My attention was especially drawn to the portrait that hung over the desk. Done in the mock-primitive style popular in the sixties of the last century, it slyly exaggerated those features of the subject which were most suggestive of the raw and barbarous. His stomach, though monumental in itself, was seen from a perspective that magnified its bulk. The face was crudely colored, particularly the nose, which was a florid, alcoholic crimson. The violet-tinged lips were at once cynical and voluptuary. The picture was the perfect archetype of the Dingo.
Yet perhaps not perfect—for the eyes shone with an intelligence and good will that seemed to contradict the overall impression of brutishness. This one dissonance added to the archetype that touch of individual life which only the best portraitists have ever been able to achieve.
I was still engaged in studying this painting (and, really, it had the strangest fascination for me) when its original stepped into the room and came forward to shake my hand.
“Sorry to have kept you waiting, but my time hasn’t been my own ever since that damned sunspot.”
When he had left off shaking my hand, he did not immediately release it, but, keeping it still tightly clasped, looked me over appraisingly.
“You’ll have to get rid of that name of yours, you know. ‘White Fang’ just won’t do now. We Dingoes—as you call us—don’t like those doggish names. Your proper name is Dennis White, isn’t it? Well, Dennis, welcome to the revolution.”
“Thank you, but…”
“But who am I? I’m the Grand High Diode. As far as you’re concerned, you may think of me as a vice-president. The Diode is second only to the Cathode Himself. Are you interested in politics?”
“Pets don’t have to be. We’re free.”
“Ah, freedom!” The Grand High Diode made an expansive gesture, then plopped into the seat behind the desk. “Your Master takes care of everything for you and leaves you so perfectly free. Except that you can’t taste anything from the good-and-evil tree, why there’s nothing that isn’t allowed you.”
He glowered at me dramatically, and I had time to compare the portrait with the portrayed. Even the man’s wild, white locks seemed to be tumbled about his head according to the same formula that the painter had used to guide his brushstrokes. My admiration for him (the painter, not the portrayed) grew by leaps and bounds.
“The Masters appeared two-thirds of a century ago. In that time human civilization has virtually disappeared. Our political institutions are in a shambles; our economy is little more than bartering now; there are practically no artists left.”
“Among you Dingoes, perhaps not. But under the Mastery, civilization is flourishing as never before in man’s history. If you’re going to talk about civilization, the Dingoes haven’t a leg to stand on.”
“Cows were never more civilized than when we bred them.”
I smiled. “Word-games. But I can play them just as well.”
“If you’d rather not argue…”
“I’d rather argue. I’d rather do anything that keeps me from returning to the gallows. It was a most distasteful experience.”
“Perhaps you can avoid the gallows altogether. Perhaps, Dennis, I can convince you to become a Dingo?” The man’s thick, violet lips distended in a wolfish grin. His eyes, which were, like the eyes in the portrait, vivid with intelligence, glittered with a strange sort of mirth.
I tried my best to temper my natural disdain with a quaver of doubt. “Isn’t it rather late to join? I should think that most of the carnage must be over by now. Aren’t you nearly ready for defeat?”
“We’ll probably be defeated, but a good revolutionary can’t let that worry him. A battle that isn’t against the odds would hardly be a battle at all. The carnage, I’ll admit, is unfortunate.”
“And unjustifiable as well. Poor St Bernard had done nothing to justify—”
“Then I won’t bother to justify it. Dirty hands is one of the prices you pay in becoming a man again.”
“Are you fighting this revolution just so you can feel guilty about it?”
“For that—and for the chance to be our own Masters. Guilt and sweat and black bread are all part of being human. Domestic animals are always bred to the point that they become helpless in the state of nature. The Masters have been breeding men.”
“And doing a better job of it than man ever did. Look at the results.”
“That, I might point out, is exactly the view a dachshund would take.”
“Then let me put in a good word for dachshunds. I prefer them to wolves. I prefer them to Dingoes.”
“Do you? Don’t make up your mind too quickly—or it may cost you your head.” And, with this threat, my incredible inquisitor began to chuckle. His chuckle became a pronounced laugh, and the laugh grew to a roar. It occurred to me that the gleam in his eyes might as well have been madness as intelligence.
Suddenly I was overcome by a desire just to have done. “My mind is made up,” I announced calmly, when he had stopped laughing.
“Then you’ll make a declaration?” Apparently, he had taken the exact opposite of the meaning I had intended.
“Why should you care which side I’m on?” I demanded angrily.
“Because a statement from you—from the son of Tennyson White—with the strength of that name behind it—would be invaluable in the cause of freedom.”
Very deliberately I approached the mahogany desk where the man was sitting, wreathed in a fatuous smile, and very deliberately I raised my hand and struck him full in the face.
Instantly the room was filled with guards who pinioned my arms behind my back. The man behind the desk began, again, to chuckle.
“You beast!” I shouted. “You Dingo! You have the conscience to kidnap and murder my father, and then you dare ask me to make you a declaration of support. I can’t believe… If you think that…” I went on raving in this vein for some little while. And as I raved that incredible man lay sprawled on the top of his desk and laughed until he had lost his breath.
“White Fang,” he managed at last to say. “That is to say—Dennis, my dear boy, excuse me. Perhaps I’ve carried this a little too far. But you see…” And now he swept aside the thick white locks from the stub of his right ear. “…I am your father and not murdered in the least.”
Chapter Eleven
In which I commit myself to the Philosophy of Dingoism.
The next week went by at a pace that would have been nightmarish if I hadn’t been so giddily, busily happy. First off, I married Julie once again—this time in accordance with the rites of the Dingoes. Daddy explained that in some matters—marriage most especially—the Dingoes could be as great sticklers for ceremony as my brother Pluto. Darling, Julie entered into the spirit of things with enthusiastic atavism, and I suspect now that part of Daddy’s insistence had had its origin in my once-again-newlywed bride. Still, it was a well-wrought ceremony, which even Pluto might have approved. Hymen’s candle never burned brighter than on the day that our hands were joined over the glowing vacuum tube on the altar of the renovated power station.
We had our first quarrel as newlyweds an hour afterward, when Julie told me that she’d known about Daddy and the ordeal he was preparing for me on the day she had come to visit me in the courthouse jail. But the quarrel ended as soon as Julie had pointed out that, since I’d passed the test so well, I had no cause for anger. I hate to think what might have happened however, if I’d agreed to make the “declaration” that Daddy had proposed.