WITLINGEN AND ADJACENT ISLANDS
THE adjacency of Vulpia was the only thing that saved the inhabitants of
Witlingen from stark madness. They organised raids upon its shores in
order to let off the accumulated wit of the weeks or months in which
they had had to repress it. They could all join patriotically in such an
expedition against the common enemies, the human foxes and tedium. For
weeks they enjoyed the elaborate preparation for the brand-new practical
jokelet; whilst its successful consummation saved their reason and gave
them laughter for months.
At other times Witlingen was a hell upon earth for them. Here were they
gathered together, the professional joculasters of the archipelago,
exiled from their favourite hunting-grounds and condemned to the company
of the men whom they detested most in the world. It was indeed the most
lugubrious of the islands. Everyone knew as thoroughly as his own all
the jests of the rest of his fellow-islanders. They had repeated them or
heard them repeated till they fled from them like a plague. They knew
the whole gamut through which human wit could play, and smiled dismally
and sceptically at the idea of a new joke; they had gone back through
the jest-books of past times, and seen how every age had merely revamped
jests that must have been prehistoric. They were quite convinced (and so
had been the fatherland of each before exiling him) that in no realm of
human industry was there so close an approach to the automatic. And a
Swoonarian, it was said, had once invented a human automaton that could
supply any one of all the witticisms that the human brain had been able
to hit upon, with a subsidiary movement for adapting it to the
circumstances or dialect of any island. The Witlingenites were so
enraged at his offer to equip the government of every country with as
many as they needed at small cost that they waylaid the ships that
carried them and sank them with their cargoes.
Theirs was one of the islands for the wayfarer to avoid; for on landing
he was liable to be mobbed, every Witlingenite rushing to secure him for
an audience, and if by any chance he was saved and became the personal
perquisite of any one inhabitant or section of the inhabitants, he had
not the life of a dog; he became the butt of their jests and, still
worse, he had to be the appreciator of them. The only way in which he
could survive or escape was to feign deafness or, still better,
inability to understand their witticisms and so to compel them to
explain them.
If any one of the Witlingenites managed to escape back to his
fatherland, he was soon recognised by his mosquito-like buzzing round
the market-place and his buttonholing of all and sundry, the
confidential and sage wag of his head, and the strut of his demeanour
after a series of successes; there was nothing in earth or out of it but
he could make himself superior to by uttering one of his little jokes
upon it; he could tread on the neck of omniscience and omnipotence
itself, if only he was allowed to jest about it to his fellow-men. It
was this peculiarity of the joculasters that made them the pariahs of
the archipelago. When one was found to have escaped from Witlingen, it
was the duty of every sane self-respecting man and woman to get him
quarantined, like a leper, and sent back. It was only there that they
got free and kept free of their terrible disease. Besides Vulpia the
Witlingenites had now another recreation-ground, in which they could
play off practical jokes much to their own satisfaction. It was the
small island of Fanfaronia. The peoples of the archipelago had begun to
be plagued with a new type of eccentric, the would-be world conqueror.
The success of two or three on military expeditions and the great glory
that they gathered to themselves thereby had sent an epidemic of
militant brag amongst the youth of the various islands. The manner was
most infectious; and, in order to stop the spread of the plague, the
saner majorities had to adopt the usual homœopathic cure. Every youth
who strutted with head on chest and arms folded, and assumed superiority
of genius to his fellows, and to their moral rules and conventions, was
exiled to Fanfaronia; and there proximity of likes kept the disease in
abeyance. But as soon as a stranger landed, the Fanfaronians struck the
stage attitudes of great conquerors and looked for adoration from him.
It was on this weakness that the Witlingenites played, and thus found
another escape-valve for their own mental malady.
