Read Ebook: Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles by Sweven Godfrey

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 650 lines and 132483 words, and 13 pages

A sight of marvellous beauty held me rigid for a moment. Marble palaces, margined with gleaming gardens, flecked the length of the river as far as my eye could reach, and rose, nested in trees, terrace above terrace, up the slopes on either side. Boats with brilliant coloured awnings plied from bank to bank, like swarms of tropical butterflies, or lay moored to flights of snow-pure steps that flanked the water at intervals. Great temples and public buildings broke the outline with their sky-pricking spires. For an instant I doubted my eyes and thought illusion was playing them false, such a dream of beauty lay before them.

I dared not approach such noble purity so begrimed as I then was. I sought the outskirts of the city, for I knew that every town, however beautiful and rich, draggles off in some direction into meanness and filth and penury. I marvelled at the extent of the squalor here. When I reached the highest point of view I saw every gully and level teeming with the evidence of indigent myriads. A reeking human quagmire stretched for miles over the flood-soaked borders of this noble city, like a rich robe of lace that has dragged its train through liquid filth. Groves of trees failed to conceal the squalor and destitution of these low-lying suburbs.

Yet there I felt must be my resting-place till I had found a footing in the land. I had enough precious stones in my possession to serve me as money for months, if not for years. Most of them I buried in a secret place, which I marked well; and I traced a map of its position from the chief features of the city, and from north and west by aid of a small compass I had. With two or three rubies I made for the centre of the city's pauperism, and by means of gestures managed to change them in a mean pawnshop for the coin of the country.

THE LANGUAGE

IN order to avoid too much observation, I got housed in an obscure hostelry that often accommodated foreigners. But none of the occupants knew my language, nor did I any of theirs. Gesture and mimicry supplied the defect for a time, and a few weeks sufficed to give me command of the vocabulary and syntax needed for the common intercourse of life, so easy seemed the tongue and so clear the articulation.

But the difficulty came at a later stage. I found I could not advance far without a teacher, and a man of the purer blood was procured to act as my tutor. I put on the dress of the marble city, and went daily to him for my lesson. What a revelation I had of the subtlety of language! It was like learning to skate; everything seemed to contribute to make me stumble or fall; and the effort to recover was more dangerous than collapse. Every word and phrase and idiom had countless variations of meaning dependent on the intonation of the voice and the peculiar gesture or facial expression adopted. There was a grammar and vocabulary of tone as well as of actual speech. And, besides this, gesture and grimace contributed their own shadings to every expression. The twitching of an eyebrow would turn "God bless you" into "God damn you." A peculiar curl of the upper lip would change an inquiry into the state of a man's health into a doubt as to the morality of his ancestors. A shrug of the left shoulder would make out of a fervid "I love you" as fervid an "I hate you"; whilst a shrug of the right shoulder would change it into "I despise you." The eye had to be on the alert as well as the ear in finding out what a man meant; and every limb had to be watched as well as every feature of the face.

The dropping of the lid of the eye, left or right, could impart to a sentence, or even to a whole conversation, meanings so radically different that I became nervously conscious of every involuntary twitching as I talked; it might imply sinister intention, or confidence partial or complete; it might convey compliment or insult. It depended on the amount of the eye left uncovered, on the rapidity or slowness of the motion, and on the eye in which it took place. But, most bewildering of all, every depression of the optic shade varied in meaning according to the sex of the person addressed and the person addressing, and the presence of both sexes, or only one. The raising of the eyebrow had, similarly, a whole grammar and dictionary to itself.

But perhaps the most difficult and dangerous of all the sections of their language was the use of the nose in conversation. For both piety and lewdness had seized upon this obtrusive organ as their own. If a phrase or word was snuffled up through the nasal channel, it might express either gathering devotion or rising passion; only a member of the inner social circle could tell to a nicety which it meant, for the former was not often accompanied with the elevation of the eye to heaven, nor the latter with obscene gesture.

Recently doubt had arisen as to their sacredness, their supremacy, and their monopoly of wisdom and thought, culture and education. For many of the youth of the poor and unprivileged had begun to show great aptitude for them, whilst the gilded youth groaned under the burden of their acquisition. But the intellect of the nation was on their side, and still more the conservatism of official life, hating, as it does, to learn some new routine. So it was shown how noble they were, how fit they alone were to be true instruments of education, and how a real knowledge of the vernacular could be acquired only through them. As I read the numerous philippics against the advocates of the new learning, I felt that it would be well-nigh profanity to neglect these marvellous rotten tongues.

Once I knew how much depended on them, I entered on their acquisition with great zeal, and found it an easier task than learning the grammars and dictionaries of tone, and gesture, and facial expression. I had been bilingual in my youth, speaking in the dialect of my mother and writing literary English; and thus new languages came easily to me. My teacher swelled with pride over my progress, though I think he had little to do with it. But my success in this lessened his labours in teaching me the shadings of his own tongue, for it minimised my despair.

