It was not until a week had passed that the first stimulus of the amazing life into which I had been plunged abated, leaving me a prey to melancholy reflections. The memory of Esther, which I had tried so hard to put away, began to recur incessantly. I felt shut off from humanity, a survival from a generation whose memory, even, had become legendary.

They seemed to understand my feelings, although they could not know their cause, and tried to keep me from brooding. By tacit understanding no references were made to my past. They accepted me as a stranger, and yet there was the same latent suspicion on Elizabeth’s part. And I could not help seeing that some heavy grief or apprehension hung over them. And I felt that I was an intruder upon it. At night I would hear David pacing his room for hours, and sometimes a groan would break from his lips.

He gave me to understand that the summons to appear before the Council might be delayed for days or weeks. It was always presented unexpectedly, and always peremptory, he said. During the week following my arrival at the Strangers’ House I never went out alone. Whenever I made the suggestion, David either volunteered to accompany me or found some excuse to detain me. In particular, he requested me to stay within doors during the four hours when he was at the Bureau, in the morning.

Finally I became almost exasperated. “You have told me that I am free,” I protested.

“And you are free, Arnold,” he answered. “It is for your own sake that I make this request of you. There are hidden things, shadows against the sunlight of our civilization, and transitory, I hope, which you would hardly understand. You must learn them by degrees, Arnold. To me they have seemed necessary in this transitional epoch; but they are hard, Arnold; hard to endure.”

And he sighed in so melancholy a fashion that I suspected one of those shadows rested on his own home.

Yes, there were hidden things, and I got no nearer the heart of them, although I had hints as to their nature. For instance, there was the Animal Vivisection Bureau. I wondered why David spoke of the Animal Vivisection Bureau, and not of the Vivisection Bureau.

I never had realized before how large a share animals played in our lives. The horse, I was told, had not existed in the British Province for a generation. Cats disappeared when the rodent virus was invented, and were now only to be found in a wild state in the woods. There seemed to be no dogs, and I did not ask David about them.

There was no social life at all. The other inmates of the Strangers’ House were lodged on the different floors and ate in common, living under the watchful care of the deputies, who occasionally came to David for advice or instructions. Our only neighbor on the top floor was a little woman with two children who had come from a northern city and intended to return as soon as passes for leaving London, which had been stopped, were again issued. Inspectors from the Children’s Bureau visited her nearly every day, always leaving her in a condition of terror, as I inferred from a remark dropped by Elizabeth. Her husband had dropped dead in the street two months before. David told me that these sudden deaths were common, and were considered a triumph for medical science.

And yet I knew that David had visitors after the solar lights went out. My room was at the end of the apartment near the street; but I heard strangers tiptoe along the passage, and whispered colloquies in David’s room. My host would appear abstracted the next morning, and watch me very thoughtfully. At such times I felt more than ever an intruder in the household.

Yes, it was a world Lazaroff would have appreciated, could he have had his wish fulfilled, to be born into it. Would his viewpoint have changed, I wondered? It was a world from which all the amenities and charities of life seemed to have been banished. I tried to lead up to that subject in my talks with David, but he appeared unable to understand me.

Was it an atheistic world? I had not ventured to question David about this. But I knew that there was no Sunday upon the calendar, and that the tenth day was the civil holiday. That day had fallen already, and endless crowds had marched through the streets, to the music of bands, to play-places in waste spots outside London. The Council supervised the games, which were compulsory. Of all the paternal regulations of the Council, this seemed to me the most arbitrary and oppressive.

“We have to keep the people under discipline,” David explained. “Once they were allowed to wander at will; but they tore up the trees and flowers and strewed paper and broken bottles everywhere.”

That was true. I remembered the public fields of my own age. I recalled how one writer had seen in them a complete indictment of democracy itself.

I was amazed and alarmed increasingly by what I saw in my journeys about the town with David: the large brass tags that gave each person his label, the occupation badges, the insolence of the whites, passing with bodyguards of blues who elbowed all out of their way. And once there came a frantic scramble to make a passage for a tall, black-bearded man in a dark-blue uniform, who passed in the midst of his retinue with clanking sword.

I had noticed these men in uniform about the streets. They strode like conquerors amid a servile populace. I learned that the tall man was Mehemet, a Turk in command of an international force, the bodyguard of Sanson, and devoted to him.

Perhaps it was as well that, before my enlightenment came, I completed a cursory survey of the new civilization. At my request David took me to one of the public schools. I was astonished to discover that no history prior to 1945 was taught, and no geography. The greater part of the curriculum was devoted to scientific and economic subjects. So great had been the progress in knowledge that, on opening some of the text-books, I discovered that I was quite unable to understand them.

I learned that Oxford and Cambridge had disappeared, with the old public schools, in 1945, after a revolution, the anger of the people having been kindled against them on account of their moral influence and the distinctive stamp of character that they produced. To prevent tutors of personality from imparting to their pupils the elements of humane tradition, David told me, the text-books were so written as to eliminate entirely the personal element in instruction, a reform that the prophet Wells had urged rather furiously, and perhaps invidiously, in his own century.

