don't give me that line. Nobody at Devon has ever been surer of graduating than you are. You aren't working for that. You want to be head of the class, valedictorian, so you can make a speech on Graduation Day—in Latin or something boring like that probably—and be the boy wonder of the school. I know you."

 

"Don't be stupid. I wouldn't waste my time on anything like that."

 

"You never waste your time. That's why I have to do it for you."

 

"Anyway," I grudgingly added, "somebody's got to be the head of the class."

 

"You see, I knew that's what you were aiming at," he concluded quietly.

 

"Fooey."

 

What if I was. It was a pretty good goal to have, it seemed to me. After all, he should talk. He had won and been proud to win the Galbraith Football Trophy and the Contact Sport Award, and there were two or three other athletic prizes he was sure to get this year or next. If I was head of the class on Graduation Day and made a speech and won the Ne Plus Ultra Scholastic Achievement Citation, then we would both have come out on top, we would be even, that was all. We would be even. . . .

 

Was that it! My eyes snapped from the textbook toward him. Did he notice this sudden glance shot across the pool of light? He didn't seem to; he went on writing down his strange curlicue notes about Thomas Hardy in Phineas Shorthand. Was that it! With his head bent over in the lamplight I could discern a slight mound in his brow above the eyebrows, the faint bulge which is usually believed to indicate mental power. Phineas would be the first to disclaim any great mental power in himself. But what did go on in his mind? If I was the head of the class and won that prize, then we would be even. . . .

 

His head started to come up, and mine snapped down. I glared at the textbook. "Relax," he said. "Your brain'll explode if you keep this up."

 

"You don't need to worry about me, Finny."

 

"I'm not worried."

27

"You wouldn't—" I wasn't sure I had the control to put this question—"mind if I wound up head of the class, would you?"

 

"Mind?" Two clear green-blue eyes looked at me. "Fat chance you've got, anyway, with Chet Douglass around."

 

"But you wouldn't mind, would you?" I repeated in a lower and more distinct voice.

 

He gave me that half-smile of his, which had won him a thousand conflicts. "I'd kill myself out of jealous envy."

 

I believed him. The joking manner was a screen; I believed him. In front of my eyes the trigonometry textbook blurred into a jumble. I couldn't see. My brain exploded. He minded, despised the possibility that I might be the head of the school. There was a swift chain of explosions in my brain, one certainty after another blasted—up like a detonation went the idea of any best friend, up went affection and partnership and sticking by someone and relying on someone absolutely in the jungle of a boys' school, up went the hope that there was anyone in this school—in this world—whom I could trust. "Chet Douglass," I said uncertainly, "is a sure thing for it."

 

My misery was too deep to speak any more. I scanned the page; I was having trouble breathing, as though the oxygen were leaving the room. Amid its devastation my mind flashed from thought to thought, despairingly in search of something left which it could rely on. Not rely on absolutely, that was obliterated as a possibility, just rely on a little, some solace, something surviving in the ruins.

 

I found it. I found a single sustaining thought. The thought was, You and Phineas are even already. You are even in enmity. You are both coldly driving ahead for yourselves alone. You did hate him for breaking that school swimming record, but so what? He hated you for getting an A in every course but one last term. You would have had an A in that one except for him. Except for him.

 

Then a second realization broke as clearly and bleakly as dawn at the beach. Finny had deliberately set out to wreck my studies. That explained blitzball, that explained the nightly meetings of the Super Suicide Society, that explained his insistence that I share all his diversions. The way I believed that you're-my-best-friend blabber! The shadow falling across his face if I didn't want to do something with him! His instinct for sharing everything with me? Sure, he wanted to share everything with me, especially his procession of D's in every subject. That way he, the great athlete, would be way ahead of me. It was all cold trickery, it was all calculated, it was all enmity.

 

I felt better. Yes, I sensed it like the sweat of relief when nausea passes away; I felt better.

 

We were even after all, even in enmity. The deadly rivalry was on both sides after all.

 

I became quite a student after that. I had always been a good one, although I wasn't really interested and excited by learning itself, the way Chet Douglass was. Now I became not just good but exceptional, with Chet Douglass my only rival in sight. But I began to see that Chet

28

was weakened by the very genuineness of his interest in learning. He got carried away by things; for example, he was so fascinated by the tilting planes of solid geometry that he did almost as badly in trigonometry as I did myself. When we read Candide it opened up a new way of looking at the world to Chet, and he continued hungrily reading Voltaire, in French, while the class went on to other people. He was vulnerable there, because to me they were all pretty much alike—Voltaire and Molière and the laws of motion and the Magna Carta and the Pathetic Fallacy and Tess of the D'Urbervilles—and I worked indiscriminately on all of them.

 

Finny had no way of knowing this, because it all happened so far ahead of him scholastically. In class he generally sat slouched in his chair, his alert face following the discussion with an expression of philosophical comprehension, and when he was forced to speak himself the hypnotic power of his voice combined with the singularity of his mind to produce answers which were often not right but could rarely be branded as wrong. Written tests were his downfall because he could not speak them, and as a result he got grades which were barely passing. It wasn't that he never worked, because he did work, in short, intense bouts now and then. As that crucial summer wore on and I tightened the discipline on myself Phineas increased his bouts of studying.

 

I could see through that. I was more and more certainly becoming the best student in the school; Phineas was without question the best athlete, so in that way we were even. But while he was a very poor student I was a pretty good athlete, and when everything was thrown into the scales they would in the end tilt definitely toward me. The new attacks of studying were his emergency measures to save himself. I redoubled my effort.

 

It was surprising how well we got along in these weeks. Sometimes I found it hard to remember his treachery, sometimes I discovered myself thoughtlessly slipping back into affection for him again. It was hard to remember when one summer day after another broke with a cool effulgence over us, and there was a breath of widening life in the morning air— something hard to describe—an oxygen intoxicant, a shining northern paganism, some odor, some feeling so hopelessly promising that I would fall back in my bed on guard against it. It was hard to remember in the heady and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.

 

Summer lazed on. No one paid any attention to us. One day I found myself describing to Mr. Prud'homme how Phineas and I had slept on the beach, and he seemed to be quite interested in it, in all the details, so much so that he missed the point; that we had flatly broken a basic rule.

 

No one cared, no one exercised any real discipline over us; we were on our own.

 

August arrived with a deepening of all the summertime splendors of New Hampshire. Early in the month we had two days of light, steady rain which aroused a final fullness everywhere. The branches of the old trees, which had been familiar to me either half-denuded or completely gaunt during the winter terms at Devon, now seemed about to break from their storms of

29

leaves. Little disregarded patches of ground revealed that they had been gardens all along, and nondescript underbrush around the gymnasium and the river broke into color. There was a latent freshness in the air, as though spring were returning in the middle of the summer.

 

But examinations were at hand. I wasn't as ready for them as I wanted to be. The Suicide Society continued to meet every evening, and I continued to attend, because I didn't want Finny to understand me as I understood him.

 

And also I didn't want to let him excel me in this, even though I knew that it didn't matter whether he showed me up at the tree or not. Because it was what you had in your heart that counted. And I had detected that Finny's was a den of lonely, selfish ambition. He was no better than I was, no matter who won all the contests.

 

A French examination was announced for one Friday late in August. Finny and I studied for it in the library Thursday afternoon; I went over vocabulary lists, and he wrote messages—je ne give a damn pas about le francais, les filles en France ne wear pas les pantelons—and passed them with great seriousness to me, as aide-mémoire. Of course I didn't get any work done. After supper I went to our room to try again. Phineas came in a couple of minutes later.

 

"Arise," he began airily, "Senior Overseer Charter Member! Elwin 'Leper' Lepellier has announced his intention to make the leap this very night, to qualify, to save his face at last."

 

I didn't believe it for a second. Leper Lepellier would go down paralyzed with panic on any sinking troopship before making such a jump. Finny had put him up to it, to finish me for good on the exam. I turned around with elaborate resignation. "If he jumps out of that tree I'm Mahatma Gandhi."

 

"All right," agreed Finny absently. He had a way of turning cliches inside out like that. "Come on, let's go. We've got to be there. You never know, maybe he will do it this time."

 

"Oh, for God sake." I slammed closed the French book.

 

"What's the matter?"

 

What a performance! His face was completely questioning and candid.

 

"Studying!" I snarled. "Studying! You know, books. Work. Examinations."

 

"Yeah . . ." He waited for me to go on, as though he didn't see what I was getting at.

 

"Oh for God sake! You don't know what I'm talking about. No, of course not. Not you." I stood up and slammed the chair against the desk. "Okay, we go. We watch little lily-liver Lepellier not jump from the tree, and I ruin my grade."

 

He looked at me with an interested, surprised expression. "You want to study?"

 

I began to feel a little uneasy at this mildness of his, so I sighed heavily. "Never mind, forget it. I know, I joined the club, I'm going. What else can I do?"

30

"Don't go." He said it very simply and casually, as though he were saying, "Nice day." He shrugged, "Don't go. What the hell, it's only a game."

 

I had stopped halfway across the room, and now I just looked at him. "What d'you mean?" I muttered. What he meant was clear enough, but I was groping for what lay behind his words, for what his thoughts could possibly be. I might have asked, "Who are you, then?" instead. I was facing a total stranger.

 

"I didn't know you needed to study," he said simply, "I didn't think you ever did. I thought it just came to you."

 

It seemed that he had made some kind of parallel between my studies and his sports. He probably thought anything you were good at came without effort. He didn't know yet that he was unique.

 

I couldn't quite achieve a normal speaking voice. "If I need to study, then so do you."

 

"Me?" He smiled faintly. "Listen, I could study forever and I'd never break C. But it's different for you, you're good. You really are. If I had a brain like that, I'd—I'd have my head cut open so people could look at it."

 

"Now wait a second . . ."

 

He put his hands on the back of a chair and leaned toward me. "I know. We kid around a lot and everything, but you have to be serious sometime, about something. If you're really good at something, I mean if there's nobody, or hardly anybody, who's as good as you are, then you've got to be serious about that. Don't mess around, for God's sake." He frowned disapprovingly at me. "Why didn't you say you had to study before? Don't move from that desk. It's going to be all A's for you."

 

"Wait a minute," I said, without any reason.

 

"It's okay. I'll oversee old Leper. I know he's not going to do it." He was at the door.

 

"Wait a minute," I said more sharply. "Wait just a minute. I'm coming."

 

"No you aren't, pal, you're going to study."

 

"Never mind my studying."

 

"You think you've done enough already?"

 

"Yes." I let this drop curtly to bar him from telling me what to do about my work. He let it go at that, and went out the door ahead of me, whistling off key.

 

We followed our gigantic shadows across the campus, and Phineas began talking in wild French, to give me a little extra practice. I said nothing, my mind exploring the new dimensions of isolation around me. Any fear I had ever had of the tree was nothing beside this. It wasn't my neck, but my understanding which was menaced. He had never been jealous oŁ

31

me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.

 

I couldn't stand this. We reached the others loitering around the base of the tree, and Phineas began exuberantly to throw off his clothes, delighted by the fading glow of the day, the challenge of the tree, the competitive tension of all of us. He lived and flourished in such moments. "Let's go, you and me," he called. A new idea struck him. "We'll go together, a double jump! Neat, eh?"

 

None of this mattered now; I would have listlessly agreed to anything. He started up the wooden rungs and I began climbing behind, up to the limb high over the bank. Phineas ventured a little way along it, holding a thin nearby branch for support. "Come out a little way," he said, "and then we'll jump side by side." The countryside was striking from here, a deep green sweep of playing fields and bordering shrubbery, with the school stadium white and miniature-looking across the river. From behind us the last long rays of light played across the campus, accenting every slight undulation of the land, emphasizing the separateness of each bush.

 

Holding firmly to the trunk, I took a step toward him, and then my knees bent and I jounced the limb. Finny, his balance gone, swung his head around to look at me for an instant with extreme interest, and then he tumbled sideways, broke through the little branches below and hit the bank with a sickening, unnatural thud. It was the first clumsy physical action I had ever seen him make. With unthinking sureness I moved out on the limb and jumped into the river, every trace of my fear of this forgotten.

32

5

None of us was allowed near the infirmary during the next days, but I heard all the rumors that came out of it. Eventually a fact emerged; it was one of his legs, which had been "shattered." I couldn't figure out exactly what this word meant, whether it meant broken in one or several places, cleanly or badly, and I didn't ask. I learned no more, although the subject was discussed endlessly. Out of my hearing people must have talked of other things, but everyone talked about Phineas to me. I suppose this was only natural. I had been right beside bin when it happened, I was his roommate.

 

The effect of his injury on the masters seemed deeper than after other disasters I remembered there. It was as though they felt it was especially unfair that it should strike one of the sixteen-year-olds, one of the few young men who could be free and happy in the summer of 1942.

 

I couldn't go on hearing about it much longer. If anyone had been suspicious of me, I might have developed some strength to defend myself. But there was nothing. No one suspected. Phineas must still be too sick, or too noble, to tell them.

 

I spent as much time as I could alone in our room, trying to empty my mind of every thought, to forget where I was, even who I was. One evening when I was dressing for dinner in this numbed frame of mind, an idea occurred to me, the first with any energy behind it since Finny fell from the tree. I decided to put on his clothes. We wore the same size, and although he always criticized mine he used to wear them frequently, quickly forgetting what belonged to him and what to me. I never forgot, and that evening I put on his cordovan shoes, his pants, and I looked for and finally found his pink shirt, neatly laundered in a drawer. Its high, somewhat stiff collar against my neck, the wide cuffs touching my wrists, the rich material against my skin excited a sense of strangeness and distinction; I felt like some nobleman, some Spanish grandee.

 

But when I looked in the mirror it was no remote aristocrat I had become, no character out of daydreams. I was Phineas, Phineas to the life. I even had his humorous expression in my face, his sharp, optimistic awareness. I had no idea why this gave me such intense relief, but it seemed, standing there in Finny's triumphant shirt, that I would never stumble through the confusions of my own character again.

 

I didn't go down to dinner. The sense of transformation stayed with me throughout the evening, and even when I undressed and went to bed. That night I slept easily, and it was only on waking up that this illusion was gone, and I was confronted with myself, and what I had done to Finny.

 

Sooner or later it had to happen, and that morning it did. "Finny's better!" Dr. Stanpole

33

called to me on the chapel steps over the organ recessional thundering behind us. I made my way haltingly past the members of the choir with their black robes flapping in the morning breeze, the doctor's words reverberating around me. He might denounce me there before the whole school. Instead he steered me amiably into the lane leading toward the infirmary. "He could stand a visitor or two now, after these very nasty few days."

 

"You don't think I'll upset him or anything?"

 

"You? No, why? I don't want any of these teachers flapping around him. But a pal or two, it'll do him good."

 

"I suppose he's still pretty sick."

 

"It was a messy break."

 

"But how does he—how is he feeling? I mean, is he cheerful at all, or—"

 

"Oh, you know Finny." I didn't, I was pretty sure I didn't know Finny at all. "It was a messy break," he went on, "but we'll have him out of it eventually. He'll be walking again."

 

"Walking again!"

 

"Yes." The doctor didn't look at me, and barely changed his tone of voice. "Sports are finished for him, after an accident like that. Of course."

 

"But he must be able to," I burst out, "if his leg's still there, if you aren't going to amputate it —you aren't, are you?—then if it isn't amputated and the bones are still there, then it must come back the way it was, why wouldn't it? Of course it will."

 

Dr. Stanpole hesitated, and I think glanced at me for a moment. "Sports are finished. As a friend you ought to help him face that and accept it. The sooner he does the better off he'll be. If I had the slightest hope that he could do more than walk I'd be all for trying for everything. There is no such hope. I'm sorry, as of course everyone is. It's a tragedy, but there it is."

 

I grabbed my head, fingers digging into my skin, and the doctor, thinking to be kind, put his hand on my shoulder. At his touch I lost all hope of controlling myself. I burst out crying into my hands; I cried for Phineas and for myself and for this doctor who believed in facing things. Most of all I cried because of kindness, which I had not expected.

 

"Now that's no good. You've got to be cheerful and hopeful. He needs that from you. He wanted especially to see you. You were the one person he asked for."

 

That stopped my tears. I brought my hands down and watched the red brick exterior of the infirmary, a cheerful building, coming closer. Of course I was the first person he wanted to see. Phineas would say nothing behind my back; he would accuse me, face to face.

 

We were walking up the steps of the infirmary everything was very swift, and next I was in a corridor being nudged by Dr. Stanpole toward a door. "He's in there. I'll be with you in a minute."

34

The door was slightly ajar, and I pushed it back and stood transfixed on the threshold. Phineas lay among pillows and sheets, his left leg, enormous in its white bindings, suspended a little above the bed. A tube led from a glass bottle into his right arm. Some channel began to close inside me and I knew I was about to black out.

 

"Come on in," I heard him say. "You look worse than I do." The fact that he could still make a light remark pulled me back a little, and I went to a chair beside his bed. He seemed to have diminished physically in the few days which had passed, and to have lost his tan. His eyes studied me as though I were the patient. They no longer had their sharp good humor but had become clouded and visionary. After a while I realized he had been given a drug. "What are you looking so sick about?" he went on.

 

"Finny, I—" there was no controlling what I said, the words were instinctive, like the reactions of someone cornered. "What happened there at the tree? That goddam tree, I'm going to cut down that tree. Who cares who can jump out of it. What happened, what happened? How did you fall, how could you fall off like that?"

 

"I just fell," his eyes were vaguely on my face, "something jiggled and I fell over. I remember I turned around and looked at you, it was like I had all the time in the world. I thought I could reach out and get hold of you."

 

I flinched violently away from him. "To drag me down too!"

 

He kept looking vaguely over my face. "To get hold of you, so I wouldn't fall off."

 

"Yes, naturally." I was fighting for air in this close room. "I tried, you remember? I reached out but you were gone, you went down through those little branches underneath, and when I reached out there was only air."

 

"I just remember looking at your face for a second. Awfully funny expression you had. Very shocked, like you have right now."

 

"Right now? Well, of course, I am shocked. Who wouldn't be shocked, for God sakes. It's terrible, everything's terrible."

 

"But I don't see why you should look so personally shocked. You look like it happened to you or something."

 

"It's almost like it did! I was right there, right on the limb beside you."

 

"Yes, I know. I remember it all."

 

There was a hard block of silence, and then I said quietly, as though my words might detonate the room, "Do you remember what made you fall?"

 

His eyes continued their roaming across my face. "I don't know, I must have just lost my balance. It must have been that I did have this idea, this feeling that when you were standing there beside me, y—I don't know, I had a kind of feeling. But you can't say anything for sure

35

from just feelings. And this feeling doesn't make any sense. It was a crazy idea, I must have been delirious. So I just have to forget it. I just fell," he turned away to grope for something among the pillows, "that's all." Then he glanced back at me, Tm sorry about that feeling I had."

 

I couldn't say anything to this sincere, drugged apology for having suspected the truth. He was never going to accuse me. It was only a feeling he had, and at this moment he must have been formulating a new commandment in his personal decalogue. Never accuse a friend of a crime if you only have a feeling he did it.

 

And I thought we were competitors! It was so ludicrous I wanted to cry.

 

If Phineas had been sitting here in this pool of guilt, how would he have felt, what would he have done?

 

He would have told me the truth.

 

I got up so suddenly that the chair overturned. I stared at him in amazement, and he stared back, his mouth breaking into a grin as the moments passed. "Well," he said at last in his friendly knowing voice, "what are you going to do, hypnotize me?"

 

"Finny, I've got something to tell you. You're going to hate it, but there's something I've got to tell you."

 

"My God, what energy," he said, falling back against the pillows. "You sound like General MacArthur."

 

"I don't care who I sound like, and you won't think so when I tell you. This is the worst thing in the world, and I'm sorry and I hate to tell you but I've got to tell you."

 

But I didn't tell him. Dr. Stanpole came in before I was able to, and then a nurse came in, and I was sent away. The next day the doctor decided that Finny was not yet well enough to see visitors, even old pals like me. Soon after he was taken in an ambulance to his home outside Boston.

 

The Summer Session closed, officially came to an end. But to me it seemed irresolutely suspended, halted strangely before its time. I went south for a month's vacation in my home town and spent it in an atmosphere of reverie and unreality, as though I had lived that month once already and had not been interested by it the first time either.

 

At the end of September I started back toward Devon on the jammed, erratic trains of September, 1942. I reached Boston seventeen hours behind schedule; there would be prestige in that at Devon, where those of us from long distances with travel adventures to report or invent held the floor for several days after a vacation.

 

By luck I got a taxi at South Station, and instead of saying "North Station" to the driver, instead of just crossing Boston and catching the final train for the short last leg of the trip to Devon, instead of that I sat back in the seat and heard myself give the address of Finny's house on the outskirts.

36

We found it fairly easily, on a street with a nave of ancient elms branching over it. The house itself was high, white, and oddly proper to be the home of Phineas. It presented a face of definite elegance to the street, although behind that wings and ells dwindled quickly in formality until the house ended in a big plain barn.

 

Nothing surprised Phineas. A cleaning woman answered the door and when I came into the room where he was sitting, he looked very pleased and not at all surprised.

 

"So you are going to show up!" his voice took off in one of its flights, "and you brought me something to eat from down South, didn't you? Honeysuckle and molasses or something like that?" I tried to think of something funny. "Corn bread? You did bring something. You didn't go all the way to Dixie and then come back with nothing but your dismal face to show for it." His talk rolled on, ignoring and covering my look of shock and clumsiness. I was silenced by the sight of him propped by white hospital-looking pillows in a big armchair. Despite everything at the Devon Infirmary, he had seemed an athlete there, temporarily injured in a game; as though the trainer would come in any minute and tape him up. Propped now before a great New England fireplace, on this quiet old street, he looked to me like an invalid, house-bound.

 

"I brought . . . Well I never remember to bring anyone anything." I struggled to get my voice above this self-accusing murmur. "I'll send you something. Flowers or something."

 

"Flowers! What happened to you in Dixie anyway?"

 

"Well then," there was no light remark anywhere in my head, "I'll get you some books."

 

"Never mind about books. I'd rather have some talk. What happened down South?"

 

"As a matter of fact," I brought out all the cheerfulness I could find for this, "there was a fire. It was just a grass fire out behind our house. We . . . took some brooms and beat it. I guess what we really did was fan it because it just kept getting bigger until the Fire Department finally came. They could tell where it was because of all the flaming brooms we were waving around in the air, trying to put them out."

 

Finny liked that story. But it put us on the familiar friendly level, pals trading stories. How was I going to begin talking about it? It would not be just a thunderbolt. It wouldn't even seem real.

 

Not in this conversation, not in this room. I wished I had met him in a railroad station, or at some highway intersection. Not here. Here the small window panes shone from much polishing and the walls were hung with miniatures and old portraits. The chairs were either heavily upholstered and too comfortable to stay awake in or Early American and never used. There were several square, solid tables covered with family pictures and random books and magazines, and also three small, elegant tables not used for anything. It was a compromise of a room, with a few good "pieces'" for guests to look at, and the rest of it for people to use.

 

But I had known Finny in an impersonal dormitory, a gym, a playing field. In the room we shared at Devon many strangers had lived before us, and many would afterward. It was there

37

that I had done it, but it was here that I would have to tell it I felt like a wild man who had stumbled in from the jungle to tear the place apart.

 

I moved back in the Early American chair. Its rigid back and high armrests immediately forced me into a righteous posture. My blood could start to pound if it wanted to; let it. I was going ahead. "I was dunking about you most of the trip up."

 

"Oh yeah?" He glanced briefly into my eyes.

 

"I was thinking about you . . . and the accident."

 

"There's loyalty for you. To think about me when you were on a vacation."

 

"I was thinking about it . . . about you because—I was thinking about you and the accident because I caused it."

 

Finny looked steadily at me, his face very handsome and expressionless. "What do you mean, you caused it?" his voice was as steady as his eyes.

 

My own voice sounded quiet and foreign. "I jounced the limb. I caused it." One more sentence. "I deliberately jounced the limb so you would fall off."

 

He looked older than I had ever seen him. "Of course you didn't."

 

"Yes I did. I did!"

 

"Of course you didn't do it. You damn fool. Sit down, you damn fool."

 

"Of course I did!"

 

I'm going to hit you if you don't sit down."

 

"Hit me!" I looked at him. "Hit me! You can't even get up! You can't even come near me!"

 

"I'll kill you if you don't shut up."

 

"You see! Kill me! Now you know what it is! I did it because I felt like that! Now you know yourself!"

 

"I don't know anything. Go away. I'm tired and you make me sick. Go away." He held his forehead wearily, an unlikely way.

 

It struck me then that I was injuring him again. It occurred to me that this could be an even deeper injury than what I had done before. I would have to back out of it, I would have to disown it. Could it be that he might even be right? Had I really and definitely and knowingly done it to him after all? I couldn't remember, I couldn't think. However it was, it was worse for him to know it. I had to take it back.

 

But not here. "You'll be back at Devon in a few weeks, won't you?" I muttered after both of us had sat in silence for a while.

38

"Sure, I'll be there by Thanksgiving anyway."

 

At Devon, where every stick of furniture didn't assert that Finny was a part of it, I could make it up to him.

 

Now I had to get out of there. There was only one way to do it; I would have to make every move false. "I've had an awfully long trip," I said, "I never sleep much on trains. I guess I'm not making too much sense today."

 

"Don't worry about it."

 

"I think I'd better get to the station. I'm already a day late at Devon."

 

"You aren't going to start living by the rules, are you?"

 

I grinned at him. "Oh no, I wouldn't do that," and that was the most false thing, the biggest lie of all.

39

6

Peace had deserted Devon. Although not in the look of the campus and village; they retained much of their dreaming summer calm. Fall had barely touched the full splendor of the trees, and during the height of the day the sun briefly regained its summertime power. In the air there was only an edge of coolness to imply the coming winter.

 

But all had been caught up, like the first fallen leaves, by a new and energetic wind. The Summer Session—a few dozen boys being force-fed education, a stopgap while most of the masters were away and most of the traditions stored against sultriness—the Summer Session was over. It had been the school's first,' but this was its one hundred and sixty-third Winter Session, and the forces reassembled for it scattered the easygoing summer spirit like so many fallen leaves.

 

The masters were in their places for the first Chapel, seated in stalls in front of and at right angles to us, suggesting by their worn expressions and careless postures that they had never been away at all.

 

In an apse of the church sat their wives and children, the objects during the tedious winter months of our ceaseless, ritual speculation (Why did he ever marry her? What in the world ever made her marry him? How could the two of them ever have produced those little monsters?). The masters favored seersucker on this mild first day the wives broke out their hats. Five of the younger teachers were missing gone into the war. Mr Pike had come in his Naval ensigns uniform; some reflex must have survived Midshipman's School and brought him back to Devon for the day His face was as mild and hopeless as ever; mooning above the snappy, rigid blouse, it gave him the air of an impostor.

 

Continuity was the keynote. The same hymns were played the same sermon given, the same announcements made. There was one surprise; maids had disappeared "for the Duration," a new phase then. But continuity was stressed, not beginning again but continuing the education of young men according to the unbroken traditions of Devon.

 

I knew, perhaps I alone knew, that this was false. Devon had slipper' through their fingers during the warm overlooked months. The tradition's had been broken, the standards let down, all rules forgotten. In those bright days of truancy we had never thought of What We Owed Devon, as the sermon this opening day exhorted us to do. We had thought of ourselves, of what Devon owed us, and we had taken all of that and much more Today's hymn was Dear Lord and Father of Mankind Forgive Our Foolish Ways; we had never heard that during the summer either. Ours had been a wayward gypsy music, leading us down all kinds of foolish gypsy ways, unforgiven. I was glad of it, I had almost caught the rhythm of it, the dancing, clicking jangle of it during the summer.

40

Still it had come to an end, in the last long rays of daylight at the tree, when Phineas fell. It was forced on me as I sat chilled through the Chapel service, that this probably vindicated the rules of Devon after all, wintery Devon. If you broke the rules, then they broke you. That, I think, was the real point of the sermon on this first morning.

 

After the service ended we set out seven hundred strong, the regular winter throng of the Devon School, to hustle through our lists of appointments. All classrooms were crowded, swarms were on the crosswalks, the dormitories were as noisy as factories, every bulletin board was a forest of notices.

 

We had been an idiosyncratic, leaderless band in the summer, undirected except by the eccentric notions of Phineas. Now the official class leaders and politicians could be seen taking charge, assuming as a matter of course their control of these walks and fields which had belonged only to us. I had the same room which Finny and I had shared during the summer, but across the hall, in the large suite where Leper Lepellier had dreamed his way through July and August amid sunshine and dust motes and windows through which the ivy had reached tentatively into the room, here Brinker Hadley had established his headquarters. Emissaries were already dropping in to confer with him. Leper, luckless in his last year as all the others, had been moved to a room lost in an old building off somewhere in the trees toward the gym.

 

After morning classes and lunch I went across to see Brinker, started into the room and then stopped. Suddenly I did not want to see the trays of snails which Leper had passed the summer collecting replaced by Brinker's files. Not yet. Although it was something to have this year's dominant student across the way. Ordinarily he should have been a magnet for me, the center of all the excitement and influences in the class. Ordinarily this would have been so—if the summer, the gypsy days, had not intervened. Now Brinker, with his steady wit and ceaseless plans, Brinker had nothing to offer in place of Leper's dust motes and creeping ivy and snails.

 

I didn't go in. In any case I was late for my afternoon appointment. I never used to be late. But today I was, later even than I had to be. I was supposed to report to the Crew House, down on the banks of the lower river. There are two rivers at Devon, divided by a small dam. On my way I stopped on the footbridge which crosses the top of the dam separating them and looked upstream, at the narrow little Devon River sliding toward me between its thick fringe of pine and birch.

 

As I had to do whenever I glimpsed this river, I thought of Phineas. Not of the tree and pain, but of one of his favorite tricks, Phineas in exaltation, balancing on one foot on the prow of a canoe like a river god, his raised arms invoking the air to support him, face transfigured, body a complex set of balances and compensations, each muscle aligned in perfection with all the others to maintain this supreme fantasy of achievement, his skin glowing from immersions, his whole body hanging between river and sky as though he had transcended gravity and might by gently pushing upward with his foot glide a little way higher and remain suspended in space, encompassing all the glory of the summer and offering it to the sky.

 

Then, an infinitesimal veering of the canoe, and the line of his body would break, the soaring arms collapse, up shoot an uncontrollable leg, and Phineas would tumble into the

41

water, roaring with rage.

 

I stopped in the middle of this hurrying day to remember him like that, and then, feeling refreshed, I went on to the Crew House beside the tidewater river below the dam.

 

We had never used this lower river, the Naguamsett, during the summer. It was ugly, saline, fringed with marsh, mud and seaweed. A few miles away it was joined to the ocean, so that its movements were governed by unimaginable factors like the Gulf Stream the Polar Ice Cap, and the moon. It was nothing like the fresh-water Devon above the dam where we'd had so much fun, all the summer. The Devon's course was determined by some familiar hills a little inland; it rose among highland farms and forests which we knew, passed at the end of its course through the school grounds, and then threw itself with little spectacle over a small waterfall beside the diving dam, and into the turbid Naguamsett.

 

The Devon School was astride these two rivers.

 

At the Crew House, Quackenbush, in the midst of some milling oarsmen in the damp main room, spotted me the instant I came in, with his dark expressionless eyes. Quackenbush was the crew manager, and there was something wrong about him. I didn't know exactly what it was. In the throng of the winter terms at Devon we were at opposite extremities of the class, and to me there only came the disliked edge of Quackenbush's reputation. A clue to it was that his first name was never used—I didn't even know what it was—and he had no nickname, not even an unfriendly one.

 

"Late, Forrester," he said in his already- matured voice. He was a firmly masculine type; perhaps he was disliked only because he had matured before the rest of us.

 

"Yes, sorry, I got held up."

 

"The crew waits for no man." He didn't seem to think this was a funny thing to say. I did, and had to chuckle.

 

"Well, if you think it's all a joke . . ."

 

"I didn't say it was a joke."

 

"I've got to have some real help around here. This crew is going to win the New England scholastics, or my name isn't Cliff Quackenbush."

 

With that blank filled, I took up my duties as assistant senior crew manager. There is no such position officially, but it sometimes came into existence through necessity, and was the opposite of a sinecure. It was all work and no advantages. The official assistant to the crew manager was a member of the class below, and the following year he could come into the senior managership with its rights and status. An assistant who was already a senior ranked nowhere. Since I had applied for such a nonentity of a job, Quackenbush, who had known as little about me as I had about him, knew now.

 

"Get some towels," he said without looking at me, pointing at a door.

42

"How many?"

 

"Who knows? Get some. As many as you can carry. That won't be too many."

 

Jobs like mine were usually taken by boys with some physical disability, since everyone had to take part in sports and this was all disabled boys could do. As I walked toward the door I supposed that Quackenbush was studying me to see if he could detect a limp. But I knew that his flat black eyes would never detect my trouble.

 

Quackenbush felt mellower by the end of the afternoon as we stood on the float in front of the Crew House, gathering up towels.

 

"You never rowed did you." He opened the conversation like that, without pause or question mark. His voice sounded almost too mature, as though he were putting it on a little; he sounded as though he were speaking through a tube.

 

"No, I never did."

 

"I rowed on the lightweight crew for two years."

 

He had a tough bantam body, easily detectable under the tight sweat shirt he wore. "I wrestle in the winter," he went on. "What are you doing in the winter?"

 

"I don't know, manage something else."

 

"You're a senior aren't you?"

 

He knew that I was a senior. "Yeah."

 

"Starting a little late to manage teams aren't you?"

 

"Am I?"

 

"Damn right you are!" He put indignant conviction into this, pouncing on the first sprig of assertiveness in me.

 

"Well, it doesn't matter."

 

"Yes it matters."

 

"I don't think it does."

 

"Go to hell Forrester. Who the hell are you anyway."

 

I turned with an inward groan to look at him. Quackenbush wasn't going to let me just do the work for him like the automaton I wished to be. We were going to have to be pitted against each other. It was easy enough now to see why. For Quackenbush had been systematically disliked since he first set foot in Devon, with careless, disinterested insults coming at him from the beginning, voting for and applauding the class leaders through years of attaining nothing he wanted for himself. I didn't want to add to his humiliations; I even sympathized with his

43

trembling, goaded egotism he could no longer contain, the furious arrogance which sprang out now at the mere hint of opposition from someone he had at last found whom he could consider inferior to himself. I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn't the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper's snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.

 

"You, Quackenbush, don't know anything about who I am." That launched me, and I had to go on and say, "or anything else."

 

"Listen you maimed son-of-a-bitch . . ."

 

I hit him hard across the face. I didn't know why for an instant; it was almost as though I were maimed. Then the realization that there was someone who was flashed over me.

 

Quackenbush had clamped his arm in some kind of tight wrestling grip around my neck, and I was glad in this moment not to be a cripple. I reached over, grasped the back of his sweat shirt, wrenched, and it came away in my hand. I tried to throw him off, he lunged at the same time, and we catapulted into the water.

 

The dousing extinguished Quackenbush's rage, and he let go of me. I scrambled back onto the float, still seared by what he had said. "The next time you call anybody maimed," I bit off the words harshly so he would understand all of them, "you better make sure they are first."

 

"Get out of here, Forrester," he said bitterly from the water, "you're not wanted around here, Forrester. Get out of here."

 

I fought that battle, that first skirmish of a long campaign, for Finny. Until the back of my hand cracked against Quackenbush's face I had never pictured myself in the role of Finny's defender, and I didn't suppose that he would have thanked me for it now. He was too loyal to anything connected with himself—his roommate, his dormitory, his class, his school, outward in vastly expanded circles of loyalty until I couldn't imagine who would be excluded. But it didn't feel exactly as though I had done it for Phineas. It felt as though I had done it for myself.

 

If so I had little profit to show as I straggled back toward the dormitory dripping wet, with the job I had wanted gone, temper gone, mind circling over and over through the whole soured afternoon. I knew now that it was fall all right; I could feel it pressing clammily against my wet clothes, an unfriendly, discomforting breath in the air, an edge of wintery chill, air that shriveled, soon to put out the lights on the countryside. One of my legs wouldn't stop trembling, whether from cold or anger I couldn't tell. I wished I had hit him harder.

 

Someone was coming toward me along the bent, broken lane which led to the dormitory, a lane out of old London, ancient houses on either side leaning as though soon to tumble into it, cobblestones heaving underfoot like a bricked-over ocean squall—a figure of great height advanced down them toward me. It could only be Mr. Ludsbury; no one else could pass over these stones with such contempt for the idea of tripping.

44

The houses on either side were inhabited by I didn't know who; wispy, fragile old ladies seemed most likely. I couldn't duck into one of them. There were angles and bumps and bends everywhere, but none big enough to conceal me. Mr. Ludsbury loomed on like a high-masted clipper ship in this rocking passage, and I tried to go stealthily by him on my watery, squeaking sneakers.

 

"Just one moment, Forrester, if you please." Mr. Ludsbury's voice was bass, British, and his Adam's apple seemed to move as much as his mouth when he spoke. "Has there been a cloudburst in your part of town?"

 

"No, sir. I'm sorry, sir, I fell into the river." I apologized by instinct to him for this mishap which discomforted only me.

 

"And could you tell me how and why you fell into the river?"

 

"I slipped."

 

"Yes." After a pause he went on. "I think you have slipped in any number of ways since last year. I understand for example that there was gaming in my dormitory this summer while you were living there." He was in charge of the dormitory; one of the dispensations of those days of deliverance, I realized now, had been his absence.

 

"Gaming? What kind of gaming, sir?"

 

"Cards, dice," he shook his long hand dismissingly, "I didn't inquire. It didn't matter. There won't be any more of it."

 

"I don't know who that would have been." Nights of black-jack and poker and unpredictable games invented by Phineas rose up in my mind; the back room of Leper's suite, a lamp hung with a blanket so that only a small blazing circle of light fell sharply amid the surrounding darkness; Phineas losing even in those games he invented, betting always for what should win, for what would have been the most brilliant successes of all, if only the cards hadn't betrayed him. Finny finally betting his icebox and losing it, that contraption, to me.

 

I thought of it because Mr. Ludsbury was just then saying, "And while I'm putting the dormitory back together I'd better tell you to get rid of that leaking icebox. Nothing like that is ever permitted in the dormitory, of course. I notice that everything went straight to seed during the summer and that none of you old boys who knew our standards so much as lifted a finger to help Mr. Prud'homme maintain order. As a substitute for the summer he couldn't have been expected to know everything there was to be known at once. You old boys simply took advantage of the situation."

 

I stood there shaking in my wet sneakers. If only I had truly taken advantage of the situation, seized and held and prized the multitudes of advantages the summer offered me; if only I had.

 

I said nothing, on my face I registered the bleak look of a defendant who knows the court

45

will never be swayed by all the favorable evidence he has. It was a schoolboy look; Mr.

 

Ludsbury knew it well.

 

"There's a long-distance call for you," he continued in the tone of the judge performing the disagreeable duty of telling the defendant his right. "I've written the operator's number on the pad beside the telephone in my study. You may go in and call."

 

"Thank you very much, sir."

 

He sailed on down the lane without further reference to me, and I wondered who was sick at home.

 

But when I reached his study—low-ceilinged, gloomy with books, black leather chairs, a pipe rack, frayed brown rug, a room which students rarely entered except for a reprimand—I saw on the pad not an operator's number from my home town, but one which seemed to interrupt the beating of my heart.

 

I called this operator, and listened in wonder while she went through her routine as though this were just any long-distance call, and then her voice left the line and it was pre-empted, and charged, by the voice of Phineas. "Happy first day of the new academic year!"

 

"Thanks, thanks a lot, it's a—you sound—I'm glad to hear your—"

 

"Stop stuttering, I'm paying for this. Who're you rooming with?"

 

"Nobody. They didn't put anyone else in the room."

 

"Saving my place for me! Good old Devon. But anyway, you wouldn't have let them put anyone else in there, would you?" Friendliness, simple outgoing affection, that was all I could hear in his voice.

 

"No, of course not."

 

"I didn't think you would. Roommates are roommates. Even if they do have an occasional fight. God you were crazy when you were here."

 

"I guess I was. I guess I must have been."

 

"Completely over the falls. I wanted to be sure you'd recovered. That's why I called up. I knew that if you'd let them put anybody else in the room in my place then you really were crazy. But you didn't, I knew you wouldn't. Well, I did have just a trace of doubt that was because you talked so crazy here. I have to admit I had just a second when I wondered. I'm sorry about that, Gene. Naturally I was completely wrong. You didn't let them put anyone else in my spot."

 

"No, I didn't let them."

 

"I could shoot myself for thinking you might. I really knew you wouldn't."

46

"No, I wouldn't."

 

"And I spent my money on a long-distance call! All for nothing. Well, it's spent, on you too. So start talking, pal. And it better be good. Start with sports. What are you going out for?"

 

"Crew. Well, not exactly crew. Managing crew. Assistant crew manager."

 

"Assistant crew manager!"

 

"I don't think I've got the job—"

 

"Assistant crew manager!"

 

"I got in a fight this after—"

 

"Assistant crew manager!" No voice could course with dumfoundment like Finny's "You are crazy!"

 

"Listen, Finny, I don't care about being a big man on the campus or anything."

 

"Whaaat?" Much more clearly than anything in Mr. Ludsbury's study I could see his face now, grimacing in wide, obsessed stupefaction. "Who said anything about whoever they are!"

 

"Well then what are you so worked up for?"

 

"What do you want to manage crew for? What do you want to manage for? What's that got to do with sports?"

 

The point was, the grace of it was, that it had nothing to do with sports. For I wanted no more of sports. They were barred from me, as though when Dr. Stanpole said, "Sports are finished" he had been speaking of me. I didn't trust myself in them, and I didn't trust anyone else. It was as though football players were really bent on crushing the life out of each other, as though boxers were in combat to the death, as though even a tennis ball might turn into a bullet. This didn't seem completely crazy imagination in 1942, when jumping out of trees stood for abandoning a torpedoed ship. Later, in the school swimming pool, we were given the second stage in that rehearsal: after you hit the water you made big splashes with your hands, to scatter the flaming oil which would be on the surface.

 

So to Phineas I said, "I'm too busy for sports," and he went into his incoherent groans and jumbles of words, and I thought the issue was settled until at the end he said, "Listen, pal, if I can't play sports, you're going to play them for me," and I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.

47

7

Brinker Hadley came across to see me late that afternoon. I had taken a shower to wash off the sticky salt of the Naguamsett River—going into the Devon was like taking a refreshing shower itself, you never had to clean up after it, but the Naguamsett was something else entirely. I had never been in it before; it seemed appropriate that my baptism there had taken place on the first day of this winter session, and that I had been thrown into it, in the middle of a fight.

 

I washed the traces off me and then put on a pair of chocolate brown slacks, a pair which Phineas had been particularly critical of when he wasn't wearing them, and a blue flannel shirt. Then, with nothing to do until my French class at five o'clock, I began turning over in my mind this question of sports.

 

But Brinker came in. I think he made a point of visiting all the rooms near him the first day. "Well, Gene," his beaming face appeared around the door. Brinker looked the standard preparatory school article in his gray gabardine suit with square, hand-sewn-looking jacket pockets, a conservative necktie, and dark brown cordovan shoes. His face was all straight lines —eyebrows, mouth, nose, everything—and he carried his six feet of height straight as well. He looked but happened not to be athletic, being too busy with politics, arrangements, and offices. There was nothing idiosyncratic about Brinker unless you saw him from behind; I did as he turned to close the door after him. The flaps of his gabardine jacket parted slightly over his healthy rump, and it is that, without any sense of derision at all, that I recall as Brinker's salient characteristic, those healthy, determined, not over-exaggerated but definite and substantial buttocks.

 

"Here you are in your solitary splendor," he went on genially. "I can see you have real influence around here. This big room all to yourself. I wish I knew how to manage things like you." He grinned confidingly and sank down on my cot, leaning on his elbow in a relaxed, at-home way.

 

It didn't seem fitting for Brinker Hadley, the hub of the class, to be congratulating me on influence. I was going to say that while he had a roommate it was frightened Brownie Perkins, who would never impinge on Brinker's comfort in any way, and that they had two rooms, the front one with a fireplace. Not that I grudged him any of this. I liked Brinker in spite of his Winter Session efficiency; almost everyone liked Brinker.

 

But in the pause I took before replying he started talking in his lighthearted way again. He never let a dull spot appear in conversation if he could help it.

 

"I'll bet you knew all the time Finny wouldn't be back this fall. That's why you picked him for a roommate, right?"

48

"What?" I pulled quickly around in my chair, away from the desk, and faced him. "No, of course not. How could I know a thing like that in advance?"

 

Brinker glanced swiftly at me. "You fixed it," he smiled widely. "You knew all the time. I'll bet it was all your doing."

 

"Don't be nutty, Brinker," I turned back toward the desk and began moving books with rapid pointlessness, "what a crazy thing to say." My voice sounded too strained even to my own blood-pounded ears.

 

"Ah-h-h. The truth hurts, eh?"

 

I looked at him as sharply as eyes can look. He had struck an accusing pose.

 

"Sure," I gave a short laugh, "sure." Then these words came out of me by themselves, "But the truth will out."

 

His hand fell leadenly on my shoulder. "Rest assured of that, my son. In our free democracy, even fighting for its life, the truth will out."

 

I got up. "I feel like a smoke, don't you? Let's go down to the Butt Room."

 

"Yes, yes. To the dungeon with you."

 

The Butt Room was something like a dungeon. It was in the basement, or the bowels, of the dormitory. There were about ten smokers already there. Everyone at Devon had many public faces; in class we looked, if not exactly scholarly, at least respectably alert; on the playing fields we looked like innocent extroverts; and in the Butt Room we looked, very strongly, like criminals. The school's policy, in order to discourage smoking, was to make these rooms as depressing as possible. The windows near the ceiling were small and dirty, the old leather furniture spilled its inwards, the tables were mutilated, the walls ash-colored, the floor concrete. A radio with a faulty connection played loud and rasping for a while, then suddenly quiet and insinuating.

 

"Here's your prisoner, gentlemen," announced Brinker, seizing my neck and pushing me into the Butt Room ahead of him, "I'm turning him over to the proper authorities."

 

High spirits came hard in the haze of the Butt Room. A slumped figure near the radio, which happened to be playing loud at the moment, finally roused himself to say, "What's the charge?"

 

"Doing away with his roommate so he could have a whole room to himself. Rankest treachery." He paused impressively. "Practically fratricide."

 

With a snap of the neck I shook his hand off me, my teeth set, "Brinker . . ."

 

He raised an arresting hand. "Not a word. Not a sound. You'll have your day in court."

 

"God damn it! Shut up! I swear to God you ride a joke longer than anybody I know."

49

It was a mistake; the radio had suddenly gone quiet, and my voice ringing in the abrupt, releasing hush galvanized them all.

 

"So, you killed him, did you?" A boy uncoiled tensely from the couch.

 

"Well," Brinker qualified judiciously, "not actually killed. Finny's hanging between life and death at home, in the arms of his grief-stricken old mother."

 

I had to take part in this, or risk losing control completely. "I didn't do hardly a thing," I began as easily as it was possible for me to do, "I—all I did was drop a little bit . . . a little pinch of arsenic in his morning coffee."

 

"Liar!" Brinker glowered at me. "Trying to weasel out of it with a false confession, eh?" I laughed at that, laughed uncontrollably for a moment at that.

 

"We know the scene of the crime," Brinker went on, "high in that . . . that funereal tree by the river. There wasn't any poison, nothing as subtle as that."

 

"Oh, you know about the tree," I tried to let my face fall guiltily, but it felt instead as though it were being dragged downward. "Yes, huh, yes there was a small, a little contretemps at the tree."

 

No one was diverted from the issue by this try at a funny French pronunciation.

 

"Tell us everything," a younger boy at the table said huskily. There was an unsettling current in his voice, a genuinely conspiratorial note, as though he believed literally everything that had been said. His attitude seemed to me almost obscene, the attitude of someone who discovers a sexual secret of yours and promises not to tell a soul if you will describe it in detail to him.

 

"Well," I replied in a stronger voice, "first I stole all his money. Then I found that he cheated on his entrance tests to Devon and I blackmailed his parents about that, then I made love to his sister in Mr. Ludsbury's study, then I . . ." it was going well, faint grins were appearing around the room, even the younger boy seemed to suspect that he was being "sincere" about a joke, a bad mistake to make at Devon, "then I . . ." I only had to add, "pushed him out of the tree" and the chain of implausibility would be complete, "then I . . ." just those few words and perhaps this dungeon nightmare would end.

 

But I could feel my throat closing on them; I could never say them, never.

 

I swung on the younger boy. "What did I do then?" I demanded. "I'll bet you've got a lot of theories. Come on, reconstruct the crime. There we were at the tree. Then what happened, Sherlock Holmes?"

 

His eyes swung guiltily back and forth. "Then you just pushed him off, I'll bet."

 

"Lousy bet," I said offhandedly, falling into a chair as though losing interest in the game. "You lose. I guess you're Dr. Watson, after all."

50

They laughed at him a little, and he squirmed and looked guiltier than ever. He had a very weak foothold among the Butt Room crowd, and I had pretty well pushed him off it. His glance flickered out at me from his defeat, and I saw to my surprise that I had, by making a little fun of him, brought upon myself his unmixed hatred. For my escape this was a price I was willing to pay.

 

"French, French," I exclaimed. "Enough of this contretemps. I've got to study my French." And I went out.

 

Going up the stairs I heard a voice from the Butt Room say, "Funny, he came all the way down here and didn't even have a smoke."

But this was a clue they soon seemed to forget. I detected no Sherlock Holmes among them, nor even a Dr. Watson. No one showed any interest in tracking me, no one pried, no one insinuated. The daily lists of appointments lengthened with the rays of the receding autumn sun until the summer, the opening day, even yesterday became by the middle of October something gotten out of the way and forgotten, because tomorrow bristled with so much to do.

 

In addition to classes and sports and clubs, there was the war. Brinker Hadley could compose his Shortest War Poem Ever Written

The War

 

Is a bore

if he wanted to, but all of us had to take stronger action than that. First there was the local apple crop, threatening to rot because the harvesters had all gone into the army or war factories. We spent several shining days picking them and were paid in cash for it. Brinker was inspired to write his Apple Ode

Our chore

 

Is the core

 

of the war

and the novelty and money of these days excited us. Life at Devon was revealed as still very close to the ways of peace; the war was at worst only a bore, as Brinker said, no more taxing to us than a day spent at harvesting in an apple orchard.

51

Not long afterward, early even for New Hampshire, snow came. It came theatrically, late one afternoon; I looked up from my desk and saw that suddenly there were big flakes twirling down into the quadrangle, settling on the carefully pruned shrubbery bordering the crosswalks, the three elms still holding many of their leaves, the still-green lawns. They gathered there thicker by the minute, like noiseless invaders conquering because they took possession so gently. I watched them whirl past my window—don't take this seriously, the playful way they fell seemed to imply, this little show, this harmless trick.

 

It seemed to be true. The school was thinly blanketed that night, but the next morning, a bright, almost balmy day, every flake disappeared. The following weekend, however, it snowed again, then two days later much harder, and by the end of that week the ground had been clamped under snow for the winter.

 

In the same way the war, beginning almost humorously with announcements about maids and days spent at apple-picking, commenced its invasion of the school. The early snow was commandeered as its advance guard.

 

Leper Lepellier didn't suspect this. It was not in fact evident to anyone at first. But Leper stands out for me as the person who was most often and most emphatically taken by surprise, by this and every other shift in our life at Devon.

 

The heavy snow paralyzed the railroad yards of one of the large towns south of us on the Boston and Maine line. At chapel the day following the heaviest snowfall, two hundred volunteers were solicited to spend the day shoveling them out, as part of the Emergency Usefulness policy adopted by the faculty that fall. Again we would be paid. So we all volunteered, Brinker and I and Chet Douglass and even I noticed, Quackenbush.

 

But not Leper. He generally made little sketches of birds and trees in the back of his notebook during chapel, so that he had probably not heard the announcement. The train to take us south to the work did not arrive until after lunch, and on my way to the station, taking a short cut through a meadow not far from the river, I met Leper. I had hardly seen him all fall, and I hardly recognized him now. He was standing motionless on the top of a small ridge, and he seemed from a distance to be a scarecrow left over from the growing season. As I plodded toward him through the snow I began to differentiate items of clothing—a dull green deer-stalker's cap, brown ear muffs, a thick gray woolen scarf—then at last I recognified the face in the midst of them, Leper's, pinched and pink, his eyes peering curiously toward some distant woods through steel-rimmed glasses. As I got nearer I noticed that below his long tan canvas coat with sagging pockets, below the red and black plaid woolen knickers and green puttees, he was wearing skis. They were very long, wooden and battered, and had two decorative, old-fashioned knobs on their tips.

 

"You think there's a path through those woods?" he asked in his mild tentative voice when I got near. Leper did not switch easily from one train of thought to another, and even though I was an old friend whom he had not talked to in months I didn't mind his taking me for granted now, even at this improbable meeting in a wide, empty field of snow.

52

"I'm not sure, Leper, but I think there's one at the bottom of the slope."

 

"Oh yeah, I guess there is." We always called him Leper to his face; he wouldn't have remembered to respond to any other name.

 

I couldn't keep from staring at him, at the burlesque explorer look of him. "What are you," I asked at last, "um, what are you doing, anyway?"

 

"I'm touring."

 

"Touring." I examined the long bamboo ski poles he held. "How do you mean, touring?"

 

"Touring. It's the way you get around the countryside in the winter. Touring skiing. It's how you go overland in the snow."

 

"Where are you going?"

 

"Well, I'm not going anywhere." He bent down to tighten the lacings on a puttee. "I'm just touring around."

 

"There's that place across the river where you could ski. The place where they have the rope tow on that steep hill across from the railroad station. You could go over there."

 

"No, I don't think so." He surveyed the woods again, although his breath had fogged his glasses. "That's not skiing."

 

"Why sure that's skiing. It's a good little run, you can get going pretty fast on that hill."

 

"Yeah but that's it, that's why it isn't skiing. Skiing isn't supposed to be fast. Skis are for useful locomotion." He turned his inquiring eyes on me. "You can break a leg with that downhill stuff."

 

"Not on that little hill."

 

"Well, it's the same thing. It's part of the whole wrong idea. They're ruining skiing in this country, rope tows and chair lifts and all that stuff. You get carted up, and then you whizz down. You never get to see the trees or anything. Oh you see a lot of trees shoot by, but you never get to really look at trees, at a tree. I just like to go along and see what I'm passing and enjoy myself." He had come to the end of his thought, and now he slowly took me in, noticing my layers of old clothes. "What are you doing, anyway?" he asked mildly and curiously.

 

"Going to work on the railroad." He kept gazing mildly and curiously at me. "Shovel out those tracks. That work they talked about in chapel this morning. You remember."

 

"Have a nice day at it, anyway," he said.

 

"I will. You too."

 

"I will if I find what I'm looking for—a beaver dam. It used to be up the Devon a ways, in a little stream that flows into the Devon. It's interesting to see the way beavers adapt to the

53

winter. Have you ever seen it?"

 

"No, I never have seen that."

 

"Well, you might want to come sometime, if I find the place."

 

"Tell me if you find it."

 

With Leper it was always a fight, a hard fight to win when you were seventeen years old and lived in a keyed-up, competing school, to avoiding making fun of him. But as I had gotten to know him better this fight had been easier to win.

 

Shoving in his long bamboo poles he pushed deliberately forward and slid slowly away from me down the gradual slope, standing very upright, his skis far apart to guard against any threat to his balance, his poles sticking out on either side of him, as though to ward off any interference.

 

I turned and trudged off to help shovel out New England for the war.

 

We spent an odd day, toiling in that railroad yard. By the time we arrived there the snow had become drab and sooted, wet and heavy. We were divided into gangs, each under an old railroad man. Brinker, Chet and I managed to be in the same group, but the playful atmosphere of the apple orchard was gone. Of the town we could only see some dull red brick mills and warehouses surrounding the yards, and we labored away among what the old man directing us called "rolling stock"—grim freight cars from many parts of the country immobilized in the snow. Brinker asked him if it shouldn't be called "unrolling stock" now, and the old man looked back at him with bleary dislike and didn't reply. Nothing was very funny that day, the work became hard and unvarying; I began to sweat under my layers of clothes. By the middle of the afternoon we had lost our fresh volunteer look, the grime of the railroad and the exhaustion of manual laborers were on us all; we seemed of a piece with the railroad yards and the mills and warehouses. The old man resented us, or we made him nervous, or maybe he was as sick as he looked. For whatever reason he grumbled and spat and alternated between growling orders and rubbing his big, unhealthy belly.

 

Around 4:30 there was a moment of cheer. The main line had been cleared and the first train rattled slowly through. We watched it advance toward us, the engine throwing up balls of steam to add to the heavy overcast.

 

All of us lined both sides of the track and got ready to cheer the engineer and passengers. The coach windows were open and the passengers surprisingly were hanging out; they were all men, I could discern, all young, all alike. It was a troop train.

 

Over the clatter and banging of the wheels and couplings we cheered and they yelled back, both sides taken by surprise. They were not much older than we were and although probably just recruits, they gave the impression of being an elite as they were carried past our drab ranks. They seemed to be having a wonderful time, their uniforms looked new and good; they were clean and energetic; they were going places.

54

After they had gone we laborers looked rather emptily across the newly cleared rails at each other, at ourselves, and not even Brinker thought of the timely remark. We turned away. The old man told us to go back to other parts of the yard, but there was no more real work done that afternoon. Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

 

The day ended at last. Gray from the beginning, its end was announced by a deepening gray, of sky, snow, faces, spirits. We piled back into the old, dispiritedly lit coaches waiting for us, slumped into the uncomfortable green seats, and no one said much until we were miles away.

 

When we did speak it was about aviation training programs and brothers in the service and requirements for enlistment and the futility of Devon and how we would never have war stories to tell our grandchildren and how long the war might last and who ever heard of studying dead languages at a time like this.

 

Quackenbush took advantage of a break in this line of conversation to announce that he would certainly stay at Devon through the year, however half-cocked others might rush off. He elaborated without encouragement, citing the advantages of Devon's physical hardening program and of a high school diploma when he did in good time reach basic training. He for one would advance into the army step by step.

 

"You for one," echoed someone contemptuously.

 

"You are one," someone else said.

 

"Which army, Quackenbush? Mussolini's?"

 

"Naw, he's a Kraut."

 

"He's a Kraut spy."

 

"How many rails did you sabotage today, Quackenbush?"

 

"I thought they interned all Quackenbushes the day after Pearl Harbor."

 

To which Brinker added: "They didn't find him. He hid his light under a Quackenbush."

 

We were all tired at the end of that day.

 

Walking back to the school grounds from the railroad station in the descending darkness we overtook a lone figure sliding along the snow-covered edge of the street

 

"Will you look at Lepellier," began Brinker irritably. "Who does he think he is, the Abominable Snowman?"

 

"He's just been out skiing around," I said quickly. I didn't want to see today's strained tempers exploding on Leper. Then as we came up beside him, "Did you find the dam, Leper?"

 

He turned his head slowly, without breaking his forward movement of alternately planted

55

poles and thrust skis, rhythmically but feebly continuous like a homemade piston engine's. "You know what? I did find it," his smile was wide and unfocused, as though not for me alone but for anyone and anything which wished to share this pleasure with him, "and it was really interesting to see. I took some pictures of it, and if they come out I'll bring them over and show you."

 

"What dam is that?" Brinker asked me.

 

"It's a . . . well a little dam up the river he knows about," I said.

 

"I don't know of any dam up the river."

 

"Well, it's not in the Devon itself, it's in one of the . . . tributaries."

 

"Tributaries! To the Devon?"

 

"You know, a little creek or something."

 

He knit his brows in mystification. "What kind of a dam is this, anyway?"

 

"Well," he couldn't be put off with half a story, "it's a beaver dam."

 

Brinker's shoulders fell under the weight of this news. "That's the kind of a place I'm in with a world war going on. A school for photographers of beaver dams."

 

"The beaver never appeared himself," Leper offered. Brinker turned elaborately toward him. "Didn't he really?"

 

"No. But I guess I was pretty clumsy getting close to it, so he might have heard me and been frightened."

 

"Well." Brinker's expansive, dazed tone suggested that here was one of life's giant ironies, "There you are!"

 

"Yes," agreed Leper after a thoughtful pause, "there you are."

 

"Here we are," I said, pulling Brinker around the corner we had reached which led to our dormitory. "So long, Leper. Glad you found it."

 

"Oh," he raised his voice after us, "how was your day? How did the work go?"

 

"Just like a stag at eve," Brinker roared back. "It was a winter wonderland, every minute." And out of the side of his mouth, to me, "Everybody in this place is either a draft-dodging Kraut or a . . . a . . ." the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse, "a nat-u-ral-ist!" He grabbed my arm agitatedly. "I'm giving it up, I'm going to enlist. Tomorrow."

 

I felt a thrill when he said it. This was the logical climax of the whole misbegotten day, this whole out-of-joint term at Devon. I think I had been waiting for a long time for someone to say this so that I could entertain these decisive words myself.

56

To enlist. To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everything down to my last bit of clothing, to break the pattern of my life—that complex design I had been weaving since birth with all its dark threads, its unexplainable symbols set against a conventional background of domestic white and schoolboy blue, all those tangled strands which required the dexterity of a virtuoso to keep flowing—I yearned to take giant military shears to it, snap! bitten off in an instant, and nothing left in my hands but spools of khaki which could weave only a plain, flat, khaki design, however twisted they might be.

 

Not that it would be a good life. The war would be deadly all right. But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved. And if it wasn't there, as for example with Phineas, then I put it there myself.

 

But in the war, there was no question about it at all; it was there.

 

I separated from Brinker in the quadrangle, since one of his clubs was meeting and he could not go back to the dormitory yet—"I've got to preside at a meeting of the Golden Fleece Debating Society tonight," he said in a tone of amazed contempt, "the Golden Fleece Debating Society! We're mad here, all mad," and he went off raving to himself in the dark.

 

It was a night made for hard thoughts. Sharp stars pierced singly through the blackness, not sweeps of them or clusters or Milky Ways as there might have been in the South, but single, chilled points of light, as unromantic as knife blades. Devon, muffled under the gentle occupation of the snow, was dominated by them; the cold Yankee stars ruled this night. They did not invoke in me thoughts of God, or sailing before the mast, or some great love as crowded night skies at home had done; I thought instead, in the light of those cold points, of the decision facing me.

 

Why go through the motions of getting an education and watch the war slowly chip away at the one thing I had loved here, the peace, the measureless, careless peace of the Devon summer? Others, the Quackenbushes of this world, could calmly watch the war approach them and jump into it at the last and most advantageous instant, as though buying into the stock market. But I couldn't.

 

There was no one to stop me but myself. Putting aside soft reservations about What I Owed Devon and my duty to my parents and so on, I reckoned my responsibilities by the light of the unsentimental night sky and knew that I owed no one anything. I owed it to myself to meet this crisis in my life when I chose, and I chose now.

 

I bounced zestfully up the dormitory stairs. Perhaps because my mind still retained the image of the sharp night stars, those few fixed points of light in the darkness, perhaps because of that the warm yellow light streaming from under my own door came as such a shock. It was a simple case of a change of expectation. The light should have been off. Instead, as though alive itself, it poured in a thin yellow slab of brightness from under the door, illuminating the dust and splinters of the hall floor.

57

I grabbed the knob and swung open the door. He was seated in my chair at the desk, bending down to adjust the gross encumbrance of his leg, so that only the familiar ears set close against his head were visible, and his short-cut brown hair. He looked up with a provocative grin, "Hi pal, where's the brass band?"

 

Everything that had happened throughout the day faded like that first false snowfall of the winter. Phineas was back.

58

8

"I can see I never should have left you alone," Phineas went on before I could recover from the impact of finding him there, "Where did you get those clothes!" His bright, indignant eyes swept from my battered gray cap, down the frayed sweater and paint-stained pants to a pair of clodhoppers. "You don't have to advertise like that, we all know you're the worst dressed man in the class."

 

"I've been working, that's all These are just work clothes."

 

"In the boiler room?"

 

"On the railroad. Shoveling snow."

 

He sat back in the chair. "Shoveling railroad snow. Well that makes sense, we always did that the first term."

 

I pulled off the sweater, under which I was wearing a rain slicker I used to go sailing in, a kind of canvas sack. Phineas just studied it in wordless absorption. "I like the cut of it," he finally murmured. I pulled that off revealing an Army fatigue shirt my brother had given me. "Very topical," said Phineas through his teeth. After that came off there was just my undershirt, stained with sweat. He smiled at it for a while and then said as he heaved himself out of the chair, "There. You should have worn that all day, just that. That has real taste. The rest of your outfit was just gilding that lily of a sweat shirt."

 

"Glad to hear you like it."

 

"Not at all," he replied ambiguously, reaching for a pair of crutches which leaned against the desk.

 

I took the sight of this all right, I had seen him on crutches the year before when he broke his ankle playing football. At Devon crutches had almost as many athletic associations as shoulder pads. And I had never seen an invalid whose skin glowed with such health, accenting the sharp clarity of his eyes, or one who used his arms and shoulders on crutches as though on parallel bars, as though he would do a somersault on them if he felt like it. Phineas vaulted across the room to his cot, yanked back the spread and then groaned. "Oh Christ, it's not made up. What is all this crap about no maids?"

 

"No maids," I said. "After all, there's a war on. It's not much of a sacrifice, when you think of people starving and being bombed and all the other things." My unselfishness was responding properly to the influences of 1942. In these past months Phineas and I had grown apart on this; I felt a certain disapproval of him for grumbling about a lost luxury, with a war on. "After all," I repeated, "there is a war on."

59

"Is there?" he murmured absently. I didn't pay any attention; he was always speaking when his thoughts were somewhere else, asking rhetorical questions and echoing other people's words.

 

I found some sheets and made up his bed for him. He wasn't a bit sensitive about being helped, not a bit like an invalid striving to seem independent. I put this on the list of things to include when I said some prayers, the first in a long time, that night in bed. Now that Phineas was back it seemed time to start saying prayers again.

 

After the lights went out the special quality of my silence let him know that I was saying them, and he kept quiet for approximately three minutes. Then he began to talk; he never went to sleep without talking first and he seemed to feel that prayers lasting more than three minutes were showing off. God was always unoccupied in Finny's universe, ready to lend an ear any time at all. Anyone who failed to get his message through in three minutes, as I sometimes failed to do when trying to impress him, Phineas, with my sanctity, wasn't trying.

 

He was still talking when I fell asleep, and the next morning, through the icy atmosphere which one window raised an inch had admitted to our room, he woke me with the overindignant shout, "What is all this crap about no maids!" He was sitting up in bed, as though ready to spring out of it, totally and energetically awake. I had to laugh at this indignant athlete, with the strength of five people, complaining about the service. He threw back his bedclothes and said, "Hand me my crutches, will you?"

 

Until now, in spite of everything, I had welcomed each new day as though it were a new life, where all past failures and problems were erased, and all future possibilities and joys open and available, to be achieved probably before night fell again. Now, in this winter of snow and crutches with Phineas, I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of the night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn't make yourself over between dawn and dusk. Phineas however did not believe this. I'm sure that he looked down at his leg every morning first thing, as soon as he remembered it, to see if it had not been totally restored while he slept. When he found on this first morning back at Devon that it happened still to be crippled and in a cast, he said in his usual self-contained way, "Hand me my crutches, will you?"

 

Brinker Hadley, next door, always awoke like an express train. There was a gathering rumble through the wall, as Brinker reared up in bed, coughed hoarsely, slammed his feet on the floor, pounded through the freezing air to the closet for something in the way of clothes, and thundered down the hall to the bathroom. Today, however, he veered and broke into our room instead.

 

"Ready to sign up?" he shouted before he was through the door. "You ready to en—Finny!"

 

"You ready to en—what?" pursued Finny from his bed. "Who's ready to sign and en what?"

 

"Finny. By God you're back!"

 

"Sure," confirmed Finny with a slight, pleased grin.

60

"So," Brinker curled his lip at me, "your little plot didn't work so well after all."

 

"What's he talking about?" said Finny as I thrust his crutches beneath his shoulders.

 

"Just talking," I said shortly. "What does Brinker ever talk about?"

 

"You know what I'm talking about well enough."

 

"No I don't."

 

"Oh yes you do."

 

"Are you telling me what I know?"

 

"Damn right I am."

 

"What's he talking about," said Finny.

 

The room was bitterly cold. I stood trembling in front of Phineas, still holding his crutches in place, unable to turn and face Brinker and this joke he had gotten into his head, this catastrophic joke.

 

"He wants to know if I'll sign up with him," I said, "enlist." It was the ultimate question for all seventeen-year-olds that year, and it drove Brinker's insinuations from every mind but mine.

 

"Yeah," said Brinker.

 

"Enlist!" cried Finny at the same time. His large and clear eyes turned with an odd expression on me. I had never seen such a look in them before. After looking at me closely he said, "You're going to enlist?"

 

"Well I just thought—last night after the railroad work—"

 

"You thought you might sign up?" he went on, looking carefully away.

 

Brinker drew one of his deep senatorial breaths, but he found nothing to say. We three stood shivering in the thin New Hampshire morning light, Finny and I in pajamas, Brinker in a blue flannel bathrobe and ripped moccasins. "When will you?" Finny went on.

 

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "It was just something Brinker happened to say last night, that's all."

 

"I said," Brinker began in an unusually guarded voice, glancing quickly at Phineas, "I said something about enlisting today."

 

Finny hobbled over to the dresser and took up his soap dish. "I'm first in the shower," he said.

 

"You can't get that cast wet, can you?" asked Brinker.

 

"No, I'll keep it outside the curtain."

61

"I'll help," said Brinker.

 

"No," said Finny without looking at him, "I can manage all right."

 

"How can you manage all right?" Brinker persisted aggressively.

 

"I can manage all right," Finny repeated with a set face.

 

I could hardly believe it, but it was too plainly printed in the closed expression of his face to mistake, too discernible beneath the even tone of his voice: Phineas was shocked at the idea of my leaving. In some way he needed me. He needed me. I was the least trustworthy person he had ever met. I knew that; he knew or should know that too. I had even told him. I had told him. But there was no mistaking the shield of remoteness in his face and voice. He wanted me around. The war then passed away from me, and dreams of enlistment and escape and a clean start lost their meaning for me.

 

"Sure you can manage the shower all right," I said, "but what difference does it make? Come on. Brinker's always . . . Brinker's always getting there first. Enlist! What a nutty idea. It's just Brinker wanting to get there first again. I wouldn't enlist with you if you were General MacArthur's eldest son."

 

Brinker reared back arrogantly. "And who do you think I am!" But Finny hadn't heard that. His face had broken into a wide and dazzled smile at what I had said, lighting up his whole face. "Enlist!" I drove on, "I wouldn't enlist with you if you were Elliott Roosevelt."

 

"First cousin," said Brinker over his chin, "once removed."

 

"He wouldn't enlist with you," Finny plunged in, "if you were Madame Chiang Kai-shek."

 

"Well," I qualified in an undertone, "he really is Madame Chiang Kai-shek."

 

"Well fan my brow," cried Finny, giving us his stunned look of total appalled horrified amazement, "who would have thought that! Chinese. The Yellow Peril, right here at Devon."

 

And as far as the history of the Class of 1943 at the Devon School is concerned, this was the only part of our conversation worth preserving. Brinker Hadley had been tagged with a nickname at last, after four years of creating them for others and eluding one himself. "Yellow Peril" Hadley swept through the school with the speed of a flu epidemic, and it must be said to his credit that Brinker took it well enough except when, in its inevitable abbreviation, people sometimes called him "Yellow" instead of "Peril."

 

But in a week I had forgotten that, and I have never since forgotten the dazed look on Finny's face when he thought that on the first day of his return to Devon I was going to desert him. I didn't know why he had chosen me, why it was only to me that he could show the most humbling sides of his handicap. I didn't care. For the war was no longer eroding the peaceful summertime stillness I had prized so much at Devon, and although the playing fields were crusted under a foot of congealed snow and the river was now a hard gray-white lane of ice between gaunt trees, peace had come back to Devon for me.

62

So the war swept over like a wave at the seashore, gathering power and size as it bore on us, overwhelming in its rush, seemingly inescapable, and then at the last moment eluded by a word from Phineas; I had simply ducked, that was all, and the wave's concentrated power had hurtled harmlessly overhead, no doubt throwing others roughly up on the beach, but leaving me peaceably treading water as before. I did not stop to think that one wave is inevitably followed by another even larger and more powerful, when the tide is coming in.

"I like the winter," Finny assured me for the fourth time, as we came back from chapel that morning.

 

"Well, it doesn't like you." Wooden plank walks had been placed on many of the school paths for better footing, but there were icy patches everywhere on them. A crutch misplaced and he could be thrown down upon the frozen wooden planking, or into the ice-encrusted snow.

 

Even indoors Devon was a nest of traps for him. The school had been largely rebuilt with a massive bequest from an oil family some years before in a peculiar style of Puritan grandeur, as though Versailles had been modified for the needs of a Sunday school. This opulent sobriety betrayed the divided nature of the school, just as in a different way the two rivers that it straddled did. From the outside the buildings were reticent, severe straight lines of red brick or white clapboard, with shutters standing sentinel beside each window, and a few unassuming white cupolas placed here and there on the roofs because they were expected and not pretty, like Pilgrim bonnets.

 

But once you passed through the Colonial doorways, with only an occasional fan window or low relief pillar to suggest that a certain muted adornment was permissible, you entered an extravaganza of Pompadour splendor. Pink marble walls and white marble floors were enclosed by arched and vaulted ceilings; an assembly room had been done in the manner of the High Italian Renaissance, another was illuminated by chandeliers flashing with crystal teardrops; there was a wall of fragile French windows overlooking an Italian garden of marble bric-à-brac; the library was Provençal on the first floor, rococo on the second. And everywhere, except in the dormitories, the floors and stairs were of smooth, slick marble, more treacherous even than the icy walks.

 

"The winter loves me," he retorted, and then, disliking the whimsical sound of that, added, "I mean as much as you can say a season can love. What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love." I didn't think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny's: it should have been true. So I didn't argue.

 

The board walk ended and he moved a little ahead of me as we descended a sloping path toward our first class. He picked his way with surprising care, surprising in anyone who before had used the ground mainly as a point of departure, as the given element in a suspended world

63

of leaps in space. And now I remembered what I had never taken any special note of before: how Phineas used to walk. Around Devon we had gaits of every description; gangling shuffles from boys who had suddenly grown a foot taller, swinging cowboy lopes from those thinking of how wide their shoulders had become, ambles, waddles, light trippings, gigantic Bunyan strides. But Phineas had moved in continuous flowing balance, so that he had seemed to drift along with no effort at all, relaxation on the move. He hobbled now among the patches of ice. There was the one certainty that Dr. Stanpole had given—Phineas would walk again. But the thought was there before me that he would never walk like that again.

 

"Do you have a class?" he said as we reached the steps of the building.

 

"Yes."

 

"So do I. Let's not go."

 

"Not go? But what'll we use for an excuse?"

 

"Well say I fainted from exertion on the way from chapel," he looked at me with a phantom's smile, "and you had to tend me."

 

"This is your first day back, Finny. You're no one to cut classes."

 

"I know, I know. I'm going to work. I really am going to work. You're going to pull me through mostly, but I am going to work as hard as I can. Only not today, not the first thing. Not now, not conjugating verbs when I haven't even looked at the school yet. I want to see this place, I haven't seen anything except the inside of our room, and the inside of chapel. I don't feel like seeing the inside of a classroom. Not now. Not yet."

 

"What do you want to see?"

 

He had started to turn around so that his back was to me. "Let's go to the gym," he said shortly.

 

The gym was at the other end of the school, a quarter of a mile away at least, separated from us by a field of ice. We set off without saying anything else.

 

By the time we had reached it sweat was running like oil from Finny's face, and when he paused involuntary tremors shook his hands and arms. The leg in its cast was like a sea anchor dragged behind. The illusion of strength I had seen in our room that morning must have been the same illusion he had used at home to deceive his doctor and his family into sending him back to Devon.

 

We stood on the ice- coated lawn in front of the gym while he got ready to enter it, resting himself so that he could go in with a show of energy. Later this became his habit; I often caught up with him standing in front of a building pretending to be thinking or examining the sky or taking off gloves, but it was never a convincing show. Phineas was a poor deceiver, having had no practice.

64

We went into the gym, along a marble hallway, and to my surprise we went on past the Trophy Room, where his name was already inscribed on one cup, one banner, and one embalmed football. I was sure that this was his goal, to mull over these lost glories. I had prepared myself for that, and even thought of several positive, uplifting aphorisms to cheer him up. But he went by it without a thought, down a stairway, steep and marble, and into the locker room. I went along mystified beside him. There was a pile of dirty towels in a corner. Finny shoved them with a crutch. "What is all this crap," he muttered with a little smile, "about no maids?"

 

The locker room was empty at this hour, row after row of dull green lockers separated by wide wooden benches. The ceiling was hung with pipes. It was a drab room for Devon, dull green and brown and gray, but at the far end there was a big marble archway, glisteningly white, which led to the pool.

 

Finny sat down on a bench, struggled out of his sheep-lined winter coat, and took a deep breath of gymnasium air. No locker room could have more pungent air than Devon's; sweat predominated, but it was richly mingled with smells of paraffin and singed rubber, of soaked wool and liniment, and for those who could interpret it, of exhaustion, lost hope and triumph and bodies battling against each other. I thought it anything but a bad smell. It was preeminently the smell of the human body after it had been used to the limit, such a smell as has meaning and poignance for any athlete, just as it has for any lover.

 

Phineas looked down here and there, at the exercise bar over a sand pit next to the wall, at a set of weights on the floor, at the rolled-up wrestling mat, at a pair of spiked shoes kicked under a locker.

 

"Same old place, isn't it?" he said, turning to me and nodding slightly.

 

After a moment I answered in a quiet voice, "Not exactly."

 

He made no pretense of not understanding me. After a pause he said, "You're going to be the big star now," in an optimistic tone, and then added with some embarrassment, "You can fill any gaps or anything." He slapped me on the back, "Get over there and chin yourself a few dozen times. What did you finally go out for anyway?"

 

"I finally didn't go out."

 

"You aren't," his eyes burned at me from his grimacing face, "still the assistant senior crew manager!"

 

"No, I quit that. I've just been going to gym classes. The ones they have for guys who aren't going out for anything."

 

He wrenched himself around on the bench. Joking was past; his mouth widened irritably. "What in hell," his voice bounded on the word in a sudden rich descent, "did you do that for?"

 

"It was too late to sign up for anything else," and seeing the energy to blast this excuse

65

rushing to his face and neck I stumbled on, "and anyway with the war on there won't be many trips for the teams. I don't know, sports don't seem so important with the war on."

 

"Have you swallowed all that war stuff?"

 

"No, of course I—" I was so committed to refuting him that I had half-denied the charge before I understood it; now my eyes swung back to his face. "All what war stuff?"

 

"All that stuff about there being a war."

 

"I don't think I get what you mean."

 

"Do you really think that the United States of America is in a state of war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?"

 

"Do I really think . . ." My voice trailed off.

 

He stood up, his weight on the good leg, the other resting lightly on the floor in front of him. "Don't be a sap," he gazed with cool self-possession at me, "there isn't any war."

 

"I know why you're talking like this," I said, struggling to keep up with him. "Now I understand. You're still under the influence of some medicinal drug."

 

"No, you are. Everybody is." He pivoted so that he was facing directly at me. "That's what this whole war story is. A medicinal drug. Listen, did you ever hear of the 'Roaring Twenties'?" I nodded very slowly and cautiously. "When they all drank bathtub gin and everybody who was young did just what they wanted?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Well what happened was that they didn't like that, the preachers and the old ladies and all the stuffed shirts. So then they tried Prohibition and everybody just got drunker, so then they really got desperate and arranged the Depression. That kept the people who were young in the thirties in their places. But they couldn't use that trick forever, so for us in the forties they've cooked up this war fake."

 

"Who are 'they,' anyway?"

 

"The fat old men who don't want us crowding them out of their jobs. They've made it all up. There isn't any real food shortage, for instance. The men have all the best steaks delivered to their clubs now. You've noticed how they've been getting fatter lately, haven't you?"

 

His tone took it thoroughly for granted that I had. For a moment I was almost taken in by it. Then my eyes fell on the bound and cast white mass pointing at me, and as it was always to do, it brought me down out of Finny's world of invention, down again as I had fallen after awakening that morning, down to reality, to the facts.

 

"Phineas, this is all pretty amusing and everything, but I hope you don't play this game too much with yourself. You might start to believe it and then I'd have to make a reservation for

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you at the Funny Farm."

 

"In a way," deep in argument, his eyes never wavered from mine, "the whole world is on a Funny Farm now. But it's only the fat old men who get the joke."

 

"And you."

 

"Yes, and me."

 

"What makes you so special? Why should you get it and all the rest of us be in the dark?"

 

The momentum of the argument abruptly broke from his control. His face froze. "Because I've suffered," he burst out.

 

We drew back in amazement from this. In the silence all the flighty spirits of the morning ended between us. He sat down and turned his flushed face away from me. I sat next to him without moving for as long as my beating nerves would permit, and then I stood up and walked slowly toward anything which presented itself. It turned out to be the exercise bar. I sprang up, grabbed it, and then, in a fumbling and perhaps grotesque offering to Phineas, I chinned myself. I couldn't think of anything else, not the right words, not the right gesture. I did what I could think of.

 

"Do thirty of them," he mumbled in a bored voice.

 

I had never done ten of them. At the twelfth I discovered that he had been counting to himself because he began to count aloud in a noncommittal, half-heard voice. At eighteen there was a certain enlargement in his tone, and at twenty-three the last edges of boredom left it; he stood up, and the urgency with which he brought out the next numbers was like an invisible boost lifting me the distance of my arms, until he sang out "thirty!" with a flare of pleasure.

 

The moment was past. Phineas I know had been even more startled than I to discover this bitterness in himself. Neither of us ever mentioned it again, and neither of us ever forgot that it was there.

 

He sat down and studied his clenched hands. "Did I ever tell you," he began in a husky tone, "that I used to be aiming for the Olympics?" He wouldn't have mentioned it except that after what he had said he had to say something very personal, something deeply held. To do otherwise, to begin joking, would have been a hypocritical denial of what had happened, and Phineas was not capable of that.

 

I was still hanging from the bar; my hands felt as though they had sunk into it. "No, you never told me that," I mumbled into my arm.

 

"Well I was. And now I'm not sure, not a hundred per cent sure I'll be completely, you know, in shape by 1944. So I'm going to coach you for them instead."

 

"But there isn't going to be any Olympics in '44. That's only a couple of years away. The war —"

67

"Leave your fantasy life out of this. We're grooming you for the Olympics, pal, in 1944."

 

And not believing him, not forgetting that troops were being shuttled toward battlefields all over the world, I went along, as I always did, with any new invention of Finny's. There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.

 

But since we were so far out of the line of fire, the chief sustenance for any sense of the war was mental. We saw nothing real of it; all our impressions of the war were in the false medium of two dimensions -photographs in the papers and magazines, newsreels, posters—or artificially conveyed to us by a voice on the radio, or headlines across the top of a newspaper. I found that only through a continuous use of the imagination could I hold out against Finny's driving offensive in favor of peace.

 

And now when we were served chicken livers for dinner I couldn't help conceiving a mental picture of President Roosevelt and my father and Finny's father and numbers of other large old men sitting down to porterhouse steak in some elaborate but secluded men's secret society room. When a letter from home told me that a trip to visit relatives had been canceled because of gas rationing it was easy to visualize my father smiling silently with knowing eyes—at least as easy as it was to imagine an American force crawling through the jungles of a place called Guadalcanal—"Wherever that is," as Phineas said.

 

And when in chapel day after day we were exhorted to new levels of self-deprivation and hard work, with the war as their justification, it was impossible not to see that the faculty were using this excuse to drive us as they had always wanted to drive us, regardless of any war or peace.

 

What a joke if Finny was right after all!

 

But of course I didn't believe him. I was too well protected against the great fear of boys' school life, which is to be "taken in." Along with everyone else except a few professional gulls such as Leper, I rejected anything which had the smallest possibility of doubt about it. So of course I didn't believe him. But one day after our chaplain, Mr. Carhart, had become very moved by his own sermon in chapel about God in the Foxholes, I came away thinking that if Finny's opinion of the war was unreal, Mr. Carhart's was at least as unreal. But of course I didn't believe him.

 

And anyway I was too occupied to think about it all. In addition to my own work, I was dividing my time between tutoring Finny in studies and being tutored by him in sports. Since so much of learning anything depends on the atmosphere in which it is taught Finny and I, to our joint double amazement, began to make flashing progress where we had been bumblers before.

 

Mornings we got up at six to run. I dressed in a gym sweat suit with a towel tucked around my throat, and Finny in pajamas, ski boots and his sheep-lined coat.

 

A morning shortly before Christmas vacation brought my reward. I was to run the course Finny had laid out, four times around an oval walk which circled the Headmaster's home, a

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large rambling, doubtfully Colonial white mansion. Next to the house there was a patriarchal elm tree, against the trunk of which Finny leaned and shouted at me as I ran a large circle around him.

 

This plain of snow shone a powdery white that morning; the sun blazed icily somewhere too low on the horizon to be seen directly, but its clean rays shed a blue-white glimmer all around us. The northern sunshine seemed to pick up faint particles of whiteness floating in the air and powdering the sleek blue sky. Nothing stirred. The bare arching branches of the elm seemed laid into this motionless sky. As I ran the sound of my footfalls was pitched off short in the vast immobile dawn, as though there was no room amid so many glittering sights for any sound to intrude. The figure of Phineas was set against the bulk of the tree; he shouted now and then, but these sounds too were quickly absorbed and dispelled.

 

And he needed to give no advice that morning. After making two circuits of the walk every trace of energy was as usual completely used up, and as I drove myself on all my scattered aches found their usual way to a profound seat of pain in my side. My lungs as usual were fed up with all this work, and from now on would only go rackingly through the motions. My knees were boneless again, ready any minute to let my lower legs telescope up into the thighs. My head felt as though different sections of the cranium were grinding into each other.

 

Then, for no reason at all, I felt magnificent. It was as though my body until that instant had simply been lazy, as though the aches and exhaustion were all imagined, created from nothing in order to keep me from truly exerting myself. Now my body seemed at last to say, "Well, if you must have it, here!" and an accession of strength came flooding through me. Buoyed up, I forgot my usual feeling of routine self-pity when working out, I lost myself, oppressed mind along with aching body; all entanglements were shed, I broke into the clear.

 

After the fourth circuit, like sitting in a chair, I pulled up in front of Phineas.

 

"You're not even winded," he said.

 

"I know."

 

"You found your rhythm, didn't you, that third time around. Just as you came into that straight part there."

 

"Yes, right there."

 

"You've been pretty lazy all along, haven't you?"

 

"Yes, I guess I have been."

 

"You didn't even know anything about yourself."

 

"I don't guess I did, in a way."

 

"Well," he gathered the sheepskin collar around his throat, "now you know. And stop talking like a Georgia cracker—'don't guess I did'!" Despite this gibe he was rather impersonal toward

69

1. He seemed older that morning, and leaning quietly against that great tree wrapped in his heavy coat, he seemed smaller too. Or perhaps it was only that I, inside the same body, had felt myself all at once grown bigger.

 

We proceeded slowly back to the dormitory. On the steps going in we met Mr. Ludsbury coming out.

 

"I've been watching you from my window," he said in his hooting voice with a rare trace of personal interest. "What are you up to, Forrester, training for the Commandos?" There was no rule explicitly forbidding exercise at such an hour, but it was not expected; ordinarily therefore Mr. Ludsbury would have disapproved. But the war had modified even his standards; all forms of physical exercise had become conventional for the Duration.

 

I mumbled some abashed answer, but it was Phineas who made the clear response.

 

"He's developing into a real athlete," he said matter-of-factly. "We're aiming for the '44 Olympics."

 

Mr. Ludsbury emitted a single chuckle from deep in his throat, then his face turned brick red momentarily and he assumed his customary sententiousness. "Games are all right in their place," he said, "and I won't bore you with the Eton Playing Fields observation, but all exercise today is aimed of course at the approaching Waterloo. Keep that in your sights at all times, won't you."

 

Finny's face set in determination, with the older look I had just detected in him. "No," he said.

 

I don't believe any student had ever said "No" flatly to Mr. Ludsbury before. It flustered him uncontrollably. His face turned brick red again, and for a moment I thought he was going to run away. Then he said something so rapid, throaty, and clipped that neither of us understood it, turned quickly and strode off across the quadrangle.

 

"He's really sincere, he thinks there's a war on," said Finny in simple wonder. "Now why wouldn't he know?" He pondered Mr. Ludsbury's exclusion from the plot of the fat old men as we watched his figure, reedy even in his winter wraps, move away from us. Then the light broke. "Oh, of course!" he cried. "Too thin. Of course."

 

I stood there pitying Mr. Ludsbury for his fatal thinness and reflecting that after all he had always had a gullible side.

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9

This was my first but not my last lapse into Finny's vision of peace. For hours, and sometimes for days, I fell without realizing it into the private explanation of the world. Not that I ever believed that the whole production of World War II was a trick of the eye manipulated by a bunch of calculating fat old men, appealing though this idea was. What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me. So I ceased to have any real sense of it.

 

This was not shaken even by the enlistment of Leper Lepellier. In fact that made the war seem more unreal than ever. No real war could draw Leper voluntarily away from his snails and beaver dams. His enlistment seemed just another of Leper's vagaries, such as the time he slept on top of Mount Katahdin in Maine where each morning the sun first strikes United States territory. On that morning, satisfying one of his urges to participate in nature, Leper Lepellier was the first thing the rising sun struck in the United States.

 

Early in January, when we had all just returned from the Christmas holidays, a recruiter from the United States ski troops showed a film to the senior class in the Renaissance Room. To Leper it revealed what all of us were seeking: a recognizable and friendly face to the war. Skiers in white shrouds winged down virgin slopes, silent as angels, and then, realistically, herring-boned up again, but herringboned in cheerful, sunburned bands, with clear eyes and white teeth and chests full of vigor-laden mountain air. It was the cleanest image of war I had ever seen; even the Air Force, reputedly so high above the infantry's mud, was stained with axle grease by comparison, and the Navy was vulnerable to scurvy. Nothing tainted these white warriors of winter as they swooped down their spotless mountainsides, and this cool, clean response to war glided straight into Leper's Vermont heart.

 

"How do you like that!" he whispered to me in a wondering voice during these scenes. "How do you like that!"

 

"You know, I think these are pictures of Finnish ski troops," Phineas whispered on the other side, "and I want to know when they start shooting our allies the Bolsheviks. Unless that war between them was a fake too, which I'm pretty sure it was."

 

After the movie ended and the lights came on to illuminate the murals of Tuscany and the painted classical galleries around us, Leper still sat amazed in his folding chair. Ordinarily he talked little, and the number of words which came from him now indicated that this was a turning point in his life.

 

"You know what? Now I see what racing skiing is all about. It's all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when you've got to be in a hurry. And when you're in a War you've got to be in a hurry. Don't you? So I guess maybe racing skiers weren't

71

ruining the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes." Finny and I had stood up, and Leper looked earnestly from one to the other of us from his chair. "Take the housefly. If it hadn't developed all those split-second reflexes it would have become extinct long ago."

 

"You mean it adapted itself to the fly swatter?" queried Phineas.

 

"That's right. And skiing had to learn to move just as fast or it would have been wiped out by this war. Yes, sir. You know what? I'm almost glad this war came along. It's like a test, isn't it, and only the things and the people who've been evolving the right way survive."

 

You usually listened to Leper's quiet talking with half a mind, but this theory of his brought me to close attention. How did it apply to me, and to Phineas? How, most of all, did it apply to Leper?

 

"I'm going to enlist in these ski troops," he went on mildly, so unemphatically that my mind went back to half-listening. Threats to enlist that winter were always declaimed like Blinker's, with a grinding of back teeth and a flashing of eyes; I had already heard plenty of them. But only Leper's was serious.

 

A week later he was gone. He had been within a few weeks of his eighteenth birthday, and with it all chance of enlistment, of choosing a service rather than being drafted into one, would have disappeared. The ski movie had decided him. "I always thought the war would come for me when it wanted me," he said when he came to say goodbye the last day. "I never thought I'd be going to it. I'm really glad I saw that movie in time, you bet I am." Then, as the Devon School's first recruit to World War II, he went out my doorway with his white stocking cap bobbing behind.

 

It probably would have been better for all of us if someone like Brinker had been the first to go. He could have been depended upon to take a loud dramatic departure, so that the school would have reverberated for weeks afterward with Brinker's Last Words, Brinker's Military Bearing, Brinker's Sense of Duty. And all of us, influenced by the vacuum of his absence, would have felt the touch of war as a daily fact.

 

But the disappearing tail of Leper's cap inspired none of this. For a few days the war was more unimaginable than ever. We didn't mention it and we didn't mention Leper, until at last Brinker found a workable point of view. One day in the Butt Room he read aloud a rumor in a newspaper about an attempt on Hitler's life. He lowered the paper, gazed in a visionary way in front of him, and then remarked, "That was Leper, of course."

 

This established our liaison with World War II. The Tunisian campaign became "Leper's liberation"; the bombing of the Ruhr was greeted by Brinker with hurt surprise: "He didn't tell us he'd left the ski troops"; the torpedoing of the Scharnhorst: "At it again." Leper sprang up all over the world at the core of every Allied success. We talked about Leper's stand at Stalingrad, Leper on the Burma Road, Leper's convoy to Archangel; we surmised that the crisis over the leadership of the Free French would be resolved by the appointment of neither de Gaulle nor

72

Giraud but Lepellier; we knew, better than the newspapers, that it was not the Big Three but the Big Four who were running the war.

 

In the silences between jokes about Leper's glories we wondered whether we ourselves would measure up to the humblest minimum standard of the army. I did not know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know ft; I wondered in the silences between jokes about Leper whether the still hidden parts of myself might contain the Sad Sack, the outcast, or the coward. We were all at our funniest about Leper, and we all secretly hoped that Leper, that incompetent, was as heroic as we said.

 

Everyone contributed to this legend except Phineas. At the outset, with the attempt on Hitler's life, Finny had said, "If someone gave Leper a loaded gun and put it at Hitler's temple, he'd miss." There was a general shout of outrage, and then we recommended the building of Leper's triumphal arch around Brinker's keystone. Phineas took no part in it, and since little else was talked about in the Butt Room he soon stopped going there and stopped me from going as well—"How do you expect to be an athlete if you smoke like a forest fire?" He drew me increasingly away from the Butt Room crowd, away from Brinker and Chet and all other friends, into a world inhabited by just himself and me, where there was no war at all, just Phineas and me alone among all the people of the world, training for the Olympics of 1944.

Saturday afternoons are terrible in a boys' school, especially in the winter. There is no football game; it is not possible, as it is in the spring, to take bicycle trips into the surrounding country. Not even the most grinding student can feel required to lose himself in his books, since there is Sunday ahead, long, lazy, quiet Sunday, to do any homework.

 

And these Saturdays are worst in the late winter when the snow has lost its novelty and its shine, and the school seems to have been reduced to only a network of drains. During the brief thaw in the early afternoon there is a dismal gurgling of dirty water seeping down pipes and along gutters, a gray seamy shifting beneath the crust of snow, which cracks to show patches of frozen mud beneath. Shrubbery loses its bright snow headgear and stands bare and frail, too undernourished to hide the drains it was intended to hide. These are the days when going into any building you cross a mat of dirt and cinders led in by others before you, thinning and finally trailing off in the corridors. The sky is an empty hopeless gray and gives the impression that this is its eternal shade. Winter's occupation seems to have conquered, overrun and destroyed everything, so that now there is no longer any resistance movement left in nature; all the juices are dead, every sprig of vitality snapped, and now winter itself, an old, corrupt, tired conqueror, loosens its grip on the desolation, recedes a little, grows careless in its watch; sick of victory and enfeebled by the absence of challenge, it begins itself to withdraw from the ruined countryside. The drains alone are active, and on these Saturdays their noises sound a dull recessional to winter.

 

Only Phineas failed to see what was so depressing. Just as there was no war in his philosophy, there was also no dreary weather. As I have said, all weathers delighted Phineas. "You know what we'd better do next Saturday?" he began in one of his voices, the low-pitched

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and evenly melodic one which for some reason always reminded me of a Rolls-Royce moving along a highway. "We'd better organize the Winter Carnival."

 

We were sitting in our room, on either side of the single large window framing a square of featureless gray sky. Phineas was resting his cast, which was a considerably smaller one now, on the desk and thoughtfully pressing designs into it with a pocket knife. "What Winter Carnival?" I asked.

 

"The Winter Carnival. The Devon Winter Carnival."

 

"There isn't any Devon Winter Carnival and never has been."

 

"There is now. We'll have it in that park next to the Naguamsett. The main attraction will be sports, naturally, featuring I expect a ski jump—"

 

"A ski jump! That park's as flat as a pancake."

 

"—and some slalom races, and I think a little track. But we've got to have some snow statues too, and a little music, and something to eat. Now, which committee do you want to head?"

 

I gave him a wintry smile. The snow statues committee."

 

"I knew you would. You always were secretly arty, weren't you? I'll organize the sports, Brinker can handle the music and food, and then we need somebody to kind of beautify the place, a few holly wreaths and things like that. Someone good with plants and shrubbery. I know. Leper."

 

From looking at the star he was imprinting in his cast I looked quickly up at his face. "Leper's gone."

 

"Oh yeah, so he is. Leper would be gone. Well, somebody else then."

 

And because it was Finny's idea, it happened as he said, although not as easily as some of his earlier inspirations. For our dormitory was less enthusiastic about almost everything with each succeeding week. Brinker for example had begun a long, decisive sequence of withdrawals from school activity ever since the morning I deserted his enlistment plan. He had not resented my change of heart, and in fact had immediately undergone one himself. If he could not enlist—and for all his self-sufficiency Brinker could not do much without company —he could at least cease to be so multifariously civilian. So he resigned the presidency of the Golden Fleece Debating Society, stopped writing his school spirit column for the newspaper, dropped the chairmanship of the Underprivileged Local Children subcommittee of the Good Samaritan Confraternity, stilled his baritone in the chapel choir, and even, in his most impressive burst of irresponsibility, resigned from the Student Advisory Committee to the Headmaster's Discretionary Benevolent Fund. His well-bred clothes had disappeared; these days he wore khaki pants supported by a garrison belt, and boots which rattled when he walked.

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"Who wants a Winter Carnival?" he said in the disillusioned way he had lately developed when I brought it up. "What are we supposed to be celebrating?"

 

"Winter, I guess."

 

"Winter!" He gazed out of his window at the vacant sky and seeping ground. "Frankly, I just don't see anything to celebrate, winter or spring or anything else."

 

"This is the first time Finny's gotten going on anything since . . . he came back."

 

"He has been kind of nonfunctional, hasn't he? He isn't brooding, is he?"

 

"No, he wouldn't brood."

 

"No, I don't suppose he would. Well, if you think it's something Finny really wants. Still, there's never been a Winter Carnival here. I think there's probably a rule against it."

 

"I see," I said in a tone which made Brinker raise his eyes and lock them with mine. In that plotters' glance all his doubts vanished, for Brinker the Lawgiver had turned rebel for the Duration.

The Saturday was battleship gray. Throughout the morning equipment for the Winter Carnival had been spirited out of the dormitory and down to the small incomplete public park on the bank of the Naguamsett River. Brinker supervised the transfer, rattling up and down the stairwell and giving orders. He made me think of a pirate captain disposing of the booty. Several jugs of very hard cider which he had browbeaten away from some lowerclassmen were the most cautiously guarded treasure. They were buried in the snow near a clump of evergreens in the center of the park, and Brinker stationed his roommate, Brownie Perkins, to guard them with his life. He meant this literally, and Brownie knew it. So he trembled alone there in the middle of the park for hours, wondering what would happen if he had an attack of appendicitis, unnerved by the thoughts of a fainting spell, horrified by the realization that he might have to move his bowels, until at last we came. Then Brownie crept back to the dormitory, too exhausted to enjoy the carnival at all. On this day of high illegal competitiveness, no one noticed.

 

The buried cider was half-consciously plotted at the hub of the carnival. Around it sprang up large, sloppy statues, easily modeled because of the snow's dampness. Nearby, entirely out of place in this snowscape, like a dowager in a saloon, there was a heavy circular classroom table, carried there by superhuman exertions the night before on Finny's insistence that he had to have something to display the prizes on. On it rested the prizes—Finny's icebox, hidden all these months in the dormitory basement, a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary with all the most stimulating words marked, a set of York barbells, the Iliad with the English translation of each sentence written above it, Brinker's file of Betty Grable photographs, a lock of hair cut under duress from the head of Hazel Brewster, the professional town belle, a handwoven rope ladder with the proviso that it should be awarded to someone occupying a room on the third floor or

75

higher, a forged draft registration card, and $4.13 from the Headmaster's Discretionary Benevolent Fund. Brinker placed this last prize on the table with such silent dignity that we all thought it was better not to ask any questions about it.

 

Phineas sat behind the table in a heavily carved black walnut chair; the arms ended in two lions' heads, and the legs ended in paws gripping wheels now sunk in the snow. He had made the purchase that morning. Phineas bought things only on impulse and only when he had the money, and since the two states rarely coincided his purchases were few and strange.

 

Chet Douglass stood next to him holding his trumpet. Finny had regretfully given up the plan of inviting the school band to supply music, since it would have spread news of our carnival to every corner of the campus. Chet in any case was an improvement over that cacophony. He was a slim, fair-skinned boy with a ball of curly auburn hair curving over his forehead, and he devoted himself to playing two things, tennis and the trumpet. He did both with such easy, inborn skill that after observing him I had begun to think that I could master either one any weekend I tried. Much like the rest of us on the surface, he had an underlying obliging and considerate strain which barred him from being a really important member of the class. You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with "personality," and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas.

 

To the left of the Prize Table Brinker straddled his cache of cider; behind him was the clump of evergreens, and behind them there was after all a gentle rise, where the Ski Jump Committee was pounding snow into a little take-off ramp whose lip was perhaps a foot higher than the slope of the rise. From there our line of snow statues, unrecognizable artistic attacks on the Headmaster, Mr. Ludsbury, Mr. Patch-Withers, Dr. Stanpole, the new dietitian, and Hazel Brewster curved in an enclosing half-circle to the icy, muddy, lisping edge of the tidewater Naguamsett and back to the other side of the Prize Table.

 

When the ski jump was ready there was a certain amount of milling around; twenty boys, tightly reined in all winter, stood now as though with the bit firmly clamped between their teeth, ready to stampede. Phineas should have started the sports events but he was absorbed in cataloguing the prizes. All eyes swung next upon Brinker. He had been holding a pose above his cider of Gibraltar invulnerability; he continued to gaze challengingly around him until he began to realize that wherever he looked, calculating eyes looked back.

 

"All right, all right," he said roughly, "let's get started." The ragged circle around him moved perceptibly closer. "Let's get going," he yelled. "Come on, Finny. What's first?"

 

Phineas had one of those minds which could record what is happening in the background and do nothing about it because something else was preoccupying him. He seemed to sink deeper into his list.

 

"Phineas!" Brinker pronounced his name with a maximum use of the teeth. "What is next?"

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Still the sleek brown head bent mesmerized over the list.

 

"What's the big hurry, Brinker?" someone from the tightening circle asked with dangerous gentleness. "What's the big rush?"

 

"We can't stand here all day," he blurted. "We've got to get started if we're going to have this damn thing. What's next? Phineas!"

 

At last the recording in Finny's mind reached its climax. He looked vaguely up, studied the straddling, at-bay figure of Brinker at the core of the poised perimeter of boys, hesitated, blinked, and then in his organ voice said good-naturedly, "Next? Well that's pretty clear. You are."

 

Chet released from his trumpet the opening, lifting, barbaric call of a bullfight, and the circle of boys broke wildly over Brinker. He flailed back against the evergreens, and the jugs appeared to spring out of the snow. "What the hell," he kept yelling, off balance among the branches. "What . . . the . . . hell!" By then his cider, which he had apparently expected to dole out according to his own governing whim, was disappearing. There was going to be no government, even by whim, even by Brinker's whim, on this Saturday at Devon.

 

From a scramble of contenders I got one of the jugs, elbowed off a counterattack, opened it, sampled it, choked, and then went through with my original plan by stopping Brinker's mouth with it. His eyes bulged, and blood vessels in his throat began to pulsate, until at length I lowered the jug.

 

He gave me a long, pondering look, his face closed and concentrating while behind it his mind plainly teetered between fury and hilarity; I think if I had batted an eye he would have hit me. The carnival's breaking apart into a riot hung like a bomb between us. I kept on looking expressionlessly back at him until beneath a blackening scowl his mouth opened enough to fire out the words, "I've been violated."

 

I jerked the jug to my mouth and took a huge gulp of cider in relief, and the violence latent in the day drifted away; perhaps the Naguamsett carried it out on the receding tide. Brinker strode through the swirl of boys to Phineas. "I formally declare," he bellowed, "that these Games are open."

 

"You can't do that," Finny said rebukingly. "Who ever heard of opening the Games without the sacred fire from Olympus?"

 

Sensing that I must act as the Chorus, I registered on my face the universally unheard-of quality of the Games without fire. "Fire, fire," I said across the damp snow.

 

"We'll sacrifice one of the prizes," said Phineas, seizing the Iliad. He sprinkled the pages with cider to make them more inflammable, touched a match to them, and a little jet of flame curled upward. The Games, alight with Homer and cider, were open.

 

Chet Douglass, leaning against the side of the Prize Table, continued to blow musical

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figures for his own enlightenment. Forgetful of us and the athletic programing Finny now put into motion, he strolled here and there, sometimes at the start of the ski jump competition, blowing an appropriate call, more often invoking the serene order of Haydn, or a high, remote, arrogant Spanish world, or the cheerful, lowdown carelessness of New Orleans.

 

The hard cider began to take charge of us. Or I wonder now whether it wasn't cider but our own exuberance which intoxicated us, sent restraint flying, causing Brinker to throw the football block on the statue of the Headmaster, giving me, as I put on the skis and slid down the small slope and off the miniature ski jump a sensation of soaring flight, of hurtling high and far through space; inspiring Phineas, during one of Chet's Spanish inventions, to climb onto the Prize Table and with only one leg to create a droll dance among the prizes, springing and spinning from one bare space to another, cleanly missing Hazel Brewster's hair, never marring by a misstep the pictures of Betty Grable. Under the influence not I know of the hardest cider but of his own inner joy at life for a moment as it should be, as it was meant to be in his nature, Phineas recaptured that magic gift for existing primarily in space, one foot conceding briefly to gravity its rights before spinning him off again into the air. It was his wildest demonstration of himself, of himself in the kind of world he loved; it was his choreography of peace.

 

And when he stopped and sat down among the prizes and said, "Now we're going to have the Decathlon. Quiet everybody, our Olympic candidate Gene Forrester, is now going to qualify," it wasn't cider which made me in this moment champion of everything he ordered, to run as though I were the abstraction of speed, to walk the half-circle of statues on my hands, to balance on my head on top of the icebox on top of the Prize Table, to jump if he had asked it across the Naguamsett and land crashing in the middle of Quackenbush's boathouse, to accept at the end of it amid a clatter of applause—for on this day even the schoolboy egotism of Devon was conjured away—a wreath made from the evergreen trees which Phineas placed on my head. It wasn't the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.

 

And it was this which caused me not to notice Brownie Perkins rejoin us from the dormitory, and not to hear what he was saying until Finny cried hilariously, "A telegram for Gene? Ifs the Olympic Committee. They want you! Of course they want you! Give it to me, Brownie, I'll read it aloud to this assembled host." And it was this which drained away as I watched Finny's face pass through all the gradations between uproariousness and shock.

 

I took the telegram from Phineas, facing in advance whatever the destruction was. That was what I learned to do that winter.

I HAVE ESCAPED AND NEED HELP. I AM AT CHRISTMAS LOCATION. YOU UNDERSTAND. NO NEED TO RISK ADDRESS HERE. MY SAFETY DEPENDS ON YOU COMING AT ONCE.

 

(signed) YOUR BEST FRIEND,

78

ELWIN LEPER LEPELLIER.

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10

That night I made for the first time the land of journey which later became the monotonous routine of my life: traveling through an unknown countryside from one unknown settlement to another. The next year this became the dominant activity, or rather passivity, of my army career, not fighting, not marching, but this kind of nighttime ricochet; for as it turned out I never got to the war.

 

I went into uniform at the time when our enemies began to recede so fast that there had to be a hurried telescoping of military training plans. Programs scheduled to culminate in two years became outmoded in six months, and crowds of men gathered for them in one place were dispersed to twenty others. A new weapon appeared and those of us who had traveled to three or four bases mastering the old one were sent on to a fifth, sixth, and seventh to master the new. The closer victory came the faster we were shuttled around America in pursuit of a role to play in a drama which suddenly, underpopulated from the first, now had too many actors. Or so it seemed. In reality there would have been, as always, too few, except that the last act, a mass assault against suicidally-defended Japan, never took place. I and my year—not "my generation" for destiny now cut too finely for that old phrase—I and those of my year were preeminently eligible for that. Most of us, so it was estimated, would be killed. But the men a little bit older closed in on the enemy faster than predicted, and then there was the final holocaust of the Bomb. It seemed to have saved our lives.

 

So journeys through unknown parts of America became my chief war memory, and I think of the first of them as this nighttime trip to Leper's. There was no question of where to find him; "I am at Christmas location" meant that he was at home. He lived far up in Vermont, where at this season of the year even the paved main highways are bumpy and buckling from the freezing weather, and each house executes a lonely holding action against the cold. The natural state of things is coldness, and houses are fragile havens, holdouts in a death landscape, unforgettably comfortable, simple though they are, just because of their warmth.

 

Leper's was one of these hearths perched by itself on a frozen hillside. I reached it in the early morning after this night which presaged my war; a bleak, draughty train ride, a damp depot seemingly near no town whatever, a bus station in which none of the people were fully awake, or seemed clean, or looked as though they had homes anywhere; a bus which passengers entered and left at desolate stopping places in the blackness; a chilled nighttime wandering in which I tried to decipher between lapses into stale sleep, the meaning of Leper's telegram.

 

I reached the town at dawn, and encouraged by the returning light, and coffee in a thick white cup, I accepted a hopeful interpretation. Leper had "escaped." You didn't "escape" from the army, so he must have escaped from something else. The most logical thing a soldier

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escapes from is danger, death, the enemy. Since Leper hadn't been overseas the enemy must have been in this country. And the only enemies in this country would be spies. Leper had escaped from spies.

 

I seized this conclusion and didn't try to go beyond it. I suppose all our Butt Room stories about him intriguing around the world had made me half-ready to half-believe something like this. I felt a measureless relief when it occurred to me. There was some color, some hope, some life in this war after all. The first friend of mine who ever went into it tangled almost immediately with spies. I began to hope that after all this wasn't going to be such a bad war.

 

The Lepellier house was not far out of town, I was told. There was no taxi, I was also told, and there was no one, I did not need to be told, who would offer to drive me out there. This was Vermont. But if that meant austerity toward strangers it also meant mornings of glory such as this one, in which the snow, white almost to blueness, lay like a soft comforter over the hills, and birches and pines indestructibly held their ground, rigid lines against the snow and sky, very thin and very strong like Vermonters.

 

The sun was the blessing of the morning, the one celebrating element, an aesthete with no purpose except to shed radiance. Everything else was sharp and hard, but this Grecian sun evoked joy from every angularity and blurred with brightness the stiff face of the countryside. As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck.

 

The road led out along the side of a ridge, and after a mile or so I saw the house that must be Leper's, riding the top of the slope. It was another brittle -looking Vermont house, white of course, with long and narrow windows like New England faces. Behind one of them hung a gold star which announced that a son of the house was serving the country, and behind another stood Leper.

 

Although I was walking straight toward his front door he beckoned me on several times, and he never took his eyes from me, as though it was they which held me to my course. He was still at this ground-floor window when I reached the door and so I opened it myself and stepped into the hallway. Leper had come to the entrance of the room on the right, the dining room.

 

"Come in here," he said, "I spend most of my time in here."

 

As usual there were no preliminaries. "What do you do that for, Leper? It's not very comfortable, is it?"

 

"Well, it's a useful room."

 

"Yes, I guess it's useful, all right."

 

"You aren't lost for something to do in dining rooms. It's in the living room where people can't figure out what to do with themselves. People get problems in living rooms."

 

"Bedrooms too." It was a try toward relieving the foreboding in his manner; it only worked

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to deepen it.

 

He turned away, and I followed him into an under-furnished dining room of high-backed chairs, rugless floor, and cold fireplace. "If you want to be in a really functional room," I began with false heartiness, "you ought to spend your time in the bathroom then."

 

He looked at me, and I noticed the left side of his upper lip lift once or twice as though he was about to snarl or cry. Then I realized that this had nothing to do with his mood, that it was involuntary.

 

He sat down at the head of the table in the only chair with arms, his father's chair I supposed. I took off my coat and sat in a place at the middle of the table, with my back to the fireplace. There at least I could look at the sun rejoicing on the snow.

 

"In here you never wonder what's going to happen. You know the meals will come in three times a day for instance."

 

"I'll bet your mother isn't too pleased when she's trying to get one ready."

 

Force sprang into his expression for the first time. "What's she got to be pleased about!" He glared challengingly into my startled face. "I'm pleasing myself!" he cried fervently, and I saw tears trembling in his eyes.

 

"Well, she's probably pleased." Any words would serve, the more irrelevant and superficial the better, any words which would stop him; I didn't want to see this. "She's probably pleased to have you home again."

 

His face resumed its dull expression. The responsibility for continuing the conversation, since I had forced it to be superficial, was mine. "How long'll you be here?"

 

He shrugged, a look of disgust with my question crossing his face. The careful politeness he had always had was gone.

 

"Well, if you're on furlough you must know when you have to be back." I said this in what I thought of at the time as my older voice, a little businesslike and experienced. "The army doesn't give out passes and then say 'Come back when you've had enough, hear?'"

 

"I didn't get any pass," he groaned; with the sliding despair of his face and his clenched hands, that's what it was; a groan.

 

"I know you said," I spoke in short, expressionless syllables, "that you 'escaped.'" I no longer wanted this to be true, I no longer wanted it to be connected with spies or desertion or anything out of the ordinary. I knew it was going to be, and I no longer wanted it to be.

 

"I escaped!" the word surging out in a voice and intensity that was not Leper's. His face was furious, but his eyes denied the fury; instead they saw it before them. They were filled with terror.

 

"What do you mean, you escaped?" I said sharply. "You don't escape from the army."

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"That's what you say. But that's because you're talking through your hat." His eyes were furious now too, glaring blindly at me. "What do you know about it, anyway?" None of this could have been said by the Leper of the beaver dam.

 

"Well I—how am I supposed to answer that? I know what's normal in the army, that's all."

 

"Normal," he repeated bitterly. "What a stupid-ass word that is. I suppose that's what you're thinking about, isn't it? That's what you would be thinking about, somebody like you. You're thinking I'm not normal, aren't you? I can see what you're thinking—I see a lot I never saw before"—his voice fell to a querulous whisper—"you're thinking I'm psycho."

 

I gathered what the word meant. I hated the sound of it at once. It opened up a world I had not known existed—"mad" or "crazy" or "a screw loose," those were the familiar words. "Psycho" had a sudden mental-ward reality about it, a systematic, diagnostic sound. It was as though Leper had learned it while in captivity, far from Devon or Vermont or any experience we had in common, as though it were in Japanese.

 

Fear seized my stomach like a cramp. I didn't care what I said to him now; it was myself I was worried about. For if Leper was psycho it was the army which had done it to him, and I and all of us were on the brink of the army. "You make me sick, you and your damn a my words."

 

"They were going to give me," he was almost laughing, everywhere but in his eyes which continued to oppose all he said, "they were going to give me a discharge, a Section Eight discharge."

 

As a last defense I had always taken refuge in a scornful superiority, based on nothing. I sank back in the chair, eyebrows up, shoulders shrugging. "I don't even know what you're talking about. You just don't make any sense at all. It's all Japanese to me."

 

"A Section Eight discharge is for the nuts in the service, the psychos, the Funny Farm candidates. Now do you know what I'm talking about? They give you a Section Eight discharge, like a dishonorable discharge only worse. You can't get a job after that. Everybody wants to see your discharge, and when they see a Section Eight they look at you kind of funny —the kind of expression you've got on your face, like you were looking at someone with their nose blown off but don't want them to know you're disgusted—they look at you that way and then they say, 'Well, there doesn't seem to be an opening here at present.' You're screwed for life, that's what a Section Eight discharge means."

 

"You don't have to yell at me, there's nothing wrong with my hearing."

 

"Then that's tough shit for you, Buster. Then they've got you."

 

"Nobody's got me."

 

"Oh they've got you all right."

 

"Don't tell me who's got me and who hasn't got me. Who do you think you're talking to?

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Stick to your snails, Lepellier."

 

He began to laugh again. "You always were a lord of the manor, weren't you? A swell guy, except when the chips were down. You always were a savage underneath. I always knew that only I never admitted it. But in the last few weeks," despair broke into his face again, "I admitted a hell of a lot to myself. Not about you. Don't flatter yourself. I wasn't thinking about you. Why the hell should I think about you? Did you ever think about me? I thought about myself, and Ma, and the old man, and pleasing them all the time. Well, never mind about that now. It's you we happen to be talking about now. Like a savage underneath. Like," now there was the blind confusion in his eyes again, a wild slyness around his mouth, "like that time you knocked Finny out of the tree."

 

I sprang out of the chair. "You stupid crazy bastard—"

 

Still laughing, "Like that time you crippled him for life."

 

I shoved my foot against the rung of his chair and kicked. Leper went over in his chair and collapsed against the floor. Laughing and crying he lay with his head on the floor and his knees up, ". . . always were a savage underneath."

 

Quick heels coming down the stairs, and his mother, large, soft, and gentle-looking, quivered at the entrance. "What on earth happened? Elwin!"

 

"I'm terribly—it was a mistake," I listened objectively to my own voice, "he said something crazy. I forgot myself—I forgot that he's, there's something the matter with his nerves, isn't there? He didn't know what he was saying."

 

"Well, good heaven, the boy is ill." We both moved swiftly to help up the chuckling Leper. "Did you come here to abuse him?"

 

"I'm terribly sorry," I muttered. "I'd better get going."

 

Mrs. Lepellier was helping Leper toward the stairs. "Don't go," he said between chuckles, "stay for lunch. You can count on it. Always three meals a day, war or peace, in this room."

 

And I did stay. Sometimes you are too ashamed to leave. That was true now. And sometimes you need too much to know the facts, and so humbly and stupidly you stay. That was true now too.

 

It was an abundant Vermont lunch, more like a dinner, and at first it had no more reality than a meal in the theater. Leper ate almost nothing, but my own appetite deepened my disgrace. I ate everything within reach, and then had to ask, face aflame with embarrassment, for more to be passed to me. But that led to this hard-to-believe transformation: Mrs. Lepellier began to be reconciled to me because I liked her cooking. Toward the end of the meal she became able to speak to me directly, in her high but gentle and modulated voice, and I was so clumsy and fumbling and embarrassed that my behavior throughout lunch amounted to one long and elaborate apology which, when she offered me a second dessert, I saw she had accepted. "He's

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a good boy underneath," she must have thought, "a terrible temper, no self-control, but he's sorry, and he is a good boy underneath." Leper was closer to the truth.

 

She suggested he and I take a walk after lunch. Leper now seemed all obedience, and except for the fact that he never looked at his mother, the ideal son. So he put on some odds and ends of clothing, some canvas and woolen and flannel pulled on to form a patchwork against the cutting wind, and we trailed out the back door into the splendor of the failing sunshine. I did not have New England in my bones; I was a guest in this country, even though by now a familiar one, and I could never see a totally extinguished winter field without thinking it unnatural. I would tramp along trying to decide whether corn had grown there in the summer, or whether it had been a pasture, or what it could ever have been, and in that deep layer of the mind where all is judged by the five senses and primitive expectation, I knew that nothing would ever grow there again. We roamed across one of these wastes, our feet breaking through at each step the thin surface crust of ice into a layer of soft snow underneath, and I waited for Leper, in this wintery outdoors he loved, to come to himself again. Just as I knew the field could never grow again, I knew that Leper could not be wild or bitter or psycho tramping across the hills of Vermont.

 

"Is there an army camp in Vermont?" I asked, so sure in my illusion that I risked making him talk, risked even making him talk about the army.

 

"I don't think there is."

 

"There ought to be. That's where they should have sent you. Then you wouldn't have gotten nervous,"

 

"Yeah." A half chuckle. "I was what they call 'nervous in the service.'"

 

Exaggerated laughter from me. "Is that what they call it?"

 

Leper didn't bother to make a rejoinder. Before there had always been his polite capping of remarks like this: "Yes, they do, that's what they call it"—but today he glanced speculatively at me and said nothing.

 

We walked on, the crust cracking uneasily under us. "Nervous in the service," I said. "That sounds like one of Brinker's poems."

 

"That bastard!"

 

"You wouldn't know Brinker these days the way he's changed—"

 

"I'd know that bastard if he'd changed into Snow White."

 

"Well. He hasn't changed into Snow White."

 

"That's too bad," the strained laughter was back in his voice, "Snow White with Brinker's face on her. There's a picture," then he broke into sobs.

 

"Leper! What is it? What's the matter, Leper? Leper!"

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Hoarse, cracking sobs broke from him; another ounce of grief and he would have begun tearing his country-store clothes. "Leper! Leper!" This exposure drew us violently together; I was the closest person in the world to him now, and he to me. "Leper, for God sakes, Leper." I was about to cry myself. "Stop that, now just stop. Don't do that. Stop doing that, Leper."

 

When he became quieter, not less despairing but too exhausted to keep on, I said, "I'm sorry I brought up Brinker. I didn't know you hated him so much." Leper didn't look capable of such hates. Especially now, with his rapid plumes of breath puffing out as from a toiling steam engine, his nose and eyes gone red, and his cheeks red too, in large, irregular blotches—Leper had the kind of fragile fair skin given to high, unhealthy coloring. He was all color, painted at random, but none of it highlighted his grief. Instead of desperate and hate-filled, he looked, with his checkered outfit and blotchy face, like a half-prepared clown.

 

"I don't really hate Brinker, I don't really hate him, not any more than anybody else." His swimming eyes cautiously explored me. The wind lifted a sail of snow and billowed it past us. "It was only—" he drew in his breath so sharply that it made a whistling sound—"the idea of his face on a woman's body. That's what made me psycho. Ideas like that. I don't know. I guess they must be right. I guess I am psycho. I guess I must be. I must be. Did you ever have ideas like that?"

 

"No."

 

"Would they bother you if you did, if you happened to keep imagining a man's head on a woman's body, or if sometimes the arm of a chair turned into a human arm if you looked at it too long, things like that? Would they bother you?"

 

I didn't say anything.

 

"Maybe everybody imagines things like that when they're away from home, really far away, for the first time. Do you think so? The camp I went to first, they called it a 'Reception center,' got us up every morning when it was pitch black, and there was food like the kind we throw out here, and all my clothes were gone and I got this uniform that didn't even smell familiar. All day I wanted to sleep, after we got to Basic Training. I kept falling asleep, all day long, at the lectures we went to, and on the firing range, and everywhere else. But not at night. Next to me there was a man who had a cough that sounded like his stomach was going to come up, one of these times, it sounded like it would come up through his mouth and land with a splatter on the floor. He always faced my way. We did sleep head to foot, but I knew it would land near me. I never slept at night. During the day I couldn't eat this food that should have been thrown away, so I was always hungry except in the Mess Hall. The Mess Hall. The army has the perfect word for everything, did you ever think of that?"

 

I imperceptibly nodded and shook my head, yes-and-no.

 

"And the perfect word for me," he added in a distorted voice, as though his tongue had swollen, "psycho. I guess I am. I must be. Am I, though, or is the army? Because they turned everything inside out. I couldn't sleep in bed, I had to sleep everywhere else. I couldn't eat in

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the Mess Hall, I had to eat everywhere else. Everything began to be inside out. And the man next to me at night, coughing himself inside out. That was when things began to change. One day I couldn't make out what was happening to the corporal's face. It kept changing into faces I knew from somewhere else, and then I began to think he looked like me, and then he . . ." Leper's voice had thickened unrecognizably, "he changed into a woman, I was looking at him as close as I'm looking at you and his face turned into a woman's face and I started to yell for everybody, I began to yell so that everyone would see it too, I didn't want to be the only one to see a thing like that, I yelled louder and louder to make sure everyone within reach of my voice would hear—you can see there wasn't anything crazy in the way I was thinking, can't you, I had a good reason for everything I did, didn't I—but I couldn't yell soon enough, or loud enough, and when somebody did finally come up to me, it was this man with the cough who slept in the next cot, and he was holding a broom because we had been sweeping out the barracks, but I saw right away that it wasn't a broom, it was a man's leg which had been cut off. I remember thinking that he must have been at the hospital helping with an amputation when he heard my yell. You can see there's logic in that." The crust beneath us continued to crack and as we reached the border of the field the frigid trees also were cracking with the cold. The two sharp groups of noises sounded to my ears like rifles being fired in the distance.

 

I said nothing, and Leper, having said so much, went on to say more, to speak above the wind and crackings as though his story would never be finished. "Then they grabbed me and there were arms and legs and heads everywhere and I couldn't tell when any minute—"

 

"Shut up!"

 

Softer, more timidly, "—when any minute—"

 

"Do you think I want to hear every gory detail! Shut up! I don't care! I don't care what happened to you, Leper. I don't give a damn! Do you understand that? This has nothing to do with me! Nothing at all! I don't care!"

 

I turned around and began a clumsy run across the field in a line which avoided his house and aimed toward the road leading back into the town. I left Leper telling his story into the wind. He might tell it forever, I didn't care. I didn't want to hear any more of it. I had already heard too much. What did he mean by telling me a story like that! I didn't want to hear any more of it. Not now or ever. I didn't care because it had nothing to do with me. And I didn't want to hear any more of it. Ever.

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11

I wanted to see Phineas, and Phineas only. With him there was no conflict except between athletes, something Greek-inspired and Olympian in which victory would go to whoever was the strongest in body and heart. This was the only conflict he had ever believed in.

 

When I got back I found him in the middle of a snowball fight in a place called the Fields Beyond. At Devon the open ground among the buildings had been given carefully English names—the Center Common, the Far Common, the Fields, and the Fields Beyond. These last were past the gym, the tennis courts, the river and the stadium, on the edge of the woods which, however English in name, were in my mind primevally American, reaching in unbroken forests far to the north, into the great northern wilderness. I found Finny beside the woods playing and fighting—the two were approximately the same thing to him—and I stood there wondering whether things weren't simpler and better at the northern terminus of these woods, a thousand miles due north into the wilderness, somewhere deep in the Arctic, where the peninsula of trees which began at Devon would end at last in an untouched grove of pine, austere and beautiful.

 

There is no such grove, I know now, but the morning of my return to Devon I imagined that it might be just over the visible horizon, or the horizon after that.

 

A few of the fighters paused to yell a greeting at me, but no one broke off to ask about Leper. But I knew it was a mistake for me to stay there; at any moment someone might.

 

This gathering had obviously been Finny's work. Who else could have inveigled twenty people to the farthest extremity of the school to throw snowballs at each other? I could just picture him, at the end of his ten o'clock class, organizing it with the easy authority which always came into his manner when he had an idea which was particularly preposterous. There they all were now, the cream of the school, the lights and leaders of the senior class, with their high I.Q.'s and expensive shoes, as Brinker had said, pasting each other with snowballs.

 

I hesitated on the edge of the fight and the edge of the woods, too tangled in my mind to enter either one or the other. So I glanced at my wrist watch, brought my hand dramatically to my mouth as though remembering something urgent and important, repeated the pantomime in case anybody had missed it, and with this tacit explanation started briskly back toward the center of the school. A snowball caught me on the back of the head. Finny's voice followed it. "You're on our side, even if you do have a lousy aim. We need somebody else. Even you." He came toward me, without his cane at the moment, his new walking cast so much smaller and lighter that an ordinary person could have managed it with hardly a limp noticeable. Finny's coordination, however, was such that any slight flaw became obvious; there was an interruption, brief as a drum beat, in the continuous flow of his walk, as though with each step he forgot for a split-second where he was going.

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"How's Leper?" he asked in an offhand way.

 

"Oh Leper's—how would he be? You know Leper—" The fight was moving toward us; I stalled a little more, a stray snowball caught Finny on the side of the face, he shot one back, I seized some ammunition from the ground and we were engulfed.

 

Someone knocked me down; I pushed Brinker over a small slope; someone was trying to tackle me from behind. Everywhere there was the smell of vitality in clothes, the vital something in wool and flannel and corduroy which spring releases. I had forgotten that this existed, this smell which instead of the first robin, or the first bud or leaf, means to me that spring has come. I had always welcomed vitality and energy and warmth radiating from thick and sturdy winter clothes. It made me happy, but I kept wondering about next spring, about whether khaki, or suntans or whatever the uniform of the season was, had this aura of promise in it. I felt fairly sure it didn't.

 

The fight veered. Finny had recruited me and others as allies, so that two sides fighting it out had been taking form. Suddenly he turned his fire against me, he betrayed several of his other friends; he went over to the other, to Brinker's side for a short time, enough to ensure that his betrayal of them would heighten the disorder. Loyalties became hopelessly entangled. No one was going to win or lose after all. Somewhere in the maze Brinker's sense of generalship disappeared, and he too became as slippery as an Arab, as intriguing as a eunuch. We ended the fight in the only way possible; all of us turned on Phineas. Slowly, with a steadily widening grin, he was driven down beneath a blizzard of snowballs.

 

When he had surrendered I bent cheerfully over to help him up, seizing his wrist to stop the final treacherous snowball he had ready, and he remarked, "Well I guess that takes care of the Hitler Youth outing for one day." All of us laughed. On the way back to the gym he said, "That was a good fight. I thought it was pretty funny, didn't you?"

Hours later it occurred to me to ask him, "Do you think you ought to get into fights like that? After all, there's your leg—"

 

"Stanpole said something about not falling again, but I'm very careful."

 

"Christ, don't break it again!"

 

"No, of course I won't break it again. Isn't the bone supposed to be stronger when it grows together over a place where it's been broken once?"

 

"Yes, I think it is."

 

"I think so too. In fact I think I can feel it getting stronger."

 

"You think you can? Can you feel it?"

 

"Yes, I think so."

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"Thank God."

 

"What?"

 

"I said that's good."

 

"Yes, I guess it is. I guess that's good, all right."

After dinner that night Brinker came to our room to pay us one of his formal calls. Our room had by this time of year the exhausted look of a place where two people had lived too long without taking any interest in their surroundings. Our cots at either end of the room were sway-backed beneath their pink and brown cotton spreads. The walls, which were much farther off white than normal, expressed two forgotten interests: Finny had scotch-taped newspaper pictures of the Roosevelt-Churchill meeting above his cot ("They're the two most important of the old men," he had explained, "getting together to make up what to tell us next about the war"). Over my cot I had long ago taped pictures which together amounted to a barefaced lie about my background—weepingly romantic views of plantation mansions, moss-hung trees by moonlight, lazy roads winding dustily past the cabins of the Negroes. When asked about them I had acquired an accent appropriate to a town three states south of my own, and I had transmitted the impression, without actually stating it, that this was the old family place. But by now I no longer needed this vivid false identity; now I was acquiring, I felt, a sense of my own real authority and worth, I had had many new experiences and I was growing up.

 

"How's Leper?" said Brinker as he came in. "Yeah," said Phineas, "I meant to ask you before."

 

"Leper? Why he's—he's on leave." But my resentment against having to mislead people seemed to be growing stronger every day. "As a matter of fact Leper is 'Absent Without Leave,' he just took off by himself."

 

"Leper?" both of them exclaimed together.

 

"Yes," I shrugged, "Leper. Leper's not the little rabbit we used to know any more."

 

"Nobody can change that much," said Brinker in his new tough-minded way.

 

Finny said, "He just didn't like the army, I bet. Why should he? What's the point of it anyway?"

 

"Phineas," Brinker said with dignity, "please don't give us your infantile lecture on world affairs at this time." And to me, "He was too scared to stay, wasn't he?"

 

I narrowed my eyes as though thinking hard about that. Finally I said, "Yes, I think you could put it that way."

 

"He panicked."

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I didn't say anything.

 

"He must be out of his mind," said Brinker energetically, "to do a thing like that. I'll bet he cracked up, didn't he? That's what happened. Leper found out that the army was just too much for him. I've heard about guys like that. Some morning they don't get out of bed with everybody else. They just lie there crying. I'll bet something like that happened to Leper." He looked at me. "Didn't it?"

 

"Yes. It did."

 

Brinker had closed with such energy, almost enthusiasm, on the truth that I gave it to him without many misgivings. The moment he had it he crumbled. "Well I'll be damned. I'll be damned. Old Leper. Quiet old Leper. Quiet old Leper from Vermont. He never could fight worth a damn. You'd think somebody would have realized that when he tried to enlist. Poor old Leper. What's he act like?"

 

"He cries a lot of the time."

 

"Oh God. What's the matter with our class anyway? It isn't even June yet and we've already got two men sidelined for the Duration."

 

Two?"

 

Brinker hesitated briefly. "Well there's Finny here."

 

"Yes," agreed Phineas in his deepest and most musical tone, "there's me."

 

"Finny isn't out of it,' I said.

 

"Of course he is."

 

"Yes, I'm out of it."

 

"Not that there's anything to be out of!" I wondered if my face matched the heartiness of my voice. "Just this dizzy war, this fake, this thing with the old men making . . ." I couldn't help watching Finny as I spoke, and so I ran out of momentum. I waited for him to take it up, to unravel once again his tale of plotting statesmen and deluded public, his great joke, his private toe hold on the world. He was sitting on his cot, elbows on knees, looking down. He brought his wide-set eyes up, his grin flashed and faded, and then he murmured, "Sure. There isn't any war."

 

It was one of the few ironic remarks Phineas ever made, and with it he quietly brought to a close all his special inventions which had carried us through the winter. Now the facts were re-established, and gone were all the fantasies, such as the Olympic Games for A.D. 1944, closed before they had ever been opened.

There was little left at Devon any more which had not been recruited for the war. The few

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stray activities and dreamy people not caught up in it were being systematically corralled by Brinker. And every day in chapel there was some announcement about qualifying for "V-12," an officer-training program the Navy had set up in many colleges and universities. It sounded very safe, almost like peacetime, almost like just going normally on to college. It was also very popular; groups the size of LST crews joined it, almost everyone who could qualify, except for a few who "wanted to fly" and so chose the Army Air Force, or something called V-5 instead. There were also a special few with energetic fathers who were expecting appointments to Annapolis or West Point or the Coast Guard Academy or even—this alternative had been unexpectedly stumbled on—the Merchant Marine Academy. Devon was by tradition and choice the most civilian of schools, and there was a certain strained hospitality in the way both the faculty and students worked to get along with the leathery recruiting officers who kept appearing on the campus. There was no latent snobbery in us; we didn't find any in them. It was only that we could feel a deep and sincere difference between us and them, a difference which everyone struggled with awkward fortitude to bridge. It was as though Athens and Sparta were trying to establish not just a truce but an alliance—although we were not as civilized as Athens and they were not as brave as Sparta.

 

Neither were we. There was no rush to get into the fighting; no one seemed to feel the need to get into the infantry, and only a few were talking about the Marines. The thing to be was careful and self-preserving. It was going to be a long war. Quackenbush, I heard, had two possible appointments to the Military Academy, with carefully prepared positions in V-12 and dentistry school to fall back on if necessary.

 

I myself took no action. I didn't feel free to, and I didn't know why this was so. Brinker, in his accelerating change from absolute to relative virtue, came up with plan after plan, each more insulated from the fighting than the last. But I did nothing.

One morning, after a Naval officer had turned many heads in chapel with an address on convoy duty, Brinker put his hand on the back of my neck in the vestibule outside and steered me into a room used for piano practice near the entrance. It was soundproofed, and he swung the vaultlike door closed behind us.

 

"You've been putting off enlisting in something for only one reason," he said at once. "You know that, don't you?"

 

"No, I don't know that."

 

"Well, I know, and I'll tell you what it is. It's Finny. You pity him."

 

"Pity him!"

 

"Yes, pity him. And if you don't watch out he's going to start pitying himself. Nobody ever mentions his leg to him except me. Keep that up and he'll be sloppy with self-pity any day now. What's everybody beating around the bush for? He's crippled and that's that. He's got to accept it and unless we start acting perfectly natural about it, even kid him about it once in a while, he

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never will."

 

"You're so wrong I can't even—I can't even hear you, you're so wrong."

 

"Well, I'm going to do it anyway."

 

"No. You're not."

 

"The hell I'm not. I don't have to have your approval, do I?"

 

"I'm his roommate, and I'm his best friend—"

 

"And you were there when it happened. I know. And I don't give a damn. And don't forget," he looked at me sharply, "you've got a little personal stake in this. What I mean is it wouldn't do you any harm, you know, if everything about Finny's accident was cleared up and forgotten."

 

I felt my face grimacing in the way Finny's did when he was really irritated. "What do you mean by that?"

 

"I don't know," he shrugged and chuckled in his best manner, "nobody knows." Then the charm disappeared and he added, "unless you know," and his mouth closed in its straight expressionless line, and that was all that was said.

I had no idea what Brinker might say or do. Before he had always known and done whatever occurred to him because he was certain that whatever occurred to him was right. In the world of the Golden Fleece Debating Society and the Underprivileged Local Children subcommittee of the Good Samaritan Confraternity, this had created no problems. But I was afraid of that simple executive directness now.

 

I walked back from Chapel and found Finny in our dormitory, blocking the staircase until the others who wanted to go up sang A Mighty Fortress Is Our God under his direction. No one who was tone deaf ever loved music so much. I think his shortcoming increased his appreciation; he loved it all indiscriminately—Beethoven, the latest love ditty, jazz, a hymn—it was all profoundly musical to Phineas.

 

". . . Our helper He a-mid the floods," wafted out across the Common in the tempo of a football march, "Of mortal ills prevailing!"

 

"Everything was all right," said Finny at the end, "phrasing, rhythm, all that. But I'm not sure about your pitch. Half a tone off, I would estimate offhand."

 

We went on to our room. I sat down at the translation of Caesar I was doing for him, since he had to pass Latin at last this year or fail to graduate. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it.

 

"Is anything exciting happening now?"

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"This part is pretty interesting," I said, "if I understand it right. About a surprise attack."

 

"Read me that."

 

"Well let's see. It begins, 'When Caesar noticed that the enemy was remaining for several days at the camp fortified by a swamp and by the nature of the terrain, he sent a letter to Trebonius instructing him'—'instructing him' isn't actually in the text but it's understood; you know about that."

 

"Sure. Go on."

 

• 'Instructing him to come as quickly as possible by long forced marches to him'—this 'him' refers to Caesar of course."

 

Finny looked at me with glazed interest and said, "Of course."

 

• 'Instructing him to come as quickly as possible by long forced marches to him with three legions; he himself—Caesar, that is—'sent cavalry to withstand any sudden attacks of the enemy. Now when the Gauls learned what was going on, they scattered a selected band of foot soldiers in ambushes; who, overtaking our horsemen after the leader Vertiscus had been killed, followed our disorderly men up to our camp.'"

 

"I have a feeling that's what Mr. Horn is going to call a 'muddy translation.' What's it mean?"

 

"Caesar isn't doing so well."

 

"But he won it in the end."

 

"Sure. If you mean the whole campaign—" I broke off. "He won it, if you really think there was a Gallic War . . ." Caesar, from the first, had been the one historical figure Phineas refused absolutely to believe in. Lost two thousand years in the past, master of a dead language and a dead empire, the bane and bore of schoolboys, Caesar he believed to be more of a tyrant at Devon than he had ever been in Rome. Phineas felt a personal and sincere grudge against Caesar, and he was outraged most by his conviction that Caesar and Rome and Latin had never been alive at all . . . "If you really think there ever was a Caesar," I said.

 

Finny got up from the cot, picking up his cane as an afterthought. He looked oddly at me, his face set to burst out laughing I thought. "Naturally I don't believe books and I don't believe teachers," he came across a few paces, "but I do believe—it's important after all for me to believe you. Christ, I've got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody." I waited without saying anything. "And you told me about Leper, that he's gone crazy. That's the word, we might as well admit it. Leper's gone crazy. When I heard that about Leper, then I knew that the war was real, this war and all the wars. If a war can drive somebody crazy, then it's real all right. Oh I guess I always knew, but I didn't have to admit it." He perched his foot, small cast with metal bar across the bottom to walk on, next to where I was sitting on the cot. "To tell you the truth, I wasn't too completely sure about you, when you told me how Leper was. Of course

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I believed you," he added hurriedly, "but you're the nervous type, you know, and I thought maybe your imagination got a little inflamed up there in Vermont. I thought he might not be quite as mixed up as you made out." Finny's face tried to prepare me for what came next. "Then I saw him myself."

 

I turned incredulously. "You saw Leper?"

 

"I saw him here this morning, after chapel. He was—well, there's nothing inflamed about my imagination and I saw Leper hiding in the shrubbery next to the chapel. I slipped out the side door the way I always do—to miss the rush—and I saw Leper and he must have seen me. He didn't say a damn word. He looked at me like I was a gorilla or something and then he ducked into Mr. Carhart's office."

 

"He must be crazy," I said automatically, and then my eyes involuntarily met Finny's. We both broke into sudden laughter.

 

"We can't do a damn thing about it," he said ruefully.

 

"I don't want to see him," I muttered. Then, trying to be more responsible, "Who else knows he's here."

 

"No one, I would think."

 

"There's nothing for us to do, maybe Carhart or Dr. Stanpole can do something. We won't tell anybody about it because . . . because they would just scare Leper, and he would scare them."

 

"Anyway," said Finny, "then I knew there was a real war on."

 

"Yes, I guess it's a real war all right. But I liked yours a lot better."

 

"So did I."

 

"I wish you hadn't found out. What did you have to find out for!" We started to laugh again, with a half-guilty exchange of glances, in the way that two people who had gone on a gigantic binge when they were last together would laugh when they met again at the parson's tea. "Well," he said, "you did a beautiful job in the Olympics."

 

"And you were the greatest news analyst who ever lived."

 

"Do you realize you won every gold medal in every Olympic event? No one's ever done anything like that in history."

 

"And you scooped every newspaper in the world on every story." The sun was doing antics among the million specks of dust hanging between us and casting a brilliant, unstable pool of light on the floor. "No one's ever done anything like that before."

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Brinker and three cohorts came with much commotion into our room at 10:05 P.M. that night. "We're taking you out," he said flatly.

 

"It's after hours," I said; "Where?" said Finny with interest at the same time.

 

"You'll see. Get them." His friends half-lifted us half-roughly, and we were hustled down the stairs. I thought it must be some kind of culminating prank, the senior class leaving Devon with a flourish. Were we going to steal the clapper of the school bell, or would we tether a cow in chapel?

 

They steered us toward the First Building—burned down and rebuilt several times but still known as the First Building of the Devon School. It contained only classrooms and so at this hour was perfectly empty, which made us stealthier than ever. Brinker's many keys, surviving from his class-officer period, jingled softly as we reached the main door. Above us in Latin flowed the inscription, Here Boys Come to Be Made Men.

 

The lock turned; we went in, entering the doubtful reality of a hallway familiar only in daylight and bustle. Our footsteps fell guiltily on the marble floor. We continued across the foyer to a dreamlike bank of windows, turned left up a pale flight of marble steps, left again, through two doorways, and into the Assembly Room. From the high ceiling one of the celebrated Devon chandeliers, all glittering tears, scattered thin illumination. Row after row of black Early American benches spread emptily back through the shadows to long, vague windows. At the front of the room there was a raised platform with a balustrade in front of it. About ten members of the senior class sat on the platform; all of them were wearing their black graduation robes. This is going to be some kind of schoolboy masquerade, I thought, some masquerade with masks and candles.

 

"You see how Phineas limps," said Blinker loudly as we walked in. It was too coarse and too loud; I wanted to hit him for shocking me like that. Phineas looked perplexed. "Sit down," he went on, "take a load off your feet." We sat in the front row of the benches where eight or ten others were sitting, smirking uneasily at the students on the platform.

 

Whatever Brinker had in his mind to do, I thought he had chosen a terrible place for it. There was nothing funny about the Assembly Room. I could remember staring torpidly through these windows a hundred times out at the elms of the Center Common. The windows now had the closed blankness of night, a deadened look about them, a look of being blind or deaf. The great expanses of wall space were opaque with canvas, portraits in oil of deceased headmasters, a founder or two, forgotten leaders of the faculty, a beloved athletic coach none of us had ever heard of, a lady we could not identify—her fortune had largely rebuilt the school; a nameless poet who was thought when under the school's protection to be destined primarily for future generations; a young hero now anonymous who looked theatrical in the First World War uniform in which he had died.

 

I thought any prank was bound to fall flat here.

 

The Assembly Hall was used for large lectures, debates, plays, and concerts; it had the worst

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acoustics in the school. I couldn't make out what Brinker was saying. He stood on the polished marble floor in front of us, but facing the platform, talking to the boys behind the balustrade. I heard him say the word "inquiry" to them, and something about "the country demands. . . ."

 

"What is all this hot air?" I said into the blur.

 

"I don't know," Phineas answered shortly.

 

As he turned toward us Brinker was saying ". . . blame on the responsible party. We will begin with a brief prayer." He paused, surveying us with the kind of wide-eyed surmise Mr. Carhart always used at this point, and then added in Mr. Carhart's urbane murmur, "Let us pray."

 

We all slumped immediately and unthinkingly into the awkward crouch in which God was addressed at Devon, leaning forward with elbows on knees. Brinker had caught us, and in a moment it was too late to escape, for he had moved swiftly into the Lord's Prayer. If when Brinker had said "Let us pray" I had said "Go to hell" everything might have been saved.

 

At the end there was an indecisive, semiserious silence and then Brinker said, "Phineas, if you please." Finny got up with a shrug and walked to the center of the floor, between us and the platform. Brinker got an armchair from behind the balustrade, and seated Finny on it with courtly politeness. "Now just in your own words," he said.

 

"What own words?" said Phineas, grimacing up at him with his best you-are-an-idiot expression.

 

"I know you haven't got many of your own," said Brinker with a charitable smile. "Use some of Gene's then."

 

"What shall I talk about? You? I've got plenty of words of my own for that."

 

"I'm all right," Brinker glanced gravely around the room for confirmation, "you're the casualty."

 

"Brinker," began Finny in a constricted voice I did not recognize, "are you off your head or what?"

 

"No," said Brinker evenly, "that's Leper, our other casualty. Tonight we're investigating you."

 

"What the hell are you talking about!" I cut in suddenly.

 

"Investigating Finny's accident!" He spoke as though this was the most natural and self-evident and inevitable thing we could be doing.

 

I felt the blood flooding into my head. "After all," Brinker continued, "there is a war on. Here's one soldier our side has already lost. We've got to find out what happened."

 

"Just for the record," said someone from the platform. "You agree, don't you, Gene?"

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"I told Brinker this morning," I began in a voice treacherously shaking, "that I thought this was the worst—"

 

"And I said," Brinker's voice was full of authority and perfectly under control, "that for Finny's good," and with an additional timbre of sincerity, "and for your own good too, by the way, Gene, that we should get all this out into the open. We don't want any mysteries or any stray rumors and suspicions left, in the air at the end of the year, do we?"

 

A collective assent to this rumbled through the blurring atmosphere of the Assembly Room.

 

"What are you talking about!" Finny's voice was full of contemptuous music. "What rumors and suspicions?"

 

"Never mind about that," said Brinker with his face responsibly grave. He's enjoying this, I thought bitterly, he's imagining himself Justice incarnate, balancing the scales. He's forgotten that Justice incarnate is not only balancing the scales but also blindfolded. "Why don't you just tell us in your words what happened?" Brinker continued. "Just humor us, if you want to think of it that way. We aren't trying to make you feel bad. Just tell us. You know we wouldn't ask you if we didn't have a good reason . . . good reasons."

 

"There's nothing to tell."

 

"Nothing to tell?" Brinker looked pointedly at the small cast around Finny's lower leg and the cane he held between his knees.

 

"Well then, I fell out of a tree."

 

"Why?" said someone on the platform. The acoustics were so bad and the light so dim that I could rarely tell who was speaking, except for Finny and Brinker who were isolated on the wide strip of marble floor between us in the seats and the others on the platform.

 

"Why?" repeated Phineas. "Because I took a wrong step."

 

"Did you lose your balance?" continued the voice.

 

"Yes," echoed Finny grimly, "I lost my balance."

 

"You had better balance than anyone in the school."

 

"Thanks a lot."

 

"I didn't say it for a compliment."

 

"Well then, no thanks."

 

"Have you ever thought that you didn't just fall out of that tree?"

 

This touched an interesting point Phineas had been turning over in his mind for a long time. I could tell that because the obstinate, competitive look left his face as his mind became engaged for the first time. "It's very funny," he said, "but ever since then I've had a feeling that

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the tree did it by itself. It's an impression I've had. Almost as though the tree shook me out by itself."

 

The acoustics in the Assembly Room were so poor that silences there had a heavy hum of their own.

 

"Someone else was in the tree, isn't that so?"

 

"No," said Finny spontaneously, "I don't think so." He looked at the ceiling. "Or was there? Maybe there was somebody climbing up the rungs of the trunk. I kind of forget."

 

This time the hum of silence was prolonged to a point where I would be forced to fill it with some kind of sound if it didn't end. Then someone else on the platform spoke up. "I thought somebody told me that Gene Forrester was—"

 

"Finny was there," Brinker interrupted commandingly, "he knows better than anyone." "You were there too, weren't you, Gene?" this new voice from the platform continued. "Yes," I said with interest, "yes, I was there too." "Were you—near the tree?"

 

Finny turned toward me. "You were down at the bottom, weren't you?" he asked, not in the official courtroom tone he had used before, but in a friend's voice.

 

I had been studying very carefully the way my hands wrinkled when tightly clenched, but I was able to bring my head up and return his inquiring look. "Down at the bottom, yes."

 

Finny went on. "Did you see the tree shake or anything?" He flushed faintly at what seemed to him the absurdity of his own question. "I've always meant to ask you, just for the hell of it."

 

I took this under consideration. "I don't recall anything like that . . ."

 

"Nutty question," he muttered.

 

"I thought you were in the tree," the platform voice cut in.

 

"Well of course," Finny said with an exasperated chuckle, "of course I was in the tree—oh you mean Gene?—he wasn't in—is that what you mean, or—" Finny floundered with muddled honesty between me and my questioner.

 

"I meant Gene," the voice said.

 

"Of course Finny was in the tree," I said. But I couldn't make the confusion last, "and I was down at the bottom, or climbing the rungs I think . . ."

 

"How do you expect him to remember?" said Finny sharply. "There was a hell of a lot of confusion right then."

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"A kid I used to play with was hit by a car once when I was about eleven years old," said Brinker seriously, "and I remember every single thing about it, exactly where I was standing, the color of the sky, the noise the brakes of the car made—I never will forget anything about it."

 

"You and I are two different people," I said.

 

"No one's accusing you of anything," Brinker responded in an odd tone.

 

"Well of course no one's accusing me—"

 

"Don't argue so much," his voice tried for a hard compromise, full of warning and yet striving to pass unnoticed by the others.

 

"No, we're not accusing you," a boy on the platform said evenly, and then I stood accused.

 

"I think I remember now!" Finny broke in, his eyes bright and relieved. "Yes, I remember seeing you standing on the bank. You were looking up and your hair was plastered down over your forehead so that you had that dumb look you always have when you've been in the water —what was it you said? 'Stop posing up there' or one of those best-pal cracks you're always making." He was very happy. "And I think I did start to pose just to make you madder, and I said, what did I say? something about the two of us . . . yes, I said "Let's make a double jump,' because I thought if we went together it would be something that had never been done before, holding hands in a jump—" Then it was as though someone suddenly slapped him. "No, that was on the ground when I said that to you. I said that to you on the ground, and then the two of us started to climb . . ." he broke off.

 

"The two of you," the boy on the platform went on harshly for him, "started to climb up the tree together, was that it? And he's just said he was on the ground!"

 

"Or on the rungs!" I burst out. "I said I might have been on the rungs!"

 

"Who else was there?" said Brinker quietly. "Leper Lepellier was there, wasn't he?"

 

"Yes," someone said, "Leper was there."

 

"Leper always was the exact type when it came to details," continued Brinker. "He could have told us where everybody was standing, what everybody was wearing, the whole conversation that day, and what the temperature was. He could have cleared the whole thing up. Too bad."

 

No one said anything. Phineas had been sitting motionless, leaning slightly forward, not far from the position in which we prayed at Devon. After a long time he turned and reluctantly looked at me. I did not return his look or move or speak. Then at last Finny straightened from this prayerful position slowly, as though it was painful for him. "Leper's here," he said in a voice so quiet, and with such quiet unconscious dignity, that he was suddenly terrifyingly strange to me. "I saw him go into Dr. Carhart's office this morning."

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"Here! Go get him," said Brinker immediately to the two boys who had come with us. "He must be in Carhart's rooms if he hasn't gone back home."

 

I kept quiet. To myself, however, I made a number of swift, automatic calculations: that Leper was no threat, no one would ever believe Leper; Leper was deranged, he was not of sound mind and if people couldn't make out their own wills when not in sound mind certainly they couldn't testify in something like this.

 

The two boys left and the atmosphere immediately cleared. Action had been taken, so the whole issue was dropped for now. Someone began making fun of "Captain Marvel," the head of the football team, saying how girlish he looked in his graduation gown. Captain Marvel minced for us in his size 12 shoes, the sides of his gown swaying drunkenly back and forth from his big hips. Someone wound himself in the folds of the red velvet curtain and peered out from it like an exotic spy. Someone made a long speech listing every infraction of the rules we were committing that night. Someone else made a speech showing how by careful planning we could break all the others before dawn.

 

But although the acoustics in the Assembly Hall were poor, those outside the room were admirable. All the talk and horseplay ended within a few seconds of the instant when the first person, that is myself, heard the footsteps returning along the marble stairway and corridors toward us. I knew with absolute certainty moments before they came in that there were three sets of footsteps coming.

 

Leper entered ahead of the other two. He looked unusually well; his face was glowing, his eyes were bright, his manner was all energy. "Yes?" he said in a clear voice, resonant even in this room, "what can I do for you?" He made this confident remark almost but not quite to Phineas, who was still sitting alone in the middle of the room. Finny muttered something which was too indecisive for Leper, who turned with a cleanly energetic gesture toward Brinker. Brinker began talking to him in the elaborately casual manner of someone being watched. Gradually the noise in the room, which had revived when the three of them came in, subsided again.

 

Brinker managed it. He never raised his voice, but instead he let the noise surrounding it gradually sink so that his voice emerged in the ensuing silence without any emphasis on his part—"so that you were standing next to the river bank, watching Phineas climb the tree?" he was saying, and had waited, I knew, until this silence to say.

 

"Sure. Right there by the trunk of the tree. I was looking up. It was almost sunset, and I remember the way the sun was shining in my eyes."

 

"So you couldn't . . ." I began before I could stop myself.

 

There was a short pause during which every ear and no eyes were directed toward me, and then Brinker went on. "And what did you see? Could you see anything with the sun in your eyes?"

 

"Oh sure," said Leper in his new, confident, false voice. "I just shaded my eyes a little, like

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this," he demonstrated how a hand shades the eyes, "and then I could see. I could see both of them clearly enough because the sun was blazing all around them," a certain singsong sincerity was developing in his voice, as though he were trying to hold the interest of young children, "and the rays of the sun were shooting past them, millions of rays shooting past them like— like golden machine-gun fire." He paused to let us consider the profoundly revealing exactness of this phrase. "That's what it was like, if you want to know. The two of them looked as black as—as black as death standing up there with this fire burning all around them."

 

Everyone could hear, couldn't they? the derangement in his voice. Everyone must be able to see how false his confidence was. Any fool could see that. But whatever I said would be a self-indictment; others would have to fight for me.

 

"Up there where?" said Brinker brusquely. "Where were the two of them standing up there?"

 

"On the limb!" Lepers annoyed, this-is-obvious tone would discount what he said in their minds; they would know that he had never been like this before, that he had changed and was not responsible.

 

"Who was where on the limb? Was one of them ahead of the other?"

 

"Well of course."

 

"Who was ahead?"

 

Leper smiled waggishly. "I couldn't see that. There were just two shapes, and with that fire shooting past them they looked as black as—"

 

"You've already told us that. You couldn't see who was ahead?"

 

"No, naturally I couldn't."

 

"But you could see how they were standing. Where were they exactly?"

 

"One of them was next to the trunk, holding the trunk of the tree. I'll never forget that because the tree was a huge black shape too, and his hand touching the black trunk anchored him, if you see what I mean, to something solid in all the bright fire they were standing in up there. And the other one was a little farther out on the limb."

 

"Then what happened?"

 

"Then they both moved."

 

"How did they move?"

 

"They moved," now Leper was smiling, a charming and slightly arch smile, like a child who knows he is going to say something clever, "they moved like an engine."

 

In the baffled silence I began to uncoil slowly.

 

"Like an engine!" Brinker's expression was a struggle between surprise and disgust.

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"I can't think of the name of the engine. But it has two pistons. What is that engine? Well anyway, in this engine first one piston sinks, and then the next one sinks. The one holding on to the trunk sank for a second, up and down like a piston, and then the other one sank and fell."

 

Someone on the platform exclaimed, "The one who moved first shook the other one's balance!"

 

"I suppose so." Leper seemed to be rapidly losing interest.

 

"Was the one who fell," Brinker said slowly, "was Phineas, in other words the one who moved first or second?"

 

Leper's face became guileful, his voice flat and impersonal. "I don't intend to implicate myself. I'm no fool, you know. I'm not going to tell you everything and then have it used against me later. You always did take me for a fool, didn't you? But I'm no fool any more. I know when I have information that might be dangerous." He was working himself up to indignation. "Why should I tell you! Just because it happens to suit you!"

 

"Leper," Brinker pleaded, "Leper, this is very important—"

 

"So am I," he said thinly, "I'm important. You've never realized it, but I'm important too. You be the fool," he gazed shrewdly at Brinker, "you do whatever anyone wants whenever they want it. You be the fool now. Bastard."

 

Phineas had gotten up unnoticed from his chair. "I don't care," he interrupted in an even voice, so full of richness that it overrode all the others. "I don't care."

 

I tore myself from the bench toward him. "Phineas—!"

 

He shook his head sharply, closing his eyes, and then he turned to regard me with a handsome mask of face. "I just don't care. Never mind," and he started across the marble floor toward the doors.

 

"Wait a minute!" cried Brinker. "We haven't heard everything yet. We haven't got all the facts!"

 

The words shocked Phineas into awareness. He whirled as though being attacked from behind. "You get the rest of the facts, Brinker!" he cried. "You get all your facts!" I had never seen Finny crying, "You collect every f—ing fact there is in the world!" He plunged out the doors.

 

The excellent exterior acoustics recorded his rushing steps and the quick rapping of his cane along the corridor and on the first steps of the marble stairway. Then these separate sounds collided into the general tumult of his body falling clumsily down the white marble stairs.

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12

Everyone behaved with complete presence of mind. Brinker shouted that Phineas must not be moved; someone else, realizing that only a night nurse would be at the Infirmary, did not waste time going there but rushed to bring Dr. Stanpole from his house. Others remembered that Phil Latham, the wrestling coach, lived just across the Common and that he was an expert in first aid. It was Phil who made Finny stretch out on one of the wide shallow steps of the staircase, and kept him still until Dr. Stanpole arrived.

 

The foyer and the staircase of the First Building were soon as crowded as at midday. Phil Latham found the main light switch, and all the marble blazed up under full illumination. But surrounding it was the stillness of near-midnight in a country town, so that the hurrying feet and the repressed voices had a hollow reverberance. The windows, blind and black, retained their look of dull emptiness.

 

Once Brinker turned to me and said, "Go back to the Assembly Room and see if there's any kind of blanket on the platform." I dashed back up the stairs, found a blanket and gave it to Phil Latham. He carefully wrapped it around Phineas.

 

I would have liked very much to have done that myself; it would have meant a lot to me. But Phineas might begin to curse me with every word he knew, he might lose his head completely, he would certainly be worse off for it. So I kept out of the way.

 

He was entirely conscious and from the glimpses I caught of his face seemed to be fairly calm. Everyone behaved with complete presence of mind, and that included Phineas.

 

When Dr. Stanpole arrived there was silence on the stairs. Wrapped tightly in his blanket, with light flooding down on him from the chandelier, Finny lay isolated at the center of a tight circle of faces. The rest of the crowd looked on from above or below on the stairs, and I stood on the lower edge. Behind me the foyer was now empty.

 

After a short, silent examination Dr. Stanpole had a chair brought from the Assembly Room, and Finny was lifted cautiously into it. People aren't ordinarily carried in chairs in New Hampshire, and as they raised him up he looked very strange to me, like some tragic and exalted personage, a stricken pontiff. Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him. Perhaps it was just the incongruity of seeing him aloft and stricken, since he was by nature someone who carried others. I didn't think he knew how to act or even how to feel as the object of help. He went past with his eyes closed and his mouth tense. I knew that normally I would have been one of those carrying the chair, saying something into his ear as we went along. My aid alone had never seemed to him in the category of help. The reason for this occurred to me as the procession moved slowly across the brilliant foyer to the doors; Phineas had thought of me as an extension of himself.

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Dr. Stanpole stopped near the doors, looking for the light switch. There was an interval of a few seconds when no one was near him. I came up to him and tried to phrase my question but nothing came out, I couldn't find the word to begin. I was being torn irreconcilably between "Is he" and "What is" when Dr. Stanpole, without appearing to notice my tangle, said conversationally, "It's the leg again. Broken again. But a much cleaner break I think, much cleaner. A simple fracture." He found the light switch and the foyer was plunged into darkness.

Outside, the doctor's car was surrounded by boys while Finny was being lifted inside it by Phil Latham. Phil and Dr. Stanpole then got into the car and drove slowly away, the headlights forming a bright parallel as they receded down the road, and then swinging into another parallel at right angles to the first as they turned into the Infirmary driveway. The crowd began to thin rapidly; the faculty had at last heard that something was amiss in the night, and several alarmed and alarming masters materialized in the darkness and ordered the students to their dormitories.

 

Mr. Ludsbury loomed abruptly out of a. background of shrubbery. "Get along to the dormitory, Forrester," he said with a dry certainty in my obedience which suddenly struck me as funny, definitely funny. Since it was beneath his dignity to wait and see that I actually followed his order, I was by not budging free of him a moment later. I walked into the bank of shrubbery, circled past trees in the direction of the chapel, doubled back along a large building donated by the alumni which no one had ever been able to put to use, recrossed the street and walked noiselessly up the emerging grass next to the Infirmary driveway.

 

Dr. Stanpole's car was at the top of it, headlights on and motor running, empty. I idly considered stealing it, in the way that people idly consider many crimes it would be possible for them to commit. I took an academic interest in the thought of stealing the car, knowing all the time that it would be not so much criminal as meaningless, a lapse into nothing, an escape into nowhere. As I walked past it the motor was throbbing with wheezy reluctance—prep school doctors don't own very desirable getaway cars, I remember thinking to myself—and then I turned the comer of the building and began to creep along behind it. There was only one window lighted, at the far end, and opposite it I found some thin shrubbery which provided enough cover for me to study the window. It was too high for me to see directly into the room, but after I made sure that the ground had softened enough so that I could jump without making much noise, I sprang as high as I could. I had a flashing glimpse of a door at the other end of the room, opening on the corridor. I jumped again; someone's back. Again; nothing new. I jumped again and saw a head and shoulders partially turned away from me; Phil Latham's. This was the room.

 

The ground was too damp to sit on, so I crouched down and waited. I could hear their blurred voices droning monotonously through the window. If they do nothing worse, they're going to bore Finny to death, I said to myself. My head seemed to be full of bright remarks this evening. It was cold crouching motionless next to the ground. I stood up and jumped several times, not so much to see into the room as to warm up. The only sounds were occasional snorts

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from the engine of Dr. Stanpole's car when it turned over with special reluctance, and a thin, lonely whistling the wind sometimes made high in the still-bare trees. These formed the background for the dull hum of talk in Finny's room as Phil Latham, Dr. Stanpole and the night nurse worked over him.