They had rivals for the use of this new arena in the inhabitants of the
large island of Simiola, that lay close to their coasts. The particular
disease that had brought the Simiolans together was an irresistible
tendency to act the shadow or echo of those whom they saw or heard, and
especially of those whom others admired. The best and feeblest of them
had been useless to the communities in which they had lived; for, though
innocent of any malignant purpose, they were mere parrots that
depreciated the currency of good words or manners or acts or wisdom by
the wear of too frequent repetition. But most of them had been
mischievous or even dangerous in their habits. They were by nature
backbiters and malicious, with a passion for depreciating and trampling
in the mud whatsoever had stirred the praise or admiration of other
people or their own envy or jealousy. These had become foul or ape-like
in their habit of life and even in their forms. There was nothing they
would not condescend to in order to bring down to their level all that
seemed to be above them. Their island was seldom approached by voyagers,
so dangerous was it to land on it. Yet waggish expeditions frequently
made it their hunting-ground; for looked at from a distance their
conduct was often laughable, and their growing likeness to apes gave
zest to the comedy. But they became violent if the strangers ever
attempted to mimic them or laugh at them; and the favourite method of
teasing them was to bring an ape and set it beside them; they hated the
mere sight of the beast, for in it, it was thought, they discovered
their own certain destiny. Yet their chief deity in their central
shrine, it was found by a daring traveller who penetrated its mystery,
was the representation of an ape, gigantic and monstrous yet man-like.
They did their best to put that traveller to death; but he had taken all
precautions and escaped. They thought that they worshipped the noblest
being in the universe, and seemed quite unconscious that they had made
his image in the likeness of an ape. It was only a foreigner and alien
who could see the resemblance.
Close by the shores of Simiola, and as like it as isle could be to isle,
lay Polaria, a still more favoured hunting-ground for the waggish youth
of the archipelago. This was where they fleshed their first intellectual
weapons; for the Polarians fell into the traps set for them with
exceptional ease. They had been exiled and brought together here on
account of a strange but common malady, that of guiding their words and
conduct by the rule of contraries; finding themselves with a passion for
independence of action, and without the power of origination, they tried
to attain the appearance of it by contradicting all they heard and
making their actions the opposite of those they saw. They, so to speak,
enjoyed each other’s society more than the inhabitants of the adjacent
islands; for it made their hearts leap to hear a flat contradiction of
what they said; their blood was up, and they had a good run by the rule
of contraries. They hated each other most heartily, and would put
themselves to infinite trouble to find out what their neighbours or
friends did or loved in order to do the very opposite. It was their
daily feast to go abroad and especially to wander in the market-place;
for, if they met a man who seemed to know something about a subject,
they could contradict him to their heart’s content, and make him feel
how little he knew of it. They cultivated ignorance of the favourite
topics of the day so that they might have a free hand in saying the
opposite of anyone who had studied them. Knowledge would shut their
mouths and deprive them of the rapture of a good long wrangle.
It was amusing to see one of the wags lay his traps for them. He would
find out from neighbours or friends what were their pet opinions,
beliefs, or principles, and being fully equipped he would approach and
announce in a loud and assertive voice one or other of them; at once
would come the recantation; and through the whole range of their creed
he would pass and get them to deny all they believed. But it needed some
adroitness to escape ultimate detection, and he had to make arrangements
for avoiding the tempest of rage that was sure to follow the process of
making them eat their own words.
They had the greatest contempt for the inhabitants of Simiola, and hated
them even more heartily than they hated each other. The very sight of
them on their distant shore drove them into a violent passion. Yet a
Simiolan would as naturally contradict a Polarian as if he had been a
Polarian himself. The two were too much alike in their principles of
action to have any chance of common sympathy.
Farther away in the direction of Tirralaria, but nearer Wotnekst on the
side of Feneralia, lay another group of islets inhabited by those who
were crazy on the subject of thrift. The Grabawlians were the misers of
the archipelago; they had developed such a faculty for the concealment
of money and possessions that you would have thought them as stricken
with poverty as their greatest enemies and nearest neighbours, the
Iconoclasts. These last counted capital the unpardonable sin. They
refused to cultivate the soil lest they should have to harvest its
fruits and store them up. Thrift they considered the greatest of vices.
