ABSTINENCE
“WHY should they refrain from the gifts that God in His goodness had
bestowed on them?” Thus argued a party of gilded youth with me as they
polecatted the air of a gorgeous room with their bamboos. My senses had
so far resisted the paralysing fume and its nausea that they were able
to fumble about amongst arguments. And I tried to break their backs with
their own rod. “Why did the Aleofanians abstain so rigidly from God’s
good gift, the juice of the grape?” “You have got the stick by the wrong
end,” they laughed. And the bell-wether of them took up the tale. “God’s
gift is transformed into poison by fermentation—” “And so is kooannoo by
fire,” I broke in. “But pyranniddee” (so they called their intoxicating
spirit) “is seductive; kooannoo is repulsive; the one will master the
strongest man; the other has to be mastered.” I acknowledged the
correctness of his distinction, but urged that all pleasures and pains
in time suffer transmutation into their opposites; a habit, that in its
nascence is pleasing, becomes loathsome in its supremacy, and one that
is hard to learn gratifies the vanity, if not the senses, when mastered;
the stoic rampant revels in his stoicism and goes to all lengths with
it; the epicurean has soon skimmed the cream of his luxuries and has to
suppress all his other natural needs and desires like a stoic that he
may still the violence of his overgrown appetites or give them some
hard-won novelty; I envied the stoic his epicurean enjoyment of his
victory over life and passion; I pitied the epicurean wallowing in the
world, that sty of desire, all its best and most luscious things
trampled under foot. “But we have chosen a plant to bear whose fumes
must ever demand resolution—” I unhinged his sentence with, “Yes, in
those who cannot indulge in it.” “You speak truly,” he said, “and
therein lies the nobleness of the choice; it is the great philanthropic
plant; it is for the discipline and maturation of others that
kooannooers sacrifice their finer sensations.” This discussion would
have fallen into a scramble of wits; for it was hard by any means to get
the better of the subtlety of this people. So I held my peace. And as I
listened, I learned and admired. They were too wise and virtuous to tope
and guzzle and carouse. They would not steep their senses in sottish
oblivion. They would have no dealings with a poison that sapped the will
and made the human system all throat and liquid fire. Who would turn his
inwards into a chemist’s alembic, his skull into a vat?
I had heard eloquence like this in my own country and cowered before the
tornado; I knew there could be no safety but in flight.
They were indeed a most ascetic people in all but the use of words. I
tried in the first two or three hostelries to obtain a little wine; but
the attempt had such a paralysing effect on mine hosts that I had to
refrain. Anything that even smelt of fermentation was a horror. It is
true I had seen many wine-presses and distilleries in the lower part of
the town. But, it was explained, their products were meant for the shops
of chemists and for use in the preservation of fruit and museum
specimens. No freeman was allowed to touch the accursed thing; only
criminals and bondsmen were permitted within the walls of these
factories of the Stygian fluid, and then only under superintendence of
government agents, who commanded the position from smell-proof
view-points afar, lest even a whiff of the Tartarean brew should reach
their nostrils.
I now understood why these Aleofanians when analysing the character of
their neighbours always introduced, as the climax of the latter or
depreciatory part of their analysis, devotion to museums and to
fruit-preserving; and in the nearest approach I had seen two make to a
quarrel, the one hurled at the other the epithet “Olekloman,” or
museumist, and got in reply, “Poolp,” or fruit-preserver, whilst both
reddened as if stung. No house in the marble city was without a large
room devoted to natural history; every man was an enthusiastic collector
of biological specimens, and in this room there were long rows of
shelves of scarabæan bottles, each filled with some clear liquid in
which floated a bug or centipede or some small parasite. They were as
enthusiastic orchardists, and generally spent a third of the year in
bottling the fruits of their trees. Autumn was the time of their most
uproarious festivals and maddest junketings. This sober, staid, and
abstinent people broke loose like bacchanals. The fruit they indulged
in, they explained, fermented within them.
It was almost a painful spectacle for me after the admiration I had felt
for their self-abnegation. They had such a horror for all fermented
liquor that they called their devil and it by the same name, pyrannidee.
And one of the wise men philosophising over the annual outbreak of high
spirits said that, according to their own proverbial philosophy, the
best way to confine a devil was to swallow him and to keep him down; he
might pester the man who formed his prison-house, but he would be kept
from all other wickedness. Thus the autumn revel of merriment was
perhaps but another instance of the great virtue of the people, their
eagerness to save their neighbours from evil. They annually swallowed
the devil to prevent him, for a short time at least, from going about
like a roaring lion seeking whom he might devour.