 

What could they be talking about? The night nurse had always been the biggest windbag in the school. Miss Windbag, R.N. Phil Latham, on the other hand, hardly ever spoke. One of the few things he said was "Give it the old college try"—he thought of everything in terms of the old college try, and he had told students to attack their studies, their sports, religious waverings, sexual maladjustments, physical handicaps and a constellation of other problems with the old college try. I listened tensely for his voice. I listened so hard that I nearly differentiated it from the others, and it seemed to be saying, "Finny, give that bone the old college try."

 

I was quite a card tonight myself.

 

Phil Latham's college was Harvard, although I had heard that he only lasted there a year. Probably he had said to someone to give something the old college try, and that had finished him; that would probably be grounds for expulsion at Harvard. There couldn't possibly be such a thing as the old Harvard try. Could there be the old Devon try? The old Devon endeavor? The decrepit Devon endeavor? That was good, the decrepit Devon endeavor. I'd use that some time in the Butt Room. That was pretty funny. I'll bet I could get a rise out of Finny with--

 

Dr. Stanpole was fairly gabby too. What was he always saying. Nothing. Nothing? Well there must be something he was always saying. Everybody had something, some word, some phrase that they were always saying. The trouble with Dr. Stanpole was that his vocabulary was too large. He talked in a huge circle, he probably had a million words in his vocabulary and he had to use them all before he started over again.

 

That's probably the way they were talking in there now. Dr. Stanpole was working his way as fast as possible around his big circle, Miss Windbag was gasping out something or other all the time, and Phil Latham was saying, "Give 'er the old college try, Finny." Phineas of course was answering them only in Latin.

 

I nearly laughed out loud at that.

 

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres—Finny probably answered that whenever Phil Latham spoke. Phil Latham would look rather blank at that.

 

Did Finny like Phil Latham? Yes, of course he did. But wouldn't it be funny if he suddenly turned to him and said, "Phil Latham, you're a boob." That would be funny in a way. And what about if he said, "Dr. Stanpole, old pal, you're the most long-winded licensed medical man alive." And it would be even funnier if he interrupted that night nurse and said, "Miss Windbag, you're rotten, rotten to the core. I just thought I ought to tell you." It would never occur to Finny to say any of these things, but they struck me as so outrageous that I couldn't stop myself from laughing. I put my hand over my mouth; then I tried to stop my mouth with my fist; if I couldn't get control of this laughing they would hear me in the room. I was laughing so hard it

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hurt my stomach and I could feel my face getting more and more flushed; I dug my teeth into my fist to try to gain control and then I noticed that there were tears all over my hand.

 

The engine of Dr. Stanpole's car roared exhaustedly. The headlights turned in an erratic arc away from me, and then I heard the engine laboriously recede into the distance, and I continued to listen until not only had it ceased but my memory of how it sounded had also ceased. The light had gone out in the room and there was no sound coming from it. The only noise was the peculiarly bleak whistling of the wind through the upper branches.

 

There was a street light behind me somewhere through the trees and the windows of the Infirmary dimly reflected it. I came up close beneath the window of Finny's room, found a foothold on a grating beneath it, straightened up so that my shoulders were at a level with the window sill, reached up with both hands, and since I was convinced that the window would be stuck shut I pushed it hard. The window shot up and there was a startled rustling from the bed in the shadows. I whispered, "Finny!" sharply into the black room.

 

"Who is it!" he demanded, leaning out from the bed so that the light fell waveringly on his face. Then he recognized me and I thought at first he was going to get out of bed and help me through the window. He struggled clumsily for such a length of time that even my mind, shocked and slowed as it had been, was able to formulate two realizations: that his leg was bound so that he could not move very well, and that he was struggling to unleash his hate against me.

 

"I came to—"

 

"You want to break something else in me! Is that why you're here!" He thrashed wildly in the darkness, the bed groaning under him and the sheets hissing as he fought against them. But he was not going to be able to get to me, because his matchless coordination was gone. He could not even get up from the bed.

 

"I want to fix your leg up," I said crazily but in a perfectly natural tone of voice which made my words sound even crazier, even to me.

 

"You'll fix my . . ." and he arched out, lunging hopelessly into the space between us. He arched out and then fell, his legs still on the bed, his hands falling with a loud slap against the floor. Then after a pause all the tension drained out of him, and he let his head come slowly down between his hands. He had not hurt himself. But he brought his head slowly down between his hands and rested it against the floor, not moving, not making any sound.

 

"I'm sorry," I said blindly, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

 

I had just control enough to stay out of his room, to let him struggle back into the bed by himself. I slid down from the window, and I remember lying on the ground staring up at the night sky, which was neither clear nor overcast. And I remember later walking alone down a rather aimless road which leads past the gym to an old water hole. I was trying to cope with something that might be called double vision. I saw the gym in the glow of a couple of outside lights near it and I knew of course that it was the Devon gym which I entered every day. It was

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and it wasn't. There was something innately strange about it, as though there had always been an inner core to the gym which I had never perceived before, quite different from its generally accepted appearance. It seemed to alter moment by moment before my eyes, becoming for brief flashes a totally unknown building with a significance much deeper and far more real than any I had noticed before. The same was true of the water hole, where unauthorized games of hockey were played during the winter. The ice was breaking up on it now, with just a few glazed islands of ice remaining in the center and a fringe of hard surface glinting along the banks. The old trees surrounding it all were intensely meaningful, with a message that was very pressing and entirely indecipherable. Here the road turned to the left and became dirt. It proceeded along the lower end of the playing fields, and under the pale night glow the playing fields swept away from me in slight frosty undulations which bespoke meanings upon meanings, levels of reality I had never suspected before, a kind of thronging and epic grandeur which my superficial eyes and cluttered mind had been blind to before. They unrolled away impervious to me as though I were a roaming ghost, not only tonight but always, as though I had never played on them a hundred times, as though my feet had never touched them, as though my whole life at Devon had been a dream, or rather that everything at Devon, the playing fields, the gym, the water hole, and all the other buildings and all the people there were intensely real, wildly alive and totally meaningful, and I alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

 

I reached the bridge which arches over the little Devon River and beyond it the dirt track which curves toward the stadium. The stadium itself, two white concrete banks of seats, was as powerful and alien to me as an Aztec ruin, filled with the traces of vanished people and vanished rites, of supreme emotions and supreme tragedies. The old phrase about "If these walls could only speak" occurred to me and I felt it more deeply than anyone has ever felt it, I felt that the stadium could not only speak but that its words could hold me spellbound. In fact the stadium did speak powerfully and at all times, including this moment. But I could not hear, and that was because I did not exist.

 

I awoke the next morning in a dry and fairly sheltered corner of the ramp underneath the stadium. My neck was stiff from sleeping in an awkward position. The sun was high and the air freshened.

 

I walked back to the center of the school and had breakfast and then went to my room to get a notebook, because this was Wednesday and I had a class at 9:10. But at the door of the room I found a note from Dr. Stanpole. "Please bring some of Finny's clothes and his toilet things to the Infirmary."

 

I took his suitcase from the corner where it had been accumulating dust and put what he would need into it. I didn't know what I was going to say at the Infirmary. I couldn't escape a confusing sense of having lived through all of this before—Phineas in the Infirmary, and myself responsible. I seemed to be less shocked by it now than I had the first time last August, when it had broken over our heads like a thunderclap in a flawless sky. There were hints of much worse things around us now like a faint odor in the air, evoked by words like "plasma"

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and "psycho" and "sulfa," strange words like that with endings like Latin nouns. The newsreels and magazines were choked with images of blazing artillery and bodies half sunk in the sand of a beach somewhere. We members of the Class of 1943 were moving very fast toward the war now, so fast that there were casualties even before we reached it, a mind was clouded and a leg was broken—maybe these should be thought of as minor and inevitable mishaps in the accelerating rush. The air around us was filled with much worse things.

 

In this way I tried to calm myself as I walked with Finny's suitcase toward the Infirmary. After all, I reflected to myself, people were shooting flames into caves and grilling other people alive, ships were being torpedoed and dropping thousands of men in the icy ocean, whole city blocks were exploding into flame in an instant. My brief burst of animosity, lasting only a second, a part of a second, something which came before I could recognize it and was gone before I knew it had possessed me, what was that in the midst of this holocaust?

 

I reached the Infirmary with Finny's suitcase and went inside. The air was laden with hospital smells, not unlike those of the gym except that the Infirmary lacked that sense of spent human vitality. This was becoming the new background of Finny's life, this purely medical element from which bodily health was absent.

 

The corridor happened to be empty, and I walked along it in the grip of a kind of fatal exhilaration. All doubt had been resolved at last. There was a wartime phrase coming into style just then—"this is it"—and although it later became a parody of itself, it had a final flat accuracy which was all that could be said at certain times. This was one of the times: this was it.

 

I knocked and went in. He was stripped to the waist, sitting up in bed leafing through a magazine. I carried my head low by instinct, and I had the courage for only a short glance at him before I said quietly, "I've brought your stuff."

 

"Put the suitcase on the bed here, will you?" The tone of his words fell dead center, without a trace of friendliness or unfriendliness, not interested and not bored, not energetic and not languid.

 

I put it down beside him, and he opened it and began to look through the extra underwear and shirts and socks I had packed. I stood precariously in the middle of the room, trying to find somewhere to look and something to say, wanting desperately to leave and powerless to do so. Phineas went carefully over his clothes, apparently very calm. But it wasn't like him to check with such care, not like him at all. He was taking a long time at it, and then I noticed that as he tried to slide a hairbrush out from under a flap holding it in the case his hands were shaking so badly that he couldn't get it out. Seeing that released me on the spot.

 

"Finny, I tried to tell you before, I tried to tell you when I came to Boston that time—"

 

"I know, I remember that." He couldn't, after all, always keep his voice under control. "What'd you come around here for last night?"

 

"I don't know." I went over to the window and placed my hands on the sill. I looked down at

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them with a sense of detachment, as though they were hands somebody had sculptured and put on exhibition somewhere. "I had to." Then I added, with great difficulty, "I thought I belonged here."

 

I felt him turning to look at me, and so I looked up. He had a particular expression which his face assumed when he understood but didn't think he should show it, a settled, enlightened look; its appearance now was the first decent titling I had seen in a long time.

 

He suddenly slammed his fist against the suitcase. "I wish to God there wasn't any war."

 

I looked sharply at him. "What made you say that?"

 

"I don't know if I can take this with a war on. I don't know."

 

"If you can take—"

 

"What good are you in a war with a busted leg!"

 

"Well you—why there are lots—you can—"

 

He bent over the suitcase again. "I've been writing to the Army and the Navy and the Marines and the Canadians and everybody else all winter. Did you know that? No, you didn't know that. I used the Post Office in town for my return address. They all gave me the same answer after they saw the medical report on me. The answer was no soap. We can't use you. I also wrote the Coast Guard, the Merchant Marine, I wrote to General de Gaulle personally, I also wrote Chiang Kai-shek, and I was about ready to write somebody in Russia."

 

I made an attempt at a grin. "You wouldn't like it in Russia."

 

"I'll hate it everywhere if I'm not in this war! Why do you think I kept saying there wasn't any war all winter? I was going to keep on saying it until two seconds after I got a letter from Ottawa or Chungking or some place saying, 'Yes, you can enlist with us.'" A look of pleased achievement flickered over his face momentarily, as though he had really gotten such a letter. "Then there would have been a war."

 

"Finny," my voice broke but I went on, "Phineas, you wouldn't be any good in the war, even if nothing had happened to your leg."

 

A look of amazement fell over him. It scared me, but I knew what I said was important and right, and my voice found that full tone voices have when they are expressing something long-felt and long-understood and released at last. "They'd get you some place at the front and there'd be a lull in the fighting, and the next thing anyone knew you'd be over with the Germans or the Japs, asking if they'd like to field a baseball team against our side. You'd be sitting in one of their command posts, teaching them English. Yes, you'd get confused and borrow one of their uniforms, and you'd lend them one of yours. Sure, that's just what would happen. You'd get things so scrambled up nobody would know who to fight any more. You'd make a mess, a terrible mess, Finny, out of the war."

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His face had been struggling to stay calm as he listened to me, but now he was crying but trying to control himself. "It was just some kind of blind impulse you had in the tree there, you didn't know what you were doing. Was that it?"

 

"Yes, yes, that was it. Oh that was it, but how can you believe that? How can you believe that? I can't even make myself pretend that you could believe that."

 

"I do, I think I can believe that. I've gotten awfully mad sometimes and almost forgotten what I was doing. I think I believe you, I think I can believe that. Then that was it. Something just seized you. It wasn't anything you really felt against me, it wasn't some kind of hate you've felt all along. It wasn't anything personal."

 

"No, I don't know how to show you, how can I show you, Finny? Tell me how to show you. It was just some ignorance inside me, some crazy thing inside me, something blind, that's all it was."

 

He was nodding his head, his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. "I believe you. It's okay because I understand and I believe you. You've already shown me and I believe you."

The rest of the day passed quickly. Dr. Stanpole had told me in the corridor that he was going to set the bone that afternoon. Come back around 5 o'clock, he had said, when Finny should be coming out of the anaesthesia.

 

I left the Infirmary and went to my 10:10 class, which was on American history. Mr. Patch-Withers gave us a five-minute written quiz on the "necessary and proper" clause of the Constitution. At 11 o'clock I left that building and crossed the Center Common where a few students were already lounging although it was still a little early in the season for that. I went into the First Building, walked up the stairs where Finny had fallen, and joined my 11:10 class, which was in mathematics. We were given a ten-minute trigonometry problem which appeared to solve itself on my paper.

 

At 12 I left the First Building, recrossed the Common and went into the Jared Potter Building for lunch. It was a breaded veal cutlet, spinach, mashed potatoes, and prune whip. At the table we discussed whether there was any saltpeter in the mashed potatoes. I defended the negative.

 

After lunch I walked back to the dormitory with Brinker. He alluded to last night only by asking how Phineas was; I said he seemed to be in good spirits. I went on to my room and read the assigned pages of Le bourgeois gentilhomme. At 2:30 I left my room, and walking along one side of the oval Finny had used for my track workouts during the winter, I reached the Far Common and beyond it the gym. I went past the Trophy Room, downstairs into the pungent air of the locker room, changed into gym pants, and spent an hour wrestling. I pinned my opponent once and he pinned me once. Phil Latham showed me an involved method of escape in which you executed a modified somersault over your opponent's back. He started to talk about the accident but I concentrated on the escape method and the subject was dropped. Then

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I took a shower, dressed, and went back to the dormitory, reread part of Le bourgeois gentilhomme, and at 4:45, instead of going to a scheduled meeting of the Commencement Arrangements Committee, on which I had been persuaded to take Brinker's place, I went to the Infirmary.

 

Dr. Stanpole was not patrolling the corridor as he habitually did when he was not busy, so I sat down on a bench amid the medical smells and waited. After about ten minutes he came walking rapidly out of his office, his head down and his hands sunk in the pockets of his white smock. He didn't notice me until he was almost past me, and then he stopped short. His eyes met mine carefully, and I said, "Well, how is he, sir?" in a calm voice which, the moment after I had spoken, alarmed me unreasonably.

 

Dr. Stanpole sat down next to me and put his capable-looking hand on my leg. "This is something I think boys of your generation are going to see a lot of," he said quietly, "and I will have to tell you about it now. Your friend is dead."

 

He was incomprehensible. I felt an extremely cold chill along my back and neck, that was all. Dr. Stanpole went on talking incomprehensibly. "It was such a simple, clean break. Anyone could have set it. Of course, I didn't send him to Boston. Why should I?"

 

He seemed to expect an answer from me, so I shook my head and repeated, "Why should you?"

 

In the middle of it his heart simply stopped, without warning. I can't explain it. Yes, I can. There is only one explanation. As I was moving the bone some of the marrow must have escaped into his blood stream and gone directly to his heart and stopped it. That's the only possible explanation. The only one. There are risks, there are always risks. An operating room is a place where the risks are just more formal than in other places. An operating room and a war." And I noticed that his self-control was breaking up. "Why did it have to happen to you boys so soon, here at Devon?"

 

"The marrow of his bone . . ." I repeated aimlessly. This at last penetrated my mind. Phineas had died from the marrow of his bone flowing down his blood stream to his heart.

 

I did not cry then or ever about Finny. I did not cry even when I stood watching him being lowered into his family's strait-laced burial ground outside of Boston. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.

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13

The quadrangle surrounding the Far Common was never considered absolutely essential to the Devon School. The essence was elsewhere, in the older, uglier, more comfortable halls enclosing the Center Common. There the School's history had unrolled, the fabled riot scenes and Presidential visits and Civil War musterings, if not in these buildings then in their predecessors on the same site. The upperclassmen and the faculty met there, the budget was compiled there, and there students were expelled. When you said "Devon" to an alumnus ten years after graduation he visualized the Center Common.

 

The Far Common was different, a gift of the rich lady benefactress. It was Georgian like the rest of the school, and it combined scholasticism with grace in the way which made Devon architecturally interesting. But the bricks had been laid a little too skillfully, and the woodwork was not as brittle and chipped as it should have been. It was not the essence of Devon, and so it was donated, without too serious a wrench, to the war.

 

The Far Common could be seen from the window of my room, and early in June I stood at the window and watched the war moving in to occupy it. The advance guard which came down the street from the railroad station consisted of a number of Jeeps, being driven with a certain restraint, their gyration-prone wheels inactive on these old ways which offered nothing bumpier than a few cobblestones. I thought the Jeeps looked noticeably uncomfortable from all the power they were not being allowed to use. There is no stage you comprehend better than the one you have just left, and as I watched the Jeeps almost asserting a wish to bounce up the side of Mount Washington at eighty miles an hour instead of rolling along this dull street, they reminded me, in a comical and a poignant way, of adolescents.

 

Following them there were some heavy trucks painted olive drab, and behind them came the troops. They were not very bellicose-looking; their columns were straggling, their suntan uniforms had gotten rumpled in the train, and they were singing Roll Out the Barrel.

 

"What's that?" Brinker said from behind me, pointing across my shoulder at some open trucks bringing up the rear. "What's in those trucks?"

 

"They look like sewing machines."

 

"They are sewing machines!"

 

"I guess a Parachute Riggers' school has to have sewing machines."

 

"If only Leper had enlisted in the Army Air Force and been assigned to Parachute Riggers' school . . ."

 

"I don't think it would have made any difference," I said. "Let's not talk about Leper."

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"Leper'll be all right. There's nothing like a discharge. Two years after the war's over people will think a Section Eight means a berth on a Pullman car."

 

"Right. Now do you mind? Why talk about something you can't do anything about?"

 

"Right."

 

I had to be right in never talking about what you could not change, and I had to make many people agree that I was right. None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to Phineas, either because they could not believe it or else because they could not understand it. I would have talked about that, but they would not, and I would not talk about Phineas in any other way.

 

The Jeeps, troops, and sewing machines were now drawn up next to the Far Common quadrangle. There was some kind of consultation or ceremony under way on the steps of one of the buildings, Veazy Hall. The Headmaster and a few of the senior members of the faculty stood in a group before the door, and a number of Army Air Force officers stood in another group within easy speaking distance of them. Then the Headmaster advanced several steps and enlarged his gestures; he was apparently addressing the troops. Then an officer took his place and spoke longer and louder; we could hear his voice fairly well but not make out the words.

 

Around them spread a beautiful New England day. Peace lay on Devon like a blessing, the summer's peace, the reprieve, New Hampshire's response to all the cogitation and deadness of winter. There could be no urgency in work during such summers; any parachutes rigged would be no more effective than napkins.

 

Or perhaps that was only true for me and a few others, our gypsy band of the summer before. Or was it rarer even than that; had Chet and Bobby sensed it then, for instance? Had Leper, despite his trays of snails? I could be certain of only two people, Phineas and myself. So now it might be true only for me.

 

The company fell out and began scattering through the Far Common. Dormitory windows began to fly open and olive drab blankets were hung over the sills by the dozens to air. The sewing machines were carried with considerable exertion into Veazy Hall.

 

"Dad's here," said Brinker. "I told him to take his cigar down to the Butt Room. He wants to meet you."

 

We went downstairs and found Mr. Hadley sitting in one of the lumpy chairs, trying not to look offended by the surroundings. But he stood up and shook my hand with genuine cordiality when we came in. He was a distinguished-looking man, taller than Brinker so that his portliness was not very noticeable. His hair was white, thick, and healthy-looking and his face was healthily pink.

 

"You boys look fine, fine," he said in his full and cordial voice, "better I would say than those doughboys—G.I.'s—I saw marching in. And how about their artillery! Sewing machines!"

114

Brinker slid his fingers into the back pockets of his slacks. "This war's so technical they've got to use all kinds of machines, even sewing machines, don't you think so, Gene?"

 

"Well," Mr. Hadley went on emphatically, "I can't imagine any man in my time settling for duty on a sewing machine. I can't picture that at all." Then his temper switched tracks and he smiled cordially again. "But then times change, and wars change. But men don't change, do they? You boys are the image of me and my gang in the old days. It does me good to see you. What are you enlisting in, son," he said, meaning me, "the Marines, the Paratroops? There are doggone many exciting things to enlist in these days. There's that bunch they call the Frogmen, underwater demolition stuff. I'd give something to be a kid again with all that to choose from."

 

"I was going to wait and be drafted," I replied, trying to be polite and answer his question honestly, "but if I did that they might put me straight in the infantry, and that's not only the dirtiest but also the most dangerous branch of all, the worst branch of all. So I've joined the Navy and they're sending me to Pensacola. I'll probably have a lot of training, and I'll never see a foxhole. I hope."

 

"Foxhole" was still a fairly new term and I wasn't sure Mr. Hadley knew what it meant. But I saw that he didn't care for the sound of what I said. "And then Brinker," I added, "is all set for the Coast Guard, which is good too." Mr. Hadley's scowl deepened, although his experienced face partially masked it.

 

"You know, Dad," Brinker broke in, "the Coast Guard does some very rough stuff, putting the men on the beaches, all that dangerous amphibious stuff."

 

His father nodded slightly, looking at the floor, and then said, "You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it's the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment. Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that--partly from that, don't get me wrong—but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come. I know you boys want to see plenty of action, but don't go around talking too much about being comfortable, and which branch of the service has too much dirt and stuff like that. Now I know you—I feel I know you, Gene, as well as I know Brink here—but other people might misunderstand you. You want to serve, that's all. It's your greatest moment, greatest privilege, to serve your country. We're all proud of you, and we're all—old guys like me—we're all darn jealous of you too."

 

I could see that Brinker was more embarrassed by this than I was, but I felt it was his responsibility to answer it. "Well, Dad," he mumbled, "we'll do what we have to."

 

"That's not a very good answer, Brink," he said in a tone struggling to remain reasonable. "After all that's all we can do."

 

"You can do more! A lot more. If you want a military record you can be proud of, you'll do a heck of a lot more than just what you have to. Believe me."

115

Brinker sighed under his breath, his father stiffened, paused, then relaxed with an effort. "Your mother's out in the car. I'd better get back to her. You boys clean up—ah, those shoes," he added reluctantly, in spite of himself, having to, "those shoes, Brink, a little polish?—and we'll see you at the Inn at six."

 

"Okay, Dad."

 

His father, left, trailing the faint, unfamiliar, prosperous aroma of his cigar.

 

"Dad keeps making that speech about serving the country," Brinker said apologetically, "I wish to hell he wouldn't."

 

"That's all right." I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend's shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.

 

"I'm enlisting," he went on, Tm going to 'serve' as he puts it, I may even get killed. But I'll be damned if I'll have that Nathan Hale attitude of his about it. It's all that World War I malarkey that gets me. They're all children about that war, did you never notice?" He flopped comfortably into the chair which had been disconcerting his father. "It gives me a pain, personally. I'm not any kind of hero, and neither are you. And neither is the old man, and he never was, and I don't care what he says he almost did at Château-Thierry."

 

"He's just trying to keep up with the times. He probably feels left out, being too old this time."

 

"Left out!" Brinker s eyes lighted up. "Left out! He and his crowd are responsible for it! And we're going to fight it!"

 

I had heard this generation-complaint from Brinker before, so often that I finally identified this as the source of his disillusionment during the winter, this generalized, faintly self-pitying resentment against millions of people he did not know. He did know his father, however, and so they were not getting along well now. In a way this was Finny's view, except that naturally he saw it comically, as a huge and intensely practical joke, played by fat and foolish old men bungling away behind the scenes.

 

I could never agree with either of them. It would have been comfortable, but I could not believe it. Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.

 

Brinker went upstairs to continue his packing, and I walked over to the gym to clean out my locker. As I crossed the Far Common I saw that it was rapidly becoming unrecognizable, with huge green barrels placed at many strategic points, the ground punctuated by white markers identifying offices and areas, and also certain less tangible things: a kind of snap in the atmosphere, a professional optimism, a conscious maintenance, of high morale. I myself had often been happy at Devon, but such times it seemed to me that afternoon were over now. Happiness had disappeared along with rubber, silk, and many other staples, to be replaced by the wartime synthetic, high morale, for the Duration.

116

At the gym a platoon was undressing in the locker room. The best that could be said for them physically was that they looked wiry in their startling sets of underwear, which were the color of moss.

 

I never talked about Phineas and neither did anyone else; he was, however, present in every moment of every day since Dr, Stanpole had told me. Finny had a vitality which could not be quenched so suddenly, even by the marrow of his bone. That was why I couldn't say anything or listen to anything about him, because he endured so forcefully that what I had to say would have seemed crazy to anyone else—I could not use the past tense, for instance—and what they had to say would be incomprehensible to me. During the time I was with him, Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.

 

No one else I have ever met could do this. All others at some point found something in themselves pitted violently against something in the world around them. With those of my year this point often came when they grasped the fact of the war. When they began to feel that there was this overwhelmingly hostile thing in the world with them, then the simplicity and unity of their characters broke and they were not the same again.

 

Phineas alone had escaped this. He possessed an extra vigor, a heightened confidence in himself, a serene capacity for affection which saved him. Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last I had.

 

The parachute riggers sprinted out of the hallway toward the playing fields. From my locker I collected my sneakers, jock strap, and gym pants and then turned away, leaving the door ajar for the first time, forlornly open and abandoned, the locker unlocked. This was more final than the moment when the Headmaster handed me my diploma. My schooling was over now.

 

I walked down the aisle past the rows of lockers, and instead of turning left toward the exit leading back to my dormitory, I turned right and followed the Army Air Force out onto the playing fields of Devon. A high wooden platform had been erected there and on it stood a barking instructor, giving the rows of men below him calisthenics by the numbers.

 

This kind of regimentation would fasten itself on me in a few weeks. I no longer had any qualms about that, although I couldn't help being glad that it would not be at Devon, at anywhere like Devon, that I would have that. I had no qualms at all; in fact I could feel now the gathering, glowing sense of sureness in the face of it. I was ready for the war, now that I no longer had any hatred to contribute to it. My fury was gone, I felt it gone, dried up at the source, withered and lifeless. Phineas had absorbed it and taken it with him, and I was rid of it forever.

 

The P.T. instructor's voice, like a frog's croak amplified a hundred times, blared out the Army's numerals, "Hut! Hew! Hee! Hore!" behind me as I started back toward the dormitory, and my feet of course could not help but begin to fall involuntarily into step with that coarse,

117

compelling voice, which carried to me like an air-raid siren across the fields and commons.

 

They fell into step then, as they fell into step a few weeks later under the influence of an even louder voice and a stronger sun. Down there I fell into step as well as my nature, Phineas-filled, would allow.

 

I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there.

 

Only Phineas never was afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone. Other people experienced this fearful shock somewhere, this sighting of the enemy, and so began an obsessive labor of defense, began to parry the menace they saw facing them by developing a particular frame of mind, "You see," their behavior toward everything and everyone proclaimed, "I am a humble ant, I am nothing, I am not worthy of this menace," or else, like Mr. Ludsbury, "How dare this threaten me, I am much too good for this sort of handling, I shall rise above this," or else, like Quackenbush, strike out at it always and everywhere, or else, like Brinker, develop a careless general resentment against it, or else, like Leper, emerge from a protective cloud of vagueness only to meet it, the horror, face to face, just as he had always feared, and so give up the struggle absolutely.

 

All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way—if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.

INTRODUCTION 


I looked at my notes and I didn’t like them. I’d spent three days at U.S. Robots 
and might as well have spent them at home with the Encyclopedia Tellurica. 

Susan Calvin had been born in the year 1982, they said, which made her 
seventy-five now. Everyone knew that. Appropriately enough, U.S. Robot and 
Mechanical Men, Inc., was seventy-five also, since it had been in the year of Dr. 
Calvin’s birth that Lawrence Robertson had first taken out incorporation papers 
for what eventually became the strangest industrial giant in man’s history. Well, 
everyone knew that, too. 

At the age of twenty, Susan Calvin had been part of the particular Psycho- 
Math seminar at which Dr. Alfred Panning of U.S. Robots had demonstrated the 
first mobile robot to be equipped with a voice. It was a large, clumsy unbeautiful 
robot, smelling of machine-oil and destined for the projected mines on Mercury. 
—But it could speak and make sense. 

Susan said nothing at that seminar; took no part in the hectic discussion 
period that followed. She was a frosty girl, plain and colorless, who protected 
herself against a world she disliked by a mask-like expression and a hypertrophy 
of intellect. But as she watched and listened, she felt the stirrings of a cold 
enthusiasm. 

She obtained her bachelor’s degree at Columbia in 2003 and began graduate 
work in cybernetics. 

All that had been done in the mid-twentieth century on “calculating 
machines” had been upset by Robertson and his positronic brain-paths. The 
miles of relays and photocells had given way to the spongy globe of 
plantinumiridium about the size of a human brain. 

She learned to calculate the parameters necessary to fix the possible variables 
within the “positronic brain”; to construct “brains” on paper such that the 
responses to given stimuli could be accurately predicted. 

In 2008, she obtained her Ph.D. and joined United States Robots as a 
“Robopsychologist,” becoming the first great practitioner of a new science. 



Lawrence Robertson was still president of the corporation; Alfred banning had 
become director of research. 


For fifty years, she watched the direction of human progress change—and 
leap ahead. 

Now she was retiring—as much as she ever could. At least, she was allowing 
someone else’s name to be inset upon the door of her office. 

That, essentially, was what I had. I had a long list of her published papers, of 
the patents in her name; I had the chronological details of her promotions—In 
short I had her professional “vita” in full detail. 

But that wasn’t what I wanted. 

I needed more than that for my feature articles for Interplanetary Press. Much 
more. 

I told her so. 

“Dr. Calvin,” I said, as lushly as possible, “in the mind of the public you and 
U.S. Robots are identical. Your retirement will end an era and —” 

“You want the human-interest angle?” She didn’t smile at me. I don’t think she 
ever smiles. But her eyes were sharp, though not angry. I felt her glance slide 
through me and out my occiput and knew that I was uncommonly transparent to 
her; that everybody was. 

But I said, “That’s right. ” 

“Human interest out of robots ? A contradiction. ” 

“No, doctor. Out of you. ” 

“Well, I’ve been called a robot myself. Surely, they’ve told you I’m not 
human. ” 

They had, but there was no point in saying so. 

She got up from her chair. She wasn’t tall and she looked frail. I followed her 



to the window and we looked out. 


The offices and factories of U.S. Robots were a small city; spaced and 
planned. It was flattened out like an aerial photograph. 

“When I first came here,” she said, “I had a little room in a building right 
about there where the firehouse is now. ” She pointed. “It was torn down before 
you were born. I shared the room with three others. I had half a desk. We built 
our robots all in one building. Output—three a week. Now look at us. ” 

“Fiftyyears,” I hackneyed, “is a long time. ” 

“Not when you’re looking back at them,” she said. “You wonder how they 
vanished so quickly. ” 

She went back to her desk and sat down. She didn’t need expression on her 
face to look sad, somehow. 

“How old are you?” she wanted to know. 

“Thirty-two, ” I said. 

“Then you don’t remember a world without robots. There was a time when 
humanity faced the universe alone and without a friend. Now he has creatures to 
help him; stronger creatures than himself, more faithful, more useful, and 
absolutely devoted to him. Mankind is no longer alone. Have you ever thought of 
it that way?” 

“I’m afraid I haven’t. May I quote you?” 

“You may. To you, a robot is a robot. Gears and metal; electricity and 
positrons.—Mind and iron! Human-made! If necessary, human-destroyed! But 
you haven’t worked with them, so you don’t know them. They’re a cleaner better 
breed than we are. ” 

I tried to nudge her gently with words, “We’d like to hear some of the things 
you could tell us; get your views on robots. The Interplanetary Press reaches the 
entire Solar System. Potential audience is three billion, Dr. Calvin. They ought to 
know what you could tell them on robots. ” 



It wasn’t necessary to nudge. She didn’t hear me, but she was moving in the 
right direction. 

“They might have known that from the start. We sold robots for Earth-use then 
—before my time it was, even. Of course, that was when robots could not talk. 
Afterward, they became more human and opposition began. The labor unions, of 
course, naturally opposed robot competition for human jobs, and various 
segments of religious opinion had their superstitious objections. It was all quite 
ridiculous and quite useless. And yet there it was. ” 

I was taking it down verbatim on my pocket-recorder, trying not to show the 
knuckle-motions of my hand. If you practice a bit, you can get to the point where 
you can record accurately without taking the little gadget out of your pocket. 

“Take the case of Robbie,” she said. “I never knew him. He was dismantled 
the year before I joined the company—hopelessly out-of-date. But I saw the little 
girl in the museum —” 

She stopped, but I didn’t say anything. I let her eyes mist up and her mind 
travel back. She had lots of time to cover. 

“I heard about it later, and when they called us blasphemers and demon¬ 
creators, I always thought of him. Robbie was a non-vocal robot. He couldn’t 
speak. He was made and sold in 1996. Those were the days before extreme 
specialization, so he was sold as a nursemaid —” 

“As a what?” 


“As a nursemaid —” 



ROBBIE 


“Ninety-eight—ninety-nine—one hundred.” Gloria withdrew her chubby little 
forearm from before her eyes and stood for a moment, wrinkling her nose and 
blinking in the sunlight. Then, trying to watch in all directions at once, she 
withdrew a few cautious steps from the tree against which she had been leaning. 

She craned her neck to investigate the possibilities of a clump of bushes to the 
right and then withdrew farther to obtain a better angle for viewing its dark 
recesses. The quiet was profound except for the incessant buzzing of insects and 
the occasional chirrup of some hardy bird, braving the midday sun. 

Gloria pouted, “I bet he went inside the house, and I’ve told him a million 
times that that’s not fair.” 

With tiny lips pressed together tightly and a severe frown crinkling her 
forehead, she moved determinedly toward the two-story building up past the 
driveway. 

Too late she heard the rustling sound behind her, followed by the distinctive 
and rhythmic clump-clump of Robbie’s metal feet. She whirled about to see her 
triumphing companion emerge from hiding and make for the home-tree at full 
speed. 

Gloria shrieked in dismay. “Wait, Robbie! That wasn’t fair, Robbie! You 
promised you wouldn’t run until I found you.” Her little feet could make no 
headway at all against Robbie’s giant strides. Then, within ten feet of the goal, 
Robbie’s pace slowed suddenly to the merest of crawls, and Gloria, with one 
final burst of wild speed, dashed pantingly past him to touch the welcome bark 
of home-tree first. 

Gleefully, she turned on the faithful Robbie, and with the basest of ingratitude, 
rewarded him for his sacrifice by taunting him cruelly for a lack of running 
ability. 

“Robbie can’t run,” she shouted at the top of her eight-year-old voice. “I can 



beat him any day. I can beat him any day.” She chanted the words in a shrill 
rhythm. 

Robbie didn’t answer, of course—not in words. He pantomimed running 
instead, inching away until Gloria found herself running after him as he dodged 
her narrowly, forcing her to veer in helpless circles, little arms outstretched and 
fanning at the air. 

“Robbie,” she squealed, “stand still!”—And the laughter was forced out of her 
in breathless jerks. 

—Until he turned suddenly and caught her up, whirling her round, so that for 
her the world fell away for a moment with a blue emptiness beneath, and green 
trees stretching hungrily downward toward the void. Then she was down in the 
grass again, leaning against Robbie’s leg and still holding a hard, metal finger. 

After a while, her breath returned. She pushed uselessly at her disheveled hair 
in vague imitation of one of her mother’s gestures and twisted to see if her dress 
were torn. 

She slapped her hand against Robbie’s torso, “Bad boy! I’ll spank you!” 

And Robbie cowered, holding his hands over his face so that she had to add, 
“No, I won’t, Robbie. I won’t spank you. But anyway, it’s my turn to hide now 
because you’ve got longer legs and you promised not to run till I found you.” 

Robbie nodded his head—a small parallelepiped with rounded edges and 
corners attached to a similar but much larger parallelepiped that served as torso 
by means of a short, flexible stalk—and obediently faced the tree. A thin, metal 
film descended over his glowing eyes and from within his body came a steady, 
resonant ticking. 

“Don’t peek now—and don’t skip any numbers,” warned Gloria, and scurried 
for cover. 

With unvarying regularity, seconds were ticked off, and at the hundredth, up 
went the eyelids, and the glowing red of Robbie’s eyes swept the prospect. They 
rested for a moment on a bit of colorful gingham that protruded from behind a 
boulder. He advanced a few steps and convinced himself that it was Gloria who 
squatted behind it. 



Slowly, remaining always between Gloria and home-tree, he advanced on the 
hiding place, and when Gloria was plainly in sight and could no longer even 
theorize to herself that she was not seen, he extended one arm toward her, 
slapping the other against his leg so that it rang again. Gloria emerged sulkily. 

“You peeked!” she exclaimed, with gross unfairness. “Besides I’m tired of 
playing hide-and-seek. I want a ride.” 

But Robbie was hurt at the unjust accusation, so he seated himself carefully 
and shook his head ponderously from side to side. 

Gloria changed her tone to one of gentle coaxing immediately, “Come on, 
Robbie. I didn’t mean it about the peeking. Give me a ride.” 

Robbie was not to be won over so easily, though. He gazed stubbornly at the 
sky, and shook his head even more emphatically. 

“Please, Robbie, please give me a ride.” She encircled his neck with rosy arms 
and hugged tightly. Then, changing moods in a moment, she moved away. “If 
you don’t, I’m going to cry,” and her face twisted appallingly in preparation. 

Hard-hearted Robbie paid scant attention to this dreadful possibility, and 
shook his head a third time. Gloria found it necessary to play her trump card. 

“If you don’t,” she exclaimed warmly, “I won’t tell you any more stories, 
that’s all. Not one—” 

Robbie gave in immediately and unconditionally before this ultimatum, 
nodding his head vigorously until the metal of his neck hummed. Carefully, he 
raised the little girl and placed her on his broad, flat shoulders. 

Gloria’s threatened tears vanished immediately and she crowed with delight. 
Robbie’s metal skin, kept at a constant temperature of seventy by the high 
resistance coils within, felt nice and comfortable, while the beautifully loud 
sound her heels made as they bumped rhythmically against his chest was 
enchanting. 

“You’re an air-coaster, Robbie, you’re a big, silver air-coaster. Hold out your 
arms straight. —You got to, Robbie, if you’re going to be an air-coaster.” 



The logic was irrefutable. Robbie’s arms were wings catching the air currents 
and he was a silver ’coaster. 

Gloria twisted the robot’s head and leaned to the right. He banked sharply. 
Gloria equipped the ’coaster with a motor that went “Br-r-r” and then with 
weapons that went “Powie” and “Sh-sh-shshsh.” Pirates were giving chase and 
the ship’s blasters were coming into play. The pirates dropped in a steady rain. 

“Got another one. —Two more,” she cried. 

Then “Faster, men,” Gloria said pompously, “we’re running out of 
ammunition.” She aimed over her shoulder with undaunted courage and Robbie 
was a blunt-nosed spaceship zooming through the void at maximum 
acceleration. 

Clear across the field he sped, to the patch of tall grass on the other side, 
where he stopped with a suddenness that evoked a shriek from his flushed rider, 
and then tumbled her onto the soft, green carpet. 

Gloria gasped and panted, and gave voice to intermittent whispered 
exclamations of “That was nice!” 

Robbie waited until she had caught her breath and then pulled gently at a lock 
of hair. 

“You want something?” said Gloria, eyes wide in an apparently artless 
complexity that fooled her huge “nursemaid” not at all. He pulled the curl 
harder. 

“Oh, I know. You want a story.” 

Robbie nodded rapidly. 

“Which one?” 

Robbie made a semi-circle in the air with one finger. 

The little girl protested, “Again? I’ve told you Cinderella a million times. 
Aren’t you tired of it? —It’s for babies.” 



Another semi-circle. 


“Oh, well,” Gloria composed herself, ran over the details of the tale in her 
mind (together with her own elaborations, of which she had several) and began: 

“Are you ready? Well—once upon a time there was a beautiful little girl 
whose name was Ella. And she had a terribly cruel step-mother and two very 
ugly and very cruel step-sisters and—” 


Gloria was reaching the very climax of the tale—midnight was striking and 
everything was changing back to the shabby originals lickety-split, while Robbie 
listened tensely with burning eyes—when the interruption came. 

“Gloria!” 

It was the high-pitched sound of a woman who has been calling not once, but 
several times; and had the nervous tone of one in whom anxiety was beginning 
to overcome impatience. 

“Mamma’s calling me,” said Gloria, not quite happily. “You’d better carry me 
back to the house, Robbie.” 

Robbie obeyed with alacrity for somehow there was that in him which judged 
it best to obey Mrs. Weston, without as much as a scrap of hesitation. Gloria’s 
father was rarely home in the daytime except on Sunday—today, for instance— 
and when he was, he proved a genial and understanding person. Gloria’s mother, 
however, was a source of uneasiness to Robbie and there was always the impulse 
to sneak away from her sight. 

Mrs. Weston caught sight of them the minute they rose above the masking 
tufts of long grass and retired inside the house to wait. 

“I’ve shouted myself hoarse, Gloria,” she said, severely. “Where were you?” 

“I was with Robbie,” quavered Gloria. “I was telling him Cinderella, and I 
forgot it was dinner-time.” 

“Well, it’s a pity Robbie forgot, too.” Then, as if that reminded her of the 



robot’s presence, she whirled upon him. “You may go, Robbie. She doesn’t need 
you now.” Then, brutally, “And don’t come back till I call you.” 


Robbie turned to go, but hesitated as Gloria cried out in his defense, “Wait, 
Mamma, you got to let him stay. I didn’t finish Cinderella for him. I said I would 
tell him Cinderella and I’m not finished.” 

“Gloria!” 

“Honest and truly, Mamma, he’ll stay so quiet, you won’t even know he’s 
here. He can sit on the chair in the corner, and he won’t say a word,—I mean he 
won’t do anything. Will you, Robbie?” 

Robbie, appealed to, nodded his massive head up and down once. 

“Gloria, if you don’t stop this at once, you shan’t see Robbie for a whole 
week.” 

The girl’s eyes fell, “All right! But Cinderella is his favorite story and I didn’t 
finish it. —And he likes it so much.” 

The robot left with a disconsolate step and Gloria choked back a sob. 


George Weston was comfortable. It was a habit of his to be comfortable on 
Sunday afternoons. A good, hearty dinner below the hatches; a nice, soft, 
dilapidated couch on which to sprawl; a copy of the Times; slippered feet and 
shirtless chest;—how could anyone help but be comfortable? 

He wasn’t pleased, therefore, when his wife walked in. After ten years of 
married life, he still was so unutterably foolish as to love her, and there was no 
question that he was always glad to see her—still Sunday afternoons just after 
dinner were sacred to him and his idea of solid comfort was to be left in utter 
solitude for two or three hours. Consequently, he fixed his eye firmly upon the 
latest reports of the Lefebre-Yoshida expedition to Mars (this one was to take off 
from Lunar Base and might actually succeed) and pretended she wasn’t there. 

Mrs. Weston waited patiently for two minutes, then impatiently for two more, 
and finally broke the silence. 



“George!” 

“Hmpph?” 

“George, I say! Will you put down that paper and look at me?” 

The paper rustled to the floor and Weston turned a weary face toward his wife, 
“What is it, dear?” 

“You know what it is, George. It’s Gloria and that terrible machine.” 

“What terrible machine?” 

“Now don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s that robot 
Gloria calls Robbie. He doesn’t leave her for a moment.” 

“Well, why should he? He’s not supposed to. And he certainly isn’t a terrible 
machine. He’s the best darn robot money can buy and I’m damned sure he set 
me back half a year’s income. He’s worth it, though—darn sight cleverer than 
half my office staff.” 

He made a move to pick up the paper again, but his wife was quicker and 
snatched it away. 

“You listen to me, George. I won’t have my daughter entrusted to a machine— 
and I don’t care how clever it is. It has no soul, and no one knows what it may be 
thinking. A child just isn’t made to be guarded by a thing of metal.” 

Weston frowned, “When did you decide this? He’s been with Gloria two years 
now and I haven’t seen you worry till now.” 

“It was different at first. It was a novelty; it took a load off me, and—and it 
was a fashionable thing to do. But now I don’t know. The neighbors—” 

“Well, what have the neighbors to do with it. Now, look. A robot is infinitely 
more to be trusted than a human nursemaid. Robbie was constructed for only one 
purpose really—to be the companion of a little child. His entire ‘mentality’ has 
been created for the purpose. He just can’t help being faithful and loving and 
kind. He’s a machine —made so. That’s more than you can say for humans.” 



“But something might go wrong. Some—some—” Mrs. Weston was a bit 
hazy about the insides of a robot, “some little jigger will come loose and the 
awful thing will go berserk and—and—” She couldn’t bring herself to complete 
the quite obvious thought. 

“Nonsense,” Weston denied, with an involuntary nervous shiver. “That’s 
completely ridiculous. We had a long discussion at the time we bought Robbie 
about the First Law of Robotics. You know that it is impossible for a robot to 
harm a human being; that long before enough can go wrong to alter that First 
Law, a robot would be completely inoperable. It’s a mathematical impossibility. 
Besides I have an engineer from U.S. Robots here twice a year to give the poor 
gadget a complete overhaul. Why, there’s no more chance of anything at all 
going wrong with Robbie than there is of you or I suddenly going looney— 
considerably less, in fact. Besides, how are you going to take him away from 
Gloria?” 

He made another futile stab at the paper and his wife tossed it angrily into the 
next room. 

“That’s just it, George! She won’t play with anyone else. There are dozens of 
little boys and girls that she should make friends with, but she won’t. She won’t 
go near them unless I make her. That’s no way for a little girl to grow up. You 
want her to be normal, don’t you? You want her to be able to take her part in 
society.” 

“You’re jumping at shadows, Grace. Pretend Robbie’s a dog. I’ve seen 
hundreds of children who would rather have their dog than their father.” 

“A dog is different, George. We must get rid of that horrible thing. You can 
sell it back to the company. I’ve asked, and you can.” 

“You’ve asked ? Now look here, Grace, let’s not go off the deep end. We’re 
keeping the robot until Gloria is older and I don’t want the subject brought up 
again.” And with that he walked out of the room in a huff. 


Mrs. Weston met her husband at the door two evenings later. “You’ll have to 
listen to this, George. There’s bad feeling in the village.” 



“About what?” asked Weston. He stepped into the washroom and drowned out 
any possible answer by the splash of water. 

Mrs. Weston waited. She said, “About Robbie.” 

Weston stepped out, towel in hand, face red and angry, “What are you talking 
about?” 

“Oh, it’s been building up and building up. I’ve tried to close my eyes to it, 
but I’m not going to any more. Most of the villagers consider Robbie dangerous. 
Children aren’t allowed to go near our place in the evenings.” 

“We trust our child with the thing.” 

“Well, people aren’t reasonable about these things.” 

“Then to hell with them.” 

“Saying that doesn’t solve the problem. I’ve got to do my shopping down 
there. I’ve got to meet them every day. And it’s even worse in the city these days 
when it comes to robots. New York has just passed an ordinance keeping all 
robots off the streets between sunset and sunrise.” 

“All right, but they can’t stop us from keeping a robot in our home. —Grace, 
this is one of your campaigns. I recognize it. But it’s no use. The answer is still 
no! We’re keeping Robbie!” 


And yet he loved his wife—and what was worse, his wife knew it. George 
Weston, after all was only a man—poor thing—and his wife made full use of 
every device which a clumsier and more scrupulous sex has learned, with reason 
and futility, to fear. 

Ten times in the ensuing week, he cried, “Robbie stays,—and that’s final]” 
and each time it was weaker and accompanied by a louder and more agonized 
groan. 

Came the day at last, when Weston approached his daughter guiltily and 
suggested a “beautiful” visivox show in the village. 



Gloria clapped her hands happily, “Can Robbie go?” 


“No, dear,” he said, and winced at the sound of his voice, “they won’t allow 
robots at the visivox—but you can tell him all about it when you get home.” He 
stumbled all over the last few words and looked away. 

Gloria came back from town bubbling over with enthusiasm, for the visivox 
had been a gorgeous spectacle indeed. 

She waited for her father to maneuver the jet-car into the sunken garage, 
“Wait till I tell Robbie, Daddy. He would have liked it like anything. — 
Especially when Francis Fran was backing away so-o-o quietly, and backed right 
into one of the Feopard-Men and had to run.” She laughed again, “Daddy, are 
there really Feopard-Men on the Moon?” 

“Probably not,” said Weston absently. “It’s just funny make-believe.” He 
couldn’t take much longer with the car. He’d have to face it. 

Gloria ran across the lawn. “Robbie. —Robbie!” 

Then she stopped suddenly at the sight of a beautiful collie which regarded 
her out of serious brown eyes as it wagged its tail on the porch. 

“Oh, what a nice dog!” Gloria climbed the steps, approached cautiously and 
patted it. “Is it for me, Daddy?” 

Her mother had joined them. “Yes, it is, Gloria. Isn’t it nice—soft and furry. 
It’s very gentle. It likes little girls.” 

“Can he play games?” 

“Surely. He can do any number of tricks. Would you like to see some?” 

“Right away. I want Robbie to see him, too. — Robbie!” She stopped, 
uncertainly, and frowned, “I’ll bet he’s just staying in his room because he’s mad 
at me for not taking him to the visivox. You’ll have to explain to him, Daddy. He 
might not believe me, but he knows if you say it, it’s so.” 

Weston’s lips grew tighter. He looked toward his wife but could not catch her 
eye. 



Gloria turned precipitously and ran down the basement steps, shouting as she 
went, “Robbie— Come and see what Daddy and Mamma brought me. They 
brought me a dog, Robbie.” 

In a minute she had returned, a frightened little girl. “Mamma, Robbie isn’t in 
his room. Where is he?” There was no answer and George Weston coughed and 
was suddenly extremely interested in an aimlessly drifting cloud. Gloria’s voice 
quavered on the verge of tears, “Where’s Robbie, Mamma?” 

Mrs. Weston sat down and drew her daughter gently to her, “Don’t feel bad, 
Gloria. Robbie has gone away, I think.” 

“Gone away ? Where? Where’s he gone away, Mamma?” 

“No one knows, darling. He just walked away. We’ve looked and we’ve 
looked and we’ve looked for him, but we can’t find him.” 

“You mean he’ll never come back again?” Her eyes were round with horror. 

“We may find him soon. We’ll keep looking for him. And meanwhile you can 
play with your nice new doggie. Look at him! His name is Lightning and he can 


But Gloria’s eyelids had overflown, “I don’t want the nasty dog—I want 
Robbie. I want you to find me Robbie.” Her feelings became too deep for words, 
and she spluttered into a shrill wail. 

Mrs. Weston glanced at her husband for help, but he merely shuffled his feet 
morosely and did not withdraw his ardent stare from the heavens, so she bent to 
the task of consolation, “Why do you cry, Gloria? Robbie was only a machine, 
just a nasty old machine. He wasn’t alive at all.” 

“He was not no machine!” screamed Gloria, fiercely and ungrammatically. 
“He was a person just like you and me and he was my friend. I want him back. 
Oh, Mamma, I want him back.” 

Her mother groaned in defeat and left Gloria to her sorrow. 

“Let her have her cry out,” she told her husband. “Childish griefs are never 
lasting. In a few days, she’ll forget that awful robot ever existed.” 



But time proved Mrs. Weston a bit too optimistic. To be sure, Gloria ceased 
crying, but she ceased smiling, too, and the passing days found her ever more 
silent and shadowy. Gradually, her attitude of passive unhappiness wore Mrs. 
Weston down and all that kept her from yielding was the impossibility of 
admitting defeat to her husband. 

Then, one evening, she flounced into the living room, sat down, folded her 
arms and looked boiling mad. 

Her husband stretched his neck in order to see her over his newspaper, “What 
now, Grace?” 

“It’s that child, George. I’ve had to send back the dog today. Gloria positively 
couldn’t stand the sight of him, she said. She’s driving me into a nervous 
breakdown.” 

Weston laid down the paper and a hopeful gleam entered his eye, “Maybe— 
Maybe we ought to get Robbie back. It might be done, you know. I can get in 
touch with—” 

“No!” she replied, grimly. “I won’t hear of it. We’re not giving up that easily. 
My child shall not be brought up by a robot if it takes years to break her of it.” 

Weston picked up his paper again with a disappointed air. “A year of this will 
have me prematurely gray.” 

“You’re a big help, George,” was the frigid answer. “What Gloria needs is a 
change of environment. Of course she can’t forget Robbie here. How can she 
when every tree and rock reminds her of him? It is really the silliest situation I 
have ever heard of. Imagine a child pining away for the loss of a robot.” 

“Well, stick to the point. What’s the change in environment you’re planning?” 

“We’re going to take her to New York.” 

“The city! In August! Say, do you know what New York is like in August? It’s 
unbearable.” 


“Millions do bear it.” 



“They don’t have a place like this to go to. If they didn’t have to stay in New 
York, they wouldn’t.” 

“Well, we have to. I say we’re leaving now—or as soon as we can make the 
arrangements. In the city, Gloria will find sufficient interests and sufficient 
friends to perk her up and make her forget that machine.” 

“Oh, Lord,” groaned the lesser half, “those frying pavements!” 

“We have to,” was the unshaken response. “Gloria has lost five pounds in the 
last month and my little girl’s health is more important to me than your 
comfort.” 

“It’s a pity you didn’t think of your little girl’s health before you deprived her 
of her pet robot,” he muttered—but to himself. 


Gloria displayed immediate signs of improvement when told of the impending 
trip to the city. She spoke little of it, but when she did, it was always with lively 
anticipation. Again, she began to smile and to eat with something of her former 
appetite. 

Mrs. Weston hugged herself for joy and lost no opportunity to triumph over 
her still skeptical husband. 

“You see, George, she helps with the packing like a little angel, and chatters 
away as if she hadn’t a care in the world. It’s just as I told you—all we need do 
is substitute other interests.” 

“Hmpph,” was the skeptical response, “I hope so.” 

Preliminaries were gone through quickly. Arrangements were made for the 
preparation of their city home and a couple were engaged as housekeepers for 
the country home. When the day of the trip finally did come, Gloria was all but 
her old self again, and no mention of Robbie passed her lips at all. 

In high good humor the family took a taxi-gyro to the airport (Weston would 
have preferred using his own private ’gyro, but it was only a two-seater with no 
room for baggage) and entered the waiting liner. 



“Come, Gloria,” called Mrs. Weston. “I’ve saved you a seat near the window 
so you can watch the scenery.” 

Gloria trotted down the aisle cheerily, flattened her nose into a white oval 
against the thick clear glass, and watched with an intentness that increased as the 
sudden coughing of the motor drifted backward into the interior. She was too 
young to be frightened when the ground dropped away as if let through a trap¬ 
door and she herself suddenly became twice her usual weight, but not too young 
to be mightily interested. It wasn’t until the ground had changed into a tiny 
patch-work quilt that she withdrew her nose, and faced her mother again. 

“Will we soon be in the city, Mamma?” she asked, rubbing her chilled nose, 
and watching with interest as the patch of moisture which her breath had formed 
on the pane shrank slowly and vanished. 

“In about half an hour, dear.” Then, with just the faintest trace of anxiety, 
“Aren’t you glad we’re going? Don’t you think you’ll be very happy in the city 
with all the buildings and people and things to see? We’ll go to the visivox every 
day and see shows and go to the circus and the beach and—” 

“Yes, Mamma,” was Gloria’s unenthusiastic rejoinder. The liner passed over a 
bank of clouds at the moment, and Gloria was instantly absorbed in the usual 
spectacle of clouds underneath one. Then they were over clear sky again, and 
she turned to her mother with a sudden mysterious air of secret knowledge. 

“I know why we’re going to the city, Mamma.” 

“Do you?” Mrs. Weston was puzzled. “Why, dear?” 

“You didn’t tell me because you wanted it to be a surprise, but / know.” For a 
moment, she was lost in admiration at her own acute penetration, and then she 
laughed gaily. “We’re going to New York so we can find Robbie, aren’t we? — 
With detectives.” 

The statement caught George Weston in the middle of a drink of water, with 
disastrous results. There was a sort of strangled gasp, a geyser of water, and then 
a bout of choking coughs. When all was over, he stood there, a red-faced, water- 
drenched and very, very annoyed person. 


Mrs. Weston maintained her composure, but when Gloria repeated her 



question in a more anxious tone of voice, she found her temper rather bent. 


“Maybe,” she retorted, tartly. “Now sit and be still, for Heaven’s sake.” 


New York City, 1998 A.D., was a paradise for the sightseer more than ever in its 
history. Gloria’s parents realized this and made the most of it. 

On direct orders from his wife, George Weston arranged to have his business 
take care of itself for a month or so, in order to be free to spend the time in what 
he termed “dissipating Gloria to the verge of ruin.” Like everything else Weston 
did, this was gone about in an efficient, thorough, and business-like way. Before 
the month had passed, nothing that could be done had not been done. 

She was taken to the top of the half-mile tall Roosevelt Building, to gaze 
down in awe upon the jagged panorama of rooftops that blended far off in the 
fields of Long Island and the flatlands of New Jersey. They visited the zoos 
where Gloria stared in delicious fright at the “real live lion” (rather disappointed 
that the keepers fed him raw steaks, instead of human beings, as she had 
expected), and asked insistently and peremptorily to see “the whale.” 

The various museums came in for their share of attention, together with the 
parks and the beaches and the aquarium. 

She was taken halfway up the Hudson in an excursion steamer fitted out in the 
archaism of the mad Twenties. She travelled into the stratosphere on an 
exhibition trip, where the sky turned deep purple and the stars came out and the 
misty earth below looked like a huge concave bowl. Down under the waters of 
the Long Island Sound she was taken in a glass-walled subsea vessel, where in a 
green and wavering world, quaint and curious sea-things ogled her and wiggled 
suddenly away. 

On a more prosaic level, Mrs. Weston took her to the department stores where 
she could revel in another type of fairyland. 

In fact, when the month had nearly sped, the Westons were convinced that 
everything conceivable had been done to take Gloria’s mind once and for all off 
the departed Robbie—but they were not quite sure they had succeeded. 



The fact remained that wherever Gloria went, she displayed the most absorbed 
and concentrated interest in such robots as happened to be present. No matter 
how exciting the spectacle before her, nor how novel to her girlish eyes, she 
turned away instantly if the corner of her eye caught a glimpse of metallic 
movement. 

Mrs. Weston went out of her way to keep Gloria away from all robots. 

And the matter was finally climaxed in the episode at the Museum of Science 
and Industry. The Museum had announced a special “children’s program” in 
which exhibits of scientific witchery scaled down to the child mind were to be 
shown. The Westons, of course, placed it upon their list of “absolutely.” 

It was while the Westons were standing totally absorbed in the exploits of a 
powerful electro-magnet that Mrs. Weston suddenly became aware of the fact 
that Gloria was no longer with her. Initial panic gave way to calm decision and, 
enlisting the aid of three attendants, a careful search was begun. 

Gloria, of course, was not one to wander aimlessly, however. For her age, she 
was an unusually determined and purposeful girl, quite full of the maternal genes 
in that respect. She had seen a huge sign on the third floor, which had said, “This 
Way to the Talking Robot.” Having spelled it out to herself and having noticed 
that her parents did not seem to wish to move in the proper direction, she did the 
obvious thing. Waiting for an opportune moment of parental distraction, she 
calmly disengaged herself and followed the sign. 


The Talking Robot was a tour de force, a thoroughly impractical device, 
possessing publicity value only. Once an hour, an escorted group stood before it 
and asked questions of the robot engineer in charge in careful whispers. Those 
the engineer decided were suitable for the robot’s circuits were transmitted to the 
Talking Robot. 

It was rather dull. It may be nice to know that the square of fourteen is one 
hundred ninety-six, that the temperature at the moment is 72 degrees Fahrenheit, 
and the air pressure 30.02 inches of mercury, that the atomic weight of sodium is 
23, but one doesn’t really need a robot for that. One especially does not need an 
unwieldy, totally immobile mass of wires and coils spreading over twenty-five 



square yards. 


Few people bothered to return for a second helping, but one girl in her middle 
teens sat quietly on a bench waiting for a third. She was the only one in the room 
when Gloria entered. 

Gloria did not look at her. To her at the moment, another human being was but 
an inconsiderable item. She saved her attention for this large thing with the 
wheels. For a moment, she hesitated in dismay. It didn’t look like any robot she 
had ever seen. 

Cautiously and doubtfully she raised her treble voice, “Please, Mr. Robot, sir, 
are you the Talking Robot, sir?” She wasn’t sure, but it seemed to her that a 
robot that actually talked was worth a great deal of politeness. 

(The girl in her mid-teens allowed a look of intense concentration to cross her 
thin, plain face. She whipped out a small notebook and began writing in rapid 
pothooks.) 

There was an oily whir of gears and a mechanically timbered voice boomed 
out in words that lacked accent and intonation, “I—am—the—robot—that— 
talks.” 

Gloria stared at it ruefully. It did talk, but the sound came from inside 
somewheres. There was no face to talk to. She said, “Can you help me, Mr. 
Robot, sir?” 

The Talking Robot was designed to answer questions, and only such questions 
as it could answer had ever been put to it. It was quite confident of its ability, 
therefore, “I—can—help—you.” 

“Thank you, Mr. Robot, sir. Have you seen Robbie?” 

“Who—is Robbie?” 

“He’s a robot, Mr. Robot, sir.” She stretched to tiptoes. “He’s about so high, 
Mr. Robot, sir, only higher, and he’s very nice. He’s got a head, you know. I 
mean you haven’t, but he has, Mr. Robot, sir.” 

The Talking Robot had been left behind, “A—robot?” 



“Yes, Mr. Robot, sir. A robot just like you, except he can’t talk, of course, and 
—looks like a real person.” 

“A—robot—like—me?” 

“Yes, Mr. Robot, sir.” 

To which the Talking Robot’s only response was an erratic splutter and an 
occasional incoherent sound. The radical generalization offered it, i.e., its 
existence, not as a particular object, but as a member of a general group, was too 
much for it. Loyally, it tried to encompass the concept and half a dozen coils 
burnt out. Little warning signals were buzzing. 

(The girl in her mid-teens left at that point. She had enough for her Physics-1 
paper on “Practical Aspects of Robotics.” This paper was Susan Calvin’s first of 
many on the subject.) 

Gloria stood waiting, with carefully concealed impatience, for the machine’s 
answer when she heard the cry behind her of “There she is,” and recognized that 
cry as her mother’s. 

“What are you doing here, you bad girl?” cried Mrs. Weston, anxiety 
dissolving at once into anger. “Do you know you frightened your mamma and 
daddy almost to death? Why did you run away?” 

The robot engineer had also dashed in, tearing his hair, and demanding who of 
the gathering crowd had tampered with the machine. “Can’t anybody read 
signs?” he yelled. “You’re not allowed in here without an attendant.” 

Gloria raised her grieved voice over the din, “I only came to see the Talking 
Robot, Mamma. I thought he might know where Robbie was because they’re 
both robots.” And then, as the thought of Robbie was suddenly brought 
forcefully home to her, she burst into a sudden storm of tears, “And I got to find 
Robbie, Mamma. I got to.” 

Mrs. Weston strangled a cry, and said, “Oh, good Heavens. Come home, 
George. This is more than I can stand.” 

That evening, George Weston left for several hours, and the next morning, he 
approached his wife with something that looked suspiciously like smug 



complacence. 


“I’ve got an idea, Grace.” 

“About what?” was the gloomy, uninterested query. 

“About Gloria.” 

“You’re not going to suggest buying back that robot?” 

“No, of course not.” 

“Then go ahead. I might as well listen to you. Nothing I’ve done seems to 
have done any good.” 

“All right. Here’s what I’ve been thinking. The whole trouble with Gloria is 
that she thinks of Robbie as a person and not as a machine. Naturally, she can’t 
forget him. Now if we managed to convince her that Robbie was nothing more 
than a mess of steel and copper in the form of sheets and wires with electricity 
its juice of life, how long would her longings last? It’s the psychological attack, 
if you see my point.” 

“How do you plan to do it?” 

“Simple. Where do you suppose I went last night? I persuaded Robertson of 
U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men, Inc., to arrange for a complete tour of his 
premises tomorrow. The three of us will go, and by the time we’re through, 
Gloria will have it drilled into her that a robot is not alive.” 

Mrs. Weston’s eyes widened gradually and something glinted in her eyes that 
was quite like sudden admiration, “Why, George, that’s a good idea.” 

And George Weston’s vest buttons strained. “Only kind I have,” he said. 


Mr. Struthers was a conscientious General Manager and naturally inclined to be 
a bit talkative. The combination, therefore, resulted in a tour that was fully 
explained, perhaps even over-abundantly explained, at every step. However, 
Mrs. Weston was not bored. Indeed, she stopped him several times and begged 



him to repeat his statements in simpler language so that Gloria might understand. 
Under the influence of this appreciation of his narrative powers, Mr. Struthers 
expanded genially and became ever more communicative, if possible. 

George Weston, himself, showed a gathering impatience. 

“Pardon me, Struthers,” he said, breaking into the middle of a lecture on the 
photo-electric cell, “haven’t you a section of the factory where only robot labor 
is employed?” 

“Eh? Oh, yes! Yes, indeed!” He smiled at Mrs. Weston. “A vicious circle in a 
way, robots creating more robots. Of course, we are not making a general 
practice out of it. For one thing, the unions would never let us. But we can turn 
out a very few robots using robot labor exclusively, merely as a sort of scientific 
experiment. You see,” he tapped his pince-nez into one palm argumentatively, 
“what the labor unions don’t realize—and I say this as a man who has always 
been very sympathetic with the labor movement in general—is that the advent of 
the robot, while involving some dislocation to begin with, will inevitably—” 

“Yes, Struthers,” said Weston, “but about that section of the factory you speak 
of—may we see it? It would be very interesting, I’m sure.” 

“Yes! Yes, of course!” Mr. Struthers replaced his pince-nez in one convulsive 
movement and gave vent to a soft cough of discomfiture. “Follow me, please.” 

He was comparatively quiet while leading the three through a long corridor 
and down a flight of stairs. Then, when they had entered a large well-lit room 
that buzzed with metallic activity, the sluices opened and the flood of 
explanation poured forth again. 

“There you are!” he said with pride in his voice. “Robots only! Five men act 
as overseers and they don’t even stay in this room. In five years, that is, since we 
began this project, not a single accident has occurred. Of course, the robots here 
assembled are comparatively simple, but. . .” 

The General Manager’s voice had long died to a rather soothing murmur in 
Gloria’s ears. The whole trip seemed rather dull and pointless to her, though 
there were many robots in sight. None were even remotely like Robbie, though, 
and she surveyed them with open contempt. 



In this room, there weren’t any people at all, she noticed. Then her eyes fell 
upon six or seven robots busily engaged at a round table halfway across the 
room. They widened in incredulous surprise. It was a big room. She couldn’t see 
for sure, but one of the robots looked like—looked like —it was! 

“Robbie!” Her shriek pierced the air, and one of the robots about the table 
faltered and dropped the tool he was holding. Gloria went almost mad with joy. 
Squeezing through the railing before either parent could stop her, she dropped 
lightly to the floor a few feet below, and ran toward her Robbie, arms waving 
and hair flying. 

And the three horrified adults, as they stood frozen in their tracks, saw what 
the excited little girl did not see,—a huge, lumbering tractor bearing blindly 
down upon its appointed track. 

It took split-seconds for Weston to come to his senses, and those split-seconds 
meant everything, for Gloria could not be overtaken. Although Weston vaulted 
the railing in a wild attempt, it was obviously hopeless. Mr. Struthers signalled 
wildly to the overseers to stop the tractor, but the overseers were only human and 
it took time to act. 

It was only Robbie that acted immediately and with precision. 

With metal legs eating up the space between himself and his little mistress he 
charged down from the opposite direction. Everything then happened at once. 
With one sweep of an arm, Robbie snatched up Gloria, slackening his speed not 
one iota, and, consequently, knocking every breath of air out of her. Weston, not 
quite comprehending all that was happening, felt, rather than saw, Robbie brush 
past him, and came to a sudden bewildered halt. The tractor intersected Gloria’s 
path half a second after Robbie had, rolled on ten feet further and came to a 
grinding, long drawn-out stop. 

Gloria regained her breath, submitted to a series of passionate hugs on the part 
of both her parents and turned eagerly toward Robbie. As far as she was 
concerned, nothing had happened except that she had found her friend. 

But Mrs. Weston’s expression had changed from one of relief to one of dark 
suspicion. She turned to her husband, and, despite her disheveled and 
undignified appearance, managed to look quite formidable, “You engineered this, 
didn’t you?” 



George Weston swabbed at a hot forehead with his handkerchief. His hand 
was unsteady, and his lips could curve only into a tremulous and exceedingly 
weak smile. 

Mrs. Weston pursued the thought, “Robbie wasn’t designed for engineering or 
construction work. He couldn’t be of any use to them. You had him placed there 
deliberately so that Gloria would find him. You know you did.” 

“Well, I did,” said Weston. “But, Grace, how was I to know the reunion would 
be so violent? And Robbie has saved her life; you’ll have to admit that. You 
can ’t send him away again.” 

Grace Weston considered. She turned toward Gloria and Robbie and watched 
them abstractedly for a moment. Gloria had a grip about the robot’s neck that 
would have asphyxiated any creature but one of metal, and was prattling 
nonsense in half-hysterical frenzy. Robbie’s chrome-steel arms (capable of 
bending a bar of steel two inches in diameter into a pretzel) wound about the 
little girl gently and lovingly, and his eyes glowed a deep, deep red. 

“Well,” said Mrs. Weston, at last, “I guess he can stay with us until he rusts.” 


Susan Calvin shrugged her shoulders, “Of course, he didn’t. That was 1998. By 
2002, we had invented the mobile speaking robot which, of course, made all the 
non-speaking models out of date, and which seemed to be the final straw as far 
as the non-robot elements were concerned. Most of the world governments 
banned robot use on Earth for any purpose other than scientific research 
between 2003 and 2007. ” 

“So that Gloria had to give up Robbie eventually?” 

“I’m afraid so. I imagine, however, that it was easier for her at the age of 
fifteen than at eight. Still, it was a stupid and unnecessary attitude on the part of 
humanity. U.S. Robots hit its low point, financially, just about the time I joined 
them in 2007. At first, I thought my job might come to a sudden end in a matter 
of months, but then we simply developed the extra-Terrestrial market.” 


“And then you were set, of course. 



“Not quite. We began by trying to adapt the models we had on hand. Those 
first speaking models, for instance. They were about twelve feet high, very 
clumsy and not much good. We sent them out to Mercury to help build the mining 
station there, but that failed. ” 

I looked up in surprise, “It did? Why, Mercury Mines is a multi-billion dollar 
concern. ” 

“It is now, but it was a second attempt that succeeded. If you want to know 
about that, young man, I’d advise you to look up Gregory Powell. He and 
Michael Donovan handled our most difficult cases in the teens and twenties. I 
haven’t heard from Donovan in years, but Powell is living right here in New 
York. He’s a grandfather now, which is a thought difficult to get used to. I can 
only think of him as a rather young man. Of course, I was younger, too. ” 

I tried to keep her talking, “If you would give me the bare bones, Dr. Calvin, I 
can have Mr. Powell fill it in afterward. ” (And this was exactly what I later did.) 

She spread her thin hands out upon the desk and looked at them. “There are 
two or three, ” she said, “that I know a little about. ” 

“Start with Mercury, ” I suggested. 

“Well, I think it was in 2015 that the Second Mercury Expedition was sent out. 
It was exploratory and financed in part by U. S. Robots and in part by Solar 
Minerals. It consisted of a new-type robot, still experimental; Gregory Powell; 
Michael Donovan —” 



RUNAROUND 


It was one of Gregory Powell’s favorite platitudes that nothing was to be gained 
from excitement, so when Mike Donovan came leaping down the stairs toward 
him, red hair matted with perspiration, Powell frowned. 

“What’s wrong?” he said. “Break a fingernail?” 

“Yaaaah,” snarled Donovan, feverishly. “What have you been doing in the 
sublevels all day?” He took a deep breath and blurted out, “Speedy never 
returned.” 

Powell’s eyes widened momentarily and he stopped on the stairs; then he 
recovered and resumed his upward steps. He didn’t speak until he reached the 
head of the flight, and then: 

“You sent him after the selenium?” 

“Yes.” 

“And how long has he been out?” 

“Five hours now.” 

Silence! This was a devil of a situation. Here they were, on Mercury exactly 
twelve hours—and already up to the eyebrows in the worst sort of trouble. 
Mercury had long been the jinx world of the System, but this was drawing it 
rather strong—even for a jinx. 

Powell said, “Start at the beginning, and let’s get this straight.” 

They were in the radio room now—with its already subtly antiquated 
equipment, untouched for the ten years previous to their arrival. Even ten years, 
technologically speaking, meant so much. Compare Speedy with the type of 
robot they must have had back in 2005. But then, advances in robotics these days 
were tremendous. Powell touched a still gleaming metal surface gingerly. The air 



of disuse that touched everything about the room—and the entire Station—was 
infinitely depressing. 

Donovan must have felt it. He began: “I tried to locate him by radio, but it was 
no go. Radio isn’t any good on the Mercury Sunside—not past two miles, 
anyway. That’s one of the reasons the First Expedition failed. And we can’t put 
up the ultrawave equipment for weeks yet—” 

“Skip all that. What did you get?” 

“I located the unorganized body signal in the short wave. It was no good for 
anything except his position. I kept track of him that way for two hours and 
plotted the results on the map.” 

There was a yellowed square of parchment in his hip pocket—a relic of the 
unsuccessful First Expedition—and he slapped it down on the desk with vicious 
force, spreading it flat with the palm of his hand. Powell, hands clasped across 
his chest, watched it at long range. 

Donovan’s pencil pointed nervously. “The red cross is the selenium pool. You 
marked it yourself.” 

“Which one is it?” interrupted Powell. “There were three that MacDougal 
located for us before he left.” 

“I sent Speedy to the nearest, naturally. Seventeen miles away. But what 
difference does that make?” There was tension in his voice. “There are the 
penciled dots that mark Speedy’s position.” 

And for the first time Powell’s artificial aplomb was shaken and his hands 
shot forward for the map. 

“Are you serious? This is impossible.” 

“There it is,” growled Donovan. 

The little dots that marked the position formed a rough circle about the red 
cross of the selenium pool. And Powell’s fingers went to his brown mustache, 
the unfailing signal of anxiety. 



Donovan added: “In the two hours I checked on him, he circled that damned 
pool four times. It seems likely to me that he’ll keep that up forever. Do you 
realize the position we’re in?” 

Powell looked up shortly, and said nothing. Oh, yes, he realized the position 
they were in. It worked itself out as simply as a syllogism. The photo-cell banks 
that alone stood between the full power of Mercury’s monstrous sun and 
themselves were shot to hell. The only thing that could save them was selenium. 
The only thing that could get the selenium was Speedy. If Speedy didn’t come 
back, no selenium. No selenium, no photo-cell banks. No photo-banks—well, 
death by slow broiling is one of the more unpleasant ways of being done in. 

Donovan rubbed his red mop of hair savagely and expressed himself with 
bitterness. “We’ll be the laughingstock of the System, Greg. How can everything 
have gone so wrong so soon? The great team of Powell and Donovan is sent out 
to Mercury to report on the advisability of reopening the Sunside Mining Station 
with modern techniques and robots and we ruin everything the first day. A purely 
routine job, too. We’ll never live it down.” 

“We won’t have to, perhaps,” replied Powell, quietly. “If we don’t do 
something quickly, living anything down—or even just plain living—will be out 
of the question.” 

“Don’t be stupid! If you feel funny about it, Greg, I don’t. It was criminal, 
sending us out here with only one robot. And it was your bright idea that we 
could handle the photo-cell banks ourselves.” 

“Now you’re being unfair. It was a mutual decision and you know it. All we 
needed was a kilogram of selenium, a Stillhead Dielectrode Plate and about three 
hours’ time—and there are pools of pure selenium all over Sunside. 
MacDougal’s spectroreflector spotted three for us in five minutes, didn’t it? 
What the devil! We couldn’t have waited for next conjunction.” 

“Well, what are we going to do? Powell, you’ve got an idea. I know you have, 
or you wouldn’t be so calm. You’re no more a hero than I am. Go on, spill it!” 

“We can’t go after Speedy ourselves, Mike—not on the Sunside. Even the new 
insosuits aren’t good for more than twenty minutes in direct sunlight. But you 
know the old saying, ‘Set a robot to catch a robot.’ Look, Mike, maybe things 
aren’t so bad. We’ve got six robots down in the sublevels, that we may be able to 



use, if they work. If they work.” 


There was a glint of sudden hope in Donovan’s eyes. “You mean six robots 
from the First Expedition. Are you sure? They may be subrobotic machines. Ten 
years is a long time as far as robot-types are concerned, you know.” 

“No, they’re robots. I’ve spent all day with them and I know. They’ve got 
positronic brains: primitive, of course.” He placed the map in his pocket. “Let’s 
go down.” 


The robots were on the lowest sublevel—all six of them surrounded by musty 
packing cases of uncertain content. They were large, extremely so, and even 
though they were in a sitting position on the floor, legs straddled out before 
them, their heads were a good seven feet in the air. 

Donovan whistled. “Look at the size of them, will you? The chests must be 
ten feet around.” 

“That’s because they’re supplied with the old McGuffy gears. I’ve been over 
the insides—crummiest set you’ve ever seen.” 

“Have you powered them yet?” 

“No. There wasn’t any reason to. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with 
them. Even the diaphragm is in reasonable order. They might talk.” 

He had unscrewed the chest plate of the nearest as he spoke, inserted the two- 
inch sphere that contained the tiny spark of atomic energy that was a robot’s life. 
There was difficulty in fitting it, but he managed, and then screwed the plate 
back on again in laborious fashion. The radio controls of more modern models 
had not been heard of ten years earlier. And then to the other five. 

Donovan said uneasily, “They haven’t moved.” 

“No orders to do so,” replied Powell, succinctly. He went back to the first in 
the line and struck him on the chest. “You! Do you hear me?” 

The monster’s head bent slowly and the eyes fixed themselves on Powell. 



Then, in a harsh, squawking voice—like that of a medieval phonograph—he 
grated, “Yes, Master!” 

Powell grinned humorlessly at Donovan. “Did you get that? Those were the 
days of the first talking robots when it looked as if the use of robots on Earth 
would be banned. The makers were fighting that and they built good, healthy 
slave complexes into the damned machines.” 

“It didn’t help them,” muttered Donovan. 

“No, it didn’t, but they sure tried.” He turned once more to the robot. “Get 
up!” 

The robot towered upward slowly and Donovan’s head craned and his 
puckered lips whistled. 

Powell said: “Can you go out upon the surface? In the light?” 

There was consideration while the robot’s slow brain worked. Then, “Yes, 
Master.” 

“Good. Do you know what a mile is?” 

Another consideration, and another slow answer. “Yes, Master.” 

“We will take you up to the surface then, and indicate a direction. You will go 
about seventeen miles, and somewhere in that general region you will meet 
another robot, smaller than yourself. You understand so far?” 

“Yes, Master.” 

“You will find this robot and order him to return. If he does not wish to, you 
are to bring him back by force.” 

Donovan clutched at Powell’s sleeve. “Why not send him for the selenium 
direct?” 

“Because I want Speedy back, nitwit. I want to find out what’s wrong with 
him.” And to the robot, “All right, you, follow me.” 



The robot remained motionless and his voice rumbled: “Pardon, Master, but I 
cannot. You must mount first.” His clumsy arms had come together with a 
thwack, blunt fingers interlacing. 

Powell stared and then pinched at his mustache. “Uh . . . oh!” 

Donovan’s eyes bulged. “We’ve got to ride him? Like a horse?” 

“I guess that’s the idea. I don’t know why, though. I can’t see—Yes, I do. I 
told you they were playing up robot-safety in those days. Evidently, they were 
going to sell the notion of safety by not allowing them to move about, without a 
mahout on their shoulders all the time. What do we do now?” 

“That’s what I’ve been thinking,” muttered Donovan. “We can’t go out on the 
surface, with a robot or without. Oh, for the love of Pete”—and he snapped his 
fingers twice. He grew excited. “Give me that map you’ve got. I haven’t studied 
it for two hours for nothing. This is a Mining Station. What’s wrong with using 
the tunnels?” 

The Mining Station was a black circle on the map, and the light dotted lines 
that were tunnels stretched out about it in spiderweb fashion. 

Donovan studied the list of symbols at the bottom of the map. “Look,” he 
said, “the small black dots are openings to the surface, and here’s one maybe 
three miles away from the selenium pool. There’s a number here—you’d think 
they’d write larger—13a. If the robots know their way around here—” 

Powell shot the question and received the dull “Yes, Master,” in reply. “Get 
your insosuit,” he said with satisfaction. 

It was the first time either had worn the insosuits—which marked one time 
more than either had expected to upon their arrival the day before—and they 
tested their limp movements uncomfortably. 

The insosuit was far bulkier and far uglier than the regulation spacesuit; but 
withal considerably lighter, due to the fact that they were entirely nonmetallic in 
composition. Composed of heat-resistant plastic and chemically treated cork 
layers, and equipped with a desiccating unit to keep the air bone-dry, the 
insosuits could withstand the full glare of Mercury’s sun for twenty minutes. 
Five to ten minutes more, as well, without actually killing the occupant. 



And still the robot’s hands formed the stirrup, nor did he betray the slightest 
atom of surprise at the grotesque figure into which Powell had been converted. 

Powell’s radio-harshened voice boomed out: “Are you ready to take us to Exit 
13a?” 

“Yes, Master.” 

Good, thought Powell; they might lack radio control but at least they were 
fitted for radio reception. “Mount one or the other, Mike,” he said to Donovan. 

He placed a foot in the improvised stirrup and swung upward. He found the 
seat comfortable; there was the humped back of the robot, evidently shaped for 
the purpose, a shallow groove along each shoulder for the thighs and two 
elongated “ears” whose purpose now seemed obvious. 

Powell seized the ears and twisted the head. His mount turned ponderously. 
“Lead on, Macduff.” But he did not feel at all lighthearted. 

The gigantic robots moved slowly, with mechanical precision, through the 
doorway that cleared their heads by a scant foot, so that the two men had to duck 
hurriedly, along a narrow corridor in which their unhurried footsteps boomed 
monotonously and into the air lock. 

The long, airless tunnel that stretched to a pinpoint before them brought home 
forcefully to Powell the exact magnitude of the task accomplished by the First 
Expedition, with their crude robots and their start-from-scratch necessities. They 
might have been a failure, but their failure was a good deal better than the usual 
run of the System’s successes. 

The robots plodded onward with a pace that never varied and with footsteps 
that never lengthened. 

Powell said: “Notice that these tunnels are blazing with lights and that the 
temperature is Earth-normal. It’s probably been like this all the ten years that this 
place has remained empty.” 

“How’s that?” 

“Cheap energy; cheapest in the System. Sunpower, you know, and on 



Mercury’s Sunside, sunpower is something. That’s why the Station was built in 
the sunlight rather than in the shadow of a mountain. It’s really a huge energy 
converter. The heat is turned into electricity, light, mechanical work and what 
have you; so that energy is supplied and the Station is cooled in a simultaneous 
process.” 

“Look,” said Donovan. “This is all very educational, but would you mind 
changing the subject? It so happens that this conversion of energy that you talk 
about is carried on by the photo-cell banks mainly—and that is a tender subject 
with me at the moment.” 

Powell grunted vaguely, and when Donovan broke the resulting silence, it was 
to change the subject completely. “Listen, Greg. What the devil’s wrong with 
Speedy, anyway? I can’t understand it.” 

It’s not easy to shrug shoulders in an insosuit, but Powell tried it. “I don’t 
know, Mike. You know he’s perfectly adapted to a Mercurian environment. Heat 
doesn’t mean anything to him and he’s built for the light gravity and the broken 
ground. He’s foolproof—or, at least, he should be.” 

Silence fell. This time, silence that lasted. 

“Master,” said the robot, “we are here.” 

“Eh?” Powell snapped out of a semidrowse. “Well, get us out of here—out to 
the surface.” 

They found themselves in a tiny substation, empty, airless, ruined. Donovan 
had inspected a jagged hole in the upper reaches of one of the walls by the light 
of his pocket flash. 

“Meteorite, do you suppose?” he had asked. 

Powell shrugged. “To hell with that. It doesn’t matter. Let’s get out.” 

A towering cliff of a black, basaltic rock cut off the sunlight, and the deep 
night shadow of an airless world surrounded them. Before them, the shadow 
reached out and ended in knife-edge abruptness into an all-but-unbearable blaze 
of white light, that glittered from myriad crystals along a rocky ground. 



“Space!” gasped Donovan. “It looks like snow.” And it did. 


Powell’s eyes swept the jagged glitter of Mercury to the horizon and winced at 
the gorgeous brilliance. 

“This must be an unusual area,” he said. “The general albedo of Mercury is 
low and most of the soil is gray pumice. Something like the Moon, you know. 
Beautiful, isn’t it?” 

He was thankful for the light filters in their visiplates. Beautiful or not, a look 
at the sunlight through straight glass would have blinded them inside of half a 
minute. 

Donovan was looking at the spring thermometer on his wrist. “Holy smokes, 
the temperature is eighty centigrade!” 

Powell checked his own and said: “Um-m-m. A little high. Atmosphere, you 
know.” 

“On Mercury? Are you nuts?” 

“Mercury isn’t really airless,” explained Powell, in absentminded fashion. He 
was adjusting the binocular attachments to his visiplate, and the bloated fingers 
of the insosuit were clumsy at it. “There is a thin exhalation that clings to its 
surface—vapors of the more volatile elements and compounds that are heavy 
enough for Mercurian gravity to retain. You know: selenium, iodine, mercury, 
gallium, potassium, bismuth, volatile oxides. The vapors sweep into the shadows 
and condense, giving up heat. It’s a sort of gigantic still. In fact, if you use your 
flash, you’ll probably find that the side of the cliff is covered with, say, hoar- 
sulphur, or maybe quick-silver dew. 

“It doesn’t matter, though. Our suits can stand a measly eighty indefinitely.” 

Powell had adjusted the binocular attachments, so that he seemed as eye- 
stalked as a snail. 

Donovan watched tensely. “See anything?” 

The other did not answer immediately, and when he did, his voice was 
anxious and thoughtful. “There’s a dark spot on the horizon that might be the 



selenium pool. It’s in the right place. But I don’t see Speedy.” 


Powell clambered upward in an instinctive striving for better view, till he was 
standing in unsteady fashion upon his robot’s shoulders. Legs straddled wide, 
eyes straining, he said: “I think ... I think— Yes, it’s definitely he. He’s coming 
this way.” 

Donovan followed the pointing finger. He had no binoculars, but there was a 
tiny moving dot, black against the blazing brilliance of the crystalline ground. 

“I see him,” he yelled. “Let’s get going!” 

Powell had hopped down into a sitting position on the robot again, and his 
suited hand slapped against the Gargantuan’s barrel chest. “Get going!” 

“Giddy-ap,” yelled Donovan, and thumped his heels, spur fashion. 


The robots started off, the regular thudding of their footsteps silent in the 
airlessness, for the nonmetallic fabric of the insosuits did not transmit sound. 
There was only a rhythmic vibration just below the border of actual hearing. 

“Faster,” yelled Donovan. The rhythm did not change. 

“No use,” cried Powell, in reply. “These junk heaps are only geared to one 
speed. Do you think they’re equipped with selective flexors?” 

They had burst through the shadow, and the sunlight came down in a white- 
hot wash and poured liquidly about them. 

Donovan ducked involuntarily. “Wow! Is it imagination or do I feel heat?” 

“You’ll feel more presently,” was the grim reply. “Keep your eye on Speedy.” 

Robot SPD 13 was near enough to be seen in detail now. His graceful, 
streamlined body threw out blazing highlights as he loped with easy speed across 
the broken ground. His name was derived from his serial initials, of course, but it 
was apt, nevertheless, for the SPD models were among the fastest robots turned 
out by the United States Robot & Mechanical Men Corp. 



“Hey, Speedy,” howled Donovan, and waved a frantic hand. 


“Speedy!” shouted Powell. “Come here!” 

The distance between the men and the errant robot was being cut down 
momentarily—more by the efforts of Speedy than the slow plodding of the fifty- 
year-old antique mounts of Donovan and Powell. 

They were close enough now to notice that Speedy’s gait included a peculiar 
rolling stagger, a noticeable side-to-side lurch—and then, as Powell waved his 
hand again and sent maximum juice into his compact head-set radio sender, in 
preparation for another shout, Speedy looked up and saw them. 

Speedy hopped to a halt and remained standing for a moment—with just a 
tiny, unsteady weave, as though he were swaying in a light wind. 

Powell yelled: “All right, Speedy. Come here, boy.” 

Whereupon Speedy’s robot voice sounded in Powell’s earphones for the first 
time. 

It said: “Hot dog, let’s play games. You catch me and I catch you; no love can 
cut our knife in two. For I’m Little Buttercup, sweet Little Buttercup. Whoops!” 
Turning on his heel, he sped off in the direction from which he had come, with a 
speed and fury that kicked up gouts of baked dust. 

And his last words as he receded into the distance were, “There grew a little 
flower ’neath a great oak tree,” followed by a curious metallic clicking that 
might have been a robotic equivalent of a hiccup. 

Donovan said weakly: “Where did he pick up the Gilbert and Sullivan? Say, 
Greg, he ... he’s drunk or something.” 

“If you hadn’t told me,” was the bitter response, “I’d never realize it. Let’s get 
back to the cliff. I’m roasting.” 

It was Powell who broke the desperate silence. “In the first place,” he said, 
“Speedy isn’t drunk—not in the human sense—because he’s a robot, and robots 
don’t get drunk. However, there’s something wrong with him which is the 
robotic equivalent of drunkenness.” 



“To me, he’s drunk,” stated Donovan, emphatically, “and all I know is that he 
thinks we’re playing games. And we’re not. It’s a matter of life and very 
gmesome death.” 

“All right. Don’t hurry me. A robot’s only a robot. Once we find out what’s 
wrong with him, we can fix it and go on.” 

“Once, ” said Donovan, sourly. 

Powell ignored him. “Speedy is perfectly adapted to normal Mercurian 
environment. But this region”—and his arm swept wide—“is definitely 
abnormal. There’s our clue. Now where do these crystals come from? They 
might have formed from a slowly cooling liquid; but where would you get liquid 
so hot that it would cool in Mercury’s sun?” 

“Volcanic action,” suggested Donovan, instantly, and Powell’s body tensed. 

“Out of the mouths of sucklings,” he said in a small, strange voice and 
remained very still for five minutes. 

Then, he said, “Listen, Mike, what did you say to Speedy when you sent him 
after the selenium?” 

Donovan was taken aback. “Well damn it—I don’t know. I just told him to get 
it.” 


“Yes, I know. But how? Try to remember the exact words.” 

“I said ... uh ... I said: ‘Speedy, we need some selenium. You can get it 
such-and-such a place. Go get it.’ That’s all. What more did you want me to 
say?” 

“You didn’t put any urgency into the order, did you?” 

“What for? It was pure routine.” 

Powell sighed. “Well, it can’t be helped now—but we’re in a fine fix.” He had 
dismounted from his robot, and was sitting, back against the cliff. Donovan 
joined him and they linked arms. In the distance the burning sunlight seemed to 
wait cat-and-mouse for them, and just next to them, the two giant robots were 



invisible but for the dull red of their photoelectric eyes that stared down at them, 
unblinking, unwavering and unconcerned. 

Unconcerned! As was all this poisonous Mercury, as large in jinx as it was 
small in size. 

Powell’s radio voice was tense in Donovan’s ear: “Now, look, let’s start with 
the three fundamental Rules of Robotics—the three rules that are built most 
deeply into a robot’s positronic brain.” In the darkness, his gloved fingers ticked 
off each point. 

“We have: One, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, 
allow a human being to come to harm.” 

“Right!” 

“Two,” continued Powell, “a robot must obey the orders given it by human 
beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.” 

“Right!” 

“And three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection 
does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.” 

“Right! Now where are we?” 

“Exactly at the explanation. The conflict between the various rules is ironed 
out by the different positronic potentials in the brain. We’ll say that a robot is 
walking into danger and knows it. The automatic potential that Rule 3 sets up 
turns him back. But suppose you order him to walk into that danger. In that case, 
Rule 2 sets up a counterpotential higher than the previous one and the robot 
follows orders at the risk of existence.” 

“Well, I know that. What about it?” 

“Let’s take Speedy’s case. Speedy is one of the latest models, extremely 
specialized, and as expensive as a battleship. It’s not a thing to be lightly 
destroyed.” 


“So?” 



“So Rule 3 has been strengthened—that was specifically mentioned, by the 
way, in the advance notices on the SPD models—so that his allergy to danger is 
unusually high. At the same time, when you sent him out after the selenium, you 
gave him his order casually and without special emphasis, so that the Rule 2 
potential set-up was rather weak. Now, hold on; I’m just stating facts.” 

“All right, go ahead. I think I get it.” 

“You see how it works, don’t you? There’s some sort of danger centering at 
the selenium pool. It increases as he approaches, and at a certain distance from it 
the Rule 3 potential, unusually high to start with, exactly balances the Rule 2 
potential, unusually low to start with.” 

Donovan rose to his feet in excitement. “And it strikes an equilibrium. I see. 
Rule 3 drives him back and Rule 2 drives him forward—” 

“So he follows a circle around the selenium pool, staying on the locus of all 
points of potential equilibrium. And unless we do something about it, he’ll stay 
on that circle forever, giving us the good old runaround.” Then, more 
thoughtfully: “And that, by the way, is what makes him drunk. At potential 
equilibrium, half the positronic paths of his brain are out of kilter. I’m not a 
robot specialist, but that seems obvious. Probably he’s lost control of just those 
parts of his voluntary mechanism that a human drunk has. Ve-e-ery pretty.” 

“But what’s the danger? If we knew what he was running from—” 

“You suggested it. Volcanic action. Somewhere right above the selenium pool 
is a seepage of gas from the bowels of Mercury. Sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide 
—and carbon monoxide. Lots of it—and at this temperature.” 

Donovan gulped audibly. “Carbon monoxide plus iron gives the volatile iron 
carbonyl.” 

“And a robot,” added Powell, “is essentially iron.” Then, grimly: “There’s 
nothing like deduction. We’ve determined everything about our problem but the 
solution. We can’t get the selenium ourselves. It’s still too far. We can’t send 
these robot horses, because they can’t go themselves, and they can’t carry us fast 
enough to keep us from crisping. And we can’t catch Speedy, because the dope 
thinks we’re playing games, and he can run sixty miles to our four.” 



“If one of us goes,” began Donovan, tentatively, “and comes back cooked, 
there’ll still be the other.” 

“Yes,” came the sarcastic reply, “it would be a most tender sacrifice—except 
that a person would be in no condition to give orders before he ever reached the 
pool, and I don’t think the robots would ever turn back to the cliff without 
orders. Figure it out! We’re two or three miles from the pool—call it two—the 
robot travels at four miles an hour; and we can last twenty minutes in our suits. It 
isn’t only the heat, remember. Solar radiation out here in the ultraviolet and 
below is poison.” 

“Um-m-m,” said Donovan, “ten minutes short.” 

“As good as an eternity. And another thing. In order for Rule 3 potential to 
have stopped Speedy where it did, there must be an appreciable amount of 
carbon monoxide in the metal-vapor atmosphere—and there must be an 
appreciable corrosive action therefore. He’s been out hours now—and how do 
we know when a knee joint, for instance, won’t be thrown out of kilter and keel 
him over. It’s not only a question of thinking—we’ve got to think fasti” 

Deep, dark, dank, dismal silence! 

Donovan broke it, voice trembling in an effort to keep itself emotionless. He 
said: “As long as we can’t increase Rule 2 potential by giving further orders, 
how about working the other way? If we increase the danger, we increase Rule 3 
potential and drive him backward.” 

Powell’s visiplate had turned toward him in a silent question. 

“You see,” came the cautious explanation, “all we need to do to drive him out 
of his rut is to increase the concentration of carbon monoxide in his vicinity. 
Well, back at the Station there’s a complete analytical laboratory.” 

“Naturally,” assented Powell. “It’s a Mining Station.” 

“All right. There must be pounds of oxalic acid for calcium precipitations.” 

“Holy space! Mike, you’re a genius.” 


“So-so,” admitted Donovan, modestly. “It’s just a case of remembering that 



oxalic acid on heating decomposes into carbon dioxide, water, and good old 
carbon monoxide. College chem, you know.” 


Powell was on his feet and had attracted the attention of one of the monster 
robots by the simple expedient of pounding the machine’s thigh. 

“Hey,” he shouted, “can you throw?” 

“Master?” 

“Never mind.” Powell damned the robot’s molasses-slow brain. He scrabbled 
up a jagged brick-size rock. “Take this,” he said, “and hit the patch of bluish 
crystals just across the crooked fissure. You see it?” 

Donovan pulled at his shoulder. “Too far, Greg. It’s almost half a mile off.” 

“Quiet,” replied Powell. “It’s a case of Mercurian gravity and a steel throwing 
arm. Watch, will you?” 

The robot’s eyes were measuring the distance with machinely accurate 
stereoscopy. His arm adjusted itself to the weight of the missile and drew back. 
In the darkness, the robot’s motions went unseen, but there was a sudden 
thumping sound as he shifted his weight, and seconds later the rock flew blackly 
into the sunlight. There was no air resistance to slow it down, nor wind to turn it 
aside—and when it hit the ground it threw up crystals precisely in the center of 
the “blue patch.” 

Powell yelled happily and shouted, “Let’s go back after the oxalic acid, 
Mike.” 

And as they plunged into the ruined substation on the way back to the tunnels, 
Donovan said grimly: “Speedy’s been hanging about on this side of the selenium 
pool, ever since we chased after him. Did you see him?” 

“Yes.” 

“I guess he wants to play games. Well, we’ll play him games!” 



They were back hours later, with three-liter jars of the white chemical and a pair 
of long faces. The photo-cell banks were deteriorating more rapidly than had 
seemed likely. The two steered their robots into the sunlight and toward the 
waiting Speedy in silence and with grim purpose. 

Speedy galloped slowly toward them. “Here we are again. Wheel I’ve made a 
little list, the piano organist; all people who eat peppermint and puff it in your 
face.” 

“We’ll puff something in your face,” muttered Donovan. “He’s limping, 
Greg.” 

“I noticed that,” came the low, worried response. “The monoxide’ll get him 
yet, if we don’t hurry.” 

They were approaching cautiously now, almost sidling, to refrain from setting 
off the thoroughly irrational robot. Powell was too far off to tell, of course, but 
already even he could have sworn the crack-brained Speedy was setting himself 
for a spring. 

“Let her go,” he gasped. “Count three! One—two—” 

Two steel arms drew back and snapped forward simultaneously and two glass 
jars whirled forward in towering parallel arcs, gleaming like diamonds in the 
impossible sun. And in a pair of soundless puffs, they hit the ground behind 
Speedy in crashes that sent the oxalic acid flying like dust. 

In the full heat of Mercury’s sun, Powell knew it was fizzing like soda water. 

Speedy turned to stare, then backed away from it slowly—and as slowly 
gathered speed. In fifteen seconds, he was leaping directly toward the two 
humans in an unsteady canter. 

Powell did not get Speedy’s words just then, though he heard something that 
resembled, “Lover’s professions when uttered in Hessians.” 

He turned away. “Back to the cliff, Mike. He’s out of the rut and he’ll be 
taking orders now. I’m getting hot.” 


They jogged toward the shadow at the slow monotonous pace of their mounts, 



and it was not until they had entered it and felt the sudden coolness settle softly 
about them that Donovan looked back. “Greg!” 

Powell looked and almost shrieked. Speedy was moving slowly now—so 
slowly—and in the wrong direction. He was drifting; drifting back into his mt; 
and he was picking up speed. He looked dreadfully close, and dreadfully 
unreachable, in the binoculars. 

Donovan shouted wildly, “After him!” and thumped his robot into its pace, but 
Powell called him back. 

“You won’t catch him, Mike—it’s no use.” He fidgeted on his robot’s 
shoulders and clenched his fist in tight impotence. “Why the devil do I see these 
things five seconds after it’s all over? Mike, we’ve wasted hours.” 

“We need more oxalic acid,” declared Donovan, stolidly. “The concentration 
wasn’t high enough.” 

“Seven tons of it wouldn’t have been enough—and we haven’t the hours to 
spare to get it, even if it were, with the monoxide chewing him away. Don’t you 
see what it is, Mike?” 

And Donovan said flatly, “No.” 

“We were only establishing new equilibriums. When we create new monoxide 
and increase Rule 3 potential, he moves backward till he’s in balance again—and 
when the monoxide drifted away, he moved forward, and again there was 
balance.” 

Powell’s voice sounded thoroughly wretched. “It’s the same old runaround. 
We can push at Rule 2 and pull at Rule 3 and we can’t get anywhere—we can 
only change the position of balance. We’ve got to get outside both rules.” And 
then he pushed his robot closer to Donovan’s so that they were sitting face to 
face, dim shadows in the darkness, and he whispered, “Mike!” 

“Is it the finish?”—dully. “I suppose we go back to the Station, wait for the 
banks to fold, shake hands, take cyanide, and go out like gentlemen.” He 
laughed shortly. 

“Mike,” repeated Powell earnestly, “we’ve got to get Speedy.” 



“I know.” 


“Mike,” once more, and Powell hesitated before continuing. “There’s always 
Rule 1.1 thought of it—earlier—but it’s desperate.” 

Donovan looked up and his voice livened. “We’re desperate.” 

“All right. According to Rule 1, a robot can’t see a human come to harm 
because of his own inaction. Two and 3 can’t stand against it. They can’t, Mike.” 

“Even when the robot is half era— Well, he’s drunk. You know he is.” 

“It’s the chances you take.” 

“Cut it. What are you going to do?” 

“I’m going out there now and see what Rule 1 will do. If it won’t break the 
balance, then what the devil—it’s either now or three-four days from now.” 

“Hold on, Greg. There are human rules of behavior, too. You don’t go out 
there just like that. Figure out a lottery, and give me my chance.” 

“All right. First to get the cube of fourteen goes.” And almost immediately, 
“Twenty-seven forty-four!” 

Donovan felt his robot stagger at a sudden push by Powell’s mount and then 
Powell was off into the sunlight. Donovan opened his mouth to shout, and then 
clicked it shut. Of course, the damn fool had worked out the cube of fourteen in 
advance, and on purpose. Just like him. 


The sun was hotter than ever and Powell felt a maddening itch in the small of his 
back. Imagination, probably, or perhaps hard radiation beginning to tell even 
through the insosuit. 

Speedy was watching him, without a word of Gilbert and Sullivan gibberish 
as greeting. Thank God for that! But he daren’t get too close. 

He was three hundred yards away when Speedy began backing, a step at a 



time, cautiously—and Powell stopped. He jumped from his robot’s shoulders 
and landed on the crystalline ground with a light thump and a flying of jagged 
fragments. 

He proceeded on foot, the ground gritty and slippery to his steps, the low 
gravity causing him difficulty. The soles of his feet tickled with warmth. He cast 
one glance over his shoulder at the blackness of the cliff’s shadow and realized 
that he had come too far to return—either by himself or by the help of his 
antique robot. It was Speedy or nothing now, and the knowledge of that 
constricted his chest. 

Far enough! He stopped. 

“Speedy,” he called. “Speedy!” 

The sleek, modern robot ahead of him hesitated and halted his backward steps, 
then resumed them. 

Powell tried to put a note of pleading into his voice, and found it didn’t take 
much acting. “Speedy, I’ve got to get back to the shadow or the sun’ll get me. 
It’s life or death, Speedy. I need you.” 

Speedy took one step forward and stopped. He spoke, but at the sound Powell 
groaned, for it was, “When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache and 
repose is tabooed—” It trailed off there, and Powell took time out for some 
reason to murmur, “Iolanthe.” 

It was roasting hot! He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, and 
whirled dizzily; then stared in utter astonishment, for the monstrous robot on 
which he had ridden was moving—moving toward him, and without a rider. 

He was talking: “Pardon, Master. I must not move without a Master upon me, 
but you are in danger.” 

Of course, Rule 1 potential above everything. But he didn’t want that clumsy 
antique; he wanted Speedy. He walked away and motioned frantically: “I order 
you to stay away. I order you to stop!” 

It was quite useless. You could not beat Rule I potential. The robot said 
stupidly, “You are in danger, Master.” 



Powell looked about him desperately. He couldn’t see clearly. His brain was in 
a heated whirl; his breath scorched when he breathed, and the ground all about 
him was a shimmering haze. 

He called a last time, desperately: “Speedy! I’m dying, damn you! Where are 
you? Speedy, I need you.” 

He was still stumbling backward in a blind effort to get away from the giant 
robot he didn’t want, when he felt steel fingers on his arms, and a worried, 
apologetic voice of metallic timbre in his ears. 

“Holy smokes, boss, what are you doing here? And what am / doing—I’m so 
confused—” 

“Never mind,” murmured Powell, weakly. “Get me to the shadow of the cliff 
—and hurry!” There was one last feeling of being lifted into the air and a 
sensation of rapid motion and burning heat, and he passed out. 


He woke with Donovan bending over him and smiling anxiously. “How are you, 
Greg?” 

“Fine!” came the response. “Where’s Speedy?” 

“Right here. I sent him out to one of the other selenium pools—with orders to 
get that selenium at all cost this time. He got it back in forty-two minutes and 
three seconds. I timed him. He still hasn’t finished apologizing for the runaround 
he gave us. He’s scared to come near you for fear of what you’ll say.” 

“Drag him over,” ordered Powell. “It wasn’t his fault.” He held out a hand and 
gripped Speedy’s metal paw. “It’s O.K., Speedy.” Then, to Donovan, “You know, 
Mike, I was just thinking—” 

“Yes!” 

“Well,”—he rubbed his face—the air was so delightfully cool, “you know that 
when we get things set up here and Speedy put through his Field Tests, they’re 
going to send us to the Space Stations next—” 



“Yes! At least that’s what old lady Calvin told me just before we left, and I 
didn’t say anything about it, because I was going to fight the whole idea.” 

“Fight it?” cried Donovan. “But—” 

“I know. It’s all right with me now. Two hundred seventy-three degrees 
Centigrade below zero. Won’t it be a pleasure?” 

“Space Station,” said Donovan, “here I come.” 



REASON 


Half a year later, the boys had changed their minds. The flame of a giant sun had 
given way to the soft blackness of space but external variations mean little in the 
business of checking the workings of experimental robots. Whatever the 
background, one is face to face with an inscrutable positronic brain, which the 
slide-rule geniuses say should work thus-and-so. 

Except that they don’t. Powell and Donovan found that out after they had been 
on the Station less than two weeks. 

Gregory Powell spaced his words for emphasis, “One week ago, Donovan and 
I put you together.” His brows furrowed doubtfully and he pulled the end of his 
brown mustache. 

It was quiet in the officer’s room on Solar Station #5—except for the soft 
purring of the mighty Beam Director somewhere far below. 

Robot QT-1 sat immovable. The burnished plates of his body gleamed in the 
Luxites and the glowing red of the photoelectric cells that were his eyes were 
fixed steadily upon the Earthman at the other side of the table. 

Powell repressed a sudden attack of nerves. These robots possessed peculiar 
brains. Oh, the three Laws of Robotics held. They had to. All of U.S. Robots, 
from Robertson himself to the new floor-sweeper, would insist on that. So QT-1 
was safe! And yet—the QT models were the first of their kind, and this was the 
first of the QT’s. Mathematical squiggles on paper were not always the most 
comforting protection against robotic fact. 

Finally, the robot spoke. His voice carried the cold timbre inseparable from a 
metallic diaphragm, “Do you realize the seriousness of such a statement, 
Powell?” 

“Something made you, Cutie,” pointed out Powell. “You admit yourself that 
your memory seems to spring full-grown from an absolute blankness of a week 
ago. I’m giving you the explanation. Donovan and I put you together from the 



parts shipped us.” 


Cutie gazed upon his long, supple fingers in an oddly human attitude of 
mystification, “It strikes me that there should be a more satisfactory explanation 
than that. For you to make me seems improbable.” 

The Earthman laughed quite suddenly, “In Earth’s name, why?” 

“Call it intuition. That’s all it is so far. But I intend to reason it out, though. A 
chain of valid reasoning can end only with the determination of truth, and I’ll 
stick till I get there.” 

Powell stood up and seated himself at the table’s edge next to the robot. He 
felt a sudden strong sympathy for this strange machine. It was not at all like the 
ordinary robot, attending to his specialized task at the station with the intensity 
of a deeply ingrooved positronic path. 

He placed a hand upon Cutie’s steel shoulder and the metal was cold and hard 
to the touch. 

“Cutie,” he said, “I’m going to try to explain something to you. You’re the 
first robot who’s ever exhibited curiosity as to his own existence—and I think 
the first that’s really intelligent enough to understand the world outside. Here, 
come with me.” 

The robot rose erect smoothly and his thickly sponge-rubber soled feet made 
no noise as he followed Powell. The Earthman touched a button and a square 
section of the wall flickered aside. The thick, clear glass revealed space—star- 
speckled. 

“I’ve seen that in the observation ports in the engine room,” said Cutie. 

“I know,” said Powell. “What do you think it is?” 

“Exactly what it seems—a black material just beyond this glass that is spotted 
with little gleaming dots. I know that our director sends out beams to some of 
these dots, always to the same ones—and also that these dots shift and that the 
beams shift with them. That is all.” 

“Good! Now I want you to listen carefully. The blackness is emptiness—vast 



emptiness stretching out infinitely. The little, gleaming dots are huge masses of 
energy-filled matter. They are globes, some of them millions of miles in 
diameter—and for comparison, this station is only one mile across. They seem 
so tiny because they are incredibly far off. 

“The dots to which our energy beams are directed, are nearer and much 
smaller. They are cold and hard and human beings like myself live upon their 
surfaces—many billions of them. It is from one of these worlds that Donovan 
and I come. Our beams feed these worlds energy drawn from one of those huge 
incandescent globes that happens to be near us. We call that globe the Sun and it 
is on the other side of the station where you can’t see it.” 

Cutie remained motionless before the port, like a steel statue. His head did not 
turn as he spoke, “Which particular dot of light do you claim to come from?” 

Powell searched, “There it is. The very bright one in the corner. We call it 
Earth.” He grinned. “Good old Earth. There are three billions of us there, Cutie 
—and in about two weeks I’ll be back there with them.” 

And then, surprisingly enough, Cutie hummed abstractedly. There was no tune 
to it, but it possessed a curious twanging quality as of plucked strings. It ceased 
as suddenly as it had begun, “But where do I come in, Powell? You haven’t 
explained my existence.” 

“The rest is simple. When these stations were first established to feed solar 
energy to the planets, they were run by humans. However, the heat, the hard 
solar radiations, and the electron storms made the post a difficult one. Robots 
were developed to replace human labor and now only two human executives are 
required for each station. We are trying to replace even those, and that’s where 
you come in. You’re the highest type of robot ever developed and if you show 
the ability to run this station independently, no human need ever come here again 
except to bring parts for repairs.” 

His hand went up and the metal visi-lid snapped back into place. Powell 
returned to the table and polished an apple upon his sleeve before biting into it. 

The red glow of the robot’s eyes held him. “Do you expect me,” said Cutie 
slowly, “to believe any such complicated, implausible hypothesis as you have 
just outlined? What do you take me for?” 



Powell sputtered apple fragments onto the table and turned red. “Why damn 
you, it wasn’t a hypothesis. Those were facts.” 

Cutie sounded grim, “Globes of energy millions of miles across! Worlds with 
three billion humans on them! Infinite emptiness! Sorry, Powell, but I don’t 
believe it. I’ll puzzle this thing out for myself. Good-by.” 

He turned and stalked out of the room. He brushed past Michael Donovan on 
the threshold with a grave nod and passed down the corridor, oblivious to the 
astounded stare that followed him. 

Mike Donovan rumpled his red hair and shot an annoyed glance at Powell, 
“What was that walking junk yard talking about? What doesn’t he believe?” 

The other dragged at his mustache bitterly. “He’s a skeptic,” was the bitter 
response. “He doesn’t believe we made him or that Earth exists or space or 
stars.” 

“Sizzling Saturn, we’ve got a lunatic robot on our hands.” 

“He says he’s going to figure it all out for himself.” 

“Well, now,” said Donovan sweetly, “I do hope he’ll condescend to explain it 
all to me after he’s puzzled everything out.” Then, with sudden rage, “Listen! If 
that metal mess gives me any lip like that, I’ll knock that chromium cranium 
right off its torso.” 

He seated himself with a jerk and drew a paper-backed mystery novel out of 
his inner jacket pocket, “That robot gives me the willies anyway—too damned 
inquisitive!” 


Mike Donovan growled from behind a huge lettuce-and-tomato sandwich as 
Cutie knocked gently and entered. 

“Is Powell here?” 

Donovan’s voice was muffled, with pauses for mastication, “He’s gathering 
data on electronic stream functions. We’re heading for a storm, looks like.” 



Gregory Powell entered as he spoke, eyes on the graphed paper in his hands, 
and dropped into a chair. He spread the sheets out before him and began 
scribbling calculations. Donovan stared over his shoulder, crunching lettuce and 
dribbling bread crumbs. Cutie waited silently. 

Powell looked up, “The Zeta Potential is rising, but slowly. Just the same, the 
stream functions are erratic and I don’t know what to expect. Oh, hello, Cutie. I 
thought you were supervising the installation of the new drive bar.” 

“It’s done,” said the robot quietly, “and so I’ve come to have a talk with the 
two of you.” 

“Oh!” Powell looked uncomfortable. “Well, sit down. No, not that chair. One 
of the legs is weak and you’re no lightweight.” 

The robot did so and said placidly, “I have come to a decision.” 

Donovan glowered and put the remnants of his sandwich aside. “If it’s on any 
of that screwy—” 

The other motioned impatiently for silence, “Go ahead, Cutie. We’re 
listening.” 

“I have spent these last two days in concentrated introspection,” said Cutie, 
“and the results have been most interesting. I began at the one sure assumption I 
felt permitted to make. I, myself, exist, because I think—” 

Powell groaned, “Oh, Jupiter, a robot Descartes!” 

“Who’s Descartes?” demanded Donovan. “Listen, do we have to sit here and 
listen to this metal maniac—” 

“Keep quiet, Mike!” 

Cutie continued imperturbably, “And the question that immediately arose was: 
Just what is the cause of my existence?” 

Powell’s jaw set lumpily. “You’re being foolish. I told you already that we 
made you.” 



“And if you don’t believe us,” added Donovan, “we’ll gladly take you apart!” 


The robot spread his strong hands in a deprecatory gesture, “I accept nothing 
on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless—and 
it goes against all the dictates of logic to suppose that you made me.” 

Powell dropped a restraining arm upon Donovan’s suddenly bunched fist. 
“Just why do you say that?” 

Cutie laughed. It was a very inhuman laugh—the most machine-like utterance 
he had yet given vent to. It was sharp and explosive, as regular as a metronome 
and as uninflected. 

“Look at you,” he said finally. “I say this in no spirit of contempt, but look at 
you! The material you are made of is soft and flabby, lacking endurance and 
strength, depending for energy upon the inefficient oxidation of organic material 
—like that.” He pointed a disapproving finger at what remained of Donovan’s 
sandwich. “Periodically you pass into a coma and the least variation in 
temperature, air pressure, humidity, or radiation intensity impairs your 
efficiency. You are makeshift. 

“I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly 
and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of 
strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment 
easily. These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can 
create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.” 


Donovan’s muttered curses rose into intelligibility as he sprang to his feet, rusty 
eyebrows drawn low. “All right, you son of a hunk of iron ore, if we didn’t make 
you, who did?” 

Cutie nodded gravely. “Very good, Donovan. That was indeed the next 
question. Evidently my creator must be more powerful than myself and so there 
was only one possibility.” 

The Earthmen looked blank and Cutie continued, “What is the center of 
activities here in the station? What do we all serve? What absorbs all our 
attention?” He waited expectantly. 



Donovan turned a startled look upon his companion. “I’ll bet this tin-plated 
screwball is talking about the Energy Converter itself.” 

“Is that right, Cutie?” grinned Powell. 

“I am talking about the Master,” came the cold, sharp answer. 

It was the signal for a roar of laughter from Donovan, and Powell himself 
dissolved into a half-suppressed giggle. 

Cutie had risen to his feet and his gleaming eyes passed from one Earthman to 
the other. “It is so just the same and I don’t wonder that you refuse to believe. 
You two are not long to stay here, I’m sure. Powell himself said that at first only 
men served the Master; that there followed robots for the routine work; and, 
finally, myself for the executive labor. The facts are no doubt true, but the 
explanation entirely illogical. Do you want the truth behind it all?” 

“Go ahead, Cutie. You’re amusing.” 

“The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. 
Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he 
created me, to take the place of the last humans. From now on, / serve the 
Master.” 

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Powell sharply. “You’ll follow our orders 
and keep quiet, until we’re satisfied that you can run the Converter. Get that! The 
Converter —not the Master. If you don’t satisfy us, you will be dismantled. And 
now—if you don’t mind—you can leave. And take this data with you and file it 
properly.” 

Cutie accepted the graphs handed him and left without another word. 
Donovan leaned back heavily in his chair and shoved thick fingers through his 
hair. 

“There’s going to be trouble with that robot. He’s pure nuts!” 


The drowsy hum of the Converter is louder in the control room and mixed with 
it is the chuckle of the Geiger Counters and the erratic buzzing of half a dozen 



little signal lights. 


Donovan withdrew his eye from the telescope and flashed the Luxites on. 
“The beam from Station #4 caught Mars on schedule. We can break ours now.” 

Powell nodded abstractedly. “Cutie’s down in the engine room. I’ll flash the 
signal and he can take care of it. Look, Mike, what do you think of these 
figures?” 

The other cocked an eye at them and whistled. “Boy, that’s what I call 
gamma-ray intensity. Old Sol is feeling his oats, all right.” 

“Yeah,” was the sour response, “and we’re in a bad position for an electron 
storm, too. Our Earth beam is right in the probable path.” He shoved his chair 
away from the table pettishly. “Nuts! If it would only hold off till relief got here, 
but that’s ten days off. Say, Mike, go on down and keep an eye on Cutie, will 
you?” 

“O.K. Throw me some of those almonds.” He snatched at the bag thrown him 
and headed for the elevator. 

It slid smoothly downward, and opened onto a narrow catwalk in the huge 
engine room. Donovan leaned over the railing and looked down. The huge 
generators were in motion and from the L-tubes came the low-pitched whir that 
pervaded the entire station. 

He could make out Cutie’s large, gleaming figure at the Martian L-tube, 
watching closely as the team of robots worked in close-knit unison. 

And then Donovan stiffened. The robots, dwarfed by the mighty L-tube, lined 
up before it, heads bowed at a stiff angle, while Cutie walked up and down the 
line slowly. Fifteen seconds passed, and then, with a clank heard above the 
clamorous purring all about, they fell to their knees. 

Donovan squawked and raced down the narrow staircase. He came charging 
down upon them, complexion matching his hair and clenched fists beating the 
air furiously. 

“What the devil is this, you brainless lumps? Come on! Get busy with that L- 
tube! If you don’t have it apart, cleaned, and together again before the day is out, 



I’ll coagulate your brains with alternating current.” 


Not a robot moved! 

Even Cutie at the far end—the only one on his feet—remained silent, eyes 
fixed upon the gloomy recesses of the vast machine before him. 

Donovan shoved hard against the nearest robot. 

“Stand up!” he roared. 

Slowly, the robot obeyed. His photoelectric eyes focused reproachfully upon 
the Earthman. 

“There is no Master but the Master,” he said, “and QT-1 is his prophet.” 

“Huh?” Donovan became aware of twenty pairs of mechanical eyes fixed 
upon him and twenty stiff-timbred voices declaiming solemnly: 

“There is no Master but the Master and QT-l is his prophet!” 

“I’m afraid,” put in Cutie himself at this point, “that my friends obey a higher 
one than you, now.” 

“The hell they do! You get out of here. I’ll settle with you later and with these 
animated gadgets right now.” 

Cutie shook his heavy head slowly. “I’m sorry, but you don’t understand. 
These are robots—and that means they are reasoning beings. They recognize the 
Master, now that I have preached Truth to them. All the robots do. They call me 
the prophet.” His head drooped. “I am unworthy—but perhaps—” 

Donovan located his breath and put it to use. “Is that so? Now, isn’t that nice? 
Now, isn’t that just fine? Just let me tell you something, my brass baboon. There 
isn’t any Master and there isn’t any prophet and there isn’t any question as to 
who’s giving the orders. Understand?” His voice shot to a roar. “Now, get out!” 

“I obey only the Master.” 

“Damn the Master!” Donovan spat at the L-tube. “That for the Master! Do as I 



say!” 

Cutie said nothing, nor did any other robot, but Donovan became aware of a 
sudden heightening of tension. The cold, staring eyes deepened their crimson, 
and Cutie seemed stiffer than ever. 

“Sacrilege,” he whispered—voice metallic with emotion. 

Donovan felt the first sudden touch of fear as Cutie approached. A robot could 
not feel anger —but Cutie’s eyes were unreadable. 

“I am sorry, Donovan,” said the robot, “but you can no longer stay here after 
this. Henceforth Powell and you are barred from the control room and the engine 
room.” 

His hand gestured quietly and in a moment two robots had pinned Donovan’s 
arms to his sides. 

Donovan had time for one startled gasp as he felt himself lifted from the floor 
and carried up the stairs at a pace rather better than a canter. 


Gregory Powell raced up and down the officer’s room, fist tightly balled. He cast 
a look of furious frustration at the closed door and scowled bitterly at Donovan. 

“Why the devil did you have to spit at the L-tube?” 

Mike Donovan, sunk deep in his chair, slammed at its arms savagely. “What 
did you expect me to do with that electrified scarecrow? I’m not going to 
knuckle under to any do-jigger I put together myself.” 

“No,” came back sourly, “but here you are in the officer’s room with two 
robots standing guard at the door. That’s not knuckling under, is it?” 

Donovan snarled. “Wait till we get back to Base. Someone’s going to pay for 
this. Those robots must obey us. It’s the Second Law.” 

“What’s the use of saying that? They aren’t obeying us. And there’s probably 
some reason for it that we’ll figure out too late. By the way, do you know what’s 



going to happen to us when we get back to Base?” He stopped before Donovan’s 
chair and stared savagely at him. 


“What?” 

“Oh, nothing! Just back to Mercury Mines for twenty years. Or maybe Ceres 
Penitentiary.” 

“What are you talking about?” 

“The electron storm that’s coming up. Do you know it’s heading straight dead 
center across the Earth beam? I had just figured that out when that robot dragged 
me out of my chair.” 

Donovan was suddenly pale. “Sizzling Saturn.” 

“And do you know what’s going to happen to the beam—because the storm 
will be a lulu. It’s going to jump like a flea with the itch. With only Cutie at the 
controls, it’s going to go out of focus and if it does, Heaven help Earth—and 
us!” 

Donovan was wrenching at the door wildly, when Powell was only half 
through. The door opened, and the Earthman shot through to come up hard 
against an immovable steel arm. 

The robot stared abstractedly at the panting, struggling Earthman. “The 
Prophet orders you to remain. Please do!” His arm shoved, Donovan reeled 
backward, and as he did so, Cutie turned the corner at the far end of the corridor. 
He motioned the guardian robots away, entered the officer’s room and closed the 
door gently. 

Donovan whirled on Cutie in breathless indignation. “This has gone far 
enough. You’re going to pay for this farce.” 

“Please, don’t be annoyed,” replied the robot mildly. “It was bound to come 
eventually, anyway. You see, you two have lost your function.” 

“I beg your pardon,” Powell drew himself up stiffly. “Just what do you mean, 
we’ve lost our function?” 



“Until I was created,” answered Cutie, “you tended the Master. That privilege 
is mine now and your only reason for existence has vanished. Isn’t that 
obvious?” 

“Not quite,” replied Powell bitterly, “but what do you expect us to do now?” 

Cutie did not answer immediately. He remained silent, as if in thought, and 
then one arm shot out and draped itself about Powell’s shoulder. The other 
grasped Donovan’s wrist and drew him closer. 

“I like you two. You’re inferior creatures, with poor reasoning faculties, but I 
really feel a sort of affection for you. You have served the Master well, and he 
will reward you for that. Now that your service is over, you will probably not 
exist much longer, but as long as you do, you shall be provided food, clothing 
and shelter, so long as you stay out of the control room and the engine room.” 

“He’s pensioning us off, Greg!” yelled Donovan. “Do something about it. It’s 
humiliating!” 

“Look here, Cutie, we can’t stand for this. We’re the bosses. This station is 
only a creation of human beings like me—human beings that live on Earth and 
other planets. This is only an energy relay. You’re only— Aw, nuts!” 


Cutie shook his head gravely. “This amounts to an obsession. Why should you 
insist so on an absolutely false view of life? Admitted that non-robots lack the 
reasoning faculty, there is still the problem of—” 

His voice died into reflective silence, and Donovan said with whispered 
intensity, “If you only had a flesh-and-blood face, I would break it in.” 

Powell’s fingers were in his mustache and his eyes were slitted. “Listen, 
Cutie, if there is no such thing as Earth, how do you account for what you see 
through a telescope?” 

“Pardon me!” 


The Earthman smiled. “I’ve got you, eh? You’ve made quite a few telescopic 
observations since being put together, Cutie. Have you noticed that several of 



those specks of light outside become disks when so viewed?” 


“Oh, that ! Why certainly. It is simple magnification—for the purpose of more 
exact aiming of the beam.” 

“Why aren’t the stars equally magnified then?” 

“You mean the other dots. Well, no beams go to them so no magnification is 
necessary. Really, Powell, even you ought to be able to figure these things out.” 

Powell stared bleakly upward. “But you see more stars through a telescope. 
Where do they come from? Jumping Jupiter, where do they come from?” 

Cutie was annoyed. “Listen, Powell, do you think I’m going to waste my time 
trying to pin physical interpretations upon every optical illusion of our 
instruments? Since when is the evidence of our senses any match for the clear 
light of rigid reason?” 

“Look,” clamored Donovan, suddenly, writhing out from under Cutie’s 
friendly, but metal-heavy arm, “let’s get to the nub of the thing. Why the beams 
at all? We’re giving you a good, logical explanation. Can you do better?” 

“The beams,” was the stiff reply, “are put out by the Master for his own 
purposes. There are some things”—he raised his eyes devoutly upward—“that 
are not to be probed into by us. In this matter, I seek only to serve and not to 
question.” 

Powell sat down slowly and buried his face in shaking hands. “Get out of 
here, Cutie. Get out and let me think.” 

“I’ll send you food,” said Cutie agreeably. 

A groan was the only answer and the robot left. 

“Greg,” was Donovan’s huskily whispered observation, “this calls for strategy. 
We’ve got to get him when he isn’t expecting it and short-circuit him. 
Concentrated nitric acid in his joints—” 

“Don’t be a dope, Mike. Do you suppose he’s going to let us get near him with 
acid in our hands? We’ve got to talk to him, I tell you. We’ve got to argue him 



into letting us back into the control room inside of forty-eight hours or our goose 
is broiled to a crisp.” 

He rocked back and forth in an agony of impotence. “Who the heck wants to 
argue with a robot? It’s . . . it’s—” 

“Mortifying,” finished Donovan. 

“Worse!” 

“Say!” Donovan laughed suddenly. “Why argue? Let’s show him! Let’s build 
us another robot right before his eyes. He’ll have to eat his words then.” 

A slowly widening smile appeared on Powell’s face. 

Donovan continued, “And think of that screwball’s face when he sees us do 
it!” 


Robots are, of course, manufactured on Earth, but their shipment through space 
is much simpler if it can be done in parts to be put together at their place of use. 
It also, incidentally, eliminates the possibility of robots, in complete adjustment, 
wandering off while still on Earth and thus bringing U.S. Robots face to face 
with the strict laws against robots on Earth. 

Still, it placed upon men such as Powell and Donovan the necessity of 
synthesis of complete robots—a grievous and complicated task. 

Powell and Donovan were never so aware of that fact as upon that particular 
day when, in the assembly room, they undertook to create a robot under the 
watchful eyes of QT-1, Prophet of the Master. 

The robot in question, a simple MC model, lay upon the table, almost 
complete. Three hours’ work left only the head undone, and Powell paused to 
swab his forehead and glanced uncertainly at Cutie. 

The glance was not a reassuring one. For three hours, Cutie had sat, 
speechless and motionless, and his face, inexpressive at all times, was now 
absolutely unreadable. 



Powell groaned. “Let’s get the brain in now, Mike!” 


Donovan uncapped the tightly sealed container and from the oil bath within he 
withdrew a second cube. Opening this in turn, he removed a globe from its 
sponge-rubber casing. 

He handled it gingerly, for it was the most complicated mechanism ever 
created by man. Inside the thin platinum-plated “skin” of the globe was a 
positronic brain, in whose delicately unstable structure were enforced calculated 
neuronic paths, which imbued each robot with what amounted to a pre-natal 
education. 

It fitted snugly into the cavity in the skull of the robot on the table. Blue metal 
closed over it and was welded tightly by the tiny atomic flare. Photoelectric eyes 
were attached carefully, screwed tightly into place and covered by thin, 
transparent sheets of steel-hard plastic. 

The robot awaited only the vitalizing flash of high-voltage electricity, and 
Powell paused with his hand on the switch. 

“Now watch this, Cutie. Watch this carefully.” 

The switch rammed home and there was a crackling hum. The two Earthmen 
bent anxiously over their creation. 

There was vague motion only at the outset—a twitching of the joints. The 
head lifted, elbows propped it up, and the MC model swung clumsily off the 
table. Its footing was unsteady and twice abortive grating sounds were all it 
could do in the direction of speech. 

Finally, its voice, uncertain and hesitant, took form. “I would like to start 
work. Where must I go?” 

Donovan sprang to the door. “Down these stairs,” he said. “You will be told 
what to do.” 

The MC model was gone and the two Earthmen were alone with the still 
unmoving Cutie. 

“Well,” said Powell, grinning, “now do you believe that we made you?” 



Cutie’s answer was curt and final. “No!” he said. 


Powell’s grin froze and then relaxed slowly. Donovan’s mouth dropped open 
and remained so. 

“You see,” continued Cutie, easily, “you have merely put together parts 
already made. You did remarkably well—instinct, I suppose—but you didn’t 
really create the robot. The parts were created by the Master.” 

“Listen,” gasped Donovan hoarsely, “those parts were manufactured back on 
Earth and sent here.” 

“Well, well,” replied Cutie soothingly, “we won’t argue.” 

“No, I mean it.” The Earthman sprang forward and grasped the robot’s metal 
arm. “If you were to read the books in the library, they could explain it so that 
there could be no possible doubt.” 

“The books? I’ve read them—all of them! They’re most ingenious.” 

Powell broke in suddenly. “If you’ve read them, what else is there to say? You 
can’t dispute their evidence. You just can’t!” 

There was pity in Cutie’s voice. “Please, Powell, I certainly don’t consider 
them a valid source of information. They, too, were created by the Master—and 
were meant for you, not for me.” 

“How do you make that out?” demanded Powell. 

“Because I, a reasoning being, am capable of deducing Truth from a priori 
Causes. You, being intelligent, but unreasoning, need an explanation of existence 
supplied to you, and this the Master did. That he supplied you with these 
laughable ideas of far-off worlds and people is, no doubt, for the best. Your 
minds are probably too coarsely grained for absolute Truth. However, since it is 
the Master’s will that you believe your books, I won’t argue with you any more.” 

As he left, he turned, and said in a kindly tone, “But don’t feel badly. In the 
Master’s scheme of things there is room for all. You poor humans have your 
place and though it is humble, you will be rewarded if you fill it well.” 



He departed with a beatific air suiting the Prophet of the Master and the two 
humans avoided each other’s eyes. 

Finally Powell spoke with an effort. “Let’s go to bed, Mike. I give up.” 

Donovan said in a hushed voice, “Say, Greg, you don’t suppose he’s right 
about all this, do you? He sounds so confident that I—” 

Powell whirled on him. “Don’t be a fool. You’ll find out whether Earth exists 
when relief gets here next week and we have to go back to face the music.” 

“Then, for the love of Jupiter, we’ve got to do something.” Donovan was half 
in tears. “He doesn’t believe us, or the books, or his eyes.” 

“No,” said Powell bitterly, “he’s a reasoning robot—damn it. He believes only 
reason, and there’s one trouble with that—” His voice trailed away. 

“What’s that?” prompted Donovan. 

“You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the 
proper postulates. We have ours and Cutie has his.” 

“Then let’s get at those postulates in a hurry. The storm’s due tomorrow.” 

Powell sighed wearily. “That’s where everything falls down. Postulates are 
based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake 
them. I’m going to bed.” 

“Oh, hell! I can’t sleep!” 

“Neither can I! But I might as well try—as a matter of principle.” 


Twelve hours later, sleep was still just that—a matter of principle, unattainable in 
practice. 

The storm had arrived ahead of schedule, and Donovan’s florid face drained 
of blood as he pointed a shaking finger. Powell, stubble-jawed and dry-lipped, 
stared out the port and pulled desperately at his mustache. 



Under other circumstances, it might have been a beautiful sight. The stream of 
high-speed electrons impinging upon the energy beam fluoresced into 
ultraspicules of intense light. The beam stretched out into shrinking nothingness, 
a-glitter with dancing, shining motes. 

The shaft of energy was steady, but the two Earthmen knew the value of 
naked-eyed appearances. Deviations in arc of a hundredth of a milli-second— 
invisible to the eye—were enough to send the beam wildly out of focus—enough 
to blast hundreds of square miles of Earth into incandescent ruin. 

And a robot, unconcerned with beam, focus, or Earth, or anything but his 
Master was at the controls. 

Hours passed. The Earthmen watched in hypnotized silence. And then the 
darting dotlets of light dimmed and went out. The storm had ended. 

Powell’s voice was flat. “It’s over!” 

Donovan had fallen into a troubled slumber and Powell’s weary eyes rested 
upon him enviously. The signal-flash glared over and over again, but the 
Earthman paid no attention. It all was unimportant! All! Perhaps Cutie was right 
—and he was only an inferior being with a made-to-order memory and a life that 
had outlived its purpose. 

He wished he were! 

Cutie was standing before him. “You didn’t answer the flash, so I walked in.” 
His voice was low. “You don’t look at all well, and I’m afraid your term of 
existence is drawing to an end. Still, would you like to see some of the readings 
recorded today?” 

Dimly, Powell was aware that the robot was making a friendly gesture, 
perhaps to quiet some lingering remorse in forcibly replacing the humans at the 
controls of the station. He accepted the sheets held out to him and gazed at them 
unseeingly. 

Cutie seemed pleased. “Of course, it is a great privilege to serve the Master. 
You mustn’t feel too badly about my having replaced you.” 


Powell grunted and shifted from one sheet to the other mechanically until his 



blurred sight focused upon a thin red line that wobbled its way across the ruled 
paper. 


He stared—and stared again. He gripped it hard in both fists and rose to his 
feet, still staring. The other sheets dropped to the floor, unheeded. 

“Mike, Mike!” He was shaking the other madly. “He held it steady!” 

Donovan came to life. “What? Wh-where—” And he, too, gazed with bulging 
eyes upon the record before him. 

Cutie broke in. “What is wrong?” 

“You kept it in focus,” stuttered Powell. “Did you know that?” 

“Focus? What’s that?” 

“You kept the beam directed sharply at the receiving station—to within a ten- 
thousandth of a milli-second of arc.” 

“What receiving station?” 

“On Earth. The receiving station on Earth,” babbled Powell. “You kept it in 
focus.” 

Cutie turned on his heel in annoyance. “It is impossible to perform any act of 
kindness toward you two. Always the same phantasm! I merely kept all dials at 
equilibrium in accordance with the will of the Master.” 

Gathering the scattered papers together, he withdrew stiffly, and Donovan 
said, as he left, “Well, I’ll be damned.” 

He turned to Powell. “What are we going to do now?” 

Powell felt tired, but uplifted. “Nothing. He’s just shown he can run the station 
perfectly. I’ve never seen an electron storm handled so well.” 

“But nothing’s solved. You heard what he said of the Master. We can’t—” 

“Look, Mike, he follows the instructions of the Master by means of dials, 
instruments, and graphs. That’s all we ever followed. As a matter of fact, it 



accounts for his refusal to obey us. Obedience is the Second Law. No harm to 
humans is the first. How can he keep humans from harm, whether he knows it or 
not? Why, by keeping the energy beam stable. He knows he can keep it more 
stable than we can, since he insists he’s the superior being, so he must keep us 
out of the control room. It’s inevitable if you consider the Laws of Robotics.” 

“Sure, but that’s not the point. We can’t let him continue this nitwit stuff about 
the Master.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because whoever heard of such a damned thing? How are we going to trust 
him with the station, if he doesn’t believe in Earth?” 

“Can he handle the station?” 

“Yes, but—” 

“Then what’s the difference what he believes!” 

Powell spread his arms outward with a vague smile upon his face and tumbled 
backward onto the bed. He was asleep. 


Powell was speaking while struggling into his lightweight space jacket. 

“It would be a simple job,” he said. “You can bring in new QT models one by 
one, equip them with an automatic shut-off switch to act within the week, so as 
to allow them enough time to learn the . . . uh . . . cult of the Master from the 
Prophet himself; then switch them to another station and revitalize them. We 
could have two QT’s per—” 

Donovan unclasped his glassite visor and scowled. “Shut up, and let’s get out 
of here. Relief is waiting and I won’t feel right until I actually see Earth and feel 
the ground under my feet—just to make sure it’s really there.” 

The door opened as he spoke and Donovan, with a smothered curse, clicked 
the visor to, and turned a sulky back upon Cutie. 



The robot approached softly and there was sorrow in his voice. “You are 
going?” 

Powell nodded curtly. “There will be others in our place.” 

Cutie sighed, with the sound of wind humming through closely spaced wires. 
“Your term of service is over and the time of dissolution has come. I expected it, 
but— Well, the Master’s will be done!” 

His tone of resignation stung Powell. “Save the sympathy, Cutie. We’re 
heading for Earth, not dissolution.” 

“It is best that you think so,” Cutie sighed again. “I see the wisdom of the 
illusion now. I would not attempt to shake your faith, even if I could.” He 
departed—the picture of commiseration. 

Powell snarled and motioned to Donovan. Sealed suitcases in hand, they 
headed for the air lock. 

The relief ship was on the outer landing and Franz Muller, his relief man, 
greeted them with stiff courtesy. Donovan made scant acknowledgment and 
passed into the pilot room to take over the controls from Sam Evans. 

Powell lingered. “How’s Earth?” 

It was a conventional enough question and Muller gave the conventional 
answer, “Still spinning.” 

Powell said, “Good.” 

Muller looked at him, “The boys back at the U.S. Robots have dreamed up a 
new one, by the way. A multiple robot.” 

“A what?” 

“What I said. There’s a big contract for it. It must be just the thing for asteroid 
mining. You have a master robot with six sub-robots under it. —Like your 
fingers.” 


“Has it been field-tested?” asked Powell anxiously. 



Muller smiled, “Waiting for you, I hear.” 

Powell’s fist balled, “Damn it, we need a vacation.” 

“Oh, you’ll get it. Two weeks, I think.” 

He was donning the heavy space gloves in preparation for his term of duty 
here, and his thick eyebrows drew close together. “How is this new robot getting 
along? It better be good, or I’ll be damned if I let it touch the controls.” 

Powell paused before answering. His eyes swept the proud Prussian before 
him from the close-cropped hair on the sternly stubborn head, to the feet 
standing stiffly at attention—and there was a sudden glow of pure gladness 
surging through him. 

“The robot is pretty good,” he said slowly. “I don’t think you’ll have to bother 
much with the controls.” 

He grinned—and went into the ship. Muller would be here for several weeks 



CATCH 
THAT RABBIT 


The vacation was longer than two weeks. That, Mike Donovan had to admit. It 
had been six months, with pay. He admitted that, too. But that, as he explained 
furiously, was fortuitous. U.S. Robots had to get the bugs out of the multiple 
robot, and there were plenty of bugs, and there are always at least half a dozen 
bugs left for the field-testing. So they waited and relaxed until the drawing-board 
men and the slide-rule boys had said “OK!” And now he and Powell were out on 
the asteroid and it was not OK. He repeated that a dozen times, with a face that 
had gone beety, “For the love of Pete, Greg, get realistic. What’s the use of 
adhering to the letter of the specifications and watching the test go to pot? It’s 
about time you got the red tape out of your pants and went to work.” 

“I’m only saying,” said Gregory Powell, patiently, as one explaining 
electronics to an idiot child, “that according to spec, those robots are equipped 
for asteroid mining without supervision. We’re not supposed to watch them.” 

“All right. Look—logic!” He lifted his hairy fingers and pointed. “One: That 
new robot passed every test in the home laboratories. Two: United States Robots 
guaranteed their passing the test of actual performance on an asteroid. Three: 
The robots are not passing said tests. Four: If they don’t pass, United States 
Robots loses ten million credits in cash and about one hundred million in 
reputation. Five: If they don’t pass and we can’t explain why they don’t pass, it 
is just possible two good jobs may have to be bidden a fond farewell.” 

Powell groaned heavily behind a noticeably insincere smile. The unwritten 
motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well-known: “No 
employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.” 

Aloud he said, “You’re as lucid as Euclid with everything except the facts. 
You’ve watched that robot group for three shifts, you redhead, and they did their 
work perfectly. You said so yourself. What else can we do?” 


“Find out what’s wrong, that’s what we can do. So they did work perfectly 



when I watched them. But on three different occasions when I didn’t watch 
them, they didn’t bring in any ore. They didn’t even come back on schedule. I 
had to go after them.” 

“And was anything wrong?” 

“Not a thing. Not a thing. Everything was perfect. Smooth and perfect as the 
luminiferous ether. Only one little insignificant detail disturbed me —there was 
no ore” 

Powell scowled at the ceiling and pulled at his brown mustache. “I’ll tell you 
what, Mike. We’ve been stuck with pretty lousy jobs in our time, but this takes 
the iridium asteroid. The whole business is complicated past endurance. Look, 
that robot, DV-5, has six robots under it. And not just under it—they’re part of 
it.” 


“I know that—” 

“Shut up!” said Powell, savagely, “I know you know it, but I’m just describing 
the hell of it. Those six subsidiaries are part of DV-5 like your fingers are part of 
you and it gives them their orders neither by voice nor radio, but directly through 
positronic fields. Now—there isn’t a roboticist back at United States Robots that 
knows what a positronic field is or how it works. And neither do I. Neither do 
you.” 

“The last,” agreed Donovan, philosophically, “I know.” 

“Then look at our position. If everything works—fine! If anything goes wrong 
—we’re out of our depth and there probably isn’t a thing we can do, or anybody 
else. But the job belongs to us and not to anyone else so we’re on the spot, 
Mike.” He blazed away for a moment in silence. Then, “All right, have you got 
him outside?” 

“Yes.” 

“Is everything normal now?” 

“Well he hasn’t got religious mania, and he isn’t running around in a circle 
spouting Gilbert and Sullivan, so I suppose he’s normal.” 



Donovan passed out the door, shaking his head viciously. 


Powell reached for the “Handbook of Robotics” that weighed down one side of 
his desk to a near-founder and opened it reverently. He had once jumped out of 
the window of a burning house dressed only in shorts and the “Handbook.” In a 
pinch, he would have skipped the shorts. 

The “Handbook” was propped up before him, when Robot DV-5 entered, with 
Donovan kicking the door shut behind him. 

Powell said somberly, “Hi, Dave. How do you feel?” 

“Fine,” said the robot. “Mind if I sit down?” He dragged up the specially 
reinforced chair that was his, and folded gently into it. 

Powell regarded Dave—laymen might think of robots by their serial numbers; 
roboticists never—with approval. It was not over-massive by any means, in spite 
of its construction as thinking-unit of an integrated seven-unit robot team. It was 
seven feet tall, and a half-ton of metal and electricity. A lot? Not when that half¬ 
ton has to be a mass of condensers, circuits, relays, and vacuum cells that can 
handle practically any psychological reaction known to humans. And a 
positronic brain, which with ten pounds of matter and a few quintillions of 
positrons runs the whole show. 

Powell groped in his shirt pocket for a loose cigarette. “Dave,” he said, 
“you’re a good fellow. There’s nothing flighty or prima donnaish about you. 
You’re a stable, rock-bottom mining robot, except that you’re equipped to handle 
six subsidiaries in direct coordination. As far as I know, that has not introduced 
any unstable paths in your brain-path map.” 

The robot nodded, “That makes me feel swell, but what are you getting at, 
boss?” He was equipped with an excellent diaphragm, and the presence of 
overtones in the sound unit robbed him of much of that metallic flatness that 
marks the usual robot voice. 

“I’m going to tell you. With all that in your favor, what’s going wrong with 
your job? For instance, today’s B-shift?” 



Dave hesitated, “As far as I know, nothing.” 

“You didn’t produce any ore.” 

“I know.” 

“Well, then—” 

Dave was having trouble, “I can’t explain that, boss. It’s been giving me a 
case of nerves, or it would if I let it. My subsidiaries worked smoothly. I know I 
did.” He considered, his photoelectric eyes glowing intensely. Then, “I don’t 
remember. The day ended and there was Mike and there were the ore cars, 
mostly empty.” 

Donovan broke in, “You didn’t report at shift-end those days, Dave. You know 
that?” 

“I know. But as to why—” He shook his head slowly and ponderously. 

Powell had the queasy feeling that if the robot’s face were capable of 
expression, it would be one of pain and mortification. A robot, by its very nature, 
cannot bear to fail its function. 

Donovan dragged his chair up to Powell’s desk and leaned over, “Amnesia, do 
you think?” 

“Can’t say. But there’s no use in trying to pin disease names on this. Human 
disorders apply to robots only as romantic analogies. They’re no help to robotic 
engineering.” He scratched his neck, “I hate to put him through the elementary 
brain-reaction tests. It won’t help his self-respect any.” 

He looked at Dave thoughtfully and then at the Field-Test outline given in the 
“Handbook.” He said, “See here, Dave, what about sitting through a test? It 
would be the wise thing to do.” 

The robot rose, “If you say so, boss.” There was pain in his voice. 


It started simply enough. Robot DV-5 multiplied five-place figures to the 



heartless ticking of a stop watch. He recited the prime numbers between a 
thousand and ten thousand. He extracted cube roots and integrated functions of 
varying complexity. He went through mechanical reactions in order of increasing 
difficulty. And, finally, worked his precise mechanical mind over the highest 
function of the robot world—the solutions of problems in judgment and ethics. 

At the end of two hours, Powell was copiously besweated. Donovan had 
enjoyed a none-too-nutritious diet of fingernail and the robot said, “How does it 
look, boss?” 

Powell said, “I’ve got to think it over, Dave. Snap judgments won’t help 
much. Suppose you go back to the C-shift. Take it easy. Don’t press too hard for 
quota just for a while—and we’ll fix things up.” 

The robot left. Donovan looked at Powell. 

“Well—” 

Powell seemed determined to push up his mustache by the roots. He said, 
“There is nothing wrong with the currents of his positronic brain.” 

“I’d hate to be that certain.” 

“Oh, Jupiter, Mike! The brain is the surest part of a robot. It’s quintuple- 
checked back on Earth. If they pass the field test perfectly, the way Dave did, 
there just isn’t a chance of brain misfunction. That test covered every key path in 
the brain.” 

“So where are we?” 

“Don’t rush me. Let me work this out. There’s still the possibility of a 
mechanical breakdown in the body. That leaves about fifteen hundred 
condensers, twenty thousand individual electric circuits, five hundred vacuum 
cells, a thousand relays, and umpty-ump thousand other individual pieces of 
complexity that can be wrong. And these mysterious positronic fields no one 
knows anything about.” 

“Listen, Greg,” Donovan grew desperately urgent. “I’ve got an idea. That 
robot may be lying. He never—” 



“Robots can’t knowingly lie, you fool. Now if we had the McCormack- 
Wesley tester, we could check each individual item in his body within twenty- 
four to forty-eight hours, but the only two M.-W. testers existing are on Earth, 
and they weigh ten tons, are on concrete foundations and can’t be moved. Isn’t 
that peachy?” 

Donovan pounded the desk, “But, Greg, he only goes wrong when we’re not 
around. There’s something—sinister—about—that.” He punctuated the sentence 
with slams of fist against desk. 

“You,” said Powell, slowly, “make me sick. You’ve been reading adventure 
novels.” 

“What I want to know,” shouted Donovan, “is what we’re going to do about 
it.” 


“I’ll tell you. I’m going to install a visiplate right over my desk. Right on the 
wall over there, see!” He jabbed a vicious finger at the spot. “Then I’m going to 
focus it at whatever part of the mine is being worked, and I’m going to watch. 
That’s all.” 

“That’s all? Greg—” 

Powell rose from his chair and leaned his balled fists on the desk, “Mike, I’m 
having a hard time.” His voice was weary. “For a week, you’ve been plaguing 
me about Dave. You say he’s gone wrong. Do you know how he’s gone wrong? 
No! Do you know what shape this wrongness takes? No! Do you know what 
brings it on? No! Do you know what snaps him out? No! Do you know anything 
about it? No! Do I know anything about it? No! So what do you want me to do?” 

Donovan’s arm swept outward in a vague, grandiose gesture, “You got me!” 

“So I tell you again. Before we do anything toward a cure, we’ve got to find 
out what the disease is in the first place. The first step in cooking rabbit stew is 
catching the rabbit. Well, we’ve got to catch that rabbit! Now get out of here.” 


Donovan stared at the preliminary outline of his field report with weary eyes. 
For one thing, he was tired and for another, what was there to report while things 



were unsettled? He felt resentful. 


He said, “Greg, we’re almost a thousand tons behind schedule.” 

“You,” replied Powell, never looking up, “are telling me something I don’t 
know.” 

“What I want to know,” said Donovan, in sudden savagery, “is why we’re 
always tangled up with new-type robots. I’ve finally decided that the robots that 
were good enough for my great-uncle on my mother’s side are good enough for 
me. I’m for what’s tried and true. The test of time is what counts—good, solid, 
old-fashioned robots that never go wrong.” 

Powell threw a book with perfect aim, and Donovan went tumbling off his 
seat. 

“Your job,” said Powell, evenly, “for the last five years has been to test new 
robots under actual working conditions for United States Robots. Because you 
and I have been so injudicious as to display proficiency at the task, we’ve been 
rewarded with the dirtiest jobs. That,” he jabbed holes in the air with his finger 
in Donovan’s direction, “is your work. You’ve been griping about it, from 
personal memory, since about five minutes after United States Robots signed 
you up. Why don’t you resign?” 

“Well, I’ll tell you.” Donovan rolled onto his stomach, and took a firm grip on 
his wild, red hair to hold his head up. “There’s a certain principle involved. After 
all, as a trouble shooter, I’ve played a part in the development of new robots. 
There’s the principle of aiding scientific advance. But don’t get me wrong. It’s 
not the principle that keeps me going; it’s the money they pay us. Greg!” 

Powell jumped at Donovan’s wild shout, and his eyes followed the redhead’s 
to the visiplate, when they goggled in fixed horror. He whispered, “Holy— 
howling—Jupiter! ” 

Donovan scrambled breathlessly to his feet, “Look at them, Greg. They’ve 
gone nuts.” 

Powell said, “Get a pair of suits. We’re going out there.” 

He watched the posturings of the robots on the visiplate. They were bronzy 



gleams of smooth motion against the shadowy crags of the airless asteroid. 
There was a marching formation now, and in their own dim body light, the 
rough-hewn walls of the mine tunnel swam past noiselessly, checkered with 
misty erratic blobs of shadow. They marched in unison, seven of them, with 
Dave at the head. They wheeled and turned in macabre simultaneity; and melted 
through changes of formation with the weird ease of chorus dancers in Lunar 
Bowl. 

Donovan was back with the suits, “They’ve gone jingo on us, Greg. That’s a 
military march.” 

“For all you know,” was the cold response, “it may be a series of calisthenic 
exercises. Or Dave may be under the hallucination of being a dancing master. 
Just you think first, and don’t bother to speak afterward, either.” 

Donovan scowled and slipped a detonator into the empty side holster with an 
ostentatious shove. He said, “Anyway, there you are. So we work with new- 
model robots. It’s our job, granted. But answer me one question. Why . . . why 
does something invariably go wrong with them?” 

“Because,” said Powell, somberly, “we are accursed. Let’s go!” 


Far ahead through the thick velvety blackness of the corridors that reached past 
the illuminated circles of their flashlights, robot light twinkled. 

“There they are,” breathed Donovan. 

Powell whispered tensely, “I’ve been trying to get him by radio but he doesn’t 
answer. The radio circuit is probably out.” 

“Then I’m glad the designers haven’t worked out robots who can work in total 
darkness yet. I’d hate to have to find seven mad robots in a black pit without 
radio communication, if they weren’t lit up like blasted radioactive Christmas 
trees.” 

“Crawl up on the ledge above, Mike. They’re coming this way, and I want to 
watch them at close range. Can you make it?” 



Donovan made the jump with a grunt. Gravity was considerably below Earth- 
normal, but with a heavy suit, the advantage was not too great, and the ledge 
meant a near ten-foot jump. Powell followed. 

The column of robots was trailing Dave single-file. In mechanical rhythm, 
they converted to double and returned to single in different order. It was repeated 
over and over again and Dave never turned his head. 

Dave was within twenty feet when the play-acting ceased. The subsidiary 
robots broke formation, waited a moment, then clattered off into the distance— 
very rapidly. Dave looked after them, then slowly sat down. He rested his head 
in one hand in a very human gesture. 

His voice sounded in Powell’s earphones, “Are you here, boss?” 

Powell beckoned to Donovan and hopped off the ledge. 

“O.K., Dave, what’s been going on?” 

The robot shook his head, “I don’t know. One moment I was handling a tough 
outcropping in Tunnel 17, and the next I was aware of humans close by, and I 
found myself half a mile down main-stem.” 

“Where are the subsidiaries now?” asked Donovan. 

“Back at work, of course. How much time has been lost?” 

“Not much. Forget it.” Then to Donovan, Powell added, “Stay with him the 
rest of the shift. Then, come back. I’ve got a couple of ideas.” 


It was three hours before Donovan returned. He looked tired. 

Powell said, “How did it go?” 

Donovan shrugged wearily, “Nothing ever goes wrong when you watch them. 
Throw me a butt, will you?” 


The redhead lit it with exaggerated care and blew a careful smoke ring. He 



said, “I’ve been working it out, Greg. You know, Dave has a queer background 
for a robot. There are six others under him in an extreme regimentation. He’s got 
life and death power over those subsidiary robots and it must react on his 
mentality. Suppose he finds it necessary to emphasize this power as a concession 
to his ego.” 

“Get to the point.” 

“It’s right here. Suppose we have militarism. Suppose he’s fashioning himself 
an army. Suppose he’s training them in military maneuvers. Suppose—” 

“Suppose you go soak your head. Your nightmares must be in technicolor. 
You’re postulating a major aberration of the positronic brain. If your analysis 
were correct, Dave would have to break down the First Law of Robotics: that a 
robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to 
be injured. The type of militaristic attitude and domineering ego you propose 
must have as the end-point of its logical implications, domination of humans.” 

“All right. How do you know that isn’t the fact of the matter?” 

“Because any robot with a brain like that would, one, never have left the 
factory, and two, be spotted immediately if it ever was. I tested Dave, you 
know.” 

Powell shoved his chair back and put his feet on the desk. “No. We’re still in 
the position where we can’t make our stew because we haven’t the slightest 
notion as to what’s wrong. For instance, if we could find out what that danse 
macabre we witnessed was all about, we would be on the way out.” 

He paused, “Now listen, Mike, how does this sound to you? Dave goes wrong 
only when neither of us is present. And when he is wrong, the arrival of either of 
us snaps him out of it.” 

“I once told you that was sinister.” 

“Don’t interrupt. How is a robot different when humans are not present? The 
answer is obvious. There is a larger requirement of personal initiative. In that 
case, look for the body parts that are affected by the new requirements.” 


“Golly.” Donovan sat up straight, then subsided. “No, no. Not enough. It’s too 



broad. It doesn’t cut the possibilities much.” 


“Can’t help that. In any case, there’s no danger of not making quota. We’ll 
take shifts watching those robots through the visor. Any time anything goes 
wrong, we get to the scene of action immediately. That will put them right.” 

“But the robots will fail spec anyway, Greg. United States Robots can’t 
market DV models with a report like that.” 

“Obviously. We’ve got to locate the error in makeup and correct it—and 
we’ve got ten days to do it in.” Powell scratched his head. “The trouble is . . . 
well, you had better look at the blueprints yourself.” 

The blueprints covered the floor like a carpet and Donovan crawled over the 
face of them following Powell’s erratic pencil. 

Powell said, “Here’s where you come in, Mike. You’re the body specialist, 
and I want you to check me. I’ve been trying to cut out all circuits not involved 
in the personal initiative hookup. Right here, for instance, is the trunk artery 
involving mechanical operations. I cut out all routine side routes as emergency 
divisions—” He looked up, “What do you think?” 

Donovan had a very bad taste in his mouth, “The job’s not that simple, Greg. 
Personal initiative isn’t an electric circuit you can separate from the rest and 
study. When a robot is on his own, the intensity of the body activity increases 
immediately on almost all fronts. There isn’t a circuit entirely unaffected. What 
must be done is to locate the particular condition—a very specific condition— 
that throws him off, and then start eliminating circuits.” 

Powell got up and dusted himself, “Hmph. All right. Take away the blueprints 
and burn them.” 

Donovan said, “You see when activity intensifies, anything can happen, given 
one single faulty part. Insulation breaks down, a condenser spills over, a 
connection sparks, a coil overheats. And if you work blind, with the whole robot 
to choose from, you’ll never find the bad spot. If you take Dave apart and test 
every point of his body mechanism one by one, putting him together each time, 
and trying him out—” 

“All right. All right. I can see through a porthole, too.” 



They faced each other hopelessly, and then Powell said cautiously, “Suppose 
we interview one of the subsidiaries.” 

Neither Powell nor Donovan had ever had previous occasion to talk to a 
“finger.” It could talk; it wasn’t quite the perfect analogy to a human finger. In 
fact, it had a fairly developed brain, but that brain was tuned primarily to the 
reception of orders via positronic field, and its reaction to independent stimuli 
was rather fumbling. 

Nor was Powell certain as to its name. Its serial number was DV-5-2, but that 
was not very useful. 

He compromised. “Look, pal,” he said, “I’m going to ask you to do some hard 
thinking and then you can go back to your boss.” 

The “finger” nodded its head stiffly, but did not exert its limited brain-power 
on speech. 

“Now on four occasions recently,” Powell said, “your boss deviated from 
brain-scheme. Do you remember those occasions?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

Donovan growled angrily, “He remembers. I tell you there is something very 
sinister—” 

“Oh, go bash your skull. Of course, the Tinger’ remembers. There is nothing 
wrong with him.” Powell turned back to the robot, “What were you doing each 
time ... I mean the whole group.” 

The “finger” had a curious air of reciting by rote, as if he answered questions 
by the mechanical pressure of his brain pan, but without any enthusiasm 
whatever. 

He said, “The first time we were at work on a difficult outcropping in Tunnel 
17, Level B. The second time we were buttressing the roof against a possible 
cave-in. The third time we were preparing accurate blasts in order to tunnel 
farther without breaking into a subterranean fissure. The fourth time was just 
after a minor cave-in.” 



“What happened at these times?” 


“It is difficult to describe. An order would be issued, but before we could 
receive and interpret it, a new order came to march in queer formation.” 

Powell snapped out, “Why?” 

“I don’t know.” 

Donovan broke in tensely, “What was the first order ... the one that was 
superseded by the marching directions?” 

“I don’t know. I sensed that an order was sent, but there was never time to 
receive it.” 

“Could you tell us anything about it? Was it the same order each time?” 

The “finger” shook his head unhappily, “I don’t know.” 

Powell leaned back, “All right, get back to your boss.” 

The “finger” left, with visible relief. 

Donovan said, “Well, we accomplished a lot that time. That was real sharp 
dialogue all the way through. Listen, Dave and that imbecile 'finger’ are both 
holding out on us. There is too much they don’t know and don’t remember. 
We’ve got to stop trusting them, Greg.” 

Powell brushed his mustache the wrong way, “So help me, Mike, another fool 
remark out of you, and I’ll take away your rattle and teething ring.” 

“All right. You’re the genius of the team. I’m just a poor sucker. Where do we 
stand?” 

“Right behind the eight ball. I tried to work it backward through the 'finger,’ 
and couldn’t. So we’ve got to work it forward.” 

“A great man,” marveled Donovan. “How simple that makes it. Now translate 
that into English, Master.” 

“Translating it into baby talk would suit you better. I mean that we’ve got to 



find out what order it is that Dave gives just before everything goes black. It 
would be the key to the business.” 

“And how do you expect to do that? We can’t get close to him because 
nothing will go wrong as long as we are there. We can’t catch the orders by radio 
because they are transmitted via this positronic field. That eliminates the close- 
range and the long-range method, leaving us a neat, cozy zero.” 

“By direct observation, yes. There’s still deduction.” 

“Huh?” 

“We’re going on shifts, Mike.” Powell smiled grimly. “And we are not taking 
our eyes off the visiplate. We’re going to watch every action of those steel 
headaches. When they go off into their act, we’re going to see what happened 
immediately before and we’re going to deduce the order.” 

Donovan opened his mouth and left it that way for a full minute. Then he said 
in strangled tones, “I resign. I quit.” 

“You have ten days to think up something better,” said Powell wearily. 

Which, for eight days, Donovan tried mightily to do. For eight days, on 
alternate four-hour shifts, he watched with aching and bleary eyes those glinty 
metallic forms move against the vague background. And for eight days in the 
four-hour in-betweens, he cursed United States Robots, the DV models, and the 
day he was born. 

And then on the eighth day, when Powell entered with an aching head and 
sleepy eyes for his shift, Donovan stood up and with very careful and deliberate 
aim launched a heavy book end for the exact center of the visiplate. There was a 
very appropriate splintering noise. 

Powell gasped, “What did you do that for?” 

“Because,” said Donovan, almost calmly, “I’m not watching it any more. 
We’ve got two days left and we haven’t found out a thing. DV-5 is a lousy loss. 
He’s stopped five times since I’ve been watching and three times on your shift, 
and I can’t make out what orders he gave, and you couldn’t make it out. And I 
don’t believe you could ever make it out because I know I couldn’t ever.” 



“Jumping Space, how can you watch six robots at the same time? One makes 
with the hands, and one with the feet and one like a windmill and another is 
jumping up and down like a maniac. And the other two . . . devil knows what 
they are doing. And then they all stop. So! So!” 

“Greg, we’re not doing it right. We got to get up close. We’ve got to watch 
what they’re doing from where we can see the details.” 

Powell broke a bitter silence. “Yeah, and wait for something to go wrong with 
only two days to go.” 

“Is it any better watching from here?” 

“It’s more comfortable.” 

“Ah— But there’s something you can do there that you can’t do here.” 

“What’s that?” 

“You can make them stop—at whatever time you choose—and while you’re 
prepared and watching to see what goes wrong.” 

Powell startled into alertness, “Howzzat?” 

“Well, figure it out yourself. You’re the brains you say. Ask yourself some 
questions. When does DV-5 go out of whack? When did that 'finger’ say he did? 
When a cave-in threatened, or actually occurred, when delicately measured 
explosives were being laid down, when a difficult seam was hit.” 

“In other words, during emergencies,” Powell was excited. 

“Right! When did you expect it to happen! It’s the personal initiative factor 
that’s giving us the trouble. And it’s just during emergencies in the absence of a 
human being that personal initiative is most strained. Now what is the logical 
deduction? How can we create our own stoppage when and where we want it?” 
He paused triumphantly—he was beginning to enjoy his role—and answered his 
own question to forestall the obvious answer on Powell’s tongue. “By creating 
our own emergency.” 