Trade and commerce they abhorred, and money, wherever they found it,
they threw into the sea; it was their devil. Tools and houses they
eschewed as the outcome of providence, and a form of capital. The only
accumulation that they looked on with tolerance was that of filth and
the refuse of Nature and man. Clothing they would have none of; it was
the result of industry and the sign and symbol of hated forethought;
they ignored and tolerated the kindly services of Nature in trying by
means of her winds and dust and various forms of decay to mould them a
substitute; for they refused to assist her in her ablutional attempts to
undo her work.
No one ever saw them eat; but this was no proof that they never ate. The
fruits disappeared off the trees; and there were many holes in the earth
to show where roots had been dug. If ever they felt the pangs of hunger
or thirst they vanished from the neighbourhood of their fellow-men; they
would rather die than acknowledge to either; for to satisfy it meant the
indulgence in industry; and industry was the sure sign of a nature
degenerating into thrift and capital. Their meals were, everybody knew,
nocturnal; they kept up the farce to each other of professing to be
above both meat and drink.
If they were ever seen to bustle about, you might be sure that they were
exterminating a nest of ants or chasing a bee off the island; these were
in their view the criminals of the animal kingdom, the economisers and
capitalists. One of their favourite maxims was this: “Go to the ant,
thou thriftling and idiot; consider her ways and be wise; see how she
toils and stores unceasingly from birth to death, enslaved to a despotic
instinct, brutally fettered to the future.”
The wonder was that they did not follow out the logic of their creed and
crusade against thrift in Nature’s own camp. There was she treasuring up
the carbon of the falling leaves to make the fruits of the coming
summer. There was she storing up sap during her idle months that she
might make her trees and plants blossom in spring. Nay, in their own
systems was she at work from infancy onwards carefully providing for
later periods of life. They did their best, it is true, to defeat her in
her providence and thrift; for they were walking skeletons and
hospitals. But after all their efforts they failed to eradicate her
thrift from their own systems. It was their unhappiness that every new
turn in their lives revealed to them some form of it in themselves, that
they had either to attempt to get rid of or pretend to each other that
they had not got. They refused to see that the only avoidance of thrift
was suicide, and that even that was a form of thrift. Nature, their foe,
had perhaps generously blinded them.
A singular group of islets was situated beyond these and collectively
called Paranomia. Their inhabitants had all been exiled for some craze
they had developed on the subject of law. They respected it either too
much or too little. Some were so devoted to it that they spent their
time in litigation and missed approach to the spirit of equity; others
reached the same goal by snapping their fingers at all law.
One of the group, called Palindicia, was colonised by justitiomaniacs,
who were not happy unless engaged in dealing out justice. They did not
object to acting the part of prosecutor or counsel; but their especial
passion was judicial; they would have risen in rebellion, had not their
administrators given them daily employment on the bench or in the
jury-box.
How to supply the people with cases and criminals was the difficulty
that beset the government, and drove them to their wits’ ends. Once they
had proposed to put in the dock a dummy or automatic criminal; but they
nearly lost their lives in the brawl that resulted. It was an
unpardonable insult to the humanity of the Palindicians to make them
play at toy trials. They would not suffer such an outrage and caricature
on the justice they so adored. They must have real flesh-and-blood
criminals to try, cases with a vein of tragedy running through them, to
whet their judicial skill upon. They would soon produce a good supply,
if the government did not look out; the administrators would last a good
while, if placed one after another in the dock.
In fact, they rather preferred an innocent man for their experiments in
justice; for, they often said, where lay the talent or ability in
sheeting a crime home to one who was guilty? There was something of true
genius in convicting an innocent man, and in making his friends feel
that there was something wrong about him. His defence was so earnest
that his prosecution and trial had to be exhibitions of the greatest
judicial talent in order to secure his condemnation. A real criminal was
clogged and handicapped by the consciousness of his crime, and after a
little struggle succumbed. The guiltless or his friends kept up the
judicial battle for years, and the whole nation was drawn into the case,
so that every citizen revelled in the exercise of his sense of justice.
