THE ETHICS OF VIOLENCE
Dusk was already rising in the narrow trench, though the world was still
bright with the colour of a sun that set early over the mountains, when
she addressed me in the medium which is fifty times more swift than
speech, and a thousand times more accurate in its transmission of the
thoughts which form it.
“How could I answer you till there was peace in my own mind?” she asked
me. “I was confused by violence. It is a thing we do not practise,
either for defence or aggression. You appear to me to be partly as we
are, and in part as the lower order of created things, and with such a
body as is more base than either. For the first time in all my life I
could not tell what was right to do--to withhold, or to aid you. It
seems to me that you must have much sorrow.
“But now I have thought of what is right. It was to you that the charge
was given. You were to avoid violence if it were possible. It was left
to you to judge of that necessity. The responsibility is not mine. From
now you will have my help when you ask it. When I thought this, peace
came, by which I know that I have thought rightly.
“For yourself, it came to me, as I saw your mind when you fell, that you
have a brave spirit in a body of deplorable weakness. It is full also of
strange passions, which you can scarcely control yourself, and for that
reason the lowest creatures can defy you. But I saw the spirit that is
imprisoned within you, and for that I respect you.
“When we return we will ask the Leaders that all shall think together
that your body may be destroyed, and you may escape from its misery.”
I answered, “I am glad that there is peace between us, and some measure
of understanding, and for your promise of future help I thank you also.
But in the world from which I came my kind is supreme of all created
things. Here you despise me, yet you yourselves are not supreme in your
world. You fear the Dwellers, who, as I understand, eat and use violence
as I do. I understand that you supply them with fish, which seems
inconsistent with your objection to the slaughter of meaner creatures
around you.”
She replied, “I know that you are telling me the truth as you see it;
and some kind of supremacy you may have in your place, though it must
be, indeed, a strange one. I cannot suppose that there are other
creatures with bodies weaker than yours, more quickly tired, or more
awkward. Are all its animals wearers of those tattered things in which
you conceal yourself so quaintly?”
I replied, “Our bodies are doubtless better adapted to their familiar
conditions than for those in which I now find myself, as our clothes are
also. The lower animals--with some unimportant exceptions--have no outer
coverings. Should we dispense with our clothes we should consider that
we had descended to their level. We wear them from shame, from
self-respect, and to enable us to endure the climatic changes, and the
severities of the colder portions of the earth on which we dwell.”
“I can well understand,” she said, “that you are ashamed to show your
bodies to other animals, or even to each other, but can you really say
that you cover them from climatic changes? Your face and hands are bare,
which would be of all parts the most sensitive. If you can harden them
to such exposure, could you not harden the remainder of your bodies
also, and feel the joys of sun and wind and water, as all creatures
should?”
“The custom of wearing clothes among my own kind,” I answered, “is very
ancient, and is universally practised. Whether it be for warmth or
ornament, or from causes more difficult of definition, it would be
impossible for any one of us to break it. He would be persecuted or
destroyed by his fellows. You must understand that we have no individual
freedom. In my own land this loss of discretion has been reduced to an
absurdity, there being so many laws to be obeyed that it is impossible
for any one--even those who give them unceasing study--to know all that
there are. Also, we pay men to make more laws continually, so that, in
theory, we may be brought into yet closer bondage, but in practice that
is a thing which is barely possible, and as new laws are made, others
fall into disuse and forgetfulness, because it is beyond human capacity
to observe so many. We do not want more laws, but we have started a
machine in which we ourselves are involved, so that we have no power to
stop it. Many of us despise the laws that we have already--so far as we
understand them--and break them whenever we can do so to our own
advantage, and with sufficient secrecy. Others respect them so greatly
that they will do mean and base things without shame, if the law require
them, thinking it to be sufficient apology.”