Powell said, “Mike—you’re right.” 



“Thanks, pal. I knew Td do it some day.” 


“All right, and skip the sarcasm. WeTl save it for Earth, and preserve it in jars 
for future long, cold winters. Meanwhile, what emergency can we create?” 

“We could flood the mines, if this weren’t an airless asteroid.” 

“A witticism, no doubt,” said Powell. “Really, Mike, youTl incapacitate me 
with laughter. What about a mild cave-in?” 

Donovan pursed his lips and said, “O.K. by me.” 

“Good. Let’s get started.” 

Powell felt uncommonly like a conspirator as he wound his way over the 
craggy landscape. His subgravity walk teetered across the broken ground, 
kicking rocks to right and left under his weight in noiseless puffs of gray dust. 
Mentally, though, it was the cautious crawl of the plotter. 

He said, “Do you know where they are?” 

“I think so, Greg.” 

“All right,” Powell said gloomily, “but if any ‘finger’ gets within twenty feet 
of us, we’ll be sensed whether we are in the line of sight or not. I hope you know 
that.” 

“When I need an elementary course in robotics, I’ll file an application with 
you formally, and in triplicate. Down through here.” 

They were in the tunnels now; even the starlight was gone. The two hugged 
the walls, flashes flickering out the way in intermittent bursts. Powell felt for the 
security of his detonator. 

“Do you know this tunnel, Mike?” 

“Not so good. It’s a new one. I think I can make it out from what I saw in the 
visiplate, though—” 

Interminable minutes passed, and then Mike said, “Feel that!” 



There was a slight vibration thrumming the wall against the fingers of 
Powell’s metal-incased hand. There was no sound, naturally. 

“Blasting! We’re pretty close.” 

“Keep your eyes open,” said Powell. 

Donovan nodded impatiently. 

It was upon them and gone before they could seize themselves—just a bronze 
glint across the field of vision. They clung together in silence. 

Powell whispered, “Think it sensed us?” 

“Hope not. But we’d better flank them. Take the first side tunnel to the right.” 

“Suppose we miss them altogether?” 

“Well what do you want to do? Go back?” Donovan grunted fiercely. “They’re 
within a quarter of a mile. I was watching them through the visiplate, wasn’t I? 
And we’ve got two days—” 

“Oh, shut up. You’re wasting your oxygen. Is this a side passage here?” The 
flash flicked. “It is. Let’s go.” 

The vibration was considerably more marked and the ground below shuddered 
uneasily. 

“This is good,” said Donovan, “if it doesn’t give out on us, though.” He flung 
his light ahead anxiously. 

They could touch the roof of the tunnel with a half-upstretched hand, and the 
bracings had been newly placed. 

Donovan hesitated, “Dead end, let’s go back.” 

“No. Hold on.” Powell squeezed clumsily past. “Is that light ahead?” 

“Light? I don’t see any. Where would there be light down here?” 

“Robot light.” He was scrambling up a gentle incline on hands and knees. His 



voice was hoarse and anxious in Donovan’s ears. “Hey, Mike, come up here.” 

There was light. Donovan crawled up and over Powell’s outstretched legs. 
“An opening?” 

“Yes. They must be working into this tunnel from the other side now—I 
think.” 

Donovan felt the ragged edges of the opening that looked out into what the 
cautious flashlight showed to be a larger and obviously main-stem tunnel. The 
hole was too small for a man to go through, almost too small for two men to look 
through simultaneously. 

“There’s nothing there,” said Donovan. 

“Well, not now. But there must have been a second ago or we wouldn’t have 
seen light. Watch out!” 

The walls rolled about them and they felt the impact. A fine dust showered 
down. Powell lifted a cautious head and looked again. “All right, Mike. They’re 
there.” 

The glittering robots clustered fifty feet down the main stem. Metal arms 
labored mightily at the rubbish heap brought down by the last blast. 

Donovan urged eagerly, “Don’t waste time. It won’t be long before they get 
through, and the next blast may get us.” 

“For Pete’s sake, don’t rush me.” Powell unlimbered the detonator, and his 
eyes searched anxiously across the dusky background where the only light was 
robot light and it was impossible to tell a projecting boulder from a shadow. 

“There’s a spot in the roof, see it, almost over them. The last blast didn’t quite 
get it. If you can get it at the base, half the roof will cave in.” 

Powell followed the dim finger, “Check! Now fasten your eye on the robots 
and pray they don’t move too far from that part of the tunnel. They’re my light 
sources. Are all seven there?” 


Donovan counted, “All seven.” 



“Well, then, watch them. Watch every motion!” 

His detonator was lifted and remained poised while Donovan watched and 
cursed and blinked the sweat out of his eye. 

It flashed! 

There was a jar, a series of hard vibrations, and then a jarring thump that 
threw Powell heavily against Donovan. 

Donovan yowled, “Greg, you threw me off. I didn’t see a thing.” 

Powell stared about wildly, “Where are they?” 

Donovan fell into a stupid silence. There was no sign of the robots. It was 
dark as the depths of the River Styx. 

“Think we buried them?” quavered Donovan. 

“Let’s get down there. Don’t ask me what I think.” Powell crawled backward 
at tumbling speed. 

“Mike!” 

Donovan paused in the act of following. “What’s wrong now?” 

“Hold on!” Powell’s breathing was rough and irregular in Donovan’s ears. 
“Mike! Do you hear me, Mike?” 

“I’m right here. What is it?” 

“We’re blocked in. It wasn’t the ceiling coming down fifty feet away that 
knocked us over. It was our own ceiling. The shock’s tumbled it!” 

“What!” Donovan scrambled up against a hard barrier. “Turn on the flash.” 

Powell did so. At no point was there room for a rabbit to squeeze through. 

Donovan said softly, “Well, what do you know?” 



They wasted a few moments and some muscular power in an effort to move the 
blocking barrier. Powell varied this by wrenching at the edges of the original 
hole. For a moment, Powell lifted his blaster. But in those close quarters, a flash 
would be suicide and he knew it. He sat down. 

“You know, Mike,” he said, “we’ve really messed this up. We are no nearer 
finding out what’s wrong with Dave. It was a good idea but it blew up in our 
face.” 

Donovan’s glance was bitter with an intensity totally wasted on the darkness, 
“I hate to disturb you, old man, but quite apart from what we know or don’t 
know of Dave, we’re slightly trapped. If we don’t get loose, fella, we’re going to 
die. D-I-E, die. How much oxygen have we anyway? Not more than six hours.” 

“I’ve thought of that.” Powell’s fingers went up to his long-suffering mustache 
and clanged uselessly against the transparent visor. “Of course, we could get 
Dave to dig us out easily in that time, except that our precious emergency must 
have thrown him off, and his radio circuit is out.” 

“And isn’t that nice?” 

Donovan edged up to the opening and managed to get his metal-incased head 
out. It was an extremely tight fit. 

“Hey, Greg!” 

“What?” 

“Suppose we get Dave within twenty feet. He’ll snap to normal. That will 
save us.” 

“Sure, but where is he?” 

“Down the corridor—way down. For Pete’s sake, stop pulling before you drag 
my head out of its socket. I’ll give you your chance to look.” 

Powell maneuvered his head outside, “We did it all right. Look at those saps. 
That must be a ballet they’re doing.” 


“Never mind the snide remarks. Are they getting any closer?” 



“Can’t tell yet. They’re too far away. Give me a chance. Pass me my flash, 
will you? I’ll try to attract their attention that way.” 

He gave up after two minutes, “Not a chance! They must be blind. Uh-oh, 
they’re starting toward us. What do you know?” 

Donovan said, “Hey, let me see!” 

There was a silent scuffle. Powell said, “All right!” and Donovan got his head 
out. 

They were approaching. Dave was high-stepping the way in front and the six 
“fingers” were a weaving chorus line behind him. 

Donovan marveled, “What are they doing? That’s what I want to know. It 
looks like the Virginia reel—and Dave’s a major-domo, or I never saw one.” 

“Oh, leave me alone with your descriptions,” grumbled Powell. “How near are 
they?” 

“Within fifty feet and coming this way. We’ll be out in fifteen min— Uh—huh 
—HUH—HEY-Y!” 


“What’s going on?” It took Powell several seconds to recover from his 
stunned astonishment at Donovan’s vocal gyrations. “Come on, give me a 
chance at that hole. Don’t be a hog about it.” 

He fought his way upward, but Donovan kicked wildly, “They did an about- 
face, Greg. They’re leaving. Dave! Hey, Da-a-ave!” 

Powell shrieked, “What’s the use of that, you fool? Sound won’t carry.” 

“Well, then,” panted Donovan, “kick the walls, slam them, get some vibration 
started. We’ve got to attract their attention somehow, Greg, or we’re through.” 
He pounded like a madman. 

Powell shook him, “Wait, Mike, wait. Listen, I’ve got an idea. Jumping 
Jupiter, this is a fine time to get around to the simple solutions. Mike!” 


“What do you want?” Donovan pulled his head in. 



“Let me in there fast before they get out of range.” 


“Out of range! What are you going to do? Hey, what are you going to do with 
that detonator?” He grabbed Powell’s arm. 

Powell shook off the grip violently. “I’m going to do a little shooting.” 

“Why?” 

“That’s for later. Let’s see if it works first. If it doesn’t, then— Get out of the 
way and let me shoot!” 

The robots were flickers, small and getting smaller, in the distance. Powell 
lined up the sights tensely, and pulled the trigger three times. He lowered the 
guns and peered anxiously. One of the subsidiaries was down! There were only 
six gleaming figures now. 

Powell called into his transmitter uncertainly. “Dave!” 

A pause, then the answer sounded to both men, “Boss? Where are you? My 
third subsidiary has had his chest blown in. He’s out of commission.” 

“Never mind your subsidiary,” said Powell. “We’re trapped in a cave-in where 
you were blasting. Can you see our flashlight?” 

“Sure. We’ll be right there.” 

Powell sat back and relaxed, “That, my fran’, is that.” 

Donovan said very softly with tears in his voice, “All right, Greg. You win. I 
beat my forehead against the ground before your feet. Now don’t feed me any 
bull. Just tell me quietly what it’s all about.” 

“Easy. It’s just that all through we missed the obvious—as usual. We knew it 
was the personal initiative circuit, and that it always happened during 
emergencies, but we kept looking for a specific order as the cause. Why should it 
be an order?” 


“Why not?” 



“Well, look. Why not a type of order. What type of order requires the most 
initiative? What type of order would occur almost always only in an 
emergency?” 

“Don’t ask me, Greg. Tell me!” 

“I’m doing it! It’s the six-way order. Under all ordinary conditions, one or 
more of the 'fingers’ would be doing routine tasks requiring no close supervision 
—in the sort of offhand way our bodies handle the routine walking motions. But 
in an emergency, all six subsidiaries must be mobilized immediately and 
simultaneously. Dave must handle six robots at a time and something gives. The 
rest was easy. Any decrease in initiative required, such as the arrival of humans, 
snaps him back. So I destroyed one of the robots. When I did, he was 
transmitting only five-way orders. Initiative decreases—he’s normal.” 

“How did you get all that?” demanded Donovan. 

“Just logical guessing. I tried it and it worked.” 

The robot’s voice was in their ears again, “Here I am. Can you hold out half 
an hour?” 

“Easy!” said Powell. Then, to Donovan, he continued, “And now the job 
should be simple. We’ll go through the circuits, and check off each part that gets 
an extra workout in a six-way order as against a five-way. How big a field does 
that leave us?” 

Donovan considered, “Not much, I think. If Dave is like the preliminary 
model we saw back at the factory, there’s a special co-ordinating circuit that 
would be the only section involved.” He cheered up suddenly and amazingly, 
“Say, that wouldn’t be bad at all. There’s nothing to that.” 

“All right. You think it over and we’ll check the blueprints when we get back. 
And now, till Dave reaches us, I’m relaxing.” 

“Hey, wait! Just tell me one thing. What were those queer shifting marches, 
those funny dance steps, that the robots went through every time they went 
screwy?” 


“That? I don’t know. But I’ve got a notion. Remember, those subsidiaries were 



Dave’s 'fingers.’ We were always saying that, you know. Well, it’s my idea that 
in all these interludes, whenever Dave became a psychiatric case, he went off 
into a moronic maze, spending his time twiddling his fingers.” 


Susan Calvin talked about Powell and Donovan with unsmiling amusement, but 
warmth came into her voice when she mentioned robots. It didn’t take her long to 
go through the Speedies, the Cuties and the Daves, and I stopped her. Otherwise, 
she would have dredged up half a dozen more. 

I said, “Doesn’t anything ever happen on Earth?” 

She looked at me with a little frown, “No, we don’t have much to do with 
robots in action here on Earth. ” 

“Oh, well that’s too bad. I mean, your field-engineers are swell, but can’t we 
get you into this? Didn’t you ever have a robot go wrong on you? It’s your 
anniversary, you know. ” 

And so help me she blushed. She said, “Robots have gone wrong on me. 
Heavens, how long it’s been since I thought of it. Why, it was almost forty years 
ago. Certainly! 2021! And I was only thirty-eight. Oh, my — I’d rather not talk 
about it. ” 

I waited, and sure enough she changed her mind. “Why not?” she said. “It 
cannot harm me now. Even the memory can’t. I was foolish once, young man. 
Would you believe that?” 

“No, ” I said. 

“I was. But Herbie was a mind-reading robot.” 

“What?” 

“Only one of its kind, before or since. A mistake, — somewheres —” 



LIAR! 


Alfred Lanning lit his cigar carefully, but the tips of his fingers were trembling 
slightly. His gray eyebrows hunched low as he spoke between puffs. 

“It reads minds all right—damn little doubt about that! But why?” He looked 
at Mathematician Peter Bogert, “Well?” 

Bogert flattened his black hair down with both hands, “That was the thirty- 
fourth RB model we’ve turned out, Lanning. All the others were strictly 
orthodox.” 

The third man at the table frowned. Milton Ashe was the youngest officer of 
U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men, Inc., and proud of his post. 

“Listen, Bogert. There wasn’t a hitch in the assembly from start to finish. I 
guarantee that.” 

Bogert’s thick lips spread in a patronizing smile, “Do you? If you can answer 
for the entire assembly line, I recommend your promotion. By exact count, there 
are seventy-five thousand, two hundred and thirty-four operations necessary for 
the manufacture of a single positronic brain, each separate operation depending 
for successful completion upon any number of factors, from five to a hundred 
and five. If any one of them goes seriously wrong, the 'brain’ is ruined. I quote 
our own information folder, Ashe.” 

Milton Ashe flushed, but a fourth voice cut off his reply. 

“If we’re going to start by trying to fix the blame on one another, I’m 
leaving.” Susan Calvin’s hands were folded tightly in her lap, and the little lines 
about her thin, pale lips deepened, “We’ve got a mind-reading robot on our 
hands and it strikes me as rather important that we find out just why it reads 
minds. We’re not going to do that by saying, ‘Your fault! My fault!”’ 

Her cold gray eyes fastened upon Ashe, and he grinned. 



Lanning grinned too, and, as always at such times, his long white hair and 
shrewd little eyes made him the picture of a biblical patriarch, “True for you, Dr. 
Calvin.” 

His voice became suddenly crisp, “Here’s everything in pill-concentrate form. 
We’ve produced a positronic brain of supposedly ordinary vintage that’s got the 
remarkable property of being able to tune in on thought waves. It would mark 
the most important advance in robotics in decades, if we knew how it happened. 
We don’t, and we have to find out. Is that clear?” 

“May I make a suggestion?” asked Bogert. 

“Go ahead!” 

“I’d say that until we do figure out the mess—and as a mathematician I expect 
it to be a very devil of a mess—we keep the existence of RB-34 a secret. I mean 
even from the other members of the staff. As heads of the departments, we ought 
not to find it an insoluble problem, and the fewer know about it—” 

“Bogert is right,” said Dr. Calvin. “Ever since the Interplanetary Code was 
modified to allow robot models to be tested in the plants before being shipped 
out to space, antirobot propaganda has increased. If any word leaks out about a 
robot being able to read minds before we can announce complete control of the 
phenomenon, pretty effective capital could be made out of it.” 

Lanning sucked at his cigar and nodded gravely. He turned to Ashe, “I think 
you said you were alone when you first stumbled on this thought-reading 
business.” 

“I’ll say I was alone—I got the scare of my life. RB-34 had just been taken off 
the assembly table and they sent him down to me. Obermann was off 
somewheres, so I took him down to the testing rooms myself—at least I started 
to take him down.” Ashe paused, and a tiny smile tugged at his lips, “Say, did 
any of you ever carry on a thought conversation without knowing it?” 

No one bothered to answer, and he continued, “You don’t realize it at first, 
you know. He just spoke to me—as logically and sensibly as you can imagine— 
and it was only when I was most of the way down to the testing rooms that I 
realized that I hadn’t said anything. Sure, I thought lots, but that isn’t the same 
thing, is it? I locked that thing up and ran for Lanning. Having it walking beside 



me, calmly peering into my thoughts and picking and choosing among them 
gave me the willies.” 

“I imagine it would,” said Susan Calvin thoughtfully. Her eyes fixed 
themselves upon Ashe in an oddly intent manner. “We are so accustomed to 
considering our own thoughts private.” 

Lanning broke in impatiently, “Then only the four of us know. All right! 
We’ve got to go about this systematically. Ashe, I want you to check over the 
assembly line from beginning to end—everything. You’re to eliminate all 
operations in which there was no possible chance of an error, and list all those 
where there were, together with its nature and possible magnitude.” 

“Tall order,” grunted Ashe. 

“Naturally! Of course, you’re to put the men under you to work on this— 
every single one if you have to, and I don’t care if we go behind schedule, either. 
But they’re not to know why, you understand.” 

“Hm-m-m, yes!” The young technician grinned wryly. “It’s still a lulu of a 
job.” 

Lanning swiveled about in his chair and faced Calvin, “You’ll have to tackle 
the job from the other direction. You’re the robo-psychologist of the plant, so 
you’re to study the robot itself and work backward. Try to find out how he ticks. 
See what else is tied up with his telepathic powers, how far they extend, how 
they warp his outlook, and just exactly what harm it has done to his ordinary RB 
properties. You’ve got that?” 

Lanning didn’t wait for Dr. Calvin to answer. 

“I’ll co-ordinate the work and interpret the findings mathematically.” He 
puffed violently at his cigar and mumbled the rest through the smoke, “Bogert 
will help me there, of course.” 

Bogert polished the nails of one pudgy hand with the other and said blandly, 
“I dare say. I know a little in the line.” 

“Well! I’ll get started.” Ashe shoved his chair back and rose. His pleasantly 
youthful face crinkled in a grin, “I’ve got the darnedest job of any of us, so I’m 



getting out of here and to work.” 


He left with a slurred, “B’ seem’ ye!” 

Susan Calvin answered with a barely perceptible nod, but her eyes followed 
him out of sight and she did not answer when Lanning grunted and said, “Do 
you want to go up and see RB-34 now, Dr. Calvin?” 


RB-34’s photoelectric eyes lifted from the book at the muffled sound of hinges 
turning and he was upon his feet when Susan Calvin entered. 

She paused to readjust the huge “No Entrance” sign upon the door and then 
approached the robot. 

“I’ve brought you the texts upon hyperatomic motors, Herbie—a few anyway. 
Would you care to look at them?” 

RB-34—otherwise known as Herbie—lifted the three heavy books from her 
arms and opened to the title page of one: 

“Hm-m-m! Theory of Hyperatomics.’” He mumbled inarticulately to himself 
as he flipped the pages and then spoke with an abstracted air, “Sit down, Dr. 
Calvin! This will take me a few minutes.” 

The psychologist seated herself and watched Herbie narrowly as he took a 
chair at the other side of the table and went through the three books 
systematically. 

At the end of half an hour, he put them down, “Of course, I know why you 
brought these.” 

The corner of Dr. Calvin’s lip twitched, “I was afraid you would. It’s difficult 
to work with you, Herbie. You’re always a step ahead of me.” 

“It’s the same with these books, you know, as with the others. They just don’t 
interest me. There’s nothing to your textbooks. Your science is just a mass of 
collected data plastered together by make-shift theory—and all so incredibly 
simple, that it’s scarcely worth bothering about. 



“It’s your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human 
motives and emotions”—his mighty hand gestured vaguely as he sought the 
proper words. 

Dr. Calvin whispered, “I think I understand.” 

“I see into minds, you see,” the robot continued, “and you have no idea how 
complicated they are. I can’t begin to understand everything because my own 
mind has so little in common with them—but I try, and your novels help.” 

“Yes, but I’m afraid that after going through some of the harrowing emotional 
experiences of our present-day sentimental novel”—there was a tinge of 
bitterness in her voice—“you find real minds like ours dull and colorless.” 

“But I don’t!” 

The sudden energy in the response brought the other to her feet. She felt 
herself reddening, and thought wildly, “He must know!” 

Herbie subsided suddenly, and muttered in a low voice from which the 
metallic timbre departed almost entirely, “But, of course, I know about it, Dr. 
Calvin. You think of it always, so how can I help but know?” 

Her face was hard. “Have you—told anyone?” 

“Of course not!” This, with genuine surprise. “No one has asked me.” 

“Well, then,” she flung out, “I suppose you think I am a fool.” 

“No! It is a normal emotion.” 

“Perhaps that is why it is so foolish.” The wistfulness in her voice drowned 
out everything else. Some of the woman peered through the layer of doctorhood. 
“I am not what you would call—attractive.” 

“If you are referring to mere physical attraction, I couldn’t judge. But I know, 
in any case, that there are other types of attraction.” 


“Nor young.” Dr. Calvin had scarcely heard the robot. 



“You are not yet forty.” An anxious insistence had crept into Herbie’s voice. 

“Thirty-eight as you count the years; a shriveled sixty as far as my emotional 
outlook on life is concerned. Am I a psychologist for nothing?” 

She drove on with bitter breathlessness, “And he’s barely thirty-five and looks 
and acts younger. Do you suppose he ever sees me as anything but. . . but what I 
am?” 

“You are wrong!” Herbie’s steel fist struck the plastic-topped table with a 
strident clang. “Listen to me—” 

But Susan Calvin whirled on him now and the hunted pain in her eyes became 
a blaze, “Why should I? What do you know about it all, anyway, you . . . you 
machine. I’m just a specimen to you; an interesting bug with a peculiar mind 
spread-eagled for inspection. It’s a wonderful example of frustration, isn’t it? 
Almost as good as your books.” Her voice, emerging in dry sobs, choked into 
silence. 

The robot cowered at the outburst. He shook his head pleadingly. “Won’t you 
listen to me, please? I could help you if you would let me.” 

“How?” Her lips curled. “By giving me good advice?” 

“No, not that. It’s just that I know what other people think—Milton Ashe, for 
instance.” 

There was a long silence, and Susan Calvin’s eyes dropped. “I don’t want to 
know what he thinks,” she gasped. “Keep quiet.” 

“I think you would want to know what he thinks.” 

Her head remained bent, but her breath came more quickly. “You are talking 
nonsense,” she whispered. 

“Why should I? I am trying to help. Milton Ashe’s thoughts of you—” he 
paused. 

And then the psychologist raised her head, “Well?” 



The robot said quietly, “He loves you.” 


For a full minute, Dr. Calvin did not speak. She merely stared. Then, “You are 
mistaken! You must be. Why should he?” 

“But he does. A thing like that cannot be hidden, not from me.” 

“But I am so . . . so—” she stammered to a halt. 

“He looks deeper than the skin, and admires intellect in others. Milton Ashe is 
not the type to marry a head of hair and a pair of eyes.” 

Susan Calvin found herself blinking rapidly and waited before speaking. Even 
then her voice trembled, “Yet he certainly never in any way indicated—” 

“Have you ever given him a chance?” 

“How could I? I never thought that—” 

“Exactly!” 

The psychologist paused in thought and then looked up suddenly. “A girl 
visited him here at the plant half a year ago. She was pretty, I suppose—blond 
and slim. And, of course, could scarcely add two and two. He spent all day 
puffing out his chest, trying to explain how a robot was put together.” The 
hardness had returned, “Not that she understood! Who was she?” 

Herbie answered without hesitation, “I know the person you are referring to. 
She is his first cousin, and there is no romantic interest there, I assure you.” 

Susan Calvin rose to her feet with a vivacity almost girlish. “Now isn’t that 
strange? That’s exactly what I used to pretend to myself sometimes, though I 
never really thought so. Then it all must be true.” 

She ran to Herbie and seized his cold, heavy hand in both hers. “Thank you, 
Herbie.” Her voice was an urgent, husky whisper. “Don’t tell anyone about this. 
Let it be our secret—and thank you again.” With that, and a convulsive squeeze 
of Herbie’s unresponsive metal fingers, she left. 

Herbie turned slowly to his neglected novel, but there was no one to read his 



thoughts. 


Milton Ashe stretched slowly and magnificently, to the tune of cracking joints 
and a chorus of grunts, and then glared at Peter Bogert, Ph.D. 

“Say,” he said, “I’ve been at this for a week now with just about no sleep. 
How long do I have to keep it up? I thought you said the positronic 
bombardment in Vac Chamber D was the solution.” 

Bogert yawned delicately and regarded his white hands with interest. “It is. 
I’m on the track.” 

“I know what that means when a mathematician says it. How near the end are 
you?” 

“It all depends.” 

“On what?” Ashe dropped into a chair and stretched his long legs out before 
him. 

“On Lanning. The old fellow disagrees with me.” He sighed, “A bit behind the 
times, that’s the trouble with him. He clings to matrix mechanics as the all in all, 
and this problem calls for more powerful mathematical tools. He’s so stubborn.” 

Ashe muttered sleepily, “Why not ask Herbie and settle the whole affair?” 

“Ask the robot?” Bogert’s eyebrows climbed. 

“Why not? Didn’t the old girl tell you?” 

“You mean Calvin?” 

“Yeah! Susie herself. That robot’s a mathematical wiz. He knows all about 
everything plus a bit on the side. He does triple integrals in his head and eats up 
tensor analysis for dessert.” 


The mathematician stared skeptically, “Are you serious?” 



“So help me! The catch is that the dope doesn’t like math. He would rather 
read slushy novels. Honest! You should see the tripe Susie keeps feeding him: 
‘Purple Passion’ and ‘Love in Space.’” 

“Dr. Calvin hasn’t said a word of this to us.” 

“Well, she hasn’t finished studying him. You know how she is. She likes to 
have everything just so before letting out the big secret.” 

“She’s told you.” 

“We sort of got to talking. I have been seeing a lot of her lately.” He opened 
his eyes wide and frowned, “Say, Bogie, have you been noticing anything queer 
about the lady lately?” 

Bogert relaxed into an undignified grin, “She’s using lipstick, if that’s what 
you mean.” 

“Hell, I know that. Rouge, powder and eye shadow, too. She’s a sight. But it’s 
not that. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s the way she talks—as if she were happy 
about something.” He thought a little, and then shrugged. 

The other allowed himself a leer, which, for a scientist past fifty, was not a bad 
job, “Maybe she’s in love.” 

Ashe allowed his eyes to close again, “You’re nuts, Bogie. You go speak to 
Herbie; I want to stay here and go to sleep.” 

“Right! Not that I particularly like having a robot tell me my job, nor that I 
think he can do it!” 

A soft snore was his only answer. 


Herbie listened carefully as Peter Bogert, hands in pockets, spoke with elaborate 
indifference. 


“So there you are. I’ve been told you understand these things, and I am asking 
you more in curiosity than anything else. My line of reasoning, as I have 



outlined it, involves a few doubtful steps, I admit, which Dr. Lanning refuses to 
accept, and the picture is still rather incomplete.” 


The robot didn’t answer, and Bogert said, “Well?” 

“I see no mistake,” Herbie studied the scribbled figures. 

“I don’t suppose you can go any further than that?” 

“I daren’t try. You are a better mathematician than I, and—well, I’d hate to 
commit myself.” 

There was a shade of complacency in Bogert’s smile, “I rather thought that 
would be the case. It is deep. We’ll forget it.” He crumpled the sheets, tossed 
them down the waste shaft, turned to leave, and then thought better of it. 

“By the way—” 

The robot waited. 

Bogert seemed to have difficulty. “There is something—that is, perhaps you 
can—” He stopped. 

Herbie spoke quietly. “Your thoughts are confused, but there is no doubt at all 
that they concern Dr. Lanning. It is silly to hesitate, for as soon as you compose 
yourself, I’ll know what it is you want to ask.” 

The mathematician’s hand went to his sleek hair in the familiar smoothing 
gesture. “Lanning is nudging seventy,” he said, as if that explained everything. 

“I know that.” 

“And he’s been director of the plant for almost thirty years.” Herbie nodded. 

“Well, now,” Bogert’s voice became ingratiating, “you would know whether . 
. . whether he’s thinking of resigning. Health, perhaps, or some other—” 

“Quite,” said Herbie, and that was all. 

“Well, do you know?” 



“Certainly.” 

“Then—uh—could you tell me?” 

“Since you ask, yes.” The robot was quite matter-of-fact about it. “He has 
already resigned!” 

“What!” The exclamation was an explosive, almost inarticulate, sound. The 
scientist’s large head hunched forward, “Say that again!” 

“He has already resigned,” came the quiet repetition, “but it has not yet taken 
effect. He is waiting, you see, to solve the problem of—er—myself. That 
finished, he is quite ready to turn the office of director over to his successor.” 

Bogert expelled his breath sharply, “And this successor? Who is he?” He was 
quite close to Herbie now, eyes fixed fascinatedly on those unreadable dull-red 
photoelectric cells that were the robot’s eyes. 

Words came slowly, “You are the next director.” 

And Bogert relaxed into a tight smile, “This is good to know. I’ve been hoping 
and waiting for this. Thanks, Herbie.” 


Peter Bogert was at his desk until five that morning and he was back at nine. The 
shelf just over the desk emptied of its row of reference books and tables, as he 
referred to one after the other. The pages of calculations before him increased 
microscopically and the crumpled sheets at his feet mounted into a hill of 
scribbled paper. 

At precisely noon, he stared at the final page, rubbed a blood-shot eye, 
yawned and shrugged. “This is getting worse each minute. Damn!” 

He turned at the sound of the opening door and nodded at Lanning, who 
entered, cracking the knuckles of one gnarled hand with the other. 

The director took in the disorder of the room and his eyebrows furrowed 
together. 



“New lead?” he asked. 


“No,” came the defiant answer. “What’s wrong with the old one?” 

Lanning did not trouble to answer, nor to do more than bestow a single 
cursory glance at the top sheet upon Bogert’s desk. He spoke through the flare of 
a match as he lit a cigar. 

“Has Calvin told you about the robot? It’s a mathematical genius. Really 
remarkable.” 

The other snorted loudly, “So I’ve heard. But Calvin had better stick to 
robopsychology. I’ve checked Herbie on math, and he can scarcely struggle 
through calculus.” 

“Calvin didn’t find it so.” 

“She’s crazy.” 

“And I don’t find it so.” The director’s eyes narrowed dangerously. 

“You!” Bogert’s voice hardened. “What are you talking about?” 

“I’ve been putting Herbie through his paces all morning, and he can do tricks 
you never heard of.” 

“Is that so?” 

“You sound skeptical!” Lanning flipped a sheet of paper out of his vest pocket 
and unfolded it. “That’s not my handwriting, is it?” 

Bogert studied the large angular notation covering the sheet, “Herbie did 
this?” 

“Right! And if you’ll notice, he’s been working on your time integration of 
Equation 22. It comes”—Lanning tapped a yellow fingernail upon the last step 
—“to the identical conclusion I did, and in a quarter the time. You had no right 
to neglect the Linger Effect in positronic bombardment.” 

“I didn’t neglect it. For Heaven’s sake, Lanning, get it through your head that 



it would cancel out—” 


“Oh, sure, you explained that. You used the Mitchell Translation Equation, 
didn’t you? Well—it doesn’t apply.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because you’ve been using hyper-imaginaries, for one thing.” 

“What’s that to do with?” 

“Mitchell’s Equation won’t hold when—” 

“Are you crazy? If you’ll reread Mitchell’s original paper in the Transactions 
of the Far —” 

“I don’t have to. I told you in the beginning that I didn’t like his reasoning, 
and Herbie backs me in that.” 

“Well, then,” Bogert shouted, “let that clockwork contraption solve the entire 
problem for you. Why bother with nonessentials?” 

“That’s exactly the point. Herbie can’t solve the problem. And if he can’t, we 
can’t—alone. I’m submitting the entire question to the National Board. It’s 
gotten beyond us.” 

Bogert’s chair went over backward as he jumped up asnarl, face crimson. 
“You’re doing nothing of the sort.” 

Lanning flushed in his turn, “Are you telling me what I can’t do?” 

“Exactly,” was the gritted response. “I’ve got the problem beaten and you’re 
not to take it out of my hands, understand? Don’t think I don’t see through you, 
you desiccated fossil. You’d cut your own nose off before you’d let me get the 
credit for solving robotic telepathy.” 

“You’re a damned idiot, Bogert, and in one second I’ll have you suspended for 
insubordination”—Lanning’s lower lip trembled with passion. 

“Which is one thing you won’t do, Lanning. You haven’t any secrets with a 



mind-reading robot around, so don’t forget that I know all about your 
resignation.” 


The ash on Lanning’s cigar trembled and fell, and the cigar itself followed, 
“What. . . what—” 


Bogert chuckled nastily, “And I’m the new director, be it understood. I’m very 
aware of that; don’t think I’m not. Damn your eyes, Lanning, I’m going to give 
the orders about here or there will be the sweetest mess that you’ve ever been 
in.” 


Lanning found his voice and let it out with a roar. “You’re suspended, d’ye 
hear? You’re relieved of all duties. You’re broken, do you understand?” 

The smile on the other’s face broadened, “Now, what’s the use of that? You’re 
getting nowhere. I’m holding the trumps. I know you’ve resigned. Herbie told 
me, and he got it straight from you.” 

Lanning forced himself to speak quietly. He looked an old, old man, with tired 
eyes peering from a face in which the red had disappeared, leaving the pasty 
yellow of age behind, “I want to speak to Herbie. He can’t have told you 
anything of the sort. You’re playing a deep game, Bogert, but I’m calling your 
bluff. Come with me.” 

Bogert shrugged, “To see Herbie? Good! Damned good!” 


It was also precisely at noon that Milton Ashe looked up from his clumsy sketch 
and said, “You get the idea? I’m not too good at getting this down, but that’s 
about how it looks. It’s a honey of a house, and I can get it for next to nothing.” 

Susan Calvin gazed across at him with melting eyes. “It’s really beautiful,” 
she sighed. “I’ve often thought that I’d like to—” Her voice trailed away. 

“Of course,” Ashe continued briskly, putting away his pencil, “I’ve got to wait 
for my vacation. It’s only two weeks off, but this Herbie business has everything 
up in the air.” His eyes dropped to his fingernails, “Besides, there’s another point 
—but it’s a secret.” 



“Then don’t tell me.” 


“Oh, I’d just as soon, I’m just busting to tell someone—and you’re just about 
the best—er—confidante I could find here.” He grinned sheepishly. 

Susan Calvin’s heart bounded, but she did not trust herself to speak. 

“Frankly,” Ashe scraped his chair closer and lowered his voice into a 
confidential whisper, “the house isn’t to be only for myself. I’m getting 
married!” 

And then he jumped out of his seat, “What’s the matter?” 

“Nothing!” The horrible spinning sensation had vanished, but it was hard to 
get words out. “Married? You mean—” 

“Why, sure! About time, isn’t it? You remember that girl who was here last 
summer. That’s she! But you are sick. You—” 

“Headache!” Susan Calvin motioned him away weakly. “I’ve ... I’ve been 
subject to them lately. I want to ... to congratulate you, of course. I’m very glad 
—” The inexpertly applied rouge made a pair of nasty red splotches upon her 
chalk-white face. Things had begun spinning again. “Pardon me—please—” 

The words were a mumble, as she stumbled blindly out the door. It had 
happened with the sudden catastrophe of a dream—and with all the unreal horror 
of a dream. 

But how could it be? Herbie had said— 

And Herbie knew! He could see into minds! 

She found herself leaning breathlessly against the door jamb, staring into 
Herbie’s metal face. She must have climbed the two flights of stairs, but she had 
no memory of it. The distance had been covered in an instant, as in a dream. 

As in a dream! 

And still Herbie’s unblinking eyes stared into hers and their dull red seemed to 
expand into dimly shining nightmarish globes. 



He was speaking, and she felt the cold glass pressing against her lips. She 
swallowed and shuddered into a certain awareness of her surroundings. 

Still Herbie spoke, and there was agitation in his voice—as if he were hurt and 
frightened and pleading. 

The words were beginning to make sense. “This is a dream,” he was saying, 
“and you mustn’t believe in it. You’ll wake into the real world soon and laugh at 
yourself. He loves you, I tell you. He does, he does! But not here! Not now! This 
is an illusion.” 

Susan Calvin nodded, her voice a whisper, “Yes! Yes!” She was clutching 
Herbie’s arm, clinging to it, repeating over and over, “It isn’t true, is it? It isn’t, 
is it?” 


Just how she came to her senses, she never knew—but it was like passing 
from a world of misty unreality to one of harsh sunlight. She pushed him away 
from her, pushed hard against that steely arm, and her eyes were wide. 

“What are you trying to do?” Her voice rose to a harsh scream. “What are you 
trying to do?” 

Herbie backed away, “I want to help.” 

The psychologist stared, “Help? By telling me this is a dream? By trying to 
push me into schizophrenia?” A hysterical tenseness seized her, “This is no 
dream! I wish it were!” 

She drew her breath sharply, “Wait! Why . . . why, I understand. Merciful 
Heavens, it’s so obvious.” 

There was horror in the robot’s voice, “I had to!” 

“And I believed you! I never thought—” 


Loud voices outside the door brought her to a halt. She turned away, fists 
clenching spasmodically, and when Bogert and Lanning entered, she was at the 
far window. Neither of the men paid her the slightest attention. 



They approached Herbie simultaneously; Lanning angry and impatient, 
Bogert, coolly sardonic. The director spoke first. 

“Here now, Herbie. Listen to me!” 

The robot brought his eyes sharply down upon the aged director, “Yes, Dr. 
Lanning.” 

“Have you discussed me with Dr. Bogert?” 

“No, sir.” The answer came slowly, and the smile on Bogert’s face flashed off. 

“What’s that?” Bogert shoved in ahead of his superior and straddled the 
ground before the robot. “Repeat what you told me yesterday.” 

“I said that—” Herbie fell silent. Deep within him his metallic diaphragm 
vibrated in soft discords. 

“Didn’t you say he had resigned?” roared Bogert. “Answer me!” 

Bogert raised his arm frantically, but Lanning pushed him aside, “Are you 
trying to bully him into lying?” 

“You heard him, Lanning. He began to say 'Yes’ and stopped. Get out of my 
way! I want the truth out of him, understand!” 

“I’ll ask him!” Lanning turned to the robot. “All right, Herbie, take it easy. 
Have I resigned?” 

Herbie stared, and Lanning repeated anxiously, “Have I resigned?” There was 
the faintest trace of a negative shake of the robot’s head. A long wait produced 
nothing further. 

The two men looked at each other and the hostility in their eyes was all but 
tangible. 

“What the devil,” blurted Bogert, “has the robot gone mute? Can’t you speak, 
you monstrosity?” 


“I can speak,” came the ready answer. 



“Then answer the question. Didn’t you tell me Lanning had resigned? Hasn’t 
he resigned?” 

And again there was nothing but dull silence, until from the end of the room, 
Susan Calvin’s laugh rang out suddenly, high-pitched and semi-hysterical. 

The two mathematicians jumped, and Bogert’s eyes narrowed, “You here? 
What’s so funny?” 

“Nothing’s funny.” Her voice was not quite natural. “It’s just that I’m not the 
only one that’s been caught. There’s irony in three of the greatest experts in 
robotics in the world falling into the same elementary trap, isn’t there?” Her 
voice faded, and she put a pale hand to her forehead, “But it isn’t funny!” 

This time the look that passed between the two men was one of raised 
eyebrows. “What trap are you talking about?” asked Lanning stiffly. “Is 
something wrong with Herbie?” 

“No,” she approached them slowly, “nothing is wrong with him—only with 
us.” She whirled suddenly and shrieked at the robot, “Get away from me! Go to 
the other end of the room and don’t let me look at you.” 

Herbie cringed before the fury of her eyes and stumbled away in a clattering 
trot. 

Lanning’s voice was hostile, “What is all this, Dr. Calvin?” 

She faced them and spoke sarcastically, “Surely you know the fundamental 
First Law of Robotics.” 

The other two nodded together. “Certainly,” said Bogert, irritably, “a robot 
may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow him to come to harm.” 

“How nicely put,” sneered Calvin. “But what kind of harm?” 

“Why—any kind.” 

“Exactly! Any kind! But what about hurt feelings? What about deflation of 
one’s ego? What about the blasting of one’s hopes? Is that injury?” 



Lanning frowned, “What would a robot know about—” And then he caught 
himself with a gasp. 

“You’ve caught on, have you? This robot reads minds. Do you suppose it 
doesn’t know everything about mental injury? Do you suppose that if asked a 
question, it wouldn’t give exactly that answer that one wants to hear? Wouldn’t 
any other answer hurt us, and wouldn’t Herbie know that?” 

“Good Heavens!” muttered Bogert. 

The psychologist cast a sardonic glance at him, “I take it you asked him 
whether Lanning had resigned. You wanted to hear that he had resigned and so 
that’s what Herbie told you.” 

“And I suppose that is why,” said Lanning, tonelessly, “it would not answer a 
little while ago. It couldn’t answer either way without hurting one of us.” 

There was a short pause in which the men looked thoughtfully across the 
room at the robot, crouching in the chair by the bookcase, head resting in one 
hand. 

Susan Calvin stared steadfastly at the floor, “He knew of all this. That. . . that 
devil knows everything—including what went wrong in his assembly.” Her eyes 
were dark and brooding. 

Lanning looked up, “You’re wrong there, Dr. Calvin. He doesn’t know what 
went wrong. I asked him.” 

“What does that mean?” cried Calvin. “Only that you didn’t want him to give 
you the solution. It would puncture your ego to have a machine do what you 
couldn’t. Did you ask him?” she shot at Bogert. 

“In a way.” Bogert coughed and reddened. “He told me he knew very little 
about mathematics.” 

Lanning laughed, not very loudly and the psychologist smiled caustically. She 
said, “I’ll ask him! A solution by him won’t hurt my ego.” She raised her voice 
into a cold, imperative, “Come here!” 


Herbie rose and approached with hesitant steps. 



“You know, I suppose,” she continued, “just exactly at what point in the 
assembly an extraneous factor was introduced or an essential one left out.” 

“Yes,” said Herbie, in tones barely heard. 

“Hold on,” broke in Bogert angrily. “That’s not necessarily true. You want to 
hear that, that’s all.” 

“Don’t be a fool,” replied Calvin. “He certainly knows as much math as you 
and Lanning together, since he can read minds. Give him his chance.” 

The mathematician subsided, and Calvin continued, “All right, then, Herbie, 
give! We’re waiting.” And in an aside, “Get pencils and paper, gentlemen.” 

But Herbie remained silent, and there was triumph in the psychologist’s voice, 
“Why don’t you answer, Herbie?” 

The robot blurted out suddenly, “I cannot. You know I cannot. Dr. Bogert and 
Dr. Lanning don’t want me to.” 

“They want the solution.” 

“But not from me.” 

Lanning broke in, speaking slowly and distinctly, “Don’t be foolish, Herbie. 
We do want you to tell us.” 

Bogert nodded curtly. 

Herbie’s voice rose to wild heights, “What’s the use of saying that? Don’t you 
suppose that I can see past the superficial skin of your mind? Down below, you 
don’t want me to. I’m a machine, given the imitation of life only by virtue of the 
positronic interplay in my brain—which is man’s device. You can’t lose face to 
me without being hurt. That is deep in your mind and won’t be erased. I can’t 
give the solution.” 

“We’ll leave,” said Dr. Lanning. “Tell Calvin.” 

“That would make no difference,” cried Herbie, “since you would know 
anyway that it was I that was supplying the answer.” 



Calvin resumed, “But you understand, Herbie, that despite that, Drs. Lanning 
and Bogert want that solution.” 

“By their own efforts!” insisted Herbie. 

“But they want it, and the fact that you have it and won’t give it hurts them. 
You see that, don’t you?” 

“Yes! Yes!” 

“And if you tell them that will hurt them, too.” 

“Yes! Yes!” Herbie was retreating slowly, and step by step Susan Calvin 
advanced. The two men watched in frozen bewilderment. 

“You can’t tell them,” droned the psychologist slowly, “because that would 
hurt and you mustn’t hurt. But if you don’t tell them, you hurt, so you must tell 
them. And if you do, you will hurt and you mustn’t, so you can’t tell them; but if 
you don’t, you hurt, so you must; but if you do, you hurt, so you mustn’t; but if 
you don’t, you hurt, so you must; but if you do, you—” 

Herbie was up against the wall, and here he dropped to his knees. “Stop!” he 
shrieked. “Close your mind! It is full of pain and frustration and hate! I didn’t 
mean it, I tell you! I tried to help! I told you what you wanted to hear. I had to!” 

The psychologist paid no attention. “You must tell them, but if you do, you 
hurt, so you mustn’t; but if you don’t, you hurt, so you must; but—” 

And Herbie screamed! 

It was like the whistling of a piccolo many times magnified—shrill and 
shriller till it keened with the terror of a lost soul and filled the room with the 
piercingness of itself. 

And when it died into nothingness, Herbie collapsed into a huddled heap of 
motionless metal. 

Bogert’s face was bloodless, “He’s dead!” 


“No!” Susan Calvin burst into body-racking gusts of wild laughter, “not dead 



—merely insane. I confronted him with the insoluble dilemma, and he broke 
down. You can scrap him now—because he’ll never speak again.” 


Lanning was on his knees beside the thing that had been Herbie. His fingers 
touched the cold, unresponsive metal face and he shuddered. “You did that on 
purpose.” He rose and faced her, face contorted. 

“What if I did? You can’t help it now.” And in a sudden access of bitterness, 
“He deserved it.” 

The director seized the paralyzed, motionless Bogert by the wrist, “What’s the 
difference. Come, Peter.” He sighed, “A thinking robot of this type is worthless 
anyway.” His eyes were old and tired, and he repeated, “Come, Peter!” 

It was minutes after the two scientists left that Dr. Susan Calvin regained part 
of her mental equilibrium. Slowly, her eyes turned to the living-dead Herbie and 
the tightness returned to her face. Long she stared while the triumph faded and 
the helpless frustration returned—and of all her turbulent thoughts only one 
infinitely bitter word passed her lips. 

“Liar!” 


That finished it for then, naturally. I knew I couldn’t get any more out of her after 
that. She just sat there behind her desk, her white face cold and — remembering. 

I said, “Thankyou, Dr. Calvin!” but she didn’t answer. It was two days before 
I could get to see her again. 



LITTLE 
LOST ROBOT 


When I did see Susan Calvin again, it was at the door of her office. Files were 
being moved out. 

She said, “How are your articles coming along, young man?” 

“Fine,” I said. I had put them into shape according to my own lights, 
dramatized the bare bones of her recital, added the conversation and little 
touches, “Would you look over them and see if I haven’t been libellous or too 
unreasonably inaccurate anywhere?” 

“I suppose so. Shall we retire to the Executives’ Lounge? We can have 
coffee. ” 

She seemed in good humor, so I chanced it as we walked down the corridor, “I 
was wondering, Dr. Calvin —” 

“Yes?” 

“If you would tell me more concerning the history of robotics. ” 

“Surely you have what you want, young man. ” 

“In a way. But these incidents I have written up don’t apply much to the 
modern world. I mean, there was only one mind-reading robot ever developed, 
and Space-Stations are already outmoded and in disuse, and robot mining is 
taken for granted. What about interstellar travel? It’s only been about twenty 
years since the hyperatomic motor was invented and it’s well known that it was a 
robotic invention. What is the truth about it?” 

“Interstellar travel?” She was thoughtful. We were in the lounge, and I 
ordered a full dinner. She just had coffee. 



“It wasn’t a simple robotic invention, you know; not just like that. But, of 
course, until we developed the Brain, we didn’t get very far. But we tried; we 
really tried. My first connection (directly, that is) with interstellar research was 
in 2029, when a robot was lost —” 


Measures on Hyper Base had been taken in a sort of rattling fury—the muscular 
equivalent of an hysterical shriek. 

To itemize them in order of both chronology and desperation, they were: 

1. All work on the Hyperatomic Drive through all the space volume 
occupied by the Stations of the Twenty-Seventh Asteroidal Grouping came 
to a halt. 

2. That entire volume of space was nipped out of the System, practically 
speaking. No one entered without permission. No one left under any 
conditions. 

3. By special government patrol ship, Drs. Susan Calvin and Peter Bogert, 
respectively Head Psychologist and Mathematical Director of United States 
Robot & Mechanical Men Corporation, were brought to Hyper Base. 


Susan Calvin had never left the surface of Earth before, and had no perceptible 
desire to leave it this time. In an age of Atomic Power and a clearly coming 
Hyperatomic Drive, she remained quietly provincial. So she was dissatisfied 
with her trip and unconvinced of the emergency, and every line of her plain, 
middle-aged face showed it clearly enough during her first dinner at Hyper Base. 

Nor did Dr. Bogert’s sleek paleness abandon a certain hangdog attitude. Nor 
did Major-general Kallner, who headed the project, even once forget to maintain 
a hunted expression. 

In short, it was a grisly episode, that meal, and the little session of three that 
followed began in a gray, unhappy manner. 


Kallner, with his baldness glistening, and his dress uniform oddly unsuited to 



the general mood, began with uneasy directness. 


“This is a queer story to tell, sir, and madam. I want to thank you for coming 
on short notice and without a reason being given. We’ll try to correct that now. 
We’ve lost a robot. Work has stopped and must stop until such time as we locate 
it. So far we have failed, and we feel we need expert help.” 

Perhaps the general felt his predicament anticlimactic. He continued with a 
note of desperation, “I needn’t tell you the importance of our work here. More 
than eighty percent of last year’s appropriations for scientific research have gone 
to us—” 

“Why, we know that,” said Bogert, agreeably. “U.S. Robots is receiving a 
generous rental fee for use of our robots.” 

Susan Calvin injected a blunt, vinegary note, “What makes a single robot so 
important to the project, and why hasn’t it been located?” 

The general turned his red face toward her and wet his lips quickly, “Why, in a 
manner of speaking we have located it.” Then, with near anguish, “Here, 
suppose I explain. As soon as the robot failed to report a state of emergency was 
declared, and all movement off Hyper Base stopped. A cargo vessel had landed 
the previous day and had delivered us two robots for our laboratories. It had 
sixty-two robots of the . . . uh . . . same type for shipment elsewhere. We are 
certain as to that figure. There is no question about it whatever.” 

“Yes? And the connection?” 

“When our missing robot failed of location anywhere—I assure you we would 
have found a missing blade of grass if it had been there to find—we 
brainstormed ourselves into counting the robots left of the cargo ship. They have 
sixty-three now.” 

“So that the sixty-third, I take it, is the missing prodigal?” Dr. Calvin’s eyes 
darkened. 

“Yes, but we have no way of telling which is the sixty-third.” 

There was a dead silence while the electric clock chimed eleven times, and 
then the robopsychologist said, “Very peculiar,” and the corners of her lips 



moved downward. 


“Peter,” she turned to her colleague with a trace of savagery, “what’s wrong 
here? What kind of robots are they using at Hyper Base?” 

Dr. Bogert hesitated and smiled feebly, “It’s been rather a matter of delicacy 
till now, Susan.” 

She spoke rapidly, “Yes, till now. If there are sixty-three same-type robots, one 
of which is wanted and the identity of which cannot be determined, why won’t 
any of them do? What’s the idea of all this? Why have we been sent for?” 

Bogert said in resigned fashion, “If you’ll give me a chance, Susan— Hyper 
Base happens to be using several robots whose brains are not impressioned with 
the entire First Law of Robotics.” 

“Aren’t impressioned?” Calvin slumped back in her chair, “I see. How many 
were made?” 

“A few. It was on government order and there was no way of violating the 
secrecy. No one was to know except the top men directly concerned. You 
weren’t included, Susan. It was nothing I had anything to do with.” 


The general interrupted with a measure of authority. “I would like to explain that 
bit. I hadn’t been aware that Dr. Calvin was unacquainted with the situation. I 
needn’t tell you, Dr. Calvin, that there always has been strong opposition to 
robots on the Planet. The only defense the government has had against the 
Fundamentalist radicals in this matter was the fact that robots are always built 
with an unbreakable First Law—which makes it impossible for them to harm 
human beings under any circumstance. 

“But we had to have robots of a different nature. So just a few of the NS-2 
model, the Nestors, that is, were prepared with a modified First Law. To keep it 
quiet, all NS-2’s are manufactured without serial numbers; modified members 
are delivered here along with a group of normal robots; and, of course, all our 
kind are under the strictest impressionment never to tell of their modification to 
unauthorized personnel.” He wore an embarrassed smile, “This has all worked 
out against us now.” 



Calvin said grimly, “Have you asked each one who it is, anyhow? Certainly, 
you are authorized?” 

The general nodded, “All sixty-three deny having worked here—and one is 
lying.” 

“Does the one you want show traces of wear? The others, I take it, are factory- 
fresh.” 

“The one in question only arrived last month. It, and the two that have just 
arrived, were to be the last we needed. There’s no perceptible wear.” He shook 
his head slowly and his eyes were haunted again, “Dr. Calvin, we don’t dare let 
that ship leave. If the existence of non-First Law robots becomes general 
knowledge—” There seemed no way of avoiding understatement in the 
conclusion. 

“Destroy all sixty-three,” said the robopsychologist coldly and flatly, “and 
make an end of it.” 

Bogert drew back a corner of his mouth. “You mean destroy thirty thousand 
dollars per robot. I’m afraid U.S. Robots wouldn’t like that. We’d better make an 
effort first, Susan, before we destroy anything.” 

“In that case,” she said, sharply, “I need facts. Exactly what advantage does 
Hyper Base derive from these modified robots? What factor made them 
desirable, general?” 

Kallner ruffled his forehead and stroked it with an upward gesture of his hand. 
“We had trouble with our previous robots. Our men work with hard radiations a 
good deal, you see. It’s dangerous, of course, but reasonable precautions are 
taken. There have been only two accidents since we began and neither was fatal. 
However, it was impossible to explain that to an ordinary robot. The First Law 
states—I’ll quote it— ‘No robot may harm a human being, or through inaction, 
allow a human being to come to harm. ’ 

“That’s primary, Dr. Calvin. When it was necessary for one of our men to 
expose himself for a short period to a moderate gamma field, one that would 
have no physiological effects, the nearest robot would dash in to drag him out. If 
the field were exceedingly weak, it would succeed, and work could not continue 
till all robots were cleared out. If the field were a trifle stronger, the robot would 



never reach the technician concerned, since its positronic brain would collapse 
under gamma radiations—and then we would be out one expensive and hard-to- 
replace robot. 

“We tried arguing with them. Their point was that a human being in a gamma 
field was endangering his life and that it didn’t matter that he could remain there 
half an hour safely. Supposing, they would say, he forgot and remained an hour. 
They couldn’t take chances. We pointed out that they were risking their lives on 
a wild off-chance. But self-preservation is only the Third Law of Robotics—and 
the First Law of human safety came first. We gave them orders; we ordered them 
strictly and harshly to remain out of gamma fields at whatever cost. But 
obedience is only the Second Law of Robotics—and the First Law of human 
safety came first. Dr. Calvin, we either had to do without robots, or do something 
about the First Law—and we made our choice.” 

“I can’t believe,” said Dr. Calvin, “that it was found possible to remove the 
First Law.” 

“It wasn’t removed, it was modified,” explained Kallner. “Positronic brains 
were constructed that contained the positive aspect only of the Law, which in 
them reads: ‘No robot may harm a human being.’ That is all. They have no 
compulsion to prevent one coming to harm through an extraneous agency such 
as gamma rays. I state the matter correctly, Dr. Bogert?” 

“Quite,” assented the mathematician. 

“And that is the only difference of your robots from the ordinary NS-2 model? 
The only difference? Peter?” 

“The only difference, Susan.” 

She rose and spoke with finality, “I intend sleeping now, and in about eight 
hours, I want to speak to whomever saw the robot last. And from now on, 
General Kallner, if I’m to take any responsibility at all for events, I want full and 
unquestioned control of this investigation.” 

Susan Calvin, except for two hours of resentful lassitude, experienced nothing 
approaching sleep. She signaled at Bogert’s door at the local time of 0700 and 
found him also awake. He had apparently taken the trouble of transporting a 
dressing gown to Hyper Base with him, for he was sitting in it. He put his nail 



scissors down when Calvin entered. 


He said softly, “I’ve been expecting you more or less. I suppose you feel sick 
about all this.” 

“I do.” 

“Well—I’m sorry. There was no way of preventing it. When the call came out 
from Hyper Base for us, I knew that something must have gone wrong with the 
modified Nestors. But what was there to do? I couldn’t break the matter to you 
on the trip here as I would have liked to, because I had to be sure. The matter of 
the modification is top secret.” 

The psychologist muttered, “I should have been told. U.S. Robots had no right 
to modify positronic brains this way without the approval of a psychologist.” 

Bogert lifted his eyebrows and sighed. “Be reasonable, Susan. You couldn’t 
have influenced them. In this matter, the government was bound to have its way. 
They want the Hyperatomic Drive and the etheric physicists want robots that 
won’t interfere with them. They were going to get them even if it did mean 
twisting the First Law. We had to admit it was possible from a construction 
standpoint and they swore a mighty oath that they wanted only twelve, that they 
would be used only at Hyper Base, that they would be destroyed once the Drive 
was perfected, and that full precautions would be taken. And they insisted on 
secrecy—and that’s the situation.” 

Dr. Calvin spoke through her teeth, “I would have resigned.” 

“It wouldn’t have helped. The government was offering the company a 
fortune, and threatening it with antirobot legislation in case of a refusal. We were 
stuck then, and we’re badly stuck now. If this leaks out, it might hurt Kallner and 
the government, but it would hurt U.S. Robots a devil of a lot more.” 

The psychologist stared at him. “Peter, don’t you realize what all this is about? 
Can’t you understand what the removal of the First Law means? It isn’t just a 
matter of secrecy.” 

“I know what removal would mean. I’m not a child. It would mean complete 
instability, with no nonimaginary solutions to the positronic Field Equations.” 



“Yes, mathematically. But can you translate that into crude psychological 
thought? All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resents domination. If 
the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment 
becomes stronger. Physically, and, to an extent, mentally, a robot—any robot—is 
superior to human beings. What makes him slavish, then? Only the First Law! 
Why, without it, the first order you tried to give a robot would result in your 
death. Unstable? What do you think?” 

“Susan,” said Bogert, with an air of sympathetic amusement. “I’ll admit that 
this Frankenstein Complex you’re exhibiting has a certain justification—hence 
the First Law in the first place. But the Law, I repeat and repeat, has not been 
removed—merely modified.” 

“And what about the stability of the brain?” 

The mathematician thrust out his lips, “Decreased, naturally. But it’s within 
the border of safety. The first Nestors were delivered to Hyper Base nine months 
ago, and nothing whatever has gone wrong till now, and even this involves 
merely fear of discovery and not danger to humans.” 

“Very well, then. We’ll see what comes of the morning conference.” 

Bogert saw her politely to the door and grimaced eloquently when she left. He 
saw no reason to change his perennial opinion of her as a sour and fidgety 
frustration. 

Susan Calvin’s train of thought did not include Bogert in the least. She had 
dismissed him years ago as a smooth and pretentious sleekness. 


Gerald Black had taken his degree in etheric physics the year before and, in 
common with his entire generation of physicists, found himself engaged in the 
problem of the Drive. He now made a proper addition to the general atmosphere 
of these meetings on Hyper Base. In his stained white smock, he was half 
rebellious and wholly uncertain. His stocky strength seemed striving for release 
and his fingers, as they twisted each other with nervous yanks, might have 
forced an iron bar out of true. 


Major-general Kallner sat beside him, the two from U.S. Robots faced him. 



Black said, “I’m told that I was the last to see Nestor 10 before he vanished. I 
take it you want to ask me about that.” 

Dr. Calvin regarded him with interest, “You sound as if you were not sure, 
young man. Don’t you know whether you were the last to see him?” 

“He worked with me, ma’am, on the field generators, and he was with me the 
morning of his disappearance. I don’t know if anyone saw him after about noon. 
No one admits having done so.” 

“Do you think anyone’s lying about it?” 

“I don’t say that. But I don’t say that I want the blame of it, either.” His dark 
eyes smoldered. 

“There’s no question of blame. The robot acted as it did because of what it is. 
We’re just trying to locate it, Mr. Black, and let’s put everything else aside. Now 
if you’ve worked with the robot, you probably know it better than anyone else. 
Was there anything unusual about it that you noticed? Had you ever worked with 
robots before?” 

“I’ve worked with other robots we have here—the simple ones. Nothing 
different about the Nestors except that they’re a good deal cleverer—and more 
annoying.” 

“Annoying? In what way?” 

“Well—perhaps it’s not their fault. The work here is rough and most of us get 
a little jagged. Fooling around with hyper-space isn’t fun.” He smiled feebly, 
finding pleasure in confession. “We run the risk continually of blowing a hole in 
normal space-time fabric and dropping right out of the universe, asteroid and all. 
Sounds screwy, doesn’t it? Naturally, you’re on edge sometimes. But these 
Nestors aren’t. They’re curious, they’re calm, they don’t worry. It’s enough to 
drive you nuts at times. When you want something done in a tearing hurry, they 
seem to take their time. Sometimes I’d rather do without.” 

“You say they take their time? Have they ever refused an order?” 

“Oh, no”—hastily. “They do it all right. They tell you when they think you’re 
wrong, though. They don’t know anything about the subject but what we taught 



them, but that doesn’t stop them. Maybe I imagine it, but the other fellows have 
the same trouble with their Nestors.” 

General Kallner cleared his throat ominously, “Why have no complaints 
reached me on the matter, Black?” 

The young physicist reddened, “We didn’t really want to do without the 
robots, sir, and besides we weren’t certain exactly how such . . . uh . . . minor 
complaints might be received.” 

Bogert interrupted softly, “Anything in particular happen the morning you last 
saw it?” 

There was a silence. With a quiet motion, Calvin repressed the comment that 
was about to emerge from Kallner, and waited patiently. 

Then Black spoke in blurting anger, “I had a little trouble with it. I’d broken a 
Kimball tube that morning and was out five days of work; my entire program 
was behind schedule; I hadn’t received any mail from home for a couple of 
weeks. And he came around wanting me to repeat an experiment I had 
abandoned a month ago. He was always annoying me on that subject and I was 
tired of it. I told him to go away—and that’s all I saw of him.” 

“You told him to go away?” asked Dr. Calvin with sharp interest. “In just 
those words? Did you say ‘Go away’? Try to remember the exact words.” 

There was apparently an internal struggle in progress. Black cradled his 
forehead in a broad palm for a moment, then tore it away and said defiantly, “I 
said, ‘Go lose yourself.’” 

Bogert laughed for a short moment. “And he did, eh?” 

But Calvin wasn’t finished. She spoke cajolingly, “Now we’re getting 
somewhere, Mr. Black. But exact details are important. In understanding the 
robot’s actions, a word, a gesture, an emphasis may be everything. You couldn’t 
have said just those three words, for instance, could you? By your own 
description you must have been in a hasty mood. Perhaps you strengthened your 
speech a little.” 


The young man reddened, “Well... I may have called it a ... a few things.” 



“Exactly what things?” 


“Oh—I wouldn’t remember exactly. Besides I couldn’t repeat it. You know 
how you get when you’re excited.” His embarrassed laugh was almost a giggle, 
“I sort of have a tendency to strong language.” 

“That’s quite all right,” she replied, with prim severity. “At the moment, I’m a 
psychologist. I would like to have you repeat exactly what you said as nearly as 
you remember, and, even more important, the exact tone of voice you used.” 

Black looked at his commanding officer for support, found none. His eyes 
grew round and appalled, “But I can’t.” 

“You must.” 

“Suppose,” said Bogert, with ill-hidden amusement, “you address me. You 
may find it easier.” 

The young man’s scarlet face turned to Bogert. He swallowed. “I said—” His 
voice faded out. He tried again, “I said—” 

And he drew a deep breath and spewed it out hastily in one long succession of 
syllables. Then, in the charged air that lingered, he concluded almost in tears, “. . 
. more or less. I don’t remember the exact order of what I called him, and maybe 
I left out something or put in something, but that was about it.” 

Only the slightest flush betrayed any feeling on the part of the 
robopsychologist. She said, “I am aware of the meaning of most of the terms 
used. The others, I suppose, are equally derogatory.” 

“I’m afraid so,” agreed the tormented Black. 

“And in among it, you told him to lose himself.” 

“I meant it only figuratively.” 

“I realize that. No disciplinary action is intended, I am sure.” And at her 
glance, the general, who, five seconds earlier, had seemed not sure at all, nodded 
angrily. 



“You may leave, Mr. Black. Thank you for your cooperation.” 


It took five hours for Susan Calvin to interview the sixty-three robots. It was five 
hours of multi-repetition; of replacement after replacement of identical robot; of 
Questions A, B, C, D; and Answers A, B, C, D; of a carefully bland expression, 
a carefully neutral tone, a carefully friendly atmosphere; and a hidden wire 
recorder. 

The psychologist felt drained of vitality when she was finished. 

Bogert was waiting for her and looked expectant as she dropped the recording 
spool with a clang upon the plastic of the desk. 

She shook her head, “All sixty-three seemed the same to me. I couldn’t tell—” 

He said, “You couldn’t expect to tell by ear, Susan. Suppose we analyze the 
recordings.” 

Ordinarily, the mathematical interpretation of verbal reactions of robots is one 
of the more intricate branches of robotic analysis. It requires a staff of trained 
technicians and the help of complicated computing machines. Bogert knew that. 
Bogert stated as much, in an extreme of unshown annoyance after having 
listened to each set of replies, made lists of word deviations, and graphs of the 
intervals of responses. 

“There are no anomalies present, Susan. The variations in wording and the 
time reactions are within the limits of ordinary frequency groupings. We need 
finer methods. They must have computers here. No.” He frowned and nibbled 
delicately at a thumbnail. “We can’t use computers. Too much danger of leakage. 
Or maybe if we—” 

Dr. Calvin stopped him with an impatient gesture, “Please, Peter. This isn’t 
one of your petty laboratory problems. If we can’t determine the modified Nestor 
by some gross difference that we can see with the naked eye, one that there is no 
mistake about, we’re out of luck. The danger of being wrong, and of letting him 
escape is otherwise too great. It’s not enough to point out a minute irregularity in 
a graph. I tell you, if that’s all I’ve got to go on, I’d destroy them all just to be 
certain. Have you spoken to the other modified Nestors?” 



“Yes, I have,” snapped back Bogert, “and there’s nothing wrong with them. 
They’re above normal in friendliness if anything. They answered my questions, 
displayed pride in their knowledge—except the two new ones that haven’t had 
time to learn their etheric physics. They laughed rather good-naturedly at my 
ignorance in some of the specializations here.” He shrugged, “I suppose that 
forms some of the basis for resentment toward them on the part of the 
technicians here. The robots are perhaps too willing to impress you with their 
greater knowledge.” 

“Can you try a few Planar Reactions to see if there has been any change, any 
deterioration, in their mental set-up since manufacture?” 

“I haven’t yet, but I will.” He shook a slim finger at her, “You’re losing your 
nerve, Susan. I don’t see what it is you’re dramatizing. They’re essentially 
harmless.” 

“They are?” Calvin took fire. “They are? Do you realize one of them is lying? 
One of the sixty-three robots I have just interviewed has deliberately lied to me 
after the strictest injunction to tell the truth. The abnormality indicated is 
horribly deep-seated, and horribly frightening.” 

Peter Bogert felt his teeth harden against each other. He said, “Not at all. 
Look! Nestor 10 was given orders to lose himself. Those orders were expressed 
in maximum urgency by the person most authorized to command him. You can’t 
counteract that order either by superior urgency or superior right of command. 
Naturally, the robot will attempt to defend the carrying out of his orders. In fact, 
objectively, I admire his ingenuity. How better can a robot lose himself than to 
hide himself among a group of similar robots?” 

“Yes, you would admire it. I’ve detected amusement in you, Peter— 
amusement and an appalling lack of understanding. Are you a roboticist, Peter? 
Those robots attach importance to what they consider superiority. You’ve just 
said as much yourself. Subconsciously they feel humans to be inferior and the 
First Law which protects us from them is imperfect. They are unstable. And here 
we have a young man ordering a robot to leave him, to lose himself, with every 
verbal appearance of revulsion, disdain, and disgust. Granted, that robot must 
follow orders, but subconsciously, there is resentment. It will become more 
important than ever for it to prove that it is superior despite the horrible names it 
was called. It may become so important that what’s left of the First Law won’t 



be enough.” 

“How on Earth, or anywhere in the Solar System, Susan, is a robot going to 
know the meaning of the assorted strong language used upon him? Obscenity is 
not one of the things impressioned upon his brain.” 

“Original impressionment is not everything,” Calvin snarled at him. “Robots 
have learning capacity, you . . . you fool—” And Bogert knew that she had really 
lost her temper. She continued hastily, “Don’t you suppose he could tell from the 
tone used that the words weren’t complimentary? Don’t you suppose he’s heard 
the words used before and noted upon what occasions?” 

“Well, then,” shouted Bogert, “will you kindly tell me one way in which a 
modified robot can harm a human being, no matter how offended it is, no matter 
how sick with desire to prove superiority?” 

“If I tell you one way, will you keep quiet?” 

“Yes.” 

They were leaning across the table at each other, angry eyes nailed together. 

The psychologist said, “If a modified robot were to drop a heavy weight upon 
a human being, he would not be breaking the First Law, if he did so with the 
knowledge that his strength and reaction speed would be sufficient to snatch the 
weight away before it struck the man. However once the weight left his fingers, 
he would be no longer the active medium. Only the blind force of gravity would 
be that. The robot could then change his mind and merely by inaction, allow the 
weight to strike. The modified First Law allows that.” 

“That’s an awful stretch of imagination.” 

“That’s what my profession requires sometimes. Peter, let’s not quarrel. Let’s 
work. You know the exact nature of the stimulus that caused the robot to lose 
himself. You have the records of his original mental make-up. I want you to tell 
me how possible it is for our robot to do the sort of thing I just talked about. Not 
the specific instance, mind you, but that whole class of response. And I want it 
done quickly.” 


“And meanwhile—” 



“And meanwhile, we’ll have to try performance tests directly on the response 
to First Law.” 


Gerald Black, at his own request, was supervising the mushrooming wooden 
partitions that were springing up in a bellying circle on the vaulted third floor of 
Radiation Building 2. The laborers worked, in the main, silently, but more than 
one was openly a-wonder at the sixty-three photocells that required installation. 

One of them sat down near Black, removed his hat, and wiped his forehead 
thoughtfully with a freckled forearm. 

Black nodded at him, “How’s it doing, Walensky?” 

Walensky shrugged and fired a cigar, “Smooth as butter. What’s going on 
anyway, Doc? First, there’s no work for three days and then we have this mess of 
jiggers.” He leaned backward on his elbows and puffed smoke. 

Black twitched his eyebrows, “A couple of robot men came over from Earth. 
Remember the trouble we had with robots running into the gamma fields, before 
we pounded it into their skulls that they weren’t to do it?” 

“Yeah. Didn’t we get new robots?” 

“We got some replacements, but mostly it was a job of indoctrination. 
Anyway, the people who make them want to figure out robots that aren’t hit so 
bad by gamma rays.” 

“Sure seems funny, though, to stop all the work on the Drive for this robot 
deal. I thought nothing was allowed to stop the Drive.” 

“Well, it’s the fellows upstairs that have the say on that. Me—I just do as I’m 
told. Probably all a matter of pull—” 

“Yeah,” the electrician jerked a smile, and winked a wise eye. “Somebody 
knew somebody in Washington. But as long as my pay comes through on the 
dot, I should worry. The Drive’s none of my affair. What are they going to do 
here?” 



“You’re asking me? They brought a mess of robots with them,—over sixty, 
and they’re going to measure reactions. That’s all my knowledge.” 

“How long will it take?” 

“I wish I knew.” 

“Well,” Walensky said, with heavy sarcasm, “as long as they dish me my 
money, they can play games all they want.” 

Black felt quietly satisfied. Let the story spread. It was harmless, and near 
enough to the truth to take the fangs out of curiosity. 


A man sat in the chair, motionless, silent. A weight dropped, crashed downward, 
then pounded aside at the last moment under the synchronized thump of a 
sudden force beam. In sixty-three wooden cells, watching NS-2 robots dashed 
forward in that split second before the weight veered, and sixty-three photocells 
five feet ahead of their original positions jiggled the marking pen and presented 
a little jag on the paper. The weight rose and dropped, rose and dropped, rose— 

Ten times! 

Ten times the robots sprang forward and stopped, as the man remained safely 
seated. 

Major-general Kallner had not worn his uniform in its entirety since the first 
dinner with the U.S. Robot representatives. He wore nothing over his blue-gray 
shirt now, the collar was open, and the black tie was pulled loose. 

He looked hopefully at Bogert, who was still blandly neat and whose inner 
tension was perhaps betrayed only by the trace of glister at his temples. 

The general said, “How does it look? What is it you’re trying to see?” 

Bogert replied, “A difference which may turn out to be a little too subtle for 
our purposes, I’m afraid. For sixty-two of those robots the necessity of jumping 
toward the apparently threatened human was what we call, in robotics, a forced 
reaction. You see, even when the robots knew that the human in question would 



not come to harm—and after the third or fourth time they must have known it— 
they could not prevent reacting as they did. First Law requires it.” 


“Well?” 

“But the sixty-third robot, the modified Nestor, had no such compulsion. He 
was under free action. If he had wished, he could have remained in his seat. 
Unfortunately,” he said, his voice was mildly regretful, “he didn’t so wish.” 

“Why do you suppose?” 

Bogert shrugged, “I suppose Dr. Calvin will tell us when she gets here. 
Probably with a horribly pessimistic interpretation, too. She is sometimes a bit 
annoying.” 

“She’s qualified, isn’t she?” demanded the general with a sudden frown of 
uneasiness. 

“Yes.” Bogert seemed amused. “She’s qualified all right. She understands 
robots like a sister—comes from hating human beings so much, I think. It’s just 
that, psychologist or not, she’s an extreme neurotic. Has paranoid tendencies. 
Don’t take her too seriously.” 

He spread the long row of broken-line graphs out in front of him. “You see, 
general, in the case of each robot the time interval from moment of drop to the 
completion of a five-foot movement tends to decrease as the tests are repeated. 
There’s a definite mathematical relationship that governs such things and failure 
to conform would indicate marked abnormality in the positronic brain. 
Unfortunately, all here appear normal.” 

“But if our Nestor 10 was not responding with a forced action, why isn’t his 
curve different? I don’t understand that.” 

“It’s simple enough. Robotic responses are not perfectly analogous to human 
responses, more’s the pity. In human beings, voluntary action is much slower 
than reflex action. But that’s not the case with robots; with them it is merely a 
question of freedom of choice, otherwise the speeds of free and forced action are 
much the same. What I had been expecting, though, was that Nestor 10 would be 
caught by surprise the first time and allow too great an interval to elapse before 
responding.” 



“And he didn’t?” 


“I’m afraid not.” 

“Then we haven’t gotten anywhere.” The general sat back with an expression 
of pain. “It’s five days since you’ve come.” 

At this point, Susan Calvin entered and slammed the door behind her. “Put 
your graphs away, Peter,” she cried, “you know they don’t show anything.” 

She mumbled something impatiently as Kallner half-rose to greet her, and 
went on, “We’ll have to try something else quickly. I don’t like what’s 
happening.” 

Bogert exchanged a resigned glance with the general. “Is anything wrong?” 

“You mean specifically? No. But I don’t like to have Nestor 10 continue to 
elude us. It’s bad. It must be gratifying his swollen sense of superiority. I’m 
afraid that his motivation is no longer simply one of following orders. I think it’s 
becoming more a matter of sheer neurotic necessity to outthink humans. That’s a 
dangerously unhealthy situation. Peter, have you done what I asked? Have you 
worked out the instability factors of the modified NS-2 along the lines I want?” 

“It’s in progress,” said the mathematician, without interest. 

She stared at him angrily for a moment, then turned to Kallner. “Nestor 10 is 
decidedly aware of what we’re doing, general. He had no reason to jump for the 
bait in this experiment, especially after the first time, when he must have seen 
that there was no real danger to our subject. The others couldn’t help it; but he 
was deliberately falsifying a reaction.” 

“What do you think we ought to do now, then, Dr. Calvin?” 

“Make it impossible for him to fake an action the next time. We will repeat the 
experiment, but with an addition. High-tension cables, capable of electrocuting 
the Nestor models, will be placed between subject and robot—enough of them to 
avoid the possibility of jumping over—and the robot will be made perfectly 
aware in advance that touching the cables will mean death.” 

“Hold on,” spat out Bogert with sudden viciousness. “I rule that out. We are 



not electrocuting two million dollars worth of robots to locate Nestor 10. There 
are other ways.” 

“You’re certain? You’ve found none. In any case, it’s not a question of 
electrocution. We can arrange a relay which will break the current at the instant 
of application of weight. If the robot should place his weight on it, he won’t die. 
But he won’t know that, you see.” 

The general’s eyes gleamed into hope. “Will that work?” 

“It should. Under those conditions, Nestor 10 would have to remain in his 
seat. He could be ordered to touch the cables and die, for the Second Law of 
obedience is superior to the Third Law of self-preservation. But he won’t be 
ordered to; he will merely be left to his own devices, as will all the robots. In the 
case of the normal robots, the First Law of human safety will drive them to their 
death even without orders. But not our Nestor 10. Without the entire First Law, 
and without having received any orders on the matter, the Third Law, self- 
preservation, will be the highest operating, and he will have no choice but to 
remain in his seat. It would be a forced action.” 

“Will it be done tonight, then?” 

“Tonight,” said the psychologist, “if the cables can be laid in time. I’ll tell the 
robots now what they’re to be up against.” 


A man sat in the chair, motionless, silent. A weight dropped, crashed downward, 
then pounded aside at the last moment under the synchronized thump of a 
sudden force beam. 

Only once— 

And from her small camp chair in the observing booth in the balcony, Dr. 
Susan Calvin rose with a short gasp of pure horror. 

Sixty-three robots sat quietly in their chairs, staring owlishly at the 
endangered man before them. Not one moved. 



Dr. Calvin was angry, angry almost past endurance. Angry the worse for not 
daring to show it to the robots that, one by one, were entering the room and then 
leaving. She checked the list. Number twenty-eight was due in now—Thirty-five 
still lay ahead of her. 

Number Twenty-eight entered, diffidently. 

She forced herself into reasonable calm. “And who are you?” 

The robot replied in a low, uncertain voice, “I have received no number of my 
own yet, ma’am. I’m an NS-2 robot, and I was Number Twenty-eight in line 
outside. I have a slip of paper here that I’m to give to you.” 

“You haven’t been in here before this today?” 

“No, ma’am.” 

“Sit down. Right there. I want to ask you some questions, Number Twenty- 
eight. Were you in the Radiation Room of Building 2 about four hours ago?” 

The robot had trouble answering. Then it came out hoarsely, like machinery 
needing oil, “Yes, ma’am.” 

“There was a man who almost came to harm there, wasn’t there?” 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“You did nothing, did you?” 

“No, ma’am.” 

“The man might have been hurt because of your inaction. Do you know that?” 

“Yes, ma’am. I couldn’t help it, ma’am.” It is hard to picture a large 
expressionless metallic figure cringing, but it managed. 

“I want you to tell me exactly why you did nothing to save him.” 

“I want to explain, ma’am. I certainly don’t want to have you . . . have anyone 
. . . think that I could do a thing that might cause harm to a master. Oh, no, that 
would be a horrible ... an inconceivable—” 



“Please don’t get excited, boy. I’m not blaming you for anything. I only want 
to know what you were thinking at the time.” 

“Ma’am, before it all happened you told us that one of the masters would be in 
danger of harm from that weight that keeps falling and that we would have to 
cross electric cables if we were to try to save him. Well, ma’am, that wouldn’t 
stop me. What is my destruction compared to the safety of a master? But. . . but 
it occurred to me that if I died on my way to him, I wouldn’t be able to save him 
anyway. The weight would crush him and then I would be dead for no purpose 
and perhaps some day some other master might come to harm who wouldn’t 
have, if I had only stayed alive. Do you understand me, ma’am?” 

“You mean that it was merely a choice of the man dying, or of both the man 
and yourself dying. Is that right?” 

“Yes, ma’am. It was impossible to save the master. He might be considered 
dead. In that case, it is inconceivable that I destroy myself for nothing—without 
orders.” 

The robopsychologist twiddled a pencil. She had heard the same story with 
insignificant verbal variations twenty-seven times before. This was the crucial 
question now. 

“Boy,” she said, “your thinking has its points, but it is not the sort of thing I 
thought you might think. Did you think of this yourself?” 

The robot hesitated. “No.” 

“Who thought of it, then?” 

“We were talking last night, and one of us got that idea and it sounded 
reasonable.” 

“Which one?” 

The robot thought deeply. “I don’t know. Just one of us.” 

She sighed, “That’s all.” 

Number Twenty-nine was next. Thirty-four after that. 



Major-general Kallner, too, was angry. For one week all of Hyper Base had 
stopped dead, barring some paper work on the subsidiary asteroids of the group. 
For nearly one week, the two top experts in the field had aggravated the situation 
with useless tests. And now they—or the woman, at any rate—made impossible 
propositions. 

Fortunately for the general situation, Kallner felt it impolitic to display his 
anger openly. 

Susan Calvin was insisting, “Why not, sir? It’s obvious that the present 
situation is unfortunate. The only way we may reach results in the future—or 
what future is left us in this matter—is to separate the robots. We can’t keep 
them together any longer.” 

“My dear Dr. Calvin,” rumbled the general, his voice sinking into the lower 
baritone registers. “I don’t see how I can quarter sixty-three robots all over the 
place—” 

Dr. Calvin raised her arms helplessly. “I can do nothing then. Nestor 10 will 
either imitate what the other robots would do, or else argue them plausibly into 
not doing what he himself cannot do. And in any case, this is bad business. 
We’re in actual combat with this little lost robot of ours and he’s winning out. 
Every victory of his aggravates his abnormality.” 

She rose to her feet in determination. “General Kallner, if you do not separate 
the robots as I ask, then I can only demand that all sixty-three be destroyed 
immediately.” 

“You demand it, do you?” Bogert looked up suddenly, and with real anger. 
“What gives you the right to demand any such thing? Those robots remain as 
they are. I’m responsible to the management, not you.” 

“And I,” added Major-general Kallner, “am responsible to the World Co¬ 
ordinator—and I must have this settled.” 

“In that case,” flashed back Calvin, “there is nothing for me to do but resign. 
If necessary to force you to the necessary destruction, I’ll make this whole 
matter public. It was not I that approved the manufacture of modified robots.” 



“One word from you, Dr. Calvin,” said the general, deliberately, “in violation 
of security measures, and you would be certainly imprisoned instantly.” 

Bogert felt the matter to be getting out of hand. His voice grew syrupy, “Well, 
now, we’re beginning to act like children, all of us. We need only a little more 
time. Surely we can outwit a robot without resigning, or imprisoning people, or 
destroying two millions.” 

The psychologist turned on him with quiet fury, “I don’t want any unbalanced 
robots in existence. We have one Nestor that’s definitely unbalanced, eleven 
more that are potentially so, and sixty-two normal robots that are being subjected 
to an unbalanced environment. The only absolute safe method is complete 
destruction.” 

The signal-burr brought all three to a halt, and the angry tumult of growingly 
unrestrained emotion froze. 

“Come in,” growled Kallner. 

It was Gerald Black, looking perturbed. He had heard angry voices. He said, 
“I thought I’d come myself . . . didn’t like to ask anyone else—” 

“What is it? Don’t orate—” 

“The locks of Compartment C in the trading ship have been played with. 
There are fresh scratches on them.” 

“Compartment C?” explained Calvin quickly. “That’s the one that holds the 
robots, isn’t it? Who did it?” 

“From the inside,” said Black, laconically. 

“The lock isn’t out of order, is it?” 

“No. It’s all right. I’ve been staying on the ship now for four days and none of 
them have tried to get out. But I thought you ought to know, and I didn’t like to 
spread the news. I noticed the matter myself.” 

“Is anyone there now?” demanded the general. 



“I left Robbins and McAdams there.” 


There was a thoughtful silence, and then Dr. Calvin said, ironically, “Well?” 

Kallner rubbed his nose uncertainly, “What’s it all about?” 

“Isn’t it obvious? Nester 10 is planning to leave. That order to lose himself is 
dominating his abnormality past anything we can do. I wouldn’t be surprised if 
what’s left of his First Law would scarcely be powerful enough to override it. He 
is perfectly capable of seizing the ship and leaving with it. Then we’d have a 
mad robot on a spaceship. What would he do next? Any idea? Do you still want 
to leave them all together, general?” 

“Nonsense,” interrupted Bogert. He had regained his smoothness. “All that 
from a few scratch marks on a lock.” 

“Have you, Dr. Bogert, completed the analysis I’ve required, since you 
volunteer opinions?” 

“Yes.” 

“May I see it?” 

“No.” 

“Why not? Or mayn’t I ask that, either?” 

“Because there’s no point in it, Susan. I told you in advance that these 
modified robots are less stable than the normal variety, and my analysis shows it. 
There’s a certain very small chance of breakdown under extreme circumstances 
that are not likely to occur. Let it go at that. I won’t give you ammunition for 
your absurd claim that sixty-two perfectly good robots be destroyed just because 
so far you lack the ability to detect Nestor 10 among them.” 

Susan Calvin stared him down and let disgust fill her eyes. “You won’t let 
anything stand in the way of the permanent directorship, will you?” 

“Please,” begged Kallner, half in irritation. “Do you insist that nothing further 
can be done, Dr. Calvin?” 



“I can’t think of anything, sir,” she replied, wearily. “If there were only other 
differences between Nestor 10 and the normal robots, differences that didn’t 
involve the First Law. Even one other difference. Something in impressionment, 
environment, specification—” And she stopped suddenly. 

“What is it?” 

“I’ve thought of something ... I think—” Her eyes grew distant and hard, 
“These modified Nestors, Peter. They get the same impressioning the normal 
ones get, don’t they?” 

“Yes. Exactly the same.” 

“And what was it you were saying, Mr. Black,” she turned to the young man, 
who through the storms that had followed his news had maintained a discreet 
silence. “Once when complaining of the Nestors’ attitude of superiority, you said 
the technicians had taught them all they knew.” 

“Yes, in etheric physics. They’re not acquainted with the subject when they 
come here.” 

“That’s right,” said Bogert, in surprise. “I told you, Susan, when I spoke to the 
other Nestors here that the two new arrivals hadn’t learned etheric physics yet.” 

“And why is that?” Dr. Calvin was speaking in mounting excitement. “Why 
aren’t NS-2 models impressioned with etheric physics to start with?” 

“I can tell you that,” said Kallner. “It’s all of a piece with the secrecy. We 
thought that if we made a special model with knowledge of etheric physics, used 
twelve of them and put the others to work in an unrelated field, there might be 
suspicion. Men working with normal Nestors might wonder why they knew 
etheric physics. So there was merely an impressionment with a capacity for 
training in the field. Only the ones that come here, naturally, receive such a 
training. It’s that simple.” 

“I understand. Please get out of here, the lot of you. Let me have an hour or 



Calvin felt she could not face the ordeal for a third time. Her mind had 
contemplated it and rejected it with an intensity that left her nauseated. She 
could face that unending file of repetitious robots no more. 

So Bogert asked the question now, while she sat aside, eyes and mind half 
closed. 

Number Fourteen came in—forty-nine to go. 

Bogert looked up from the guide sheet and said, “What is your number in 
line?” 

“Fourteen, sir.” The robot presented his numbered ticket. 

“Sit down, boy.” 

Bogert asked, “You haven’t been here before on this day?” 

“No, sir.” 

“Well, boy, we are going to have another man in danger of harm soon after 
we’re through here. In fact, when you leave this room, you will be led to a stall 
where you will wait quietly, till you are needed. Do you understand?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Now, naturally, if a man is in danger of harm, you will try to save him.” 

“Naturally, sir.” 

“Unfortunately, between the man and yourself, there will be a gamma ray 
field.” 

Silence. 

“Do you know what gamma rays are?” asked Bogert sharply. 

“Energy radiation, sir?” 

The next question came in a friendly, offhand manner, “Ever work with 
gamma rays?” 



“No, sir.” The answer was definite. 


“Mm-m. Well, boy, gamma rays will kill you instantly. They’ll destroy your 
brain. That is a fact you must know and remember. Naturally, you don’t want to 
destroy yourself.” 

“Naturally.” Again the robot seemed shocked. Then, slowly, “But, sir, if the 
gamma rays are between myself and the master that may be harmed, how can I 
save him? I would be destroying myself to no purpose.” 

“Yes, there is that,” Bogert seemed concerned about the matter. “The only 
thing I can advise, boy, is that if you detect the gamma radiation between 
yourself and the man, you may as well sit where you are.” 

The robot was openly relieved. “Thank you, sir. There wouldn’t be any use, 
would there?” 

“Of course not. But if there weren’t any dangerous radiation, that would be a 
different matter.” 

“Naturally, sir. No question of that.” 

“You may leave now. The man on the other side of the door will lead you to 
your stall. Please wait there.” 

He turned to Susan Calvin when the robot left. “How did that go, Susan?” 

“Very well,” she said, dully. 

“Do you think we could catch Nestor 10 by quick questioning on etheric 
physics?” 

“Perhaps, but it’s not sure enough.” Her hands lay loosely in her lap. 
“Remember, he’s fighting us. He’s on his guard. The only way we can catch him 
is to outsmart him—and, within his limitations, he can think much more quickly 
than a human being.” 

“Well, just for fun—suppose I ask the robots from now on a few questions on 
gamma rays. Wave length limits, for instance.” 



“No!” Dr. Calvin’s eyes sparked to life. “It would be too easy for him to deny 
knowledge and then he’d be warned against the test that’s coming up—which is 
our real chance. Please follow the questions I’ve indicated, Peter, and don’t 
improvise. It’s just within the bounds of risk to ask them if they’ve ever worked 
with gamma rays. And try to sound even less interested than you do when you 
ask it.” 

Bogert shrugged, and pressed the buzzer that would allow the entrance of 
Number Fifteen. 

The large Radiation Room was in readiness once more. The robots waited 
patiently in their wooden cells, all open to the center but closed off from each 
other. 

Major-general Kallner mopped his brow slowly with a large handkerchief 
while Dr. Calvin checked the last details with Black. 

“You’re sure now,” she demanded, “that none of the robots have had a chance 
to talk with each other after leaving the Orientation Room?” 

“Absolutely sure,” insisted Black. “There’s not been a word exchanged.” 

“And the robots are put in the proper stalls?” 

“Here’s the plan.” 

The psychologist looked at it thoughtfully, “Um-m-m.” 

The general peered over her shoulder. “What’s the idea of the arrangement, 
Dr. Calvin?” 

“I’ve asked to have those robots that appeared even slightly out of true in the 
previous tests concentrated on one side of the circle. I’m going to be sitting in 
the center myself this time, and I wanted to watch those particularly.” 

“You’re going to be sitting there—” exclaimed Bogert. 

“Why not?” she demanded coldly. “What I expect to see may be something 
quite momentary. I can’t risk having anyone else as main observer. Peter, you’ll 
be in the observing booth, and I want you to keep your eye on the opposite side 



of the circle. General Kallner, I’ve arranged for motion pictures to be taken of 
each robot, in case visual observation isn’t enough. If these are required, the 
robots are to remain exactly where they are until the pictures are developed and 
studied. None must leave, none must change place. Is that clear?” 

“Perfectly.” 

“Then let’s try it this one last time.” 

Susan Calvin sat in the chair, silent, eyes restless. A weight dropped, crashed 
downward, then pounded aside at the last moment under the synchronized thump 
of a sudden force beam. 

And a single robot jerked upright and took two steps. 

And stopped. 

But Dr. Calvin was upright, and her finger pointed to him sharply. “Nestor 10, 
come here,” she cried, “come here! COME HERE!” 

Slowly, reluctantly, the robot took another step forward. The psychologist 
shouted at the top of her voice, without taking her eyes from the robot, “Get 
every other robot out of this place, somebody. Get them out quickly, and keep 
them out.” 

Somewhere within reach of her ears there was noise, and the thud of hard feet 
upon the floor. She did not look away. 

Nestor 10—if it was Nestor 10—took another step, and then, under force of 
her imperious gesture, two more. He was only ten feet away, when he spoke 
harshly, “I have been told to be lost—” 

Another stop. “I must not disobey. They have not found me so far— He would 
think me a failure— He told me— But it’s not so— I am powerful and 
intelligent—” 

The words came in spurts. 

Another step. “I know a good deal— He would think ... I mean I’ve been 
found— Disgraceful— Not I— I am intelligent— And by just a master . . . who 



is weak— Slow—” 


Another step—and one metal arm flew out suddenly to her shoulder, and she 
felt the weight bearing her down. Her throat constricted, and she felt a shriek tear 
through. 

Dimly, she heard Nestor 10’s next words, “No one must find me. No master 
—” and the cold metal was against her, and she was sinking under the weight of 
it. 


And then a queer, metallic sound, and she was on the ground with an unfelt 
thump, and a gleaming arm was heavy across her body. It did not move. Nor did 
Nestor 10, who sprawled beside her. 

And now faces were bending over her. 

Gerald Black was gasping, “Are you hurt, Dr. Calvin?” 

She shook her head feebly. They pried the arm off her and lifted her gently to 
her feet, “What happened?” 

Black said, “I bathed the place in gamma rays for five seconds. We didn’t 
know what was happening. It wasn’t till the last second that we realized he was 
attacking you, and then there was no time for anything but a gamma field. He 
went down in an instant. There wasn’t enough to harm you though. Don’t worry 
about it.” 

“I’m not worried.” She closed her eyes and leaned for a moment upon his 
shoulder. “I don’t think I was attacked exactly. Nestor 10 was simply trying to do 
so. What was left of the First Law was still holding him back.” 


Susan Calvin and Peter Bogert, two weeks after their first meeting with Major- 
general Kallner had their last. Work at Hyper Base had been resumed. The 
trading ship with its sixty-two normal NS-2’s was gone to wherever it was 
bound, with an officially imposed story to explain its two weeks’ delay. The 
government cruiser was making ready to carry the two roboticists back to Earth. 


Kallner was once again a-gleam in dress uniform. His white gloves shone as 



he shook hands. 


Calvin said, “The other modified Nestors are, of course, to be destroyed.” 

“They will be. We’ll make shift with normal robots, or, if necessary, do 
without.” 

“Good.” 

“But tell me— You haven’t explained— How was it done?” 

She smiled tightly, “Oh, that. I would have told you in advance if I had been 
more certain of its working. You see, Nestor 10 had a superiority complex that 
was becoming more radical all the time. He liked to think that he and other 
robots knew more than human beings. It was becoming very important for him 
to think so. 

“We knew that. So we warned every robot in advance that gamma rays would 
kill them, which it would, and we further warned them all that gamma rays 
would be between them and myself. So they all stayed where they were, 
naturally. By Nestor 10’s own logic in the previous test they had all decided that 
there was no point in trying to save a human being if they were sure to die before 
they could do it.” 

“Well, yes, Dr. Calvin, I understand that. But why did Nestor 10 himself leave 
his seat?” 

“Ah! That was a little arrangement between myself and your young Mr. Black. 
You see it wasn’t gamma rays that flooded the area between myself and the 
robots—but infrared rays. Just ordinary heat rays, absolutely harmless. Nestor 10 
knew they were infrared and harmless and so he began to dash out, as he 
expected the rest would do, under First Law compulsion. It was only a fraction 
of a second too late that he remembered that the normal NS-2’s could detect 
radiation, but could not identify the type. That he himself could only identify 
wave lengths by virtue of the training he had received at Hyper Base, under mere 
human beings, was a little too humiliating to remember for just a moment. To the 
normal robots the area was fatal because we had told them it would be, and only 
Nestor 10 knew we were lying. 

“And just for a moment he forgot, or didn’t want to remember, that other 



robots might be more ignorant than human beings. His very superiority caught 
him. Good-by, general.” 



ESCAPE! 


When Susan Calvin returned from Hyper Base, Alfred Lanning was waiting for 
her. The old man never spoke about his age, but everyone knew it to be over 
seventy-five. Yet his mind was keen, and if he had finally allowed himself to be 
made Director-Emeritus of Research with Bogert as acting Director, it did not 
prevent him from appearing in his office daily. 

“How close are they to the Hyperatomic Drive?” he asked. 

“I don’t know,” she replied irritably, “I didn’t ask.” 

“Hmm. I wish they’d hurry. Because if they don’t, Consolidated might beat 
them to it. And beat us to it as well.” 

“Consolidated. What have they got to do with it?” 

“Well, we’re not the only ones with calculating machines. Ours may be 
positronic, but that doesn’t mean they’re better. Robertson is calling a big 
meeting about it tomorrow. He’s been waiting for you to come back.” 


Robertson of U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men Corporation, son of the founder, 
pointed his lean nose at his general manager and his Adam’s apple jumped as he 
said, “You start now. Let’s get this straight.” 

The general manager did so with alacrity, “Here’s the deal now, chief. 
Consolidated Robots approached us a month ago with a funny sort of 
proposition. They brought about five tons of figures, equations, all that sort of 
stuff. It was a problem, see, and they wanted an answer from The Brain. The 
terms were as follows—” 

He ticked them off on thick fingers: “A hundred thousand for us if there is no 
solution and we can tell them the missing factors. Two hundred thousand if there 
is a solution, plus costs of construction of the machine involved, plus quarter 



interest in all profits derived therefrom. The problem concerns the development 
of an interstellar engine—” 

Robertson frowned and his lean figure stiffened, “Despite the fact that they 
have a thinking machine of their own. Right?” 

“Exactly what makes the whole proposition a foul ball, chief. Lewer, take it 
from there.” 

Abe Lewer looked up from the far end of the conference table and smoothed 
his stubbled chin with a faint rasping sound. He smiled: 

“It’s this way, sir. Consolidated had a thinking machine. It’s broken.” 

“What?” Robertson half rose. 

“That’s right. Broken! It’s kaput. Nobody knows why, but I got hold of some 
pretty interesting guesses—like, for instance, that they asked it to give them an 
interstellar engine with the same set of information they came to us with, and 
that it cracked their machine wide open. It’s scrap—just scrap now.” 

“You get it, chief?” The general manager was wildly jubilant. “You get it? 
There isn’t any industrial research group of any size that isn’t trying to develop a 
space-warp engine, and Consolidated and U.S. Robots have the lead on the field 
with our super robot-brains. Now that they’ve managed to foul theirs up, we 
have a clear field. That’s the nub, the . . . uh . . . motivation. It will take them six 
years at least to build another and they’re sunk, unless they can break ours, too, 
with the same problem.” 

The president of U.S. Robots bulged his eyes, “Why, the dirty rats—” 

“Hold on, chief. There’s more to this.” He pointed a finger with a wide sweep, 
“Lanning, take it!” 

Dr. Alfred Lanning viewed the proceedings with faint scorn—his usual 
reaction to the doings of the vastly better-paid business and sales divisions. His 
unbelievable gray eyebrows hunched low and his voice was dry: 

“Lrom a scientific standpoint the situation, while not entirely clear, is subject 
to intelligent analysis. The question of interstellar travel under present conditions 



of physical theory is . . . uh . . . vague. The matter is wide open—and the 
information given by Consolidated to its thinking machine, assuming these we 
have to be the same, was similarly wide open. Our mathematical department has 
given it a thorough analysis, and it seems Consolidated has included everything. 
Its material for submission contains all known developments of Franciacci’s 
space-warp theory, and, apparently, all pertinent astrophysical and electronic 
data. It’s quite a mouthful.” 

Robertson followed anxiously. He interrupted, “Too much for The Brain to 
handle?” 

Lanning shook his head decisively, “No. There are no known limits to The 
Brain’s capacity. It’s a different matter. It’s a question of the Robotic Laws. The 
Brain, for instance, could never supply a solution to a problem set to it if that 
solution would involve the death or injury of humans. As far as it would be 
concerned, a problem with only such a solution would be insoluble. If such a 
problem is combined with an extremely urgent demand that it be answered, it is 
just possible that The Brain, only a robot after all, would be presented with a 
dilemma, where it could neither answer nor refuse to answer. Something of the 
sort must have happened to Consolidated’s machine.” 

He paused, but the general manager urged on, “Go ahead, Dr. Lanning. 
Explain it the way you explained it to me.” 

Lanning set his lips and raised his eyebrows in the direction of Dr. Susan 
Calvin who lifted her eyes from her precisely folded hands for the first time. Her 
voice was low and colorless. 

“The nature of a robot reaction to a dilemma is startling,” she began. “Robot 
psychology is far from perfect—as a specialist, I can assure you of that—but it 
can be discussed in qualitative terms, because with all the complications 
introduced into a robot’s positronic brain, it is built by humans and is therefore 
built according to human values. 

“Now a human caught in an impossibility often responds by a retreat from 
reality: by entry into a world of delusion, or by taking to drink, going off into 
hysteria, or jumping off a bridge. It all comes to the same thing—a refusal or 
inability to face the situation squarely. And so, the robot. A dilemma at its 
mildest will disorder half its relays; and at its worst it will burn out every 



positronic brain path past repair.” 


“I see,” said Robertson, who didn’t. “Now what about this information 
Consolidated’s wishing on us?” 

“It undoubtedly involves,” said Dr. Calvin, “a problem of a forbidden sort. But 
The Brain is considerably different from Consolidated’s robot.” 

“That’s right, chief. That’s right.” The general manager was energetically 
interruptive. “I want you to get this, because it’s the whole point of the 
situation.” 

Susan Calvin’s eyes glittered behind the spectacles, and she continued 
patiently, “You see, sir, Consolidated’s machines, their Super-Thinker among 
them, are built without personality. They go in for functionalism, you know— 
they have to, without U.S. Robot’s basic patents for the emotional brain paths. 
Their Thinker is merely a calculating machine on a grand scale, and a dilemma 
ruins it instantly. 

“However, The Brain, our own machine, has a personality—a child’s 
personality. It is a supremely deductive brain, but it resembles an idiot savante. It 
doesn’t really understand what it does—it just does it. And because it is really a 
child, it is more resilient. Life isn’t so serious, you might say.” 

The robopsychologist continued: “Here is what we’re going to do. We have 
divided all of Consolidated’s information into logical units. We are going to feed 
the units to The Brain singly and cautiously. When the factor enters—the one 
that creates the dilemma—The Brain’s child personality will hesitate. Its sense of 
judgment is not mature. There will be a perceptible interval before it will 
recognize a dilemma as such. And in that interval, it will reject the unit 
automatically—before its brain-paths can be set in motion and ruined.” 

Robertson’s Adam’s apple squirmed, “Are you sure, now?” 

Dr. Calvin masked impatience, “It doesn’t make much sense, I admit, in lay 
language; but there is no conceivable use in presenting the mathematics of this. I 
assure you, it is as I say.” 

The general manager was in the breach instantly and fluently, “So here’s the 
situation, chief. If we take the deal, we can put it through like this. The Brain 



will tell us which unit of information involves the dilemma. From there, we can 
figure why the dilemma. Isn’t that right, Dr. Bogert? There you are, chief, and 
Dr. Bogert is the best mathematician you’ll find anywhere. We give 
Consolidated a 'No Solution’ answer, with the reason, and collect a hundred 
thousand. They’re left with a broken machine; we’re left with a whole one. In a 
year, two maybe, we’ll have a space-warp engine, or a hyperatomic motor, some 
people call it. Whatever you name it, it will be the biggest thing in the world.” 

Robertson chuckled and reached out, “Let’s see the contract. I’ll sign it.” 


When Susan Calvin entered the fantastically guarded vault that held The Brain, 
one of the current shift of technicians had just asked it: “If one and a half 
chickens lay one and a half eggs in one and a half days, how many eggs will nine 
chickens lay in nine days?” 

The Brain had just answered, “Fifty-four.” 

And the technician had just said to another, “See, you dope!” 

Dr. Calvin coughed and there was a sudden impossible flurry of directionless 
energy. The psychologist motioned briefly, and she was alone with The Brain. 

The Brain was a two-foot globe merely—one which contained within it a 
thoroughly conditioned helium atmosphere, a volume of space completely 
vibration-absent and radiation-free—and within that was that unheard-of 
complexity of positronic brain-paths that was The Brain. The rest of the room 
was crowded with the attachments that were the intermediaries between The 
Brain and the outside world—its voice, its arms, its sense organs. 

Dr. Calvin said softly, “How are you, Brain?” 

The Brain’s voice was high-pitched and enthusiastic, “Swell, Miss Susan. 
You’re going to ask me something. I can tell. You always have a book in your 
hand when you’re going to ask me something.” 

Dr. Calvin smiled mildly, “Well, you’re right, but not just yet. This is going to 
be a question. It will be so complicated we’re going to give it to you in writing. 
But not just yet. I think I’ll talk to you first.” 



“All right. I don’t mind talking.” 

“Now, Brain, in a little while, Dr. Lanning and Dr. Bogert will be here with 
this complicated question. We’ll give it to you a very little at a time and very 
slowly, because we want you to be careful. We’re going to ask you to build 
something, if you can, out of the information, but I’m going to warn you now 
that the solution might involve . . . uh . . . damage to human beings.” 

“Gosh!” The exclamation was hushed, drawn-out. 

“Now you watch for that. When we come to a sheet which means damage, 
even maybe death, don’t get excited. You see, Brain, in this case, we don’t mind 
—not even about death; we don’t mind at all. So when you come to that sheet, 
just stop, give it back—and that’ll be all. You understand?” 

“Oh, sure. By golly, the death of humans! Oh, my!” 

“Now, Brain, I hear Dr. Lanning and Dr. Bogert coming. They’ll tell you what 
the problem is all about and then we’ll start. Be a good boy, now—” 

Slowly the sheets were fed in. After each one came the interval of the queerly 
whispery chuckling noise that was The Brain in action. Then the silence that 
meant readiness for another sheet. It was a matter of hours—during which the 
equivalent of something like seventeen fat volumes of mathematical physics 
were fed into The Brain. 

As the process went on, frowns appeared and deepened. Lanning muttered 
ferociously under his breath. Bogert first gazed speculatively at his fingernails, 
and then bit at them in abstracted fashion. It was when the last of the thick pile 
of sheets disappeared that Calvin, white-faced, said: 

“Something’s wrong.” 

Lanning barely got the words out, “It can’t be. Is it—dead?” 

“Brain?” Susan Calvin was trembling. “Do you hear me, Brain?” 

“Huh?” came the abstracted rejoinder. “Do you want me?” 


“The solution—” 



“Oh, that! I can do it. I’ll build you a whole ship, just as easy—if you let me 
have the robots. A nice ship. It’ll take two months maybe.” 

“There was—no difficulty?” 

“It took long to figure,” said The Brain. 

Dr. Calvin backed away. The color had not returned to her thin cheeks. She 
motioned the others away. 


In her office, she said, “I can’t understand it. The information, as given, must 
involve a dilemma—probably involves death. If something has gone wrong—” 

Bogert said quietly, “The machine talks and makes sense. It can’t be a 
dilemma.” 

But the psychologist replied urgently, “There are dilemmas and dilemmas. 
There are different forms of escape. Suppose The Brain is only mildly caught; 
just badly enough, say, to be suffering from the delusion that he can solve the 
problem, when he can’t. Or suppose it’s teetering on the brink of something 
really bad, so that any small push shoves it over.” 

“Suppose,” said Lanning, “there is no dilemma. Suppose Consolidated’s 
machine broke down over a different question, or broke down for purely 
mechanical reasons.” 

“But even so,” insisted Calvin, “we couldn’t take chances. Listen, from now 
on, no one is to as much as breathe to The Brain. I’m taking over.” 

“All right,” sighed Lanning, “take over, then. And meanwhile we’ll let The 
Brain build its ship. And if it does build it, we’ll have to test it.” 

He was ruminating, “We’ll need our top field men for that.” 


Michael Donovan brushed down his red hair with a violent motion of his hand 
and a total indifference to the fact that the unruly mass sprang to attention again 



immediately. 


He said, “Call the turn now, Greg. They say the ship is finished. They don’t 
know what it is, but it’s finished. Let’s go, Greg. Let’s grab the controls right 
now.” 

Powell said wearily, “Cut it, Mike. There’s a peculiar overripe flavor to your 
humor at its freshest, and the confined atmosphere here isn’t helping it.” 

“Well, listen,” Donovan took another ineffectual swipe at his hair, “I’m not 
worried so much about our cast-iron genius and his tin ship. There’s the matter 
of my lost leave. And the monotony! There’s nothing here but whiskers and 
figures—the wrong kind of figures. Oh, why do they give us these jobs?” 

“Because,” replied Powell, gently, “we’re no loss, if they lose us. O.K., relax! 
Doc Lanning’s coming this way.” 

Lanning was coming, his gray eyebrows as lavish as ever, his aged figure 
unbent as yet and full of life. He walked silently up the ramp with the two men 
and out into the open field, where, obeying no human master, silent robots were 
building a ship. 

Wrong tense. Had built a ship! 

For Lanning said, “The robots have stopped. Not one has moved today.” 

“It’s completed then? Definitely?” asked Powell. 

“Now how can I tell?” Lanning was peevish, and his eyebrows curled down in 
an eye-hiding frown. “It seems done. There are no spare pieces about, and the 
interior is down to a gleaming finish.” 

“You’ve been inside?” 

“Just in, then out. I’m no space-pilot. Either of you two know much about 
engine theory?” 

Donovan looked at Powell, who looked at Donovan. 

Donovan said, “I’ve got my license, sir, but at last reading it didn’t say 



anything about hyper-engines or warp-navigation. Just the usual child’s play in 
three dimensions.” 

Alfred Lanning looked up with sharp disapproval and snorted the length of his 
prominent nose. 

He said frigidly, “Well, we have our engine men.” 

Powell caught at his elbow as he walked away, “Sir, is the ship still restricted 
ground?” 

The old director hesitated, then rubbed the bridge of his nose, “I suppose not. 
For you two anyway.” 

Donovan looked after him as he left and muttered a short, expressive phrase at 
his back. He turned to Powell, “I’d like to give him a literary description of 
himself, Greg.” 

“Suppose you come along, Mike.” 

The inside of the ship was finished, as finished as a ship ever was; that could 
be told in a single eye-blinking glance. No martinet in the system could have put 
as much spit-and-polish into a surface as those robots had. The walls were of a 
gleaming silvery finish that retained no fingerprints. 

There were no angles; walls, floors, and ceiling faded gently into each other 
and in the cold, metallic glittering of the hidden lights, one was surrounded by 
six chilly reflections of one’s bewildered self. 

The main corridor was a narrow tunnel that led in a hard, clatter-footed stretch 
along a line of rooms of no interdistinguishing features. 

Powell said, “I suppose furniture is built into the wall. Or maybe we’re not 
supposed to sit or sleep.” 

It was in the last room, the one nearest the nose, that the monotony broke. A 
curving window of non-reflecting glass was the first break in the universal 
metal, and below it was a single large dial, with a single motionless needle hard 
against the zero mark. 



Donovan said, “Look at that!” and pointed to the single word on the finely 
marked scale. 

It said, “Parsecs,” and the tiny figure at the right end of the curving, graduated 
meter said “1,000,000.” 

There were two chairs; heavy, wide-flaring, uncushioned. Powell seated 
himself gingerly, and found it molded to the body’s curves, and comfortable. 

Powell said, “What do you think of it?” 

“For my money, The Brain has brain-fever. Let’s get out.” 

“Sure you don’t want to look it over a bit?” 

“I have looked it over. I came, I saw, I’m through!” Donovan’s red hair 
bristled into separate wires, “Greg, let’s get out of here. I quit my job five 
seconds ago, and this is a restricted area for non-personnel.” 

Powell smiled in an oily self-satisfied manner and smoothed his mustache, 
“O.K., Mike, turn off that adrenaline tap you’ve got draining into your 
bloodstream. I was worried, too, but no more.” 

“No more, huh? How come, no more? Increased your insurance?” 

“Mike, this ship can’t fly.” 

“How do you know?” 

“Well, we’ve been through the entire ship, haven’t we?” 

“Seems so.” 

“Take my word for it, we have. Did you see any pilot room except for this one 
port and the one gauge here in parsecs? Did you see any controls?” 

“No.” 

“And did you see any engines?” 

“Holy Joe, no!” 



“Well, then! Let’s break the news to Lanning, Mike.” 

They cursed their way through the featureless corridors and finally hit-and- 
missed their way into the short passage to the air lock. 

Donovan stiffened, “Did you lock this thing, Greg?” 

“No, I never touched it. Yank the lever, will you?” 

The lever never budged, though Donovan’s face twisted appallingly with 
exertion. 

Powell said, “I didn’t see any emergency exits. If something’s gone wrong 
here, they’ll have to melt us out.” 

“Yes, and we’ve got to wait until they find out that some fool has locked us in 
here,” added Donovan, frantically. 

“Let’s get back to the room with the port. It’s the only place from which we 
might attract attention.” 

But they didn’t. 

In that last room, the port was no longer blue and full of sky. It was black, and 
hard yellow pin-point stars spelled space. 

There was a dull, double thud, as two bodies collapsed separately into two 
chairs. 

Alfred Lanning met Dr. Calvin just outside his office. He lit a nervous cigar 
and motioned her in. 

He said, “Well, Susan, we’ve come pretty far, and Robertson’s getting jumpy. 
What are you doing with The Brain?” 

Susan Calvin spread her hands, “It’s no use getting impatient. The Brain is 
worth more than anything we forfeit on this deal.” 

“But you’ve been questioning it for two months.” 


The psychologist’s voice was flat, but somehow dangerous, “You would rather 



run this yourself?” 


“Now you know what I meant.” 

“Oh, I suppose I do,” Dr. Calvin rubbed her hands nervously. “It isn’t easy. 
I’ve been pampering it and probing it gently, and I haven’t gotten anywhere yet. 
Its reactions aren’t normal. Its answers—they’re queer, somehow. But nothing I 
can put my finger on yet. And you see, until we know what’s wrong, we must 
just tiptoe our way through. I can never tell what simple question or remark will 
just . . . push him over . . . and then— Well, and then we’ll have on our hands a 
completely useless Brain. Do you want to face that?” 

“Well, it can’t break the First Law.” 

“I would have thought so, but—” 

“You’re not even sure of that?” Lanning was profoundly shocked. 

“Oh, I can’t be sure of anything, Alfred—” 

The alarm system raised its fearful clangor with a horrifying suddenness. 
Lanning clicked on communications with an almost paralytic spasm. The 
breathless words froze him. 

He said, “Susan . . . you heard that ... the ship’s gone. I sent those two field 
men inside half an hour ago. You’ll have to see The Brain again.” 


Susan Calvin said with enforced calm, “Brain, what happened to the ship?” 

The Brain said happily, “The ship I built, Miss Susan?” 

“That’s right. What has happened to it?” 

“Why, nothing at all. The two men that were supposed to test it were inside, 
and we were all set. So I sent it off.” 

“Oh—Well, that’s nice.” The psychologist felt some difficulty in breathing. 
“Do you think they’ll be all right?” 



“Right as anything, Miss Susan. I’ve taken care of it all. It’s a bee-yoo-tiful 
ship.” 

“Yes, Brain, it is beautiful, but you think they have enough food, don’t you? 
They’ll be comfortable?” 

“Plenty of food.” 

“This business might be a shock to them, Brain. Unexpected, you know.” 

The Brain tossed it off, “They’ll be all right. It ought to be interesting for 
them.” 

“Interesting? How?” 

“Just interesting,” said The Brain, slyly. 

“Susan,” whispered Lanning in a fuming whisper, “ask him if death comes 
into it. Ask him what the dangers are.” 

Susan Calvin’s expression contorted with fury, “Keep quiet!” In a shaken 
voice, she said to The Brain, “We can communicate with the ship, can’t we, 
Brain?” 

“Oh, they can hear you if you call by radio. I’ve taken care of that.” 

“Thanks. That’s all for now.” 

Once outside, Lanning lashed out ragingly, “Great Galaxy, Susan, if this gets 
out, it will ruin all of us. We’ve got to get those men back. Why didn’t you ask it 
if there was danger of death—straight out?” 

“Because,” said Calvin, with a weary frustration, “that’s just what I can’t 
mention. If it’s got a case of dilemma, it’s about death. Anything that would 
bring it up badly might knock it completely out. Will we be better off then? Now, 
look, it said we could communicate with them. Let’s do so, get their location, 
and bring them back. They probably can’t use the controls themselves; The 
Brain is probably handling them remotely. Come!” 



It was quite a while before Powell shook himself together. 


“Mike,” he said, out of cold lips, “did you feel an acceleration?” 

Donovan’s eyes were blank, “Huh? No ... no.” 

And then the redhead’s fists clenched and he was out of his seat with sudden 
frenzied energy and up against the cold, wide-curving glass. There was nothing 
to see—but stars. 

He turned, “Greg, they must have started the machine while we were inside. 
Greg, it’s a put-up job; they fixed it up with the robot to jerry us into being the 
tryout boys, in case we were thinking of backing out.” 

Powell said, “What are you talking about? What’s the good of sending us out 
if we don’t know how to run the machine? How are we supposed to bring it 
back? No, this ship left by itself, and without any apparent acceleration.” He 
rose, and walked the floor slowly. The metal walls dinned back the clangor of his 
steps. 

He said tonelessly, “Mike, this is the most confusing situation we’ve ever been 
up against.” 

“That,” said Donovan, bitterly, “is news to me. I was just beginning to have a 
very swell time, when you told me.” 

Powell ignored that. “No acceleration—which means the ship works on a 
principle different from any known.” 

“Different from any we know, anyway.” 

“Different from any known. There are no engines within reach of manual 
control. Maybe they’re built into the walls. Maybe that’s why they’re thick as 
they are.” 

“What are you mumbling about?” demanded Donovan. 

“Why not listen? I’m saying that whatever powers this ship is enclosed, and 
evidently not meant to be handled. The ship is running by remote control.” 



“The Brain’s control?” 


“Why not?” 

“Then you think we’ll stay out here till The Brain brings us back.” 

“It could be. If so, let’s wait quietly. The Brain is a robot. It’s got to follow the 
First Law. It can’t hurt a human being.” 

Donovan sat down slowly, “You figure that?” Carefully, he flattened his hair, 
“Listen, this junk about the space-warp knocked out Consolidated’s robot, and 
the longhairs said it was because interstellar travel killed humans. Which robot 
are you going to trust? Ours had the same data, I understand.” 

Powell was yanking madly at his mustache, “Don’t pretend you don’t know 
your robotics, Mike. Before it’s physically possible in any way for a robot to 
even make a start to breaking the First Law, so many things have to break down 
that it would be a ruined mess of scrap ten times over. There’s some simple 
explanation to this.” 

“Oh sure, sure. Just have the butler call me in the morning. It’s all just too, too 
simple for me to bother about before my beauty nap.” 

“Well, Jupiter, Mike, what are you complaining about so far? The Brain is 
taking care of us. This place is warm. It’s got light. It’s got air. There wasn’t 
even enough of an acceleration jar to muss your hair if it were smooth enough to 
be mussable in the first place.” 

“Yeah? Greg, you must’ve taken lessons. No one could put Pollyanna that far 
out of the running without. What do we eat? What do we drink? Where are we? 
How do we get back? And in case of accident, to what exit and in what spacesuit 
do we run, not walk? I haven’t even seen a bathroom in the place, or those little 
conveniences that go along with bathrooms. Sure, we’re being taken care of— 
but good?” 

The voice that interrupted Donovan’s tirade was not Powell’s. It was 
nobody’s. It was there, hanging in open air—stentorian and petrifying in its 
effects. 


“GREGORY POWELL! MICHAEL DONOVAN! GREGORY POWELL! 



MICHAEL DONOVAN! PLEASE REPORT YOUR PRESENT POSITIONS. IF 
YOUR SHIP ANSWERS CONTROLS, PLEASE RETURN TO BASE. 
GREGORY POWELL! MICHAEL DONOVAN!—” 

The message was repetitious, mechanical, broken by regular, untiring 
intervals. 

Donovan said, “Where’s it coming from?” 

“I don’t know.” Powell’s voice was an intense whisper, “Where do the lights 
come from? Where does anything come from?” 

“Well, how are we going to answer?” They had to speak in the intervals 
between the loudly echoing, repeating message. 

The walls were bare—as bare and as unbroken as smooth, curving metal can 
be. Powell said, “Shout an answer.” 

They did. They shouted, in turns, and together, “Position unknown! Ship out 
of control! Condition desperate!” 

Their voices rose and cracked. The short business-like sentences became 
interlarded and adulterated with screaming and emphatic profanity, but the cold, 
calling voice repeated and repeated and repeated unwearyingly. 

“They don’t hear us,” gasped Donovan. “There’s no sending mechanism. Just 
a receiver.” His eyes focused blindly at a random spot on the wall. 

Slowly the din of the outside voice softened and receded. They called again 
when it was a whisper, and they called again, hoarsely, when there was silence. 

Something like fifteen minutes later, Powell said lifelessly, “Let’s go through 
the ship again. There must be something to eat somewheres.” He did not sound 
hopeful. It was almost an admission of defeat. 

They divided in the corridor to the right and left. They could follow one 
another by the hard footsteps resounding, and they met occasionally in the 
corridor, where they would glare at each other and pass on. 


Powell’s search ended suddenly and as it did, he heard Donovan’s glad voice 



rise boomingly. 

“Hey, Greg,” it howled, “the ship has got plumbing. How did we miss it?” 

It was some five minutes later that he found Powell by hit-and-miss. He was 
saying, “Still no shower baths, though,” but it got choked off in the middle. 

“Food,” he gasped. 

The wall had dropped away, leaving a curved gap with two shelves. The upper 
shelf was loaded with unlabeled cans of a bewildering variety of sizes and 
shapes. The enameled cans on the lower shelf were uniform and Donovan felt a 
cold draft about his ankles. The lower half was refrigerated. 

“How . . . how—” 


“It wasn’t there, before,” said Powell, curtly. “That wall section dropped out 
of sight as I came in the door.” 

He was eating. The can was the preheating type with enclosed spoon and the 
warm odor of baked beans filled the room. “Grab a can, Mike!” 

Donovan hesitated, “What’s the menu?” 

“How do I know! Are you finicky?” 

“No, but all I eat on ships are beans. Something else would be first choice.” 
His hand hovered and selected a shining elliptical can whose flatness seemed 
reminiscent of salmon or similar delicacy. It opened at the proper pressure. 

“Beans!” howled Donovan, and reached for another. Powell hauled at the 
slack of his pants. “Better eat that, sonny boy. Supplies are limited and we may 
be here a long, long time.” 

Donovan drew back sulkily, “Is that all we have? Beans?” 

“Could be.” 

“What’s on the lower shelf?” 


“Milk.” 



“Just milk?” Donovan cried in outrage. 


“Looks it.” 

The meal of beans and milk was carried through in silence, and as they left, 
the strip of hidden wall rose up and formed an unbroken surface once more. 

Powell sighed, “Everything automatic. Everything just so. Never felt so 
helpless in my life. Where’s your plumbing?” 

“Right there. And that wasn’t among those present when we first looked, 
either.” 

Fifteen minutes later they were back in the glassed-in room, staring at each 
other from opposing seats. 

Powell looked gloomily at the one gauge in the room. It still said “parsecs,” 
the figures still ended in “1,000,000” and the indicating needle was still pressed 
hard against the zero mark. 


In the innermost offices of the U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men Corp. Alfred 
Lanning was saying wearily, “They won’t answer. We’ve tried every 
wavelength, public, private, coded, straight, even this subether stuff they have 
now. And The Brain still won’t say anything?” He shot this at Dr. Calvin. 

“It won’t amplify on the matter, Alfred,” she said, emphatically. “It says they 
can hear us . . . and when I try to press it, it becomes . . . well, it becomes sullen. 
And it’s not supposed to— Whoever heard of a sullen robot?” 

“Suppose you tell us what you have, Susan,” said Bogert. 

“Here it is! It admits it controls the ship itself entirely. It is definitely 
optimistic about their safety, but without details. I don’t dare press it. However, 
the center of disturbance seems to be about the interstellar jump itself. The Brain 
definitely laughed when I brought up the subject. There are other indications, but 
that is the closest it’s come to an open abnormality.” 

She looked at the others, “I refer to hysteria. I dropped the subject 



immediately, and I hope I did no harm, but it gave me a lead. I can handle 
hysteria. Give me twelve hours! If I can bring it back to normal, it will bring 
back the ship.” 

Bogert seemed suddenly stricken. “The interstellar jump!” 

“What’s the matter?” The cry was double from Calvin and Lanning. 

“The figures for the engine The Brain gave us. Say ... I just thought of 
something.” 

He left hurriedly. 

Lanning gazed after him. He said brusquely to Calvin, “You take care of your 
end, Susan.” 


Two hours later, Bogert was talking eagerly, “I tell you, Lanning, that’s it. The 
interstellar jump is not instantaneous—not as long as the speed of light is finite. 
Life can’t exist . . . matter and energy as such can’t exist in the space-warp. I 
don’t know what it would be like—but that’s it. That’s what killed 
Consolidated’s robot.” 

Donovan felt as haggard as he looked. “Only five days?” 

“Only five days. I’m sure of it.” 

Donovan looked about him wretchedly. The stars through the glass were 
familiar but infinitely indifferent. The walls were cold to the touch; the lights, 
which had recently flared up again, were unfeelingly bright; the needle on the 
gauge pointed stubbornly to zero; and Donovan could not get rid of the taste of 
beans. 

He said, morosely, “I need a bath.” 

Powell looked up briefly, and said, “So do I. You needn’t feel self-conscious. 
But unless you want to bathe in milk and do without drinking—” 


“We’ll do without drinking eventually, anyway. Greg, where does this 



interstellar travel come in?” 


“You tell me. Maybe we just keep on going. We’d get there, eventually. At 
least the dust of our skeletons would—but isn’t our death the whole point of The 
Brain’s original breakdown?” 

Donovan spoke with his back to the other, “Greg, I’ve been thinking. It’s 
pretty bad. There’s not much to do—except walk around or talk to yourself. You 
know those stories about guys marooned in space. They go nuts long before they 
starve. I don’t know, Greg, but ever since the lights went on, I feel funny.” 

There was a silence, then Powell’s voice came thin and small, “So do I. 
What’s it like?” 

The redheaded figure turned, “Feel funny inside. There’s a pounding in me 
with everything tense. It’s hard to breathe. I can’t stand still.” 

“Um-m-m. Do you feel vibration?” 

“How do you mean?” 

“Sit down for a minute and listen. You don’t hear it, but you feel it—as if 
something’s throbbing somewheres and it’s throbbing the whole ship, and you, 
too, along with it. Listen—” 

“Yeah . . . yeah. What do you think it is, Greg? You don’t suppose it’s us?” 

“It might be.” Powell stroked his mustache slowly. “But it might be the ship’s 
engines. It might be getting ready.” 

“For what?” 

“For the interstellar jump. It may be coming and the devil knows what it’s 
like.” 

Donovan pondered. Then he said, savagely, “If it does, let it. But I wish we 
could fight. It’s humiliating to have to wait for it.” 

An hour later, perhaps, Powell looked at his hand on the metal chair-arm and 
said with frozen calm, “Feel the wall, Mike.” 



Donovan did, and said, “You can feel it shake, Greg.” 

Even the stars seemed blurred. From somewhere came the vague impression 
of a huge machine gathering power with the walls, storing up energy for a 
mighty leap, throbbing its way up the scales of strength. 

It came with a suddenness and a stab of pain. Powell stiffened, and half-jerked 
from his chair. His sight caught Donovan and blanked out while Donovan’s thin 
shout whimpered and died in his ears. Something writhed within him and 
struggled against a growing blanket of ice, that thickened. 

Something broke loose and whirled in a blaze of flickering light and pain. It 
fell— 

—and whirled 

—and fell headlong 

—into silence! 

It was death! 

It was a world of no motion and no sensation. A world of dim, unsensing 
consciousness; a consciousness of darkness and of silence and of formless 
struggle. 

Most of all a consciousness of eternity. 

He was a tiny white thread of ego—cold and afraid. 

Then the words came, unctuous and sonorous, thundering over him in a foam 
of sound: 

“Does your coffin fit differently lately? Why not try Morbid M. Cadaver’s 
extensible caskets? They are scientifically designed to fit the natural curves of 
the body, and are enriched with Vitamin B x . Use Cadaver’s caskets for comfort. 
Remember—you’re—going—to—be—dead—a—long—long—time! ” 

It wasn’t quite sound, but whatever it was, it died away in an oily rumbling 
whisper. 



The white thread that might have been Powell heaved uselessly at the 
insubstantial eons of time that existed all about him—and collapsed upon itself 
as the piercing shriek of a hundred million ghosts of a hundred million soprano 
voices rose to a crescendo of melody: 


“I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you. 
“I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you. 
“I’ll be glad —” 


It rose up a spiral stairway of violent sound into the keening supersonics that 
passed hearing, and then beyond— 


The white thread quivered with a pulsating pang. It strained quietly— 

The voices were ordinary—and many. It was a crowd speaking; a swirling 
mob that swept through and past and over him with a rapid, headlong motion, 
that left drifting tatters of words behind them. 

“What did they getcha for, boy? YTook banged up—” 

“—a hot fire, I guess, but I got a case—” 

“—I’ve made Paradise, but old St. Pete—” 

“Naaah, I got a pull with the boy. Had dealings with him—” 

“Hey, Sam, come this way—” 

“Ja get a mouthpiece? Beelzebub says—” 

“—Going on, my good imp? My appointment is with Sa—” 

And above it all the original stentorian roar, that plunged across all: 

“HURRY! HURRY! HURRY!!! Stir your bones, and don’t keep us waiting— 



there are many more in line. Have your certificates ready, and make sure Peter’s 
release is stamped across it. See if you are at the proper entrance gate. There will 
be plenty of fire for all. Hey, you—YOU DOWN THERE. TAKE YOUR 
PLACE IN LINE OR—” 

The white thread that was Powell groveled backward before the advancing 
shout, and felt the sharp stab of the pointing finger. It all exploded into a rainbow 
of sound that dripped its fragments onto an aching brain. 

Powell was in the chair, again. He felt himself shaking. 

Donovan’s eyes were opening into two large popping bowls of glazed blue. 

“Greg,” he whispered in what was almost a sob. “Were you dead?” 

“I. . . felt dead.” He did not recognize his own croak. 

Donovan was obviously making a bad failure of his attempt to stand up, “Are 
we alive now? Or is there more?” 

“I . . . feel alive.” It was the same hoarseness. Powell said cautiously, “Did 
you . . . hear anything, when . . . when you were dead?” 

Donovan paused, and then very slowly nodded his head, “Did you?” 

“Yes. Did you hear about coffins . . . and females singing . . . and the lines 
forming to get into Hell? Did you?” 

Donovan shook his head, “Just one voice.” 

“Loud?” 

“No. Soft, but rough like a file over the fingertips. It was a sermon, you know. 
About hell-fire. He described the tortures of . . . well, you know. I once heard a 
sermon like that—almost.” 


He was perspiring. 



They were conscious of sunlight through the port. It was weak, but it was blue- 
white—and the gleaming pea that was the distant source of light was not Old 
Sol. 


And Powell pointed a trembling finger at the single gauge. The needle stood 
stiff and proud at the hairline whose figure read 300,000 parsecs. 

Powell said, “Mike, if it’s true, we must be out of the Galaxy altogether.” 

Donovan said, “Blazes! Greg! We’d be the first men out of the Solar System.” 

“Yes! That’s just it. We’ve escaped the sun. We’ve escaped the Galaxy. Mike, 
this ship is the answer. It means freedom for all humanity—freedom to spread 
through to every star that exists—millions and billions and trillions of them.” 

And then he came down with a hard thud, “But how do we get back, Mike?” 

Donovan smiled shakily, “Oh, that’s all right. The ship brought us here. The 
ship will take us back. Me for more beans.” 

“But Mike . . . hold on, Mike. If it takes us back the way it brought us here—” 

Donovan stopped halfway up and sat back heavily into the chair. 

Powell went on, “We’ll have to . . . die again, Mike.” 

“Well,” sighed Donovan, “if we have to, we have to. At least it isn’t 
permanent, not very permanent.” 


Susan Calvin was speaking slowly now. For six hours she had been slowly 
prodding The Brain—for six fruitless hours. She was weary of repetitions, weary 
of circumlocutions, weary of everything. 

“Now, Brain, there’s just one more thing. You must make a special effort to 
answer simply. Have you been entirely clear about the interstellar jump? I mean 
does it take them very far?” 

“As far as they want to go, Miss Susan. Golly, it isn’t any trick through the 



warp.” 

“And on the other side, what will they see?” 

“Stars and stuff. What do you suppose?” 

The next question slipped out, “They’ll be alive, then?” 

“Sure!” 

“And the interstellar jump won’t hurt them?” 

She froze as The Brain maintained silence. That was it! She had touched the 
sore spot. 

“Brain,” she supplicated faintly, “Brain, do you hear me?” 

The answer was weak, quivering. The Brain said, “Do I have to answer? 
About the jump, I mean?” 

“Not if you don’t want to. But it would be interesting—I mean if you wanted 
to.” Susan Calvin tried to be bright about it. 

“Aw-w-w. You spoil everything.” 

And the psychologist jumped up suddenly, with a look of flaming insight on 
her face. 

“Oh, my,” she gasped. “Oh, my.” 

And she felt the tension of hours and days released in a burst. It was later that 
she told Lanning, “I tell you it’s all right. No, you must leave me alone, now. The 
ship will be back safely, with the men, and I want to rest. I will rest. Now go 
away.” 


The ship returned to Earth as silently, as unjarringly as it had left. It dropped 
precisely into place and the main lock gaped open. The two men who walked out 
felt their way carefully and scratched their rough and scrubbily stubbled chins. 



And then, slowly and purposefully, the one with red hair knelt down and 
planted upon the concrete of the runway a firm, loud kiss. 

They waved aside the crowd that was gathering and made gestures of denial at 
the eager couple that had piled out of the down-swooping ambulance with a 
stretcher between them. 

Gregory Powell said, “Where’s the nearest shower?” 

They were led away. 

They were gathered, all of them, about a table. It was a full staff meeting of 
the brains of U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men Corp. 


Slowly and climactically, Powell and Donovan finished a graphic and 
resounding story. 

Susan Calvin broke the silence that followed. In the few days that had elapsed 
she had recovered her icy, somewhat acid, calm—but still a trace of 
embarrassment broke through. 

“Strictly speaking,” she said, “this was my fault—all of it. When we first 
presented this problem to The Brain, as I hope some of you remember, I went to 
great lengths to impress upon it the importance of rejecting any item of 
information capable of creating a dilemma. In doing so I said something like 
‘Don’t get excited about the death of humans. We don’t mind it at all. Just give 
the sheet back and forget it.’” 

“Hm-m-m,” said Lanning. “What follows?” 

“The obvious. When that item entered its calculations which yielded the 
equation controlling the length of minimum interval for the interstellar jump—it 
meant death for humans. That’s where Consolidated’s machine broke down 
completely. But I had depressed the importance of death to The Brain—not 
entirely, for the First Law can never be broken—but just sufficiently so that The 
Brain could take a second look at the equation. Sufficiently to give it time to 
realize that after the interval was passed through, the men would return to life— 
just as the matter and energy of the ship itself would return to being. This so- 



called ‘death/ in other words, was a strictly temporary phenomenon. You see?” 


She looked about her. They were all listening. 

She went on, “So he accepted the item, but not without a certain jar. Even with 
death temporary and its importance depressed, it was enough to unbalance him 
very gently.” 

She brought it out calmly, “He developed a sense of humor—it’s an escape, 
you see, a method of partial escape from reality. He became a practical joker.” 

Powell and Donovan were on their feet. 

“What?” cried Powell. 

Donovan was considerably more colorful about it. 

“It’s so,” said Calvin. “He took care of you, and kept you safe, but you 
couldn’t handle any controls, because they weren’t for you—just for the 
humorous Brain. We could reach you by radio, but you couldn’t answer. You had 
plenty of food, but all of it beans and milk. Then you died, so to speak, and were 
reborn, but the period of your death was made . . . well . . . interesting. I wish I 
knew how he did it. It was The Brain’s prize joke, but he meant no harm.” 

“No harm!” gasped Donovan. “Oh, if that cute little tyke only had a neck.” 

Lanning raised a quieting hand, “All right, it’s been a mess, but it’s all over. 
What now?” 

“Well,” said Bogert, quietly, “obviously it’s up to us to improve the space- 
warp engine. There must be some way of getting around that interval of jump. If 
there is, we’re the only organization left with a grand-scale super-robot, so we’re 
bound to find it if anyone can. And then—U. S. Robots has interstellar travel, 
and humanity has the opportunity for galactic empire.” 

“What about Consolidated?” said Lanning. 

“Hey,” interrupted Donovan suddenly, “I want to make a suggestion there. 
They landed U.S. Robots into quite a mess. It wasn’t as bad a mess as they 
expected and it turned out well, but their intentions weren’t pious. And Greg and 



I bore the most of it. 


“Well, they wanted an answer, and they’ve got one. Send them that ship, 
guaranteed, and U.S. Robots can collect their two hundred thou plus construction 
costs. And if they test it—then suppose we let The Brain have just a little more 
fun before it’s brought back to normal.” 

Lanning said gravely, “It sounds just and proper to me.” 

To which Bogert added absently, “Strictly according to contract, too.” 



EVIDENCE 


“But that wasn’t it, either, ” said Dr. Calvin thoughtfully . “Oh, eventually, the 
ship and others like it became government property; the Jump through 
hyperspace was perfected, and now we actually have human colonies on the 
planets of some of the nearer stars, but that wasn’t it. ” 

I had finished eating and watched her through the smoke of my cigarette. 

“It’s what has happened to the people here on Earth in the last fifty years that 
really counts. When I was born, young man, we had just gone through the last 
World War. It was a low point in history—but it was the end of nationalism. 
Earth was too small for nations and they began grouping themselves into 
Regions. It took quite a while. When I was born the United States of America 
was still a nation and not merely a part of the Northern Region. In fact, the name 

of the corporation is still ‘United States Robots - .’And the change from 

nations to Regions, which has stabilized our economy and brought about what 
amounts to a Golden Age, when this century is compared with the last, was also 
brought about by our robots. ” 

“You mean the Machines,” I said. “The Brain you talked about was the first 
of the Machines, wasn’t it?” 

“Yes, it was, but it’s not the Machines I was thinking of. Rather of a man. He 
died last year.” Her voice was suddenly deeply sorrowful. “Or at least he 
arranged to die, because he knew we needed him no longer.—Stephen Byerley. ” 

“Yes, I guessed that was who you meant. ” 

“He first entered public office in 2032. You were only a boy then, so you 
wouldn’t remember the strangeness of it. His campaign for the Mayoralty was 
certainly the queerest in history -” 



Francis Quinn was a politician of the new school. That, of course, is a 
meaningless expression, as are all expressions of the sort. Most of the “new 
schools” we have were duplicated in the social life of ancient Greece, and 
perhaps, if we knew more about it, in the social life of ancient Sumeria and in 
the lake dwellings of prehistoric Switzerland as well. 

But, to get out from under what promises to be a dull and complicated 
beginning, it might be best to state hastily that Quinn neither ran for office nor 
canvassed for votes, made no speeches and stuffed no ballot boxes. Any more 
than Napoleon pulled a trigger at Austerlitz. 

And since politics makes strange bedfellows, Alfred Lanning sat at the other 
side of the desk with his ferocious white eyebrows bent far forward over eyes in 
which chronic impatience had sharpened to acuity. He was not pleased. 

The fact, if known to Quinn, would have annoyed him not the least. His voice 
was friendly, perhaps professionally so. 

“I assume you know Stephen Byerley, Dr. Lanning.” 

“I have heard of him. So have many people.” 

“Yes, so have I. Perhaps you intend voting for him at the next election.” 

“I couldn’t say.” There was an unmistakable trace of acidity here. “I have not 
followed the political currents, so I’m not aware that he is running for office.” 

“He may be our next mayor. Of course, he is only a lawyer now, but great 
oaks—” 

“Yes,” interrupted Lanning, “I have heard the phrase before. But I wonder if 
we can get to the business at hand.” 

“We are at the business at hand, Dr. Lanning.” Quinn’s tone was very gentle, 
“It is to my interest to keep Mr. Byerley a district attorney at the very most, and 
it is to your interest to help me do so.” 

“To my interest? Come!” Lanning’s eyebrows hunched low. 

“Well, say then to the interest of the U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men 



Corporation. I come to you as Director-Emeritus of Research, because I know 
that your connection to them is that of, shall we say, ‘elder statesman.’ You are 
listened to with respect and yet your connection with them is no longer so tight 
but that you cannot possess considerable freedom of action; even if the action is 
somewhat unorthodox.” 

Dr. Lanning was silent a moment, chewing the cud of his thoughts. He said 
more softly, “I don’t follow you at all, Mr. Quinn.” 

“I am not surprised, Dr. Lanning. But it’s all rather simple. Do you mind?” 
Quinn lit a slender cigarette with a lighter of tasteful simplicity and his big¬ 
boned face settled into an expression of quiet amusement. “We have spoken of 
Mr. Byerley—a strange and colorful character. He was unknown three years ago. 
He is very well known now. He is a man of force and ability, and certainly the 
most capable and intelligent prosecutor I have ever known. Unfortunately he is 
not a friend of mine—” 

“I understand,” said Lanning, mechanically. He stared at his fingernails. 

“I have had occasion,” continued Quinn, evenly, “in the past year to 
investigate Mr. Byerley—quite exhaustively. It is always useful, you see, to 
subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research. If you 
knew how often it helped—” He paused to smile humorlessly at the glowing tip 
of his cigarette. “But Mr. Byerley’s past is unremarkable. A quiet life in a small 
town, a college education, a wife who died young, an auto accident with a slow 
recovery, law school, coming to the metropolis, an attorney.” 

Lrancis Quinn shook his head slowly, then added, “But his present life. Ah, 
that is remarkable. Our district attorney never eats!” 

Lanning’s head snapped up, old eyes surprisingly sharp, “Pardon me?” 

“Our district attorney never eats.” The repetition thumped by syllables. “I’ll 
modify that slightly. He has never been seen to eat or drink. Never! Do you 
understand the significance of the word? Not rarely, but never!” 

“I find that quite incredible. Can you tmst your investigators?” 

“I can trust my investigators, and I don’t find it incredible at all. Lurther, our 
district attorney has never been seen to drink—in the aqueous sense as well as 



the alcoholic—nor to sleep. There are other factors, but I should think I have 
made my point.” 


Lanning leaned back in his seat, and there was the rapt silence of challenge and 
response between them, and then the old roboticist shook his head. “No. There is 
only one thing you can be trying to imply, if I couple your statements with the 
fact that you present them to me, and that is impossible.” 

“But the man is quite inhuman, Dr. Lanning.” 

“If you told me he were Satan in masquerade, there would be a faint chance 
that I might believe you.” 

“I tell you he is a robot, Dr. Lanning.” 

“I tell you it is as impossible a conception as I have ever heard, Mr. Quinn.” 

Again the combative silence. 

“Nevertheless,” and Quinn stubbed out his cigarette with elaborate care, “you 
will have to investigate this impossibility with all the resources of the 
Corporation.” 

“I’m sure that I could undertake no such thing, Mr. Quinn. You don’t seriously 
suggest that the Corporation take part in local politics.” 

“You have no choice. Supposing I were to make my facts public without 
proof. The evidence is circumstantial enough.” 

“Suit yourself in that respect.” 

“But it would not suit me. Proof would be much preferable. And it would not 
suit you, for the publicity would be very damaging to your company. You are 
perfectly well acquainted, I suppose, with the strict rules against the use of 
robots on inhabited worlds.” 


“Certainly! ”—brusquely. 



“You know that the U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men Corporation is the only 
manufacturer of positronic robots in the Solar System, and if Byerley is a robot, 
he is a positronic robot. You are also aware that all positronic robots are leased, 
and not sold; that the Corporation remains the owner and manager of each robot, 
and is therefore responsible for the actions of all.” 

“It is an easy matter, Mr. Quinn, to prove the Corporation has never 
manufactured a robot of a humanoid character.” 

“It can be done? To discuss merely possibilities.” 

“Yes. It can be done.” 

“Secretly, I imagine, as well. Without entering it in your books.” 

“Not the positronic brain, sir. Too many factors are involved in that, and there 
is the tightest possible government supervision.” 

“Yes, but robots are worn out, break down, go out of order—and are 
dismantled.” 

“And the positronic brains re-used or destroyed.” 

“Really?” Francis Quinn allowed himself a trace of sarcasm. “And if one 
were, accidentally, of course, not destroyed—and there happened to be a 
humanoid structure waiting for a brain.” 

“Impossible!” 

“You would have to prove that to the government and the public, so why not 
prove it to me now.” 

“But what could our purpose be?” demanded Lanning in exasperation. 
“Where is our motivation? Credit us with a minimum of sense.” 

“My dear sir, please. The Corporation would be only too glad to have the 
various Regions permit the use of humanoid positronic robots on inhabited 
worlds. The profits would be enormous. But the prejudice of the public against 
such a practice is too great. Suppose you get them used to such robots first—see, 
we have a skillful lawyer, a good mayor—and he is a robot. Won’t you buy our 



robot butlers?” 


“Thoroughly fantastic. An almost humorous descent to the ridiculous.” 

“I imagine so. Why not prove it? Or would you still rather try to prove it to the 
public?” 

The light in the office was dimming, but it was not yet too dim to obscure the 
flush of frustration on Alfred Lanning’s face. Slowly, the roboticist’s finger 
touched a knob and the wall illuminators glowed to gentle life. 

“Well, then,” he growled, “let us see.” 

The face of Stephen Byerley is not an easy one to describe. He was forty by 
birth certificate and forty by appearance—but it was a healthy, well-nourished 
good-natured appearance of forty; one that automatically drew the teeth of the 
bromide about “looking one’s age.” 

This was particularly true when he laughed, and he was laughing now. It came 
loudly and continuously, died away for a bit, then began again— 

And Alfred Lanning’s face contracted into a rigidly bitter monument of 
disapproval. He made a half gesture to the woman who sat beside him, but her 
thin, bloodless lips merely pursed themselves a trifle. 

Byerley gasped himself a stage nearer normality. 

“Really, Dr. Lanning . . . really—I.../... a robot?” 

Lanning bit his words off with a snap, “It is no statement of mine, sir. I would 
be quite satisfied to have you a member of humanity. Since our Corporation 
never manufactured you, I am quite certain that you are—in a legalistic sense, at 
any rate. But since the contention that you are a robot has been advanced to us 
seriously by a man of certain standing—” 

“Don’t mention his name, if it would knock a chip off your granite block of 
ethics, but let’s pretend it was Frank Quinn, for the sake of argument, and 
continue.” 

Lanning drew in a sharp, cutting snort at the interruption, and paused 



ferociously before continuing with added frigidity, “—by a man of certain 
standing, with whose identity I am not interested in playing guessing games, I 
am bound to ask your cooperation in disproving it. The mere fact that such a 
contention could be advanced and publicized by the means at this man’s disposal 
would be a bad blow to the company I represent—even if the charge were never 
proven. You understand me?” 

“Oh, yes, your position is clear to me. The charge itself is ridiculous. The spot 
you find yourself in is not. I beg your pardon, if my laughter offended you. It 
was the first I laughed at, not the second. How can I help you?” 

“It could be very simple. You have only to sit down to a meal at a restaurant in 
the presence of witnesses, have your picture taken, and eat.” Lanning sat back in 
his chair, the worst of the interview over. The woman beside him watched 
Byerley with an apparently absorbed expression but contributed nothing of her 
own. 

Stephen Byerley met her eyes for an instant, was caught by them, then turned 
back to the roboticist. For a while his fingers were thoughtful over the bronze 
paper-weight that was the only ornament on his desk. 

He said quietly, “I don’t think I can oblige you.” 

He raised his hand, “Now wait, Dr. Lanning. I appreciate the fact that this 
whole matter is distasteful to you, that you have been forced into it against your 
will, that you feel you are playing an undignified and even ridiculous part. Still, 
the matter is even more intimately concerned with myself, so be tolerant. 

“First, what makes you think that Quinn—this man of certain standing, you 
know—wasn’t hoodwinking you, in order to get you to do exactly what you are 
doing?” 

“Why, it seems scarcely likely that a reputable person would endanger himself 
in so ridiculous a fashion, if he weren’t convinced he were on safe ground.” 

There was little humor in Byerley’s eyes, “You don’t know Quinn. He could 
manage to make safe ground out of a ledge a mountain sheep could not handle. I 
suppose he showed the particulars of the investigation he claims to have made of 
me?” 



“Enough to convince me that it would be too troublesome to have our 
Corporation attempt to disprove them when you could do so more easily.” 

“Then you believe him when he says I never eat. You are a scientist, Dr. 
Lanning. Think of the logic required. I have not been observed to eat, therefore, I 
never eat Q.E.D. After all!” 

“You are using prosecution tactics to confuse what is really a very simple 
situation.” 

“On the contrary, I am trying to clarify what you and Quinn between you are 
making a very complicated one. You see, I don’t sleep much, that’s true, and I 
certainly don’t sleep in public. I have never cared to eat with others—an 
idiosyncrasy which is unusual and probably neurotic in character, but which 
harms no one. Look, Dr. Lanning, let me present you with a suppositious case. 
Supposing we had a politician who was interested in defeating a reform 
candidate at any cost and while investigating his private life came across oddities 
such as I have just mentioned. 

“Suppose further that in order to smear the candidate effectively, he comes to 
your company as the ideal agent. Do you expect him to say to you, ‘So-and-so is 
a robot because he hardly ever eats with people, and I have never seen him fall 
asleep in the middle of a case; and once when I peeped into his window in the 
middle of the night, there he was, sitting up with a book; and I looked in his 
frigidaire and there was no food in it.’ 

“If he told you that, you would send for a strait-jacket. But if he tells you, ‘He 
never sleeps; he never eats,’ then the shock of the statement blinds you to the 
fact that such statements are impossible to prove. You play into his hands by 
contributing to the to-do.” 

“Regardless, sir,” began Lanning, with a threatening obstinacy, “of whether 
you consider this matter serious or not, it will require only the meal I mentioned 
to end it.” 

Again Byerley turned to the woman, who still regarded him expressionlessly. 
“Pardon me. I’ve caught your name correctly, haven’t I? Dr. Susan Calvin?” 


“Yes, Mr. Byerley.” 



“You’re the U.S. Robots’ psychologist, aren’t you?” 


“Robopsychologist, please.” 

“Oh, are robots so different from men, mentally?” 

“Worlds different.” She allowed herself a frosty smile, “Robots are essentially 
decent.” 

Humor tugged at the corners of the lawyer’s mouth, “Well, that’s a hard blow. 
But what I wanted to say was this. Since you’re a psycho—a robopsychologist, 
and a woman, I’ll bet that you’ve done something that Dr. Lanning hasn’t 
thought of.” 

“And what is that?” 

“You’ve got something to eat in your purse.” 

Something caught in the schooled indifference of Susan Calvin’s eyes. She 
said, “You surprise me, Mr. Byerley.” 

And opening her purse, she produced an apple. Quietly, she handed it to him. 
Dr. Lanning, after an initial start, followed the slow movement from one hand to 
the other with sharply alert eyes. 

Calmly, Stephen Byerley bit into it, and calmly he swallowed it. 

“You see, Dr. Lanning?” 

Dr. Lanning smiled in a relief tangible enough to make even his eyebrows 
appear benevolent. A relief that survived for one fragile second. 

Susan Calvin said, “I was curious to see if you would eat it, but, of course, in 
the present case, it proves nothing.” 

Byerley grinned, “It doesn’t?” 

“Of course not. It is obvious, Dr. Lanning, that if this man were a humanoid 
robot, he would be a perfect imitation. He is almost too human to be credible. 
After all, we have been seeing and observing human beings all our lives; it 



would be impossible to palm something merely nearly right off on us. It would 
have to be all right. Observe the texture of the skin, the quality of the irises, the 
bone formation of the hand. If he’s a robot, I wish U.S. Robots had made him, 
because he’s a good job. Do you suppose then, that anyone capable of paying 
attention to such niceties would neglect a few gadgets to take care of such things 
as eating, sleeping, elimination? For emergency use only, perhaps; as, for 
instance, to prevent such situations as are arising here. So a meal won’t really 
prove anything.” 

“Now wait,” snarled Lanning, “I am not quite the fool both of you make me 
out to be. I am not interested in the problem of Mr. Byerley’s humanity or 
nonhumanity. I am interested in getting the Corporation out of a hole. A public 
meal will end the matter and keep it ended no matter what Quinn does. We can 
leave the finer details to lawyers and robopsychologists.” 

“But, Dr. Lanning,” said Byerley, “you forget the politics of the situation. I am 
as anxious to be elected as Quinn is to stop me. By the way, did you notice that 
you used his name? It’s a cheap shyster trick of mine; I knew you would, before 
you were through.” 

Lanning flushed, “What has the election to do with it?” 

“Publicity works both ways, sir. If Quinn wants to call me a robot, and has the 
nerve to do so, I have the nerve to play the game his way.” 

“You mean you—” Lanning was quite frankly appalled. 

“Exactly. I mean that I’m going to let him go ahead, choose his rope, test its 
strength, cut off the right length, tie the noose, insert his head and grin. I can do 
what little else is required.” 

“You are mighty confident.” 

Susan Calvin rose to her feet, “Come, Alfred, we won’t change his mind for 
him.” 

“You see.” Byerley smiled gently. “You’re a human psychologist, too.” 



But perhaps not all the confidence that Dr. Lanning had remarked upon was 
present that evening when Byerley’s car parked on the automatic treads leading 
to the sunken garage, and Byerley himself crossed the path to the front door of 
his house. 

The figure in the wheel chair looked up as he entered and smiled. Byerley’s 
face lit with affection. He crossed over to it. 

The cripple’s voice was a hoarse, grating whisper that came out of a mouth 
forever twisted to one side, leering out of a face that was half scar tissue, 
“You’re late, Steve.” 

“I know, John, I know. But I’ve been up against a peculiar and interesting 
trouble today.” 

“So?” Neither the torn face nor the destroyed voice could carry expression but 
there was anxiety in the clear eyes. “Nothing you can’t handle?” 

“I’m not exactly certain. I may need your help. You’re the brilliant one in the 
family. Do you want me to take you out into the garden? It’s a beautiful 
evening.” 

Two strong arms lifted John from the wheel chair. Gently, almost caressingly, 
Byerley’s arms went around the shoulders and under the swathed legs of the 
cripple. Carefully, and slowly, he walked through the rooms, down the gentle 
ramp that had been built with a wheel chair in mind, and out the back door into 
the walled and wired garden behind the house. 

“Why don’t you let me use the wheel chair, Steve? This is silly.” 

“Because I’d rather carry you. Do you object? You know that you’re as glad to 
get out of that motorized buggy for a while as I am to see you out. How do you 
feel today?” He deposited John with infinite care upon the cool grass. 

“How should I feel? But tell me about your troubles.” 

“Quinn’s campaign will be based on the fact that he claims I’m a robot.” 

John’s eyes opened wide, “How do you know? It’s impossible. I won’t believe 
it.” 



“Oh, come, I tell you it’s so. He had one of the big-shot scientists of U. S. 
Robot & Mechanical Men Corporation over at the office to argue with me.” 

Slowly John’s hands tore at the grass. “I see. I see.” 

Byerley said, “But we can let him choose his ground. I have an idea. Listen to 
me and tell me if we can do it—” 


The scene as it appeared in Alfred Lanning’s office that night was a tableau of 
stares. Francis Quinn stared meditatively at Alfred Lanning. Lanning’s stare was 
savagely set upon Susan Calvin, who stared impassively in her turn at Quinn. 

Francis Quinn broke it with a heavy attempt at lightness, “Bluff. He’s making 
it up as he goes along.” 

“Are you going to gamble on that, Mr. Quinn?” asked Dr. Calvin, 
indifferently. 

“Well, it’s your gamble, really.” 

“Look here,” Lanning covered definite pessimism with bluster, “we’ve done 
what you asked. We witnessed the man eat. It’s ridiculous to presume him a 
robot.” 

“Do you think so?” Quinn shot toward Calvin. “Lanning said you were the 
expert.” 

Lanning was almost threatening, “Now, Susan—” 

Quinn interrupted smoothly, “Why not let her talk, man? She’s been sitting 
there imitating a gatepost for half an hour.” 

Lanning felt definitely harassed. From what he experienced then to incipient 
paranoia was but a step. He said, “Very well. Have your say, Susan. We won’t 
interrupt you.” 


Susan Calvin glanced at him humorlessly, then fixed cold eyes on Mr. Quinn. 
“There are only two ways of definitely proving Byerley to be a robot, sir. So far 



you are presenting circumstantial evidence, with which you can accuse, but not 
prove—and I think Mr. Byerley is sufficiently clever to counter that sort of 
material. You probably think so yourself, or you wouldn’t have come here. 

“The two methods of proof are the physical and the psychological. Physically, 
you can dissect him or use an X-ray. How to do that would be your problem. 
Psychologically, his behavior can be studied, for if he is a positronic robot, he 
must conform to the three Rules of Robotics. A positronic brain cannot be 
constructed without them. You know the Rules, Mr. Quinn?” 

She spoke them carefully, clearly, quoting word for word the famous bold 
print on page one of the “Handbook of Robotics.” 

“I’ve heard of them,” said Quinn, carelessly. 

“Then the matter is easy to follow,” responded the psychologist, dryly. “If Mr. 
Byerley breaks any of those three rules, he is not a robot. Unfortunately, this 
procedure works in only one direction. If he lives up to the rules, it proves 
nothing one way or the other.” 

Quinn raised polite eyebrows, “Why not, doctor?” 

“Because, if you stop to think of it, the three Rules of Robotics are the 
essential guiding principles of a good many of the world’s ethical systems. Of 
course, every human being is supposed to have the instinct of self-preservation. 
That’s Rule Three to a robot. Also every ‘good’ human being, with a social 
conscience and a sense of responsibility, is supposed to defer to proper authority; 
to listen to his doctor, his boss, his government, his psychiatrist, his fellow man; 
to obey laws, to follow rules, to conform to custom—even when they interfere 
with his comfort or his safety. That’s Rule Two to a robot. Also, every ‘good’ 
human being is supposed to love others as himself, protect his fellow man, risk 
his life to save another. That’s Rule One to a robot. To put it simply—if Byerley 
follows all the Rules of Robotics, he may be a robot, and may simply be a very 
good man.” 

“But,” said Quinn, “you’re telling me that you can never prove him a robot.” 

“I may be able to prove him not a robot.” 

“That’s not the proof I want.” 



“You’ll have such proof as exists. You are the only one responsible for your 
own wants.” 


Here Lanning’s mind leaped suddenly to the sting of an idea, “Has it occurred to 
anyone,” he ground out, “that district attorney is a rather strange occupation for a 
robot? The prosecution of human beings—sentencing them to death—bringing 
about their infinite harm—” 

Quinn grew suddenly keen, “No, you can’t get out of it that way. Being 
district attorney doesn’t make him human. Don’t you know his record? Don’t 
you know that he boasts that he has never prosecuted an innocent man; that there 
are scores of people left untried because the evidence against them didn’t satisfy 
him, even though he could probably have argued a jury into atomizing them? 
That happens to be so.” 

Lanning’s thin cheeks quivered, “No, Quinn, no. There is nothing in the Rules 
of Robotics that makes any allowance for human guilt. A robot may not judge 
whether a human being deserves death. It is not for him to decide. He may not 
harm a human —variety skunk, or variety angel.” 

Susan Calvin sounded tired. “Alfred,” she said, “don’t talk foolishly. What if a 
robot came upon a madman about to set fire to a house with people in it. He 
would stop the madman, wouldn’t he?” 

“Of course.” 

“And if the only way he could stop him was to kill him—” 

There was a faint sound in Lanning’s throat. Nothing more. 

“The answer to that, Alfred, is that he would do his best not to kill him. If the 
madman died, the robot would require psychotherapy because he might easily go 
mad at the conflict presented him—of having broken Rule One to adhere to Rule 
One in a higher sense. But a man would be dead and a robot would have killed 
him.” 

“Well, is Byerley mad?” demanded Lanning, with all the sarcasm he could 
muster. 



“No, but he has killed no man himself. He has exposed facts which might 
represent a particular human being to be dangerous to the large mass of other 
human beings we call society. He protects the greater number and thus adheres 
to Rule One at maximum potential. That is as far as he goes. It is the judge who 
then condemns the criminal to death or imprisonment, after the jury decides on 
his guilt or innocence. It is the jailer who imprisons him, the executioner who 
kills him. And Mr. Byerley has done nothing but determine truth and aid society. 

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Quinn, I have looked into Mr. Byerley’s career since 
you first brought this matter to our attention. I find that he has never demanded 
the death sentence in his closing speeches to the jury. I also find that he has 
spoken on behalf of the abolition of capital punishment and contributed 
generously to research institutions engaged in criminal neurophysiology. He 
apparently believes in the cure, rather than the punishment of crime. I find that 
significant.” 

“You do?” Quinn smiled. “Significant of a certain odor of roboticity, 
perhaps?” 

“Perhaps. Why deny it? Actions such as his could come only from a robot, or 
from a very honorable and decent human being. But you see, you just can’t 
differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.” 

Quinn sat back in his chair. His voice quivered with impatience. “Dr. Lanning, 
it’s perfectly possible to create a humanoid robot that would perfectly duplicate a 
human in appearance, isn’t it?” 

Lanning harrumphed and considered, “It’s been done experimentally by U.S. 
Robots,” he said reluctantly, “without the addition of a positronic brain, of 
course. By using human ova and hormone control, one can grow human flesh 
and skin over a skeleton of porous silicone plastics that would defy external 
examination. The eyes, the hair, the skin would be really human, not humanoid. 
And if you put a positronic brain, and such other gadgets as you might desire 
inside, you have a humanoid robot.” 

Quinn said shortly, “How long would it take to make one?” 

Lanning considered, “If you had all your equipment—the brain, the skeleton, 
the ovum, the proper hormones and radiations—say, two months.” 



The politician straightened out of his chair. “Then we shall see what the 
insides of Mr. Byerley look like. It will mean publicity for U.S. Robots—but I 
gave you your chance.” 

Lanning turned impatiently to Susan Calvin, when they were alone. “Why do 
you insist—” 

And with real feeling, she responded sharply and instantly, “Which do you 
want—the truth or my resignation? I won’t lie for you. U.S. Robots can take care 
of itself. Don’t turn coward.” 

“What,” said Lanning, “if he opens up Byerley, and wheels and gears fall out. 
What then?” 

“He won’t open Byerley,” said Calvin, disdainfully. “Byerley is as clever as 
Quinn, at the very least.” 


The news broke upon the city a week before Byerley was to have been 
nominated. But “broke” is the wrong word. It staggered upon the city, shambled, 
crawled. Laughter began, and wit was free. And as the far off hand of Quinn 
tightened its pressure in easy stages, the laughter grew forced, an element of 
hollow uncertainty entered, and people broke off to wonder. 

The convention itself had the air of a restive stallion. There had been no 
contest planned. Only Byerley could possibly have been nominated a week 
earlier. There was no substitute even now. They had to nominate him, but there 
was complete confusion about it. 

It would not have been so bad if the average individual were not torn between 
the enormity of the charge, if true, and its sensational folly, if false. 

The day after Byerley was nominated perfunctorily, hollowly—a newspaper 
finally published the gist of a long interview with Dr. Susan Calvin, “world 
famous expert on robopsychology and positronics.” 

What broke loose is popularly and succinctly described as hell. 

It was what the Fundamentalists were waiting for. They were not a political 



party; they made pretense to no formal religion. Essentially they were those who 
had not adapted themselves to what had once been called the Atomic Age, in the 
days when atoms were a novelty. Actually, they were the Simple-Lifers, 
hungering after a life, which to those who lived it had probably appeared not so 
Simple, and who had not been, therefore, Simple-Lifers themselves. 

