CHAPTER XVISNEEKAPE
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 theDaydreamwas; 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.