There was not an ornament or free appendage about fashionable dress but was brought to bear in the expression of shades of thought and emotion--the eyeglass, the key-ring, the chatelaine, the fan, the shoe-tie, the garter; the slightest motion of each of these was pregnant with meaning, and a mistake in their use might lead to serious consequences; for almost every word contained in germ senses that were often contradictory. The word for "good" also meant "feeble" or "silly," that for "vice" also meant "pleasure." The same word stood for "heaven" and "the purgatory of fools," another for "well-born" and "idiot," another for "gentlemanly" and "inconsiderate," another for "well-mannered" and "apish," and still another for "genius" and "lunatic." So love and lust, fashion and gas, insult and courage, fornication and marriage, harlot and messenger of the deity, deception and artistic power, impudence and prayer, bankruptcy and good luck, illegitimacy and the legal profession, beautiful woman and hag, sage and pedant, murder and nobility, candour and credulity, sword and stigma, infallible utterance and absurd error, wise saying and despicable thing, universal religion and bigotry, worship and play the hypocrite, to please and to conjure, to knock down and to co-operate, wit and vanity, to prepare food and to embezzle, courtier and pimp, sacred rite and vexation--each of these pairs had but one expression for both.

There still lingered in me grave doubts whether, if this were the contribution of the rotten tongues, they had been of any great service to the nation. It had already puzzled me to think that a people who glorified truth should take as their model two ancient nations that held this virtue but lightly, that it should almost deify purity of life and modesty, and yet bring up its youth on two literatures that laughed at these. The moral ideals of this people had been the scorn of the Thribs and Slaps.

But I had not command enough of the language to express these thoughts, and I had to accept his apology for the rotten tongues. I was soon able to adorn my conversation with fragments of them and roll Thribbaty and Slapyak words and phrases off with unctuous gusto, as if they settled every question. It was a great satisfaction to feel that without intellectual effort one could knock down his opponent in argument by a quotation, however little one understood it. And it gave one a blessed sense of superiority to rattle off a long word or phrase that others could not understand.

After I had gained skill in the use of the speech and the overspeech and the rotten tongues I thought my task was done. But I found there was almost as much to learn before I could enter into their highest social life. Assisted by a posture-master, he initiated me into all the niceties of fashionable conduct. I had to learn the methods of address to every caste in society and to every rank in official life. The most reverential terms were employed very freely: "Your noblest highness in the universe," "Your most serene godship," "Your most beautiful ladyship upon earth," "Your most reverent of all sages." I protested against the indiscriminate use of such fulsome flattery. But it was explained to me that all this was neutralised in the next section of deportment. I was taught to reverse or cancel every compliment I was paying by a peculiar use of the facial features as I bowed. I could even turn the flattery into a curse when I had become skilled enough in the practice of oaths and oath-making gestures. I wondered how it was possible to conceal from the person addressed such reversal of compliments paid to him. And here the posture-master stepped in. He told me I must be ignorant of the barest elements of deportment, when I did not know how to bear the body in addressing high social functionaries. He laughed at my innocence in thinking that we should turn face to face and bow or shake hands. That had been the custom in ancient and barbarous times, before the great period of King Kallipyges and his queen. But for generations the proper method had been to turn back to back and bow gracefully; and if the two wished to show special fervour, they then ran butt at each other. This monarch had had a most repulsive face, whilst both he and his queen looked magnificent from behind. Hence the change. I did not dare to laugh. But it was a hard task to conceal my amusement when he explained that one of the most delicate attentions a superior could pay to an inferior was to face round after the preliminary posterior bow and raise the point of the right shoe to his nether garments. It took me several weeks to acquire ease in all these details of deportment.

And it was well that I had learned them and reduced them to commonplace by familiarity. For when my old pedagogue and cicerone led me into society, the sight of the posterior bowings and scrapings was almost too much for me.

ALEOFANIAN SOCIETY AND RELIGION

LIKE their language, their social fabric was an intricate work of art, and it took me months to understand even its elementary lessons and principles. It had the qualities of all great products of nature or human industry; its structure at the first glance was simple and clear; but it would have taken the lifetime of Methuselah to study out its meanings and principles. Those who belonged to the inner circles, of course, knew the whole code of conduct; but they kept a judicious silence on disputed points, and nearly all points were disputed. It was perfectly simple, they said; in fact, they would not condescend to explain the obvious. I was perpetually meeting difficulties, but they smiled a superior smile and let me flounder. Even my old tutor threw mystery round the topic and indulged in smiling silence over my bewilderment. I have little doubt that what seemed paradox and contradiction to me was to them clear and harmonious.

The first principle of their life was, I was assured on all sides, devotion to truth. The name of their country, Aleofane, meant, they insisted, the gem of truth. Every statement they made was prefaced with an appeal to truth in the abstract, and ended, if it were of any length, with an apostrophe to the deity as the god of truth. Their favourite oaths had reference to the virtue of truthfulness. Their greatest heroes never told a lie, as the tombstones and biographies showed in letters of gold. Their commonest form of asseveration was, "May all the spirits of dead truth-speakers testify," or "In the name of all who have been great and truthful." And in every one of their courts of law and witnessing-places there was a copy of their sacred books; and this had grown greasy with the kisses of myriads of these Aleofanians, swearing upon it to the truth of what they said. Nay, the expletive that entered into every second phrase of conversation--"dyoos"--was the popular remains of a prayer that perdition might catch their souls if they did not speak the truth.