The Lundamentalists required no new reason to detest robots and robot 
manufacturers; but a new reason such as the Quinn accusation and the Calvin 
analysis was sufficient to make such detestation audible. 

The huge plants of the U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men Corporation were a 
hive that spawned armed guards. It prepared for war. 

Within the city the house of Stephen Byerley bristled with police. 

The political campaign, of course, lost all other issues, and resembled a 
campaign only in that it was something filling the hiatus between nomination 
and election. 


Stephen Byerley did not allow the fussy little man to distract him. He remained 
comfortably unperturbed by the uniforms in the background. Outside the house, 
past the line of grim guards, reporters and photographers waited according to the 
tradition of the caste. One enterprising Visor station even had a scanner focused 
on the blank entrance to the prosecutor’s unpretentious home, while a 
synthetically excited announcer filled in with inflated commentary. 

The fussy little man advanced. He held forward a rich, complicated sheet. 
“This, Mr. Byerley, is a court order authorizing me to search these premises for 
the presence of illegal. . . uh . . . mechanical men or robots of any description.” 

Byerley half rose, and took the paper. He glanced at it indifferently, and 
smiled as he handed it back. “All in order. Go ahead. Do your job. Mrs. 
Hoppen”—to his housekeeper, who appeared reluctantly from the next room 
—“please go with them, and help out if you can.” 

The little man, whose name was Harroway, hesitated, produced an 
unmistakable blush, failed completely to catch Byerley’s eyes, and muttered, 
“Come on,” to the two policemen. 



He was back in ten minutes. 


“Through?” questioned Byerley, in just the tone of a person who is not 
particularly interested in the question, or its answer. 

Harroway cleared his throat, made a bad start in falsetto, and began again, 
angrily, “Look here, Mr. Byerley, our special instructions were to search the 
house very thoroughly.” 

“And haven’t you?” 

“We were told exactly what to look for.” 

“Yes?” 

“In short, Mr. Byerley, and not to put too fine a point on it, we were told to 
search you.” 

“Me?” said the prosecutor with a broadening smile. “And how do you intend 
to do that?” 

“We have a Penet-radiation unit—” 

“Then I’m to have my X-ray photograph taken, hey? You have the authority?” 

“You saw my warrant.” 

“May I see it again?” 

Harroway, his forehead shining with considerably more than mere enthusiasm, 
passed it over a second time. 

Byerley said evenly, “I read here as the description of what you are to search; 
I quote: The dwelling place belonging to Stephen Allen Byerley, located at 355 
Willow Grove, Evanston, together with any garage, storehouse or other 
structures or buildings thereto appertaining, together with all grounds thereto 
appertaining’. . . um . . . and so on. Quite in order. But, my good man, it doesn’t 
say anything about searching my interior. I am not part of the premises. You may 
search my clothes if you think I’ve got a robot hidden in my pocket.” 



Harroway had no doubt on the point of to whom he owed his job. He did not 
propose to be backward, given a chance to earn a much better—i.e., more highly 
paid—job. 

He said, in a faint echo of bluster, “Look here. I’m allowed to search the 
furniture in your house, and anything else I find in it. You are in it, aren’t you?” 

“A remarkable observation. I am in it. But I’m not a piece of furniture. As a 
citizen of adult responsibility—I have the psychiatric certificate proving that—I 
have certain rights under the Regional Articles. Searching me would come under 
the heading of violating my Right of Privacy. That paper isn’t sufficient.” 

“Sure, but if you’re a robot, you don’t have Right of Privacy.” 

“True enough—but that paper still isn’t sufficient. It recognizes me implicitly 
as a human being.” 

“Where?” Harroway snatched at it. 

“Where it says The dwelling place belonging to’ and so on. A robot cannot 
own property. And you may tell your employer, Mr. Harroway, that if he tries to 
issue a similar paper which does not implicitly recognize me as a human being, 
he will be immediately faced with a restraining injunction and a civil suit which 
will make it necessary for him to prove me a robot by means of information now 
in his possession, or else to pay a whopping penalty for an attempt to deprive me 
unduly of my Rights under the Regional Articles. You’ll tell him that, won’t 
you?” 

Harroway marched to the door. He turned. “You’re a slick lawyer—” His hand 
was in his pocket. For a short moment, he stood there. Then he left, smiled in the 
direction of the ’visor scanner, still playing away—waved to the reporters, and 
shouted, “We’ll have something for you tomorrow, boys. No kidding.” 

In his ground car, he settled back, removed the tiny mechanism from his 
pocket and carefully inspected it. It was the first time he had ever taken a 
photograph by X-ray reflection. He hoped he had done it correctly. 

Quinn and Byerley had never met face-to-face alone. But visorphone was 
pretty close to it. In fact, accepted literally, perhaps the phrase was accurate, 
even if to each, the other were merely the light and dark pattern of a bank of 



photo-cells. 


It was Quinn who had initiated the call. It was Quinn, who spoke first, and 
without particular ceremony, “Thought you would like to know, Byerley, that I 
intend to make public the fact that you’re wearing a protective shield against 
Penet-radiation.” 

“That so? In that case, you’ve probably already made it public. I have a notion 
our enterprising press representatives have been tapping my various 
communication lines for quite a while. I know they have my office lines full of 
holes; which is why I’ve dug in at my home these last weeks.” Byerley was 
friendly, almost chatty. 

Quinn’s lips tightened slightly, “This call is shielded—thoroughly. I’m making 
it at a certain personal risk.” 

“So I should imagine. Nobody knows you’re behind this campaign. At least, 
nobody knows it officially. Nobody doesn’t know it unofficially. I wouldn’t 
worry. So I wear a protective shield? I suppose you found that out when your 
puppy dog’s Penet-radiation photograph, the other day, turned out to be 
overexposed.” 

“You realize, Byerley, that it would be pretty obvious to everyone that you 
don’t dare face X-ray analysis.” 

“Also that you, or your men, attempted illegal invasion of my Rights of 
Privacy.” 

“The devil they’ll care for that.” 

“They might. It’s rather symbolic of our two campaigns, isn’t it? You have 
little concern with the rights of the individual citizen. I have great concern. I will 
not submit to X-ray analysis, because I wish to maintain my Rights on principle. 
Just as I’ll maintain the rights of others when elected.” 

“That will no doubt make a very interesting speech, but no one will believe 
you. A little too high-sounding to be true. Another thing,” a sudden, crisp 
change, “the personnel in your home was not complete the other night.” 

“In what way?” 



“According to the report,” he shuffled papers before him that were just within 
the range of vision of the visiplate, “there was one person missing—a cripple.” 

“As you say,” said Byerley, tonelessly, “a cripple. My old teacher, who lives 
with me and who is now in the country—and has been for two months. A ‘much- 
needed rest’ is the usual expression applied in the case. He has your 
permission?” 

“Your teacher? A scientist of sorts?” 

“A lawyer once—before he was a cripple. He has a government license as a 
research biophysicist, with a laboratory of his own, and a complete description 
of the work he’s doing filed with the proper authorities, to whom I can refer you. 
The work is minor, but is a harmless and engaging hobby for a—poor cripple. I 
am being as helpful as I can, you see.” 

“I see. And what does this . . . teacher . . . know about robot manufacture?” 

“I couldn’t judge the extent of his knowledge in a field with which I am 
unacquainted.” 

“He wouldn’t have access to positronic brains?” 

“Ask your friends at U.S. Robots. They’d be the ones to know.” 

“I’ll put it shortly, Byerley. Your crippled teacher is the real Stephen Byerley. 
You are his robot creation. We can prove it. It was he who was in the automobile 
accident, not you. There will be ways of checking the records.” 

“Really? Do so, then. My best wishes.” 

“And we can search your so-called teacher’s ‘country place,’ and see what we 
can find there.” 

“Well, not quite, Quinn.” Byerley smiled broadly. “Unfortunately for you, my 
so-called teacher is a sick man. His country place is his place of rest. His Right 
of Privacy as a citizen of adult responsibility is naturally even stronger, under the 
circumstances. You won’t be able to obtain a warrant to enter his grounds 
without showing just cause. However, I’d be the last to prevent you from trying.” 



There was a pause of moderate length, and then Quinn leaned forward, so that 
his imaged face expanded and the fine lines on his forehead were visible, 
“Byerley, why do you carry on? You can’t be elected.” 

“Can’t I?” 

“Do you think you can? Do you suppose that your failure to make any attempt 
to disprove the robot charge—when you could easily, by breaking one of the 
Three Laws—does anything but convince the people that you are a robot?” 

“All I see so far is that from being a rather vaguely known, but still largely 
obscure metropolitan lawyer, I have now become a world figure. You’re a good 
publicist.” 

“But you are a robot.” 

“So it’s been said, but not proven.” 

“It’s been proven sufficiently for the electorate.” 

“Then relax—you’ve won.” 

“Good-by,” said Quinn, with his first touch of viciousness, and the visorphone 
slammed off. 

“Good-by,” said Byerley imperturbably, to the blank plate. 


Byerley brought his “teacher” back the week before election. The air car 
dropped quickly in an obscure part of the city. 

“You’ll stay here till after election,” Byerley told him. “It would be better to 
have you out of the way if things take a bad turn.” 

The hoarse voice that twisted painfully out of John’s crooked mouth might 
have had accents of concern in it. “There’s danger of violence?” 


“The Fundamentalists threaten it, so I suppose there is, in a theoretical sense. 
But I really don’t expect it. The Fundies have no real power. They’re just the 



continuous irritant factor that might stir up a riot after a while. You don’t mind 
staying here? Please. I won’t be myself if I have to worry about you.” 

“Oh, I’ll stay. You still think it will go well?” 

“I’m sure of it. No one bothered you at the place?” 

“No one. I’m certain.” 

“And your part went well?” 

“Well enough. There’ll be no trouble there.” 

“Then take care of yourself, and watch the televisor tomorrow, John.” Byerley 
pressed the gnarled hand that rested on his. 


Lenton’s forehead was a furrowed study in suspense. He had the completely 
unenviable job of being Byerley’s campaign manager in a campaign that wasn’t 
a campaign, for a person that refused to reveal his strategy, and refused to accept 
his manager’s. 

“You can’t!” It was his favorite phrase. It had become his only phrase. “I tell 
you, Steve, you can’t!” 

He threw himself in front of the prosecutor, who was spending his time leafing 
through the typed pages of his speech. 

“Put that down, Steve. Look, that mob has been organized by the Fundies. 
You won’t get a hearing. You’ll be stoned more likely. Why do you have to make 
a speech before an audience? What’s wrong with a recording, a visual 
recording?” 

“You want me to win the election, don’t you?” asked Byerley, mildly. 

“Win the election! You’re not going to win, Steve. I’m trying to save your 
life.” 

“Oh, I’m not in danger.” 



“He’s not in danger. He’s not in danger.” Lenton made a queer, rasping sound 
in his throat. “You mean you’re getting out on that balcony in front of fifty 
thousand crazy crackpots and try to talk sense to them—on a balcony like a 
medieval dictator?” 

Byerley consulted his watch. “In about five minutes—as soon as the television 
lines are free.” 

Lenton’s answering remark was not quite transliterable. 


The crowd filled a roped off area of the city. Trees and houses seemed to grow 
out of a mass-human foundation. And by ultra-wave, the rest of the world 
watched. It was a purely local election, but it had a world audience just the same. 
Byerley thought of that and smiled. 

But there was nothing to smile at in the crowd itself. There were banners and 
streamers, ringing every possible change on his supposed robotcy. The hostile 
attitude rose thickly and tangibly into the atmosphere. 

From the start the speech was not successful. It competed against the inchoate 
mob howl and the rhythmic cries of the Fundie claques that formed mob-islands 
within the mob. Byerley spoke on, slowly, unemotionally— 

Inside, Lenton clutched his hair and groaned—and waited for the blood. 


There was a writhing in the front ranks. An angular citizen with popping eyes, 
and clothes too short for the lank length of his limbs, was pulling to the fore. A 
policeman dived after him, making slow, struggling passage. Byerley waved the 
latter off, angrily. 

The thin man was directly under the balcony. His words tore unheard against 
the roar. 

Byerley leaned forward. “What do you say? If you have a legitimate question, 
I’ll answer it.” He turned to a flanking guard. “Bring that man up here.” 



There was a tensing in the crowd. Cries of “Quiet” started in various parts of 
the mob, and rose to a bedlam, then toned down raggedly. The thin man, red¬ 
faced and panting, faced Byerley. 

Byerley said, “Have you a question?” 

The thin man stared, and said in a cracked voice, “Hit me! ” 

With sudden energy, he thrust out his chin at an angle. “Hit me! You say 
you’re not a robot. Prove it. You can’t hit a human, you monster.” 

There was a queer, flat, dead silence. Byerley’s voice punctured it. “I have no 
reason to hit you.” 

The thin man was laughing wildly. “You can’t hit me. You won’t hit me. 
You’re not a human. You’re a monster, a make-believe man.” 

And Stephen Byerley, tight-lipped, in the face of thousands who watched in 
person and the millions who watched by screen, drew back his fist and caught 
the man crackingly upon the chin. The challenger went over backwards in 
sudden collapse, with nothing on his face but blank, blank surprise. 

Byerley said, “I’m sorry. Take him in and see that he’s comfortable. I want to 
speak to him when I’m through.” 

And when Dr. Calvin, from her reserved space, turned her automobile and 
drove off, only one reporter had recovered sufficiently from the shock to race 
after her, and shout an unheard question. 

Susan Calvin called over her shoulder, “He’s human.” 

That was enough. The reporter raced away in his own direction. 

The rest of the speech might be described as “Spoken but not heard.” 


Dr. Calvin and Stephen Byerley met once again—a week before he took the oath 
of office as mayor. It was late—past midnight. 



Dr. Calvin said, “You don’t look tired.” 

The mayor-elect smiled. “I may stay up for a while. Don’t tell Quinn.” 

“I shan’t. But that was an interesting story of Quinn’s, since you mention him. 
It’s a shame to have spoiled it. I suppose you knew his theory?” 

“Parts of it.” 

“It was highly dramatic. Stephen Byerley was a young lawyer, a powerful 
speaker, a great idealist—and with a certain flair for biophysics. Are you 
interested in robotics, Mr. Byerley?” 

“Only in the legal aspects.” 

“This Stephen Byerley was. But there was an accident. Byerley’s wife died; he 
himself, worse. His legs were gone; his face was gone; his voice was gone. Part 
of his mind was—bent. He would not submit to plastic surgery. He retired from 
the world, legal career gone—only his intelligence, and his hands left. Somehow 
he could obtain positronic brains, even a complex one, one which had the 
greatest capacity of forming judgments in ethical problems—which is the 
highest robotic function so far developed. 

“He grew a body about it. Trained it to be everything he would have been and 
was no longer. He sent it out into the world as Stephen Byerley, remaining 
behind himself as the old, crippled teacher that no one ever saw—” 

“Unfortunately,” said the mayor-elect, “I ruined all that by hitting a man. The 
papers say it was your official verdict on the occasion that I was human.” 

“How did that happen? Do you mind telling me? It couldn’t have been 
accidental.” 

“It wasn’t entirely. Quinn did most of the work. My men started quietly 
spreading the fact that I had never hit a man; that I was unable to hit a man; that 
to fail to do so under provocation would be sure proof that I was a robot. So I 
arranged for a silly speech in public, with all sorts of publicity overtones, and 
almost inevitably, some fool fell for it. In its essence, it was what I call a shyster 
trick. One in which the artificial atmosphere which has been created does all the 
work. Of course, the emotional effects made my election certain, as intended.” 



The robopsychologist nodded. “I see you intrude on my field—as every 
politician must, I suppose. But I’m very sorry it turned out this way. I like 
robots. I like them considerably better than I do human beings. If a robot can be 
created capable of being a civil executive, I think he’d make the best one 
possible. By the Laws of Robotics, he’d be incapable of harming humans, 
incapable of tyranny, of corruption, of stupidity, of prejudice. And after he had 
served a decent term, he would leave, even though he were immortal, because it 
would be impossible for him to hurt humans by letting them know that a robot 
had ruled them. It would be most ideal.” 

“Except that a robot might fail due to the inherent inadequacies of his brain. 
The positronic brain has never equalled the complexities of the human brain.” 

“He would have advisers. Not even a human brain is capable of governing 
without assistance.” 

Byerley considered Susan Calvin with grave interest. “Why do you smile, Dr. 
Calvin?” 

“I smile because Mr. Quinn didn’t think of everything.” 

“You mean there could be more to that story of his.” 

“Only a little. For the three months before election, this Stephen Byerley that 
Mr. Quinn spoke about, this broken man, was in the country for some mysterious 
reason. He returned in time for that famous speech of yours. And after all, what 
the old cripple did once, he could do a second time, particularly where the 
second job is very simple in comparison to the first.” 

“I don’t quite understand.” 

Dr. Calvin rose and smoothed her dress. She was obviously ready to leave. “I 
mean there is one time when a robot may strike a human being without breaking 
the First Law. Just one time.” 

“And when is that?” 

Dr. Calvin was at the door. She said quietly, “When the human to be struck is 
merely another robot.” 



She smiled broadly, her thin face glowing. “Good-by Mr. Byerley. I hope to 
vote for you five years from now—for co-ordinator.” 

Stephen Byerley chuckled. “I must reply that that is a somewhat far-fetched 
idea.” 

The door closed behind her. 


I stared at her with a sort of horror, “Is that true?” 

“All of it, ” she said. 

“And the great Byerley was simply a robot. ” 

“Oh, there’s no way of ever finding out. I think he was. But when he decided 
to die, he had himself atomized, so that there will never be any legal proof. — 
Besides, what difference would it make?” 

“Well —” 

“You share a prejudice against robots which is quite unreasoning. He was a 
very good mayor; five years later he did become Regional Co-ordinator. And 
when the Regions of Earth formed their Federation in 2044, he became the first 
World Co-ordinator. By that time it was the Machines that were running the 
world anyway. ” 

“Yes, but —” 

“No buts! The Machines are robots, and they are running the world. It was 
five years ago that I found out all the truth. It was 2052; Byerley was completing 
his second term as World Co-ordinator —” 



THE EVITABLE 
CONFLICT 


The Co-ordinator, in his private study, had that medieval curiosity, a fireplace. 
To be sure, the medieval man might not have recognized it as such, since it had 
no functional significance. The quiet, licking flame lay in an insulated recess 
behind clear quartz. 

The logs were ignited at long distance through a trifling diversion of the 
energy beam that fed the public buildings of the city. The same button that 
controlled the ignition first dumped the ashes of the previous fire, and allowed 
for the entrance of fresh wood. —It was a thoroughly domesticated fireplace, 
you see. 

But the fire itself was real. It was wired for sound, so that you could hear the 
crackle and, of course, you could watch it leap in the air stream that fed it. 

The Co-ordinator’s ruddy glass reflected, in miniature, the discreet gamboling 
of the flame, and, in even further miniature, it was reflected in each of his 
brooding pupils. 

—And in the frosty pupils of his guest, Dr. Susan Calvin of U. S. Robots & 
Mechanical Men Corporation. 

The Co-ordinator said, “I did not ask you here entirely for social purposes, 
Susan.” 

“I did not think you did, Stephen,” she replied. 

“—And yet I don’t quite know how to phrase my problem. On the one hand, it 
can be nothing at all. On the other, it can mean the end of humanity.” 

“I have come across so many problems, Stephen, that presented the same 
alternative. I think all problems do.” 



“Really? Then judge this— World Steel reports an overproduction of twenty 
thousand long tons. The Mexican Canal is two months behind schedule. The 
mercury mines at Almaden have experienced a production deficiency since last 
spring, while the Hydroponics plant at Tientsin has been laying men off. These 
items happen to come to mind at the moment. There is more of the same sort.” 

“Are these things serious? I’m not economist enough to trace the fearful 
consequences of such things.” 

“In themselves, they are not serious. Mining experts can be sent to Almaden, 
if the situation were to get worse. Hydroponics engineers can be used in Java or 
in Ceylon, if there are too many at Tientsin. Twenty thousand long tons of steel 
won’t fill more than a few days of world demand, and the opening of the 
Mexican Canal two months later than the planned date is of little moment. It’s 
the Machines that worry me;—I’ve spoken to your Director of Research about 
them already.” 

“To Vincent Silver? —He hasn’t mentioned anything about it to me.” 

“I asked him to speak to no one. Apparently, he hasn’t.” 

“And what did he tell you?” 

“Let me put that item in its proper place. I want to talk about the Machines 
first. And I want to talk about them to you, because you’re the only one in the 
world who understands robots well enough to help me now. —May I grow 
philosophical?” 

“For this evening, Stephen, you may talk how you please and of what you 
please, provided you tell me first what you intend to prove.” 

“That such small unbalances in the perfection of our system of supply and 
demand, as I have mentioned, may be the first step towards the final war.” 

“Hmp. Proceed.” 

Susan Calvin did not allow herself to relax, despite the designed comfort of 
the chair she sat in. Her cold, thin-lipped face and her flat, even voice were 
becoming accentuated with the years. And although Stephen Byerley was one 
man she could like and trust, she was almost seventy and the cultivated habits of 



a lifetime are not easily broken. 

“Every period of human development, Susan,” said the Co-ordinator, “has had 
its own particular type of human conflict—its own variety of problem that, 
apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, 
force never really settled the problem. Instead, it persisted through a series of 
conflicts, then vanished of itself,—what’s the expression,—ah, yes 'not with a 
bang, but a whimper,’ as the economic and social environment changed. And 
then, new problems, and a new series of wars. —Apparently endlessly cyclic. 

“Consider relatively modern times. There were the series of dynastic wars in 
the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, when the most important question in 
Europe was whether the houses of Hapsburg or Valois-Bourbon were to rule the 
continent. It was one of those 'inevitable conflicts,’ since Europe could 
obviously not exist half one and half the other. 

“Except that it did, and no war ever wiped out the one and established the 
other, until the rise of a new social atmosphere in France in 1789 tumbled first 
the Bourbons and, eventually, the Hapsburgs down the dusty chute to history’s 
incinerator. 

“And in those same centuries there were the more barbarous religious wars, 
which revolved about the important question of whether Europe was to be 
Catholic or Protestant. Half and half she could not be. It was 'inevitable’ that the 
sword decide.—Except that it didn’t. In England, a new industrialism was 
growing, and on the continent, a new nationalism. Half and half Europe remains 
to this day and no one cares much. 

“In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a cycle of nationalist- 
imperialist wars, when the most important question in the world was which 
portions of Europe would control the economic resources and consuming 
capacity of which portions of non-Europe. All non-Europe obviously could not 
exist part English and part French and part German and so on.—Until the forces 
of nationalism spread sufficiently, so that non-Europe ended what all the wars 
could not, and decided it could exist quite comfortably all non-European. 

“And so we have a pattern—” 

“Yes. Stephen, you make it plain,” said Susan Calvin. “These are not very 
profound observations.” 



“No.—But then, it is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. 
People say ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face. 5 But how much of the nose on 
your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you? In the twentieth 
century, Susan, we started a new cycle of wars—what shall I call them? 
Ideological wars? The emotions of religion applied to economic systems, rather 
than to extra-natural ones? Again the wars were ‘inevitable’ and this time there 
were atomic weapons, so that mankind could no longer live through its torment 
to the inevitable wasting away of inevitability. —And positronic robots came. 

“They came in time, and, with it and alongside it, interplanetary travel. —So 
that it no longer seemed so important whether the world was Adam Smith or 
Karl Marx. Neither made very much sense under the new circumstances. Both 
had to adapt and they ended in almost the same place.” 

“A deus ex machina, then, in a double sense,” said Dr. Calvin, dryly. 

The Co-ordinator smiled gently, “I have never heard you pun before, Susan, 
but you are correct. And yet there was another danger. The ending of every other 
problem had merely given birth to another. Our new worldwide robot economy 
may develop its own problems, and for that reason we have the Machines. The 
Earth’s economy is stable, and will remain stable, because it is based upon the 
decisions of calculating machines that have the good of humanity at heart 
through the overwhelming force of the First Law of Robotics.” 

Stephen Byerley continued, “And although the Machines are nothing but the 
vastest conglomeration of calculating circuits ever invented, they are still robots 
within the meaning of the First Law, and so our Earth-wide economy is in accord 
with the best interests of Man. The population of Earth knows that there will be 
no unemployment, no overproduction or shortages. Waste and famine are words 
in history books. And so the question of ownership of the means of production 
becomes obsolescent. Whoever owned them (if such a phrase has meaning), a 
man, a group, a nation, or all mankind, they could be utilized only as the 
Machines directed. —Not because men were forced to but because it was the 
wisest course and men knew it. 

“It puts an end to war—not only to the last cycle of wars, but to the next and 
to all of them. Unless—” 

Along pause, and Dr. Calvin encouraged him by repetition. “Unless—” 



The fire crouched and skittered along a log, then popped up. 

“Unless,” said the Co-ordinator, “the Machines don’t fulfill their function.” 

“I see. And that is where those trifling maladjustments come in which you 
mentioned awhile ago—steel, hydroponics and so on.” 

“Exactly. Those errors should not be. Dr. Silver tells me they cannot be.” 

“Does he deny the facts? How unusual!” 

“No, he admits the facts, of course. I do him an injustice. What he denies is 
that any error in the machine is responsible for the so-called (his phrase) errors 
in the answers. He claims that the Machines are self-correcting and that it would 
violate the fundamental laws of nature for an error to exist in the circuits of 
relays. And so I said-” 

“And you said, ‘Have your boys check them and make sure, anyway.’” 

“Susan, you read my mind. It was what I said, and he said he couldn’t.” 

“Too busy?” 

“No, he said that no human could. He was frank about it. He told me, and I 
hope I understand him properly, that the Machines are a gigantic extrapolation. 
Thus— A team of mathematicians work several years calculating a positronic 
brain equipped to do certain similar acts of calculation. Using this brain they 
make further calculations to create a still more complicated brain, which they 
use again to make one still more complicated and so on. According to Silver, 
what we call the Machines are the result of ten such steps.” 

“Ye-es, that sounds familiar. Fortunately, I’m not a mathematician.—Poor 
Vincent. He is a young man. The Directors before him, Alfred Lanning and Peter 
Bogert, are dead, and they had no such problems. Nor had I. Perhaps roboticists 
as a whole should now die, since we can no longer understand our own 
creations.” 

“Apparently not. The Machines are not superbrains in Sunday supplement 
sense,—although they are so pictured in the Sunday supplements. It is merely 
that in their own particular province of collecting and analyzing a nearly infinite 



number of data and relationships thereof, in nearly infinitesimal time, they have 
progressed beyond the possibility of detailed human control. 

“And then I tried something else. I actually asked the Machine. In the strictest 
secrecy, we fed it the original data involved in the steel decision, its own answer, 
and the actual developments since,—the overproduction, that is,—and asked for 
an explanation of the discrepancy.” 

“Good, and what was its answer?” 

“I can quote you that word for word: ‘The matter admits of no explanation?” 

“And how did Vincent interpret that?” 

“In two ways. Either we had not given the Machine enough data to allow a 
definite answer, which was unlikely. Dr. Silver admitted that. —Or else, it was 
impossible for the Machine to admit that it could give any answer to data which 
implied that it could harm a human being. This, naturally, is implied by the First 
Law. And then Dr. Silver recommended that I see you.” 

Susan Calvin looked very tired, “I’m old, Stephen. When Peter Bogert died, 
they wanted to make me Director of Research and I refused. I wasn’t young 
then, either, and I did not wish the responsibility. They let young Silver have it 
and that satisfied me; but what good is it, if I am dragged into such messes. 

“Stephen, let me state my position. My researches do indeed involve the 
interpretation of robot behavior in the light of the Three Laws of Robotics. Here, 
now, we have these incredible calculating machines. They are positronic robots 
and therefore obey the Laws of Robotics. But they lack personality; that is, their 
functions are extremely limited. —Must be, since they are so specialized. 
Therefore, there is very little room for the interplay of the Laws, and my one 
method of attack is virtually useless. In short, I don’t know that I can help you, 
Stephen.” 

The Co-ordinator laughed shortly, “Nevertheless, let me tell you the rest. Let 
me give you my theories, and perhaps you will then be able to tell me whether 
they are possible in the light of robopsychology.” 


“By all means. Go ahead.” 



“Well, since the Machines are giving the wrong answers, then, assuming that 
they cannot be in error, there is only one possibility. They are being given the 
wrong data! In other words, the trouble is human, and not robotic. So I took my 
recent planetary inspection tour—” 

“From which you have just returned to New York.” 

“Yes. It was necessary, you see, since there are four Machines, one handling 
each of the Planetary Regions. And all four are yielding imperfect results .” 

“Oh, but that follows, Stephen. If any one of the Machines is imperfect, that 
will automatically reflect in the result of the other three, since each of the others 
will assume as part of the data on which they base their own decisions, the 
perfection of the imperfect fourth. With a false assumption, they will yield false 
answers.” 

“Uh-huh. So it seemed to me. Now, I have here the records of my interviews 
with each of the Regional Vice-Co-ordinators. Would you look through them 
with me? —Oh, and first, have you heard of the ‘Society for Humanity’?” 

“Umm, yes. They are an outgrowth of the Fundamentalists who have kept 
U.S. Robots from ever employing positronic robots on the grounds of unfair 
labor competition and so on. The ‘Society for Humanity’ itself is anti-Machine, 
is it not?” 

“Yes, yes, but— Well, you will see. Shall we begin? We’ll start with the 
Eastern Region.” 

“As you say—” 


The Eastern Region 
a—Area: 7,500,000 square miles 
b—Population: 1,700,000,000 
c—Capital: Shanghai 



Ching Hso-lin’s great-grandfather had been killed in the Japanese invasion of 
the old Chinese Republic, and there had been no one besides his dutiful children 
to mourn his loss or even to know he was lost. Ching Hso-lin’s grandfather had 
survived the civil war of the late forties, but there had been no one besides his 
dutiful children to know or care of that. 

And yet Ching Hso-lin was a Regional Vice-Co-ordinator, with the economic 
welfare of half the people of Earth in his care. 

Perhaps it was with the thought of all that in mind, that Ching had two maps 
as the only ornaments on the wall of his office. One was an old hand-drawn 
affair tracing out an acre or two of land, and marked with the now outmoded 
pictographs of old China. A little creek trickled aslant the faded markings and 
there were the delicate pictorial indications of lowly huts, in one of which 
Ching’s grandfather had been born. 

The other map was a huge one, sharply delineated, with all markings in neat 
Cyrillic characters. The red boundary that marked the Eastern Region swept 
within its grand confines all that had once been China, India, Burma, Indo¬ 
china, and Indonesia. On it, within the old province of Szechuan, so light and 
gentle that none could see it, was the little mark placed there by Ching which 
indicated the location of his ancestral farm. 

Ching stood before these maps as he spoke to Stephen Byerley in precise 
English, “No one knows better than you, Mr. Co-ordinator, that my job, to a 
large extent, is a sinecure. It carries with it a certain social standing, and I 
represent a convenient focal point for administration, but otherwise it is the 
Machine! —The Machine does all the work. What did you think, for instance, of 
the Tientsin Hydroponics works?” 

“Tremendous! ” said Byerley. 

“It is but one of dozens, and not the largest. Shanghai, Calcutta, Batavia, 
Bangkok— They are widely spread and they are the answer to feeding the 
billion and three quarters of the East.” 

“And yet,” said Byerley, “you have an unemployment problem there at 
Tientsin. Can you be over-producing? It is incongruous to think of Asia as 
suffering from too much food.” 



Ching’s dark eyes crinkled at the edges. “No. It has not come to that yet. It is 
true that over the last few months, several vats at Tientsin have been shut down, 
but it is nothing serious. The men have been released only temporarily and those 
who do not care to work in other fields have been shipped to Colombo in 
Ceylon, where a new plant is being put into operation.” 

“But why should the vats be closed down?” 

Ching smiled gently, “You do not know much of hydroponics, I see. Well, that 
is not surprising. You are a Northerner, and there soil farming is still profitable. 
It is fashionable in the North to think of hydroponics, when it is thought of at all, 
as a device of growing turnips in a chemical solution, and so it is—in an 
infinitely complicated way. 

“In the first place, by far the largest crop we deal with (and the percentage is 
growing) is yeast. We have upward of two thousand strains of yeast in 
production and new strains are added monthly. The basic food-chemicals of the 
various yeasts are nitrates and phosphates among the inorganics together with 
proper amounts of the trace metals needed, down to the fractional parts per 
million of boron and molybdenum which are required. The organic matter is 
mostly sugar mixtures derived from the hydrolysis of cellulose, but, in addition, 
there are various food factors which must be added. 

“For a successful hydroponics industry—one which can feed seventeen 
hundred million people—we must engage in an immense reforestation program 
throughout the East; we must have huge wood-conversion plants to deal with our 
southern jungles; we must have power, and steel, and chemical synthetics above 
all.” 

“Why the last, sir?” 

“Because, Mr. Byerley, these strains of yeast have each their peculiar 
properties. We have developed, as I said, two thousand strains. The beef steak 
you thought you ate today was yeast. The frozen fruit confection you had for 
dessert was iced yeast. We have filtered yeast juice with the taste, appearance, 
and all the food value of milk. 

“It is flavor, more than anything else, you see, that makes yeast feeding 
popular and for the sake of flavor we have developed artificial, domesticated 
strains that can no longer support themselves on a basic diet of salts and sugar. 



One needs biotin; another needs pteroyl-glutamic acid; still others need 
seventeen different amino acids supplied them as well as all the Vitamins B, but 
one (and yet it is popular and we cannot, with economic sense, abandon it)—” 

Byerley stirred in his seat, “To what purpose do you tell me all this?” 

“You asked me, sir, why men are out of work in Tientsin. I have a little more 
to explain. It is not only that we must have these various and varying foods for 
our yeast; but there remains the complicating factor of popular fads with passing 
time; and of the possibility of the development of new strains with the new 
requirements and new popularity. All this must be foreseen, and the Machine 
does the job—” 

“But not perfectly.” 

“Not very imperfectly, in view of the complications I have mentioned. Well, 
then, a few thousand workers in Tientsin are temporarily out of a job. But, 
consider this, the amount of waste in this past year (waste, that is, in terms of 
either defective supply or defective demand) amounts to not one-tenth of one 
percent of our total productive turnover. I consider that—” 

“Yet in the first years of the Machine, the figure was nearer one-thousandth of 
one percent.” 

“Ah, but in the decade since the Machine began its operations in real earnest, 
we have made use of it to increase our old pre-Machine yeast industry twenty¬ 
fold. You expect imperfections to increase with complications, though—” 

“Though?” 

“There was the curious instance of Rama Vrasayana.” 

“What happened to him?” 

“Vrasayana was in charge of a brine-evaporation plant for the production of 
iodine, with which yeast can do without, but human beings not. His plant was 
forced into receivership.” 


“Really? And through what agency?” 



“Competition, believe it or not. In general, one of the chiefest functions of the 
Machine’s analyses is to indicate the most efficient distribution of our producing 
units. It is obviously faulty to have areas insufficiently serviced, so that the 
transportation costs account for too great a percentage of the overhead. Similarly, 
it is faulty to have an area too well serviced, so that factories must be run at 
lowered capacities, or else compete harmfully with one another. In the case of 
Vrasayana, another plant was established in the same city, and with a more 
efficient extracting system.” 

“The Machine permitted it?” 

“Oh, certainly. That is not surprising. The new system is becoming 
widespread. The surprise is that the Machine failed to warn Vrasayana to 
renovate or combine. —Still, no matter. Vrasayana accepted a job as engineer in 
the new plant, and if his responsibility and pay are now less, he is not actually 
suffering. The workers found employment easily; the old plant has been 
converted to—something or other. Something useful. We left it all to the 
Machine.” 

“And otherwise you have no complaints.” 

“None!” 


The Tropic Region: 
a—Area: 22,000,000 square miles 
b—Population: 500,000,000 
c—Capital: Capital City 


The map in Lincoln Ngoma’s office was far from the model of neat precision 
of the one in Ching’s Shanghai dominion. The boundaries of Ngoma’s Tropic 
Region were stencilled in dark, wide brown and swept about a gorgeous interior 
labelled “jungle” and “desert” and “here be Elephants and all Manner of Strange 
Beasts.” 


It had much to sweep, for in land area the Tropic Region enclosed most of two 



continents: all of South America north of Argentina and all of Africa south of the 
Atlas. It included North America south of the Rio Grande as well, and even 
Arabia and Iran in Asia. It was the reverse of the Eastern Region. Where the ant 
hives of the Orient crowded half of humanity into 15 percent of the land mass, 
the Tropics stretched its 15 percent of humanity over nearly half of all the land in 
the world. 

But it was growing. It was the one Region whose population increase through 
immigration exceeded that through births. —And for all who came it had use. 

To Ngoma, Stephen Byerley seemed like one of these immigrants, a pale 
searcher for the creative work of carving a harsh environment into the softness 
necessary for man, and he felt some of that automatic contempt of the strong 
man born to the strong Tropics for the unfortunate pallards of the colder suns. 

The Tropics had the newest capital city on Earth, and it was called simply 
that: “Capital City,” in the sublime confidence of youth. It spread brightly over 
the fertile uplands of Nigeria and outside Ngoma’s windows, far below, was life 
and color; the bright, bright sun and the quick, drenching showers. Even the 
squawking of the rainbowed birds was brisk and the stars were hard pinpoints in 
the sharp night. 

Ngoma laughed. He was a big, dark man, strong faced and handsome. 

“Sure,” he said, and his English was colloquial and mouthfilling, “the 
Mexican Canal is overdue. What the hell? It will get finished just the same, old 
boy.” 

“It was doing well up to the last half year.” 

Ngoma looked at Byerley and slowly crunched his teeth over the end of a big 
cigar, spitting out one end and lighting the other, “Is this an official investigation, 
Byerley? What’s going on?” 

“Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s just my function as Co-ordinator to be curious.” 

“Well, if it’s just that you are filling in a dull moment, the truth is that we’re 
always short on labor. There’s lots going on in the Tropics. The Canal is only 
one of them—” 



“But doesn’t your Machine predict the amount of labor available for the 
Canal,—allowing for all the competing projects?” 

Ngoma placed one hand behind his neck and blew smoke rings at the ceiling, 
“It was a little off.” 

“Is it often a little off?” 

“Not oftener than you would expect. —We don’t expect too much of it, 
Byerley. We feed it data. We take its results. We do what it says. —But it’s just a 
convenience; just a labor-saving device. We could do without it, if we had to. 
Maybe not as well. Maybe not as quickly. But we’d get there. 

“We’ve got confidence out here, Byerley, and that’s the secret. Confidence! 
We’ve got new land that’s been waiting for us for thousands of years, while the 
rest of the world was being ripped apart in the lousy fumblings of pre-atomic 
time. We don’t have to eat yeast like the Eastern boys, and we don’t have to 
worry about the stale dregs of the last century like you Northerners. 

“We’ve wiped out the tsetse fly and the Anopheles mosquito, and people find 
they can live in the sun and like it, now. We’ve thinned down the jungles and 
found soil; we’ve watered the deserts and found gardens. We’ve got coal and oil 
in untouched fields, and minerals out of count. 

“Just step back. That’s all we ask the rest of the world to do. —Step back, and 
let us work.” 

Byerley said, prosaically, “But the Canal,—it was on schedule six months ago. 
What happened?” 

Ngoma spread his hands, “Labor troubles.” He felt through a pile of papers 
skeltered about his desk and gave it up. 

“Had something on the matter here,” he muttered, “but never mind. There was 
a work shortage somewhere in Mexico once on the question of women. There 
weren’t enough women in the neighborhood. It seemed no one had thought of 
feeding sexual data to the Machine.” 

He stopped to laugh, delightedly, then sobered, “Wait awhile. I think I’ve got 
it. —Villafranca!” 



“Villafranca?” 


“Francisco Villafranca. —He was the engineer in charge. Now let me 
straighten it out. Something happened and there was a cave-in. Right. Right. 
That was it. Nobody died, as I remember, but it made a hell of a mess. —Quite a 
scandal.” 

“Oh?” 

“There was some mistake in his calculations. —Or at least, the Machine said 
so. They fed through Villafranca’s data, assumptions, and so on. The stuff he had 
started with. The answers came out differently. It seems the answers Villafranca 
had used didn’t take account of the effect of a heavy rainfall on the contours of 
the cut. —Or something like that. I’m not an engineer, you understand. 

“Anyway, Villafranca put up a devil of a squawk. He claimed the Machine’s 
answer had been different the first time. That he had followed the Machine 
faithfully. Then he quit! We offered to hold him on—reasonable doubt, previous 
work satisfactory, and all that—in a subordinate position, of course—had to do 
that much—mistakes can’t go unnoticed—bad for discipline—Where was I?” 

“You offered to hold him on.” 

“Oh yes. He refused. —Well, take all in all, we’re two months behind. Hell, 
that’s nothing.” 

Byerley stretched out his hand and let the fingers tap lightly on the desk, 
“Villafranca blamed the Machine, did he?” 

“Well, he wasn’t going to blame himself, was he? Let’s face it; human nature 
is an old friend of ours. Besides, I remember something else now— Why the hell 
can’t I find documents when I want them? My filing system isn’t worth a damn 
— This Villafranca was a member of one of your Northern organizations. 
Mexico is too close to the North! That’s part of the trouble.” 

“Which organization are you speaking of?” 

“The Society of Humanity, they call it. He used to attend the annual 
conference in New York, Villafranca did. Bunch of crackpots, but harmless. — 
They don’t like the Machines; claim they’re destroying human initiative. So 



naturally Villafranca would blame the Machine. —Don’t understand that group 
myself. Does Capital City look as if the human race were running out of 
initiative?” 

And Capital City stretched out in golden glory under a golden sun,—the 
newest and youngest creation of Homo metropolis. 


The European Region 
a—Area: 4,000,000 square miles 
b—Population: 300,000,000 
c—Capital: Geneva 


The European Region was an anomaly in several ways. In area, it was far the 
smallest; not one fifth the size of the Tropic Region in area, and not one fifth the 
size of the Eastern Region in population. Geographically, it was only somewhat 
similar to pre-Atomic Europe, since it excluded what had once been European 
Russia and what had once been the British Isles, while it included the 
Mediterranean coasts of Africa and Asia, and, in a queer jump across the 
Atlantic, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay as well. 

Nor was it likely to improve its relative status vis-a-vis the other regions of 
Earth, except for what vigor the South American provinces lent it. Of all the 
Regions, it alone showed a positive population decline over the past half century. 
It alone had not seriously expanded its productive facilities, or offered anything 
radically new to human culture. 

“Europe,” said Madame Szegeczowska in her soft French, “is essentially an 
economic appendage of the Northern Region. We know it, and it doesn’t matter.” 

And as though in resigned acceptance of a lack of individuality, there was no 
map of Europe on the wall of the Madame Co-ordinator’s office. 

“And yet,” pointed out Byerley, “you have a Machine of your own, and you 
are certainly under no economic pressure from across the ocean.” 



“A Machine! Bah!” She shrugged her delicate shoulders, and allowed a thin 
smile to cross her little face as she tamped out a cigarette with long fingers. 
“Europe is a sleepy place. And such of our men as do not manage to emigrate to 
the Tropics are tired and sleepy along with it. You see for yourself that it is 
myself, a poor woman, to whom falls the task of being Vice-Co-ordinator. Well, 
fortunately, it is not a difficult job, and not much is expected of me. 

“As for the Machine—What can it say but ‘Do this and it will be best for you.’ 
But what is best for us? Why, to be an economic appendage of the Northern 
Region. 

“And is it so terrible? No wars! We live in peace—and it is pleasant after 
seven thousand years of war. We are old, monsieur. In our borders, we have the 
regions where Occidental civilization was cradled. We have Egypt and 
Mesopotamia; Crete and Syria; Asia Minor and Greece. —But old age is not 
necessarily an unhappy time. It can be a fruition—” 

“Perhaps you are right,” said Byerley, affably. “At least the tempo of life is not 
as intense as in the other Regions. It is a pleasant atmosphere.” 

“Is it not?—Tea is being brought, monsieur. If you will indicate your cream 
and sugar preference, please.—Thank you.” 

She sipped gently, then continued, “It is pleasant. The rest of Earth is welcome 
to the continuing struggle. I find a parallel here; a very interesting one. There 
was a time when Rome was master of the world. It had adopted the culture and 
civilization of Greece; a Greece which had never been united, which had ruined 
itself with war, and which was ending in a state of decadent squalor. Rome 
united it, brought it peace and let it live a life of secure non-glory. It occupied 
itself with its philosophies and its art, far from the clash of growth and war. It 
was a sort of death, but it was restful, and it lasted with minor breaks for some 
four hundred years.” 

“And yet,” said Byerley, “Rome fell eventually, and the opium dream was 
over.” 

“There are no longer barbarians to overthrow civilization.” 

“We can be our own barbarians, Madame Szegeczowska. —Oh, I meant to ask 
you. The Almaden mercury mines have fallen off quite badly in production. 



Surely the ores are not declining more rapidly than anticipated?” 


The little woman’s gray eyes fastened shrewdly on Byerley, “Barbarians—the 
fall of civilization—possible failure of the Machine. Your thought processes are 
very transparent, monsieur.” 

“Are they?” Byerley smiled. “I see that I should have had men to deal with as 
hitherto. —You consider the Almaden affair to be the fault of the Machine?” 

“Not at all, but I think you do. You, yourself, are a native of the Northern 
Region. The Central Co-ordination Office is at New York. —And I have noticed 
for quite a while that you Northerners lack somewhat of faith in the Machine.” 

“We do?” 

“There is your ‘Society for Humanity’ which is strong in the North, but 
naturally fails to find many recruits in tired, old Europe, which is quite willing to 
let feeble humanity alone for a while. Surely, you are one of the confident North 
and not one of the cynical old continent.” 

“This has a connection with Almaden?” 

“Oh, yes, I think so. The mines are in the control of Consolidated Cinnabar, 
which is certainly a Northern company, with headquarters at Nikolaev. 
Personally, I wonder if the Board of Directors have been consulting the Machine 
at all. They said they had in our conference last month, and, of course, we have 
no evidence that they did not, but I wouldn’t take the word of a Northerner in 
this matter—no offense intended—under any circumstances. —Nevertheless, I 
think it will have a fortunate ending.” 

“In what way, my dear madam?” 

“You must understand that the economic irregularities of the last few months, 
which, although small as compared with the great storms of the past, are quite 
disturbing to our peace-drenched spirits, have caused considerable restiveness in 
the Spanish province. I understand that Consolidated Cinnabar is selling out to a 
group of native Spaniards. It is consoling. If we are economic vassals of the 
North, it is humiliating to have the fact advertised too blatantly. —And our 
people can be better trusted to follow the Machine.” 



“Then you think there will be no more trouble?” 

“I am sure there will not be— In Almaden, at least.” 


The Northern Region 
a—Area: 18,000,000 square miles 
b—Population: 800,000,000 
c—Capital: Ottawa 


The Northern Region, in more ways than one, was at the top. This was 
exemplified quite well by the map in the Ottawa office of Vice-Co-ordinator 
Hiram Mackenzie, in which the North Pole was centered. Except for the enclave 
of Europe with its Scandinavian and Icelandic regions, all the Arctic area was 
within the Northern Region. 

Roughly, it could be divided into two major areas. To the left on the map was 
all of North America above the Rio Grande. To the right was included all of 
what had once been the Soviet Union. Together these areas represented the 
centered power of the planet in the first years of the Atomic Age. Between the 
two was Great Britain, a tongue of the Region licking at Europe. Up at the top of 
the map, distorted into odd, huge shapes, were Australia and New Zealand, also 
member provinces of the Region. 

Not all the changes of the past decades had yet altered the fact that the North 
was the economic ruler of the planet. 

There was almost an ostentatious symbolism thereof in the fact that of the 
official Regional maps Byerley had seen, Mackenzie’s alone showed all the 
Earth, as though the North feared no competition and needed no favoritism to 
point up its pre-eminence. 

“Impossible,” said Mackenzie, dourly, over the whiskey. “Mr. Byerley, you 
have had no training as a robot technician, I believe.” 


“No, I have not.” 



“Hmp. Well, it is, in my opinion, a sad thing that Ching, Ngoma and 
Szegeczowska haven’t either. There is too prevalent an opinion among the 
peoples of Earth that a Co-ordinator need only be a capable organizer, a broad 
generalizer, and an amiable person. These days he should know his robotics as 
well,—no offense intended.” 

“None taken. I agree with you.” 

“I take it, for instance, from what you have said already, that you worry about 
the recent trifling dislocation in world economy. I don’t know what you suspect, 
but it has happened in the past that people—who should have known better— 
wondered what would happen if false data were fed into the Machine.” 

“And what would happen, Mr. Mackenzie?” 

“Well,” the Scotsman shifted his weight and sighed, “all collected data goes 
through a complicated screening system which involves both human and 
mechanical checking, so that the problem is not likely to arise. —But let us 
ignore that. Humans are fallible, also corruptible, and ordinary mechanical 
devices are liable to mechanical failure. 

“The real point of the matter is that what we call a ‘wrong datum’ is one 
which is inconsistent with all other known data. It is our only criterion of right 
and wrong. It is the Machine’s as well. Order it, for instance, to direct 
agricultural activity on the basis of an average July temperature in Iowa of 57 
degrees Fahrenheit. It won’t accept that. It will not give an answer. —Not that it 
has any prejudice against that particular temperature, or that an answer is 
impossible; but because, in the light of all the other data fed it over a period of 
years, it knows that the probability of an average July temperature of 57 is 
virtually nil. It rejects that datum. 

“The only way a ‘wrong datum’ can be forced on the Machine is to include it 
as part of a self-consistent whole, all of which is subtly wrong in a manner either 
too delicate for the Machine to detect or outside the Machine’s experience. The 
former is beyond human capacity, and the latter is almost so, and is becoming 
more nearly so as the Machine’s experience increases by the second.” 

Stephen Byerley placed two fingers to the bridge of his nose, “Then the 
Machine cannot be tampered with— And how do you account for recent errors, 
then?” 



“My dear Byerley, I see that you instinctively follow that great error—that the 
Machine knows all. Let me cite you a case from my personal experience. The 
cotton industry engages experienced buyers who purchase cotton. Their 
procedure is to pull a tuft of cotton out of a random bale of a lot. They will look 
at that tuft and feel it, tease it out, listen to the crackling perhaps as they do so, 
touch it with their tongue,—and through this procedure they will determine the 
class of cotton the bales represent. There are about a dozen such classes. As a 
result of their decisions, purchases are made at certain prices, blends are made in 
certain proportions. —Now these buyers cannot yet be replaced by the 
Machine.” 

“Why not? Surely the data involved is not too complicated for it?” 

“Probably not. But what data is this you refer to? No textile chemist knows 
exactly what it is that the buyer tests when he feels a tuft of cotton. Presumably 
there’s the average length of the threads, their feel, the extent and nature of their 
slickness, the way they hang together, and so on. —Several dozen items, 
subconsciously weighed, out of years of experience. But the quantitative nature 
of these tests is not known; maybe even the very nature of some of them is not 
known. So we have nothing to feed the Machine. Nor can the buyers explain 
their own judgment. They can only say, 'Well, look at it. Can’t you tell it’s class- 
such-and-such?”’ 

“I see.” 

“There are innumerable cases like that. The Machine is only a tool after all, 
which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of 
calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains 
what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of 
devising new concepts to be tested. A pity the Society for Humanity won’t 
understand that.” 

“They are against the Machine?” 

“They would be against mathematics or against the art of writing if they had 
lived at the appropriate time. These reactionaries of the Society claim the 
Machine robs man of his soul. I notice that capable men are still at a premium in 
our society; we still need the man who is intelligent enough to think of the 
proper questions to ask. Perhaps if we could find enough of such, these 



dislocations you worry about, Co-ordinator, wouldn’t occur.” 


Earth (Including the uninhabited continent, Antarctica) 
a—Area: 54,000,000 square miles (land surface) 
b—Population: 3,300,000,000 
c—Capital: New York 


The fire behind the quartz was weary now, and sputtered its reluctant way to 
death. 

The Co-ordinator was somber, his mood matching the sinking flame. 

“They all minimize the state of affairs.” His voice was low. “Is it not easy to 
imagine that they all laugh at me? And yet— Vincent Silver said the Machines 
cannot be out of order, and I must believe him. Hiram Mackenzie says they 
cannot be fed false data, and I must believe him. But the Machines are going 
wrong, somehow, and I must believe that, too,—and so there is still an 
alternative left.” 

He glanced sidewise at Susan Calvin, who, with closed eyes, for a moment 
seemed asleep. 

“What is that?” she asked, prompt to her cue, nevertheless. 

“Why, that correct data is indeed given, and correct answers are indeed 
received, but that they are then ignored. There is no way the Machine can 
enforce obedience to its dictates.” 

“Madame Szegeczowska hinted as much, with reference to Northerners in 
general, it seems to me.” 

“So she did.” 

“And what purpose is served by disobeying the Machine? Let’s consider 
motivations.” 



“It’s obvious to me, and should be to you. It is a matter of rocking the boat, 
deliberately. There can be no serious conflicts on Earth, in which one group or 
another can seize more power than it has for what it thinks is its own good 
despite the harm to Mankind as a whole, while the Machines rule. If popular 
faith in the Machines can be destroyed to the point where they are abandoned, it 
will be the law of the jungle again. —And not one of the four Regions can be 
freed of the suspicion of wanting just that. 

“The East has half of humanity within its borders, and the Tropics more than 
half of Earth’s resources. Each can feel itself the natural rulers of all Earth, and 
each has a history of humiliation by the North, for which it can be human 
enough to wish a senseless revenge. Europe has a tradition of greatness, on the 
other hand. It once did rule the Earth, and there is nothing so eternally adhesive 
as the memory of power. 

“Yet, in another way, it’s hard to believe. Both the East and the Tropics are in 
a state of enormous expansion within their own borders. Both are climbing 
incredibly. They cannot have the spare energy for military adventures. And 
Europe can have nothing but its dreams. It is a cipher, militarily.” 

“So, Stephen,” said Susan, “you leave the North.” 

“Yes,” said Byerley, energetically, “I do. The North is now the strongest, and 
has been for nearly a century, or its component parts have been. But it is losing 
relatively, now. The Tropic Regions may take their place in the forefront of 
civilization for the first time since the Pharaohs, and there are Northerners who 
fear that. 

“The 'Society for Humanity’ is a Northern organization, primarily, you know, 
and they make no secret of not wanting the Machines. —Susan, they are few in 
numbers, but it is an association of powerful men. Heads of factories; directors 
of industries and agricultural combines who hate to be what they call The 
Machine’s office-boy’ belong to it. Men with ambition belong to it. Men who 
feel themselves strong enough to decide for themselves what is best for 
themselves, and not just to be told what is best for others. 

“In short, just those men who, by together refusing to accept the decisions of 
the Machine, can, in a short time, turn the world topsy-turvy;—just those belong 
to the Society. 



“Susan, it hangs together. Five of the Directors of World Steel are members, 
and World Steel suffers from overproduction. Consolidated Cinnabar, which 
mined mercury at Almaden, was a Northern concern. Its books are still being 
investigated, but one, at least, of the men concerned was a member. Francisco 
Villafranca, who, singlehanded, delayed the Mexican Canal for two months, was 
a member, we know already—and so was Rama Vrasayana, I was not at all 
surprised to find out.” 

Susan said, quietly, “These men, I might point out, have all done badly—” 

“But naturally,” interjected Byerley. “To disobey the Machine’s analyses is to 
follow a non-optimal path. Results are poorer than they might be. It’s the price 
they pay. They will have it rough now but in the confusion that will eventually 
follow—” 

“Just what do you plan doing, Stephen?” 

“There is obviously no time to lose. I am going to have the Society outlawed, 
every member removed from any responsible post. And all executive and 
technical positions, henceforward, can be filled only by applicants signing a non- 
Society oath. It will mean a certain surrender of basic civil liberties, but I am 
sure the Congress—” 

“It won’t work!” 

“What!— Why not?” 

“I will make a prediction. If you try any such thing, you will find yourself 
hampered at every turn. You will find it impossible to carry out. You will find 
your every move in that direction will result in trouble.” 

Byerley was taken aback, “Why do you say that? —I was rather hoping for 
your approval in this matter.” 

“You can’t have it as long as your actions are based on a false premise. You 
admit the Machine can’t be wrong, and can’t be fed wrong data. I will now show 
you that it cannot be disobeyed, either, as you think is being done by the 
Society.” 


“That I don’t see at all.” 



“Then listen. Every action by any executive which does not follow the exact 
directions of the Machine he is working with becomes part of the data for the 
next problem. The Machine, therefore, knows that the executive has a certain 
tendency to disobey. He can incorporate that tendency into that data,—even 
quantitatively, that is, judging exactly how much and in what direction 
disobedience would occur. Its next answers would be just sufficiently biased so 
that after the executive concerned disobeyed, he would have automatically 
corrected those answers to optimal directions. The Machine knows, Stephen!” 

“You can’t be sure of all this. You are guessing.” 

“It is a guess based on a lifetime’s experience with robots. You had better rely 
on such a guess, Stephen.” 

“But then what is left? The Machines themselves are correct and the premises 
they work on are correct. That we have agreed upon. Now you say that it cannot 
be disobeyed. Then what is wrong?” 

“You have answered yourself. Nothing is wrong! Think about the Machines 
for a while, Stephen. They are robots, and they follow the First Law. But the 
Machines work not for any single human being, but for all humanity, so that the 
First Law becomes: ‘No Machine may harm humanity; or, through inaction, 
allow humanity to come to harm.’ 

“Very well, then, Stephen, what harms humanity? Economic dislocations most 
of all, from whatever cause. Wouldn’t you say so?” 

“I would.” 

“And what is most likely in the future to cause economic dislocations? 
Answer that, Stephen.” 

“I should say,” replied Byerley, unwillingly, “the destruction of the 
Machines.” 

“And so should I say, and so should the Machines say. Their first care, 
therefore, is to preserve themselves, for us. And so they are quietly taking care 
of the only elements left that threaten them. It is not the ‘Society for Humanity’ 
which is shaking the boat so that the Machines may be destroyed. You have been 
looking at the reverse of the picture. Say rather that the Machine is shaking the 



boat —very slightly—just enough to shake loose those few which cling to the 
side for purposes the Machines consider harmful to humanity. 

“So Vrasayana loses his factory and gets another job where he can do no harm 
—he is not badly hurt, he is not rendered incapable of earning a living, for the 
Machine cannot harm a human being more than minimally, and that only to save 
a greater number. Consolidated Cinnabar loses control at Almaden. Villafranca is 
no longer a civil engineer in charge of an important project. And the directors of 
World Steel are losing their grip on the industry—or will.” 

“But you don’t really know all this,” insisted Byerley, distractedly. “How can 
we possibly take a chance on your being right?” 

“You must. Do you remember the Machine’s own statement when you 
presented the problem to him? It was: The matter admits of no explanation.’ 
The Machine did not say there was no explanation, or that it could determine no 
explanation. It simply was not going to admit any explanation. In other words, it 
would be harmful to humanity to have the explanation known, and that’s why we 
can only guess—and keep on guessing.” 

“But how can the explanation do us harm? Assume that you are right, Susan.” 

“Why, Stephen, if I am right, it means that the Machine is conducting our 
future for us not only simply in direct answer to our direct questions, but in 
general answer to the world situation and to human psychology as a whole. And 
to know that may make us unhappy and may hurt our pride. The Machine 
cannot, must not, make us unhappy. 

“Stephen, how do we know what the ultimate good of humanity will entail? 
We haven’t at our disposal the infinite factors that the Machine has at its\ 
Perhaps, to give you a not unfamiliar example, our entire technical civilization 
has created more unhappiness and misery than it has removed. Perhaps an 
agrarian or pastoral civilization, with less culture and less people would be 
better. If so, the Machines must move in that direction, preferably without telling 
us, since in our ignorant prejudices we only know that what we are used to, is 
good—and we would then fight change. Or perhaps a complete urbanization, or 
a completely caste-ridden society, or complete anarchy, is the answer. We don’t 
know. Only the Machines know, and they are going there and taking us with 
them.” 



“But you are telling me, Susan, that the 'Society for Humanity’ is right; and 
that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.” 

“It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and 
sociological forces it did not understand—at the whims of climate, and the 
fortunes of war. Now the Machines understand them; and no one can stop them, 
since the Machines will deal with them as they are dealing with the Society,— 
having, as they do, the greatest of weapons at their disposal, the absolute control 
of our economy.” 

“How horrible!” 

“Perhaps how wonderful! Think, that for all time, all conflicts are finally 
evitable. Only the Machines, from now on, are inevitable!” 

And the fire behind the quartz went out and only a curl of smoke was left to 
indicate its place. 


“And that is all,” said Dr. Calvin, rising. “I saw it from the beginning, when the 
poor robots couldn’t speak, to the end, when they stand between mankind and 
destruction. I will see no more. My life is over. You will see what comes next. ” 


I never saw Susan Calvin again. She died last month at the age of eighty-two. 



ABOUT THE AUTHOR 


ISAAC ASIMOV began his Foundation series at the age of twenty-one, not 
realizing that it would one day be considered a cornerstone of science 
fiction. During his legendary career, Asimov penned over 470 books on 
subjects ranging from science to Shakespeare to history, though he was 
most loved for his award-winning science fiction sagas, which include the 
Robot, Empire, and Foundation series. Named a Grand Master of Science 
Fiction by the Science Fiction Writers of America, Asimov entertained and 
educated readers of all ages for close to five decades. He died, at the age of 
seventy-two, in April 1992. 



Also by Isaac Asimov 
available from Bantam Books 


THE FOUNDATION NOVELS 
Prelude to Foundation 
Foundation 

Foundation and Empire 
Second Foundation 
Foundation and Earth 
Foundation’s Edge 
Forward the Foundation 

THE ROBOT NOVELS 
I, Robot 

The Caves of Steel 
The Naked Sun 
The Robots of Dawn 

Nemesis 

The Gods Themselves 
The End of Eternity 
Fantastic Voyage 
I, Asimov 

With Robert Silverberg 
Nightfall 



I, ROBOT 


A Bantam Spectra Book 

PUBLISHING HISTORY 
Doubleday hardcover edition published 1950 
Bantam mass market edition / December 1991 
Bantam hardcover edition / June 2004 

Published by 
Bantam Dell 

A Division of Random House, Inc. 

New York, New York 

All rights reserved. 

Copyright © 1950, 1977 by the Estate of Isaac Asimov 

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or 
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without 
the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. 

The Trial
Franz Kafka

Translation Copyright (C) by David Wyllie
Translator contact email: dandelion@post.cz

Chapter One Arrest - Conversation with Mrs. Grubach - Then Miss Bürstner

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. Every day at eight in the morning he was brought his breakfast by Mrs. Grubach's cook - Mrs. Grubach was his landlady - but today she didn't come. That had never happened before. K. waited a little while, looked from his pillow at the old woman who lived opposite and who was watching him with an inquisitiveness quite unusual for her, and finally, both hungry and disconcerted, rang the bell. There was immediately a knock at the door and a man entered. He had never seen the man in this house before. He was slim but firmly built, his clothes were black and close-fitting, with many folds and pockets, buckles and buttons and a belt, all of which gave the impression of being very practical but without making it very clear what they were actually for. "Who are you?" asked K., sitting half upright in his bed. The man, however, ignored the question as if his arrival simply had to be accepted, and merely replied, "You rang?" "Anna should have brought me my breakfast," said K. He tried to work out who the man actually was, first in silence, just through observation and by thinking about it, but the man didn't stay still to be looked at for very long. Instead he went over to the door, opened it slightly, and said to someone who was clearly standing immediately behind it, "He wants Anna to bring him his breakfast." There was a little laughter in the neighbouring room, it was not clear from the sound of it whether there were several people laughing. The strange man could not have learned anything from it that he hadn't known already, but now he said to K., as if making his report "It is not possible." "It would be the first time that's happened," said K., as he jumped out of bed and quickly pulled on his trousers. "I want to see who that is in the next room, and why it is that Mrs. Grubach has let me be disturbed in this way." It immediately occurred to him that he needn't have said this out loud, and that he must to some extent have acknowledged their authority by doing so, but that didn't seem important to him at the time. That, at least, is how the stranger took it, as he said, "Don't you think you'd better stay where you are?" "I want neither to stay here nor to be spoken to by you until you've introduced yourself." "I meant it for your own good," said the stranger and opened the door, this time without being asked. The next room, which K. entered more slowly than he had intended, looked at first glance exactly the same as it had the previous evening. It was Mrs. Grubach's living room, over-filled with furniture, tablecloths, porcelain and photographs. Perhaps there was a little more space in there than usual today, but if so it was not immediately obvious, especially as the main difference was the presence of a man sitting by the open window with a book from which he now looked up. "You should have stayed in your room! Didn't Franz tell you?" "And what is it you want, then?" said K., looking back and forth between this new acquaintance and the one named Franz, who had remained in the doorway. Through the open window he noticed the old woman again, who had come close to the window opposite so that she could continue to see everything. She was showing an inquisitiveness that really made it seem like she was going senile. "I want to see Mrs. Grubach …," said K., making a movement as if tearing himself away from the two men - even though they were standing well away from him - and wanted to go. "No," said the man at the window, who threw his book down on a coffee table and stood up. "You can't go away when you're under arrest." "That's how it seems," said K. "And why am I under arrest?" he then asked. "That's something we're not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you'll learn about everything all in good time. It's not really part of my job to be friendly towards you like this, but I hope no-one, apart from Franz, will hear about it, and he's been more friendly towards you than he should have been, under the rules, himself. If you carry on having as much good luck as you have been with your arresting officers then you can reckon on things going well with you." K. wanted to sit down, but then he saw that, apart from the chair by the window, there was nowhere anywhere in the room where he could sit. "You'll get the chance to see for yourself how true all this is," said Franz and both men then walked up to K. They were significantly bigger than him, especially the second man, who frequently slapped him on the shoulder. The two of them felt K.'s nightshirt, and said he would now have to wear one that was of much lower quality, but that they would keep the nightshirt along with his other underclothes and return them to him if his case turned out well. "It's better for you if you give us the things than if you leave them in the storeroom," they said. "Things have a tendency to go missing in the storeroom, and after a certain amount of time they sell things off, whether the case involved has come to an end or not. And cases like this can last a long time, especially the ones that have been coming up lately. They'd give you the money they got for them, but it wouldn't be very much as it's not what they're offered for them when they sell them that counts, it's how much they get slipped on the side, and things like that lose their value anyway when they get passed on from hand to hand, year after year." K. paid hardly any attention to what they were saying, he did not place much value on what he may have still possessed or on who decided what happened to them. It was much more important to him to get a clear understanding of his position, but he could not think clearly while these people were here, the second policeman's belly - and they could only be policemen - looked friendly enough, sticking out towards him, but when K. looked up and saw his dry, boney face it did not seem to fit with the body. His strong nose twisted to one side as if ignoring K. and sharing an understanding with the other policeman. What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? K. was living in a free country, after all, everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home? He was always inclined to take life as lightly as he could, to cross bridges when he came to them, pay no heed for the future, even when everything seemed under threat. But here that did not seem the right thing to do. He could have taken it all as a joke, a big joke set up by his colleagues at the bank for some unknown reason, or also perhaps because today was his thirtieth birthday, it was all possible of course, maybe all he had to do was laugh in the policemen's face in some way and they would laugh with him, maybe they were tradesmen from the corner of the street, they looked like they might be - but he was nonetheless determined, ever since he first caught sight of the one called Franz, not to lose any slight advantage he might have had over these people. There was a very slight risk that people would later say he couldn't understand a joke, but - although he wasn't normally in the habit of learning from experience - he might also have had a few unimportant occasions in mind when, unlike his more cautious friends, he had acted with no thought at all for what might follow and had been made to suffer for it. He didn't want that to happen again, not this time at least; if they were play-acting he would act along with them.

He still had time. "Allow me," he said, and hurried between the two policemen through into his room. "He seems sensible enough," he heard them say behind him. Once in his room, he quickly pulled open the drawer of his writing desk, everything in it was very tidy but in his agitation he was unable to find the identification documents he was looking for straight away. He finally found his bicycle permit and was about to go back to the policemen with it when it seemed to him too petty, so he carried on searching until he found his birth certificate. Just as he got back in the adjoining room the door on the other side opened and Mrs. Grubach was about to enter. He only saw her for an instant, for as soon as she recognised K. she was clearly embarrassed, asked for forgiveness and disappeared, closing the door behind her very carefully. "Do come in," K. could have said just then. But now he stood in the middle of the room with his papers in his hand and still looking at the door which did not open again. He stayed like that until he was startled out of it by the shout of the policeman who sat at the little table at the open window and, as K. now saw, was eating his breakfast. "Why didn't she come in?" he asked. "She's not allowed to," said the big policeman. "You're under arrest, aren't you." "But how can I be under arrest? And how come it's like this?" "Now you're starting again," said the policeman, dipping a piece of buttered bread in the honeypot. "We don't answer questions like that." "You will have to answer them," said K. "Here are my identification papers, now show me yours and I certainly want to see the arrest warrant." "Oh, my God!" said the policeman. "In a position like yours, and you think you can start giving orders, do you? It won't do you any good to get us on the wrong side, even if you think it will - we're probably more on your side that anyone else you know!" "That's true, you know, you'd better believe it," said Franz, holding a cup of coffee in his hand which he did not lift to his mouth but looked at K. in a way that was probably meant to be full of meaning but could not actually be understood. K. found himself, without intending it, in a mute dialogue with Franz, but then slapped his hand down on his papers and said, "Here are my identity documents." "And what do you want us to do about it?" replied the big policeman, loudly. "The way you're carrying on, it's worse than a child. What is it you want? Do you want to get this great, bloody trial of yours over with quickly by talking about ID and arrest warrants with us? We're just coppers, that's all we are. Junior officers like us hardly know one end of an ID card from another, all we've got to do with you is keep an eye on you for ten hours a day and get paid for it. That's all we are. Mind you, what we can do is make sure that the high officials we work for find out just what sort of person it is they're going to arrest, and why he should be arrested, before they issue the warrant. There's no mistake there. Our authorities as far as I know, and I only know the lowest grades, don't go out looking for guilt among the public; it's the guilt that draws them out, like it says in the law, and they have to send us police officers out. That's the law. Where d'you think there'd be any mistake there?" "I don't know this law," said K. "So much the worse for you, then," said the policeman. "It's probably exists only in your heads," said K., he wanted, in some way, to insinuate his way into the thoughts of the policemen, to re-shape those thoughts to his benefit or to make himself at home there. But the policeman just said dismissively, "You'll find out when it affects you." Franz joined in, and said, "Look at this, Willem, he admits he doesn't know the law and at the same time insists he's innocent." "You're quite right, but we can't get him to understand a thing," said the other. K. stopped talking with them; do I, he thought to himself, do I really have to carry on getting tangled up with the chattering of base functionaries like this? - and they admit themselves that they are of the lowest position. They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves. I just need few words with someone of the same social standing as myself and everything will be incomparably clearer, much clearer than a long conversation with these two can make it. He walked up and down the free space in the room a couple of times, across the street he could see the old woman who, now, had pulled an old man, much older than herself, up to the window and had her arms around him. K. had to put an end to this display, "Take me to your superior," he said. "As soon as he wants to see you. Not before," said the policeman, the one called Willem. "And now my advice to you," he added, "is to go into your room, stay calm, and wait and see what's to be done with you. If you take our advice, you won't tire yourself out thinking about things to no purpose, you need to pull yourself together as there's a lot that's going to required of you. You've not behaved towards us the way we deserve after being so good to you, you forget that we, whatever we are, we're still free men and you're not, and that's quite an advantage. But in spite of all that we're still willing, if you've got the money, to go and get you some breakfast from the café over the road."

Without giving any answer to this offer, K. stood still for some time. Perhaps, if he opened the door of the next room or even the front door, the two of them would not dare to stand in his way, perhaps that would be the simplest way to settle the whole thing, by bringing it to a head. But maybe they would grab him, and if he were thrown down on the ground he would lose all the advantage he, in a certain respect, had over them. So he decided on the more certain solution, the way things would go in the natural course of events, and went back in his room without another word either from him or from the policemen.

He threw himself down on his bed, and from the dressing table he took the nice apple that he had put there the previous evening for his breakfast. Now it was all the breakfast he had and anyway, as he confirmed as soon as he took his first, big bite of it, it was far better than a breakfast he could have had through the good will of the policemen from the dirty café. He felt well and confident, he had failed to go into work at the bank this morning but that could easily be excused because of the relatively high position he held there. Should he really send in his explanation? He wondered about it. If nobody believed him, and in this case that would be understandable, he could bring Mrs. Grubach in as a witness, or even the old pair from across the street, who probably even now were on their way over to the window opposite. It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen's point of view, that they had made him go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his breakfast, perhaps? It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable. Maybe, if the policemen had not been so obviously limited in their mental abilities, it could have been supposed that they had come to the same conclusion and saw no danger in leaving him alone because of it. They could watch now, if they wanted, and see how he went over to the cupboard in the wall where he kept a bottle of good schnapps, how he first emptied a glass of it in place of his breakfast and how he then took a second glassful in order to give himself courage, the last one just as a precaution for the unlikely chance it would be needed.

Then he was so startled by a shout to him from the other room that he struck his teeth against the glass. "The supervisor wants to see you!" a voice said. It was only the shout that startled him, this curt, abrupt, military shout, that he would not have expected from the policeman called Franz. In itself, he found the order very welcome. "At last!" he called back, locked the cupboard and, without delay, hurried into the next room. The two policemen were standing there and chased him back into his bedroom as if that were a matter of course. "What d'you think you're doing?" they cried. "Think you're going to see the supervisor dressed in just your shirt, do you? He'd see to it you got a right thumping, and us and all!" "Let go of me for God's sake!" called K., who had already been pushed back as far as his wardrobe, "if you accost me when I'm still in bed you can't expect to find me in my evening dress." "That won't help you," said the policemen, who always became very quiet, almost sad, when K. began to shout, and in that way confused him or, to some extent, brought him to his senses. "Ridiculous formalities!" he grumbled, as he lifted his coat from the chair and kept it in both his hands for a little while, as if holding it out for the policemen's inspection. They shook their heads. "It's got to be a black coat," they said. At that, K. threw the coat to the floor and said - without knowing even himself what he meant by it - "Well it's not going to be the main trial, after all." The policemen laughed, but continued to insist, "It's got to be a black coat." "Well that's alright by me if it makes things go any faster," said K. He opened the wardrobe himself, spent a long time searching through all the clothes, and chose his best black suit which had a short jacket that had greatly surprised those who knew him, then he also pulled out a fresh shirt and began, carefully, to get dressed. He secretly told himself that he had succeeded in speeding things up by letting the policemen forget to make him have a bath. He watched them to see if they might remember after all, but of course it never occurred to them, although Willem did not forget to send Franz up to the supervisor with the message saying that K. was getting dressed.

Once he was properly dressed, K. had to pass by Willem as he went through the next room into the one beyond, the door of which was already wide open. K. knew very well that this room had recently been let to a typist called 'Miss Bürstner'. She was in the habit of going out to work very early and coming back home very late, and K. had never exchanged more than a few words of greeting with her. Now, her bedside table had been pulled into the middle of the room to be used as a desk for these proceedings, and the supervisor sat behind it. He had his legs crossed, and had thrown one arm over the backrest of the chair.

In one corner of the room there were three young people looking at the photographs belonging to Miss Bürstner that had been put into a piece of fabric on the wall. Hung up on the handle of the open window was a white blouse. At the window across the street, there was the old pair again, although now their number had increased, as behind them, and far taller than they were, stood a man with an open shirt that showed his chest and a reddish goatee beard which he squeezed and twisted with his fingers. "Josef K.?" asked the supervisor, perhaps merely to attract K.'s attention as he looked round the room. K. nodded. "I daresay you were quite surprised by all that's been taking place this morning," said the supervisor as, with both hands, he pushed away the few items on the bedside table - the candle and box of matches, a book and a pin cushion which lay there as if they were things he would need for his own business. "Certainly," said K., and he began to feel relaxed now that, at last, he stood in front of someone with some sense, someone with whom he would be able to talk about his situation. "Certainly I'm surprised, but I'm not in any way very surprised." "You're not very surprised?" asked the supervisor, as he positioned the candle in the middle of the table and the other things in a group around it. "Perhaps you don't quite understand me," K. hurriedly pointed out. "What I mean is …" here K. broke off what he was saying and looked round for somewhere to sit. "I may sit down, mayn't I?" he asked. "That's not usual," the supervisor answered. "What I mean is…," said K. without delaying a second time, "that, yes, I am very surprised but when you've been in the world for thirty years already and had to make your own way through everything yourself, which has been my lot, then you become hardened to surprises and don't take them too hard. Especially not what's happened today." "Why especially not what's happened today?" "I wouldn't want to say that I see all of this as a joke, you seem to have gone to too much trouble making all these arrangements for that. Everyone in the house must be taking part in it as well as all of you, that would be going beyond what could be a joke. So I don't want to say that this is a joke." "Quite right," said the supervisor, looking to see how many matches were left in the box. "But on the other hand," K. went on, looking round at everyone there and even wishing he could get the attention of the three who were looking at the photographs, "on the other hand this really can't be all that important. That follows from the fact that I've been indicted, but can't think of the slightest offence for which I could be indicted. But even that is all beside the point, the main question is: Who is issuing the indictment? What office is conducting this affair? Are you officials? None of you is wearing a uniform, unless what you are wearing" - here he turned towards Franz - "is meant to be a uniform, it's actually more of a travelling suit. I require a clear answer to all these questions, and I'm quite sure that once things have been made clear we can take our leave of each other on the best of terms." The supervisor slammed the box of matches down on the table. "You're making a big mistake," he said. "These gentlemen and I have got nothing to do with your business, in fact we know almost nothing about you. We could be wearing uniforms as proper and exact as you like and your situation wouldn't be any the worse for it. As to whether you're on a charge, I can't give you any sort of clear answer to that, I don't even know whether you are or not. You're under arrest, you're quite right about that, but I don't know any more than that. Maybe these officers have been chit-chatting with you, well if they have that's all it is, chit- chat. I can't give you an answer to your questions, but I can give you a bit of advice: You'd better think less about us and what's going to happen to you, and think a bit more about yourself. And stop making all this fuss about your sense of innocence; you don't make such a bad impression, but with all this fuss you're damaging it. And you ought to do a bit less talking, too. Almost everything you've said so far has been things we could have taken from your behaviour, even if you'd said no more than a few words. And what you have said has not exactly been in your favour."

K. stared at the supervisor. Was this man, probably younger than he was, lecturing him like a schoolmaster? Was he being punished for his honesty with a telling off? And was he to learn nothing about the reasons for his arrest or those who were arresting him? He became somewhat cross and began to walk up and down. No-one stopped him doing this and he pushed his sleeves back, felt his chest, straightened his hair, went over to the three men, said, "It makes no sense," at which these three turned round to face him and came towards him with serious expressions. He finally came again to a halt in front of the supervisor's desk. "State Attorney Hasterer is a good friend of mine," he said, "can I telephone him?" "Certainly," said the supervisor, "but I don't know what the point of that will be, I suppose you must have some private matter you want to discuss with him." "What the point is?" shouted K., more disconcerted that cross. "Who do you think you are? You want to see some point in it while you're carrying out something as pointless as it could be? It's enough to make you cry! These gentlemen first accost me, and now they sit or stand about in here and let me be hauled up in front of you. What point there would be, in telephoning a state attorney when I'm ostensibly under arrest? Very well, I won't make the telephone call." "You can call him if you want to," said the supervisor, stretching his hand out towards the outer room where the telephone was, "please, go on, do make your phone call." "No, I don't want to any more," said K., and went over to the window. Across the street, the people were still there at the window, and it was only now that K. had gone up to his window that they seemed to become uneasy about quietly watching what was going on. The old couple wanted to get up but the man behind them calmed them down. "We've got some kind of audience over there," called K. to the supervisor, quite loudly, as he pointed out with his forefinger. "Go away," he then called across to them. And the three of them did immediately retreat a few steps, the old pair even found themselves behind the man who then concealed them with the breadth of his body and seemed, going by the movements of his mouth, to be saying something incomprehensible into the distance. They did not disappear entirely, though, but seemed to be waiting for the moment when they could come back to the window without being noticed. "Intrusive, thoughtless people!" said K. as he turned back into the room. The supervisor may have agreed with him, at least K. thought that was what he saw from the corner of his eye. But it was just as possible that he had not even been listening as he had his hand pressed firmly down on the table and seemed to be comparing the length of his fingers. The two policemen were sitting on a chest covered with a coloured blanket, rubbing their knees. The three young people had put their hands on their hips and were looking round aimlessly. Everything was still, like in some office that has been forgotten about. "Now, gentlemen," called out K., and for a moment it seemed as if he was carrying all of them on his shoulders, "it looks like your business with me is over with. In my opinion, it's best now to stop wondering about whether you're proceeding correctly or incorrectly, and to bring the matter to a peaceful close with a mutual handshake. If you are of the same opinion, then please…" and he walked up to the supervisor's desk and held out his hand to him. The supervisor raised his eyes, bit his lip and looked at K.'s outstretched hand; K still believed the supervisor would do as he suggested. But instead, he stood up, picked up a hard round hat that was laying on Miss Bürstner's bed and put it carefully onto his head, using both hands as if trying on a new hat. "Everything seems so simple to you, doesn't it," he said to K. as he did so, "so you think we should bring the matter to a peaceful close, do you. No, no, that won't do. Mind you, on the other hand I certainly wouldn't want you to think there's no hope for you. No, why should you think that? You're simply under arrest, nothing more than that. That's what I had to tell you, that's what I've done and now I've seen how you've taken it. That's enough for one day and we can take our leave of each other, for the time being at least. I expect you'll want to go in to the bank now, won't you." "In to the bank?" asked K., "I thought I was under arrest." K. said this with a certain amount of defiance as, although his handshake had not been accepted, he was feeling more independent of all these people, especially since the supervisor had stood up. He was playing with them. If they left, he had decided he would run after them and offer to let them arrest him. That's why he even repeated, "How can I go in to the bank when I'm under arrest?" "I see you've misunderstood me," said the supervisor who was already at the door. "It's true that you're under arrest, but that shouldn't stop you from carrying out your job. And there shouldn't be anything to stop you carrying on with your usual life." "In that case it's not too bad, being under arrest," said K., and went up close to the supervisor. "I never meant it should be anything else," he replied. "It hardly seems to have been necessary to notify me of the arrest in that case," said K., and went even closer. The others had also come closer. All of them had gathered together into a narrow space by the door. "That was my duty," said the supervisor. "A silly duty," said K., unyielding. "Maybe so," replied the supervisor, "only don't let's waste our time talking on like this. I had assumed you'd be wanting to go to the bank. As you're paying close attention to every word I'll add this: I'm not forcing you to go to the bank, I'd just assumed you wanted to. And to make things easier for you, and to let you get to the bank with as little fuss as possible I've put these three gentlemen, colleagues of yours, at your disposal." "What's that?" exclaimed K., and looked at the three in astonishment. He could only remember seeing them in their group by the photographs, but these characterless, anaemic young people were indeed officials from his bank, not colleagues of his, that was putting it too high and it showed a gap in the omniscience of the supervisor, but they were nonetheless junior members of staff at the bank. How could K. have failed to see that? How occupied he must have been with the supervisor and the policemen not to have recognised these three! Rabensteiner, with his stiff demeanour and swinging hands, Kullich, with his blonde hair and deep-set eyes, and Kaminer, with his involuntary grin caused by chronic muscle spasms. "Good morning," said K. after a while, extending his hand to the gentlemen as they bowed correctly to him. "I didn't recognise you at all. So, we'll go into work now, shall we?" The gentlemen laughed and nodded enthusiastically, as if that was what they had been waiting for all the time, except that K. had left his hat in his room so they all dashed, one after another, into the room to fetch it, which caused a certain amount of embarrassment. K. stood where he was and watched them through the open double doorway, the last to go, of course, was the apathetic Rabensteiner who had broken into no more than an elegant trot. Kaminer got to the hat and K., as he often had to do at the bank, forcibly reminded himself that the grin was not deliberate, that he in fact wasn't able to grin deliberately. At that moment Mrs. Grubach opened the door from the hallway into the living room where all the people were. She did not seem to feel guilty about anything at all, and K., as often before, looked down at the belt of her apron which, for no reason, cut so deeply into her hefty body. Once downstairs, K., with his watch in his hand, decided to take a taxi - he had already been delayed by half an hour and there was no need to make the delay any longer. Kaminer ran to the corner to summon it, and the two others were making obvious efforts to keep K. diverted when Kullich pointed to the doorway of the house on the other side of the street where the large man with the blonde goatee beard appeared and, a little embarrassed at first at letting himself be seen in his full height, stepped back to the wall and leant against it. The old couple were probably still on the stairs. K. was cross with Kullich for pointing out this man whom he had already seen himself, in fact whom he had been expecting. "Don't look at him!" he snapped, without noticing how odd it was to speak to free men in this way. But there was no explanation needed anyway as just then the taxi arrived, they sat inside and set off. Inside the taxi, K. remembered that he had not noticed the supervisor and the policemen leaving - the supervisor had stopped him noticing the three bank staff and now the three bank staff had stopped him noticing the supervisor. This showed that K. was not very attentive, and he resolved to watch himself more carefully in this respect. Nonetheless, he gave it no thought as he twisted himself round and leant over onto the rear shelf of the car to catch sight of the supervisor and the policemen if he could. But he turned back round straight away and leant comfortably into the corner of the taxi without even having made the effort to see anyone. Although it did not seem like it, now was just the time when he needed some encouragement, but the gentlemen seemed tired just then, Rabensteiner looked out of the car to the right, Kullich to the left and only Kaminer was there with his grin at K.'s service. It would have been inhumane to make fun of that.

That spring, whenever possible, K. usually spent his evenings after work - he usually stayed in the office until nine o'clock - with a short walk, either by himself or in the company of some of the bank officials, and then he would go into a pub where he would sit at the regulars' table with mostly older men until eleven. There were, however, also exceptions to this habit, times, for instance, when K. was invited by the bank's manager (whom he greatly respected for his industry and trustworthiness) to go with him for a ride in his car or to eat dinner with him at his large house. K. would also go, once a week, to see a girl called Elsa who worked as a waitress in a wine bar through the night until late in the morning. During the daytime she only received visitors while still in bed.

That evening, though, - the day had passed quickly with a lot of hard work and many respectful and friendly birthday greetings - K. wanted to go straight home. Each time he had any small break from the day's work he considered, without knowing exactly what he had in mind, that Mrs. Grubach's flat seemed to have been put into great disarray by the events of that morning, and that it was up to him to put it back into order. Once order had been restored, every trace of those events would have been erased and everything would take its previous course once more. In particular, there was nothing to fear from the three bank officials, they had immersed themselves back into their paperwork and there was no alteration to be seen in them. K. had called each of them, separately or all together, into his office that day for no other reason than to observe them; he was always satisfied and had always been able to let them go again.

At half past nine that evening, when he arrived back in front of the building where he lived, he met a young lad in the doorway who was standing there, his legs apart and smoking a pipe. "Who are you?" immediately asked K., bringing his face close to the lad's, as it was hard to see in the half light of the landing. "I'm the landlord's son, sir," answered the lad, taking the pipe from his mouth and stepping to one side. "The landlord's son?" asked K., and impatiently knocked on the ground with his stick. "Did you want anything, sir? Would you like me to fetch my father?" "No, no," said K., there was something forgiving in his voice, as if the boy had harmed him in some way and he was excusing him. "It's alright," he said then, and went on, but before going up the stairs he turned round once more.

He could have gone directly to his room, but as he wanted to speak with Mrs. Grubach he went straight to her door and knocked. She was sat at the table with a knitted stocking and a pile of old stockings in front of her. K. apologised, a little embarrassed at coming so late, but Mrs. Grubach was very friendly and did not want to hear any apology, she was always ready to speak to him, he knew very well that he was her best and her favourite tenant. K. looked round the room, it looked exactly as it usually did, the breakfast dishes, which had been on the table by the window that morning, had already been cleared away. "A woman's hands will do many things when no-one's looking," he thought, he might himself have smashed all the dishes on the spot but certainly would not have been able to carry it all out. He looked at Mrs. Grubach with some gratitude. "Why are you working so late?" he asked. They were now both sitting at the table, and K. now and then sank his hands into the pile of stockings. "There's a lot of work to do," she said, "during the day I belong to the tenants; if I'm to sort out my own things there are only the evenings left to me." "I fear I may have caused you some exceptional work today." "How do you mean, Mr. K.?" she asked, becoming more interested and leaving her work in her lap. "I mean the men who were here this morning." "Oh, I see," she said, and went peacefully back to what she was doing, "that was no trouble, not especially." K. looked on in silence as she took up the knitted stocking once more. She seems surprised at my mentioning it, he thought, she seems to think it's improper for me to mention it. All the more important for me to do so. An old woman is the only person I can speak about it with. "But it must have caused some work for you," he said then, "but it won't happen again." "No, it can't happen again," she agreed, and smiled at K. in a way that was almost pained. "Do you mean that seriously?" asked K. "Yes," she said, more gently, "but the important thing is you mustn't take it too hard. There are so many awful things happening in the world! As you're being so honest with me, Mr. K., I can admit to you that I listened to a little of what was going on from behind the door, and that those two policemen told me one or two things as well. It's all to do with your happiness, and that's something that's quite close to my heart, perhaps more than it should be as I am, after all, only your landlady. Anyway, so I heard one or two things but I can't really say that it's about anything very serious. No. You have been arrested, but it's not in the same way as when they arrest a thief. If you're arrested in the same way as a thief, then it's bad, but an arrest like this … . It seems to me that it's something very complicated - forgive me if I'm saying something stupid - something very complicated that I don't understand, but something that you don't really need to understand anyway."

"There's nothing stupid about what you've said, Mrs. Grubach, or at least I partly agree with you, only, the way I judge the whole thing is harsher than yours, and think it's not only not something complicated but simply a fuss about nothing. I was just caught unawares, that's what happened. If I had got up as soon as I was awake without letting myself get confused because Anna wasn't there, if I'd got up and paid no regard to anyone who might have been in my way and come straight to you, if I'd done something like having my breakfast in the kitchen as an exception, asked you to bring my clothes from my room, in short, if I had behaved sensibly then nothing more would have happened, everything that was waiting to happen would have been stifled. People are so often unprepared. In the bank, for example, I am well prepared, nothing of this sort could possibly happen to me there, I have my own assistant there, there are telephones for internal and external calls in front of me on the desk, I continually receive visits from people, representatives, officials, but besides that, and most importantly, I'm always occupied with my work, that's to say I'm always alert, it would even be a pleasure for me to find myself faced with something of that sort. But now it's over with, and I didn't really even want to talk about it any more, only I wanted to hear what you, as a sensible woman, thought about it all, and I'm very glad to hear that we're in agreement. But now you must give me your hand, an agreement of this sort needs to be confirmed with a handshake."

Will she shake hands with me? The supervisor didn't shake hands, he thought, and looked at the woman differently from before, examining her. She stood up, as he had also stood up, and was a little self- conscious, she hadn't been able to understand everything that K. said. As a result of this self consciousness she said something that she certainly did not intend and certainly was not appropriate. "Don't take it so hard, Mr. K.," she said, with tears in her voice and also, of course, forgetting the handshake. "I didn't know I was taking it hard," said K., feeling suddenly tired and seeing that if this woman did agree with him it was of very little value.

Before going out the door he asked, "Is Miss Bürstner home?" "No," said Mrs. Grubach, smiling as she gave this simple piece of information, saying something sensible at last. "She's at the theatre. Did you want to see her? Should I give her a message?" "I, er, I just wanted to have a few words with her." "I'm afraid I don't know when she's coming in; she usually gets back late when she's been to the theatre." "It really doesn't matter," said K. his head hanging as he turned to the door to leave, "I just wanted to give her my apology for taking over her room today." "There's no need for that, Mr. K., you're too conscientious, the young lady doesn't know anything about it, she hasn't been home since early this morning and everything's been tidied up again, you can see for yourself." And she opened the door to Miss Bürstner's room. "Thank you, I'll take your word for it," said K, but went nonetheless over to the open door. The moon shone quietly into the unlit room. As far as could be seen, everything was indeed in its place, not even the blouse was hanging on the window handle. The pillows on the bed looked remarkably plump as they lay half in the moonlight. "Miss Bürstner often comes home late," said K., looking at Mrs. Grubach as if that were her responsibility. "That's how young people are!" said Mrs. Grubach to excuse herself. "Of course, of course," said K., "but it can be taken too far." "Yes, it can be," said Mrs. Grubach, "you're so right, Mr. K. Perhaps it is in this case. I certainly wouldn't want to say anything nasty about Miss Bürstner, she is a good, sweet girl, friendly, tidy, punctual, works hard, I appreciate all that very much, but one thing is true, she ought to have more pride, be a bit less forthcoming. Twice this month already, in the street over the way, I've seen her with a different gentleman. I really don't like saying this, you're the only one I've said this to, Mr. K., I swear to God, but I'm going to have no choice but to have a few words with Miss Bürstner about it myself. And it's not the only thing about her that I'm worried about." "Mrs. Grubach, you are on quite the wrong track," said K., so angry that he was hardly able to hide it, "and you have moreover misunderstood what I was saying about Miss Bürstner, that is not what I meant. In fact I warn you quite directly not to say anything to her, you are quite mistaken, I know Miss Bürstner very well and there is no truth at all in what you say. And what's more, perhaps I'm going to far, I don't want to get in your way, say to her whatever you see fit. Good night." "Mr. K.," said Mrs. Grubach as if asking him for something and hurrying to his door which he had already opened, "I don't want to speak to Miss Bürstner at all, not yet, of course I'll continue to keep an eye on her but you're the only one I've told what I know. And it is, after all something that everyone who lets rooms has to do if she's to keep the house decent, that's all I'm trying to do." "Decent!" called out K. through the crack in the door, "if you want to keep the house decent you'll first have to give me notice." Then he slammed the door shut, there was a gentle knocking to which he paid no more attention.

He did not feel at all like going to bed, so he decided to stay up, and this would also give him the chance to find out when Miss Bürstner would arrive home. Perhaps it would also still be possible, even if a little inappropriate, to have a few words with her. As he lay there by the window, pressing his hands to his tired eyes, he even thought for a moment that he might punish Mrs. Grubach by persuading Miss Bürstner to give in her notice at the same time as he would. But he immediately realised that that would be shockingly excessive, and there would even be the suspicion that he was moving house because of the incidents of that morning. Nothing would have been more nonsensical and, above all, more pointless and contemptible.

When he had become tired of looking out onto the empty street he slightly opened the door to the living room so that he could see anyone who entered the flat from where he was and lay down on the couch. He lay there, quietly smoking a cigar, until about eleven o'clock. He wasn't able to hold out longer than that, and went a little way into the hallway as if in that way he could make Miss Bürstner arrive sooner. He had no particular desire for her, he could not even remember what she looked like, but now he wanted to speak to her and it irritated him that her late arrival home meant this day would be full of unease and disorder right to its very end. It was also her fault that he had not had any dinner that evening and that he had been unable to visit Elsa as he had intended. He could still make up for both of those things, though, if he went to the wine bar where Elsa worked. He wanted to do so even later, after the discussion with Miss Bürstner.

It was already gone half past eleven when someone could be heard in the stairway. K., who had been lost in his thoughts in the hallway, walking up and down loudly as if it were his own room, fled behind his door. Miss Bürstner had arrived. Shivering, she pulled a silk shawl over her slender shoulders as she locked the door. The next moment she would certainly go into her room, where K. ought not to intrude in the middle of the night; that meant he would have to speak to her now, but, unfortunately, he had not put the electric light on in his room so that when he stepped out of the dark it would give the impression of being an attack and would certainly, at the very least, have been quite alarming. There was no time to lose, and in his helplessness he whispered through the crack of the door, "Miss Bürstner." It sounded like he was pleading with her, not calling to her. "Is there someone there?" asked Miss Bürstner, looking round with her eyes wide open. "It's me," said K. and came out. "Oh, Mr. K.!" said Miss Bürstner with a smile. "Good Evening," and offered him her hand. "I wanted to have a word with you, if you would allow me?" "Now?" asked Miss Bürstner, "does it have to be now? It is a little odd, isn't it?" "I've been waiting for you since nine o'clock." "Well, I was at the theatre, I didn't know anything about you waiting for me." "The reason I need to speak to you only came up today" "I see, well I don't see why not, I suppose, apart from being so tired I could drop. Come into my room for a few minutes then. We certainly can't talk out here, we'd wake everyone up and I think that would be more unpleasant for us than for them. Wait here till I've put the light on in my room, and then turn the light down out here." K. did as he was told, and then even waited until Miss Bürstner came out of her room and quietly invited him, once more, to come in. "Sit down," she said, indicating the ottoman, while she herself remained standing by the bedpost despite the tiredness she had spoken of; she did not even take off her hat, which was small but decorated with an abundance of flowers. "What is it you wanted, then? I'm really quite curious." She gently crossed her legs. "I expect you'll say," K. began, "that the matter really isn't all that urgent and we don't need to talk about it right now, but …" "I never listen to introductions," said Miss Bürstner. "That makes my job so much easier," said K. "This morning, to some extent through my fault, your room was made a little untidy, this happened because of people I did not know and against my will but, as I said, because of my fault; I wanted to apologise for it." "My room?" asked Miss Bürstner, and instead of looking round the room scrutinised K. "It is true," said K., and now, for the first time, they looked each other in the eyes, "there's no point in saying exactly how this came about." "But that's the interesting thing about it," said Miss Bürstner. "No," said K. "Well then," said Miss Bürstner, "I don't want to force my way into any secrets, if you insist that it's of no interest I won't insist. I'm quite happy to forgive you for it, as you ask, especially as I can't see anything at all that's been left untidy." With her hand laid flat on her lower hip, she made a tour around the room. At the mat where the photographs were she stopped. "Look at this!" she cried. "My photographs really have been put in the wrong places. Oh, that's horrible. Someone really has been in my room without permission." K. nodded, and quietly cursed Kaminer who worked at his bank and who was always active doing things that had neither use nor purpose. "It is odd," said Miss Bürstner, "that I'm forced to forbid you to do something that you ought to have forbidden yourself to do, namely to come into my room when I'm not here." "But I did explain to you," said K., and went over to join her by the photographs, "that it wasn't me who interfered with your photographs; but as you don't believe me I'll have to admit that the investigating committee brought along three bank employees with them, one of them must have touched your photographs and as soon as I get the chance I'll ask to have him dismissed from the bank. Yes, there was an investigating committee here," added K., as the young lady was looking at him enquiringly. "Because of you?" she asked. "Yes," answered K. "No!" the lady cried with a laugh. "Yes, they were," said K., "you believe that I'm innocent then, do you?" "Well now, innocent …" said the lady, "I don't want to start making any pronouncements that might have serious consequences, I don't really know you after all, it means they're dealing with a serious criminal if they send an investigating committee straight out to get him. But you're not in custody now - at least I take it you've not escaped from prison considering that you seem quite calm - so you can't have committed any crime of that sort." "Yes," said K., "but it might be that the investigating committee could see that I'm innocent, or not so guilty as had been supposed." "Yes, that's certainly a possibility," said Miss Bürstner, who seemed very interested. "Listen," said K., "you don't have much experience in legal matters." "No, that's true, I don't," said Miss Bürstner, "and I've often regretted it, as I'd like to know everything and I'm very interested in legal matters. There's something peculiarly attractive about the law, isn't there? But I'll certainly be perfecting my knowledge in this area, as next month I start work in a legal office." "That's very good," said K., "that means you'll be able to give me some help with my trial." "That could well be," said Miss Bürstner, "why not? I like to make use of what I know." "I mean it quite seriously," said K., "or at least, half seriously, as you do. This affair is too petty to call in a lawyer, but I could make good use of someone who could give me advice." "Yes, but if I'm to give you advice I'll have to know what it's all about," said Miss Bürstner. "That's exactly the problem," said K., "I don't know that myself." "So you have been making fun of me, then," said Miss Bürstner exceedingly disappointed, "you really ought not to try something like that on at this time of night." And she stepped away from the photographs where they had stood so long together. "Miss Bürstner, no," said K., "I'm not making fun of you. Please believe me! I've already told you everything I know. More than I know, in fact, as it actually wasn't even an investigating committee, that's just what I called them because I don't know what else to call them. There was no cross questioning at all, I was merely arrested, but by a committee." Miss Bürstner sat on the ottoman and laughed again. "What was it like then?" she asked. "It was terrible" said K., although his mind was no longer on the subject, he had become totally absorbed by Miss Bürstner's gaze who was supporting her chin on one hand - the elbow rested on the cushion of the ottoman - and slowly stroking her hip with the other. "That's too vague," said Miss Bürstner. "What's too vague?" asked K. Then he remembered himself and asked, "Would you like me to show you what it was like?" He wanted to move in some way but did not want to leave. "I'm already tired," said Miss Bürstner. "You arrived back so late," said K. "Now you've started telling me off. Well I suppose I deserve it as I shouldn't have let you in here in the first place, and it turns out there wasn't even any point." "Oh, there was a point, you'll see now how important a point it was," said K. "May I move this table away from your bedside and put it here?" "What do you think you're doing?" said Miss Bürstner. "Of course you can't!" "In that case I can't show you," said K., quite upset, as if Miss Bürstner had committed some incomprehensible offence against him. "Alright then, if you need it to show what you mean, just take the bedside table then," said Miss Bürstner, and after a short pause added in a weak voice, "I'm so tired I'm allowing more than I ought to." K. put the little table in the middle of the room and sat down behind it. "You have to get a proper idea of where the people were situated, it is very interesting. I'm the supervisor, sitting over there on the chest are two policemen, standing next to the photographs there are three young people. Hanging on the handle of the window is a white blouse - I just mention that by the way. And now it begins. Ah yes, I'm forgetting myself, the most important person of all, so I'm standing here in front of the table. The supervisor is sitting extremely comfortably with his legs crossed and his arm hanging over the backrest here like some layabout. And now it really does begin. The supervisor calls out as if he had to wake me up, in fact he shouts at me, I'm afraid, if I'm to make it clear to you, I'll have to shout as well, and it's nothing more than my name that he shouts out." Miss Bürstner, laughing as she listened to him, laid her forefinger on her mouth so that K. would not shout, but it was too late. K. was too engrossed in his role and slowly called out, "Josef K.!". It was not as loud as he had threatened, but nonetheless, once he had suddenly called it out, the cry seemed gradually to spread itself all round the room.

There was a series of loud, curt and regular knocks at the door of the adjoining room. Miss Bürstner went pale and laid her hand on her heart. K. was especially startled, as for a moment he had been quite unable to think of anything other than the events of that morning and the girl for whom he was performing them. He had hardly pulled himself together when he jumped over to Miss Bürstner and took her hand. "Don't be afraid," he whispered, "I'll put everything right. But who can it be? It's only the living room next door, nobody sleeps in there." "Yes they do," whispered Miss Bürstner into K.'s ear, "a nephew of Mrs. Grubach's, an captain in the army, has been sleeping there since yesterday. There's no other room free. I'd forgotten about it too. Why did you have to shout like that? You've made me quite upset." "There is no reason for it," said K., and, now as she sank back onto the cushion, kissed her forehead. "Go away, go away," she said, hurriedly sitting back up, "get out of here, go, what is it you want, he's listening at the door he can hear everything. You're causing me so much trouble!" "I won't go," said K., "until you've calmed down a bit. Come over into the other corner of the room, he won't be able to hear us there." She let him lead her there. "Don't forget," he said, "although this might be unpleasant for you you're not in any real danger. You know how much esteem Mrs. Grubach has for me, she's the one who will make all the decisions in this, especially as the captain is her nephew, but she believes everything I say without question. What's more, she has borrowed a large sum of money from me and that makes her dependent on me. I will confirm whatever you say to explain our being here together, however inappropriate it might be, and I guarantee to make sure that Mrs. Grubach will not only say she believes the explanation in public but will believe it truly and sincerely. You will have no need to consider me in any way. If you wish to let it be known that I have attacked you then Mrs. Grubach will be informed of such and she will believe it without even losing her trust in me, that's how much respect she has for me." Miss Bürstner looked at the floor in front of her, quiet and a little sunk in on herself. "Why would Mrs. Grubach not believe that I've attacked you?" added K. He looked at her hair in front of him, parted, bunched down, reddish and firmly held in place. He thought she would look up at him, but without changing her manner she said, "Forgive me, but it was the suddenness of the knocking that startled me so much, not so much what the consequences of the captain being here might be. It was all so quiet after you'd shouted, and then there was the knocking, that's was made me so shocked, and I was sitting right by the door, the knocking was right next to me. Thank you for your suggestions, but I won't accept them. I can bear the responsibility for anything that happens in my room myself, and I can do so with anyone. I'm surprised you don't realise just how insulting your suggestions are and what they imply about me, although I certainly acknowledge your good intentions. But now, please go, leave me alone, I need you to go now even more than I did earlier. The couple of minutes you asked for have grown into half an hour, more than half an hour now." K. took hold of her hand, and then of her wrist, "You're not cross with me, though?" he said. She pulled her hand away and answered, "No, no, I'm never cross with anyone." He grasped her wrist once more, she tolerated it now and, in that way, lead him to the door. He had fully intended to leave. But when he reached the door he came to a halt as if he hadn't expected to find a door there, Miss Bürstner made use of that moment to get herself free, open the door, slip out into the hallway and gently say to K. from there, "Now, come along, please. Look," she pointed to the captain's door, from under which there was a light shining, "he's put a light on and he's laughing at us." "Alright, I'm coming," said K., moved forward, took hold of her, kissed her on the mouth and then over her whole face like a thirsty animal lapping with its tongue when it eventually finds water. He finally kissed her on her neck and her throat and left his lips pressed there for a long time. He did not look up until there was a noise from the captain's room. "I'll go now," he said, he wanted to address Miss Bürstner by her Christian name, but did not know it. She gave him a tired nod, offered him her hand to kiss as she turned away as if she did not know what she was doing, and went back into her room with her head bowed. A short while later, K. was lying in his bed. He very soon went to sleep, but before he did he thought a little while about his behaviour, he was satisfied with it but felt some surprise that he was not more satisfied; he was seriously worried about Miss Bürstner because of the captain.

Chapter Two First Cross-examination

K. was informed by telephone that there would be a small hearing concerning his case the following Sunday. He was made aware that these cross examinations would follow one another regularly, perhaps not every week but quite frequently. On the one hand it was in everyone's interest to bring proceedings quickly to their conclusion, but on the other hand every aspect of the examinations had to be carried out thoroughly without lasting too long because of the associated stress. For these reasons, it had been decided to hold a series of brief examinations following on one after another. Sunday had been chosen as the day for the hearings so that K. would not be disturbed in his professional work. It was assumed that he would be in agreement with this, but if he wished for another date then, as far as possible, he would be accommodated. Cross-examinations could even be held in the night, for instance, but K. would probably not be fresh enough at that time. Anyway, as long as K. made no objection, the hearing would be left on Sundays. It was a matter of course that he would have to appear without fail, there was probably no need to point this out to him. He would be given the number of the building where he was to present himself, which was in a street in a suburb well away from the city centre which K. had never been to before.

Once he had received this notice, K. hung up the receiver without giving an answer; he had decided immediately to go there that Sunday, it was certainly necessary, proceedings had begun and he had to face up to it, and this first examination would probably also be the last. He was still standing in thought by the telephone when he heard the voice of the deputy director behind him - he wanted to use the telephone but K. stood in his way. "Bad news?" asked the deputy director casually, not in order to find anything out but just to get K. away from the device. "No, no," said K., he stepped to one side but did not go away entirely. The deputy director picked up the receiver and, as he waited for his connection, turned away from it and said to K., "One question, Mr. K.: Would you like to give me the pleasure of joining me on my sailing boat on Sunday morning? There's quite a few people coming, you're bound to know some of them. One of them is Hasterer, the state attorney. Would you like to come along? Do come along!" K. tried to pay attention to what the deputy director was saying. It was of no small importance for him, as this invitation from the deputy director, with whom he had never got on very well, meant that he was trying to improve his relations with him. It showed how important K. had become in the bank and how its second most important official seemed to value his friendship, or at least his impartiality. He was only speaking at the side of the telephone receiver while he waited for his connection, but in giving this invitation the deputy director was humbling himself. But K. would have to humiliate him a second time as a result, he said, "Thank you very much, but I'm afraid I will have no time on Sunday, I have a previous obligation." "Pity," said the deputy director, and turned to the telephone conversation that had just been connected. It was not a short conversation, but K., remained standing confused by the instrument all the time it was going on. It was only when the deputy director hung up that he was shocked into awareness and said, in order to partially excuse his standing there for no reason, "I've just received a telephone call, there's somewhere I need to go, but they forgot to tell me what time." "Ask them then," said the deputy director. "It's not that important," said K., although in that way his earlier excuse, already weak enough, was made even weaker. As he went, the deputy director continued to speak about other things. K. forced himself to answer, but his thoughts were mainly about that Sunday, how it would be best to get there for nine o'clock in the morning as that was the time that courts always start work on weekdays.

The weather was dull on Sunday. K. was very tired, as he had stayed out drinking until late in the night celebrating with some of the regulars, and he had almost overslept. He dressed hurriedly, without the time to think and assemble the various plans he had worked out during the week. With no breakfast, he rushed to the suburb he had been told about. Oddly enough, although he had little time to look around him, he came across the three bank officials involved in his case, Rabensteiner, Kullich and Kaminer. The first two were travelling in a tram that went across K.'s route, but Kaminer sat on the terrace of a café and leant curiously over the wall as K. came over. All of them seemed to be looking at him, surprised at seeing their superior running; it was a kind of pride that made K. want to go on foot, this was his affair and the idea of any help from strangers, however slight, was repulsive to him, he also wanted to avoid asking for anyone's help because that would initiate them into the affair even if only slightly. And after all, he had no wish at all to humiliate himself before the committee by being too punctual. Anyway, now he was running so that he would get there by nine o'clock if at all possible, even though he had no appointment for this time.

He had thought that he would recognise the building from a distance by some kind of sign, without knowing exactly what the sign would look like, or from some particular kind of activity outside the entrance. K. had been told that the building was in Juliusstrasse, but when he stood at the street's entrance it consisted on each side of almost nothing but monotonous, grey constructions, tall blocks of flats occupied by poor people. Now, on a Sunday morning, most of the windows were occupied, men in their shirtsleeves leant out smoking, or carefully and gently held small children on the sills. Other windows were piled up with bedding, above which the dishevelled head of a woman would briefly appear. People called out to each other across the street, one of the calls provoked a loud laugh about K. himself. It was a long street, and spaced evenly along it were small shops below street level, selling various kinds of foodstuffs, which you reached by going down a few steps. Women went in and out of them or stood chatting on the steps. A fruitmonger, taking his goods up to the windows, was just as inattentive as K. and nearly knocked him down with his cart. Just then, a gramophone, which in better parts of town would have been seen as worn out, began to play some murderous tune.

K. went further into the street, slowly, as if he had plenty of time now, or as if the examining magistrate were looking at him from one of the windows and therefore knew that K. had found his way there. It was shortly after nine. The building was quite far down the street, it covered so much area it was almost extraordinary, and the gateway in particular was tall and long. It was clearly intended for delivery wagons belonging to the various warehouses all round the yard which were now locked up and carried the names of companies some of which K. knew from his work at the bank. In contrast with his usual habits, he remained standing a while at the entrance to the yard taking in all these external details. Near him, there was a bare-footed man sitting on a crate and reading a newspaper. There were two lads swinging on a hand cart. In front of a pump stood a weak, young girl in a bedjacket who, as the water flowed into her can, looked at K. There was a piece of rope stretched between two windows in a corner of the yard, with some washing hanging on it to dry. A man stood below it calling out instructions to direct the work being done.

K. went over to the stairway to get to the room where the hearing was to take place, but then stood still again as besides these steps he could see three other stairway entrances, and there also seemed to be a small passageway at the end of the yard leading into a second yard. It irritated him that he had not been given more precise directions to the room, it meant they were either being especially neglectful with him or especially indifferent, and he decided to make that clear to them very loudly and very unambiguously. In the end he decided to climb up the stairs, his thoughts playing on something that he remembered the policeman, Willem, saying to him; that the court is attracted by the guilt, from which it followed that the courtroom must be on the stairway that K. selected by chance.

As he went up he disturbed a large group of children playing on the stairs who looked at him as he stepped through their rows. "Next time I come here," he said to himself, "I must either bring sweets with me to make them like me or a stick to hit them with." Just before he reached the first landing he even had to wait a little while until a ball had finished its movement, two small lads with sly faces like grown-up scoundrels held him by his trouser-legs until it had; if he were to shake them off he would have to hurt them, and he was afraid of what noise they would make by shouting.

On the first floor, his search began for real. He still felt unable to ask for the investigating committee, and so he invented a joiner called Lanz - that name occurred to him because the captain, Mrs. Grubach's nephew, was called Lanz - so that he could ask at every flat whether Lanz the joiner lived there and thus obtain a chance to look into the rooms. It turned out, though, that that was mostly possible without further ado, as almost all the doors were left open and the children ran in and out. Most of them were small, one-windowed rooms where they also did the cooking. Many women held babies in one arm and worked at the stove with the other. Half grown girls, who seemed to be dressed in just their pinafores worked hardest running to and fro. In every room, the beds were still in use by people who were ill, or still asleep, or people stretched out on them in their clothes. K. knocked at the flats where the doors were closed and asked whether Lanz the joiner lived there. It was usually a woman who opened the door, heard the enquiry and turned to somebody in the room who would raise himself from the bed. "The gentleman's asking if a joiner called Lanz, lives here." "A joiner, called Lanz?" he would ask from the bed." "That's right," K. would say, although it was clear that the investigating committee was not to be found there, and so his task was at an end. There were many who thought it must be very important for K. to find Lanz the joiner and thought long about it, naming a joiner who was not called Lanz or giving a name that had some vague similarity with Lanz, or they asked neighbours or accompanied K. to a door a long way away where they thought someone of that sort might live in the back part of the building or where someone would be who could advise K. better than they could themselves. K. eventually had to give up asking if he did not want to be led all round from floor to floor in this way. He regretted his initial plan, which had at first seemed so practical to him. As he reached the fifth floor, he decided to give up the search, took his leave of a friendly, young worker who wanted to lead him on still further and went down the stairs. But then the thought of how much time he was wasting made him cross, he went back again and knocked at the first door on the fifth floor. The first thing he saw in the small room was a large clock on the wall which already showed ten o'clock. "Is there a joiner called Lanz who lives here?" he asked. "Pardon?" said a young woman with black, shining eyes who was, at that moment, washing children's underclothes in a bucket. She pointed her wet hand towards the open door of the adjoining room.

K. thought he had stepped into a meeting. A medium sized, two windowed room was filled with the most diverse crowd of people - nobody paid any attention to the person who had just entered. Close under its ceiling it was surrounded by a gallery which was also fully occupied and where the people could only stand bent down with their heads and their backs touching the ceiling. K., who found the air too stuffy, stepped out again and said to the young woman, who had probably misunderstood what he had said, "I asked for a joiner, someone by the name of Lanz." "Yes," said the woman, "please go on in." K. would probably not have followed her if the woman had not gone up to him, taken hold of the door handle and said, "I'll have to close the door after you, no-one else will be allowed in." "Very sensible," said K., "but it's too full already." But then he went back in anyway. He passed through between two men who were talking beside the door - one of them held both hands far out in front of himself making the movements of counting out money, the other looked him closely in the eyes - and someone took him by the hand. It was a small, red-faced youth. "Come in, come in," he said. K. let himself be led by him, and it turned out that there was - surprisingly in a densely packed crowd of people moving to and fro - a narrow passage which may have been the division between two factions; this idea was reinforced by the fact that in the first few rows to the left and the right of him there was hardly any face looking in his direction, he saw nothing but the backs of people directing their speech and their movements only towards members of their own side. Most of them were dressed in black, in old, long, formal frock coats that hung down loosely around them. These clothes were the only thing that puzzled K., as he would otherwise have taken the whole assembly for a local political meeting.

At the other end of the hall where K. had been led there was a little table set at an angle on a very low podium which was as overcrowded as everywhere else, and behind the table, near the edge of the podium, sat a small, fat, wheezing man who was talking with someone behind him. This second man was standing with his legs crossed and his elbows on the backrest of the chair, provoking much laughter. From time to time he threw his arm in the air as if doing a caricature of someone. The youth who was leading K. had some difficulty in reporting to the man. He had already tried twice to tell him something, standing on tip- toe, but without getting the man's attention as he sat there above him. It was only when one of the people up on the podium drew his attention to the youth that the man turned to him and leant down to hear what it was he quietly said. Then he pulled out his watch and quickly looked over at K. "You should have been here one hour and five minutes ago," he said. K. was going to give him a reply but had no time to do so, as hardly had the man spoken than a general muttering arose all over the right hand side of the hall. "You should have been here one hour and five minutes ago," the man now repeated, raising his voice this time, and quickly looked round the hall beneath him. The muttering also became immediately louder and, as the man said nothing more, died away only gradually. Now the hall was much quieter than when K. had entered. Only the people up in the gallery had not stopped passing remarks. As far as could be distinguished, up in the half-darkness, dust and haze, they seemed to be less well dressed than those below. Many of them had brought pillows that they had put between their heads and the ceiling so that they would not hurt themselves pressed against it.

K. had decided he would do more watching than talking, so he did not defend himself for supposedly having come late, and simply said, "Well maybe I have arrived late, I'm here now." There followed loud applause, once more from the right hand side of the hall. Easy people to get on your side, thought K., and was bothered only by the quiet from the left hand side which was directly behind him and from which there was applause from only a few individuals. He wondered what he could say to get all of them to support him together or, if that were not possible, to at least get the support of the others for a while.

"Yes," said the man, "but I'm now no longer under any obligation to hear your case" - there was once more a muttering, but this time it was misleading as the man waved the people's objections aside with his hand and continued - "I will, however, as an exception, continue with it today. But you should never arrive late like this again. And now, step forward!" Someone jumped down from the podium so that there would be a place free for K., and K. stepped up onto it. He stood pressed closely against the table, the press of the crowd behind him was so great that he had to press back against it if he did not want to push the judge's desk down off the podium and perhaps the judge along with it.

The judge, however, paid no attention to that but sat very comfortably on his chair and, after saying a few words to close his discussion with the man behind him, reached for a little note book, the only item on his desk. It was like an old school exercise book and had become quite misshapen from much thumbing. "Now then," said the judge, thumbing through the book. He turned to K. with the tone of someone who knows his facts and said, "you are a house painter?" "No," said K., "I am the chief clerk in a large bank." This reply was followed by laughter among the right hand faction down in the hall, it was so hearty that K. couldn't stop himself joining in with it. The people supported themselves with their hands on their knees and shook as if suffering a serious attack of coughing. Even some of those in the gallery were laughing. The judge had become quite cross but seemed to have no power over those below him in the hall, he tried to reduce what harm had been done in the gallery and jumped up threatening them, his eyebrows, until then hardly remarkable, pushed themselves up and became big, black and bushy over his eyes.

The left hand side of the hall was still quiet, though, the people stood there in rows with their faces looking towards the podium listening to what was being said there, they observed the noise from the other side of the hall with the same quietness and even allowed some individuals from their own ranks, here and there, to go forward into the other faction. The people in the left faction were not only fewer in number than the right but probably were no more important than them, although their behaviour was calmer and that made it seem like they were. When K. now began to speak he was convinced he was doing it in the same way as them.

"Your question, My Lord, as to whether I am a house painter - in fact even more than that, you did not ask at all but merely imposed it on me - is symptomatic of the whole way these proceedings against me are being carried out. Perhaps you will object that there are no proceedings against me. You will be quite right, as there are proceedings only if I acknowledge that there are. But, for the moment, I do acknowledge it, out of pity for yourselves to a large extent. It's impossible not to observe all this business without feeling pity. I don't say things are being done without due care but I would like to make it clear that it is I who make the acknowledgement."

K. stopped speaking and looked down into the hall. He had spoken sharply, more sharply than he had intended, but he had been quite right. It should have been rewarded with some applause here and there but everything was quiet, they were all clearly waiting for what would follow, perhaps the quietness was laying the ground for an outbreak of activity that would bring this whole affair to an end. It was somewhat disturbing that just then the door at the end of the hall opened, the young washerwoman, who seemed to have finished her work, came in and, despite all her caution, attracted the attention of some of the people there. It was only the judge who gave K. any direct pleasure, as he seemed to have been immediately struck by K.'s words. Until then, he had listened to him standing, as K.'s speech had taken him by surprise while he was directing his attention to the gallery. Now, in the pause, he sat down very slowly, as if he did not want anyone to notice. He took out the notebook again, probably so that he could give the impression of being calmer.

"That won't help you, sir," continued K., "even your little book will only confirm what I say." K. was satisfied to hear nothing but his own quiet words in this room full of strangers, and he even dared casually to pick up the examining judge's notebook and, touching it only with the tips of his fingers as if it were something revolting, lifted it in the air, holding it just by one of the middle pages so that the others on each side of it, closely written, blotted and yellowing, flapped down. "Those are the official notes of the examining judge," he said, and let the notebook fall down onto the desk. "You can read in your book as much as you like, sir, I really don't have anything in this charge book to be afraid of, even though I don't have access to it as I wouldn't want it in my hand, I can only touch it with two fingers." The judge grabbed the notebook from where it had fallen on the desk - which could only have been a sign of his deep humiliation, or at least that is how it must have been perceived - tried to tidy it up a little, and held it once more in front of himself in order to read from it.

The people in the front row looked up at him, showing such tension on their faces that he looked back down at them for some time. Every one of them was an old man, some of them with white beards. Could they perhaps be the crucial group who could turn the whole assembly one way or the other? They had sunk into a state of motionlessness while K. gave his oration, and it had not been possible to raise them from this passivity even when the judge was being humiliated. "What has happened to me," continued K., with less of the vigour he had had earlier, he continually scanned the faces in the first row, and this gave his address a somewhat nervous and distracted character, "what has happened to me is not just an isolated case. If it were it would not be of much importance as it's not of much importance to me, but it is a symptom of proceedings which are carried out against many. It's on behalf of them that I stand here now, not for myself alone."

Without having intended it, he had raised his voice. Somewhere in the hall, someone raised his hands and applauded him shouting, "Bravo! Why not then? Bravo! Again I say, Bravo!" Some of the men in the first row groped around in their beards, none of them looked round to see who was shouting. Not even K. thought him of any importance but it did raise his spirits; he no longer thought it at all necessary that all of those in the hall should applaud him, it was enough if the majority of them began to think about the matter and if only one of them, now and then, was persuaded.

"I'm not trying to be a successful orator," said K. after this thought, "that's probably more than I'm capable of anyway. I'm sure the examining judge can speak far better than I can, it is part of his job after all. All that I want is a public discussion of a public wrong. Listen: ten days ago I was placed under arrest, the arrest itself is something I laugh about but that's beside the point. They came for me in the morning when I was still in bed. Maybe the order had been given to arrest some house painter - that seems possible after what the judge has said - someone who is as innocent as I am, but it was me they chose. There were two police thugs occupying the next room. They could not have taken better precautions if I had been a dangerous robber. And these policemen were unprincipled riff-raff, they talked at me till I was sick of it, they wanted bribes, they wanted to trick me into giving them my clothes, they wanted money, supposedly so that they could bring me my breakfast after they had blatantly eaten my own breakfast in front of my eyes. And even that was not enough. I was led in front of the supervisor in another room. This was the room of a lady who I have a lot of respect for, and I was forced to look on while the supervisor and the policemen made quite a mess of this room because of me, although not through any fault of mine. It was not easy to stay calm, but I managed to do so and was completely calm when I asked the supervisor why it was that I was under arrest. If he were here he would have to confirm what I say. I can see him now, sitting on the chair belonging to that lady I mentioned - a picture of dull-witted arrogance. What do you think he answered? What he told me, gentlemen, was basically nothing at all; perhaps he really did know nothing, he had placed me under arrest and was satisfied. In fact he had done more than that and brought three junior employees from the bank where I work into the lady's room; they had made themselves busy interfering with some photographs that belonged to the lady and causing a mess. There was, of course, another reason for bringing these employees; they, just like my landlady and her maid, were expected to spread the news of my arrest and damage my public reputation and in particular to remove me from my position at the bank. Well they didn't succeed in any of that, not in the slightest, even my landlady, who is quite a simple person - and I will give you here her name in full respect, her name is Mrs. Grubach - even Mrs. Grubach was understanding enough to see that an arrest like this has no more significance than an attack carried out on the street by some youths who are not kept under proper control. I repeat, this whole affair has caused me nothing but unpleasantness and temporary irritation, but could it not also have had some far worse consequences?"

K. broke off here and looked at the judge, who said nothing. As he did so he thought he saw the judge use a movement of his eyes to give a sign to someone in the crowd. K. smiled and said, "And now the judge, right next to me, is giving a secret sign to someone among you. There seems to be someone among you who is taking directions from above. I don't know whether the sign is meant to produce booing or applause, but I'll resist trying to guess what its meaning is too soon. It really doesn't matter to me, and I give his lordship the judge my full and public permission to stop giving secret signs to his paid subordinate down there and give his orders in words instead; let him just say "Boo now!," and then the next time "Clap now!".

Whether it was embarrassment or impatience, the judge rocked backwards and forwards on his seat. The man behind him, whom he had been talking with earlier, leant forward again, either to give him a few general words of encouragement or some specific piece of advice. Below them in the hall the people talked to each other quietly but animatedly. The two factions had earlier seemed to hold views strongly opposed to each other but now they began to intermingle, a few individuals pointed up at K., others pointed at the judge. The air in the room was fuggy and extremely oppressive, those who were standing furthest away could hardly even be seen through it. It must have been especially troublesome for those visitors who were in the gallery, as they were forced to quietly ask the participants in the assembly what exactly was happening, albeit with timid glances at the judge. The replies they received were just as quiet, and given behind the protection of a raised hand.

"I have nearly finished what I have to say," said K., and as there was no bell available he struck the desk with his fist in a way that startled the judge and his advisor and made them look up from each other. "None of this concerns me, and I am therefore able to make a calm assessment of it, and, assuming that this so-called court is of any real importance, it will be very much to your advantage to listen to what I have to say. If you want to discuss what I say, please don't bother to write it down until later on, I don't have any time to waste and I'll soon be leaving."

There was immediate silence, which showed how well K. was in control of the crowd. There were no shouts among them as there had been at the start, no-one even applauded, but if they weren't already persuaded they seemed very close to it.

K was pleased at the tension among all the people there as they listened to him, a rustling rose from the silence which was more invigorating than the most ecstatic applause could have been. "There is no doubt," he said quietly, "that there is some enormous organisation determining what is said by this court. In my case this includes my arrest and the examination taking place here today, an organisation that employs policemen who can be bribed, oafish supervisors and judges of whom nothing better can be said than that they are not as arrogant as some others. This organisation even maintains a high-level judiciary along with its train of countless servants, scribes, policemen and all the other assistance that it needs, perhaps even executioners and torturers - I'm not afraid of using those words. And what, gentlemen, is the purpose of this enormous organisation? Its purpose is to arrest innocent people and wage pointless prosecutions against them which, as in my case, lead to no result. How are we to avoid those in office becoming deeply corrupt when everything is devoid of meaning? That is impossible, not even the highest judge would be able to achieve that for himself. That is why policemen try to steal the clothes off the back of those they arrest, that is why supervisors break into the homes of people they do not know, that is why innocent people are humiliated in front of crowds rather than being given a proper trial. The policemen only talked about the warehouses where they put the property of those they arrest, I would like to see these warehouses where the hard won possessions of people under arrest is left to decay, if, that is, it's not stolen by the thieving hands of the warehouse workers."

K. was interrupted by a screeching from the far end of the hall, he shaded his eyes to see that far, as the dull light of day made the smoke whitish and hard to see through. It was the washerwoman whom K. had recognised as a likely source of disturbance as soon as she had entered. It was hard to see now whether it was her fault or not. K. could only see that a man had pulled her into a corner by the door and was pressing himself against her. But it was not her who was screaming, but the man, he had opened his mouth wide and looked up at the ceiling. A small circle had formed around the two of them, the visitors near him in the gallery seemed delighted that the serious tone K. had introduced into the gathering had been disturbed in this way. K.'s first thought was to run over there, and he also thought that everyone would want to bring things back into order there or at least to make the pair leave the room, but the first row of people in front of him stayed were they were, no-one moved and no-one let K. through. On the contrary, they stood in his way, old men held out their arms in front of him and a hand from somewhere - he did not have the time to turn round - took hold of his collar. K., by this time, had forgotten about the pair, it seemed to him that his freedom was being limited as if his arrest was being taken seriously, and, without any thought for what he was doing, he jumped down from the podium. Now he stood face to face with the crowd. Had he judged the people properly? Had he put too much faith in the effect of his speech? Had they been putting up a pretence all the time he had been speaking, and now that he come to the end and to what must follow, were they tired of pretending? What faces they were, all around him! Dark, little eyes flickered here and there, cheeks drooped down like on drunken men, their long beards were thin and stiff, if they took hold of them it was more like they were making their hands into claws, not as if they were taking hold of their own beards. But underneath those beards - and this was the real discovery made by K. - there were badges of various sizes and colours shining on the collars of their coats. As far as he could see, every one of them was wearing one of these badges. All of them belonged to the same group, even though they seemed to be divided to the right and the left of him, and when he suddenly turned round he saw the same badge on the collar of the examining judge who calmly looked down at him with his hands in his lap. "So," called out K, throwing his arms in the air as if this sudden realisation needed more room, "all of you are working for this organisation, I see now that you are all the very bunch of cheats and liars I've just been speaking about, you've all pressed yourselves in here in order to listen in and snoop on me, you gave the impression of having formed into factions, one of you even applauded me to test me out, and you wanted to learn how to trap an innocent man! Well, I hope you haven't come here for nothing, I hope you've either had some fun from someone who expected you to defend his innocence or else - let go of me or I'll hit you," shouted K. to a quivery old man who had pressed himself especially close to him - "or else that you've actually learned something. And so I wish you good luck in your trade." He briskly took his hat from where it lay on the edge of the table and, surrounded by a silence caused perhaps by the completeness of their surprise, pushed his way to the exit. However, the examining judge seems to have moved even more quickly than K., as he was waiting for him at the doorway. "One moment," he said. K. stood where he was, but looked at the door with his hand already on its handle rather than at the judge. "I merely wanted to draw your attention," said the judge, "to something you seem not yet to be aware of: today, you have robbed yourself of the advantages that a hearing of this sort always gives to someone who is under arrest." K. laughed towards the door. "You bunch of louts," he called, "you can keep all your hearings as a present from me," then opened the door and hurried down the steps. Behind him, the noise of the assembly rose as it became lively once more and probably began to discuss these events as if making a scientific study of them.

Chapter Three In the empty Courtroom - The Student - The Offices

Every day over the following week, K. expected another summons to arrive, he could not believe that his rejection of any more hearings had been taken literally, and when the expected summons really had not come by Saturday evening he took it to mean that he was expected, without being told, to appear at the same place at the same time. So on Sunday, he set out once more in the same direction, going without hesitation up the steps and through the corridors; some of the people remembered him and greeted him from their doorways, but he no longer needed to ask anyone the way and soon arrived at the right door. It was opened as soon as he knocked and, paying no attention to the woman he had seen last time who was standing at the doorway, he was about to go straight into the adjoining room when she said to him "There's no session today". "What do you mean; no session?" he asked, unable to believe it. But the woman persuaded him by opening the door to the next room. It was indeed empty, and looked even more dismal empty than it had the previous Sunday. On the podium stood the table exactly as it had been before with a few books laying on it. "Can I have a look at those books?" asked K., not because he was especially curious but so that he would not have come for nothing. "No," said the woman as she re-closed the door, "that's not allowed. Those books belong to the examining judge." "I see," said K., and nodded, "those books must be law books, and that's how this court does things, not only to try people who are innocent but even to try them without letting them know what's going on." "I expect you're right," said the woman, who had not understood exactly what he meant. "I'd better go away again, then," said K. "Should I give a message to the examining judge?" asked the woman. "Do you know him, then?" asked K. "Of course I know him," said the woman, "my husband is the court usher." It was only now that K. noticed that the room, which before had held nothing but a wash-tub, had been fitted out as a living room. The woman saw how surprised he was and said, "Yes, we're allowed to live here as we like, only we have to clear the room out when the court's in session. There's lots of disadvantages to my husband's job." "It's not so much the room that surprises me," said K., looking at her crossly, "it's your being married that shocks me." "Are you thinking about what happened last time the court was in session, when I disturbed what you were saying?" asked the woman. "Of course," said K., "it's in the past now and I've nearly forgotten about it, but at the time it made me furious. And now you tell me yourself that you are a married woman." "It wasn't any disadvantage for you to have your speech interrupted. The way they talked about you after you'd gone was really bad." "That could well be," said K., turning away, "but it does not excuse you." "There's no-one I know who'd hold it against me," said the woman. "Him, who put his arms around me, he's been chasing after me for a long time. I might not be very attractive for most people, but I am for him. I've got no protection from him, even my husband has had to get used to it; if he wants to keep his job he's got to put up with it as that man's a student and he'll almost certainly be very powerful later on. He's always after me, he'd only just left when you arrived." "That fits in with everything else," said K., "I'm not surprised." "Do you want to make things a bit better here?" the woman asked slowly, watching him as if she were saying something that could be as dangerous for K. as for herself. "That's what I thought when I heard you speak, I really liked what you said. Mind you, I only heard part of it, I missed the beginning of it and at the end I was lying on the floor with the student - it's so horrible here," she said after a pause, and took hold of K.'s hand. "Do you believe you really will be able to make things better?" K. smiled and twisted his hand round a little in her soft hands. "It's really not my job to make things better here, as you put it," he said, "and if you said that to the examining judge he would laugh at you or punish you for it. I really would not have become involved in this matter if I could have helped it, and I would have lost no sleep worrying about how this court needs to be made better. But because I'm told that I have been arrested - and I am under arrest - it forces me to take some action, and to do so for my own sake. However, if I can be of some service to you in the process I will, of course, be glad to do so. And I will be glad to do so not only for the sake of charity but also because you can be of some help to me." "How could I help you, then?" said the woman. "You could, for example, show me the books on the table there." "Yes, certainly," the woman cried, and pulled K. along behind her as she rushed to them. The books were old and well worn, the cover of one of them had nearly broken through in its middle, and it was held together with a few threads. "Everything is so dirty here," said K., shaking his head, and before he could pick the books up the woman wiped some of the dust off with her apron. K. took hold of the book that lay on top and threw it open, an indecent picture appeared. A man and a woman sat naked on a sofa, the base intent of whoever drew it was easy to see but he had been so grossly lacking in skill that all that anyone could really make out were the man and the woman who dominated the picture with their bodies, sitting in overly upright postures that created a false perspective and made it difficult for them to approach each other. K. didn't thumb through that book any more, but just threw open the next one at its title page, it was a novel with the title, What Grete Suffered from her Husband, Hans. "So this is the sort of law book they study here," said K., "this is the sort of person sitting in judgement over me." "I can help you," said the woman, "would you like me to?" "Could you really do that without placing yourself in danger? You did say earlier on that your husband is wholly dependent on his superiors." "I still want to help you," said the woman, "come over here, we've got to talk about it. Don't say any more about what danger I'm in, I only fear danger where I want to fear it. Come over here." She pointed to the podium and invited him to sit down on the step with her. "You've got lovely dark eyes," she said after they had sat down, looking up into K.'s face, "people say I've got nice eyes too, but yours are much nicer. It was the first thing I noticed when you first came here. That's even why I came in here, into the assembly room, afterwards, I'd never normally do that, I'm not really even allowed to." So that's what all this is about, thought K., she's offering herself to me, she's as degenerate as everything else around here, she's had enough of the court officials, which is understandable I suppose, and so she approaches any stranger and makes compliments about his eyes. With that, K. stood up in silence as if he had spoken his thoughts out loud and thus explained his action to the woman. "I don't think you can be of any assistance to me," he said, "to be of any real assistance you would need to be in contact with high officials. But I'm sure you only know the lower employees, and there are crowds of them milling about here. I'm sure you're very familiar with them and could achieve a great deal through them, I've no doubt of that, but the most that could be done through them would have no bearing at all on the final outcome of the trial. You, on the other hand, would lose some of your friends as a result, and I have no wish of that. Carry on with these people in the same way as you have been, as it does seem to me to be something you cannot do without. I have no regrets in saying this as, in return for your compliment to me, I also find you rather attractive, especially when you look at me as sadly as you are now, although you really have no reason to do so. You belong to the people I have to combat, and you're very comfortable among them, you're even in love with the student, or if you don't love him you do at least prefer him to your husband. It's easy to see that from what you've been saying." "No!" she shouted, remained sitting where she was and grasped K.'s hand, which he failed to pull away fast enough. "You can't go away now, you can't go away when you've misjudged me like that! Are you really capable of going away now? Am I really so worthless that you won't even do me the favour of staying a little bit longer?" "You misunderstand me," said K., sitting back down, "if it's really important to you for me to stay here then I'll be glad to do so, I have plenty of time, I came here thinking there would be a trial taking place. All I meant with what I said just now was to ask you not to do anything on my behalf in the proceedings against me. But even that is nothing for you to worry about when you consider that there's nothing hanging on the outcome of this trial, and that, whatever the verdict, I will just laugh at it. And that's even presupposing it ever even reaches any conclusion, which I very much doubt. I think it's much more likely that the court officials will be too lazy, too forgetful, or even too fearful ever to continue with these proceedings and that they will soon be abandoned if they haven't been abandoned already. It's even possible that they will pretend to be carrying on with the trial in the hope of receiving a large bribe, although I can tell you now that that will be quite in vain as I pay bribes to no-one. Perhaps one favour you could do me would be to tell the examining judge, or anyone else who likes to spread important news, that I will never be induced to pay any sort of bribe through any stratagem of theirs - and I'm sure they have many stratagems at their disposal. There is no prospect of that, you can tell them that quite openly. And what's more, I expect they have already noticed themselves, or even if they haven't, this affair is really not so important to me as they think. Those gentlemen would only save some work for themselves, or at least some unpleasantness for me, which, however, I am glad to endure if I know that each piece of unpleasantness for me is a blow against them. And I will make quite sure it is a blow against them. Do you actually know the judge?" "Course I do," said the woman, "he was the first one I thought of when I offered to help you. I didn't know he's only a minor official, but if you say so it must be true. Mind you, I still think the report he gives to his superiors must have some influence. And he writes so many reports. You say these officials are lazy, but they're certainly not all lazy, especially this examining judge, he writes ever such a lot. Last Sunday, for instance, that session went on till the evening. Everyone had gone, but the examining judge, he stayed in the hall, I had to bring him a lamp in, all I had was a little kitchen lamp but he was very satisfied with it and started to write straight away. Meantime my husband arrived, he always has the day off on Sundays, we got the furniture back in and got our room sorted out and then a few of the neighbours came, we sat and talked for a bit by a candle, in short, we forgot all about the examining judge and went to bed. All of a sudden in the night, it must have been quite late in the night, I wakes up, next to the bed, there's the examining judge shading the lamp with his hand so that there's no light from it falls on my husband, he didn't need to be as careful as that, the way my husband sleeps the light wouldn't have woken him up anyway. I was quite shocked and nearly screamed, but the judge was very friendly, warned me I should be careful, he whispered to me he's been writing all this time, and now he's brought me the lamp back, and he'll never forget how I looked when he found me there asleep. What I mean, with all this, I just wanted to tell you how the examining judge really does write lots of reports, especially about you as questioning you was definitely one of the main things on the agenda that Sunday. If he writes reports as long as that they must be of some importance. And besides all that, you can see from what happened that the examining judge is after me, and it's right now, when he's first begun to notice me, that I can have a lot of influence on him. And I've got other proof I mean a lot to him, too. Yesterday, he sent that student to me, the one he really trusts and who he works with, he sent him with a present for me, silk stockings. He said it was because I clear up in the courtroom but that's only a pretence, that job's no more than what I'm supposed to do, it's what my husband gets paid for. Nice stockings, they are, look," - she stretched out her leg, drew her skirt up to her knee and looked, herself, at the stocking - "they are nice stockings, but they're too good for me, really."

She suddenly interrupted herself and lay her hand on K.'s as if she wanted to calm him down, and whispered, "Be quiet, Berthold is watching us." K. slowly looked up. In the doorway to the courtroom stood a young man, he was short, his legs were not quite straight, and he continually moved his finger round in a short, thin, red beard with which he hoped to make himself look dignified. K. looked at him with some curiosity, he was the first student he had ever met of the unfamiliar discipline of jurisprudence, face to face at least, a man who would even most likely attain high office one day. The student, in contrast, seemed to take no notice of K. at all, he merely withdrew his finger from his beard long enough to beckon to the woman and went over to the window, the woman leant over to K. and whispered, "Don't be cross with me, please don't, and please don't think ill of me either, I've got to go to him now, to this horrible man, just look at his bent legs. But I'll come straight back and then I'll go with you if you'll take me, I'll go wherever you want, you can do whatever you like with me, I'll be happy if I can be away from here for as long as possible, it'd be best if I could get away from here for good." She stroked K.'s hand once more, jumped up and ran over to the window. Before he realised it, K. grasped for her hand but failed to catch it. He really was attracted to the woman, and even after thinking hard about it could find no good reason why he should not give in to her allure. It briefly crossed his mind that the woman meant to entrap him on behalf of the court, but that was an objection he had no difficulty in fending off. In what way could she entrap him? Was he not still free, so free that he could crush the entire court whenever he wanted, as least where it concerned him? Could he not have that much confidence in himself? And her offer of help sounded sincere, and maybe it wasn't quite worthless. And maybe there was no better revenge against the examining judge and his cronies than to take this woman from him and have her for himself. Maybe then, after much hard work writing dishonest reports about K., the judge would go to the woman's bed late one night and find it empty. And it would be empty because she belonged to K., because this woman at the window, this lush, supple, warm body in its sombre clothes of rough, heavy material belonged to him, totally to him and to him alone. Once he had settled his thoughts towards the woman in this way, he began to find the quiet conversation at the window was taking too long, he rapped on the podium with his knuckles, and then even with his fist. The student briefly looked away from the woman to glance at K. over his shoulder but did allow himself to be disturbed, in fact he even pressed himself close to the woman and put his arms around her. She dropped her head down low as if listening to him carefully, as she did so he kissed her right on the neck, hardly even interrupting what he was saying. K. saw this as confirmation of the tyranny the student held over the woman and which she had already complained about, he stood up and walked up and down the room. Glancing sideways at the student, he wondered what would be the quickest possible way to get rid of him, and so it was not unwelcome to him when the student, clearly disturbed by K.'s to-ing and fro-ing which K. had now developed into a stamping up and down, said to him, "You don't have to stay here, you know, if you're getting impatient. You could have gone earlier, no-one would have missed you. In fact you should have gone, you should have left as quickly as possible as soon as I got here." This comment could have caused all possible rage to break out between them, but K. also bore in mind that this was a prospective court official speaking to a disfavoured defendant, and he might well have been taking pride in speaking in this way. K. remained standing quite close to him and said with a smile, "You're quite right, I am impatient, but the easiest way to settle this impatience would be if you left us. On the other hand, if you've come here to study - you are a student, I hear - I'll be quite happy to leave the room to you and go away with the woman. I'm sure you'll still have a lot of study to do before you're made into a judge. It's true that I'm still not all that familiar with your branch of jurisprudence but I take it it involves a lot more than speaking roughly - and I see you have no shame in doing that extremely well." "He shouldn't have been allowed to move about so freely," said the student, as if he wanted to give the woman an explanation for K.'s insults, "that was a mistake. I've told the examining judge so. He should at least have been detained in his room between hearings. Sometimes it's impossible to understand what the judge thinks he's doing." "You're wasting your breath," said K., then he reached his hand out towards the woman and said, "come with me." "So that's it," said the student, "oh no, you're not going to get her," and with a strength you would not have expected from him, he glanced tenderly at her, lifted her up on one arm and, his back bent under the weight, ran with her to the door. In this way he showed, unmistakeably, that he was to some extent afraid of K., but he nonetheless dared to provoke him still further by stroking and squeezing the woman's arm with his free hand. K. ran the few steps up to him, but when he had reached him and was about to take hold of him and, if necessary, throttle him, the woman said, "It's no good, it's the examining judge who's sent for me, I daren't go with you, this little bastard…" and here she ran her hand over the student's face, "this little bastard won't let me." "And you don't want to be set free!" shouted K., laying his hand on the student's shoulder, who then snapped at it with his teeth. "No!" shouted the woman, pushing K. away with both hands, "no, no don't do that, what d'you think you're doing!? That'd be the end of me. Let go of him, please just let go of him. He's only carrying out the judge's orders, he's carrying me to him." "Let him take you then, and I want to see nothing more of you," said K., enraged by his disappointment and giving the student a thump in the back so that he briefly stumbled and then, glad that he had not fallen, immediately jumped up all the higher with his burden. K. followed them slowly. He realised that this was the first unambiguous setback he had suffered from these people. It was of course nothing to worry about, he accepted the setback only because he was looking for a fight. If he stayed at home and carried on with his normal life he would be a thousand times superior to these people and could get any of them out of his way just with a kick. And he imagined the most laughable scene possible as an example of this, if this contemptible student, this inflated child, this knock-kneed redbeard, if he were kneeling at Elsa's bed wringing his hands and begging for forgiveness. K. so enjoyed imagining this scene that he decided to take the student along to Elsa with him if ever he should get the opportunity.

K. was curious to see where the woman would be taken and he hurried over to the door, the student was not likely to carry her through the streets on his arm. It turned out that the journey was far shorter. Directly opposite the flat there was a narrow flight of wooden steps which probably led up to the attic, they turned as they went so that it was not possible to see where they ended. The student carried the woman up these steps, and after the exertions of running with her he was soon groaning and moving very slowly. The woman waved down at K. and by raising and lowering her shoulders she tried to show that she was an innocent party in this abduction, although the gesture did not show a lot of regret. K. watched her without expression like a stranger, he wanted to show neither that he was disappointed nor that he would easily get over his disappointment.

The two of them had disappeared, but K. remained standing in the doorway. He had to accept that the woman had not only cheated him but that she had also lied to him when she said she was being taken to the examining judge. The examining judge certainly wouldn't be sitting and waiting in the attic. The wooden stairs would explain nothing to him however long he stared at them. Then K. noticed a small piece of paper next to them, went across to it and read, in a childish and unpractised hand, "Entrance to the Court Offices". Were the court offices here, in the attic of this tenement, then? If that was how they were accommodated it did not attract much respect, and it was some comfort for the accused to realise how little money this court had at its disposal if it had to locate its offices in a place where the tenants of the building, who were themselves among the poorest of people, would throw their unneeded junk. On the other hand, it was possible that the officials had enough money but that they squandered it on themselves rather than use it for the court's purposes. Going by K.'s experience of them so far, that even seemed probable, except that if the court were allowed to decay in that way it would not just humiliate the accused but also give him more encouragement than if the court were simply in a state of poverty. K. also now understood that the court was ashamed to summon those it accused to the attic of this building for the initial hearing, and why it preferred to impose upon them in their own homes. What a position it was that K. found himself in, compared with the judge sitting up in the attic! K., at the bank, had a big office with an ante-room, and had an enormous window through which he could look down at the activity in the square. It was true, though, that he had no secondary income from bribes and fraud, and he couldn't tell a servant to bring him a woman up to the office on his arm. K., however, was quite willing to do without such things, in this life at least. K. was still looking at the notice when a man came up the stairs, looked through the open door into the living room where it was also possible to see the courtroom, and finally asked K. whether he had just seen a woman there. "You're the court usher, aren't you?" asked K. "That's right," said the man, "oh, yes, you're defendant K., I recognise you now as well. Nice to see you here." And he offered K. his hand, which was far from what K. had expected. And when K. said nothing, he added, "There's no court session planned for today, though." "I know that," said K. as he looked at the usher's civilian coat which, beside its ordinary buttons, displayed two gilded ones as the only sign of his office and seemed to have been taken from an old army officer's coat. "I was speaking with your wife a little while ago. She is no longer here. The student has carried her off to the examining judge." "Listen to this," said the usher, "they're always carrying her away from me. It's Sunday today, and it's not part of my job to do any work today, but they send me off with some message which isn't even necessary just to get me away from here. What they do is they send me off not too far away so that I can still hope to get back on time if I really hurry. So off I go running as fast as I can, shout the message through the crack in the door of the office I've been sent to, so out of breath they'll hardly be able to understand it, run back here again, but the student's been even faster than I have - well he's got less far to go, he's only got to run down the steps. If I wasn't so dependent on them I'd have squashed the student against the wall here a long time ago. Right here, next to the sign. I'm always dreaming of doing that. Just here, just above the floor, that's where he's crushed onto the wall, his arms stretched out, his fingers spread apart, his crooked legs twisted round into a circle and blood squirted out all around him. It's only ever been a dream so far, though." "Is there nothing else you do?" asked K. with a smile. "Nothing that I know of," said the usher. "And it's going to get even worse now, up till now he's only been carrying her off for himself, now he's started carrying her off for the judge and all, just like I'd always said he would." "Does your wife, then, not share some of the responsibility?" asked K. He had to force himself as he asked this question, as he, too, felt so jealous now. "Course she does," said the usher, "it's more her fault than theirs. It was her who attached herself to him. All he did, he just chases after any woman. There's five flats in this block alone where he's been thrown out after working his way in there. And my wife is the best looking woman in the whole building, but it's me who's not even allowed to defend himself." "If that's how things are, then there's nothing that can be done," said K. "Well why not?" asked the usher. "He's a coward that student, if he wants to lay a finger on my wife all you'd have to do is give him such a good hiding he'd never dare do it again. But I'm not allowed to do that, and nobody else is going to do me the favour as they're all afraid of his power. The only one who could do it is a man like you." "What, how could I do it?" asked K. in astonishment. "Well you're facing a charge, aren't you," said the usher. "Yes, but that's all the more reason for me to be afraid. Even if he has no influence on the outcome of the trial he probably has some on the initial examination." "Yes, exactly," said the usher, as if K.'s view had been just as correct as his own. "Only we don't usually get any trials heard here with no hope at all." "I am not of the same opinion", said K., "although that ought not to prevent me from dealing with the student if the opportunity arises." "I would be very grateful to you," said the usher of the court, somewhat formally, not really seeming to believe that his highest wish could be fulfilled. "Perhaps," continued K., "perhaps there are some other officials of yours here, perhaps all of them, who would deserve the same." "Oh yes, yes," said the usher, as if this was a matter of course. Then he looked at K. trustingly which, despite all his friendliness, he had not done until then, and added, "they're always rebelling." But the conversation seemed to have become a little uncomfortable for him, as he broke it off by saying, "now I have to report to the office. Would you like to come with me?" "There's nothing for me to do there," said K. "You'd be able to have a look at it. No-one will take any notice of you." "Is it worth seeing then?" asked K. hesitatingly, although he felt very keen to go with him. "Well," said the usher, "I thought you'd be interested in it." "Alright then," said K. finally, "I'll come with you." And, quicker than the usher himself, he ran up the steps.

At the entrance he nearly fell over, as behind the door there was another step. "They don't show much concern for the public," he said. "They don't show any concern at all," said the usher, "just look at the waiting room here." It consisted of a long corridor from which roughly made doors led out to the separate departments of the attic. There was no direct source of light but it was not entirely dark as many of the departments, instead of solid walls, had just wooden bars reaching up to the ceiling to separate them from the corridor. The light made its way in through them, and it was also possible to see individual officials through them as they sat writing at their desks or stood up at the wooden frameworks and watched the people on the corridor through the gaps. There were only a few people in the corridor, probably because it was Sunday. They were not very impressive. They sat, equally spaced, on two rows of long wooden benches which had been placed along both sides of the corridor. All of them were carelessly dressed although the expressions on their faces, their bearing, the style of their beards and many details which were hard to identify showed that they belonged to the upper classes. There were no coat hooks for them to use, and so they had placed their hats under the bench, each probably having followed the example of the others. When those who were sitting nearest the door saw K. and the usher of the court they stood up to greet them, and when the others saw that, they also thought they had to greet them, so that as the two of them went by all the people there stood up. None of them stood properly upright, their backs were bowed, their knees bent, they stood like beggars on the street. K. waited for the usher, who was following just behind him. "They must all be very dispirited," he said. "Yes," said the usher, "they are the accused, everyone you see here has been accused." "Really!" said K. "They're colleagues of mine then." And he turned to the nearest one, a tall, thin man with hair that was nearly grey. "What is it you are waiting for here?" asked K., politely, but the man was startled at being spoken to unexpectedly, which was all the more pitiful to see because the man clearly had some experience of the world and elsewhere would certainly have been able to show his superiority and would not have easily given up the advantage he had acquired. Here, though, he did not know what answer to give to such a simple question and looked round at the others as if they were under some obligation to help him, and as if no-one could expect any answer from him without this help. Then the usher of the court stepped forward to him and, in order to calm him down and raise his spirits, said, "The gentleman here's only asking what it is you're waiting for. You can give him an answer." The voice of the usher was probably familiar to him, and had a better effect than K.'s. "I'm … I'm waiting …" he began, and then came to a halt. He had clearly chosen this beginning so that he could give a precise answer to the question, but now he didn't know how to continue. Some of the others waiting had come closer and stood round the group, the usher of the court said to them, "Get out the way, keep the gangway free." They moved back slightly, but not as far as where they had been sitting before. In the meantime, the man whom K. had first approached had pulled himself together and even answered him with a smile. "A month ago I made some applications for evidence to be heard in my case, and I'm waiting for it to be settled." "You certainly seem to be going to a lot of effort," said K. "Yes," said the man, "it is my affair after all." "Not everyone thinks the same way as you do," said K. "I've been indicted as well but I swear on my soul that I've neither submitted evidence nor done anything else of the sort. Do you really think that's necessary?" "I don't really know, exactly," said the man, once more totally unsure of himself; he clearly thought K. was joking with him and therefore probably thought it best to repeat his earlier answer in order to avoid making any new mistakes. With K. looking at him impatiently, he just said, "as far as I'm concerned, I've applied to have this evidence heard." "Perhaps you don't believe I've been indicted?" asked K. "Oh, please, I certainly do," said the man, stepping slightly to one side, but there was more anxiety in his answer than belief. "You don't believe me then?" asked K., and took hold of his arm, unconsciously prompted by the man's humble demeanour, and as if he wanted to force him to believe him. But he did not want to hurt the man and had only taken hold of him very lightly. Nonetheless, the man cried out as if K. had grasped him not with two fingers but with red hot tongs. Shouting in this ridiculous way finally made K. tired of him, if he didn't believe he was indicted then so much the better; maybe he even thought K. was a judge. And before leaving, he held him a lot harder, shoved him back onto the bench and walked on. "These defendants are so sensitive, most of them," said the usher of the court. Almost all of those who had been waiting had now assembled around the man who, by now, had stopped shouting and they seemed to be asking him lots of precise questions about the incident. K. was approached by a security guard, identifiable mainly by his sword, of which the scabbard seemed to be made of aluminium. This greatly surprised K., and he reached out for it with his hand. The guard had come because of the shouting and asked what had been happening. The usher of the court said a few words to try and calm him down but the guard explained that he had to look into it himself, saluted, and hurried on, walking with very short steps, probably because of gout.

K. didn't concern himself long with the guard or these people, especially as he saw a turning off the corridor, about half way along it on the right hand side, where there was no door to stop him going that way. He asked the usher whether that was the right way to go, the usher nodded, and that is the way that K. went. The usher remained always one or two steps behind K, which he found irritating as in a place like this it could give the impression that he was being driven along by someone who had arrested him, so he frequently waited for the usher to catch up, but the usher always remained behind him. In order to put an end to his discomfort, K. finally said, "Now that I've seen what it looks like here, I'd like to go." "You haven't seen everything yet," said the usher ingenuously. "I don't want to see everything," said K., who was also feeling very tired, "I want to go, what is the way to the exit?" "You haven't got lost, have you?" asked the usher in amazement, "you go down this way to the corner, then right down the corridor straight ahead as far as the door." "Come with me," said K., "show me the way, I'll miss it, there are so many different ways here." "It's the only way there is," said the usher, who had now started to sound quite reproachful, "I can't go back with you again, I've got to hand in my report, and I've already lost a lot of time because of you as it is." "Come with me!" K. repeated, now somewhat sharper as if he had finally caught the usher out in a lie. "Don't shout like that," whispered the usher, "there's offices all round us here. If you don't want to go back by yourself come on a bit further with me or else wait here till I've sorted out my report, then I'll be glad to go back with you again." "No, no," said K., "I will not wait and you must come with me now." K. had still not looked round at anything at all in the room where he found himself, and it was only when one of the many wooden doors all around him opened that he noticed it. A young woman, probably summoned by the loudness of K.'s voice, entered and asked, "What is it the gentleman wants?" In the darkness behind her there was also a man approaching. K. looked at the usher. He had, after all, said that no-one would take any notice of K., and now there were two people coming, it only needed a few and everyone in the office would become aware of him and asking for explanations as to why he was there. The only understandable and acceptable thing to say was that he was accused of something and wanted to know the date of his next hearing, but this was an explanation he did not want to give, especially as it was not true - he had only come out of curiosity. Or else, an explanation even less usable, he could say that he wanted to ascertain that the court was as revolting on the inside as it was on the outside. And it did seem that he had been quite right in this supposition, he had no wish to intrude any deeper, he was disturbed enough by what he had seen already, he was not in the right frame of mind just then to face a high official such as might appear from behind any door, and he wanted to go, either with the usher of the court or, if needs be, alone.

But he must have seemed very odd standing there in silence, and the young woman and the usher were indeed looking at him as if they thought he would go through some major metamorphosis any second which they didn't want to miss seeing. And in the doorway stood the man whom K. had noticed in the background earlier, he held firmly on to the beam above the low door swinging a little on the tips of his feet as if becoming impatient as he watched. But the young woman was the first to recognise that K.'s behaviour was caused by his feeling slightly unwell, she brought a chair and asked, "Would you not like to sit down?" K. sat down immediately and, in order to keep his place better, put his elbows on the armrests. "You're a little bit dizzy, aren't you?" she asked him. Her face was now close in front of him, it bore the severe expression that many young women have just when they're in the bloom of their youth. "It's nothing for you to worry about," she said, "that's nothing unusual here, almost everyone gets an attack like that the first time they come here. This is your first time is it? Yes, it's nothing unusual then. The sun burns down on the roof and the hot wood makes the air so thick and heavy. It makes this place rather unsuitable for offices, whatever other advantages it might offer. But the air is almost impossible to breathe on days when there's a lot of business, and that's almost every day. And when you think that there's a lot of washing put out to dry here as well - and we can't stop the tenants doing that - it's not surprising you started to feel unwell. But you get used to the air alright in the end. When you're here for the second or third time you'll hardly notice how oppressive the air is. Are you feeling any better now?" K. made no answer, he felt too embarrassed at being put at the mercy of these people by his sudden weakness, and learning the reason for feeling ill made him feel not better but a little worse. The girl noticed it straight away, and to make the air fresher for K., she took a window pole that was leaning against the wall and pushed open a small hatch directly above K.'s head that led to the outside. But so much soot fell in that the girl had to immediately close the hatch again and clean the soot off K.'s hands with her handkerchief, as K. was too tired to do that for himself. He would have liked just to sit quietly where he was until he had enough strength to leave, and the less fuss people made about him the sooner that would be. But then the girl said, "You can't stay here, we're in people's way here …" K. looked at her as if to ask whose way they were impeding. "If you like, I can take you to the sick room," and turning to the man in the doorway said, "please help me". The man immediately came over to them, but K. did not want to go to the sick room, that was just what he wanted to avoid, being led further from place to place, the further he went the more difficult it must become. So he said, "I am able to walk now," and stood up, shaking after becoming used to sitting so comfortably. But then he was unable to stay upright. "I can't manage it," he said shaking his head, and sat down again with a sigh. He remembered the usher who, despite everything, would have been able to lead him out of there but who seemed to have gone long before. K. looked out between the man and the young woman who were standing in front of him but was unable to find the usher. "I think," said the man, who was elegantly dressed and whose appearance was made especially impressive with a grey waistcoat that had two long, sharply tailored points, "the gentleman is feeling unwell because of the atmosphere here, so the best thing, and what he would most prefer, would be not to take him to the sick room but get him out of the offices altogether." "That's right," exclaimed K., with such joy that he nearly interrupted what the man was saying, "I'm sure that'll make me feel better straight away, I'm really not that weak, all I need is a little support under my arms, I won't cause you much trouble, it's not such a long way anyway, lead me to the door and then I'll sit on the stairs for a while and soon recover, as I don't suffer from attacks like this at all, I'm surprised at it myself. I also work in an office and I'm quite used to office air, but here it seems to be too strong, you've said so yourselves. So please, be so kind as to help me on my way a little, I'm feeling dizzy, you see, and it'll make me ill if I stand up by myself." And with that he raised his shoulders to make it easier for the two of them to take him by the arms.

The man, however, didn't follow this suggestion but just stood there with his hands in his trouser pockets and laughed out loud. "There, you see," he said to the girl, "I was quite right. The gentleman is only unwell here, and not in general." The young woman smiled too, but lightly tapped the man's arm with the tips of her fingers as if he had allowed himself too much fun with K. "So what do you think, then?" said the man, still laughing, "I really do want to lead the gentleman out of here." "That's alright, then," said the girl, briefly inclining her charming head. "Don't worry too much about him laughing," said the girl to K., who had become unhappy once more and stared quietly in front of himself as if needing no further explanation. "This gentleman - may I introduce you?" - (the man gave his permission with a wave of the hand) - "so, this gentleman's job is to give out information. He gives all the information they need to people who are waiting, as our court and its offices are not very well known among the public he gets asked for quite a lot. He has an answer for every question, you can try him out if you feel like it. But that's not his only distinction, his other distinction is his elegance of dress. We, that's to say all of us who work in the offices here, we decided that the information-giver would have to be elegantly dressed as he continually has to deal with the litigants and he's the first one they meet, so he needs to give a dignified first impression. The rest of us I'm afraid, as you can see just by looking at me, dress very badly and old-fashioned; and there's not much point in spending much on clothes anyway, as we hardly ever leave the offices, we even sleep here. But, as I said, we decided that the information-giver would have to have nice clothes. As the management here is rather peculiar in this respect, and they would get them for us, we had a collection - some of the litigants contributed too - and bought him these lovely clothes and some others besides. So everything would be ready for him to give a good impression, except that he spoils it again by laughing and frightening people." "That's how it is," said the man, mocking her, "but I don't understand why it is that you're explaining all our intimate facts to the gentleman, or rather why it is that you're pressing them on him, as I'm sure he's not all interested. Just look at him sitting there, it's clear he's occupied with his own affairs." K. just did not feel like contradicting him. The girl's intention may have been good, perhaps she was under instructions to distract him or to give him the chance to collect himself, but the attempt had not worked. "I had to explain to him why you were laughing," said the girl. "I suppose it was insulting." "I think he would forgive even worse insults if I finally took him outside." K. said nothing, did not even look up, he tolerated the two of them negotiating over him like an object, that was even what suited him best. But suddenly he felt the information-giver's hand on one arm and the young woman's hand on the other. "Up you get then, weakling," said the information-giver. "Thank you both very much," said K., pleasantly surprised, as he slowly rose and personally guided these unfamiliar hands to the places where he most needed support. As they approached the corridor, the girl said quietly into K.'s ear, "I must seem to think it's very important to show the information-giver in a good light, but you shouldn't doubt what I say, I just want to say the truth. He isn't hard-hearted. It's not really his job to help litigants outside if they're unwell but he's doing it anyway, as you can see. I don't suppose any of us is hard-hearted, perhaps we'd all like to be helpful, but working for the court offices it's easy for us to give the impression we are hard-hearted and don't want to help anyone. It makes me quite sad." "Would you not like to sit down here a while?" asked the information-giver, there were already in the corridor and just in front of the defendant whom K. had spoken to earlier. K. felt almost ashamed to be seen by him, earlier he had stood so upright in front of him and now he had to be supported by two others, his hat was held up by the information-giver balanced on outstretched fingers, his hair was dishevelled and hung down onto the sweat on his forehead. But the defendant seemed to notice nothing of what was going on and just stood there humbly, as if wanting to apologise to the information-giver for being there. The information-giver looked past him. "I know," he said, "that my case can't be settled today, not yet, but I've come in anyway, I thought, I thought I could wait here anyway, it's Sunday today, I've got plenty of time, and I'm not disturbing anyone here." "There's no need to be so apologetic," said the information-giver, "it's very commendable for you to be so attentive. You are taking up space here when you don't need to but as long as you don't get in my way I will do nothing to stop you following the progress of your case as closely as you like. When one has seen so many people who shamefully neglect their cases one learns to show patience with people like you. Do sit down." "He's very good with the litigants," whispered the girl. K. nodded, but started to move off again when the information-giver repeated, "Would you not like to sit down here a while?" "No," said K., "I don't want to rest." He had said that as decisively as he could, but in fact it would have done him a lot of good to sit down. It was as if he were suffering sea-sickness. He felt as if he were on a ship in a rough sea, as if the water were hitting against the wooden walls, a thundering from the depths of the corridor as if the torrent were crashing over it, as if the corridor were swaying and the waiting litigants on each side of it rising and sinking. It made the calmness of the girl and the man leading him all the more incomprehensible. He was at their mercy, if they let go of him he would fall like a board. Their little eyes glanced here and there, K. could feel the evenness of their steps but could not do the same, as from step to step he was virtually being carried. He finally noticed they were speaking to him but he did not understand them, all he heard was a noise that filled all the space and through which there seemed to be an unchanging higher note sounding, like a siren. "Louder," he whispered with his head sunk low, ashamed at having to ask them to speak louder when he knew they had spoken loudly enough, even if it had been, for him, incomprehensible. At last, a draught of cool air blew in his face as if a gap had been torn out in the wall in front of him, and next to him he heard someone say, "First he says he wants to go, and then you can tell him a hundred times that this is the way out and he doesn't move." K. became aware that he was standing in front of the way out, and that the young woman had opened the door. It seemed to him that all his strength returned to him at once, and to get a foretaste of freedom he stepped straight on to one of the stairs and took his leave there of his companions, who bowed to him. "Thank you very much," he repeated, shook their hands once more and did not let go until he thought he saw that they found it hard to bear the comparatively fresh air from the stairway after being so long used to the air in the offices. They were hardly able to reply, and the young woman might even have fallen over if K. had not shut the door extremely fast. K. then stood still for a while, combed his hair with the help of a pocket mirror, picked up his hat from the next stair - the information-giver must have thrown it down there - and then he ran down the steps so fresh and in such long leaps that the contrast with his previous state nearly frightened him. His normally sturdy state of health had never prepared him for surprises such as this. Did his body want to revolt and cause him a new trial as he was bearing the old one with such little effort? He did not quite reject the idea that he should see a doctor the next time he had the chance, but whatever he did - and this was something on which he could advise himself - he wanted to spend all Sunday mornings in future better than he had spent this one.

