CHAPTER XXVIIFENERALIA
WE got at last to the highest point of the island, and thence we saw on the other shore a large falla at anchor. Sneekape came as close to ecstasy as such a petty nature could; he recognised her as one from his own island; at this period of the year they were able to bargain for the best females from Swoonarie for use in his country; now was the time when they were most hypnotised by their narcotic atmosphere or their problems; and it was easy to take the most beautiful, healthy, and dreamy-natured. These sleepy denizens of Swoonarie were great breeders, and their women when young had a dreamy grace that made them especially attractive to a race of active, marauding disposition; away from their opiate plain and atmosphere and the seductions of their ailool, the blood in their veins grew almost active and touched their peachy cheeks with bloom; their dark eyes languished with slumberous light; their limbs moved as in a dream-dance; their voices grew as sweet and far-off as the scarce-caught echo of lapsing rivers, or the low sigh of wind through grass; their thoughts and passions would rise at times out of the dim abyss of dreams in wild, consuming tempests. This falla-load, if it had been well selected, would fetch an enormous price and fill the treasury of the state.
We posted as quickly as our sleep-viscous limbs and faculties would permit down towards the beach; and soon we were on board of a luxuriously fitted galleon, the largest I had ever seen in the archipelago. Off shore the glutinous lethargy that had clogged every pore of our being seemed to melt and move with the blood. Sneekape was soon closeted with the leaders of the enterprise; and after the interview I was admitted to their fulsome salutations and oppressively eager acquaintanceship. The women were in the middle of the ship; for I could hear a faint, confused hum that rose at times into the muffled sounds of feminine voices. Towards evening the swish of paddles was heard, and going on deck I saw through the thickening gossamer of twilight a canoe approach. It grated against the bulwarks, and the men leaped on board and drew up after them some mantled and swathed figures that must have been another instalment of women. There was a hurried consultation, and the anchors were lifted. The great paddles were set in motion; but before the sails bellied with the wind that blew outside the shelter of the island the whizz of an arrow struck on my ear; the missile sliced the water not many yards astern. Towards the shore dark objects moved in the dim light, but the wind had now given the keel and helm firm grip, and no paddles could overtake us. The expedition had just escaped its greatest danger,—an attack from the fierce Feneralians for poaching on their preserves. Most of these voyages to Swoonarie ended in bloodshed, and it often happened that neither falla nor crew ever returned.
I had full opportunity on the voyage of hearing about these neighbours of the dreamers; for it fell calm, when we had got out of sight of land, and the paddles propelled the ship at but a slow pace. Feneralia was an island to which had been deported for centuries all the habitual bankrupts of the archipelago. It will scarcely be believed in the communities of Christendom, and it was long before I could be brought to credit the story. But Sneekape asserted again and again that a species of financial madness often seizes some of the more luxurious of the peoples on the islands; they imagine that they have been specially commissioned by heaven to spend; they have a fixed idea that mankind is naturally portioned off into the earners and the spenders, and the latter are as rare as creative genius upon earth; they are angelic spirits that have abandoned their birthright to the infinite, and wandered down into a world condemned to labour and acquisition; they are beams of heavenly light let in upon the darkness of a race given over to wage-earning. In some communities their story of divine mission is accepted; they are made politicians and statesmen, and the public treasury is handed over to them to do with as they please; some new tax or loan is ever demanding their powers of expenditure; and how to turn the plus into a minus almost wears them to a shadow. In other communities they have been smiled at as harmless madmen till they have grown subtly skilful and ingenious in inventing new methods of getting command of the surplus earnings of their neighbours; to gratify the moral weakness of their fellow-citizens they become periodically bankrupt, and start again on their virtuous mission to turn the needless plus of some other plutocratic locality into a minus. When their divine mission has thus come to be considered harmless lunacy, they are given the alternative of joining the altruists on Tirralaria or being deported to Feneralia. This was an island originally of great fertility and natural powers, but nothing would now grow on it, and the inhabitants in order to live had to become the buccaneers of the archipelago. They called themselves philanthropists; for they loved their fellow-men so much that they were ever relieving them of unnecessary burdens and spending for them that which they had never learned to spend for themselves. Another favourite name that they adopted was financiers; they were ever sailing out on great loan expeditions; they would land in force on an island, advertise a huge loan with the attraction of a large percentage, pay the first interest out of the capital and vanish forever with the rest. If they went back there, they had some other scheme to cover their philanthropy: for example, a company to extract gold from sea-water or silver from starlight, destined to make all the shareholders rich. Sneekape held that they were nothing but freebooters.
On these financial raids they generally employed some of the mild-eyed dreamers of Swoonarie to mask their batteries. These had always some fine scheme on hand that needed money to make it coin gold, and by their simplicity they easily drew a community into belief in their dream; when the money was secured, a Feneralian force was ready to make off with it and repel any attempt to reclaim it; and when any people tried to retaliate on Swoonarie, or make reprisals, or injure it in any way, they swooped down on the invaders with their bloodthirsty manners and cheerful arrogance.
They were the spenders of the world; the rest of mankind were the earners. They would not hear of joining with the Tirralarians. Socialists! Not they. They did not believe in the equality of men; there were at least two levels, that of themselves and that of all other men; they had the appetites and the appreciation of enjoyment; the rest of the world was their purse; what did Heaven mean by such specialisation but that the one set was to serve the other? It was only the lack of numbers that prevented their carrying out the scheme of nature in its entirety. It was this that made them starve for months on their now barren island, whilst their harvest was preparing in the rest of the world. Ignorance blinded the wage-earners to the true object of their earning and made them fight to retain the result; if only they could open their eyes and look at things as they are in reality, they would see that it was meant for the appetite-bearers, the Feneralians. So these latter were often kept out of their rights, and had to fight to the death for them. They were often cooped up in their island by the stupid savages, who would not listen to the voice of nature and justice. Periodical raids were made upon them by way of retaliation; but it had been impossible to clear out this nest of pirates, as other men called it; this home of philanthropy, their own name for it. It was ever being recruited by the unearning spenders who had failed to make the people in their own islands believe in their divine mission. They were a cheerful, active race that never abandoned hope even in the midst of starvation, and never lost their patronising manners even when clad in rags. They were the natural lords of creation, dethroned by their slaves, the earners and fortune-makers. Some communities were wise enough to recognise their genius and make them their statesmen. The millennium would never arrive till all communities did the same.