ALEOFANIAN DEVOTION TO TRUTH

MY admiration grew as I gradually discovered how everything in this wonderful country gave way before this great virtue. It was the first lesson taught the child; it was the last injunction of the dying Aleofanian to his friends as they stood round his death-bed. Every other book that was published had this as a moral, that truth would prevail; all their biography and history had this as their ultimate teaching; the schoolbooks were compiled with this in view; the copy-books had as their headlines the favourite proverbs on the theme, such as "Tell the truth and shame the fiends," "Nothing but truth will butter your bread," "The root of all evil is untruth," "Truth is the good man's friend, the sinner's foe," "Truth is her own reward." The popular songs and lyrics had this virtue as their chief stock-in-trade, for embellishments and even for topics. "True, true, love" was the parrot note of all the songsters. Beauty was but the other side of truth, truth the only claim to beauty. All sentiment played round the loyalty and candour of friends. On the tombstones were the headlines from the copy-books and the texts from the sacred writings that dealt with eulogy of the virtue. The graveyard was a perfect school of the prophets. So, too, was every hoarding and blank wall; for every seller of goods lavishly advertised their "truth."

I had grave embarrassments when I came to look at the practice of the people in this light that beat upon their lives. But these were owing to my ignorance of the language and the conventions. At every new paradox I felt I was a mere novice.

I had changed my place of residence to a public hostelry in the marble city as soon as my tutor thought I was sufficiently instructed not to shock people by my alien speech or ways. I had found no difficulty in negotiating and paying when I lived in the district of the poor. Now I misunderstood every week some term of the agreement, and the mistake always turned out to my disadvantage. It showed the selfishness of my European human nature that I should always have interpreted the words to my own benefit. And the correction was made with such courtesy, and so many and so profuse apologies that I rejoiced at the mistake as an opportunity of revealing the noble natures of the hosts. They never lost their good temper and suavity, however often they had to correct these financial blunders on my part. I began to feel that the ambiguity of their language was a wise provision of nature for bringing out the perfection of their manners in dealing with strangers and for allowing them to compensate themselves financially for their forbearance. My bills were generally double what I expected them to be; but I considered myself amply repaid by the gracious manner in which I was set right. The geometrical progression of my cost of living compelled me reluctantly to change my hostelry from time to time, and bid farewell to numerous suave and apologetic hosts.

I could have, if I had desired, spent all my sojourn after the first few weeks in private houses, so profuse was the offer of hospitality. It was a grievous thing to each host, as he proffered me the kindness, that just at that moment his house was in disorder; in fact it was in process of getting renewed and prepared for my reception, and he would not dishonour me by asking me to come during such a period of confusion. At last the invitations were so many that I dared not accept any one lest I should have to accept all; and it would have taken the lifetime of a Methuselah to fulfil the engagements. How deeply they grieved over this, they kept reminding me. And their grief was ever driving them to my hostelry and rooms that they might pour it out over my well-laden table. I shall not soon forget the fervour with which they shared in my victuals for my sake and performed the dorsal salutation. I never had such a multitude of true friends in my life. Each would deal with me as if we were the only two beings in the whole world worth a thought, and as if nothing could untie the knot of friendship. What looks of admiration they dealt me! At the close of every interview I felt how great and good we both were, what a genius I was, what a noble fellow he was. And so devoted did many of them become to me as a friend that they overcame their sense of dignity so far as to borrow from me. I was weighed down with the great burden of honour that was heaped upon me.

The greatest embarrassment from the wealth of their friendship was the number of those that claimed it. Each social circle, each member of it, came to daggers drawn with every other over me. And I began to feel myself one of the most unfortunate of beings, to have introduced such internecine strife amongst so peaceful and noble a people. I thought at times that the whole of the upper classes were on the verge of civil war over me, and that there would soon be universal bloodshed and annihilation. But the gentleness of their natures and the ambiguity of their tongue again stood them in good stead. They went so far as charging one another with the sin that was unpardonable amongst them, that of lying. But it turned out to be only a misunderstanding in each case; the double meaning of their words was a special provision of nature for keeping the peace. They fell on each other's neck and wept. Oh, how blessed was the equivocalness of the Aleofanian tongue! When everything had been settled amicably, most of them, to prove their friendship and devotion to me, took another loan from me. And I was fully compensated by the grace with which they conferred the favour.