“It is too strange,” she answered, “to be understood, unless it be told
more fully, and our time is too short for that, but I have not replied
to your question concerning the fish-feeding of the Dwellers. I see
clearly what you mean, but it is a thing which had been done from the
beginning. It was arranged by our Leaders, and we have not thought to
question it. It is true that the Dwellers, though they are superior to
your kind beyond comparing, are of more animal bodies than we. They must
be fed, and their food, in part, is the fish, which themselves live by
the destruction of others, and are destroyed by them continually. We
divide the shoals and drive those that become excessive into the great
tanks which extend beneath the mountains, where the Dwellers do with
them as they will. I neither doubt nor excuse it. The mackerel that we
drive, or the deep-sea salmon, will eat even of their own kind, and the
fruits of death are in their own entrails while we drive them. They obey
us, as is natural, without protest, and this thing which we do has never
troubled our peace.
“You say that you are supreme, and we are not. I think you can have
supremacy only amidst a very low creation. It is something which, until
now, we have neither sought nor heeded. In all the oceans we have held
it without challenge.
“But I think the difference is not there. It is that you are not sure of
yourself. Your own thoughts, or even your own body, may resist your
will. You are like the state of which you tell me, wherein laws are
confused and changing, and may be broken by those who make them.
“Of all this we know nothing, and therefore, were I in the midst of the
Dwellers, whose powers are terrible, I should walk in greater freedom
than you could do in your own land, whatever be your supremacy among
inferior things. But I am hindering your mind from the adventure which
is before us. It is yours to direct it, as our Leaders rightly saw, for
we are contending against creatures who are more of your own kind than
ours. Let me know what is your purpose, and I will give you all the aid
I may, either with mind or body.”
As she concluded thus, we reached the place where the trench we followed
stopped abruptly before a rising bank, and we knew that we were at the
end of the divided fields, and could no longer travel in the same
concealment. Steps led here to a trodden path, which we left immediately
for the lesser risk of a hillside which was covered with gigantic
boulders, between which we moved cautiously upward, while the day was
slowly dying, the western sky showing, for the first time in my
experience, something of the sunset-light of my familiar world, in a
cloud-born glory of yellow and purple light above the mountains.
My companion answered my thought: “It is the season of storms
approaching. In three days’ time there will be cloud, and great winds,
and hidden skies. It is nothing to us, but for those that live on the
earth’s surface it must be distasteful.”
I made no reply, for at that moment my glance fell on a Browning pistol
which lay amongst the loose stones I was treading. In the compelling
strangeness of the experiences through which I had passed I had given
little thought to those who had come here before me, but I remembered
now the arsenal of weapons with which Templeton had returned and
vanished.
I looked round, as though expecting him to appear before me. In the
growing gloom I searched round for some further sign, but could find
nothing. I opened my mind to my companion, but she could not help me,
though she searched with keener eyes than mine. I reflected that we were
a long distance from the spot on which I--and presumably he, but was
that certain?--had first arrived. If he had travelled so far, he might
have gone farther. The abandoned pistol was ominous, but perhaps he had
only thrown it away because his ammunition was ended. Possibly he had
left it there, intending to return. Possibly he dropped it by accident.
Anyway, it was useless to me, and I laid it down where I found it.
And as I rose, my companion’s mind, to which I was becoming increasingly
sensitive, interjected urgently: “Do not move, or fear. Look up to the
right hand.”
The ridge of the rocky hill we climbed stood out sharply against the
sunset light behind it, and above it rose the head and shoulders of a
giant form. He had stepped over to our side of the ridge, and stood
above us, one hand on the crest, as a man might lean his hand on his own
gate, and was gazing around, as one who is more occupied with his own
thoughts than with a familiar scene beneath him.
So he stayed for a moment, and then descended the hill with giant
strides, as the Titans may have moved when they found the earth too
small, and thought to own the heavens.
He might have crushed us under foot, as a plough-horse treads a
crouching mouse in the furrow, but we stood quiet and unmoving as he
went past without seeing us--or so I thought, but my companion differed.
“You cannot know the thoughts of the Dwellers,” she told me. “They are
not as we, or as you are. They are terrible in power, and, sometimes, in
forbearance also. But they are beyond our understanding.”
My own impression was different. I saw a Titan indeed, but one of my own
kind, and one, I thought, who was preoccupied with a great perplexity.
But whether he had seen us I could not tell.