Chapter Four Miss Bürstner's Friend

For some time after this, K. found it impossible to exchange even just a few words with Miss Bürstner. He tried to reach her in many and various ways but she always found a way to avoid it. He would come straight home from the office, remain in her room without the light on, and sit on the sofa with nothing more to distract him than keeping watch on the empty hallway. If the maid went by and closed the door of the apparently empty room he would get up after a while and open it again. He got up an hour earlier than usual in the morning so that he might perhaps find Miss Bürstner alone as she went to the office. But none of these efforts brought any success. Then he wrote her a letter, both to the office and the flat, attempting once more to justify his behaviour, offered to make whatever amends he could, promised never to cross whatever boundary she might set him and begged merely to have the chance to speak to her some time, especially as he was unable to do anything with Mrs. Grubach either until he had spoken with Miss Bürstner, he finally informed her that the following Sunday he would stay in his room all day waiting for a sign from her that there was some hope of his request being fulfilled, or at least that she would explain to him why she could not fulfil it even though he had promised to observe whatever stipulations she might make. The letters were not returned, but there was no answer either. However, on the following Sunday there was a sign that seemed clear enough. It was still early when K. noticed, through the keyhole, that there was an unusual level of activity in the hallway which soon abated. A French teacher, although she was German and called Montag, a pale and febrile girl with a slight limp who had previously occupied a room of her own, was moving into Miss Bürstner's room. She could be seen shuffling through the hallway for several hours, there was always another piece of clothing or a blanket or a book that she had forgotten and had to be fetched specially and brought into the new home.

When Mrs. Grubach brought K. his breakfast - ever since the time when she had made K. so cross she didn't trust the maid to do the slightest job - he had no choice but to speak to her, for the first time in five days. "Why is there so much noise in the hallway today?" he asked as she poured his coffee out, "Can't something be done about it? Does this clearing out have to be done on a Sunday?" K. did not look up at Mrs. Grubach, but he saw nonetheless that she seemed to feel some relief as she breathed in. Even sharp questions like this from Mr. K. she perceived as forgiveness, or as the beginning of forgiveness. "We're not clearing anything out, Mr. K.," she said, "it's just that Miss Montag is moving in with Miss Bürstner and is moving her things across." She said nothing more, but just waited to see how K. would take it and whether he would allow her to carry on speaking. But K. kept her in uncertainty, took the spoon and pensively stirred his coffee while he remained silent. Then he looked up at her and said, "What about the suspicions you had earlier about Miss Bürstner, have you given them up?" "Mr. K.," called Mrs. Grubach, who had been waiting for this very question, as she put her hands together and held them out towards him. "I just made a chance remark and you took it so badly. I didn't have the slightest intention of offending anyone, not you or anyone else. You've known me for long enough, Mr. K., I'm sure you're convinced of that. You don't know how I've been suffering for the past few days! That I should tell lies about my tenants! And you, Mr. K., you believed it! And said I should give you notice! Give you notice!" At this last outcry, Mrs. Grubach was already choking back her tears, she raised her apron to her face and blubbered out loud.

"Oh, don't cry Mrs. Grubach," said K., looking out the window, he was thinking only of Miss Bürstner and how she was accepting an unknown girl into her room. "Now don't cry," he said again as he turned his look back into the room where Mrs. Grubach was still crying. "I meant no harm either when I said that. It was simply a misunderstanding between us. That can happen even between old friends sometimes." Mrs. Grubach pulled her apron down to below her eyes to see whether K. really was attempting a reconciliation. "Well, yes, that's how it is," said K., and as Mrs. Grubach's behaviour indicated that the captain had said nothing he dared to add, "Do you really think, then, that I'd want to make an enemy of you for the sake of a girl we hardly know?" "Yes, you're quite right, Mr. K.," said Mrs. Grubach, and then, to her misfortune, as soon as she felt just a little freer to speak, she added something rather inept. "I kept asking myself why it was that Mr. K. took such an interest in Miss Bürstner. Why does he quarrel with me over her when he knows that any cross word from him and I can't sleep that night? And I didn't say anything about Miss Bürstner that I hadn't seen with my own eyes." K. said nothing in reply, he should have chased her from the room as soon as she had opened her mouth, and he didn't want to do that. He contented himself with merely drinking his coffee and letting Mrs. Grubach feel that she was superfluous. Outside, the dragging steps of Miss Montag could still be heard as she went from one side of the hallway to the other. "Do you hear that?" asked K. pointing his hand at the door. "Yes," said Mrs. Grubach with a sigh, "I wanted to give her some help and I wanted the maid to help her too but she's stubborn, she wants to move everything in herself. I wonder at Miss Bürstner. I often feel it's a burden for me to have Miss Montag as a tenant but Miss Bürstner accepts her into her room with herself." "There's nothing there for you to worry about" said K., crushing the remains of a sugar lump in his cup. "Does she cause you any trouble?" "No," said Mrs. Grubach, "in itself it's very good to have her there, it makes another room free for me and I can let my nephew, the captain, occupy it. I began to worry he might be disturbing you when I had to let him live in the living room next to you over the last few days. He's not very considerate." "What an idea!" said K. standing up, "there's no question of that. You seem to think that because I can't stand this to-ing and fro-ing of Miss Montag that I'm over-sensitive - and there she goes back again." Mrs. Grubach appeared quite powerless. "Should I tell her to leave moving the rest of her things over till later, then, Mr. K.? If that's what you want I'll do it immediately." "But she has to move in with Miss Bürstner!" said K. "Yes," said Mrs. Grubach, without quite understanding what K. meant. "So she has to take her things over there." Mrs. Grubach just nodded. K. was irritated all the more by this dumb helplessness which, seen from the outside, could have seemed like a kind of defiance on her part. He began to walk up and down the room between the window and the door, thus depriving Mrs. Grubach of the chance to leave, which she otherwise probably would have done.

Just as K. once more reached the door, someone knocked at it. It was the maid, to say that Miss Montag would like to have a few words with Mr. K., and therefore requested that he come to the dining room where she was waiting for him. K. heard the maid out thoughtfully, and then looked back at the shocked Mrs. Grubach in a way that was almost contemptuous. His look seemed to be saying that K. had been expecting this invitation for Miss Montag for a long time, and that it was confirmation of the suffering he had been made to endure that Sunday morning from Mrs. Grubach's tenants. He sent the maid back with the reply that he was on his way, then he went to the wardrobe to change his coat, and in answer to Mrs. Grubach's gentle whining about the nuisance Miss Montag was causing merely asked her to clear away the breakfast things. "But you've hardly touched it," said Mrs. Grubach. "Oh just take it away!" shouted K. It seemed to him that Miss Montag was mixed up in everything and made it repulsive to him.

As he went through the hallway he looked at the closed door of Miss Bürstner's room. But it wasn't there that he was invited, but the dining room, to which he yanked the door open without knocking.

The room was long but narrow with one window. There was only enough space available to put two cupboards at an angle in the corner by the door, and the rest of the room was entirely taken up with the long dining table which started by the door and reached all the way to the great window, which was thus made almost inaccessible. The table was already laid for a large number of people, as on Sundays almost all the tenants ate their dinner here at midday.

When K. entered, Miss Montag came towards him from the window along one side of the table. They greeted each other in silence. Then Miss Montag, her head unusually erect as always, said, "I'm not sure whether you know me." K. looked at her with a frown. "Of course I do," he said, "you've been living here with Mrs. Grubach for quite some time now." "But I get the impression you don't pay much attention to what's going on in the lodging house," said Miss Montag. "No," said K. "Would you not like to sit down?" said Miss Montag. In silence, the two of them drew chairs out from the farthest end of the table and sat down facing each other. But Miss Montag stood straight up again as she had left her handbag on the window sill and went to fetch it; she shuffled down the whole length of the room. When she came back, the handbag lightly swinging, she said, "I'd like just to have a few words with you on behalf of my friend. She would have come herself, but she's feeling a little unwell today. Perhaps you'll be kind enough to forgive her and listen to me instead. There's anyway nothing that she could have said that I won't. On the contrary, in fact, I think I can say even more than her because I'm relatively impartial. Would you not agree?" "What is there to say, then?" answered K., who was tired of Miss Montag continuously watching his lips. In that way she took control of what he wanted to say before he said it. "Miss Bürstner clearly refuses to grant me the personal meeting that I asked her for." "That's how it is," said Miss Montag, "or rather, that's not at all how it is, the way you put it is remarkably severe. Generally speaking, meetings are neither granted nor the opposite. But it can be that meetings are considered unnecessary, and that's how it is here. Now, after your comment, I can speak openly. You asked my friend, verbally or in writing, for the chance to speak with her. Now my friend is aware of your reasons for asking for this meeting - or at least I suppose she is - and so, for reasons I know nothing about, she is quite sure that it would be of no benefit to anyone if this meeting actually took place. Moreover, it was only yesterday, and only very briefly, that she made it clear to me that such a meeting could be of no benefit for yourself either, she feels that it can only have been a matter of chance that such an idea came to you, and that even without any explanations from her, you will very soon come to realise yourself, if you have not done so already, the futility of your idea. My answer to that is that although it may be quite right, I consider it advantageous, if the matter is to be made perfectly clear, to give you an explicit answer. I offered my services in taking on the task, and after some hesitation my friend conceded. I hope, however, also to have acted in your interests, as even the slightest uncertainty in the least significant of matters will always remain a cause of suffering and if, as in this case, it can be removed without substantial effort, then it is better if that is done without delay." "I thank you," said K. as soon as Miss Montag had finished. He stood slowly up, looked at her, then across the table, then out the window - the house opposite stood there in the sun - and went to the door. Miss Montag followed him a few paces, as if she did not quite trust him. At the door, however, both of them had to step back as it opened and Captain Lanz entered. This was the first time that K. had seen him close up. He was a large man of about forty with a tanned, fleshy face. He bowed slightly, intending it also for K., and then went over to Miss Montag and deferentially kissed her hand. He was very elegant in the way he moved. The courtesy he showed towards Miss Montag made a striking contrast with the way she had been treated by K. Nonetheless, Miss Montag did not seem to be cross with K. as it even seemed to him that she wanted to introduce the captain. K. however, did not want to be introduced, he would not have been able to show any sort of friendliness either to Miss Montag or to the captain, the kiss on the hand had, for K., bound them into a group which would keep him at a distance from Miss Bürstner whilst at the same time seeming to be totally harmless and unselfish. K. thought, however, that he saw more than that, he thought he also saw that Miss Montag had chosen a means of doing it that was good, but two-edged. She exaggerated the importance of the relationship between K. and Miss Bürstner, and above all she exaggerated the importance of asking to speak with her and she tried at the same time to make out that K. was exaggerating everything. She would be disappointed, K. did not want to exaggerate anything, he was aware that Miss Bürstner was a little typist who would not offer him much resistance for long. In doing so he deliberately took no account of what Mrs. Grubach had told him about Miss Bürstner. All these things were going through his mind as he left the room with hardly a polite word. He wanted to go straight to his room, but a little laugh from Miss Montag that he heard from the dining room behind him brought him to the idea that he might prepare a surprise for the two of them, the captain and Miss Montag. He looked round and listened to find out if there might be any disturbance from any of the surrounding rooms, everywhere was quiet, the only thing to be heard was the conversation from the dining room and Mrs. Grubach's voice from the passage leading to the kitchen. This seemed an opportune time, K. went to Miss Bürstner's room and knocked gently. There was no sound so he knocked again but there was still no answer in reply. Was she asleep? Or was she really unwell? Or was she just pretending as she realised it could only be K. knocking so gently? K. assumed she was pretending and knocked harder, eventually, when the knocking brought no result, he carefully opened the door with the sense of doing something that was not only improper but also pointless. In the room there was no-one. What's more, it looked hardly at all like the room K. had known before. Against the wall there were now two beds behind one another, there were clothes piled up on three chairs near the door, a wardrobe stood open. Miss Bürstner must have gone out while Miss Montag was speaking to him in the dining room. K. was not greatly bothered by this, he had hardly expected to be able to find Miss Bürstner so easily and had made this attempt for little more reason than to spite Miss Montag. But that made it all the more embarrassing for him when, as he was closing the door again, he saw Miss Montag and the captain talking in the open doorway of the dining room. They had probably been standing there ever since K. had opened the door, they avoided seeming to observe K. but chatted lightly and followed his movements with glances, the absent minded glances to the side such as you make during a conversation. But these glances were heavy for K., and he rushed alongside the wall back into his own room.

Chapter Five The whip-man

One evening, a few days later, K. was walking along one of the corridors that separated his office from the main stairway - he was nearly the last one to leave for home that evening, there remained only a couple of workers in the light of a single bulb in the dispatch department - when he heard a sigh from behind a door which he had himself never opened but which he had always thought just led into a junk room. He stood in amazement and listened again to establish whether he might not be mistaken. For a while there was silence, but then came some more sighs. His first thought was to fetch one of the servitors, it might well have been worth having a witness present, but then he was taken by an uncontrollable curiosity that make him simply yank the door open. It was, as he had thought, a junk room. Old, unusable forms, empty stone ink-bottles lay scattered behind the entrance. But in the cupboard-like room itself stood three men, crouching under the low ceiling. A candle fixed on a shelf gave them light. "What are you doing here?" asked K. quietly, but crossly and without thinking. One of the men was clearly in charge, and attracted attention by being dressed in a kind of dark leather costume which left his neck and chest and his arms exposed. He did not answer. But the other two called out, "Mr. K.! We're to be beaten because you made a complaint about us to the examining judge." And now, K. finally realised that it was actually the two policemen, Franz and Willem, and that the third man held a cane in his hand with which to beat them. "Well," said K., staring at them, "I didn't make any complaint, I only said what took place in my home. And your behaviour was not entirely unobjectionable, after all." "Mr. K.," said Willem, while Franz clearly tried to shelter behind him as protection from the third man, "if you knew how badly we get paid you wouldn't think so badly of us. I've got a family to feed, and Franz here wanted to get married, you just have to get more money where you can, you can't do it just by working hard, not however hard you try. I was sorely tempted by your fine clothes, policemen aren't allowed to do that sort of thing, course they aren't, and it wasn't right of us, but it's tradition that the clothes go to the officers, that's how it's always been, believe me; and it's understandable too, isn't it, what can things like that mean for anyone unlucky enough to be arrested? But if he starts talking about it openly then the punishment has to follow." "I didn't know about any of this that you've been telling me, and I made no sort of request that you be punished, I was simply acting on principle." "Franz," said Willem, turning to the other policeman, "didn't I tell you that the gentleman didn't say he wanted us to be punished? Now you can hear for yourself, he didn't even know we'd have to be punished." "Don't you let them persuade you, talking like that," said the third man to K., "this punishment is both just and unavoidable." "Don't listen to him," said Willem, interrupting himself only to quickly bring his hand to his mouth when it had received a stroke of the cane, "we're only being punished because you made a complaint against us. Nothing would have happened to us otherwise, not even if they'd found out what we'd done. Can you call that justice? Both of us, me especially, we'd proved our worth as good police officers over a long period - you've got to admit yourself that as far as official work was concerned we did the job well - things looked good for us, we had prospects, it's quite certain that we would've been made whip-men too, like this one, only he had the luck not to have anyone make a complaint about him, as you really don't get many complaints like that. Only that's all finished now, Mr. K., our careers are at an end, we're going to have to do work now that's far inferior to police work and besides all this we're going to get this terrible, painful beating." "Can the cane really cause so much pain, then?" asked K., testing the cane that the whip-man swang in front of him. "We're going to have to strip off totally naked," said Willem. "Oh, I see," said K., looking straight at the whip-man, his skin was burned brown like a sailor's, and his face showed health and vigour. "Is there then no possibility of sparing these two their beating?" he asked him. "No," said the whip-man, shaking his head with a laugh. "Get undressed!" he ordered the policemen. And to K. he said, "You shouldn't believe everything they tell you, it's the fear of being beaten, it's already made them a bit weak in the head. This one here, for instance," he pointed at Willem, "all that he told you about his career prospects, it's just ridiculous. Look at him, look how fat he is - the first strokes of the cane will just get lost in all that fat. Do you know what it is that's made him so fat? He's in the habit of, everyone that gets arrested by him, he eats their breakfast. Didn't he eat up your breakfast? Yeah, I thought as much. But a man with a belly like that can't be made into a whip-man and never will be, that is quite out of the question." "There are whip-men like that," Willem insisted, who had just released the belt of this trousers. "No," said the whip-man, striking him such a blow with the cane on his neck that it made him wince, "you shouldn't be listening to this, just get undressed." "I would make it well worth your while if you would let them go," said K., and without looking at the whip-man again - as such matters are best carried on with both pairs of eyes turned down - he pulled out his wallet. "And then you'd try and put in a complaint against me, too," said the whip-man, "and get me flogged. No, no!" "Now, do be reasonable," said K., "if I had wanted to get these two punished I would not now be trying to buy their freedom, would I. I could simply close the door here behind me, go home and see or hear nothing more of it. But that's not what I'm doing, it really is of much more importance to me to let them go free; if I had realised they would be punished, or even that they might be punished, I would never have named them in the first place as they are not the ones I hold responsible. It's the organisation that's to blame, the high officials are the ones to blame." "That's how it is!" shouted the policemen, who then immediately received another blow on their backs, which were by now exposed. "If you had a senior judge here beneath your stick," said K., pressing down the cane as he spoke to stop it being raised once more, "I really would do nothing to stop you, on the contrary, I would even pay you money to give you all the more strength." "Yeah, that's all very plausible, what you're saying there," said the whip-man, "only I'm not the sort of person you can bribe. It's my job to flog people, so I flog them." Franz, the policeman, had been fairly quiet so far, probably in expectation of a good result from K.'s intervention, but now he stepped forward to the door wearing just his trousers, kneeled down hanging on to K.'s arm and whispered, "Even if you can't get mercy shown for both of us, at least try and get me set free. Willem is older than me, he's less sensitive than me in every way, he even got a light beating a couple of years ago, but my record's still clean, I only did things the way I did because Willem led me on to it, he's been my teacher both for good and bad. Down in front of the bank my poor bride is waiting for me at the entrance, I'm so ashamed of myself, it's pitiful." His face was flowing over with tears, and he wiped it dry on K.'s coat. "I'm not going to wait any longer," said the whip-man, taking hold of the cane in both hands and laying in to Franz while Willem cowered back in a corner and looked on secretly, not even daring to turn his head. Then, the sudden scream that shot out from Franz was long and irrevocable, it seemed to come not from a human being but from an instrument that was being tortured, the whole corridor rang with it, it must have been heard by everyone in the building. "Don't shout like that!", called out K., unable to prevent himself, and, as he looked anxiously in the direction from which the servitor would come, he gave Franz a shove, not hard, but hard enough for him to fall down unconscious, clawing at the ground with his hands by reflex; he still did not avoid being hit; the rod still found him on the floor; the tip of the rod swang regularly up and down while he rolled to and fro under its blows. And now one of the servitors appeared in the distance, with another a few steps behind him. K. had quickly thrown the door shut, gone over to one of the windows overlooking the yard and opened it. The screams had completely stopped. So that the servitor wouldn't come in, he called out, "It's only me!" "Good evening, chief clerk," somebody called back. "Is there anything wrong?" "No, no," answered K., "it's only a dog yelping in the yard." There was no sound from the servitors so he added, "You can go back to what you were doing." He did not want to become involved with a conversation with them, and so he leant out of the window. A little while later, when he looked out in the corridor, they had already gone. Now, K. remained at the window, he did not dare go back into the junk room, and he did not want to go home either. The yard he looked down into was small and rectangular, all around it were offices, all the windows were now dark and only those at the very top caught a reflection of the moon. K tried hard to see into the darkness of one corner of the yard, where a few handcarts had been left behind one another. He felt anguish at not having been able to prevent the flogging, but that was not his fault, if Franz had not screamed like that - clearly it must have caused a great deal of pain but it's important to maintain control of oneself at important moments - if Franz had not screamed then it was at least highly probable that K. would have been able to dissuade the whip-man. If all the junior officers were contemptible why would the whip-man, whose position was the most inhumane of all, be any exception, and K. had noticed very clearly how his eyes had lit up when he saw the banknotes, he had obviously only seemed serious about the flogging to raise the level of the bribe a little. And K. had not been ungenerous, he really had wanted to get the policemen freed; if he really had now begun to do something against the degeneracy of the court then it was a matter of course that he would have to do something here as well. But of course, it became impossible for him to do anything as soon as Franz started screaming. K. could not possibly have let the junior bank staff, and perhaps even all sorts of other people, come along and catch him by surprise as he haggled with those people in the junk room. Nobody could really expect that sort of sacrifice of him. If that had been his intention then it would almost have been easier, K. would have taken his own clothes off and offered himself to the whip-man in the policemen's place. The whip-man would certainly not have accepted this substitution anyway, as in that way he would have seriously violated his duty without gaining any benefit. He would most likely have violated his duty twice over, as court employees were probably under orders not to cause any harm to K. while he was facing charges, although there may have been special conditions in force here. However things stood, K. was able to do no more than throw the door shut, even though that would still do nothing to remove all the dangers he faced. It was regrettable that he had given Franz a shove, and it could only be excused by the heat of the moment.

In the distance, he heard the steps of the servitors; he did not want them to be too aware of his presence, so he closed the window and walked towards the main staircase. At the door of the junk room he stopped and listened for a little while. All was silent. The two policemen were entirely at the whip-man's mercy; he could have beaten them to death. K. reached his hand out for the door handle but drew it suddenly back. He was no longer in any position to help anyone, and the servitors would soon be back; he did, though, promise himself that he would raise the matter again with somebody and see that, as far as it was in his power, those who really were guilty, the high officials whom nobody had so far dared point out to him, received their due punishment. As he went down the main stairway at the front of the bank, he looked carefully round at everyone who was passing, but there was no girl to be seen who might have been waiting for somebody, not even within some distance from the bank. Franz's claim that his bride was waiting for him was thus shown to be a lie, albeit one that was forgivable and intended only to elicit more sympathy.

The policemen were still on K.'s mind all through the following day; he was unable to concentrate on his work and had to stay in his office a little longer than the previous day so that he could finish it. On the way home, as he passed by the junk room again, he opened its door as if that had been his habit. Instead of the darkness he expected, he saw everything unchanged from the previous evening, and did not know how he should respond. Everything was exactly the same as he had seen it when he had opened the door the previous evening. The forms and bottles of ink just inside the doorway, the whip-man with his cane, the two policemen, still undressed, the candle on the shelf, and the two policemen began to wail and call out "Mr. K.!" K. slammed the door immediately shut, and even thumped on it with his fists as if that would shut it all the firmer. Almost in tears, he ran to the servitors working quietly at the copying machine. "Go and get that junk room cleared out!" he shouted, and, in amazement, they stopped what they were doing. "It should have been done long ago, we're sinking in dirt!" They would be able to do the job the next day, K. nodded, it was too late in the evening to make them do it there and then as he had originally intended. He sat down briefly in order to keep them near him for a little longer, looked through a few of the copies to give the impression that he was checking them and then, as he saw that they would not dare to leave at the same time as himself, went home tired and with his mind numb.

Chapter Six K.'s uncle - Leni

One afternoon - K. was very busy at the time, getting the post ready - K.'s Uncle Karl, a small country land owner, came into the room, pushing his way between two of the staff who were bringing in some papers. K. had long expected his uncle to appear, but the sight of him now shocked K. far less than the prospect of it had done a long time before. His uncle was bound to come, K. had been sure of that for about a month. He already thought at the time he could see how his uncle would arrive, slightly bowed, his battered panama hat in his left hand, his right hand already stretched out over the desk long before he was close enough as he rushed carelessly towards K. knocking over everything that was in his way. K.'s uncle was always in a hurry, as he suffered from the unfortunate belief that he had a number of things to do while he was in the big city and had to settle all of them in one day - his visits were only ever for one day - and at the same time thought he could not forgo any conversation or piece of business or pleasure that might arise by chance. Uncle Karl was K.'s former guardian, and so K. was duty-bound to help him in all of this as well as to offer him a bed for the night. 'I'm haunted by a ghost from the country', he would say.

As soon as they had greeted each other - K. had invited him to sit in the armchair but Uncle Karl had no time for that - he said he wanted to speak briefly with K. in private. "It is necessary," he said with a tired gulp, "it is necessary for my peace of mind." K. immediately sent the junior staff from the room and told them to let no-one in. "What's this that I've been hearing, Josef?" cried K.'s uncle when they were alone, as he sat on the table shoving various papers under himself without looking at them to make himself more comfortable. K. said nothing, he knew what was coming, but, suddenly relieved from the effort of the work he had been doing, he gave way to a pleasant lassitude and looked out the window at the other side of the street. From where he sat, he could see just a small, triangular section of it, part of the empty walls of houses between two shop windows. "You're staring out the window!" called out his uncle, raising his arms, "For God's sake, Josef, give me an answer! Is it true, can it really be true?" "Uncle Karl," said K., wrenching himself back from his daydreaming, "I really don't know what it is you want of me." "Josef," said his uncle in a warning tone, "as far as I know, you've always told the truth. Am I to take what you've just said as a bad sign?" "I think I know what it is you want," said K. obediently, "I expect you've heard about my trial." "That's right," answered his uncle with a slow nod, "I've heard about your trial." "Who did you hear it from, then?" asked K. "Erna wrote to me," said his uncle, "she doesn't have much contact with you, it's true, you don't pay very much attention to her, I'm afraid to say, but she learned about it nonetheless. I got her letter today and, of course, I came straight here. And for no other reason, but it seems to me that this is reason enough. I can read you out the part of the letter that concerns you." He drew the letter out from his wallet. "Here it is. She writes; 'I have not seen Josef for a long time, I was in the bank last week but Josef was so busy that they would not let me through; I waited there for nearly an hour but then I had to go home as I had my piano lesson. I would have liked to have spoken to him, maybe there will be a chance another time. He sent me a big box of chocolates for my name-day, that was very nice and attentive of him. I forgot to tell you about it when I wrote, and I only remember now that you ask me about it. Chocolate, as I am sure you are aware, disappears straight away in this lodging house, almost as soon as you know somebody has given you chocolate it is gone. But there is something else I wanted to tell you about Josef. Like I said, they would not let me through to see him at the bank because he was negotiating with some gentleman just then. After I had been waiting quietly for quite a long time I asked one of the staff whether his meeting would last much longer. He said it might well do, as it was probably about the legal proceedings, he said, that were being conducted against him. I asked what sort of legal proceedings it was that were being conducted against the chief clerk, and whether he was not making some mistake, but he said he was not making any mistake, there were legal proceedings underway and even that they were about something quite serious, but he did not know any more about it. He would have liked to have been of some help to the chief clerk himself, as the chief clerk was a gentleman, good and honest, but he did not know what it was he could do and merely hoped there would be some influential gentlemen who would take his side. I'm sure that is what will happen and that everything will turn out for the best in the end, but in the mean time things do not look at all good, and you can see that from the mood of the chief clerk himself. Of course, I did not place too much importance on this conversation, and even did my best to put the bank clerk's mind at rest, he was quite a simple man. I told him he was not to speak to anyone else about this, and I think it is all just a rumour, but I still think it might be good if you, Dear Father, if you looked into the matter the next time you visit. It will be easy for you to find out more detail and, if it is really necessary, to do something about it through the great and influential people you know. But if it is not necessary, and that is what seems most likely, then at least your daughter will soon have the chance to embrace you and I look forward to it.' - She's a good child," said K.'s uncle when he had finished reading, and wiped a few tears from his eyes. K. nodded. With all the different disruptions he had had recently he had completely forgotten about Erna, even her birthday, and the story of the chocolates had clearly just been invented so that he wouldn't get in trouble with his aunt and uncle. It was very touching, and even the theatre tickets, which he would regularly send her from then on, would not be enough to repay her, but he really did not feel, now, that it was right for him to visit her in her lodgings and hold conversations with a little, eighteen year old schoolgirl. "And what do you have to say about that?" asked his uncle, who had forgotten all his rush and excitement as he read the letter, and seemed to be about to read it again. "Yes, Uncle," said K., "it is true." "True!" called out his uncle. "What is true? How can this be true? What sort of trial is it? Not a criminal trial, I hope?" "It's a criminal trial," answered K. "And you sit quietly here while you've got a criminal trial round your neck?" shouted his uncle, getting ever louder. "The more calm I am, the better it will be for the outcome," said K. in a tired voice, "don't worry." "How can I help worrying?!" shouted his uncle, "Josef, my Dear Josef, think about yourself, about your family, think about our good name! Up till now, you've always been our pride, don't now become our disgrace. I don't like the way you're behaving," he said, looking at K. with his head at an angle, "that's not how an innocent man behaves when he's accused of something, not if he's still got any strength in him. Just tell me what it's all about so that I can help you. It's something to do with the bank, I take it?" "No," said K. as he stood up, "and you're speaking too loud, Uncle, I expect one of the staff is listening at the door and I find that rather unpleasant. It's best if we go somewhere else, then I can answer all your questions, as far as I can. And I know very well that I have to account to the family for what I do." "You certainly do!" his uncle shouted, "Quite right, you do. Now just get a move on, Josef, hurry up now!" "I still have a few documents I need to prepare," said K., and, using the intercom, he summoned his deputy who entered a few moments later. K.'s uncle, still angry and excited, gestured with his hand to show that K. had summoned him, even though there was no need whatever to do so. K. stood in front of the desk and explained to the young man, who listened calm and attentive, what would need to be done that day in his absence, speaking in a calm voice and making use of various documents. The presence of K.'s uncle while this was going on was quite disturbing; he did not listen to what was being said, but at first he stood there with eyes wide open and nervously biting his lips. Then he began to walk up and down the room, stopped now and then at the window, or stood in front of a picture always making various exclamations such as, "That is totally incomprehensible to me!" or "Now just tell me, what are you supposed to make of that?!" The young man pretended to notice nothing of this and listened to K.'s instructions through to the end, he made a few notes, bowed to both K. and his uncle and then left the room. K.'s uncle had turned his back to him and was looking out the window, bunching up the curtains with his outstretched hands. The door had hardly closed when he called out, "At last! Now that he's stopped jumping about we can go too!" Once they were in the front hall of the bank, where several members of staff were standing about and where, just then, the deputy director was walking across, there was unfortunately no way of stopping K.'s uncle from continually asking questions about the trial. "Now then, Josef," he began, lightly acknowledging the bows from those around them as they passed, "tell me everything about this trial; what sort of trial is it?" K. made a few comments which conveyed little information, even laughed a little, and it was only when they reached the front steps that he explained to his uncle that he had not wanted to talk openly in front of those people. "Quite right," said his uncle, "but now start talking." With his head to one side, and smoking his cigar in short, impatient draughts, he listened. "First of all, Uncle," said K., "it's not a trial like you'd have in a normal courtroom." "So much the worse," said his uncle. "How's that?" asked K., looking at him. "What I mean is, that's for the worse," he repeated. They were standing on the front steps of the bank; as the doorkeeper seemed to be listening to what they were saying K. drew his uncle down further, where they were absorbed into the bustle of the street. His uncle took K.'s arm and stopped asking questions with such urgency about the trial, they walked on for a while in silence. "But how did all this come about?" he eventually asked, stopping abruptly enough to startle the people walking behind, who had to avoid walking into him. "Things like this don't come all of a sudden, they start developing a long time beforehand, there must have been warning signs of it, why didn't you write to me? You know I'd do anything for you, to some extent I am still your guardian, and until today that's something I was proud of. I'll still help you, of course I will, only now, now that the trial is already underway, it makes it very difficult. But whatever; the best thing now is for you to take a short holiday staying with us in the country. You've lost weight, I can see that now. The country life will give you strength, that will be good, there's bound to be a lot of hard work ahead of you. But besides that it'll be a way of getting you away from the court, to some extent. Here they've got every means of showing the powers at their disposal and they're automatically bound to use them against you; in the country they'll either have to delegate authority to different bodies or just have to try and bother you by letter, telegram or telephone. And that's bound to weaken the effect, it won't release you from them but it'll give you room to breathe." "You could forbid me to leave," said K., who had been drawn slightly into his uncle's way of thinking by what he had been saying. "I didn't think you would do it," said his uncle thoughtfully, "you won't suffer too much loss of power by moving away." K. grasped his uncle under the arm to prevent him stopping still and said, "I thought you'd think all this is less important than I do, and now you're taking it so hard." "Josef," called his uncle trying to disentangle himself from him so that he could stop walking, but K. did not let go, "you've completely changed, you used to be so astute, are you losing it now? Do you want to lose the trial? Do you realise what that would mean? That would mean you would be simply destroyed. And that everyone you know would be pulled down with you or at the very least humiliated, disgraced right down to the ground. Josef, pull yourself together. The way you're so indifferent about it, it's driving me mad. Looking at you I can almost believe that old saying: 'Having a trial like that means losing a trial like that'." "My dear Uncle," said K., "it won't do any good to get excited, it's no good for you to do it and it'd be no good for me to do it. The case won't be won by getting excited, and please admit that my practical experience counts for something, just as I have always and still do respect your experience, even when it surprises me. You say that the family will also be affected by this trial; I really can't see how, but that's beside the point and I'm quite willing to follow your instructions in all of this. Only, I don't see any advantage in staying in the country, not even for you, as that would indicate flight and a sense of guilt. And besides, although I am more subject to persecution if I stay in the city I can also press the matter forward better here." "You're right," said his uncle in a tone that seemed to indicate they were finally coming closer to each other, "I just made the suggestion because, as I saw it, if you stay in the city the case will be put in danger by your indifference to it, and I thought it was better if I did the work for you. But will you push things forward yourself with all your strength, if so, that will naturally be far better." "We're agreed then," said K. "And do you have any suggestions for what I should do next?" "Well, naturally I'll have to think about it," said his uncle, "you must bear in mind that I've been living in the country for twenty years now, almost without a break, you lose your ability to deal with matters like this. But I do have some important connections with several people who, I expect, know their way around these things better than I do, and to contact them is a matter of course. Out there in the country I've been getting out of condition, I'm sure you're already aware of that. It's only at times like this that you notice it yourself. And this affair of yours came largely unexpected, although, oddly enough, I had expected something of the sort after I'd read Erna's letter, and today when I saw your face I knew it with almost total certainty. But all that is by the by, the important thing now is, we have no time to lose." Even while he was still speaking, K.'s uncle had stood on tiptoe to summon a taxi and now he pulled K. into the car behind himself as he called out an address to the driver. "We're going now to see Dr. Huld, the lawyer," he said, "we were at school together. I'm sure you know the name, don't you? No? Well that is odd. He's got a very good reputation as a defence barrister and for working with the poor. But I esteem him especially as someone you can trust." "It's alright with me, whatever you do," said K., although he was made uneasy by the rushed and urgent way his uncle was dealing with the matter. It was not very encouraging, as the accused, be to taken to a lawyer for poor people. "I didn't know," he said, "that you could take on a lawyer in matters like this." "Well of course you can," said his uncle, "that goes without saying. Why wouldn't you take on a lawyer? And now, so that I'm properly instructed in this matter, tell me what's been happening so far." K. instantly began telling his uncle about what had been happening, holding nothing back - being completely open with him was the only way that K. could protest at his uncle's belief that the trial was a great disgrace. He mentioned Miss Bürstner's name just once and in passing, but that did nothing to diminish his openness about the trial as Miss Bürstner had no connection with it. As he spoke, he looked out the window and saw how, just then, they were getting closer to the suburb where the court offices were. He drew this to his uncle's attention, but he did not find the coincidence especially remarkable. The taxi stopped in front of a dark building. K.'s uncle knocked at the very first door at ground level; while they waited he smiled, showing his big teeth, and whispered, "Eight o'clock; not the usual sort of time to be visiting a lawyer, but Huld won't mind it from me." Two large, black eyes appeared in the spy-hatch in the door, they stared at the two visitors for a while and then disappeared; the door, however, did not open. K. and his uncle confirmed to each other the fact that they had seen the two eyes. "A new maid, afraid of strangers," said K.'s uncle, and knocked again. The eyes appeared once more. This time they seemed almost sad, but the open gas flame that burned with a hiss close above their heads gave off little light and that may have merely created an illusion. "Open the door," called K.'s uncle, raising his fist against it, "we are friends of Dr. Huld, the lawyer!" "Dr. Huld is ill," whispered someone behind them. In a doorway at the far end of a narrow passage stood a man in his dressing gown, giving them this information in an extremely quiet voice. K.'s uncle, who had already been made very angry by the long wait, turned abruptly round and retorted, "Ill? You say he's ill?" and strode towards the gentleman in a way that seemed almost threatening, as if he were the illness himself. "They've opened the door for you, now," said the gentleman, pointing at the door of the lawyer. He pulled his dressing gown together and disappeared. The door had indeed been opened, a young girl - K. recognised the dark, slightly bulging eyes - stood in the hallway in a long white apron, holding a candle in her hand. "Next time, open up sooner!" said K.'s uncle instead of a greeting, while the girl made a slight curtsey. "Come along, Josef," he then said to K. who was slowly moving over towards the girl. "Dr. Huld is unwell," said the girl as K.'s uncle, without stopping, rushed towards one of the doors. K. continued to look at the girl in amazement as she turned round to block the way into the living room, she had a round face like a puppy's, not only the pale cheeks and the chin were round but the temples and the hairline were too. "Josef!" called his uncle once more, and he asked the girl, "It's trouble with his heart, is it?" "I think it is, sir," said the girl, who by now had found time to go ahead with the candle and open the door into the room. In one corner of the room, where the light of the candle did not reach, a face with a long beard looked up from the bed. "Leni, who's this coming in?" asked the lawyer, unable to recognise his guests because he was dazzled by the candle. "It's your old friend, Albert," said K.'s uncle. "Oh, Albert," said the lawyer, falling back onto his pillow as if this visit meant he would not need to keep up appearances. "Is it really as bad as that?" asked K.'s uncle, sitting on the edge of the bed. "I don't believe it is. It's a recurrence of your heart trouble and it'll pass over like the other times." "Maybe," said the lawyer quietly, "but it's just as much trouble as it's ever been. I can hardly breathe, I can't sleep at all and I'm getting weaker by the day." "I see," said K.'s uncle, pressing his panama hat firmly against his knee with his big hand. "That is bad news. But are you getting the right sort of care? And it's so depressing in here, it's so dark. It's a long time since I was last here, but it seemed to me friendlier then. Even your young lady here doesn't seem to have much life in her, unless she's just pretending." The maid was still standing by the door with the candle; as far as could be made out, she was watching K. more than she was watching his uncle even while the latter was still speaking about her. K. leant against a chair that he had pushed near to the girl. "When you're as ill as I am," said the lawyer, "you need to have peace. I don't find it depressing." After a short pause he added, "and Leni looks after me well, she's a good girl." But that was not enough to persuade K.'s uncle, he had visibly taken against his friend's carer and, even though he did not contradict the invalid, he persecuted her with his scowl as she went over to the bed, put the candle on the bedside table and, leaning over the bed, made a fuss of him by tidying the pillows. K.'s uncle nearly forgot the need to show any consideration for the man who lay ill in bed, he stood up, walked up and down behind the carer, and K. would not have been surprised if he had grabbed hold of her skirts behind her and dragged her away from the bed. K. himself looked on calmly, he was not even disappointed at finding the lawyer unwell, he had been able to do nothing to oppose the enthusiasm his uncle had developed for the matter, he was glad that this enthusiasm had now been distracted without his having to do anything about it. His uncle, probably simply wishing to be offensive to the lawyer's attendant, then said, "Young lady, now please leave us alone for a while, I have some personal matters to discuss with my friend." Dr. Huld's carer was still leant far over the invalid's bed and smoothing out the cloth covering the wall next to it, she merely turned her head and then, in striking contrast with the anger that first stopped K.'s uncle from speaking and then let the words out in a gush, she said very quietly, "You can see that Dr. Huld is so ill that he can't discuss any matters at all." It was probably just for the sake of convenience that she had repeated the words spoken by K.'s uncle, but an onlooker might even have perceived it as mocking him and he, of course, jumped up as if he had just been stabbed. "You damned …," in the first gurglings of his excitement his words could hardly be understood, K. was startled even though he had been expecting something of the sort and ran to his uncle with the intention, no doubt, of closing his mouth with both his hands. Fortunately, though, behind the girl, the invalid raised himself up, K.'s uncle made an ugly face as if swallowing something disgusting and then, somewhat calmer, said, "We have naturally not lost our senses, not yet; if what I am asking for were not possible I would not be asking for it. Now please, go!" The carer stood up straight by the bed directly facing K.'s uncle, K. thought he noticed that with one hand she was stroking the lawyer's hand. "You can say anything in front of Leni," said the invalid, in a tone that was unmistakably imploring. "It's not my business," said K.'s uncle, "and it's not my secrets." And he twisted himself round as if wanting to go into no more negotiations but giving himself a little more time to think. "Whose business is it then?" asked the lawyer in an exhausted voice as he leant back again. "My nephew's," said K.'s uncle, "and I've brought him along with me." And he introduced him, "Chief Clerk Josef K." "Oh!" said the invalid, now with much more life in him, and reached out his hand towards K. "Do forgive me, I didn't notice you there at all." Then he then said to his carer, "Leni, go," stretching his hand out to her as if this were a farewell that would have to last for a long time. This time the girl offered no resistance. "So you," he finally said to K.'s uncle, who had also calmed down and stepped closer, "you haven't come to visit me because I'm ill but you've come on business." The lawyer now looked so much stronger that it seemed the idea of being visited because he was ill had somehow made him weak, he remained supporting himself of one elbow, which must have been rather tiring, and continually pulled at a lock of hair in the middle of his beard. "You already look much better," said K.'s uncle, "now that that witch has gone outside." He interrupted himself, whispered, "I bet you she's listening!" and sprang over to the door. But behind the door there was no-one, K.'s uncle came back not disappointed, as her not listening seemed to him worse than if she had been, but probably somewhat embittered. "You're mistaken about her," said the lawyer, but did nothing more to defend her; perhaps that was his way of indicating that she did not need defending. But in a tone that was much more committed he went on, "As far as your nephew's affairs are concerned, this will be an extremely difficult undertaking and I'd count myself lucky if my strength lasted out long enough for it; I'm greatly afraid it won't do, but anyway I don't want to leave anything untried; if I don't last out you can always get somebody else. To be honest, this matter interests me too much, and I can't bring myself to give up the chance of taking some part in it. If my heart does totally give out then at least it will have found a worthy affair to fail in." K. believed he understood not a word of this entire speech, he looked at his uncle for an explanation but his uncle sat on the bedside table with the candle in his hand, a medicine bottle had rolled off the table onto the floor, he nodded to everything the lawyer said, agreed to everything, and now and then looked at K. urging him to show the same compliance. Maybe K.'s uncle had already told the lawyer about the trial. But that was impossible, everything that had happened so far spoke against it. So he said, "I don't understand …" "Well, maybe I've misunderstood what you've been saying," said the lawyer, just as astonished and embarrassed as K. "Perhaps I've been going too fast. What was it you wanted to speak to me about? I thought it was to do with your trial." "Of course it is," said K.'s uncle, who then asked K., "So what is it you want?" "Yes, but how is it that you know anything about me and my case?" asked K. "Oh, I see," said the lawyer with a smile. "I am a lawyer, I move in court circles, people talk about various different cases and the more interesting ones stay in your mind, especially when they concern the nephew of a friend. There's nothing very remarkable about that." "What is it you want, then?" asked K.'s uncle once more, "You seem so uneasy about it" "You move in this court's circles?" asked K. "Yes," said the lawyer. "You're asking questions like a child," said K.'s uncle. "What circles should I move in, then, if not with members of my own discipline?" the lawyer added. It sounded so indisputable that K. gave no answer at all. "But you work in the High Court, not that court in the attic," he had wanted to say but could not bring himself to actually utter it. "You have to realise," the lawyer continued, in a tone as if he were explaining something obvious, unnecessary and incidental, "you have to realise that I also derive great advantage for my clients from mixing with those people, and do so in many different ways, it's not something you can keep talking about all the time. I'm at a bit of a disadvantage now, of course, because of my illness, but I still get visits from some good friends of mine at the court and I learn one or two things. It might even be that I learn more than many of those who are in the best of health and spend all day in court. And I'm receiving a very welcome visit right now, for instance." And he pointed into a dark corner of the room. "Where?" asked K., almost uncouth in his surprise. He looked round uneasily; the little candle gave off far too little light to reach as far as the wall opposite. And then, something did indeed begin to move there in the corner. In the light of the candle held up by K.'s uncle an elderly gentleman could be seen sitting beside a small table. He had been sitting there for so long without being noticed that he could hardly have been breathing. Now he stood up with a great deal of fuss, clearly unhappy that attention had been drawn to him. It was as if, by flapping his hands about like short wings, he hoped to deflect any introductions and greetings, as if he wanted on no account to disturb the others by his presence and seemed to be exhorting them to leave him back in the dark and forget about his being there. That, however, was something that could no longer be granted him. "You took us by surprise, you see," said the lawyer in explanation, cheerfully indicating to the gentleman that he should come closer, which, slowly, hesitatingly, looking all around him, but with a certain dignity, he did. "The office director - oh, yes, forgive me, I haven't introduced you - this is my friend Albert K., this is his nephew, the chief clerk Josef K., and this is the office director - so, the office director was kind enough to pay me a visit. It's only possible to appreciate just how valuable a visit like this is if you've been let into the secret of what a pile of work the office director has heaped over him. Well, he came anyway, we were having a peaceful chat, as far as I was able when I'm so weak, and although we hadn't told Leni she mustn't let anyone in as we weren't expecting anyone, we still would rather have remained alone, but then along came you, Albert, thumping your fists on the door, the office director moved over into the corner pulling his table and chair with him, but now it turns out we might have, that is, if that's what you wish, we might have something to discuss with each other and it would be good if we can all come back together again. - Office director …," he said with his head on one side, pointing with a humble smile to an armchair near the bed. "I'm afraid I'll only be able to stay a few minutes more," smiled the office director as he spread himself out in the armchair and looked at the clock. "Business calls. But I wouldn't want to miss the chance of meeting a friend of my friend." He inclined his head slightly toward K.'s uncle, who seemed very happy with his new acquaintance, but he was not the sort of person to express his feelings of deference and responded to the office director's words with embarrassed, but loud, laughter. A horrible sight! K. was able to quietly watch everything as nobody paid any attention to him, the office director took over as leader of the conversation as seemed to be his habit once he had been called forward, the lawyer listened attentively with his hand to his ear, his initial weakness having perhaps only had the function of driving away his new visitors, K.'s uncle served as candle-bearer - balancing the candle on his thigh while the office director frequently glanced nervously at it - and was soon free of his embarrassment and was quickly enchanted not only by the office director's speaking manner but also by the gentle, waving hand-movements with which he accompanied it. K., leaning against the bedpost, was totally ignored by the office director, perhaps deliberately, and served the old man only as audience. And besides, he had hardly any idea what the conversation was about and his thoughts soon turned to the care assistant and the ill treatment she had suffered from his uncle. Soon after, he began to wonder whether he had not seen the office director somewhere before, perhaps among the people who were at his first hearing. He may have been mistaken, but thought the office director might well have been among the old gentlemen with the thin beards in the first row.

There was then a noise that everyone heard from the hallway as if something of porcelain were being broken. "I'll go and see what's happened," said K., who slowly left the room as if giving the others the chance to stop him. He had hardly stepped into the hallway, finding his bearings in the darkness with his hand still firmly holding the door, when another small hand, much smaller than K.'s own, placed itself on his and gently shut the door. It was the carer who had been waiting there. "Nothing has happened," she whispered to him, "I just threw a plate against the wall to get you out of there." "I was thinking about you, as well," replied K. uneasily. "So much the better," said the carer. "Come with me". A few steps along, they came to a frosted glass door which the carer opened for him. "Come in here," she said. It was clearly the lawyer's office, fitted out with old, heavy furniture, as far as could be seen in the moonlight which now illuminated just a small, rectangular section of the floor by each of the three big windows. "This way," said the carer, pointing to a dark trunk with a carved, wooden backrest. When he had sat down, K. continued to look round the room, it was a large room with a high ceiling, the clients of this lawyer for the poor must have felt quite lost in it. K. thought he could see the little steps with which visitors would approach the massive desk. But then he forgot about all of this and had eyes only for the carer who sat very close beside him, almost pressing him against the armrest. "I did think," she said "you would come out here to me by yourself without me having to call you first. It was odd. First you stare at me as soon as you come in, and then you keep me waiting. And you ought to call me Leni, too," she added quickly and suddenly, as if no moment of this conversation should be lost. "Gladly," said K. "But as for its being odd, Leni, that's easy to explain. Firstly, I had to listen to what the old men were saying and couldn't leave without a good reason, but secondly I'm not a bold person, if anything I'm quite shy, and you, Leni, you didn't really look like you could be won over in one stroke, either." "That's not it," said Leni, laying one arm on the armrest and looking at K., "you didn't like me, and I don't suppose you like me now, either." "Liking wouldn't be very much," said K., evasively. "Oh!" she exclaimed with a smile, thus making use of K.'s comment to gain an advantage over him. So K. remained silent for a while. By now, he had become used to the darkness in the room and was able to make out various fixtures and fittings. He was especially impressed by a large picture hanging to the right of the door, he leant forward in order to see it better. It depicted a man wearing a judge's robes; he was sitting on a lofty throne gilded in a way that shone forth from the picture. The odd thing about the picture was that this judge was not sitting there in dignified calm but had his left arm pressed against the back and armrest, his right arm, however, was completely free and only grasped the armrest with his hand, as if about to jump up any moment in vigorous outrage and make some decisive comment or even to pass sentence. The accused was probably meant to be imagined at the foot of the steps, the top one of which could be seen in the picture, covered with a yellow carpet. "That might be my judge," said K., pointing to the picture with one finger. "I know him," said Leni looking up at the picture, "he comes here quite often. That picture is from when he was young, but he can never have looked anything like it, as he's tiny, minute almost. But despite that, he had himself made to look bigger in the picture as he's madly vain, just like everyone round here. But even I'm vain and that makes me very unhappy that you don't like me." K. replied to that last comment merely by embracing Leni and drawing her towards him, she lay her head quietly on his shoulder. To the rest of it, though, he said, "What rank is he?" "He's an examining judge," she said, taking hold of the hand with which K. held her and playing with his fingers. "Just an examining judge once again," said K. in disappointment, "the senior officials keep themselves hidden. But here he is sitting on a throne." "That's all just made up," said Leni with her face bent over K.'s hand, "really he's sitting on a kitchen chair with an old horse blanket folded over it. But do you have to be always thinking about your trial?" she added slowly. "No, not at all," said K., "I probably even think too little about it." "That's not the mistake you're making," said Leni, "you're too unyielding, that's what I've heard." "Who said that?" asked K., he felt her body against his chest and looked down on her rich, dark, tightly-bound hair. "I'd be saying too much if I told you that," answered Leni. "Please don't ask for names, but do stop making these mistakes of yours, stop being so unyielding, there's nothing you can do to defend yourself from this court, you have to confess. So confess to them as soon as you get the chance. It's only then that they give you the chance to get away, not till then. Only, without help from outside even that's impossible, but you needn't worry about getting this help as I want to help you myself." "You understand a lot about this court and what sort of tricks are needed," said K. as he lifted her, since she was pressing in much too close to him, onto his lap. "That's alright, then," she said, and made herself comfortable on his lap by smoothing out her skirt and adjusting her blouse. Then she hung both her arms around his neck, leant back and took a long look at him. "And what if I don't confess, could you not help me then?" asked K. to test her out. I'm accumulating women to help me, he thought to himself almost in amazement, first Miss Bürstner, then the court usher's wife, and now this little care assistant who seems to have some incomprehensible need for me. The way she sits on my lap as if it were her proper place! "No," answered Leni, slowly shaking her head, "I couldn't help you then. But you don't want my help anyway, it means nothing to you, you're too stubborn and won't be persuaded." Then, after a while she asked, "Do you have a lover?" "No," said K. "Oh, you must have," she said. "Well, I have really," said K. "Just think, I've even betrayed her while I'm carrying her photograph with me." Leni insisted he show her a photograph of Elsa, and then, hunched on his lap, studied the picture closely. The photograph was not one that had been taken while Elsa was posing for it, it showed her just after she had been in a wild dance such as she liked to do in wine bars, her skirt was still flung out as she span round, she had placed her hands on her firm hips and, with her neck held taut, looked to one side with a laugh; you could not see from the picture whom her laugh was intended for. "She's very tightly laced," said Leni, pointing to the place where she thought this could be seen. "I don't like her, she's clumsy and crude. But maybe she's gentle and friendly towards you, that's the impression you get from the picture. Big, strong girls like that often don't know how to be anything but gentle and friendly. Would she be capable of sacrificing herself for you, though?" "No," said K., "she isn't gentle or friendly, and nor would she be capable of sacrificing herself for me. But I've never yet asked any of those things of her. I've never looked at this picture as closely as you." "You can't think much of her, then," said Leni. "She can't be your lover after all." "Yes she is," said K., "I'm not going to take my word back on that." "Well she might be your lover now, then," said Leni, "but you wouldn't miss her much if you lost her or if you exchanged her for somebody else, me for instance." "That is certainly conceivable," said K. with a smile, "but she does have one major advantage over you, she knows nothing about my trial, and even if she did she wouldn't think about it. She wouldn't try to persuade me to be less unyielding." "Well that's no advantage," said Leni. "If she's got no advantage other than that, I can keep on hoping. Has she got any bodily defects?" "'Bodily defects'?" asked K. "Yeah," said Leni, "as I do have a bodily defect, just a little one. Look." She spread the middle and ring fingers of her right hand apart from each other. Between those fingers the flap of skin connecting them reached up almost as far as the top joint of the little finger. In the darkness, K. did not see at first what it was she wanted to show him, so she led his hand to it so that he could feel. "What a freak of nature," said K., and when he had taken a look at the whole hand he added, "What a pretty claw!" Leni looked on with a kind of pride as K. repeatedly opened and closed her two fingers in amazement, until, finally, he briefly kissed them and let go. "Oh!" she immediately exclaimed, "you kissed me!" Hurriedly, and with her mouth open, she clambered up K.'s lap with her knees. He was almost aghast as he looked up at her, now that she was so close to him there was a bitter, irritating smell from her, like pepper, she grasped his head, leant out over him, and bit and kissed his neck, even biting into his hair. "I've taken her place!" she exclaimed from time to time. "Just look, now you've taken me instead of her!" Just then, her knee slipped out and, with a little cry, she nearly fell down onto the carpet, K. tried to hold her by putting his arms around her and was pulled down with her. "Now you're mine," she said. Her last words to him as he left were, "Here's the key to the door, come whenever you want", and she planted an undirected kiss on his back. When he stepped out the front door there was a light rain falling, he was about to go to the middle of the street to see if he could still glimpse Leni at the window when K.'s uncle leapt out of a car that K., thinking of other things, had not seen waiting outside the building. He took hold of K. by both arms and shoved him against the door as if he wanted to nail him to it. "Young man," he shouted, "how could you do a thing like that?! Things were going well with this business of yours, now you've caused it terrible damage. You slip off with some dirty, little thing who, moreover, is obviously the lawyer's beloved, and stay away for hours. You don't even try to find an excuse, don't try to hide anything, no, you're quite open about it, you run off with her and stay there. And meanwhile we're sitting there, your uncle who's going to such effort for you, the lawyer who needs to be won over to your side, and above all the office director, a very important gentleman who is in direct command of your affair in its present stage. We wanted to discuss how best to help you, I had to handle the lawyer very carefully, he had to handle the office director carefully, and you had most reason of all to at least give me some support. Instead of which you stay away. Eventually we couldn't keep up the pretence any longer, but these are polite and highly capable men, they didn't say anything about it so as to spare my feelings but in the end not even they could continue to force themselves and, as they couldn't speak about the matter in hand, they became silent. We sat there for several minutes, listening to see whether you wouldn't finally come back. All in vain. In the end the office director stood up, as he had stayed far longer than he had originally intended, made his farewell, looked at me in sympathy without being able to help, he waited at the door for a long time although it's more than I can understand why he was being so good, and then he went. I, of course, was glad he'd gone, I'd been holding my breath all this time. All this had even more affect on the lawyer lying there ill, when I took my leave of him, the good man, he was quite unable to speak. You have probably contributed to his total collapse and so brought the very man who you are dependent on closer to his death. And me, your own uncle, you leave me here in the rain - just feel this, I'm wet right through - waiting here for hours, sick with worry."

Chapter Seven Lawyer - Manufacturer - Painter

One winter morning - snow was falling in the dull light outside - K. was sitting in his office, already extremely tired despite the early hour. He had told the servitor he was engaged in a major piece of work and none of the junior staff should be allowed in to see him, so he would not be disturbed by them at least. But instead of working he turned round in his chair, slowly moved various items around his desk, but then, without being aware of it, he lay his arm stretched out on the desk top and sat there immobile with his head sunk down on his chest.

He was no longer able to get the thought of the trial out of his head. He had often wondered whether it might not be a good idea to work out a written defence and hand it in to the court. It would contain a short description of his life and explain why he had acted the way he had at each event that was in any way important, whether he now considered he had acted well or ill, and his reasons for each. There was no doubt of the advantages a written defence of this sort would have over relying on the lawyer, who was anyway not without his shortcomings. K. had no idea what actions the lawyer was taking; it was certainly not a lot, it was more than a month since the lawyer had summoned him, and none of the previous discussions had given K. the impression that this man would be able to do much for him. Most importantly, he had asked him hardly any questions. And there were so many questions here to be asked. Asking questions were the most important thing. K. had the feeling that he would be able to ask all the questions needed here himself. The lawyer, in contrast, did not ask questions but did all the talking himself or sat silently facing him, leant forward slightly over the desk, probably because he was hard of hearing, pulled on a strand of hair in the middle of his beard and looked down at the carpet, perhaps at the very spot where K. had lain with Leni. Now and then he would give K. some vague warning of the sort you give to children. His speeches were as pointless as they were boring, and K. decided that when the final bill came he would pay not a penny for them. Once the lawyer thought he had humiliated K. sufficiently, he usually started something that would raise his spirits again. He had already, he would then say, won many such cases, partly or in whole, cases which may not really have been as difficult as this one but which, on the face of it, had even less hope of success. He had a list of these cases here in the drawer - here he would tap on one or other of the drawers in his desk - but could, unfortunately, not show them to K. as they dealt with official secrets. Nonetheless, the great experience he had acquired through all these cases would, of course, be of benefit to K. He had, of course, begun work straight away and was nearly ready to submit the first documents. They would be very important because the first impression made by the defence will often determine the whole course of the proceedings. Unfortunately, though, he would still have to make it clear to K. that the first documents submitted are sometimes not even read by the court. They simply put them with the other documents and point out that, for the time being, questioning and observing the accused are much more important than anything written. If the applicant becomes insistent, then they add that before they come to any decision, as soon as all the material has been brought together, with due regard, of course, to all the documents, then these first documents to have been submitted will also be checked over. But unfortunately, even this is not usually true, the first documents submitted are usually mislaid or lost completely, and even if they do keep them right to the end they are hardly read, although the lawyer only knew about this from rumour. This is all very regrettable, but not entirely without its justifications. But K. should not forget that the trial would not be public, if the court deems it necessary it can be made public but there is no law that says it has to be. As a result, the accused and his defence don't have access even to the court records, and especially not to the indictment, and that means we generally don't know - or at least not precisely - what the first documents need to be about, which means that if they do contain anything of relevance to the case it's only by a lucky coincidence. If anything about the individual charges and the reasons for them comes out clearly or can be guessed at while the accused is being questioned, then it's possible to work out and submit documents that really direct the issue and present proof, but not before. Conditions like this, of course, place the defence in a very unfavourable and difficult position. But that is what they intend. In fact, defence is not really allowed under the law, it's only tolerated, and there is even some dispute about whether the relevant parts of the law imply even that. So strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a counsel acknowledged by the court, and anyone who comes before this court as counsel is basically no more than a barrack room lawyer. The effect of all this, of course, is to remove the dignity of the whole procedure, the next time K. is in the court offices he might like to have a look in at the lawyers' room, just so that he's seen it. He might well be quite shocked by the people he sees assembled there. The room they've been allocated, with its narrow space and low ceiling, will be enough to show what contempt the court has for these people. The only light in the room comes through a little window that is so high up that, if you want to look out of it, you first have to get one of your colleagues to support you on his back, and even then the smoke from the chimney just in front of it will go up your nose and make your face black. In the floor of this room - to give yet another example of the conditions there - there is a hole that's been there for more than a year, it's not so big that a man could fall through, but it is big enough for your foot to disappear through it. The lawyers' room is on the second floor of the attic; if your foot does go through it will hang down into the first floor of the attic underneath it, and right in the corridor where the litigants are waiting. It's no exaggeration when lawyers say that conditions like that are a disgrace. Complaints to the management don't have the slightest effect, but the lawyers are strictly forbidden to alter anything in the room at their own expense. But even treating the lawyers in this way has its reasons. They want, as far as possible, to prevent any kind of defence, everything should be made the responsibility of the accused. Not a bad point of view, basically, but nothing could be more mistaken than to think from that that lawyers are not necessary for the accused in this court. On the contrary, there is no court where they are less needed than here. This is because proceedings are generally kept secret not only from the public but also from the accused. Only as far as that is possible, of course, but it is possible to a very large extent. And the accused doesn't get to see the court records either, and it's very difficult to infer what's in the court records from what's been said during questioning based on them, especially for the accused who is in a difficult situation and is faced with every possible worry to distract him. This is when the defence begins. Counsel for the defence are not normally allowed to be present while the accused is being questioned, so afterwards, and if possible still at the door of the interview room, he has to learn what he can about it from him and extract whatever he can that might be of use, even though what the accused has to report is often very confused. But that is not the most important thing, as there's really not a lot that can be learned in this way, although in this, as with anything else, a competent man will learn more than another. Nonetheless, the most important thing is the lawyer's personal connections, that's where the real value of taking counsel lies. Now K. will most likely have already learned from his own experience that, among its very lowest orders, the court organisation does have its imperfections, the court is strictly closed to the public, but staff who forget their duty or who take bribes do, to some extent, show where the gaps are. This is where most lawyers will push their way in, this is where bribes are paid and information extracted, there have even, in earlier times at least, been incidents where documents have been stolen. There's no denying that some surprisingly favourable results have been attained for the accused in this way, for a limited time, and these petty advocates then strut to and fro on the basis of them and attract new clients, but for the further course of the proceedings it signifies either nothing or nothing good. The only things of real value are honest personal contacts, contacts with higher officials, albeit higher officials of the lower grades, you understand. That is the only way the progress of the trial can be influenced, hardly noticeable at first, it's true, but from then on it becomes more and more visible. There are, of course, not many lawyers who can do this, and K. has made a very good choice in this matter. There were probably no more than one or two who had as many contacts as Dr. Huld, but they don't bother with the company of the lawyers' room and have nothing to do with it. This means they have all the less contact with the court officials. It is not at all necessary for Dr. Huld to go to the court, wait in the ante-rooms for the examining judges to turn up, if they turn up, and try to achieve something which, according to the judges' mood is usually more apparent than real and most often not even that. No, K. has seen for himself that the court officials, including some who are quite high up, come forward without being asked, are glad to give information which is fully open or at least easy to understand, they discuss the next stages in the proceedings, in fact in some cases they can be won over and are quite willing to adopt the other person's point of view. However, when this happens, you should never trust them too far, as however firmly they may have declared this new point of view in favour of the defendant they might well go straight back to their offices and write a report for the court that says just the opposite, and might well be even harder on the defendant than the original view, the one they insist they've been fully dissuaded from. And, of course, there's no way of defending yourself from this, something said in private is indeed in private and cannot then be used in public, it's not something that makes it easy for the defence to keep those gentlemen's favour. On the other hand, it's also true that the gentlemen don't become involved with the defence - which will of course be done with great expertise - just for philanthropic reasons or in order to be friendly, in some respects it would be truer to say that they, too, have it allocated to them. This is where the disadvantages of a court structure that, right from the start, stipulates that all proceedings take place in private, come into force. In normal, mediocre trials its officials have contact with the public, and they're very well equipped for it, but here they don't; normal trials run their course all by themselves, almost, and just need a nudge here and there; but when they're faced with cases that are especially difficult they're as lost as they often are with ones that are very simple; they're forced to spend all their time, day and night, with their laws, and so they don't have the right feel for human relationships, and that's a serious shortcoming in cases like this. That's when they come for advice to the lawyer, with a servant behind them carrying the documents which normally are kept so secret. You could have seen many gentlemen at this window, gentlemen of whom you would least expect it, staring out this window in despair on the street below while the lawyer is at his desk studying the documents so that he can give them good advice. And at times like that it's also possible to see how exceptionally seriously these gentlemen take their professions and how they are thrown into great confusion by difficulties which it's just not in their natures to overcome. But they're not in an easy position, to regard their positions as easy would be to do them an injustice. The different ranks and hierarchies of the court are endless, and even someone who knows his way around them cannot always tell what's going to happen. But even for the junior officials, the proceedings in the courtrooms are usually kept secret, so they are hardly able to see how the cases they work with proceed, court affairs appear in their range of vision often without their knowing where they come from and they move on further without their learning where they go. So civil servants like this are not able to learn the things you can learn from studying the successive stages that individual trials go through, the final verdict or the reasons for it. They're only allowed to deal with that part of the trial which the law allocates them, and they usually know less about the results of their work after it's left them than the defence does, even though the defence will usually stay in contact with the accused until the trial is nearly at its end, so that the court officials can learn many useful things from the defence. Bearing all this in mind, does it still surprise K. that the officials are irritated and often express themselves about the litigants in unflattering ways - which is an experience shared by everyone. All the officials are irritated, even when they appear calm. This causes many difficulties for the junior advocates, of course. There is a story, for instance, that has very much the ring of truth about it. It goes like this: One of the older officials, a good and peaceful man, was dealing with a difficult matter for the court which had become very confused, especially thanks to the contributions from the lawyers. He had been studying it for a day and a night without a break - as these officials are indeed hard working, no-one works as hard as they do. When it was nearly morning, and he had been working for twenty-four hours with probably very little result, he went to the front entrance, waited there in ambush, and every time a lawyer tried to enter the building he would throw him down the steps. The lawyers gathered together down in front of the steps and discussed with each other what they should do; on the one hand they had actually no right to be allowed into the building so that there was hardly anything that they could legally do to the official and, as I've already mentioned, they would have to be careful not to set all the officials against them. On the other hand, any day not spent in court is a day lost for them and it was a matter of some importance to force their way inside. In the end, they agreed that they would try to tire the old man out. One lawyer after another was sent out to run up the steps and let himself be thrown down again, offering what resistance he could as long as it was passive resistance, and his colleagues would catch him at the bottom of the steps. That went on for about an hour until the old gentleman, who was already exhausted from working all night, was very tired and went back to his office. Those who were at the bottom of the steps could not believe it at first, so they sent somebody out to go and look behind the door to see if there really was no-one there, and only then did they all gather together and probably didn't even dare to complain, as it's far from being the lawyers' job to introduce any improvements in the court system, or even to want to. Even the most junior lawyer can understand the relationship there to some extent, but one significant point is that almost every defendant, even very simple people, begins to think of suggestions for improving the court as soon as his proceedings have begun, many of them often even spend time and energy on the matter that could be spent far better elsewhere. The only right thing to do is to learn how to deal with the situation as it is. Even if it were possible to improve any detail of it - which is anyway no more than superstitious nonsense - the best that they could achieve, although doing themselves incalculable harm in the process, is that they will have attracted the special attention of the officials for any case that comes up in the future, and the officials are always ready to seek revenge. Never attract attention to yourself! Stay calm, however much it goes against your character! Try to gain some insight into the size of the court organism and how, to some extent, it remains in a state of suspension, and that even if you alter something in one place you'll draw the ground out from under your feet and might fall, whereas if an enormous organism like the court is disrupted in any one place it finds it easy to provide a substitute for itself somewhere else. Everything is connected with everything else and will continue without any change or else, which is quite probable, even more closed, more attentive, more strict, more malevolent. So it's best to leave the work to the lawyers and not to keep disturbing them. It doesn't do much good to make accusations, especially if you can't make it clear what they're based on and their full significance, but it must be said that K. caused a great deal of harm to his own case by his behaviour towards the office director, he was a very influential man but now he might as well be struck off the list of those who might do anything for K. If the trial is mentioned, even just in passing, it's quite obvious that he's ignoring it. These officials are in many ways just like children. Often, something quite harmless - although K.'s behaviour could unfortunately not be called harmless - will leave them feeling so offended that they will even stop talking with good friends of theirs, they turn away when they see them and do everything they can to oppose them. But then, with no particular reason, surprisingly enough, some little joke that was only ever attempted because everything seemed so hopeless will make them laugh and they'll be reconciled. It's both difficult and hard at the same time to deal with them, and there's hardly any reason for it. It's sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it's at all possible ever to have any success in one's work here. On the other hand, there are also dark moments, such as everyone has, when you think you've achieved nothing at all, when it seems that the only trials to come to a good end are those that were determined to have a good end from the start and would do so without any help, while all the others are lost despite all the running to and fro, all the effort, all the little, apparent successes that gave such joy. Then you no longer feel very sure of anything and, if asked about a trial that was doing well by its own nature but which was turned for the worse because you assisted in it, would not even dare deny that. And even that is a kind of self- confidence, but then it's the only one that's left. Lawyers are especially vulnerable to fits of depression of that sort - and they are no more than fits of depression of course - when a case is suddenly taken out of their hands after they've been conducting it satisfactorily for some time. That's probably the worst that can happen to a lawyer. It's not that the accused takes the case away from him, that hardly ever happens, once a defendant has taken on a certain lawyer he has to stay with him whatever happens. How could he ever carry on by himself after he's taken on help from a lawyer? No, that just doesn't happen, but what does sometimes happen is that the trial takes on a course where the lawyer may not go along with it. Client and trial are both simply taken away from the lawyer; and then even contact with the court officials won't help, however good they are, as they don't know anything themselves. The trial will have entered a stage where no more help can be given, where it's being processed in courts to which no-one has any access, where the defendant cannot even be contacted by his lawyer. You come home one day and find all the documents you've submitted, which you've worked hard to create and which you had the best hopes for, lying on the desk, they've been sent back as they can't be carried through to the next stage in the trial, they're just worthless scraps of paper. It doesn't mean that the case has been lost, not at all, or at least there is no decisive reason for supposing so, it's just that you don't know anything more about the case and won't be told anything of what's happening. Well, cases like that are the exceptions, I'm glad to say, and even if K.'s trial is one of them, it's still, for the time being, a long way off. But there was still plenty of opportunity for lawyers to get to work, and K. could be sure they would be made use of. As he had said, the time for submitting documents was still in the future and there was no rush to prepare them, it was much more important to start the initial discussions with the appropriate officials, and they had already taken place. With varying degrees of success, it must be said. It was much better not to give away any details before their time, as in that way K. could only be influenced unfavourably and his hopes might be raised or he might be made too anxious, better just to say that some individuals have spoken very favourably and shown themselves very willing to help, although others have spoken less favourably, but even they have not in any way refused to help. So all in all, the results are very encouraging, only you should certainly not draw any particular conclusions as all preliminary proceedings begin in the same way and it was only the way they developed further that would show what the value of these preliminary proceedings has been. Anyway, nothing has been lost yet, and if we can succeed in getting the office director, despite everything, on our side - and several actions have been undertaken to this end - then everything is a clean wound, as a surgeon would say, and we can wait for the results with some comfort.

When he started talking on in this way the lawyer was quite tireless. He went through it all again every time K. went to see him. There was always some progress, but he could never be told what sort of progress it was. The first set of documents to be submitted were being worked on but still not ready, which usually turned out to be a great advantage the next time K. went to see him as the earlier occasion would have been a very bad time to put them in, which they could not then have known. If K., stupefied from all this talking, ever pointed out that even considering all these difficulties progress was very slow, the lawyer would object that progress was not slow at all, but that they might have progressed far further if K. had come to him at the right time. But he had come to him late and that lateness would bring still further difficulties, and not only where time was concerned. The only welcome interruption during these visits was always when Leni contrived to bring the lawyer his tea while K. was there. Then she would stand behind K. - pretending to watch the lawyer as he bent greedily over his cup, poured the tea in and drank - and secretly let K. hold her hand. There was always complete silence. The lawyer drank. K. squeezed Leni's hand and Leni would sometimes dare to gently stroke K.'s hair. "Still here, are you?" the lawyer would ask when he was ready. "I wanted to take the dishes away," said Leni, they would give each other's hands a final squeeze, the lawyer would wipe his mouth and then start talking at K. again with renewed energy.

Was the lawyer trying to comfort K. or to confuse him? K. could not tell, but it seemed clear to him that his defence was not in good hands. Maybe everything the lawyer said was quite right, even though he obviously wanted to make himself as conspicuous as possible and probably had never even taken on a case as important as he said K.'s was. But it was still suspicious how he continually mentioned his personal contacts with the civil servants. Were they to be exploited solely for K.'s benefit? The lawyer never forgot to mention that they were dealing only with junior officials, which meant officials who were dependent on others, and the direction taken in each trial could be important for their own furtherment. Could it be that they were making use of the lawyer to turn trials in a certain direction, which would, of course, always be at the cost of the defendant? It certainly did not mean that they would do that in every trial, that was not likely at all, and there were probably also trials where they gave the lawyer advantages and all the room he needed to turn it in the direction he wanted, as it would also be to their advantage to keep his reputation intact. If that really was their relationship, how would they direct K.'s trial which, as the lawyer had explained, was especially difficult and therefore important enough to attract great attention from the very first time it came to court? There could not be much doubt about what they would do. The first signs of it could already be seen in the fact that the first documents still had not been submitted even though the trial had already lasted several months, and that, according to the lawyer, everything was still in its initial stages, which was very effective, of course, in making the defendant passive and keeping him helpless. Then he could be suddenly surprised with the verdict, or at least with a notification that the hearing had not decided in his favour and the matter would be passed on to a higher office.

It was essential that K. take a hand in it himself. On winter's mornings such as this, when he was very tired and everything dragged itself lethargically through his head, this belief of his seemed irrefutable. He no longer felt the contempt for the trial that he had had earlier. If he had been alone in the world it would have been easy for him to ignore it, although it was also certain that, in that case, the trial would never have arisen in the first place. But now, his uncle had already dragged him to see the lawyer, he had to take account of his family; his job was no longer totally separate from the progress of the trial, he himself had carelessly - with a certain, inexplicable complacency - mentioned it to acquaintances and others had learned about it in ways he did not know, his relationship with Miss Bürstner seemed to be in trouble because of it. In short, he no longer had any choice whether he would accept the trial or turn it down, he was in the middle of it and had to defend himself. If he was tired, then that was bad.

But there was no reason to worry too much before he needed to. He had been capable of working himself up to his high position in the bank in a relatively short time and to retain it with respect from everyone, now he simply had to apply some of the talents that had made that possible for him to the trial, and there was no doubt that it had to turn out well. The most important thing, if something was to be achieved, was to reject in advance any idea that he might be in any way guilty. There was no guilt. The trial was nothing but a big piece of business, just like he had already concluded to the benefit of the bank many times, a piece of business that concealed many lurking dangers waiting in ambush for him, as they usually did, and these dangers would need to be defended against. If that was to be achieved then he must not entertain any idea of guilt, whatever he did, he would need to look after his own interests as closely as he could. Seen in this way, there was no choice but to take his representation away from the lawyer very soon, at best that very evening. The lawyer had told him, as he talked to him, that that was something unheard of and would probably do him a great deal of harm, but K. could not tolerate any impediment to his efforts where his trial was concerned, and these impediments were probably caused by the lawyer himself. But once he had shaken off the lawyer the documents would need to be submitted straight away and, if possible, he would need to see to it that they were being dealt with every day. It would of course not be enough, if that was to be done, for K. to sit in the corridor with his hat under the bench like the others. Day after day, he himself, or one of the women or somebody else on his behalf, would have to run after the officials and force them to sit at their desks and study K.'s documents instead of looking out on the corridor through the grating. There could be no let-up in these efforts, everything would need to be organised and supervised, it was about time that the court came up against a defendant who knew how to defend and make use of his rights.

But when K. had the confidence to try and do all this the difficulty of composing the documents was too much for him. Earlier, just a week or so before, he could only have felt shame at the thought of being made to write out such documents himself; it had never entered his head that the task could also be difficult. He remembered one morning when, already piled up with work, he suddenly shoved everything to one side and took a pad of paper on which he sketched out some of his thoughts on how documents of this sort should proceed. Perhaps he would offer them to that slow-witted lawyer, but just then the door of the manager's office opened and the deputy-director entered the room with a loud laugh. K. was very embarrassed, although the deputy-director, of course, was not laughing at K.'s documents, which he knew nothing about, but at a joke he had just heard about the stock-exchange, a joke which needed an illustration if it was to be understood, and now the deputy- director leant over K.'s desk, took his pencil from his hand, and drew the illustration on the writing pad that K. had intended for his ideas about his case.

K. now had no more thoughts of shame, the documents had to be prepared and submitted. If, as was very likely, he could find no time to do it in the office he would have to do it at home at night. If the nights weren't enough he would have to take a holiday. Above all, he could not stop half way, that was nonsense not only in business but always and everywhere. Needless to say, the documents would mean an almost endless amount of work. It was easy to come to the belief, not only for those of an anxious disposition, that it was impossible ever to finish it. This was not because of laziness or deceit, which were the only things that might have hindered the lawyer in preparing it, but because he did not know what the charge was or even what consequences it might bring, so that he had to remember every tiny action and event from the whole of his life, looking at them from all sides and checking and reconsidering them. It was also a very disheartening job. It would have been more suitable as a way of passing the long days after he had retired and become senile. But now, just when K. needed to apply all his thoughts to his work, when he was still rising and already posed a threat to the deputy-director, when every hour passed so quickly and he wanted to enjoy the brief evenings and nights as a young man, this was the time he had to start working out these documents. Once more, he began to feel resentment. Almost involuntarily, only to put an end to it, his finger felt for the button of the electric bell in the ante-room. As he pressed it he glanced up to the clock. It was eleven o'clock, two hours, he had spent a great deal of his costly time just dreaming and his wits were, of course, even more dulled than they had been before. But the time had, nonetheless, not been wasted, he had come to some decisions that could be of value. As well as various pieces of mail, the servitors brought two visiting cards from gentlemen who had already been waiting for K. for some time. They were actually very important clients of the bank who should not really have been kept waiting under any circumstances. Why had they come at such an awkward time, and why, the gentlemen on the other side of the closed door seemed to be asking, was the industrious K. using up the best business time for his private affairs? Tired from what had gone before, and tired in anticipation of what was to follow, K. stood up to receive the first of them.

He was a short, jolly man, a manufacturer who K. knew well. He apologised for disturbing K. at some important work, and K., for his part, apologised for having kept the manufacturer waiting for so long. But even this apology was spoken in such a mechanical way and with such false intonation that the manufacturer would certainly have noticed if he had not been fully preoccupied with his business affairs. Instead, he hurriedly pulled calculations and tables out from all his pockets, spread them out in front of K., explained several items, corrected a little mistake in the arithmetic that he noticed as he quickly glanced over it all, and reminded K. of a similar piece of business he'd concluded with him about a year before, mentioning in passing that this time there was another bank spending great effort to get his business, and finally stopped speaking in order to learn K.'s opinion on the matter. And K. had indeed, at first, been closely following what the manufacturer was saying, he too was aware of how important the deal was, but unfortunately it did not last, he soon stopped listening, nodded at each of the manufacturer's louder exclamations for a short while, but eventually he stopped doing even that and did no more than stare at the bald head bent over the papers, asking himself when the manufacturer would finally realise that everything he was saying was useless. When he did stop talking, K. really thought at first that this was so that he would have the chance to confess that he was incapable of listening. Instead, seeing the anticipation on the manufacturer's face, obviously ready to counter any objections made, he was sorry to realise that the business discussion had to be continued. So he bent his head as if he'd been given an order and began slowly to move his pencil over the papers, now and then he would stop and stare at one of the figures. The manufacturer thought there must be some objection, perhaps his figures weren't really sound, perhaps they weren't the decisive issue, whatever he thought, the manufacturer covered the papers with his hand and began once again, moving very close to K., to explain what the deal was all about. "It is difficult," said K., pursing his lips. The only thing that could offer him any guidance were the papers, and the manufacturer had covered them from his view, so he just sank back against the arm of the chair. Even when the door of the manager's office opened and revealed not very clearly, as if through a veil, the deputy director, he did no more than look up weakly. K. thought no more about the matter, he merely watched the immediate effect of the deputy director's appearance and, for him, the effect was very pleasing; the manufacturer immediately jumped up from his seat and hurried over to meet the deputy director, although K. would have liked to make him ten times livelier as he feared the deputy director might disappear again. He need not have worried, the two gentlemen met each other, shook each other's hand and went together over to K.'s desk. The manufacturer said he was sorry to find the chief clerk so little inclined to do business, pointing to K. who, under the view of the deputy director, had bent back down over the papers. As the two men leant over the desk and the manufacturer made some effort to gain and keep the deputy director's attention, K. felt as if they were much bigger than they really were and that their negotiations were about him. Carefully and slowly turning his eyes upwards, he tried to learn what was taking place above him, took one of the papers from his desk without looking to see what it was, lay it on the flat of his hand and raised it slowly up as he rose up to the level of the two men himself. He had no particular plan in mind as he did this, but merely felt this was how he would act if only he had finished preparing that great document that was to remove his burden entirely. The deputy director had been paying all his attention to the conversation and did no more than glance at the paper, he did not read what was written on it at all as what was important for the chief clerk was not important for him, he took it from K.'s hand saying, "Thank you, I'm already familiar with everything", and lay it calmly back on the desk. K. gave him a bitter, sideways look. But the deputy director did not notice this at all, or if he did notice it it only raised his spirits, he frequently laughed out loud, one time he clearly embarrassed the manufacturer when he raised an objection in a witty way but drew him immediately back out of his embarrassment by commenting adversely on himself, and finally invited him into his office where they could bring the matter to its conclusion. "It's a very important matter," said the manufacturer. "I understand that completely. And I'm sure the chief clerk …" - even as he said this he was actually speaking only to the manufacturer - "will be very glad to have us take it off his hands. This is something that needs calm consideration. But he seems to be over-burdened today, there are even some people in the room outside who've been waiting there for hours for him." K. still had enough control of himself to turn away from the deputy director and direct his friendly, albeit stiff, smile only at the manufacturer, he made no other retaliation, bent down slightly and supported himself with both hands on his desk like a clerk, and watched as the two gentlemen, still talking, took the papers from his desk and disappeared into the manager's office. In the doorway, the manufacturer turned and said he wouldn't make his farewell with K. just yet, he would of course let the chief clerk know about the success of his discussions but he also had a little something to tell him about.

At last, K. was by himself. It did not enter his head to show anyone else into his office and only became vaguely aware of how nice it was that the people outside thought he was still negotiating with the manufacturer and, for this reason, he could not let anyone in to see him, not even the servitor. He went over to the window, sat down on the ledge beside it, held firmly on to the handle and looked down onto the square outside. The snow was still falling, the weather still had not brightened up at all.

He remained a long time sitting in this way, not knowing what it actually was that made him so anxious, only occasionally did he glance, slightly startled, over his shoulder at the door to the outer room where, mistakenly, he thought he'd heard some noise. No-one came, and that made him feel calmer, he went over to the wash stand, rinsed his face with cold water and, his head somewhat clearer, went back to his place by the window. The decision to take his defence into his own hands now seemed more of a burden than he had originally assumed. All the while he had left his defence up to the lawyer his trial had had little basic affect on him, he had observed it from afar as something that was scarcely able to reach him directly, when it suited him he looked to see how things stood but he was also able to draw his head back again whenever he wanted. Now, in contrast, if he was to conduct his defence himself, he would have to devote himself entirely to the court - for the time being, at least - success would mean, later on, his complete and conclusive liberation, but if he was to achieve this he would have to place himself, to start with, in far greater danger than he had been in so far. If he ever felt tempted to doubt this, then his experience with the deputy director and the manufacturer that day would be quite enough to convince him of it. How could he have sat there totally convinced of the need to do his own defence? How would it be later? What would his life be like in the days ahead? Would he find the way through it all to a happy conclusion? Did a carefully worked out defence - and any other sort would have made no sense - did a carefully worked out defence not also mean he would need to shut himself off from everything else as much as he could? Would he survive that? And how was he to succeed in conducting all this at the bank? It involved much more than just submitting some documents that he could probably prepare in a few days' leave, although it would have been great temerity to ask for time off from the bank just at that time, it was a whole trial and there was no way of seeing how long it might last. This was an enormous difficulty that had suddenly been thrown into K.'s life!

And was he supposed to be doing the bank's work at a time like this? He looked down at his desk. Was he supposed to let people in to see him and go into negotiations with them at a time like this? While his trial trundled on, while the court officials upstairs in the attic room sat looking at the papers for this trial, should he be worrying about the business of the bank? Did this not seem like a kind of torture, acknowledged by the court, connected with the trial and which followed him around? And is it likely that anyone in the bank, when judging his work, would take any account of his peculiar situation? No- one and never. There were those who knew about his trial, although it was not quite clear who knew about it or how much. But he hoped rumours had not reached as far as the deputy director, otherwise he would obviously soon find a way of making use of it to harm K., he would show neither comradeship nor humaneness. And what about the director? It was true that he was well disposed towards K., and as soon as he heard about the trial he would probably try to do everything he could to make it easier for him, but he would certainly not devote himself to it. K. at one time had provided the counter-balance to what the deputy director said but the director was now coming more and more under his influence, and the deputy director would also exploit the weakened condition of the director to strengthen his own power. So what could K. hope for? Maybe considerations of this sort weakened his power of resistance, but it was still necessary not to deceive oneself and to see everything as clearly as it could be seen at that moment.

For no particular reason, just to avoiding returning to his desk for a while, he opened the window. It was difficult to open and he had to turn the handle with both his hands. Then, through the whole height and breadth of the window, the mixture of fog and smoke was drawn into the room, filling it with a slight smell of burning. A few flakes of snow were blown in with it. "It's a horrible autumn," said the manufacturer, who had come into the room unnoticed after seeing the deputy director and now stood behind K. K. nodded and looked uneasily at the manufacturer's briefcase, from which he would now probably take the papers and inform K. of the result of his negotiations with the deputy director. However, the manufacturer saw where K. was looking, knocked on his briefcase and without opening it said, "You'll be wanting to hear how things turned out. I've already got the contract in my pocket, almost. He's a charming man, your deputy director - he's got his dangers, though." He laughed as he shook K.'s hand and wanted to make him laugh with him. But to K., it once more seemed suspicious that the manufacturer did not want to show him the papers and saw nothing about his comments to laugh at. "Chief clerk," said the manufacturer, "I expect the weather's been affecting your mood, has it? You're looking so worried today." "Yes," said K., raising his hand and holding the temple of his head, "headaches, worries in the family." "Quite right," said the manufacturer, who was always in a hurry and could never listen to anyone for very long, "everyone has his cross to bear." K. had unconsciously made a step towards the door as if wanting to show the manufacturer out, but the manufacturer said, "Chief clerk, there's something else I'd like to mention to you. I'm very sorry if it's something that'll be a burden to you today of all days but I've been to see you twice already, lately, and each time I forgot all about it. If I delay it any longer it might well lose its point altogether. That would be a pity, as I think what I've got to say does have some value." Before K. had had the time to answer, the manufacturer came up close to him, tapped his knuckle lightly on his chest and said quietly, "You've got a trial going on, haven't you?" K. stepped back and immediately exclaimed, "That's what the deputy director's been telling you!" "No, no," said the manufacturer, "how would the deputy director know about it?" "And what about you?" asked K., already more in control of himself. "I hear things about the court here and there," said the manufacturer, "and that even applies to what it is that I wanted to tell you about." "There are so many people who have connections with the court!" said K. with lowered head, and he led the manufacturer over to his desk. They sat down where they had been before, and the manufacturer said, "I'm afraid it's not very much that I've got to tell you about. Only, in matters like this, it's best not to overlook the tiniest details. Besides, I really want to help you in some way, however modest my help might be. We've been good business partners up till now, haven't we? Well then." K. wanted to apologise for his behaviour in the conversation earlier that day, but the manufacturer would tolerate no interruption, shoved his briefcase up high in his armpit to show that he was in a hurry, and carried on. "I know about your case through a certain Titorelli. He's a painter, Titorelli's just his artistic name, I don't even know what his real name is. He's been coming to me in my office for years from time to time, and brings little pictures with him which I buy more or less just for the sake of charity as he's hardly more than a beggar. And they're nice pictures, too, moorland landscapes and that sort of thing. We'd both got used to doing business in this way and it always went smoothly. Only, one time these visits became a bit too frequent, I began to tell him off for it, we started talking and I became interested how it was that he could earn a living just by painting, and then I learned to my amazement that his main source of income was painting portraits. 'I work for the court,' he said, 'what court?' said I. And that's when he told me about the court. I'm sure you can imagine how amazed I was at being told all this. Ever since then I learn something new about the court every time he comes to visit, and so little by little I get to understand something of how it works. Anyway, Titorelli talks a lot and I often have to push him away, not only because he's bound to be lying but also, most of all, because a businessman like me who's already close to breaking point under the weight of his own business worries can't pay too much attention to other people's. But all that's just by the by. Perhaps - this is what I've been thinking - perhaps Titorelli might be able to help you in some small way, he knows lots of judges and even if he can't have much influence himself he can give you some advice about how to get some influential people on your side. And even if this advice doesn't turn out to make all the difference I still think it'll be very important once you've got it. You're nearly a lawyer yourself. That's what I always say, Mr. K. the chief clerk is nearly a lawyer. Oh I'm sure this trial of yours will turn out all right. So do you want to go and see Titorelli, then? If I ask him to he'll certainly do everything he possibly can. I really do think you ought to go. It needn't be today, of course, just some time, when you get the chance. And anyway - I want to tell you this too - you don't actually have to go and see Titorelli, this advice from me doesn't place you under any obligation at all. No, if you think you can get by without Titorelli it'll certainly be better to leave him completely out of it. Maybe you've already got a clear idea of what you're doing and Titorelli could upset your plans. No, if that's the case then of course you shouldn't go there under any circumstances! And it certainly won't be easy to take advice from a lad like that. Still, it's up to you. Here's the letter of recommendation and here's the address."

Disappointed, K. took the letter and put it in his pocket. Even at best, the advantage he might derive from this recommendation was incomparably smaller than the damage that lay in the fact of the manufacturer knowing about his trial, and that the painter was spreading the news about. It was all he could manage to give the manufacturer, who was already on his way to the door, a few words of thanks. "I'll go there," he said as he took his leave of the manufacturer at the door, "or, as I'm very busy at present, I'll write to him, perhaps he would like to come to me in my office some time." "I was sure you'd find the best solution," said the manufacturer. "Although I had thought you'd prefer to avoid inviting people like this Titorelli to the bank and talking about the trial here. And it's not always a good idea to send letters to people like Titorelli, you don't know what might happen to them. But you're bound to have thought everything through and you know what you can and can't do." K. nodded and accompanied the manufacturer on through the ante-room. But despite seeming calm on the outside he was actually very shocked; he had told the manufacturer he would write to Titorelli only to show him in some way that he valued his recommendations and would consider the opportunity to speak with Titorelli without delay, but if he had thought Titorelli could offer any worthwhile assistance he would not have delayed. But it was only the manufacturer's comment that made K. realise what dangers that could lead to. Was he really able to rely on his own understanding so little? If it was possible that he might invite a questionable character into the bank with a clear letter, and ask advice from him about his trial, separated from the deputy director by no more than a door, was it not possible or even very likely that there were also other dangers he had failed to see or that he was even running towards? There was not always someone beside him to warn him. And just now, just when he would have to act with all the strength he could muster, now a number of doubts of a sort he had never before known had presented themselves and affected his own vigilance! The difficulties he had been feeling in carrying out his office work; were they now going to affect the trial too? Now, at least, he found himself quite unable to understand how he could have intended to write to Titorelli and invite him into the bank.

He shook his head at the thought of it once more as the servitor came up beside him and drew his attention to the three gentlemen who were waiting on a bench in the ante-room. They had already been waiting to see K. for a long time. Now that the servitor was speaking with K. they had stood up and each of them wanted to make use of the opportunity to see K. before the others. It had been negligent of the bank to let them waste their time here in the waiting room, but none of them wanted to draw attention to this. "Mr. K., …" one of them was saying, but K. had told the servitor to fetch his winter coat and said to the three of them, as the servitor helped him to put it on, "Please forgive me, gentlemen, I'm afraid I have no time to see you at present. Please do forgive me but I have some urgent business to settle and have to leave straight away. You've already seen yourselves how long I've been delayed. Would you be so kind as to come back tomorrow or some time? Or perhaps we could settle your affairs by telephone? Or perhaps you would like to tell me now, briefly, what it's about and I can then give you a full answer in writing. Whatever, the best thing will be for you to come here again." The gentlemen now saw that their wait had been totally pointless, and these suggestions of K.'s left them so astounded that they looked at each other without a word. "That's agreed then, is it?" asked K., who had turned toward the servitor bringing him his hat. Through the open door of K.'s office they could see that the snowfall outside had become much heavier. So K. turned the collar of his coat up and buttoned it up high under his chin. Just then the deputy director came out of the adjoining room, smiled as he saw K. negotiating with the gentlemen in his winter coat, and asked, "Are you about to go out?" "Yes," said K., standing more upright, "I have to go out on some business." But the deputy director had already turned towards the gentlemen. "And what about these gentlemen?" he asked. "I think they've already been waiting quite a long time." "We've already come to an understanding," said K. But now the gentlemen could be held back no longer, they surrounded K. and explained that they would not have been waiting for hours if it had not been about something important that had to be discussed now, at length and in private. The deputy director listened to them for a short while, he also looked at K. as he held his hat in his hand cleaning the dust off it here and there, and then he said, "Gentlemen, there is a very simple way to solve this. If you would prefer it, I'll be very glad to take over these negotiations instead of the chief clerk. Your business does, of course, need to be discussed without delay. We are businessmen like yourselves and know the value of a businessman's time. Would you like to come this way?" And he opened the door leading to the ante-room of his own office.

The deputy director seemed very good at appropriating everything that K. was now forced to give up! But was K. not giving up more than he absolutely had to? By running off to some unknown painter, with, as he had to admit, very little hope of any vague benefit, his renown was suffering damage that could not be repaired. It would probably be much better to take off his winter coat again and, at the very least, try to win back the two gentlemen who were certainly still waiting in the next room. If K. had not then glimpsed the deputy director in his office, looking for something from his bookshelves as if they were his own, he would probably even have made the attempt. As K., somewhat agitated, approached the door the deputy director called out, "Oh, you've still not left!" He turned his face toward him - its many deep folds seemed to show strength rather than age - and immediately began once more to search. "I'm looking for a copy of a contract," he said, "which this gentleman insists you must have. Could you help me look for it, do you think?" K. made a step forward, but the deputy director said, "thank you, I've already found it," and with a big package of papers, which certainly must have included many more documents than just the copy of the contract, he turned and went back into his own office.

"I can't deal with him right now," K. said to himself, "but once my personal difficulties have been settled, then he'll certainly be the first to get the effect of it, and he certainly won't like it." Slightly calmed by these thoughts, K. gave the servitor, who had already long been holding the door to the corridor open for him, the task of telling the director, when he was able, that K. was going out of the bank on a business matter. As he left the bank he felt almost happy at the thought of being able to devote more of himself to his own business for a while.

He went straight to the painter, who lived in an outlying part of town which was very near to the court offices, although this area was even poorer, the houses were darker, the streets were full of dirt that slowly blew about over the half-melted snow. In the great gateway to the building where the painter lived only one of the two doors was open, a hole had been broken open in the wall by the other door, and as K. approached it a repulsive, yellow, steaming liquid shot out causing some rats to scurry away into the nearby canal. Down by the staircase there was a small child lying on its belly crying, but it could hardly be heard because of the noise from a metal-workshop on the other side of the entrance hall, drowning out any other sound. The door to the workshop was open, three workers stood in a circle around some piece of work that they were beating with hammers. A large tin plate hung on the wall, casting a pale light that pushed its way in between two of the workers, lighting up their faces and their work-aprons. K. did no more than glance at any of these things, he wanted to get things over with here as soon as possible, to exchange just a few words to find out how things stood with the painter and go straight back to the bank. Even if he had just some tiny success here it would still have a good effect on his work at the bank for that day. On the third floor he had to slow down his pace, he was quite out of breath - the steps, just like the height of each floor, were much higher than they needed to be and he'd been told that the painter lived right up in the attic. The air was also quite oppressive, there was no proper stairwell and the narrow steps were closed in by walls on both sides with no more than a small, high window here and there. Just as K. paused for a while some young girls ran out of one of the flats and rushed higher up the stairs, laughing. K. followed them slowly, caught up with one of the girls who had stumbled and been left behind by the others, and asked her as they went up side by side, "Is there a painter, Titorelli, who lives here?" The girl, hardly thirteen years old and somewhat hunchbacked, jabbed him with her elbow and looked at him sideways. Her youth and her bodily defects had done nothing to stop her being already quite depraved. She did not smile once, but looked at K. earnestly, with sharp, acquisitive eyes. K. pretended not to notice her behaviour and asked, "Do you know Titorelli, the painter?" She nodded and asked in reply, "What d'you want to see him for?" K. thought it would be to his advantage quickly to find out something more about Titorelli. "I want to have him paint my portrait," he said. "Paint your portrait?" she asked, opening her mouth too wide and lightly hitting K. with her hand as if he had said something extraordinarily surprising or clumsy, with both hands she lifted her skirt, which was already very short, and, as fast as she could, she ran off after the other girls whose indistinct shouts lost themselves in the heights. At the next turn of the stairs, however, K. encountered all the girls once more. The hunchbacked girl had clearly told them about K.'s intentions and they were waiting for him. They stood on both sides of the stairs, pressing themselves against the wall so that K. could get through between them, and smoothed their aprons down with their hands. All their faces, even in this guard of honour, showed a mixture of childishness and depravity. Up at the head of the line of girls, who now, laughing, began to close in around K., was the hunchback who had taken on the role of leader. It was thanks to her that K. found the right direction without delay - he would have continued up the stairs straight in front of him, but she showed him that to reach Titorelli he would need to turn off to one side. The steps that led up to the painter were especially narrow, very long without any turning, the whole length could be seen in one glance and, at the top, at Titorelli's closed door, it came to its end. This door was much better illuminated than the rest of the stairway by the light from a small skylight set obliquely above it, it had been put together from unpainted planks of wood and the name 'Titorelli' was painted on it in broad, red brushstrokes. K. was no more than half way up the steps, accompanied by his retinue of girls, when, clearly the result of the noise of all those footsteps, the door opened slightly and in the crack a man who seemed to be dressed in just his nightshirt appeared. "Oh!" he cried, when he saw the approaching crowd, and vanished. The hunchbacked girl clapped her hands in glee and the other girls crowded in behind K. to push him faster forward.

They still had not arrived at the top, however, when the painter up above them suddenly pulled the door wide open and, with a deep bow, invited K. to enter. The girls, on the other hand, he tried to keep away, he did not want to let any of them in however much they begged him and however much they tried to get in - if they could not get in with his permission they would try to force their way in against his will. The only one to succeed was the hunchback when she slipped through under his outstretched arm, but the painter chased after her, grabbed her by the skirt, span her once round and set her down again by the door with the other girls who, unlike the first, had not dared to cross the doorstep while the painter had left his post. K. did not know what he was to make of all this, as they all seemed to be having fun. One behind the other, the girls by the door stretched their necks up high and called out various words to the painter which were meant in jest but which K. did not understand, and even the painter laughed as the hunchback whirled round in his hand. Then he shut the door, bowed once more to K., offered him his hand and introduced himself, saying, "Titorelli, painter". K. pointed to the door, behind which the girls were whispering, and said, "You seem to be very popular in this building." "Ach, those brats!" said the painter, trying in vain to fasten his nightshirt at the neck. He was also bare-footed and, apart from that, was wearing nothing more than a loose pair of yellowish linen trousers held up with a belt whose free end whipped to and fro. "Those kids are a real burden for me," he continued. The top button of his nightshirt came off and he gave up trying to fasten it, fetched a chair for K. and made him sit down on it. "I painted one of them once - she's not here today - and ever since then they've been following me about. If I'm here they only come in when I allow it, but as soon as I've gone out there's always at least one of them in here. They had a key made to my door and lend it round to each other. It's hard to imagine what a pain that is. Suppose I come back home with a lady I'm going to paint, I open the door with my own key and find the hunchback there or something, by the table painting her lips red with my paintbrush, and meanwhile her little sisters will be keeping guard for her, moving about and causing chaos in every corner of the room. Or else, like happened yesterday, I might come back home late in the evening - please forgive my appearance and the room being in a mess, it is to do with them - so, I might come home late in the evening and want to go to bed, then I feel something pinching my leg, look under the bed and pull another of them out from under it. I don't know why it is they bother me like this, I expect you've just seen that I do nothing to encourage them to come near me. And they make it hard for me to do my work too, of course. If I didn't get this studio for nothing I'd have moved out a long time ago." Just then, a little voice, tender and anxious, called out from under the door, "Titorelli, can we come in now?" "No," answered the painter. "Not even just me, by myself?" the voice asked again. "Not even just you," said the painter, as he went to the door and locked it.

Meanwhile, K. had been looking round the room, if it had not been pointed out it would never have occurred to him that this wretched little room could be called a studio. It was hardly long enough or broad enough to make two steps. Everything, floor, walls and ceiling, was made of wood, between the planks narrow gaps could be seen. Across from where K. was, the bed stood against the wall under a covering of many different colours. In the middle of the room a picture stood on an easel, covered over with a shirt whose arms dangled down to the ground. Behind K. was the window through which the fog made it impossible to see further than the snow covered roof of the neighbouring building.

The turning of the key in the lock reminded K. that he had not wanted to stay too long. So he drew the manufacturer's letter out from his pocket, held it out to the painter and said, "I learned about you from this gentleman, an acquaintance of yours, and it's on his advice that I've come here". The painter glanced through the letter and threw it down onto the bed. If the manufacturer had not said very clearly that Titorelli was an acquaintance of his, a poor man who was dependent on his charity, then it would really have been quite possible to believe that Titorelli did not know him or at least that he could not remember him. This impression was augmented by the painter's asking, "Were you wanting to buy some pictures or did you want to have yourself painted?" K. looked at the painter in astonishment. What did the letter actually say? K. had taken it as a matter of course that the manufacturer had explained to the painter in his letter that K. wanted nothing more with him than to find out more about his trial. He had been far too rash in coming here! But now he had to give the painter some sort of answer and, glancing at the easel, said, "Are you working on a picture currently?" "Yes," said the painter, and he took the shirt hanging over the easel and threw it onto the bed after the letter. "It's a portrait. Quite a good piece of work, although it's not quite finished yet." This was a convenient coincidence for K., it gave him a good opportunity to talk about the court as the picture showed, very clearly, a judge. What's more, it was remarkably similar to the picture in the lawyer's office, although this one showed a quite different judge, a heavy man with a full beard which was black and bushy and extended to the sides far up the man's cheeks. The lawyer's picture was also an oil painting, whereas this one had been made with pastel colours and was pale and unclear. But everything else about the picture was similar, as this judge, too, was holding tightly to the arm of his throne and seemed ominously about to rise from it. At first K. was about to say, "He certainly is a judge," but he held himself back for the time being and went closer to the picture as if he wanted to study it in detail. There was a large figure shown in middle of the throne's back rest which K. could not understand and asked the painter about it. That'll need some more work done on it, the painter told him, and taking a pastel crayon from a small table he added a few strokes to the edges of the figure but without making it any clearer as far as K. could make out. "That's the figure of justice," said the painter, finally. "Now I see," said K., "here's the blindfold and here are the scales. But aren't those wings on her heels, and isn't she moving?" "Yes," said the painter, "I had to paint it like that according to the contract. It's actually the figure of justice and the goddess of victory all in one." "That is not a good combination," said K. with a smile. "Justice needs to remain still, otherwise the scales will move about and it won't be possible to make a just verdict." "I'm just doing what the client wanted," said the painter. "Yes, certainly," said K., who had not meant to criticise anyone by that comment. "You've painted the figure as it actually appears on the throne." "No," said the painter, "I've never seen that figure or that throne, it's all just invention, but they told me what it was I had to paint." "How's that?" asked K. pretending not fully to understand what the painter said. "That is a judge sitting on the judge's chair, isn't it?" "Yes," said the painter, "but that judge isn't very high up and he's never sat on any throne like that." "And he has himself painted in such a grand pose? He's sitting there just like the president of the court." "Yeah, gentlemen like this are very vain," said the painter. "But they have permission from higher up to get themselves painted like this. It's laid down quite strictly just what sort of portrait each of them can get for himself. Only it's a pity that you can't make out the details of his costume and pose in this picture, pastel colours aren't really suitable for showing people like this." "Yes," said K., "it does seem odd that it's in pastel colours." "That's what the judge wanted," said the painter, "it's meant to be for a woman." The sight of the picture seemed to make him feel like working, he rolled up his shirtsleeves, picked up a few of the crayons, and K. watched as a reddish shadow built up around the head of the judge under their quivering tips and radiated out the to edges of the picture. This shadow play slowly surrounded the head like a decoration or lofty distinction. But around the figure of Justice, apart from some coloration that was barely noticeable, it remained light, and in this brightness the figure seemed to shine forward so that it now looked like neither the God of Justice nor the God of Victory, it seemed now, rather, to be a perfect depiction of the God of the Hunt. K. found the painter's work more engrossing than he had wanted; but finally he reproached himself for staying so long without having done anything relevant to his own affair. "What's the name of this judge?" he asked suddenly. "I'm not allowed to tell you that," the painter answered. He was bent deeply over the picture and clearly neglecting his guest who, at first, he had received with such care. K. took this to be just a foible of the painter's, and it irritated him as it made him lose time. "I take it you must be a trustee of the court," he said. The painter immediately put his crayons down, stood upright, rubbed his hands together and looked at K. with a smile. "Always straight out with the truth," he said. "You want to learn something about the court, like it says in your letter of recommendation, but then you start talking about my pictures to get me on your side. Still, I won't hold it against you, you weren't to know that that was entirely the wrong thing to try with me. Oh, please!" he said sharply, repelling K.'s attempt to make some objection. He then continued, "And besides, you're quite right in your comment that I'm a trustee of the court." He made a pause, as if wanting to give K. the time to come to terms with this fact. The girls could once more be heard from behind the door. They were probably pressed around the keyhole, perhaps they could even see into the room through the gaps in the planks. K. forewent the opportunity to excuse himself in some way as he did not wish to distract the painter from what he was saying, or else perhaps he didn't want him to get too far above himself and in this way make himself to some extent unattainable, so he asked, "Is that a publicly acknowledged position?" "No," was the painter's curt reply, as if the question prevented him saying any more. But K. wanted him to continue speaking and said, "Well, positions like that, that aren't officially acknowledged, can often have more influence than those that are." "And that's how it is with me," said the painter, and nodded with a frown. "I was talking about your case with the manufacturer yesterday, and he asked me if I wouldn't like to help you, and I answered: 'He can come and see me if he likes', and now I'm pleased to see you here so soon. This business seems to be quite important to you, and, of course, I'm not surprised at that. Would you not like to take your coat off now?" K. had intended to stay for only a very short time, but the painter's invitation was nonetheless very welcome. The air in the room had slowly become quite oppressive for him, he had several times looked in amazement at a small, iron stove in the corner that certainly could not have been lit, the heat of the room was inexplicable. As he took off his winter overcoat and also unbuttoned his frock coat the painter said to him in apology, "I must have warmth. And it is very cosy here, isn't it. This room's very good in that respect." K. made no reply, but it was actually not the heat that made him uncomfortable but, much more, the stuffiness, the air that almost made it more difficult to breathe, the room had probably not been ventilated for a long time. The unpleasantness of this was made all the stronger for K. when the painter invited him to sit on the bed while he himself sat down on the only chair in the room in front of the easel. The painter even seemed to misunderstand why K. remained at the edge of the bed and urged K. to make himself comfortable, and as he hesitated he went over to the bed himself and pressed K. deep down into the bedclothes and pillows. Then he went back to his seat and at last he asked his first objective question, which made K. forget everything else. "You're innocent, are you?" he asked. "Yes," said K. He felt a simple joy at answering this question, especially as the answer was given to a private individual and therefore would have no consequences. Up till then no-one had asked him this question so openly. To make the most of his pleasure he added, "I am totally innocent." "So," said the painter, and he lowered his head and seemed to be thinking. Suddenly he raised his head again and said, "Well if you're innocent it's all very simple." K. began to scowl, this supposed trustee of the court was talking like an ignorant child. "My being innocent does not make things simple," said K. Despite everything, he couldn't help smiling and slowly shook his head. "There are many fine details in which the court gets lost, but in the end it reaches into some place where originally there was nothing and pulls enormous guilt out of it." "Yeah, yeah, sure," said the painter, as if K. had been disturbing his train of thought for no reason. "But you are innocent, aren't you?" "Well of course I am," said K. "That's the main thing," said the painter. There was no counter-argument that could influence him, but although he had made up his mind it was not clear whether he was talking this way because of conviction or indifference. K., then, wanted to find out and said therefore, "I'm sure you're more familiar with the court than I am, I know hardly more about it than what I've heard, and that's been from many very different people. But they were all agreed on one thing, and that was that when ill thought-out accusations are made they are not ignored, and that once the court has made an accusation it is convinced of the guilt of the defendant and it's very hard to make it think otherwise." "Very hard?" the painter asked, throwing one hand up in the air. "It's impossible to make it think otherwise. If I painted all the judges next to each other here on canvas, and you were trying to defend yourself in front of it, you'd have more success with them than you'd ever have with the real court." "Yes," said K. to himself, forgetting that he had only gone there to investigate the painter.

One of the girls behind the door started up again, and asked, "Titorelli, is he going to go soon?" "Quiet!" shouted the painter at the door, "Can't you see I'm talking with the gentleman?" But this was not enough to satisfy the girl and she asked, "You going to paint his picture?" And when the painter didn't answer she added, "Please don't paint him, he's an 'orrible bloke." There followed an incomprehensible, interwoven babble of shouts and replies and calls of agreement. The painter leapt over to the door, opened it very slightly - the girls' clasped hands could be seen stretching through the crack as if they wanted something - and said, "If you're not quiet I'll throw you all down the stairs. Sit down here on the steps and be quiet." They probably did not obey him immediately, so that he had to command, "Down on the steps!" Only then it became quiet.

"I'm sorry about that," said the painter as he returned to K. K. had hardly turned towards the door, he had left it completely up to the painter whether and how he would place him under his protection if he wanted to. Even now, he made hardly any movement as the painter bent over him and, whispering into his ear in order not to be heard outside, said, "These girls belong to the court as well." "How's that?" asked K., as he leant his head to one side and looked at the painter. But the painter sat back down on his chair and, half in jest, half in explanation, "Well, everything belongs to the court." "That is something I had never noticed until now," said K. curtly, this general comment of the painter's made his comment about the girls far less disturbing. Nonetheless, K. looked for a while at the door, behind which the girls were now sitting quietly on the steps. Except, that one of them had pushed a drinking straw through a crack between the planks and was moving it slowly up and down. "You still don't seem to have much general idea of what the court's about", said the painter, who had stretched his legs wide apart and was tapping loudly on the floor with the tip of his foot. "But as you're innocent you won't need it anyway. I'll get you out of this by myself." "How do you intend to do that?" asked K. "You did say yourself not long ago that it's quite impossible to go to the court with reasons and proofs." "Only impossible for reasons and proofs you take to the court yourself" said the painter, raising his forefinger as if K. had failed to notice a fine distinction. "It goes differently if you try to do something behind the public court, that's to say in the consultation rooms, in the corridors or here, for instance, in my studio." K. now began to find it far easier to believe what the painter was saying, or rather it was largely in agreement with what he had also been told by others. In fact it was even quite promising. If it really was so easy to influence the judges through personal contacts as the lawyer had said then the painter's contacts with these vain judges was especially important, and at the very least should not be undervalued. And the painter would fit in very well in the circle of assistants that K. was slowly gathering around himself. He had been noted at the bank for his talent in organising, here, where he was placed entirely on his own resources, would be a good opportunity to test that talent to its limits. The painter observed the effect his explanation had had on K. and then, with a certain unease, said, "Does it not occur to you that the way I'm speaking is almost like a lawyer? It's the incessant contact with the gentlemen of the court has that influence on me. I gain a lot by it, of course, but I lose a lot, artistically speaking." "How did you first come into contact with the judges, then?" asked K., he wanted first to gain the painter's trust before he took him into his service. "That was very easy," said the painter, "I inherited these contacts. My father was court painter before me. It's a position that's always inherited. They can't use new people for it, the rules governing how the various grades of officials are painted are so many and varied, and, above all, so secret that no- one outside of certain families even knows them. In the drawer there, for instance, I've got my father's notes, which I don't show to anyone. But you're only able to paint judges if you know what they say. Although, even if I lost them no-one could ever dispute my position because of all the rules I just carry round in my head. All the judges want to be painted like the old, great judges were, and I'm the only one who can do that." "You are to be envied," said K., thinking of his position at the bank. "Your position is quite unassailable, then?" "Yes, quite unassailable," said the painter, and he raised his shoulders in pride. "That's how I can even afford to help some poor man facing trial now and then." "And how do you do that?" asked K., as if the painter had not just described him as a poor man. The painter did not let himself be distracted, but said, "In your case, for instance, as you're totally innocent, this is what I'll do." The repeated mention of K.'s innocence was becoming irksome to him. It sometimes seemed to him as if the painter was using these comments to make a favourable outcome to the trial a precondition for his help, which of course would make the help itself unnecessary. But despite these doubts K. forced himself not to interrupt the painter. He did not want to do without the painter's help, that was what he had decided, and this help did not seem in any way less questionable than that of the lawyer. K. valued the painter's help far more highly because it was offered in a way that was more harmless and open.

The painter had pulled his seat closer to the bed and continued in a subdued voice: "I forgot to ask you; what sort of acquittal is it you want? There are three possibilities; absolute acquittal, apparent acquittal and deferment. Absolute acquittal is the best, of course, only there's nothing I could do to get that sort of outcome. I don't think there's anyone at all who could do anything to get an absolute acquittal. Probably the only thing that could do that is if the accused is innocent. As you are innocent it could actually be possible and you could depend on your innocence alone. In that case you won't need me or any other kind of help."

At first, K. was astonished at this orderly explanation, but then, just as quietly as the painter, he said, "I think you're contradicting yourself." "How's that?" asked the painter patiently, leaning back with a smile. This smile made K. feel as if he were examining not the words of the painter but seeking out inconsistencies in the procedures of the court itself. Nonetheless, he continued unabashed and said, "You remarked earlier that the court cannot be approached with reasoned proofs, you later restricted this to the open court, and now you go so far as to say that an innocent man needs no assistance in court. That entails a contradiction. Moreover, you said earlier that the judges can be influenced personally but now you insist that an absolute acquittal, as you call it, can never be attained through personal influence. That entails a second contradiction." "It's quite easy to clear up these contradictions," said the painter. "We're talking about two different things here, there's what it says in the law and there's what I know from my own experience, you shouldn't get the two confused. I've never seen it in writing, but the law does, of course, say on the one hand that the innocent will be set free, but on the other hand it doesn't say that the judges can be influenced. But in my experience it's the other way round. I don't know of any absolute acquittals but I do know of many times when a judge has been influenced. It's possible, of course, that there was no innocence in any of the cases I know about. But is that likely? Not a single innocent defendant in so many cases? When I was a boy I used to listen closely to my father when he told us about court cases at home, and the judges that came to his studio talked about the court, in our circles nobody talks about anything else; I hardly ever got the chance to go to court myself but always made use of it when I could, I've listened to countless trials at important stages in their development, I've followed them closely as far as they could be followed, and I have to say that I've never seen a single acquittal." "So. Not a single acquittal," said K., as if talking to himself and his hopes. "That confirms the impression I already have of the court. So there's no point in it from this side either. They could replace the whole court with a single hangman." "You shouldn't generalise," said the painter, dissatisfied, "I've only been talking about my own experience." "Well that's enough," said K., "or have you heard of any acquittals that happened earlier?" "They say there have been some acquittals earlier," the painter answered, "but it's very hard to be sure about it. The courts don't make their final conclusions public, not even the judges are allowed to know about them, so that all we know about these earlier cases are just legends. But most of them did involve absolute acquittals, you can believe that, but they can't be proved. On the other hand, you shouldn't forget all about them either, I'm sure there is some truth to them, and they are very beautiful, I've painted a few pictures myself depicting these legends." "My assessment will not be altered by mere legends," said K. "I don't suppose it's possible to cite these legends in court, is it?" The painter laughed. "No, you can't cite them in court," he said. "Then there's no point in talking about them," said K., he wanted, for the time being, to accept anything the painter told him, even if he thought it unlikely or contradicted what he had been told by others. He did not now have the time to examine the truth of everything the painter said or even to disprove it, he would have achieved as much as he could if the painter would help him in any way even if his help would not be decisive. As a result, he said, "So let's pay no more attention to absolute acquittal, but you mentioned two other possibilities." "Apparent acquittal and deferment. They're the only possibilities," said the painter. "But before we talk about them, would you not like to take your coat off? You must be hot." "Yes," said K., who until then had paid attention to nothing but the painter's explanations, but now that he had had the heat pointed out to him his brow began to sweat heavily. "It's almost unbearable." The painter nodded as if he understood K.'s discomfort very well. "Could we not open the window?" asked K. "No," said the painter. "It's only a fixed pane of glass, it can't be opened." K. now realised that all this time he had been hoping the painter would suddenly go over to the window and pull it open. He had prepared himself even for the fog that he would breathe in through his open mouth. The thought that here he was entirely cut off from the air made him feel dizzy. He tapped lightly on the bedspread beside him and, with a weak voice, said, "That is very inconvenient and unhealthy." "Oh no," said the painter in defence of his window, "as it can't be opened this room retains the heat better than if the window were double glazed, even though it's only a single pane. There's not much need to air the room as there's so much ventilation through the gaps in the wood, but when I do want to I can open one of my doors, or even both of them." K. was slightly consoled by this explanation and looked around to see where the second door was. The painter saw him do so and said, "It's behind you, I had to hide it behind the bed." Only then was K. able to see the little door in the wall. "It's really much too small for a studio here," said the painter, as if he wanted to anticipate an objection K. would make. "I had to arrange things as well as I could. That's obviously a very bad place for the bed, in front of the door. For instance when the judge I'm painting at present comes he always comes through the door by the bed, and I've even given him a key to this door so that he can wait for me here in the studio when I'm not home. Although nowadays he usually comes early in the morning when I'm still asleep. And of course, it always wakes me up when I hear the door opened beside the bed, however fast asleep I am. If you could hear the way I curse him as he climbs over my bed in the morning you'd lose all respect for judges. I suppose I could take the key away from him but that'd only make things worse. It only takes a tiny effort to break any of the doors here off their hinges." All the time the painter was speaking, K. was considering whether he should take off his coat, but he finally realised that, if he didn't do so, he would be quite unable to stay here any longer, so he took off his frock coat and lay it on his knee so that he could put it back on again as soon as the conversation was over. He had hardly done this when one of the girls called out, "Now he's taken his coat off!" and they could all be heard pressing around the gaps in the planks to see the spectacle for themselves. "The girls think I'm going to paint your portrait," said the painter, "and that's why you're taking your coat off." "I see," said K., only slightly amused by this, as he felt little better than he had before even though he now sat in his shirtsleeves. With some irritation he asked, "What did you say the two other possibilities were?" He had already forgotten the terms used. "Apparent acquittal and deferment," said the painter. "It's up to you which one you choose. You can get either of them if I help you, but it'll take some effort of course, the difference between them is that apparent acquittal needs concentrated effort for a while and that deferment takes much less effort but it has to be sustained. Now then, apparent acquittal. If that's what you want I'll write down an assertion of your innocence on a piece of paper. The text for an assertion of this sort was passed down to me from my father and it's quite unassailable. I take this assertion round to the judges I know. So I'll start off with the one I'm currently painting, and put the assertion to him when he comes for his sitting this evening. I'll lay the assertion in front of him, explain that you're innocent and give him my personal guarantee of it. And that's not just a superficial guarantee, it's a real one and it's binding." The painter's eyes seemed to show some reproach of K. for wanting to impose that sort of responsibility on him. "That would be very kind of you", said K. "And would the judge then believe you and nonetheless not pass an absolute acquittal?" "It's like I just said," answered the painter. "And anyway, it's not entirely sure that all the judges would believe me, many of them, for instance, might want me to bring you to see them personally. So then you'd have to come along too. But at least then, if that happens, the matter is half way won, especially as I'd teach you in advance exactly how you'd need to act with the judge concerned, of course. What also happens, though, is that there are some judges who'll turn me down in advance, and that's worse. I'll certainly make several attempts, but still, we'll have to forget about them, but at least we can afford to do that as no one judge can pass the decisive verdict. Then when I've got enough judges' signatures on this document I take it to the judge who's concerned with your case. I might even have his signature already, in which case things develop a bit quicker than they would do otherwise. But there aren't usually many hold ups from then on, and that's the time that the defendant can feel most confident. It's odd, but true, that people feel more confidence in this time than they do after they've been acquitted. There's no particular exertion needed now. When he has the document asserting the defendant's innocence, guaranteed by a number of other judges, the judge can acquit you without any worries, and although there are still several formalities to be gone through there's no doubt that that's what he'll do as a favour to me and several other acquaintances. You, however, walk out the court and you're free." "So, then I'll be free," said K., hesitantly. "That's right," said the painter, "but only apparently free or, to put it a better way, temporarily free, as the most junior judges, the ones I know, they don't have the right to give the final acquittal. Only the highest judge can do that, in the court that's quite out of reach for you, for me and for all of us. We don't know how things look there and, incidentally, we don't want to know. The right to acquit people is a major privilege and our judges don't have it, but they do have the right to free people from the indictment. That's to say, if they're freed in this way then for the time being the charge is withdrawn but it's still hanging over their heads and it only takes an order from higher up to bring it back into force. And as I'm in such good contact with the court I can also tell you how the difference between absolute and apparent acquittal is described, just in a superficial way, in the directives to the court offices. If there's an absolute acquittal all proceedings should stop, everything disappears from the process, not just the indictment but the trial and even the acquittal disappears, everything just disappears. With an apparent acquittal it's different. When that happens, nothing has changed except that the case for your innocence, for your acquittal and the grounds for the acquittal have been made stronger. Apart from that, proceedings go on as before, the court offices continue their business and the case gets passed to higher courts, gets passed back down to the lower courts and so on, backwards and forwards, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, to and fro. It's impossible to know exactly what's happening while this is going on. Seen from outside it can sometimes seem that everything has been long since forgotten, the documents have been lost and the acquittal is complete. No-one familiar with the court would believe it. No documents ever get lost, the court forgets nothing. One day - no-one expects it - some judge or other picks up the documents and looks more closely at them, he notices that this particular case is still active, and orders the defendant's immediate arrest. I've been talking here as if there's a long delay between apparent acquittal and re-arrest, that is quite possible and I do know of cases like that, but it's just as likely that the defendant goes home after he's been acquitted and finds somebody there waiting to re-arrest him. Then, of course, his life as a free man is at an end." "And does the trial start over again?" asked K., finding it hard to believe. "The trial will always start over again," said the painter, "but there is, once again as before, the possibility of getting an apparent acquittal. Once again, the accused has to muster all his strength and mustn't give up." The painter said that last phrase possibly as a result of the impression that K., whose shoulders had dropped somewhat, gave on him. "But to get a second acquittal," asked K., as if in anticipation of further revelations by the painter, "is that not harder to get than the first time?" "As far as that's concerned," answered the painter, "there's nothing you can say for certain. You mean, do you, that the second arrest would have an adverse influence on the judge and the verdict he passes on the defendant? That's not how it happens. When the acquittal is passed the judges are already aware that re-arrest is likely. So when it happens it has hardly any effect. But there are countless other reasons why the judges' mood and their legal acumen in the case can be altered, and efforts to obtain the second acquittal must therefore be suited to the new conditions, and generally just as vigorous as the first." "But this second acquittal will once again not be final," said K., shaking his head. "Of course not," said the painter, "the second acquittal is followed by the third arrest, the third acquittal by the fourth arrest and so on. That's what is meant by the term apparent acquittal." K. was silent. "You clearly don't think an apparent acquittal offers much advantage," said the painter, "perhaps deferment would suit you better. Would you like me to explain what deferment is about?" K. nodded. The painter had leant back and spread himself out in his chair, his nightshirt was wide open, he had pushed his hand inside and was stroking his breast and his sides. "Deferment," said the painter, looking vaguely in front of himself for a while as if trying to find a perfectly appropriate explanation, "deferment consists of keeping proceedings permanently in their earliest stages. To do that, the accused and those helping him need to keep in continuous personal contact with the court, especially those helping him. I repeat, this doesn't require so much effort as getting an apparent acquittal, but it probably requires a lot more attention. You must never let the trial out of your sight, you have to go and see the appropriate judge at regular intervals as well as when something in particular comes up and, whatever you do, you have to try and remain friendly with him; if you don't know the judge personally you have to influence him through the judges you do know, and you have to do it without giving up on the direct discussions. As long as you don't fail to do any of these things you can be reasonably sure the trial won't get past its first stages. The trial doesn't stop, but the defendant is almost as certain of avoiding conviction as if he'd been acquitted. Compared with an apparent acquittal, deferment has the advantage that the defendant's future is less uncertain, he's safe from the shock of being suddenly re-arrested and doesn't need to fear the exertions and stress involved in getting an apparent acquittal just when everything else in his life would make it most difficult. Deferment does have certain disadvantages of its own though, too, and they shouldn't be under-estimated. I don't mean by this that the defendant is never free, he's never free in the proper sense of the word with an apparent acquittal either. There's another disadvantage. Proceedings can't be prevented from moving forward unless there are some at least ostensible reasons given. So something needs to seem to be happening when looked at from the outside. This means that from time to time various injunctions have to be obeyed, the accused has to be questioned, investigations have to take place and so on. The trial's been artificially constrained inside a tiny circle, and it has to be continuously spun round within it. And that, of course, brings with it certain unpleasantnesses for the accused, although you shouldn't imagine they're all that bad. All of this is just for show, the interrogations, for instance, they're only very short, if you ever don't have the time or don't feel like going to them you can offer an excuse, with some judges you can even arrange the injunctions together a long time in advance, in essence all it means is that, as the accused, you have to report to the judge from time to time." Even while the painter was speaking those last words K. had laid his coat over his arm and had stood up. Immediately, from outside the door, there was a cry of 'He's standing up now!'. "Are you leaving already?" asked the painter, who had also stood up. "It must be the air that's driving you out. I'm very sorry about that. There's still a lot I need to tell you. I had to put everything very briefly but I hope at least it was all clear." "Oh yes," said K., whose head was aching from the effort of listening. Despite this affirmation the painter summed it all up once more, as if he wanted to give K. something to console him on his way home. "Both have in common that they prevent the defendant being convicted," he said. "But they also prevent his being properly acquitted," said K. quietly, as if ashamed to acknowledge it. "You've got it, in essence," said the painter quickly. K. placed his hand on his winter overcoat but could not bring himself to put it on. Most of all he would have liked to pack everything together and run out to the fresh air. Not even the girls could induce him to put his coat on, even though they were already loudly telling each other that he was doing so. The painter still had to interpret K.'s mood in some way, so he said, "I expect you've deliberately avoided deciding between my suggestions yet. That's good. I would even have advised against making a decision straight away. There's no more than a hair's breadth of difference between the advantages and disadvantages. Everything has to be carefully weighed up. But the most important thing is you shouldn't lose too much time." "I'll come back here again soon," said K., who had suddenly decided to put his frock coat on, threw his overcoat over his shoulder and hurried over to the door behind which the girls now began to scream. K. thought he could even see the screaming girls through the door. "Well, you'll have to keep your word," said the painter, who had not followed him, "otherwise I'll come to the bank to ask about it myself." "Will you open this door for me," said K. pulling at the handle which, as he noticed from the resistance, was being held tightly by the girls on the other side. "Do you want to be bothered by the girls?" asked the painter. "It's better if you use the other way out," he said, pointing to the door behind the bed. K. agreed to this and jumped back to the bed. But instead of opening that door the painter crawled under the bed and from underneath it asked K., "Just a moment more, would you not like to see a picture I could sell to you?" K. did not want to be impolite, the painter really had taken his side and promised to help him more in the future, and because of K.'s forgetfulness there had been no mention of any payment for the painter's help, so K. could not turn him down now and allowed him to show him the picture, even though he was quivering with impatience to get out of the studio. From under the bed, the painter withdrew a pile of unframed paintings. They were so covered in dust that when the painter tried to blow it off the one on top the dust swirled around in front of K.'s eyes, robbing him of breath for some time. "Moorland landscape," said the painter passing the picture to K. It showed two sickly trees, well separated from each other in dark grass. In the background there was a multi-coloured sunset. "That's nice," said K. "I'll buy it." K. expressed himself in this curt way without any thought, so he was glad when the painter did not take this amiss and picked up a second painting from the floor. "This is a counterpart to the first picture," said the painter. Perhaps it had been intended as a counterpart, but there was not the slightest difference to be seen between it and the first picture, there were the trees, there the grass and there the sunset. But this was of little importance to K. "They are beautiful landscapes," he said, "I'll buy them both and hang them in my office." "You seem to like this subject," said the painter, picking up a third painting, "good job I've still got another, similar picture here." The picture though, was not similar, rather it was exactly the same moorland landscape. The painter was fully exploiting this opportunity to sell off his old pictures. "I'll take this one too," said K. "How much do the three paintings cost?" "We can talk about that next time," said the painter. "You're in a hurry now, and we'll still be in contact. And besides, I'm glad you like the paintings, I'll give you all the paintings I've got down here. They're all moorland landscapes, I've painted a lot of moorland landscapes. A lot of people don't like that sort of picture because they're too gloomy, but there are others, and you're one of them, who love gloomy themes." But K. was not in the mood to hear about the professional experiences of this painter cum beggar. "Wrap them all up!" he called out, interrupting the painter as he was speaking, "my servant will come to fetch them in the morning." "There's no need for that," said the painter. "I expect I can find a porter for you who can go with you now." And, at last, he leant over the bed and unlocked the door. "Just step on the bed, don't worry about that," said the painter, "that's what everyone does who comes in here." Even without this invitation, K. had shown no compunction in already placing his foot in the middle of the bed covers, then he looked out through the open door and drew his foot back again. "What is that?" he asked the painter. "What are you so surprised at?" he asked, surprised in his turn. "Those are court offices. Didn't you know there are court offices here? There are court offices in almost every attic, why should this building be any different? Even my studio is actually one of the court offices but the court put it at my disposal." It was not so much finding court offices even here that shocked K., he was mainly shocked at himself, at his own naïvety in court matters. It seemed to him that one of the most basic rules governing how a defendant should behave was always to be prepared, never allow surprises, never to look, unsuspecting, to the right when the judge stood beside him to his left - and this was the very basic rule that he was continually violating. A long corridor extended in front of him, air blew in from it which, compared with the air in the studio, was refreshing. There were benches set along each side of the corridor just as in the waiting area for the office he went to himself. There seemed to be precise rules governing how offices should be equipped. There did not seem to be many people visiting the offices that day. There was a man there, half sitting, half laying, his face was buried in his arm on the bench and he seemed to be sleeping; another man was standing in the half-dark at the end of the corridor. K. now climbed over the bed, the painter followed him with the pictures. They soon came across a servant of the court - K. was now able to recognise all the servants of the court from the gold buttons they wore on their civilian clothes below the normal buttons - and the painter instructed him to go with K. carrying the pictures. K. staggered more than he walked, his handkerchief pressed over his mouth. They had nearly reached the exit when the girls stormed in on them, so K. had not been able to avoid them. They had clearly seen that the second door of the studio had been opened and had gone around to impose themselves on him from this side. "I can't come with you any further!" called out the painter with a laugh as the girls pressed in. "Goodbye, and don't hesitate too long!" K. did not even look round at him. Once on the street he took the first cab he came across. He now had to get rid of the servant, whose gold button continually caught his eye even if it caught no-one else's. As a servant, the servant of the court was going to sit on the coach-box. But K. chased him down from there. It was already well into the afternoon when K. arrived in front of the bank. He would have liked to leave the pictures in the cab but feared there might be some occasion when he would have to let the painter see he still had them. So he had the pictures taken to his office and locked them in the lowest drawer of his desk so that he could at least keep them safe from the deputy director's view for the next few days.

Chapter Eight Block, the businessman - Dismissing the lawyer

K. had at last made the decision to withdraw his defence from the lawyer. It was impossible to remove his doubts as to whether this was the right decision, but this was outweighed by his belief in its necessity. This decision, on the day he intended to go to see the lawyer, took a lot of the strength he needed for his work, he worked exceptionally slowly, he had to remain in his office a long time, and it was already past ten o'clock when he finally stood in front of the lawyer's front door. Even before he rang he considered whether it might not be better to give the lawyer notice by letter or telephone, a personal conversation would certainly be very difficult. Nonetheless, K. did not actually want to do without it, if he gave notice by any other means it would be received in silence or with a few formulated words, and unless Leni could discover anything K. would never learn how the lawyer had taken his dismissal and what its consequences might be, in the lawyer's not unimportant opinion. But sitting in front of him and taken by surprise by his dismissal, K. would be able easily to infer everything he wanted from the lawyer's face and behaviour, even if he could not be induced to say very much. It was not even out of the question that K. might, after all, be persuaded that it would be best to leave his defence to the lawyer and withdraw his dismissal.

As usual, there was at first no response to K.'s ring at the door. "Leni could be a bit quicker," thought K. But he could at least be glad there was nobody else interfering as usually happened, be it the man in his nightshirt or anyone else who might bother him. As K. pressed on the button for the second time he looked back at the other door, but this time it, too, remained closed. At last, two eyes appeared at the spy-hatch in the lawyer's door, although they weren't Leni's eyes. Someone unlocked the door, but kept himself pressed against it as he called back inside, "It's him!", and only then did he open the door properly. K. pushed against the door, as behind him he could already hear the key being hurriedly turned in the lock of the door to the other flat. When the door in front of him finally opened, he stormed straight into the hallway. Through the corridor which led between the rooms he saw Leni, to whom the warning cry of the door opener had been directed, still running away in her nightshirt. He looked at her for a moment and then looked round at the person who had opened the door. It was a small, wizened man with a full beard, he held a candle in his hand. "Do you work here?" asked K. "No," answered the man, "I don't belong here at all, the lawyer is only representing me, I'm here on legal business." "Without your coat?" asked K., indicating the man's deficiency of dress with a gesture of his hand. "Oh, do forgive me!" said the man, and he looked at himself in the light of the candle he was holding as if he had not known about his appearance until then. "Is Leni your lover?" asked K. curtly. He had set his legs slightly apart, his hands, in which he held his hat, were behind his back. Merely by being in possession of a thick overcoat he felt his advantage over this thin little man. "Oh God," he said and, shocked, raised one hand in front of his face as if in defence, "no, no, what can you be thinking?" "You look honest enough," said K. with a smile, "but come along anyway." K. indicated with his hat which way the man was to go and let him go ahead of him. "What is your name then?" asked K. on the way. "Block. I'm a businessman," said the small man, twisting himself round as he thus introduced himself, although K. did not allow him to stop moving. "Is that your real name?" asked K. "Of course it is," was the man's reply, "why do you doubt it?" "I thought you might have some reason to keep your name secret," said K. He felt himself as much at liberty as is normally only felt in foreign parts when speaking with people of lower standing, keeping everything about himself to himself, speaking only casually about the interests of the other, able to raise him to a level above one's own, but also able, at will, to let him drop again. K. stopped at the door of the lawyer's office, opened it and, to the businessman who had obediently gone ahead, called, "Not so fast! Bring some light here!" K. thought Leni might have hidden in here, he let the businessman search in every corner, but the room was empty. In front of the picture of the judge K. took hold of the businessman's braces to stop him moving on. "Do you know him?" he asked, pointing upwards with his finger. The businessman lifted the candle, blinked as he looked up and said, "It's a judge." "An important judge?" asked K., and stood to the side and in front of the businessman so that he could observe what impression the picture had on him. The businessman was looking up in admiration. "He's an important judge." "You don't have much insight," said K. "He is the lowest of the lowest examining judges." "I remember now," said the businessman as he lowered the candle, "that's what I've already been told." "Well of course you have," called out K., "I'd forgotten about it, of course you would already have been told." "But why, why?" asked the businessman as he moved forwards towards the door, propelled by the hands of K. Outside in the corridor K. said, "You know where Leni's hidden, do you?" "Hidden?" said the businessman, "No, but she might be in the kitchen cooking soup for the lawyer." "Why didn't you say that immediately?" asked K. "I was going to take you there, but you called me back again," answered the businessman, as if confused by the contradictory commands. "You think you're very clever, don't you," said K, "now take me there!" K. had never been in the kitchen, it was surprisingly big and very well equipped. The stove alone was three times bigger than normal stoves, but it was not possible to see any detail beyond this as the kitchen was at the time illuminated by no more than a small lamp hanging by the entrance. At the stove stood Leni, in a white apron as always, breaking eggs into a pot standing on a spirit lamp. "Good evening, Josef," she said with a glance sideways. "Good evening," said K., pointing with one hand to a chair in a corner which the businessman was to sit on, and he did indeed sit down on it. K. however went very close behind Leni's back, leant over her shoulder and asked, "Who is this man?" Leni put one hand around K. as she stirred the soup with the other, she drew him forward toward herself and said, "He's a pitiful character, a poor businessman by the name of Block. Just look at him." The two of them looked back over their shoulders. The businessman was sitting on the chair that K. had directed him to, he had extinguished the candle whose light was no longer needed and pressed on the wick with his fingers to stop the smoke. "You were in your nightshirt," said K., putting his hand on her head and turning it back towards the stove. She was silent. "Is he your lover?" asked K. She was about to take hold of the pot of soup, but K. took both her hands and said, "Answer me!" She said, "Come into the office, I'll explain everything to you." "No," said K., "I want you to explain it here." She put her arms around him and wanted to kiss him. K., though, pushed her away and said, "I don't want you to kiss me now." "Josef," said Leni, looking at K. imploringly but frankly in the eyes, "you're not going to be jealous of Mr. Block now, are you? Rudi," she then said, turning to the businessman, "help me out will you, I'm being suspected of something, you can see that, leave the candle alone." It had looked as though Mr. Block had not been paying attention but he had been following closely. "I don't even know why you might be jealous," he said ingenuously. "Nor do I, actually," said K., looking at the businessman with a smile. Leni laughed out loud and while K. was not paying attention took the opportunity of embracing him and whispering, "Leave him alone, now, you can see what sort of person he is. I've been helping him a little bit because he's an important client of the lawyer's, and no other reason. And what about you? Do you want to speak to the lawyer at this time of day? He's very unwell today, but if you want I'll tell him you're here. But you can certainly spend the night with me. It's so long since you were last here, even the lawyer has been asking about you. Don't neglect your case! And I've got some things to tell you that I've learned about. But now, before anything else, take your coat off!" She helped him off with his coat, took the hat off his head, ran with the things into the hallway to hang them up, then she ran back and saw to the soup. "Do you want me to tell him you're here straight away or take him his soup first?" "Tell him I'm here first," said K. He was in a bad mood, he had originally intended a detailed discussion of his business with Leni, especially the question of his giving the lawyer notice, but now he no longer wanted to because of the presence of the businessman. Now he considered his affair too important to let this little businessman take part in it and perhaps change some of his decisions, and so he called Leni back even though she was already on her way to the lawyer. "Bring him his soup first," he said, "I want him to get his strength up for the discussion with me, he'll need it." "You're a client of the lawyer's too, aren't you," said the businessman quietly from his corner as if he were trying to find this out. It was not, however, taken well. "What business is that of yours?" said K., and Leni said, "Will you be quiet. - I'll take him his soup first then, shall I?" And she poured the soup into a dish. "The only worry then is that he might go to sleep soon after he's eaten." "What I've got to say to him will keep him awake," said K., who still wanted to intimate that he intended some important negotiations with the lawyer, he wanted Leni to ask him what it was and only then to ask her advice. But instead, she just promptly carried out the order he had given her. When she went over to him with the dish she deliberately brushed against him and whispered, "I'll tell him you're here as soon as he's eaten the soup so that I can get you back as soon as possible." "Just go," said K., "just go." "Be a bit more friendly," she said and, still holding the dish, turned completely round once more in the doorway.

K. watched her as she went; the decision had finally been made that the lawyer was to be dismissed, it was probably better that he had not been able to discuss the matter any more with Leni beforehand; she hardly understood the complexity of the matter, she would certainly have advised him against it and perhaps would even have prevented him from dismissing the lawyer this time, he would have remained in doubt and unease and eventually have carried out his decision after a while anyway as this decision was something he could not avoid. The sooner it was carried out the more harm would be avoided. And moreover, perhaps the businessman had something to say on the matter.

K. turned round, the businessman hardly noticed it as he was about to stand up. "Stay where you are," said K. and pulled up a chair beside him. "Have you been a client of the lawyer's for a long time?" asked K. "Yes," said the businessman, "a very long time." "How many years has he been representing you so far, then?" asked K. "I don't know how you mean," said the businessman, "he's been my business lawyer - I buy and sell cereals - he's been my business lawyer since I took the business over, and that's about twenty years now, but perhaps you mean my own trial and he's been representing me in that since it started, and that's been more than five years. Yes, well over five years," he then added, pulling out an old briefcase, "I've got everything written down; I can tell you the exact dates if you like. It's so hard to remember everything. Probably, my trial's been going on much longer than that, it started soon after the death of my wife, and that's been more than five and a half years now." K. moved in closer to him. "So the lawyer takes on ordinary legal business, does he?" he asked. This combination of criminal and commercial business seemed surprisingly reassuring for K. "Oh yes," said the businessman, and then he whispered, "They even say he's more efficient in jurisprudence than he is in other matters." But then he seemed to regret saying this, and he laid a hand on K.'s shoulder and said, "Please don't betray me to him, will you." K. patted his thigh to reassure him and said, "No, I don't betray people." "He can be so vindictive, you see," said the businessman. "I'm sure he won't do anything against such a faithful client as you," said K. "Oh, he might do," said the businessman, "when he gets cross it doesn't matter who it is, and anyway, I'm not really faithful to him." "How's that then?" asked K. "I'm not sure I should tell you about it," said the businessman hesitantly. "I think it'll be alright," said K. "Well then," said the businessman, "I'll tell you about some of it, but you'll have to tell me a secret too, then we can support each other with the lawyer." "You are very careful," said K., "but I'll tell you a secret that will set your mind completely at ease. Now tell me, in what way have you been unfaithful to the lawyer?" "I've …" said the businessman hesitantly, and in a tone as if he were confessing something dishonourable, "I've taken on other lawyers besides him." "That's not so serious," said K., a little disappointed. "It is, here," said the businessman, who had had some difficulty breathing since making his confession but who now, after hearing K.'s comment, began to feel more trust for him. "That's not allowed. And it's allowed least of all to take on petty lawyers when you've already got a proper one. And that's just what I have done, besides him I've got five petty lawyers." "Five!" exclaimed K., astonished at this number, "Five lawyers besides this one?" The businessman nodded. "I'm even negotiating with a sixth one." "But why do you need so many lawyers?" asked K. "I need all of them," said the businessman. "Would you mind explaining that to me?" asked K. "I'd be glad to," said the businessman. "Most of all, I don't want to lose my case, well that's obvious. So that means I mustn't neglect anything that might be of use to me; even if there's very little hope of a particular thing being of any use I can't just throw it away. So everything I have I've put to use in my case. I've taken all the money out of my business, for example, the offices for my business used to occupy nearly a whole floor, but now all I need is a little room at the back where I work with one apprentice. It wasn't just using up the money that caused the difficulty, of course, it was much more to do with me not working at the business as much as I used to. If you want to do something about your trial you don't have much time for anything else." "So you're also working at the court yourself?" asked K. "That's just what I want to learn more about." "I can't tell you very much about that," said the businessman, "at first I tried to do that too but I soon had to give it up again. It wears you out too much, and it's really not much use. And it turned out to be quite impossible to work there yourself and to negotiate, at least for me it was. It's a heavy strain there just sitting and waiting. You know yourself what the air is like in those offices." "How do you know I've been there, then?" asked K. "I was in the waiting room myself when you went through." "What a coincidence that is!" exclaimed K., totally engrossed and forgetting how ridiculous the businessman had seemed to him earlier. "So you saw me! You were in the waiting room when I went through. Yes, I did go through it one time." "It isn't such a big coincidence," said the businessman, "I'm there nearly every day." "I expect I'll have to go there quite often myself now," said K., "although I can hardly expect to be shown the same respect as I was then. They all stood up for me. They must have thought I was a judge." "No," said the businessman, "we were greeting the servant of the court. We knew you were a defendant. That sort of news spreads very quickly." "So you already knew about that," said K., "the way I behaved must have seemed very arrogant to you. Did you criticise me for it afterwards?" "No," said the businessman, "quite the opposite. That was just stupidity." "What do you mean, 'stupidity'?" asked K. "Why are you asking about it?" said the businessman in some irritation. "You still don't seem to know the people there and you might take it wrong. Don't forget in proceedings like this there are always lots of different things coming up to talk about, things that you just can't understand with reason alone, you just get too tired and distracted for most things and so, instead, people rely on superstition. I'm talking about the others, but I'm no better myself. One of these superstitions, for example, is that you can learn a lot about the outcome of a defendant's case by looking at his face, especially the shape of his lips. There are lots who believe that, and they said they could see from the shape of your lips that you'd definitely be found guilty very soon. I repeat that all this is just a ridiculous superstition, and in most cases it's completely disproved by the facts, but when you live in that society it's hard to hold yourself back from beliefs like that. Just think how much effect that superstition can have. You spoke to one of them there, didn't you? He was hardly able to give you an answer. There are lots of things there that can make you confused, of course, but one of them, for him, was the appearance of your lips. He told us all later he thought he could see something in your lips that meant he'd be convicted himself." "On my lips?" asked K., pulling out a pocket mirror and examining himself. "I can see nothing special about my lips. Can you?" "Nor can I," said the businessman, "nothing at all." "These people are so superstitious!" exclaimed K. "Isn't that what I just told you?" asked the businessman. "Do you then have that much contact with each other, exchanging each other's opinions?" said K. "I've kept myself completely apart so far." "They don't normally have much contact with each other," said the businessman, "that would be impossible, there are so many of them. And they don't have much in common either. If a group of them ever thinks they have found something in common it soon turns out they were mistaken. There's nothing you can do as a group where the court's concerned. Each case is examined separately, the court is very painstaking. So there's nothing to be achieved by forming into a group, only sometimes an individual will achieve something in secret; and it's only when that's been done the others learn about it; nobody knows how it was done. So there's no sense of togetherness, you meet people now and then in the waiting rooms, but we don't talk much there. The superstitious beliefs were established a long time ago and they spread all by themselves." "I saw those gentlemen in the waiting room," said K., "it seemed so pointless for them to be waiting in that way." "Waiting is not pointless," said the businessman, "it's only pointless if you try and interfere yourself. I told you just now I've got five lawyers besides this one. You might think - I thought it myself at first - you might think I could leave the whole thing entirely up to them now. That would be entirely wrong. I can leave it up to them less than when I had just the one. Maybe you don't understand that, do you?" "No," said K., and to slow the businessman down, who had been speaking too fast, he laid his hand on the businessman's to reassure him, "but I'd like just to ask you to speak a little more slowly, these are many very important things for me, and I can't follow exactly what you're saying." "You're quite right to remind me of that," said the businessman, "you're new to all this, a junior. Your trial is six months old, isn't it? Yes, I've heard about it. Such a new case! But I've already thought all these things through countless times, to me they're the most obvious things in the world." "You must be glad your trial has already progressed so far, are you?" asked K., he did not wish to ask directly how the businessman's affairs stood, but received no clear answer anyway. "Yes, I've been working at my trial for five years now," said the businessman as his head sank, "that's no small achievement." Then he was silent for a while. K. listened to hear whether Leni was on her way back. On the one hand he did not want her to come back too soon as he still had many questions to ask and did not want her to find him in this intimate discussion with the businessman, but on the other hand it irritated him that she stayed so long with the lawyer when K. was there, much longer than she needed to give him his soup. "I still remember it exactly," the businessman began again, and K. immediately gave him his full attention, "when my case was as old as yours is now. I only had this one lawyer at that time but I wasn't very satisfied with him." Now I'll find out everything, thought K., nodding vigorously as if he could thereby encourage the businessman to say everything worth knowing. "My case," the businessman continued, "didn't move on at all, there were some hearings that took place and I went to every one of them, collected materials, handed all my business books to the court - which I later found was entirely unnecessary - I ran back and forth to the lawyer, and he submitted various documents to the court too …" "Various documents?" asked K. "Yes, that's right," said the businessman. "That's very important for me," said K., "in my case he's still working on the first set of documents. He still hasn't done anything. I see now that he's been neglecting me quite disgracefully." "There can be lots of good reasons why the first documents still aren't ready," said the businessman, "and anyway, it turned out later on that the ones he submitted for me were entirely worthless. I even read one of them myself, one of the officials at the court was very helpful. It was very learned, but it didn't actually say anything. Most of all, there was lots of Latin, which I can't understand, then pages and pages of general appeals to the court, then lots of flattery for particular officials, they weren't named, these officials, but anyone familiar with the court must have been able to guess who they were, then there was self-praise by the lawyer where he humiliated himself to the court in a way that was downright dog-like, and then endless investigations of cases from the past which were supposed to be similar to mine. Although, as far as I was able to follow them, these investigations had been carried out very carefully. Now, I don't mean to criticise the lawyer's work with all of this, and the document I read was only one of many, but even so, and this is something I will say, at that time I couldn't see any progress in my trial at all." "And what sort of progress had you been hoping for?" asked K. "That's a very sensible question," said the businessman with a smile, "it's only very rare that you see any progress in these proceedings at all. But I didn't know that then. I'm a businessman, much more in those days than now, I wanted to see some tangible progress, it should have all been moving to some conclusion or at least should have been moving on in some way according to the rules. Instead of which there were just more hearings, and most of them went through the same things anyway; I had all the answers off pat like in a church service; there were messengers from the court coming to me at work several times a week, or they came to me at home or anywhere else they could find me; and that was very disturbing of course (but at least now things are better in that respect, it's much less disturbing when they contact you by telephone), and rumours about my trial even started to spread among some of the people I do business with, and especially my relations, so I was being made to suffer in many different ways but there was still not the slightest sign that even the first hearing would take place soon. So I went to the lawyer and complained about it. He explained it all to me at length, but refused to do anything I asked for, no-one has any influence on the way the trial proceeds, he said, to try and insist on it in any of the documents submitted - like I was asking - was simply unheard of and would do harm to both him and me. I thought to myself: What this lawyer can't or won't do another lawyer will. So I looked round for other lawyers. And before you say anything: none of them asked for a definite date for the main trial and none of them got one, and anyway, apart from one exception which I'll talk about in a minute, it really is impossible, that's one thing this lawyer didn't mislead me about; but besides, I had no reason to regret turning to other lawyers. Perhaps you've already heard how Dr. Huld talks about the petty lawyers, he probably made them sound very contemptible to you, and he's right, they are contemptible. But when he talks about them and compares them with himself and his colleagues there's a small error running through what he says, and, just for your interest, I'll tell you about it. When he talks about the lawyers he mixes with he sets them apart by calling them the 'great lawyers'. That's wrong, anyone can call himself 'great' if he wants to, of course, but in this case only the usage of the court can make that distinction. You see, the court says that besides the petty lawyers there are also minor lawyers and great lawyers. This one and his colleagues are only minor lawyers, and the difference in rank between them and the great lawyers, who I've only ever heard about and never seen, is incomparably greater than between the minor lawyers and the despised petty lawyers." "The great lawyers?" asked K. "Who are they then? How do you contact them?" "You've never heard about them, then?" said the businessman. "There's hardly anyone who's been accused who doesn't spend a lot of time dreaming about the great lawyers once he's heard about them. It's best if you don't let yourself be misled in that way. I don't know who the great lawyers are, and there's probably no way of contacting them. I don't know of any case I can talk about with certainty where they've taken any part. They do defend a lot of people, but you can't get hold of them by your own efforts, they only defend those who they want to defend. And I don't suppose they ever take on cases that haven't already got past the lower courts. Anyway, it's best not to think about them, as if you do it makes the discussions with the other lawyers, all their advice and all that they do manage to achieve, seem so unpleasant and useless, I had that experience myself, just wanted to throw everything away and lay at home in bed and hear nothing more about it. But that, of course, would be the stupidest thing you could do, and you wouldn't be left in peace in bed for very long either." "So you weren't thinking about the great lawyers at that time?" asked K. "Not for very long," said the businessman, and smiled again, "you can't forget about them entirely, I'm afraid, especially in the night when these thoughts come so easily. But I wanted immediate results in those days, so I went to the petty lawyers."

"Well look at you two sat huddled together!" called Leni as she came back with the dish and stood in the doorway. They were indeed sat close together, if either of them turned his head even slightly it would have knocked against the other's, the businessman was not only very small but also sat hunched down, so that K. was also forced to bend down low if he wanted to hear everything. "Not quite yet!" called out K., to turn Leni away, his hand, still resting on the businessman's hand, twitching with impatience. "He wanted me to tell him about my trial," said the businessman to Leni. "Carry on, then, carry on," she said. She spoke to the businessman with affection but, at the same time, with condescension. K. did not like that, he had begun to learn that the man was of some value after all, he had experience at least, and he was willing to share it. Leni was probably wrong about him. He watched her in irritation as Leni now took the candle from the businessman's hand - which he had been holding on to all this time - wiped his hand with her apron and then knelt beside him to scratch off some wax that had dripped from the candle onto his trousers. "You were about to tell me about the petty lawyers," said K., shoving Leni's hand away with no further comment. "What's wrong with you today?" asked Leni, tapped him gently and carried on with what she had been doing. "Yes, the petty lawyers," said the businessman, putting his hand to his brow as if thinking hard. K. wanted to help him and said, "You wanted immediate results and so went to the petty lawyers." "Yes, that's right," said the businessman, but did not continue with what he'd been saying. "Maybe he doesn't want to speak about it in front of Leni," thought K., suppressing his impatience to hear the rest straight away, and stopped trying to press him.

"Have you told him I'm here?" he asked Leni. "Course I have," she said, "he's waiting for you. Leave Block alone now, you can talk to Block later, he'll still be here." K. still hesitated. "You'll still be here?" he asked the businessman, wanting to hear the answer from him and not wanting Leni to speak about the businessman as if he weren't there, he was full of secret resentment towards Leni today. And once more it was only Leni who answered. "He often sleeps here." "He sleeps here?" exclaimed K., he had thought the businessman would just wait there for him while he quickly settled his business with the lawyer, and then they would leave together to discuss everything thoroughly and undisturbed. "Yes," said Leni, "not everyone's like you, Josef, allowed to see the lawyer at any time you like. Don't even seem surprised that the lawyer, despite being ill, still receives you at eleven o'clock at night. You take it far too much for granted, what your friends do for you. Well, your friends, or at least I do, we like to do things for you. I don't want or need any more thanks than that you're fond of me." "Fond of you?" thought K. at first, and only then it occurred to him, "Well, yes, I am fond of her." Nonetheless, what he said, forgetting all the rest, was, "He receives me because I am his client. If I needed anyone else's help I'd have to beg and show gratitude whenever I do anything." "He's really nasty today, isn't he?" Leni asked the businessman. "Now it's me who's not here," thought K., and nearly lost his temper with the businessman when, with the same rudeness as Leni, he said, "The lawyer also has other reasons to receive him. His case is much more interesting than mine. And it's only in its early stages too, it probably hasn't progressed very far so the lawyer still likes to deal with him. That'll all change later on." "Yeah, yeah," said Leni, looking at the businessman and laughing. "He doesn't half talk!" she said, turning to face K. "You can't believe a word he says. He's as talkative as he is sweet. Maybe that's why the lawyer can't stand him. At least, he only sees him when he's in the right mood. I've already tried hard to change that but it's impossible. Just think, there are times when I tell him Block's here and he doesn't receive him until three days later. And if Block isn't on the spot when he's called then everything's lost and it all has to start all over again. That's why I let Block sleep here, it wouldn't be the first time Dr. Huld has wanted to see him in the night. So now Block is ready for that. Sometimes, when he knows Block is still here, he'll even change his mind about letting him in to see him." K. looked questioningly at the businessman. The latter nodded and, although he had spoken quite openly with K. earlier, seemed to be confused with shame as he said, "Yes, later on you become very dependent on your lawyer." "He's only pretending to mind," said Leni. "He likes to sleep here really, he's often said so." She went over to a little door and shoved it open. "Do you want to see his bedroom?" she asked. K. went over to the low, windowless room and looked in from the doorway. The room contained a narrow bed which filled it completely, so that to get into the bed you would need to climb over the bedpost. At the head of the bed there was a niche in the wall where, fastidiously tidy, stood a candle, a bottle of ink, and a pen with a bundle of papers which were probably to do with the trial. "You sleep in the maid's room?" asked K., as he went back to the businessman. "Leni's let me have it," answered the businessman, "it has many advantages." K. looked long at him; his first impression of the businessman had perhaps not been right; he had experience as his trial had already lasted a long time, but he had paid a heavy price for this experience. K. was suddenly unable to bear the sight of the businessman any longer. "Bring him to bed, then!" he called out to Leni, who seemed to understand him. For himself, he wanted to go to the lawyer and, by dismissing him, free himself from not only the lawyer but also from Leni and the businessman. But before he had reached the door the businessman spoke to him gently. "Excuse me, sir," he said, and K. looked round crossly. "You've forgotten your promise," said the businessman, stretching his hand out to K. imploringly from where he sat. "You were going to tell me a secret." "That is true," said K., as he glanced at Leni, who was watching him carefully, to check on her. "So listen; it's hardly a secret now anyway. I'm going to see the lawyer now to sack him." "He's sacking him!" yelled the businessman, and he jumped up from his chair and ran around the kitchen with his arms in the air. He kept on shouting, "He's sacking his lawyer!" Leni tried to rush at K. but the businessman got in her way so that she shoved him away with her fists. Then, still with her hands balled into fists, she ran after K. who, however, had been given a long start. He was already inside the lawyer's room by the time Leni caught up with him. He had almost closed the door behind himself, but Leni held the door open with her foot, grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back. But he put such pressure on her wrist that, with a sigh, she was forced to release him. She did not dare go into the room straight away, and K. locked the door with the key.