As great generosity did they show in dealing with the reputations of their neighbours and fellow-citizens. It was cheering, indeed, to my feeling of human kindness to hear them eulogise each other. Even the marvellous riches of their vocabulary were found scant in the expression of their mutual love and admiration. Their ancestors had laid out much of their great talent for eulogy on the manufacture of language for it, and especially of titles of address. They had, as it were, established out of their linguistic wealth a great national bank of panegyric; and any one of the people of the marble city might draw upon it at any moment and to any extent, so nearly boundless were its resources. I have now none of that false modesty which is encouraged in your civilisation to shrink from the estimation or statement of one's own merits, because I have ceased to have any egotism or over-consciousness of myself; and yet to this day I hesitate to quote some of the methods of address used to me and the encomiums passed upon me. It was only their profanity that prevented me from bursting into laughter at their exaggeration. I was classed with the divinities; the attributes of godhead were applied to me. "O celestial person," "O propitiable refuge of the world," were amongst the least offensive. But I am bound to say that, when I went into the higher ranks of society, especially into the court, I found them most impartially peppered over the company. And it was in the same lavish spirit that the fixed titles of the nobility and other ranks had been measured out. They seemed to be proportionate to the acreage of the lands from which the nucleus of each was drawn. There was a law that superiors were to be allowed to reduce them to one thousandth part of their usual size, and equals to one hundredth part, except on ceremonial occasions. It was passed after a great social upheaval in which the political faction called The Economisers of Time won the day. It would never have succeeded but for a new king who by the death of many intermediate claimants to the throne had been raised out of comparative obscurity, and who delighted in outraging the proprieties. Moreover, he was somewhat asthmatic, and royal interviews had often to be postponed indefinitely because the royal lungs broke down in the middle of some official's name. Even after so many generations it was keen agony for most of the nobility to hear the monarch address the Serene Superintendent of the Royal Vaults as Nip, or the Grand Deputy Supervisor of the Royal Laundry Women as Tubby, the mere preliminary syllables of their acre-broad names. It was occasionally a relief to get into the lower ranks of this noble society, for then the difficulty of remembering and uttering the names of the people I met was complicated only by a few hyphens.

But here, too, hosannas rang in every term of address and every opening sentence. And thus having handsomely credited their neighbours and friends with so much, they felt that the debit side of life's account was all the larger. It was a sharp agony, they each told me, to lay bare the faults of those whom they so much loved and admired; but it was their painful duty so to do. How could the state be cured of its evils if this was not done? How could spiritual pride be subdued if the faults of men were not laid bare? It was a world of sorrow and care, and they had their full share of it in thus serving their friends and fellows. I had therefore the character of every man and woman whom I came to know faithfully analysed from a hundred different points of view. And though at times my critical friends seemed to enjoy the anatomy of others, it was, I was assured, only as the surgeon enjoys his own skill when he works with his knife in cutting out malignant growths. They were indeed most skilful anatomists of character. But it was all in the way of discipline; they had to disparage those who were praised too much, and sow scandal about those who had too good reputation lest that vile contagion of pride should fall on the community. It was an agonising duty to perform, but they had performed it without flinching; and they had already poured balm upon the coming wounds by preliminary eulogies drawn from the ancestral stock of curative panegyric.

Most of their social institutions and conduct had some disciplinary purpose. I often saw men and women meet their friends with a frown or pass them by with gloom on their faces. On asking, I found it was generally to cure the spiritual pride or some other defect in these friends that this sadness was assumed. I wondered, too, at the minute division into social circles that professed to be rigidly exclusive, but really overlapped, and at the haughty scorn with which a member of one a step higher in the scale would treat some other citizen who seemed to me infinitely his superior in both morals and manners, if not also in intellect and capacity. I found that all this was based on the same principle. The spirits of men and women had to be preserved from defect that the state might remain secure. This was the true scheme of nature that each man should be his brother's keeper; and by these fences and folds they kept their brothers apart so that they might be draughted up or down. And in order to keep these fences ungapped they had to exercise their hauteur and scorn. How many unhappy hours they gave themselves thus for the good of their brethren and the state! What brotherly love, what patriotism shone behind the frown upon their brow or the curl of the lip or the effort to point their long noses heavenward! It was especially evident in all large gatherings of the purest blood of the marble city; for then the moral spread, the lesson had its fullest effect.

The minute gradations of social life represented in the shades of this mutual discipline puzzled me even more than their dictionaries of overspeech. I could never reach solid ground in them. Once I thought I had found the very innermost social circle, where none could curl the lip at another. It included the family of the king and the monarch himself. I was speaking with some intimacy to the highest noble of this grade, and remarked to him in a confident tone that I supposed the king and he were the noblest efflorescence of this world's aristocracy. "Ay, if only that blot had not smirched the royal pedigree a thousand years ago," slid out of the curling lips. What a giddy pinnacle he seemed to stand on, this king-scorning aristocrat! He must have longed for other worlds to scorn and patronise and discipline. Mere human insignificance was too far beneath him to exercise his nasal elevation upon. I dared not affront him by revealing my ignorance of his ancestry. But I at once assumed that it was divine, when it could produce such sublimity of social solitude and noble blood.

It was a height which must have intoxicated him to think of. For he had only to turn to the literature of his nation to see it assumed that not only had there never been a nobler people upon earth, but that according to reasoning from first principles there could not be another to surpass it. This fundamental axiom was never overtly stated except in controversial pamphlets that had been issued against the contemptible claims of nations in other islets of the archipelago. But in their science and philosophy it was the tacit foundation of all reasonings and conclusions. Every scientist in making observations of nature or basing a law upon them had in his mind as an undisputed truth that this world was the only world that was worth considering, and that Aleofanian nature was nature absolute; what other peoples did or saw differently was abnormal, a mere departure from the scheme of creation. Every economist, much as he might disagree with others, ever agreed with them in this: that the system of industry and wealth and classes that then existed in Aleofane was the final economical system of human society; it might be and must be modified in details, but its great central principle was the only one that could keep mankind in proper gradation and subordination. Philosophy investigated Aleofanian humanity and systems and analysed the Aleofanian mind that it might show forth the divine plan of the universe. As for art, what else was worth admiring than what the Aleofanians admired? And by the Aleofanians was meant those of them who were in society. The philosophers had only to get at the abstract principle that lay behind Aleofanian music and architecture, painting and sculpture, and they would have the final secret of beauty, the ultimate principle of all art.

