SNEEKAPE
THERE was one exception to the rule of masculine indifference. I had
been watching the figure for some time amongst the women before I
discovered it to be that of a man. He had a small, well-proportioned
head, even smaller than that of most of the women; and it was poised on
his long neck like a bird’s; it had such rapidity and variety and ease
of motion as if it were on a universal joint; it wiggled and bobbed, it
danced and undulated to every emotion that came into his breast, while
the little bead eyes twinkled and leered and winked; no head other than
a sparrow’s ever pirouetted and jerked and quivered with such manifest
enjoyment and self-admiration. He thought himself a humourist too, for
some of the younger women smirked and giggled as he stretched his wide
mouth and curved the corners of his eyes and shook and wagged his little
head. His themes were evidently the men around, but his voice was too
low and his gusto over his own jests too great for any of them to reach
beyond his immediate circle; like all wits of the shallow type, he was
his own best audience, though I could see he needed a feminine smile
somewhere about. At first I had admired his gallantry and kindness, for
he was the only man who sided with the women in their struggle for food.
But afterwards I hesitated, for I began to see that it was only the
women of handsome, stalwart form and finely moulded face, the women who
needed no help, that he fidgeted and bustled about; if ever he helped
any who could not help themselves, I saw that they had graceful forms
and the hectic beauty of the delicate. Another feature of his chivalry
that lowered my first opinion of him was that, nimble and sedulous
though he was in his attentions, what he did was superfluous; even the
women who most smirked at his jokes and innuendoes could not conceal a
lurking contempt for his officiousness and feminine vigilance about
trifling minutiæ.
Tall and graceful though he was, with an air of brisk intelligence and
dapper education, I began to take an inexplicable dislike to him. He
seemed to have some magnetic sense of this, for, after appearing
unconscious of my glance for a long time, he sidled up to me and with a
purring, confidential tone in his voice and a wise wag of his little
head and self-appreciative twinkle of his little eyes, he apologised in
the Aleofanian tongue for addressing me; but he heard from my accents
that I was a stranger, and felt drawn to me, as he was an alien, too, in
a strange land. If he felt any recoil against my somewhat brusque
rejection of his sympathy, he did not betray it. He wheedled himself by
abject subservience and subtle self-abasement into what he thought my
confidence. He artfully fished about for topics on which he could agree
with me, and ostentatiously paraded a yearning to know my opinions on
them; he looked transports of admiration and enthusiasm for them when
uttered; and the whole piece of acting was done with such an appearance
of candour and amiability that I began to feel myself discourteous and
unjust in being so surly to him. His urbanity and sweetness of temper
were never for an instant ruffled. He wore his most fascinating smile as
if to the manner born. He was bent on being the good Samaritan to my
spiritual wounds; he would not probe a single sore; he would apply balm
to all my sorrows if only he could get at them, if only I would admit
him to my heart of hearts. The kindness, the brotherly love he displayed
for all men at last won me over from my thorny silence, although I still
inwardly wished the fellow would insult me in order that I might have
the pleasure of kicking him. With all his suavity and cooing benignancy
and hearty assumption of good-fellowship, he stirred up in me the savage
irascibility that lies still in the heart of even the most civilised;
and I did not thank him for it.
He had much of the wisdom of the serpent, too, or at least a certain
magnetic instinct that stood for it; for he did not follow up what he
manifestly thought his victory over my churlishness with any use of it;
he went off to his group of feminine worshippers. I could see from the
eyes of some of them that his witchery had taken effect.
Garrulesi had been outside, and his return withdrew my observation from
the stranger’s sinuous wiles. We went outside, and my thoughts were
caught up by the sight. We stood on a platform that overlooked the
tranquil ocean. Not a breath disturbed the morning air. The sun from
behind us had not attained his tropic strength; his level shafts still
flung colour over the land and sky, and shot the silken fabric of the
slope before us with fretted shadow. The great edifice out of which we
had come threw a dark and cool sierra out upon the sea; its lofty towers
and pinnacles and domes lengthening out in silhouette into gigantic
peaks. Above us rose the alabaster cone of Klimarol, the smoke-haloed
mountain, along the shoulder of which the great disk of the morning wove
his web of shimmering light. Our temple rose from the plateau of the
front range, the highest of all that broke the emerald wave of foliage
between the sky line and the sea.
He was silent before my delight in the scene. Then we moved out into the
forests of palms and fruited trees. I ventured on asking him about the
scene inside the temple. He told me that, when the religion had
crystallised into the socialism of gods and men, it was felt that the
mere difference of a material shell should not exclude the human-divine
from the privileges of the divine. Into these great edifices the artist
caste, so long as it had existed, had put all their genius and time and
all the wealth that they could extract from the people as a whole or
from individuals; in fact, half the wealth of the nation had disappeared
in them. And, as by universal agreement there was no service or ceremony
performed in them, it became obvious in time that they were a monstrous
waste, thus unutilised, when half the people or embryo gods slept during
the wet season in the open air and suffered from the inclemency of the
nights, whilst the other half had only roofless or dilapidated huts, or
caves or holes in the rocks to sleep in. It seemed a gratuitous insult
to the slumbering divinity within the people to exclude them from the
shelter of these great domes built for divinity. The birds of the air
with their excrementitious filth were allowed to nest there from year’s
end to year’s end; and the gods in human form, only because they were
still unfledged and wingless, were fenced off from the use of this
buried wealth. Nothing seemed more irrational to the Tirralarians of a
former age than such an elevation of the mere beasts and the disembodied
gods into a special caste that were to be sheltered and roofed from the
weather with the noblest architecture. They shrank in horror from such a
violation of their constitution, and thereafter they ranged men with
gods and winged beasts. Some of the temples have been set apart for the
women and children, who may, however, penetrate by day into any of the
others they please. This that we have left is specially occupied by
those who are the council of advisers of the people, though others may
in emergency set up their sleeping mats in it, and the strangers who are
not feared or suspected are housed here. It is called the
council-and-guest temple. But guests are excluded during important
deliberations.