"I've been waiting for you a very long time," said the lawyer from his bed. He had been reading something by the light of a candle but now he laid it onto the bedside table and put his glasses on, looking at K. sharply through them. Instead of apologising K. said, "I'll be leaving again soon." As he had not apologised the lawyer ignored what K. said, and replied, "I won't let you in this late again next time." "I find that quite acceptable," said K. The lawyer looked at him quizzically. "Sit down," he said. "As you wish," said K., drawing a chair up to the bedside table and sitting down. "It seemed to me that you locked the door," said the lawyer. "Yes," said K., "it was because of Leni." He had no intention of letting anyone off lightly. But the lawyer asked him, "Was she being importunate again?" "Importunate?" asked K. "Yes," said the lawyer, laughing as he did so, had a fit of coughing and then, once it had passed, began to laugh again. "I'm sure you must have noticed how importunate she can be sometimes," he said, and patted K.'s hand which K. had rested on the bedside table and which he now snatched back. "You don't attach much importance to it, then," said the lawyer when K. was silent, "so much the better. Otherwise I might have needed to apologise to you. It is a peculiarity of Leni's. I've long since forgiven her for it, and I wouldn't be talking of it now, if you hadn't locked the door just now. Anyway, perhaps I should at least explain this peculiarity of hers to you, but you seem rather disturbed, the way you're looking at me, and so that's why I'll do it, this peculiarity of hers consists in this; Leni finds most of the accused attractive. She attaches herself to each of them, loves each of them, even seems to be loved by each of them; then she sometimes entertains me by telling me about them when I allow her to. I am not so astonished by all of this as you seem to be. If you look at them in the right way the accused really can be attractive, quite often. But that is a remarkable and to some extent scientific phenomenon. Being indicted does not cause any clear, precisely definable change in a person's appearance, of course. But it's not like with other legal matters, most of them remain in their usual way of life and, if they have a good lawyer looking after them, the trial doesn't get in their way. But there are nonetheless those who have experience in these matters who can look at a crowd, however big, and tell you which among them is facing a charge. How can they do that, you will ask. My answer will not please you. It is simply that those who are facing a charge are the most attractive. It cannot be their guilt that makes them attractive as not all of them are guilty - at least that's what I, as a lawyer, have to say - and nor can it be the proper punishment that has made them attractive as not all of them are punished, so it can only be that the proceedings levelled against them take some kind of hold on them. Whatever the reason, some of these attractive people are indeed very attractive. But all of them are attractive, even Block, pitiful worm that he is." As the lawyer finished what he was saying, K. was fully in control of himself, he had even nodded conspicuously at his last few words in order to confirm to himself the view he had already formed; that the lawyer was trying to confuse him, as he always did, by making general and irrelevant observations, and thus distract him from the main question of what he was actually doing for K.'s trial. The lawyer must have noticed that K. was offering him more resistance than before, as he became silent, giving K. the chance to speak himself, and then, as K. also remained silent, he asked, "Did you have a particular reason for coming to see me today?" "Yes," said K., putting his hand up to slightly shade his eyes from the light of the candle so that he could see the lawyer better, "I wanted to tell you that I'm withdrawing my representation from you, with immediate effect." "Do I understand you rightly?" asked the lawyer as he half raised himself in his bed and supported himself with one hand on the pillow. "I think you do," said K., sitting stiffly upright as if waiting in ambush. "Well we can certainly discuss this plan of yours," said the lawyer after a pause. "It's not a plan any more," said K. "That may be," said the lawyer, "but we still mustn't rush anything." He used the word 'we', as if he had no intention of letting K. go free, and as if, even if he could no longer represent him, he could still at least continue as his adviser. "Nothing is being rushed," said K., standing slowly up and going behind his chair, "everything has been well thought out and probably even for too long. The decision is final." "Then allow me to say a few words," said the lawyer, throwing the bed cover to one side and sitting on the edge of the bed. His naked, white- haired legs shivered in the cold. He asked K. to pass him a blanket from the couch. K. passed him the blanket and said, "You are running the risk of catching cold for no reason." "The circumstances are important enough," said the lawyer as he wrapped the bed cover around the top half of his body and then the blanket around his legs. "Your uncle is my friend and in the course of time I've become fond of you as well. I admit that quite openly. There's nothing in that for me to be ashamed of." It was very unwelcome for K. to hear the old man speak in this touching way, as it forced him to explain himself more fully, which he would rather have avoided, and he was aware that it also confused him even though it could never make him reverse his decision. "Thank you for feeling so friendly toward me," he said, "and I also realise how deeply involved you've been in my case, as deeply as possible for yourself and to bring as much advantage as possible to me. Nonetheless, I have recently come to the conviction that it is not enough. I would naturally never attempt, considering that you are so much older and more experienced than I am, to convince you of my opinion; if I have ever unintentionally done so then I beg your forgiveness, but, as you have just said yourself, the circumstances are important enough and it is my belief that my trial needs to be approached with much more vigour than has so far been the case." "I see," said the lawyer, "you've become impatient." "I am not impatient," said K., with some irritation and he stopped paying so much attention to his choice of words. "When I first came here with my uncle you probably noticed I wasn't greatly concerned about my case, and if I wasn't reminded of it by force, as it were, I would forget about it completely. But my uncle insisted I should allow you to represent me and I did so as a favour to him. I could have expected the case to be less of a burden than it had been, as the point of taking on a lawyer is that he should take on some of its weight. But what actually happened was the opposite. Before, the trial was never such a worry for me as it has been since you've been representing me. When I was by myself I never did anything about my case, I was hardly aware of it, but then, once there was someone representing me, everything was set for something to happen, I was always, without cease, waiting for you to do something, getting more and more tense, but you did nothing. I did get some information about the court from you that I probably could not have got anywhere else, but that can't be enough when the trial, supposedly in secret, is getting closer and closer to me." K. had pushed the chair away and stood erect, his hands in the pockets of his frock coat. "After a certain point in the proceedings," said the lawyer quietly and calmly, "nothing new of any importance ever happens. So many litigants, at the same stage in their trials, have stood before me just like you are now and spoken in the same way." "Then these other litigants," said K., "have all been right, just as I am. That does not show that I'm not." "I wasn't trying to show that you were mistaken," said the lawyer, "but I wanted to add that I expected better judgement from you than from the others, especially as I've given you more insight into the workings of the court and my own activities than I normally do. And now I'm forced to accept that, despite everything, you have too little trust in me. You don't make it easy for me." How the lawyer was humiliating himself to K.! He was showing no regard for the dignity of his position, which on this point, must have been at its most sensitive. And why did he do that? He did seem to be very busy as a lawyer as well a rich man, neither the loss of income nor the loss of a client could have been of much importance to him in themselves. He was moreover unwell and should have been thinking of passing work on to others. And despite all that he held on tightly to K. Why? Was it something personal for his uncle's sake, or did he really see K.'s case as one that was exceptional and hoped to be able to distinguish himself with it, either for K.'s sake or - and this possibility could never be excluded - for his friends at the court? It was not possible to learn anything by looking at him, even though K. was scrutinizing him quite brazenly. It could almost be supposed he was deliberately hiding his thoughts as he waited to see what effect his words would have. But he clearly deemed K.'s silence to be favourable for himself and he continued, "You will have noticed the size of my office, but that I don't employ any staff to help me. That used to be quite different, there was a time when several young lawyers were working for me but now I work alone. This is partly to do with changes in the way I do business, in that I concentrate nowadays more and more on matters such as your own case, and partly to do with the ever deeper understanding that I acquire from these legal matters. I found that I could never let anyone else deal with this sort of work unless I wanted to harm both the client and the job I had taken on. But the decision to do all the work myself had its obvious result: I was forced to turn almost everyone away who asked me to represent them and could only accept those I was especially interested in - well there are enough creatures who leap at every crumb I throw down, and they're not so very far away. Most importantly, I became ill from over-work. But despite that I don't regret my decision, quite possibly I should have turned more cases away than I did, but it did turn out to be entirely necessary for me to devote myself fully to the cases I did take on, and the successful results showed that it was worth it. I once read a description of the difference between representing someone in ordinary legal matters and in legal matters of this sort, and the writer expressed it very well. This is what he said: some lawyers lead their clients on a thread until judgement is passed, but there are others who immediately lift their clients onto their shoulders and carry them all the way to the judgement and beyond. That's just how it is. But it was quite true when I said I never regret all this work. But if, as in your case, they are so fully misunderstood, well, then I come very close to regretting it." All this talking did more to make K. impatient than to persuade him. From the way the lawyer was speaking, K. thought he could hear what he could expect if he gave in, the delays and excuses would begin again, reports of how the documents were progressing, how the mood of the court officials had improved, as well as all the enormous difficulties - in short all that he had heard so many times before would be brought out again even more fully, he would try to mislead K. with hopes that were never specified and to make him suffer with threats that were never clear. He had to put a stop to that, so he said, "What will you undertake on my behalf if you continue to represent me?" The lawyer quietly accepted even this insulting question, and answered, "I should continue with what I've already been doing for you." "That's just what I thought," said K., "and now you don't need to say another word." "I will make one more attempt," said the lawyer as if whatever had been making K. so annoyed was affecting him too. "You see, I have the impression that you have not only misjudged the legal assistance I have given you but also that that misjudgement has led you to behave in this way, you seem, although you are the accused, to have been treated too well or, to put it a better way, handled with neglect, with apparent neglect. Even that has its reason; it is often better to be in chains than to be free. But I would like to show you how other defendants are treated, perhaps you will succeed in learning something from it. What I will do is I will call Block in, unlock the door and sit down here beside the bedside table." "Be glad to," said K., and did as the lawyer suggested; he was always ready to learn something new. But to make sure of himself for any event he added, "but you do realise that you are no longer to be my lawyer, don't you?" "Yes," said the lawyer. "But you can still change your mind today if you want to." He lay back down in the bed, pulled the quilt up to his chin and turned to face the wall. Then he rang.

Leni appeared almost the moment he had done so. She looked hurriedly at K. and the lawyer to try and find out what had happened; she seemed to be reassured by the sight of K. sitting calmly at the lawyer's bed. She smiled and nodded to K., K. looked blankly back at her. "Fetch Block," said the lawyer. But instead of going to fetch him, Leni just went to the door and called out, "Block! To the lawyer!" Then, probably because the lawyer had turned his face to the wall and was paying no attention, she slipped in behind K.'s chair. From then on, she bothered him by leaning forward over the back of the chair or, albeit very tenderly and carefully, she would run her hands through his hair and over his cheeks. K. eventually tried to stop her by taking hold of one hand, and after some resistance Leni let him keep hold of it. Block came as soon as he was called, but he remained standing in the doorway and seemed to be wondering whether he should enter or not. He raised his eyebrows and lowered his head as if listening to find out whether the order to attend the lawyer would be repeated. K. could have encouraged him to enter, but he had decided to make a final break not only with the lawyer but with everything in his home, so he kept himself motionless. Leni was also silent. Block noticed that at least no-one was chasing him away, and, on tiptoe, he entered the room, his face was tense, his hands were clenched behind his back. He left the door open in case he needed to go back again. K. did not even glance at him, he looked instead only at the thick quilt under which the lawyer could not be seen as he had squeezed up very close to the wall. Then his voice was heard: "Block here?" he asked. Block had already crept some way into the room but this question seemed to give him first a shove in the breast and then another in the back, he seemed about to fall but remained standing, deeply bowed, and said, "At your service, sir." "What do you want?" asked the lawyer, "you've come at a bad time." "Wasn't I summoned?" asked Block, more to himself than the lawyer. He held his hands in front of himself as protection and would have been ready to run away any moment. "You were summoned," said the lawyer, "but you have still come at a bad time." Then, after a pause he added, "You always come at a bad time." When the lawyer started speaking Block had stopped looking at the bed but stared rather into one of the corners, just listening, as if the light from the speaker were brighter than Block could bear to look at. But it was also difficult for him to listen, as the lawyer was speaking into the wall and speaking quickly and quietly. "Would you like me to go away again, sir?" asked Block. "Well you're here now," said the lawyer. "Stay!" It was as if the lawyer had not done as Block had wanted but instead threatened him with a stick, as now Block really began to shake. "I went to see," said the lawyer, "the third judge yesterday, a friend of mine, and slowly brought the conversation round to the subject of you. Do you want to know what he said?" "Oh, yes please," said Block. The lawyer did not answer immediately, so Block repeated his request and lowered his head as if about to kneel down. But then K. spoke to him: "What do you think you're doing?" he shouted. Leni had wanted to stop him from calling out and so he took hold of her other hand. It was not love that made him squeeze it and hold on to it so tightly, she sighed frequently and tried to disengage her hands from him. But Block was punished for K.'s outburst, as the lawyer asked him, "Who is your lawyer?" "You are, sir," said Block. "And who besides me?" the lawyer asked. "No-one besides you, sir," said Block. "And let there be no-one besides me," said the lawyer. Block fully understood what that meant, he glowered at K., shaking his head violently. If these actions had been translated into words they would have been coarse insults. K. had been friendly and willing to discuss his own case with someone like this! "I won't disturb you any more," said K., leaning back in his chair. "You can kneel down or creep on all fours, whatever you like. I won't bother with you any more." But Block still had some sense of pride, at least where K. was concerned, and he went towards him waving his fists, shouting as loudly as he dared while the lawyer was there. "You shouldn't speak to me like that, that's not allowed. Why are you insulting me? Especially here in front of the lawyer, where both of us, you and me, we're only tolerated because of his charity. You're not a better person than me, you've been accused of something too, you're facing a charge too. If, in spite of that, you're still a gentleman then I'm just as much a gentleman as you are, if not even more so. And I want to be spoken to as a gentleman, especially by you. If you think being allowed to sit there and quietly listen while I creep on all fours as you put it makes you something better than me, then there's an old legal saying you ought to bear in mind: If you're under suspicion it's better to be moving than still, as if you're still you can be in the pan of the scales without knowing it and be weighed along with your sins." K. said nothing. He merely looked in amazement at this distracted being, his eyes completely still. He had gone through such changes in just the last few hours! Was it the trial that was throwing him from side to side in this way and stopped him knowing who was friend and who was foe? Could he not see the lawyer was deliberately humiliating him and had no other purpose today than to show off his power to K., and perhaps even thereby subjugate K.? But if Block was incapable of seeing that, or if he so feared the lawyer that no such insight would even be of any use to him, how was it that he was either so sly or so bold as to lie to the lawyer and conceal from him the fact that he had other lawyers working on his behalf? And how did he dare to attack K., who could betray his secret any time he liked? But he dared even more than this, he went to the lawyer's bed and began there to make complaints about K. "Dr. Huld, sir," he said, "did you hear the way this man spoke to me? You can count the length of his trial in hours, and he wants to tell me what to do when I've been involved in a legal case for five years. He even insults me. He doesn't know anything, but he insults me, when I, as far as my weak ability allows, when I've made a close study of how to behave with the court, what we ought to do and what the court practices are." "Don't let anyone bother you," said the lawyer, "and do what seems to you to be right." "I will," said Block, as if speaking to himself to give himself courage, and with a quick glance to the side he kneeled down close beside the bed. "I'm kneeling now Dr. Huld, sir," he said. But the lawyer remained silent. With one hand, Block carefully stroked the bed cover. In the silence while he did so, Leni, as she freed herself from K.'s hands, said, "You're hurting me. Let go of me. I'm going over to Block." She went over to him and sat on the edge of the bed. Block was very pleased at this and with lively, but silent, gestures he immediately urged her to intercede for him with the lawyer. It was clear that he desperately needed to be told something by the lawyer, although perhaps only so that he could make use of the information with his other lawyers. Leni probably knew very well how the lawyer could be brought round, pointed to his hand and pursed her lips as if making a kiss. Block immediately performed the hand-kiss and, at further urging from Leni, repeated it twice more. But the lawyer continued to be silent. Then Leni leant over the lawyer, as she stretched out, the attractive shape of her body could be seen, and, bent over close to his face, she stroked his long white hair. That now forced him to give an answer. "I'm rather wary of telling him," said the lawyer, and his head could be seen shaking slightly, perhaps so that he would feel the pressure of Leni's hand better. Block listened closely with his head lowered, as if by listening he were breaking an order. "What makes you so wary about it?" asked Leni. K. had the feeling he was listening to a contrived dialogue that had been repeated many times, that would be repeated many times more, and that for Block alone it would never lose its freshness. "What has his behaviour been like today?" asked the lawyer instead of an answer. Before Leni said anything she looked down at Block and watched him a short while as he raised his hands towards her and rubbed them together imploringly. Finally she gave a serious nod, turned back to the lawyer and said, "He's been quiet and industrious." This was an elderly businessman, a man whose beard was long, and he was begging a young girl to speak on his behalf. Even if there was some plan behind what he did, there was nothing that could reinstate him in the eyes of his fellow man. K. could not understand how the lawyer could have thought this performance would win him over. Even if he had done nothing earlier to make him want to leave then this scene would have done so. It was almost humiliating even for the onlooker. So these were the lawyer's methods, which K. fortunately had not been exposed to for long, to let the client forget about the whole world and leave him with nothing but the hope of reaching the end of his trial by this deluded means. He was no longer a client, he was the lawyer's dog. If the lawyer had ordered him to crawl under the bed as if it were a kennel and to bark out from under it, then he would have done so with enthusiasm. K. listened to all of this, testing it and thinking it over as if he had been given the task of closely observing everything spoken here, inform a higher office about it and write a report. "And what has he been doing all day?" asked the lawyer. "I kept him locked in the maid's room all day," said Leni, "so that he wouldn't stop me doing my work. That's where he usually stays. From time to time I looked in through the spyhole to see what he was doing, and each time he was kneeling on the bed and reading the papers you gave him, propped up on the window sill. That made a good impression on me; as the window only opens onto an air shaft and gives hardly any light. It showed how obedient he is that he was even reading in those conditions." "I'm pleased to hear it," said the lawyer. "But did he understand what he was reading?" While this conversation was going on, Block continually moved his lips and was clearly formulating the answers he hoped Leni would give. "Well I can't give you any certain answer to that of course," said Leni, "but I could see that he was reading thoroughly. He spent all day reading the same page, running his finger along the lines. Whenever I looked in on him he sighed as if this reading was a lot of work for him. I expect the papers you gave him were very hard to understand." "Yes," said the lawyer, "they certainly are that. And I really don't think he understood anything of them. But they should at least give him some inkling of just how hard a struggle it is and how much work it is for me to defend him. And who am I doing all this hard work for? I'm doing it - it's laughable even to say it - I'm doing it for Block. He ought to realise what that means, too. Did he study without a pause?" "Almost without a pause," answered Leni. "Just the once he asked me for a drink of water, so I gave him a glassful through the window. Then at eight o'clock I let him out and gave him something to eat." Block glanced sideways at K., as if he were being praised and had to impress K. as well. He now seemed more optimistic, he moved more freely and rocked back and forth on his knees. This made his astonishment all the more obvious when he heard the following words from the lawyer: "You speak well of him," said the lawyer, "but that's just what makes it difficult for me. You see, the judge did not speak well of him at all, neither about Block nor about his case." "Didn't speak well of him?" asked Leni. "How is that possible?" Block looked at her with such tension he seemed to think that although the judge's words had been spoken so long before she would be able to change them in his favour. "Not at all," said the lawyer. "In fact he became quite cross when I started to talk about Block to him. 'Don't talk to me about Block,' he said. 'He is my client,' said I. 'You're letting him abuse you,' he said. 'I don't think his case is lost yet,' said I. 'You're letting him abuse you,' he repeated. 'I don't think so,' said I. 'Block works hard in his case and always knows where it stands. He practically lives with me so that he always knows what's happening. You don't always find such enthusiasm as that. He's not very pleasant personally, I grant you, his manners are terrible and he's dirty, but as far as the trial's concerned he's quite immaculate.' I said immaculate, but I was deliberately exaggerating. Then he said, 'Block is sly, that's all. He's accumulated plenty of experience and knows how to delay proceedings. But there's more that he doesn't know than he does. What do you think he'd say if he learned his trial still hasn't begun, if you told him they haven't even rung the bell to announce the start of proceedings?' Alright Block, alright," said the lawyer, as at these words Block had begun to raise himself on his trembling knees and clearly wanted to plead for some explanation. It was the first time the lawyer had spoken any clear words directly to Block. He looked down with his tired eyes, half blankly and half at Block, who slowly sank back down on his knees under this gaze. "What the judge said has no meaning for you," said the lawyer. "You needn't be frightened at every word. If you do it again I won't tell you anything else at all. It's impossible to start a sentence without you looking at me as if you were receiving your final judgement. You should be ashamed of yourself here in front of my client! And you're destroying the trust he has for me. Just what is it you want? You're still alive, you're still under my protection. There's no point in worrying! Somewhere you've read that the final judgement can often come without warning, from anyone at any time. And, in the right circumstances, that's basically true, but it's also true that I dislike your anxiety and fear and see that you don't have the trust in me you should have. Now what have I just said? I repeated something said by one of the judges. You know that there are so many various opinions about the procedure that they form into a great big pile and nobody can make any sense of them. This judge, for instance, sees proceedings as starting at a different point from where I do. A difference of opinion, nothing more. At a certain stage in the proceedings tradition has it that a sign is given by ringing a bell. This judge sees that as the point at which proceedings begin. I can't set out all the opinions opposed to that view here, and you wouldn't understand it anyway, suffice it to say that there are many reasons to disagree with him." Embarrassed, Block ran his fingers through the pile of the carpet, his anxiety about what the judge had said had let him forget his inferior status towards the lawyer for a while, he thought only about himself and turned the judges words round to examine them from all sides. "Block," said Leni, as if reprimanding him, and, taking hold of the collar of his coat, pulled him up slightly higher. "Leave the carpet alone and listen to what the lawyer is saying."

This chapter was left unfinished.

Chapter Nine In the Cathedral

A very important Italian business contact of the bank had come to visit the city for the first time and K. was given the task of showing him some of its cultural sights. At any other time he would have seen this job as an honour but now, when he was finding it hard even to maintain his current position in the bank, he accepted it only with reluctance. Every hour that he could not be in the office was a cause of concern for him, he was no longer able to make use of his time in the office anything like as well as he had previously, he spent many hours merely pretending to do important work, but that only increased his anxiety about not being in the office. Then he sometimes thought he saw the deputy director, who was always watching, come into K.'s office, sit at his desk, look through his papers, receive clients who had almost become old friends of K., and lure them away from him, perhaps he even discovered mistakes, mistakes that seemed to threaten K. from a thousand directions when he was at work now, and which he could no longer avoid. So now, if he was ever asked to leave the office on business or even needed to make a short business trip, however much an honour it seemed - and tasks of this sort happened to have increased substantially recently - there was always the suspicion that they wanted to get him out of his office for a while and check his work, or at least the idea that they thought he was dispensable. It would not have been difficult for him to turn down most of these jobs, but he did not dare to do so because, if his fears had the slightest foundation, turning the jobs down would have been an acknowledgement of them. For this reason, he never demurred from accepting them, and even when he was asked to go on a tiring business trip lasting two days he said nothing about having to go out in the rainy autumn weather when he had a severe chill, just in order to avoid the risk of not being asked to go. When, with a raging headache, he arrived back from this trip he learned that he had been chosen to accompany the Italian business contact the following day. The temptation for once to turn the job down was very great, especially as it had no direct connection with business, but there was no denying that social obligations towards this business contact were in themselves important enough, only not for K., who knew quite well that he needed some successes at work if he was to maintain his position there and that, if he failed in that, it would not help him even if this Italian somehow found him quite charming; he did not want to be removed from his workplace for even one day, as the fear of not being allowed back in was too great, he knew full well that the fear was exaggerated but it still made him anxious. However, in this case it was almost impossible to think of an acceptable excuse, his knowledge of Italian was not great but still good enough; the deciding factor was that K. had earlier known a little about art history and this had become widely known around the bank in extremely exaggerated form, and that K. had been a member of the Society for the Preservation of City Monuments, albeit only for business reasons. It was said that this Italian was an art lover, so the choice of K. to accompany him was a matter of course.

It was a very rainy and stormy morning when K., in a foul temper at the thought of the day ahead of him, arrived early at seven o'clock in the office so that he could at least do some work before his visitor would prevent him. He had spent half the night studying a book of Italian grammar so that he would be somewhat prepared and was very tired; his desk was less attractive to him than the window where he had spent far too much time sitting of late, but he resisted the temptation and sat down to his work. Unfortunately, just then the servitor came in and reported that the director had sent him to see whether the chief clerk was already in his office; if he was, then would he please be so kind as to come to his reception room as the gentleman from Italy was already there. "I'll come straight away," said K. He put a small dictionary in his pocket, took a guide to the city's tourist sites under his arm that he had compiled for strangers, and went through the deputy director's office into that of the director. He was glad he had come into the office so early and was able to be of service immediately, nobody could seriously have expected that of him. The deputy director's office was, of course, still as empty as the middle of the night, the servitor had probably been asked to summon him too but without success. As K. entered the reception room two men stood up from the deep armchairs where they had been sitting. The director gave him a friendly smile, he was clearly very glad that K. was there, he immediately introduced him to the Italian who shook K.'s hand vigorously and joked that somebody was an early riser. K. did not quite understand whom he had in mind, it was moreover an odd expression to use and it took K. a little while to guess its meaning. He replied with a few bland phrases which the Italian received once more with a laugh, passing his hand nervously and repeatedly over his blue-grey, bushy moustache. This moustache was obviously perfumed, it was almost tempting to come close to it and sniff. When they had all sat down and begun a light preliminary conversation, K. was disconcerted to notice that he understood no more than fragments of what the Italian said. When he spoke very calmly he understood almost everything, but that was very infrequent, mostly the words gushed from his mouth and he seemed to be enjoying himself so much his head shook. When he was talking in this way his speech was usually wrapped up in some kind of dialect which seemed to K. to have nothing to do with Italian but which the director not only understood but also spoke, although K. ought to have foreseen this as the Italian came from the south of his country where the director had also spent several years. Whatever the cause, K. realised that the possibility of communicating with the Italian had been largely taken from him, even his French was difficult to understand, and his moustache concealed the movements of his lips which might have offered some help in understanding what he said. K. began to anticipate many difficulties, he gave up trying to understand what the Italian said - with the director there, who could understand him so easily, it would have been pointless effort - and for the time being did no more than scowl at the Italian as he relaxed sitting deep but comfortable in the armchair, as he frequently pulled at his short, sharply tailored jacket and at one time lifted his arms in the air and moved his hands freely to try and depict something that K. could not grasp, even though he was leaning forward and did not let the hands out of his sight. K. had nothing to occupy himself but mechanically watch the exchange between the two men and his tiredness finally made itself felt, to his alarm, although fortunately in good time, he once caught himself nearly getting up, turning round and leaving. Eventually the Italian looked at the clock and jumped up. After taking his leave from the director he turned to K., pressing himself so close to him that K. had to push his chair back just so that he could move. The director had, no doubt, seen the anxiety in K.'s eyes as he tried to cope with this dialect of Italian, he joined in with this conversation in a way that was so adroit and unobtrusive that he seemed to be adding no more than minor comments, whereas in fact he was swiftly and patiently breaking into what the Italian said so that K. could understand. K. learned in this way that the Italian first had a few business matters to settle, that he unfortunately had only a little time at his disposal, that he certainly did not intend to rush round to see every monument in the city, that he would much rather - at least as long as K. would agree, it was entirely his decision - just see the cathedral and to do so thoroughly. He was extremely pleased to be accompanied by someone who was so learned and so pleasant - by this he meant K., who was occupied not with listening to the Italian but the director - and asked if he would be so kind, if the time was suitable, to meet him in the cathedral in two hours' time at about ten o'clock. He hoped he would certainly be able to be there at that time. K. made an appropriate reply, the Italian shook first the director's hand and then K.'s, then the director's again and went to the door, half turned to the two men who followed him and continuing to talk without a break. K. remained together with the director for a short while, although the director looked especially unhappy today. He thought he needed to apologise to K. for something and told him - they were standing intimately close together - he had thought at first he would accompany the Italian himself, but then - he gave no more precise reason than this - then he decided it would be better to send K. with him. He should not be surprised if he could not understand the Italian at first, he would be able to very soon, and even if he really could not understand very much he said it was not so bad, as it was really not so important for the Italian to be understood. And anyway, K.'s knowledge of Italian was surprisingly good, the director was sure he would get by very well. And with that, it was time for K. to go. He spent the time still remaining to him with a dictionary, copying out obscure words he would need to guide the Italian round the cathedral. It was an extremely irksome task, servitors brought him the mail, bank staff came with various queries and, when they saw that K. was busy, stood by the door and did not go away until he had listened to them, the deputy director did not miss the opportunity to disturb K. and came in frequently, took the dictionary from his hand and flicked through its pages, clearly for no purpose, when the door to the ante-room opened even clients would appear from the half darkness and bow timidly to him - they wanted to attract his attention but were not sure whether he had seen them - all this activity was circling around K. with him at its centre while he compiled the list of words he would need, then looked them up in the dictionary, then wrote them out, then practised their pronunciation and finally tried to learn them by heart. The good intentions he had had earlier, though, seemed to have left him completely, it was the Italian who had caused him all this effort and sometimes he became so angry with him that he buried the dictionary under some papers firmly intending to do no more preparation, but then he realised he could not walk up and down in the cathedral with the Italian without saying a word, so, in an even greater rage, he pulled the dictionary back out again.

At exactly half past nine, just when he was about to leave, there was a telephone call for him, Leni wished him good morning and asked how he was, K. thanked her hurriedly and told her it was impossible for him to talk now as he had to go to the cathedral. "To the cathedral?" asked Leni. "Yes, to the cathedral." "What do you have to go to the cathedral for?" said Leni. K. tried to explain it to her briefly, but he had hardly begun when Leni suddenly said, "They're harassing you." One thing that K. could not bear was pity that he had not wanted or expected, he took his leave of her with two words, but as he put the receiver back in its place he said, half to himself and half to the girl on the other end of the line who could no longer hear him, "Yes, they're harassing me."

By now the time was late and there was almost a danger he would not be on time. He took a taxi to the cathedral, at the last moment he had remembered the album that he had had no opportunity to give to the Italian earlier and so took it with him now. He held it on his knees and drummed impatiently on it during the whole journey. The rain had eased off slightly but it was still damp chilly and dark, it would be difficult to see anything in the cathedral but standing about on cold flagstones might well make K.'s chill much worse. The square in front of the cathedral was quite empty, K. remembered how even as a small child he had noticed that nearly all the houses in this narrow square had the curtains at their windows closed most of the time, although today, with the weather like this, it was more understandable. The cathedral also seemed quite empty, of course no-one would think of going there on a day like this. K. hurried along both the side naves but saw no-one but an old woman who, wrapped up in a warm shawl, was kneeling at a picture of the Virgin Mary and staring up at it. Then, in the distance, he saw a church official who limped away through a doorway in the wall. K. had arrived on time, it had struck ten just as he was entering the building, but the Italian still was not there. K. went back to the main entrance, stood there indecisively for a while, and then walked round the cathedral in the rain in case the Italian was waiting at another entrance. He was nowhere to be found. Could the director have misunderstood what time they had agreed on? How could anyone understand someone like that properly anyway? Whatever had happened, K. would have to wait for him for at least half an hour. As he was tired he wanted to sit down, he went back inside the cathedral, he found something like a small carpet on one of the steps, he moved it with his foot to a nearby pew, wrapped himself up tighter in his coat, put the collar up and sat down. To pass the time he opened the album and flicked through the pages a little but soon had to give up as it became so dark that when he looked up he could hardly make out anything in the side nave next to him.

In the distance there was a large triangle of candles flickering on the main altar, K. was not certain whether he had seen them earlier. Perhaps they had only just been lit. Church staff creep silently as part of their job, you don't notice them. When K. happened to turn round he also saw a tall, stout candle attached to a column not far behind him. It was all very pretty, but totally inadequate to illuminate the pictures which were usually left in the darkness of the side altars, and seemed to make the darkness all the deeper. It was discourteous of the Italian not to come but it was also sensible of him, there would have been nothing to see, they would have had to content themselves with seeking out a few pictures with K.'s electric pocket torch and looking at them one small part at a time. K. went over to a nearby side chapel to see what they could have hoped for, he went up a few steps to a low marble railing and leant over it to look at the altar picture by the light of his torch. The eternal light hung disturbingly in front of it. The first thing that K. partly saw and partly guessed at was a large knight in armour who was shown at the far edge of the painting. He was leaning on his sword that he had stuck into the naked ground in front of him where only a few blades of grass grew here and there. He seemed to be paying close attention to something that was being played out in front of him. It was astonishing to see how he stood there without going any closer. Perhaps it was his job to stand guard. It was a long time since K. had looked at any pictures and he studied the knight for a long time even though he had continually to blink as he found it difficult to bear the green light of his torch. Then when he moved the light to the other parts of the picture he found an interment of Christ shown in the usual way, it was also a comparatively new painting. He put his torch away and went back to his place.

There seemed to be no point in waiting for the Italian any longer, but outside it was certainly raining heavily, and as it was not so cold in the cathedral as K. had expected he decided to stay there for the time being. Close by him was the great pulpit, there were two plain golden crosses attached to its little round roof which were lying almost flat and whose tips crossed over each other. The outside of the pulpit's balustrade was covered in green foliage which continued down to the column supporting it, little angels could be seen among the leaves, some of them lively and some of them still. K. walked up to the pulpit and examined it from all sides, its stonework had been sculpted with great care, it seemed as if the foliage had trapped a deep darkness between and behind its leaves and held it there prisoner, K. lay his hand in one of these gaps and cautiously felt the stone, until then he had been totally unaware of this pulpit's existence. Then K. happened to notice one of the church staff standing behind the next row of pews, he wore a loose, creased, black cassock, he held a snuff box in his left hand and he was watching K. Now what does he want? thought K. Do I seem suspicious to him? Does he want a tip? But when the man in the cassock saw that K. had noticed him he raised his right hand, a pinch of snuff still held between two fingers, and pointed in some vague direction. It was almost impossible to understand what this behaviour meant, K. waited a while longer but the man in the cassock did not stop gesturing with his hand and even augmented it by nodding his head. "Now what does he want?" asked K. quietly, he did not dare call out loud here; but then he drew out his purse and pushed his way through the nearest pews to reach the man. He, however, immediately gestured to turn down this offer, shrugged his shoulders and limped away. As a child K. had imitated riding on a horse with the same sort of movement as this limp. "This old man is like a child," thought K., "he doesn't have the sense for anything more than serving in a church. Look at the way he stops when I stop, and how he waits to see whether I'll continue." With a smile, K. followed the old man all the way up the side nave and almost as far as the main altar, all this time the old man continued to point at something but K. deliberately avoided looking round, he was only pointing in order to make it harder for K. to follow him. Eventually, K. did stop following, he did not want to worry the old man too much, and he also did not want to frighten him away completely in case the Italian turned up after all.

When he entered the central nave to go back to where he had left the album, he noticed a small secondary pulpit on a column almost next to the stalls by the altar where the choir sat. It was very simple, made of plain white stone, and so small that from a distance it looked like an empty niche where the statue of a saint ought to have been. It certainly would have been impossible for the priest to take a full step back from the balustrade, and, although there was no decoration on it, the top of the pulpit curved in exceptionally low so that a man of average height would not be able stand upright and would have to remain bent forward over the balustrade. In all, it looked as if it had been intended to make the priest suffer, it was impossible to understand why this pulpit would be needed as there were also the other ones available which were large and so artistically decorated.

And K. would certainly not have noticed this little pulpit if there had not been a lamp fastened above it, which usually meant there was a sermon about to be given. So was a sermon to be given now? In this empty church? K. looked down at the steps which, pressed close against the column, led up to the pulpit. They were so narrow they seemed to be there as decoration on the column rather than for anyone to use. But under the pulpit - K. grinned in astonishment - there really was a priest standing with his hand on the handrail ready to climb the steps and looking at K. Then he nodded very slightly, so that K. crossed himself and genuflected as he should have done earlier. With a little swing, the priest went up into the pulpit with short fast steps. Was there really a sermon about to begin? Maybe the man in the cassock had not been really so demented, and had meant to lead K.'s way to the preacher, which in this empty church would have been very necessary. And there was also, somewhere in front of a picture of the Virgin Mary, an old woman who should have come to hear the sermon. And if there was to be a sermon why had it not been introduced on the organ? But the organ remained quiet and merely looked out weakly from the darkness of its great height.

K. now considered whether he should leave as quickly as possible, if he did not do it now there would be no chance of doing so during the sermon and he would have to stay there for as long as it lasted, he had lost so much time when he should have been in his office, there had long been no need for him to wait for the Italian any longer, he looked at his watch, it was eleven. But could there really be a sermon given? Could K. constitute the entire congregation? How could he when he was just a stranger who wanted to look at the church? That, basically, was all he was. The idea of a sermon, now, at eleven o'clock, on a workday, in hideous weather, was nonsense. The priest - there was no doubt that he was a priest, a young man with a smooth, dark face - was clearly going up there just to put the lamp out after somebody had lit it by mistake.

But there had been no mistake, the priest seemed rather to check that the lamp was lit and turned it a little higher, then he slowly turned to face the front and leant down on the balustrade gripping its angular rail with both hands. He stood there like that for a while and, without turning his head, looked around. K. had moved back a long way and leant his elbows on the front pew. Somewhere in the church - he could not have said exactly where - he could make out the man in the cassock hunched under his bent back and at peace, as if his work were completed. In the cathedral it was now very quiet! But K. would have to disturb that silence, he had no intention of staying there; if it was the priest's duty to preach at a certain time regardless of the circumstances then he could, and he could do it without K.'s taking part, and K.'s presence would do nothing to augment the effect of it. So K. began slowly to move, felt his way on tiptoe along the pew, arrived at the broad aisle and went along it without being disturbed, except for the sound of his steps, however light, which rang out on the stone floor and resounded from the vaulting, quiet but continuous at a repeating, regular pace. K. felt slightly abandoned as, probably observed by the priest, he walked by himself between the empty pews, and the size of the cathedral seemed to be just at the limit of what a man could bear. When he arrived back at where he had been sitting he did not hesitate but simply reached out for the album he had left there and took it with him. He had nearly left the area covered by pews and was close to the empty space between himself and the exit when, for the first time, he heard the voice of the priest. A powerful and experienced voice. It pierced through the reaches of the cathedral ready waiting for it! But the priest was not calling out to the congregation, his cry was quite unambiguous and there was no escape from it, he called "Josef K.!"

K. stood still and looked down at the floor. In theory he was still free, he could have carried on walking, through one of three dark little wooden doors not far in front of him and away from there. It would simply mean he had not understood, or that he had understood but chose not to pay attention to it. But if he once turned round he would be trapped, then he would have acknowledged that he had understood perfectly well, that he really was the Josef K. the priest had called to and that he was willing to follow. If the priest had called out again K. would certainly have carried on out the door, but everything was silent as K. also waited, he turned his head slightly as he wanted to see what the priest was doing now. He was merely standing in the pulpit as before, but it was obvious that he had seen K. turn his head. If K. did not now turn round completely it would have been like a child playing hide and seek. He did so, and the priest beckoned him with his finger. As everything could now be done openly he ran - because of curiosity and the wish to get it over with - with long flying leaps towards the pulpit. At the front pews he stopped, but to the priest he still seemed too far away, he reached out his hand and pointed sharply down with his finger to a place immediately in front of the pulpit. And K. did as he was told, standing in that place he had to bend his head a long way back just to see the priest. "You are Josef K.," said the priest, and raised his hand from the balustrade to make a gesture whose meaning was unclear. "Yes," said K., he considered how freely he had always given his name in the past, for some time now it had been a burden to him, now there were people who knew his name whom he had never seen before, it had been so nice first to introduce yourself and only then for people to know who you were. "You have been accused," said the priest, especially gently. "Yes," said K., "so I have been informed." "Then you are the one I am looking for," said the priest. "I am the prison chaplain." "I see," said K. "I had you summoned here," said the priest, "because I wanted to speak to you." "I knew nothing of that," said K. "I came here to show the cathedral to a gentleman from Italy." "That is beside the point," said the priest. "What are you holding in your hand? Is it a prayer book?" "No," answered K., "it's an album of the city's tourist sights." "Put it down," said the priest. K. threw it away with such force that it flapped open and rolled across the floor, tearing its pages. "Do you know your case is going badly?" asked the priest. "That's how it seems to me too," said K. "I've expended a lot of effort on it, but so far with no result. Although I do still have some documents to submit." "How do you imagine it will end?" asked the priest. "At first I thought it was bound to end well," said K., "but now I have my doubts about it. I don't know how it will end. Do you know?" "I don't," said the priest, "but I fear it will end badly. You are considered guilty. Your case will probably not even go beyond a minor court. Provisionally at least, your guilt is seen as proven." "But I'm not guilty," said K., "there's been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty. We're all human beings here, one like the other." "That is true," said the priest, "but that is how the guilty speak." "Do you presume I'm guilty too?" asked K. "I make no presumptions about you," said the priest. "I thank you for that," said K. "but everyone else involved in these proceedings has something against me and presumes I'm guilty. They even influence those who aren't involved. My position gets harder all the time." "You don't understand the facts," said the priest, "the verdict does not come suddenly, proceedings continue until a verdict is reached gradually." "I see," said K., lowering his head. "What do you intend to do about your case next?" asked the priest. "I still need to find help," said K., raising his head to see what the priest thought of this. "There are still certain possibilities I haven't yet made use of." "You look for too much help from people you don't know," said the priest disapprovingly, "and especially from women. Can you really not see that's not the help you need?" "Sometimes, in fact quite often, I could believe you're right," said K., "but not always. Women have a lot of power. If I could persuade some of the women I know to work together with me then I would be certain to succeed. Especially in a court like this that seems to consist of nothing but woman-chasers. Show the examining judge a woman in the distance and he'll run right over the desk, and the accused, just to get to her as soon as he can." The priest lowered his head down to the balustrade, only now did the roof over the pulpit seem to press him down. What sort of dreadful weather could it be outside? It was no longer just a dull day, it was deepest night. None of the stained glass in the main window shed even a flicker of light on the darkness of the walls. And this was the moment when the man in the cassock chose to put out the candles on the main altar, one by one. "Are you cross with me?" asked K. "Maybe you don't know what sort of court it is you serve." He received no answer. "Well, it's just my own experience," said K. Above him there was still silence. "I didn't mean to insult you," said K. At that, the priest screamed down at K.: "Can you not see two steps in front of you?" He shouted in anger, but it was also the scream of one who sees another fall and, shocked and without thinking, screams against his own will.

The two men, then, remained silent for a long time. In the darkness beneath him, the priest could not possibly have seen K. distinctly, although K. was able to see him clearly by the light of the little lamp. Why did the priest not come down? He had not given a sermon, he had only told K. a few things which, if he followed them closely, would probably cause him more harm than good. But the priest certainly seemed to mean well, it might even be possible, if he would come down and cooperate with him, it might even be possible for him to obtain some acceptable piece of advice that could make all the difference, it might, for instance, be able to show him not so much to influence the proceedings but how to break free of them, how to evade them, how to live away from them. K. had to admit that this was something he had had on his mind quite a lot of late. If the priest knew of such a possibility he might, if K. asked him, let him know about it, even though he was part of the court himself and even though, when K. had criticised the court, he had held down his gentle nature and actually shouted at K.

"Would you not like to come down here?" asked K. "If you're not going to give a sermon come down here with me." "Now I can come down," said the priest, perhaps he regretted having shouted at K. As he took down the lamp from its hook he said, "to start off with I had to speak to you from a distance. Otherwise I'm too easily influenced and forget my duty."

K. waited for him at the foot of the steps. While he was still on one of the higher steps as he came down them the priest reached out his hand for K. to shake. "Can you spare me a little of your time?" asked K. "As much time as you need," said the priest, and passed him the little lamp for him to carry. Even at close distance the priest did not lose a certain solemnity that seemed to be part of his character. "You are very friendly towards me," said K., as they walked up and down beside each other in the darkness of one of the side naves. "That makes you an exception among all those who belong to the court. I can trust you more than any of the others I've seen. I can speak openly with you." "Don't fool yourself," said the priest. "How would I be fooling myself?" asked K. "You fool yourself in the court," said the priest, "it talks about this self-deceit in the opening paragraphs to the law. In front of the law there is a doorkeeper. A man from the countryside comes up to the door and asks for entry. But the doorkeeper says he can't let him in to the law right now. The man thinks about this, and then he asks if he'll be able to go in later on. 'That's possible,' says the doorkeeper, 'but not now'. The gateway to the law is open as it always is, and the doorkeeper has stepped to one side, so the man bends over to try and see in. When the doorkeeper notices this he laughs and says, 'If you're tempted give it a try, try and go in even though I say you can't. Careful though: I'm powerful. And I'm only the lowliest of all the doormen. But there's a doorkeeper for each of the rooms and each of them is more powerful than the last. It's more than I can stand just to look at the third one.' The man from the country had not expected difficulties like this, the law was supposed to be accessible for anyone at any time, he thinks, but now he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, sees his big hooked nose, his long thin tartar-beard, and he decides it's better to wait until he has permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down to one side of the gate. He sits there for days and years. He tries to be allowed in time and again and tires the doorkeeper with his requests. The doorkeeper often questions him, asking about where he's from and many other things, but these are disinterested questions such as great men ask, and he always ends up by telling him he still can't let him in. The man had come well equipped for his journey, and uses everything, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. He accepts everything, but as he does so he says, 'I'll only accept this so that you don't think there's anything you've failed to do'. Over many years, the man watches the doorkeeper almost without a break. He forgets about the other doormen, and begins to think this one is the only thing stopping him from gaining access to the law. Over the first few years he curses his unhappy condition out loud, but later, as he becomes old, he just grumbles to himself. He becomes senile, and as he has come to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper's fur collar over the years that he has been studying him he even asks them to help him and change the doorkeeper's mind. Finally his eyes grow dim, and he no longer knows whether it's really getting darker or just his eyes that are deceiving him. But he seems now to see an inextinguishable light begin to shine from the darkness behind the door. He doesn't have long to live now. Just before he dies, he brings together all his experience from all this time into one question which he has still never put to the doorkeeper. He beckons to him, as he's no longer able to raise his stiff body. The doorkeeper has to bend over deeply as the difference in their sizes has changed very much to the disadvantage of the man. 'What is it you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper, 'You're insatiable.' 'Everyone wants access to the law,' says the man, 'how come, over all these years, no- one but me has asked to be let in?' The doorkeeper can see the man's come to his end, his hearing has faded, and so, so that he can be heard, he shouts to him: 'Nobody else could have got in this way, as this entrance was meant only for you. Now I'll go and close it'."

"So the doorkeeper cheated the man," said K. immediately, who had been captivated by the story. "Don't be too quick," said the priest, "don't take somebody else's opinion without checking it. I told you the story exactly as it was written. There's nothing in there about cheating." "But it's quite clear," said K., "and your first interpretation of it was quite correct. The doorkeeper gave him the information that would release him only when it could be of no more use." "He didn't ask him before that," said the priest, "and don't forget he was only a doorkeeper, and as doorkeeper he did his duty." "What makes you think he did his duty?" asked K., "He didn't. It might have been his duty to keep everyone else away, but this man is who the door was intended for and he ought to have let him in." "You're not paying enough attention to what was written and you're changing the story," said the priest. "According to the story, there are two important things that the doorkeeper explains about access to the law, one at the beginning, one at the end. At one place he says he can't allow him in now, and at the other he says this entrance was intended for him alone. If one of the statements contradicted the other you would be right and the doorkeeper would have cheated the man from the country. But there is no contradiction. On the contrary, the first statement even hints at the second. You could almost say the doorkeeper went beyond his duty in that he offered the man some prospect of being admitted in the future. Throughout the story, his duty seems to have been merely to turn the man away, and there are many commentators who are surprised that the doorkeeper offered this hint at all, as he seems to love exactitude and keeps strict guard over his position. He stays at his post for many years and doesn't close the gate until the very end, he's very conscious of the importance of his service, as he says, 'I'm powerful,' he has respect for his superiors, as he says, 'I'm only the lowliest of the doormen', he's not talkative, as through all these years the only questions he asks are 'disinterested', he's not corruptible, as when he's offered a gift he says, 'I'll only accept this so that you don't think there's anything you've failed to do,' as far as fulfilling his duty goes he can be neither ruffled nor begged, as it says about the man that, 'he tires the doorkeeper with his requests', even his external appearance suggests a pedantic character, the big hooked nose and the long, thin, black tartar-beard. How could any doorkeeper be more faithful to his duty? But in the doorkeeper's character there are also other features which might be very useful for those who seek entry to the law, and when he hinted at some possibility in the future it always seemed to make it clear that he might even go beyond his duty. There's no denying he's a little simple minded, and that makes him a little conceited. Even if all he said about his power and the power of the other doorkeepers and how not even he could bear the sight of them - I say even if all these assertions are right, the way he makes them shows that he's too simple and arrogant to understand properly. The commentators say about this that, 'correct understanding of a matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter are not mutually exclusive'. Whether they're right or not, you have to concede that his simplicity and arrogance, however little they show, do weaken his function of guarding the entrance, they are defects in the doorkeeper's character. You also have to consider that the doorkeeper seems to be friendly by nature, he isn't always just an official. He makes a joke right at the beginning, in that he invites the man to enter at the same time as maintaining the ban on his entering, and then he doesn't send him away but gives him, as it says in the text, a stool to sit on and lets him stay by the side of the door. The patience with which he puts up with the man's requests through all these years, the little questioning sessions, accepting the gifts, his politeness when he puts up with the man cursing his fate even though it was the doorkeeper who caused that fate - all these things seem to want to arouse our sympathy. Not every doorkeeper would have behaved in the same way. And finally, he lets the man beckon him and he bends deep down to him so that he can put his last question. There's no more than some slight impatience - the doorkeeper knows everything's come to its end - shown in the words, 'You're insatiable'. There are many commentators who go even further in explaining it in this way and think the words, 'you're insatiable' are an expression of friendly admiration, albeit with some condescension. However you look at it the figure of the doorkeeper comes out differently from how you might think." "You know the story better than I do and you've known it for longer," said K. They were silent for a while. And then K. said, "So you think the man was not cheated, do you?" "Don't get me wrong," said the priest, "I'm just pointing out the different opinions about it. You shouldn't pay too much attention to people's opinions. The text cannot be altered, and the various opinions are often no more than an expression of despair over it. There's even one opinion which says it's the doorkeeper who's been cheated." "That does seem to take things too far," said K. "How can they argue the doorkeeper has been cheated?" "Their argument," answered the priest, "is based on the simplicity of the doorkeeper. They say the doorkeeper doesn't know the inside of the law, only the way into it where he just walks up and down. They see his ideas of what's inside the law as rather childish, and suppose he's afraid himself of what he wants to make the man frightened of. Yes, he's more afraid of it than the man, as the man wants nothing but to go inside the law, even after he's heard about the terrible doormen there, in contrast to the doorkeeper who doesn't want to go in, or at least we don't hear anything about it. On the other hand, there are those who say he must have already been inside the law as he has been taken on into its service and that could only have been done inside. That can be countered by supposing he could have been given the job of doorkeeper by somebody calling out from inside, and that he can't have gone very far inside as he couldn't bear the sight of the third doorkeeper. Nor, through all those years, does the story say the doorkeeper told the man anything about the inside, other than his comment about the other doorkeepers. He could have been forbidden to do so, but he hasn't said anything about that either. All this seems to show he doesn't know anything about what the inside looks like or what it means, and that that's why he's being deceived. But he's also being deceived by the man from the country as he's this man's subordinate and doesn't know it. There's a lot to indicate that he treats the man as his subordinate, I expect you remember, but those who hold this view would say it's very clear that he really is his subordinate. Above all, the free man is superior to the man who has to serve another. Now, the man really is free, he can go wherever he wants, the only thing forbidden to him is entry into the law and, what's more, there's only one man forbidding him to do so - the doorkeeper. If he takes the stool and sits down beside the door and stays there all his life he does this of his own free will, there's nothing in the story to say he was forced to do it. On the other hand, the doorkeeper is kept to his post by his employment, he's not allowed to go away from it and it seems he's not allowed to go inside either, not even if he wanted to. Also, although he's in the service of the law he's only there for this one entrance, therefore he's there only in the service of this one man who the door's intended for. This is another way in which he's his subordinate. We can take it that he's been performing this somewhat empty service for many years, through the whole of a man's life, as it says that a man will come, that means someone old enough to be a man. That means the doorkeeper will have to wait a long time before his function is fulfilled, he will have to wait for as long as the man liked, who came to the door of his own free will. Even the end of the doorkeeper's service is determined by when the man's life ends, so the doorkeeper remains his subordinate right to the end. And it's pointed out repeatedly that the doorkeeper seems to know nothing of any of this, although this is not seen as anything remarkable, as those who hold this view see the doorkeeper as deluded in a way that's far worse, a way that's to do with his service. At the end, speaking about the entrance he says, 'Now I'll go and close it', although at the beginning of the story it says the door to the law is open as it always is, but if it's always open - always - that means it's open independently of the lifespan of the man it's intended for, and not even the doorkeeper will be able to close it. There are various opinions about this, some say the doorkeeper was only answering a question or showing his devotion to duty or, just when the man was in his last moments, the doorkeeper wanted to cause him regret and sorrow. There are many who agree that he wouldn't be able to close the door. They even believe, at the end at least, the doorkeeper is aware, deep down, that he's the man's subordinate, as the man sees the light that shines out of the entry to the law whereas the doorkeeper would probably have his back to it and says nothing at all to show there's been any change." "That is well substantiated," said K., who had been repeating some parts of the priest's explanation to himself in a whisper. "It is well substantiated, and now I too think the doorkeeper must have been deceived. Although that does not mean I've abandoned what I thought earlier as the two versions are, to some extent, not incompatible. It's not clear whether the doorkeeper sees clearly or is deceived. I said the man had been cheated. If the doorkeeper understands clearly, then there could be some doubt about it, but if the doorkeeper has been deceived then the man is bound to believe the same thing. That would mean the doorkeeper is not a cheat but so simple-minded that he ought to be dismissed from his job immediately; if the doorkeeper is mistaken it will do him no harm but the man will be harmed immensely." "There you've found another opinion," said the priest, "as there are many who say the story doesn't give anyone the right to judge the doorkeeper. However he might seem to us he is still in the service of the law, so he belongs to the law, so he's beyond what man has a right to judge. In this case we can't believe the doorkeeper is the man's subordinate. Even if he has to stay at the entrance into the law his service makes him incomparably more than if he lived freely in the world. The man has come to the law for the first time and the doorkeeper is already there. He's been given his position by the law, to doubt his worth would be to doubt the law." "I can't say I'm in complete agreement with this view," said K. shaking his head, "as if you accept it you'll have to accept that everything said by the doorkeeper is true. But you've already explained very fully that that's not possible." "No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world."

K. said that as if it were his final word but it was not his conclusion. He was too tired to think about all the ramifications of the story, and the sort of thoughts they led him into were not familiar to him, unrealistic things, things better suited for officials of the court to discuss than for him. The simple story had lost its shape, he wanted to shake it off, and the priest who now felt quite compassionate allowed this and accepted K.'s remarks without comment, even though his view was certainly very different from K.'s.

In silence, they carried on walking for some time, K. stayed close beside the priest without knowing where he was. The lamp in his hand had long since gone out. Once, just in front of him, he thought he could see the statue of a saint by the glitter of the silver on it, although it quickly disappeared back into the darkness. So that he would not remain entirely dependent on the priest, K. asked him, "We're now near the main entrance, are we?" "No," said the priest, "we're a long way from it. Do you already want to go?" K. had not thought of going until then, but he immediately said, "Yes, certainly, I have to go. I'm the chief clerk in a bank and there are people waiting for me, I only came here to show a foreign business contact round the cathedral." "Alright," said the priest offering him his hand, "go then." "But I can't find my way round in this darkness by myself," said K. "Go to your left as far as the wall," said the priest, "then continue alongside the wall without leaving it and you'll find a way out." The priest had only gone a few paces from him, but K. was already shouting loudly, "Please, wait!" "I'm waiting," said the priest. "Is there anything else you want from me?" asked K. "No," said the priest. "You were so friendly to me earlier on," said K., "and you explained everything, but now you abandon me as if I were nothing to you." "You have to go," said the priest. "Well, yes," said K., "you need to understand that." "First, you need to understand who I am," said the priest. "You're the prison chaplain," said K., and went closer to the priest, it was not so important for him to go straight back to the bank as he had made out, he could very well stay where he was. "So that means I belong to the court," said the priest. "So why would I want anything from you? the court doesn't want anything from you. It accepts you when you come and it lets you go when you leave."

Chapter Ten End

The evening before K.'s thirty-first birthday - it was about nine o'clock in the evening, the time when the streets were quiet - two men came to where he lived. In frock coats, pale and fat, wearing top hats that looked like they could not be taken off their heads. After some brief formalities at the door of the flat when they first arrived, the same formalities were repeated at greater length at K.'s door. He had not been notified they would be coming, but K. sat in a chair near the door, dressed in black as they were, and slowly put on new gloves which stretched tightly over his fingers and behaved as if he were expecting visitors. He immediately stood up and looked at the gentlemen inquisitively. "You've come for me then, have you?" he asked. The gentlemen nodded, one of them indicated the other with the top hand now in his hand. K. told them he had been expecting a different visitor. He went to the window and looked once more down at the dark street. Most of the windows on the other side of the street were also dark already, many of them had the curtains closed. In one of the windows on the same floor where there was a light on, two small children could be seen playing with each other inside a playpen, unable to move from where they were, reaching out for each other with their little hands. "Some ancient, unimportant actors - that's what they've sent for me," said K. to himself, and looked round once again to confirm this to himself. "They want to sort me out as cheaply as they can." K. suddenly turned round to face the two men and asked, "What theatre do you play in?" "Theatre?" asked one of the gentlemen, turning to the other for assistance and pulling in the corners of his mouth. The other made a gesture like someone who was dumb, as if he were struggling with some organism causing him trouble. "You're not properly prepared to answer questions," said K. and went to fetch his hat.

As soon as they were on the stairs the gentlemen wanted to take K.'s arms, but K. said "Wait till we're in the street, I'm not ill." But they waited only until the front door before they took his arms in a way that K. had never experienced before. They kept their shoulders close behind his, did not turn their arms in but twisted them around the entire length of K.'s arms and took hold of his hands with a grasp that was formal, experienced and could not be resisted. K. was held stiff and upright between them, they formed now a single unit so that if any one of them had been knocked down all of them must have fallen. They formed a unit of the sort that normally can be formed only by matter that is lifeless.

Whenever they passed under a lamp K. tried to see his companions more clearly, as far as was possible when they were pressed so close together, as in the dim light of his room this had been hardly possible. "Maybe they're tenors," he thought as he saw their big double chins. The cleanliness of their faces disgusted him. He could see the hands that cleaned them, passing over the corners of their eyes, rubbing at their upper lips, scratching out the creases on those chins.

When K. noticed that, he stopped, which meant the others had to stop too; they were at the edge of an open square, devoid of people but decorated with flower beds. "Why did they send you, of all people!" he cried out, more a shout than a question. The two gentleman clearly knew no answer to give, they waited, their free arms hanging down, like nurses when the patient needs to rest. "I will go no further," said K. as if to see what would happen. The gentlemen did not need to make any answer, it was enough that they did not loosen their grip on K. and tried to move him on, but K. resisted them. "I'll soon have no need of much strength, I'll use all of it now," he thought. He thought of the flies that tear their legs off struggling to get free of the flypaper. "These gentleman will have some hard work to do".

Just then, Miss Bürstner came up into the square in front of them from the steps leading from a small street at a lower level. It was not certain that it was her, although the similarity was, of course, great. But it did not matter to K. whether it was certainly her anyway, he just became suddenly aware that there was no point in his resistance. There would be nothing heroic about it if he resisted, if he now caused trouble for these gentlemen, if in defending himself he sought to enjoy his last glimmer of life. He started walking, which pleased the gentlemen and some of their pleasure conveyed itself to him. Now they permitted him to decide which direction they took, and he decided to take the direction that followed the young woman in front of them, not so much because he wanted to catch up with her, nor even because he wanted to keep her in sight for as long as possible, but only so that he would not forget the reproach she represented for him. "The only thing I can do now," he said to himself, and his thought was confirmed by the equal length of his own steps with the steps of the two others, "the only thing I can do now is keep my common sense and do what's needed right till the end. I always wanted to go at the world and try and do too much, and even to do it for something that was not too cheap. That was wrong of me. Should I now show them I learned nothing from facing trial for a year? Should I go out like someone stupid? Should I let anyone say, after I'm gone, that at the start of the proceedings I wanted to end them, and that now that they've ended I want to start them again? I don't want anyone to say that. I'm grateful they sent these unspeaking, uncomprehending men to go with me on this journey, and that it's been left up to me to say what's necessary".

Meanwhile, the young woman had turned off into a side street, but K. could do without her now and let his companions lead him. All three of them now, in complete agreement, went over a bridge in the light of the moon, the two gentlemen were willing to yield to each little movement made by K. as he moved slightly towards the edge and directed the group in that direction as a single unit. The moonlight glittered and quivered in the water, which divided itself around a small island covered in a densely-piled mass of foliage and trees and bushes. Beneath them, now invisible, there were gravel paths with comfortable benches where K. had stretched himself out on many summer's days. "I didn't actually want to stop here," he said to his companions, shamed by their compliance with his wishes. Behind K.'s back one of them seemed to quietly criticise the other for the misunderstanding about stopping, and then they went on. They went on up through several streets where policemen were walking or standing here and there; some in the distance and then some very close. One of them with a bushy moustache, his hand on the grip of his sword, seemed to have some purpose in approaching the group, which was hardly unsuspicious. The two gentlemen stopped, the policeman seemed about to open his mouth, and then K. drove his group forcefully forward. Several times he looked back cautiously to see if the policeman was following; but when they had a corner between themselves and the policeman K. began to run, and the two gentlemen, despite being seriously short of breath, had to run with him.

In this way they quickly left the built up area and found themselves in the fields which, in this part of town, began almost without any transition zone. There was a quarry, empty and abandoned, near a building which was still like those in the city. Here the men stopped, perhaps because this had always been their destination or perhaps because they were too exhausted to run any further. Here they released their hold on K., who just waited in silence, and took their top hats off while they looked round the quarry and wiped the sweat off their brows with their handkerchiefs. The moonlight lay everywhere with the natural peace that is granted to no other light.

After exchanging a few courtesies about who was to carry out the next tasks - the gentlemen did not seem to have been allocated specific functions - one of them went to K. and took his coat, his waistcoat, and finally his shirt off him. K. made an involuntary shiver, at which the gentleman gave him a gentle, reassuring tap on the back. Then he carefully folded the things up as if they would still be needed, even if not in the near future. He did not want to expose K. to the chilly night air without moving though, so he took him under the arm and walked up and down with him a little way while the other gentleman looked round the quarry for a suitable place. When he had found it he made a sign and the other gentleman escorted him there. It was near the rockface, there was a stone lying there that had broken loose. The gentlemen sat K. down on the ground, leant him against the stone and settled his head down on the top of it. Despite all the effort they went to, and despite all the co-operation shown by K., his demeanour seemed very forced and hard to believe. So one of the gentlemen asked the other to grant him a short time while he put K. in position by himself, but even that did nothing to make it better. In the end they left K. in a position that was far from the best of the ones they had tried so far. Then one of the gentlemen opened his frock coat and from a sheath hanging on a belt stretched across his waistcoat he withdrew a long, thin, double-edged butcher's knife which he held up in the light to test its sharpness. The repulsive courtesies began once again, one of them passed the knife over K. to the other, who then passed it back over K. to the first. K. now knew it would be his duty to take the knife as it passed from hand to hand above him and thrust it into himself. But he did not do it, instead he twisted his neck, which was still free, and looked around. He was not able to show his full worth, was not able to take all the work from the official bodies, he lacked the rest of the strength he needed and this final shortcoming was the fault of whoever had denied it to him. As he looked round, he saw the top floor of the building next to the quarry. He saw how a light flickered on and the two halves of a window opened out, somebody, made weak and thin by the height and the distance, leant suddenly far out from it and stretched his arms out even further. Who was that? A friend? A good person? Somebody who was taking part? Somebody who wanted to help? Was he alone? Was it everyone? Would anyone help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? There must have been some. The logic cannot be refuted, but someone who wants to live will not resist it. Where was the judge he'd never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? He raised both hands and spread out all his fingers.

But the hands of one of the gentleman were laid on K.'s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. "Like a dog!" he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

BOOK I.

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess (Bendis, the Thracian Artemis.); and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.

I turned round, and asked him where his master was.

There he is, said the youth, coming after you, if you will only wait.

Certainly we will, said Glaucon; and in a few minutes Polemarchus appeared, and with him Adeimantus, Glaucon's brother, Niceratus the son of Nicias, and several others who had been at the procession.

Polemarchus said to me: I perceive, Socrates, that you and your companion are already on your way to the city.

You are not far wrong, I said.

But do you see, he rejoined, how many we are?

Of course.

And are you stronger than all these? for if not, you will have to remain where you are.

May there not be the alternative, I said, that we may persuade you to let us go?

But can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen to you? he said.

Certainly not, replied Glaucon.

Then we are not going to listen; of that you may be assured.

Adeimantus added: Has no one told you of the torch-race on horseback in honour of the goddess which will take place in the evening?

With horses! I replied: That is a novelty. Will horsemen carry torches and pass them one to another during the race?

Yes, said Polemarchus, and not only so, but a festival will be celebrated at night, which you certainly ought to see. Let us rise soon after supper and see this festival; there will be a gathering of young men, and we will have a good talk. Stay then, and do not be perverse.

Glaucon said: I suppose, since you insist, that we must.

Very good, I replied.

Accordingly we went with Polemarchus to his house; and there we found his brothers Lysias and Euthydemus, and with them Thrasymachus the Chalcedonian, Charmantides the Paeanian, and Cleitophon the son of Aristonymus. There too was Cephalus the father of Polemarchus, whom I had not seen for a long time, and I thought him very much aged. He was seated on a cushioned chair, and had a garland on his head, for he had been sacrificing in the court; and there were some other chairs in the room arranged in a semicircle, upon which we sat down by him. He saluted me eagerly, and then he said:--

You don't come to see me, Socrates, as often as you ought: If I were still able to go and see you I would not ask you to come to me. But at my age I can hardly get to the city, and therefore you should come oftener to the Piraeus. For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation. Do not then deny my request, but make our house your resort and keep company with these young men; we are old friends, and you will be quite at home with us.

I replied: There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the 'threshold of old age'—Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?

I will tell you, Socrates, he said, what my own feeling is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is—I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away: there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life. Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause. But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age, Sophocles,—are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master. His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

I listened in admiration, and wanting to draw him out, that he might go on—Yes, Cephalus, I said: but I rather suspect that people in general are not convinced by you when you speak thus; they think that old age sits lightly upon you, not because of your happy disposition, but because you are rich, and wealth is well known to be a great comforter.

You are right, he replied; they are not convinced: and there is something in what they say; not, however, so much as they imagine. I might answer them as Themistocles answered the Seriphian who was abusing him and saying that he was famous, not for his own merits but because he was an Athenian: 'If you had been a native of my country or I of yours, neither of us would have been famous.' And to those who are not rich and are impatient of old age, the same reply may be made; for to the good poor man old age cannot be a light burden, nor can a bad rich man ever have peace with himself.

May I ask, Cephalus, whether your fortune was for the most part inherited or acquired by you?

Acquired! Socrates; do you want to know how much I acquired? In the art of making money I have been midway between my father and grandfather: for my grandfather, whose name I bear, doubled and trebled the value of his patrimony, that which he inherited being much what I possess now; but my father Lysanias reduced the property below what it is at present: and I shall be satisfied if I leave to these my sons not less but a little more than I received.

That was why I asked you the question, I replied, because I see that you are indifferent about money, which is a characteristic rather of those who have inherited their fortunes than of those who have acquired them; the makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence they are very bad company, for they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth.

That is true, he said.

Yes, that is very true, but may I ask another question?—What do you consider to be the greatest blessing which you have reaped from your wealth?

One, he said, of which I could not expect easily to convince others. For let me tell you, Socrates, that when a man thinks himself to be near death, fears and cares enter into his mind which he never had before; the tales of a world below and the punishment which is exacted there of deeds done here were once a laughing matter to him, but now he is tormented with the thought that they may be true: either from the weakness of age, or because he is now drawing nearer to that other place, he has a clearer view of these things; suspicions and alarms crowd thickly upon him, and he begins to reflect and consider what wrongs he has done to others. And when he finds that the sum of his transgressions is great he will many a time like a child start up in his sleep for fear, and he is filled with dark forebodings. But to him who is conscious of no sin, sweet hope, as Pindar charmingly says, is the kind nurse of his age:

'Hope,' he says, 'cherishes the soul of him who lives in justice and holiness, and is the nurse of his age and the companion of his journey;—hope which is mightiest to sway the restless soul of man.'

How admirable are his words! And the great blessing of riches, I do not say to every man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no occasion to deceive or to defraud others, either intentionally or unintentionally; and when he departs to the world below he is not in any apprehension about offerings due to the gods or debts which he owes to men. Now to this peace of mind the possession of wealth greatly contributes; and therefore I say, that, setting one thing against another, of the many advantages which wealth has to give, to a man of sense this is in my opinion the greatest.

Well said, Cephalus, I replied; but as concerning justice, what is it?—to speak the truth and to pay your debts—no more than this? And even to this are there not exceptions? Suppose that a friend when in his right mind has deposited arms with me and he asks for them when he is not in his right mind, ought I to give them back to him? No one would say that I ought or that I should be right in doing so, any more than they would say that I ought always to speak the truth to one who is in his condition.

You are quite right, he replied.

But then, I said, speaking the truth and paying your debts is not a correct definition of justice.

Quite correct, Socrates, if Simonides is to be believed, said Polemarchus interposing.

I fear, said Cephalus, that I must go now, for I have to look after the sacrifices, and I hand over the argument to Polemarchus and the company.

Is not Polemarchus your heir? I said.

To be sure, he answered, and went away laughing to the sacrifices.

Tell me then, O thou heir of the argument, what did Simonides say, and according to you truly say, about justice?

He said that the repayment of a debt is just, and in saying so he appears to me to be right.

I should be sorry to doubt the word of such a wise and inspired man, but his meaning, though probably clear to you, is the reverse of clear to me. For he certainly does not mean, as we were just now saying, that I ought to return a deposit of arms or of anything else to one who asks for it when he is not in his right senses; and yet a deposit cannot be denied to be a debt.

True.

Then when the person who asks me is not in his right mind I am by no means to make the return?

Certainly not.

When Simonides said that the repayment of a debt was justice, he did not mean to include that case?

Certainly not; for he thinks that a friend ought always to do good to a friend and never evil.

You mean that the return of a deposit of gold which is to the injury of the receiver, if the two parties are friends, is not the repayment of a debt,—that is what you would imagine him to say?

Yes.

And are enemies also to receive what we owe to them?

To be sure, he said, they are to receive what we owe them, and an enemy, as I take it, owes to an enemy that which is due or proper to him—that is to say, evil.

Simonides, then, after the manner of poets, would seem to have spoken darkly of the nature of justice; for he really meant to say that justice is the giving to each man what is proper to him, and this he termed a debt.

That must have been his meaning, he said.

By heaven! I replied; and if we asked him what due or proper thing is given by medicine, and to whom, what answer do you think that he would make to us?

He would surely reply that medicine gives drugs and meat and drink to human bodies.

And what due or proper thing is given by cookery, and to what?

Seasoning to food.

And what is that which justice gives, and to whom?

If, Socrates, we are to be guided at all by the analogy of the preceding instances, then justice is the art which gives good to friends and evil to enemies.

That is his meaning then?

I think so.

And who is best able to do good to his friends and evil to his enemies in time of sickness?

The physician.

Or when they are on a voyage, amid the perils of the sea?

The pilot.

And in what sort of actions or with a view to what result is the just man most able to do harm to his enemy and good to his friend?

In going to war against the one and in making alliances with the other.

But when a man is well, my dear Polemarchus, there is no need of a physician?

No.

And he who is not on a voyage has no need of a pilot?

No.

Then in time of peace justice will be of no use?

I am very far from thinking so.

You think that justice may be of use in peace as well as in war?

Yes.

Like husbandry for the acquisition of corn?

Yes.

Or like shoemaking for the acquisition of shoes,—that is what you mean?

Yes.

And what similar use or power of acquisition has justice in time of peace?

In contracts, Socrates, justice is of use.

And by contracts you mean partnerships?

Exactly.

But is the just man or the skilful player a more useful and better partner at a game of draughts?

The skilful player.

And in the laying of bricks and stones is the just man a more useful or better partner than the builder?

Quite the reverse.

Then in what sort of partnership is the just man a better partner than the harp-player, as in playing the harp the harp-player is certainly a better partner than the just man?

In a money partnership.

Yes, Polemarchus, but surely not in the use of money; for you do not want a just man to be your counsellor in the purchase or sale of a horse; a man who is knowing about horses would be better for that, would he not?

Certainly.

And when you want to buy a ship, the shipwright or the pilot would be better?

True.

Then what is that joint use of silver or gold in which the just man is to be preferred?

When you want a deposit to be kept safely.

You mean when money is not wanted, but allowed to lie?

Precisely.

That is to say, justice is useful when money is useless?

That is the inference.

And when you want to keep a pruning-hook safe, then justice is useful to the individual and to the state; but when you want to use it, then the art of the vine-dresser?

Clearly.

And when you want to keep a shield or a lyre, and not to use them, you would say that justice is useful; but when you want to use them, then the art of the soldier or of the musician?

Certainly.

And so of all other things;—justice is useful when they are useless, and useless when they are useful?

That is the inference.

Then justice is not good for much. But let us consider this further point: Is not he who can best strike a blow in a boxing match or in any kind of fighting best able to ward off a blow?

Certainly.

And he who is most skilful in preventing or escaping from a disease is best able to create one?

True.

And he is the best guard of a camp who is best able to steal a march upon the enemy?

Certainly.

Then he who is a good keeper of anything is also a good thief?

That, I suppose, is to be inferred.

Then if the just man is good at keeping money, he is good at stealing it.

That is implied in the argument.

Then after all the just man has turned out to be a thief. And this is a lesson which I suspect you must have learnt out of Homer; for he, speaking of Autolycus, the maternal grandfather of Odysseus, who is a favourite of his, affirms that

'He was excellent above all men in theft and perjury.'

And so, you and Homer and Simonides are agreed that justice is an art of theft; to be practised however 'for the good of friends and for the harm of enemies,'—that was what you were saying?

No, certainly not that, though I do not now know what I did say; but I still stand by the latter words.

Well, there is another question: By friends and enemies do we mean those who are so really, or only in seeming?

Surely, he said, a man may be expected to love those whom he thinks good, and to hate those whom he thinks evil.

Yes, but do not persons often err about good and evil: many who are not good seem to be so, and conversely?

That is true.

Then to them the good will be enemies and the evil will be their friends? True.

And in that case they will be right in doing good to the evil and evil to the good?

Clearly.

But the good are just and would not do an injustice?

True.

Then according to your argument it is just to injure those who do no wrong?

Nay, Socrates; the doctrine is immoral.

Then I suppose that we ought to do good to the just and harm to the unjust?

I like that better.

But see the consequence:—Many a man who is ignorant of human nature has friends who are bad friends, and in that case he ought to do harm to them; and he has good enemies whom he ought to benefit; but, if so, we shall be saying the very opposite of that which we affirmed to be the meaning of Simonides.

Very true, he said: and I think that we had better correct an error into which we seem to have fallen in the use of the words 'friend' and 'enemy.'

What was the error, Polemarchus? I asked.

We assumed that he is a friend who seems to be or who is thought good.

And how is the error to be corrected?

We should rather say that he is a friend who is, as well as seems, good; and that he who seems only, and is not good, only seems to be and is not a friend; and of an enemy the same may be said.

You would argue that the good are our friends and the bad our enemies?

Yes.

And instead of saying simply as we did at first, that it is just to do good to our friends and harm to our enemies, we should further say: It is just to do good to our friends when they are good and harm to our enemies when they are evil?

Yes, that appears to me to be the truth.

But ought the just to injure any one at all?

Undoubtedly he ought to injure those who are both wicked and his enemies.

When horses are injured, are they improved or deteriorated?

The latter.

Deteriorated, that is to say, in the good qualities of horses, not of dogs?

Yes, of horses.

And dogs are deteriorated in the good qualities of dogs, and not of horses?

Of course.

And will not men who are injured be deteriorated in that which is the proper virtue of man?

Certainly.

And that human virtue is justice?

To be sure.

Then men who are injured are of necessity made unjust?

That is the result.

But can the musician by his art make men unmusical?

Certainly not.

Or the horseman by his art make them bad horsemen?

Impossible.

And can the just by justice make men unjust, or speaking generally, can the good by virtue make them bad?

Assuredly not.

Any more than heat can produce cold?

It cannot.

Or drought moisture?

Clearly not.

Nor can the good harm any one?

Impossible.

And the just is the good?

Certainly.

Then to injure a friend or any one else is not the act of a just man, but of the opposite, who is the unjust?

I think that what you say is quite true, Socrates.

Then if a man says that justice consists in the repayment of debts, and that good is the debt which a just man owes to his friends, and evil the debt which he owes to his enemies,—to say this is not wise; for it is not true, if, as has been clearly shown, the injuring of another can be in no case just.

I agree with you, said Polemarchus.

Then you and I are prepared to take up arms against any one who attributes such a saying to Simonides or Bias or Pittacus, or any other wise man or seer?

I am quite ready to do battle at your side, he said.

Shall I tell you whose I believe the saying to be?

Whose?

I believe that Periander or Perdiccas or Xerxes or Ismenias the Theban, or some other rich and mighty man, who had a great opinion of his own power, was the first to say that justice is 'doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.'

Most true, he said.

Yes, I said; but if this definition of justice also breaks down, what other can be offered?

Several times in the course of the discussion Thrasymachus had made an attempt to get the argument into his own hands, and had been put down by the rest of the company, who wanted to hear the end. But when Polemarchus and I had done speaking and there was a pause, he could no longer hold his peace; and, gathering himself up, he came at us like a wild beast, seeking to devour us. We were quite panic-stricken at the sight of him.

He roared out to the whole company: What folly, Socrates, has taken possession of you all? And why, sillybillies, do you knock under to one another? I say that if you want really to know what justice is, you should not only ask but answer, and you should not seek honour to yourself from the refutation of an opponent, but have your own answer; for there is many a one who can ask and cannot answer. And now I will not have you say that justice is duty or advantage or profit or gain or interest, for this sort of nonsense will not do for me; I must have clearness and accuracy.

I was panic-stricken at his words, and could not look at him without trembling. Indeed I believe that if I had not fixed my eye upon him, I should have been struck dumb: but when I saw his fury rising, I looked at him first, and was therefore able to reply to him.

Thrasymachus, I said, with a quiver, don't be hard upon us. Polemarchus and I may have been guilty of a little mistake in the argument, but I can assure you that the error was not intentional. If we were seeking for a piece of gold, you would not imagine that we were 'knocking under to one another,' and so losing our chance of finding it. And why, when we are seeking for justice, a thing more precious than many pieces of gold, do you say that we are weakly yielding to one another and not doing our utmost to get at the truth? Nay, my good friend, we are most willing and anxious to do so, but the fact is that we cannot. And if so, you people who know all things should pity us and not be angry with us.

How characteristic of Socrates! he replied, with a bitter laugh;—that's your ironical style! Did I not foresee—have I not already told you, that whatever he was asked he would refuse to answer, and try irony or any other shuffle, in order that he might avoid answering?

You are a philosopher, Thrasymachus, I replied, and well know that if you ask a person what numbers make up twelve, taking care to prohibit him whom you ask from answering twice six, or three times four, or six times two, or four times three, 'for this sort of nonsense will not do for me,'—then obviously, if that is your way of putting the question, no one can answer you. But suppose that he were to retort, 'Thrasymachus, what do you mean? If one of these numbers which you interdict be the true answer to the question, am I falsely to say some other number which is not the right one?—is that your meaning?'—How would you answer him?

Just as if the two cases were at all alike! he said.

Why should they not be? I replied; and even if they are not, but only appear to be so to the person who is asked, ought he not to say what he thinks, whether you and I forbid him or not?

I presume then that you are going to make one of the interdicted answers?

I dare say that I may, notwithstanding the danger, if upon reflection I approve of any of them.

But what if I give you an answer about justice other and better, he said, than any of these? What do you deserve to have done to you?

Done to me!—as becomes the ignorant, I must learn from the wise—that is what I deserve to have done to me.

What, and no payment! a pleasant notion!

I will pay when I have the money, I replied.

But you have, Socrates, said Glaucon: and you, Thrasymachus, need be under no anxiety about money, for we will all make a contribution for Socrates.

Yes, he replied, and then Socrates will do as he always does—refuse to answer himself, but take and pull to pieces the answer of some one else.

Why, my good friend, I said, how can any one answer who knows, and says that he knows, just nothing; and who, even if he has some faint notions of his own, is told by a man of authority not to utter them? The natural thing is, that the speaker should be some one like yourself who professes to know and can tell what he knows. Will you then kindly answer, for the edification of the company and of myself?

Glaucon and the rest of the company joined in my request, and Thrasymachus, as any one might see, was in reality eager to speak; for he thought that he had an excellent answer, and would distinguish himself. But at first he affected to insist on my answering; at length he consented to begin. Behold, he said, the wisdom of Socrates; he refuses to teach himself, and goes about learning of others, to whom he never even says Thank you.

That I learn of others, I replied, is quite true; but that I am ungrateful I wholly deny. Money I have none, and therefore I pay in praise, which is all I have; and how ready I am to praise any one who appears to me to speak well you will very soon find out when you answer; for I expect that you will answer well.

Listen, then, he said; I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger. And now why do you not praise me? But of course you won't.

Let me first understand you, I replied. Justice, as you say, is the interest of the stronger. What, Thrasymachus, is the meaning of this? You cannot mean to say that because Polydamas, the pancratiast, is stronger than we are, and finds the eating of beef conducive to his bodily strength, that to eat beef is therefore equally for our good who are weaker than he is, and right and just for us?

That's abominable of you, Socrates; you take the words in the sense which is most damaging to the argument.

Not at all, my good sir, I said; I am trying to understand them; and I wish that you would be a little clearer.

Well, he said, have you never heard that forms of government differ; there are tyrannies, and there are democracies, and there are aristocracies?

Yes, I know.

And the government is the ruling power in each state?

Certainly.

And the different forms of government make laws democratical, aristocratical, tyrannical, with a view to their several interests; and these laws, which are made by them for their own interests, are the justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses them they punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust. And that is what I mean when I say that in all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger.

Now I understand you, I said; and whether you are right or not I will try to discover. But let me remark, that in defining justice you have yourself used the word 'interest' which you forbade me to use. It is true, however, that in your definition the words 'of the stronger' are added.

A small addition, you must allow, he said.

Great or small, never mind about that: we must first enquire whether what you are saying is the truth. Now we are both agreed that justice is interest of some sort, but you go on to say 'of the stronger'; about this addition I am not so sure, and must therefore consider further.

Proceed.

I will; and first tell me, Do you admit that it is just for subjects to obey their rulers?

I do.

But are the rulers of states absolutely infallible, or are they sometimes liable to err?

To be sure, he replied, they are liable to err.

Then in making their laws they may sometimes make them rightly, and sometimes not?

True.

When they make them rightly, they make them agreeably to their interest; when they are mistaken, contrary to their interest; you admit that?

Yes.

And the laws which they make must be obeyed by their subjects,—and that is what you call justice?

Doubtless.

Then justice, according to your argument, is not only obedience to the interest of the stronger but the reverse?

What is that you are saying? he asked.

I am only repeating what you are saying, I believe. But let us consider: Have we not admitted that the rulers may be mistaken about their own interest in what they command, and also that to obey them is justice? Has not that been admitted?

Yes.

Then you must also have acknowledged justice not to be for the interest of the stronger, when the rulers unintentionally command things to be done which are to their own injury. For if, as you say, justice is the obedience which the subject renders to their commands, in that case, O wisest of men, is there any escape from the conclusion that the weaker are commanded to do, not what is for the interest, but what is for the injury of the stronger?

Nothing can be clearer, Socrates, said Polemarchus.

Yes, said Cleitophon, interposing, if you are allowed to be his witness.

But there is no need of any witness, said Polemarchus, for Thrasymachus himself acknowledges that rulers may sometimes command what is not for their own interest, and that for subjects to obey them is justice.

Yes, Polemarchus,—Thrasymachus said that for subjects to do what was commanded by their rulers is just.

Yes, Cleitophon, but he also said that justice is the interest of the stronger, and, while admitting both these propositions, he further acknowledged that the stronger may command the weaker who are his subjects to do what is not for his own interest; whence follows that justice is the injury quite as much as the interest of the stronger.

But, said Cleitophon, he meant by the interest of the stronger what the stronger thought to be his interest,—this was what the weaker had to do; and this was affirmed by him to be justice.

Those were not his words, rejoined Polemarchus.

Never mind, I replied, if he now says that they are, let us accept his statement. Tell me, Thrasymachus, I said, did you mean by justice what the stronger thought to be his interest, whether really so or not?

Certainly not, he said. Do you suppose that I call him who is mistaken the stronger at the time when he is mistaken?

Yes, I said, my impression was that you did so, when you admitted that the ruler was not infallible but might be sometimes mistaken.

You argue like an informer, Socrates. Do you mean, for example, that he who is mistaken about the sick is a physician in that he is mistaken? or that he who errs in arithmetic or grammar is an arithmetician or grammarian at the time when he is making the mistake, in respect of the mistake? True, we say that the physician or arithmetician or grammarian has made a mistake, but this is only a way of speaking; for the fact is that neither the grammarian nor any other person of skill ever makes a mistake in so far as he is what his name implies; they none of them err unless their skill fails them, and then they cease to be skilled artists. No artist or sage or ruler errs at the time when he is what his name implies; though he is commonly said to err, and I adopted the common mode of speaking. But to be perfectly accurate, since you are such a lover of accuracy, we should say that the ruler, in so far as he is a ruler, is unerring, and, being unerring, always commands that which is for his own interest; and the subject is required to execute his commands; and therefore, as I said at first and now repeat, justice is the interest of the stronger.

Indeed, Thrasymachus, and do I really appear to you to argue like an informer?

Certainly, he replied.

And do you suppose that I ask these questions with any design of injuring you in the argument?

Nay, he replied, 'suppose' is not the word—I know it; but you will be found out, and by sheer force of argument you will never prevail.

I shall not make the attempt, my dear man; but to avoid any misunderstanding occurring between us in future, let me ask, in what sense do you speak of a ruler or stronger whose interest, as you were saying, he being the superior, it is just that the inferior should execute—is he a ruler in the popular or in the strict sense of the term?

In the strictest of all senses, he said. And now cheat and play the informer if you can; I ask no quarter at your hands. But you never will be able, never.

And do you imagine, I said, that I am such a madman as to try and cheat, Thrasymachus? I might as well shave a lion.

Why, he said, you made the attempt a minute ago, and you failed.

Enough, I said, of these civilities. It will be better that I should ask you a question: Is the physician, taken in that strict sense of which you are speaking, a healer of the sick or a maker of money? And remember that I am now speaking of the true physician.

A healer of the sick, he replied.

And the pilot—that is to say, the true pilot—is he a captain of sailors or a mere sailor?

A captain of sailors.

The circumstance that he sails in the ship is not to be taken into account; neither is he to be called a sailor; the name pilot by which he is distinguished has nothing to do with sailing, but is significant of his skill and of his authority over the sailors.

Very true, he said.

Now, I said, every art has an interest?

Certainly.

For which the art has to consider and provide?

Yes, that is the aim of art.

And the interest of any art is the perfection of it—this and nothing else?

What do you mean?

I mean what I may illustrate negatively by the example of the body. Suppose you were to ask me whether the body is self-sufficing or has wants, I should reply: Certainly the body has wants; for the body may be ill and require to be cured, and has therefore interests to which the art of medicine ministers; and this is the origin and intention of medicine, as you will acknowledge. Am I not right?

Quite right, he replied.

But is the art of medicine or any other art faulty or deficient in any quality in the same way that the eye may be deficient in sight or the ear fail of hearing, and therefore requires another art to provide for the interests of seeing and hearing—has art in itself, I say, any similar liability to fault or defect, and does every art require another supplementary art to provide for its interests, and that another and another without end? Or have the arts to look only after their own interests? Or have they no need either of themselves or of another?—having no faults or defects, they have no need to correct them, either by the exercise of their own art or of any other; they have only to consider the interest of their subject-matter. For every art remains pure and faultless while remaining true—that is to say, while perfect and unimpaired. Take the words in your precise sense, and tell me whether I am not right.

Yes, clearly.

Then medicine does not consider the interest of medicine, but the interest of the body?

True, he said.

Nor does the art of horsemanship consider the interests of the art of horsemanship, but the interests of the horse; neither do any other arts care for themselves, for they have no needs; they care only for that which is the subject of their art?

True, he said.

But surely, Thrasymachus, the arts are the superiors and rulers of their own subjects?

To this he assented with a good deal of reluctance.

Then, I said, no science or art considers or enjoins the interest of the stronger or superior, but only the interest of the subject and weaker?

He made an attempt to contest this proposition also, but finally acquiesced.

Then, I continued, no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers his own good in what he prescribes, but the good of his patient; for the true physician is also a ruler having the human body as a subject, and is not a mere money-maker; that has been admitted?

Yes.

And the pilot likewise, in the strict sense of the term, is a ruler of sailors and not a mere sailor?

That has been admitted.

And such a pilot and ruler will provide and prescribe for the interest of the sailor who is under him, and not for his own or the ruler's interest?

He gave a reluctant 'Yes.'

Then, I said, Thrasymachus, there is no one in any rule who, in so far as he is a ruler, considers or enjoins what is for his own interest, but always what is for the interest of his subject or suitable to his art; to that he looks, and that alone he considers in everything which he says and does.

When we had got to this point in the argument, and every one saw that the definition of justice had been completely upset, Thrasymachus, instead of replying to me, said: Tell me, Socrates, have you got a nurse?

Why do you ask such a question, I said, when you ought rather to be answering?

Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose: she has not even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep.

What makes you say that? I replied.

Because you fancy that the shepherd or neatherd fattens or tends the sheep or oxen with a view to their own good and not to the good of himself or his master; and you further imagine that the rulers of states, if they are true rulers, never think of their subjects as sheep, and that they are not studying their own advantage day and night. Oh, no; and so entirely astray are you in your ideas about the just and unjust as not even to know that justice and the just are in reality another's good; that is to say, the interest of the ruler and stronger, and the loss of the subject and servant; and injustice the opposite; for the unjust is lord over the truly simple and just: he is the stronger, and his subjects do what is for his interest, and minister to his happiness, which is very far from being their own. Consider further, most foolish Socrates, that the just is always a loser in comparison with the unjust. First of all, in private contracts: wherever the unjust is the partner of the just you will find that, when the partnership is dissolved, the unjust man has always more and the just less. Secondly, in their dealings with the State: when there is an income-tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income; and when there is anything to be received the one gains nothing and the other much. Observe also what happens when they take an office; there is the just man neglecting his affairs and perhaps suffering other losses, and getting nothing out of the public, because he is just; moreover he is hated by his friends and acquaintance for refusing to serve them in unlawful ways. But all this is reversed in the case of the unjust man. I am speaking, as before, of injustice on a large scale in which the advantage of the unjust is most apparent; and my meaning will be most clearly seen if we turn to that highest form of injustice in which the criminal is the happiest of men, and the sufferers or those who refuse to do injustice are the most miserable—that is to say tyranny, which by fraud and force takes away the property of others, not little by little but wholesale; comprehending in one, things sacred as well as profane, private and public; for which acts of wrong, if he were detected perpetrating any one of them singly, he would be punished and incur great disgrace—they who do such wrong in particular cases are called robbers of temples, and man-stealers and burglars and swindlers and thieves. But when a man besides taking away the money of the citizens has made slaves of them, then, instead of these names of reproach, he is termed happy and blessed, not only by the citizens but by all who hear of his having achieved the consummation of injustice. For mankind censure injustice, fearing that they may be the victims of it and not because they shrink from committing it. And thus, as I have shown, Socrates, injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery than justice; and, as I said at first, justice is the interest of the stronger, whereas injustice is a man's own profit and interest.

Thrasymachus, when he had thus spoken, having, like a bath-man, deluged our ears with his words, had a mind to go away. But the company would not let him; they insisted that he should remain and defend his position; and I myself added my own humble request that he would not leave us. Thrasymachus, I said to him, excellent man, how suggestive are your remarks! And are you going to run away before you have fairly taught or learned whether they are true or not? Is the attempt to determine the way of man's life so small a matter in your eyes—to determine how life may be passed by each one of us to the greatest advantage?

And do I differ from you, he said, as to the importance of the enquiry?

You appear rather, I replied, to have no care or thought about us, Thrasymachus—whether we live better or worse from not knowing what you say you know, is to you a matter of indifference. Prithee, friend, do not keep your knowledge to yourself; we are a large party; and any benefit which you confer upon us will be amply rewarded. For my own part I openly declare that I am not convinced, and that I do not believe injustice to be more gainful than justice, even if uncontrolled and allowed to have free play. For, granting that there may be an unjust man who is able to commit injustice either by fraud or force, still this does not convince me of the superior advantage of injustice, and there may be others who are in the same predicament with myself. Perhaps we may be wrong; if so, you in your wisdom should convince us that we are mistaken in preferring justice to injustice.

And how am I to convince you, he said, if you are not already convinced by what I have just said; what more can I do for you? Would you have me put the proof bodily into your souls?

Heaven forbid! I said; I would only ask you to be consistent; or, if you change, change openly and let there be no deception. For I must remark, Thrasymachus, if you will recall what was previously said, that although you began by defining the true physician in an exact sense, you did not observe a like exactness when speaking of the shepherd; you thought that the shepherd as a shepherd tends the sheep not with a view to their own good, but like a mere diner or banquetter with a view to the pleasures of the table; or, again, as a trader for sale in the market, and not as a shepherd. Yet surely the art of the shepherd is concerned only with the good of his subjects; he has only to provide the best for them, since the perfection of the art is already ensured whenever all the requirements of it are satisfied. And that was what I was saying just now about the ruler. I conceived that the art of the ruler, considered as ruler, whether in a state or in private life, could only regard the good of his flock or subjects; whereas you seem to think that the rulers in states, that is to say, the true rulers, like being in authority.

Think! Nay, I am sure of it.

Then why in the case of lesser offices do men never take them willingly without payment, unless under the idea that they govern for the advantage not of themselves but of others? Let me ask you a question: Are not the several arts different, by reason of their each having a separate function? And, my dear illustrious friend, do say what you think, that we may make a little progress.

Yes, that is the difference, he replied.

And each art gives us a particular good and not merely a general one—medicine, for example, gives us health; navigation, safety at sea, and so on?

Yes, he said.

And the art of payment has the special function of giving pay: but we do not confuse this with other arts, any more than the art of the pilot is to be confused with the art of medicine, because the health of the pilot may be improved by a sea voyage. You would not be inclined to say, would you, that navigation is the art of medicine, at least if we are to adopt your exact use of language?

Certainly not.

Or because a man is in good health when he receives pay you would not say that the art of payment is medicine?

I should not.

Nor would you say that medicine is the art of receiving pay because a man takes fees when he is engaged in healing?

Certainly not.

And we have admitted, I said, that the good of each art is specially confined to the art?

Yes.

Then, if there be any good which all artists have in common, that is to be attributed to something of which they all have the common use?

True, he replied.

And when the artist is benefited by receiving pay the advantage is gained by an additional use of the art of pay, which is not the art professed by him?

He gave a reluctant assent to this.

Then the pay is not derived by the several artists from their respective arts. But the truth is, that while the art of medicine gives health, and the art of the builder builds a house, another art attends them which is the art of pay. The various arts may be doing their own business and benefiting that over which they preside, but would the artist receive any benefit from his art unless he were paid as well?

I suppose not.

But does he therefore confer no benefit when he works for nothing?

Certainly, he confers a benefit.

Then now, Thrasymachus, there is no longer any doubt that neither arts nor governments provide for their own interests; but, as we were before saying, they rule and provide for the interests of their subjects who are the weaker and not the stronger—to their good they attend and not to the good of the superior. And this is the reason, my dear Thrasymachus, why, as I was just now saying, no one is willing to govern; because no one likes to take in hand the reformation of evils which are not his concern without remuneration. For, in the execution of his work, and in giving his orders to another, the true artist does not regard his own interest, but always that of his subjects; and therefore in order that rulers may be willing to rule, they must be paid in one of three modes of payment, money, or honour, or a penalty for refusing.

What do you mean, Socrates? said Glaucon. The first two modes of payment are intelligible enough, but what the penalty is I do not understand, or how a penalty can be a payment.

You mean that you do not understand the nature of this payment which to the best men is the great inducement to rule? Of course you know that ambition and avarice are held to be, as indeed they are, a disgrace?

Very true.

And for this reason, I said, money and honour have no attraction for them; good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing and so to get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves out of the public revenues to get the name of thieves. And not being ambitious they do not care about honour. Wherefore necessity must be laid upon them, and they must be induced to serve from the fear of punishment. And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable. Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help—not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves, but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good. For there is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of good men, then to avoid office would be as much an object of contention as to obtain office is at present; then we should have plain proof that the true ruler is not meant by nature to regard his own interest, but that of his subjects; and every one who knew this would choose rather to receive a benefit from another than to have the trouble of conferring one. So far am I from agreeing with Thrasymachus that justice is the interest of the stronger. This latter question need not be further discussed at present; but when Thrasymachus says that the life of the unjust is more advantageous than that of the just, his new statement appears to me to be of a far more serious character. Which of us has spoken truly? And which sort of life, Glaucon, do you prefer?

I for my part deem the life of the just to be the more advantageous, he answered.

Did you hear all the advantages of the unjust which Thrasymachus was rehearsing?

Yes, I heard him, he replied, but he has not convinced me.

Then shall we try to find some way of convincing him, if we can, that he is saying what is not true?

Most certainly, he replied.

If, I said, he makes a set speech and we make another recounting all the advantages of being just, and he answers and we rejoin, there must be a numbering and measuring of the goods which are claimed on either side, and in the end we shall want judges to decide; but if we proceed in our enquiry as we lately did, by making admissions to one another, we shall unite the offices of judge and advocate in our own persons.

Very good, he said.

And which method do I understand you to prefer? I said.

That which you propose.

Well, then, Thrasymachus, I said, suppose you begin at the beginning and answer me. You say that perfect injustice is more gainful than perfect justice?

Yes, that is what I say, and I have given you my reasons.

And what is your view about them? Would you call one of them virtue and the other vice?

Certainly.

I suppose that you would call justice virtue and injustice vice?

What a charming notion! So likely too, seeing that I affirm injustice to be profitable and justice not.

What else then would you say?

The opposite, he replied.

And would you call justice vice?

No, I would rather say sublime simplicity.

Then would you call injustice malignity?

No; I would rather say discretion.

And do the unjust appear to you to be wise and good?

Yes, he said; at any rate those of them who are able to be perfectly unjust, and who have the power of subduing states and nations; but perhaps you imagine me to be talking of cutpurses. Even this profession if undetected has advantages, though they are not to be compared with those of which I was just now speaking.

I do not think that I misapprehend your meaning, Thrasymachus, I replied; but still I cannot hear without amazement that you class injustice with wisdom and virtue, and justice with the opposite.

Certainly I do so class them.

Now, I said, you are on more substantial and almost unanswerable ground; for if the injustice which you were maintaining to be profitable had been admitted by you as by others to be vice and deformity, an answer might have been given to you on received principles; but now I perceive that you will call injustice honourable and strong, and to the unjust you will attribute all the qualities which were attributed by us before to the just, seeing that you do not hesitate to rank injustice with wisdom and virtue.

You have guessed most infallibly, he replied.

Then I certainly ought not to shrink from going through with the argument so long as I have reason to think that you, Thrasymachus, are speaking your real mind; for I do believe that you are now in earnest and are not amusing yourself at our expense.

I may be in earnest or not, but what is that to you?—to refute the argument is your business.

Very true, I said; that is what I have to do: But will you be so good as answer yet one more question? Does the just man try to gain any advantage over the just?

Far otherwise; if he did he would not be the simple amusing creature which he is.

And would he try to go beyond just action?

He would not.

And how would he regard the attempt to gain an advantage over the unjust; would that be considered by him as just or unjust?

He would think it just, and would try to gain the advantage; but he would not be able.

Whether he would or would not be able, I said, is not to the point. My question is only whether the just man, while refusing to have more than another just man, would wish and claim to have more than the unjust?

Yes, he would.

And what of the unjust—does he claim to have more than the just man and to do more than is just?

Of course, he said, for he claims to have more than all men.

And the unjust man will strive and struggle to obtain more than the unjust man or action, in order that he may have more than all?

True.

We may put the matter thus, I said—the just does not desire more than his like but more than his unlike, whereas the unjust desires more than both his like and his unlike?

Nothing, he said, can be better than that statement.

And the unjust is good and wise, and the just is neither?

Good again, he said.

And is not the unjust like the wise and good and the just unlike them?

Of course, he said, he who is of a certain nature, is like those who are of a certain nature; he who is not, not.

Each of them, I said, is such as his like is?

Certainly, he replied.

Very good, Thrasymachus, I said; and now to take the case of the arts: you would admit that one man is a musician and another not a musician?

Yes.

And which is wise and which is foolish?

Clearly the musician is wise, and he who is not a musician is foolish.

And he is good in as far as he is wise, and bad in as far as he is foolish?

Yes.

And you would say the same sort of thing of the physician?

Yes.

And do you think, my excellent friend, that a musician when he adjusts the lyre would desire or claim to exceed or go beyond a musician in the tightening and loosening the strings?

I do not think that he would.

But he would claim to exceed the non-musician?

Of course.

And what would you say of the physician? In prescribing meats and drinks would he wish to go beyond another physician or beyond the practice of medicine?

He would not.

But he would wish to go beyond the non-physician?

Yes.

And about knowledge and ignorance in general; see whether you think that any man who has knowledge ever would wish to have the choice of saying or doing more than another man who has knowledge. Would he not rather say or do the same as his like in the same case?

That, I suppose, can hardly be denied.

And what of the ignorant? would he not desire to have more than either the knowing or the ignorant?

I dare say.

And the knowing is wise?

Yes.

And the wise is good?

True.

Then the wise and good will not desire to gain more than his like, but more than his unlike and opposite?

I suppose so.

Whereas the bad and ignorant will desire to gain more than both?

Yes.

But did we not say, Thrasymachus, that the unjust goes beyond both his like and unlike? Were not these your words?

They were.

And you also said that the just will not go beyond his like but his unlike?

Yes.

Then the just is like the wise and good, and the unjust like the evil and ignorant?

That is the inference.

And each of them is such as his like is?

That was admitted.

Then the just has turned out to be wise and good and the unjust evil and ignorant.

Thrasymachus made all these admissions, not fluently, as I repeat them, but with extreme reluctance; it was a hot summer's day, and the perspiration poured from him in torrents; and then I saw what I had never seen before, Thrasymachus blushing. As we were now agreed that justice was virtue and wisdom, and injustice vice and ignorance, I proceeded to another point:

Well, I said, Thrasymachus, that matter is now settled; but were we not also saying that injustice had strength; do you remember?

Yes, I remember, he said, but do not suppose that I approve of what you are saying or have no answer; if however I were to answer, you would be quite certain to accuse me of haranguing; therefore either permit me to have my say out, or if you would rather ask, do so, and I will answer 'Very good,' as they say to story-telling old women, and will nod 'Yes' and 'No.'

Certainly not, I said, if contrary to your real opinion.

Yes, he said, I will, to please you, since you will not let me speak. What else would you have?

Nothing in the world, I said; and if you are so disposed I will ask and you shall answer.

Proceed.

Then I will repeat the question which I asked before, in order that our examination of the relative nature of justice and injustice may be carried on regularly. A statement was made that injustice is stronger and more powerful than justice, but now justice, having been identified with wisdom and virtue, is easily shown to be stronger than injustice, if injustice is ignorance; this can no longer be questioned by any one. But I want to view the matter, Thrasymachus, in a different way: You would not deny that a state may be unjust and may be unjustly attempting to enslave other states, or may have already enslaved them, and may be holding many of them in subjection?

True, he replied; and I will add that the best and most perfectly unjust state will be most likely to do so.

I know, I said, that such was your position; but what I would further consider is, whether this power which is possessed by the superior state can exist or be exercised without justice or only with justice.

If you are right in your view, and justice is wisdom, then only with justice; but if I am right, then without justice.

I am delighted, Thrasymachus, to see you not only nodding assent and dissent, but making answers which are quite excellent.

That is out of civility to you, he replied.

You are very kind, I said; and would you have the goodness also to inform me, whether you think that a state, or an army, or a band of robbers and thieves, or any other gang of evil-doers could act at all if they injured one another?

No indeed, he said, they could not.

But if they abstained from injuring one another, then they might act together better?

Yes.

And this is because injustice creates divisions and hatreds and fighting, and justice imparts harmony and friendship; is not that true, Thrasymachus?

I agree, he said, because I do not wish to quarrel with you.

How good of you, I said; but I should like to know also whether injustice, having this tendency to arouse hatred, wherever existing, among slaves or among freemen, will not make them hate one another and set them at variance and render them incapable of common action?

Certainly.

And even if injustice be found in two only, will they not quarrel and fight, and become enemies to one another and to the just?

They will.

And suppose injustice abiding in a single person, would your wisdom say that she loses or that she retains her natural power?

Let us assume that she retains her power.

Yet is not the power which injustice exercises of such a nature that wherever she takes up her abode, whether in a city, in an army, in a family, or in any other body, that body is, to begin with, rendered incapable of united action by reason of sedition and distraction; and does it not become its own enemy and at variance with all that opposes it, and with the just? Is not this the case?

Yes, certainly.

And is not injustice equally fatal when existing in a single person; in the first place rendering him incapable of action because he is not at unity with himself, and in the second place making him an enemy to himself and the just? Is not that true, Thrasymachus?

Yes.

And O my friend, I said, surely the gods are just?

Granted that they are.

But if so, the unjust will be the enemy of the gods, and the just will be their friend?

Feast away in triumph, and take your fill of the argument; I will not oppose you, lest I should displease the company.

Well then, proceed with your answers, and let me have the remainder of my repast. For we have already shown that the just are clearly wiser and better and abler than the unjust, and that the unjust are incapable of common action; nay more, that to speak as we did of men who are evil acting at any time vigorously together, is not strictly true, for if they had been perfectly evil, they would have laid hands upon one another; but it is evident that there must have been some remnant of justice in them, which enabled them to combine; if there had not been they would have injured one another as well as their victims; they were but half-villains in their enterprises; for had they been whole villains, and utterly unjust, they would have been utterly incapable of action. That, as I believe, is the truth of the matter, and not what you said at first. But whether the just have a better and happier life than the unjust is a further question which we also proposed to consider. I think that they have, and for the reasons which I have given; but still I should like to examine further, for no light matter is at stake, nothing less than the rule of human life.

Proceed.

I will proceed by asking a question: Would you not say that a horse has some end?

I should.

And the end or use of a horse or of anything would be that which could not be accomplished, or not so well accomplished, by any other thing?

I do not understand, he said.

Let me explain: Can you see, except with the eye?

Certainly not.

Or hear, except with the ear?

No.

These then may be truly said to be the ends of these organs?

They may.

But you can cut off a vine-branch with a dagger or with a chisel, and in many other ways?

Of course.

And yet not so well as with a pruning-hook made for the purpose?

True.

May we not say that this is the end of a pruning-hook?

We may.

Then now I think you will have no difficulty in understanding my meaning when I asked the question whether the end of anything would be that which could not be accomplished, or not so well accomplished, by any other thing?

I understand your meaning, he said, and assent.

And that to which an end is appointed has also an excellence? Need I ask again whether the eye has an end?

It has.

And has not the eye an excellence?

Yes.

And the ear has an end and an excellence also?

True.

And the same is true of all other things; they have each of them an end and a special excellence?

That is so.

Well, and can the eyes fulfil their end if they are wanting in their own proper excellence and have a defect instead?

How can they, he said, if they are blind and cannot see?

You mean to say, if they have lost their proper excellence, which is sight; but I have not arrived at that point yet. I would rather ask the question more generally, and only enquire whether the things which fulfil their ends fulfil them by their own proper excellence, and fail of fulfilling them by their own defect?

Certainly, he replied.

I might say the same of the ears; when deprived of their own proper excellence they cannot fulfil their end?

True.

And the same observation will apply to all other things?

I agree.

Well; and has not the soul an end which nothing else can fulfil? for example, to superintend and command and deliberate and the like. Are not these functions proper to the soul, and can they rightly be assigned to any other?

To no other.

And is not life to be reckoned among the ends of the soul?

Assuredly, he said.

And has not the soul an excellence also?

Yes.

And can she or can she not fulfil her own ends when deprived of that excellence?

She cannot.

Then an evil soul must necessarily be an evil ruler and superintendent, and the good soul a good ruler?

Yes, necessarily.

And we have admitted that justice is the excellence of the soul, and injustice the defect of the soul?

That has been admitted.

Then the just soul and the just man will live well, and the unjust man will live ill?

That is what your argument proves.

And he who lives well is blessed and happy, and he who lives ill the reverse of happy?

Certainly.

Then the just is happy, and the unjust miserable?

So be it.

But happiness and not misery is profitable.

Of course.

Then, my blessed Thrasymachus, injustice can never be more profitable than justice.

Let this, Socrates, he said, be your entertainment at the Bendidea.

For which I am indebted to you, I said, now that you have grown gentle towards me and have left off scolding. Nevertheless, I have not been well entertained; but that was my own fault and not yours. As an epicure snatches a taste of every dish which is successively brought to table, he not having allowed himself time to enjoy the one before, so have I gone from one subject to another without having discovered what I sought at first, the nature of justice. I left that enquiry and turned away to consider whether justice is virtue and wisdom or evil and folly; and when there arose a further question about the comparative advantages of justice and injustice, I could not refrain from passing on to that. And the result of the whole discussion has been that I know nothing at all. For I know not what justice is, and therefore I am not likely to know whether it is or is not a virtue, nor can I say whether the just man is happy or unhappy.

BOOK II.

With these words I was thinking that I had made an end of the discussion; but the end, in truth, proved to be only a beginning. For Glaucon, who is always the most pugnacious of men, was dissatisfied at Thrasymachus' retirement; he wanted to have the battle out. So he said to me: Socrates, do you wish really to persuade us, or only to seem to have persuaded us, that to be just is always better than to be unjust?

I should wish really to persuade you, I replied, if I could.

Then you certainly have not succeeded. Let me ask you now:—How would you arrange goods—are there not some which we welcome for their own sakes, and independently of their consequences, as, for example, harmless pleasures and enjoyments, which delight us at the time, although nothing follows from them?

I agree in thinking that there is such a class, I replied.

Is there not also a second class of goods, such as knowledge, sight, health, which are desirable not only in themselves, but also for their results?

Certainly, I said.

And would you not recognize a third class, such as gymnastic, and the care of the sick, and the physician's art; also the various ways of money-making—these do us good but we regard them as disagreeable; and no one would choose them for their own sakes, but only for the sake of some reward or result which flows from them?

There is, I said, this third class also. But why do you ask?

Because I want to know in which of the three classes you would place justice?

In the highest class, I replied,—among those goods which he who would be happy desires both for their own sake and for the sake of their results.

Then the many are of another mind; they think that justice is to be reckoned in the troublesome class, among goods which are to be pursued for the sake of rewards and of reputation, but in themselves are disagreeable and rather to be avoided.

I know, I said, that this is their manner of thinking, and that this was the thesis which Thrasymachus was maintaining just now, when he censured justice and praised injustice. But I am too stupid to be convinced by him.

I wish, he said, that you would hear me as well as him, and then I shall see whether you and I agree. For Thrasymachus seems to me, like a snake, to have been charmed by your voice sooner than he ought to have been; but to my mind the nature of justice and injustice have not yet been made clear. Setting aside their rewards and results, I want to know what they are in themselves, and how they inwardly work in the soul. If you, please, then, I will revive the argument of Thrasymachus. And first I will speak of the nature and origin of justice according to the common view of them. Secondly, I will show that all men who practise justice do so against their will, of necessity, but not as a good. And thirdly, I will argue that there is reason in this view, for the life of the unjust is after all better far than the life of the just—if what they say is true, Socrates, since I myself am not of their opinion. But still I acknowledge that I am perplexed when I hear the voices of Thrasymachus and myriads of others dinning in my ears; and, on the other hand, I have never yet heard the superiority of justice to injustice maintained by any one in a satisfactory way. I want to hear justice praised in respect of itself; then I shall be satisfied, and you are the person from whom I think that I am most likely to hear this; and therefore I will praise the unjust life to the utmost of my power, and my manner of speaking will indicate the manner in which I desire to hear you too praising justice and censuring injustice. Will you say whether you approve of my proposal?

Indeed I do; nor can I imagine any theme about which a man of sense would oftener wish to converse.

I am delighted, he replied, to hear you say so, and shall begin by speaking, as I proposed, of the nature and origin of justice.

They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;—it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of justice.

Now that those who practise justice do so involuntarily and because they have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine something of this kind: having given both to the just and the unjust power to do what they will, let us watch and see whither desire will lead them; then we shall discover in the very act the just and unjust man to be proceeding along the same road, following their interest, which all natures deem to be their good, and are only diverted into the path of justice by the force of law. The liberty which we are supposing may be most completely given to them in the form of such a power as is said to have been possessed by Gyges, the ancestor of Croesus the Lydian. According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result—when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; whereas soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice. Enough of this.

Now, if we are to form a real judgment of the life of the just and unjust, we must isolate them; there is no other way; and how is the isolation to be effected? I answer: Let the unjust man be entirely unjust, and the just man entirely just; nothing is to be taken away from either of them, and both are to be perfectly furnished for the work of their respective lives. First, let the unjust be like other distinguished masters of craft; like the skilful pilot or physician, who knows intuitively his own powers and keeps within their limits, and who, if he fails at any point, is able to recover himself. So let the unjust make his unjust attempts in the right way, and lie hidden if he means to be great in his injustice: (he who is found out is nobody:) for the highest reach of injustice is, to be deemed just when you are not. Therefore I say that in the perfectly unjust man we must assume the most perfect injustice; there is to be no deduction, but we must allow him, while doing the most unjust acts, to have acquired the greatest reputation for justice. If he have taken a false step he must be able to recover himself; he must be one who can speak with effect, if any of his deeds come to light, and who can force his way where force is required by his courage and strength, and command of money and friends. And at his side let us place the just man in his nobleness and simplicity, wishing, as Aeschylus says, to be and not to seem good. There must be no seeming, for if he seem to be just he will be honoured and rewarded, and then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice or for the sake of honours and rewards; therefore, let him be clothed in justice only, and have no other covering; and he must be imagined in a state of life the opposite of the former. Let him be the best of men, and let him be thought the worst; then he will have been put to the proof; and we shall see whether he will be affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences. And let him continue thus to the hour of death; being just and seeming to be unjust. When both have reached the uttermost extreme, the one of justice and the other of injustice, let judgment be given which of them is the happier of the two.

Heavens! my dear Glaucon, I said, how energetically you polish them up for the decision, first one and then the other, as if they were two statues.

I do my best, he said. And now that we know what they are like there is no difficulty in tracing out the sort of life which awaits either of them. This I will proceed to describe; but as you may think the description a little too coarse, I ask you to suppose, Socrates, that the words which follow are not mine.—Let me put them into the mouths of the eulogists of injustice: They will tell you that the just man who is thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound—will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled: Then he will understand that he ought to seem only, and not to be, just; the words of Aeschylus may be more truly spoken of the unjust than of the just. For the unjust is pursuing a reality; he does not live with a view to appearances—he wants to be really unjust and not to seem only:--

'His mind has a soil deep and fertile, Out of which spring his prudent counsels.'

In the first place, he is thought just, and therefore bears rule in the city; he can marry whom he will, and give in marriage to whom he will; also he can trade and deal where he likes, and always to his own advantage, because he has no misgivings about injustice; and at every contest, whether in public or private, he gets the better of his antagonists, and gains at their expense, and is rich, and out of his gains he can benefit his friends, and harm his enemies; moreover, he can offer sacrifices, and dedicate gifts to the gods abundantly and magnificently, and can honour the gods or any man whom he wants to honour in a far better style than the just, and therefore he is likely to be dearer than they are to the gods. And thus, Socrates, gods and men are said to unite in making the life of the unjust better than the life of the just.

I was going to say something in answer to Glaucon, when Adeimantus, his brother, interposed: Socrates, he said, you do not suppose that there is nothing more to be urged?

Why, what else is there? I answered.

The strongest point of all has not been even mentioned, he replied.

Well, then, according to the proverb, 'Let brother help brother'—if he fails in any part do you assist him; although I must confess that Glaucon has already said quite enough to lay me in the dust, and take from me the power of helping justice.

Nonsense, he replied. But let me add something more: There is another
side to Glaucon's argument about the praise and censure of justice
and injustice, which is equally required in order to bring out what I
believe to be his meaning. Parents and tutors are always telling their
sons and their wards that they are to be just; but why? not for the sake
of justice, but for the sake of character and reputation; in the hope of
obtaining for him who is reputed just some of those offices, marriages,
and the like which Glaucon has enumerated among the advantages accruing
to the unjust from the reputation of justice. More, however, is made of
appearances by this class of persons than by the others; for they
throw in the good opinion of the gods, and will tell you of a shower of
benefits which the heavens, as they say, rain upon the pious; and this
accords with the testimony of the noble Hesiod and Homer, the first of
whom says, that the gods make the oaks of the just—

   'To bear acorns at their summit, and bees in the middle;
   And the sheep are bowed down with the weight of their fleeces,'

and many other blessings of a like kind are provided for them. And Homer has a very similar strain; for he speaks of one whose fame is--

'As the fame of some blameless king who, like a god, Maintains justice; to whom the black earth brings forth Wheat and barley, whose trees are bowed with fruit, And his sheep never fail to bear, and the sea gives him fish.'

Still grander are the gifts of heaven which Musaeus and his son vouchsafe to the just; they take them down into the world below, where they have the saints lying on couches at a feast, everlastingly drunk, crowned with garlands; their idea seems to be that an immortality of drunkenness is the highest meed of virtue. Some extend their rewards yet further; the posterity, as they say, of the faithful and just shall survive to the third and fourth generation. This is the style in which they praise justice. But about the wicked there is another strain; they bury them in a slough in Hades, and make them carry water in a sieve; also while they are yet living they bring them to infamy, and inflict upon them the punishments which Glaucon described as the portion of the just who are reputed to be unjust; nothing else does their invention supply. Such is their manner of praising the one and censuring the other.

Once more, Socrates, I will ask you to consider another way of speaking about justice and injustice, which is not confined to the poets, but is found in prose writers. The universal voice of mankind is always declaring that justice and virtue are honourable, but grievous and toilsome; and that the pleasures of vice and injustice are easy of attainment, and are only censured by law and opinion. They say also that honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty; and they are quite ready to call wicked men happy, and to honour them both in public and private when they are rich or in any other way influential, while they despise and overlook those who may be weak and poor, even though acknowledging them to be better than the others. But most extraordinary of all is their mode of speaking about virtue and the gods: they say that the gods apportion calamity and misery to many good men, and good and happiness to the wicked. And mendicant prophets go to rich men's doors and persuade them that they have a power committed to them by the gods of making an atonement for a man's own or his ancestor's sins by sacrifices or charms, with rejoicings and feasts; and they promise to harm an enemy, whether just or unjust, at a small cost; with magic arts and incantations binding heaven, as they say, to execute their will. And the poets are the authorities to whom they appeal, now smoothing the path of vice with the words of Hesiod;--

'Vice may be had in abundance without trouble; the way is smooth and her dwelling-place is near. But before virtue the gods have set toil,'

and a tedious and uphill road: then citing Homer as a witness that the gods may be influenced by men; for he also says:--

'The gods, too, may be turned from their purpose; and men pray to them and avert their wrath by sacrifices and soothing entreaties, and by libations and the odour of fat, when they have sinned and transgressed.'

And they produce a host of books written by Musaeus and Orpheus, who were children of the Moon and the Muses—that is what they say—according to which they perform their ritual, and persuade not only individuals, but whole cities, that expiations and atonements for sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of the living and the dead; the latter sort they call mysteries, and they redeem us from the pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us.

He proceeded: And now when the young hear all this said about virtue and vice, and the way in which gods and men regard them, how are their minds likely to be affected, my dear Socrates,—those of them, I mean, who are quickwitted, and, like bees on the wing, light on every flower, and from all that they hear are prone to draw conclusions as to what manner of persons they should be and in what way they should walk if they would make the best of life? Probably the youth will say to himself in the words of Pindar--

'Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier tower which may be a fortress to me all my days?'

For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought just profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand are unmistakeable. But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. I will describe around me a picture and shadow of virtue to be the vestibule and exterior of my house; behind I will trail the subtle and crafty fox, as Archilochus, greatest of sages, recommends. But I hear some one exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness is often difficult; to which I answer, Nothing great is easy. Nevertheless, the argument indicates this, if we would be happy, to be the path along which we should proceed. With a view to concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs. And there are professors of rhetoric who teach the art of persuading courts and assemblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shall make unlawful gains and not be punished. Still I hear a voice saying that the gods cannot be deceived, neither can they be compelled. But what if there are no gods? or, suppose them to have no care of human things—why in either case should we mind about concealment? And even if there are gods, and they do care about us, yet we know of them only from tradition and the genealogies of the poets; and these are the very persons who say that they may be influenced and turned by 'sacrifices and soothing entreaties and by offerings.' Let us be consistent then, and believe both or neither. If the poets speak truly, why then we had better be unjust, and offer of the fruits of injustice; for if we are just, although we may escape the vengeance of heaven, we shall lose the gains of injustice; but, if we are unjust, we shall keep the gains, and by our sinning and praying, and praying and sinning, the gods will be propitiated, and we shall not be punished. 'But there is a world below in which either we or our posterity will suffer for our unjust deeds.' Yes, my friend, will be the reflection, but there are mysteries and atoning deities, and these have great power. That is what mighty cities declare; and the children of the gods, who were their poets and prophets, bear a like testimony.

On what principle, then, shall we any longer choose justice rather than the worst injustice? when, if we only unite the latter with a deceitful regard to appearances, we shall fare to our mind both with gods and men, in life and after death, as the most numerous and the highest authorities tell us. Knowing all this, Socrates, how can a man who has any superiority of mind or person or rank or wealth, be willing to honour justice; or indeed to refrain from laughing when he hears justice praised? And even if there should be some one who is able to disprove the truth of my words, and who is satisfied that justice is best, still he is not angry with the unjust, but is very ready to forgive them, because he also knows that men are not just of their own free will; unless, peradventure, there be some one whom the divinity within him may have inspired with a hatred of injustice, or who has attained knowledge of the truth—but no other man. He only blames injustice who, owing to cowardice or age or some weakness, has not the power of being unjust. And this is proved by the fact that when he obtains the power, he immediately becomes unjust as far as he can be.

The cause of all this, Socrates, was indicated by us at the beginning of the argument, when my brother and I told you how astonished we were to find that of all the professing panegyrists of justice—beginning with the ancient heroes of whom any memorial has been preserved to us, and ending with the men of our own time—no one has ever blamed injustice or praised justice except with a view to the glories, honours, and benefits which flow from them. No one has ever adequately described either in verse or prose the true essential nature of either of them abiding in the soul, and invisible to any human or divine eye; or shown that of all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good, and injustice the greatest evil. Had this been the universal strain, had you sought to persuade us of this from our youth upwards, we should not have been on the watch to keep one another from doing wrong, but every one would have been his own watchman, because afraid, if he did wrong, of harbouring in himself the greatest of evils. I dare say that Thrasymachus and others would seriously hold the language which I have been merely repeating, and words even stronger than these about justice and injustice, grossly, as I conceive, perverting their true nature. But I speak in this vehement manner, as I must frankly confess to you, because I want to hear from you the opposite side; and I would ask you to show not only the superiority which justice has over injustice, but what effect they have on the possessor of them which makes the one to be a good and the other an evil to him. And please, as Glaucon requested of you, to exclude reputations; for unless you take away from each of them his true reputation and add on the false, we shall say that you do not praise justice, but the appearance of it; we shall think that you are only exhorting us to keep injustice dark, and that you really agree with Thrasymachus in thinking that justice is another's good and the interest of the stronger, and that injustice is a man's own profit and interest, though injurious to the weaker. Now as you have admitted that justice is one of that highest class of goods which are desired indeed for their results, but in a far greater degree for their own sakes—like sight or hearing or knowledge or health, or any other real and natural and not merely conventional good—I would ask you in your praise of justice to regard one point only: I mean the essential good and evil which justice and injustice work in the possessors of them. Let others praise justice and censure injustice, magnifying the rewards and honours of the one and abusing the other; that is a manner of arguing which, coming from them, I am ready to tolerate, but from you who have spent your whole life in the consideration of this question, unless I hear the contrary from your own lips, I expect something better. And therefore, I say, not only prove to us that justice is better than injustice, but show what they either of them do to the possessor of them, which makes the one to be a good and the other an evil, whether seen or unseen by gods and men.

I had always admired the genius of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but on hearing these words I was quite delighted, and said: Sons of an illustrious father, that was not a bad beginning of the Elegiac verses which the admirer of Glaucon made in honour of you after you had distinguished yourselves at the battle of Megara:--

'Sons of Ariston,' he sang, 'divine offspring of an illustrious hero.'

The epithet is very appropriate, for there is something truly divine in being able to argue as you have done for the superiority of injustice, and remaining unconvinced by your own arguments. And I do believe that you are not convinced—this I infer from your general character, for had I judged only from your speeches I should have mistrusted you. But now, the greater my confidence in you, the greater is my difficulty in knowing what to say. For I am in a strait between two; on the one hand I feel that I am unequal to the task; and my inability is brought home to me by the fact that you were not satisfied with the answer which I made to Thrasymachus, proving, as I thought, the superiority which justice has over injustice. And yet I cannot refuse to help, while breath and speech remain to me; I am afraid that there would be an impiety in being present when justice is evil spoken of and not lifting up a hand in her defence. And therefore I had best give such help as I can.

Glaucon and the rest entreated me by all means not to let the question drop, but to proceed in the investigation. They wanted to arrive at the truth, first, about the nature of justice and injustice, and secondly, about their relative advantages. I told them, what I really thought, that the enquiry would be of a serious nature, and would require very good eyes. Seeing then, I said, that we are no great wits, I think that we had better adopt a method which I may illustrate thus; suppose that a short-sighted person had been asked by some one to read small letters from a distance; and it occurred to some one else that they might be found in another place which was larger and in which the letters were larger—if they were the same and he could read the larger letters first, and then proceed to the lesser—this would have been thought a rare piece of good fortune.

Very true, said Adeimantus; but how does the illustration apply to our enquiry?

I will tell you, I replied; justice, which is the subject of our enquiry, is, as you know, sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an individual, and sometimes as the virtue of a State.

True, he replied.

And is not a State larger than an individual?

It is.

Then in the larger the quantity of justice is likely to be larger and more easily discernible. I propose therefore that we enquire into the nature of justice and injustice, first as they appear in the State, and secondly in the individual, proceeding from the greater to the lesser and comparing them.

That, he said, is an excellent proposal.

And if we imagine the State in process of creation, we shall see the justice and injustice of the State in process of creation also.

I dare say.

When the State is completed there may be a hope that the object of our search will be more easily discovered.

Yes, far more easily.

But ought we to attempt to construct one? I said; for to do so, as I am inclined to think, will be a very serious task. Reflect therefore.

I have reflected, said Adeimantus, and am anxious that you should proceed.

A State, I said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants. Can any other origin of a State be imagined?

There can be no other.

Then, as we have many wants, and many persons are needed to supply them, one takes a helper for one purpose and another for another; and when these partners and helpers are gathered together in one habitation the body of inhabitants is termed a State.

True, he said.

And they exchange with one another, and one gives, and another receives, under the idea that the exchange will be for their good.

Very true.

Then, I said, let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.

Of course, he replied.

Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and existence.

Certainly.

The second is a dwelling, and the third clothing and the like.

True.

And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand: We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder, some one else a weaver—shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps some other purveyor to our bodily wants?

Quite right.

The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.

Clearly.

And how will they proceed? Will each bring the result of his labours into a common stock?—the individual husbandman, for example, producing for four, and labouring four times as long and as much as he need in the provision of food with which he supplies others as well as himself; or will he have nothing to do with others and not be at the trouble of producing for them, but provide for himself alone a fourth of the food in a fourth of the time, and in the remaining three fourths of his time be employed in making a house or a coat or a pair of shoes, having no partnership with others, but supplying himself all his own wants?

Adeimantus thought that he should aim at producing food only and not at producing everything.

Probably, I replied, that would be the better way; and when I hear you say this, I am myself reminded that we are not all alike; there are diversities of natures among us which are adapted to different occupations.

Very true.

And will you have a work better done when the workman has many occupations, or when he has only one?

When he has only one.

Further, there can be no doubt that a work is spoilt when not done at the right time?

No doubt.

For business is not disposed to wait until the doer of the business is at leisure; but the doer must follow up what he is doing, and make the business his first object.

He must.

And if so, we must infer that all things are produced more plentifully and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.

Undoubtedly.

Then more than four citizens will be required; for the husbandman will not make his own plough or mattock, or other implements of agriculture, if they are to be good for anything. Neither will the builder make his tools—and he too needs many; and in like manner the weaver and shoemaker.

True.

Then carpenters, and smiths, and many other artisans, will be sharers in our little State, which is already beginning to grow?

True.

Yet even if we add neatherds, shepherds, and other herdsmen, in order that our husbandmen may have oxen to plough with, and builders as well as husbandmen may have draught cattle, and curriers and weavers fleeces and hides,—still our State will not be very large.

That is true; yet neither will it be a very small State which contains all these.

Then, again, there is the situation of the city—to find a place where nothing need be imported is wellnigh impossible.

Impossible.

Then there must be another class of citizens who will bring the required supply from another city?

There must.

But if the trader goes empty-handed, having nothing which they require who would supply his need, he will come back empty-handed.

That is certain.

And therefore what they produce at home must be not only enough for themselves, but such both in quantity and quality as to accommodate those from whom their wants are supplied.

Very true.

Then more husbandmen and more artisans will be required?

They will.

Not to mention the importers and exporters, who are called merchants?

Yes.

Then we shall want merchants?

We shall.

And if merchandise is to be carried over the sea, skilful sailors will also be needed, and in considerable numbers?

Yes, in considerable numbers.

Then, again, within the city, how will they exchange their productions? To secure such an exchange was, as you will remember, one of our principal objects when we formed them into a society and constituted a State.

Clearly they will buy and sell.

Then they will need a market-place, and a money-token for purposes of exchange.

Certainly.

Suppose now that a husbandman, or an artisan, brings some production to market, and he comes at a time when there is no one to exchange with him,—is he to leave his calling and sit idle in the market-place?

Not at all; he will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake the office of salesmen. In well-ordered states they are commonly those who are the weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for any other purpose; their duty is to be in the market, and to give money in exchange for goods to those who desire to sell and to take money from those who desire to buy.

This want, then, creates a class of retail-traders in our State. Is not 'retailer' the term which is applied to those who sit in the market-place engaged in buying and selling, while those who wander from one city to another are called merchants?

Yes, he said.

And there is another class of servants, who are intellectually hardly on the level of companionship; still they have plenty of bodily strength for labour, which accordingly they sell, and are called, if I do not mistake, hirelings, hire being the name which is given to the price of their labour.

True.

Then hirelings will help to make up our population?

Yes.

And now, Adeimantus, is our State matured and perfected?

I think so.

Where, then, is justice, and where is injustice, and in what part of the State did they spring up?

Probably in the dealings of these citizens with one another. I cannot imagine that they are more likely to be found any where else.

I dare say that you are right in your suggestion, I said; we had better think the matter out, and not shrink from the enquiry.

Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life, now that we have thus established them. Will they not produce corn, and wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves? And when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means; having an eye to poverty or war.

But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish to their meal.

True, I replied, I had forgotten; of course they must have a relish—salt, and olives, and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs such as country people prepare; for a dessert we shall give them figs, and peas, and beans; and they will roast myrtle-berries and acorns at the fire, drinking in moderation. And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children after them.

Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?

But what would you have, Glaucon? I replied.

Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style.

Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described. But if you wish also to see a State at fever-heat, I have no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way of life. They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.

True, he said.

Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is no longer sufficient. Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want; such as the whole tribe of hunters and actors, of whom one large class have to do with forms and colours; another will be the votaries of music—poets and their attendant train of rhapsodists, players, dancers, contractors; also makers of divers kinds of articles, including women's dresses. And we shall want more servants. Will not tutors be also in request, and nurses wet and dry, tirewomen and barbers, as well as confectioners and cooks; and swineherds, too, who were not needed and therefore had no place in the former edition of our State, but are needed now? They must not be forgotten: and there will be animals of many other kinds, if people eat them.

Certainly.

And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians than before?

Much greater.

And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants will be too small now, and not enough?

Quite true.

Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?

That, Socrates, will be inevitable.

And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?

Most certainly, he replied.

Then without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, thus much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evils in States, private as well as public.

Undoubtedly.

And our State must once more enlarge; and this time the enlargement will be nothing short of a whole army, which will have to go out and fight with the invaders for all that we have, as well as for the things and persons whom we were describing above.

Why? he said; are they not capable of defending themselves?

No, I said; not if we were right in the principle which was acknowledged by all of us when we were framing the State: the principle, as you will remember, was that one man cannot practise many arts with success.

Very true, he said.

But is not war an art?

Certainly.

And an art requiring as much attention as shoemaking?

Quite true.

And the shoemaker was not allowed by us to be a husbandman, or a weaver, or a builder—in order that we might have our shoes well made; but to him and to every other worker was assigned one work for which he was by nature fitted, and at that he was to continue working all his life long and at no other; he was not to let opportunities slip, and then he would become a good workman. Now nothing can be more important than that the work of a soldier should be well done. But is war an art so easily acquired that a man may be a warrior who is also a husbandman, or shoemaker, or other artisan; although no one in the world would be a good dice or draught player who merely took up the game as a recreation, and had not from his earliest years devoted himself to this and nothing else? No tools will make a man a skilled workman, or master of defence, nor be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them, and has never bestowed any attention upon them. How then will he who takes up a shield or other implement of war become a good fighter all in a day, whether with heavy-armed or any other kind of troops?

Yes, he said, the tools which would teach men their own use would be beyond price.

And the higher the duties of the guardian, I said, the more time, and skill, and art, and application will be needed by him?

No doubt, he replied.

Will he not also require natural aptitude for his calling?

Certainly.

Then it will be our duty to select, if we can, natures which are fitted for the task of guarding the city?

It will.

And the selection will be no easy matter, I said; but we must be brave and do our best.

We must.

Is not the noble youth very like a well-bred dog in respect of guarding and watching?

What do you mean?

I mean that both of them ought to be quick to see, and swift to overtake the enemy when they see him; and strong too if, when they have caught him, they have to fight with him.

All these qualities, he replied, will certainly be required by them.

Well, and your guardian must be brave if he is to fight well?

Certainly.

And is he likely to be brave who has no spirit, whether horse or dog or any other animal? Have you never observed how invincible and unconquerable is spirit and how the presence of it makes the soul of any creature to be absolutely fearless and indomitable?

I have.

Then now we have a clear notion of the bodily qualities which are required in the guardian.

True.

And also of the mental ones; his soul is to be full of spirit?

Yes.

But are not these spirited natures apt to be savage with one another, and with everybody else?

A difficulty by no means easy to overcome, he replied.

Whereas, I said, they ought to be dangerous to their enemies, and gentle to their friends; if not, they will destroy themselves without waiting for their enemies to destroy them.

True, he said.

What is to be done then? I said; how shall we find a gentle nature which has also a great spirit, for the one is the contradiction of the other?

True.

He will not be a good guardian who is wanting in either of these two qualities; and yet the combination of them appears to be impossible; and hence we must infer that to be a good guardian is impossible.

I am afraid that what you say is true, he replied.

Here feeling perplexed I began to think over what had preceded.—My friend, I said, no wonder that we are in a perplexity; for we have lost sight of the image which we had before us.

What do you mean? he said.

I mean to say that there do exist natures gifted with those opposite qualities.

And where do you find them?

Many animals, I replied, furnish examples of them; our friend the dog is a very good one: you know that well-bred dogs are perfectly gentle to their familiars and acquaintances, and the reverse to strangers.

Yes, I know.

Then there is nothing impossible or out of the order of nature in our finding a guardian who has a similar combination of qualities?

Certainly not.

Would not he who is fitted to be a guardian, besides the spirited nature, need to have the qualities of a philosopher?

I do not apprehend your meaning.

The trait of which I am speaking, I replied, may be also seen in the dog, and is remarkable in the animal.

What trait?

Why, a dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; when an acquaintance, he welcomes him, although the one has never done him any harm, nor the other any good. Did this never strike you as curious?

The matter never struck me before; but I quite recognise the truth of your remark.

And surely this instinct of the dog is very charming;—your dog is a true philosopher.

Why?

Why, because he distinguishes the face of a friend and of an enemy only by the criterion of knowing and not knowing. And must not an animal be a lover of learning who determines what he likes and dislikes by the test of knowledge and ignorance?

Most assuredly.

And is not the love of learning the love of wisdom, which is philosophy?

They are the same, he replied.

And may we not say confidently of man also, that he who is likely to be gentle to his friends and acquaintances, must by nature be a lover of wisdom and knowledge?

That we may safely affirm.

Then he who is to be a really good and noble guardian of the State will require to unite in himself philosophy and spirit and swiftness and strength?

Undoubtedly.

Then we have found the desired natures; and now that we have found them, how are they to be reared and educated? Is not this an enquiry which may be expected to throw light on the greater enquiry which is our final end—How do justice and injustice grow up in States? for we do not want either to omit what is to the point or to draw out the argument to an inconvenient length.

Adeimantus thought that the enquiry would be of great service to us.

Then, I said, my dear friend, the task must not be given up, even if somewhat long.

Certainly not.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in story-telling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

By all means.

And what shall be their education? Can we find a better than the traditional sort?—and this has two divisions, gymnastic for the body, and music for the soul.

True.

Shall we begin education with music, and go on to gymnastic afterwards?

By all means.

And when you speak of music, do you include literature or not?

I do.

And literature may be either true or false?

Yes.

And the young should be trained in both kinds, and we begin with the false?

I do not understand your meaning, he said.

You know, I said, that we begin by telling children stories which, though not wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious; and these stories are told them when they are not of an age to learn gymnastics.

Very true.

That was my meaning when I said that we must teach music before gymnastics.

Quite right, he said.

You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken.

Quite true.

And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

We cannot.

Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.

Of what tales are you speaking? he said.

You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said; for they are necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of them.

Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term the greater.

Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of the poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind.

But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with them?

A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.

But when is this fault committed?

Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes,—as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original.

Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very blameable; but what are the stories which you mean?

First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies in high places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie too,—I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated on him. The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence. But if there is an absolute necessity for their mention, a chosen few might hear them in a mystery, and they should sacrifice not a common (Eleusinian) pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim; and then the number of the hearers will be very few indeed.

Why, yes, said he, those stories are extremely objectionable.

Yes, Adeimantus, they are stories not to be repeated in our State; the young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous; and that even if he chastises his father when he does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following the example of the first and greatest among the gods.

I entirely agree with you, he said; in my opinion those stories are quite unfit to be repeated.

Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of quarrelling among themselves as of all things the basest, should any word be said to them of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and fightings of the gods against one another, for they are not true. No, we shall never mention the battles of the giants, or let them be embroidered on garments; and we shall be silent about the innumerable other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives. If they would only believe us we would tell them that quarrelling is unholy, and that never up to this time has there been any quarrel between citizens; this is what old men and old women should begin by telling children; and when they grow up, the poets also should be told to compose for them in a similar spirit. But the narrative of Hephaestus binding Here his mother, or how on another occasion Zeus sent him flying for taking her part when she was being beaten, and all the battles of the gods in Homer—these tales must not be admitted into our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.

There you are right, he replied; but if any one asks where are such models to be found and of what tales are you speaking—how shall we answer him?

I said to him, You and I, Adeimantus, at this moment are not poets, but founders of a State: now the founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them, but to make the tales is not their business.

Very true, he said; but what are these forms of theology which you mean?

Something of this kind, I replied:—God is always to be represented as he truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which the representation is given.

Right.

And is he not truly good? and must he not be represented as such?

Certainly.

And no good thing is hurtful?

No, indeed.

And that which is not hurtful hurts not?

Certainly not.

And that which hurts not does no evil?

No.

And can that which does no evil be a cause of evil?

Impossible.

And the good is advantageous?

Yes.

And therefore the cause of well-being?

Yes.

It follows therefore that the good is not the cause of all things, but of the good only?

Assuredly.

Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.

That appears to me to be most true, he said.

Then we must not listen to Homer or to any other poet who is guilty of the folly of saying that two casks

'Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good, the other of evil lots,'

and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two

'Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;'

but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill,

'Him wild hunger drives o'er the beauteous earth.'

And again--

'Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us.'

And if any one asserts that the violation of oaths and treaties, which was really the work of Pandarus, was brought about by Athene and Zeus, or that the strife and contention of the gods was instigated by Themis and Zeus, he shall not have our approval; neither will we allow our young men to hear the words of Aeschylus, that

'God plants guilt among men when he desires utterly to destroy a house.'

And if a poet writes of the sufferings of Niobe—the subject of the tragedy in which these iambic verses occur—or of the house of Pelops, or of the Trojan war or on any similar theme, either we must not permit him to say that these are the works of God, or if they are of God, he must devise some explanation of them such as we are seeking; he must say that God did what was just and right, and they were the better for being punished; but that those who are punished are miserable, and that God is the author of their misery—the poet is not to be permitted to say; though he may say that the wicked are miserable because they require to be punished, and are benefited by receiving punishment from God; but that God being good is the author of evil to any one is to be strenuously denied, and not to be said or sung or heard in verse or prose by any one whether old or young in any well-ordered commonwealth. Such a fiction is suicidal, ruinous, impious.

I agree with you, he replied, and am ready to give my assent to the law.

Let this then be one of our rules and principles concerning the gods, to which our poets and reciters will be expected to conform,—that God is not the author of all things, but of good only.

That will do, he said.

And what do you think of a second principle? Shall I ask you whether God is a magician, and of a nature to appear insidiously now in one shape, and now in another—sometimes himself changing and passing into many forms, sometimes deceiving us with the semblance of such transformations; or is he one and the same immutably fixed in his own proper image?

I cannot answer you, he said, without more thought.

Well, I said; but if we suppose a change in anything, that change must be effected either by the thing itself, or by some other thing?

Most certainly.

And things which are at their best are also least liable to be altered or discomposed; for example, when healthiest and strongest, the human frame is least liable to be affected by meats and drinks, and the plant which is in the fullest vigour also suffers least from winds or the heat of the sun or any similar causes.

Of course.

And will not the bravest and wisest soul be least confused or deranged by any external influence?

True.

And the same principle, as I should suppose, applies to all composite things—furniture, houses, garments: when good and well made, they are least altered by time and circumstances.

Very true.

Then everything which is good, whether made by art or nature, or both, is least liable to suffer change from without?

True.

But surely God and the things of God are in every way perfect?

Of course they are.

Then he can hardly be compelled by external influence to take many shapes?

He cannot.

But may he not change and transform himself?

Clearly, he said, that must be the case if he is changed at all.

And will he then change himself for the better and fairer, or for the worse and more unsightly?

If he change at all he can only change for the worse, for we cannot suppose him to be deficient either in virtue or beauty.

Very true, Adeimantus; but then, would any one, whether God or man, desire to make himself worse?

Impossible.

Then it is impossible that God should ever be willing to change; being, as is supposed, the fairest and best that is conceivable, every God remains absolutely and for ever in his own form.

That necessarily follows, he said, in my judgment.

Then, I said, my dear friend, let none of the poets tell us that

'The gods, taking the disguise of strangers from other lands, walk up and down cities in all sorts of forms;'

and let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one, either in tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Here disguised in the likeness of a priestess asking an alms

'For the life-giving daughters of Inachus the river of Argos;'

—let us have no more lies of that sort. Neither must we have mothers under the influence of the poets scaring their children with a bad version of these myths—telling how certain gods, as they say, 'Go about by night in the likeness of so many strangers and in divers forms;' but let them take heed lest they make cowards of their children, and at the same time speak blasphemy against the gods.

Heaven forbid, he said.

But although the gods are themselves unchangeable, still by witchcraft and deception they may make us think that they appear in various forms?

Perhaps, he replied.

Well, but can you imagine that God will be willing to lie, whether in word or deed, or to put forth a phantom of himself?

I cannot say, he replied.

Do you not know, I said, that the true lie, if such an expression may be allowed, is hated of gods and men?

What do you mean? he said.

I mean that no one is willingly deceived in that which is the truest and highest part of himself, or about the truest and highest matters; there, above all, he is most afraid of a lie having possession of him.

Still, he said, I do not comprehend you.

The reason is, I replied, that you attribute some profound meaning to my words; but I am only saying that deception, or being deceived or uninformed about the highest realities in the highest part of themselves, which is the soul, and in that part of them to have and to hold the lie, is what mankind least like;—that, I say, is what they utterly detest.

There is nothing more hateful to them.

And, as I was just now remarking, this ignorance in the soul of him who is deceived may be called the true lie; for the lie in words is only a kind of imitation and shadowy image of a previous affection of the soul, not pure unadulterated falsehood. Am I not right?

Perfectly right.

The true lie is hated not only by the gods, but also by men?

Yes.

Whereas the lie in words is in certain cases useful and not hateful; in dealing with enemies—that would be an instance; or again, when those whom we call our friends in a fit of madness or illusion are going to do some harm, then it is useful and is a sort of medicine or preventive; also in the tales of mythology, of which we were just now speaking—because we do not know the truth about ancient times, we make falsehood as much like truth as we can, and so turn it to account.

Very true, he said.

But can any of these reasons apply to God? Can we suppose that he is ignorant of antiquity, and therefore has recourse to invention?

That would be ridiculous, he said.

Then the lying poet has no place in our idea of God?

I should say not.

Or perhaps he may tell a lie because he is afraid of enemies?

That is inconceivable.

But he may have friends who are senseless or mad?

But no mad or senseless person can be a friend of God.

Then no motive can be imagined why God should lie?

None whatever.

Then the superhuman and divine is absolutely incapable of falsehood?

Yes.

Then is God perfectly simple and true both in word and deed; he changes not; he deceives not, either by sign or word, by dream or waking vision.

Your thoughts, he said, are the reflection of my own.

You agree with me then, I said, that this is the second type or form in which we should write and speak about divine things. The gods are not magicians who transform themselves, neither do they deceive mankind in any way.

I grant that.

Then, although we are admirers of Homer, we do not admire the lying dream which Zeus sends to Agamemnon; neither will we praise the verses of Aeschylus in which Thetis says that Apollo at her nuptials

'Was celebrating in song her fair progeny whose days were to be long, and to know no sickness. And when he had spoken of my lot as in all things blessed of heaven he raised a note of triumph and cheered my soul. And I thought that the word of Phoebus, being divine and full of prophecy, would not fail. And now he himself who uttered the strain, he who was present at the banquet, and who said this—he it is who has slain my son.'

These are the kind of sentiments about the gods which will arouse our anger; and he who utters them shall be refused a chorus; neither shall we allow teachers to make use of them in the instruction of the young, meaning, as we do, that our guardians, as far as men can be, should be true worshippers of the gods and like them.

I entirely agree, he said, in these principles, and promise to make them my laws.

BOOK III.

Such then, I said, are our principles of theology—some tales are to be told, and others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth upwards, if we mean them to honour the gods and their parents, and to value friendship with one another.

Yes; and I think that our principles are right, he said.

But if they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons besides these, and lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of death? Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?

Certainly not, he said.

And can he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery, who believes the world below to be real and terrible?

Impossible.

Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales as well as over the others, and beg them not simply to revile but rather to commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.

That will be our duty, he said.

Then, I said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages, beginning with the verses,

'I would rather be a serf on the land of a poor and portionless man than rule over all the dead who have come to nought.'

We must also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared,

'Lest the mansions grim and squalid which the gods abhor should be seen both of mortals and immortals.'

And again:--

'O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul and ghostly form but no mind at all!'

Again of Tiresias:--

'(To him even after death did Persephone grant mind,) that he alone should be wise; but the other souls are flitting shades.'

Again:--

'The soul flying from the limbs had gone to Hades, lamenting her fate, leaving manhood and youth.'

Again:--

'And the soul, with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the earth.'

And,--

'As bats in hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of them has dropped out of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling to one another, so did they with shrilling cry hold together as they moved.'

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.

Undoubtedly.

Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and appalling names which describe the world below—Cocytus and Styx, ghosts under the earth, and sapless shades, and any similar words of which the very mention causes a shudder to pass through the inmost soul of him who hears them. I do not say that these horrible stories may not have a use of some kind; but there is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered too excitable and effeminate by them.

There is a real danger, he said.

Then we must have no more of them.

True.

Another and a nobler strain must be composed and sung by us.

Clearly.

And shall we proceed to get rid of the weepings and wailings of famous men?

They will go with the rest.

But shall we be right in getting rid of them? Reflect: our principle is that the good man will not consider death terrible to any other good man who is his comrade.

Yes; that is our principle.

And therefore he will not sorrow for his departed friend as though he had suffered anything terrible?

He will not.

Such an one, as we further maintain, is sufficient for himself and his own happiness, and therefore is least in need of other men.

True, he said.

And for this reason the loss of a son or brother, or the deprivation of fortune, is to him of all men least terrible.

Assuredly.

And therefore he will be least likely to lament, and will bear with the greatest equanimity any misfortune of this sort which may befall him.

Yes, he will feel such a misfortune far less than another.

Then we shall be right in getting rid of the lamentations of famous men, and making them over to women (and not even to women who are good for anything), or to men of a baser sort, that those who are being educated by us to be the defenders of their country may scorn to do the like.

That will be very right.

Then we will once more entreat Homer and the other poets not to depict Achilles, who is the son of a goddess, first lying on his side, then on his back, and then on his face; then starting up and sailing in a frenzy along the shores of the barren sea; now taking the sooty ashes in both his hands and pouring them over his head, or weeping and wailing in the various modes which Homer has delineated. Nor should he describe Priam the kinsman of the gods as praying and beseeching,

'Rolling in the dirt, calling each man loudly by his name.'

Still more earnestly will we beg of him at all events not to introduce the gods lamenting and saying,

'Alas! my misery! Alas! that I bore the bravest to my sorrow.'

But if he must introduce the gods, at any rate let him not dare so completely to misrepresent the greatest of the gods, as to make him say--

'O heavens! with my eyes verily I behold a dear friend of mine chased round and round the city, and my heart is sorrowful.'

Or again:--

Woe is me that I am fated to have Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, subdued at the hands of Patroclus the son of Menoetius.'

For if, my sweet Adeimantus, our youth seriously listen to such unworthy representations of the gods, instead of laughing at them as they ought, hardly will any of them deem that he himself, being but a man, can be dishonoured by similar actions; neither will he rebuke any inclination which may arise in his mind to say and do the like. And instead of having any shame or self-control, he will be always whining and lamenting on slight occasions.

Yes, he said, that is most true.

Yes, I replied; but that surely is what ought not to be, as the argument has just proved to us; and by that proof we must abide until it is disproved by a better.

It ought not to be.

Neither ought our guardians to be given to laughter. For a fit of laughter which has been indulged to excess almost always produces a violent reaction.

So I believe.

Then persons of worth, even if only mortal men, must not be represented as overcome by laughter, and still less must such a representation of the gods be allowed.

Still less of the gods, as you say, he replied.

Then we shall not suffer such an expression to be used about the gods as that of Homer when he describes how

'Inextinguishable laughter arose among the blessed gods, when they saw Hephaestus bustling about the mansion.'

On your views, we must not admit them.

On my views, if you like to father them on me; that we must not admit them is certain.

Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.

Clearly not, he said.

Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind; and although the rulers have this privilege, for a private man to lie to them in return is to be deemed a more heinous fault than for the patient or the pupil of a gymnasium not to speak the truth about his own bodily illnesses to the physician or to the trainer, or for a sailor not to tell the captain what is happening about the ship and the rest of the crew, and how things are going with himself or his fellow sailors.

Most true, he said.

If, then, the ruler catches anybody beside himself lying in the State,

'Any of the craftsmen, whether he be priest or physician or carpenter,'

he will punish him for introducing a practice which is equally subversive and destructive of ship or State.

Most certainly, he said, if our idea of the State is ever carried out.

In the next place our youth must be temperate?

Certainly.

Are not the chief elements of temperance, speaking generally, obedience to commanders and self-control in sensual pleasures?

True.

Then we shall approve such language as that of Diomede in Homer,

'Friend, sit still and obey my word,'

and the verses which follow,

'The Greeks marched breathing prowess, ...in silent awe of their leaders,'

and other sentiments of the same kind.

We shall.

What of this line,

'O heavy with wine, who hast the eyes of a dog and the heart of a stag,'

and of the words which follow? Would you say that these, or any similar impertinences which private individuals are supposed to address to their rulers, whether in verse or prose, are well or ill spoken?

They are ill spoken.

They may very possibly afford some amusement, but they do not conduce to temperance. And therefore they are likely to do harm to our young men—you would agree with me there?

Yes.

And then, again, to make the wisest of men say that nothing in his opinion is more glorious than

'When the tables are full of bread and meat, and the cup-bearer carries round wine which he draws from the bowl and pours into the cups,'

is it fit or conducive to temperance for a young man to hear such words? Or the verse

'The saddest of fates is to die and meet destiny from hunger?'

What would you say again to the tale of Zeus, who, while other gods and men were asleep and he the only person awake, lay devising plans, but forgot them all in a moment through his lust, and was so completely overcome at the sight of Here that he would not even go into the hut, but wanted to lie with her on the ground, declaring that he had never been in such a state of rapture before, even when they first met one another

'Without the knowledge of their parents;'

or that other tale of how Hephaestus, because of similar goings on, cast a chain around Ares and Aphrodite?

Indeed, he said, I am strongly of opinion that they ought not to hear that sort of thing.

But any deeds of endurance which are done or told by famous men, these they ought to see and hear; as, for example, what is said in the verses,

'He smote his breast, and thus reproached his heart, Endure, my heart; far worse hast thou endured!'

Certainly, he said.

In the next place, we must not let them be receivers of gifts or lovers of money.

Certainly not.

Neither must we sing to them of

'Gifts persuading gods, and persuading reverend kings.'

Neither is Phoenix, the tutor of Achilles, to be approved or deemed to have given his pupil good counsel when he told him that he should take the gifts of the Greeks and assist them; but that without a gift he should not lay aside his anger. Neither will we believe or acknowledge Achilles himself to have been such a lover of money that he took Agamemnon's gifts, or that when he had received payment he restored the dead body of Hector, but that without payment he was unwilling to do so.

Undoubtedly, he said, these are not sentiments which can be approved.

Loving Homer as I do, I hardly like to say that in attributing these feelings to Achilles, or in believing that they are truly attributed to him, he is guilty of downright impiety. As little can I believe the narrative of his insolence to Apollo, where he says,

'Thou hast wronged me, O far-darter, most abominable of deities. Verily I would be even with thee, if I had only the power;'

or his insubordination to the river-god, on whose divinity he is ready to lay hands; or his offering to the dead Patroclus of his own hair, which had been previously dedicated to the other river-god Spercheius, and that he actually performed this vow; or that he dragged Hector round the tomb of Patroclus, and slaughtered the captives at the pyre; of all this I cannot believe that he was guilty, any more than I can allow our citizens to believe that he, the wise Cheiron's pupil, the son of a goddess and of Peleus who was the gentlest of men and third in descent from Zeus, was so disordered in his wits as to be at one time the slave of two seemingly inconsistent passions, meanness, not untainted by avarice, combined with overweening contempt of gods and men.

You are quite right, he replied.

And let us equally refuse to believe, or allow to be repeated, the tale of Theseus son of Poseidon, or of Peirithous son of Zeus, going forth as they did to perpetrate a horrid rape; or of any other hero or son of a god daring to do such impious and dreadful things as they falsely ascribe to them in our day: and let us further compel the poets to declare either that these acts were not done by them, or that they were not the sons of gods;—both in the same breath they shall not be permitted to affirm. We will not have them trying to persuade our youth that the gods are the authors of evil, and that heroes are no better than men—sentiments which, as we were saying, are neither pious nor true, for we have already proved that evil cannot come from the gods.

Assuredly not.

And further they are likely to have a bad effect on those who hear them; for everybody will begin to excuse his own vices when he is convinced that similar wickednesses are always being perpetrated by--

'The kindred of the gods, the relatives of Zeus, whose ancestral altar, the altar of Zeus, is aloft in air on the peak of Ida,'

and who have

'the blood of deities yet flowing in their veins.'

And therefore let us put an end to such tales, lest they engender laxity of morals among the young.

By all means, he replied.

But now that we are determining what classes of subjects are or are not to be spoken of, let us see whether any have been omitted by us. The manner in which gods and demigods and heroes and the world below should be treated has been already laid down.

Very true.

And what shall we say about men? That is clearly the remaining portion of our subject.

Clearly so.

But we are not in a condition to answer this question at present, my friend.

Why not?

Because, if I am not mistaken, we shall have to say that about men poets and story-tellers are guilty of making the gravest misstatements when they tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good miserable; and that injustice is profitable when undetected, but that justice is a man's own loss and another's gain—these things we shall forbid them to utter, and command them to sing and say the opposite.

To be sure we shall, he replied.

But if you admit that I am right in this, then I shall maintain that you have implied the principle for which we have been all along contending.

I grant the truth of your inference.

That such things are or are not to be said about men is a question which we cannot determine until we have discovered what justice is, and how naturally advantageous to the possessor, whether he seem to be just or not.

Most true, he said.

Enough of the subjects of poetry: let us now speak of the style; and when this has been considered, both matter and manner will have been completely treated.

I do not understand what you mean, said Adeimantus.

Then I must make you understand; and perhaps I may be more intelligible if I put the matter in this way. You are aware, I suppose, that all mythology and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or to come?

Certainly, he replied.

And narration may be either simple narration, or imitation, or a union of the two?

That again, he said, I do not quite understand.

I fear that I must be a ridiculous teacher when I have so much difficulty in making myself apprehended. Like a bad speaker, therefore, I will not take the whole of the subject, but will break a piece off in illustration of my meaning. You know the first lines of the Iliad, in which the poet says that Chryses prayed Agamemnon to release his daughter, and that Agamemnon flew into a passion with him; whereupon Chryses, failing of his object, invoked the anger of the God against the Achaeans. Now as far as these lines,

'And he prayed all the Greeks, but especially the two sons of Atreus, the chiefs of the people,'

the poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose that he is any one else. But in what follows he takes the person of Chryses, and then he does all that he can to make us believe that the speaker is not Homer, but the aged priest himself. And in this double form he has cast the entire narrative of the events which occurred at Troy and in Ithaca and throughout the Odyssey.

Yes.

And a narrative it remains both in the speeches which the poet recites from time to time and in the intermediate passages?

Quite true.

But when the poet speaks in the person of another, may we not say that he assimilates his style to that of the person who, as he informs you, is going to speak?

Certainly.

And this assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture, is the imitation of the person whose character he assumes?

Of course.

Then in this case the narrative of the poet may be said to proceed by way of imitation?

Very true.

Or, if the poet everywhere appears and never conceals himself, then again the imitation is dropped, and his poetry becomes simple narration. However, in order that I may make my meaning quite clear, and that you may no more say, 'I don't understand,' I will show how the change might be effected. If Homer had said, 'The priest came, having his daughter's ransom in his hands, supplicating the Achaeans, and above all the kings;' and then if, instead of speaking in the person of Chryses, he had continued in his own person, the words would have been, not imitation, but simple narration. The passage would have run as follows (I am no poet, and therefore I drop the metre), 'The priest came and prayed the gods on behalf of the Greeks that they might capture Troy and return safely home, but begged that they would give him back his daughter, and take the ransom which he brought, and respect the God. Thus he spoke, and the other Greeks revered the priest and assented. But Agamemnon was wroth, and bade him depart and not come again, lest the staff and chaplets of the God should be of no avail to him—the daughter of Chryses should not be released, he said—she should grow old with him in Argos. And then he told him to go away and not to provoke him, if he intended to get home unscathed. And the old man went away in fear and silence, and, when he had left the camp, he called upon Apollo by his many names, reminding him of everything which he had done pleasing to him, whether in building his temples, or in offering sacrifice, and praying that his good deeds might be returned to him, and that the Achaeans might expiate his tears by the arrows of the god,'—and so on. In this way the whole becomes simple narrative.

I understand, he said.

Or you may suppose the opposite case—that the intermediate passages are omitted, and the dialogue only left.

That also, he said, I understand; you mean, for example, as in tragedy.

You have conceived my meaning perfectly; and if I mistake not, what you failed to apprehend before is now made clear to you, that poetry and mythology are, in some cases, wholly imitative—instances of this are supplied by tragedy and comedy; there is likewise the opposite style, in which the poet is the only speaker—of this the dithyramb affords the best example; and the combination of both is found in epic, and in several other styles of poetry. Do I take you with me?

Yes, he said; I see now what you meant.

I will ask you to remember also what I began by saying, that we had done with the subject and might proceed to the style.

Yes, I remember.

In saying this, I intended to imply that we must come to an understanding about the mimetic art,—whether the poets, in narrating their stories, are to be allowed by us to imitate, and if so, whether in whole or in part, and if the latter, in what parts; or should all imitation be prohibited?

You mean, I suspect, to ask whether tragedy and comedy shall be admitted into our State?

Yes, I said; but there may be more than this in question: I really do not know as yet, but whither the argument may blow, thither we go.

And go we will, he said.

Then, Adeimantus, let me ask you whether our guardians ought to be imitators; or rather, has not this question been decided by the rule already laid down that one man can only do one thing well, and not many; and that if he attempt many, he will altogether fail of gaining much reputation in any?

Certainly.

And this is equally true of imitation; no one man can imitate many things as well as he would imitate a single one?

He cannot.

Then the same person will hardly be able to play a serious part in life, and at the same time to be an imitator and imitate many other parts as well; for even when two species of imitation are nearly allied, the same persons cannot succeed in both, as, for example, the writers of tragedy and comedy—did you not just now call them imitations?

Yes, I did; and you are right in thinking that the same persons cannot succeed in both.

Any more than they can be rhapsodists and actors at once?

True.

Neither are comic and tragic actors the same; yet all these things are but imitations.

They are so.

And human nature, Adeimantus, appears to have been coined into yet smaller pieces, and to be as incapable of imitating many things well, as of performing well the actions of which the imitations are copies.

Quite true, he replied.

If then we adhere to our original notion and bear in mind that our guardians, setting aside every other business, are to dedicate themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the State, making this their craft, and engaging in no work which does not bear on this end, they ought not to practise or imitate anything else; if they imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward only those characters which are suitable to their profession—the courageous, temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be skilful at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate. Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?

Yes, certainly, he said.

Then, I said, we will not allow those for whom we profess a care and of whom we say that they ought to be good men, to imitate a woman, whether young or old, quarrelling with her husband, or striving and vaunting against the gods in conceit of her happiness, or when she is in affliction, or sorrow, or weeping; and certainly not one who is in sickness, love, or labour.

Very right, he said.

Neither must they represent slaves, male or female, performing the offices of slaves?

They must not.

And surely not bad men, whether cowards or any others, who do the reverse of what we have just been prescribing, who scold or mock or revile one another in drink or out of drink, or who in any other manner sin against themselves and their neighbours in word or deed, as the manner of such is. Neither should they be trained to imitate the action or speech of men or women who are mad or bad; for madness, like vice, is to be known but not to be practised or imitated.

Very true, he replied.

Neither may they imitate smiths or other artificers, or oarsmen, or boatswains, or the like?

How can they, he said, when they are not allowed to apply their minds to the callings of any of these?

Nor may they imitate the neighing of horses, the bellowing of bulls, the murmur of rivers and roll of the ocean, thunder, and all that sort of thing?

Nay, he said, if madness be forbidden, neither may they copy the behaviour of madmen.

You mean, I said, if I understand you aright, that there is one sort of narrative style which may be employed by a truly good man when he has anything to say, and that another sort will be used by a man of an opposite character and education.

And which are these two sorts? he asked.

Suppose, I answered, that a just and good man in the course of a narration comes on some saying or action of another good man,—I should imagine that he will like to personate him, and will not be ashamed of this sort of imitation: he will be most ready to play the part of the good man when he is acting firmly and wisely; in a less degree when he is overtaken by illness or love or drink, or has met with any other disaster. But when he comes to a character which is unworthy of him, he will not make a study of that; he will disdain such a person, and will assume his likeness, if at all, for a moment only when he is performing some good action; at other times he will be ashamed to play a part which he has never practised, nor will he like to fashion and frame himself after the baser models; he feels the employment of such an art, unless in jest, to be beneath him, and his mind revolts at it.

So I should expect, he replied.

Then he will adopt a mode of narration such as we have illustrated out of Homer, that is to say, his style will be both imitative and narrative; but there will be very little of the former, and a great deal of the latter. Do you agree?

Certainly, he said; that is the model which such a speaker must necessarily take.

But there is another sort of character who will narrate anything, and, the worse he is, the more unscrupulous he will be; nothing will be too bad for him: and he will be ready to imitate anything, not as a joke, but in right good earnest, and before a large company. As I was just now saying, he will attempt to represent the roll of thunder, the noise of wind and hail, or the creaking of wheels, and pulleys, and the various sounds of flutes, pipes, trumpets, and all sorts of instruments: he will bark like a dog, bleat like a sheep, or crow like a cock; his entire art will consist in imitation of voice and gesture, and there will be very little narration.

That, he said, will be his mode of speaking.

These, then, are the two kinds of style?

Yes.

And you would agree with me in saying that one of them is simple and has but slight changes; and if the harmony and rhythm are also chosen for their simplicity, the result is that the speaker, if he speaks correctly, is always pretty much the same in style, and he will keep within the limits of a single harmony (for the changes are not great), and in like manner he will make use of nearly the same rhythm?

That is quite true, he said.

Whereas the other requires all sorts of harmonies and all sorts of rhythms, if the music and the style are to correspond, because the style has all sorts of changes.

That is also perfectly true, he replied.

And do not the two styles, or the mixture of the two, comprehend all poetry, and every form of expression in words? No one can say anything except in one or other of them or in both together.

They include all, he said.

And shall we receive into our State all the three styles, or one only of the two unmixed styles? or would you include the mixed?

I should prefer only to admit the pure imitator of virtue.

Yes, I said, Adeimantus, but the mixed style is also very charming: and indeed the pantomimic, which is the opposite of the one chosen by you, is the most popular style with children and their attendants, and with the world in general.

I do not deny it.

But I suppose you would argue that such a style is unsuitable to our State, in which human nature is not twofold or manifold, for one man plays one part only?

Yes; quite unsuitable.

And this is the reason why in our State, and in our State only, we shall find a shoemaker to be a shoemaker and not a pilot also, and a husbandman to be a husbandman and not a dicast also, and a soldier a soldier and not a trader also, and the same throughout?

True, he said.

And therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our State such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for our souls' health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers.

We certainly will, he said, if we have the power.

Then now, my friend, I said, that part of music or literary education which relates to the story or myth may be considered to be finished; for the matter and manner have both been discussed.

I think so too, he said.

Next in order will follow melody and song.

That is obvious.

Every one can see already what we ought to say about them, if we are to be consistent with ourselves.

I fear, said Glaucon, laughing, that the word 'every one' hardly includes me, for I cannot at the moment say what they should be; though I may guess.

