of crocodiles: and suddenly he began to beat on an African tom-tom and to croon with his voice, swaying his lean, half-clad body to and fro and staring at them all, out of eyes which were like burning coals. This time John saw no picture of an Island at all. He seemed to be in a dark green place full of tangled roots and hairy vegetable tubes: and all at once he saw in it shapes moving and writhing that were not vegetable but human. And the dark green grew darker, and a fierce heat came out of it: and suddenly all the shapes that were moving in the darkness came together to make a single obscene image which dominated the whole room. And the song was over.
‘Priceless,’ said the Clevers. ‘Too stark! Too virile.’
John blinked and looked round; and when he saw all the Clevers as cool as cucumbers, smoking their cigarettes and drinking the drinks that looked like medicines, all as if nothing remarkable had happened, he was troubled in his mind; for he thought that the song must have meant something different to them, and ‘If so,’ he argued, ‘what very pure-minded people they must be.’ Feeling himself among his betters, he became ashamed.
‘You like it, hein?’ said the bearded singer.
‘I—I don’t think I understood it,’ said John.
‘I make you like it, hein,’ said the singer, snatching up his tom-tom again. ‘It was what you really wanted all the time.’
‘No, no,’ cried John. ‘I know you are wrong there. I grant you, that—that sort of thing—is what I always get if I think too long about the Island. But it can’t be what I want.’
It was a low-brow blunder to mention the most obvious thing about it
‘No? Why not?’
‘If it is what I wanted, why am I so disappointed when I get it? If what a man really wanted was food, how could he be disappointed when the food arrived? As well, I don’t understand——’
‘What you not understand? I explain to you.’
‘Well, it’s like this. I thought that you objected to Mr. Halfways’ singing because it led to brown girls in the end.’
‘So we do.’
‘Well, why is it better to lead to black girls in the beginning?’
A low whistle ran round the whole laboratory. John knew he had made a horrible blunder.
‘Look here,’ said the bearded singer in a new voice, ‘what do you mean? You are not suggesting that there is anything of that kind about my singing, are you?’
‘I—I suppose—perhaps it was my fault,’ stammered John.
‘In other words,’ said the singer, ‘you are not yet able to distinguish between art and pornography!’ and advancing towards John very deliberately, he spat in his face and turned to walk out of the room.
‘That’s right, Phally,’ cried the Clevers, ‘serve him right.’
‘Filthy-minded little beast,’ said one.
‘Yah! Puritanian!’ said a girl.
‘I expect he’s impotent,’ whispered another.
‘You mustn’t be too hard on him,’ said Gus. ‘He is full of inhibitions and everything he says is only a rationalization of them. Perhaps he would get on better with something more formal. Why don’t you sing, Glugly?’
Chapter Three
Freedom of Thought
Glugly instantly rose. She was very tall and as lean as a post: and her mouth was not quite straight in her face. When she was in the middle of the room, and silence had been obtained, she began to make gestures. First of all she set her arms a-kimbo and cleverly turned her hands the wrong way so that it looked as if her wrists were sprained. Then she waddled to and fro with her toes pointing in. After that she twisted herself to make it look as if her hip bone was out of joint. Finally she made some grunts, and said:
The gibberish-literature of the Lunatic Twenties
‘Globol obol oogle ogle globol gloogle gloo,’ and ended by pursing up her lips and making a vulgar noise such as children make in their nurseries. Then she went back to her place and sat down.
‘Thank you very much,’ said John politely.
But Glugly made no reply, for Glugly could not talk, owing to an accident in infancy.
‘I hoped you liked it,’ said young Halfways.
‘I didn’t understand her.’
‘Ah,’ said a woman in spectacles who seemed to be Glugly’s nurse or keeper, ‘that is because you are looking for beauty. You are still thinking of your Island. You have got to realize that satire is the moving force in modern music.’
‘It is the expression of a savage disillusionment,’ said someone else.
‘Reality has broken down,’ said a fat boy who had drunk a great deal of the medicine and was lying flat on his back, smiling happily.
‘Our art must be brutal,’ said Glugly’s nurse.
‘We lost our ideals when there was a war in this country,’ said a very young Clever, ‘they were ground out of us in the mud and the flood and the blood. That is why we have to be so stark and brutal.’
‘But, look here,’ cried John, ‘that war was years ago. It was your fathers who were in it: and they are all settled down and living ordinary lives.’
‘Puritanian! Bourgeois!’ cried the Clevers. Everyone seemed to have risen.
‘Hold your tongue,’ whispered Gus in John’s ear. But already someone had struck John on the head, and as he bowed under the blow someone else hit him from behind.
‘It was the mud and the blood,’ hissed the girls all round him.
‘Well,’ said John, ducking to avoid a retort that had been flung at him, ‘if you are really old enough to remember that war, why do you pretend to be so young?’
‘We are young,’ they howled; ‘we are the new movement; we are the revolt.’
He abandons ‘the Movement’, though a little damaged by it
‘We have got over humanitarianism,’ bellowed one of the bearded men, kicking John on the kneecap.
‘And prudery,’ said a thin little old maid trying to wrench his clothes off from the neck. And at the same moment six girls leaped at his face with their nails, and he was kicked in the back and the belly, and tripped up so that he fell on his face, and hit again as he rose, and all the glass in the world seemed breaking round his head as he fled for his life from the laboratory. And all the dogs of Eschropolis joined in the chase as he ran along the street,