He had mentioned a council of advisers, and I asked him if this were the
government that they had. He looked furtively round, and, seeing some
rag-poles lying near under the shade of some trees and others
approaching, though at some distance, he struck an oratorical attitude
and launched forth on the enormities of all governments. He was wound up
for hours, and I saw no chance of rescue; for lazzaroni citizens
littered every corner with their slouching, rag-patched fat. I could
gather from the loud voice and the rhetorical touches that he was
addressing every ear within reach, and giving unctuous vent to the
official creed. The gist of what he larded with eloquence was this:
government was an insult to full-grown humanity; where reason ruled,
every man was a law unto himself; all that was needed was a committee
selected from time to time for the distribution of the fruits of the
soil and the gifts of nature; there was no labour, and therefore no need
of organising labour; there were no lawyers, no police, no professions;
for every man attended to his own needs; whilst all worked as they
wished for all; nature dealt with the weak and sickly and gave them
brief life and swift euthanasia. It was indeed a perfect life, where all
were equal and serene in perfect content, and health, and strength.
I was almost glad when the red-haired bewitcher of women approached and
rescued me from the declamatory clockwork and his inexorable pendulum of
rhetoric. A look of disgust swept like a cloud over the broad
self-complacence of the orator’s face; whether it was at the untimely
interruption of his speech or at the personality of the intruder I could
not tell at the time; afterwards I saw that it was the latter.
The amorous stranger was profuse in apologetic flatteries, and did his
best to soothe the injured dignity of the people’s adviser. He resorted
to his confidential trick, and sidling up whispered in his ear what
seemed some important secret, at the same time throwing me from his
agile little eyes a smile that was intended to take me into still deeper
strata of his confidence. He succeeded in neither project, and was yet
well satisfied with his nimble diplomacy. There was always an air about
him as if he were dealing with toy humanity that might be broken by
rough usage; he had doubtless acquired it by long handling of the merely
amorous elements of life. He moved with such a familiar and confidential
superiority even amongst strangers, and such an interlarding of
egregious flattery and subtle assumption of special and intimate
friendship as implied lifelong engagement in intrigue and the lowest
estimate of the intelligence of the women he dealt with.
My gorge rose before he spoke a word to me, and the peddlingly
confidential manner had evidently the same effect on Garrulesi, for he
abruptly turned his back and walked off. Unabashed, the lath-like
diplomat laid his little head close to mine, under the assumption that
he had made another conquest. He poured into my ear faint praise of the
fast disappearing orator and subtly slid into a faint disparagement. As
I held my peace he passed rapidly into the elevation of himself and me
into a category by ourselves against all the world. He fixed his bead
eyes on me with a bewitching look as if he sought the inmost depths of
the spirit and would rest there. I lowered my glance with a certain
scorn and loathing that was scarcely full-formed. He clearly assumed the
change to mean humble submission to his advances; and he slyly entered
on a most abusive and captious analysis of Tirralarian civilisation,
wording it in velvet that, lest he should be mistaken in me, he could
cover his retreat or involve me in the consequences of his strictures.
He was an adept in white lies and ambiguous calumnies that seemed to do
honour to the victim.
As far as I could gather from his insinuations, the island was nothing
but an organisation of thieves, who, when they could not get any
foreigner to steal from, had to pass their time in enforced but
delightful idleness. There was nothing to steal amongst themselves. That
was the meaning of the rags they wore. He always landed in a dress that
was a harmony of worthless fragments. His first few visits had been a
painful experience; piece by piece his garments and possessions had
vanished no one knew whither till he was left naked on his sleeping mat,
and only the vanity of a Tirralarian buck, who wished to show him his
skill in pilfering, gave him shreds enough to make a loin-cloth. No one
of them cared to have anything above rags and a bare subsistence, for he
knew that if he had, it would disappear mysteriously. Their skill in
purloining seemed like a magician’s. It was the only talent that had
remained from their old civilisation; into this their inherited
cleverness had run; and any one of them would make a fortune either as a
juggler or as a thief in any other nation; but none of the other islands
of the archipelago would admit them, knowing well which of the two
professions would be the more lucrative and fascinating for a
Tirralarian. So their wonderful gift was hidden under a bushel.