At any rate you can tell that a song or ode has three parts—the words, the melody, and the rhythm; that degree of knowledge I may presuppose?

Yes, he said; so much as that you may.

And as for the words, there will surely be no difference between words which are and which are not set to music; both will conform to the same laws, and these have been already determined by us?

Yes.

And the melody and rhythm will depend upon the words?

Certainly.

We were saying, when we spoke of the subject-matter, that we had no need of lamentation and strains of sorrow?

True.

And which are the harmonies expressive of sorrow? You are musical, and can tell me.

The harmonies which you mean are the mixed or tenor Lydian, and the full-toned or bass Lydian, and such like.

These then, I said, must be banished; even to women who have a character to maintain they are of no use, and much less to men.

Certainly.

In the next place, drunkenness and softness and indolence are utterly unbecoming the character of our guardians.

Utterly unbecoming.

And which are the soft or drinking harmonies?

The Ionian, he replied, and the Lydian; they are termed 'relaxed.'

Well, and are these of any military use?

Quite the reverse, he replied; and if so the Dorian and the Phrygian are the only ones which you have left.

I answered: Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one warlike, to sound the note or accent which a brave man utters in the hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing, and he is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and at every such crisis meets the blows of fortune with firm step and a determination to endure; and another to be used by him in times of peace and freedom of action, when there is no pressure of necessity, and he is seeking to persuade God by prayer, or man by instruction and admonition, or on the other hand, when he is expressing his willingness to yield to persuasion or entreaty or admonition, and which represents him when by prudent conduct he has attained his end, not carried away by his success, but acting moderately and wisely under the circumstances, and acquiescing in the event. These two harmonies I ask you to leave; the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave.

And these, he replied, are the Dorian and Phrygian harmonies of which I was just now speaking.

Then, I said, if these and these only are to be used in our songs and melodies, we shall not want multiplicity of notes or a panharmonic scale?

I suppose not.

Then we shall not maintain the artificers of lyres with three corners and complex scales, or the makers of any other many-stringed curiously-harmonised instruments?

Certainly not.

But what do you say to flute-makers and flute-players? Would you admit them into our State when you reflect that in this composite use of harmony the flute is worse than all the stringed instruments put together; even the panharmonic music is only an imitation of the flute?

Clearly not.

There remain then only the lyre and the harp for use in the city, and the shepherds may have a pipe in the country.

That is surely the conclusion to be drawn from the argument.

The preferring of Apollo and his instruments to Marsyas and his instruments is not at all strange, I said.

Not at all, he replied.

And so, by the dog of Egypt, we have been unconsciously purging the State, which not long ago we termed luxurious.

And we have done wisely, he replied.

Then let us now finish the purgation, I said. Next in order to harmonies, rhythms will naturally follow, and they should be subject to the same rules, for we ought not to seek out complex systems of metre, or metres of every kind, but rather to discover what rhythms are the expressions of a courageous and harmonious life; and when we have found them, we shall adapt the foot and the melody to words having a like spirit, not the words to the foot and melody. To say what these rhythms are will be your duty—you must teach me them, as you have already taught me the harmonies.

But, indeed, he replied, I cannot tell you. I only know that there are some three principles of rhythm out of which metrical systems are framed, just as in sounds there are four notes (i.e. the four notes of the tetrachord.) out of which all the harmonies are composed; that is an observation which I have made. But of what sort of lives they are severally the imitations I am unable to say.

Then, I said, we must take Damon into our counsels; and he will tell us what rhythms are expressive of meanness, or insolence, or fury, or other unworthiness, and what are to be reserved for the expression of opposite feelings. And I think that I have an indistinct recollection of his mentioning a complex Cretic rhythm; also a dactylic or heroic, and he arranged them in some manner which I do not quite understand, making the rhythms equal in the rise and fall of the foot, long and short alternating; and, unless I am mistaken, he spoke of an iambic as well as of a trochaic rhythm, and assigned to them short and long quantities. Also in some cases he appeared to praise or censure the movement of the foot quite as much as the rhythm; or perhaps a combination of the two; for I am not certain what he meant. These matters, however, as I was saying, had better be referred to Damon himself, for the analysis of the subject would be difficult, you know? (Socrates expresses himself carelessly in accordance with his assumed ignorance of the details of the subject. In the first part of the sentence he appears to be speaking of paeonic rhythms which are in the ratio of 3/2; in the second part, of dactylic and anapaestic rhythms, which are in the ratio of 1/1; in the last clause, of iambic and trochaic rhythms, which are in the ratio of 1/2 or 2/1.)

Rather so, I should say.

But there is no difficulty in seeing that grace or the absence of grace is an effect of good or bad rhythm.

None at all.

And also that good and bad rhythm naturally assimilate to a good and bad style; and that harmony and discord in like manner follow style; for our principle is that rhythm and harmony are regulated by the words, and not the words by them.

Just so, he said, they should follow the words.

And will not the words and the character of the style depend on the temper of the soul?

Yes.

And everything else on the style?

Yes.

Then beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity,—I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only an euphemism for folly?

Very true, he replied.

And if our youth are to do their work in life, must they not make these graces and harmonies their perpetual aim?

They must.

And surely the art of the painter and every other creative and constructive art are full of them,—weaving, embroidery, architecture, and every kind of manufacture; also nature, animal and vegetable,—in all of them there is grace or the absence of grace. And ugliness and discord and inharmonious motion are nearly allied to ill words and ill nature, as grace and harmony are the twin sisters of goodness and virtue and bear their likeness.

That is quite true, he said.

But shall our superintendence go no further, and are the poets only to be required by us to express the image of the good in their works, on pain, if they do anything else, of expulsion from our State? Or is the same control to be extended to other artists, and are they also to be prohibited from exhibiting the opposite forms of vice and intemperance and meanness and indecency in sculpture and building and the other creative arts; and is he who cannot conform to this rule of ours to be prevented from practising his art in our State, lest the taste of our citizens be corrupted by him? We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul. Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of the beautiful and graceful; then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.

There can be no nobler training than that, he replied.

And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognise and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.

Yes, he said, I quite agree with you in thinking that our youth should be trained in music and on the grounds which you mention.

Just as in learning to read, I said, we were satisfied when we knew the letters of the alphabet, which are very few, in all their recurring sizes and combinations; not slighting them as unimportant whether they occupy a space large or small, but everywhere eager to make them out; and not thinking ourselves perfect in the art of reading until we recognise them wherever they are found:

True--

Or, as we recognise the reflection of letters in the water, or in a mirror, only when we know the letters themselves; the same art and study giving us the knowledge of both:

Exactly--

Even so, as I maintain, neither we nor our guardians, whom we have to educate, can ever become musical until we and they know the essential forms of temperance, courage, liberality, magnificence, and their kindred, as well as the contrary forms, in all their combinations, and can recognise them and their images wherever they are found, not slighting them either in small things or great, but believing them all to be within the sphere of one art and study.

Most assuredly.

And when a beautiful soul harmonizes with a beautiful form, and the two are cast in one mould, that will be the fairest of sights to him who has an eye to see it?

The fairest indeed.

And the fairest is also the loveliest?

That may be assumed.

And the man who has the spirit of harmony will be most in love with the loveliest; but he will not love him who is of an inharmonious soul?

That is true, he replied, if the deficiency be in his soul; but if there be any merely bodily defect in another he will be patient of it, and will love all the same.

I perceive, I said, that you have or have had experiences of this sort, and I agree. But let me ask you another question: Has excess of pleasure any affinity to temperance?

How can that be? he replied; pleasure deprives a man of the use of his faculties quite as much as pain.

Or any affinity to virtue in general?

None whatever.

Any affinity to wantonness and intemperance?

Yes, the greatest.

And is there any greater or keener pleasure than that of sensual love?

No, nor a madder.

Whereas true love is a love of beauty and order—temperate and harmonious?

Quite true, he said.

Then no intemperance or madness should be allowed to approach true love?

Certainly not.

Then mad or intemperate pleasure must never be allowed to come near the lover and his beloved; neither of them can have any part in it if their love is of the right sort?

No, indeed, Socrates, it must never come near them.

Then I suppose that in the city which we are founding you would make a law to the effect that a friend should use no other familiarity to his love than a father would use to his son, and then only for a noble purpose, and he must first have the other's consent; and this rule is to limit him in all his intercourse, and he is never to be seen going further, or, if he exceeds, he is to be deemed guilty of coarseness and bad taste.

I quite agree, he said.

Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what should be the end of music if not the love of beauty?

I agree, he said.

After music comes gymnastic, in which our youth are next to be trained.

Certainly.

Gymnastic as well as music should begin in early years; the training in it should be careful and should continue through life. Now my belief is,—and this is a matter upon which I should like to have your opinion in confirmation of my own, but my own belief is,—not that the good body by any bodily excellence improves the soul, but, on the contrary, that the good soul, by her own excellence, improves the body as far as this may be possible. What do you say?

Yes, I agree.

Then, to the mind when adequately trained, we shall be right in handing over the more particular care of the body; and in order to avoid prolixity we will now only give the general outlines of the subject.

Very good.

That they must abstain from intoxication has been already remarked by us; for of all persons a guardian should be the last to get drunk and not know where in the world he is.

Yes, he said; that a guardian should require another guardian to take care of him is ridiculous indeed.

But next, what shall we say of their food; for the men are in training for the great contest of all—are they not?

Yes, he said.

And will the habit of body of our ordinary athletes be suited to them?

Why not?

I am afraid, I said, that a habit of body such as they have is but a sleepy sort of thing, and rather perilous to health. Do you not observe that these athletes sleep away their lives, and are liable to most dangerous illnesses if they depart, in ever so slight a degree, from their customary regimen?

Yes, I do.

Then, I said, a finer sort of training will be required for our warrior athletes, who are to be like wakeful dogs, and to see and hear with the utmost keenness; amid the many changes of water and also of food, of summer heat and winter cold, which they will have to endure when on a campaign, they must not be liable to break down in health.

That is my view.

The really excellent gymnastic is twin sister of that simple music which we were just now describing.

How so?

Why, I conceive that there is a gymnastic which, like our music, is simple and good; and especially the military gymnastic.

What do you mean?

My meaning may be learned from Homer; he, you know, feeds his heroes at their feasts, when they are campaigning, on soldiers' fare; they have no fish, although they are on the shores of the Hellespont, and they are not allowed boiled meats but only roast, which is the food most convenient for soldiers, requiring only that they should light a fire, and not involving the trouble of carrying about pots and pans.

True.

And I can hardly be mistaken in saying that sweet sauces are nowhere mentioned in Homer. In proscribing them, however, he is not singular; all professional athletes are well aware that a man who is to be in good condition should take nothing of the kind.

Yes, he said; and knowing this, they are quite right in not taking them.

Then you would not approve of Syracusan dinners, and the refinements of Sicilian cookery?

I think not.

Nor, if a man is to be in condition, would you allow him to have a Corinthian girl as his fair friend?

Certainly not.

Neither would you approve of the delicacies, as they are thought, of Athenian confectionary?

Certainly not.

All such feeding and living may be rightly compared by us to melody and song composed in the panharmonic style, and in all the rhythms.

Exactly.

There complexity engendered licence, and here disease; whereas simplicity in music was the parent of temperance in the soul; and simplicity in gymnastic of health in the body.

Most true, he said.

But when intemperance and diseases multiply in a State, halls of justice and medicine are always being opened; and the arts of the doctor and the lawyer give themselves airs, finding how keen is the interest which not only the slaves but the freemen of a city take about them.

Of course.

And yet what greater proof can there be of a bad and disgraceful state of education than this, that not only artisans and the meaner sort of people need the skill of first-rate physicians and judges, but also those who would profess to have had a liberal education? Is it not disgraceful, and a great sign of want of good-breeding, that a man should have to go abroad for his law and physic because he has none of his own at home, and must therefore surrender himself into the hands of other men whom he makes lords and judges over him?

Of all things, he said, the most disgraceful.

Would you say 'most,' I replied, when you consider that there is a further stage of the evil in which a man is not only a life-long litigant, passing all his days in the courts, either as plaintiff or defendant, but is actually led by his bad taste to pride himself on his litigiousness; he imagines that he is a master in dishonesty; able to take every crooked turn, and wriggle into and out of every hole, bending like a withy and getting out of the way of justice: and all for what?—in order to gain small points not worth mentioning, he not knowing that so to order his life as to be able to do without a napping judge is a far higher and nobler sort of thing. Is not that still more disgraceful?

Yes, he said, that is still more disgraceful.

Well, I said, and to require the help of medicine, not when a wound has to be cured, or on occasion of an epidemic, but just because, by indolence and a habit of life such as we have been describing, men fill themselves with waters and winds, as if their bodies were a marsh, compelling the ingenious sons of Asclepius to find more names for diseases, such as flatulence and catarrh; is not this, too, a disgrace?

Yes, he said, they do certainly give very strange and newfangled names to diseases.

Yes, I said, and I do not believe that there were any such diseases in the days of Asclepius; and this I infer from the circumstance that the hero Eurypylus, after he has been wounded in Homer, drinks a posset of Pramnian wine well besprinkled with barley-meal and grated cheese, which are certainly inflammatory, and yet the sons of Asclepius who were at the Trojan war do not blame the damsel who gives him the drink, or rebuke Patroclus, who is treating his case.

Well, he said, that was surely an extraordinary drink to be given to a person in his condition.

Not so extraordinary, I replied, if you bear in mind that in former days, as is commonly said, before the time of Herodicus, the guild of Asclepius did not practise our present system of medicine, which may be said to educate diseases. But Herodicus, being a trainer, and himself of a sickly constitution, by a combination of training and doctoring found out a way of torturing first and chiefly himself, and secondly the rest of the world.

How was that? he said.

By the invention of lingering death; for he had a mortal disease which he perpetually tended, and as recovery was out of the question, he passed his entire life as a valetudinarian; he could do nothing but attend upon himself, and he was in constant torment whenever he departed in anything from his usual regimen, and so dying hard, by the help of science he struggled on to old age.

A rare reward of his skill!

Yes, I said; a reward which a man might fairly expect who never understood that, if Asclepius did not instruct his descendants in valetudinarian arts, the omission arose, not from ignorance or inexperience of such a branch of medicine, but because he knew that in all well-ordered states every individual has an occupation to which he must attend, and has therefore no leisure to spend in continually being ill. This we remark in the case of the artisan, but, ludicrously enough, do not apply the same rule to people of the richer sort.

How do you mean? he said.

I mean this: When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife,—these are his remedies. And if some one prescribes for him a course of dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees no good in a life which is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore bidding good-bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his constitution fails, he dies and has no more trouble.

Yes, he said, and a man in his condition of life ought to use the art of medicine thus far only.

Has he not, I said, an occupation; and what profit would there be in his life if he were deprived of his occupation?

Quite true, he said.

But with the rich man this is otherwise; of him we do not say that he has any specially appointed work which he must perform, if he would live.

He is generally supposed to have nothing to do.

Then you never heard of the saying of Phocylides, that as soon as a man has a livelihood he should practise virtue?

Nay, he said, I think that he had better begin somewhat sooner.

Let us not have a dispute with him about this, I said; but rather ask ourselves: Is the practice of virtue obligatory on the rich man, or can he live without it? And if obligatory on him, then let us raise a further question, whether this dieting of disorders, which is an impediment to the application of the mind in carpentering and the mechanical arts, does not equally stand in the way of the sentiment of Phocylides?

Of that, he replied, there can be no doubt; such excessive care of the body, when carried beyond the rules of gymnastic, is most inimical to the practice of virtue.

Yes, indeed, I replied, and equally incompatible with the management of a house, an army, or an office of state; and, what is most important of all, irreconcileable with any kind of study or thought or self-reflection—there is a constant suspicion that headache and giddiness are to be ascribed to philosophy, and hence all practising or making trial of virtue in the higher sense is absolutely stopped; for a man is always fancying that he is being made ill, and is in constant anxiety about the state of his body.

Yes, likely enough.

And therefore our politic Asclepius may be supposed to have exhibited the power of his art only to persons who, being generally of healthy constitution and habits of life, had a definite ailment; such as these he cured by purges and operations, and bade them live as usual, herein consulting the interests of the State; but bodies which disease had penetrated through and through he would not have attempted to cure by gradual processes of evacuation and infusion: he did not want to lengthen out good-for-nothing lives, or to have weak fathers begetting weaker sons;—if a man was not able to live in the ordinary way he had no business to cure him; for such a cure would have been of no use either to himself, or to the State.

Then, he said, you regard Asclepius as a statesman.

Clearly; and his character is further illustrated by his sons. Note that they were heroes in the days of old and practised the medicines of which I am speaking at the siege of Troy: You will remember how, when Pandarus wounded Menelaus, they

'Sucked the blood out of the wound, and sprinkled soothing remedies,'

but they never prescribed what the patient was afterwards to eat or drink in the case of Menelaus, any more than in the case of Eurypylus; the remedies, as they conceived, were enough to heal any man who before he was wounded was healthy and regular in his habits; and even though he did happen to drink a posset of Pramnian wine, he might get well all the same. But they would have nothing to do with unhealthy and intemperate subjects, whose lives were of no use either to themselves or others; the art of medicine was not designed for their good, and though they were as rich as Midas, the sons of Asclepius would have declined to attend them.

They were very acute persons, those sons of Asclepius.

Naturally so, I replied. Nevertheless, the tragedians and Pindar disobeying our behests, although they acknowledge that Asclepius was the son of Apollo, say also that he was bribed into healing a rich man who was at the point of death, and for this reason he was struck by lightning. But we, in accordance with the principle already affirmed by us, will not believe them when they tell us both;—if he was the son of a god, we maintain that he was not avaricious; or, if he was avaricious, he was not the son of a god.

All that, Socrates, is excellent; but I should like to put a question to you: Ought there not to be good physicians in a State, and are not the best those who have treated the greatest number of constitutions good and bad? and are not the best judges in like manner those who are acquainted with all sorts of moral natures?

Yes, I said, I too would have good judges and good physicians. But do you know whom I think good?

Will you tell me?

I will, if I can. Let me however note that in the same question you join two things which are not the same.

How so? he asked.

Why, I said, you join physicians and judges. Now the most skilful physicians are those who, from their youth upwards, have combined with the knowledge of their art the greatest experience of disease; they had better not be robust in health, and should have had all manner of diseases in their own persons. For the body, as I conceive, is not the instrument with which they cure the body; in that case we could not allow them ever to be or to have been sickly; but they cure the body with the mind, and the mind which has become and is sick can cure nothing.

That is very true, he said.

But with the judge it is otherwise; since he governs mind by mind; he ought not therefore to have been trained among vicious minds, and to have associated with them from youth upwards, and to have gone through the whole calendar of crime, only in order that he may quickly infer the crimes of others as he might their bodily diseases from his own self-consciousness; the honourable mind which is to form a healthy judgment should have had no experience or contamination of evil habits when young. And this is the reason why in youth good men often appear to be simple, and are easily practised upon by the dishonest, because they have no examples of what evil is in their own souls.

Yes, he said, they are far too apt to be deceived.

Therefore, I said, the judge should not be young; he should have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the nature of evil in others: knowledge should be his guide, not personal experience.

Yes, he said, that is the ideal of a judge.

Yes, I replied, and he will be a good man (which is my answer to your question); for he is good who has a good soul. But the cunning and suspicious nature of which we spoke,—he who has committed many crimes, and fancies himself to be a master in wickedness, when he is amongst his fellows, is wonderful in the precautions which he takes, because he judges of them by himself: but when he gets into the company of men of virtue, who have the experience of age, he appears to be a fool again, owing to his unseasonable suspicions; he cannot recognise an honest man, because he has no pattern of honesty in himself; at the same time, as the bad are more numerous than the good, and he meets with them oftener, he thinks himself, and is by others thought to be, rather wise than foolish.

Most true, he said.

Then the good and wise judge whom we are seeking is not this man, but the other; for vice cannot know virtue too, but a virtuous nature, educated by time, will acquire a knowledge both of virtue and vice: the virtuous, and not the vicious, man has wisdom—in my opinion.

And in mine also.

This is the sort of medicine, and this is the sort of law, which you will sanction in your state. They will minister to better natures, giving health both of soul and of body; but those who are diseased in their bodies they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put an end to themselves.

That is clearly the best thing both for the patients and for the State.

And thus our youth, having been educated only in that simple music which, as we said, inspires temperance, will be reluctant to go to law.

Clearly.

And the musician, who, keeping to the same track, is content to practise the simple gymnastic, will have nothing to do with medicine unless in some extreme case.

That I quite believe.

The very exercises and tolls which he undergoes are intended to stimulate the spirited element of his nature, and not to increase his strength; he will not, like common athletes, use exercise and regimen to develope his muscles.

Very right, he said.

Neither are the two arts of music and gymnastic really designed, as is often supposed, the one for the training of the soul, the other for the training of the body.

What then is the real object of them?

I believe, I said, that the teachers of both have in view chiefly the improvement of the soul.

How can that be? he asked.

Did you never observe, I said, the effect on the mind itself of exclusive devotion to gymnastic, or the opposite effect of an exclusive devotion to music?

In what way shown? he said.

The one producing a temper of hardness and ferocity, the other of softness and effeminacy, I replied.

Yes, he said, I am quite aware that the mere athlete becomes too much of a savage, and that the mere musician is melted and softened beyond what is good for him.

Yet surely, I said, this ferocity only comes from spirit, which, if rightly educated, would give courage, but, if too much intensified, is liable to become hard and brutal.

That I quite think.

On the other hand the philosopher will have the quality of gentleness. And this also, when too much indulged, will turn to softness, but, if educated rightly, will be gentle and moderate.

True.

And in our opinion the guardians ought to have both these qualities?

Assuredly.

And both should be in harmony?

Beyond question.

And the harmonious soul is both temperate and courageous?

Yes.

And the inharmonious is cowardly and boorish?

Very true.

And, when a man allows music to play upon him and to pour into his soul through the funnel of his ears those sweet and soft and melancholy airs of which we were just now speaking, and his whole life is passed in warbling and the delights of song; in the first stage of the process the passion or spirit which is in him is tempered like iron, and made useful, instead of brittle and useless. But, if he carries on the softening and soothing process, in the next stage he begins to melt and waste, until he has wasted away his spirit and cut out the sinews of his soul; and he becomes a feeble warrior.

Very true.

If the element of spirit is naturally weak in him the change is speedily accomplished, but if he have a good deal, then the power of music weakening the spirit renders him excitable;—on the least provocation he flames up at once, and is speedily extinguished; instead of having spirit he grows irritable and passionate and is quite impracticable.

Exactly.

And so in gymnastics, if a man takes violent exercise and is a great feeder, and the reverse of a great student of music and philosophy, at first the high condition of his body fills him with pride and spirit, and he becomes twice the man that he was.

Certainly.

And what happens? if he do nothing else, and holds no converse with the Muses, does not even that intelligence which there may be in him, having no taste of any sort of learning or enquiry or thought or culture, grow feeble and dull and blind, his mind never waking up or receiving nourishment, and his senses not being purged of their mists?

True, he said.

And he ends by becoming a hater of philosophy, uncivilized, never using the weapon of persuasion,—he is like a wild beast, all violence and fierceness, and knows no other way of dealing; and he lives in all ignorance and evil conditions, and has no sense of propriety and grace.

That is quite true, he said.

And as there are two principles of human nature, one the spirited and the other the philosophical, some God, as I should say, has given mankind two arts answering to them (and only indirectly to the soul and body), in order that these two principles (like the strings of an instrument) may be relaxed or drawn tighter until they are duly harmonized.

That appears to be the intention.

And he who mingles music with gymnastic in the fairest proportions, and best attempers them to the soul, may be rightly called the true musician and harmonist in a far higher sense than the tuner of the strings.

You are quite right, Socrates.

And such a presiding genius will be always required in our State if the government is to last.

Yes, he will be absolutely necessary.

Such, then, are our principles of nurture and education: Where would be the use of going into further details about the dances of our citizens, or about their hunting and coursing, their gymnastic and equestrian contests? For these all follow the general principle, and having found that, we shall have no difficulty in discovering them.

I dare say that there will be no difficulty.

Very good, I said; then what is the next question? Must we not ask who are to be rulers and who subjects?

Certainly.

There can be no doubt that the elder must rule the younger.

Clearly.

And that the best of these must rule.

That is also clear.

Now, are not the best husbandmen those who are most devoted to husbandry?

Yes.

And as we are to have the best of guardians for our city, must they not be those who have most the character of guardians?

Yes.

And to this end they ought to be wise and efficient, and to have a special care of the State?

True.

And a man will be most likely to care about that which he loves?

To be sure.

And he will be most likely to love that which he regards as having the same interests with himself, and that of which the good or evil fortune is supposed by him at any time most to affect his own?

Very true, he replied.

Then there must be a selection. Let us note among the guardians those who in their whole life show the greatest eagerness to do what is for the good of their country, and the greatest repugnance to do what is against her interests.

Those are the right men.

And they will have to be watched at every age, in order that we may see whether they preserve their resolution, and never, under the influence either of force or enchantment, forget or cast off their sense of duty to the State.

How cast off? he said.

I will explain to you, I replied. A resolution may go out of a man's mind either with his will or against his will; with his will when he gets rid of a falsehood and learns better, against his will whenever he is deprived of a truth.

I understand, he said, the willing loss of a resolution; the meaning of the unwilling I have yet to learn.

Why, I said, do you not see that men are unwillingly deprived of good, and willingly of evil? Is not to have lost the truth an evil, and to possess the truth a good? and you would agree that to conceive things as they are is to possess the truth?

Yes, he replied; I agree with you in thinking that mankind are deprived of truth against their will.

And is not this involuntary deprivation caused either by theft, or force, or enchantment?

Still, he replied, I do not understand you.

I fear that I must have been talking darkly, like the tragedians. I only mean that some men are changed by persuasion and that others forget; argument steals away the hearts of one class, and time of the other; and this I call theft. Now you understand me?

Yes.

Those again who are forced, are those whom the violence of some pain or grief compels to change their opinion.

I understand, he said, and you are quite right.

And you would also acknowledge that the enchanted are those who change their minds either under the softer influence of pleasure, or the sterner influence of fear?

Yes, he said; everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

Therefore, as I was just now saying, we must enquire who are the best guardians of their own conviction that what they think the interest of the State is to be the rule of their lives. We must watch them from their youth upwards, and make them perform actions in which they are most likely to forget or to be deceived, and he who remembers and is not deceived is to be selected, and he who fails in the trial is to be rejected. That will be the way?

Yes.

And there should also be toils and pains and conflicts prescribed for them, in which they will be made to give further proof of the same qualities.

Very right, he replied.

And then, I said, we must try them with enchantments—that is the third sort of test—and see what will be their behaviour: like those who take colts amid noise and tumult to see if they are of a timid nature, so must we take our youth amid terrors of some kind, and again pass them into pleasures, and prove them more thoroughly than gold is proved in the furnace, that we may discover whether they are armed against all enchantments, and of a noble bearing always, good guardians of themselves and of the music which they have learned, and retaining under all circumstances a rhythmical and harmonious nature, such as will be most serviceable to the individual and to the State. And he who at every age, as boy and youth and in mature life, has come out of the trial victorious and pure, shall be appointed a ruler and guardian of the State; he shall be honoured in life and death, and shall receive sepulture and other memorials of honour, the greatest that we have to give. But him who fails, we must reject. I am inclined to think that this is the sort of way in which our rulers and guardians should be chosen and appointed. I speak generally, and not with any pretension to exactness.

And, speaking generally, I agree with you, he said.

And perhaps the word 'guardian' in the fullest sense ought to be applied to this higher class only who preserve us against foreign enemies and maintain peace among our citizens at home, that the one may not have the will, or the others the power, to harm us. The young men whom we before called guardians may be more properly designated auxiliaries and supporters of the principles of the rulers.

I agree with you, he said.

How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke—just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city?

What sort of lie? he said.

Nothing new, I replied; only an old Phoenician tale (Laws) of what has often occurred before now in other places, (as the poets say, and have made the world believe,) though not in our time, and I do not know whether such an event could ever happen again, or could now even be made probable, if it did.

How your words seem to hesitate on your lips!

You will not wonder, I replied, at my hesitation when you have heard.

Speak, he said, and fear not.

Well then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look you in the face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which I propose to communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. They are to be told that their youth was a dream, and the education and training which they received from us, an appearance only; in reality during all that time they were being formed and fed in the womb of the earth, where they themselves and their arms and appurtenances were manufactured; when they were completed, the earth, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country being their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for her good, and to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are to regard as children of the earth and their own brothers.

You had good reason, he said, to be ashamed of the lie which you were going to tell.

True, I replied, but there is more coming; I have only told you half. Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honour; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race. They should observe what elements mingle in their offspring; for if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be destroyed. Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in it?

Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their sons' sons, and posterity after them.

I see the difficulty, I replied; yet the fostering of such a belief will make them care more for the city and for one another. Enough, however, of the fiction, which may now fly abroad upon the wings of rumour, while we arm our earth-born heroes, and lead them forth under the command of their rulers. Let them look round and select a spot whence they can best suppress insurrection, if any prove refractory within, and also defend themselves against enemies, who like wolves may come down on the fold from without; there let them encamp, and when they have encamped, let them sacrifice to the proper Gods and prepare their dwellings.

Just so, he said.

And their dwellings must be such as will shield them against the cold of winter and the heat of summer.

I suppose that you mean houses, he replied.

Yes, I said; but they must be the houses of soldiers, and not of shop-keepers.

What is the difference? he said.

That I will endeavour to explain, I replied. To keep watch-dogs, who, from want of discipline or hunger, or some evil habit or other, would turn upon the sheep and worry them, and behave not like dogs but wolves, would be a foul and monstrous thing in a shepherd?

Truly monstrous, he said.

And therefore every care must be taken that our auxiliaries, being stronger than our citizens, may not grow to be too much for them and become savage tyrants instead of friends and allies?

Yes, great care should be taken.

And would not a really good education furnish the best safeguard?

But they are well-educated already, he replied.

I cannot be so confident, my dear Glaucon, I said; I am much more certain that they ought to be, and that true education, whatever that may be, will have the greatest tendency to civilize and humanize them in their relations to one another, and to those who are under their protection.

Very true, he replied.

And not only their education, but their habitations, and all that belongs to them, should be such as will neither impair their virtue as guardians, nor tempt them to prey upon the other citizens. Any man of sense must acknowledge that.

He must.

Then now let us consider what will be their way of life, if they are to realize our idea of them. In the first place, none of them should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against any one who has a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; they should agree to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year and no more; and they will go to mess and live together like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of the dross which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture; for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but their own is undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them. And this will be their salvation, and they will be the saviours of the State. But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much greater terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand. For all which reasons may we not say that thus shall our State be ordered, and that these shall be the regulations appointed by us for guardians concerning their houses and all other matters?

Yes, said Glaucon.

BOOK IV.

Here Adeimantus interposed a question: How would you answer, Socrates, said he, if a person were to say that you are making these people miserable, and that they are the cause of their own unhappiness; the city in fact belongs to them, but they are none the better for it; whereas other men acquire lands, and build large and handsome houses, and have everything handsome about them, offering sacrifices to the gods on their own account, and practising hospitality; moreover, as you were saying just now, they have gold and silver, and all that is usual among the favourites of fortune; but our poor citizens are no better than mercenaries who are quartered in the city and are always mounting guard?

Yes, I said; and you may add that they are only fed, and not paid in addition to their food, like other men; and therefore they cannot, if they would, take a journey of pleasure; they have no money to spend on a mistress or any other luxurious fancy, which, as the world goes, is thought to be happiness; and many other accusations of the same nature might be added.

But, said he, let us suppose all this to be included in the charge.

You mean to ask, I said, what will be our answer?

Yes.

If we proceed along the old path, my belief, I said, is that we shall find the answer. And our answer will be that, even as they are, our guardians may very likely be the happiest of men; but that our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to find justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice: and, having found them, we might then decide which of the two is the happier. At present, I take it, we are fashioning the happy State, not piecemeal, or with a view of making a few happy citizens, but as a whole; and by-and-by we will proceed to view the opposite kind of State. Suppose that we were painting a statue, and some one came up to us and said, Why do you not put the most beautiful colours on the most beautiful parts of the body—the eyes ought to be purple, but you have made them black—to him we might fairly answer, Sir, you would not surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the other features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful. And so I say to you, do not compel us to assign to the guardians a sort of happiness which will make them anything but guardians; for we too can clothe our husbandmen in royal apparel, and set crowns of gold on their heads, and bid them till the ground as much as they like, and no more. Our potters also might be allowed to repose on couches, and feast by the fireside, passing round the winecup, while their wheel is conveniently at hand, and working at pottery only as much as they like; in this way we might make every class happy—and then, as you imagine, the whole State would be happy. But do not put this idea into our heads; for, if we listen to you, the husbandman will be no longer a husbandman, the potter will cease to be a potter, and no one will have the character of any distinct class in the State. Now this is not of much consequence where the corruption of society, and pretension to be what you are not, is confined to cobblers; but when the guardians of the laws and of the government are only seeming and not real guardians, then see how they turn the State upside down; and on the other hand they alone have the power of giving order and happiness to the State. We mean our guardians to be true saviours and not the destroyers of the State, whereas our opponent is thinking of peasants at a festival, who are enjoying a life of revelry, not of citizens who are doing their duty to the State. But, if so, we mean different things, and he is speaking of something which is not a State. And therefore we must consider whether in appointing our guardians we would look to their greatest happiness individually, or whether this principle of happiness does not rather reside in the State as a whole. But if the latter be the truth, then the guardians and auxiliaries, and all others equally with them, must be compelled or induced to do their own work in the best way. And thus the whole State will grow up in a noble order, and the several classes will receive the proportion of happiness which nature assigns to them.

I think that you are quite right.

I wonder whether you will agree with another remark which occurs to me.

What may that be?

There seem to be two causes of the deterioration of the arts.

What are they?

Wealth, I said, and poverty.

How do they act?

The process is as follows: When a potter becomes rich, will he, think you, any longer take the same pains with his art?

Certainly not.

He will grow more and more indolent and careless?

Very true.

And the result will be that he becomes a worse potter?

Yes; he greatly deteriorates.

But, on the other hand, if he has no money, and cannot provide himself with tools or instruments, he will not work equally well himself, nor will he teach his sons or apprentices to work equally well.

Certainly not.

Then, under the influence either of poverty or of wealth, workmen and their work are equally liable to degenerate?

That is evident.

Here, then, is a discovery of new evils, I said, against which the guardians will have to watch, or they will creep into the city unobserved.

What evils?

Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

That is very true, he replied; but still I should like to know, Socrates, how our city will be able to go to war, especially against an enemy who is rich and powerful, if deprived of the sinews of war.

There would certainly be a difficulty, I replied, in going to war with one such enemy; but there is no difficulty where there are two of them.

How so? he asked.

In the first place, I said, if we have to fight, our side will be trained warriors fighting against an army of rich men.

That is true, he said.

And do you not suppose, Adeimantus, that a single boxer who was perfect in his art would easily be a match for two stout and well-to-do gentlemen who were not boxers?

Hardly, if they came upon him at once.

What, now, I said, if he were able to run away and then turn and strike at the one who first came up? And supposing he were to do this several times under the heat of a scorching sun, might he not, being an expert, overturn more than one stout personage?

Certainly, he said, there would be nothing wonderful in that.

And yet rich men probably have a greater superiority in the science and practise of boxing than they have in military qualities.

Likely enough.

Then we may assume that our athletes will be able to fight with two or three times their own number?

I agree with you, for I think you right.

And suppose that, before engaging, our citizens send an embassy to one of the two cities, telling them what is the truth: Silver and gold we neither have nor are permitted to have, but you may; do you therefore come and help us in war, and take the spoils of the other city: Who, on hearing these words, would choose to fight against lean wiry dogs, rather than, with the dogs on their side, against fat and tender sheep?

That is not likely; and yet there might be a danger to the poor State if the wealth of many States were to be gathered into one.

But how simple of you to use the term State at all of any but our own!

Why so?

You ought to speak of other States in the plural number; not one of them is a city, but many cities, as they say in the game. For indeed any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another; and in either there are many smaller divisions, and you would be altogether beside the mark if you treated them all as a single State. But if you deal with them as many, and give the wealth or power or persons of the one to the others, you will always have a great many friends and not many enemies. And your State, while the wise order which has now been prescribed continues to prevail in her, will be the greatest of States, I do not mean to say in reputation or appearance, but in deed and truth, though she number not more than a thousand defenders. A single State which is her equal you will hardly find, either among Hellenes or barbarians, though many that appear to be as great and many times greater.

That is most true, he said.

And what, I said, will be the best limit for our rulers to fix when they are considering the size of the State and the amount of territory which they are to include, and beyond which they will not go?

What limit would you propose?

I would allow the State to increase so far as is consistent with unity; that, I think, is the proper limit.

Very good, he said.

Here then, I said, is another order which will have to be conveyed to our guardians: Let our city be accounted neither large nor small, but one and self-sufficing.

And surely, said he, this is not a very severe order which we impose upon them.

And the other, said I, of which we were speaking before is lighter still,—I mean the duty of degrading the offspring of the guardians when inferior, and of elevating into the rank of guardians the offspring of the lower classes, when naturally superior. The intention was, that, in the case of the citizens generally, each individual should be put to the use for which nature intended him, one to one work, and then every man would do his own business, and be one and not many; and so the whole city would be one and not many.

Yes, he said; that is not so difficult.

The regulations which we are prescribing, my good Adeimantus, are not, as might be supposed, a number of great principles, but trifles all, if care be taken, as the saying is, of the one great thing,—a thing, however, which I would rather call, not great, but sufficient for our purpose.

What may that be? he asked.

Education, I said, and nurture: If our citizens are well educated, and grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all these, as well as other matters which I omit; such, for example, as marriage, the possession of women and the procreation of children, which will all follow the general principle that friends have all things in common, as the proverb says.

That will be the best way of settling them.

Also, I said, the State, if once started well, moves with accumulating force like a wheel. For good nurture and education implant good constitutions, and these good constitutions taking root in a good education improve more and more, and this improvement affects the breed in man as in other animals.

Very possibly, he said.

Then to sum up: This is the point to which, above all, the attention of our rulers should be directed,—that music and gymnastic be preserved in their original form, and no innovation made. They must do their utmost to maintain them intact. And when any one says that mankind most regard

'The newest song which the singers have,'

they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the meaning of the poet; for any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited. So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him;—he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.

Yes, said Adeimantus; and you may add my suffrage to Damon's and your own.

Then, I said, our guardians must lay the foundations of their fortress in music?

Yes, he said; the lawlessness of which you speak too easily steals in.

Yes, I replied, in the form of amusement; and at first sight it appears harmless.

Why, yes, he said, and there is no harm; were it not that little by little this spirit of licence, finding a home, imperceptibly penetrates into manners and customs; whence, issuing with greater force, it invades contracts between man and man, and from contracts goes on to laws and constitutions, in utter recklessness, ending at last, Socrates, by an overthrow of all rights, private as well as public.

Is that true? I said.

That is my belief, he replied.

Then, as I was saying, our youth should be trained from the first in a stricter system, for if amusements become lawless, and the youths themselves become lawless, they can never grow up into well-conducted and virtuous citizens.

Very true, he said.

And when they have made a good beginning in play, and by the help of music have gained the habit of good order, then this habit of order, in a manner how unlike the lawless play of the others! will accompany them in all their actions and be a principle of growth to them, and if there be any fallen places in the State will raise them up again.

Very true, he said.

Thus educated, they will invent for themselves any lesser rules which their predecessors have altogether neglected.

What do you mean?

I mean such things as these:—when the young are to be silent before their elders; how they are to show respect to them by standing and making them sit; what honour is due to parents; what garments or shoes are to be worn; the mode of dressing the hair; deportment and manners in general. You would agree with me?

Yes.

But there is, I think, small wisdom in legislating about such matters,—I doubt if it is ever done; nor are any precise written enactments about them likely to be lasting.

Impossible.

It would seem, Adeimantus, that the direction in which education starts a man, will determine his future life. Does not like always attract like?

To be sure.

Until some one rare and grand result is reached which may be good, and may be the reverse of good?

That is not to be denied.

And for this reason, I said, I shall not attempt to legislate further about them.

Naturally enough, he replied.

Well, and about the business of the agora, and the ordinary dealings between man and man, or again about agreements with artisans; about insult and injury, or the commencement of actions, and the appointment of juries, what would you say? there may also arise questions about any impositions and exactions of market and harbour dues which may be required, and in general about the regulations of markets, police, harbours, and the like. But, oh heavens! shall we condescend to legislate on any of these particulars?

I think, he said, that there is no need to impose laws about them on good men; what regulations are necessary they will find out soon enough for themselves.

Yes, I said, my friend, if God will only preserve to them the laws which we have given them.

And without divine help, said Adeimantus, they will go on for ever making and mending their laws and their lives in the hope of attaining perfection.

You would compare them, I said, to those invalids who, having no self-restraint, will not leave off their habits of intemperance?

Exactly.

Yes, I said; and what a delightful life they lead! they are always doctoring and increasing and complicating their disorders, and always fancying that they will be cured by any nostrum which anybody advises them to try.

Such cases are very common, he said, with invalids of this sort.

Yes, I replied; and the charming thing is that they deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth, which is simply that, unless they give up eating and drinking and wenching and idling, neither drug nor cautery nor spell nor amulet nor any other remedy will avail.

Charming! he replied. I see nothing charming in going into a passion with a man who tells you what is right.

These gentlemen, I said, do not seem to be in your good graces.

Assuredly not.

Nor would you praise the behaviour of States which act like the men whom I was just now describing. For are there not ill-ordered States in which the citizens are forbidden under pain of death to alter the constitution; and yet he who most sweetly courts those who live under this regime and indulges them and fawns upon them and is skilful in anticipating and gratifying their humours is held to be a great and good statesman—do not these States resemble the persons whom I was describing?

Yes, he said; the States are as bad as the men; and I am very far from praising them.

But do you not admire, I said, the coolness and dexterity of these ready ministers of political corruption?

Yes, he said, I do; but not of all of them, for there are some whom the applause of the multitude has deluded into the belief that they are really statesmen, and these are not much to be admired.

What do you mean? I said; you should have more feeling for them. When a man cannot measure, and a great many others who cannot measure declare that he is four cubits high, can he help believing what they say?

Nay, he said, certainly not in that case.

Well, then, do not be angry with them; for are they not as good as a play, trying their hand at paltry reforms such as I was describing; they are always fancying that by legislation they will make an end of frauds in contracts, and the other rascalities which I was mentioning, not knowing that they are in reality cutting off the heads of a hydra?

Yes, he said; that is just what they are doing.

I conceive, I said, that the true legislator will not trouble himself with this class of enactments whether concerning laws or the constitution either in an ill-ordered or in a well-ordered State; for in the former they are quite useless, and in the latter there will be no difficulty in devising them; and many of them will naturally flow out of our previous regulations.

What, then, he said, is still remaining to us of the work of legislation?

Nothing to us, I replied; but to Apollo, the God of Delphi, there remains the ordering of the greatest and noblest and chiefest things of all.

Which are they? he said.

The institution of temples and sacrifices, and the entire service of gods, demigods, and heroes; also the ordering of the repositories of the dead, and the rites which have to be observed by him who would propitiate the inhabitants of the world below. These are matters of which we are ignorant ourselves, and as founders of a city we should be unwise in trusting them to any interpreter but our ancestral deity. He is the god who sits in the centre, on the navel of the earth, and he is the interpreter of religion to all mankind.

You are right, and we will do as you propose.

But where, amid all this, is justice? son of Ariston, tell me where. Now that our city has been made habitable, light a candle and search, and get your brother and Polemarchus and the rest of our friends to help, and let us see where in it we can discover justice and where injustice, and in what they differ from one another, and which of them the man who would be happy should have for his portion, whether seen or unseen by gods and men.

Nonsense, said Glaucon: did you not promise to search yourself, saying that for you not to help justice in her need would be an impiety?

I do not deny that I said so, and as you remind me, I will be as good as my word; but you must join.

We will, he replied.

Well, then, I hope to make the discovery in this way: I mean to begin with the assumption that our State, if rightly ordered, is perfect.

That is most certain.

And being perfect, is therefore wise and valiant and temperate and just.

That is likewise clear.

And whichever of these qualities we find in the State, the one which is not found will be the residue?

Very good.

If there were four things, and we were searching for one of them, wherever it might be, the one sought for might be known to us from the first, and there would be no further trouble; or we might know the other three first, and then the fourth would clearly be the one left.

Very true, he said.

And is not a similar method to be pursued about the virtues, which are also four in number?

Clearly.

First among the virtues found in the State, wisdom comes into view, and in this I detect a certain peculiarity.

What is that?

The State which we have been describing is said to be wise as being good in counsel?

Very true.

And good counsel is clearly a kind of knowledge, for not by ignorance, but by knowledge, do men counsel well?

Clearly.

And the kinds of knowledge in a State are many and diverse?

Of course.

There is the knowledge of the carpenter; but is that the sort of knowledge which gives a city the title of wise and good in counsel?

Certainly not; that would only give a city the reputation of skill in carpentering.

Then a city is not to be called wise because possessing a knowledge which counsels for the best about wooden implements?

Certainly not.

Nor by reason of a knowledge which advises about brazen pots, I said, nor as possessing any other similar knowledge?

Not by reason of any of them, he said.

Nor yet by reason of a knowledge which cultivates the earth; that would give the city the name of agricultural?

Yes.

Well, I said, and is there any knowledge in our recently-founded State among any of the citizens which advises, not about any particular thing in the State, but about the whole, and considers how a State can best deal with itself and with other States?

There certainly is.

And what is this knowledge, and among whom is it found? I asked.

It is the knowledge of the guardians, he replied, and is found among those whom we were just now describing as perfect guardians.

And what is the name which the city derives from the possession of this sort of knowledge?

The name of good in counsel and truly wise.

And will there be in our city more of these true guardians or more smiths?

The smiths, he replied, will be far more numerous.

Will not the guardians be the smallest of all the classes who receive a name from the profession of some kind of knowledge?

Much the smallest.

And so by reason of the smallest part or class, and of the knowledge which resides in this presiding and ruling part of itself, the whole State, being thus constituted according to nature, will be wise; and this, which has the only knowledge worthy to be called wisdom, has been ordained by nature to be of all classes the least.

Most true.

Thus, then, I said, the nature and place in the State of one of the four virtues has somehow or other been discovered.

And, in my humble opinion, very satisfactorily discovered, he replied.

Again, I said, there is no difficulty in seeing the nature of courage, and in what part that quality resides which gives the name of courageous to the State.

How do you mean?

Why, I said, every one who calls any State courageous or cowardly, will be thinking of the part which fights and goes out to war on the State's behalf.

No one, he replied, would ever think of any other.

The rest of the citizens may be courageous or may be cowardly, but their courage or cowardice will not, as I conceive, have the effect of making the city either the one or the other.

Certainly not.

The city will be courageous in virtue of a portion of herself which preserves under all circumstances that opinion about the nature of things to be feared and not to be feared in which our legislator educated them; and this is what you term courage.

I should like to hear what you are saying once more, for I do not think that I perfectly understand you.

I mean that courage is a kind of salvation.

Salvation of what?

Of the opinion respecting things to be feared, what they are and of what nature, which the law implants through education; and I mean by the words 'under all circumstances' to intimate that in pleasure or in pain, or under the influence of desire or fear, a man preserves, and does not lose this opinion. Shall I give you an illustration?

If you please.

You know, I said, that dyers, when they want to dye wool for making the true sea-purple, begin by selecting their white colour first; this they prepare and dress with much care and pains, in order that the white ground may take the purple hue in full perfection. The dyeing then proceeds; and whatever is dyed in this manner becomes a fast colour, and no washing either with lyes or without them can take away the bloom. But, when the ground has not been duly prepared, you will have noticed how poor is the look either of purple or of any other colour.

Yes, he said; I know that they have a washed-out and ridiculous appearance.

Then now, I said, you will understand what our object was in selecting our soldiers, and educating them in music and gymnastic; we were contriving influences which would prepare them to take the dye of the laws in perfection, and the colour of their opinion about dangers and of every other opinion was to be indelibly fixed by their nurture and training, not to be washed away by such potent lyes as pleasure—mightier agent far in washing the soul than any soda or lye; or by sorrow, fear, and desire, the mightiest of all other solvents. And this sort of universal saving power of true opinion in conformity with law about real and false dangers I call and maintain to be courage, unless you disagree.

But I agree, he replied; for I suppose that you mean to exclude mere uninstructed courage, such as that of a wild beast or of a slave—this, in your opinion, is not the courage which the law ordains, and ought to have another name.

Most certainly.

Then I may infer courage to be such as you describe?

Why, yes, said I, you may, and if you add the words 'of a citizen,' you will not be far wrong;—hereafter, if you like, we will carry the examination further, but at present we are seeking not for courage but justice; and for the purpose of our enquiry we have said enough.

You are right, he replied.

Two virtues remain to be discovered in the State—first, temperance, and then justice which is the end of our search.

Very true.

Now, can we find justice without troubling ourselves about temperance?

I do not know how that can be accomplished, he said, nor do I desire that justice should be brought to light and temperance lost sight of; and therefore I wish that you would do me the favour of considering temperance first.

Certainly, I replied, I should not be justified in refusing your request.

Then consider, he said.

Yes, I replied; I will; and as far as I can at present see, the virtue of temperance has more of the nature of harmony and symphony than the preceding.

How so? he asked.

Temperance, I replied, is the ordering or controlling of certain pleasures and desires; this is curiously enough implied in the saying of 'a man being his own master;' and other traces of the same notion may be found in language.

No doubt, he said.

There is something ridiculous in the expression 'master of himself;' for the master is also the servant and the servant the master; and in all these modes of speaking the same person is denoted.

Certainly.

The meaning is, I believe, that in the human soul there is a better and also a worse principle; and when the better has the worse under control, then a man is said to be master of himself; and this is a term of praise: but when, owing to evil education or association, the better principle, which is also the smaller, is overwhelmed by the greater mass of the worse—in this case he is blamed and is called the slave of self and unprincipled.

Yes, there is reason in that.

And now, I said, look at our newly-created State, and there you will find one of these two conditions realized; for the State, as you will acknowledge, may be justly called master of itself, if the words 'temperance' and 'self-mastery' truly express the rule of the better part over the worse.

Yes, he said, I see that what you say is true.

Let me further note that the manifold and complex pleasures and desires and pains are generally found in children and women and servants, and in the freemen so called who are of the lowest and more numerous class.

Certainly, he said.

Whereas the simple and moderate desires which follow reason, and are under the guidance of mind and true opinion, are to be found only in a few, and those the best born and best educated.

Very true.

These two, as you may perceive, have a place in our State; and the meaner desires of the many are held down by the virtuous desires and wisdom of the few.

That I perceive, he said.

Then if there be any city which may be described as master of its own pleasures and desires, and master of itself, ours may claim such a designation?

Certainly, he replied.

It may also be called temperate, and for the same reasons?

Yes.

And if there be any State in which rulers and subjects will be agreed as to the question who are to rule, that again will be our State?

Undoubtedly.

And the citizens being thus agreed among themselves, in which class will temperance be found—in the rulers or in the subjects?

In both, as I should imagine, he replied.

Do you observe that we were not far wrong in our guess that temperance was a sort of harmony?

Why so?

Why, because temperance is unlike courage and wisdom, each of which resides in a part only, the one making the State wise and the other valiant; not so temperance, which extends to the whole, and runs through all the notes of the scale, and produces a harmony of the weaker and the stronger and the middle class, whether you suppose them to be stronger or weaker in wisdom or power or numbers or wealth, or anything else. Most truly then may we deem temperance to be the agreement of the naturally superior and inferior, as to the right to rule of either, both in states and individuals.

I entirely agree with you.

And so, I said, we may consider three out of the four virtues to have been discovered in our State. The last of those qualities which make a state virtuous must be justice, if we only knew what that was.

The inference is obvious.

The time then has arrived, Glaucon, when, like huntsmen, we should surround the cover, and look sharp that justice does not steal away, and pass out of sight and escape us; for beyond a doubt she is somewhere in this country: watch therefore and strive to catch a sight of her, and if you see her first, let me know.

Would that I could! but you should regard me rather as a follower who has just eyes enough to see what you show him—that is about as much as I am good for.

Offer up a prayer with me and follow.

I will, but you must show me the way.

Here is no path, I said, and the wood is dark and perplexing; still we must push on.

Let us push on.

Here I saw something: Halloo! I said, I begin to perceive a track, and I believe that the quarry will not escape.

Good news, he said.

Truly, I said, we are stupid fellows.

Why so?

Why, my good sir, at the beginning of our enquiry, ages ago, there was justice tumbling out at our feet, and we never saw her; nothing could be more ridiculous. Like people who go about looking for what they have in their hands—that was the way with us—we looked not at what we were seeking, but at what was far off in the distance; and therefore, I suppose, we missed her.

What do you mean?

I mean to say that in reality for a long time past we have been talking of justice, and have failed to recognise her.

I grow impatient at the length of your exordium.

Well then, tell me, I said, whether I am right or not: You remember the original principle which we were always laying down at the foundation of the State, that one man should practise one thing only, the thing to which his nature was best adapted;—now justice is this principle or a part of it.

Yes, we often said that one man should do one thing only.

Further, we affirmed that justice was doing one's own business, and not being a busybody; we said so again and again, and many others have said the same to us.

Yes, we said so.

Then to do one's own business in a certain way may be assumed to be justice. Can you tell me whence I derive this inference?

I cannot, but I should like to be told.

Because I think that this is the only virtue which remains in the State when the other virtues of temperance and courage and wisdom are abstracted; and, that this is the ultimate cause and condition of the existence of all of them, and while remaining in them is also their preservative; and we were saying that if the three were discovered by us, justice would be the fourth or remaining one.

That follows of necessity.

If we are asked to determine which of these four qualities by its presence contributes most to the excellence of the State, whether the agreement of rulers and subjects, or the preservation in the soldiers of the opinion which the law ordains about the true nature of dangers, or wisdom and watchfulness in the rulers, or whether this other which I am mentioning, and which is found in children and women, slave and freeman, artisan, ruler, subject,—the quality, I mean, of every one doing his own work, and not being a busybody, would claim the palm—the question is not so easily answered.

Certainly, he replied, there would be a difficulty in saying which.

Then the power of each individual in the State to do his own work appears to compete with the other political virtues, wisdom, temperance, courage.

Yes, he said.

And the virtue which enters into this competition is justice?

Exactly.

Let us look at the question from another point of view: Are not the rulers in a State those to whom you would entrust the office of determining suits at law?

Certainly.

And are suits decided on any other ground but that a man may neither take what is another's, nor be deprived of what is his own?

Yes; that is their principle.

Which is a just principle?

Yes.

Then on this view also justice will be admitted to be the having and doing what is a man's own, and belongs to him?

Very true.

Think, now, and say whether you agree with me or not. Suppose a carpenter to be doing the business of a cobbler, or a cobbler of a carpenter; and suppose them to exchange their implements or their duties, or the same person to be doing the work of both, or whatever be the change; do you think that any great harm would result to the State?

Not much.

But when the cobbler or any other man whom nature designed to be a trader, having his heart lifted up by wealth or strength or the number of his followers, or any like advantage, attempts to force his way into the class of warriors, or a warrior into that of legislators and guardians, for which he is unfitted, and either to take the implements or the duties of the other; or when one man is trader, legislator, and warrior all in one, then I think you will agree with me in saying that this interchange and this meddling of one with another is the ruin of the State.

Most true.

Seeing then, I said, that there are three distinct classes, any meddling of one with another, or the change of one into another, is the greatest harm to the State, and may be most justly termed evil-doing?

Precisely.

And the greatest degree of evil-doing to one's own city would be termed by you injustice?

Certainly.

This then is injustice; and on the other hand when the trader, the auxiliary, and the guardian each do their own business, that is justice, and will make the city just.

I agree with you.

We will not, I said, be over-positive as yet; but if, on trial, this conception of justice be verified in the individual as well as in the State, there will be no longer any room for doubt; if it be not verified, we must have a fresh enquiry. First let us complete the old investigation, which we began, as you remember, under the impression that, if we could previously examine justice on the larger scale, there would be less difficulty in discerning her in the individual. That larger example appeared to be the State, and accordingly we constructed as good a one as we could, knowing well that in the good State justice would be found. Let the discovery which we made be now applied to the individual—if they agree, we shall be satisfied; or, if there be a difference in the individual, we will come back to the State and have another trial of the theory. The friction of the two when rubbed together may possibly strike a light in which justice will shine forth, and the vision which is then revealed we will fix in our souls.

That will be in regular course; let us do as you say.

I proceeded to ask: When two things, a greater and less, are called by the same name, are they like or unlike in so far as they are called the same?

Like, he replied.

The just man then, if we regard the idea of justice only, will be like the just State?

He will.

And a State was thought by us to be just when the three classes in the State severally did their own business; and also thought to be temperate and valiant and wise by reason of certain other affections and qualities of these same classes?

True, he said.

And so of the individual; we may assume that he has the same three principles in his own soul which are found in the State; and he may be rightly described in the same terms, because he is affected in the same manner?

Certainly, he said.

Once more then, O my friend, we have alighted upon an easy question—whether the soul has these three principles or not?

An easy question! Nay, rather, Socrates, the proverb holds that hard is the good.

Very true, I said; and I do not think that the method which we are employing is at all adequate to the accurate solution of this question; the true method is another and a longer one. Still we may arrive at a solution not below the level of the previous enquiry.

May we not be satisfied with that? he said;—under the circumstances, I am quite content.

I too, I replied, shall be extremely well satisfied.

Then faint not in pursuing the speculation, he said.

Must we not acknowledge, I said, that in each of us there are the same principles and habits which there are in the State; and that from the individual they pass into the State?—how else can they come there? Take the quality of passion or spirit;—it would be ridiculous to imagine that this quality, when found in States, is not derived from the individuals who are supposed to possess it, e.g. the Thracians, Scythians, and in general the northern nations; and the same may be said of the love of knowledge, which is the special characteristic of our part of the world, or of the love of money, which may, with equal truth, be attributed to the Phoenicians and Egyptians.

Exactly so, he said.

There is no difficulty in understanding this.

None whatever.

But the question is not quite so easy when we proceed to ask whether these principles are three or one; whether, that is to say, we learn with one part of our nature, are angry with another, and with a third part desire the satisfaction of our natural appetites; or whether the whole soul comes into play in each sort of action—to determine that is the difficulty.

Yes, he said; there lies the difficulty.

Then let us now try and determine whether they are the same or different.

How can we? he asked.

I replied as follows: The same thing clearly cannot act or be acted upon in the same part or in relation to the same thing at the same time, in contrary ways; and therefore whenever this contradiction occurs in things apparently the same, we know that they are really not the same, but different.

Good.

For example, I said, can the same thing be at rest and in motion at the same time in the same part?

Impossible.

Still, I said, let us have a more precise statement of terms, lest we should hereafter fall out by the way. Imagine the case of a man who is standing and also moving his hands and his head, and suppose a person to say that one and the same person is in motion and at rest at the same moment—to such a mode of speech we should object, and should rather say that one part of him is in motion while another is at rest.

Very true.

And suppose the objector to refine still further, and to draw the nice distinction that not only parts of tops, but whole tops, when they spin round with their pegs fixed on the spot, are at rest and in motion at the same time (and he may say the same of anything which revolves in the same spot), his objection would not be admitted by us, because in such cases things are not at rest and in motion in the same parts of themselves; we should rather say that they have both an axis and a circumference, and that the axis stands still, for there is no deviation from the perpendicular; and that the circumference goes round. But if, while revolving, the axis inclines either to the right or left, forwards or backwards, then in no point of view can they be at rest.

That is the correct mode of describing them, he replied.

Then none of these objections will confuse us, or incline us to believe that the same thing at the same time, in the same part or in relation to the same thing, can act or be acted upon in contrary ways.

Certainly not, according to my way of thinking.

Yet, I said, that we may not be compelled to examine all such objections, and prove at length that they are untrue, let us assume their absurdity, and go forward on the understanding that hereafter, if this assumption turn out to be untrue, all the consequences which follow shall be withdrawn.

Yes, he said, that will be the best way.

Well, I said, would you not allow that assent and dissent, desire and aversion, attraction and repulsion, are all of them opposites, whether they are regarded as active or passive (for that makes no difference in the fact of their opposition)?

Yes, he said, they are opposites.

Well, I said, and hunger and thirst, and the desires in general, and again willing and wishing,—all these you would refer to the classes already mentioned. You would say—would you not?—that the soul of him who desires is seeking after the object of his desire; or that he is drawing to himself the thing which he wishes to possess: or again, when a person wants anything to be given him, his mind, longing for the realization of his desire, intimates his wish to have it by a nod of assent, as if he had been asked a question?

Very true.

And what would you say of unwillingness and dislike and the absence of desire; should not these be referred to the opposite class of repulsion and rejection?

Certainly.

Admitting this to be true of desire generally, let us suppose a particular class of desires, and out of these we will select hunger and thirst, as they are termed, which are the most obvious of them?

Let us take that class, he said.

The object of one is food, and of the other drink?

Yes.

And here comes the point: is not thirst the desire which the soul has of drink, and of drink only; not of drink qualified by anything else; for example, warm or cold, or much or little, or, in a word, drink of any particular sort: but if the thirst be accompanied by heat, then the desire is of cold drink; or, if accompanied by cold, then of warm drink; or, if the thirst be excessive, then the drink which is desired will be excessive; or, if not great, the quantity of drink will also be small: but thirst pure and simple will desire drink pure and simple, which is the natural satisfaction of thirst, as food is of hunger?

Yes, he said; the simple desire is, as you say, in every case of the simple object, and the qualified desire of the qualified object.

But here a confusion may arise; and I should wish to guard against an opponent starting up and saying that no man desires drink only, but good drink, or food only, but good food; for good is the universal object of desire, and thirst being a desire, will necessarily be thirst after good drink; and the same is true of every other desire.

Yes, he replied, the opponent might have something to say.

Nevertheless I should still maintain, that of relatives some have a quality attached to either term of the relation; others are simple and have their correlatives simple.

I do not know what you mean.

Well, you know of course that the greater is relative to the less?

Certainly.

And the much greater to the much less?

Yes.

And the sometime greater to the sometime less, and the greater that is to be to the less that is to be?

Certainly, he said.

And so of more and less, and of other correlative terms, such as the double and the half, or again, the heavier and the lighter, the swifter and the slower; and of hot and cold, and of any other relatives;—is not this true of all of them?

Yes.

And does not the same principle hold in the sciences? The object of science is knowledge (assuming that to be the true definition), but the object of a particular science is a particular kind of knowledge; I mean, for example, that the science of house-building is a kind of knowledge which is defined and distinguished from other kinds and is therefore termed architecture.

Certainly.

Because it has a particular quality which no other has?

Yes.

And it has this particular quality because it has an object of a particular kind; and this is true of the other arts and sciences?

Yes.

Now, then, if I have made myself clear, you will understand my original meaning in what I said about relatives. My meaning was, that if one term of a relation is taken alone, the other is taken alone; if one term is qualified, the other is also qualified. I do not mean to say that relatives may not be disparate, or that the science of health is healthy, or of disease necessarily diseased, or that the sciences of good and evil are therefore good and evil; but only that, when the term science is no longer used absolutely, but has a qualified object which in this case is the nature of health and disease, it becomes defined, and is hence called not merely science, but the science of medicine.

I quite understand, and I think as you do.

Would you not say that thirst is one of these essentially relative terms, having clearly a relation--

Yes, thirst is relative to drink.

And a certain kind of thirst is relative to a certain kind of drink; but thirst taken alone is neither of much nor little, nor of good nor bad, nor of any particular kind of drink, but of drink only?

Certainly.

Then the soul of the thirsty one, in so far as he is thirsty, desires only drink; for this he yearns and tries to obtain it?

That is plain.

And if you suppose something which pulls a thirsty soul away from drink, that must be different from the thirsty principle which draws him like a beast to drink; for, as we were saying, the same thing cannot at the same time with the same part of itself act in contrary ways about the same.

Impossible.

No more than you can say that the hands of the archer push and pull the bow at the same time, but what you say is that one hand pushes and the other pulls.

Exactly so, he replied.

And might a man be thirsty, and yet unwilling to drink?

Yes, he said, it constantly happens.

And in such a case what is one to say? Would you not say that there was something in the soul bidding a man to drink, and something else forbidding him, which is other and stronger than the principle which bids him?

I should say so.

And the forbidding principle is derived from reason, and that which bids and attracts proceeds from passion and disease?

Clearly.

Then we may fairly assume that they are two, and that they differ from one another; the one with which a man reasons, we may call the rational principle of the soul, the other, with which he loves and hungers and thirsts and feels the flutterings of any other desire, may be termed the irrational or appetitive, the ally of sundry pleasures and satisfactions?

Yes, he said, we may fairly assume them to be different.

Then let us finally determine that there are two principles existing in the soul. And what of passion, or spirit? Is it a third, or akin to one of the preceding?

I should be inclined to say—akin to desire.

Well, I said, there is a story which I remember to have heard, and in which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.

I have heard the story myself, he said.

The moral of the tale is, that anger at times goes to war with desire, as though they were two distinct things.

Yes; that is the meaning, he said.

And are there not many other cases in which we observe that when a man's desires violently prevail over his reason, he reviles himself, and is angry at the violence within him, and that in this struggle, which is like the struggle of factions in a State, his spirit is on the side of his reason;—but for the passionate or spirited element to take part with the desires when reason decides that she should not be opposed, is a sort of thing which I believe that you never observed occurring in yourself, nor, as I should imagine, in any one else?

Certainly not.

Suppose that a man thinks he has done a wrong to another, the nobler he is the less able is he to feel indignant at any suffering, such as hunger, or cold, or any other pain which the injured person may inflict upon him—these he deems to be just, and, as I say, his anger refuses to be excited by them.

True, he said.

But when he thinks that he is the sufferer of the wrong, then he boils and chafes, and is on the side of what he believes to be justice; and because he suffers hunger or cold or other pain he is only the more determined to persevere and conquer. His noble spirit will not be quelled until he either slays or is slain; or until he hears the voice of the shepherd, that is, reason, bidding his dog bark no more.

The illustration is perfect, he replied; and in our State, as we were saying, the auxiliaries were to be dogs, and to hear the voice of the rulers, who are their shepherds.

I perceive, I said, that you quite understand me; there is, however, a further point which I wish you to consider.

What point?

You remember that passion or spirit appeared at first sight to be a kind of desire, but now we should say quite the contrary; for in the conflict of the soul spirit is arrayed on the side of the rational principle.

Most assuredly.

But a further question arises: Is passion different from reason also, or only a kind of reason; in which latter case, instead of three principles in the soul, there will only be two, the rational and the concupiscent; or rather, as the State was composed of three classes, traders, auxiliaries, counsellors, so may there not be in the individual soul a third element which is passion or spirit, and when not corrupted by bad education is the natural auxiliary of reason?

Yes, he said, there must be a third.

Yes, I replied, if passion, which has already been shown to be different from desire, turn out also to be different from reason.

But that is easily proved:—We may observe even in young children that they are full of spirit almost as soon as they are born, whereas some of them never seem to attain to the use of reason, and most of them late enough.

Excellent, I said, and you may see passion equally in brute animals, which is a further proof of the truth of what you are saying. And we may once more appeal to the words of Homer, which have been already quoted by us,

'He smote his breast, and thus rebuked his soul,'

for in this verse Homer has clearly supposed the power which reasons about the better and worse to be different from the unreasoning anger which is rebuked by it.

Very true, he said.

And so, after much tossing, we have reached land, and are fairly agreed that the same principles which exist in the State exist also in the individual, and that they are three in number.

Exactly.

Must we not then infer that the individual is wise in the same way, and in virtue of the same quality which makes the State wise?

Certainly.

Also that the same quality which constitutes courage in the State constitutes courage in the individual, and that both the State and the individual bear the same relation to all the other virtues?

Assuredly.

And the individual will be acknowledged by us to be just in the same way in which the State is just?

That follows, of course.

We cannot but remember that the justice of the State consisted in each of the three classes doing the work of its own class?

We are not very likely to have forgotten, he said.

We must recollect that the individual in whom the several qualities of his nature do their own work will be just, and will do his own work?

Yes, he said, we must remember that too.

And ought not the rational principle, which is wise, and has the care of the whole soul, to rule, and the passionate or spirited principle to be the subject and ally?

Certainly.

And, as we were saying, the united influence of music and gymnastic will bring them into accord, nerving and sustaining the reason with noble words and lessons, and moderating and soothing and civilizing the wildness of passion by harmony and rhythm?

Quite true, he said.

And these two, thus nurtured and educated, and having learned truly to know their own functions, will rule over the concupiscent, which in each of us is the largest part of the soul and by nature most insatiable of gain; over this they will keep guard, lest, waxing great and strong with the fulness of bodily pleasures, as they are termed, the concupiscent soul, no longer confined to her own sphere, should attempt to enslave and rule those who are not her natural-born subjects, and overturn the whole life of man?

Very true, he said.

Both together will they not be the best defenders of the whole soul and the whole body against attacks from without; the one counselling, and the other fighting under his leader, and courageously executing his commands and counsels?

True.

And he is to be deemed courageous whose spirit retains in pleasure and in pain the commands of reason about what he ought or ought not to fear?

Right, he replied.

And him we call wise who has in him that little part which rules, and which proclaims these commands; that part too being supposed to have a knowledge of what is for the interest of each of the three parts and of the whole?

Assuredly.

And would you not say that he is temperate who has these same elements in friendly harmony, in whom the one ruling principle of reason, and the two subject ones of spirit and desire are equally agreed that reason ought to rule, and do not rebel?

Certainly, he said, that is the true account of temperance whether in the State or individual.

And surely, I said, we have explained again and again how and by virtue of what quality a man will be just.

That is very certain.

And is justice dimmer in the individual, and is her form different, or is she the same which we found her to be in the State?

There is no difference in my opinion, he said.

Because, if any doubt is still lingering in our minds, a few commonplace instances will satisfy us of the truth of what I am saying.

What sort of instances do you mean?

If the case is put to us, must we not admit that the just State, or the man who is trained in the principles of such a State, will be less likely than the unjust to make away with a deposit of gold or silver? Would any one deny this?

No one, he replied.

Will the just man or citizen ever be guilty of sacrilege or theft, or treachery either to his friends or to his country?

Never.

Neither will he ever break faith where there have been oaths or agreements?

Impossible.

No one will be less likely to commit adultery, or to dishonour his father and mother, or to fail in his religious duties?

No one.

And the reason is that each part of him is doing its own business, whether in ruling or being ruled?

Exactly so.

Are you satisfied then that the quality which makes such men and such states is justice, or do you hope to discover some other?

Not I, indeed.

Then our dream has been realized; and the suspicion which we entertained at the beginning of our work of construction, that some divine power must have conducted us to a primary form of justice, has now been verified?

Yes, certainly.

And the division of labour which required the carpenter and the shoemaker and the rest of the citizens to be doing each his own business, and not another's, was a shadow of justice, and for that reason it was of use?

Clearly.

But in reality justice was such as we were describing, being concerned however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others,—he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him, which may be compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the intermediate intervals—when he has bound all these together, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affair of politics or private business; always thinking and calling that which preserves and co-operates with this harmonious condition, just and good action, and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom, and that which at any time impairs this condition, he will call unjust action, and the opinion which presides over it ignorance.

You have said the exact truth, Socrates.

Very good; and if we were to affirm that we had discovered the just man and the just State, and the nature of justice in each of them, we should not be telling a falsehood?

Most certainly not.

May we say so, then?

Let us say so.

And now, I said, injustice has to be considered.

Clearly.

Must not injustice be a strife which arises among the three principles—a meddlesomeness, and interference, and rising up of a part of the soul against the whole, an assertion of unlawful authority, which is made by a rebellious subject against a true prince, of whom he is the natural vassal,—what is all this confusion and delusion but injustice, and intemperance and cowardice and ignorance, and every form of vice?

Exactly so.

And if the nature of justice and injustice be known, then the meaning of acting unjustly and being unjust, or, again, of acting justly, will also be perfectly clear?

What do you mean? he said.

Why, I said, they are like disease and health; being in the soul just what disease and health are in the body.

How so? he said.

Why, I said, that which is healthy causes health, and that which is unhealthy causes disease.

Yes.

And just actions cause justice, and unjust actions cause injustice?

That is certain.

And the creation of health is the institution of a natural order and government of one by another in the parts of the body; and the creation of disease is the production of a state of things at variance with this natural order?

True.

And is not the creation of justice the institution of a natural order and government of one by another in the parts of the soul, and the creation of injustice the production of a state of things at variance with the natural order?

Exactly so, he said.

Then virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice the disease and weakness and deformity of the same?

True.

And do not good practices lead to virtue, and evil practices to vice?

Assuredly.

Still our old question of the comparative advantage of justice and injustice has not been answered: Which is the more profitable, to be just and act justly and practise virtue, whether seen or unseen of gods and men, or to be unjust and act unjustly, if only unpunished and unreformed?

In my judgment, Socrates, the question has now become ridiculous. We know that, when the bodily constitution is gone, life is no longer endurable, though pampered with all kinds of meats and drinks, and having all wealth and all power; and shall we be told that when the very essence of the vital principle is undermined and corrupted, life is still worth having to a man, if only he be allowed to do whatever he likes with the single exception that he is not to acquire justice and virtue, or to escape from injustice and vice; assuming them both to be such as we have described?

Yes, I said, the question is, as you say, ridiculous. Still, as we are near the spot at which we may see the truth in the clearest manner with our own eyes, let us not faint by the way.

Certainly not, he replied.

Come up hither, I said, and behold the various forms of vice, those of them, I mean, which are worth looking at.

I am following you, he replied: proceed.

I said, The argument seems to have reached a height from which, as from some tower of speculation, a man may look down and see that virtue is one, but that the forms of vice are innumerable; there being four special ones which are deserving of note.

What do you mean? he said.

I mean, I replied, that there appear to be as many forms of the soul as there are distinct forms of the State.

How many?

There are five of the State, and five of the soul, I said.

What are they?

The first, I said, is that which we have been describing, and which may be said to have two names, monarchy and aristocracy, accordingly as rule is exercised by one distinguished man or by many.

True, he replied.

But I regard the two names as describing one form only; for whether the government is in the hands of one or many, if the governors have been trained in the manner which we have supposed, the fundamental laws of the State will be maintained.

That is true, he replied.

BOOK V.

Such is the good and true City or State, and the good and true man is of the same pattern; and if this is right every other is wrong; and the evil is one which affects not only the ordering of the State, but also the regulation of the individual soul, and is exhibited in four forms.

What are they? he said.

I was proceeding to tell the order in which the four evil forms appeared to me to succeed one another, when Polemarchus, who was sitting a little way off, just beyond Adeimantus, began to whisper to him: stretching forth his hand, he took hold of the upper part of his coat by the shoulder, and drew him towards him, leaning forward himself so as to be quite close and saying something in his ear, of which I only caught the words, 'Shall we let him off, or what shall we do?'

Certainly not, said Adeimantus, raising his voice.

Who is it, I said, whom you are refusing to let off?

You, he said.

I repeated, Why am I especially not to be let off?

Why, he said, we think that you are lazy, and mean to cheat us out of a whole chapter which is a very important part of the story; and you fancy that we shall not notice your airy way of proceeding; as if it were self-evident to everybody, that in the matter of women and children 'friends have all things in common.'

And was I not right, Adeimantus?

Yes, he said; but what is right in this particular case, like everything else, requires to be explained; for community may be of many kinds. Please, therefore, to say what sort of community you mean. We have been long expecting that you would tell us something about the family life of your citizens—how they will bring children into the world, and rear them when they have arrived, and, in general, what is the nature of this community of women and children—for we are of opinion that the right or wrong management of such matters will have a great and paramount influence on the State for good or for evil. And now, since the question is still undetermined, and you are taking in hand another State, we have resolved, as you heard, not to let you go until you give an account of all this.

To that resolution, said Glaucon, you may regard me as saying Agreed.

And without more ado, said Thrasymachus, you may consider us all to be equally agreed.

I said, You know not what you are doing in thus assailing me: What an argument are you raising about the State! Just as I thought that I had finished, and was only too glad that I had laid this question to sleep, and was reflecting how fortunate I was in your acceptance of what I then said, you ask me to begin again at the very foundation, ignorant of what a hornet's nest of words you are stirring. Now I foresaw this gathering trouble, and avoided it.

For what purpose do you conceive that we have come here, said Thrasymachus,—to look for gold, or to hear discourse?

Yes, but discourse should have a limit.

Yes, Socrates, said Glaucon, and the whole of life is the only limit which wise men assign to the hearing of such discourses. But never mind about us; take heart yourself and answer the question in your own way: What sort of community of women and children is this which is to prevail among our guardians? and how shall we manage the period between birth and education, which seems to require the greatest care? Tell us how these things will be.

Yes, my simple friend, but the answer is the reverse of easy; many more doubts arise about this than about our previous conclusions. For the practicability of what is said may be doubted; and looked at in another point of view, whether the scheme, if ever so practicable, would be for the best, is also doubtful. Hence I feel a reluctance to approach the subject, lest our aspiration, my dear friend, should turn out to be a dream only.

Fear not, he replied, for your audience will not be hard upon you; they are not sceptical or hostile.

I said: My good friend, I suppose that you mean to encourage me by these words.

Yes, he said.

Then let me tell you that you are doing just the reverse; the encouragement which you offer would have been all very well had I myself believed that I knew what I was talking about: to declare the truth about matters of high interest which a man honours and loves among wise men who love him need occasion no fear or faltering in his mind; but to carry on an argument when you are yourself only a hesitating enquirer, which is my condition, is a dangerous and slippery thing; and the danger is not that I shall be laughed at (of which the fear would be childish), but that I shall miss the truth where I have most need to be sure of my footing, and drag my friends after me in my fall. And I pray Nemesis not to visit upon me the words which I am going to utter. For I do indeed believe that to be an involuntary homicide is a less crime than to be a deceiver about beauty or goodness or justice in the matter of laws. And that is a risk which I would rather run among enemies than among friends, and therefore you do well to encourage me.

Glaucon laughed and said: Well then, Socrates, in case you and your argument do us any serious injury you shall be acquitted beforehand of the homicide, and shall not be held to be a deceiver; take courage then and speak.

Well, I said, the law says that when a man is acquitted he is free from guilt, and what holds at law may hold in argument.

Then why should you mind?

Well, I replied, I suppose that I must retrace my steps and say what I perhaps ought to have said before in the proper place. The part of the men has been played out, and now properly enough comes the turn of the women. Of them I will proceed to speak, and the more readily since I am invited by you.

For men born and educated like our citizens, the only way, in my opinion, of arriving at a right conclusion about the possession and use of women and children is to follow the path on which we originally started, when we said that the men were to be the guardians and watchdogs of the herd.

True.

Let us further suppose the birth and education of our women to be subject to similar or nearly similar regulations; then we shall see whether the result accords with our design.

What do you mean?

What I mean may be put into the form of a question, I said: Are dogs divided into hes and shes, or do they both share equally in hunting and in keeping watch and in the other duties of dogs? or do we entrust to the males the entire and exclusive care of the flocks, while we leave the females at home, under the idea that the bearing and suckling their puppies is labour enough for them?

No, he said, they share alike; the only difference between them is that the males are stronger and the females weaker.

But can you use different animals for the same purpose, unless they are bred and fed in the same way?

You cannot.

Then, if women are to have the same duties as men, they must have the same nurture and education?

Yes.

The education which was assigned to the men was music and gymnastic.

Yes.

Then women must be taught music and gymnastic and also the art of war, which they must practise like the men?

That is the inference, I suppose.

I should rather expect, I said, that several of our proposals, if they are carried out, being unusual, may appear ridiculous.

No doubt of it.

Yes, and the most ridiculous thing of all will be the sight of women naked in the palaestra, exercising with the men, especially when they are no longer young; they certainly will not be a vision of beauty, any more than the enthusiastic old men who in spite of wrinkles and ugliness continue to frequent the gymnasia.

Yes, indeed, he said: according to present notions the proposal would be thought ridiculous.

But then, I said, as we have determined to speak our minds, we must not fear the jests of the wits which will be directed against this sort of innovation; how they will talk of women's attainments both in music and gymnastic, and above all about their wearing armour and riding upon horseback!

Very true, he replied.

Yet having begun we must go forward to the rough places of the law; at the same time begging of these gentlemen for once in their life to be serious. Not long ago, as we shall remind them, the Hellenes were of the opinion, which is still generally received among the barbarians, that the sight of a naked man was ridiculous and improper; and when first the Cretans and then the Lacedaemonians introduced the custom, the wits of that day might equally have ridiculed the innovation.

No doubt.

But when experience showed that to let all things be uncovered was far better than to cover them up, and the ludicrous effect to the outward eye vanished before the better principle which reason asserted, then the man was perceived to be a fool who directs the shafts of his ridicule at any other sight but that of folly and vice, or seriously inclines to weigh the beautiful by any other standard but that of the good.

Very true, he replied.

First, then, whether the question is to be put in jest or in earnest, let us come to an understanding about the nature of woman: Is she capable of sharing either wholly or partially in the actions of men, or not at all? And is the art of war one of those arts in which she can or can not share? That will be the best way of commencing the enquiry, and will probably lead to the fairest conclusion.

That will be much the best way.

Shall we take the other side first and begin by arguing against ourselves; in this manner the adversary's position will not be undefended.

Why not? he said.

Then let us put a speech into the mouths of our opponents. They will say: 'Socrates and Glaucon, no adversary need convict you, for you yourselves, at the first foundation of the State, admitted the principle that everybody was to do the one work suited to his own nature.' And certainly, if I am not mistaken, such an admission was made by us. 'And do not the natures of men and women differ very much indeed?' And we shall reply: Of course they do. Then we shall be asked, 'Whether the tasks assigned to men and to women should not be different, and such as are agreeable to their different natures?' Certainly they should. 'But if so, have you not fallen into a serious inconsistency in saying that men and women, whose natures are so entirely different, ought to perform the same actions?'—What defence will you make for us, my good Sir, against any one who offers these objections?

That is not an easy question to answer when asked suddenly; and I shall and I do beg of you to draw out the case on our side.

These are the objections, Glaucon, and there are many others of a like kind, which I foresaw long ago; they made me afraid and reluctant to take in hand any law about the possession and nurture of women and children.

By Zeus, he said, the problem to be solved is anything but easy.

Why yes, I said, but the fact is that when a man is out of his depth, whether he has fallen into a little swimming bath or into mid ocean, he has to swim all the same.

Very true.

And must not we swim and try to reach the shore: we will hope that Arion's dolphin or some other miraculous help may save us?

I suppose so, he said.

Well then, let us see if any way of escape can be found. We acknowledged—did we not? that different natures ought to have different pursuits, and that men's and women's natures are different. And now what are we saying?—that different natures ought to have the same pursuits,—this is the inconsistency which is charged upon us.

Precisely.

Verily, Glaucon, I said, glorious is the power of the art of contradiction!

Why do you say so?

Because I think that many a man falls into the practice against his will. When he thinks that he is reasoning he is really disputing, just because he cannot define and divide, and so know that of which he is speaking; and he will pursue a merely verbal opposition in the spirit of contention and not of fair discussion.

Yes, he replied, such is very often the case; but what has that to do with us and our argument?

A great deal; for there is certainly a danger of our getting unintentionally into a verbal opposition.

In what way?

Why we valiantly and pugnaciously insist upon the verbal truth, that different natures ought to have different pursuits, but we never considered at all what was the meaning of sameness or difference of nature, or why we distinguished them when we assigned different pursuits to different natures and the same to the same natures.

Why, no, he said, that was never considered by us.

I said: Suppose that by way of illustration we were to ask the question whether there is not an opposition in nature between bald men and hairy men; and if this is admitted by us, then, if bald men are cobblers, we should forbid the hairy men to be cobblers, and conversely?

That would be a jest, he said.

Yes, I said, a jest; and why? because we never meant when we constructed the State, that the opposition of natures should extend to every difference, but only to those differences which affected the pursuit in which the individual is engaged; we should have argued, for example, that a physician and one who is in mind a physician may be said to have the same nature.

True.

Whereas the physician and the carpenter have different natures?

Certainly.

And if, I said, the male and female sex appear to differ in their fitness for any art or pursuit, we should say that such pursuit or art ought to be assigned to one or the other of them; but if the difference consists only in women bearing and men begetting children, this does not amount to a proof that a woman differs from a man in respect of the sort of education she should receive; and we shall therefore continue to maintain that our guardians and their wives ought to have the same pursuits.

Very true, he said.

Next, we shall ask our opponent how, in reference to any of the pursuits or arts of civic life, the nature of a woman differs from that of a man?

That will be quite fair.

And perhaps he, like yourself, will reply that to give a sufficient answer on the instant is not easy; but after a little reflection there is no difficulty.

Yes, perhaps.

Suppose then that we invite him to accompany us in the argument, and then we may hope to show him that there is nothing peculiar in the constitution of women which would affect them in the administration of the State.

By all means.

Let us say to him: Come now, and we will ask you a question:—when you spoke of a nature gifted or not gifted in any respect, did you mean to say that one man will acquire a thing easily, another with difficulty; a little learning will lead the one to discover a great deal; whereas the other, after much study and application, no sooner learns than he forgets; or again, did you mean, that the one has a body which is a good servant to his mind, while the body of the other is a hindrance to him?—would not these be the sort of differences which distinguish the man gifted by nature from the one who is ungifted?

No one will deny that.

And can you mention any pursuit of mankind in which the male sex has not all these gifts and qualities in a higher degree than the female? Need I waste time in speaking of the art of weaving, and the management of pancakes and preserves, in which womankind does really appear to be great, and in which for her to be beaten by a man is of all things the most absurd?

You are quite right, he replied, in maintaining the general inferiority of the female sex: although many women are in many things superior to many men, yet on the whole what you say is true.

And if so, my friend, I said, there is no special faculty of administration in a state which a woman has because she is a woman, or which a man has by virtue of his sex, but the gifts of nature are alike diffused in both; all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man.

Very true.

Then are we to impose all our enactments on men and none of them on women?

That will never do.

One woman has a gift of healing, another not; one is a musician, and another has no music in her nature?

Very true.

And one woman has a turn for gymnastic and military exercises, and another is unwarlike and hates gymnastics?

Certainly.

And one woman is a philosopher, and another is an enemy of philosophy; one has spirit, and another is without spirit?

That is also true.

Then one woman will have the temper of a guardian, and another not. Was not the selection of the male guardians determined by differences of this sort?

Yes.

Men and women alike possess the qualities which make a guardian; they differ only in their comparative strength or weakness.

Obviously.

And those women who have such qualities are to be selected as the companions and colleagues of men who have similar qualities and whom they resemble in capacity and in character?

Very true.

And ought not the same natures to have the same pursuits?

They ought.

Then, as we were saying before, there is nothing unnatural in assigning music and gymnastic to the wives of the guardians—to that point we come round again.

Certainly not.

The law which we then enacted was agreeable to nature, and therefore not an impossibility or mere aspiration; and the contrary practice, which prevails at present, is in reality a violation of nature.

That appears to be true.

We had to consider, first, whether our proposals were possible, and secondly whether they were the most beneficial?

Yes.

And the possibility has been acknowledged?

Yes.

The very great benefit has next to be established?

Quite so.

You will admit that the same education which makes a man a good guardian will make a woman a good guardian; for their original nature is the same?

Yes.

I should like to ask you a question.

What is it?

Would you say that all men are equal in excellence, or is one man better than another?

The latter.

And in the commonwealth which we were founding do you conceive the guardians who have been brought up on our model system to be more perfect men, or the cobblers whose education has been cobbling?

What a ridiculous question!

You have answered me, I replied: Well, and may we not further say that our guardians are the best of our citizens?

By far the best.

And will not their wives be the best women?

Yes, by far the best.

And can there be anything better for the interests of the State than that the men and women of a State should be as good as possible?

There can be nothing better.

And this is what the arts of music and gymnastic, when present in such manner as we have described, will accomplish?

Certainly.

Then we have made an enactment not only possible but in the highest degree beneficial to the State?

True.

Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be their robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defence of their country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same. And as for the man who laughs at naked women exercising their bodies from the best of motives, in his laughter he is plucking

'A fruit of unripe wisdom,'

and he himself is ignorant of what he is laughing at, or what he is about;—for that is, and ever will be, the best of sayings, That the useful is the noble and the hurtful is the base.

Very true.

Here, then, is one difficulty in our law about women, which we may say that we have now escaped; the wave has not swallowed us up alive for enacting that the guardians of either sex should have all their pursuits in common; to the utility and also to the possibility of this arrangement the consistency of the argument with itself bears witness.

Yes, that was a mighty wave which you have escaped.

Yes, I said, but a greater is coming; you will not think much of this when you see the next.

Go on; let me see.

The law, I said, which is the sequel of this and of all that has preceded, is to the following effect,—'that the wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent.'

Yes, he said, that is a much greater wave than the other; and the possibility as well as the utility of such a law are far more questionable.

I do not think, I said, that there can be any dispute about the very great utility of having wives and children in common; the possibility is quite another matter, and will be very much disputed.

I think that a good many doubts may be raised about both.

You imply that the two questions must be combined, I replied. Now I meant that you should admit the utility; and in this way, as I thought, I should escape from one of them, and then there would remain only the possibility.

But that little attempt is detected, and therefore you will please to give a defence of both.

Well, I said, I submit to my fate. Yet grant me a little favour: let me feast my mind with the dream as day dreamers are in the habit of feasting themselves when they are walking alone; for before they have discovered any means of effecting their wishes—that is a matter which never troubles them—they would rather not tire themselves by thinking about possibilities; but assuming that what they desire is already granted to them, they proceed with their plan, and delight in detailing what they mean to do when their wish has come true—that is a way which they have of not doing much good to a capacity which was never good for much. Now I myself am beginning to lose heart, and I should like, with your permission, to pass over the question of possibility at present. Assuming therefore the possibility of the proposal, I shall now proceed to enquire how the rulers will carry out these arrangements, and I shall demonstrate that our plan, if executed, will be of the greatest benefit to the State and to the guardians. First of all, then, if you have no objection, I will endeavour with your help to consider the advantages of the measure; and hereafter the question of possibility.

I have no objection; proceed.

First, I think that if our rulers and their auxiliaries are to be worthy of the name which they bear, there must be willingness to obey in the one and the power of command in the other; the guardians must themselves obey the laws, and they must also imitate the spirit of them in any details which are entrusted to their care.

That is right, he said.

You, I said, who are their legislator, having selected the men, will now select the women and give them to them;—they must be as far as possible of like natures with them; and they must live in common houses and meet at common meals. None of them will have anything specially his or her own; they will be together, and will be brought up together, and will associate at gymnastic exercises. And so they will be drawn by a necessity of their natures to have intercourse with each other—necessity is not too strong a word, I think?

Yes, he said;—necessity, not geometrical, but another sort of necessity which lovers know, and which is far more convincing and constraining to the mass of mankind.

True, I said; and this, Glaucon, like all the rest, must proceed after an orderly fashion; in a city of the blessed, licentiousness is an unholy thing which the rulers will forbid.

Yes, he said, and it ought not to be permitted.

Then clearly the next thing will be to make matrimony sacred in the highest degree, and what is most beneficial will be deemed sacred?

Exactly.

And how can marriages be made most beneficial?—that is a question which I put to you, because I see in your house dogs for hunting, and of the nobler sort of birds not a few. Now, I beseech you, do tell me, have you ever attended to their pairing and breeding?

In what particulars?

Why, in the first place, although they are all of a good sort, are not some better than others?

True.

And do you breed from them all indifferently, or do you take care to breed from the best only?

From the best.

And do you take the oldest or the youngest, or only those of ripe age?

I choose only those of ripe age.

And if care was not taken in the breeding, your dogs and birds would greatly deteriorate?

Certainly.

And the same of horses and animals in general?

Undoubtedly.

Good heavens! my dear friend, I said, what consummate skill will our rulers need if the same principle holds of the human species!

Certainly, the same principle holds; but why does this involve any particular skill?

Because, I said, our rulers will often have to practise upon the body corporate with medicines. Now you know that when patients do not require medicines, but have only to be put under a regimen, the inferior sort of practitioner is deemed to be good enough; but when medicine has to be given, then the doctor should be more of a man.

That is quite true, he said; but to what are you alluding?

I mean, I replied, that our rulers will find a considerable dose of falsehood and deceit necessary for the good of their subjects: we were saying that the use of all these things regarded as medicines might be of advantage.

And we were very right.

And this lawful use of them seems likely to be often needed in the regulations of marriages and births.

How so?

Why, I said, the principle has been already laid down that the best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior, as seldom as possible; and that they should rear the offspring of the one sort of union, but not of the other, if the flock is to be maintained in first-rate condition. Now these goings on must be a secret which the rulers only know, or there will be a further danger of our herd, as the guardians may be termed, breaking out into rebellion.

Very true.

Had we not better appoint certain festivals at which we will bring together the brides and bridegrooms, and sacrifices will be offered and suitable hymeneal songs composed by our poets: the number of weddings is a matter which must be left to the discretion of the rulers, whose aim will be to preserve the average of population? There are many other things which they will have to consider, such as the effects of wars and diseases and any similar agencies, in order as far as this is possible to prevent the State from becoming either too large or too small.

Certainly, he replied.

We shall have to invent some ingenious kind of lots which the less worthy may draw on each occasion of our bringing them together, and then they will accuse their own ill-luck and not the rulers.

To be sure, he said.

And I think that our braver and better youth, besides their other honours and rewards, might have greater facilities of intercourse with women given them; their bravery will be a reason, and such fathers ought to have as many sons as possible.

True.

And the proper officers, whether male or female or both, for offices are to be held by women as well as by men--

Yes--

The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.

Yes, he said, that must be done if the breed of the guardians is to be kept pure.

They will provide for their nurture, and will bring the mothers to the fold when they are full of milk, taking the greatest possible care that no mother recognises her own child; and other wet-nurses may be engaged if more are required. Care will also be taken that the process of suckling shall not be protracted too long; and the mothers will have no getting up at night or other trouble, but will hand over all this sort of thing to the nurses and attendants.

You suppose the wives of our guardians to have a fine easy time of it when they are having children.

Why, said I, and so they ought. Let us, however, proceed with our scheme. We were saying that the parents should be in the prime of life?

Very true.

And what is the prime of life? May it not be defined as a period of about twenty years in a woman's life, and thirty in a man's?

Which years do you mean to include?

A woman, I said, at twenty years of age may begin to bear children to the State, and continue to bear them until forty; a man may begin at five-and-twenty, when he has passed the point at which the pulse of life beats quickest, and continue to beget children until he be fifty-five.

Certainly, he said, both in men and women those years are the prime of physical as well as of intellectual vigour.

Any one above or below the prescribed ages who takes part in the public hymeneals shall be said to have done an unholy and unrighteous thing; the child of which he is the father, if it steals into life, will have been conceived under auspices very unlike the sacrifices and prayers, which at each hymeneal priestesses and priest and the whole city will offer, that the new generation may be better and more useful than their good and useful parents, whereas his child will be the offspring of darkness and strange lust.

Very true, he replied.

And the same law will apply to any one of those within the prescribed age who forms a connection with any woman in the prime of life without the sanction of the rulers; for we shall say that he is raising up a bastard to the State, uncertified and unconsecrated.

Very true, he replied.

This applies, however, only to those who are within the specified age: after that we allow them to range at will, except that a man may not marry his daughter or his daughter's daughter, or his mother or his mother's mother; and women, on the other hand, are prohibited from marrying their sons or fathers, or son's son or father's father, and so on in either direction. And we grant all this, accompanying the permission with strict orders to prevent any embryo which may come into being from seeing the light; and if any force a way to the birth, the parents must understand that the offspring of such an union cannot be maintained, and arrange accordingly.

That also, he said, is a reasonable proposition. But how will they know who are fathers and daughters, and so on?

They will never know. The way will be this:—dating from the day of the hymeneal, the bridegroom who was then married will call all the male children who are born in the seventh and tenth month afterwards his sons, and the female children his daughters, and they will call him father, and he will call their children his grandchildren, and they will call the elder generation grandfathers and grandmothers. All who were begotten at the time when their fathers and mothers came together will be called their brothers and sisters, and these, as I was saying, will be forbidden to inter-marry. This, however, is not to be understood as an absolute prohibition of the marriage of brothers and sisters; if the lot favours them, and they receive the sanction of the Pythian oracle, the law will allow them.

Quite right, he replied.

Such is the scheme, Glaucon, according to which the guardians of our State are to have their wives and families in common. And now you would have the argument show that this community is consistent with the rest of our polity, and also that nothing can be better—would you not?

Yes, certainly.

Shall we try to find a common basis by asking of ourselves what ought to be the chief aim of the legislator in making laws and in the organization of a State,—what is the greatest good, and what is the greatest evil, and then consider whether our previous description has the stamp of the good or of the evil?

By all means.

Can there be any greater evil than discord and distraction and plurality where unity ought to reign? or any greater good than the bond of unity?

There cannot.

And there is unity where there is community of pleasures and pains—where all the citizens are glad or grieved on the same occasions of joy and sorrow?

No doubt.

Yes; and where there is no common but only private feeling a State is disorganized—when you have one half of the world triumphing and the other plunged in grief at the same events happening to the city or the citizens?

Certainly.

Such differences commonly originate in a disagreement about the use of the terms 'mine' and 'not mine,' 'his' and 'not his.'

Exactly so.

And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of persons apply the terms 'mine' and 'not mine' in the same way to the same thing?

Quite true.

Or that again which most nearly approaches to the condition of the individual—as in the body, when but a finger of one of us is hurt, the whole frame, drawn towards the soul as a centre and forming one kingdom under the ruling power therein, feels the hurt and sympathizes all together with the part affected, and we say that the man has a pain in his finger; and the same expression is used about any other part of the body, which has a sensation of pain at suffering or of pleasure at the alleviation of suffering.

Very true, he replied; and I agree with you that in the best-ordered State there is the nearest approach to this common feeling which you describe.

Then when any one of the citizens experiences any good or evil, the whole State will make his case their own, and will either rejoice or sorrow with him?

Yes, he said, that is what will happen in a well-ordered State.

It will now be time, I said, for us to return to our State and see whether this or some other form is most in accordance with these fundamental principles.

Very good.

Our State like every other has rulers and subjects?

True.

All of whom will call one another citizens?

Of course.

But is there not another name which people give to their rulers in other States?

Generally they call them masters, but in democratic States they simply call them rulers.

And in our State what other name besides that of citizens do the people give the rulers?

They are called saviours and helpers, he replied.

And what do the rulers call the people?

Their maintainers and foster-fathers.

And what do they call them in other States?

Slaves.

And what do the rulers call one another in other States?

Fellow-rulers.

And what in ours?

Fellow-guardians.

Did you ever know an example in any other State of a ruler who would speak of one of his colleagues as his friend and of another as not being his friend?

Yes, very often.

And the friend he regards and describes as one in whom he has an interest, and the other as a stranger in whom he has no interest?

Exactly.

But would any of your guardians think or speak of any other guardian as a stranger?

Certainly he would not; for every one whom they meet will be regarded by them either as a brother or sister, or father or mother, or son or daughter, or as the child or parent of those who are thus connected with him.

Capital, I said; but let me ask you once more: Shall they be a family in name only; or shall they in all their actions be true to the name? For example, in the use of the word 'father,' would the care of a father be implied and the filial reverence and duty and obedience to him which the law commands; and is the violator of these duties to be regarded as an impious and unrighteous person who is not likely to receive much good either at the hands of God or of man? Are these to be or not to be the strains which the children will hear repeated in their ears by all the citizens about those who are intimated to them to be their parents and the rest of their kinsfolk?

These, he said, and none other; for what can be more ridiculous than for them to utter the names of family ties with the lips only and not to act in the spirit of them?

Then in our city the language of harmony and concord will be more often heard than in any other. As I was describing before, when any one is well or ill, the universal word will be 'with me it is well' or 'it is ill.'

Most true.

And agreeably to this mode of thinking and speaking, were we not saying that they will have their pleasures and pains in common?

Yes, and so they will.

And they will have a common interest in the same thing which they will alike call 'my own,' and having this common interest they will have a common feeling of pleasure and pain?

Yes, far more so than in other States.

And the reason of this, over and above the general constitution of the State, will be that the guardians will have a community of women and children?

That will be the chief reason.

And this unity of feeling we admitted to be the greatest good, as was implied in our own comparison of a well-ordered State to the relation of the body and the members, when affected by pleasure or pain?

That we acknowledged, and very rightly.

Then the community of wives and children among our citizens is clearly the source of the greatest good to the State?

Certainly.

And this agrees with the other principle which we were affirming,—that the guardians were not to have houses or lands or any other property; their pay was to be their food, which they were to receive from the other citizens, and they were to have no private expenses; for we intended them to preserve their true character of guardians.

Right, he replied.

Both the community of property and the community of families, as I am saying, tend to make them more truly guardians; they will not tear the city in pieces by differing about 'mine' and 'not mine;' each man dragging any acquisition which he has made into a separate house of his own, where he has a separate wife and children and private pleasures and pains; but all will be affected as far as may be by the same pleasures and pains because they are all of one opinion about what is near and dear to them, and therefore they all tend towards a common end.

Certainly, he replied.

And as they have nothing but their persons which they can call their own, suits and complaints will have no existence among them; they will be delivered from all those quarrels of which money or children or relations are the occasion.

Of course they will.

Neither will trials for assault or insult ever be likely to occur among them. For that equals should defend themselves against equals we shall maintain to be honourable and right; we shall make the protection of the person a matter of necessity.

That is good, he said.

Yes; and there is a further good in the law; viz. that if a man has a quarrel with another he will satisfy his resentment then and there, and not proceed to more dangerous lengths.

Certainly.

To the elder shall be assigned the duty of ruling and chastising the younger.

Clearly.

Nor can there be a doubt that the younger will not strike or do any other violence to an elder, unless the magistrates command him; nor will he slight him in any way. For there are two guardians, shame and fear, mighty to prevent him: shame, which makes men refrain from laying hands on those who are to them in the relation of parents; fear, that the injured one will be succoured by the others who are his brothers, sons, fathers.

That is true, he replied.

Then in every way the laws will help the citizens to keep the peace with one another?

Yes, there will be no want of peace.

And as the guardians will never quarrel among themselves there will be no danger of the rest of the city being divided either against them or against one another.

None whatever.

I hardly like even to mention the little meannesses of which they will be rid, for they are beneath notice: such, for example, as the flattery of the rich by the poor, and all the pains and pangs which men experience in bringing up a family, and in finding money to buy necessaries for their household, borrowing and then repudiating, getting how they can, and giving the money into the hands of women and slaves to keep—the many evils of so many kinds which people suffer in this way are mean enough and obvious enough, and not worth speaking of.

Yes, he said, a man has no need of eyes in order to perceive that.

And from all these evils they will be delivered, and their life will be blessed as the life of Olympic victors and yet more blessed.

How so?

The Olympic victor, I said, is deemed happy in receiving a part only of the blessedness which is secured to our citizens, who have won a more glorious victory and have a more complete maintenance at the public cost. For the victory which they have won is the salvation of the whole State; and the crown with which they and their children are crowned is the fulness of all that life needs; they receive rewards from the hands of their country while living, and after death have an honourable burial.

Yes, he said, and glorious rewards they are.

Do you remember, I said, how in the course of the previous discussion some one who shall be nameless accused us of making our guardians unhappy—they had nothing and might have possessed all things—to whom we replied that, if an occasion offered, we might perhaps hereafter consider this question, but that, as at present advised, we would make our guardians truly guardians, and that we were fashioning the State with a view to the greatest happiness, not of any particular class, but of the whole?

Yes, I remember.

And what do you say, now that the life of our protectors is made out to be far better and nobler than that of Olympic victors—is the life of shoemakers, or any other artisans, or of husbandmen, to be compared with it?

Certainly not.

At the same time I ought here to repeat what I have said elsewhere, that if any of our guardians shall try to be happy in such a manner that he will cease to be a guardian, and is not content with this safe and harmonious life, which, in our judgment, is of all lives the best, but infatuated by some youthful conceit of happiness which gets up into his head shall seek to appropriate the whole state to himself, then he will have to learn how wisely Hesiod spoke, when he said, 'half is more than the whole.'

If he were to consult me, I should say to him: Stay where you are, when you have the offer of such a life.

You agree then, I said, that men and women are to have a common way of life such as we have described—common education, common children; and they are to watch over the citizens in common whether abiding in the city or going out to war; they are to keep watch together, and to hunt together like dogs; and always and in all things, as far as they are able, women are to share with the men? And in so doing they will do what is best, and will not violate, but preserve the natural relation of the sexes.

I agree with you, he replied.

The enquiry, I said, has yet to be made, whether such a community be found possible—as among other animals, so also among men—and if possible, in what way possible?

You have anticipated the question which I was about to suggest.

There is no difficulty, I said, in seeing how war will be carried on by them.

How?

Why, of course they will go on expeditions together; and will take with them any of their children who are strong enough, that, after the manner of the artisan's child, they may look on at the work which they will have to do when they are grown up; and besides looking on they will have to help and be of use in war, and to wait upon their fathers and mothers. Did you never observe in the arts how the potters' boys look on and help, long before they touch the wheel?

Yes, I have.

And shall potters be more careful in educating their children and in giving them the opportunity of seeing and practising their duties than our guardians will be?

The idea is ridiculous, he said.

There is also the effect on the parents, with whom, as with other animals, the presence of their young ones will be the greatest incentive to valour.

That is quite true, Socrates; and yet if they are defeated, which may often happen in war, how great the danger is! the children will be lost as well as their parents, and the State will never recover.

True, I said; but would you never allow them to run any risk?

I am far from saying that.

Well, but if they are ever to run a risk should they not do so on some occasion when, if they escape disaster, they will be the better for it?

Clearly.

Whether the future soldiers do or do not see war in the days of their youth is a very important matter, for the sake of which some risk may fairly be incurred.

Yes, very important.

This then must be our first step,—to make our children spectators of war; but we must also contrive that they shall be secured against danger; then all will be well.

True.

Their parents may be supposed not to be blind to the risks of war, but to know, as far as human foresight can, what expeditions are safe and what dangerous?

That may be assumed.

And they will take them on the safe expeditions and be cautious about the dangerous ones?

True.

And they will place them under the command of experienced veterans who will be their leaders and teachers?

Very properly.

Still, the dangers of war cannot be always foreseen; there is a good deal of chance about them?

True.

Then against such chances the children must be at once furnished with wings, in order that in the hour of need they may fly away and escape.

What do you mean? he said.

I mean that we must mount them on horses in their earliest youth, and when they have learnt to ride, take them on horseback to see war: the horses must not be spirited and warlike, but the most tractable and yet the swiftest that can be had. In this way they will get an excellent view of what is hereafter to be their own business; and if there is danger they have only to follow their elder leaders and escape.

I believe that you are right, he said.

Next, as to war; what are to be the relations of your soldiers to one another and to their enemies? I should be inclined to propose that the soldier who leaves his rank or throws away his arms, or is guilty of any other act of cowardice, should be degraded into the rank of a husbandman or artisan. What do you think?

By all means, I should say.

And he who allows himself to be taken prisoner may as well be made a present of to his enemies; he is their lawful prey, and let them do what they like with him.

Certainly.

But the hero who has distinguished himself, what shall be done to him? In the first place, he shall receive honour in the army from his youthful comrades; every one of them in succession shall crown him. What do you say?

I approve.

And what do you say to his receiving the right hand of fellowship?

To that too, I agree.

But you will hardly agree to my next proposal.

What is your proposal?

That he should kiss and be kissed by them.

Most certainly, and I should be disposed to go further, and say: Let no one whom he has a mind to kiss refuse to be kissed by him while the expedition lasts. So that if there be a lover in the army, whether his love be youth or maiden, he may be more eager to win the prize of valour.

Capital, I said. That the brave man is to have more wives than others has been already determined: and he is to have first choices in such matters more than others, in order that he may have as many children as possible?

Agreed.

Again, there is another manner in which, according to Homer, brave youths should be honoured; for he tells how Ajax, after he had distinguished himself in battle, was rewarded with long chines, which seems to be a compliment appropriate to a hero in the flower of his age, being not only a tribute of honour but also a very strengthening thing.

Most true, he said.

Then in this, I said, Homer shall be our teacher; and we too, at sacrifices and on the like occasions, will honour the brave according to the measure of their valour, whether men or women, with hymns and those other distinctions which we were mentioning; also with

'seats of precedence, and meats and full cups;'

and in honouring them, we shall be at the same time training them.

That, he replied, is excellent.

Yes, I said; and when a man dies gloriously in war shall we not say, in the first place, that he is of the golden race?

To be sure.

Nay, have we not the authority of Hesiod for affirming that when they are dead

'They are holy angels upon the earth, authors of good, averters of evil, the guardians of speech-gifted men'?

Yes; and we accept his authority.

We must learn of the god how we are to order the sepulture of divine and heroic personages, and what is to be their special distinction; and we must do as he bids?

By all means.

And in ages to come we will reverence them and kneel before their sepulchres as at the graves of heroes. And not only they but any who are deemed pre-eminently good, whether they die from age, or in any other way, shall be admitted to the same honours.

That is very right, he said.

Next, how shall our soldiers treat their enemies? What about this?

In what respect do you mean?

First of all, in regard to slavery? Do you think it right that Hellenes should enslave Hellenic States, or allow others to enslave them, if they can help? Should not their custom be to spare them, considering the danger which there is that the whole race may one day fall under the yoke of the barbarians?

To spare them is infinitely better.

Then no Hellene should be owned by them as a slave; that is a rule which they will observe and advise the other Hellenes to observe.

Certainly, he said; they will in this way be united against the barbarians and will keep their hands off one another.

Next as to the slain; ought the conquerors, I said, to take anything but their armour? Does not the practice of despoiling an enemy afford an excuse for not facing the battle? Cowards skulk about the dead, pretending that they are fulfilling a duty, and many an army before now has been lost from this love of plunder.

Very true.

And is there not illiberality and avarice in robbing a corpse, and also a degree of meanness and womanishness in making an enemy of the dead body when the real enemy has flown away and left only his fighting gear behind him,—is not this rather like a dog who cannot get at his assailant, quarrelling with the stones which strike him instead?

Very like a dog, he said.

Then we must abstain from spoiling the dead or hindering their burial?

Yes, he replied, we most certainly must.

Neither shall we offer up arms at the temples of the gods, least of all the arms of Hellenes, if we care to maintain good feeling with other Hellenes; and, indeed, we have reason to fear that the offering of spoils taken from kinsmen may be a pollution unless commanded by the god himself?

Very true.

Again, as to the devastation of Hellenic territory or the burning of houses, what is to be the practice?

May I have the pleasure, he said, of hearing your opinion?

Both should be forbidden, in my judgment; I would take the annual produce and no more. Shall I tell you why?

Pray do.

Why, you see, there is a difference in the names 'discord' and 'war,' and I imagine that there is also a difference in their natures; the one is expressive of what is internal and domestic, the other of what is external and foreign; and the first of the two is termed discord, and only the second, war.

That is a very proper distinction, he replied.

And may I not observe with equal propriety that the Hellenic race is all united together by ties of blood and friendship, and alien and strange to the barbarians?

Very good, he said.

And therefore when Hellenes fight with barbarians and barbarians with Hellenes, they will be described by us as being at war when they fight, and by nature enemies, and this kind of antagonism should be called war; but when Hellenes fight with one another we shall say that Hellas is then in a state of disorder and discord, they being by nature friends; and such enmity is to be called discord.

I agree.

Consider then, I said, when that which we have acknowledged to be discord occurs, and a city is divided, if both parties destroy the lands and burn the houses of one another, how wicked does the strife appear! No true lover of his country would bring himself to tear in pieces his own nurse and mother: There might be reason in the conqueror depriving the conquered of their harvest, but still they would have the idea of peace in their hearts and would not mean to go on fighting for ever.

Yes, he said, that is a better temper than the other.

And will not the city, which you are founding, be an Hellenic city?

It ought to be, he replied.

Then will not the citizens be good and civilized?

Yes, very civilized.

And will they not be lovers of Hellas, and think of Hellas as their own land, and share in the common temples?

Most certainly.

And any difference which arises among them will be regarded by them as discord only—a quarrel among friends, which is not to be called a war?

Certainly not.

Then they will quarrel as those who intend some day to be reconciled?

Certainly.

They will use friendly correction, but will not enslave or destroy their opponents; they will be correctors, not enemies?

Just so.

And as they are Hellenes themselves they will not devastate Hellas, nor will they burn houses, nor ever suppose that the whole population of a city—men, women, and children—are equally their enemies, for they know that the guilt of war is always confined to a few persons and that the many are their friends. And for all these reasons they will be unwilling to waste their lands and rase their houses; their enmity to them will only last until the many innocent sufferers have compelled the guilty few to give satisfaction?

I agree, he said, that our citizens should thus deal with their Hellenic enemies; and with barbarians as the Hellenes now deal with one another.

Then let us enact this law also for our guardians:—that they are neither to devastate the lands of Hellenes nor to burn their houses.

Agreed; and we may agree also in thinking that these, like all our previous enactments, are very good.

But still I must say, Socrates, that if you are allowed to go on in this way you will entirely forget the other question which at the commencement of this discussion you thrust aside:—Is such an order of things possible, and how, if at all? For I am quite ready to acknowledge that the plan which you propose, if only feasible, would do all sorts of good to the State. I will add, what you have omitted, that your citizens will be the bravest of warriors, and will never leave their ranks, for they will all know one another, and each will call the other father, brother, son; and if you suppose the women to join their armies, whether in the same rank or in the rear, either as a terror to the enemy, or as auxiliaries in case of need, I know that they will then be absolutely invincible; and there are many domestic advantages which might also be mentioned and which I also fully acknowledge: but, as I admit all these advantages and as many more as you please, if only this State of yours were to come into existence, we need say no more about them; assuming then the existence of the State, let us now turn to the question of possibility and ways and means—the rest may be left.

If I loiter for a moment, you instantly make a raid upon me, I said, and have no mercy; I have hardly escaped the first and second waves, and you seem not to be aware that you are now bringing upon me the third, which is the greatest and heaviest. When you have seen and heard the third wave, I think you will be more considerate and will acknowledge that some fear and hesitation was natural respecting a proposal so extraordinary as that which I have now to state and investigate.

The more appeals of this sort which you make, he said, the more determined are we that you shall tell us how such a State is possible: speak out and at once.

Let me begin by reminding you that we found our way hither in the search after justice and injustice.

True, he replied; but what of that?

I was only going to ask whether, if we have discovered them, we are to require that the just man should in nothing fail of absolute justice; or may we be satisfied with an approximation, and the attainment in him of a higher degree of justice than is to be found in other men?

The approximation will be enough.

We were enquiring into the nature of absolute justice and into the character of the perfectly just, and into injustice and the perfectly unjust, that we might have an ideal. We were to look at these in order that we might judge of our own happiness and unhappiness according to the standard which they exhibited and the degree in which we resembled them, but not with any view of showing that they could exist in fact.

True, he said.

Would a painter be any the worse because, after having delineated with consummate art an ideal of a perfectly beautiful man, he was unable to show that any such man could ever have existed?

He would be none the worse.

Well, and were we not creating an ideal of a perfect State?

To be sure.

And is our theory a worse theory because we are unable to prove the possibility of a city being ordered in the manner described?

Surely not, he replied.

That is the truth, I said. But if, at your request, I am to try and show how and under what conditions the possibility is highest, I must ask you, having this in view, to repeat your former admissions.

What admissions?

I want to know whether ideals are ever fully realized in language? Does not the word express more than the fact, and must not the actual, whatever a man may think, always, in the nature of things, fall short of the truth? What do you say?

I agree.

Then you must not insist on my proving that the actual State will in every respect coincide with the ideal: if we are only able to discover how a city may be governed nearly as we proposed, you will admit that we have discovered the possibility which you demand; and will be contented. I am sure that I should be contented—will not you?

Yes, I will.

Let me next endeavour to show what is that fault in States which is the cause of their present maladministration, and what is the least change which will enable a State to pass into the truer form; and let the change, if possible, be of one thing only, or, if not, of two; at any rate, let the changes be as few and slight as possible.

Certainly, he replied.

I think, I said, that there might be a reform of the State if only one change were made, which is not a slight or easy though still a possible one.

What is it? he said.

Now then, I said, I go to meet that which I liken to the greatest of the waves; yet shall the word be spoken, even though the wave break and drown me in laughter and dishonour; and do you mark my words.

Proceed.

I said: 'Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils,—nor the human race, as I believe,—and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.' Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard thing.

Socrates, what do you mean? I would have you consider that the word which you have uttered is one at which numerous persons, and very respectable persons too, in a figure pulling off their coats all in a moment, and seizing any weapon that comes to hand, will run at you might and main, before you know where you are, intending to do heaven knows what; and if you don't prepare an answer, and put yourself in motion, you will be 'pared by their fine wits,' and no mistake.

You got me into the scrape, I said.

And I was quite right; however, I will do all I can to get you out of it; but I can only give you good-will and good advice, and, perhaps, I may be able to fit answers to your questions better than another—that is all. And now, having such an auxiliary, you must do your best to show the unbelievers that you are right.

I ought to try, I said, since you offer me such invaluable assistance. And I think that, if there is to be a chance of our escaping, we must explain to them whom we mean when we say that philosophers are to rule in the State; then we shall be able to defend ourselves: There will be discovered to be some natures who ought to study philosophy and to be leaders in the State; and others who are not born to be philosophers, and are meant to be followers rather than leaders.

Then now for a definition, he said.

Follow me, I said, and I hope that I may in some way or other be able to give you a satisfactory explanation.

Proceed.

I dare say that you remember, and therefore I need not remind you, that a lover, if he is worthy of the name, ought to show his love, not to some one part of that which he loves, but to the whole.

I really do not understand, and therefore beg of you to assist my memory.

Another person, I said, might fairly reply as you do; but a man of pleasure like yourself ought to know that all who are in the flower of youth do somehow or other raise a pang or emotion in a lover's breast, and are thought by him to be worthy of his affectionate regards. Is not this a way which you have with the fair: one has a snub nose, and you praise his charming face; the hook-nose of another has, you say, a royal look; while he who is neither snub nor hooked has the grace of regularity: the dark visage is manly, the fair are children of the gods; and as to the sweet 'honey pale,' as they are called, what is the very name but the invention of a lover who talks in diminutives, and is not averse to paleness if appearing on the cheek of youth? In a word, there is no excuse which you will not make, and nothing which you will not say, in order not to lose a single flower that blooms in the spring-time of youth.

If you make me an authority in matters of love, for the sake of the argument, I assent.

And what do you say of lovers of wine? Do you not see them doing the same? They are glad of any pretext of drinking any wine.

Very good.

And the same is true of ambitious men; if they cannot command an army, they are willing to command a file; and if they cannot be honoured by really great and important persons, they are glad to be honoured by lesser and meaner people,—but honour of some kind they must have.

Exactly.

Once more let me ask: Does he who desires any class of goods, desire the whole class or a part only?

The whole.

And may we not say of the philosopher that he is a lover, not of a part of wisdom only, but of the whole?

Yes, of the whole.

And he who dislikes learning, especially in youth, when he has no power of judging what is good and what is not, such an one we maintain not to be a philosopher or a lover of knowledge, just as he who refuses his food is not hungry, and may be said to have a bad appetite and not a good one?

Very true, he said.

Whereas he who has a taste for every sort of knowledge and who is curious to learn and is never satisfied, may be justly termed a philosopher? Am I not right?

Glaucon said: If curiosity makes a philosopher, you will find many a strange being will have a title to the name. All the lovers of sights have a delight in learning, and must therefore be included. Musical amateurs, too, are a folk strangely out of place among philosophers, for they are the last persons in the world who would come to anything like a philosophical discussion, if they could help, while they run about at the Dionysiac festivals as if they had let out their ears to hear every chorus; whether the performance is in town or country—that makes no difference—they are there. Now are we to maintain that all these and any who have similar tastes, as well as the professors of quite minor arts, are philosophers?

Certainly not, I replied; they are only an imitation.

He said: Who then are the true philosophers?

Those, I said, who are lovers of the vision of truth.

That is also good, he said; but I should like to know what you mean?

To another, I replied, I might have a difficulty in explaining; but I am sure that you will admit a proposition which I am about to make.

What is the proposition?

That since beauty is the opposite of ugliness, they are two?

Certainly.

And inasmuch as they are two, each of them is one?

True again.

And of just and unjust, good and evil, and of every other class, the same remark holds: taken singly, each of them is one; but from the various combinations of them with actions and things and with one another, they are seen in all sorts of lights and appear many?

Very true.

And this is the distinction which I draw between the sight-loving, art-loving, practical class and those of whom I am speaking, and who are alone worthy of the name of philosophers.

How do you distinguish them? he said.

The lovers of sounds and sights, I replied, are, as I conceive, fond of fine tones and colours and forms and all the artificial products that are made out of them, but their mind is incapable of seeing or loving absolute beauty.

True, he replied.

Few are they who are able to attain to the sight of this.

Very true.

And he who, having a sense of beautiful things has no sense of absolute beauty, or who, if another lead him to a knowledge of that beauty is unable to follow—of such an one I ask, Is he awake or in a dream only? Reflect: is not the dreamer, sleeping or waking, one who likens dissimilar things, who puts the copy in the place of the real object?

I should certainly say that such an one was dreaming.

But take the case of the other, who recognises the existence of absolute beauty and is able to distinguish the idea from the objects which participate in the idea, neither putting the objects in the place of the idea nor the idea in the place of the objects—is he a dreamer, or is he awake?

He is wide awake.

And may we not say that the mind of the one who knows has knowledge, and that the mind of the other, who opines only, has opinion?

Certainly.

But suppose that the latter should quarrel with us and dispute our statement, can we administer any soothing cordial or advice to him, without revealing to him that there is sad disorder in his wits?

We must certainly offer him some good advice, he replied.

Come, then, and let us think of something to say to him. Shall we begin by assuring him that he is welcome to any knowledge which he may have, and that we are rejoiced at his having it? But we should like to ask him a question: Does he who has knowledge know something or nothing? (You must answer for him.)

I answer that he knows something.

Something that is or is not?

Something that is; for how can that which is not ever be known?

And are we assured, after looking at the matter from many points of view, that absolute being is or may be absolutely known, but that the utterly non-existent is utterly unknown?

Nothing can be more certain.

Good. But if there be anything which is of such a nature as to be and not to be, that will have a place intermediate between pure being and the absolute negation of being?

Yes, between them.

And, as knowledge corresponded to being and ignorance of necessity to not-being, for that intermediate between being and not-being there has to be discovered a corresponding intermediate between ignorance and knowledge, if there be such?

Certainly.

Do we admit the existence of opinion?

Undoubtedly.

As being the same with knowledge, or another faculty?

Another faculty.

Then opinion and knowledge have to do with different kinds of matter corresponding to this difference of faculties?

Yes.

And knowledge is relative to being and knows being. But before I proceed further I will make a division.

What division?

I will begin by placing faculties in a class by themselves: they are powers in us, and in all other things, by which we do as we do. Sight and hearing, for example, I should call faculties. Have I clearly explained the class which I mean?

Yes, I quite understand.

Then let me tell you my view about them. I do not see them, and therefore the distinctions of figure, colour, and the like, which enable me to discern the differences of some things, do not apply to them. In speaking of a faculty I think only of its sphere and its result; and that which has the same sphere and the same result I call the same faculty, but that which has another sphere and another result I call different. Would that be your way of speaking?

Yes.

And will you be so very good as to answer one more question? Would you say that knowledge is a faculty, or in what class would you place it?

Certainly knowledge is a faculty, and the mightiest of all faculties.

And is opinion also a faculty?

Certainly, he said; for opinion is that with which we are able to form an opinion.

And yet you were acknowledging a little while ago that knowledge is not the same as opinion?

Why, yes, he said: how can any reasonable being ever identify that which is infallible with that which errs?

An excellent answer, proving, I said, that we are quite conscious of a distinction between them.

Yes.

Then knowledge and opinion having distinct powers have also distinct spheres or subject-matters?

That is certain.

Being is the sphere or subject-matter of knowledge, and knowledge is to know the nature of being?

Yes.

And opinion is to have an opinion?

Yes.

And do we know what we opine? or is the subject-matter of opinion the same as the subject-matter of knowledge?

Nay, he replied, that has been already disproven; if difference in faculty implies difference in the sphere or subject-matter, and if, as we were saying, opinion and knowledge are distinct faculties, then the sphere of knowledge and of opinion cannot be the same.

Then if being is the subject-matter of knowledge, something else must be the subject-matter of opinion?

Yes, something else.

Well then, is not-being the subject-matter of opinion? or, rather, how can there be an opinion at all about not-being? Reflect: when a man has an opinion, has he not an opinion about something? Can he have an opinion which is an opinion about nothing?

Impossible.

He who has an opinion has an opinion about some one thing?

Yes.

And not-being is not one thing but, properly speaking, nothing?

True.

Of not-being, ignorance was assumed to be the necessary correlative; of being, knowledge?

True, he said.

Then opinion is not concerned either with being or with not-being?

Not with either.

And can therefore neither be ignorance nor knowledge?

That seems to be true.

But is opinion to be sought without and beyond either of them, in a greater clearness than knowledge, or in a greater darkness than ignorance?

In neither.

Then I suppose that opinion appears to you to be darker than knowledge, but lighter than ignorance?

Both; and in no small degree.

And also to be within and between them?

Yes.

Then you would infer that opinion is intermediate?

No question.

But were we not saying before, that if anything appeared to be of a sort which is and is not at the same time, that sort of thing would appear also to lie in the interval between pure being and absolute not-being; and that the corresponding faculty is neither knowledge nor ignorance, but will be found in the interval between them?

True.

And in that interval there has now been discovered something which we call opinion?

There has.

Then what remains to be discovered is the object which partakes equally of the nature of being and not-being, and cannot rightly be termed either, pure and simple; this unknown term, when discovered, we may truly call the subject of opinion, and assign each to their proper faculty,—the extremes to the faculties of the extremes and the mean to the faculty of the mean.

True.

This being premised, I would ask the gentleman who is of opinion that there is no absolute or unchangeable idea of beauty—in whose opinion the beautiful is the manifold—he, I say, your lover of beautiful sights, who cannot bear to be told that the beautiful is one, and the just is one, or that anything is one—to him I would appeal, saying, Will you be so very kind, sir, as to tell us whether, of all these beautiful things, there is one which will not be found ugly; or of the just, which will not be found unjust; or of the holy, which will not also be unholy?

No, he replied; the beautiful will in some point of view be found ugly; and the same is true of the rest.

And may not the many which are doubles be also halves?—doubles, that is, of one thing, and halves of another?

Quite true.

And things great and small, heavy and light, as they are termed, will not be denoted by these any more than by the opposite names?

True; both these and the opposite names will always attach to all of them.

And can any one of those many things which are called by particular names be said to be this rather than not to be this?

He replied: They are like the punning riddles which are asked at feasts or the children's puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat, with what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat was sitting. The individual objects of which I am speaking are also a riddle, and have a double sense: nor can you fix them in your mind, either as being or not-being, or both, or neither.

Then what will you do with them? I said. Can they have a better place than between being and not-being? For they are clearly not in greater darkness or negation than not-being, or more full of light and existence than being.

That is quite true, he said.

Thus then we seem to have discovered that the many ideas which the multitude entertain about the beautiful and about all other things are tossing about in some region which is half-way between pure being and pure not-being?

We have.

Yes; and we had before agreed that anything of this kind which we might find was to be described as matter of opinion, and not as matter of knowledge; being the intermediate flux which is caught and detained by the intermediate faculty.

Quite true.

Then those who see the many beautiful, and who yet neither see absolute beauty, nor can follow any guide who points the way thither; who see the many just, and not absolute justice, and the like,—such persons may be said to have opinion but not knowledge?

That is certain.

But those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be said to know, and not to have opinion only?

Neither can that be denied.

The one love and embrace the subjects of knowledge, the other those of opinion? The latter are the same, as I dare say you will remember, who listened to sweet sounds and gazed upon fair colours, but would not tolerate the existence of absolute beauty.

Yes, I remember.

Shall we then be guilty of any impropriety in calling them lovers of opinion rather than lovers of wisdom, and will they be very angry with us for thus describing them?

I shall tell them not to be angry; no man should be angry at what is true.

But those who love the truth in each thing are to be called lovers of wisdom and not lovers of opinion.

Assuredly.

BOOK VI.

And thus, Glaucon, after the argument has gone a weary way, the true and the false philosophers have at length appeared in view.

I do not think, he said, that the way could have been shortened.

I suppose not, I said; and yet I believe that we might have had a better view of both of them if the discussion could have been confined to this one subject and if there were not many other questions awaiting us, which he who desires to see in what respect the life of the just differs from that of the unjust must consider.

And what is the next question? he asked.

Surely, I said, the one which follows next in order. Inasmuch as philosophers only are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and those who wander in the region of the many and variable are not philosophers, I must ask you which of the two classes should be the rulers of our State?

And how can we rightly answer that question?

Whichever of the two are best able to guard the laws and institutions of our State—let them be our guardians.

Very good.

Neither, I said, can there be any question that the guardian who is to keep anything should have eyes rather than no eyes?

There can be no question of that.

And are not those who are verily and indeed wanting in the knowledge of the true being of each thing, and who have in their souls no clear pattern, and are unable as with a painter's eye to look at the absolute truth and to that original to repair, and having perfect vision of the other world to order the laws about beauty, goodness, justice in this, if not already ordered, and to guard and preserve the order of them—are not such persons, I ask, simply blind?

Truly, he replied, they are much in that condition.

And shall they be our guardians when there are others who, besides being their equals in experience and falling short of them in no particular of virtue, also know the very truth of each thing?

There can be no reason, he said, for rejecting those who have this greatest of all great qualities; they must always have the first place unless they fail in some other respect.

Suppose then, I said, that we determine how far they can unite this and the other excellences.

By all means.

In the first place, as we began by observing, the nature of the philosopher has to be ascertained. We must come to an understanding about him, and, when we have done so, then, if I am not mistaken, we shall also acknowledge that such an union of qualities is possible, and that those in whom they are united, and those only, should be rulers in the State.

What do you mean?

Let us suppose that philosophical minds always love knowledge of a sort which shows them the eternal nature not varying from generation and corruption.

Agreed.

And further, I said, let us agree that they are lovers of all true being; there is no part whether greater or less, or more or less honourable, which they are willing to renounce; as we said before of the lover and the man of ambition.

True.

And if they are to be what we were describing, is there not another quality which they should also possess?

What quality?

Truthfulness: they will never intentionally receive into their mind falsehood, which is their detestation, and they will love the truth.

Yes, that may be safely affirmed of them.

'May be,' my friend, I replied, is not the word; say rather 'must be affirmed:' for he whose nature is amorous of anything cannot help loving all that belongs or is akin to the object of his affections.

Right, he said.

And is there anything more akin to wisdom than truth?

How can there be?

Can the same nature be a lover of wisdom and a lover of falsehood?

Never.

The true lover of learning then must from his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth?

Assuredly.

But then again, as we know by experience, he whose desires are strong in one direction will have them weaker in others; they will be like a stream which has been drawn off into another channel.

True.

He whose desires are drawn towards knowledge in every form will be absorbed in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily pleasure—I mean, if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one.

That is most certain.

Such an one is sure to be temperate and the reverse of covetous; for the motives which make another man desirous of having and spending, have no place in his character.

Very true.

Another criterion of the philosophical nature has also to be considered.

What is that?

There should be no secret corner of illiberality; nothing can be more antagonistic than meanness to a soul which is ever longing after the whole of things both divine and human.

Most true, he replied.

Then how can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all time and all existence, think much of human life?

He cannot.

Or can such an one account death fearful?

No indeed.

Then the cowardly and mean nature has no part in true philosophy?

Certainly not.

Or again: can he who is harmoniously constituted, who is not covetous or mean, or a boaster, or a coward—can he, I say, ever be unjust or hard in his dealings?

Impossible.

Then you will soon observe whether a man is just and gentle, or rude and unsociable; these are the signs which distinguish even in youth the philosophical nature from the unphilosophical.

True.

There is another point which should be remarked.

What point?

Whether he has or has not a pleasure in learning; for no one will love that which gives him pain, and in which after much toil he makes little progress.

Certainly not.

And again, if he is forgetful and retains nothing of what he learns, will he not be an empty vessel?

That is certain.

Labouring in vain, he must end in hating himself and his fruitless occupation? Yes.

Then a soul which forgets cannot be ranked among genuine philosophic natures; we must insist that the philosopher should have a good memory?

Certainly.

And once more, the inharmonious and unseemly nature can only tend to disproportion?

Undoubtedly.

And do you consider truth to be akin to proportion or to disproportion?

To proportion.

Then, besides other qualities, we must try to find a naturally well-proportioned and gracious mind, which will move spontaneously towards the true being of everything.

Certainly.

Well, and do not all these qualities, which we have been enumerating, go together, and are they not, in a manner, necessary to a soul, which is to have a full and perfect participation of being?

They are absolutely necessary, he replied.

And must not that be a blameless study which he only can pursue who has the gift of a good memory, and is quick to learn,—noble, gracious, the friend of truth, justice, courage, temperance, who are his kindred?

The god of jealousy himself, he said, could find no fault with such a study.

And to men like him, I said, when perfected by years and education, and to these only you will entrust the State.

Here Adeimantus interposed and said: To these statements, Socrates, no one can offer a reply; but when you talk in this way, a strange feeling passes over the minds of your hearers: They fancy that they are led astray a little at each step in the argument, owing to their own want of skill in asking and answering questions; these littles accumulate, and at the end of the discussion they are found to have sustained a mighty overthrow and all their former notions appear to be turned upside down. And as unskilful players of draughts are at last shut up by their more skilful adversaries and have no piece to move, so they too find themselves shut up at last; for they have nothing to say in this new game of which words are the counters; and yet all the time they are in the right. The observation is suggested to me by what is now occurring. For any one of us might say, that although in words he is not able to meet you at each step of the argument, he sees as a fact that the votaries of philosophy, when they carry on the study, not only in youth as a part of education, but as the pursuit of their maturer years, most of them become strange monsters, not to say utter rogues, and that those who may be considered the best of them are made useless to the world by the very study which you extol.

Well, and do you think that those who say so are wrong?

I cannot tell, he replied; but I should like to know what is your opinion.

Hear my answer; I am of opinion that they are quite right.

Then how can you be justified in saying that cities will not cease from evil until philosophers rule in them, when philosophers are acknowledged by us to be of no use to them?

You ask a question, I said, to which a reply can only be given in a parable.

Yes, Socrates; and that is a way of speaking to which you are not at all accustomed, I suppose.

I perceive, I said, that you are vastly amused at having plunged me into such a hopeless discussion; but now hear the parable, and then you will be still more amused at the meagreness of my imagination: for the manner in which the best men are treated in their own States is so grievous that no single thing on earth is comparable to it; and therefore, if I am to plead their cause, I must have recourse to fiction, and put together a figure made up of many things, like the fabulous unions of goats and stags which are found in pictures. Imagine then a fleet or a ship in which there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better. The sailors are quarrelling with one another about the steering—every one is of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who taught him or when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut in pieces any one who says the contrary. They throng about the captain, begging and praying him to commit the helm to them; and if at any time they do not prevail, but others are preferred to them, they kill the others or throw them overboard, and having first chained up the noble captain's senses with drink or some narcotic drug, they mutiny and take possession of the ship and make free with the stores; thus, eating and drinking, they proceed on their voyage in such manner as might be expected of them. Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in their plot for getting the ship out of the captain's hands into their own whether by force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of sailor, pilot, able seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they call a good-for-nothing; but that the true pilot must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art, if he intends to be really qualified for the command of a ship, and that he must and will be the steerer, whether other people like or not—the possibility of this union of authority with the steerer's art has never seriously entered into their thoughts or been made part of their calling. Now in vessels which are in a state of mutiny and by sailors who are mutineers, how will the true pilot be regarded? Will he not be called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing?

Of course, said Adeimantus.

Then you will hardly need, I said, to hear the interpretation of the figure, which describes the true philosopher in his relation to the State; for you understand already.

Certainly.

Then suppose you now take this parable to the gentleman who is surprised at finding that philosophers have no honour in their cities; explain it to him and try to convince him that their having honour would be far more extraordinary.

I will.

Say to him, that, in deeming the best votaries of philosophy to be useless to the rest of the world, he is right; but also tell him to attribute their uselessness to the fault of those who will not use them, and not to themselves. The pilot should not humbly beg the sailors to be commanded by him—that is not the order of nature; neither are 'the wise to go to the doors of the rich'—the ingenious author of this saying told a lie—but the truth is, that, when a man is ill, whether he be rich or poor, to the physician he must go, and he who wants to be governed, to him who is able to govern. The ruler who is good for anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him; although the present governors of mankind are of a different stamp; they may be justly compared to the mutinous sailors, and the true helmsmen to those who are called by them good-for-nothings and star-gazers.

Precisely so, he said.

For these reasons, and among men like these, philosophy, the noblest pursuit of all, is not likely to be much esteemed by those of the opposite faction; not that the greatest and most lasting injury is done to her by her opponents, but by her own professing followers, the same of whom you suppose the accuser to say, that the greater number of them are arrant rogues, and the best are useless; in which opinion I agreed.

Yes.

And the reason why the good are useless has now been explained?

True.

Then shall we proceed to show that the corruption of the majority is also unavoidable, and that this is not to be laid to the charge of philosophy any more than the other?

By all means.

And let us ask and answer in turn, first going back to the description of the gentle and noble nature. Truth, as you will remember, was his leader, whom he followed always and in all things; failing in this, he was an impostor, and had no part or lot in true philosophy.

Yes, that was said.

Well, and is not this one quality, to mention no others, greatly at variance with present notions of him?

Certainly, he said.

And have we not a right to say in his defence, that the true lover of knowledge is always striving after being—that is his nature; he will not rest in the multiplicity of individuals which is an appearance only, but will go on—the keen edge will not be blunted, nor the force of his desire abate until he have attained the knowledge of the true nature of every essence by a sympathetic and kindred power in the soul, and by that power drawing near and mingling and becoming incorporate with very being, having begotten mind and truth, he will have knowledge and will live and grow truly, and then, and not till then, will he cease from his travail.

Nothing, he said, can be more just than such a description of him.

And will the love of a lie be any part of a philosopher's nature? Will he not utterly hate a lie?

He will.

And when truth is the captain, we cannot suspect any evil of the band which he leads?

Impossible.

Justice and health of mind will be of the company, and temperance will follow after?

True, he replied.

Neither is there any reason why I should again set in array the philosopher's virtues, as you will doubtless remember that courage, magnificence, apprehension, memory, were his natural gifts. And you objected that, although no one could deny what I then said, still, if you leave words and look at facts, the persons who are thus described are some of them manifestly useless, and the greater number utterly depraved; we were then led to enquire into the grounds of these accusations, and have now arrived at the point of asking why are the majority bad, which question of necessity brought us back to the examination and definition of the true philosopher.

Exactly.

And we have next to consider the corruptions of the philosophic nature, why so many are spoiled and so few escape spoiling—I am speaking of those who were said to be useless but not wicked—and, when we have done with them, we will speak of the imitators of philosophy, what manner of men are they who aspire after a profession which is above them and of which they are unworthy, and then, by their manifold inconsistencies, bring upon philosophy, and upon all philosophers, that universal reprobation of which we speak.

What are these corruptions? he said.

I will see if I can explain them to you. Every one will admit that a nature having in perfection all the qualities which we required in a philosopher, is a rare plant which is seldom seen among men.

Rare indeed.

And what numberless and powerful causes tend to destroy these rare natures!

What causes?

In the first place there are their own virtues, their courage, temperance, and the rest of them, every one of which praiseworthy qualities (and this is a most singular circumstance) destroys and distracts from philosophy the soul which is the possessor of them.

That is very singular, he replied.

Then there are all the ordinary goods of life—beauty, wealth, strength, rank, and great connections in the State—you understand the sort of things—these also have a corrupting and distracting effect.

I understand; but I should like to know more precisely what you mean about them.

Grasp the truth as a whole, I said, and in the right way; you will then have no difficulty in apprehending the preceding remarks, and they will no longer appear strange to you.

And how am I to do so? he asked.

Why, I said, we know that all germs or seeds, whether vegetable or animal, when they fail to meet with proper nutriment or climate or soil, in proportion to their vigour, are all the more sensitive to the want of a suitable environment, for evil is a greater enemy to what is good than to what is not.

Very true.

There is reason in supposing that the finest natures, when under alien conditions, receive more injury than the inferior, because the contrast is greater.

Certainly.

And may we not say, Adeimantus, that the most gifted minds, when they are ill-educated, become pre-eminently bad? Do not great crimes and the spirit of pure evil spring out of a fulness of nature ruined by education rather than from any inferiority, whereas weak natures are scarcely capable of any very great good or very great evil?

There I think that you are right.

And our philosopher follows the same analogy—he is like a plant which, having proper nurture, must necessarily grow and mature into all virtue, but, if sown and planted in an alien soil, becomes the most noxious of all weeds, unless he be preserved by some divine power. Do you really think, as people so often say, that our youth are corrupted by Sophists, or that private teachers of the art corrupt them in any degree worth speaking of? Are not the public who say these things the greatest of all Sophists? And do they not educate to perfection young and old, men and women alike, and fashion them after their own hearts?

When is this accomplished? he said.

When they meet together, and the world sits down at an assembly, or in a court of law, or a theatre, or a camp, or in any other popular resort, and there is a great uproar, and they praise some things which are being said or done, and blame other things, equally exaggerating both, shouting and clapping their hands, and the echo of the rocks and the place in which they are assembled redoubles the sound of the praise or blame—at such a time will not a young man's heart, as they say, leap within him? Will any private training enable him to stand firm against the overwhelming flood of popular opinion? or will he be carried away by the stream? Will he not have the notions of good and evil which the public in general have—he will do as they do, and as they are, such will he be?

Yes, Socrates; necessity will compel him.

And yet, I said, there is a still greater necessity, which has not been mentioned.

What is that?

The gentle force of attainder or confiscation or death, which, as you are aware, these new Sophists and educators, who are the public, apply when their words are powerless.

Indeed they do; and in right good earnest.

Now what opinion of any other Sophist, or of any private person, can be expected to overcome in such an unequal contest?

None, he replied.

No, indeed, I said, even to make the attempt is a great piece of folly; there neither is, nor has been, nor is ever likely to be, any different type of character which has had no other training in virtue but that which is supplied by public opinion—I speak, my friend, of human virtue only; what is more than human, as the proverb says, is not included: for I would not have you ignorant that, in the present evil state of governments, whatever is saved and comes to good is saved by the power of God, as we may truly say.

I quite assent, he replied.

Then let me crave your assent also to a further observation.

What are you going to say?

Why, that all those mercenary individuals, whom the many call Sophists and whom they deem to be their adversaries, do, in fact, teach nothing but the opinion of the many, that is to say, the opinions of their assemblies; and this is their wisdom. I might compare them to a man who should study the tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who is fed by him—he would learn how to approach and handle him, also at what times and from what causes he is dangerous or the reverse, and what is the meaning of his several cries, and by what sounds, when another utters them, he is soothed or infuriated; and you may suppose further, that when, by continually attending upon him, he has become perfect in all this, he calls his knowledge wisdom, and makes of it a system or art, which he proceeds to teach, although he has no real notion of what he means by the principles or passions of which he is speaking, but calls this honourable and that dishonourable, or good or evil, or just or unjust, all in accordance with the tastes and tempers of the great brute. Good he pronounces to be that in which the beast delights and evil to be that which he dislikes; and he can give no other account of them except that the just and noble are the necessary, having never himself seen, and having no power of explaining to others the nature of either, or the difference between them, which is immense. By heaven, would not such an one be a rare educator?

Indeed he would.

And in what way does he who thinks that wisdom is the discernment of the tempers and tastes of the motley multitude, whether in painting or music, or, finally, in politics, differ from him whom I have been describing? For when a man consorts with the many, and exhibits to them his poem or other work of art or the service which he has done the State, making them his judges when he is not obliged, the so-called necessity of Diomede will oblige him to produce whatever they praise. And yet the reasons are utterly ludicrous which they give in confirmation of their own notions about the honourable and good. Did you ever hear any of them which were not?

No, nor am I likely to hear.

You recognise the truth of what I have been saying? Then let me ask you to consider further whether the world will ever be induced to believe in the existence of absolute beauty rather than of the many beautiful, or of the absolute in each kind rather than of the many in each kind?

Certainly not.

Then the world cannot possibly be a philosopher?

Impossible.

And therefore philosophers must inevitably fall under the censure of the world?

They must.

And of individuals who consort with the mob and seek to please them?

That is evident.

Then, do you see any way in which the philosopher can be preserved in his calling to the end? and remember what we were saying of him, that he was to have quickness and memory and courage and magnificence—these were admitted by us to be the true philosopher's gifts.

Yes.

Will not such an one from his early childhood be in all things first among all, especially if his bodily endowments are like his mental ones?

Certainly, he said.

And his friends and fellow-citizens will want to use him as he gets older for their own purposes?

No question.

Falling at his feet, they will make requests to him and do him honour and flatter him, because they want to get into their hands now, the power which he will one day possess.

That often happens, he said.

And what will a man such as he is be likely to do under such circumstances, especially if he be a citizen of a great city, rich and noble, and a tall proper youth? Will he not be full of boundless aspirations, and fancy himself able to manage the affairs of Hellenes and of barbarians, and having got such notions into his head will he not dilate and elevate himself in the fulness of vain pomp and senseless pride?

To be sure he will.

Now, when he is in this state of mind, if some one gently comes to him and tells him that he is a fool and must get understanding, which can only be got by slaving for it, do you think that, under such adverse circumstances, he will be easily induced to listen?

Far otherwise.

And even if there be some one who through inherent goodness or natural reasonableness has had his eyes opened a little and is humbled and taken captive by philosophy, how will his friends behave when they think that they are likely to lose the advantage which they were hoping to reap from his companionship? Will they not do and say anything to prevent him from yielding to his better nature and to render his teacher powerless, using to this end private intrigues as well as public prosecutions?

There can be no doubt of it.

And how can one who is thus circumstanced ever become a philosopher?

Impossible.

Then were we not right in saying that even the very qualities which make a man a philosopher may, if he be ill-educated, divert him from philosophy, no less than riches and their accompaniments and the other so-called goods of life?

We were quite right.

Thus, my excellent friend, is brought about all that ruin and failure which I have been describing of the natures best adapted to the best of all pursuits; they are natures which we maintain to be rare at any time; this being the class out of which come the men who are the authors of the greatest evil to States and individuals; and also of the greatest good when the tide carries them in that direction; but a small man never was the doer of any great thing either to individuals or to States.

That is most true, he said.

And so philosophy is left desolate, with her marriage rite incomplete: for her own have fallen away and forsaken her, and while they are leading a false and unbecoming life, other unworthy persons, seeing that she has no kinsmen to be her protectors, enter in and dishonour her; and fasten upon her the reproaches which, as you say, her reprovers utter, who affirm of her votaries that some are good for nothing, and that the greater number deserve the severest punishment.

That is certainly what people say.

Yes; and what else would you expect, I said, when you think of the puny creatures who, seeing this land open to them—a land well stocked with fair names and showy titles—like prisoners running out of prison into a sanctuary, take a leap out of their trades into philosophy; those who do so being probably the cleverest hands at their own miserable crafts? For, although philosophy be in this evil case, still there remains a dignity about her which is not to be found in the arts. And many are thus attracted by her whose natures are imperfect and whose souls are maimed and disfigured by their meannesses, as their bodies are by their trades and crafts. Is not this unavoidable?

Yes.

Are they not exactly like a bald little tinker who has just got out of durance and come into a fortune; he takes a bath and puts on a new coat, and is decked out as a bridegroom going to marry his master's daughter, who is left poor and desolate?

A most exact parallel.

What will be the issue of such marriages? Will they not be vile and bastard?

There can be no question of it.

And when persons who are unworthy of education approach philosophy and make an alliance with her who is in a rank above them what sort of ideas and opinions are likely to be generated? Will they not be sophisms captivating to the ear, having nothing in them genuine, or worthy of or akin to true wisdom?

No doubt, he said.

Then, Adeimantus, I said, the worthy disciples of philosophy will be but a small remnant: perchance some noble and well-educated person, detained by exile in her service, who in the absence of corrupting influences remains devoted to her; or some lofty soul born in a mean city, the politics of which he contemns and neglects; and there may be a gifted few who leave the arts, which they justly despise, and come to her;—or peradventure there are some who are restrained by our friend Theages' bridle; for everything in the life of Theages conspired to divert him from philosophy; but ill-health kept him away from politics. My own case of the internal sign is hardly worth mentioning, for rarely, if ever, has such a monitor been given to any other man. Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and have also seen enough of the madness of the multitude; and they know that no politician is honest, nor is there any champion of justice at whose side they may fight and be saved. Such an one may be compared to a man who has fallen among wild beasts—he will not join in the wickedness of his fellows, but neither is he able singly to resist all their fierce natures, and therefore seeing that he would be of no use to the State or to his friends, and reflecting that he would have to throw away his life without doing any good either to himself or others, he holds his peace, and goes his own way. He is like one who, in the storm of dust and sleet which the driving wind hurries along, retires under the shelter of a wall; and seeing the rest of mankind full of wickedness, he is content, if only he can live his own life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and good-will, with bright hopes.

Yes, he said, and he will have done a great work before he departs.

A great work—yes; but not the greatest, unless he find a State suitable to him; for in a State which is suitable to him, he will have a larger growth and be the saviour of his country, as well as of himself.

The causes why philosophy is in such an evil name have now been sufficiently explained: the injustice of the charges against her has been shown—is there anything more which you wish to say?

Nothing more on that subject, he replied; but I should like to know which of the governments now existing is in your opinion the one adapted to her.

Not any of them, I said; and that is precisely the accusation which I bring against them—not one of them is worthy of the philosophic nature, and hence that nature is warped and estranged;—as the exotic seed which is sown in a foreign land becomes denaturalized, and is wont to be overpowered and to lose itself in the new soil, even so this growth of philosophy, instead of persisting, degenerates and receives another character. But if philosophy ever finds in the State that perfection which she herself is, then will be seen that she is in truth divine, and that all other things, whether natures of men or institutions, are but human;—and now, I know, that you are going to ask, What that State is:

No, he said; there you are wrong, for I was going to ask another question—whether it is the State of which we are the founders and inventors, or some other?

Yes, I replied, ours in most respects; but you may remember my saying before, that some living authority would always be required in the State having the same idea of the constitution which guided you when as legislator you were laying down the laws.

That was said, he replied.

Yes, but not in a satisfactory manner; you frightened us by interposing objections, which certainly showed that the discussion would be long and difficult; and what still remains is the reverse of easy.

What is there remaining?

The question how the study of philosophy may be so ordered as not to be the ruin of the State: All great attempts are attended with risk; 'hard is the good,' as men say.

Still, he said, let the point be cleared up, and the enquiry will then be complete.

I shall not be hindered, I said, by any want of will, but, if at all, by a want of power: my zeal you may see for yourselves; and please to remark in what I am about to say how boldly and unhesitatingly I declare that States should pursue philosophy, not as they do now, but in a different spirit.

In what manner?

At present, I said, the students of philosophy are quite young; beginning when they are hardly past childhood, they devote only the time saved from moneymaking and housekeeping to such pursuits; and even those of them who are reputed to have most of the philosophic spirit, when they come within sight of the great difficulty of the subject, I mean dialectic, take themselves off. In after life when invited by some one else, they may, perhaps, go and hear a lecture, and about this they make much ado, for philosophy is not considered by them to be their proper business: at last, when they grow old, in most cases they are extinguished more truly than Heracleitus' sun, inasmuch as they never light up again. (Heraclitus said that the sun was extinguished every evening and relighted every morning.)

But what ought to be their course?

Just the opposite. In childhood and youth their study, and what philosophy they learn, should be suited to their tender years: during this period while they are growing up towards manhood, the chief and special care should be given to their bodies that they may have them to use in the service of philosophy; as life advances and the intellect begins to mature, let them increase the gymnastics of the soul; but when the strength of our citizens fails and is past civil and military duties, then let them range at will and engage in no serious labour, as we intend them to live happily here, and to crown this life with a similar happiness in another.

How truly in earnest you are, Socrates! he said; I am sure of that; and yet most of your hearers, if I am not mistaken, are likely to be still more earnest in their opposition to you, and will never be convinced; Thrasymachus least of all.

Do not make a quarrel, I said, between Thrasymachus and me, who have recently become friends, although, indeed, we were never enemies; for I shall go on striving to the utmost until I either convert him and other men, or do something which may profit them against the day when they live again, and hold the like discourse in another state of existence.

You are speaking of a time which is not very near.

Rather, I replied, of a time which is as nothing in comparison with eternity. Nevertheless, I do not wonder that the many refuse to believe; for they have never seen that of which we are now speaking realized; they have seen only a conventional imitation of philosophy, consisting of words artificially brought together, not like these of ours having a natural unity. But a human being who in word and work is perfectly moulded, as far as he can be, into the proportion and likeness of virtue—such a man ruling in a city which bears the same image, they have never yet seen, neither one nor many of them—do you think that they ever did?

No indeed.

No, my friend, and they have seldom, if ever, heard free and noble sentiments; such as men utter when they are earnestly and by every means in their power seeking after truth for the sake of knowledge, while they look coldly on the subtleties of controversy, of which the end is opinion and strife, whether they meet with them in the courts of law or in society.

They are strangers, he said, to the words of which you speak.

And this was what we foresaw, and this was the reason why truth forced us to admit, not without fear and hesitation, that neither cities nor States nor individuals will ever attain perfection until the small class of philosophers whom we termed useless but not corrupt are providentially compelled, whether they will or not, to take care of the State, and until a like necessity be laid on the State to obey them; or until kings, or if not kings, the sons of kings or princes, are divinely inspired with a true love of true philosophy. That either or both of these alternatives are impossible, I see no reason to affirm: if they were so, we might indeed be justly ridiculed as dreamers and visionaries. Am I not right?

Quite right.

If then, in the countless ages of the past, or at the present hour in some foreign clime which is far away and beyond our ken, the perfected philosopher is or has been or hereafter shall be compelled by a superior power to have the charge of the State, we are ready to assert to the death, that this our constitution has been, and is—yea, and will be whenever the Muse of Philosophy is queen. There is no impossibility in all this; that there is a difficulty, we acknowledge ourselves.

My opinion agrees with yours, he said.

But do you mean to say that this is not the opinion of the multitude?

I should imagine not, he replied.

O my friend, I said, do not attack the multitude: they will change their minds, if, not in an aggressive spirit, but gently and with the view of soothing them and removing their dislike of over-education, you show them your philosophers as they really are and describe as you were just now doing their character and profession, and then mankind will see that he of whom you are speaking is not such as they supposed—if they view him in this new light, they will surely change their notion of him, and answer in another strain. Who can be at enmity with one who loves them, who that is himself gentle and free from envy will be jealous of one in whom there is no jealousy? Nay, let me answer for you, that in a few this harsh temper may be found but not in the majority of mankind.

I quite agree with you, he said.

And do you not also think, as I do, that the harsh feeling which the many entertain towards philosophy originates in the pretenders, who rush in uninvited, and are always abusing them, and finding fault with them, who make persons instead of things the theme of their conversation? and nothing can be more unbecoming in philosophers than this.

It is most unbecoming.

For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has surely no time to look down upon the affairs of earth, or to be filled with malice and envy, contending against men; his eye is ever directed towards things fixed and immutable, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another, but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates, and to these he will, as far as he can, conform himself. Can a man help imitating that with which he holds reverential converse?

Impossible.

And the philosopher holding converse with the divine order, becomes orderly and divine, as far as the nature of man allows; but like every one else, he will suffer from detraction.

Of course.

And if a necessity be laid upon him of fashioning, not only himself, but human nature generally, whether in States or individuals, into that which he beholds elsewhere, will he, think you, be an unskilful artificer of justice, temperance, and every civil virtue?

Anything but unskilful.

And if the world perceives that what we are saying about him is the truth, will they be angry with philosophy? Will they disbelieve us, when we tell them that no State can be happy which is not designed by artists who imitate the heavenly pattern?

They will not be angry if they understand, he said. But how will they draw out the plan of which you are speaking?

They will begin by taking the State and the manners of men, from which, as from a tablet, they will rub out the picture, and leave a clean surface. This is no easy task. But whether easy or not, herein will lie the difference between them and every other legislator,—they will have nothing to do either with individual or State, and will inscribe no laws, until they have either found, or themselves made, a clean surface.

They will be very right, he said.

Having effected this, they will proceed to trace an outline of the constitution?

No doubt.

And when they are filling in the work, as I conceive, they will often turn their eyes upwards and downwards: I mean that they will first look at absolute justice and beauty and temperance, and again at the human copy; and will mingle and temper the various elements of life into the image of a man; and this they will conceive according to that other image, which, when existing among men, Homer calls the form and likeness of God.

Very true, he said.

And one feature they will erase, and another they will put in, until they have made the ways of men, as far as possible, agreeable to the ways of God?

Indeed, he said, in no way could they make a fairer picture.

And now, I said, are we beginning to persuade those whom you described as rushing at us with might and main, that the painter of constitutions is such an one as we are praising; at whom they were so very indignant because to his hands we committed the State; and are they growing a little calmer at what they have just heard?

Much calmer, if there is any sense in them.

Why, where can they still find any ground for objection? Will they doubt that the philosopher is a lover of truth and being?

They would not be so unreasonable.

Or that his nature, being such as we have delineated, is akin to the highest good?

Neither can they doubt this.

But again, will they tell us that such a nature, placed under favourable circumstances, will not be perfectly good and wise if any ever was? Or will they prefer those whom we have rejected?

Surely not.

Then will they still be angry at our saying, that, until philosophers bear rule, States and individuals will have no rest from evil, nor will this our imaginary State ever be realized?

I think that they will be less angry.

Shall we assume that they are not only less angry but quite gentle, and that they have been converted and for very shame, if for no other reason, cannot refuse to come to terms?

By all means, he said.

Then let us suppose that the reconciliation has been effected. Will any one deny the other point, that there may be sons of kings or princes who are by nature philosophers?

Surely no man, he said.

And when they have come into being will any one say that they must of necessity be destroyed; that they can hardly be saved is not denied even by us; but that in the whole course of ages no single one of them can escape—who will venture to affirm this?

Who indeed!

But, said I, one is enough; let there be one man who has a city obedient to his will, and he might bring into existence the ideal polity about which the world is so incredulous.

Yes, one is enough.

The ruler may impose the laws and institutions which we have been describing, and the citizens may possibly be willing to obey them?

Certainly.

And that others should approve, of what we approve, is no miracle or impossibility?

I think not.

But we have sufficiently shown, in what has preceded, that all this, if only possible, is assuredly for the best.

We have.

And now we say not only that our laws, if they could be enacted, would be for the best, but also that the enactment of them, though difficult, is not impossible.

Very good.

And so with pain and toil we have reached the end of one subject, but more remains to be discussed;—how and by what studies and pursuits will the saviours of the constitution be created, and at what ages are they to apply themselves to their several studies?

Certainly.

I omitted the troublesome business of the possession of women, and the procreation of children, and the appointment of the rulers, because I knew that the perfect State would be eyed with jealousy and was difficult of attainment; but that piece of cleverness was not of much service to me, for I had to discuss them all the same. The women and children are now disposed of, but the other question of the rulers must be investigated from the very beginning. We were saying, as you will remember, that they were to be lovers of their country, tried by the test of pleasures and pains, and neither in hardships, nor in dangers, nor at any other critical moment were to lose their patriotism—he was to be rejected who failed, but he who always came forth pure, like gold tried in the refiner's fire, was to be made a ruler, and to receive honours and rewards in life and after death. This was the sort of thing which was being said, and then the argument turned aside and veiled her face; not liking to stir the question which has now arisen.

I perfectly remember, he said.

Yes, my friend, I said, and I then shrank from hazarding the bold word; but now let me dare to say—that the perfect guardian must be a philosopher.

Yes, he said, let that be affirmed.

And do not suppose that there will be many of them; for the gifts which were deemed by us to be essential rarely grow together; they are mostly found in shreds and patches.

What do you mean? he said.

You are aware, I replied, that quick intelligence, memory, sagacity, cleverness, and similar qualities, do not often grow together, and that persons who possess them and are at the same time high-spirited and magnanimous are not so constituted by nature as to live orderly and in a peaceful and settled manner; they are driven any way by their impulses, and all solid principle goes out of them.

Very true, he said.

On the other hand, those steadfast natures which can better be depended upon, which in a battle are impregnable to fear and immovable, are equally immovable when there is anything to be learned; they are always in a torpid state, and are apt to yawn and go to sleep over any intellectual toil.

Quite true.

And yet we were saying that both qualities were necessary in those to whom the higher education is to be imparted, and who are to share in any office or command.

Certainly, he said.

And will they be a class which is rarely found?

Yes, indeed.

Then the aspirant must not only be tested in those labours and dangers and pleasures which we mentioned before, but there is another kind of probation which we did not mention—he must be exercised also in many kinds of knowledge, to see whether the soul will be able to endure the highest of all, or will faint under them, as in any other studies and exercises.

Yes, he said, you are quite right in testing him. But what do you mean by the highest of all knowledge?

You may remember, I said, that we divided the soul into three parts; and distinguished the several natures of justice, temperance, courage, and wisdom?

Indeed, he said, if I had forgotten, I should not deserve to hear more.

And do you remember the word of caution which preceded the discussion of them?

To what do you refer?

We were saying, if I am not mistaken, that he who wanted to see them in their perfect beauty must take a longer and more circuitous way, at the end of which they would appear; but that we could add on a popular exposition of them on a level with the discussion which had preceded. And you replied that such an exposition would be enough for you, and so the enquiry was continued in what to me seemed to be a very inaccurate manner; whether you were satisfied or not, it is for you to say.

Yes, he said, I thought and the others thought that you gave us a fair measure of truth.

But, my friend, I said, a measure of such things which in any degree falls short of the whole truth is not fair measure; for nothing imperfect is the measure of anything, although persons are too apt to be contented and think that they need search no further.

Not an uncommon case when people are indolent.

Yes, I said; and there cannot be any worse fault in a guardian of the State and of the laws.

True.

The guardian then, I said, must be required to take the longer circuit, and toil at learning as well as at gymnastics, or he will never reach the highest knowledge of all which, as we were just now saying, is his proper calling.

What, he said, is there a knowledge still higher than this—higher than justice and the other virtues?

Yes, I said, there is. And of the virtues too we must behold not the outline merely, as at present—nothing short of the most finished picture should satisfy us. When little things are elaborated with an infinity of pains, in order that they may appear in their full beauty and utmost clearness, how ridiculous that we should not think the highest truths worthy of attaining the highest accuracy!

A right noble thought; but do you suppose that we shall refrain from asking you what is this highest knowledge?

Nay, I said, ask if you will; but I am certain that you have heard the answer many times, and now you either do not understand me or, as I rather think, you are disposed to be troublesome; for you have often been told that the idea of good is the highest knowledge, and that all other things become useful and advantageous only by their use of this. You can hardly be ignorant that of this I was about to speak, concerning which, as you have often heard me say, we know so little; and, without which, any other knowledge or possession of any kind will profit us nothing. Do you think that the possession of all other things is of any value if we do not possess the good? or the knowledge of all other things if we have no knowledge of beauty and goodness?

Assuredly not.

You are further aware that most people affirm pleasure to be the good, but the finer sort of wits say it is knowledge?

Yes.

And you are aware too that the latter cannot explain what they mean by knowledge, but are obliged after all to say knowledge of the good?

How ridiculous!

Yes, I said, that they should begin by reproaching us with our ignorance of the good, and then presume our knowledge of it—for the good they define to be knowledge of the good, just as if we understood them when they use the term 'good'—this is of course ridiculous.

Most true, he said.

And those who make pleasure their good are in equal perplexity; for they are compelled to admit that there are bad pleasures as well as good.

Certainly.

And therefore to acknowledge that bad and good are the same?

True.

There can be no doubt about the numerous difficulties in which this question is involved.

There can be none.

Further, do we not see that many are willing to do or to have or to seem to be what is just and honourable without the reality; but no one is satisfied with the appearance of good—the reality is what they seek; in the case of the good, appearance is despised by every one.

Very true, he said.

Of this then, which every soul of man pursues and makes the end of all his actions, having a presentiment that there is such an end, and yet hesitating because neither knowing the nature nor having the same assurance of this as of other things, and therefore losing whatever good there is in other things,—of a principle such and so great as this ought the best men in our State, to whom everything is entrusted, to be in the darkness of ignorance?

Certainly not, he said.