“The Council shapes each citizen’s education from the cradle to the workshop,” said David. “It is very anxious to secure precision of knowledge. For instance, it is a criminal offense for mothers to teach their children fairy stories. It is the duty of the inspectors to question children rigorously, in order to ascertain whether they are acquainted with any of this unscientific, heretical folk-lore.”

“Which has doubtless all perished,” I said.

“On the contrary,” he answered, “an immense quantity of it has come down to us, practically unchanged, through all the revolutions of the past century, and not only that but new tales have arisen. The authorities are at their wits’ end to discover who is responsible for the existence of this masonic secret among the younger generation.”

From the school we went to the workshop. On the way home we stopped at one of the open-air moving picture shows, and saw two or three dramatized versions of public affairs. Ingenious mechanism synchronized the movements of the figures upon the screen, which were in stereoscopic relief, with speeches made through the telephone funnels. These, David said, took the place of newspapers when the socialized State destroyed the printed news-sheet by the simple process of killing the advertising.

We also looked inside the district art gallery. None of the pictures antedated the year 1978, and each illustrated some phase of the new civilization in an educational way. I must not forget to say that later I found a novel in David’s home, which Elizabeth must have read in her schoolgirl days. The scene was laid in the early twentieth century, and the story dealt with the adventures of a young man of property, depicting the romance of his care-free life. A moral at the end, and copious footnotes, inserted by the Council’s order, drew attention to the improvement in the human lot since that barbarous period.

So, day by day, I waited, and my eyes were opened more and more to my environment. Daily I expected the Council summons that did not come, and daily the constraint grew. I was thinking of suggesting to David that I should be located among the other strangers in place of continuing to accept his hospitality; but before I could decide to approach him an incident occurred which revealed to me the existence of conditions which, unintelligible though they were, made me decide to approach David again with a view to a mutual understanding.

David was at the Strangers’ Bureau and would not return for at least two hours. Under Elizabeth’s instruction I had made swift progress in understanding the combinations of syllables that make up the written language. I had just begun, in fact, to master the ingenious Breboeuf system, whereby the simpler of the syllables have been combined to form the written speech of four of the five Provinces. David had told me that the Council’s inability to enforce the invented language Spekezi as the universal tongue, had been one of the severest shocks that the new civilization had received. Then came Breboeuf with his universal syllabic symbols.

Now, if the written language were merely pictorial, it could have been used to represent all the languages on earth. But since it is syllabic, and therefore depicts words instead of ideas, it was a supreme achievement to have invented a written language adapted to four tongues. The Breboeuf system is based, of course, upon the common Latin and Sanskrit elements. Breboeuf, who was one of the last of the classical scholars, was rewarded, as is well known, by being freed from the defectives’ art factories in his old age, and pensioned.

However, it was not my purpose to touch upon this matter. My interest was beginning to flag, and I was paying more attention to Elizabeth than to the lesson. I was trying to trace in her features some elusive resemblance to Esther. I was wondering whether I could ever become a normal citizen of this strange world. Suddenly the telephone funnel shouted Elizabeth’s name.

She sprang from her chair and rushed into her bedroom, which was next to the external elevator shaft. Her expression and gestures alarmed me so greatly that I ran after her. When I reached her door I saw her standing in the middle of the room, deathly white, and clenched in her hand was a knife, which she was aiming at her heart.

I ran into the room and wrested the weapon from her grasp. She fell upon the floor unconscious. All the while this was happening the funnel was shouting stridently, “Elizabeth!” “Elizabeth!” together with the string of letters and figures that completed her nomenclature.

I went to the funnel and lied to the voice. “She is not here,” I said.

“Then tell her, when she returns, that the price of the dress will be five units more, on account of the new wool schedule,” the voice responded.

Such was the half-comic ending of what had nearly been a tragedy. I revived the girl and explained the matter to her, but for some time she remained in a condition approaching collapse. When she began to regain consciousness she wept hysterically.

It was only the fear of causing David anxiety that enabled her to resume her accustomed demeanor by the time he returned. She begged me to make no mention of the matter to him, and I agreed on condition that she would never use the knife except in the last extremity. But I was working in the dark, for, though she consented to the bargain, when I begged her to tell me what it was she feared, she remained mute, shaking her head and closing her mouth obstinately.

“Will you not trust me, Elizabeth?” I pleaded.

Then, to my surprise, she looked accusingly at me. “Will you trust me?” she asked. “Will you not trust my father and me? Haven’t you news of Paul?” Her expression was indescribably beseeching.

“We don’t know who you are,” she went on rapidly. “My father trusts everybody. But I know your assumed ignorance is impossible. You don’t trust us, Arnold, and you are playing with us. You have been here three weeks and the Council has not sent for you. If you were what you claim to be you would know your danger. Trust us, and, if you are what we hoped you were, tell me about Paul. Is he safe? Is he well?”

“I never heard of him,” I stammered. “I—”

She looked at me with reproach and glided quietly away. I heard her sigh mournfully. And still I groped in a fog of mystery and could learn nothing.