Of course I knew the principle of the constitution—that there should be
no private property. Property, they held, is theft; and so to abolish
theft they abolished property, and law with it. Everything that anybody
got or made or produced was anybody’s, and they were magpies at
concealment. The first trick Garrulesi taught me was to stow away my
valuables; he saw Sneekape lead me off, and I might be quite sure that
for further safety he had bestowed it in another crevice that he alone
would know. Work had ceased generations ago, for no one could secure
what he produced unless he were as sharp in pilfering and concealing as
his neighbours; and he had not time to learn the secrets or the skill of
these arts when he was busy with other things. Every trade and craft
vanished into legerdemain and light-fingeredness. Their existence was
only hand-to-mouth; and winter or a hurricane or any blight on the
fruits of nature sent all who had not an extra store of fat on their
bodies into the grave. They had now grown too indolent to fish or make
raids on the wealth of their neighbours. An occasional atavistic
survival like Garrulesi, with a gift of talk and a restless energy, went
out secretly and tried a mission on other islands that the converts
might bring their goods with them and help to stave off the
ever-recurrent evil day. It was supposed to be the duty of the advisers
of the people like him to supply everyone with food and clothing and
roofage. But it was difficult to divide nothing. Not long after the
abolition of private property, all property vanished that could be
stolen or could retain its value only by labour. They could not tax,
they could not compel the labour that everyone was supposed voluntarily
to contribute to the community; and their position had become no
enviable one. In fact it was difficult to find advisers; a few revealed
in their green youth, before they knew the relationships of things, a
talent for glib talk, or for governing, or muddling, and were thrust
into the position; and they found it no easy task to relinquish it, hard
and slavish though they came to count it. When they grew older and wiser
they were eager to get out of it, but flattery or persecution kept them
at the helm till they dropped from old age or disease. They were the
real martyrs of Tirralaria, though many of them, like Garrulesi, enjoyed
their martyrdom for a time, as long, in fact, as the atavistic energy
burned brightly in their veins. A few were so goaded by the slavery of
the position that they feigned paralysis of the tongue in order to be
clear of it, and they remained dumb till death; and one or two had been
driven to the extraordinary activity of suicide.
What made the duty particularly difficult and offensive was that where
there was no law every man was his own policeman. Of course they
declared and proved that there was no crime amongst them. But it
depended on the meaning of crime; crime was a breach of the law; and
where there was no law there could be no breach of the law. Instead of
wiping out the old outrages against human nature, their socialism had
greatly increased them, and they called them peccadilloes. I would see
the ragged savages fight like wild beasts over any accidental find, or
even what one had failed to steal from another; and when they had come
to blows, one of the combatants had to die unless a crowd was near and
could separate them. Each knew that the other, if beaten, could not live
and leave the insult unavenged; indolence might postpone the day of
revenge for a time, but it was sure to come. For his own protection he
had to wipe out his opponent, and if he buried the body there would
never be any question. For there was no family life or family love. The
unions were only temporary. The fundamental principle of their society
was that they lived by love. But they more often died by it. The most
fertile source of fatal quarrels was the appropriation of members of the
opposite sex. The women had their combats, and counted their scalps as
well as the men, for the two sexes were supposed to be on an equality.
For many generations after they had socialised property, they kept up
households and family life and monogamy. But idleness produced
libertinism, and libertinism became concubinage, and then gave place to
polygamy and polyandry. A great rebellion of the younger and
unprivileged in matrimony, both male and female, against the older who
monopolised the best and fairest of the other sex swept away the last
traces of marriage. It had always been felt to be an inconsistency that
there should be allowed in their state the private possession of
affection or of children. Children were now common property after they
could run without their mothers. They had to look after themselves if
maternal care deserted them, and that generally occurred after the first
year. The female advisers were supposed to attend to them; but when they
had no common stock they had little to give; they had enough to do to
keep an eye on their own and to keep the life in.
As for the royal roads to education which Garrulesi would descant on by
the day, they amounted to imitative skill in picking up the tricks of a
conjurer and thief. The education that the royal roads led to was about
as much as would exist amongst a community of monkeys or magpies. They
had no arts, no learning, no literature; for these had, when they
existed amongst them, stirred envy and jealousy, and they were voted by
the majority to be disturbers of peace and of true socialistic
civilisation. How could anyone have what others could not share in
without breeding uneasiness and strife? So there was nothing then to
learn except the supreme art of the whole nation—skill in pilfering.
Their education in this proceeded every moment of their lives, unless
during a famine, when no strangers approached the island, and there was
food only for the strong who could seize it and keep it. Then force
alone was able to sustain life by clutching the coarse remains of the
summer’s produce. A famine was often prayed for by those who had the
best interests of the nation at heart, for it checked the overflow of
the people and strengthened the generations by leaving only vigorous
survivors to propagate the race. Every ten or a dozen years the numbers
became too great for what unaided nature within the limits of the island
could supply, in spite of the ravages of neglect amongst the children
and the effectual obliteration of so many by quarrels over
treasure-trove, thefts, and amours; and then, even without the aid of a
hurricane, or an epidemic or blight, the shortage of food made brief
work of the surplus population. Amongst the survivors the skeleton
frames soon swelled with fat; for after a famine year, nature, having
lain fallow for a season, lavished all her powers in superabundance of
fruits, like a mother after the punishment of her child, exhibiting her
treasures of love to it.
If there were anything worth ruling in the island, it would be the
easiest thing in the world with a few faithful troops and a few
cart-loads of luxuries to master it in a day or two, the whole people
were so lazy and such kleptomaniacs. All the conqueror would have to do
would be to pretend to conceal a cart-load of goods in one part of the
forest and another in another part. Within half an hour after the
concealment the whole population would be busy over them as flies over
pots of treacle; a few dozen men would trap them clogged with spoil, or
absorbed in hiding it or pilfering it when hidden. Their fingers were
always itching for goods to steal; it was the only channel for their
great talents. But what would be the use of them after being trapped
unless you could distribute them through some wealthy community like
Aleofane, and be sure that you could make them disgorge their plunder?