The only thing that shocked me almost past recovery was the application of this axiom to the sphere of religion. Brought up as I had been, a Christian amongst Christians, I felt that I had only to state to them the great and undisputed doctrines and the practical precepts of Christianity to make them turn from their idolatry of other gods, and their crude ideas of worship. What was my surprise and anguish to find even the most vulgar and least educated amongst them turn on me with a patronising smile and deal with me as if I were a child or a mild lunatic who had got adrift and had to be shepherded! They would not condescend to argue with me, and as I reiterated or argued, they only laughed louder at my simplicity. I had at last to cease speaking of my own religion and suffer my agony in silence. It was true that they were split up into innumerable sects, and many utterly denied the existence of their gods; but the sectarians were winked at or perhaps loftily scorned; for they at least accepted the fundamental tenets; whilst the atheists were endured, inasmuch as it was the Aleofanian gods they denied and thus made superior to the false gods of other races. Some two thirds of the population never entered the doors of the great temples; but there was much satisfaction in feeling that they entered the temples of no other gods, and that all their incomes gave evidence of their devotion to the Aleofanian worship by contributing one tenth each year for its support through the state treasury. The other third of the population were directly or indirectly interested in the temple revenues; every family had one member at least drawing a large salary from it by honouring it with his presence once or twice a year as superintendent when its worship was proceeding.

The principle of the religion was self-denial; but as one of their soundest philosophers had shown that all the world was practically included in the self or ego, inasmuch as thought was the perpetual creator of the world, and the chief element of the ego was thought, the inconveniences of the principle were avoided without sacrificing any of its glory or integrity. Their desires and appetites formed but an infinitesimal fraction of a self that included the whole planet, and an act of devotion once a year was more than enough to fulfil the duty of self-denial. The other and larger portion of the self, consisting chiefly of other people, they gladly mortified and denied and sacrificed; such incense was ever rising from the altars of their gods. The priests who performed the services and inculcated the precepts and explained the tenets showed in their emaciated frames and starved families how great the sacrifice of the deputy-self. Forgers, embezzlers, debtors who could not pay their debts, and in short all financial criminals were allowed to expiate their sins by devoting themselves for life to the service of a temple for little or nothing, generally the latter. Thus no people in the world did so much for the central principle of religion, that of self-sacrifice.

Not that the gilded race delegated all the duty. They lavished their wealth upon the art of the temples. The altars shone with precious marbles and stones; brilliant mosaics covered the floors and the walls; the domes were frescoed by the greatest painters and niched by the best sculptors. Some of their temples were so noble and spacious and adorned that the value of an empire seemed spent on them, and the poor human voice of the priest as he prayed or prelected sounded like the buzzing of a fly on a distant window-pane. And the robes that hung upon the framework of the skeleton-officiator were stiff with jewelry and brocade. It happened occasionally that one of the wealthy superintendents of religion had a gift of oratory, and then you would find his well-fed outlines filling the gorgeous vestments and his luxurious voice filling his temple and drawing crowds. And there again the self-sacrifice came in; every follower of his, especially of the opposite sex, gave up time and money to his welfare; and great fortunes were spent on this act of worship. The garments of the worshippers displayed as gorgeous art as the temple itself that all might be in unison in pleasing the gods.

But most of all were the gods supposed to be pleased by efforts to persuade the outer world to their creed. The zealous were greatly troubled at the obstinacy of the peoples of the other islets, who refused to turn from their own shade of piety and belief; I was assured that they were sunk in depravity and sin; for millions had been spent on their conversion, and in the long years only a few had been gathered into the fold. But these few were so well-kept and prosperous that they became shining examples to their infidel brethren. Ah, the fervour, the devotion, the self-sacrifice, the millions lavished upon these aliens! One must have been valued as much by the gods as a thousand Aleofanians brought up to the Aleofane worship. For tens of thousands huddled together in the fold, heedless of their own spiritual welfare, ignoring the existence of the temples, starving, unkempt, and ragged. Never were the grimy mob permitted to soil the precincts of the holy places, or to mar the beauty of the art displayed in them by the inhabitants of the marble city. To see the squalor of the labouring horde, I was told, would have cancelled the noblest acts of their artistic worship, would have made the gods to faint.

I have spoken of their gods; but they would have held it profanity so to speak. They had been polytheists in prehistoric times, and the missionaries who had introduced monotheism had been astute enough to take the best of their deities and find them in the qualities of the one. The generations of subtle divines that came between had solved all the difficulties of having many deities rolled into one, so that the Aleofanian mind found it no sacrilege to deify a dead hero or erect a shrine to one of their prehistoric deities, whilst they persecuted to the death anyone who dared to deny the unity of godhead. Just as there were myriads of stars and but one cosmos, so, they said, there were innumerable manifestations of the deity and but one god. They were ashamed of the polytheism of their ancestors, and as converts to the true faith would have no slur upon it. Men might have no creed if they pleased; but if they had a creed, it must be in one god and his religion. Their theologians had discussed for centuries the manner in which the various old gods and new saints coalesced into one; but none of them had the folly to deny the unity. There had been and still existed a score or more of theological schools, each of which agonised over the stupidity and unreasonableness of the rest in their explanation of the unification. The dominant school used to roast or rack their heresies out of their opponents; they still roasted and racked, but only socially and politically; the spirit was as true to zeal for the one faith, only the method had changed. And their library shelves groaned with volumes of anathemas reasoned or unreasoned.

