There was no hanger; such might serve, she supposed, as a tool. Her shoes were gone, with their laces, and, too, her stockings. The bedding from her cot, was missing. Her brief cotton dress lacked even a belt.
She returned to the center of the room, near the cot. Over it, dangling on a short cord, some four inches long, from a beam, was a light bulb. Its shade was missing. The bulb was off.
Numbly she went to the wall switch and turned the bulb on. It lit. Then, moaning, she turned it off again.
She went then again to the center of the room, and looked slowly about, at the white-washed plaster, the bleakness, and then up at the hot tin overhead, then down to the thin, striped mattress on the iron cot.
Then suddenly she ran to the door and pounded on it, weeping. “William!” she cried. “Gunther! Professor Herjellsen! Professor Herjellsen!”
There was no answer from the compound.
She screamed and pounded on the door, and wept. She ran to the barred window, which bars had been placed there in her absence with William and Gunther. She seized the bars in her small fists and screamed between them. “William!” she screamed. “Gunther! Professor Herjellsen! Professor Herjellsen!” Then she screamed out again. “Help! Please, help! Someone! Help me! Please help me!”
But there was again no answer from the compound.
Dr. Brenda Hamilton, shaking, walked unsteadily to the iron cot. ‘
Her mind reeled.
“You understand nothing,” Gunther had told her. “You were a fool to come to the bush,” Gunther had told her.
“I’m needed!” had cried Hamilton.
“Yes, little fool,” had said Gunther. “You are needed. That is true.”
Hamilton was bewildered.
She sank to the floor beside the cot. She put her head to the boards, and wept.
“Here is a brush, cosmetics and such,” said William, placing a small cardboard shoe box on the floor of Brenda Hamilton’s quarters.
Brenda Hamilton stood across the room from him, facing him. She wore still the brief white garment, that of thin cotton, sleeveless.
He sat on one of the cane chairs. It was ten P.M. Mosquito netting had been stapled across the window. The room was lit from the single light bulb, dangling on its short cord from the beam.
A tray, with food, brought earlier by William, lay on Brenda Hamilton’s cot. It was not touched.
“Eat your food,” said William.
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
He shrugged.
“I want my clothing, William,” she said.
“It is interesting,” said William. “In all your belongings, there was not one dress.”
“I do not wear dresses,” she said.
“You are an attractive woman,” said William. “Why not?”
“Dresses are hobbling devices,” she said. “They are a garment that men have made for women, to set them apart and, in effect, to keep them prisoner.”
“You do not appear much hobbled,” observed William.
Brenda Hamilton flushed.
“I feel exposed,” she said. “Another function of the dress,” she said, “is to make the female feel exposed, to make her more aware of her sexuality.”
“Perhaps,” said William.
“Give me my own clothing,” begged Brenda Hamilton.
“You are quite lovely as you are,” said William.
“Do not use that diminishing, trivializing word of me,” snapped Hamilton. “It is as objectionable as `pretty’.”
William smiled. “But Brenda,” he said, “you are quite pretty.”
Please, William,” begged Hamilton.
She looked in the mirror. It was true what William had said. She was, to her fury, very lovely, very pretty.
“Actually,” said William, “you are rather more than lovely, and certainly far more than pretty.”
“Please, William,” begged Hamilton.
“You are beautiful, quite beautiful, Brenda,” said William.
“Call me Doctor Hamilton,” said Hamilton.
“Very well,” agreed William. He looked at her, appreciatively, scrutinizing her casually, to her rage, from her trim ankles to her proud head. “You are indeed far more than pretty, Doctor Hamilton,” said William. “You are beautiful, quite beautiful, Doctor Hamilton,” said William.
Hamilton turned away, stifling a sob.
“Be careful, Doctor Hamilton,” cautioned William. “That is almost a female response.”
She spun to face him. “I am a female!” she cried.
“Obviously,” said William.
“Why am I being treated like this?” demanded Brenda Hamilton.
“Like what?” asked William.
“Why has that mirror been placed in the room?” she demanded. “Why am I dressed like this?”
“It seems strange, does it not,” asked William, “that you, an attractive female, should object to being clothed as an attractive female?”
“I do not wish to be so clothed!” she cried.
“Are you ashamed of your body?” asked William.
“No!” she cried.
“Of course, you are,” smiled William. “But look at yourself in the mirror. You should not be ashamed of your body, but proud of it. You are extremely beautiful.”
“I am being displayed,” she wept.
“True,” said William.
“I do not wish to be displayed,” she said.
“You are not simply being displayed for our pleasure,” said William.
She looked at him.
“You are being displayed also for your own instruction, that you may be fully aware of what a beauty you are.”
She looked at the mirror. “It is so-so different from a man’s body,” she said.
“Precisely,” said William. “It is extremely different, its softness, its vulnerability, its beauty.”
“So different,” she whispered.
“And you, too, my dear Doctor Hamilton, are quite different.”
“No!” she snapped.
William laughed.
“Being a female is a role,” cried Hamilton. “Only a role!”
“Tell that to a sociologist,” said William, “not to a physician, or a man of the world, one experienced in life.”
Hamilton turned on him in rage.
“The body and the mind,” said William, “is a unity. Do you really think that with a body like yours you might have any sort of mind, one, say, like mine or Gunther’s? Do you not think there might not be, associated with such a body, an indigenous sensibility, indigenous talents,. emotions, brilliancies? Do you really think that the mind is only an accident, unrelated to the entire evolved organism?”
“I have a doctorate in mathematics,” said Hamilton, lamely, defensively.
“And we both speak English,” said William. “I speak of deeper things.”
“Being feminine,” said Hamilton, “is only a role.”
“And doubtless,” said William, “being a leopard is only a role, one played by something which is really not a leopard at all.”
“You are hateful,” said Brenda Hamilton.
“I do not mean to be, Doctor Hamilton,” said William. “But I must remind you that what you seem to think so significant, a cultural veneer, is a recent acquisition to the human animal, an overlay, a bit of tissue paper masking deeper realities.” William looked down. “I suppose,” he said, “we do not know, truly, what a man is, or a woman.”
“We can condition a man to be feminine, and a woman to be masculine,” said Brenda Hamilton. “It is a simple matter of positive and negative reinforcement.”
“We can also stunt trees and dwarf animals, and drive dogs insane,” said William. “We can also bind the feet of Chinese women, crippling them. We can administer contradictory conditioning programs and drive men, and women, insane with anxieties and guilts, culturally momentous, and yet, physiologically considered, meaningless, irrelevant to the biology being distorted.”