They had nothing to rule, nothing to steal, nothing to divide.
Yes, yes, they had once had lofty purposes and ideals. They were going
to recreate the world when they settled here. But there were perpetual
oscillations for many ages from despotism to revolution. The chiefs had
little thanks for their work. Their distribution of labour and its
products was a continual source of discontent that rose recurrently into
emeute. They had to apply the strong hand and suppress the journals and
journalists that encouraged the rebellion. Reign of terror followed
reign of terror, for the people were never satisfied; whatever
arrangements were made, some large section of them found them unjust,
whilst some other section cunningly learned to make more than their due
share out of them. Money had been abolished, but everything that was
substituted for it—labour ticket, token, bread, fruit—came to suffer the
abuses of money; professions that traded in the substitute sprang up,
and attempts to suppress them only made them secret and virulent. None
would take to the offensive trades that had to do with stenches and
corrupt matter. The burying of the dead, the shifting of refuse and
manure, the obliteration of filth, the uncleaner domestic services, were
left to themselves, and plagues became common till the advisers of the
people kidnapped men from outlying islands, put them in chains, and set
them to these foul employments.
And at this point he began to whisper mysteriously in my ear. “I shall
take you some night, when all in our temple are asleep, to see how they
respect liberty and equality. They have slaves who never leave the
crater of Klimarol except under the whip. You have seen its glow on the
sky of night. It comes from the burning of the dead and of the refuse of
the temples and huts of Tirralaria. During the night a detachment of
slaves descends the mountain under the lash of the whip; a section of
the council superintends the work by turns; they gather the débris of
the previous day’s Tirralarian civilisation, and by the morning they
have drawn it on sleds up the snow-cone; and during the next day and
night it is thrown into the boiling lake of lava. The stench is past
endurance for any who have not been brought up in it. Within the crater
are raised and made the produce and the articles that those below are
too idle or too refined in senses to have anything to do with. If it
were not for the great slave factory within Klimarol the country would
soon be without an inhabitant, for they have always been too proud to
keep themselves or their land clean, and now they are too indolent to do
it if it were needed; and plagues of the most virulent intensity would
sweep the island.
“Not long after they landed here and abolished differentiation of reward
for labour, except a slight one for special employments and professions
and for special skill, medicine was deserted. The night work and the
offensive or cruel tasks of surgery and the constant intercourse with
the weakly and sick and dying were not sufficiently rewarded to be
attractive. The chiefs attempted to coerce the clever young men and
women into the profession. But their cleverness always enabled them to
evade the order; they were perpetually feigning sickness or paralysis of
the arms and hands. At first they thought of teaching their Klimarol
slaves the secret of the art, but they shrank from putting the lives of
themselves and their fellow-citizens into such hands. So the cure and
care of the sick and dying have been left to chance, which means nobody.
“This page of their history has been torn out and a fiction substituted
for it. So, too, is the introduction of slavery hidden under the pall of
night, for it is an outrage on the foundation of their community, the
dignity of man’s nature. They count it treason for any stranger to
meddle with or inquire into these secrets of their prison-house.
“They are keenly sensitive to any mention of their gradual lapse from
the great ideals with which they began. All were to work voluntarily for
the whole community; there was abundance of everything to be produced
for the use of every citizen. It soon turned out that no one was to
work; for it is always more pleasant for average human nature to play or
idle than to work. The talking professions were flooded; orators and
logicians and lecturers and preachers and writers soon came to form more
than one half of the population. The other half began to feel themselves
slaves, and threw up their spades and mattocks and the tools of their
trades. Nothing was produced but what nature and the slaves of Klimarol
gave them. And as soon as any compulsion is applied the cry of tyranny
arises, and threatened rebellion puts an end to the reform. Where there
is no force, no stimulus, no motives, it is not difficult to see what
human nature will do. To work for the community is too shadowy to be
effective; it implies the almost perfect humanity to begin with, which
all human social systems set up as their aim and goal.
“At the beginning there were many who were willing to toil for the sake
of the ideal, especially the cultured and artistic. They could live on
imagination and its products. And it was they who erected these
marvellous temples that are now the abode of the bat and the owl and the
Tirralarian. The real difficulty came when the measure of remuneration
had to be fixed. How were the various trades and professions to have
their relative values estimated? That was the first rock on which the
new socialistic community split. At first a rough time-standard was
adopted, the number of hours of work per day, with some little
differentiation for the various trades and professions, according as
they were more or less offensive or more or less intellectual. But this
attempt at comparison of kinds of work was only arbitrary and could
never be based on any principle. It had to be readjusted every year. And
as there was a continual outcry against an aristocracy of mind and one
of stench, the intellectual and offensive employments being fixed at a
smaller number of hours per day, the whole system was at last abolished,
and all had to work the same number of hours. It soon became apparent
that this was as unjust a standard as the differentiation of kinds of
work. Some dawdled away their hours of labour, whilst others wore out
their energies and shortened their lives at their toil. For a time they
discussed a true and scientific standard of measurement. A few of the
thinkers saw that the only possible approach to it would be to gauge the
amount of tissue used up in the act of labour. Some scientists thought
that they might discover a method of doing this; but the shadow of the
old difficulty fell over them again. Tissues differed in delicacy and in
the value and refinement of the nutriment they each required. How could
they weigh brain tissue against muscular tissue? And it took geological
ages to make an infinitesimal advance in the organisation or amount of
the one, whilst the other would palpably change in a few days or weeks.