They prided themselves on their perfect command of reason; they could adapt it to any purpose, so skilled had they become in its use. And they assumed as a first principle of conduct that they had reached the final truth on all things in earth or heaven. Only reason could teach truth; and they alone of all people in the world had mastery of reasoning. The common beliefs of the nation were therefore absolute truth; and each acted on the maxim that what he persuaded himself of was unconditioned truth. Amongst a less subtle people this would have meant continual quarrel; but with them the ambiguity of their language stepped in as peacemaker. A disagreement never came to anything serious; it was always found to be a misunderstanding of words.

They had no need to state this syllogism to themselves; it was at the foundation of their conduct and beliefs. They scorned the art, the literature, the philosophy of all other peoples as poor trivial monstrosities, permissible, of course, in a world of variety like ours, but ridiculous in the extreme. It was useless for a stranger like myself to criticise them and their civilisation; I was only wasting my breath and affording them occasion for laughing at my inordinate vanity.

SOCIAL CUSTOMS

THE first time that I went to a high-rank social entertainment of theirs, I broke into a hearty laugh at the spectacle as I entered; but I came to regret my imprudence. There were the select of the marble city, including the royal family, turning Catherine-wheels round the room in pairs to the sound of quick music; even fat old dowagers with bombasted breeches on kept up the frantic exercise, the perspiration pouring from their brows. It was a large room lit with hundreds of lamps, and round it again and again each pair had to roll, and as I looked at the stately nobles and dames head downwards my thoughts turned back to the street arabs of my native land and their cry, "Stand on my head for a penny," and I burst again into a laugh. My guide and introducer ignored the first; but at the second he turned round on me with questioning surprise. I was soon sobered, and turned away to smother my amusement. Another friend came up to greet me, and he at once burst into loud admiration of the scene. "Was it not noble? It was the finest flower of all art to see the most beautiful and high-blooded of men and women letting their souls forth in harmony, glowing with colour and life; surely this was the sight of sights; it was the very poetry of motion; what grace! what beauty and roundedness of calf! was it not joy to see the fair twinkling feet in the air, and in a moment so the solid floor again, pair with pair? It was indeed the music of the spheres, this revolution of the extremities round the centre of gravity; it was a copy of the motion of the great universe, sex with sex in unison pointing alternate head and feet to the zenith. Where else in the world could such a spectacle be seen?"

I acknowledged with as much gravity as I could command that I had never seen anything like it. And I must concede that after a time the whirl of bodies, as the music quickened, half intoxicated my judgment and made me almost long to join in the general somersault; the rhythm of so many feet and heads flying through the air fired my blood to fever heat, and as I looked on, my sense of the absurdity of the scene entirely disappeared; I became a partisan of the exercise and could see nothing but grace and harmony in it. I felt almost ashamed of my burst of laughter, though afterwards, when I retired to my hostelry and cooled down, the sense of incongruity returned, and I laughed heartily at the memory of haughty aristocrats standing on their heads, and the legs of shrivelled dowagers revolving like spokes of a wheel.

I found on inquiry that a considerable portion of their youth was spent in acquiring ease at this indoor exercise. Women especially gave the best of their days and nights to "fallallaroo," the name by which they called this art of rhythmical gyration, for they found it was their best means of ingratiating themselves with the promising young men; and most of the resolves to marry were formed in the meetings for fallallaroo. It was said by some physicians to produce certain common diseases, but the gilded society held that it was productive of health; they knew so from their own experience. Even the old men and women with grey hair and shrunken shanks kept up the exhausting exercise, for to leave it off was universally considered the sign of approaching age. It had been introduced by a monarch who had suffered from vertigo and St. Vitus's dance, but tradition had hallowed it and poetry had surrounded it with romance. And now it would have been like tearing up the roots of society to abolish it.

Another custom that was considered almost sacred tried my nerves still more. The men usually wore a bamboo behind their right ear, and whenever they were at leisure, and as often when they were not, they would take it out and fill one end with the dried leaves of a vile plant called kooannoo, not unlike a coprosma, and in smell pure assafoetida, and lighting it, stick the other end into one of their nostrils. Every expiration of breath sent forth a cloud of smoke and every inspiration drew some of it in; but they had grown so expert in the practice that they could always prevent it getting into the mouth or the throat, even when they were talking vigorously. The smell was something intolerable, and reminded me of burning heaps of rubbish and manure. In their more candid moods and when they were not themselves engaged in the practice, they acknowledged the likeness, especially on going into the lower quarters of the city; for there, in order to produce the fashionable flavour and smell, the kooannoo-sellers were accustomed to steep broad leaves in mire for a time, and drying them make them up as kooannoo; nay, some of the poor, when they could not afford to buy the leaf, openly stuck pieces of dried earth into their bamboos and lit them, and many of them adhered to the practice when they were better off, preferring the flavour and smell to those of the fashionable leaf.

