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Burton held out a stick of gum to Alice and said, "I just had half a piece. Would you care for the other half?" She looked at him without expression and said, "No, thanks."
"There are eight huts," he said. "There isn’t any doubt about who is sharing which but with whom, except for Wilfreda, you, and me "I don’t thick there’s any doubt about that," she said.
"Then you’re sleeping with Gwenafra?" She kept her face turned away from him. He squatted for a few seconds and then got up and went back to the other side and sat down by Wilfreda.
"You can move on, Sir Richard," she said. Her lip was curled. "Lord grab me, I don’t like being second choice. You could of asked "er where nobody could of seen you. I got some pride, too." He was silent for a minute. His first impulse had been to lash out at her with a sharp-pointed insult. But she was right. He had been too contemptuous of her. Even if she had been a whore, she had a right to be treated as a human being. Especially since she maintained that it was hunger that had driven her to prostitution, though he had been skeptical about that. Too many prostitutes had to rationalize their profession; too many had justifying fantasies about their entrance into the business. Yet, her rage at Smithson and her behavior toward him indicated that she was sincere.
He stood up and said, "I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings."
"Are you in love with her?" Wilfreda said, looking up at him.
"I’ve only told one woman that I ever loved her," he said.
"Your wife?"
"No. The girl died before I could marry her."
"And how long was you married?"
"Twenty-nine years, though it’s none of your business."
"Lord grab me! All that time, and you never once told her you loved her!"
"It wasn’t necessary," he said, and walked away. The hut he chose was occupied by Monat and Kazz. Kazz was snoring away; Monat was leaning on his elbow and smoking a marihuana stick. Monat preferred that to tobacco, because it tasted more like his native tobacco. However, he got little effect from it. On the other hand, tobacco sometimes gave him fleeting but vividly colored visions.
Burton decided to save the rest of his dreamgum, as he called it. He lit up a cigarette, knowing that marihuana would probably make his rage and frustration even darker. He asked Monat questions about his home, Ghuurrkh. He was intensely interested, but the marihuana betrayed him, and he drifted away while the Cetan’s voice became fainter and fainter.
"…cover your eyes, boys!" Gilchrist said in his broad Scots speech.
Richard looked at Edward; Edward gri
The woman’s head was in the stock by now; her long brown hair had fallen over her face. He wished he could see her expression as she stared down at the basket waiting for her, or for her head, rather.
"Don’t peek now, boys!" Gilchrist said again.
There was a roll of drums, a single shout, and the blade raced downward, and then a concerted shout from the crowd, mingled with some screams and moans, and the head fell down. The neck spurted out blood and would never stop. It kept spurting and spurting while the sun gleamed on it, it spurted out and covered the crowd and, though he was at least fifty yards from her, the blood struck him in the hands and seeped down between his fingers and over his face, filling his eyes and blinding him and making his lips sticky and salty. He screamed…
"Wake up, Dick!" Monat was saying. He was shaking Burton by the shoulder. "Wake up! You must have been having a nightmare!"
Burton, sobbing and shivering, sat up. He rubbed his hands and then felt his face. Both were wet. But with perspiration, not with blood.
"I was dreaming," he said. "I was just six years old and in the city of Tours. In France, where we were living then. My tutor, John Gilchrist, took me and my brother Edward to see the execution of a woman who had poisoned her family. It was a treat, Gilchrist said. I was excited, and I peeked through my fingers when he told us not to watch the final seconds, when the blade of the guillotine came down. But I did; I had to. I remember getting a little sick at my stomach but that was the only effect the gruesome scene had on me. I seemed to have dislocated myself while I was watching it; it was as if I saw the whole thing through a thick glass, as if it were unreal. Or I was unreal so I wasn’t really horrified."
Monat had lit another marihuana. Its fight was enough so that Burton could see him shaking his head. "Flow savage! You mean that you not only killed your criminals, you cut their heads off! In public! And you allowed children to see it!"
"They were a little more humane in England," Burton said. "They hung the criminals!"
"At least the French permitted the people to be fully aware that they were spilling the blood of their criminals," Monat said. "The blood was on their hands. But apparently this aspect did not occur to anyone. Not consciously, anyway. So now, after how many years — sixty-three? — you smoke some marihuana and you relive an incident which you had always believed did not harm you. But, this time, you recoil with horror. You screamed like a frightened child. You reacted as you should have reacted when you were a child. I would say that the marihuana dug away some deep layers of repression and uncovered the horror that had been buried there for sixty-three years."
"Perhaps," Burton said. He stopped. There was thunder and lightning in the distance. A minute later, a rushing sound came, and then the patter of drops on the roof. It had rained about this time last night, about three in the morning, he would guess. And this second night, it was raining about the same time. The downpour became heavy, but the roof had been packed tightly, and no water dripped down through it. Some water did, however, come under the lick wall, which was uphill. It spread out over the floor but did not wet them, since the grass and leaves under them formed a mat about ten inches thick. Burton talked with Monat until the rain ceased approximately half an hour later. Monat fell asleep; Kazz had never awakened. Burton tried to get back to sleep but could not. He had never felt so alone, and he was afraid that he might slip back into the nightmare. After a while, he left the but and walked to the one which Wilfreda had chosen. He smelled the tobacco before he got to the doorway. The tip of her cigarette glowed in the dark. She was a dim figure sitting upright in the pile of grass and leaves.
"Hello," she said. "I was hoping you would come."
"It’s the instinct to own property," Burton said.
"I doubt that it’s an instinct in man" Frigate said. Some people in the "60’s — 1960’s, that is — tried to demonstrate that man had an instinct which they called the territorial imperative But…"
"I like that phrase: It has a fine ring to it," Burton said.
"I knew you’d like it," Frigate said. "But Ardrey and others tried to prove that man not only had an instinct to claim a certain area of land as his own, he also was descended from a killer ape. And the instinct to kill was still strong in his heritage from the killer ape. Which explained national boundaries, patriotism both national and local, capitalism, war, murder, crime, and so forth. But the other school of thought, or of the temperamental inclination, maintained that all these are the results of culture, of the cultural continuity of societies dedicated from earliest times to tribal hostilities, to war, to murder, to crime, and so forth. Change the culture, and the killer ape is missing. Missing because he was never there, like the little man on the stairs. The killer was the society, and society bred the new killers out of every batch of babies. But there were some societies; composed of preliterates, it is true, but still societies, that did not breed killers. And they were proof that man was not descended from a killer ape. Or I should say, he was perhaps descended from the ape but he did not carry the killing genes any longer, any more than he carried the genes for a heavy supraorbital ridge of hairy skin or thick bones or a skull with only 650 cubic centimeters capacity."