Here crept in another of the prime difficulties in measuring
remuneration or punishment—the contribution of ancestry either negative
or positive. The whole attempt was felt to be doctrinaire and
impossible. And it was only those who argued for it that gave any
prominence to the only true and fundamental standard of wages—payment
according to the real results, that is, the advance secured for the
race, or for humanity at large, by the act of labour.
“The final interpretation of their maxim, ‘To every man according to his
works,’ was ‘To every man according to his hours of work.’ A fixed
amount of food and clothing was to be doled out to each, and every
citizen was to work so many hours a day, whatever might be the nature of
the employment.
“When this was secured, the amount produced for the state and by the
community grew less and less, till it became utterly inadequate for
anything but the barest subsistence in rags. One by one the citizens
fell into the feeblest way of filling up the required tale of hours; and
at last nature had to produce unaided what was necessary for life. All
but the artists were idler during the supposed hours of work than during
the hours of leisure. And the cry against an aristocracy of art and
culture grew to be the daily occupation of the unoccupied national
tongue, and at last swelled into a revolution that destroyed art and
educated employments. The whole nation became an aristocracy of
lazzaroni.”
I had become deeply interested in the story in spite of myself. And,
without noticing the distance we had travelled through the groves and
orchards, I found before he stopped that we had rounded a great
promontory and come suddenly upon a large settlement; for crowds moved
or lay about the shores and under the fruit trees. I could see no
temples or houses. But before long we came upon a succession of holes in
the earth roofed with fallen trees and withered branches, or fragments
dragged from the ruins of a former temple that we found afterwards in
the forest. The race was again becoming troglodytic; and with my fine,
sparrow-headed guide, I could see no fate before it but a complete
though gradual return to aboriginal barbarism. The only things that
stemmed the downward current were two: the retention of slave labour in
Klimarol, and the periodical famines that cleared out the weaklings. But
the survivors were ever becoming feebler and idler, and it was growing
more and more difficult to fill up the gaps in the ranks of the slaves.
As we returned, the critic had by talking and explaining and slandering
so worked himself into full confidence that I was now deeply attached to
him. I knew that he had no more affection or loyalty to me or to any
other human being than a cat. But, as he purred and made himself
comfortable over the débris of his criticism of others, he gave out a
certain amount of magnetism that seemed to make the intercourse close
and fervid. It is the substitute in the amorous for friendship or love,
and can be turned on or off with almost mechanical precision. The only
safeguard against it amongst its victims is the vanity that accompanies
it and makes it a desultory wanderer in its desire for further
conquests.
He assumed that I was now a devoted admirer of him and his powers; and
perhaps he put down my silence to moroseness or scant acquaintance with
the language. At any rate he needed no key-word or question to start him
on a new track. He had in fact now come to the subject for which he had
been all along preparing the way; and it was amusing to see the ambushes
and underground works by which he attacked it. Long before his mines
reached the ramparts of the subject I saw his aim. He evidently knew
that I was the owner of the new marine monster that had appeared in the
waters of the archipelago, and he was anxious to secure my help for a
great seraglio raid that he had planned for the repopulation of his
island—which he let me indirectly know was called Figlefia, or the
island of love. It was their efforts in the cause of humanity that had
thinned their numbers, and a noble race would soon vanish unless some
means were devised for introducing new blood. It had a great mission in
the world: to leaven mankind with mutual affection and a lofty ideal of
human rapture. Only by such a stock, inoculated with the nobleness of
passion, could the world be turned from its evil ways. Preaching could
not do it; propagandism was barren of permanent effect; absorption by
conquest was a chimera. The only way to save the world was by stocking
it with new blood. This was taking advantage of the path of nature. She
worked by generation and crossing of breeds in order to get at the
hardier race that would withstand the new conditions of new times.
Figlefia was a great experimental nursery. Scions were introduced from
all the races and stocks of the world and grafted on the Figlefian race.
The finest women that could be found were brought to the island,
experiments were made, and the finest results were carefully preserved
and nurtured to plant out in other regions of the earth. They were
trained in the noblest doctrines of love and sent forth to propagate
them through the nations and to introduce amongst them a newer and
better breed that might make the race of man advance at an ever
accelerated rate. The Figlefians had struck on the only true method of
improving mankind and of covering the planet with the finest human stock
it could support; and perhaps in some future age, when they had
renovated all the nations of the earth, they would send out new breeds
to the other planets and systems. It was indeed the noblest scheme that
this orb had ever experienced.
Meantime their efforts for the good of the species had stinted their
numbers, and new grafts were needed for their experiments in
cross-breeding. The nursery of mankind needed replenishing. It was
useless introducing sires, for the Figlefians were the finest on the
globe. All that was needed was new dams that the great experimental
method for the conversion of the world might proceed. There was no
religion like that of the improvement of the human race; and no such
improvement could there be as by the Figlefian scheme of cross-breeding
and defertilising the failures. Did not my heart burn within me as I
listened to the mighty creed? Did not I feel that the world, if not the
universe, was getting reborn? Did I not desire to join in the great
experimental method of progress?
I felt that he was coming close to his chief object, for he blinked his
beady eyes and wagged his sage little head and looked unutterable things
at me; he tried his strongest hypnotism on me and would hedge me round
with him as the two select of the world; he shot his most magnetic
influence into his words; he was bent on finally and completely chaining
me to him by his fascinations. The upshot of it was that I would be
serving the whole human race if I should lend him my wind-compelling or
wind-defying ship to run half a dozen voyages through the islands in
order to recruit the great nursery of mankind. He had the women selected
and persuaded to leave with him if only he had the rapid means of
conveying them. He had his own ship lying off the coast of Tirralaria
awaiting his orders; but it was slow and wind-obeying, and it might be
years before he restocked Figlefia by her means.
I professed that I did not know where the _Daydream_ was; I had come in
Garrulesi’s falla, and whether she would follow or not I could not tell;
but if she did I might be able to accommodate him for a voyage or two. I
was not deeply impressed with his scheme, for the sufficient reason that
I should be sorry to propagate the great Figlefian species, if this were
a specimen of the stud. The world would soon be full of a race of feline
hypocrites if he and his like were to repopulate it. And, though I had
been cornered by the courtesies of the situation into promising my
yacht, I prayed that she might keep far out of his reach.
He managed to close the negotiations just as we got back to the temple
of the advisers of the people. The bulk of the food that had been run
down by the slaves into one corner of it was gone; but Garrulesi had
hidden a portion for me, and one of the inamoratas of the Figlefian
sparrow had done the same for him. So we fared not ill. Our share
consisted of fruits that were not unpalatable and of the flesh of some
wild animal that abounded on the slopes of Klimarol. I cooked and ate
and was satisfied.
I left my amorous instructor absorbed in his old occupation amongst the
women, and stepped out again into the sunshine. I found Garrulesi
waiting for me on the platform that overlooked the ocean. He gazed at me
sadly as if at a lost sinner. He thought me wholly given over to the
popinjay.
A few words put him into his most rhetorical humour. He understood my
estimate of the man by the very tone of my answers to his first remarks.
So he made no attack on the guest of his temple. With all his
loose-jointed character and morality, he would not take advantage of my
sympathy to slander one whom I plainly despised. He was too good-natured
to trouble himself much about the designs or the petty gallantries of
the creature. He merely scorned the unmanliness of this trifler with
women, and fought shy of even speaking of him, as he would of a
dunghill. In conversation with others of his countrymen who knew the
Aleofanian tongue I found out what good cause he and his whole nation
had to hate and persecute this Sneekape, as, they told me he was called.
He was nothing but a pander for his island. The Figlefians were
voluptuaries, and had been so for untold generations. They still
retained something of the boldness that enabled them to subdue the
aboriginal inhabitants of their island; and with this they enslaved them
and kidnapped others from other portions of the archipelago. The hard
fare, the brutal treatment, the stoical life of toil that these had to
bear kept up their numbers and gave, in what they produced, great luxury
to their masters. But the day was not far off when the slaves, hardened
and emboldened by their mode of existence, would throw off the yoke of
the sybarites and resume their long-lost freedom. A few of the
aristocratic Figlefians had, like Sneekape, retained some of the energy
and courage of their forefathers, the subjugators of the island, and
either managed the work of the slaves by means of the lash or sailed out
in search of new occupants of the harems. The rest were the vilest of
debauchees, spending most of their time in cheating their neighbours out
of the loyalty of their wives. And the whole race was ulcerous with
disease, puny, though tall in frame, and periodically on the verge of
madness. Its stamina was exhausted by concupiscence and debauchery. The
skull was of the smallest, and most of its capacity lay in the back of
it; it was like a cocoanut trying to force its way into a lemon. And the
hair that covered it, as a rule, was of a dirty yellow merging into red.
They were not unhandsome, these Figlefians, with all their corrupt blood
and the gleam of incipient madness in their eyes, for most of them had
come from some of the finest women who could be entrapped by their
emissaries throughout the archipelago. But they knew it so well that
they were intoxicated with vanity; they bore themselves like coquettes,
smirking and capering and continually expectant of adoration. They kept,
most of them, huge seraglios to which they were ever adding. Yet their
greatest rapture was to get into a neighbour’s, and especially a
friend’s enclosure and decoy his most faithful or most beautiful
concubine. Six days out of seven were occupied in maturing or revenging
some such intrigue. They had a code of honour based upon this feature of
their life, and they counted the honours of their pedigree by the number
of handsome women their ancestors and they had been able to cajole; and
all the women they fascinated were, in the annals of their families,
handsome. The other side of their roll of honour was the number of men
they had slain in these amorous adventures. To add a sharp savour to
this their chief employment and amusement, they upheld monogamy to be
the true and divine form of the relations of the sexes; and their
preachers almost daily prelected to them on the nobleness of purity of
life. Half the taste of their erotic enterprises would vanish if they
were allowed to follow them up without check or secrecy. Their whole
polite literature would fall to dust at a stroke if either polygamy or
libertinism were made legal, customary, and religious. A legislator who
passed such a law amongst them and accomplished such a reform would
obliterate all the traditional wit and humour, all the smart stories
they had to tell, all the gusto of their grotesque and often lewd art;
life would become so vapid that there would occur an epidemic of
suicide. To legalise these irregular unions that filled their seraglios
would be to annihilate the purpose of their civilisation.
In some islands Sneekape and his fellow-panders were publicly proclaimed
as enemies of the state, and, if at any time they were discovered there,
were liable to be hunted down like vermin. In Tirralaria their offence
was not felt so deeply. For the leisurely, pleasure-loving life
precipitated a larger proportion of female children than of males. The
freedom of intercourse between the sexes removed all special premiums on
the passion; there could be nothing illicit in love; there was no bond
and no law to dare or break. And thus they held there was nothing of
intoxication in amorous intercourse; there was no more stimulus to it
than there was to eating; it had become commonplace; and lasciviousness
was as rare as gluttony, if not as miserliness in a state that had no
money. As a rule, though there were no bonds, no state authorisations of
permanency in the unions, they were more constant than in a monogamous
community; and as there was in most years plenty of food to be got for
nothing and parents could at their option retain their children or hand
them over to the temple of female advisers, there was no check on the
growth of the population. They were not sorry then that some of the
women should elope with the Figlefian emissaries; in fact it relieved
the drain on the supply of food and left fewer to suffer from any famine
that might occur. There was indeed no compulsion on their women any more
than on their men to stay on the island. And those who did follow
Sneekape or any other of his libertines went with their eyes open; they
now knew the capricious fate of a Figlefian seraglio. It was only the
young fools amongst them that now allowed themselves to be decoyed. As a
rule, they were handsome women who were flabby from adulation, and most
of them had only the hectic beauty of weakness and ill-health; and these
soon died off amid the rigours of Figlefian prostitution. Few ever
returned from their escapade.
It was clear that they winked at Sneekape’s mission, and rendered it as
easy as possible, whilst he hoodwinked himself into the belief that it
was his personal attractions that removed its difficulty. The high value
that he placed on his face and figure, and especially on the hypnotism
of his eyes and tongue, laid him open to any trap that an astute schemer
would set for him; his vanity rendered him as foolish as a coot, whilst
it at the same time made him think that he was a heaven-born diplomat
and intriguer. For the morbid natures of the sickly and weak-willed he
had manifest attractions; he could practically mesmerise these
feebleminded beauties and make them follow him wherever he would, and he
prided himself on these conquests with bantam-like gestures and crow.
The strong-willed women were too wholesome in mind and too astute to be
influenced by his flatteries or his hypnotising glances. They
entertained a certain amused scorn of his vanity, his amorous advances,
and his adulation.
During the day Garrulesi and his friends showed me great attention and
descanted on the glories of their state. Whilst other communities had
elevated the means towards happiness into an end they were already at
the goal; they did not trouble themselves about the future, but enjoyed
the present; they did not fidget 364 days that they might rest on the
365th, with the chance of dying before it came; they loved the bird in
the hand better than ten thousand in the bush. The fools of the world,
the most of men, chased the elusive to-morrow or wailed the vanished
yesterday, till to-day had run its sands. Between two phantom worlds,
the one dead, the other to be born, they let the present run, a rosary
of tears or prayers. The moment was the only capital that men could be
sure of; what folly to hide it in a stocking for that which may never
be, to lose the reality in grasping at the shadow! The Tirralarians had
based their whole life and civilisation on the maxim that neither the
past nor the future is theirs to deal in. Time is but the flight of a
moment between two midnights; all else is a dream; out of a dream we
issue; into a dream we vanish; how vain to spend our only sleepless
present as a lethargic past or an uncreated future!
And, as I walked about with them, I felt that there was something
strikingly ephemeral in their existence. The only members of the
community that thought of anything but the immediate hour were the
advisers of the people; and even they were satisfied with but the
outlook of a season; they tried to secure nature a chance of repairing
the ravages a dislawed people might do her in gratifying their appetites
with her products; they saw that the trees and bushes were not so broken
down or pillaged of seed that they could not restore their vital powers;
they watched over the recuperative faculty of a climate that though
sub-tropical yet needed the husbanding of the trees and other growths.
It was indeed like talking with children from a cross between the
barbaric past and the coming millennium, as I encountered and conversed
with these ragged philosophers. In the opportunities of their
civilisation they were not one step in advance of the savage of ten
thousand years ago; in their mental and lingual outfit they were the
equals of the subtlest and most advanced of nations. All day their life
through, they sharpened their wits in argument, or discussion, or dream.
They had had nothing to do but talk for centuries; and their power of
rhetoric or argumentation was the accumulated legacy of a hundred
generations. They had no books or art, for they had deliberately
destroyed or abolished the professions that worked in them. But they had
almost overcome the results of such a defect by the keenness of their
memory and the potency of their imagination. Though they professed to
live in the moment, their minds swept through all time and space.
Without infinity of past and future, of stars above and beyond, the
present would have been an intolerable prison-house. The energy that was
no longer used in muscle and framework and the processes of digestion
concentrated in the brain. They counted it no blemish on the perfection
of idleness to dream for ever waking dreams or keep the tongue in
perpetual motion. They did not harass themselves with imaginary cares
and thus waste the tissue that went to the enjoyment of complete living.
If disease or famine came, why then they died and there was an end of
it. But what could it profit them to anticipate such evils? They could
not by thinking and acting and forerunning sorrow and harassment add a
moment to their years or postpone the arrival of the inevitable end.
