CHAPTER XXIVWITLINGEN 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.