"You brave man," interposed the observer.
Jake gave up Rosenberg and nodded appreciatively, hoping to be told what for this fellow said him brave man.
"Your ego has been subjected to a massive onslaught. Of the events in detail inducing you to set your foot on the path that has brought you here this afternoon, I know nothing; but of this I am quite sure, that they were of a sort to injure your pride most severely. So it must have gone with all the intervening events. Today, given among other factors your age and class, was the supreme test. I confess to having done a little to aggravate it; I apologise, and can plead only the excuse of scientific curiosity. I salute you, sir, and would ask you to do me the honour of allowing me to shake your hand."
They shook; Jake had been about to get up from his chair to do so but remembered the state of his clothing, which indeed had seldom been far from his thoughts over the past half-hour and which now, for some reason, decided him against getting up. He was still most interested in the question of the artificial stimulator and was satisfied soon enough. Professor Trefusis, with Miss Newman at her side, again stood before him. She was holding up an object of yellowish metal about the size of a pepper pot with a small protuberance at the top.
"This," she said, "is the artificial stimulator."
With a neat movement she tripped a switch on the device and a thin high-pitched whine started up. To Jake it sounded like a dentist's high-speed drill and some of his reaction to the thought must have shown in his face, because Trefusis smiled and spoke reassuringly, took his hand and laid the metal protuberance, which he now saw was spinning rapidly, against it.
He felt an agreeable stroking sensation, not intense, as if something between a fingertip and a feather were being applied with superhuman regularity. He nodded appreciatively again.
Part II now went ahead with businesslike dispatch. Artificial stimulator in hand, Miss Newman knelt before him. Professor Trefusis looked quickly through the contents of one of her folders and said,
"You'll now be subjected to the same stimuli as before while also being stimulated genitally. No doubt you'll appreciate that should your response come to climax the programme would have to be discontinued."
"Yes," said Jake, thinking this was a bit mealy-mouthed of her in the circumstances.
"So if you raise your hand the genital, stimulation will cease at once."
"Fine."
What followed was physical pleasure in its purest form, unaccompanied, in other words, by any of the range of feelings from tenderness to triumph normally embodied with it. Even the desire for its continuance was missing, so that every minute, every dozen seconds he had to strive not to send the damned contraption 'flying' and run for the door, no trousers or no no trousers. How can she do it? lie kept asking himself, not rhetorically: what sort of woman does it take to measure what happens to chaps" willies for a living? What does your mummy do? And how can her husband cope? The she he meant was entirely the fair professor; Miss Newman never entered his thoughts. It was that, he saw afterwards, that made the whole shooting-match bearable: by luck or amazing judgement they had passed over for the artificial-stimulator-wielding spot all the impossible kinds of person, to wit males, attractive females and unattractive females, and come up with somebody as near nobody as anybody could be, somebody totally unmemorable, somebody who did nothing at all except as ordered. Or perhaps her behaviour, or absence of behaviour, was the result of her having been carefully briefed in the interests of relaxation of atmosphere and total informality.
The girl in the straw hat went back into the folder and the whine of the cunning little gadget sank in pitch and disappeared. Jake sighed and swallowed. His eyelids felt heavy; in fact so did most of the rest of him. Professor Trefusis came and muttered into his ear,
"Would you like a climax? We can give you one, not out here of course, or we can arrange for you to give yourself one in private."
"I don't think I will, thanks very much all the same."
When they parted a few minutes later she said to him, "I hope to see you again soon."
"Again? Soon?"
"After the successful completion of Dr Rosenberg's treatment."
9—Guilt and Shame
Jake and Rosenberg went together across the hospital hall, which had a fight going on in it near one of the sidewalls. Two medium-sized men in white suits were struggling to hold a largish man in a fawn raincoat who seemed to be doing no more than trying to free himself from them. Not many of the people standing about or passing through bothered to watch.
"If it's been like that all the way here," said Jake, "those two are earning their money."
Rosenberg smiled leniently. "They're ward staff. The poor fellow's objection must be to being made to leave. There, you see?"
The man in the raincoat, at liberty for a moment, ran back towards the lifts where the two nurses caught him again. Jake had a last glimpse of the captive's forefinger straining to reach, and being held back from reaching, the call-button with great intensity, as if this were no call-button but, TV-style, the means of activating a bank alarm or nuclear missile. Outside it wasn't quite raining but was damp and chilly. Rosenberg looked to and fro a couple of times in a furtive sort of way, swinging his unnaturally large black briefcase about, then he said,
"How were you intending to make the return journey, Mr Richardson?"
"Bus."
"Ah, it's not the weather for that. I have my car here, I'd be happy to give you a ride."
"That's very kind of you."
But the other stayed where he was a space longer, looking down at his disproportionately small feet. There was that in his manner which meant that it came as no complete surprise when he flung back his head and produced one of those stares he and Curnow went in for, had perhaps developed together as part of some research project. Jake met this one and waited. When Rosenberg spoke it was in a strained, almost querulous tone, as if he was at great moral cost dragging out a deeply overlaid memory.
"Am I quite mistaken or did you tell me you were sometimes known to take a glass of sherry before dinner?"
"I must have. It's true anyway."
"I thought so. I thought so. And it's before dinner now. Some time before, I grant you, but before. You see I find a small amount of alcohol at this time of day distinctly beneficial. Tell me, have you any objection to drinking in a public house?"
In its tone and much of its phraseology the last part of that so closely resembled the bagger's favourite question that Jake started to want to hit him, but he soon stopped and said, "Not in principle." He could have added that in practice he found the activity distasteful, especially of late; it was also true that nothing would have kept him from seeing the little psychologist in the proposed new setting.
With a peremptory sideways movement of his head Rosenberg led off at a smart pace. A minute's walk up towards the main road brought them to a pub called the Lord Nelson which Jake, occupied with his madwoman, hadn't noticed on the way down. The exterior, royal blue picked out in yellow, was promising, and the interior had no more than half a dozen youngsters in it, wearing their offensive perpetual-holiday clothes, true, but not laughing and talking above a mild shout. The noise from the fruit machine was that of an intermittent and fairly distant automatic rifle, and even the jukebox thumped and cried away well below the threshold of pain; all in all a real find. Of course it was early yet.