CHAPTER XXIIJABBEROO
BETWEEN it and Awdyoo, but farther to the north than the current was likely to carry us, lay a group of islands that Sneekape declared would have been as good as a play to see. He entertained me with an account of them as we drew away from the odours of Awdyoo. I listened with reserve of judgment; for his story, as usual, sounded like fiction; and I had no means of testing it. It was interesting enough, and drew my mental energy from my nose to my ears. I knew afterwards that there was a good deal of truth at the basis of it, even though the tricky, airy manner made me doubt the whole of it. The nearest of the group to Awdyoo was called Jabberoo, and seemed to be the inferno of talkers. Hither were banished all who had become insufferable for their loquacity. For a time it was said to have been the silentest island in the archipelago, such an effect had the encagement of so many praters in one place upon the disposition of each. They had all been so enamoured of the sound of their own voices that they could not bear to hear anyone else speak; that was the disease for which they had been quarantined; and it looked as if this drastic step of exile was about to be an effectual cure of it. Once the patients from the different islands realised that Jabberoo was nothing but a huge garrulity hospital, they howled with rage and found a certain distraction in airing their grievance to one another. Each tested the listening power of every other inhabitant of the island, and, finding that it was no greater than his own, settled down into sullen taciturnity. Not even the variety of dialects in which they spoke gave them any consolation; the babel only intensified their horror and disgust at being cooped up with men and women as passionately fond of babble as they were. Every talk they started became almost at once a competitive duologue; the two voices rose into a shout that made hearing the words an impossibility. Not one of them could bear to see his neighbour begin to talk; he knew he could not get a word in except by main force of lung, and he dared not risk the torrent of babble. The first few days on land left them hoarse and exhausted; and thereafter they muzzled their passion and went about mute as fish. Mariners and boatmen avoided the shores of the island after a time; for those that landed at first were almost torn to pieces by the Jabberoon mob, each eager to secure a good listener; and even if any arrival had the good fortune to meet only one Jabbaroon and be monopolised by him in secret, he was glad to make his escape, lest he should turn into a pillar of salt under the infliction of fluency; the only successful means of flight was to bear the torrent till the darkness of night, slip out of his upper garments which his buttonholer held, and leave in his place a wooden substitute. The sullen silence had been no cure of the disease after all.
A benevolent Swoonarian took pity on the wretched islanders and invented an automatic listener. But, like all the inventions of his people, it came to nothing. In theory it seemed as if it would work. He made a figure in human form with a sensitive word-repeater inside it that at certain sounds could by internal mechanism set it swaying and gesticulating, as if in high nervous excitement. It could be wound up for a whole day, or in some of the more expensive specimens even for a whole week. As it heaved and swung about, one would have said that it was a real, human listener moved by the eloquence of a speaker; but the shipment failed. Superior though the automatic audience was to most human beings in responsiveness and emotional endurance, something was wanting; the look of suppressed despair on the face, the irritable attempts at interjection, and the unavailing efforts to escape. The inventor intended, if this venture had succeeded, to add those movements to his figures; but unfortunately the first purchasers lost their tempers over the monotonous acceptance of all they said and the repetition of the gestures and attitudes as they repeated their favourite phrases; they grew frantic with rage and smashed the whole consignment to pieces.
It looked, indeed, at one time as if the community of Jabberoons would go furiously mad for want of good listeners, and commit suicide in a body; but a missionary arrived from a neighbouring island, called Tubberythumpia, or the island of demagogues; and though his sufferings often rose to torture at first, he knew from experience in his own land how to endure them. In the end he conquered; he was able to get a word in now and again; and this occasional word won its way by slow degrees into the brains of the Jabberoons and bore fruit. They listened to the gospel of the newcomer once a week or so, and resolved to adopt the new evangel of alternation of eloquence. They organised themselves into councils, assemblies, senates, conferences, synods, mob meetings, boards, election meetings, parliaments, cabinets, conclaves, chambers, convocations, congresses, consistories, diets, juntas, comitias, directories, commissions, sanhedrims, and committees, so that every man and woman was a member of forty or fifty of these bodies and could attend the meetings of two or three dozen of them every day. They adopted it as a basis of their new constitution that only one was to speak at once in any sitting, and, whenever two began to speak together, it was thereby dissolved. It is quite true that there were dissolutions every hour of the day; but some speaker had had his say out, and those who were disappointed in getting an escape-valve for their tongue energy had plenty of other meetings to attend, where they might have a chance of evacuating their own particular section of the dictionary.
The plan was a miraculous success for a time. It saved the Jabberoons from universal frenzy and suicide. Every one of them was able to get off half a dozen eloquent speeches every day to an audience more or less unwilling, but that had by the constitution of the country to listen; and it was easier for them to keep the mouth shut when they knew that they too would have their chance before long. They worked just enough to keep the wolf from the door; and then all the rest of the time was given up to those delightful meetings and conferences, where each felt that he could make others hear the sweet sound of his voice. They never settled anything of any importance to anybody; but they felt that the existence of the universe depended on their oratory. To satisfy themselves they discussed every possible topic that had occurred or could ever occur to any human mind, and they passed resolutions upon it to send on to other meetings and conferences and assemblies. By the time these resolutions had got through the various bodies and come back to the originators, they had become so transformed as to be unrecognisable, and so bewildering in their labyrinth of clauses and amendments as to be beyond human intelligence; but they were recommitted and recreated and again sent on their career of transformation. They kept the jaws working and the tongues wagging. And every ambiguity introduced served the same national and benign purpose.
With all this development of eloquence and elaboration of counsel, it might have been expected that Jabberoo was the best governed country in the world. Every citizen worked the clack-mill night and day for the good government and guidance of every other citizen. Nothing could surpass the earnestness and enthusiasm of the whole community in pounding out the arguments for and against every possible course that any member or section of it might take in life. They were in danger of starving, so busy were they in deliberation over the questions, how every man should earn his food, how he should cook his food, how he should eat it, and how he should dispose of his surplus. They had not time to drink, so strenuous in their tongue exertions were they over what to drink and what not to drink. They left their children to run naked, and their own clothes to fall into rags, whilst they discussed the best kind of cloth for different weathers and climates, and the best form of garments for various ages, and the best way of wearing garments. No people in the world had ever held so many deliberations and consultations, or ever spent so much eloquence and wisdom over the proper way of bringing up a family; meantime every family was allowed to tumble up in the best way it could, till the momentous questions were settled. Never was there a nation that so strove to get at the highest ideal of government as the Jabberoons did in meeting and conference and assembly; and never was there a nation so devoid of all pure government or even co-operation for their own internal administration or their defence. There was nothing they would not do in their speeches on behalf of their country, so fiery were they in their patriotism; but when a pirate landed with a small boatload of men, there was not a Jabberoon to be seen within shooting distance, and once, when a mad dog was let loose on the beach, the silence and solitude of the island could be felt.
For himself, Sneekape asserted that, if the Jabberoo women were worth a thought, he would land and walk off with the whole of them; but they had such predominant and huge mouths and such pestilential tongues that no ordinary human nature could endure them. Their recent developments under the Tubbery-thumpian missionary had made their shores safe for strangers to visit; but for his part he would keep at a safe distance from such a nation of magpies. He could not endure the endless chatter of a prating, gossipy woman. He preferred her with a good stormy channel between him and her.
The latest development of their commonweal had again made landing dangerous. Their tongue-courage had grown too mild for the expression of all they felt. Argument and eloquence had given way to vituperation and insult, and their meetings now generally ended in free fights. Scratched noses and cracked crowns had become the natural accompaniment of political fervour.