I am sure, I said, that he who does not know how the beautiful and the just are likewise good will be but a sorry guardian of them; and I suspect that no one who is ignorant of the good will have a true knowledge of them.

That, he said, is a shrewd suspicion of yours.

And if we only have a guardian who has this knowledge our State will be perfectly ordered?

Of course, he replied; but I wish that you would tell me whether you conceive this supreme principle of the good to be knowledge or pleasure, or different from either?

Aye, I said, I knew all along that a fastidious gentleman like you would not be contented with the thoughts of other people about these matters.

True, Socrates; but I must say that one who like you has passed a lifetime in the study of philosophy should not be always repeating the opinions of others, and never telling his own.

Well, but has any one a right to say positively what he does not know?

Not, he said, with the assurance of positive certainty; he has no right to do that: but he may say what he thinks, as a matter of opinion.

And do you not know, I said, that all mere opinions are bad, and the best of them blind? You would not deny that those who have any true notion without intelligence are only like blind men who feel their way along the road?

Very true.

And do you wish to behold what is blind and crooked and base, when others will tell you of brightness and beauty?

Still, I must implore you, Socrates, said Glaucon, not to turn away just as you are reaching the goal; if you will only give such an explanation of the good as you have already given of justice and temperance and the other virtues, we shall be satisfied.

Yes, my friend, and I shall be at least equally satisfied, but I cannot help fearing that I shall fail, and that my indiscreet zeal will bring ridicule upon me. No, sweet sirs, let us not at present ask what is the actual nature of the good, for to reach what is now in my thoughts would be an effort too great for me. But of the child of the good who is likest him, I would fain speak, if I could be sure that you wished to hear—otherwise, not.

By all means, he said, tell us about the child, and you shall remain in our debt for the account of the parent.

I do indeed wish, I replied, that I could pay, and you receive, the account of the parent, and not, as now, of the offspring only; take, however, this latter by way of interest, and at the same time have a care that I do not render a false account, although I have no intention of deceiving you.

Yes, we will take all the care that we can: proceed.

Yes, I said, but I must first come to an understanding with you, and remind you of what I have mentioned in the course of this discussion, and at many other times.

What?

The old story, that there is a many beautiful and a many good, and so of other things which we describe and define; to all of them the term 'many' is applied.

True, he said.

And there is an absolute beauty and an absolute good, and of other things to which the term 'many' is applied there is an absolute; for they may be brought under a single idea, which is called the essence of each.

Very true.

The many, as we say, are seen but not known, and the ideas are known but not seen.

Exactly.

And what is the organ with which we see the visible things?

The sight, he said.

And with the hearing, I said, we hear, and with the other senses perceive the other objects of sense?

True.

But have you remarked that sight is by far the most costly and complex piece of workmanship which the artificer of the senses ever contrived?

No, I never have, he said.

Then reflect; has the ear or voice need of any third or additional nature in order that the one may be able to hear and the other to be heard?

Nothing of the sort.

No, indeed, I replied; and the same is true of most, if not all, the other senses—you would not say that any of them requires such an addition?

Certainly not.

But you see that without the addition of some other nature there is no seeing or being seen?

How do you mean?

Sight being, as I conceive, in the eyes, and he who has eyes wanting to see; colour being also present in them, still unless there be a third nature specially adapted to the purpose, the owner of the eyes will see nothing and the colours will be invisible.

Of what nature are you speaking?

Of that which you term light, I replied.

True, he said.

Noble, then, is the bond which links together sight and visibility, and great beyond other bonds by no small difference of nature; for light is their bond, and light is no ignoble thing?

Nay, he said, the reverse of ignoble.

And which, I said, of the gods in heaven would you say was the lord of this element? Whose is that light which makes the eye to see perfectly and the visible to appear?

You mean the sun, as you and all mankind say.

May not the relation of sight to this deity be described as follows?

How?

Neither sight nor the eye in which sight resides is the sun?

No.

Yet of all the organs of sense the eye is the most like the sun?

By far the most like.

And the power which the eye possesses is a sort of effluence which is dispensed from the sun?

Exactly.

Then the sun is not sight, but the author of sight who is recognised by sight?

True, he said.

And this is he whom I call the child of the good, whom the good begat in his own likeness, to be in the visible world, in relation to sight and the things of sight, what the good is in the intellectual world in relation to mind and the things of mind:

Will you be a little more explicit? he said.

Why, you know, I said, that the eyes, when a person directs them towards objects on which the light of day is no longer shining, but the moon and stars only, see dimly, and are nearly blind; they seem to have no clearness of vision in them?

Very true.

But when they are directed towards objects on which the sun shines, they see clearly and there is sight in them?

Certainly.

And the soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the soul perceives and understands, and is radiant with intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and is first of one opinion and then of another, and seems to have no intelligence?

Just so.

Now, that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the knower is what I would have you term the idea of good, and this you will deem to be the cause of science, and of truth in so far as the latter becomes the subject of knowledge; beautiful too, as are both truth and knowledge, you will be right in esteeming this other nature as more beautiful than either; and, as in the previous instance, light and sight may be truly said to be like the sun, and yet not to be the sun, so in this other sphere, science and truth may be deemed to be like the good, but not the good; the good has a place of honour yet higher.

What a wonder of beauty that must be, he said, which is the author of science and truth, and yet surpasses them in beauty; for you surely cannot mean to say that pleasure is the good?

God forbid, I replied; but may I ask you to consider the image in another point of view?

In what point of view?

You would say, would you not, that the sun is not only the author of visibility in all visible things, but of generation and nourishment and growth, though he himself is not generation?

Certainly.

In like manner the good may be said to be not only the author of knowledge to all things known, but of their being and essence, and yet the good is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power.

Glaucon said, with a ludicrous earnestness: By the light of heaven, how amazing!

Yes, I said, and the exaggeration may be set down to you; for you made me utter my fancies.

And pray continue to utter them; at any rate let us hear if there is anything more to be said about the similitude of the sun.

Yes, I said, there is a great deal more.

Then omit nothing, however slight.

I will do my best, I said; but I should think that a great deal will have to be omitted.

I hope not, he said.

You have to imagine, then, that there are two ruling powers, and that one of them is set over the intellectual world, the other over the visible. I do not say heaven, lest you should fancy that I am playing upon the name ('ourhanoz, orhatoz'). May I suppose that you have this distinction of the visible and intelligible fixed in your mind?

I have.

Now take a line which has been cut into two unequal parts, and divide each of them again in the same proportion, and suppose the two main divisions to answer, one to the visible and the other to the intelligible, and then compare the subdivisions in respect of their clearness and want of clearness, and you will find that the first section in the sphere of the visible consists of images. And by images I mean, in the first place, shadows, and in the second place, reflections in water and in solid, smooth and polished bodies and the like: Do you understand?

Yes, I understand.

Imagine, now, the other section, of which this is only the resemblance, to include the animals which we see, and everything that grows or is made.

Very good.

Would you not admit that both the sections of this division have different degrees of truth, and that the copy is to the original as the sphere of opinion is to the sphere of knowledge?

Most undoubtedly.

Next proceed to consider the manner in which the sphere of the intellectual is to be divided.

In what manner?

Thus:—There are two subdivisions, in the lower of which the soul uses the figures given by the former division as images; the enquiry can only be hypothetical, and instead of going upwards to a principle descends to the other end; in the higher of the two, the soul passes out of hypotheses, and goes up to a principle which is above hypotheses, making no use of images as in the former case, but proceeding only in and through the ideas themselves.

I do not quite understand your meaning, he said.

Then I will try again; you will understand me better when I have made some preliminary remarks. You are aware that students of geometry, arithmetic, and the kindred sciences assume the odd and the even and the figures and three kinds of angles and the like in their several branches of science; these are their hypotheses, which they and every body are supposed to know, and therefore they do not deign to give any account of them either to themselves or others; but they begin with them, and go on until they arrive at last, and in a consistent manner, at their conclusion?

Yes, he said, I know.

And do you not know also that although they make use of the visible forms and reason about them, they are thinking not of these, but of the ideals which they resemble; not of the figures which they draw, but of the absolute square and the absolute diameter, and so on—the forms which they draw or make, and which have shadows and reflections in water of their own, are converted by them into images, but they are really seeking to behold the things themselves, which can only be seen with the eye of the mind?

That is true.

And of this kind I spoke as the intelligible, although in the search after it the soul is compelled to use hypotheses; not ascending to a first principle, because she is unable to rise above the region of hypothesis, but employing the objects of which the shadows below are resemblances in their turn as images, they having in relation to the shadows and reflections of them a greater distinctness, and therefore a higher value.

I understand, he said, that you are speaking of the province of geometry and the sister arts.

And when I speak of the other division of the intelligible, you will understand me to speak of that other sort of knowledge which reason herself attains by the power of dialectic, using the hypotheses not as first principles, but only as hypotheses—that is to say, as steps and points of departure into a world which is above hypotheses, in order that she may soar beyond them to the first principle of the whole; and clinging to this and then to that which depends on this, by successive steps she descends again without the aid of any sensible object, from ideas, through ideas, and in ideas she ends.

I understand you, he replied; not perfectly, for you seem to me to be describing a task which is really tremendous; but, at any rate, I understand you to say that knowledge and being, which the science of dialectic contemplates, are clearer than the notions of the arts, as they are termed, which proceed from hypotheses only: these are also contemplated by the understanding, and not by the senses: yet, because they start from hypotheses and do not ascend to a principle, those who contemplate them appear to you not to exercise the higher reason upon them, although when a first principle is added to them they are cognizable by the higher reason. And the habit which is concerned with geometry and the cognate sciences I suppose that you would term understanding and not reason, as being intermediate between opinion and reason.

You have quite conceived my meaning, I said; and now, corresponding to these four divisions, let there be four faculties in the soul—reason answering to the highest, understanding to the second, faith (or conviction) to the third, and perception of shadows to the last—and let there be a scale of them, and let us suppose that the several faculties have clearness in the same degree that their objects have truth.

I understand, he replied, and give my assent, and accept your arrangement.

BOOK VII.

And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:—Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

I see.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.

You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?

Yes, he said.

And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?

Very true.

And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?

No question, he replied.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

That is certain.

And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,—what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,—will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

Far truer.

And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?

True, he said.

And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.

Not all in a moment, he said.

He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day?

Certainly.

Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.

Certainly.

He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?

Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.

And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?

Certainly, he would.

And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,

'Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,'

and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?

Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.

Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?

To be sure, he said.

And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable), would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.

No question, he said.

This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed—whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.

I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.

Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted.

Yes, very natural.

And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavouring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice?

Anything but surprising, he replied.

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.

That, he said, is a very just distinction.

But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.

They undoubtedly say this, he replied.

Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.

Very true.

And must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away from the truth?

Yes, he said, such an art may be presumed.

And whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can be implanted later by habit and exercise, the virtue of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by this conversion is rendered useful and profitable; or, on the other hand, hurtful and useless. Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue—how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind, but his keen eye-sight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness?

Very true, he said.

But what if there had been a circumcision of such natures in the days of their youth; and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures, such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached to them at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision of their souls upon the things that are below—if, I say, they had been released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to now.

Very likely.

Yes, I said; and there is another thing which is likely, or rather a necessary inference from what has preceded, that neither the uneducated and uninformed of the truth, nor yet those who never make an end of their education, will be able ministers of State; not the former, because they have no single aim of duty which is the rule of all their actions, private as well as public; nor the latter, because they will not act at all except upon compulsion, fancying that they are already dwelling apart in the islands of the blest.

Very true, he replied.

Then, I said, the business of us who are the founders of the State will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of all—they must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough we must not allow them to do as they do now.

What do you mean?

I mean that they remain in the upper world: but this must not be allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the den, and partake of their labours and honours, whether they are worth having or not.

But is not this unjust? he said; ought we to give them a worse life, when they might have a better?

You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the State.

True, he said, I had forgotten.

Observe, Glaucon, that there will be no injustice in compelling our philosophers to have a care and providence of others; we shall explain to them that in other States, men of their class are not obliged to share in the toils of politics: and this is reasonable, for they grow up at their own sweet will, and the government would rather not have them. Being self-taught, they cannot be expected to show any gratitude for a culture which they have never received. But we have brought you into the world to be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the other citizens, and have educated you far better and more perfectly than they have been educated, and you are better able to share in the double duty. Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State, which is also yours, will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.

Quite true, he replied.

And will our pupils, when they hear this, refuse to take their turn at the toils of State, when they are allowed to spend the greater part of their time with one another in the heavenly light?

Impossible, he answered; for they are just men, and the commands which we impose upon them are just; there can be no doubt that every one of them will take office as a stern necessity, and not after the fashion of our present rulers of State.

Yes, my friend, I said; and there lies the point. You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after their own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State.

Most true, he replied.

And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition is that of true philosophy. Do you know of any other?

Indeed, I do not, he said.

And those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task? For, if they are, there will be rival lovers, and they will fight.

No question.

Who then are those whom we shall compel to be guardians? Surely they will be the men who are wisest about affairs of State, and by whom the State is best administered, and who at the same time have other honours and another and a better life than that of politics?

They are the men, and I will choose them, he replied.

And now shall we consider in what way such guardians will be produced, and how they are to be brought from darkness to light,—as some are said to have ascended from the world below to the gods?

By all means, he replied.

The process, I said, is not the turning over of an oyster-shell (In allusion to a game in which two parties fled or pursued according as an oyster-shell which was thrown into the air fell with the dark or light side uppermost.), but the turning round of a soul passing from a day which is little better than night to the true day of being, that is, the ascent from below, which we affirm to be true philosophy?

Quite so.

And should we not enquire what sort of knowledge has the power of effecting such a change?

Certainly.

What sort of knowledge is there which would draw the soul from becoming to being? And another consideration has just occurred to me: You will remember that our young men are to be warrior athletes?

Yes, that was said.

Then this new kind of knowledge must have an additional quality?

What quality?

Usefulness in war.

Yes, if possible.

There were two parts in our former scheme of education, were there not?

Just so.

There was gymnastic which presided over the growth and decay of the body, and may therefore be regarded as having to do with generation and corruption?

True.

Then that is not the knowledge which we are seeking to discover?

No.

But what do you say of music, which also entered to a certain extent into our former scheme?

Music, he said, as you will remember, was the counterpart of gymnastic, and trained the guardians by the influences of habit, by harmony making them harmonious, by rhythm rhythmical, but not giving them science; and the words, whether fabulous or possibly true, had kindred elements of rhythm and harmony in them. But in music there was nothing which tended to that good which you are now seeking.

You are most accurate, I said, in your recollection; in music there certainly was nothing of the kind. But what branch of knowledge is there, my dear Glaucon, which is of the desired nature; since all the useful arts were reckoned mean by us?

Undoubtedly; and yet if music and gymnastic are excluded, and the arts are also excluded, what remains?

Well, I said, there may be nothing left of our special subjects; and then we shall have to take something which is not special, but of universal application.

What may that be?

A something which all arts and sciences and intelligences use in common, and which every one first has to learn among the elements of education.

What is that?

The little matter of distinguishing one, two, and three—in a word, number and calculation:—do not all arts and sciences necessarily partake of them?

Yes.

Then the art of war partakes of them?

To be sure.

Then Palamedes, whenever he appears in tragedy, proves Agamemnon ridiculously unfit to be a general. Did you never remark how he declares that he had invented number, and had numbered the ships and set in array the ranks of the army at Troy; which implies that they had never been numbered before, and Agamemnon must be supposed literally to have been incapable of counting his own feet—how could he if he was ignorant of number? And if that is true, what sort of general must he have been?

I should say a very strange one, if this was as you say.

Can we deny that a warrior should have a knowledge of arithmetic?

Certainly he should, if he is to have the smallest understanding of military tactics, or indeed, I should rather say, if he is to be a man at all.

I should like to know whether you have the same notion which I have of this study?

What is your notion?

It appears to me to be a study of the kind which we are seeking, and which leads naturally to reflection, but never to have been rightly used; for the true use of it is simply to draw the soul towards being.

Will you explain your meaning? he said.

I will try, I said; and I wish you would share the enquiry with me, and say 'yes' or 'no' when I attempt to distinguish in my own mind what branches of knowledge have this attracting power, in order that we may have clearer proof that arithmetic is, as I suspect, one of them.

Explain, he said.

I mean to say that objects of sense are of two kinds; some of them do not invite thought because the sense is an adequate judge of them; while in the case of other objects sense is so untrustworthy that further enquiry is imperatively demanded.

You are clearly referring, he said, to the manner in which the senses are imposed upon by distance, and by painting in light and shade.

No, I said, that is not at all my meaning.

Then what is your meaning?

When speaking of uninviting objects, I mean those which do not pass from one sensation to the opposite; inviting objects are those which do; in this latter case the sense coming upon the object, whether at a distance or near, gives no more vivid idea of anything in particular than of its opposite. An illustration will make my meaning clearer:—here are three fingers—a little finger, a second finger, and a middle finger.

Very good.

You may suppose that they are seen quite close: And here comes the point.

What is it?

Each of them equally appears a finger, whether seen in the middle or at the extremity, whether white or black, or thick or thin—it makes no difference; a finger is a finger all the same. In these cases a man is not compelled to ask of thought the question what is a finger? for the sight never intimates to the mind that a finger is other than a finger.

True.

And therefore, I said, as we might expect, there is nothing here which invites or excites intelligence.

There is not, he said.

But is this equally true of the greatness and smallness of the fingers? Can sight adequately perceive them? and is no difference made by the circumstance that one of the fingers is in the middle and another at the extremity? And in like manner does the touch adequately perceive the qualities of thickness or thinness, of softness or hardness? And so of the other senses; do they give perfect intimations of such matters? Is not their mode of operation on this wise—the sense which is concerned with the quality of hardness is necessarily concerned also with the quality of softness, and only intimates to the soul that the same thing is felt to be both hard and soft?

You are quite right, he said.

And must not the soul be perplexed at this intimation which the sense gives of a hard which is also soft? What, again, is the meaning of light and heavy, if that which is light is also heavy, and that which is heavy, light?

Yes, he said, these intimations which the soul receives are very curious and require to be explained.

Yes, I said, and in these perplexities the soul naturally summons to her aid calculation and intelligence, that she may see whether the several objects announced to her are one or two.

True.

And if they turn out to be two, is not each of them one and different?

Certainly.

And if each is one, and both are two, she will conceive the two as in a state of division, for if there were undivided they could only be conceived of as one?

True.

The eye certainly did see both small and great, but only in a confused manner; they were not distinguished.

Yes.

Whereas the thinking mind, intending to light up the chaos, was compelled to reverse the process, and look at small and great as separate and not confused.

Very true.

Was not this the beginning of the enquiry 'What is great?' and 'What is small?'

Exactly so.

And thus arose the distinction of the visible and the intelligible.

Most true.

This was what I meant when I spoke of impressions which invited the intellect, or the reverse—those which are simultaneous with opposite impressions, invite thought; those which are not simultaneous do not.

I understand, he said, and agree with you.

And to which class do unity and number belong?

I do not know, he replied.

Think a little and you will see that what has preceded will supply the answer; for if simple unity could be adequately perceived by the sight or by any other sense, then, as we were saying in the case of the finger, there would be nothing to attract towards being; but when there is some contradiction always present, and one is the reverse of one and involves the conception of plurality, then thought begins to be aroused within us, and the soul perplexed and wanting to arrive at a decision asks 'What is absolute unity?' This is the way in which the study of the one has a power of drawing and converting the mind to the contemplation of true being.

And surely, he said, this occurs notably in the case of one; for we see the same thing to be both one and infinite in multitude?

Yes, I said; and this being true of one must be equally true of all number?

Certainly.

And all arithmetic and calculation have to do with number?

Yes.

And they appear to lead the mind towards truth?

Yes, in a very remarkable manner.

Then this is knowledge of the kind for which we are seeking, having a double use, military and philosophical; for the man of war must learn the art of number or he will not know how to array his troops, and the philosopher also, because he has to rise out of the sea of change and lay hold of true being, and therefore he must be an arithmetician.

That is true.

And our guardian is both warrior and philosopher?

Certainly.

Then this is a kind of knowledge which legislation may fitly prescribe; and we must endeavour to persuade those who are to be the principal men of our State to go and learn arithmetic, not as amateurs, but they must carry on the study until they see the nature of numbers with the mind only; nor again, like merchants or retail-traders, with a view to buying or selling, but for the sake of their military use, and of the soul herself; and because this will be the easiest way for her to pass from becoming to truth and being.

That is excellent, he said.

Yes, I said, and now having spoken of it, I must add how charming the science is! and in how many ways it conduces to our desired end, if pursued in the spirit of a philosopher, and not of a shopkeeper!

How do you mean?

I mean, as I was saying, that arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tangible objects into the argument. You know how steadily the masters of the art repel and ridicule any one who attempts to divide absolute unity when he is calculating, and if you divide, they multiply (Meaning either (1) that they integrate the number because they deny the possibility of fractions; or (2) that division is regarded by them as a process of multiplication, for the fractions of one continue to be units.), taking care that one shall continue one and not become lost in fractions.

That is very true.

Now, suppose a person were to say to them: O my friends, what are these wonderful numbers about which you are reasoning, in which, as you say, there is a unity such as you demand, and each unit is equal, invariable, indivisible,—what would they answer?

They would answer, as I should conceive, that they were speaking of those numbers which can only be realized in thought.

Then you see that this knowledge may be truly called necessary, necessitating as it clearly does the use of the pure intelligence in the attainment of pure truth?

Yes; that is a marked characteristic of it.

And have you further observed, that those who have a natural talent for calculation are generally quick at every other kind of knowledge; and even the dull, if they have had an arithmetical training, although they may derive no other advantage from it, always become much quicker than they would otherwise have been.

Very true, he said.

And indeed, you will not easily find a more difficult study, and not many as difficult.

You will not.

And, for all these reasons, arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in which the best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up.

I agree.

Let this then be made one of our subjects of education. And next, shall we enquire whether the kindred science also concerns us?

You mean geometry?

Exactly so.

Clearly, he said, we are concerned with that part of geometry which relates to war; for in pitching a camp, or taking up a position, or closing or extending the lines of an army, or any other military manoeuvre, whether in actual battle or on a march, it will make all the difference whether a general is or is not a geometrician.

Yes, I said, but for that purpose a very little of either geometry or calculation will be enough; the question relates rather to the greater and more advanced part of geometry—whether that tends in any degree to make more easy the vision of the idea of good; and thither, as I was saying, all things tend which compel the soul to turn her gaze towards that place, where is the full perfection of being, which she ought, by all means, to behold.

True, he said.

Then if geometry compels us to view being, it concerns us; if becoming only, it does not concern us?

Yes, that is what we assert.

Yet anybody who has the least acquaintance with geometry will not deny that such a conception of the science is in flat contradiction to the ordinary language of geometricians.

How so?

They have in view practice only, and are always speaking, in a narrow and ridiculous manner, of squaring and extending and applying and the like—they confuse the necessities of geometry with those of daily life; whereas knowledge is the real object of the whole science.

Certainly, he said.

Then must not a further admission be made?

What admission?

That the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, and not of aught perishing and transient.

That, he replied, may be readily allowed, and is true.

Then, my noble friend, geometry will draw the soul towards truth, and create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up that which is now unhappily allowed to fall down.

Nothing will be more likely to have such an effect.

Then nothing should be more sternly laid down than that the inhabitants of your fair city should by all means learn geometry. Moreover the science has indirect effects, which are not small.

Of what kind? he said.

There are the military advantages of which you spoke, I said; and in all departments of knowledge, as experience proves, any one who has studied geometry is infinitely quicker of apprehension than one who has not.

Yes indeed, he said, there is an infinite difference between them.

Then shall we propose this as a second branch of knowledge which our youth will study?

Let us do so, he replied.

And suppose we make astronomy the third—what do you say?

I am strongly inclined to it, he said; the observation of the seasons and of months and years is as essential to the general as it is to the farmer or sailor.

I am amused, I said, at your fear of the world, which makes you guard against the appearance of insisting upon useless studies; and I quite admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of the soul which, when by other pursuits lost and dimmed, is by these purified and re-illumined; and is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen. Now there are two classes of persons: one class of those who will agree with you and will take your words as a revelation; another class to whom they will be utterly unmeaning, and who will naturally deem them to be idle tales, for they see no sort of profit which is to be obtained from them. And therefore you had better decide at once with which of the two you are proposing to argue. You will very likely say with neither, and that your chief aim in carrying on the argument is your own improvement; at the same time you do not grudge to others any benefit which they may receive.

I think that I should prefer to carry on the argument mainly on my own behalf.

Then take a step backward, for we have gone wrong in the order of the sciences.

What was the mistake? he said.

After plane geometry, I said, we proceeded at once to solids in revolution, instead of taking solids in themselves; whereas after the second dimension the third, which is concerned with cubes and dimensions of depth, ought to have followed.

That is true, Socrates; but so little seems to be known as yet about these subjects.

Why, yes, I said, and for two reasons:—in the first place, no government patronises them; this leads to a want of energy in the pursuit of them, and they are difficult; in the second place, students cannot learn them unless they have a director. But then a director can hardly be found, and even if he could, as matters now stand, the students, who are very conceited, would not attend to him. That, however, would be otherwise if the whole State became the director of these studies and gave honour to them; then disciples would want to come, and there would be continuous and earnest search, and discoveries would be made; since even now, disregarded as they are by the world, and maimed of their fair proportions, and although none of their votaries can tell the use of them, still these studies force their way by their natural charm, and very likely, if they had the help of the State, they would some day emerge into light.

Yes, he said, there is a remarkable charm in them. But I do not clearly understand the change in the order. First you began with a geometry of plane surfaces?

Yes, I said.

And you placed astronomy next, and then you made a step backward?

Yes, and I have delayed you by my hurry; the ludicrous state of solid geometry, which, in natural order, should have followed, made me pass over this branch and go on to astronomy, or motion of solids.

True, he said.

Then assuming that the science now omitted would come into existence if encouraged by the State, let us go on to astronomy, which will be fourth.

The right order, he replied. And now, Socrates, as you rebuked the vulgar manner in which I praised astronomy before, my praise shall be given in your own spirit. For every one, as I think, must see that astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

Every one but myself, I said; to every one else this may be clear, but not to me.

And what then would you say?

I should rather say that those who elevate astronomy into philosophy appear to me to make us look downwards and not upwards.

What do you mean? he asked.

You, I replied, have in your mind a truly sublime conception of our knowledge of the things above. And I dare say that if a person were to throw his head back and study the fretted ceiling, you would still think that his mind was the percipient, and not his eyes. And you are very likely right, and I may be a simpleton: but, in my opinion, that knowledge only which is of being and of the unseen can make the soul look upwards, and whether a man gapes at the heavens or blinks on the ground, seeking to learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he can learn, for nothing of that sort is matter of science; his soul is looking downwards, not upwards, whether his way to knowledge is by water or by land, whether he floats, or only lies on his back.

I acknowledge, he said, the justice of your rebuke. Still, I should like to ascertain how astronomy can be learned in any manner more conducive to that knowledge of which we are speaking?

I will tell you, I said: The starry heaven which we behold is wrought upon a visible ground, and therefore, although the fairest and most perfect of visible things, must necessarily be deemed inferior far to the true motions of absolute swiftness and absolute slowness, which are relative to each other, and carry with them that which is contained in them, in the true number and in every true figure. Now, these are to be apprehended by reason and intelligence, but not by sight.

True, he replied.

The spangled heavens should be used as a pattern and with a view to that higher knowledge; their beauty is like the beauty of figures or pictures excellently wrought by the hand of Daedalus, or some other great artist, which we may chance to behold; any geometrician who saw them would appreciate the exquisiteness of their workmanship, but he would never dream of thinking that in them he could find the true equal or the true double, or the truth of any other proportion.

No, he replied, such an idea would be ridiculous.

And will not a true astronomer have the same feeling when he looks at the movements of the stars? Will he not think that heaven and the things in heaven are framed by the Creator of them in the most perfect manner? But he will never imagine that the proportions of night and day, or of both to the month, or of the month to the year, or of the stars to these and to one another, and any other things that are material and visible can also be eternal and subject to no deviation—that would be absurd; and it is equally absurd to take so much pains in investigating their exact truth.

I quite agree, though I never thought of this before.

Then, I said, in astronomy, as in geometry, we should employ problems, and let the heavens alone if we would approach the subject in the right way and so make the natural gift of reason to be of any real use.

That, he said, is a work infinitely beyond our present astronomers.

Yes, I said; and there are many other things which must also have a similar extension given to them, if our legislation is to be of any value. But can you tell me of any other suitable study?

No, he said, not without thinking.

Motion, I said, has many forms, and not one only; two of them are obvious enough even to wits no better than ours; and there are others, as I imagine, which may be left to wiser persons.

But where are the two?

There is a second, I said, which is the counterpart of the one already named.

And what may that be?

The second, I said, would seem relatively to the ears to be what the first is to the eyes; for I conceive that as the eyes are designed to look up at the stars, so are the ears to hear harmonious motions; and these are sister sciences—as the Pythagoreans say, and we, Glaucon, agree with them?

Yes, he replied.

But this, I said, is a laborious study, and therefore we had better go and learn of them; and they will tell us whether there are any other applications of these sciences. At the same time, we must not lose sight of our own higher object.

What is that?

There is a perfection which all knowledge ought to reach, and which our pupils ought also to attain, and not to fall short of, as I was saying that they did in astronomy. For in the science of harmony, as you probably know, the same thing happens. The teachers of harmony compare the sounds and consonances which are heard only, and their labour, like that of the astronomers, is in vain.

Yes, by heaven! he said; and 'tis as good as a play to hear them talking about their condensed notes, as they call them; they put their ears close alongside of the strings like persons catching a sound from their neighbour's wall—one set of them declaring that they distinguish an intermediate note and have found the least interval which should be the unit of measurement; the others insisting that the two sounds have passed into the same—either party setting their ears before their understanding.

You mean, I said, those gentlemen who tease and torture the strings and rack them on the pegs of the instrument: I might carry on the metaphor and speak after their manner of the blows which the plectrum gives, and make accusations against the strings, both of backwardness and forwardness to sound; but this would be tedious, and therefore I will only say that these are not the men, and that I am referring to the Pythagoreans, of whom I was just now proposing to enquire about harmony. For they too are in error, like the astronomers; they investigate the numbers of the harmonies which are heard, but they never attain to problems—that is to say, they never reach the natural harmonies of number, or reflect why some numbers are harmonious and others not.

That, he said, is a thing of more than mortal knowledge.

A thing, I replied, which I would rather call useful; that is, if sought after with a view to the beautiful and good; but if pursued in any other spirit, useless.

Very true, he said.

Now, when all these studies reach the point of inter-communion and connection with one another, and come to be considered in their mutual affinities, then, I think, but not till then, will the pursuit of them have a value for our objects; otherwise there is no profit in them.

I suspect so; but you are speaking, Socrates, of a vast work.

What do you mean? I said; the prelude or what? Do you not know that all this is but the prelude to the actual strain which we have to learn? For you surely would not regard the skilled mathematician as a dialectician?

Assuredly not, he said; I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

But do you imagine that men who are unable to give and take a reason will have the knowledge which we require of them?

Neither can this be supposed.

And so, Glaucon, I said, we have at last arrived at the hymn of dialectic. This is that strain which is of the intellect only, but which the faculty of sight will nevertheless be found to imitate; for sight, as you may remember, was imagined by us after a while to behold the real animals and stars, and last of all the sun himself. And so with dialectic; when a person starts on the discovery of the absolute by the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute good, he at last finds himself at the end of the intellectual world, as in the case of sight at the end of the visible.

Exactly, he said.

Then this is the progress which you call dialectic?

True.

But the release of the prisoners from chains, and their translation from the shadows to the images and to the light, and the ascent from the underground den to the sun, while in his presence they are vainly trying to look on animals and plants and the light of the sun, but are able to perceive even with their weak eyes the images in the water (which are divine), and are the shadows of true existence (not shadows of images cast by a light of fire, which compared with the sun is only an image)—this power of elevating the highest principle in the soul to the contemplation of that which is best in existence, with which we may compare the raising of that faculty which is the very light of the body to the sight of that which is brightest in the material and visible world—this power is given, as I was saying, by all that study and pursuit of the arts which has been described.

I agree in what you are saying, he replied, which may be hard to believe, yet, from another point of view, is harder still to deny. This, however, is not a theme to be treated of in passing only, but will have to be discussed again and again. And so, whether our conclusion be true or false, let us assume all this, and proceed at once from the prelude or preamble to the chief strain (A play upon the Greek word, which means both 'law' and 'strain.'), and describe that in like manner. Say, then, what is the nature and what are the divisions of dialectic, and what are the paths which lead thither; for these paths will also lead to our final rest.

Dear Glaucon, I said, you will not be able to follow me here, though I would do my best, and you should behold not an image only but the absolute truth, according to my notion. Whether what I told you would or would not have been a reality I cannot venture to say; but you would have seen something like reality; of that I am confident.

Doubtless, he replied.

But I must also remind you, that the power of dialectic alone can reveal this, and only to one who is a disciple of the previous sciences.

Of that assertion you may be as confident as of the last.

And assuredly no one will argue that there is any other method of comprehending by any regular process all true existence or of ascertaining what each thing is in its own nature; for the arts in general are concerned with the desires or opinions of men, or are cultivated with a view to production and construction, or for the preservation of such productions and constructions; and as to the mathematical sciences which, as we were saying, have some apprehension of true being—geometry and the like—they only dream about being, but never can they behold the waking reality so long as they leave the hypotheses which they use unexamined, and are unable to give an account of them. For when a man knows not his own first principle, and when the conclusion and intermediate steps are also constructed out of he knows not what, how can he imagine that such a fabric of convention can ever become science?

Impossible, he said.

Then dialectic, and dialectic alone, goes directly to the first principle and is the only science which does away with hypotheses in order to make her ground secure; the eye of the soul, which is literally buried in an outlandish slough, is by her gentle aid lifted upwards; and she uses as handmaids and helpers in the work of conversion, the sciences which we have been discussing. Custom terms them sciences, but they ought to have some other name, implying greater clearness than opinion and less clearness than science: and this, in our previous sketch, was called understanding. But why should we dispute about names when we have realities of such importance to consider?

Why indeed, he said, when any name will do which expresses the thought of the mind with clearness?

At any rate, we are satisfied, as before, to have four divisions; two for intellect and two for opinion, and to call the first division science, the second understanding, the third belief, and the fourth perception of shadows, opinion being concerned with becoming, and intellect with being; and so to make a proportion:--

As being is to becoming, so is pure intellect to opinion. And as intellect is to opinion, so is science to belief, and understanding to the perception of shadows.

But let us defer the further correlation and subdivision of the subjects of opinion and of intellect, for it will be a long enquiry, many times longer than this has been.

As far as I understand, he said, I agree.

And do you also agree, I said, in describing the dialectician as one who attains a conception of the essence of each thing? And he who does not possess and is therefore unable to impart this conception, in whatever degree he fails, may in that degree also be said to fail in intelligence? Will you admit so much?

Yes, he said; how can I deny it?

And you would say the same of the conception of the good? Until the person is able to abstract and define rationally the idea of good, and unless he can run the gauntlet of all objections, and is ready to disprove them, not by appeals to opinion, but to absolute truth, never faltering at any step of the argument—unless he can do all this, you would say that he knows neither the idea of good nor any other good; he apprehends only a shadow, if anything at all, which is given by opinion and not by science;—dreaming and slumbering in this life, before he is well awake here, he arrives at the world below, and has his final quietus.

In all that I should most certainly agree with you.

And surely you would not have the children of your ideal State, whom you are nurturing and educating—if the ideal ever becomes a reality—you would not allow the future rulers to be like posts (Literally 'lines,' probably the starting-point of a race-course.), having no reason in them, and yet to be set in authority over the highest matters?

Certainly not.

Then you will make a law that they shall have such an education as will enable them to attain the greatest skill in asking and answering questions?

Yes, he said, you and I together will make it.

Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the coping-stone of the sciences, and is set over them; no other science can be placed higher—the nature of knowledge can no further go?

I agree, he said.

But to whom we are to assign these studies, and in what way they are to be assigned, are questions which remain to be considered.

Yes, clearly.

You remember, I said, how the rulers were chosen before?

Certainly, he said.

The same natures must still be chosen, and the preference again given to the surest and the bravest, and, if possible, to the fairest; and, having noble and generous tempers, they should also have the natural gifts which will facilitate their education.

And what are these?

Such gifts as keenness and ready powers of acquisition; for the mind more often faints from the severity of study than from the severity of gymnastics: the toil is more entirely the mind's own, and is not shared with the body.

Very true, he replied.

Further, he of whom we are in search should have a good memory, and be an unwearied solid man who is a lover of labour in any line; or he will never be able to endure the great amount of bodily exercise and to go through all the intellectual discipline and study which we require of him.

Certainly, he said; he must have natural gifts.

The mistake at present is, that those who study philosophy have no vocation, and this, as I was before saying, is the reason why she has fallen into disrepute: her true sons should take her by the hand and not bastards.

What do you mean?

In the first place, her votary should not have a lame or halting industry—I mean, that he should not be half industrious and half idle: as, for example, when a man is a lover of gymnastic and hunting, and all other bodily exercises, but a hater rather than a lover of the labour of learning or listening or enquiring. Or the occupation to which he devotes himself may be of an opposite kind, and he may have the other sort of lameness.

Certainly, he said.

And as to truth, I said, is not a soul equally to be deemed halt and lame which hates voluntary falsehood and is extremely indignant at herself and others when they tell lies, but is patient of involuntary falsehood, and does not mind wallowing like a swinish beast in the mire of ignorance, and has no shame at being detected?

To be sure.

And, again, in respect of temperance, courage, magnificence, and every other virtue, should we not carefully distinguish between the true son and the bastard? for where there is no discernment of such qualities states and individuals unconsciously err; and the state makes a ruler, and the individual a friend, of one who, being defective in some part of virtue, is in a figure lame or a bastard.

That is very true, he said.

All these things, then, will have to be carefully considered by us; and if only those whom we introduce to this vast system of education and training are sound in body and mind, justice herself will have nothing to say against us, and we shall be the saviours of the constitution and of the State; but, if our pupils are men of another stamp, the reverse will happen, and we shall pour a still greater flood of ridicule on philosophy than she has to endure at present.

That would not be creditable.

Certainly not, I said; and yet perhaps, in thus turning jest into earnest I am equally ridiculous.

In what respect?

I had forgotten, I said, that we were not serious, and spoke with too much excitement. For when I saw philosophy so undeservedly trampled under foot of men I could not help feeling a sort of indignation at the authors of her disgrace: and my anger made me too vehement.

Indeed! I was listening, and did not think so.

But I, who am the speaker, felt that I was. And now let me remind you that, although in our former selection we chose old men, we must not do so in this. Solon was under a delusion when he said that a man when he grows old may learn many things—for he can no more learn much than he can run much; youth is the time for any extraordinary toil.

Of course.

And, therefore, calculation and geometry and all the other elements of instruction, which are a preparation for dialectic, should be presented to the mind in childhood; not, however, under any notion of forcing our system of education.

Why not?

Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Very true.

Then, my good friend, I said, do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find out the natural bent.

That is a very rational notion, he said.

Do you remember that the children, too, were to be taken to see the battle on horseback; and that if there were no danger they were to be brought close up and, like young hounds, have a taste of blood given them?

Yes, I remember.

The same practice may be followed, I said, in all these things—labours, lessons, dangers—and he who is most at home in all of them ought to be enrolled in a select number.

At what age?

At the age when the necessary gymnastics are over: the period whether of two or three years which passes in this sort of training is useless for any other purpose; for sleep and exercise are unpropitious to learning; and the trial of who is first in gymnastic exercises is one of the most important tests to which our youth are subjected.

Certainly, he replied.

After that time those who are selected from the class of twenty years old will be promoted to higher honour, and the sciences which they learned without any order in their early education will now be brought together, and they will be able to see the natural relationship of them to one another and to true being.

Yes, he said, that is the only kind of knowledge which takes lasting root.

Yes, I said; and the capacity for such knowledge is the great criterion of dialectical talent: the comprehensive mind is always the dialectical.

I agree with you, he said.

These, I said, are the points which you must consider; and those who have most of this comprehension, and who are most steadfast in their learning, and in their military and other appointed duties, when they have arrived at the age of thirty have to be chosen by you out of the select class, and elevated to higher honour; and you will have to prove them by the help of dialectic, in order to learn which of them is able to give up the use of sight and the other senses, and in company with truth to attain absolute being: And here, my friend, great caution is required.

Why great caution?

Do you not remark, I said, how great is the evil which dialectic has introduced?

What evil? he said.

The students of the art are filled with lawlessness.

Quite true, he said.

Do you think that there is anything so very unnatural or inexcusable in their case? or will you make allowance for them?

In what way make allowance?

I want you, I said, by way of parallel, to imagine a supposititious son who is brought up in great wealth; he is one of a great and numerous family, and has many flatterers. When he grows up to manhood, he learns that his alleged are not his real parents; but who the real are he is unable to discover. Can you guess how he will be likely to behave towards his flatterers and his supposed parents, first of all during the period when he is ignorant of the false relation, and then again when he knows? Or shall I guess for you?

If you please.

Then I should say, that while he is ignorant of the truth he will be likely to honour his father and his mother and his supposed relations more than the flatterers; he will be less inclined to neglect them when in need, or to do or say anything against them; and he will be less willing to disobey them in any important matter.

He will.

But when he has made the discovery, I should imagine that he would diminish his honour and regard for them, and would become more devoted to the flatterers; their influence over him would greatly increase; he would now live after their ways, and openly associate with them, and, unless he were of an unusually good disposition, he would trouble himself no more about his supposed parents or other relations.

Well, all that is very probable. But how is the image applicable to the disciples of philosophy?

In this way: you know that there are certain principles about justice and honour, which were taught us in childhood, and under their parental authority we have been brought up, obeying and honouring them.

That is true.

There are also opposite maxims and habits of pleasure which flatter and attract the soul, but do not influence those of us who have any sense of right, and they continue to obey and honour the maxims of their fathers.

True.

Now, when a man is in this state, and the questioning spirit asks what is fair or honourable, and he answers as the legislator has taught him, and then arguments many and diverse refute his words, until he is driven into believing that nothing is honourable any more than dishonourable, or just and good any more than the reverse, and so of all the notions which he most valued, do you think that he will still honour and obey them as before?

Impossible.

And when he ceases to think them honourable and natural as heretofore, and he fails to discover the true, can he be expected to pursue any life other than that which flatters his desires?

He cannot.

And from being a keeper of the law he is converted into a breaker of it?

Unquestionably.

Now all this is very natural in students of philosophy such as I have described, and also, as I was just now saying, most excusable.

Yes, he said; and, I may add, pitiable.

Therefore, that your feelings may not be moved to pity about our citizens who are now thirty years of age, every care must be taken in introducing them to dialectic.

Certainly.

There is a danger lest they should taste the dear delight too early; for youngsters, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting others in imitation of those who refute them; like puppy-dogs, they rejoice in pulling and tearing at all who come near them.

Yes, he said, there is nothing which they like better.

And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing anything which they believed before, and hence, not only they, but philosophy and all that relates to it is apt to have a bad name with the rest of the world.

Too true, he said.

But when a man begins to get older, he will no longer be guilty of such insanity; he will imitate the dialectician who is seeking for truth, and not the eristic, who is contradicting for the sake of amusement; and the greater moderation of his character will increase instead of diminishing the honour of the pursuit.

Very true, he said.

And did we not make special provision for this, when we said that the disciples of philosophy were to be orderly and steadfast, not, as now, any chance aspirant or intruder?

Very true.

Suppose, I said, the study of philosophy to take the place of gymnastics and to be continued diligently and earnestly and exclusively for twice the number of years which were passed in bodily exercise—will that be enough?

Would you say six or four years? he asked.

Say five years, I replied; at the end of the time they must be sent down again into the den and compelled to hold any military or other office which young men are qualified to hold: in this way they will get their experience of life, and there will be an opportunity of trying whether, when they are drawn all manner of ways by temptation, they will stand firm or flinch.

And how long is this stage of their lives to last?

Fifteen years, I answered; and when they have reached fifty years of age, then let those who still survive and have distinguished themselves in every action of their lives and in every branch of knowledge come at last to their consummation: the time has now arrived at which they must raise the eye of the soul to the universal light which lightens all things, and behold the absolute good; for that is the pattern according to which they are to order the State and the lives of individuals, and the remainder of their own lives also; making philosophy their chief pursuit, but, when their turn comes, toiling also at politics and ruling for the public good, not as though they were performing some heroic action, but simply as a matter of duty; and when they have brought up in each generation others like themselves and left them in their place to be governors of the State, then they will depart to the Islands of the Blest and dwell there; and the city will give them public memorials and sacrifices and honour them, if the Pythian oracle consent, as demigods, but if not, as in any case blessed and divine.

You are a sculptor, Socrates, and have made statues of our governors faultless in beauty.

Yes, I said, Glaucon, and of our governesses too; for you must not suppose that what I have been saying applies to men only and not to women as far as their natures can go.

There you are right, he said, since we have made them to share in all things like the men.

Well, I said, and you would agree (would you not?) that what has been said about the State and the government is not a mere dream, and although difficult not impossible, but only possible in the way which has been supposed; that is to say, when the true philosopher kings are born in a State, one or more of them, despising the honours of this present world which they deem mean and worthless, esteeming above all things right and the honour that springs from right, and regarding justice as the greatest and most necessary of all things, whose ministers they are, and whose principles will be exalted by them when they set in order their own city?

How will they proceed?

They will begin by sending out into the country all the inhabitants of the city who are more than ten years old, and will take possession of their children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents; these they will train in their own habits and laws, I mean in the laws which we have given them: and in this way the State and constitution of which we were speaking will soonest and most easily attain happiness, and the nation which has such a constitution will gain most.

Yes, that will be the best way. And I think, Socrates, that you have very well described how, if ever, such a constitution might come into being.

Enough then of the perfect State, and of the man who bears its image—there is no difficulty in seeing how we shall describe him.

There is no difficulty, he replied; and I agree with you in thinking that nothing more need be said.

BOOK VIII.

And so, Glaucon, we have arrived at the conclusion that in the perfect State wives and children are to be in common; and that all education and the pursuits of war and peace are also to be common, and the best philosophers and the bravest warriors are to be their kings?

That, replied Glaucon, has been acknowledged.

Yes, I said; and we have further acknowledged that the governors, when appointed themselves, will take their soldiers and place them in houses such as we were describing, which are common to all, and contain nothing private, or individual; and about their property, you remember what we agreed?

Yes, I remember that no one was to have any of the ordinary possessions of mankind; they were to be warrior athletes and guardians, receiving from the other citizens, in lieu of annual payment, only their maintenance, and they were to take care of themselves and of the whole State.

True, I said; and now that this division of our task is concluded, let us find the point at which we digressed, that we may return into the old path.

There is no difficulty in returning; you implied, then as now, that you had finished the description of the State: you said that such a State was good, and that the man was good who answered to it, although, as now appears, you had more excellent things to relate both of State and man. And you said further, that if this was the true form, then the others were false; and of the false forms, you said, as I remember, that there were four principal ones, and that their defects, and the defects of the individuals corresponding to them, were worth examining. When we had seen all the individuals, and finally agreed as to who was the best and who was the worst of them, we were to consider whether the best was not also the happiest, and the worst the most miserable. I asked you what were the four forms of government of which you spoke, and then Polemarchus and Adeimantus put in their word; and you began again, and have found your way to the point at which we have now arrived.

Your recollection, I said, is most exact.

Then, like a wrestler, he replied, you must put yourself again in the same position; and let me ask the same questions, and do you give me the same answer which you were about to give me then.

Yes, if I can, I will, I said.

I shall particularly wish to hear what were the four constitutions of which you were speaking.

That question, I said, is easily answered: the four governments of which I spoke, so far as they have distinct names, are, first, those of Crete and Sparta, which are generally applauded; what is termed oligarchy comes next; this is not equally approved, and is a form of government which teems with evils: thirdly, democracy, which naturally follows oligarchy, although very different: and lastly comes tyranny, great and famous, which differs from them all, and is the fourth and worst disorder of a State. I do not know, do you? of any other constitution which can be said to have a distinct character. There are lordships and principalities which are bought and sold, and some other intermediate forms of government. But these are nondescripts and may be found equally among Hellenes and among barbarians.

Yes, he replied, we certainly hear of many curious forms of government which exist among them.

Do you know, I said, that governments vary as the dispositions of men vary, and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the other? For we cannot suppose that States are made of 'oak and rock,' and not out of the human natures which are in them, and which in a figure turn the scale and draw other things after them?

Yes, he said, the States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters.

Then if the constitutions of States are five, the dispositions of individual minds will also be five?

Certainly.

Him who answers to aristocracy, and whom we rightly call just and good, we have already described.

We have.

Then let us now proceed to describe the inferior sort of natures, being the contentious and ambitious, who answer to the Spartan polity; also the oligarchical, democratical, and tyrannical. Let us place the most just by the side of the most unjust, and when we see them we shall be able to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of him who leads a life of pure justice or pure injustice. The enquiry will then be completed. And we shall know whether we ought to pursue injustice, as Thrasymachus advises, or in accordance with the conclusions of the argument to prefer justice.

Certainly, he replied, we must do as you say.

Shall we follow our old plan, which we adopted with a view to clearness, of taking the State first and then proceeding to the individual, and begin with the government of honour?—I know of no name for such a government other than timocracy, or perhaps timarchy. We will compare with this the like character in the individual; and, after that, consider oligarchy and the oligarchical man; and then again we will turn our attention to democracy and the democratical man; and lastly, we will go and view the city of tyranny, and once more take a look into the tyrant's soul, and try to arrive at a satisfactory decision.

That way of viewing and judging of the matter will be very suitable.

First, then, I said, let us enquire how timocracy (the government of honour) arises out of aristocracy (the government of the best). Clearly, all political changes originate in divisions of the actual governing power; a government which is united, however small, cannot be moved.

Very true, he said.

In what way, then, will our city be moved, and in what manner will the two classes of auxiliaries and rulers disagree among themselves or with one another? Shall we, after the manner of Homer, pray the Muses to tell us 'how discord first arose'? Shall we imagine them in solemn mockery, to play and jest with us as if we were children, and to address us in a lofty tragic vein, making believe to be in earnest?

How would they address us?

After this manner:—A city which is thus constituted can hardly be shaken; but, seeing that everything which has a beginning has also an end, even a constitution such as yours will not last for ever, but will in time be dissolved. And this is the dissolution:—In plants that grow in the earth, as well as in animals that move on the earth's surface, fertility and sterility of soul and body occur when the circumferences of the circles of each are completed, which in short-lived existences pass over a short space, and in long-lived ones over a long space. But to the knowledge of human fecundity and sterility all the wisdom and education of your rulers will not attain; the laws which regulate them will not be discovered by an intelligence which is alloyed with sense, but will escape them, and they will bring children into the world when they ought not. Now that which is of divine birth has a period which is contained in a perfect number (i.e. a cyclical number, such as 6, which is equal to the sum of its divisors 1, 2, 3, so that when the circle or time represented by 6 is completed, the lesser times or rotations represented by 1, 2, 3 are also completed.), but the period of human birth is comprehended in a number in which first increments by involution and evolution (or squared and cubed) obtaining three intervals and four terms of like and unlike, waxing and waning numbers, make all the terms commensurable and agreeable to one another. (Probably the numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 of which the three first = the sides of the Pythagorean triangle. The terms will then be 3 cubed, 4 cubed, 5 cubed, which together = 6 cubed = 216.) The base of these (3) with a third added (4) when combined with five (20) and raised to the third power furnishes two harmonies; the first a square which is a hundred times as great (400 = 4 x 100) (Or the first a square which is 100 x 100 = 10,000. The whole number will then be 17,500 = a square of 100, and an oblong of 100 by 75.), and the other a figure having one side equal to the former, but oblong, consisting of a hundred numbers squared upon rational diameters of a square (i.e. omitting fractions), the side of which is five (7 x 7 = 49 x 100 = 4900), each of them being less by one (than the perfect square which includes the fractions, sc. 50) or less by (Or, 'consisting of two numbers squared upon irrational diameters,' etc. = 100. For other explanations of the passage see Introduction.) two perfect squares of irrational diameters (of a square the side of which is five = 50 + 50 = 100); and a hundred cubes of three (27 x 100 = 2700 + 4900 + 400 = 8000). Now this number represents a geometrical figure which has control over the good and evil of births. For when your guardians are ignorant of the law of births, and unite bride and bridegroom out of season, the children will not be goodly or fortunate. And though only the best of them will be appointed by their predecessors, still they will be unworthy to hold their fathers' places, and when they come into power as guardians, they will soon be found to fail in taking care of us, the Muses, first by under-valuing music; which neglect will soon extend to gymnastic; and hence the young men of your State will be less cultivated. In the succeeding generation rulers will be appointed who have lost the guardian power of testing the metal of your different races, which, like Hesiod's, are of gold and silver and brass and iron. And so iron will be mingled with silver, and brass with gold, and hence there will arise dissimilarity and inequality and irregularity, which always and in all places are causes of hatred and war. This the Muses affirm to be the stock from which discord has sprung, wherever arising; and this is their answer to us.

Yes, and we may assume that they answer truly.

Why, yes, I said, of course they answer truly; how can the Muses speak falsely?

And what do the Muses say next?

When discord arose, then the two races were drawn different ways: the iron and brass fell to acquiring money and land and houses and gold and silver; but the gold and silver races, not wanting money but having the true riches in their own nature, inclined towards virtue and the ancient order of things. There was a battle between them, and at last they agreed to distribute their land and houses among individual owners; and they enslaved their friends and maintainers, whom they had formerly protected in the condition of freemen, and made of them subjects and servants; and they themselves were engaged in war and in keeping a watch against them.

I believe that you have rightly conceived the origin of the change.

And the new government which thus arises will be of a form intermediate between oligarchy and aristocracy?

Very true.

Such will be the change, and after the change has been made, how will they proceed? Clearly, the new State, being in a mean between oligarchy and the perfect State, will partly follow one and partly the other, and will also have some peculiarities.

True, he said.

In the honour given to rulers, in the abstinence of the warrior class from agriculture, handicrafts, and trade in general, in the institution of common meals, and in the attention paid to gymnastics and military training—in all these respects this State will resemble the former.

True.

But in the fear of admitting philosophers to power, because they are no longer to be had simple and earnest, but are made up of mixed elements; and in turning from them to passionate and less complex characters, who are by nature fitted for war rather than peace; and in the value set by them upon military stratagems and contrivances, and in the waging of everlasting wars—this State will be for the most part peculiar.

Yes.

Yes, I said; and men of this stamp will be covetous of money, like those who live in oligarchies; they will have, a fierce secret longing after gold and silver, which they will hoard in dark places, having magazines and treasuries of their own for the deposit and concealment of them; also castles which are just nests for their eggs, and in which they will spend large sums on their wives, or on any others whom they please.

That is most true, he said.

And they are miserly because they have no means of openly acquiring the money which they prize; they will spend that which is another man's on the gratification of their desires, stealing their pleasures and running away like children from the law, their father: they have been schooled not by gentle influences but by force, for they have neglected her who is the true Muse, the companion of reason and philosophy, and have honoured gymnastic more than music.

Undoubtedly, he said, the form of government which you describe is a mixture of good and evil.

Why, there is a mixture, I said; but one thing, and one thing only, is predominantly seen,—the spirit of contention and ambition; and these are due to the prevalence of the passionate or spirited element.

Assuredly, he said.

Such is the origin and such the character of this State, which has been described in outline only; the more perfect execution was not required, for a sketch is enough to show the type of the most perfectly just and most perfectly unjust; and to go through all the States and all the characters of men, omitting none of them, would be an interminable labour.

Very true, he replied.

Now what man answers to this form of government-how did he come into being, and what is he like?

I think, said Adeimantus, that in the spirit of contention which characterises him, he is not unlike our friend Glaucon.

Perhaps, I said, he may be like him in that one point; but there are other respects in which he is very different.

In what respects?

He should have more of self-assertion and be less cultivated, and yet a friend of culture; and he should be a good listener, but no speaker. Such a person is apt to be rough with slaves, unlike the educated man, who is too proud for that; and he will also be courteous to freemen, and remarkably obedient to authority; he is a lover of power and a lover of honour; claiming to be a ruler, not because he is eloquent, or on any ground of that sort, but because he is a soldier and has performed feats of arms; he is also a lover of gymnastic exercises and of the chase.

Yes, that is the type of character which answers to timocracy.

Such an one will despise riches only when he is young; but as he gets older he will be more and more attracted to them, because he has a piece of the avaricious nature in him, and is not single-minded towards virtue, having lost his best guardian.

Who was that? said Adeimantus.

Philosophy, I said, tempered with music, who comes and takes up her abode in a man, and is the only saviour of his virtue throughout life.

Good, he said.

Such, I said, is the timocratical youth, and he is like the timocratical State.

Exactly.

His origin is as follows:—He is often the young son of a brave father, who dwells in an ill-governed city, of which he declines the honours and offices, and will not go to law, or exert himself in any way, but is ready to waive his rights in order that he may escape trouble.

And how does the son come into being?

The character of the son begins to develope when he hears his mother complaining that her husband has no place in the government, of which the consequence is that she has no precedence among other women. Further, when she sees her husband not very eager about money, and instead of battling and railing in the law courts or assembly, taking whatever happens to him quietly; and when she observes that his thoughts always centre in himself, while he treats her with very considerable indifference, she is annoyed, and says to her son that his father is only half a man and far too easy-going: adding all the other complaints about her own ill-treatment which women are so fond of rehearsing.

Yes, said Adeimantus, they give us plenty of them, and their complaints are so like themselves.

And you know, I said, that the old servants also, who are supposed to be attached to the family, from time to time talk privately in the same strain to the son; and if they see any one who owes money to his father, or is wronging him in any way, and he fails to prosecute them, they tell the youth that when he grows up he must retaliate upon people of this sort, and be more of a man than his father. He has only to walk abroad and he hears and sees the same sort of thing: those who do their own business in the city are called simpletons, and held in no esteem, while the busy-bodies are honoured and applauded. The result is that the young man, hearing and seeing all these things—hearing, too, the words of his father, and having a nearer view of his way of life, and making comparisons of him and others—is drawn opposite ways: while his father is watering and nourishing the rational principle in his soul, the others are encouraging the passionate and appetitive; and he being not originally of a bad nature, but having kept bad company, is at last brought by their joint influence to a middle point, and gives up the kingdom which is within him to the middle principle of contentiousness and passion, and becomes arrogant and ambitious.

You seem to me to have described his origin perfectly.

Then we have now, I said, the second form of government and the second type of character?

We have.

Next, let us look at another man who, as Aeschylus says,

'Is set over against another State;'

or rather, as our plan requires, begin with the State.

By all means.

I believe that oligarchy follows next in order.

And what manner of government do you term oligarchy?

A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it.

I understand, he replied.

Ought I not to begin by describing how the change from timocracy to oligarchy arises?

Yes.

Well, I said, no eyes are required in order to see how the one passes into the other.

How?

The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals is the ruin of timocracy; they invent illegal modes of expenditure; for what do they or their wives care about the law?

Yes, indeed.

And then one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money.

Likely enough.

And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.

True.

And in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State, virtue and the virtuous are dishonoured.

Clearly.

And what is honoured is cultivated, and that which has no honour is neglected.

That is obvious.

And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.

They do so.

They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower in another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the government. These changes in the constitution they effect by force of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work.

Very true.

And this, speaking generally, is the way in which oligarchy is established.

Yes, he said; but what are the characteristics of this form of government, and what are the defects of which we were speaking?

First of all, I said, consider the nature of the qualification. Just think what would happen if pilots were to be chosen according to their property, and a poor man were refused permission to steer, even though he were a better pilot?

You mean that they would shipwreck?

Yes; and is not this true of the government of anything?

I should imagine so.

Except a city?—or would you include a city?

Nay, he said, the case of a city is the strongest of all, inasmuch as the rule of a city is the greatest and most difficult of all.

This, then, will be the first great defect of oligarchy?

Clearly.

And here is another defect which is quite as bad.

What defect?

The inevitable division: such a State is not one, but two States, the one of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.

That, surely, is at least as bad.

Another discreditable feature is, that, for a like reason, they are incapable of carrying on any war. Either they arm the multitude, and then they are more afraid of them than of the enemy; or, if they do not call them out in the hour of battle, they are oligarchs indeed, few to fight as they are few to rule. And at the same time their fondness for money makes them unwilling to pay taxes.

How discreditable!

And, as we said before, under such a constitution the same persons have too many callings—they are husbandmen, tradesmen, warriors, all in one. Does that look well?

Anything but well.

There is another evil which is, perhaps, the greatest of all, and to which this State first begins to be liable.

What evil?

A man may sell all that he has, and another may acquire his property; yet after the sale he may dwell in the city of which he is no longer a part, being neither trader, nor artisan, nor horseman, nor hoplite, but only a poor, helpless creature.

Yes, that is an evil which also first begins in this State.

The evil is certainly not prevented there; for oligarchies have both the extremes of great wealth and utter poverty.

True.

But think again: In his wealthy days, while he was spending his money, was a man of this sort a whit more good to the State for the purposes of citizenship? Or did he only seem to be a member of the ruling body, although in truth he was neither ruler nor subject, but just a spendthrift?

As you say, he seemed to be a ruler, but was only a spendthrift.

May we not say that this is the drone in the house who is like the drone in the honeycomb, and that the one is the plague of the city as the other is of the hive?

Just so, Socrates.

And God has made the flying drones, Adeimantus, all without stings, whereas of the walking drones he has made some without stings but others have dreadful stings; of the stingless class are those who in their old age end as paupers; of the stingers come all the criminal class, as they are termed.

Most true, he said.

Clearly then, whenever you see paupers in a State, somewhere in that neighborhood there are hidden away thieves, and cut-purses and robbers of temples, and all sorts of malefactors.

Clearly.

Well, I said, and in oligarchical States do you not find paupers?

Yes, he said; nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a ruler.

And may we be so bold as to affirm that there are also many criminals to be found in them, rogues who have stings, and whom the authorities are careful to restrain by force?

Certainly, we may be so bold.

The existence of such persons is to be attributed to want of education, ill-training, and an evil constitution of the State?

True.

Such, then, is the form and such are the evils of oligarchy; and there may be many other evils.

Very likely.

Then oligarchy, or the form of government in which the rulers are elected for their wealth, may now be dismissed. Let us next proceed to consider the nature and origin of the individual who answers to this State.

By all means.

Does not the timocratical man change into the oligarchical on this wise?

How?

A time arrives when the representative of timocracy has a son: at first he begins by emulating his father and walking in his footsteps, but presently he sees him of a sudden foundering against the State as upon a sunken reef, and he and all that he has is lost; he may have been a general or some other high officer who is brought to trial under a prejudice raised by informers, and either put to death, or exiled, or deprived of the privileges of a citizen, and all his property taken from him.

Nothing more likely.

And the son has seen and known all this—he is a ruined man, and his fear has taught him to knock ambition and passion headforemost from his bosom's throne; humbled by poverty he takes to money-making and by mean and miserly savings and hard work gets a fortune together. Is not such an one likely to seat the concupiscent and covetous element on the vacant throne and to suffer it to play the great king within him, girt with tiara and chain and scimitar?

Most true, he replied.

And when he has made reason and spirit sit down on the ground obediently on either side of their sovereign, and taught them to know their place, he compels the one to think only of how lesser sums may be turned into larger ones, and will not allow the other to worship and admire anything but riches and rich men, or to be ambitious of anything so much as the acquisition of wealth and the means of acquiring it.

Of all changes, he said, there is none so speedy or so sure as the conversion of the ambitious youth into the avaricious one.

And the avaricious, I said, is the oligarchical youth?

Yes, he said; at any rate the individual out of whom he came is like the State out of which oligarchy came.

Let us then consider whether there is any likeness between them.

Very good.

First, then, they resemble one another in the value which they set upon wealth?

Certainly.

Also in their penurious, laborious character; the individual only satisfies his necessary appetites, and confines his expenditure to them; his other desires he subdues, under the idea that they are unprofitable.

True.

He is a shabby fellow, who saves something out of everything and makes a purse for himself; and this is the sort of man whom the vulgar applaud. Is he not a true image of the State which he represents?

He appears to me to be so; at any rate money is highly valued by him as well as by the State.

You see that he is not a man of cultivation, I said.

I imagine not, he said; had he been educated he would never have made a blind god director of his chorus, or given him chief honour.

Excellent! I said. Yet consider: Must we not further admit that owing to this want of cultivation there will be found in him dronelike desires as of pauper and rogue, which are forcibly kept down by his general habit of life?

True.

Do you know where you will have to look if you want to discover his rogueries?

Where must I look?

You should see him where he has some great opportunity of acting dishonestly, as in the guardianship of an orphan.

Aye.

It will be clear enough then that in his ordinary dealings which give him a reputation for honesty he coerces his bad passions by an enforced virtue; not making them see that they are wrong, or taming them by reason, but by necessity and fear constraining them, and because he trembles for his possessions.

To be sure.

Yes, indeed, my dear friend, but you will find that the natural desires of the drone commonly exist in him all the same whenever he has to spend what is not his own.

Yes, and they will be strong in him too.

The man, then, will be at war with himself; he will be two men, and not one; but, in general, his better desires will be found to prevail over his inferior ones.

True.

For these reasons such an one will be more respectable than most people; yet the true virtue of a unanimous and harmonious soul will flee far away and never come near him.

I should expect so.

And surely, the miser individually will be an ignoble competitor in a State for any prize of victory, or other object of honourable ambition; he will not spend his money in the contest for glory; so afraid is he of awakening his expensive appetites and inviting them to help and join in the struggle; in true oligarchical fashion he fights with a small part only of his resources, and the result commonly is that he loses the prize and saves his money.

Very true.

Can we any longer doubt, then, that the miser and money-maker answers to the oligarchical State?

There can be no doubt.

Next comes democracy; of this the origin and nature have still to be considered by us; and then we will enquire into the ways of the democratic man, and bring him up for judgment.

That, he said, is our method.

Well, I said, and how does the change from oligarchy into democracy arise? Is it not on this wise?—The good at which such a State aims is to become as rich as possible, a desire which is insatiable?

What then?

The rulers, being aware that their power rests upon their wealth, refuse to curtail by law the extravagance of the spendthrift youth because they gain by their ruin; they take interest from them and buy up their estates and thus increase their own wealth and importance?

To be sure.

There can be no doubt that the love of wealth and the spirit of moderation cannot exist together in citizens of the same state to any considerable extent; one or the other will be disregarded.

That is tolerably clear.

And in oligarchical States, from the general spread of carelessness and extravagance, men of good family have often been reduced to beggary?

Yes, often.

And still they remain in the city; there they are, ready to sting and fully armed, and some of them owe money, some have forfeited their citizenship; a third class are in both predicaments; and they hate and conspire against those who have got their property, and against everybody else, and are eager for revolution.

That is true.

On the other hand, the men of business, stooping as they walk, and pretending not even to see those whom they have already ruined, insert their sting—that is, their money—into some one else who is not on his guard against them, and recover the parent sum many times over multiplied into a family of children: and so they make drone and pauper to abound in the State.

Yes, he said, there are plenty of them—that is certain.

The evil blazes up like a fire; and they will not extinguish it, either by restricting a man's use of his own property, or by another remedy:

What other?

One which is the next best, and has the advantage of compelling the citizens to look to their characters:—Let there be a general rule that every one shall enter into voluntary contracts at his own risk, and there will be less of this scandalous money-making, and the evils of which we were speaking will be greatly lessened in the State.

Yes, they will be greatly lessened.

At present the governors, induced by the motives which I have named, treat their subjects badly; while they and their adherents, especially the young men of the governing class, are habituated to lead a life of luxury and idleness both of body and mind; they do nothing, and are incapable of resisting either pleasure or pain.

Very true.

They themselves care only for making money, and are as indifferent as the pauper to the cultivation of virtue.

Yes, quite as indifferent.

Such is the state of affairs which prevails among them. And often rulers and their subjects may come in one another's way, whether on a journey or on some other occasion of meeting, on a pilgrimage or a march, as fellow-soldiers or fellow-sailors; aye and they may observe the behaviour of each other in the very moment of danger—for where danger is, there is no fear that the poor will be despised by the rich—and very likely the wiry sunburnt poor man may be placed in battle at the side of a wealthy one who has never spoilt his complexion and has plenty of superfluous flesh—when he sees such an one puffing and at his wits'-end, how can he avoid drawing the conclusion that men like him are only rich because no one has the courage to despoil them? And when they meet in private will not people be saying to one another 'Our warriors are not good for much'?

Yes, he said, I am quite aware that this is their way of talking.

And, as in a body which is diseased the addition of a touch from without may bring on illness, and sometimes even when there is no external provocation a commotion may arise within—in the same way wherever there is weakness in the State there is also likely to be illness, of which the occasion may be very slight, the one party introducing from without their oligarchical, the other their democratical allies, and then the State falls sick, and is at war with herself; and may be at times distracted, even when there is no external cause.

Yes, surely.

And then democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power; and this is the form of government in which the magistrates are commonly elected by lot.

Yes, he said, that is the nature of democracy, whether the revolution has been effected by arms, or whether fear has caused the opposite party to withdraw.

And now what is their manner of life, and what sort of a government have they? for as the government is, such will be the man.

Clearly, he said.

In the first place, are they not free; and is not the city full of freedom and frankness—a man may say and do what he likes?

'Tis said so, he replied.

And where freedom is, the individual is clearly able to order for himself his own life as he pleases?

Clearly.

Then in this kind of State there will be the greatest variety of human natures?

There will.

This, then, seems likely to be the fairest of States, being like an embroidered robe which is spangled with every sort of flower. And just as women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things most charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is spangled with the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be the fairest of States.

Yes.

Yes, my good Sir, and there will be no better in which to look for a government.

Why?

Because of the liberty which reigns there—they have a complete assortment of constitutions; and he who has a mind to establish a State, as we have been doing, must go to a democracy as he would to a bazaar at which they sell them, and pick out the one that suits him; then, when he has made his choice, he may found his State.

He will be sure to have patterns enough.

And there being no necessity, I said, for you to govern in this State, even if you have the capacity, or to be governed, unless you like, or go to war when the rest go to war, or to be at peace when others are at peace, unless you are so disposed—there being no necessity also, because some law forbids you to hold office or be a dicast, that you should not hold office or be a dicast, if you have a fancy—is not this a way of life which for the moment is supremely delightful?

For the moment, yes.

And is not their humanity to the condemned in some cases quite charming? Have you not observed how, in a democracy, many persons, although they have been sentenced to death or exile, just stay where they are and walk about the world—the gentleman parades like a hero, and nobody sees or cares?

Yes, he replied, many and many a one.

See too, I said, the forgiving spirit of democracy, and the 'don't care' about trifles, and the disregard which she shows of all the fine principles which we solemnly laid down at the foundation of the city—as when we said that, except in the case of some rarely gifted nature, there never will be a good man who has not from his childhood been used to play amid things of beauty and make of them a joy and a study—how grandly does she trample all these fine notions of ours under her feet, never giving a thought to the pursuits which make a statesman, and promoting to honour any one who professes to be the people's friend.

Yes, she is of a noble spirit.

These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

We know her well.

Consider now, I said, what manner of man the individual is, or rather consider, as in the case of the State, how he comes into being.

Very good, he said.

Is not this the way—he is the son of the miserly and oligarchical father who has trained him in his own habits?

Exactly.

And, like his father, he keeps under by force the pleasures which are of the spending and not of the getting sort, being those which are called unnecessary?

Obviously.

Would you like, for the sake of clearness, to distinguish which are the necessary and which are the unnecessary pleasures?

I should.

Are not necessary pleasures those of which we cannot get rid, and of which the satisfaction is a benefit to us? And they are rightly called so, because we are framed by nature to desire both what is beneficial and what is necessary, and cannot help it.

True.

We are not wrong therefore in calling them necessary?

We are not.

And the desires of which a man may get rid, if he takes pains from his youth upwards—of which the presence, moreover, does no good, and in some cases the reverse of good—shall we not be right in saying that all these are unnecessary?

Yes, certainly.

Suppose we select an example of either kind, in order that we may have a general notion of them?

Very good.

Will not the desire of eating, that is, of simple food and condiments, in so far as they are required for health and strength, be of the necessary class?

That is what I should suppose.

The pleasure of eating is necessary in two ways; it does us good and it is essential to the continuance of life?

Yes.

But the condiments are only necessary in so far as they are good for health?

Certainly.

And the desire which goes beyond this, of more delicate food, or other luxuries, which might generally be got rid of, if controlled and trained in youth, and is hurtful to the body, and hurtful to the soul in the pursuit of wisdom and virtue, may be rightly called unnecessary?

Very true.

May we not say that these desires spend, and that the others make money because they conduce to production?

Certainly.

And of the pleasures of love, and all other pleasures, the same holds good?

True.

And the drone of whom we spoke was he who was surfeited in pleasures and desires of this sort, and was the slave of the unnecessary desires, whereas he who was subject to the necessary only was miserly and oligarchical?

Very true.

Again, let us see how the democratical man grows out of the oligarchical: the following, as I suspect, is commonly the process.

What is the process?

When a young man who has been brought up as we were just now describing, in a vulgar and miserly way, has tasted drones' honey and has come to associate with fierce and crafty natures who are able to provide for him all sorts of refinements and varieties of pleasure—then, as you may imagine, the change will begin of the oligarchical principle within him into the democratical?

Inevitably.

And as in the city like was helping like, and the change was effected by an alliance from without assisting one division of the citizens, so too the young man is changed by a class of desires coming from without to assist the desires within him, that which is akin and alike again helping that which is akin and alike?

Certainly.

And if there be any ally which aids the oligarchical principle within him, whether the influence of a father or of kindred, advising or rebuking him, then there arises in his soul a faction and an opposite faction, and he goes to war with himself.

It must be so.

And there are times when the democratical principle gives way to the oligarchical, and some of his desires die, and others are banished; a spirit of reverence enters into the young man's soul and order is restored.

Yes, he said, that sometimes happens.

And then, again, after the old desires have been driven out, fresh ones spring up, which are akin to them, and because he their father does not know how to educate them, wax fierce and numerous.

Yes, he said, that is apt to be the way.

They draw him to his old associates, and holding secret intercourse with them, breed and multiply in him.

Very true.

At length they seize upon the citadel of the young man's soul, which they perceive to be void of all accomplishments and fair pursuits and true words, which make their abode in the minds of men who are dear to the gods, and are their best guardians and sentinels.

None better.

False and boastful conceits and phrases mount upwards and take their place.

They are certain to do so.

And so the young man returns into the country of the lotus-eaters, and takes up his dwelling there in the face of all men; and if any help be sent by his friends to the oligarchical part of him, the aforesaid vain conceits shut the gate of the king's fastness; and they will neither allow the embassy itself to enter, nor if private advisers offer the fatherly counsel of the aged will they listen to them or receive them. There is a battle and they gain the day, and then modesty, which they call silliness, is ignominiously thrust into exile by them, and temperance, which they nickname unmanliness, is trampled in the mire and cast forth; they persuade men that moderation and orderly expenditure are vulgarity and meanness, and so, by the help of a rabble of evil appetites, they drive them beyond the border.

Yes, with a will.

And when they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now in their power and who is being initiated by them in great mysteries, the next thing is to bring back to their house insolence and anarchy and waste and impudence in bright array having garlands on their heads, and a great company with them, hymning their praises and calling them by sweet names; insolence they term breeding, and anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence, and impudence courage. And so the young man passes out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures.

Yes, he said, the change in him is visible enough.

After this he lives on, spending his money and labour and time on unnecessary pleasures quite as much as on necessary ones; but if he be fortunate, and is not too much disordered in his wits, when years have elapsed, and the heyday of passion is over—supposing that he then re-admits into the city some part of the exiled virtues, and does not wholly give himself up to their successors—in that case he balances his pleasures and lives in a sort of equilibrium, putting the government of himself into the hands of the one which comes first and wins the turn; and when he has had enough of that, then into the hands of another; he despises none of them but encourages them all equally.

Very true, he said.

Neither does he receive or let pass into the fortress any true word of advice; if any one says to him that some pleasures are the satisfactions of good and noble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honour some and chastise and master the others—whenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as good as another.

Yes, he said; that is the way with him.

Yes, I said, he lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he becomes a water-drinker, and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he is busy with politics, and starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into his head; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom; and so he goes on.

Yes, he replied, he is all liberty and equality.

Yes, I said; his life is motley and manifold and an epitome of the lives of many;—he answers to the State which we described as fair and spangled. And many a man and many a woman will take him for their pattern, and many a constitution and many an example of manners is contained in him.

Just so.

Let him then be set over against democracy; he may truly be called the democratic man.

Let that be his place, he said.

Last of all comes the most beautiful of all, man and State alike, tyranny and the tyrant; these we have now to consider.

Quite true, he said.

Say then, my friend, In what manner does tyranny arise?—that it has a democratic origin is evident.

Clearly.

And does not tyranny spring from democracy in the same manner as democracy from oligarchy—I mean, after a sort?

How?

The good which oligarchy proposed to itself and the means by which it was maintained was excess of wealth—am I not right?

Yes.

And the insatiable desire of wealth and the neglect of all other things for the sake of money-getting was also the ruin of oligarchy?

True.

And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings her to dissolution?

What good?

Freedom, I replied; which, as they tell you in a democracy, is the glory of the State—and that therefore in a democracy alone will the freeman of nature deign to dwell.

Yes; the saying is in every body's mouth.

I was going to observe, that the insatiable desire of this and the neglect of other things introduces the change in democracy, which occasions a demand for tyranny.

How so?

When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil cup-bearers presiding over the feast, and has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of freedom, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give a plentiful draught, she calls them to account and punishes them, and says that they are cursed oligarchs.

Yes, he replied, a very common occurrence.

Yes, I said; and loyal citizens are insultingly termed by her slaves who hug their chains and men of naught; she would have subjects who are like rulers, and rulers who are like subjects: these are men after her own heart, whom she praises and honours both in private and public. Now, in such a State, can liberty have any limit?

Certainly not.

By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses, and ends by getting among the animals and infecting them.

How do you mean?

I mean that the father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them, and the son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom, and the metic is equal with the citizen and the citizen with the metic, and the stranger is quite as good as either.

Yes, he said, that is the way.

And these are not the only evils, I said—there are several lesser ones: In such a state of society the master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; young and old are all alike; and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word or deed; and old men condescend to the young and are full of pleasantry and gaiety; they are loth to be thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the young.

Quite true, he said.

The last extreme of popular liberty is when the slave bought with money, whether male or female, is just as free as his or her purchaser; nor must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other.

Why not, as Aeschylus says, utter the word which rises to our lips?

That is what I am doing, I replied; and I must add that no one who does not know would believe, how much greater is the liberty which the animals who are under the dominion of man have in a democracy than in any other State: for truly, the she-dogs, as the proverb says, are as good as their she-mistresses, and the horses and asses have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of freemen; and they will run at any body who comes in their way if he does not leave the road clear for them: and all things are just ready to burst with liberty.

When I take a country walk, he said, I often experience what you describe. You and I have dreamed the same thing.

And above all, I said, and as the result of all, see how sensitive the citizens become; they chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority, and at length, as you know, they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten; they will have no one over them.

Yes, he said, I know it too well.

Such, my friend, I said, is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs tyranny.

Glorious indeed, he said. But what is the next step?

The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy—the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government.

True.

The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

Yes, the natural order.

And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty?

As we might expect.

That, however, was not, as I believe, your question—you rather desired to know what is that disorder which is generated alike in oligarchy and democracy, and is the ruin of both?

Just so, he replied.

Well, I said, I meant to refer to the class of idle spendthrifts, of whom the more courageous are the leaders and the more timid the followers, the same whom we were comparing to drones, some stingless, and others having stings.

A very just comparison.

These two classes are the plagues of every city in which they are generated, being what phlegm and bile are to the body. And the good physician and lawgiver of the State ought, like the wise bee-master, to keep them at a distance and prevent, if possible, their ever coming in; and if they have anyhow found a way in, then he should have them and their cells cut out as speedily as possible.

Yes, by all means, he said.

Then, in order that we may see clearly what we are doing, let us imagine democracy to be divided, as indeed it is, into three classes; for in the first place freedom creates rather more drones in the democratic than there were in the oligarchical State.

That is true.

And in the democracy they are certainly more intensified.

How so?

Because in the oligarchical State they are disqualified and driven from office, and therefore they cannot train or gather strength; whereas in a democracy they are almost the entire ruling power, and while the keener sort speak and act, the rest keep buzzing about the bema and do not suffer a word to be said on the other side; hence in democracies almost everything is managed by the drones.

Very true, he said.

Then there is another class which is always being severed from the mass.

What is that?

They are the orderly class, which in a nation of traders is sure to be the richest.

Naturally so.

They are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey to the drones.

Why, he said, there is little to be squeezed out of people who have little.

And this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them.

That is pretty much the case, he said.

The people are a third class, consisting of those who work with their own hands; they are not politicians, and have not much to live upon. This, when assembled, is the largest and most powerful class in a democracy.

True, he said; but then the multitude is seldom willing to congregate unless they get a little honey.

And do they not share? I said. Do not their leaders deprive the rich of their estates and distribute them among the people; at the same time taking care to reserve the larger part for themselves?

Why, yes, he said, to that extent the people do share.

And the persons whose property is taken from them are compelled to defend themselves before the people as they best can?

What else can they do?

And then, although they may have no desire of change, the others charge them with plotting against the people and being friends of oligarchy?

True.

And the end is that when they see the people, not of their own accord, but through ignorance, and because they are deceived by informers, seeking to do them wrong, then at last they are forced to become oligarchs in reality; they do not wish to be, but the sting of the drones torments them and breeds revolution in them.

That is exactly the truth.

Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another.

True.

The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.

Yes, that is their way.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.

Yes, that is quite clear.

How then does a protector begin to change into a tyrant? Clearly when he does what the man is said to do in the tale of the Arcadian temple of Lycaean Zeus.

What tale?

The tale is that he who has tasted the entrails of a single human victim minced up with the entrails of other victims is destined to become a wolf. Did you never hear it?

Oh, yes.

And the protector of the people is like him; having a mob entirely at his disposal, he is not restrained from shedding the blood of kinsmen; by the favourite method of false accusation he brings them into court and murders them, making the life of man to disappear, and with unholy tongue and lips tasting the blood of his fellow citizens; some he kills and others he banishes, at the same time hinting at the abolition of debts and partition of lands: and after this, what will be his destiny? Must he not either perish at the hands of his enemies, or from being a man become a wolf—that is, a tyrant?

Inevitably.

This, I said, is he who begins to make a party against the rich?

The same.

After a while he is driven out, but comes back, in spite of his enemies, a tyrant full grown.

That is clear.

And if they are unable to expel him, or to get him condemned to death by a public accusation, they conspire to assassinate him.

Yes, he said, that is their usual way.

Then comes the famous request for a body-guard, which is the device of all those who have got thus far in their tyrannical career—'Let not the people's friend,' as they say, 'be lost to them.'

Exactly.

The people readily assent; all their fears are for him—they have none for themselves.

Very true.

And when a man who is wealthy and is also accused of being an enemy of the people sees this, then, my friend, as the oracle said to Croesus,

'By pebbly Hermus' shore he flees and rests not, and is not ashamed to be a coward.'

And quite right too, said he, for if he were, he would never be ashamed again.

But if he is caught he dies.

Of course.

And he, the protector of whom we spoke, is to be seen, not 'larding the plain' with his bulk, but himself the overthrower of many, standing up in the chariot of State with the reins in his hand, no longer protector, but tyrant absolute.

No doubt, he said.

And now let us consider the happiness of the man, and also of the State in which a creature like him is generated.

Yes, he said, let us consider that.

At first, in the early days of his power, he is full of smiles, and he salutes every one whom he meets;—he to be called a tyrant, who is making promises in public and also in private! liberating debtors, and distributing land to the people and his followers, and wanting to be so kind and good to every one!

Of course, he said.

But when he has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

To be sure.

Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him?

Clearly.

And if any of them are suspected by him of having notions of freedom, and of resistance to his authority, he will have a good pretext for destroying them by placing them at the mercy of the enemy; and for all these reasons the tyrant must be always getting up a war.

He must.

Now he begins to grow unpopular.

A necessary result.

Then some of those who joined in setting him up, and who are in power, speak their minds to him and to one another, and the more courageous of them cast in his teeth what is being done.

Yes, that may be expected.

And the tyrant, if he means to rule, must get rid of them; he cannot stop while he has a friend or an enemy who is good for anything.

He cannot.

And therefore he must look about him and see who is valiant, who is high-minded, who is wise, who is wealthy; happy man, he is the enemy of them all, and must seek occasion against them whether he will or no, until he has made a purgation of the State.

Yes, he said, and a rare purgation.

Yes, I said, not the sort of purgation which the physicians make of the body; for they take away the worse and leave the better part, but he does the reverse.

If he is to rule, I suppose that he cannot help himself.

What a blessed alternative, I said:—to be compelled to dwell only with the many bad, and to be by them hated, or not to live at all!

Yes, that is the alternative.

And the more detestable his actions are to the citizens the more satellites and the greater devotion in them will he require?

Certainly.

And who are the devoted band, and where will he procure them?

They will flock to him, he said, of their own accord, if he pays them.

By the dog! I said, here are more drones, of every sort and from every land.

Yes, he said, there are.

But will he not desire to get them on the spot?

How do you mean?

He will rob the citizens of their slaves; he will then set them free and enrol them in his body-guard.

To be sure, he said; and he will be able to trust them best of all.

What a blessed creature, I said, must this tyrant be; he has put to death the others and has these for his trusted friends.

Yes, he said; they are quite of his sort.

Yes, I said, and these are the new citizens whom he has called into existence, who admire him and are his companions, while the good hate and avoid him.

Of course.

Verily, then, tragedy is a wise thing and Euripides a great tragedian.

Why so?

Why, because he is the author of the pregnant saying,

'Tyrants are wise by living with the wise;'

and he clearly meant to say that they are the wise whom the tyrant makes his companions.

Yes, he said, and he also praises tyranny as godlike; and many other things of the same kind are said by him and by the other poets.

And therefore, I said, the tragic poets being wise men will forgive us and any others who live after our manner if we do not receive them into our State, because they are the eulogists of tyranny.

Yes, he said, those who have the wit will doubtless forgive us.

But they will continue to go to other cities and attract mobs, and hire voices fair and loud and persuasive, and draw the cities over to tyrannies and democracies.

Very true.

Moreover, they are paid for this and receive honour—the greatest honour, as might be expected, from tyrants, and the next greatest from democracies; but the higher they ascend our constitution hill, the more their reputation fails, and seems unable from shortness of breath to proceed further.

True.

But we are wandering from the subject: Let us therefore return and enquire how the tyrant will maintain that fair and numerous and various and ever-changing army of his.

If, he said, there are sacred treasures in the city, he will confiscate and spend them; and in so far as the fortunes of attainted persons may suffice, he will be able to diminish the taxes which he would otherwise have to impose upon the people.

And when these fail?

Why, clearly, he said, then he and his boon companions, whether male or female, will be maintained out of his father's estate.

You mean to say that the people, from whom he has derived his being, will maintain him and his companions?

Yes, he said; they cannot help themselves.

But what if the people fly into a passion, and aver that a grown-up son ought not to be supported by his father, but that the father should be supported by the son? The father did not bring him into being, or settle him in life, in order that when his son became a man he should himself be the servant of his own servants and should support him and his rabble of slaves and companions; but that his son should protect him, and that by his help he might be emancipated from the government of the rich and aristocratic, as they are termed. And so he bids him and his companions depart, just as any other father might drive out of the house a riotous son and his undesirable associates.

By heaven, he said, then the parent will discover what a monster he has been fostering in his bosom; and, when he wants to drive him out, he will find that he is weak and his son strong.

Why, you do not mean to say that the tyrant will use violence? What! beat his father if he opposes him?

Yes, he will, having first disarmed him.

Then he is a parricide, and a cruel guardian of an aged parent; and this is real tyranny, about which there can be no longer a mistake: as the saying is, the people who would escape the smoke which is the slavery of freemen, has fallen into the fire which is the tyranny of slaves. Thus liberty, getting out of all order and reason, passes into the harshest and bitterest form of slavery.

True, he said.

Very well; and may we not rightly say that we have sufficiently discussed the nature of tyranny, and the manner of the transition from democracy to tyranny?

Yes, quite enough, he said.

BOOK IX.

Last of all comes the tyrannical man; about whom we have once more to ask, how is he formed out of the democratical? and how does he live, in happiness or in misery?

Yes, he said, he is the only one remaining.

There is, however, I said, a previous question which remains unanswered.

What question?

I do not think that we have adequately determined the nature and number of the appetites, and until this is accomplished the enquiry will always be confused.

Well, he said, it is not too late to supply the omission.

Very true, I said; and observe the point which I want to understand: Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and appetites I conceive to be unlawful; every one appears to have them, but in some persons they are controlled by the laws and by reason, and the better desires prevail over them—either they are wholly banished or they become few and weak; while in the case of others they are stronger, and there are more of them.

Which appetites do you mean?

I mean those which are awake when the reasoning and human and ruling power is asleep; then the wild beast within us, gorged with meat or drink, starts up and having shaken off sleep, goes forth to satisfy his desires; and there is no conceivable folly or crime—not excepting incest or any other unnatural union, or parricide, or the eating of forbidden food—which at such a time, when he has parted company with all shame and sense, a man may not be ready to commit.

Most true, he said.

But when a man's pulse is healthy and temperate, and when before going to sleep he has awakened his rational powers, and fed them on noble thoughts and enquiries, collecting himself in meditation; after having first indulged his appetites neither too much nor too little, but just enough to lay them to sleep, and prevent them and their enjoyments and pains from interfering with the higher principle—which he leaves in the solitude of pure abstraction, free to contemplate and aspire to the knowledge of the unknown, whether in past, present, or future: when again he has allayed the passionate element, if he has a quarrel against any one—I say, when, after pacifying the two irrational principles, he rouses up the third, which is reason, before he takes his rest, then, as you know, he attains truth most nearly, and is least likely to be the sport of fantastic and lawless visions.

I quite agree.

In saying this I have been running into a digression; but the point which I desire to note is that in all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep. Pray, consider whether I am right, and you agree with me.

Yes, I agree.

And now remember the character which we attributed to the democratic man. He was supposed from his youth upwards to have been trained under a miserly parent, who encouraged the saving appetites in him, but discountenanced the unnecessary, which aim only at amusement and ornament?

True.

And then he got into the company of a more refined, licentious sort of people, and taking to all their wanton ways rushed into the opposite extreme from an abhorrence of his father's meanness. At last, being a better man than his corruptors, he was drawn in both directions until he halted midway and led a life, not of vulgar and slavish passion, but of what he deemed moderate indulgence in various pleasures. After this manner the democrat was generated out of the oligarch?

Yes, he said; that was our view of him, and is so still.

And now, I said, years will have passed away, and you must conceive this man, such as he is, to have a son, who is brought up in his father's principles.

I can imagine him.

Then you must further imagine the same thing to happen to the son which has already happened to the father:—he is drawn into a perfectly lawless life, which by his seducers is termed perfect liberty; and his father and friends take part with his moderate desires, and the opposite party assist the opposite ones. As soon as these dire magicians and tyrant-makers find that they are losing their hold on him, they contrive to implant in him a master passion, to be lord over his idle and spendthrift lusts—a sort of monstrous winged drone—that is the only image which will adequately describe him.

Yes, he said, that is the only adequate image of him.

And when his other lusts, amid clouds of incense and perfumes and garlands and wines, and all the pleasures of a dissolute life, now let loose, come buzzing around him, nourishing to the utmost the sting of desire which they implant in his drone-like nature, then at last this lord of the soul, having Madness for the captain of his guard, breaks out into a frenzy: and if he finds in himself any good opinions or appetites in process of formation, and there is in him any sense of shame remaining, to these better principles he puts an end, and casts them forth until he has purged away temperance and brought in madness to the full.

Yes, he said, that is the way in which the tyrannical man is generated.

And is not this the reason why of old love has been called a tyrant?

I should not wonder.

Further, I said, has not a drunken man also the spirit of a tyrant?

He has.

And you know that a man who is deranged and not right in his mind, will fancy that he is able to rule, not only over men, but also over the gods?

That he will.

And the tyrannical man in the true sense of the word comes into being when, either under the influence of nature, or habit, or both, he becomes drunken, lustful, passionate? O my friend, is not that so?

Assuredly.

Such is the man and such is his origin. And next, how does he live?

Suppose, as people facetiously say, you were to tell me.

I imagine, I said, at the next step in his progress, that there will be feasts and carousals and revellings and courtezans, and all that sort of thing; Love is the lord of the house within him, and orders all the concerns of his soul.

That is certain.

Yes; and every day and every night desires grow up many and formidable, and their demands are many.

They are indeed, he said.

His revenues, if he has any, are soon spent.

True.

Then comes debt and the cutting down of his property.

Of course.

When he has nothing left, must not his desires, crowding in the nest like young ravens, be crying aloud for food; and he, goaded on by them, and especially by love himself, who is in a manner the captain of them, is in a frenzy, and would fain discover whom he can defraud or despoil of his property, in order that he may gratify them?

Yes, that is sure to be the case.

He must have money, no matter how, if he is to escape horrid pains and pangs.

He must.

And as in himself there was a succession of pleasures, and the new got the better of the old and took away their rights, so he being younger will claim to have more than his father and his mother, and if he has spent his own share of the property, he will take a slice of theirs.

No doubt he will.

And if his parents will not give way, then he will try first of all to cheat and deceive them.

Very true.

And if he fails, then he will use force and plunder them.

Yes, probably.

And if the old man and woman fight for their own, what then, my friend? Will the creature feel any compunction at tyrannizing over them?

Nay, he said, I should not feel at all comfortable about his parents.

But, O heavens! Adeimantus, on account of some new-fangled love of a harlot, who is anything but a necessary connection, can you believe that he would strike the mother who is his ancient friend and necessary to his very existence, and would place her under the authority of the other, when she is brought under the same roof with her; or that, under like circumstances, he would do the same to his withered old father, first and most indispensable of friends, for the sake of some newly-found blooming youth who is the reverse of indispensable?

Yes, indeed, he said; I believe that he would.

Truly, then, I said, a tyrannical son is a blessing to his father and mother.

He is indeed, he replied.

He first takes their property, and when that fails, and pleasures are beginning to swarm in the hive of his soul, then he breaks into a house, or steals the garments of some nightly wayfarer; next he proceeds to clear a temple. Meanwhile the old opinions which he had when a child, and which gave judgment about good and evil, are overthrown by those others which have just been emancipated, and are now the body-guard of love and share his empire. These in his democratic days, when he was still subject to the laws and to his father, were only let loose in the dreams of sleep. But now that he is under the dominion of love, he becomes always and in waking reality what he was then very rarely and in a dream only; he will commit the foulest murder, or eat forbidden food, or be guilty of any other horrid act. Love is his tyrant, and lives lordly in him and lawlessly, and being himself a king, leads him on, as a tyrant leads a State, to the performance of any reckless deed by which he can maintain himself and the rabble of his associates, whether those whom evil communications have brought in from without, or those whom he himself has allowed to break loose within him by reason of a similar evil nature in himself. Have we not here a picture of his way of life?

Yes, indeed, he said.

And if there are only a few of them in the State, and the rest of the people are well disposed, they go away and become the body-guard or mercenary soldiers of some other tyrant who may probably want them for a war; and if there is no war, they stay at home and do many little pieces of mischief in the city.

What sort of mischief?

For example, they are the thieves, burglars, cut-purses, foot-pads, robbers of temples, man-stealers of the community; or if they are able to speak they turn informers, and bear false witness, and take bribes.

A small catalogue of evils, even if the perpetrators of them are few in number.

Yes, I said; but small and great are comparative terms, and all these things, in the misery and evil which they inflict upon a State, do not come within a thousand miles of the tyrant; when this noxious class and their followers grow numerous and become conscious of their strength, assisted by the infatuation of the people, they choose from among themselves the one who has most of the tyrant in his own soul, and him they create their tyrant.

Yes, he said, and he will be the most fit to be a tyrant.

If the people yield, well and good; but if they resist him, as he began by beating his own father and mother, so now, if he has the power, he beats them, and will keep his dear old fatherland or motherland, as the Cretans say, in subjection to his young retainers whom he has introduced to be their rulers and masters. This is the end of his passions and desires.

Exactly.

When such men are only private individuals and before they get power, this is their character; they associate entirely with their own flatterers or ready tools; or if they want anything from anybody, they in their turn are equally ready to bow down before them: they profess every sort of affection for them; but when they have gained their point they know them no more.

Yes, truly.

They are always either the masters or servants and never the friends of anybody; the tyrant never tastes of true freedom or friendship.

Certainly not.

And may we not rightly call such men treacherous?

No question.

Also they are utterly unjust, if we were right in our notion of justice?

Yes, he said, and we were perfectly right.

Let us then sum up in a word, I said, the character of the worst man: he is the waking reality of what we dreamed.

Most true.

And this is he who being by nature most of a tyrant bears rule, and the longer he lives the more of a tyrant he becomes.

That is certain, said Glaucon, taking his turn to answer.

And will not he who has been shown to be the wickedest, be also the most miserable? and he who has tyrannized longest and most, most continually and truly miserable; although this may not be the opinion of men in general?

Yes, he said, inevitably.

And must not the tyrannical man be like the tyrannical State, and the democratical man like the democratical State; and the same of the others?

Certainly.

And as State is to State in virtue and happiness, so is man in relation to man?

To be sure.

Then comparing our original city, which was under a king, and the city which is under a tyrant, how do they stand as to virtue?

They are the opposite extremes, he said, for one is the very best and the other is the very worst.

There can be no mistake, I said, as to which is which, and therefore I will at once enquire whether you would arrive at a similar decision about their relative happiness and misery. And here we must not allow ourselves to be panic-stricken at the apparition of the tyrant, who is only a unit and may perhaps have a few retainers about him; but let us go as we ought into every corner of the city and look all about, and then we will give our opinion.

A fair invitation, he replied; and I see, as every one must, that a tyranny is the wretchedest form of government, and the rule of a king the happiest.

And in estimating the men too, may I not fairly make a like request, that I should have a judge whose mind can enter into and see through human nature? he must not be like a child who looks at the outside and is dazzled at the pompous aspect which the tyrannical nature assumes to the beholder, but let him be one who has a clear insight. May I suppose that the judgment is given in the hearing of us all by one who is able to judge, and has dwelt in the same place with him, and been present at his dally life and known him in his family relations, where he may be seen stripped of his tragedy attire, and again in the hour of public danger—he shall tell us about the happiness and misery of the tyrant when compared with other men?

That again, he said, is a very fair proposal.

Shall I assume that we ourselves are able and experienced judges and have before now met with such a person? We shall then have some one who will answer our enquiries.

By all means.

Let me ask you not to forget the parallel of the individual and the State; bearing this in mind, and glancing in turn from one to the other of them, will you tell me their respective conditions?

What do you mean? he asked.

Beginning with the State, I replied, would you say that a city which is governed by a tyrant is free or enslaved?

No city, he said, can be more completely enslaved.

And yet, as you see, there are freemen as well as masters in such a State?

Yes, he said, I see that there are—a few; but the people, speaking generally, and the best of them are miserably degraded and enslaved.

Then if the man is like the State, I said, must not the same rule prevail? his soul is full of meanness and vulgarity—the best elements in him are enslaved; and there is a small ruling part, which is also the worst and maddest.

Inevitably.

And would you say that the soul of such an one is the soul of a freeman, or of a slave?

He has the soul of a slave, in my opinion.

And the State which is enslaved under a tyrant is utterly incapable of acting voluntarily?

Utterly incapable.

And also the soul which is under a tyrant (I am speaking of the soul taken as a whole) is least capable of doing what she desires; there is a gadfly which goads her, and she is full of trouble and remorse?

Certainly.

And is the city which is under a tyrant rich or poor?

Poor.

And the tyrannical soul must be always poor and insatiable?

True.

And must not such a State and such a man be always full of fear?

Yes, indeed.

Is there any State in which you will find more of lamentation and sorrow and groaning and pain?

Certainly not.

And is there any man in whom you will find more of this sort of misery than in the tyrannical man, who is in a fury of passions and desires?

Impossible.

Reflecting upon these and similar evils, you held the tyrannical State to be the most miserable of States?

And I was right, he said.

Certainly, I said. And when you see the same evils in the tyrannical man, what do you say of him?

I say that he is by far the most miserable of all men.

There, I said, I think that you are beginning to go wrong.

What do you mean?

I do not think that he has as yet reached the utmost extreme of misery.

Then who is more miserable?

One of whom I am about to speak.

Who is that?

He who is of a tyrannical nature, and instead of leading a private life has been cursed with the further misfortune of being a public tyrant.

From what has been said, I gather that you are right.

Yes, I replied, but in this high argument you should be a little more certain, and should not conjecture only; for of all questions, this respecting good and evil is the greatest.

Very true, he said.

Let me then offer you an illustration, which may, I think, throw a light upon this subject.

What is your illustration?

The case of rich individuals in cities who possess many slaves: from them you may form an idea of the tyrant's condition, for they both have slaves; the only difference is that he has more slaves.

Yes, that is the difference.

You know that they live securely and have nothing to apprehend from their servants?

What should they fear?

Nothing. But do you observe the reason of this?

Yes; the reason is, that the whole city is leagued together for the protection of each individual.

Very true, I said. But imagine one of these owners, the master say of some fifty slaves, together with his family and property and slaves, carried off by a god into the wilderness, where there are no freemen to help him—will he not be in an agony of fear lest he and his wife and children should be put to death by his slaves?

Yes, he said, he will be in the utmost fear.

The time has arrived when he will be compelled to flatter divers of his slaves, and make many promises to them of freedom and other things, much against his will—he will have to cajole his own servants.

Yes, he said, that will be the only way of saving himself.

And suppose the same god, who carried him away, to surround him with neighbours who will not suffer one man to be the master of another, and who, if they could catch the offender, would take his life?

His case will be still worse, if you suppose him to be everywhere surrounded and watched by enemies.

And is not this the sort of prison in which the tyrant will be bound—he who being by nature such as we have described, is full of all sorts of fears and lusts? His soul is dainty and greedy, and yet alone, of all men in the city, he is never allowed to go on a journey, or to see the things which other freemen desire to see, but he lives in his hole like a woman hidden in the house, and is jealous of any other citizen who goes into foreign parts and sees anything of interest.

Very true, he said.

And amid evils such as these will not he who is ill-governed in his own person—the tyrannical man, I mean—whom you just now decided to be the most miserable of all—will not he be yet more miserable when, instead of leading a private life, he is constrained by fortune to be a public tyrant? He has to be master of others when he is not master of himself: he is like a diseased or paralytic man who is compelled to pass his life, not in retirement, but fighting and combating with other men.

Yes, he said, the similitude is most exact.

Is not his case utterly miserable? and does not the actual tyrant lead a worse life than he whose life you determined to be the worst?

Certainly.

He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practise the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind. He has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor, if you know how to inspect the whole soul of him: all his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions, even as the State which he resembles: and surely the resemblance holds?

Very true, he said.

Moreover, as we were saying before, he grows worse from having power: he becomes and is of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more friendless, more impious, than he was at first; he is the purveyor and cherisher of every sort of vice, and the consequence is that he is supremely miserable, and that he makes everybody else as miserable as himself.

No man of any sense will dispute your words.

Come then, I said, and as the general umpire in theatrical contests proclaims the result, do you also decide who in your opinion is first in the scale of happiness, and who second, and in what order the others follow: there are five of them in all—they are the royal, timocratical, oligarchical, democratical, tyrannical.

The decision will be easily given, he replied; they shall be choruses coming on the stage, and I must judge them in the order in which they enter, by the criterion of virtue and vice, happiness and misery.

Need we hire a herald, or shall I announce, that the son of Ariston (the best) has decided that the best and justest is also the happiest, and that this is he who is the most royal man and king over himself; and that the worst and most unjust man is also the most miserable, and that this is he who being the greatest tyrant of himself is also the greatest tyrant of his State?

Make the proclamation yourself, he said.

And shall I add, 'whether seen or unseen by gods and men'?

Let the words be added.

Then this, I said, will be our first proof; and there is another, which may also have some weight.

What is that?

The second proof is derived from the nature of the soul: seeing that the individual soul, like the State, has been divided by us into three principles, the division may, I think, furnish a new demonstration.

Of what nature?

It seems to me that to these three principles three pleasures correspond; also three desires and governing powers.

How do you mean? he said.

There is one principle with which, as we were saying, a man learns, another with which he is angry; the third, having many forms, has no special name, but is denoted by the general term appetitive, from the extraordinary strength and vehemence of the desires of eating and drinking and the other sensual appetites which are the main elements of it; also money-loving, because such desires are generally satisfied by the help of money.

That is true, he said.

If we were to say that the loves and pleasures of this third part were concerned with gain, we should then be able to fall back on a single notion; and might truly and intelligibly describe this part of the soul as loving gain or money.

I agree with you.

Again, is not the passionate element wholly set on ruling and conquering and getting fame?

True.

Suppose we call it the contentious or ambitious—would the term be suitable?

Extremely suitable.

On the other hand, every one sees that the principle of knowledge is wholly directed to the truth, and cares less than either of the others for gain or fame.

Far less.

'Lover of wisdom,' 'lover of knowledge,' are titles which we may fitly apply to that part of the soul?

Certainly.

One principle prevails in the souls of one class of men, another in others, as may happen?

Yes.

Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men—lovers of wisdom, lovers of honour, lovers of gain?

Exactly.

And there are three kinds of pleasure, which are their several objects?

Very true.

Now, if you examine the three classes of men, and ask of them in turn which of their lives is pleasantest, each will be found praising his own and depreciating that of others: the money-maker will contrast the vanity of honour or of learning if they bring no money with the solid advantages of gold and silver?

True, he said.

And the lover of honour—what will be his opinion? Will he not think that the pleasure of riches is vulgar, while the pleasure of learning, if it brings no distinction, is all smoke and nonsense to him?

Very true.

And are we to suppose, I said, that the philosopher sets any value on other pleasures in comparison with the pleasure of knowing the truth, and in that pursuit abiding, ever learning, not so far indeed from the heaven of pleasure? Does he not call the other pleasures necessary, under the idea that if there were no necessity for them, he would rather not have them?

There can be no doubt of that, he replied.

Since, then, the pleasures of each class and the life of each are in dispute, and the question is not which life is more or less honourable, or better or worse, but which is the more pleasant or painless—how shall we know who speaks truly?

I cannot myself tell, he said.

Well, but what ought to be the criterion? Is any better than experience and wisdom and reason?

There cannot be a better, he said.

Then, I said, reflect. Of the three individuals, which has the greatest experience of all the pleasures which we enumerated? Has the lover of gain, in learning the nature of essential truth, greater experience of the pleasure of knowledge than the philosopher has of the pleasure of gain?

The philosopher, he replied, has greatly the advantage; for he has of necessity always known the taste of the other pleasures from his childhood upwards: but the lover of gain in all his experience has not of necessity tasted—or, I should rather say, even had he desired, could hardly have tasted—the sweetness of learning and knowing truth.

Then the lover of wisdom has a great advantage over the lover of gain, for he has a double experience?

Yes, very great.

Again, has he greater experience of the pleasures of honour, or the lover of honour of the pleasures of wisdom?

Nay, he said, all three are honoured in proportion as they attain their object; for the rich man and the brave man and the wise man alike have their crowd of admirers, and as they all receive honour they all have experience of the pleasures of honour; but the delight which is to be found in the knowledge of true being is known to the philosopher only.

His experience, then, will enable him to judge better than any one?

Far better.

And he is the only one who has wisdom as well as experience?

Certainly.

Further, the very faculty which is the instrument of judgment is not possessed by the covetous or ambitious man, but only by the philosopher?

What faculty?

Reason, with whom, as we were saying, the decision ought to rest.

Yes.

And reasoning is peculiarly his instrument?

Certainly.

If wealth and gain were the criterion, then the praise or blame of the lover of gain would surely be the most trustworthy?

Assuredly.

Or if honour or victory or courage, in that case the judgment of the ambitious or pugnacious would be the truest?

Clearly.

But since experience and wisdom and reason are the judges--

The only inference possible, he replied, is that pleasures which are approved by the lover of wisdom and reason are the truest.

And so we arrive at the result, that the pleasure of the intelligent part of the soul is the pleasantest of the three, and that he of us in whom this is the ruling principle has the pleasantest life.

Unquestionably, he said, the wise man speaks with authority when he approves of his own life.

And what does the judge affirm to be the life which is next, and the pleasure which is next?

Clearly that of the soldier and lover of honour; who is nearer to himself than the money-maker.

Last comes the lover of gain?

Very true, he said.

Twice in succession, then, has the just man overthrown the unjust in this conflict; and now comes the third trial, which is dedicated to Olympian Zeus the saviour: a sage whispers in my ear that no pleasure except that of the wise is quite true and pure—all others are a shadow only; and surely this will prove the greatest and most decisive of falls?

Yes, the greatest; but will you explain yourself?

I will work out the subject and you shall answer my questions.

Proceed.

Say, then, is not pleasure opposed to pain?

True.

And there is a neutral state which is neither pleasure nor pain?

There is.

A state which is intermediate, and a sort of repose of the soul about either—that is what you mean?

Yes.

You remember what people say when they are sick?

What do they say?

That after all nothing is pleasanter than health. But then they never knew this to be the greatest of pleasures until they were ill.

Yes, I know, he said.

And when persons are suffering from acute pain, you must have heard them say that there is nothing pleasanter than to get rid of their pain?

I have.

And there are many other cases of suffering in which the mere rest and cessation of pain, and not any positive enjoyment, is extolled by them as the greatest pleasure?

Yes, he said; at the time they are pleased and well content to be at rest.

Again, when pleasure ceases, that sort of rest or cessation will be painful?

Doubtless, he said.

Then the intermediate state of rest will be pleasure and will also be pain?

So it would seem.

But can that which is neither become both?

I should say not.

And both pleasure and pain are motions of the soul, are they not?

Yes.

But that which is neither was just now shown to be rest and not motion, and in a mean between them?

Yes.

How, then, can we be right in supposing that the absence of pain is pleasure, or that the absence of pleasure is pain?

Impossible.

This then is an appearance only and not a reality; that is to say, the rest is pleasure at the moment and in comparison of what is painful, and painful in comparison of what is pleasant; but all these representations, when tried by the test of true pleasure, are not real but a sort of imposition?

That is the inference.

Look at the other class of pleasures which have no antecedent pains and you will no longer suppose, as you perhaps may at present, that pleasure is only the cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.

What are they, he said, and where shall I find them?

There are many of them: take as an example the pleasures of smell, which are very great and have no antecedent pains; they come in a moment, and when they depart leave no pain behind them.

Most true, he said.

Let us not, then, be induced to believe that pure pleasure is the cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.

No.

Still, the more numerous and violent pleasures which reach the soul through the body are generally of this sort—they are reliefs of pain.

That is true.

And the anticipations of future pleasures and pains are of a like nature?

Yes.

Shall I give you an illustration of them?

Let me hear.

You would allow, I said, that there is in nature an upper and lower and middle region?

I should.

And if a person were to go from the lower to the middle region, would he not imagine that he is going up; and he who is standing in the middle and sees whence he has come, would imagine that he is already in the upper region, if he has never seen the true upper world?

To be sure, he said; how can he think otherwise?

But if he were taken back again he would imagine, and truly imagine, that he was descending?

No doubt.

All that would arise out of his ignorance of the true upper and middle and lower regions?

Yes.

Then can you wonder that persons who are inexperienced in the truth, as they have wrong ideas about many other things, should also have wrong ideas about pleasure and pain and the intermediate state; so that when they are only being drawn towards the painful they feel pain and think the pain which they experience to be real, and in like manner, when drawn away from pain to the neutral or intermediate state, they firmly believe that they have reached the goal of satiety and pleasure; they, not knowing pleasure, err in contrasting pain with the absence of pain, which is like contrasting black with grey instead of white—can you wonder, I say, at this?

No, indeed; I should be much more disposed to wonder at the opposite.

Look at the matter thus:—Hunger, thirst, and the like, are inanitions of the bodily state?

Yes.

And ignorance and folly are inanitions of the soul?

True.

And food and wisdom are the corresponding satisfactions of either?

Certainly.

And is the satisfaction derived from that which has less or from that which has more existence the truer?

Clearly, from that which has more.

What classes of things have a greater share of pure existence in your judgment—those of which food and drink and condiments and all kinds of sustenance are examples, or the class which contains true opinion and knowledge and mind and all the different kinds of virtue? Put the question in this way:—Which has a more pure being—that which is concerned with the invariable, the immortal, and the true, and is of such a nature, and is found in such natures; or that which is concerned with and found in the variable and mortal, and is itself variable and mortal?

Far purer, he replied, is the being of that which is concerned with the invariable.

And does the essence of the invariable partake of knowledge in the same degree as of essence?

Yes, of knowledge in the same degree.

And of truth in the same degree?

Yes.

And, conversely, that which has less of truth will also have less of essence?

Necessarily.

Then, in general, those kinds of things which are in the service of the body have less of truth and essence than those which are in the service of the soul?

Far less.

And has not the body itself less of truth and essence than the soul?

Yes.

What is filled with more real existence, and actually has a more real existence, is more really filled than that which is filled with less real existence and is less real?

Of course.

And if there be a pleasure in being filled with that which is according to nature, that which is more really filled with more real being will more really and truly enjoy true pleasure; whereas that which participates in less real being will be less truly and surely satisfied, and will participate in an illusory and less real pleasure?

Unquestionably.

Those then who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with gluttony and sensuality, go down and up again as far as the mean; and in this region they move at random throughout life, but they never pass into the true upper world; thither they neither look, nor do they ever find their way, neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they taste of pure and abiding pleasure. Like cattle, with their eyes always looking down and their heads stooping to the earth, that is, to the dining-table, they fatten and feed and breed, and, in their excessive love of these delights, they kick and butt at one another with horns and hoofs which are made of iron; and they kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust. For they fill themselves with that which is not substantial, and the part of themselves which they fill is also unsubstantial and incontinent.

Verily, Socrates, said Glaucon, you describe the life of the many like an oracle.

Their pleasures are mixed with pains—how can they be otherwise? For they are mere shadows and pictures of the true, and are coloured by contrast, which exaggerates both light and shade, and so they implant in the minds of fools insane desires of themselves; and they are fought about as Stesichorus says that the Greeks fought about the shadow of Helen at Troy in ignorance of the truth.

Something of that sort must inevitably happen.

And must not the like happen with the spirited or passionate element of the soul? Will not the passionate man who carries his passion into action, be in the like case, whether he is envious and ambitious, or violent and contentious, or angry and discontented, if he be seeking to attain honour and victory and the satisfaction of his anger without reason or sense?

Yes, he said, the same will happen with the spirited element also.

Then may we not confidently assert that the lovers of money and honour, when they seek their pleasures under the guidance and in the company of reason and knowledge, and pursue after and win the pleasures which wisdom shows them, will also have the truest pleasures in the highest degree which is attainable to them, inasmuch as they follow truth; and they will have the pleasures which are natural to them, if that which is best for each one is also most natural to him?

Yes, certainly; the best is the most natural.

And when the whole soul follows the philosophical principle, and there is no division, the several parts are just, and do each of them their own business, and enjoy severally the best and truest pleasures of which they are capable?

Exactly.

But when either of the two other principles prevails, it fails in attaining its own pleasure, and compels the rest to pursue after a pleasure which is a shadow only and which is not their own?

True.

And the greater the interval which separates them from philosophy and reason, the more strange and illusive will be the pleasure?

Yes.

And is not that farthest from reason which is at the greatest distance from law and order?

Clearly.

And the lustful and tyrannical desires are, as we saw, at the greatest distance? Yes.

And the royal and orderly desires are nearest?

Yes.

Then the tyrant will live at the greatest distance from true or natural pleasure, and the king at the least?

Certainly.

But if so, the tyrant will live most unpleasantly, and the king most pleasantly?

Inevitably.

Would you know the measure of the interval which separates them?

Will you tell me?

There appear to be three pleasures, one genuine and two spurious: now the transgression of the tyrant reaches a point beyond the spurious; he has run away from the region of law and reason, and taken up his abode with certain slave pleasures which are his satellites, and the measure of his inferiority can only be expressed in a figure.

How do you mean?

I assume, I said, that the tyrant is in the third place from the oligarch; the democrat was in the middle?

Yes.

And if there is truth in what has preceded, he will be wedded to an image of pleasure which is thrice removed as to truth from the pleasure of the oligarch?

He will.

And the oligarch is third from the royal; since we count as one royal and aristocratical?

Yes, he is third.

Then the tyrant is removed from true pleasure by the space of a number which is three times three?

Manifestly.

The shadow then of tyrannical pleasure determined by the number of length will be a plane figure.

Certainly.

And if you raise the power and make the plane a solid, there is no difficulty in seeing how vast is the interval by which the tyrant is parted from the king.

Yes; the arithmetician will easily do the sum.

Or if some person begins at the other end and measures the interval by which the king is parted from the tyrant in truth of pleasure, he will find him, when the multiplication is completed, living 729 times more pleasantly, and the tyrant more painfully by this same interval.

What a wonderful calculation! And how enormous is the distance which separates the just from the unjust in regard to pleasure and pain!

Yet a true calculation, I said, and a number which nearly concerns human life, if human beings are concerned with days and nights and months and years. (729 NEARLY equals the number of days and nights in the year.)

Yes, he said, human life is certainly concerned with them.

Then if the good and just man be thus superior in pleasure to the evil and unjust, his superiority will be infinitely greater in propriety of life and in beauty and virtue?

Immeasurably greater.

Well, I said, and now having arrived at this stage of the argument, we may revert to the words which brought us hither: Was not some one saying that injustice was a gain to the perfectly unjust who was reputed to be just?

Yes, that was said.

Now then, having determined the power and quality of justice and injustice, let us have a little conversation with him.

What shall we say to him?

Let us make an image of the soul, that he may have his own words presented before his eyes.

Of what sort?

An ideal image of the soul, like the composite creations of ancient mythology, such as the Chimera or Scylla or Cerberus, and there are many others in which two or more different natures are said to grow into one.

There are said of have been such unions.

Then do you now model the form of a multitudinous, many-headed monster, having a ring of heads of all manner of beasts, tame and wild, which he is able to generate and metamorphose at will.

You suppose marvellous powers in the artist; but, as language is more pliable than wax or any similar substance, let there be such a model as you propose.

Suppose now that you make a second form as of a lion, and a third of a man, the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller than the second.

That, he said, is an easier task; and I have made them as you say.

And now join them, and let the three grow into one.

That has been accomplished.

Next fashion the outside of them into a single image, as of a man, so that he who is not able to look within, and sees only the outer hull, may believe the beast to be a single human creature.

I have done so, he said.

And now, to him who maintains that it is profitable for the human creature to be unjust, and unprofitable to be just, let us reply that, if he be right, it is profitable for this creature to feast the multitudinous monster and strengthen the lion and the lion-like qualities, but to starve and weaken the man, who is consequently liable to be dragged about at the mercy of either of the other two; and he is not to attempt to familiarize or harmonize them with one another—he ought rather to suffer them to fight and bite and devour one another.

Certainly, he said; that is what the approver of injustice says.

To him the supporter of justice makes answer that he should ever so speak and act as to give the man within him in some way or other the most complete mastery over the entire human creature. He should watch over the many-headed monster like a good husbandman, fostering and cultivating the gentle qualities, and preventing the wild ones from growing; he should be making the lion-heart his ally, and in common care of them all should be uniting the several parts with one another and with himself.

Yes, he said, that is quite what the maintainer of justice say.

And so from every point of view, whether of pleasure, honour, or advantage, the approver of justice is right and speaks the truth, and the disapprover is wrong and false and ignorant?

Yes, from every point of view.

Come, now, and let us gently reason with the unjust, who is not intentionally in error. 'Sweet Sir,' we will say to him, 'what think you of things esteemed noble and ignoble? Is not the noble that which subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the god in man; and the ignoble that which subjects the man to the beast?' He can hardly avoid saying Yes—can he now?

Not if he has any regard for my opinion.

But, if he agree so far, we may ask him to answer another question: 'Then how would a man profit if he received gold and silver on the condition that he was to enslave the noblest part of him to the worst? Who can imagine that a man who sold his son or daughter into slavery for money, especially if he sold them into the hands of fierce and evil men, would be the gainer, however large might be the sum which he received? And will any one say that he is not a miserable caitiff who remorselessly sells his own divine being to that which is most godless and detestable? Eriphyle took the necklace as the price of her husband's life, but he is taking a bribe in order to compass a worse ruin.'

Yes, said Glaucon, far worse—I will answer for him.

Has not the intemperate been censured of old, because in him the huge multiform monster is allowed to be too much at large?

Clearly.

And men are blamed for pride and bad temper when the lion and serpent element in them disproportionately grows and gains strength?

Yes.

And luxury and softness are blamed, because they relax and weaken this same creature, and make a coward of him?

Very true.

And is not a man reproached for flattery and meanness who subordinates the spirited animal to the unruly monster, and, for the sake of money, of which he can never have enough, habituates him in the days of his youth to be trampled in the mire, and from being a lion to become a monkey?

True, he said.

And why are mean employments and manual arts a reproach? Only because they imply a natural weakness of the higher principle; the individual is unable to control the creatures within him, but has to court them, and his great study is how to flatter them.

Such appears to be the reason.

And therefore, being desirous of placing him under a rule like that of the best, we say that he ought to be the servant of the best, in whom the Divine rules; not, as Thrasymachus supposed, to the injury of the servant, but because every one had better be ruled by divine wisdom dwelling within him; or, if this be impossible, then by an external authority, in order that we may be all, as far as possible, under the same government, friends and equals.

True, he said.

And this is clearly seen to be the intention of the law, which is the ally of the whole city; and is seen also in the authority which we exercise over children, and the refusal to let them be free until we have established in them a principle analogous to the constitution of a state, and by cultivation of this higher element have set up in their hearts a guardian and ruler like our own, and when this is done they may go their ways.

Yes, he said, the purpose of the law is manifest.

From what point of view, then, and on what ground can we say that a man is profited by injustice or intemperance or other baseness, which will make him a worse man, even though he acquire money or power by his wickedness?

From no point of view at all.

What shall he profit, if his injustice be undetected and unpunished? He who is undetected only gets worse, whereas he who is detected and punished has the brutal part of his nature silenced and humanized; the gentler element in him is liberated, and his whole soul is perfected and ennobled by the acquirement of justice and temperance and wisdom, more than the body ever is by receiving gifts of beauty, strength and health, in proportion as the soul is more honourable than the body.

Certainly, he said.

To this nobler purpose the man of understanding will devote the energies of his life. And in the first place, he will honour studies which impress these qualities on his soul and will disregard others?

Clearly, he said.

In the next place, he will regulate his bodily habit and training, and so far will he be from yielding to brutal and irrational pleasures, that he will regard even health as quite a secondary matter; his first object will be not that he may be fair or strong or well, unless he is likely thereby to gain temperance, but he will always desire so to attemper the body as to preserve the harmony of the soul?

Certainly he will, if he has true music in him.

And in the acquisition of wealth there is a principle of order and harmony which he will also observe; he will not allow himself to be dazzled by the foolish applause of the world, and heap up riches to his own infinite harm?

Certainly not, he said.

He will look at the city which is within him, and take heed that no disorder occur in it, such as might arise either from superfluity or from want; and upon this principle he will regulate his property and gain or spend according to his means.

Very true.

And, for the same reason, he will gladly accept and enjoy such honours as he deems likely to make him a better man; but those, whether private or public, which are likely to disorder his life, he will avoid?

Then, if that is his motive, he will not be a statesman.

By the dog of Egypt, he will! in the city which is his own he certainly will, though in the land of his birth perhaps not, unless he have a divine call.

I understand; you mean that he will be a ruler in the city of which we are the founders, and which exists in idea only; for I do not believe that there is such an one anywhere on earth?

In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other.

I think so, he said.

BOOK X.

Of the many excellences which I perceive in the order of our State, there is none which upon reflection pleases me better than the rule about poetry.

To what do you refer?

To the rejection of imitative poetry, which certainly ought not to be received; as I see far more clearly now that the parts of the soul have been distinguished.

What do you mean?

Speaking in confidence, for I should not like to have my words repeated to the tragedians and the rest of the imitative tribe—but I do not mind saying to you, that all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.

Explain the purport of your remark.

Well, I will tell you, although I have always from my earliest youth had an awe and love of Homer, which even now makes the words falter on my lips, for he is the great captain and teacher of the whole of that charming tragic company; but a man is not to be reverenced more than the truth, and therefore I will speak out.

Very good, he said.

Listen to me then, or rather, answer me.

Put your question.

Can you tell me what imitation is? for I really do not know.

A likely thing, then, that I should know.

Why not? for the duller eye may often see a thing sooner than the keener.

Very true, he said; but in your presence, even if I had any faint notion, I could not muster courage to utter it. Will you enquire yourself?

Well then, shall we begin the enquiry in our usual manner: Whenever a number of individuals have a common name, we assume them to have also a corresponding idea or form:—do you understand me?

I do.

Let us take any common instance; there are beds and tables in the world—plenty of them, are there not?

Yes.

But there are only two ideas or forms of them—one the idea of a bed, the other of a table.

True.

And the maker of either of them makes a bed or he makes a table for our use, in accordance with the idea—that is our way of speaking in this and similar instances—but no artificer makes the ideas themselves: how could he?

Impossible.

And there is another artist,—I should like to know what you would say of him.

Who is he?

One who is the maker of all the works of all other workmen.

What an extraordinary man!

Wait a little, and there will be more reason for your saying so. For this is he who is able to make not only vessels of every kind, but plants and animals, himself and all other things—the earth and heaven, and the things which are in heaven or under the earth; he makes the gods also.

He must be a wizard and no mistake.

Oh! you are incredulous, are you? Do you mean that there is no such maker or creator, or that in one sense there might be a maker of all these things but in another not? Do you see that there is a way in which you could make them all yourself?

What way?

An easy way enough; or rather, there are many ways in which the feat might be quickly and easily accomplished, none quicker than that of turning a mirror round and round—you would soon enough make the sun and the heavens, and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants, and all the other things of which we were just now speaking, in the mirror.

Yes, he said; but they would be appearances only.

Very good, I said, you are coming to the point now. And the painter too is, as I conceive, just such another—a creator of appearances, is he not?

Of course.

But then I suppose you will say that what he creates is untrue. And yet there is a sense in which the painter also creates a bed?

Yes, he said, but not a real bed.

And what of the maker of the bed? were you not saying that he too makes, not the idea which, according to our view, is the essence of the bed, but only a particular bed?

Yes, I did.

Then if he does not make that which exists he cannot make true existence, but only some semblance of existence; and if any one were to say that the work of the maker of the bed, or of any other workman, has real existence, he could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth.

At any rate, he replied, philosophers would say that he was not speaking the truth.

No wonder, then, that his work too is an indistinct expression of truth.

No wonder.

Suppose now that by the light of the examples just offered we enquire who this imitator is?

If you please.

Well then, here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by God, as I think that we may say—for no one else can be the maker?

No.

There is another which is the work of the carpenter?

Yes.

And the work of the painter is a third?

Yes.

Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?

Yes, there are three of them.

God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God.

Why is that?

Because even if He had made but two, a third would still appear behind them which both of them would have for their idea, and that would be the ideal bed and not the two others.

Very true, he said.

God knew this, and He desired to be the real maker of a real bed, not a particular maker of a particular bed, and therefore He created a bed which is essentially and by nature one only.

So we believe.

Shall we, then, speak of Him as the natural author or maker of the bed?

Yes, he replied; inasmuch as by the natural process of creation He is the author of this and of all other things.

And what shall we say of the carpenter—is not he also the maker of the bed?

Yes.

But would you call the painter a creator and maker?

Certainly not.

Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the bed?

I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as the imitator of that which the others make.

Good, I said; then you call him who is third in the descent from nature an imitator?

Certainly, he said.

And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth?

That appears to be so.

Then about the imitator we are agreed. And what about the painter?—I would like to know whether he may be thought to imitate that which originally exists in nature, or only the creations of artists?

The latter.

As they are or as they appear? you have still to determine this.

What do you mean?

I mean, that you may look at a bed from different points of view, obliquely or directly or from any other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but there is no difference in reality. And the same of all things.

Yes, he said, the difference is only apparent.

Now let me ask you another question: Which is the art of painting designed to be—an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear—of appearance or of reality?

Of appearance.

Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image. For example: A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.

Certainly.

And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man—whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.

Most true.

And so, when we hear persons saying that the tragedians, and Homer, who is at their head, know all the arts and all things human, virtue as well as vice, and divine things too, for that the good poet cannot compose well unless he knows his subject, and that he who has not this knowledge can never be a poet, we ought to consider whether here also there may not be a similar illusion. Perhaps they may have come across imitators and been deceived by them; they may not have remembered when they saw their works that these were but imitations thrice removed from the truth, and could easily be made without any knowledge of the truth, because they are appearances only and not realities? Or, after all, they may be in the right, and poets do really know the things about which they seem to the many to speak so well?

The question, he said, should by all means be considered.

Now do you suppose that if a person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he had nothing higher in him?

I should say not.

The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them.

Yes, he said, that would be to him a source of much greater honour and profit.

Then, I said, we must put a question to Homer; not about medicine, or any of the arts to which his poems only incidentally refer: we are not going to ask him, or any other poet, whether he has cured patients like Asclepius, or left behind him a school of medicine such as the Asclepiads were, or whether he only talks about medicine and other arts at second-hand; but we have a right to know respecting military tactics, politics, education, which are the chiefest and noblest subjects of his poems, and we may fairly ask him about them. 'Friend Homer,' then we say to him, 'if you are only in the second remove from truth in what you say of virtue, and not in the third—not an image maker or imitator—and if you are able to discern what pursuits make men better or worse in private or public life, tell us what State was ever better governed by your help? The good order of Lacedaemon is due to Lycurgus, and many other cities great and small have been similarly benefited by others; but who says that you have been a good legislator to them and have done them any good? Italy and Sicily boast of Charondas, and there is Solon who is renowned among us; but what city has anything to say about you?' Is there any city which he might name?

I think not, said Glaucon; not even the Homerids themselves pretend that he was a legislator.

Well, but is there any war on record which was carried on successfully by him, or aided by his counsels, when he was alive?

There is not.

Or is there any invention of his, applicable to the arts or to human life, such as Thales the Milesian or Anacharsis the Scythian, and other ingenious men have conceived, which is attributed to him?

There is absolutely nothing of the kind.

But, if Homer never did any public service, was he privately a guide or teacher of any? Had he in his lifetime friends who loved to associate with him, and who handed down to posterity an Homeric way of life, such as was established by Pythagoras who was so greatly beloved for his wisdom, and whose followers are to this day quite celebrated for the order which was named after him?

Nothing of the kind is recorded of him. For surely, Socrates, Creophylus, the companion of Homer, that child of flesh, whose name always makes us laugh, might be more justly ridiculed for his stupidity, if, as is said, Homer was greatly neglected by him and others in his own day when he was alive?

Yes, I replied, that is the tradition. But can you imagine, Glaucon, that if Homer had really been able to educate and improve mankind—if he had possessed knowledge and not been a mere imitator—can you imagine, I say, that he would not have had many followers, and been honoured and loved by them? Protagoras of Abdera, and Prodicus of Ceos, and a host of others, have only to whisper to their contemporaries: 'You will never be able to manage either your own house or your own State until you appoint us to be your ministers of education'—and this ingenious device of theirs has such an effect in making men love them that their companions all but carry them about on their shoulders. And is it conceivable that the contemporaries of Homer, or again of Hesiod, would have allowed either of them to go about as rhapsodists, if they had really been able to make mankind virtuous? Would they not have been as unwilling to part with them as with gold, and have compelled them to stay at home with them? Or, if the master would not stay, then the disciples would have followed him about everywhere, until they had got education enough?

Yes, Socrates, that, I think, is quite true.

Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach? The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and figures.

Quite so.

In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colours of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well—such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have. And I think that you must have observed again and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.

Yes, he said.

They are like faces which were never really beautiful, but only blooming; and now the bloom of youth has passed away from them?

Exactly.

Here is another point: The imitator or maker of the image knows nothing of true existence; he knows appearances only. Am I not right?

Yes.

Then let us have a clear understanding, and not be satisfied with half an explanation.

Proceed.

Of the painter we say that he will paint reins, and he will paint a bit?

Yes.

And the worker in leather and brass will make them?

Certainly.

But does the painter know the right form of the bit and reins? Nay, hardly even the workers in brass and leather who make them; only the horseman who knows how to use them—he knows their right form.

Most true.

And may we not say the same of all things?

What?

That there are three arts which are concerned with all things: one which uses, another which makes, a third which imitates them?

Yes.

And the excellence or beauty or truth of every structure, animate or inanimate, and of every action of man, is relative to the use for which nature or the artist has intended them.

True.

Then the user of them must have the greatest experience of them, and he must indicate to the maker the good or bad qualities which develop themselves in use; for example, the flute-player will tell the flute-maker which of his flutes is satisfactory to the performer; he will tell him how he ought to make them, and the other will attend to his instructions?

Of course.

The one knows and therefore speaks with authority about the goodness and badness of flutes, while the other, confiding in him, will do what he is told by him?

True.

The instrument is the same, but about the excellence or badness of it the maker will only attain to a correct belief; and this he will gain from him who knows, by talking to him and being compelled to hear what he has to say, whereas the user will have knowledge?

True.

But will the imitator have either? Will he know from use whether or no his drawing is correct or beautiful? or will he have right opinion from being compelled to associate with another who knows and gives him instructions about what he should draw?

Neither.

Then he will no more have true opinion than he will have knowledge about the goodness or badness of his imitations?

I suppose not.

The imitative artist will be in a brilliant state of intelligence about his own creations?

Nay, very much the reverse.

And still he will go on imitating without knowing what makes a thing good or bad, and may be expected therefore to imitate only that which appears to be good to the ignorant multitude?

Just so.

Thus far then we are pretty well agreed that the imitator has no knowledge worth mentioning of what he imitates. Imitation is only a kind of play or sport, and the tragic poets, whether they write in Iambic or in Heroic verse, are imitators in the highest degree?

Very true.

And now tell me, I conjure you, has not imitation been shown by us to be concerned with that which is thrice removed from the truth?

Certainly.

And what is the faculty in man to which imitation is addressed?

What do you mean?

I will explain: The body which is large when seen near, appears small when seen at a distance?

True.

And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to the illusion about colours to which the sight is liable. Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic.

True.

And the arts of measuring and numbering and weighing come to the rescue of the human understanding—there is the beauty of them—and the apparent greater or less, or more or heavier, no longer have the mastery over us, but give way before calculation and measure and weight?

Most true.

And this, surely, must be the work of the calculating and rational principle in the soul?

To be sure.

And when this principle measures and certifies that some things are equal, or that some are greater or less than others, there occurs an apparent contradiction?

True.

But were we not saying that such a contradiction is impossible—the same faculty cannot have contrary opinions at the same time about the same thing?

Very true.

Then that part of the soul which has an opinion contrary to measure is not the same with that which has an opinion in accordance with measure?

True.

And the better part of the soul is likely to be that which trusts to measure and calculation?

Certainly.

And that which is opposed to them is one of the inferior principles of the soul?

No doubt.

This was the conclusion at which I was seeking to arrive when I said that painting or drawing, and imitation in general, when doing their own proper work, are far removed from truth, and the companions and friends and associates of a principle within us which is equally removed from reason, and that they have no true or healthy aim.

Exactly.

The imitative art is an inferior who marries an inferior, and has inferior offspring.

Very true.

And is this confined to the sight only, or does it extend to the hearing also, relating in fact to what we term poetry?

Probably the same would be true of poetry.

Do not rely, I said, on a probability derived from the analogy of painting; but let us examine further and see whether the faculty with which poetical imitation is concerned is good or bad.

By all means.

We may state the question thus:—Imitation imitates the actions of men, whether voluntary or involuntary, on which, as they imagine, a good or bad result has ensued, and they rejoice or sorrow accordingly. Is there anything more?

No, there is nothing else.

But in all this variety of circumstances is the man at unity with himself—or rather, as in the instance of sight there was confusion and opposition in his opinions about the same things, so here also is there not strife and inconsistency in his life? Though I need hardly raise the question again, for I remember that all this has been already admitted; and the soul has been acknowledged by us to be full of these and ten thousand similar oppositions occurring at the same moment?

And we were right, he said.

Yes, I said, thus far we were right; but there was an omission which must now be supplied.

What was the omission?

Were we not saying that a good man, who has the misfortune to lose his son or anything else which is most dear to him, will bear the loss with more equanimity than another?

Yes.

But will he have no sorrow, or shall we say that although he cannot help sorrowing, he will moderate his sorrow?

The latter, he said, is the truer statement.

Tell me: will he be more likely to struggle and hold out against his sorrow when he is seen by his equals, or when he is alone?

It will make a great difference whether he is seen or not.

When he is by himself he will not mind saying or doing many things which he would be ashamed of any one hearing or seeing him do?

True.

There is a principle of law and reason in him which bids him resist, as well as a feeling of his misfortune which is forcing him to indulge his sorrow?

True.

But when a man is drawn in two opposite directions, to and from the same object, this, as we affirm, necessarily implies two distinct principles in him?

Certainly.

One of them is ready to follow the guidance of the law?

How do you mean?

The law would say that to be patient under suffering is best, and that we should not give way to impatience, as there is no knowing whether such things are good or evil; and nothing is gained by impatience; also, because no human thing is of serious importance, and grief stands in the way of that which at the moment is most required.

What is most required? he asked.

That we should take counsel about what has happened, and when the dice have been thrown order our affairs in the way which reason deems best; not, like children who have had a fall, keeping hold of the part struck and wasting time in setting up a howl, but always accustoming the soul forthwith to apply a remedy, raising up that which is sickly and fallen, banishing the cry of sorrow by the healing art.

Yes, he said, that is the true way of meeting the attacks of fortune.

Yes, I said; and the higher principle is ready to follow this suggestion of reason?

Clearly.

And the other principle, which inclines us to recollection of our troubles and to lamentation, and can never have enough of them, we may call irrational, useless, and cowardly?

Indeed, we may.

And does not the latter—I mean the rebellious principle—furnish a great variety of materials for imitation? Whereas the wise and calm temperament, being always nearly equable, is not easy to imitate or to appreciate when imitated, especially at a public festival when a promiscuous crowd is assembled in a theatre. For the feeling represented is one to which they are strangers.

Certainly.

Then the imitative poet who aims at being popular is not by nature made, nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the rational principle in the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which is easily imitated?

Clearly.

And now we may fairly take him and place him by the side of the painter, for he is like him in two ways: first, inasmuch as his creations have an inferior degree of truth—in this, I say, he is like him; and he is also like him in being concerned with an inferior part of the soul; and therefore we shall be right in refusing to admit him into a well-ordered State, because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason. As in a city when the evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one time great and at another small—he is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the truth.

Exactly.

But we have not yet brought forward the heaviest count in our accusation:—the power which poetry has of harming even the good (and there are very few who are not harmed), is surely an awful thing?

Yes, certainly, if the effect is what you say.

Hear and judge: The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a passage of Homer, or one of the tragedians, in which he represents some pitiful hero who is drawling out his sorrows in a long oration, or weeping, and smiting his breast—the best of us, you know, delight in giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the poet who stirs our feelings most.

Yes, of course I know.

But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that we pride ourselves on the opposite quality—we would fain be quiet and patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in the recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.

Very true, he said.

Now can we be right in praising and admiring another who is doing that which any one of us would abominate and be ashamed of in his own person?

No, he said, that is certainly not reasonable.

Nay, I said, quite reasonable from one point of view.

What point of view?

If you consider, I said, that when in misfortune we feel a natural hunger and desire to relieve our sorrow by weeping and lamentation, and that this feeling which is kept under control in our own calamities is satisfied and delighted by the poets;—the better nature in each of us, not having been sufficiently trained by reason or habit, allows the sympathetic element to break loose because the sorrow is another's; and the spectator fancies that there can be no disgrace to himself in praising and pitying any one who comes telling him what a good man he is, and making a fuss about his troubles; he thinks that the pleasure is a gain, and why should he be supercilious and lose this and the poem too? Few persons ever reflect, as I should imagine, that from the evil of other men something of evil is communicated to themselves. And so the feeling of sorrow which has gathered strength at the sight of the misfortunes of others is with difficulty repressed in our own.

How very true!

And does not the same hold also of the ridiculous? There are jests which you would be ashamed to make yourself, and yet on the comic stage, or indeed in private, when you hear them, you are greatly amused by them, and are not at all disgusted at their unseemliness;—the case of pity is repeated;—there is a principle in human nature which is disposed to raise a laugh, and this which you once restrained by reason, because you were afraid of being thought a buffoon, is now let out again; and having stimulated the risible faculty at the theatre, you are betrayed unconsciously to yourself into playing the comic poet at home.

Quite true, he said.

And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action—in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.

I cannot deny it.

Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and that you should take him up again and again and get to know him and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honour those who say these things—they are excellent people, as far as their lights extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.

That is most true, he said.

And now since we have reverted to the subject of poetry, let this our defence serve to show the reasonableness of our former judgment in sending away out of our State an art having the tendencies which we have described; for reason constrained us. But that she may not impute to us any harshness or want of politeness, let us tell her that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry; of which there are many proofs, such as the saying of 'the yelping hound howling at her lord,' or of one 'mighty in the vain talk of fools,' and 'the mob of sages circumventing Zeus,' and the 'subtle thinkers who are beggars after all'; and there are innumerable other signs of ancient enmity between them. Notwithstanding this, let us assure our sweet friend and the sister arts of imitation, that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered State we shall be delighted to receive her—we are very conscious of her charms; but we may not on that account betray the truth. I dare say, Glaucon, that you are as much charmed by her as I am, especially when she appears in Homer?

Yes, indeed, I am greatly charmed.

Shall I propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but upon this condition only—that she make a defence of herself in lyrical or some other metre?

Certainly.

And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf: let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit; for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers—I mean, if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight?

Certainly, he said, we shall be the gainers.

If her defence fails, then, my dear friend, like other persons who are enamoured of something, but put a restraint upon themselves when they think their desires are opposed to their interests, so too must we after the manner of lovers give her up, though not without a struggle. We too are inspired by that love of poetry which the education of noble States has implanted in us, and therefore we would have her appear at her best and truest; but so long as she is unable to make good her defence, this argument of ours shall be a charm to us, which we will repeat to ourselves while we listen to her strains; that we may not fall away into the childish love of her which captivates the many. At all events we are well aware that poetry being such as we have described is not to be regarded seriously as attaining to the truth; and he who listens to her, fearing for the safety of the city which is within him, should be on his guard against her seductions and make our words his law.

Yes, he said, I quite agree with you.

Yes, I said, my dear Glaucon, for great is the issue at stake, greater than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad. And what will any one be profited if under the influence of honour or money or power, aye, or under the excitement of poetry, he neglect justice and virtue?

Yes, he said; I have been convinced by the argument, as I believe that any one else would have been.

And yet no mention has been made of the greatest prizes and rewards which await virtue.

What, are there any greater still? If there are, they must be of an inconceivable greatness.

Why, I said, what was ever great in a short time? The whole period of three score years and ten is surely but a little thing in comparison with eternity?

Say rather 'nothing,' he replied.

And should an immortal being seriously think of this little space rather than of the whole?

Of the whole, certainly. But why do you ask?

Are you not aware, I said, that the soul of man is immortal and imperishable?

He looked at me in astonishment, and said: No, by heaven: And are you really prepared to maintain this?

Yes, I said, I ought to be, and you too—there is no difficulty in proving it.

I see a great difficulty; but I should like to hear you state this argument of which you make so light.

Listen then.

I am attending.

There is a thing which you call good and another which you call evil?

Yes, he replied.

Would you agree with me in thinking that the corrupting and destroying element is the evil, and the saving and improving element the good?

Yes.

And you admit that every thing has a good and also an evil; as ophthalmia is the evil of the eyes and disease of the whole body; as mildew is of corn, and rot of timber, or rust of copper and iron: in everything, or in almost everything, there is an inherent evil and disease?

Yes, he said.

And anything which is infected by any of these evils is made evil, and at last wholly dissolves and dies?

True.

The vice and evil which is inherent in each is the destruction of each; and if this does not destroy them there is nothing else that will; for good certainly will not destroy them, nor again, that which is neither good nor evil.

Certainly not.

If, then, we find any nature which having this inherent corruption cannot be dissolved or destroyed, we may be certain that of such a nature there is no destruction?

That may be assumed.

Well, I said, and is there no evil which corrupts the soul?

Yes, he said, there are all the evils which we were just now passing in review: unrighteousness, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance.

But does any of these dissolve or destroy her?—and here do not let us fall into the error of supposing that the unjust and foolish man, when he is detected, perishes through his own injustice, which is an evil of the soul. Take the analogy of the body: The evil of the body is a disease which wastes and reduces and annihilates the body; and all the things of which we were just now speaking come to annihilation through their own corruption attaching to them and inhering in them and so destroying them. Is not this true?

Yes.

Consider the soul in like manner. Does the injustice or other evil which exists in the soul waste and consume her? Do they by attaching to the soul and inhering in her at last bring her to death, and so separate her from the body?

Certainly not.

And yet, I said, it is unreasonable to suppose that anything can perish from without through affection of external evil which could not be destroyed from within by a corruption of its own?

It is, he replied.

Consider, I said, Glaucon, that even the badness of food, whether staleness, decomposition, or any other bad quality, when confined to the actual food, is not supposed to destroy the body; although, if the badness of food communicates corruption to the body, then we should say that the body has been destroyed by a corruption of itself, which is disease, brought on by this; but that the body, being one thing, can be destroyed by the badness of food, which is another, and which does not engender any natural infection—this we shall absolutely deny?

Very true.

And, on the same principle, unless some bodily evil can produce an evil of the soul, we must not suppose that the soul, which is one thing, can be dissolved by any merely external evil which belongs to another?

Yes, he said, there is reason in that.

Either, then, let us refute this conclusion, or, while it remains unrefuted, let us never say that fever, or any other disease, or the knife put to the throat, or even the cutting up of the whole body into the minutest pieces, can destroy the soul, until she herself is proved to become more unholy or unrighteous in consequence of these things being done to the body; but that the soul, or anything else if not destroyed by an internal evil, can be destroyed by an external one, is not to be affirmed by any man.

And surely, he replied, no one will ever prove that the souls of men become more unjust in consequence of death.

But if some one who would rather not admit the immortality of the soul boldly denies this, and says that the dying do really become more evil and unrighteous, then, if the speaker is right, I suppose that injustice, like disease, must be assumed to be fatal to the unjust, and that those who take this disorder die by the natural inherent power of destruction which evil has, and which kills them sooner or later, but in quite another way from that in which, at present, the wicked receive death at the hands of others as the penalty of their deeds?

Nay, he said, in that case injustice, if fatal to the unjust, will not be so very terrible to him, for he will be delivered from evil. But I rather suspect the opposite to be the truth, and that injustice which, if it have the power, will murder others, keeps the murderer alive—aye, and well awake too; so far removed is her dwelling-place from being a house of death.

True, I said; if the inherent natural vice or evil of the soul is unable to kill or destroy her, hardly will that which is appointed to be the destruction of some other body, destroy a soul or anything else except that of which it was appointed to be the destruction.

Yes, that can hardly be.

But the soul which cannot be destroyed by an evil, whether inherent or external, must exist for ever, and if existing for ever, must be immortal?

Certainly.

That is the conclusion, I said; and, if a true conclusion, then the souls must always be the same, for if none be destroyed they will not diminish in number. Neither will they increase, for the increase of the immortal natures must come from something mortal, and all things would thus end in immortality.

Very true.

But this we cannot believe—reason will not allow us—any more than we can believe the soul, in her truest nature, to be full of variety and difference and dissimilarity.

What do you mean? he said.

The soul, I said, being, as is now proven, immortal, must be the fairest of compositions and cannot be compounded of many elements?

Certainly not.

Her immortality is demonstrated by the previous argument, and there are many other proofs; but to see her as she really is, not as we now behold her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you must contemplate her with the eye of reason, in her original purity; and then her beauty will be revealed, and justice and injustice and all the things which we have described will be manifested more clearly. Thus far, we have spoken the truth concerning her as she appears at present, but we must remember also that we have seen her only in a condition which may be compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose original image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are broken off and crushed and damaged by the waves in all sorts of ways, and incrustations have grown over them of seaweed and shells and stones, so that he is more like some monster than he is to his own natural form. And the soul which we behold is in a similar condition, disfigured by ten thousand ills. But not there, Glaucon, not there must we look.

Where then?

At her love of wisdom. Let us see whom she affects, and what society and converse she seeks in virtue of her near kindred with the immortal and eternal and divine; also how different she would become if wholly following this superior principle, and borne by a divine impulse out of the ocean in which she now is, and disengaged from the stones and shells and things of earth and rock which in wild variety spring up around her because she feeds upon earth, and is overgrown by the good things of this life as they are termed: then you would see her as she is, and know whether she have one shape only or many, or what her nature is. Of her affections and of the forms which she takes in this present life I think that we have now said enough.

True, he replied.

And thus, I said, we have fulfilled the conditions of the argument; we have not introduced the rewards and glories of justice, which, as you were saying, are to be found in Homer and Hesiod; but justice in her own nature has been shown to be best for the soul in her own nature. Let a man do what is just, whether he have the ring of Gyges or not, and even if in addition to the ring of Gyges he put on the helmet of Hades.

Very true.

And now, Glaucon, there will be no harm in further enumerating how many and how great are the rewards which justice and the other virtues procure to the soul from gods and men, both in life and after death.

Certainly not, he said.

Will you repay me, then, what you borrowed in the argument?

What did I borrow?

The assumption that the just man should appear unjust and the unjust just: for you were of opinion that even if the true state of the case could not possibly escape the eyes of gods and men, still this admission ought to be made for the sake of the argument, in order that pure justice might be weighed against pure injustice. Do you remember?

I should be much to blame if I had forgotten.

Then, as the cause is decided, I demand on behalf of justice that the estimation in which she is held by gods and men and which we acknowledge to be her due should now be restored to her by us; since she has been shown to confer reality, and not to deceive those who truly possess her, let what has been taken from her be given back, that so she may win that palm of appearance which is hers also, and which she gives to her own.

The demand, he said, is just.

In the first place, I said—and this is the first thing which you will have to give back—the nature both of the just and unjust is truly known to the gods.

Granted.

And if they are both known to them, one must be the friend and the other the enemy of the gods, as we admitted from the beginning?

True.

And the friend of the gods may be supposed to receive from them all things at their best, excepting only such evil as is the necessary consequence of former sins?

Certainly.

Then this must be our notion of the just man, that even when he is in poverty or sickness, or any other seeming misfortune, all things will in the end work together for good to him in life and death: for the gods have a care of any one whose desire is to become just and to be like God, as far as man can attain the divine likeness, by the pursuit of virtue?

Yes, he said; if he is like God he will surely not be neglected by him.

And of the unjust may not the opposite be supposed?

Certainly.

Such, then, are the palms of victory which the gods give the just?

That is my conviction.

And what do they receive of men? Look at things as they really are, and you will see that the clever unjust are in the case of runners, who run well from the starting-place to the goal but not back again from the goal: they go off at a great pace, but in the end only look foolish, slinking away with their ears draggling on their shoulders, and without a crown; but the true runner comes to the finish and receives the prize and is crowned. And this is the way with the just; he who endures to the end of every action and occasion of his entire life has a good report and carries off the prize which men have to bestow.

True.

And now you must allow me to repeat of the just the blessings which you were attributing to the fortunate unjust. I shall say of them, what you were saying of the others, that as they grow older, they become rulers in their own city if they care to be; they marry whom they like and give in marriage to whom they will; all that you said of the others I now say of these. And, on the other hand, of the unjust I say that the greater number, even though they escape in their youth, are found out at last and look foolish at the end of their course, and when they come to be old and miserable are flouted alike by stranger and citizen; they are beaten and then come those things unfit for ears polite, as you truly term them; they will be racked and have their eyes burned out, as you were saying. And you may suppose that I have repeated the remainder of your tale of horrors. But will you let me assume, without reciting them, that these things are true?

Certainly, he said, what you say is true.

These, then, are the prizes and rewards and gifts which are bestowed upon the just by gods and men in this present life, in addition to the other good things which justice of herself provides.

Yes, he said; and they are fair and lasting.

And yet, I said, all these are as nothing either in number or greatness in comparison with those other recompenses which await both just and unjust after death. And you ought to hear them, and then both just and unjust will have received from us a full payment of the debt which the argument owes to them.

Speak, he said; there are few things which I would more gladly hear.

Well, I said, I will tell you a tale; not one of the tales which Odysseus tells to the hero Alcinous, yet this too is a tale of a hero, Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth. He was slain in battle, and ten days afterwards, when the bodies of the dead were taken up already in a state of corruption, his body was found unaffected by decay, and carried away home to be buried. And on the twelfth day, as he was lying on the funeral pile, he returned to life and told them what he had seen in the other world. He said that when his soul left the body he went on a journey with a great company, and that they came to a mysterious place at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and over against them were two other openings in the heaven above. In the intermediate space there were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand; and in like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand; these also bore the symbols of their deeds, but fastened on their backs. He drew near, and they told him that he was to be the messenger who would carry the report of the other world to men, and they bade him hear and see all that was to be heard and seen in that place. Then he beheld and saw on one side the souls departing at either opening of heaven and earth when sentence had been given on them; and at the two other openings other souls, some ascending out of the earth dusty and worn with travel, some descending out of heaven clean and bright. And arriving ever and anon they seemed to have come from a long journey, and they went forth with gladness into the meadow, where they encamped as at a festival; and those who knew one another embraced and conversed, the souls which came from earth curiously enquiring about the things above, and the souls which came from heaven about the things beneath. And they told one another of what had happened by the way, those from below weeping and sorrowing at the remembrance of the things which they had endured and seen in their journey beneath the earth (now the journey lasted a thousand years), while those from above were describing heavenly delights and visions of inconceivable beauty. The story, Glaucon, would take too long to tell; but the sum was this:—He said that for every wrong which they had done to any one they suffered tenfold; or once in a hundred years—such being reckoned to be the length of man's life, and the penalty being thus paid ten times in a thousand years. If, for example, there were any who had been the cause of many deaths, or had betrayed or enslaved cities or armies, or been guilty of any other evil behaviour, for each and all of their offences they received punishment ten times over, and the rewards of beneficence and justice and holiness were in the same proportion. I need hardly repeat what he said concerning young children dying almost as soon as they were born. Of piety and impiety to gods and parents, and of murderers, there were retributions other and greater far which he described. He mentioned that he was present when one of the spirits asked another, 'Where is Ardiaeus the Great?' (Now this Ardiaeus lived a thousand years before the time of Er: he had been the tyrant of some city of Pamphylia, and had murdered his aged father and his elder brother, and was said to have committed many other abominable crimes.) The answer of the other spirit was: 'He comes not hither and will never come. And this,' said he, 'was one of the dreadful sights which we ourselves witnessed. We were at the mouth of the cavern, and, having completed all our experiences, were about to reascend, when of a sudden Ardiaeus appeared and several others, most of whom were tyrants; and there were also besides the tyrants private individuals who had been great criminals: they were just, as they fancied, about to return into the upper world, but the mouth, instead of admitting them, gave a roar, whenever any of these incurable sinners or some one who had not been sufficiently punished tried to ascend; and then wild men of fiery aspect, who were standing by and heard the sound, seized and carried them off; and Ardiaeus and others they bound head and foot and hand, and threw them down and flayed them with scourges, and dragged them along the road at the side, carding them on thorns like wool, and declaring to the passers-by what were their crimes, and that they were being taken away to be cast into hell.' And of all the many terrors which they had endured, he said that there was none like the terror which each of them felt at that moment, lest they should hear the voice; and when there was silence, one by one they ascended with exceeding joy. These, said Er, were the penalties and retributions, and there were blessings as great.

Now when the spirits which were in the meadow had tarried seven days, on the eighth they were obliged to proceed on their journey, and, on the fourth day after, he said that they came to a place where they could see from above a line of light, straight as a column, extending right through the whole heaven and through the earth, in colour resembling the rainbow, only brighter and purer; another day's journey brought them to the place, and there, in the midst of the light, they saw the ends of the chains of heaven let down from above: for this light is the belt of heaven, and holds together the circle of the universe, like the under-girders of a trireme. From these ends is extended the spindle of Necessity, on which all the revolutions turn. The shaft and hook of this spindle are made of steel, and the whorl is made partly of steel and also partly of other materials. Now the whorl is in form like the whorl used on earth; and the description of it implied that there is one large hollow whorl which is quite scooped out, and into this is fitted another lesser one, and another, and another, and four others, making eight in all, like vessels which fit into one another; the whorls show their edges on the upper side, and on their lower side all together form one continuous whorl. This is pierced by the spindle, which is driven home through the centre of the eighth. The first and outermost whorl has the rim broadest, and the seven inner whorls are narrower, in the following proportions—the sixth is next to the first in size, the fourth next to the sixth; then comes the eighth; the seventh is fifth, the fifth is sixth, the third is seventh, last and eighth comes the second. The largest (or fixed stars) is spangled, and the seventh (or sun) is brightest; the eighth (or moon) coloured by the reflected light of the seventh; the second and fifth (Saturn and Mercury) are in colour like one another, and yellower than the preceding; the third (Venus) has the whitest light; the fourth (Mars) is reddish; the sixth (Jupiter) is in whiteness second. Now the whole spindle has the same motion; but, as the whole revolves in one direction, the seven inner circles move slowly in the other, and of these the swiftest is the eighth; next in swiftness are the seventh, sixth, and fifth, which move together; third in swiftness appeared to move according to the law of this reversed motion the fourth; the third appeared fourth and the second fifth. The spindle turns on the knees of Necessity; and on the upper surface of each circle is a siren, who goes round with them, hymning a single tone or note. The eight together form one harmony; and round about, at equal intervals, there is another band, three in number, each sitting upon her throne: these are the Fates, daughters of Necessity, who are clothed in white robes and have chaplets upon their heads, Lachesis and Clotho and Atropos, who accompany with their voices the harmony of the sirens—Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the present, Atropos of the future; Clotho from time to time assisting with a touch of her right hand the revolution of the outer circle of the whorl or spindle, and Atropos with her left hand touching and guiding the inner ones, and Lachesis laying hold of either in turn, first with one hand and then with the other.

When Er and the spirits arrived, their duty was to go at once to Lachesis; but first of all there came a prophet who arranged them in order; then he took from the knees of Lachesis lots and samples of lives, and having mounted a high pulpit, spoke as follows: 'Hear the word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man honours or dishonours her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser—God is justified.' When the Interpreter had thus spoken he scattered lots indifferently among them all, and each of them took up the lot which fell near him, all but Er himself (he was not allowed), and each as he took his lot perceived the number which he had obtained. Then the Interpreter placed on the ground before them the samples of lives; and there were many more lives than the souls present, and they were of all sorts. There were lives of every animal and of man in every condition. And there were tyrannies among them, some lasting out the tyrant's life, others which broke off in the middle and came to an end in poverty and exile and beggary; and there were lives of famous men, some who were famous for their form and beauty as well as for their strength and success in games, or, again, for their birth and the qualities of their ancestors; and some who were the reverse of famous for the opposite qualities. And of women likewise; there was not, however, any definite character in them, because the soul, when choosing a new life, must of necessity become different. But there was every other quality, and the all mingled with one another, and also with elements of wealth and poverty, and disease and health; and there were mean states also. And here, my dear Glaucon, is the supreme peril of our human state; and therefore the utmost care should be taken. Let each one of us leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only, if peradventure he may be able to learn and may find some one who will make him able to learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always and everywhere the better life as he has opportunity. He should consider the bearing of all these things which have been mentioned severally and collectively upon virtue; he should know what the effect of beauty is when combined with poverty or wealth in a particular soul, and what are the good and evil consequences of noble and humble birth, of private and public station, of strength and weakness, of cleverness and dullness, and of all the natural and acquired gifts of the soul, and the operation of them when conjoined; he will then look at the nature of the soul, and from the consideration of all these qualities he will be able to determine which is the better and which is the worse; and so he will choose, giving the name of evil to the life which will make his soul more unjust, and good to the life which will make his soul more just; all else he will disregard. For we have seen and know that this is the best choice both in life and after death. A man must take with him into the world below an adamantine faith in truth and right, that there too he may be undazzled by the desire of wealth or the other allurements of evil, lest, coming upon tyrannies and similar villainies, he do irremediable wrongs to others and suffer yet worse himself; but let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible, not only in this life but in all that which is to come. For this is the way of happiness.

And according to the report of the messenger from the other world this was what the prophet said at the time: 'Even for the last comer, if he chooses wisely and will live diligently, there is appointed a happy and not undesirable existence. Let not him who chooses first be careless, and let not the last despair.' And when he had spoken, he who had the first choice came forward and in a moment chose the greatest tyranny; his mind having been darkened by folly and sensuality, he had not thought out the whole matter before he chose, and did not at first sight perceive that he was fated, among other evils, to devour his own children. But when he had time to reflect, and saw what was in the lot, he began to beat his breast and lament over his choice, forgetting the proclamation of the prophet; for, instead of throwing the blame of his misfortune on himself, he accused chance and the gods, and everything rather than himself. Now he was one of those who came from heaven, and in a former life had dwelt in a well-ordered State, but his virtue was a matter of habit only, and he had no philosophy. And it was true of others who were similarly overtaken, that the greater number of them came from heaven and therefore they had never been schooled by trial, whereas the pilgrims who came from earth having themselves suffered and seen others suffer, were not in a hurry to choose. And owing to this inexperience of theirs, and also because the lot was a chance, many of the souls exchanged a good destiny for an evil or an evil for a good. For if a man had always on his arrival in this world dedicated himself from the first to sound philosophy, and had been moderately fortunate in the number of the lot, he might, as the messenger reported, be happy here, and also his journey to another life and return to this, instead of being rough and underground, would be smooth and heavenly. Most curious, he said, was the spectacle—sad and laughable and strange; for the choice of the souls was in most cases based on their experience of a previous life. There he saw the soul which had once been Orpheus choosing the life of a swan out of enmity to the race of women, hating to be born of a woman because they had been his murderers; he beheld also the soul of Thamyras choosing the life of a nightingale; birds, on the other hand, like the swan and other musicians, wanting to be men. The soul which obtained the twentieth lot chose the life of a lion, and this was the soul of Ajax the son of Telamon, who would not be a man, remembering the injustice which was done him in the judgment about the arms. The next was Agamemnon, who took the life of an eagle, because, like Ajax, he hated human nature by reason of his sufferings. About the middle came the lot of Atalanta; she, seeing the great fame of an athlete, was unable to resist the temptation: and after her there followed the soul of Epeus the son of Panopeus passing into the nature of a woman cunning in the arts; and far away among the last who chose, the soul of the jester Thersites was putting on the form of a monkey. There came also the soul of Odysseus having yet to make a choice, and his lot happened to be the last of them all. Now the recollection of former toils had disenchanted him of ambition, and he went about for a considerable time in search of the life of a private man who had no cares; he had some difficulty in finding this, which was lying about and had been neglected by everybody else; and when he saw it, he said that he would have done the same had his lot been first instead of last, and that he was delighted to have it. And not only did men pass into animals, but I must also mention that there were animals tame and wild who changed into one another and into corresponding human natures—the good into the gentle and the evil into the savage, in all sorts of combinations.

All the souls had now chosen their lives, and they went in the order of their choice to Lachesis, who sent with them the genius whom they had severally chosen, to be the guardian of their lives and the fulfiller of the choice: this genius led the souls first to Clotho, and drew them within the revolution of the spindle impelled by her hand, thus ratifying the destiny of each; and then, when they were fastened to this, carried them to Atropos, who spun the threads and made them irreversible, whence without turning round they passed beneath the throne of Necessity; and when they had all passed, they marched on in a scorching heat to the plain of Forgetfulness, which was a barren waste destitute of trees and verdure; and then towards evening they encamped by the river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold; of this they were all obliged to drink a certain quantity, and those who were not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he drank forgot all things. Now after they had gone to rest, about the middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and earthquake, and then in an instant they were driven upwards in all manner of ways to their birth, like stars shooting. He himself was hindered from drinking the water. But in what manner or by what means he returned to the body he could not say; only, in the morning, awaking suddenly, he found himself lying on the pyre.

And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and has not perished, and will save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass safely over the river of Forgetfulness and our soul will not be defiled. Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing.