FOOLGAR
THE adjacent island over which we had to pass made me almost regret our
departure from Wotnekst. It was a low, marshy, rich-soiled island that
did not bulk into the appearance of land till we were almost half-way
across the straits. A few knolls, like a row of buttons, ran across it
and gave it the appearance at first of a thread of minute islets strung
rosary fashion. They were each topped with either a house or a group of
houses that as we approached stood out amid groves of trees against the
sky. A nearer view made the island even picturesque; streams and brooks
flashed in and out across the low terraces that, meadowed and treed,
broke the slope downwards to the shore.
When we reached the surf, there was no one to be seen; but for the
cultivated aspects of the centre, we should have said that the island
was uninhabited. We shot through the broken water at the mouth of a
stream, and ran up its channel as far as the shallows would permit. We
moored our boat and made for a little village that nestled at the foot
of one of the hills; but we could not get anyone to speak to us. I
thought that they were all deaf, till Sneekape demonstrated the
contrary; one to whom we spoke went like the others past us, his nose
turned skywards; my companion at once imitated with his tongue the
twanging of a bowstring and the whizz and cloop of an arrow that enters
wood; the figure first cowered and then ran, and when at a safe distance
glanced furtively round.
We left the islander to recover from his fright and turned into what
seemed a shop in the long street. Here we experienced wholly different
treatment. We made extensive purchases of personal clothing and
exchanged our absurd Meddlarian guise for this. Our appearance was now
less like that of circus clowns. And something in our gait and manner,
something perhaps imperious, changed the sullen irresponsiveness of the
shopman into the most obsequious attention. He rubbed his hands and
bowed before us and anticipated our every wish. He grew servile and
cringing; and Sneekape fooled him to the top of his bent. He got the
whole of the goods of the shop turned out upon the tables; he objected
to everything, or showed the loftiest contempt for the services and
eagerness of the capering, bowing salesman; he ordered this or that in
the loudest and vulgarest of tones, and the man danced attendance on him
all the more abjectly. I stood by and wondered at the change from the
haughty churlishness to the supple servility. It came about after and
not before we had made our purchases and donned them. In spite of the
trouble that Sneekape had given to the clothier, he bought nothing more,
and yet was bowed out of the shop with the most fawning of smiles.
We entered another at the upper end of the street; and our reputation,
or rather Sneekape’s, had preceded us; for we experienced the same
sycophantic court. The attendants bowed us in and offered us seats with
bent eyes and gracious smiles. We wished something to eat and drink, and
my guide gave his orders with the same insolent parade and pompous voice
that he had assumed in the garment store. It was indeed amusing to see
how the shopmen bustled about and smirked and bowed to his every
command. I knew that there must be another section of the islanders who
indulged freely in the manner Sneekape had assumed—loud, overbearing
tones, inflated contempt, and supercilious swagger.
I had not long to wait for a specimen. A female islander sailed into the
eating-shop with an elevation of her nose and chin that would have
annihilated a less impudent man than my fellow-traveller. I sat in my
corner and watched. She assumed the most complete oblivion of our
existence, although we sat right in front of her. A minute had elapsed
before any one of the attendants had perceived her entrance. She
answered his eager and servile inquiries as to her wishes by freezing
silence; she still held her nose in the air far above mere terrene
interests. He offered her a seat, and after a time she bent her rigid
frame and majestically rested. He then retired into the background
crushed. When she had settled her dress and airs, a trumpet note of the
loudest, most contemptuous kind recalled him to her side, and he knelt
down before her and apparently begged her pardon and the knowledge of
her wishes; she ordered like a drill sergeant. When the food and drink
came, there was a comparative lull; nothing but the sound of her
instruments and jaws for five minutes.
Sneekape outswaggered her; he paraded with proud strut from side to side
of the shop and trumpeted his orders into general space till the whole
of the attendants buzzed round him like a swarm of bees, leaving the
high-toned engulfer of viands in solitary state. Even the clatter of her
plate and spoon seemed to subside. It was as when a rooster in full crow
in the middle of the barnyard on a sudden hears another crow more
lustily within a few yards of him; with wings depressed and feeble strut
he collapses and seeks a safe corner; whilst the partlets range around
the newcomer. He knew the human nature he had to deal with, that coarse,
swaggering fibre of would-be aristocracies that is on one side bully and
on the other craven. There was an almost subdued tone of appeal in the
lady’s voice when she next addressed the shopman; and she sidled out
worsted and crestfallen.
There was a buzz of interest around us as we inquired our way to the
main town, and traversed it. The story of Sneekape’s lordly airs and
voice had preceded us. Great court was paid us by those who were
evidently members of the trading class, whilst the labourers assumed a
peculiar rigidity of body, their usual method of showing respect to a
superior. The few of the lordly class we came across passed us by with a
prolonged stare that seemed as if it would investigate the internal
machinery of our bodies.
We had not got far into the streets of the town, when an elaborately
arrayed flunkey gleaming in purple and gold stopped us with a servile
genuflection and besought us in the name of Soma and Sama Deloorna, the
latter of whom had met us in the eating-shop, to do them the honour of
resting at their house. We had nothing else to do, and Sneekape in his
most lordly manner bade the lackey lead the way.
We entered a fortified courtyard, surrounded by low houses, evidently
the dwelling-places of the menials of the household. Across it, we
reached a showy portal whose doors opened with a suddenness that was
overawing. We were bowed in from lackey to lackey through a gloomy and
pompous hall, and were at last ushered into a great room that was almost
grotesque in its equipment. Everywhere were sculptured or painted forms
of men and women in their burial-dress, the ghastly, lustreless gaze of
the dead upon their faces. Around each were gathered what were evidently
the favourite relics of the original, here a hunting-whip, there the
skins or feathers of wild animals, here a skull mounted as a drinking
cup, there the mummified feature of some animal or human being. It was a
great museum of the dead, perhaps the ancestry of the household. Above
each figure was stuck what seemed a heraldic emblem, wreathed in the
folds of some white cloth, brocaded with gold; and in front of it what
might be a little altar, a shallow cup on it that steamed and smoked
with smouldering fragrance.
After a delay of an hour or more our hostess entered with great bustle
and retinue. She apologised, so I was afterwards told, for not having
shown in the shop the courtesies of Foolgar to so distinguished
strangers. It was Sneekape she meant; for she turned to him and bowed
and smirked and acted most graciously to him in her majesty. She was not
massive; yet the performance was like that of an elephant condescending
to a minuet. My companion was equal to the occasion, and trumpeted forth
as lordly apologies, bowing as graciously. He began with distant
references to his far-back ancestry, astutely introducing some of the
most distinguished names of Riallaro; he made large draughts on his
imagination, he afterwards acknowledged to me, when he was elevating
himself at the expense of the Foolgarians by showing me how he laughed
at them. For she too had entered on the imaginative task of
out-ancestoring him. The contest was evidently a very keen one; for the
two bridled up to new hauteur at intervals. I did not understand the
conversation; yet I could see the drift of it in the gestures and
interplay of emotion on the faces.
It ended in another victory for my guide, as I could see by the
obsequious manner in which she now treated him, in spite of the presence
of her menials who had come to announce the approach of her lord. This
great red-headed lout bent himself low before each of the funereal
figures on the one side of the room as he came up. I afterwards learned
that these were his ancestors. Then with a stiff majesty that ill suited
his swollen pompous figure he approached us and bowed. He was the
coarsest specimen of humanity I had ever seen. If he was proud of his
ancestry it was difficult to understand how there could be any
reciprocity in the feeling, should their spirits be conscious. He had a
huge, ill-cut chasm for a mouth, even larger than Sneekape’s, and the
thick lips would never fulfil their original purpose of concealing the
amorphous, unsightly teeth and the processes of salivation and
speech,—two processes that were ever in foamy, spluttering contest. He
would insist on stretching the slit to its full elasticity by wearing a
sickly, patronising smile; and the rusty-red hair sprawled over various
sections of his face, and failed to conceal what it might have concealed
with advantage. The sections it left exposed to view were measly with
freckles and new artistic patterns in terra-cotta.
Still he held himself with the personal vanity of an Adonis; and it
would not be hard to conceive him dying of love of his own reflection,
like Narcissus in the myth. Yet he was so substantial that the process
would have to be spread over years, if not centuries.
He knew Aleofanian, and he prelected to me with the condescension of a
god on the greatness of his ancestors. It was the dreariest infliction I
had ever borne; but he would allow no interruption, and with
considerable diplomacy he turned the flank of Sneekape’s endeavours to
try a fall with him. He had me all to himself; whilst his wife abased
herself before my companion, he made up for the abasement by a truly
pavonine strut and spread of his feathers.
Amongst the few items of fact that floated on the torrent of his
imagination were these: the name of the island was, translated, the Land
of Lofty Lineage, and there were none amongst them whose ancestry did
not trace back to some god; their history covered myriads of centuries;
and no race on the face of the earth or even in the heavens above could
compare with them in ancientness or nobility; ah, they were the most
unfortunate of men, so lonely in their majestic isolation, there being
none in the universe with whom they could deal on an equal footing.
The thought took him up into regions whither ordinary mortals evidently
could not follow. The gross features were as near transfiguration as
they could ever be. I was glad to be ignored or, at least, unaddressed,
during his reverie on the solemn grandeur of his solitude in the
universe, glad to feel I was too insignificant for his lofty notice. He
strutted with a low, cooing chuckle as if he were superintending the
hatching of a world.
Sneekape jerked him out of his trance as with a lasso. He used an
epithet which, he afterwards told me, implied in these islands the
obliteration of ancestry, what would be considered nihilism in Foolgar.
It was like a whip-stroke to the bovine frame. He writhed as if stung.
His persecutor followed up the interjection with a stream of eulogy of
his own ancestors, piling in heroes and gods, till the lineage
overshadowed all mortal heraldry. The keeper of the great ancestral
museum and saint-shop, in which we were, fell at the feet of his
braggart visitor, prostrate. He had been outboasted, and grovelled
before this surpassing artist in heraldic imagination and in the
vulgarities on which he so prided himself.
He gave us a retinue wherever we went throughout the islands, and fêted
us every day, till we grew sick of his unwholesome attentions. He looked
as if he would lick the ground over which Sneekape walked. A man with so
great a lineage and such lordly airs and voice must be made much of.
Sneekape had still a wicked twinkle in his eye. He gave the gorgeous
servants of our host a high-sounding embassy to return with, and then
led me away through by-lanes into an unpretentious, if not squalid,
section of the town. We stopped before what I would have called an
ancient temple; it looked outside as if worn by the weather of
centuries, and it was clothed with their filth too. It had upon its
pediment a huge inscription in letters of gold, and this, according to
Sneekape’s interpretation, meant: “Honour thy forefathers; they
circulate in thy veins and guide thy life; there is no godhead equal to
theirs.” A feeling of solemnity crept over me, as we stepped into the
antique portico of what was the oldest shrine of ancestry worship in the
archipelago. All round there were evidences of primitive customs and
relics of olden times; and, in spite of the filth and dust of ages,
worshippers in rich robes knelt or moved about with anxious looks upon
their faces. I supposed that they were waiting for admission to the
inner temple, though they had a skulking gait, seemed to try to avoid
recognition, and had their hoods drawn over their faces. Every few
minutes men with villainous low brows, whom I took from their official
robes to be attendant priests, came out of the great folding-doors and
had conference with one or other of the hooded figures in confidential
whispers.
My curiosity was deeply excited; for the service was evidently
proceeding; even in the street as I approached the building I could hear
the hubbub of adoration, and when the door opened the babel of voices
suppliant or hortative burst upon our ears in deafening tumult. Sneekape
approached an attendant and after much haggling, during which I saw
several times the half-concealed passage of coin from palm to palm, he
seemed to succeed in his requests. We were soon threading our way along
devious and dark passages; I stumbled frequently; but, after escaping
many risks of accident, we found ourselves again outside of a door that
smothered the devotional riot within; and in another moment we had
plunged into the tempestuous ocean of devotees.
It was some time before I collected my wits sufficiently to observe the
centre of the scene; it was a huge priest in official robes standing in
a raised pulpit with two subordinates seated beside him writing in books
and a bevy of acolytes buzzing hither and thither around the dais. He
was shouting almost continuously with stentorian lungs that must have
needed the full capacity of his huge chest to contain. He had a hammer
in his hand and with this he pointed in various directions throughout
the congregation as he exhorted or chided, besought or encouraged; and
ever and anon a sounding blow of the mallet on his desk would still the
babel for a moment, while the buzzing acolytes rushed hither and thither
bearing new documents or inscriptions that were evidently portions of
the sacred writings.
I looked round at the sea of faces upturned in worship, and I thought I
had never seen such a villainous collection outside of a criminal court.
It was little wonder that the priest had to exert himself so
frantically, if he were to make any religious impression on such a
crowd. Their countenances belied them if they did not stand sorely in
need of his exhortations. The officiant was now ready with another
portion of scripture, an inordinately long scroll; and around in niches
behind him had been placed by the acolytes a row of mild-faced images
that I took to be a collection of minor deities, evidently of one
family; for there was a strong likeness in the countenances of all of
them. Again the tumult of devotion rose; I felt scared by its
importunacy and reflected that no god would dare to disregard such a
deafening invocation; but the priest’s voice rose above it like thunder
in a tempest. He appealed to them in bovine tones and with postulant
gestures; he exhibited his script and read portions aloud for their
benefit; he turned back to the images and seemed to laud them to heaven;
and ever and again he jerked out some appeal to the assembly, gesturing
wildly with his mallet; and responses to his litany came now from one
worshipper and now from another. As the scene proceeded, the service
seemed to narrow itself to three officiants, the priest in his pulpit
and two somewhat lordly-looking worshippers, whose faces I could not at
first see. The interchange of appeal and reply was like a fusilade, so
rapid and sharp was it; and ever and anon the acolytes held up an image,
or raised the long strip of manuscript in the air. The suppressed
excitement in the assembly grew intense. Not a sound was heard but the
voices of the three officiants, that of the priest in the pulpit
predominating.
A crisis was evidently approaching, the threefold litany crackling out
upon the blank silence like thunder on the depth of midnight. I was
conjecturing what would be the climax, when the mallet rapped with a
sharp click on the desk, and the acolytes bore off the images and the
manuscript. One of the response-givers turned around and his face was
dark and troubled as a tumultuous sea under the shadow of a cloud. With
excited gestures and rising intonations the worshippers bustled out; a
fierce quarrel was manifestly on foot, there being, I could see, two
contending sects present; face turned to face with darkening scowl and
arrested threat. Religious fervour had changed into virulent bigotry;
and the narrow space within the temple seemed to accentuate the
suppressed volcanic fire, to judge by the fierce, dark faces all
hieroglyphed by the passions of a murderous past; there was bloodshed in
store for the two divisions of the church. We did not follow them; but
before long we could hear in the neighbourhood the furious cries of a
sanguinary contest with a fringe of feminine wailing and screeching.
Sneekape drew me aside, and, when the crowd had thinned off, we went
into what seemed a huge warehouse in the rear of the temple. Here were
great rows of images and countless rolls of manuscript; and the
attendants were taking from the hands of hooded figures other images and
rolls. My guide took me into a still corner, and told me that this was a
pedigree pawnshop we had entered, and that the scene we had just
witnessed was an auction of ancestors. The great temple of ancestral
worship had been poverty-stricken till it had recognised the signs of
the times and ceased to prohibit with its ban the secret but
long-established traffic in lineage throughout the island and
archipelago. The ever-progressive extravagance and impoverishment of old
families had led to its necessary consequence, an ancestry exchange,
where for a consideration a new favourite of fortune could acquire an
ancestry with its good name and titles and its resultant social position
and prestige. It is true the commodity was encumbered with a few stones
of human flesh in the shape of a daughter of the family whom the newly
enriched or his son had to marry, or in the shape of a son to whom he
had to give his daughter in marriage; but there was discount for that,
and he could soon get clear of the encumbrance by divorcing it to some
other island. There was generally a higgling of the market according as
there was more supply or more demand all over the archipelago. The
mothers and fathers of the old families prided themselves on their
bargaining skill; they drew from the aspirant the more coin, the more
they disparaged himself and his forefather; if they could make him out a
blackguard, so much the better bargain could they drive. Most romantic
stories were told of great fortunes being made out of such a sale
through the employment of detectives, who found out the scoundrelism of
the buyer’s past.
The church had for centuries considered the traffic as a desecration of
the ancestral worship that it cherished, and frowned upon it; and the
consequence was that it was itself sunk in poverty and neglect. But a
generation before, a great ecclesiastical genius arose, who saw the
possibilities of the practice, and blessed it instead of cursing it. He
organised it into a regular business over which the priests presided. He
established the famous ancestral pawnshop behind the ancient temple and
extended its operations through the whole archipelago. At first the
priests kept the commerce semi-private so as to save the feelings of the
old families; but most of these latter had no compunctions about the
haggling for a price and pressed the church officials more and more
eagerly and openly to make a good bargain for them. After a time the
business became so large and open that an auction was established in the
temple; and bidders gathered from all parts of the archipelago. The
growth of commerce and the rise of new families to wealth at first
overtook the supply and then out distanced it. An old family name and
pedigree was one of the dearest of commodities and re-enriched
impoverished households. Still some of them shrank from the publicity of
the auction and pawnshop of ancestry and came thither with their
proposals hooded and unrecognisable. The church and then the individual
priests grew rapidly in wealth; and their increasing taste for luxury
demanded larger and still larger income. They established agencies in
the other islands, and at last, to meet the demand, set up a great
pedigree factory.
Our next visit was to this. One department of it printed off the long
strips of parchment with fictitious records of lineage, the earlier part
of it in ancient letters and language and stained with the marks of age.
Another department manufactured images, and artistically chipped,
cracked, and sullied them into true relics of antiquity. It was indeed
difficult to distinguish the old models from the new imitations; and I
was not surprised to hear that the buyers of the brand-new pedigrees
held their heads as high as those who had to pay ten times as much for a
well-known ancestry and titles. The priests alone knew the difference,
and it was their interest to keep it secret, and preserve the skill in
distinguishing true from false as a trade mystery. Sneekape told me
afterwards that it was the rarest of all privileges to get admission to
the factory of lineage. He had great personal influence with one of the
chief priests and considerable pecuniary influence over the
subordinates. We were both sworn to secrecy over the sacred writings and
by ceremonies that were meant to overawe us. I cannot say that I felt
much inclined to reveal anything I saw, so ordinary did it seem to me.
What impressed me most deeply was the auction in the temple. I had never
encountered any instance so bold and unconcealing of a practice, common
to all peoples, yet usually hidden under a thousand different fine names
and subterfuges. The scene engraved itself upon my memory, the priestly
auctioneer crying up his goods, and the wild, dark-faced assembly of
bidders, loudly competitive. I was soon led to understand that it had
been an auction to be remembered even by a people accustomed to such
scenes. The ancestry had been that of one of the most famous families in
the archipelago, a family of statesmen, reformers, divines, and
philanthropists, once of enormous wealth, now reduced to what was
comparative poverty in that age of luxury. There was attached to the
title and lineage the condition that the purchaser should marry the only
female representative, a beautiful and gentle-hearted young girl; and
the condition had this time given enhanced value to the pedigree. It
drew bidders from all portions of the archipelago; but amongst them it
soon came to be generally whispered about that no one had any chance
against two notorious corsairs of Broolyi, who had lately retired from
the overt pursuit of their profession with huge fortunes and bought
great estates and castles in the island. The hooded figures in the
portico had been the sellers hovering about, awaiting the result. At
first the other bidders kept up the running; but the price soon
overleapt the resources of all but the two pirates, who had each a force
of his old sailors and followers ready to carry out what his purse might
not be able to do. I had seen the conclusion of the matter as far as the
temple was concerned; but the true conclusion had to be reached by the
aid of knives in the open air. I protested against the fate of the young
lady, who would have to pass her life with her piratical purchaser; but
Sneekape and his friends on the islands only laughed at such a mistaken
view of a provision of nature. Krokya (the successful corsair) had paid
his full price; never had any lot had such a good market; the old family
was set on its legs again; the girl was supremely happy; for she would
have everything that money could purchase; and her husband, though he
still had interests in several piratical craft that were doing a
handsome business in the archipelago, had thoroughly reformed, and,
having settled down to the life of a respectable citizen, was worthy of
the best pedigree he could purchase. He would now move about with his
head high in the most aristocratic circles of the best islands, and
where could any girl find a better match? Her people, it seems, held
high festival over the result of the auction; for, although they had
bartered away the good name of the family, they had restored its
fortunes. What nobler thing could religion have done for ancestors than
to provide them with an organised and respectable means of raising the
family out of the slough of poverty and misfortune, and attaching
themselves to a new and successful family? The church had shown itself a
true philanthropist in thus acting as intermediary between ancestried
poverty and ignoble wealth.
After this explanation and defence of the system, I was anxious to
return to the temple and watch another auction; and as a large number of
small pedigrees were to be sold, the scene was sure to be interesting
and varied. To me it was from one point ludicrous, from another sad. The
officiant priest, evidently using phrases that he had used thousands of
times before, stirred the competitive eagerness of the audience. “Here
we have one of the finest commodities I have ever submitted in this
temple; look at the length of the pedigree; roll it out before the
gentlemen; show them the great names that occur in it; call out the
lateral connections of the family with the greatest families of the
archipelago. Now, gentlemen, let us have a bid; the opportunity will
never recur; I have clients behind here in the pignorative warehouse who
have been pressing me to submit it to private sale; why, I could have
sold it twenty times over since the family put it into my hands; but I
determined that the public, my old and faithful clients, should have the
first offer. A hundred pounds! Come, come, you are joking. Let us begin
with two hundred. You think this is a pedigree from the isle of
socialists. I tell you it is from the greatest country in the
archipelago, from Aleofane. Now look at the images of the ancestors.
Here is one who alone is worth the money. He has got the lineaments of a
god, and his life is written in the annals of the country. Just hold up
this image to the gentlemen. This, you can see, is the face of a
philosopher, thought in his every wrinkle, wisdom in the stoop of his
shoulders, lofty meditation in the gaze of his brooding eyes. Pass on to
the next in the row; who cannot see in his bold front, stern mouth and
chin, and high cheek-bones the lines of a successful warrior? Victory is
written over his face and mien; and, if you look into the features, you
will see in the scars upon his face the map of his innumerable
battlefields. Now, gentlemen, you can never be ashamed of a lineage like
this. What! Only ten pounds more! No, no; I must have twenty-pound bids.
And the lady who owns this lineage is a goddess in beauty and gait. Why,
if I were not so old, I would unfrock me of my priesthood, and bid for
the pedigree myself, so fair and so divine is she. No, no, it would be
sacrilege to let it go for such a paltry sum.” I could make out some of
this now from his gestures, aided by my knowledge of the temple and its
trade; and Sneekape eked out my conjectures by his running translation.
The pedigree was knocked down for coin equivalent to our thousand pounds
to a chimney-sweep who had made a fortune by extracting some valuable
chemical from the soot. Now that he had a pedigree and an estate, he
became a transmuter of fire-products, and he afterwards moved in the
best social circles of the archipelago. My guide slily drew me up
towards the images and manuscript as they passed out, and showed me that
they had been amongst the most recent production of the factory. Where
the priests got the divine lady attached to them, he said he could not
explain. Perhaps this was their method of disposing of undowried,
unancestored girls. It revealed at least the source of the vast and
increasing wealth of the temple.
Up till this experience of mine, I had thought that they had no public
religion; each household, it had seemed to me at first, had its own, and
worshipped its ancestors with the usual outward devotion and inward
freedom. They cared little for the character of those they worshipped,
whether good or bad, and called only that divine in them which fitted
their own desires and passions. There were amongst them all the evils of
inbreeding, intensified by its being in the sphere of religion; they
were tortured with morbidity and other diseases of the spirit, such as a
sort of moral epilepsy, and spiritual anæmia. The worst malady amongst
them was that which made them seem insane to the other inhabitants of
the archipelago,—intellectual wry-neck and tip-nose; they could never
look at any thing or person without getting their perspective twisted by
a vision false or true of some far-back past; they were ever craning
their necks back to an ancestry generally fictitious, or lifting their
noses high above someone who did not trouble himself about whether he
had any or not.
My guide had neither the conscience nor the honour to feel any scruples
about taking advantage of their weakness. He trumpeted and strutted in a
more and more lordly and vulgar way, till the Foolgarians, armoured
though they were in genealogies that reached farther back than the
creation, licked the dust off his feet. If they had not been such mean
bullies and parasites themselves, I should have been sorry for them, so
heartlessly did he trample upon their most sacred treasures and
feelings. His ancestral references were as fictitious as most of theirs;
but they were magnificent lies, brazened out irrespective of human
weaknesses. Poor, lank body though he had, he managed to give it an
appearance of volume by bulging his chest and raising his nose in the
air and stamping his feet on the ground; and by some means I never
discovered he changed his low nasal voice into a bovine trumpet-note,
with which he outbullied the loudest lineage braggartry of the
Foolgarians. The meaner side of human nature was gratified to see these
pompous pretenders and bullies biting the dust before one of their own
kin and revealing so plainly how natural to them was the other side of
their nature, cowardice and fawning. He was their supreme god for a day
or two.
Yet he knew that the charm would not work long, and that, when they
discovered how like he was to themselves as an artist in genealogical
fiction, they would turn and rend him. He chose the very top of the wave
of devotion, and we made a triumphal exit, our canoe full of all manner
of dainties and luxurious foods. To the last they kept their cringing
attitude. Long after we had shot over the bar and put to sea, we could
discern their bodies bending to the ground as in an act of worship.
Sneekape laughed loud, when we had got out of earshot and eyeshot. I did
not join in the outburst; the spirit of coarse mockery and triumph by
means of deceit was even worse than the mixture of bullying and
grovelling we had just seen. He was evidently much surprised and tried
to explain the jest to me. He said that these islanders were the butt of
the archipelago; the meanest laughed at them for the lordly airs they
assumed, and when his people were in lack of a good laugh or jest, they
organised an expedition to Foolgar, taking with them some comedian, who
would by his outlording their lordliness bring all to the dust-kissing
stage of fawning. It was the happy hunting-ground of practical jokers,
and they seldom failed to raise some good game, so mad were the
islanders with the itch for ancestry. The usual translation of its name
throughout the archipelago was the Isle of Snobs.
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