At other times of the year I often found them, men as well as women,
sitting in their houses and shedding copious tears over the sadness of
this mortal state; so overwhelmed were they with the thought that their
words jostled one another in strange confusion; and if they rose to bid
me farewell, they fell upon my neck and wept, or collapsed in the
greatness of their grief upon the couch or floor. This tenderness of
heart was widespread amongst the upper classes; for days would they weep
thus over the woes of existence. And still more unmanning was their
sorrow for the death of friends; they would sit stupefied by the blow
for hours together, unable to speak articulately; and a whole week or
month of sickness and silent confinement to their bedroom would follow
the stroke. How sorely stricken this people were I could not have
realised but by my experience; the death of a dear friend occurred on an
average once a month in the life of some fashionable Aleofanians at
certain periods of the year, but especially during the severe season,
winter. And when they rose from bed and appeared in public, their
haggard, woebegone faces told the agony through which they had passed.
Surely fate was too hard upon this much-bereaved nation. As hard was it
upon their teeth; for the loss of a tooth under ether or stupefying gas
was equally frequent; one friend, whom I had to see often, suffered
grievously. I counted during my acquaintance with him forty-five losses
of a tooth under ether. But nature was strangely beneficent to the
Aleofanian jaw; she seemed to compensate for the losses almost
immediately: my friend had as many teeth when I left as when I saw him
first.
And with all these recurrent bereavements and the illnesses that
followed, you may imagine how important a functionary was the physician
in social life. He was the father-confessor of the household. He was
generally a soft-voiced, stooping-shouldered, silent-footed man. He
condescended and yet he flattered; he insinuated himself into a man’s
confidence, and still more into a woman’s, by veiled compliments; he
mastered by seeming to accept his patient’s opinions; he prescribed what
suited the appetites and desires; the subtlety of the race rose to its
highest in his profession, so skilfully had he to adapt himself to the
weaknesses of his clients; he knew all the secrets of the household and
built his omnipotence upon them; he had a feminine manner and a feminine
vein in his character, judgment and action through instinct, and a
passion for the minutenesses of life; and yet he piloted his way into
the mastery of the family through the women, who, in spite of his
womanliness, adored him; for he had learned by long tradition and
training how to make them abandon themselves body and soul to his
direction; their pains he knew how to soothe by anodynes; their troubles
and sorrows he made them forget by either spiritual or physical
consolation; he surrounded them with an atmosphere of belief in
themselves and him as the two select of the world; he quarantined them
from all other influences by flattery or pyrannidee; he dosed them with
well-sweetened gossip made powerful by being communicated in
confidential whispers and with oaths to secrecy; for he had command of
all the inner workings of the private life of a neighbourhood; and it
was one of the wonders of his power that most of the families which he
confessionalled were not on speaking terms with one another; he was
always sacrificing himself to bring about peace, and each of them
trusted him entirely; yet human nature is so prone to jealousy that they
refused his mediation and only listened to his soft-voiced details of
the inner life of their foes. What would the higher social life have
been in Aleofane without this silent-footed intermediary!
The chemist fulfilled the same important function for the poorer
classes. He sold the pyrannidee that the government factories made; but
he was restricted to using it for the cure of disease and the
assuagement of pain. And most of the grown-up population had a disease
to be cured and a pain to be assuaged every day, so sorely smitten were
they by fate, so long-suffering were they. It was one of the sights of
the city to see the kolako or the warehouses of the chemists at night;
crowds pressed into them by one door with agony depicted on their faces,
whilst out from the other sauntered patient after patient with a
wandering, nerveless smile upon his face, a jaunty, loose-gaited fashion
of throwing his limbs, and a whiff of pyrannidee in his breath; for if
it was not the medicine itself it was the medium of it, and he had left
his pain behind him in the store. Little wonder that the chemist was a
man of such power in Aleofane; he was generally of strong build and
swaggering gait and showed his masterfulness in every gesture; for he
had often severe muscular duties to perform; it seems that some of his
patients of the most abandoned and criminal classes, after being cured
of their pain or sickness, refused to leave his warehouse; seized by an
evil spirit, I was told, they would foam at the mouth, kick, and bite;
and it took great strength to tie them hand and foot and eject them.
Some of my friends in the marble city mourned over this possession by
wandering demons of the air; but they said it was only the degraded
whose bodies they entered.
The profession was one of the most lucrative in Aleofane, for one of its
essentials was great physical strength, and this was rarely to be found
in the gilded classes. I could pick out chemists in a crowd by their
brawny frame, bold gait, and short, well-knit stature. Their faces were
as a rule strong and corrugated with muscle and tense self-control; they
looked with an open and almost arrogant light in their eyes. Most of
them, I was told, were descendants of a few survivors from a wreck on
the coast, and there was occasionally a lurking fear that, with their
great influence over the lower part of the city, their strong will, and
their powerful squat frame, they might seize the reins of government;
but this was prevented by dividing their interests and sowing
dissensions and jealousies amongst them; the very largeness of the
incomes they made lowered their ambitions towards money-making; and this
made them fly asunder like globules of quicksilver.