I was surprised at the agonies the young men underwent in learning the loathsome habit, such nausea and pallor and misery overspread their whole frame; and it was only by the loss of all delicacy of smell and taste that they at last mastered the loathing and qualms; no refined senses could live within reach of the smoke. It was undoubtedly one of the acts of heroic stoicism on the part of the nation; they assured me that it was one of their disciplines for the subjugation of the body. But it acted, as most of their disciplines did, in an altruistic way; it had destroyed the fine sensations of the kooannooers themselves; but their neighbours, who had not learned, and especially women, suffered daily the agonies of disgust. And the agonies were undergone without a murmur, nay, with a smile upon the face, for the practice was almost universal amongst the highest class and in the royal family.

The origin was difficult to get at. But it seems that in some past age a number of the younger sons of aristocratic families had gone out in search of adventure; and during a period of great straits they had learned from a tribe of savages to eat and burn kooannoo in order to subdue the pangs of hunger. When they got food at last, they felt proud of an accomplishment that they had learned with so much agony, and, as they had ceased to suffer from it, they brought it home with them amongst other practices copied from the wild men. Their wonderful adventures made them the fashion; and all the youths set themselves to copy this, the most striking of their habits, counting it as the truest mark of manliness and courage. Having acquired it with so much suffering and difficulty, they would not easily give it up when it had ceased to disgust them. When kooannooing, they could sit silent with dignity whilst others talked; and it gave them a certain semblance of superiority to others, as they kept the red in their cheeks whilst others around who did not use the bamboo grew pale and sick. They felt masterful and heroic as they kooannooed, like the voyager who can resist the approach of sea-sickness when his fellows succumb. So the habit carried with it a certain overbearing rudeness and want of consideration for others. Generation after generation of youth had come to count it as the distinctive mark of manhood; and having learned the practice with great suffering they could not forego the sense of triumph over those who had not learned it; they were the braves of the nation; not to bamboo was a sign of womanliness and delicacy of feeling; and men who indulged such refinement and weakness ought to be disciplined along with the women; they were intolerant with their fine sensations; the world would not be worth living in if they had their way; it was time something was done to bring them into order. And these kooannooers felt most heroic and manly as they followed their loathsome practice. And most of the women endured their stinking breath and clothes and the agonies of nausea and headache in silence, or rather with the pretence that the habit was most delightful. There was something in what they said, that it soothed the men and put them into better humour; for when a kooannooer had a bamboo in his nose he wore a self-complacent smile; he felt manly and superior without the expenditure of any effort; his vanity was flattered. Of course a number who did not bamboo showed that the leaf acted as a poison and slowly sapped the health. But scientific kooannooers replied that small doses of the poison killed nothing but the germs of disease. They bambooed for the good of the public; they were the national sanitarians and fumigators. It showed how patriotic they were, when they persevered in the practice, though they knew that it tended to destroy the germ of manners as well as of diseases. These kooannooers were the most self-denying of philanthropists.

ABSTINENCE

"WHY should they refrain from the gifts that God in His goodness had bestowed on them?" Thus argued a party of gilded youth with me as they polecatted the air of a gorgeous room with their bamboos. My senses had so far resisted the paralysing fume and its nausea that they were able to fumble about amongst arguments. And I tried to break their backs with their own rod. "Why did the Aleofanians abstain so rigidly from God's good gift, the juice of the grape?" "You have got the stick by the wrong end," they laughed. And the bell-wether of them took up the tale. "God's gift is transformed into poison by fermentation--" "And so is kooannoo by fire," I broke in. "But pyranniddee" "is seductive; kooannoo is repulsive; the one will master the strongest man; the other has to be mastered." I acknowledged the correctness of his distinction, but urged that all pleasures and pains in time suffer transmutation into their opposites; a habit, that in its nascence is pleasing, becomes loathsome in its supremacy, and one that is hard to learn gratifies the vanity, if not the senses, when mastered; the stoic rampant revels in his stoicism and goes to all lengths with it; the epicurean has soon skimmed the cream of his luxuries and has to suppress all his other natural needs and desires like a stoic that he may still the violence of his overgrown appetites or give them some hard-won novelty; I envied the stoic his epicurean enjoyment of his victory over life and passion; I pitied the epicurean wallowing in the world, that sty of desire, all its best and most luscious things trampled under foot. "But we have chosen a plant to bear whose fumes must ever demand resolution--" I unhinged his sentence with, "Yes, in those who cannot indulge in it." "You speak truly," he said, "and therein lies the nobleness of the choice; it is the great philanthropic plant; it is for the discipline and maturation of others that kooannooers sacrifice their finer sensations." This discussion would have fallen into a scramble of wits; for it was hard by any means to get the better of the subtlety of this people. So I held my peace. And as I listened, I learned and admired. They were too wise and virtuous to tope and guzzle and carouse. They would not steep their senses in sottish oblivion. They would have no dealings with a poison that sapped the will and made the human system all throat and liquid fire. Who would turn his inwards into a chemist's alembic, his skull into a vat?