They acknowledge that records might have aided them in enhancing the
happiness they had, but writing them was too much like the old chase of
the mirage, the search for happiness. Who could be expected to postpone
the enjoyment of a brilliant fancy or noble image for the purpose of
giving it written expression? If they had had from the nervous energy of
their old and futile civilisation some automatic means of having their
words or thoughts recorded, then would they now have books enough to let
a generation amuse and instruct those that followed. But, before many
generations had gone, books would become a burden to the race; the
necessity of having to read them and know them would sit like a
nightmare upon every man who wished to be up to his age. Libraries crush
the souls of men till they become all eyes and comment on the past;
their heads are twisted on their necks till they can see only behind.
The worst books contaminate the future like a foul stream. The best
books become gods that tyrannise over the ages to come and bind the
human spirit in irrefragable chains of minute devotion. They preserve
the past only to be a fetish and slave-driver of souls. Through them the
generations can lay dead fingers upon the hearts of men and frighten
courage out with their stony stare and grasp. The noblest of them when
deified by time grow an evil dream. Books, they found, had become the
high-priests of the human spirit, and ultimately claimed communion with
omniscience. Why should they, when they had abolished all privilege in
earth and heaven, as far as they were concerned, leave a privileged race
of human creations that would episcopate over every nascent thought or
imagination or element of faith? The past was too much with them even as
it was. Through heredity it fettered and lamed the footsteps of mankind.
What we have done, still more what our ancestors have done, lays
mortmain on what we do or have still to do. And books give the grip of a
vice to this dead hand of the past. The Tirralarians grew weary of
perpetuating outworn elements, and made a bonfire of their libraries.
Theirs was thoroughgoing socialism that would not permit inequality of
voice and influence even among the dead. Every man had his chance of
moulding the future through his children and friends. Heredity gave him
as strong a power of flight through the spaces of time and over the
barriers of death as socialism or nature could allow. In all nations and
races it needed far more strength to fight the dead past and throw off
its yoke than to climb up the steep of progress. Tradition aiding
heredity gave it almost omnipotence. Books, completing the yoke, gave
such organisation and order and permanence to the power that it had no
limit, and the young generations and young talents and thoughts were
hopeless in the struggle. Through them tradition became like the
snake-haired head of fable that turned all it stared at into stone;
orally it is liquid or at least malleable, if not plastic; but in record
it is the petrifaction of the past. Half of every life is a struggle
with this gorgon, this sphinx, even when it has only the diaphanous
texture of myth; but when it gathers to it the worship of past ages, it
has the mystic fascination of destiny in its eyes, and there is no
evading it in our threescore years and ten. We are born with the
tentacles of this octopus round us, and with our growth they grow; and
if they have in them the strength of past ages that literature gives,
there is no spirit, however herculean, but must succumb to them; for
every snaky arm that we unwind from our souls, a myriad retwine
themselves about us. It is an unequal combat, this of the human present
with its past; we arm the latter with weapons of such might, we are such
traitors to our own happiness and our own future. The history of
civilisation in any nation is but a record of the struggle of man to
disentangle the coils of his past from his soul; and what makes it so
tragic is that in his folly he is ever feeding the monster with his own
vitals, his devotion, worship, reverence. Oh, the cruel laceration of
his heart in times of revolution, when he rises to superhuman passion
and resolves that he will be rid of the snaky coils! But, as the great
mood begins to burn low, he finds that the hydra has only crept down on
him with renewed life. To enjoy the present we must not multiply the
terrors of the past by eternalising them, or brood over the dangers of
the future till they become nightmares.
The rest of my day in Tirralaria had the sharp savour of epigram in it;
so mean were the externals of life, so easy and opulent the thought and
phraseology. Low living and high thinking was the rule amongst those
whom I came to know. But I had the suspicion that these were but the
floating remains of a great intellectual past come down the stream of
heredity, for I saw gleam out of the eyes of most that I did not speak
to the spirit of a wolf or of a sloth. Envy, malice, hatred, the
passionate soul of Cain, had not vanished with the destruction of
property, class, profession, literature, art. Low living without any
thinking was the rule of the majority perforce; and it was these
embruted elements of the nation that usually survived a famine or
plague. I could see savagery loom at no distant date on the horizon of
this people, for it had no means of conserving its higher elements or
natures. High thinking cannot live in the sty of Epicurus; even in the
higher natures it must drown in the deluge of talk.
I slung my mat with these melancholy thoughts dominating my mind and
with the resolve to investigate the civilisation of the island more
minutely before I left it.
I could not have slept long when a movement of my hammock awoke me to
the hoarse chaos of a hundred nasal trumpets. I sat up in consternation,
and through the darkness I could discern the figure of my Figlefian
critic erect beside me. He waited a few seconds to let me master the
situation, and then whispered in my ear: “It is time to set out if we
wish to see Klimarol.” I remembered our tacit agreement, and rose after
donning my rags. On getting into the starlight my wits returned to me,
and I began to think how dangerous was the enterprise, especially with
such an untrustworthy guide. I pleaded that I had forgotten something,
and, picking up a bright shell that gleamed upon the earth, I returned
to my mat and wrote upon it, as well as the darkness would allow, a
brief message in English for my men, telling them to beware of Figlefia,
although they might find me there should I have left Tirralaria; they
should take a guide and follow me with caution. On its outer surface I
scratched a word or two in Aleofanian to Garrulesi.
[Illustration]
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