One of the most successful methods for employing all the people in a
trial for a long period was, when a crime actually occurred, to get the
wronged in the dock and make the guilty try him. It relieved the
government for years and years of anxiety about the supply of subjects
for the judicial scalpel. The bench of criminals so enmeshed their
victim in the toils that there was no escape for him, and yet there was
the most exquisite exercise for the national passion. The labyrinth
became almost too intricate for their sense of justice. Yet they were
thankful for it; it was exactly what they wanted; for it meant appeal
from court to court, and trial after trial with all the evidence and the
details over again. In fact, they had manufactured so many tribunals,
one above another in even gradation, that the simplest case might last
them years, and every member of the community have his judicial skill
whetted every day. The result was that, however guiltless the accused
might seem when he first entered the dock, he was driven into false
witness, or perjury, or treason before he had gone far, and by the close
every Palindician was convinced that he only got his deserts, when
condemned; their sense of justice was fully satisfied, as well as their
passion for judgment; and those who had brought him into the meshes were
panegyrised as true patriots. They were always deeply grieved at the
condemnation of an accused by the last court of appeal; for the case was
then finally disposed of, and ceased to afford an arena for their
judicial talents. The only consolation in the misfortune was that the
defence and its failure might possibly supply a new crop of traitors,
whose cases might last for years.
Century after century they had had a splendid judicial preserve in the
remnant of an aboriginal race that had developed a genius for finance
and subtlety. Whatever laws the Palindicians might pass, these aliens
were so astute that in all their financial triumphs they could avoid
breaking them. It was one of the patriotic amusements of the citizens to
get up a periodical battue and hunt one or another of these unfortunates
into the legal nest; self-defence or retaliation generally led him at
last to commit some crime, treason or assault or slander, against a
citizen; and thus a first-class criminal was manufactured for their
unemployed law-courts, and, as he was baited by witnesses false or true
from court to court, he fell deeper and deeper into genuine criminality;
by developing new phases and working up new issues, they could husband
the case for a long period.
But too frequent battues had thinned the game in this legal preserve,
and the proclamation of a close season had not sufficed to restore the
old numbers, or even make them commensurate with the Palindician passion
for justice. They were driven at last to use up any strangers that
landed on their shores. Unfortunately most of these were criminals from
the other islands, and they had always made better material for the
bench than for the dock. In fact, it had become the custom for the
Palindicians to use them as judges; for who could dispense justice so
well as the guilty? Who more experienced than the criminal in finding
out crime? The culprits of the archipelago were so convinced of the
rightness of Palindician judgment that they fled at once to the island,
unless the cruel despotism of law retained them in their own. It was
with regret then that these devotees of justice were driven by failure
of the natural supply to change their policy and put them in the dock.
There they were anything but satisfactory, and were convicted too easily
and rapidly.
The Palindicians had grown sad as they reflected over the mysterious
workings of Providence; for here were they with all this passion and
genius for justice; and yet this new supply ran short. The criminals of
the archipelago had ceased to believe in Palindician justice, and
preferred in their blindness to take refuge in some other paradise; and
it looked as if the inhabitants of this unfortunate island would either
have to find subjects for their judicial talent in their own ranks or
abandon its refinement and power through want of practice. Such a
dilemma never had any people had to face.
And where would justice find a home, if they were driven to the latter
alternative? Would not the world mourn the greatest of virtues perished,
if once she were banished from her last refuge? No, rather would they
resort to the trivial contests of civil litigation than permit such a
catastrophe; rather would they manufacture their criminals out of the
guiltless in their own ranks than let Palindicia cease to be the jewel
of justice. Not one of them but would sacrifice his dearest friend
rather than allow the genius for judgment to vanish from the earth.
It was prattle like this that made me forget the malodorous state of the
narrator. Sneekape knew that he had to do something in order to withdraw
my energies from my olfactory nerves; and he succeeded. His
entertainment, when it ended, left me again a prey to the thought of the
commanding odours that rayed out from him. But rest and freedom were
near; for night fell and mesmerised our faculties.
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