But the contrast between them and the rest of the upper classes in
physical appearance was very striking. The Aleofanians proper stooped in
the shoulders of their long, thin bodies like bulrushes before the wind;
not for weight of the head they bore; for it was small though well
proportioned, and by various fashions and contrivances they managed to
convey a false impression of its size; of their eyes it was impossible
to make out the shape or colour; for they peeped through a thin slit
between the eyelids, doubtless afraid of the glare of the sun; their
nose ran like a sharp promontory down towards the middle of their upper
lip, as if to help in covering the enormous aperture of the mouth and
its thick, sensuous lips; these last I could see in the women, but the
men concealed them by all the hair they could grow on their long-drawn
faces; and their hair inclined as a rule to red. Their gait formed
perhaps the deepest contrast to that of the chemists; they walked like
ghosts, with a feline, scarcely perceptible footfall; and nothing could
take them unawares or startle them out of it; yet ever and again some of
them would pull themselves up and put on a bustling gait and bluff
demeanour that completely belied their personal appearance; it was like
a cat masquerading as a lion.
But they conducted themselves with great dignity in all the relations of
their life. They would have no part in the gross candour of the
chemists. Their whole demeanour and language were ordered with full
regard to decency and decorum. They shrank with horror from lewdness and
intrigue, and refused to acknowledge the existence of libertines amongst
them. I never heard so much solemn and devout feeling expressed as on
this topic; and at the corner of every street the attention of the
passer-by was arrested by placards quoting in huge letters from their
sacred books the noblest maxims on the sweetness of a chaste life. I
could find no one to confess that there was such a thing in the island
as a man who was libidinous, but every girl who broke this rule of
morality was thrust forth from house and home. Scores of such outcasts I
saw flaunting in brilliant robes along the streets. They had all the
appearance of living in great luxury. But I was assured they were
supported by secret funds sent by the inhabitants of a vicious island
close at hand. And I could believe it. For no one ever spoke to them,
and ladies as they passed drew their skirts in, whilst gentlemen after
brushing past them would rub their coatsleeves as if from contamination.
It was only the great chastity of the people that permitted these
creatures to remain in their island. Nothing could surpass the horror
and loathing which the Aleofanians exhibited towards them. It was
painful indeed to see the agony the notables had to endure in suffering
them to remain.
How devoted they were to charity! It was, I felt, their life, their all.
They refused to do half the mischief that there was opportunity of doing
to others. Every moment, every energy, was spent in restricting it to
this fraction. So much destructive force was latent in them, so much
destructive opportunity lay to hand, that they might have annihilated
the reputation and peace of mind of all their fellow-citizens. How proud
they were of their fraternal love in sowing only a few slanders and
dissensions per day, and these, too, only to discipline the haughty and
too fortunate, or to keep their own faculties from rusting! It was the
same with their benevolence; nothing could surpass the nobleness and
care with which they dispensed it. Half their revenues they gave away,
but not in reckless alms; they were too wise and self-controlling for
that; they knew too much of the economic laws of life, and respected
them too well to violate even the least of them. So they never forgot
discipline in giving to those who needed; they carefully exacted as much
work from them as would pay the principal, and, lest the kindness should
lapse from memory and leave no impression on the life and conduct, half
as much again. To what infinite trouble they put themselves to see that
these laws of nature should never be outraged by them! Great troops of
the lower classes were fed and clothed and cared for by each of them for
years, whilst they were trying to repay those noble eleemosynary gifts,
and satisfying the laws of economics.
Nor must it be held an inconsistency in them that they thought money the
root of all evil as against those very laws. They despised it and hated
it. And lest it should do to their neighbours the harm for which they
feared it and loathed it, they gathered as much of it into their hands
as they could. “They swallowed the devil” again, according to their own
proverbial phrase, as the best means of preventing the mischief he might
do to others. It was one of the most altruistic of their principles,
they considered, this accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, lest
the many should suffer. They could hedge the monster round and narrow
his sphere of operations. And every provision had been made by the state
for centuries that he should not approach the masses with his foul
influence. It was the gilded classes of the marble city that could alone
withstand the evils he worked, and amongst them therefore was he
imprisoned. They were, so to speak, the turnkeys of this vampire of
commercial races; and in their duties they were all vigilant lest he
should escape and work irremediable havoc amongst the rest of the
nation.
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