I had heard eloquence like this in my own country and cowered before the tornado; I knew there could be no safety but in flight.

They were indeed a most ascetic people in all but the use of words. I tried in the first two or three hostelries to obtain a little wine; but the attempt had such a paralysing effect on mine hosts that I had to refrain. Anything that even smelt of fermentation was a horror. It is true I had seen many wine-presses and distilleries in the lower part of the town. But, it was explained, their products were meant for the shops of chemists and for use in the preservation of fruit and museum specimens. No freeman was allowed to touch the accursed thing; only criminals and bondsmen were permitted within the walls of these factories of the Stygian fluid, and then only under superintendence of government agents, who commanded the position from smell-proof view-points afar, lest even a whiff of the Tartarean brew should reach their nostrils.

I now understood why these Aleofanians when analysing the character of their neighbours always introduced, as the climax of the latter or depreciatory part of their analysis, devotion to museums and to fruit-preserving; and in the nearest approach I had seen two make to a quarrel, the one hurled at the other the epithet "Olekloman," or museumist, and got in reply, "Poolp," or fruit-preserver, whilst both reddened as if stung. No house in the marble city was without a large room devoted to natural history; every man was an enthusiastic collector of biological specimens, and in this room there were long rows of shelves of scarabaean bottles, each filled with some clear liquid in which floated a bug or centipede or some small parasite. They were as enthusiastic orchardists, and generally spent a third of the year in bottling the fruits of their trees. Autumn was the time of their most uproarious festivals and maddest junketings. This sober, staid, and abstinent people broke loose like bacchanals. The fruit they indulged in, they explained, fermented within them.

It was almost a painful spectacle for me after the admiration I had felt for their self-abnegation. They had such a horror for all fermented liquor that they called their devil and it by the same name, pyrannidee. And one of the wise men philosophising over the annual outbreak of high spirits said that, according to their own proverbial philosophy, the best way to confine a devil was to swallow him and to keep him down; he might pester the man who formed his prison-house, but he would be kept from all other wickedness. Thus the autumn revel of merriment was perhaps but another instance of the great virtue of the people, their eagerness to save their neighbours from evil. They annually swallowed the devil to prevent him, for a short time at least, from going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he might devour.

At other times of the year I often found them, men as well as women, sitting in their houses and shedding copious tears over the sadness of this mortal state; so overwhelmed were they with the thought that their words jostled one another in strange confusion; and if they rose to bid me farewell, they fell upon my neck and wept, or collapsed in the greatness of their grief upon the couch or floor. This tenderness of heart was widespread amongst the upper classes; for days would they weep thus over the woes of existence. And still more unmanning was their sorrow for the death of friends; they would sit stupefied by the blow for hours together, unable to speak articulately; and a whole week or month of sickness and silent confinement to their bedroom would follow the stroke. How sorely stricken this people were I could not have realised but by my experience; the death of a dear friend occurred on an average once a month in the life of some fashionable Aleofanians at certain periods of the year, but especially during the severe season, winter. And when they rose from bed and appeared in public, their haggard, woebegone faces told the agony through which they had passed. Surely fate was too hard upon this much-bereaved nation. As hard was it upon their teeth; for the loss of a tooth under ether or stupefying gas was equally frequent; one friend, whom I had to see often, suffered grievously. I counted during my acquaintance with him forty-five losses of a tooth under ether. But nature was strangely beneficent to the Aleofanian jaw; she seemed to compensate for the losses almost immediately: my friend had as many teeth when I left as when I saw him first.

And with all these recurrent bereavements and the illnesses that followed, you may imagine how important a functionary was the physician in social life. He was the father-confessor of the household. He was generally a soft-voiced, stooping-shouldered, silent-footed man. He condescended and yet he flattered; he insinuated himself into a man's confidence, and still more into a woman's, by veiled compliments; he mastered by seeming to accept his patient's opinions; he prescribed what suited the appetites and desires; the subtlety of the race rose to its highest in his profession, so skilfully had he to adapt himself to the weaknesses of his clients; he knew all the secrets of the household and built his omnipotence upon them; he had a feminine manner and a feminine vein in his character, judgment and action through instinct, and a passion for the minutenesses of life; and yet he piloted his way into the mastery of the family through the women, who, in spite of his womanliness, adored him; for he had learned by long tradition and training how to make them abandon themselves body and soul to his direction; their pains he knew how to soothe by anodynes; their troubles and sorrows he made them forget by either spiritual or physical consolation; he surrounded them with an atmosphere of belief in themselves and him as the two select of the world; he quarantined them from all other influences by flattery or pyrannidee; he dosed them with well-sweetened gossip made powerful by being communicated in confidential whispers and with oaths to secrecy; for he had command of all the inner workings of the private life of a neighbourhood; and it was one of the wonders of his power that most of the families which he confessionalled were not on speaking terms with one another; he was always sacrificing himself to bring about peace, and each of them trusted him entirely; yet human nature is so prone to jealousy that they refused his mediation and only listened to his soft-voiced details of the inner life of their foes. What would the higher social life have been in Aleofane without this silent-footed intermediary!

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet