Riallaro: the Archipelago of Exiles

RIALLARO

THE ARCHIPELAGO OF

EXILES

BY

GODFREY SWEVEN

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

The Knickerbocker Press

1901

Copyright, 1901

by

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

CONTENTS

RIALLARO

RIALLARO

INTRODUCTION
THE MYSTERIOUS SHOT

“DEAD, for a ducat, dead,” roared Somm, as he shouldered his gun and rushed to the beach. Nothing had come within reach of shot all afternoon till, in the thickening twilight, a flash of broad wings in the distance awakened our camp. “A wounded albatross,” shouted both my companions, as they peered through the shuttling grey of the evening, and watched the south wind, still wild with the force of storm, shepherd some baffled creature of wings up towards our nestling-place. “Some still stranger bird,” I thought, as we seized our guns and ran to the edge of the cliff. The sudden descent of night checked further question; and as the winged thing gleamed along the face of the precipice, three shots echoed across the sound, and, in a lull of the fitful gusts, we heard a dull plunge in the water far below.

It seemed but a few minutes till we met Somm in the rocky hollow that was the harbour for our boat; he had rowed out and back, and was leaning over some dark object that lay in the stern. Not a sign of feather or anything that gleamed was there about it. It was the form of a human being, apparently dead. We bore it up through the bush with the tender care that diggers are wont to give to the corpse of a comrade. Our burden was so light that we expected to look upon a thin, emaciated body. But, as we laid it in the flicker of our hut fire, we were amazed to see the rounded form and ruddy cheeks of the dead stranger.

We stripped him of his wrapping,—a strange muslin-like transparent toga,—and searched for the gunshot wound. Except for one broad bruise, there was no mark on the body. And then it began to dawn upon us that this had nothing to do with the flashing wings, or our shots, that we were guiltless of human blood. It was a case of drowning, but not yet dead. And we set to work to draw the clogging water from his heart and lungs. Slowly the breath began to come and the blood to circulate. The bosom heaved and we felt ourselves in the presence of another and a stranger human soul. What he was, whence he came, whirled through our minds in silence. Faint and in need of rest he manifestly was. We poured some stimulant down his throat and laid him on one of our rude beds of manuka and fern. We saw him fall into a deep and healthy sleep. And dawn was already threatening the east with flickering light when we went into the open and drew a long, sweet breath.

We consulted together over the strange occurrence, and determined to search the fiord for traces of the winged thing that flashed out at our shots. Before we had gone far, we found a pair of huge fans that had drifted into one of the frequent channels amongst the rocks. They were not of feathers, but of some strong, transparent, and almost weightless material that did not wilt in the sun or the wet. We lifted them, and there hung by them dragging in the water filmy strings like the long tentacles of a medusa. We cut them adrift, and bore the strange wing-like floats up to our cliff. Each of them seemed to move on a pivot with ease, and almost rose on the gentle breeze into which the storm had now died. After full examination of them, we laid them far back in the cavern, which we used as our storehouse and larder, and thought no more about them.

We cooked and ate our morning meal, and then spread out over the bush that overlooked the waters of the sound, forgetful of the stranger whom we had left in one of our huts. We were in search of gold, and, having found faint traces of it on the small, fan-like beaches that intervalled the sheer precipices on our side, we had been prospecting several months for the alluvial pocket or the reef from which the glittering specks had wandered down. The following week we were rewarded with success; but, as we have no desire to have our noble solitude disturbed by the noise of a frenzied, gambling crowd,—we are but woodmen and sealers and photographers to the outside world when it intrudes in the shape of tourists,—I shall not mention at present the name of the New Zealand fiord in which we live.

I was working up a watercourse, panning the sand and dirt that lay in the crevices and occasional levels, at times startled by a weka that impudently slid through the undergrowth and eyed me close at hand, or by the harsh call of the kea, as it flew from some resting-place and circled in the air. Rudely awakened from my absorption, I looked out on the marvellous scene that lay at my feet; precipice towered over precipice, often forest-clad from base to summit. Almost sheer below me slept the waters of the sound, landlocked as if it were a lake. Only the indignant cry of the kea, or the weka’s raucous whistle, or the echo of a distant avalanche ever broke the silence of this solitary land. Never did it cease to throw its shadow on my thoughts or stir their sense of beauty or their sadness.

Absorbed in contemplation of its sublimity, I sat for a moment on a rock that rose out of the bush. I almost leapt from it, startled; a voice, unheralded, fell “like a falling star” through the soundless air. I had heard no footstep, no snap of trodden twig or rustle of reluctant branch. My senses were so thrilled with the sound that its purport shot past them. There at the base of the rock stood the strangest figure that ever met my eyes.

It was the sea-trove we had left sleeping in the hut—a small, well-knit frame like that of a north-country Englishman; but folded though it was in the slender gauzy garment we had unwound from it the night before, I felt conscious of a radiance that seemed to rid it of its opaque substantiality; it was as if lit from within; the face was luminous and clear, like the star-limpid waters of the fiord at night. My eyes were drawn to search the depths; yet the veil of flesh and blood still hid all but the aurora-like flashings of thought and feeling that swept in and out across the features. There was the play of some strong inward tumult, the revival, I soon found, of long-dead memories. I sat dumb as a stone, too much moved to break the silence, too much awed by the face to know what to say. It seems that my face too, with its weather-beaten vigour of northern life, had stirred the nature of the stranger to its depths; a long-forgotten existence had surged up in him from the darkness of the past, and he was recovering it feature by feature. I have often watched the conflict of cloud and wind, of light and gloom, across the torn azure of night’s infinity before the coming of a tempest; but the sight did not approach in intense magnetism the dizzy chase of shadow and gleam across this singular countenance.

At last the turmoil had passed its crisis. The memories had fallen into array. And, in slow but passionate northern English strangely shot with silvery rhythm, I was asked what country this was and whether I was not an Englishman. My palsy of speech vanished. And the familiar words, uttered though they were in new accents, led me back into the common world of question and answer. I found it was the Britain of a generation ago he knew, before the colonies of the Pacific had focussed her new spirit of enterprise, or transmuted their golden dreams. He remembered the mining fever of Australia, but it was news that it had smitten New Zealand too.

As I spoke with him, he seemed to be dragging his language out of the depths of sleep. His words and recognition of my meaning came half reluctantly. And through them wove fitfully hints and after-gleams of some intervening existence that had reached a higher plane than that of his youth. The ethereal ring would come into his voice, the translucent look into his face, and then vanish before the touch of those lower terrene reminiscences. Yet even amidst them there would appear at times the tremulous appeal of human pathos. As our words approached the memories of his childhood, they sounded from his lips like the funeral bells of a village folded in mist. The grosser humanity that seemed to come back to him from a buried past grew shadowed and mournful with piteous thoughts. There sighed out of his lost youth a winter wind that sounded through the crevices of ruined cities and over uncounted graves.

It took weeks for us to reach more familiar intercourse; and this alternation of a common and ethereal humanity in him continued to break the magnetism that often seemed about to bind us. We came from the same district of the North, although he evaded all questions as to the locality; and I came to know by instinct the topics to avoid with him. He would listen by the hour to stories and descriptions of the dales and hills; but he never permitted a reference that would fix his native place or time. One serious difficulty at first was his refusal of all our ordinary food; he would not touch the flesh of animal in any form, and we had to give up to him all our meal and flour and lentils. But, as we saw him at times grow faint, we introduced some of our animal soups into his food—for he refused all food that needed the use of teeth. A singular change seemed to come over him from this time; he began to grow more like our muscular, carnal humanity, and his moods of limpid ethereality were rarer and briefer. Thereafter he seemed to lower himself more to our plane of thought and life, though even then he rose long flights above us. Why he stayed with rough miners like us so long, when he might have shone in the most brilliant circles of Europe, was a mystery; but it became clear at a later stage. He worked with me and had a marvellous power of revealing the secrets of the rocks and the crust of the earth; like the fabulous divining rod he knew what metal lay below, and how far we should have to seek for it; and ten thousand times over he repaid all that his living cost. We offered him his share of our partnership; but our proposal was ever smiled aside as if it came from children in some childish play. He seemed to look years beyond our point of view.

How deep the debt we owe him when we think of all he taught us! Beside it all else sinks into nothingness. And there is no way in which we can vent our gratitude to him but by telling his story to other men as he told it to us. We could have spent all our days as well as all our nights in listening to him. But it was only now and then he fell into the mood of reminiscence. And so great a value did we attach to his every word that after each conversation or monologue we retired into our storehouse cave and wrote it down. We did our best to give his own language and form, but memory is treacherous, and we felt at each attempt that we had marred the beauty or nobleness of his utterances by phrases of our own or by the tinge of our personalities. He followed no sequence of time or circumstance; for he spoke as his own spirit or our themes moved him. But out of our rough jottings we have pieced together the following narrative, most of it our representation at the moment of his speech, some of it from the distant memory of incidental talks with him in the bush, when we were far from paper or pen. It is as close an approach to his very words as our love and reverence have been able to achieve.

Godfrey Sweven,

Theodore Somm,

Christian Trowm.

CHAPTER I
RESURRECTIONS

GOD, God! how Thy past clings to us like shadows, turn we as we may forever to the sunrise! Out of the night and from beyond it come forms that seem buried below the reach of grave-desecrating memory; they plead with us and claim us as their kin, and all the nobleness we have laboured after succumbs to the witchery of their piteous appeals.

It was indeed pathetic to see his face as he struggled with a past that had been dead for a generation. He thrust it from him and it would return. He reached out for dim features of it he had loved, and they eluded him. At last came out of the wreckage of dreams the solidarity of life and law.

How tyrannous the bond of nature is! What love my mother bore me, and how the memory of it wells over the desert of my youth! Had she lived, I never could have broken with my European life. It is maternal love that binds age to age. A torrent of inborn feeling wakes in me for the old graveyard where she lies overlooking the sea. I know she is not there, and yet I could kiss the dear earth that covers her ashes. From her I drew all that was best in me; to her, only a fisherman’s daughter, I looked for every thought that controlled me in boyhood. My father, the earl’s son, disowned for his lowly love and marriage, was only a phantom to me, honoured but unreal; for he died soon after I was born. Nor could I ever own the churlish stock that thrust him forth for loyalty to a peasant. Often did the crabbed old grandsire try to woo me from the sea-smelling hut to his great castle; as often was his pride wounded by refusal. What had I to do with a race still savage in its adherence to caste, and incapable of seeing the beauty of a character apart from position? All my being belonged to the gentler, more civilised nature of my mother; I was obstinately democratic in my sympathies, hating even the shadow of primeval aristocracy that rests upon childhood and youth.

One thing he succeeded in doing. He drove my mother, by dint of threats, expostulations, and reasonings, to send me for a few years to one of the large English public schools. And this period was the purgatory of my life, such despotisms and persecutions demonised over the unconforming nucleus of my character. And, when summer came, her love, the uncouth sympathy of the fishermen, the rhythmic sea, and the steadfast foreheads of the cliffs cooled the fever of my wronged spirit. Only the persistence of the old fire-eater with his instinctive valuation of the still savage virtues of his caste could keep her from yielding to my never-ending entreaties. Not till palsy shut the gates of his expression did she take courage to resist his influence, and let me remain with her and solitude as my teachers.

A few years more and his iron spirit left its long-dead tenement. His title and mansion and great estates were thrust upon me. But I refused to acknowledge the position except so far as to divide the revenue amongst the poor. What did I or my mother need more than we had? Why should we leave our lowly friends, and our comradeship with the sea? What good purpose could it serve to spend these vast sums every year on personal enjoyment that would be none to us? We stayed in our little dwelling perched in a nook of the cliffs, and I followed my ancestral calling over the ever-moving element that had nursed me. Courage and lowliness and love of mankind sank deeper and deeper into my system. Books and thought and the ever-changeful waves tutored my spirit and widened the issues of life. I began to feel strangely dissatisfied with all that was called civilisation, seeing how far it fell short of justice and truth and liberty. I was harassed with my own destiny and even more with that of mankind. How could I better my thoughts by heaping the responsibilities of lucre upon them? The everlasting antagonism between our longing for rest and our need of labour goaded me as it did all others. And how was change of sphere or multiplication of financial cares to effect a truce? No; it seemed to me, in my youthful romancing, that the possibility of cure lay not in increasing the desires and their means of satisfaction, but in reducing the needs. The denominator in this poor fraction of the universe called human life was more plastic than the numerator. What was the acquisition of wealth and influence but the insertion of ciphers in our little decimal of existence? What could the world do for the inborn sickness of the human spirit?

If the rest was to be found, it was in primitive conditions of life, perhaps in some obscure tribe that lived close to nature and had never heard an echo of our western world. With the restless nomadic instincts of boyhood and youth passionate within me, I longed to set forth on a voyage of discovery into seas untraversed. The sea-ferment stirred my Scandinavian blood. To rove untrammelled, to meet sudden storms and dangers, to hold intercourse with pure human souls fresh from God’s hand and unstained with the duplicities of luxurious grasping races—this was the dream of my early years. But my mother would not stir from the loved shore of her girlhood or the grave of the husband who had died too young to shatter her romance. And she was a comrade from whom I could not part. Year after year had bound us closer together, and, before manhood had unloosed the reins of my will, her forty years and locality—a stronger influence in her sex—had riveted down their fetters upon her spirit.

But ah, God! there came a time——

The surge of memory was too great for him. He would not let the tears come and he fled out into the woods. We saw no more of him for days. Nor could he approach the subject but with wild resurgence of sorrow that choked up speech. But by hint and inference we were able to mosaic together the history of this tempest that swept through his life. His mother had died not long after he had attained his majority, and his grief palsied his energies for almost a year. But driven to the net and the sea again by sheer fatigue of brooding, youth reflooded his veins with the old passions and ideals, and the flame in his blood mastered grief. Then came the thought that the wealth he had repelled so long might enable him to fulfil the dream of his boyhood, and to reach some land untainted by the vices of Europe. And the discovery that part of his heritage was a yacht driven by the marvellous new power of steam, that laughed at wind, and wave, and current, made him as one possessed. Everything bent to his new idea. He gathered his old comrades and playmates together, and he went with them to master the whole craft of the steam-engine and the screw; they learned every item of the marine engineer’s trade; and each he set to gain skill in some special part. He travelled himself from university to university, from laboratory to laboratory in order to master the best that was known in the physical sciences. He fitted out his yacht with the apparatus and material that would be needed for repairing any part of her, furnished her with everything that would enable him to pass years away from civilisation and to gain influence over the wild races he might encounter. Nor did he fail to collect for her a library of the finest books, not only imaginative and scientific, but pertaining to the arts. And, when all was ready and his machinery and crew had been tested in brief voyages north and west across the winter and summer Atlantic, he bade farewell to his hut upon the shore and the loved graveyard on the hill and set out to seek adventure and a land of primitive simplicity in untravelled seas.

How our blood surged with delight as we swept away to the south under full sail and head of steam! The ridged currents of the main, the wind-curled summits of the great billows only made our hearts to tingle. We were out free with God’s elements, our friends; no rumour of cruelty or injustice or bitter grief to harass our spirits. Young, bold, well-mated, bound by the ties of common tastes and common traditions, nothing seemed to us too difficult to attempt.

Round the old cape of storms, down into the latitude of icebergs, we easted till we hailed the coasts of Australia. In her towns and cities we learned from traders and sailors all we could of the islands that lay in the Pacific. Much of romance, much of dim rumour based on fact vitiated their tales and yet drew us on with magnetic power. Past New Zealand with her sombre fiords and the argent glory of her mountains we swept, gleaning from her sealers and whalers still more of the mysteries of the dim Pacific world we were about to see. Our blood coursed quicker in our veins as we touched the first palm-fringed atolls of the coral belt. And every new island we reached we seemed to get closer and closer to the centre of the primitive world we desired to visit.

For through the narratives that we heard of the wonders of the great Pacific archipelago there ran an undercurrent of reference to some mystic region that had deeply impressed the imaginations of all frequenters of this tropical sea, whether natives or foreigners. The islanders would scarcely speak of it and a curtain of superstition hung round it unlifted. Even Europeans spoke of it with bated breath.

But the more they evaded my questions, the more was I roused to get at some definite knowledge. From island to island we sailed in quest of the direction of this strange mirage of the sea. At times I concluded that it was but a religious myth, a hades invented by the priests or by the crude imagination of early worshippers to account for the misery of man and to define the destiny of his wilder nature. Then would come some hint that pointed to physical fact as its basis.

After weary, half-baffled investigation, I seemed to find a certain nucleus of reality. There lay away to the south-east of Oceania, out of the track of ships, an enormous region of the Pacific sealed by a ring of fog that had never lifted in the memory of man. Ships had sailed into it and never come out again; canoes that had ventured too near had been sucked in by the eddies that circled round it, and never been seen again. Above it there flashed strange lights that dimmed the stars and the play of gleaming wings seemed at times to rise far above it and vanish. To some islanders it was the refuge of the souls of their dead; to others it was the home of the demons who issued half-seen, half-unseen to torture them with plague and storm and disaster.

When I had discovered the direction in which it lay and defined its position on my chart, we ran back to the coast of New Zealand for coal and other supplies that would last me months, if not years. All ready, I summoned my staunch comrades who formed the crew and told them the bent of my enterprise, laying stress upon its dangers and uncertainty. Not one flinched, perhaps because their lives lay all in the future; none had left wife or sweetheart behind, none was old enough to have fixed ambition or a desire of settled existence. The sea had bred in them through their long ancestry a love of its mystery and its many-voiced dreams. None but imaginative natures had attached themselves to me in youth. And on board, during their long periods of rest, it was romance, and poetry, and other books of imagination they read. Not one of them had escaped the lotus-breathing air of these dreamy archipelagoes. Not one of them but loathed the thought of western life with its mean ambitions and falsities. Anything was better than the labyrinth of disease and wrong and crime wherein they must lose their way in old Europe. Even without such considerations, there was enough loyalty to their old comrade and leader to make them follow him wherever he would go. A cheer ended our conference, and we weighed anchor to a new chant with the refrain “Heave ho! let’s seek the secret of Riallaro.”

CHAPTER II
RIALLARO

SUCH was the name that one group of islands gave to this mystic region of the sea; and it meant “the ring of mist.” A sense of awe fell on me as I listened to the chorus. Whither was I dragging these young spirits with me? What would be the end of our expedition? Would we ever come forth alive from this misty sphere? It held within it, I felt, some of the most momentous secrets of existence; but whether these would be baneful or gracious no one could tell. It was only after I had felt everything ready for my venture that I became tremulous as to the result. The energy of my nature, that had been absorbed in definite search for knowledge, and definite preparation, was now set free for brooding; and I passed daily in thought from hope to despair, from despair to hope. All the delight of outlook was now lost in the uncertainty. The few shreds of fact, that I had been able to pick out of hint and tradition and religious fear, seemed in the immediate presence of the mystery to be ridiculous and inadequate for any definite step. I became the prey of trepidation and self-upbraiding. Dreams of failure and disaster haunted me day and night. I thought over the stories of Ulysses, and Æneas, of Orpheus, and Dante as the prototypes of our enterprise; they had returned from the lower world; might not we too return from this nebulous hades? But alas! no consolation came from such tales; they were but the shadows of dreams; whilst we were about to face an impossible geographical problem in the midst of a sceptical scientific generation. How could I close my eyes to the insane hardihood of our venture?

Before I could recover from the truculent despotism of such thoughts, this sphinx of mist stared me in the face, and no retreat was left for us. Long and silent meditations and pacings of the deck had left me exhausted, and one breathless and moonless night I sank into a profound sleep that fettered me down long after sunrise. My officers could not waken me, and it was only at last sheer necessity that drove them to rouse me by main force. I stared about me dazed; but one word from them—“Riallaro”—set every nerve a-quiver. I rushed on deck and saw close on us a mist that blurred the whole eastern side of the sky. I stopped the engines and then reversed them. But on came the mist; on flew the ship into it. I looked over the bulwarks, and saw that we were borne along by a current like a mill-race. My men stared blankly at me. The engines had little effect in stemming the force of the water. And before we could think what to do the fog had closed in upon us, and we could not see above a ship’s length in any direction.

Away we rushed, whither we knew not, for the compass spun wildly back and forward on its pivot. Every piece of iron on the ship seemed to be turned into a magnet. And what was worse, my signals to the engine-room were unheeded; and on looking down, we found the engineers lying stiff upon its floor. I sent two down to take their place; and as soon as they had stopped the engines, they too succumbed and fell into a trance. Even the man at the wheel felt drowsy and incapable, only violent self-control and movement resisting the somnolence that seemed to creep over him. I remembered that the house in which he stood was iron, and that around there was more iron than anywhere else on the ship, except in the engine-room. I determined to husband my crew till I had understood our position, and was ready for a supreme effort at escape.

Amazement passed into terror, as there swept out of the mist and slowly passed us an old Spanish caravel, with rotting sails and yards, and shrivelled mummies in antique Spanish costume lying on the poop and at various points of the deck, in the attitude of sleep. We could have almost leapt on board this ship of death, so close was it to us. The horror paralysed us, and out of sight it vanished, taking giant proportions to it in the mist. Not many yards behind it moved another apparition of the past, a canoe with mummied natives fallen at the oar as in a trance. And still another in the ghostly funeral train, a Malay proa with motionless crew that seemed just fallen asleep, loomed spectral in our rear. Was this awful procession never to cease? Were we to fall into its line and sail on for ages? The last apparition was right in our wake, and had it moved nearer to us would have struck us on the stern; but it swept on after a brief interval aft. And then I had time to think that it was the impulse of the reversed engines that had thus brought us within sight of three different craft in this ghastly pageant.

The native superstition that nests in every seafarer’s heart began to leaven my crew and master even their courage and their loyalty to me. A curse seemed to rest on all that were drawn into this mist-bearing current. Whither it was to take us and what would be our fate weighed heavily on my own mind. A drowsy feeling crept over me as I stood and meditated; only when I moved about could I drive off the lethargy. If once we went to sleep, there was clearly no awaking. Action was needed; and yet how to act was a puzzle; in which direction to steer we knew not.

Out of my reverie was I startled by a new and appalling danger. There rose gigantic out of the mist upon our starboard bow a great ship as still and silent as the reef into which it was wedged. My men rushed with a wild cry to the bulwarks to fend off our yacht; but we grazed past her unhurt; and on her decks we saw the forms of English sailors stretched in sleep at least if not in death. The sight dispelled the creeping torpor from our minds. I saw that swift action must be taken. I sent a volunteer down into the engine-room; and, before the iron drowse overcame him, he managed to fasten two ropes, that we let down from the skylights, in such a way that we could start or stop the engines from the deck. We must get steering way upon the ship in order to avoid these reefs and their wrecks. We moved gently ahead and passed along the ghostly procession; every generation for centuries past, every seafaring race upon earth seemed to contribute one ship of death, or more, to this long funeral train; ghastly lay their crew, sometimes shrivelled by long ages of rest, often seeming to have just fallen asleep.

My newly stirred thought now grasped the meaning of this sepulchral pageant. The movement of these hurrying graves must be in a circle round some centre that lay on the starboard; round and round they had wheeled for years, many of them for centuries. If I were to fulfil the purpose of my voyage, our way lay to the right; for from the larboard side we had been sucked into this whirlpool.

I took the wheel myself and steered the ship across the floating funeral train. Once we grazed the bow of an East Indiaman; again we cut in two a war canoe of the islanders; out of the mist they swept appallingly upon us. Nor could we pause to see what became of the shattered craft. A half an hour and we sailed in freer waters; for several minutes not one circling apparition loomed through the mist; the set of the current grew less impetuous; and the fog seemed to rarefy. Before long a luminous warmth mingled with the nebulous atmosphere; we could see denser masses move and break above us; and at last a corona of light shone hazily through the gloom. Our hearts leapt within us; and yet we repressed the cry of joy that rose spontaneously to our lips, for we might only be passing across from one circle of eclipse to another. The glimmer of light grew into intermittent gleams and then broke into the resplendence of full day. The repressed cheer burst forth at the sight, and our comrades stirred in their trance at the sound. They rubbed their eyes and awoke. They marvelled at our jubilance, and thought that they had fainted but the minute before. It had been an hour or so after daybreak that we entered the circle of death and now the sun was westering towards its set. The long hours of fast and terror and anxious thought had exhausted those of us who had been awake. And after instructions to those who had but risen from sleep to stop the ship and watch, we succumbed to our fatigue.

We lay inert for almost twenty-four hours, and our comrades, after stopping the engines, had again fallen into their trance. It was more than mere exhaustion that held us so imprisoned in unconsciousness; it was the magnetic power of the ring of mist through which we had passed.

I learned afterwards the causes of this strange phenomenon, though for years it remained a mystery to me. Thousands of ages before a submerged continent had left an irregular oval like a broken ring close to the surface of the water; and this annular reef consisted chiefly of magnetic iron molten from the adjacent rocks by the heat of the great central volcano that formed the nucleus of the gigantic atoll; on this adamantine ellipse the coral insects had raised their lace-like ridge. Upon the north and south sides of it respectively two great currents impinged, one from the tropics and one from the antarctic regions. The warmer rush of waters was bent round the eastern side of the circular wall of iron, the colder broke round the western side; and instead of losing all their impetus, or neutralising each other, they ran parallel most of their watery orbit before they mingled; and this continuous proximity of hot and cold generated the circle of steam that sealed the waters of this mighty unknown atoll. Into the swift circle of death ships were sucked both from north and south, and the magnetic force of the iron foundations of the reef caught their life in the trammels of sleep and then of death. Never before had a power that could master these subtle forces entered the sphere of their influence. Steam had broken the seal of this annular exhalation. And good fortune had led me to steer our new craft through the only opening left unpiled by the little coral workers. A feeble branch of the elliptic current found its way into the quieter waters within; and upon this we chanced in our efforts to get clear of the ships of death that swept on in funeral procession.

So gentle was this current that I had not noticed it before I fell asleep; and when I awoke under the stroke of the noon’s rays I found that we were drifting rapidly upon a precipitous coast.

With the swiftness of alarm I wakened my men and sent her spinning astern at full speed. As we stood out from the land, I could see it was a low island or promontory, for the water beyond gleamed across it. And far in the distance were the dim outlines of two or three islands that broke the horizon line; and like an iceberg rose, at a still greater distance, the snow-capped peak of some great mountain that seemed companion to the clouds of fleece in the sky. Behind us lay the wall of mist through which we had broken; the eastern curve of the ellipse was too far off to show the slightest fleck of mist above the rim of sky.

CHAPTER III
LANDING

AT last, I was sure, we were about to know a people that had not blurred the features of primeval virtue. And yet I laughed at the thought. What was there in human nature to insure material advance without contamination of the spirit? How were the ages to whip the old Adam out of us but by new vices? Never had the world known exception. But here were lands fenced off from contagion for uncounted ages. Perchance the strange conditions had evolved a simpler civilisation; perchance the strange quarantine in human history had checked the influx of all common spiritual disease.

And there was a strange ethereal beauty misted over the parts that we could see. A thin veil, as of gossamer, withdrew and yet revealed the features of the scenery; and our imaginations were stirred to know the reality we could but dimly see. It excited us like a dream but half-remembered. Our natures tingled with curiosity and eagerness; and every nerve was braced to find our way beneath the veil.

We made for a beautiful landlocked harbour that seemed to promise shelter of the fairest; but it was only a mirage and faded into a long shelving beach of sand. We tried to anchor, but we could find no bottom. And as there was perfect calm we rowed towards the shore with a hawser, hoping to find some rock or tree on which to tie it. The sandy slope was but an illusion, too, and when we came to solid features we found there was nothing but a sheer wall of rock, rising to hundreds of feet above us, that laughed at our toil. Chance after chance, point of vantage after point of vantage led us on, eager, expectant, only to sicken us with illusion. It seemed to be the land of phantasms.

At length, weary with chilled eagerness, we saw the coast slope downwards to the mouth of a river. Our labours were about to be crowned with success. We found an anchorage and rowed towards the shore. But no landing-place offered; every piece of seeming solid shore turned out a quicksand when we touched it with our feet; only the watchful care of our comrades in the boat saved us from disaster. And the breakers on the bar of the river churned to white warned us off. We risked the entrance at last, and were capsized. I swam for a jutting rock that near the bank stemmed the outrunning current. Exhausted with the long effort I reached out and caught the weedy tangle that clung to its sides; I dragged myself up its jagged, wounding slope, and fell into a hollow that held me as I lay in swoon.

Annihilation thawed into consciousness of the blue sky in my eyes and of the flinty rock on which I was stretched. I rose, torn and bleeding, and looked out for my comrades. I could see only the keel of the boat floating out to sea; no yacht, no sign of life. In my hunger, exhaustion, and abandonment I could think of nothing but to make for land and the nearest habitations. I ate some of the shell-fish on the rock, stanched my wounds, and then threw myself into the inflowing tide. I easily breasted the current that divided my solitary crag from the bank, yet it bore me in its swiftness many miles inland before I could reach a landing-point; for broad spaces of glistening mud, in which I sank and floundered, divided me from the green fields beyond. The tide swept me towards a grassy point; I seized an overhanging branch of a tree and sprang upon the firm ground.

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.

CHAPTER IV
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.

I would have abandoned the task of mastering the various grammars and dictionaries but for the enthusiasm of my tutor. He believed that nothing ever existed so much worth learning—except what were called the rotten tongues. These were two languages that had been spoken centuries before by a race now despised, if not extinct; it was a hotly discussed question who were its descendants, and, in order to avoid the awkward necessity of seeming to follow the lead of a now debased people, the usual course was to deny their existence or their connection with the sacred or rotten tongues—Thribbaty and Slapyak. The great books of their religion were studied in these; for, although it was quite a different language in which they were supposed to have been originally communicated to men, the missionaries who had established the faith in this country had spoken in either Thribbaty or Slapyak, and the ritual had been for ages written in these. A great political revolution had changed all this generations before, and the holy writings were read and the prayers and public functions performed in the vernacular. But it had become the custom for orators, wits, and men of the world to adorn their speech with words and phrases and quotations from the rotten or interred tongues, though all their best wisdom and thought had been incorporated in the native literature, and the stage of civilisation and especially ethics that they represented had long been antiquated. They had come to be the most valued shibboleth of the privileged classes, the barrier which none but the most nimble and daring wits of the mob could overleap. On them, therefore, was based all education; to their acquisition were attached all the great prizes of state. On an apt quotation from them some of the greatest reputations had been founded. By a dissertation on some obscure point of their grammar the ablest statesmen had leapt into office. They were spoken of as the highroads to greatness and power.

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.

And something, indeed, was needed to overcome my aversion to the subtleties of their overspeech. Cautious as my pedagogue was in introducing me to new sections of it, I was almost daily stumbling into them. One day, thinking to put him into good humour, I had referred to him as a great scholar; I was startled to find him grow red as if at an insult; and he had to show me that the attitude I had been in (I had been leaning my forehead on my forefinger) had turned the word into “addlehead.” Another day I spoke of him as “well-bred,” with the same result; and he had to explain to me that, blowing my nose as I had been at the time, I had made the word mean “nincompoop.” And he had to initiate me into the whole by-play of the handkerchief; it took me days to master the infinite variety of meaning conveyed by its varied manipulation. By ladies it was not so frequently used; the scent-bottle took its place. And by its aid the gentler sex could woo, propose, and win with as great ease as the other and with far less indiscretion in word.

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.

I characterised the language that could be so double in its meaning as insincere and barbarous. My school-master argued that the two meanings were in each case naturally connected and that nothing so subtle or refined had ever existed; he hesitated and added, “except Thribbaty and Slapyak. It is the highest stage of social development to have a language so ambiguous and difficult that it takes the greatest wits to manage it. Look at the common people; they have but one meaning, the more concrete and physical, for each word; and the result is boorish and superficial.” I called his attention to the simple and direct signification of the words in the admired rotten tongues. He assured me that I was mistaken; great scholars had shown how there were depths beyond depths of reflected and refracted meaning in every word of the great Thribs and Slaps. “And was it natural that two peoples such as these, ignoring, as they did, nay despising, truthfulness as a virtue, should leave their language so unrefined, superficial, and straightforward as they seemed to untrained eyes? To tell the truth in clear and unambiguous language is the mark of barbarity. It is their very example that has led us to hide truth like a precious treasure in wrappings of subtlety. We shrink from exhibiting her to vulgar eyes. It would be but sacrilege. And our greatest investigators have shown a priori that nations like the Thribs and Slaps could not have existed without overspeech like ours to express the subtle shades of emotion and thought.”

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 (calling their land Aleofane, as they often explained to me, “the gem of 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.

CHAPTER V
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.

I had found an ideal people. This was my reflection as I discovered how deep was their reverence for truth—so candid were they, and yet so courteous. With my own crude knowledge of their language and conventions, I was ever stumbling into some too candid statement that my tutor advised me to withdraw. That was but a small check to my great joy in finding a people so sincere, so removed from all falsity. Wherever I went I found statues of Truth or of the heroes of truthfulness; there were temples and shrines specially devoted to Her worship; and the sacred books of the people were the embodiment of absolute truth concerning the universe. Some, if not most, of the historical statements in these and all of their representations of the laws and processes of nature had been challenged by latter-day investigators as contrary to fact. But the priests and theologians had amply shown how these writers had, with their eyes blinded and uninspired, taken the crude superficial sense and failed to penetrate beneath the veil under which the truth sheltered itself from the profane gaze. Daily they prelected on the hidden meaning of their inspired literature; but the people were so convinced of the greatness of truth and the safeness of the hands to which absolute truth had been intrusted, that few or none ever listened to these prelections, for if any went to hear them, they fell promptly asleep in order to show how unquestioning was their faith. It was one of the most convincing testimonies, I was assured, to the inspiration of their sacred books and the supremacy of Aleofanian worship—this child-like trust of the people; nay, I have heard priests declare that, as they read or spoke their defences of the absolute truth of their religion, the nasal confession of implicit faith that rang through the temple seemed to them like the trumpets of heaven proclaiming theirs the only true creed on earth. Ah! the devotion of these men to truth! Nothing could stand in its way. Their predecessors in former ages had tortured with the greatest ingenuity, disembowelled, roasted alive the deniers or questioners of the truth of their tenets, so much did they love that truth. And these guardians of it would have done the same but for the sweetness and nobleness of their courtesy and forbearance. They went so far as to hold that even the precepts, if not the spirit, of their absolute truth must be disregarded at times, when dealing with those who would throw doubt upon it. What was there to compensate for its loss in life, if once it were allowed to be questioned? “Truth first and all the world after” was a favourite saying. And they considered that they might violate all the temporal and local laws and forms of truth in order to preserve intact and undoubted truth absolute, seeing that they had it amongst them in written form. It was all for the good of the race and the creed, i.e., the ultimate good of the whole universe. Little wonder that the Aleofanians, whether dead or alive, could sleep at peace within the temple walls! “The truth must be believed in by all even at the cost of truth”; this was the motto of these noble guardians of the faith.

CHAPTER VI
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.

CHAPTER VII
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 assafœtida, 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.

CHAPTER VIII
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” (so they called their intoxicating spirit) “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 scarabæan 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!

The chemist fulfilled the same important function for the poorer classes. He sold the pyrannidee that the government factories made; but he was restricted to using it for the cure of disease and the assuagement of pain. And most of the grown-up population had a disease to be cured and a pain to be assuaged every day, so sorely smitten were they by fate, so long-suffering were they. It was one of the sights of the city to see the kolako or the warehouses of the chemists at night; crowds pressed into them by one door with agony depicted on their faces, whilst out from the other sauntered patient after patient with a wandering, nerveless smile upon his face, a jaunty, loose-gaited fashion of throwing his limbs, and a whiff of pyrannidee in his breath; for if it was not the medicine itself it was the medium of it, and he had left his pain behind him in the store. Little wonder that the chemist was a man of such power in Aleofane; he was generally of strong build and swaggering gait and showed his masterfulness in every gesture; for he had often severe muscular duties to perform; it seems that some of his patients of the most abandoned and criminal classes, after being cured of their pain or sickness, refused to leave his warehouse; seized by an evil spirit, I was told, they would foam at the mouth, kick, and bite; and it took great strength to tie them hand and foot and eject them. Some of my friends in the marble city mourned over this possession by wandering demons of the air; but they said it was only the degraded whose bodies they entered.

The profession was one of the most lucrative in Aleofane, for one of its essentials was great physical strength, and this was rarely to be found in the gilded classes. I could pick out chemists in a crowd by their brawny frame, bold gait, and short, well-knit stature. Their faces were as a rule strong and corrugated with muscle and tense self-control; they looked with an open and almost arrogant light in their eyes. Most of them, I was told, were descendants of a few survivors from a wreck on the coast, and there was occasionally a lurking fear that, with their great influence over the lower part of the city, their strong will, and their powerful squat frame, they might seize the reins of government; but this was prevented by dividing their interests and sowing dissensions and jealousies amongst them; the very largeness of the incomes they made lowered their ambitions towards money-making; and this made them fly asunder like globules of quicksilver.

But the contrast between them and the rest of the upper classes in physical appearance was very striking. The Aleofanians proper stooped in the shoulders of their long, thin bodies like bulrushes before the wind; not for weight of the head they bore; for it was small though well proportioned, and by various fashions and contrivances they managed to convey a false impression of its size; of their eyes it was impossible to make out the shape or colour; for they peeped through a thin slit between the eyelids, doubtless afraid of the glare of the sun; their nose ran like a sharp promontory down towards the middle of their upper lip, as if to help in covering the enormous aperture of the mouth and its thick, sensuous lips; these last I could see in the women, but the men concealed them by all the hair they could grow on their long-drawn faces; and their hair inclined as a rule to red. Their gait formed perhaps the deepest contrast to that of the chemists; they walked like ghosts, with a feline, scarcely perceptible footfall; and nothing could take them unawares or startle them out of it; yet ever and again some of them would pull themselves up and put on a bustling gait and bluff demeanour that completely belied their personal appearance; it was like a cat masquerading as a lion.

But they conducted themselves with great dignity in all the relations of their life. They would have no part in the gross candour of the chemists. Their whole demeanour and language were ordered with full regard to decency and decorum. They shrank with horror from lewdness and intrigue, and refused to acknowledge the existence of libertines amongst them. I never heard so much solemn and devout feeling expressed as on this topic; and at the corner of every street the attention of the passer-by was arrested by placards quoting in huge letters from their sacred books the noblest maxims on the sweetness of a chaste life. I could find no one to confess that there was such a thing in the island as a man who was libidinous, but every girl who broke this rule of morality was thrust forth from house and home. Scores of such outcasts I saw flaunting in brilliant robes along the streets. They had all the appearance of living in great luxury. But I was assured they were supported by secret funds sent by the inhabitants of a vicious island close at hand. And I could believe it. For no one ever spoke to them, and ladies as they passed drew their skirts in, whilst gentlemen after brushing past them would rub their coatsleeves as if from contamination. It was only the great chastity of the people that permitted these creatures to remain in their island. Nothing could surpass the horror and loathing which the Aleofanians exhibited towards them. It was painful indeed to see the agony the notables had to endure in suffering them to remain.

How devoted they were to charity! It was, I felt, their life, their all. They refused to do half the mischief that there was opportunity of doing to others. Every moment, every energy, was spent in restricting it to this fraction. So much destructive force was latent in them, so much destructive opportunity lay to hand, that they might have annihilated the reputation and peace of mind of all their fellow-citizens. How proud they were of their fraternal love in sowing only a few slanders and dissensions per day, and these, too, only to discipline the haughty and too fortunate, or to keep their own faculties from rusting! It was the same with their benevolence; nothing could surpass the nobleness and care with which they dispensed it. Half their revenues they gave away, but not in reckless alms; they were too wise and self-controlling for that; they knew too much of the economic laws of life, and respected them too well to violate even the least of them. So they never forgot discipline in giving to those who needed; they carefully exacted as much work from them as would pay the principal, and, lest the kindness should lapse from memory and leave no impression on the life and conduct, half as much again. To what infinite trouble they put themselves to see that these laws of nature should never be outraged by them! Great troops of the lower classes were fed and clothed and cared for by each of them for years, whilst they were trying to repay those noble eleemosynary gifts, and satisfying the laws of economics.

Nor must it be held an inconsistency in them that they thought money the root of all evil as against those very laws. They despised it and hated it. And lest it should do to their neighbours the harm for which they feared it and loathed it, they gathered as much of it into their hands as they could. “They swallowed the devil” again, according to their own proverbial phrase, as the best means of preventing the mischief he might do to others. It was one of the most altruistic of their principles, they considered, this accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, lest the many should suffer. They could hedge the monster round and narrow his sphere of operations. And every provision had been made by the state for centuries that he should not approach the masses with his foul influence. It was the gilded classes of the marble city that could alone withstand the evils he worked, and amongst them therefore was he imprisoned. They were, so to speak, the turnkeys of this vampire of commercial races; and in their duties they were all vigilant lest he should escape and work irremediable havoc amongst the rest of the nation.

CHAPTER IX
THE ORGANISATION OF REPUTE

THESE items of information concerning the virtues of the race I learned not so much from the dwellers in the marble city themselves—they were too modest for that—as from public prints and the placards on hoardings and in public places. From the same sources I gathered innumerable details about the life of the monarch and the nobles and the wealthiest citizens, and these were always to their credit. Had I been as much in the habit of frequenting their temples or consulting the physicians as the gilded were, I would clearly have gathered still more, for I never heard a sermon or prayer or piece of medical advice in Aleofane but it contained or was accompanied by an elaborate eulogy of some one or more of the marble citizens besides a general exaltation of all of them.

I was also struck with the singular unobtrusiveness and even modesty of their public men; the more they were called for at public meetings, the less frequently they appeared; the more they were eulogised and fêted, the less eager did they seem to be spoken of. Their names were blazoned abroad in newspapers and on hoardings, yet they shrank from showing themselves. It was a game of hide-and-seek between them and the people. Crowds shouted for them; they ran off. Banquets and processions were held in their honour; they were the only men that withdrew from sight.

After a time I noticed that it was only a certain round of names that was kept persistently before the public. Occasionally a new one appeared and another vanished. But with them all, as long as they were in the line, it was a sort of file-firing of reputation signals.

I was at last eager to know what it meant, for it differed from any other social phenomenon I had ever observed. I soon discovered the secret of it. There was a department of state called the Bureau of Fame. At one time reputation had been allowed to look after itself, although men valued it even more than money. Private enterprise traded in it and juggled with it and made a monopoly of its growth, although it should have moved as freely as the air or water. For a time it had been in the hands of vendors of quack medicines and soaps; there were none so well known throughout the nation as they; there were none whose names would carry so much weight with the uneducated people. Simmity, the proprietor of a popular purgative, Hones, who owned the most widely advertised soap, and Bulunu, who sold the strongest kooannoo, might have divided the monarchy amongst them, had they been able to come to an agreement, and thought it worth while to rouse and lead the mob for such a mere bauble; as it was they were both richer and more famous than the king; and what did they require? Their descendants were now the most powerful nobles in the land.

The next stage in the organisation of fame was to grant to a company the monopoly of all advertising opportunities in the realm. It had long been a scandal that men with little brains, less conscience, and still less education had got their names fixed in the popular mind more firmly and more widely than the ablest or wealthiest or noblest. It needed little persuasion then on the part of the company to precipitate the grant. And it set itself at once to organise all the methods it could invent for increasing reputation. It hired the best poets and prose writers in the kingdom; its artists were the most talented painters and draughtsmen; whenever any boys or girls showed musical talent, it bound them to it by pecuniary and other chains; every demagogue with power of lung and command over words, every entertainer who could amuse the people, every jester who could make them laugh, every contriver of ingenious methods of attracting attention it had in its pay and ready at its beck. The newspapers and journals with their writers took instructions from it; for they knew there was no such good paymaster to be found. It had emissaries and claqueurs through all grades of the nation, mingling with their society, leading their thoughts, and touching their emotions.

A man could go into its office and get a quotation for any kind or extent of fame. He could have as little as a sixpenny-worth, a tanna, it was called; this consisted in a whisper set agoing in his favour within his own private circle. If he wished his name spread in a grade or locality that knew nothing of him, it would cost him a pownee, about ten pounds in our money, per month; for there was ever a time-element in these bargains. The price of keeping up a reputation increased till it was firmly established; then it lessened till the man passed his vigour of faculty; after the grand climacteric it increased again, but more gradually than before; for the mystery of retirement and the tradition of a reputation passing into the mouths of a second generation gave a man’s story almost the vogue of a myth, and thus made it easier for the company to keep up the name. On death and for a week after, its charges were lower, as the funeral and obituary notices and the dark dresses and long faces of the relatives kept the memory green for about that length of time and relieved the servants of fame of much of their onerous duty. Thereafter the price rose till at a hundred years after death it became enormous, and at a thousand it became fabulous. Only one had ever had fortune large enough to buy up his fame for that posthumous period; and I still heard his name on all sides although he had been dead for twelve hundred years. The company had made large profits out of this bargain; for the uniqueness of the transaction had made the name a traditional topic in hours of leisure and a commonplace in literature; the natural channels of fame had become its unpaid auxiliaries.

Every kind of reputation had its own price per day or month or year, though the price varied from time to time according to the rise or fall of a particular virtue or line of life in public estimation. One item in the old price-list that amazed me was the money value of a reputation for truthfulness; it was by far the most costly, and next to it came the reputation for generosity, and that for purity of life. Surely it should have been easy to acquire the name of truthful or generous or pure in a community that paid such devotion to these virtues, and cultivated them so much. But, it was explained, there was of course greater competition for fame in them; men were especially eager to gain it, for it gave them full return even in money. It struck me that, where truth and charity and chastity were so widespread, it should have been very easy to get and keep the name for them; high charges meant special rarity in the commodity or special difficulty in obtaining it; and either seemed to argue widespread scepticism as to the possession of these virtues. But I was silenced with the argument that, where all or most had a virtue, it was difficult to win a reputation for special excellence in it.

The charges for fame in each of the virtues varied too with the employment and social grade. A journalist had to pay one hundred times more than a peasant or artisan for the reputation of truthfulness. The poet and preacher and vendor of quack medicines had to pay only one half as much as a newspaper-man for it; for, it was told me, they with their clients were perfectly well aware that their profession was to deal in fiction, and they tried in unprofessional life to get clear of the taint of their trade, and took delight in blurting out the most candid truths. The highest price for reputed sobriety was demanded of the temperance reformer and the lecturer on the evils of drunkenness. The poor man and the spendthrift were charged next to nothing for the name of generous; the wealthy had to pay for the same, enormous sums in proportion to their wealth and social position. The reputation for wit was one of their cheapest commodities, being only a little higher than that for being not a bad sort of a fellow and that for being good but dull. And yet it was one of the dearest for ambitious young conversationalists and writers and orators and men of the world. It was almost as dear as a reputation for humour when professional jesters wished to buy it. The price-list indeed was one of the most striking comments on the past social history of the people.

What led to the overthrow of this strange company was a very natural extension of their business. They opened a branch for the destruction of fame, or, as they called it, for negative reputation. They found that they had continual demands made for this natural complement to their other function. At last they yielded to the pressure, and tried to use their old staff in the new service; but it was found that it destroyed their eulogistic talents; they rapidly developed into such accomplished slanderers and backbiters and defamers that they found it difficult to say a word in favour of anyone. In order to save the best of their old employees, the company had to hire a new set for the new business. They had intended to keep it an absolutely secret service. But, as the story of the new employment leaked out, their offices were daily mobbed by applicants for posts. They were of all sorts and sizes; but those who brought the most glowing testimonials to their capacity as traducers were tall and lank, long-nosed and large-mouthed, red-haired and small-skulled—as fine a crowd of Judases, it was said, as could have been picked out of living creatures. It was impossible to hire them all; half the nation would have been in the pay of the company. But those whom they rejected set themselves so vigorously to traducing the company that a yell of execration rose against it.

Such an outcry might have been ignored, but that their other department, which had been in full working order for several generations, had excited the hostility of many of the most respectable families. For the passion for posthumous fame had eaten into their fortunes. Men of wealth had taken the money that they should have left to their relatives and posterity, and willed it to the company in the purchase of as much immortality as it would buy. Some of the noblest houses were impoverished by this itch for keeping a name alive. And still more would have been reduced to poverty, but that they had a large pecuniary interest in the business, or had most of their members salaried in its employ.

It had come to be a great scandal and had roused the attention of the state; added to the outcry of the disappointed Judases, this supplied the opportunity for the reformers. And, on looking into the matter, they found that the company was growing too powerful for any government to stand up against it. It was absorbing most of the wealth and all the real influence over the Aleofanians. It had such vast and disciplined forces as no nation could bring into the field. The longing for reputation or fame had made one half the people its clients, and the necessities of fortune and the love of slander had made the other half into its servants. The king’s ministers had to move with great caution, for they would have to meet all the talking, puffing, amusing, slandering power of the race organised into a subtle impalpable phalanx; the discipline was more imperturbable than that of the strongest army; there was no breaking the ranks whilst the influence penetrated everywhere like an atmosphere. In fact for generations they had not dared to move against their own creation. And even now that there was a strong set of the current of public opinion against it, its abolition could be brought about only by a secret and sudden blow. They met in dark conclave and took their measures without any item of the secret oozing out. The company was caught unawares and surrendered. Its business was appropriated and placed under the administration of a new department. A royal proclamation, accepting all its servants as employees of the new bureau, and all its obligations as state obligations, prevented panic; and the transference was made without the slightest public commotion.

The revolutionary measure left the directors of the company wealthy but powerless. And it gave to the government a prestige no ministry had ever had. The Bureau of Fame became a tower of strength that grew at last impregnable; and the direction of it was the main object of a statesman’s ambition. It gave him the subtlest of influences over the desires of men. Before him even the greatest and proudest cringed; for he could make or annihilate that upon which their existence hung. They lived in the breath of others; to have all speak ill of them or, still worse, speak nothing of them was more bitter than death. What were wealth, huge estates, great fortune, unlimited power over luxuries, compared with the ballooning of their name whilst they lived and the surety that it would still be raised aloft when they were dead? Their present heaven consisted in the favouring winds of fame; the salvation of their souls lay in immortal reputation. One of their philosophers indeed had with much applause defined the soul as the breath not of a man’s own body, but of his neighbours and his public. To be no more talked of was real death. The disanimation of the body was not the true end of life; many died long before that; whilst some few outlived the dissolution of the dust.

CHAPTER X
THE CHURCH AND JOURNALISM

THE Bureau of Fame had come to be the real shrine of religion. For it had the power of heaven and hell beyond as well as on this side of the grave. And one of the most significant changes in the government of Aleofane in recent times had been the amalgamation of the ministry of public worship with the department of fame. The church had of course from the earliest times been a state institution; and in spite of new-fangled philosophers was likely to continue so. For how could so subtle a force in human nature as religion be allowed to straggle lawlessly throughout a nation? Above all things it needed the most skilful piloting. A church apart from the state, an independent power, meant the spirit against the body, a divorce unnatural, if not monstrous. This was the philosophy of the position. And so convinced of it were the rulers that they allowed less independence of action in the ecclesiastical than in any other department. The head of the church was a minister responsible to the government, and they thought it illogical and feeble to let such an organisation legislate for itself. It was according to nature, it was the true primitive law, that the state and the church should be completely one. The idea of their separation was the result of degeneracy from the golden age. And what anarchy would ensue from an attempt to realise such a scheme or rather no scheme!

To speak of the separation of church and state in Aleofane was to speak of human life without breath, of the noon sky without the sun. The religion had grown to be the inner spirit of government. Never had there existed so religious a state. It could accomplish nothing except through its ecclesiastical organisation. It could affect the spirits of all the nation in any direction it pleased. It is true the people jealously guarded the traditional creed. But by gradual and impalpable change in the teachings of the priests or in the ceremonies the national mind could be bent in any way to suit the governors.

One of the first and most effective changes in the spiritual scheme of the state had been the gradual degradation of all the great posts in the church. The princely salaries attached to them were from tenure to tenure reduced till at last the chief ecclesiastical officers had to rely on charity for subsistence. The great spiritual influence that obstinately clung to them drew occasionally men of rank and ability. But all the common priesthoods fell so low in estimation that at last the state had to fill them with the milder type of higher-class criminals. No one would enter voluntarily into what was practically mental slavery to the government of the time. So, if any marble citizen fell into habitual and transparent falsehood, or failed before the eyes of all in some dishonest scheme, or let his fortune imperceptibly leak away and ceased to conceal the financial minus on which he luxuriously lived, he was promptly given the choice of the church or journalism; though for that matter the two had been for centuries amalgamated; they were but two branches of ecclesiastical business.

For it would have been foolish on the part of so successful a government to stop one intellectual leak in the nation and leave a wider one unguarded. It had been always a matter of course that those who could teach or influence the people with any talent should be the servants of the state. It came about, therefore, that, as a literature developed, the church was but journalism through speech and ceremony, journalism was but the church in writing. They were but two phases of the same function of the state. And the governors laughed as I told them of the position of affairs in Europe, where the state was supposed to rule the church, but had allowed the press complete independence. And they told me as a close analogy the story of one of their citizens who had soon drifted into idiocy; a bird of great beauty had flown into his house, and he resolved to catch it; and to make sure of it he planted a ring of servants all round the house and shut his doors and locked them, and opened his windows wide. For some time afterwards, if any one of them met me, he would with a twinkle of the eye ask me whether the governments of “Yullup” had ever caught their bird.

There was, I inwardly confessed, a logical thoroughness about leashing in the service of the state the twin spiritual powers of the church and the press. But I was pained in my European vanity to find the most cherished features of our modern civilisation so productive of mirth. They showed me that the only two logical positions were complete independence of both the great spiritual powers or complete control of both; nothing could justify the release of one and the bondage of the other.

As retaliation for their laughter at our civilisation and its hard-won fruits I smiled at their employment of criminals as priests and journalists, and asked them how they could expect to have religion well taught or truth well disseminated by such characters. They were not to be beaten—those subtle reasoners; I felt this in the smile of superiority with which they met mine. They asked me how I could expect priests who were by their positions and incomes independent of the state, and bound only by their own caprices or by those of the locality or circle to which they ministered, to teach the creed of the nation aright? To secure their salaries or to win reputation, they would launch into originalities, nay, into absurdities: they would pander to the predominant passions of their flocks, whilst keeping up the appearance of teaching the creed. The very contradictoriness of human nature would drive them in different directions from one another. With the journalists this would be still more the case, bound as they would be by no definite creed or set of rules or kind of emotions. How could they be expected to spread truth when there was no guide or master for them, no book of truth to appeal to? Nothing could be so productive of mental chaos as a class of men who without training or guidance or common consent or a common set of beliefs or principles should be allowed to pour their vagaries into the minds of the people. Would the nation ever advance, or keep from degeneracy, if these were to be its daily teachers, men who would pander to the commonest of popular passions and tastes, heedless of right or truth or even policy?

And when the state had both religion and journalism in its hands, how was it to secure the dissemination of what it considered absolute truth except by complete abeyance of the wills and characters of the disseminators? Centuries ago they had had a church whose priesthood was filled by men of the purest life and highest principle and then no one knew what the creed was; it was torn into shreds; and over its remains the preachers and theologians trampled like wild colts; there were a hundred schools and sects within the church, and each claimed for itself divine authority and divine truth; the people could find no guidance in faith or in morality; nor dare the state interfere with the extreme preachings or practices of any division, or even of any individual priest, for his followers, seeing the nobleness of his life and believing therefore that he had reached ultimate truth, would gladly die at the stake for him; and the high-salaried ecclesiastics having once got into their posts lived a free life without regard for God or man or government; they became fountains of immorality and discontent; by their example on the one hand and their luxury on the other, the spiritual head of the church was powerless; he dared not interfere with the privileges of his subordinates or even their beliefs; everything was indeed chaos, and that a chaos of religious enthusiasm.

It was the birth and growth of journalism that taught the state the true cure for such a diseased condition. Some of the most abandoned but able men in the nation had sunk so low that no one would trust them; in order to get something to live on they were driven to take advantage of an invention that had been recently made; the use of free types had cheapened printing, and with this and some other means of cheaply multiplying written productions, they determined to sell at a price sheets that would amuse the people. They were successful; and the more they invented lies and filled their sheets with fiction, the more lucrative it became. All the most accomplished liars of the nation crowded into it, and it was generally spoken of as the new profession of lying for the amusement of the people. The fortunes that had begun to be gained in it and the various attacks made upon men in authority called the attention of the ministry to the nascent power. And they were only just in time; a few more years and it would have been too strong for any state to cope with. They manipulated it with caution; they bought up the poorest and most unscrupulous of the journalists into what was practically lifelong servitude to the state, and turned the whole force of their talents in fabricating untruth against the few that had made fortunes in the trade; it was not long before these latter were ruined and had to sell their services to the government. But after a time it was found that the ablest of the state journalists grew vain of their powers and showed signs of striking out for themselves. Wages was not a strong enough lien over the talents of men who had grown conscious of their hold on the people. The trade was therefore proclaimed a state monopoly, and all the conceited journalists were weeded out; and into their places were put the most capable of the marble criminals who had been condemned to state servitude for life. It was made one of the rewards of good behaviour amongst convicts; for as journalists they were allowed to live in some degree of luxury; they had full scope for their craving for falsehood and dishonesty, and made of these a fine art. The only condition they had to fulfil was obedience to orders; all their productions were based on ideas supplied to them by the department and had to undergo criticism or revision by its officers. The state had them absolutely in its power; and yet the average of literary talent amongst them was far higher than when journalism had been free and independent; in fact a literature of some power, a pure state literature, had resulted. It was universally acknowledged that genius is essentially immoral on one or more rules of the moral code and sometimes on all; it has ever a vein of eccentricity or even madness in it that makes it leap over the pales of convention or principle or law; and hence in previous ages it had always been a pariah. At its first escapade it was now hurried into the fetters of the state, and was soon glad to accept the comparative freedom of state journalism. Thus the government had gathered into its service the greatest imaginations of the people, and through them could mould the nation to what purpose it would.

The success of this conquest of a new-born power and domestication of the wild spirits of the race pointed out the true secret for remedying the evils of religion and the church. Eccentricity was rampant in them; they were ever producing discontent and riot and rebellion; they were the homes of all that threatened the existence of the state. And yet the state dared not remove the offending priests, lest it should inflame the disloyalty of the people who followed them. The most astute of their statesmen saw the lesson of the conquest of journalism and applied it. He gradually reduced the salaries of the clergy, basing the policy chiefly on the ground that those who served God should be humble and free from the temptations of luxury; another and minor reason was that during a time of scarcity and depression economy was needed in the departments of the state. His successors carried out his craft with as much system and success, and, when the lower clergy had been reduced to a pittance, crusaded through the journals against the princes of the church and their luxury. By this time the marble citizens had ceased to send their children into the ordinary priesthoods, which gave no more the chance of a career, and all the clergy now belonged to the poorer classes. The higher posts were in the gift of the government; and it stripped them one by one of their great revenues and bestowed them thus lowered upon the common priests who showed themselves obsequious and obedient. And at last the very headship of the church was surrendered by the aristocracy, when it had lost its enormous salary and influence. The state at once created a department of public worship to absorb its functions. But, without journalism in its hands, it would never have been able to accomplish so complete a revolution; against it and its power over the people the church dignitaries were pithless; whilst the common clergy were too much torn by sectarian opinions to offer a united front. The later steps of this clever statecraft were easy and rapid.

But religion was not yet turned to its final purpose. Even the poor priests had their eccentricities, and broke away from state leading-strings. The unity of church and government was merely nominal, if this could occur. To make any function of the state real, perfect discipline is needed. A national army would succumb to the first foe, if regiments of it, or individual generals, were to follow their own caprice. And a national church, if it is to be a true engine of the state, has still more need of exceptionless discipline, inasmuch as it has to master the spirits of men.

Generation after generation of Aleofanian statesmen turned their best energies to this problem. Experiment after experiment was tried, but none succeeded till the policy of government journalism was adopted. Criminals with a turn for piety—and very few were without it—were offered the choice of incarceration for life or careers as priests. Already the people had been inoculated by the journals with the belief that the stream of divine unction had poured down through the ages quite irrespective of the channels along which it flowed; it would have been a hard thing indeed if the evil characters and lives of so many priests in the past had stopped their transmission of the favour of heaven to their flocks; long ago would true religion have failed them had it depended on the officiating ministers of the deity; it would have shown limitation of God’s omnipotence if He had been supposed unable to send His inspiration through any person or character. The journalists had indeed found it easy to press home this doctrine, for the great church dignitaries, being often men of evil life, had been forced to inculcate it for many ages, and, being not seldom feeble in intellect, had reduced their duties down to the mere performance of ceremonies and the reading of prayers and portions of the sacred books. It was only amongst the poorest sectaries that the clergy had to use their brains in the way of reasoning out abstract doctrine into practical precept, or in rousing their flocks to religious fervour. Their light it was easy to extinguish or ignore. And all the marble city and its society readily accepted the change from the dull, uninterested performances of the old dignitaries to the smart elocution and brilliant histrionic attainments of the criminals. The state chose these not only for their piety, a common and superabundant commodity amongst them, but for their grace of speech and action, and sent them for several years to a great dramatic college, where every one of the arts of the stage was taught to perfection.

The long-talked-of reamalgamation of the theatre and the church was at last silently accomplished. What was the use of paying to see a poor performance in the theatre or concert-room, when they could enter any church for nothing and see a far more brilliant ceremonial enacted, and hear far more talented elocution? The minister of public worship encouraged by rewards the clever rogues, whom he had selected for the church, to invent new and more interesting modes of conducting the services, and new and more fascinating ways of chaining the attention of a crowd. The dramatic companies and public entertainers had to close their doors and seek employment under the state, and especially in the Bureau of Fame. The old revenues of the church were spent on magnificent choirs and instrumental bands, on the training of the musical talent of the nation for its services, as well as on the training of the criminals for its priesthood. As a rule the best histrionic ability straggled off into prison, for it delighted in outraging first convention and then law; it had a great taste, so my guide informed me, for extravagance and show, and soon developed a tendency to lying and hypocrisy. And such a truthful and sincere people had elaborate laws, of course, for the punishment and constraint of such vices. Thus the state got all the actor-talent of the marble city into its power. But it had to hire the musical talents, for they were too vain to have any vice but quarrelling; they had to be caught by other nets, the nets of gain; it secured from childhood all who had fine voices or great and original talent for melodious composition, or the management of musical instruments, and it trained them elaborately for the service of the church; the only certain employer was the state, and thus it had a monopoly of everything musical in the nation.

Elaborate and attractive though the church services in the hands of the state had grown, they still repelled or sent to sleep a considerable proportion of the worshippers; for the prelections and sermons had been left unreformed; they were as old and tedious and uninteresting as they had been centuries before in the hands of the incapable scions of the marble citizens. A reforming statesman had recently turned his attention to this defect; he had founded a great college of oratory, and selected the best of the cultivated and able criminals to be trained there. It was found an easier task than had been anticipated. For great gifts of speech and great powers of moralising were found to run frequently with immoral and criminal tendencies. And now it was remembered that, under the freer régime of an olden time, it had been men of the loosest life who had gained greatest influence over the people and the popular assemblies; popular orator and scoundrel had in the older language been synonymous terms; whilst even orator had had a flavour of dishonesty and untruthfulness, if not libertinism, about it. So the prison officials saw that it was generally the most untrustworthy of their wards who were most persuasive in speech, and had to be isolated lest they should incite to riots and rebellions.

Thus it was found necessary to choose all the future preachers of the church from the criminals classified as dangerous. But once their passion for oratory was allowed a safety-valve, once they began their training in the college, they became comparatively harmless; provided nothing was left in their way to steal, and no one sufficiently off his guard for them to deceive or corrupt. When I arrived in Aleofane, the first batch of oratorical criminals was being draughted into the service of the church. And I found great commotion amongst the older worshippers against the innovation; they complained that they and their ancestors had furnished their sections in the churches as dormitories; and now they claimed damages from the state as this expenditure had been rendered useless; just as the music had induced somnolence, they were roused by the bellowing appeals of these loud-lunged miscreants to conscience and the loftiest principles of morality; their ancestors had not thus been disturbed, nor were they going to be; they removed to the older-fashioned churches where the droning old sermonisers still buzzed; there they would have peace on holy days to rest; they would be gone to the final sleep before the ranting crowd had followed them. The younger set of worshippers were delighted at the change; for they listened now to lively declamation and vivid and picturesque oratory. Nothing could surpass the electric effect of some of those preachers on their audiences; you could hear strong men weep, and women that were usually marvels of silence cry out in wild ecstasy; thousands would sway as one soul to the passion of the speaker, or again a ripple of laughter would freshen over the throng, to be followed by a shadow of pathos like a summer cloud over corn-fields. I have seen men and women who had entered the building with smiling faces fall prostrate on the marble floors in an agony of repentance. It was one of their greatest luxuries in religion to have those strong emotions. They came to the church purposely to be moved out of their sluggish routine of feeling; and, having suffered the wild ecstasy, they had all the enjoyment of convalescence from the spiritual stroke of paralysis. The hysterical passions that were often lit by the flame of church oratory were like strong drink to them amid the level conventions of their daily life.

Nor did the state permit any preacher to pall upon his audience. As soon as the enthusiasm began to slacken, he was removed to another locality and church, and another brawny young orator fresh from the collegiate hulks was launched on his career of appeal to the emotions. The only danger was that in abandoning himself to the stream of his eloquence he might depart too far from the written sermon that had been revised by the state critics and utter something that might clash with state formulæ. But there were always in his audience guardians who kept their eye on him and by a threatening look pulled him up. And if he persisted, his promising career was broken off, for a time at least. The fear of this was generally sufficient to deter these oratorical and pious criminals from indulging in unlawful flights. For it was a terrible punishment for those who had the talent of persuasive talk to be shut up and have their speech throttled for ever in silent and repulsive cells. Indeed it was whispered that there had been attempts at suicide on the part of some budding orators who had so far transgressed as to be condemned to lifelong absence from the rostrum; whilst some who could not get their oratorical passions slaked or even recognised have been known to commit a serious crime and then stir up disturbance in prison in order to get scope for their power of influencing the emotions of others.

And it was marvellous to see the fervour of these convict-priests; they were most eloquent and convincing on the evils of the vice to which they were most addicted; they knew its subtlety and its fascinations; they could describe with the most picturesque realism its insidious progress and its resultant misery; they would enact the scenes of its various stages and phases with a truth and histrionic power that made the worshippers shudder. And then the appeals they made to repentance were really addressed to their own ideal selves; and so fervid and sincere were they, so full of pathos and melting prayer, that none could resist. I have heard a vast crowd of Aleofanians of the most righteous lives cry out in response, as if they had been the most abandoned of sinners.

What could not the state do with its people, when it had command of such channels into their very hearts! Whatever new purpose it had it subtly introduced into the sermons and church services, either didactically or dramatically; songs and hymns and ceremonies were manufactured for it; gorgeous spectacles were invented and drew crowds to the churches for months. But never was the purpose allowed to show itself obtrusively; it penetrated the spirit of these like a delicate perfume. And the people could not help being fascinated by it, so subtly did it ally itself with all the sweetest anodynes of care and pain and all the most tempting delights of the senses. Sweet savours, delicious perfumes, melodious sounds, the most artistic and beautiful sights soon made the new state policy the very atmosphere of the inner shrine of memory. And the priests and church orators touched the springs of emotion with hidden but concrete presentments of it; they were handsomely rewarded for every new and successful method they invented of getting it interwoven with the most popular feelings and the most sacred passions and memories.

But there was an ecclesiastical engine of state that promised to be more effective than any of these. For ages there had been in the church an institution that had somewhat fallen into neglect except with morbid women of the upper classes. They were accustomed to go at stated times into a box like a horse-stall and whisper the secrets that burdened them into an aperture like an ear; from this the sound passed by a tube into the secret chamber of the priests of the church; and there came back to the ear of the client spiritual advice that would console her in her difficulties or help her out of them. Neither priest nor worshipper was supposed to see or know the other; the act and communication were purely impersonal.

This custom the state revived and expanded, after it had begun to see what a powerful engine the church could be made. And it grafted it on to one of its few failures. When it had discovered how useful it might make criminals, one of its most ingenious and ambitious ministers determined to annex it to the medical profession. He saw its subtle and secret power in detail, and thought that, if he could weld this into a unity and make it an engine of state, it would be almost omnipotent; for the physician had complete command of his patients, and could make them believe what he would. He had their spirits and imaginations at a time when, at the lowest ebb of life’s tide, they were most the prey of superstition. Whether hypochondriac or really sick, they were at his mercy, and what he prescribed or even loosely remarked sank deeply into them. Was not this the very vantage the state needed for riveting its chains upon the spirits of its subjects? The invalid periods of a man’s life, and still more those of a woman’s, and the invalid members of a household, are the very fulcra of the levers of existence. Such points of spiritual omnipotence should not be in the hands of private bunglers. The only thing that kept the physicians from ruling the nation was their mutual jealousy and perpetual disunion.

As a fact it was the state that supported the colleges of medicine and guaranteed the ability of the licentiates sent out by them. What could be easier than to go a step farther and make the physicians servants of the state? Some of the most astute convicts who had tastes in that direction were selected and trained in the full course of the medical schools, and sent out to practise with instructions to use their opportunities for the state. But there could be no check upon their proceedings as there was over the convict-priests. They revelled in doing evil, and a most obnoxious practice grew up amongst them. It was soon noticed that they became most luxurious in their style of living, and at last the death of several of their patients along with a new codicil to their wills bequeathing to the convict-doctor large legacies aroused suspicion and confirmed the long-unheeded outcry that the professional physicians had raised against them. It was found on close inquiry that they had milked their richest patients of most of their fortune, and the more alert and obstinate of them they had drugged into subservience to their will and then given them euthanasia. No custom could live in the midst of the odium that this revelation stirred. And the great statesman had to swallow his ingenious invention and policy.

But he was not content to remain passive under this recoil. He adapted his contrivance to the ecclesiastical organisation of the state, and turned his convict-physicians into confessors. They had been chosen to some extent for their soft, low voices, their refined and feminine manners, and their insinuating and confidential air. A little more training in the arts of sophistry and in the subtle distinctions and precepts of theology would fit them exactly to be spiritual advisers in the church. To warn them from the use of their posts for purposes of extortion, their brethren who had gone astray in medicine were severely punished. And to hold check on their conduct and advice, the confessional chambers of all the churches were connected by auditory tubes with the central office of public worship, and every confession and every consolation could be heard by the minister or his officials if he liked.

The practice of consultation in the auricular stalls of the church grew with amazing rapidity. The insinuating young voices, the subtle consolation, the efficient advice so soothed the perturbed spirits of the mentally sick that on the slightest commotion in the atmosphere of their life they rushed again to the ecclesiastical ear. Even the men began, at first in a shamefaced way, to await a vacancy in the stalls, afterwards most boldly and as a habit of fashionable life they indulged in the practice.

It reduced the revenues of the physicians by more than half; and they could make no outcry against it, for it was more powerful than they. At last one great financial minister of public worship organised the new departure; he had all the auricular stalls of all the churches of the nation connected directly with his central office; and in his presence all the spiritual advisers sat and received confessions and gave consolations. He had an army of clerks to insert in the secret doomsday-book opposite the name of each citizen anything in his or her confession that seemed of importance, whilst every morning he gave out the general policy and tone of the advices to be communicated; on exceptional cases he had always to be consulted at once.

He also offered a percentage on the legacies left by any worshipper to the church; this was given to the criminal on whose advice it was left. The department of public worship was coming to be the wealthiest in the state; for he fitted up the auricular boxes of the church as the most luxurious boudoirs, where a lady could lounge in the midst of the sweetest perfumes and music and the most beautiful paintings and statuary. He even allowed at a large rental auricular stalls to be let by the month or year to single individuals or families. Hither could the invalid or convalescent come in her moods of despair or depression and pour her sorrows into the ear of the soft-voiced comforter who shed, by his casuistries and gentle persuasiveness, balm upon her spiritual wounds. At last he permitted auricular tubes to be laid to the private chambers of confirmed invalids and of the dying, at a large premium. And this added such enormous sums to the revenue in the shape of legacies that he reduced the rate. Yet he left it as a policy of the office that it should never be so far lowered as to bring the privilege within the reach of those who had but moderate incomes.

Never had such a powerful engine come into the hands of the state; and every precaution was taken that it should not be abused and that no secret of this great confession bureau should leak out. But, whenever any citizen grew restive or obstreperous, an appeal was made to the pages of the doomsday-book, and some secret found there was applied to him with the effect that he curled up into unobtrusive silence. The convict-confessors were, of course, all locked up at night in a well-sentried building, and by day every action of theirs was under unseen surveillance.

They still continued their medical studies and duties, and were able to prescribe through the auditory tubes to whatever patient could give a clear account of his symptoms. If anyone had symptoms that did not permit of a clear diagnosis of his disease, he was encouraged to come into the consulting-room of the office of public worship, and there the various convict-physicians questioned him and examined him unseen; the diseased organ or part was placed under powerful microscopes into which they looked; then the whole staff consulted on his case and gave him advice accordingly. But these were rare instances; as a rule, the patients were satisfied with the impersonal advice and acted upon it. Half the diseases had their source in the mind and only needed spiritual advice; and most were both mental and physical; none but felt great benefit from unburdening their spirits and receiving sympathy and consolation.

Half the confessor-physicians were on duty by night and half by day; and the former section consisted of the ablest and the most subtle and persuasive; for it was found that night patients and worshippers needed more spiritual consolation than day clients. It was during the sleepless hours of the dark that the soul sank into the abyss of morbid weakness and often into the paralysis of terror. It was then that it seemed to absorb the functions of the body and infect them with its own diseases. It was then that most succumbed to the assaults of sickness, the life ebbed farthest away and left the sensitive nerves naked to the irritations of thought and passion. It was then that the great harvest of bequests was reaped; seized by superstitious fears, by the terrors of the darkness around and to come, the spirit was ready to abandon the mere dross of life for a little support on the threshold of the grave, for a little religion. And the office of public worship never hesitated to promise all they asked for beyond the final darkness, provided they paid well for the boon. It was then that the most hideous secrets of life were whispered into the ear of the church, then that terror drove the soul into the refuge of complete disburthenment. Even when death was years off, the feebleness of the morbid or invalid or convalescent spirit during hours when sleep would not approach laid it open to assault; for the footfall of the awful destroyer seemed to be heard in the dread silence. It was then that it sought the consolations of the auditory tube and opened the flood-gates of repentance into the ear of the confessor-physician. The morning brought regret for the rash candour, but the secret was recorded; the office of public worship had undying power over the fate of the unburthened soul.

By the time I arrived in the island, the physicians felt that their profession was doomed, that the wily statesman had outwitted them; and doubtless before many generations most of them would plead to be admitted into the service of the state. When that occurred they would have to resign themselves body and soul to it; it would receive none but those who were completely in its power. Of course there was still much scope for them in families that would not trust mere impersonal advice or feared to resign their independence of spirit into the power of an office of state. They were also much employed in seeing the treatment recommended by the convict-physicians carried out; and in this they often retaliated upon the state by contradicting the advice and sowing doubt of its soundness in the minds of the patients. Doubtless the next move of the department of public worship would be to blow through pneumatic tubes into the auricular stalls of the churches, or into the chambers of the sick the drugs and medical requisites that were recommended.

By means of these three uses of the talents of convicts the state church had become a reality and was far more powerful than the press. Journalism poured suggestion into the public mind; but it was into the healthy, wide-awake, often recoiling public mind; its reasonings, eloquence, or imaginative schemes and suggestions were not always accepted; they had often to lie ungerminated in the soil of the national spirit for years, till they were forgotten and some new occasion laid them bare and made them seem to spring up spontaneously. The personality of the writers though not unfelt was unseen, and so far had the potence of that which is mysterious; but they could not, like the ecclesiastical convicts, use the shadowy distance of the world to come in the way of threats and promises; they could not stir the soil of the present to immediate harvest with the plough of the future. They had to depend on the weapons and tools of the average man; they had to reason and persuade, explain, or appeal to the emotions, as neighbour to neighbour, except that they had the impersonality and anonymity of confessors and could gag their opponents in any attempt at reply.

Their power would have seemed enormous, had it not been put into comparison with the complete state organisation of the church and been overshadowed by it. They were used as the dogs of war, gathering as they did into the hands of a minister the loose fangs of irresponsible gossip, leashed as they were to one purpose and one spirit or policy. They knew that they had but one master to please, one master who had their liberty and still more their luxury in his power; and him they served with all their faculties and especially their faculties of invention, personal venom, and vituperation. They had no principle, no scruple except towards him and the government he embodied. If they entertained the majority, they did not care who suffered. Their first object was to strengthen the roots of the state, and especially of the minister of the department; their next was to make the largest number possible read their articles and paragraphs. If any one of their victims turned upon them and denied the news about him as a slander, they were at once made by the head of the department to apologise and explain that by some mistake the paragraph had slipped out of the pure fiction column into that of news, and that the name of the citizen had strayed out of the column of eulogies in transferring type. Where this was impossible as an explanation, the minister could easily appease the wrath of his victim by showing him how an especially unscrupulous convict had been introduced new into the office and had acted on his own responsibility and ignorance of the rules of revision.

I wondered at so great and virtuous a people enduring such an institution in their midst. They marvelled at my wonder, and thought of it as based on the very laws of nature. How could any marble citizen indulge in such work and retain his self-respect, and how could a state be accountable for the vagaries of irresponsible writers, whose dignity and self-respect were lost? The only means of producing a united and vigorous literature was to make the writers bond to the state. The only means of keeping it pure and free from attacks on the nation and the national spirit was to put the journalists body and soul into the hands of a department, and to make the department responsible for their productions. This was a provision of nature as soon as such an institution arose.

CHAPTER XI
THE BUREAU OF FAME

I WAS evidently as far astray on this point as I had been on the employment of convicts in the church. And when the full significance of the functions of state had been laid before me, I had to acknowledge that there was much in their prejudice in favour of the enslavement of genius and talent—the most capricious of human things.

As soon as the organisation of fame became a function of government, it was an essential that national genius and talent, the arbiters of fame, should be robbed of their caprice and yoked to the will of a single responsible man. What would be the use of spreading one rumour if the press and the church, which could creep into the very heart of the nation, were able to contradict it or render it fangless? What would all other means avail for planting a reputation, if the reasoning, imaginative, and rhetorical ability of the nation were not bound to water and foster it?

It seemed to them as natural as breathing that the literary and oratorical power of the nation should be fenced in to the service of the nation. And no one ever thought of complaining that it was entrapped as early in life as possible into lifelong slavery to the state. Where would the reputations of all of them be if this were not done? They would be as safe as the lives of their children with a jungle of wild beasts let loose amongst them. Who could control these irresponsible madmen we call geniuses if it were not the representative of the force of the nation—the state?

Trained from youth by the strong hand, they might be of great service in moulding the national future; but if left from the first to follow their own caprice, nothing could result but the wildest confusion of principles and beliefs, and the sacrifice of the reputation of every average citizen to their unslakable thirst for fame. There was indeed no alternative left for any self-respecting community but the enslavement of all the capricious power of imagination born in its midst. They might train it to do their behests and serve their destiny; if left uncaged, they would have to do its behests and serve its destiny.

The amalgamation of the Bureau of Fame with the department of public worship and public opinion was a policy of self-preservation. The church made ready the soil, the press sowed the seed, and the bureau watered and weeded and reaped. It would have been a national folly to allow any disagreement or collision amongst these processes. Better almost to have left the national genius to its old internecine conflict.

Now the Bureau of Fame was the pivot of the government; and it was the greatest ambition of an Aleofanian to rise to its administration. Its minister for the time being was arbiter of all for which the ablest men lived; he could make or mar careers; he could raise whom he would to immortality, or damn him to everlasting execration, or, what was worse, oblivion; he was far more powerful than any pope and any monarch combined could be; it was indeed the chance of heaven or hell he could deal out.

There was, of course, a price-list for various kinds and periods of reputation; and a citizen with a large fortune could buy what was for human life immortality. But the chief business of the office was political, to enforce the privileges and enhance the fame of the marble citizens, and especially of those in power—a great noble, a child of the monarch, or one whom the court and the minister delighted to honour.

If the new protégé of fame was a commoner, the first proceeding of the bureau was to confer on him one of the noble titles which it had within its prerogative; for it was the guardian and creator of all orders and titles. Next it set one or more of its most imaginative criminals to invent an ancestry for him and a life-history; a few well-known dates and facts were supplied as the skeleton; but round the skeleton grew a living form that no one would have recognised who knew the original, so romantic, so striking, so sublime did it become. Into every historical event a progenitor was thrust and a large share was assigned to him. Marvellous incidents were interwoven with historical facts and the new name introduced as the centre of them. Back to the heroes the family story went until it was lost in the mists of the origin of all things. There was not a link left broken or weak, not an opening left for destructive criticism; for the most hypercritical of the journalistic criminals were let loose upon the result of the heraldic fictionists’ work; they found every weak spot and tore the art to pieces. With this analysis and criticism attached to it, it was returned to the original authors for repairs. Again and again it went through the criticism factory, and again and again, after submitting to every test that could be thought of, it returned to the hands of the regenerators. Having reached the final form that withstood the scepticism of the subtlest critics, it was intermingled with the annals of the country and, being printed in a form that could easily be read, it was distributed amongst a section of the people who were unlearned yet not uninterested in the national history. If they failed to find the seams of the patchwork and accepted the newly intruded portions as genuine, the work was finally passed as ready for the second process of the bureau.

A staff of poets—epic, lyric, and dramatic—were turned on to the new episodes, and, being left to their individual tastes, picked out one this and another that. They each worked their theme into brilliant verse. The result in one case would be a long romance fit for recitation during the nights of the dimmer half of the year; in another it would be a rattling ballad or song that would, when sung through the streets or villages, catch the ear of the people; in a third it would be a dramatic scene or complete play that could be staged either by the church or by the bands of strolling actors who perambulated the country districts in the pay of the state.

Having thus got a brand-new literature manufactured for its protégé’s life and ancestry, the office set its staff of musicians to work on the legend and its poetry, and gorgeous pieces were composed for the ecclesiastical and other orchestras and choirs upon its various themes; and short catches and glees and songs were composed for the common people and their ballad-singers. These were sent out through the length and breadth of the island on the fingers and lips of itinerant players and singers and in the mechanical automata that were manufactured by the hundred to repeat any tune of a fixed number. The whole country was soon jigging and singing to the popular chorus that enshrined the new name and the new deed or that by a new genealogy linked the name with the gods or the national history. And all the marble citizens and the people of the city were trying to whistle or hum or reproduce on their private tinkling instruments the more melodious passages or the orchestral or choral celebration of the new fame.

Meantime the journals had been playing battledore with the topic and the various sections of it; they introduced it in paragraphs, in articles, in verses, in romances; there was mysterious gossip about the new name and loud, brazen-voiced eulogy; there were subtle inquiries about its fame and as subtle answers. And these were all adapted in method and tone to the two great kinds of journals. For there were journals for the common people and journals for the marble city. The one inculcated due regard to the station into which a man was born and reverence for all notabilities. The other fitted the idiosyncrasies of high-born society, describing its splendours, its wit, its genius, its lofty origin, its generosity. The one was didactic, the other descriptive and eulogistic. The one was tedious and thoroughgoing; the other was imaginative and sparkling. And by each the topic was treated in its own peculiar way.

The church did its duty too. It never failed to inculcate the fatalism of class and birth, even when it was floating some new man into fame, although he had but recently changed his class and had his ancestry manufactured. “Each man to the station God has given him,” was the watchword of its prayers and its prelections. How pathetically the preachers dwelt on the fearful results of attempts to reverse the commands of nature! They could point to their own cases as the ruin of ill-weaved ambition. What could be a better proof of the evil of contravening the divine arrangement of classes than their own career? They had tried to rise above their fellows and the place God had given them, and, to accomplish this, had been impelled to break the laws; the consequences their hearers might see with their own eyes. And often the tears would roll down the orator’s cheeks, and the audience would weep with him, as he painted the horrors of transgressing the divine order of society, and appealed to them to abstain from all such transgression and to be content with the station God had assigned them.

Yet the next part of the service would be a recitation of the mythical ancestry of some new man and of their great deeds, or a dramatic representation of his heroic efforts for the state, or a hymn in his honour with full choral or orchestral effects. Once the transgression of the divine order of the universe was accomplished, it was accepted as a portion of that order. However obscure the birth of the favourite, however base his nature, it was at once transfigured by his successful breach of the social laws of nature. And, when the Bureau of Fame adopted him as protégé, he was within less than a generation washed pure as snow, the noblest of the noble in personality, in ancestry, in posterity; all his life and character and origin were consecrated in the national consciousness; and it would have been treason, nay sacrilege, to doubt the divine sanction or the truth of the story or to give a hint of the poor facts that had been buried in oblivion. The name was interwoven with the holiest feelings of reverence; the splendid fiction in song and drama, in prayer and pulpit oration, stirred the deepest enthusiasm of worship, and wound itself into the most sacred memories. And the whole process had begun and gone on so impalpably, so subtly, that it was accomplished before anyone could awaken himself to criticism; and then it was past remedy. It was the great act of regeneration. The character and manners and morality of the man and his family might be as unclean and repulsive as before; his name—the true living principle of a man according to this people—was raised to the level of heroes and gods, was launched upon the career of immortality.

Alas! there were conditions and limits, as there are to everything human. The negative business of the bureau, though kept in subordination, still existed. If any man offended the minister or his patrons or satellites, then was his name first dropped, “quick as a falling star,” from the heaven of all public services and performances; the literature and music and art that enshrined his deeds and the performances of his ancestry vanished no one knew how. For a time vague and derogatory rumours concerning him crept through the journals; they hinted at something base, if not criminal, and yet the hints could not be charged with any definite meaning. At last there was complete and unbroken silence. The man was buried better than if he were dead without tombstone or memorial.

I marvelled that a nation that so worshipped reputation could have allowed the concentration of this power in the hands of any man. But I was assured that it was used with great wisdom and caution. The negative function was rarely set to work, and then in the most underground manner; it was felt but never seen. The bureau employed no organised band of slanderers as the company had attempted to do. In fact it doubted the prudence or effectiveness of such a course. Continual and open-mouthed detraction of any man would probably produce the opposite effect; it would make the neutral suspect some plot against him and stir their innate sympathy for the oppressed. Nay, many would court the notoriety of organised criticism and derogation as a cheap method of keeping their names in the mouths of the nation. What the bureau did in the negative way was truly negative. Its policy was the inculcation of complete silence; and oblivion was the result—a result so telling amongst the Aleofanians that the marble citizens almost grovelled before the court and the minister of fame, and even before their parasites.

With the common people the bureau and its power of heaven and hell had no influence; to condemn to everlasting oblivion was no threat for them; to raise them to immortality was no reward. It was the main engine of discipline in the marble city. And never was there so effective a discipline amongst an aristocracy. A frown from the minister was enough to cow the boldest spirit. Never was a nobility so meek, so free from turbulence and rebellious self-seeking; they were willing to take whatever colour the court delighted in; they changed their opinions, their manners, their principles, their morality, their life to the subtlest changes in the court and the bureau; human chameleons, they would change their hue even from hour to hour, as the court changed. No group of beings in heaven or earth surpassed the discipline of these Aleofanians.

CHAPTER XII
FREEDOM AND REVOLUTION

YET they gloried in their freedom and their love of freedom. No people could be freer than they. Daily in their temples were there songs and hymns chanted in honour of liberty. It was a truism of the journals that liberty and liberty alone could be the true spiritual atmosphere of a nation. They loved to worship superiors and reverence especially the vicegerent of God upon earth—the head of the Bureau of Fame. They bowed to him and did him every obeisance because he was the head of the church and worthy of all manner of worshipful obedience. But he had no control over their actions except the moral and religious control which they willingly acknowledged.

As an instance of their complete freedom of action they pointed to the way in which the government allowed them to do as they liked with the peasants and artisans and the lower classes generally who were in their service. In the discipline of these they were untrammelled. They acknowledged that they were responsible to the state for the good conduct of their servants; but on the other hand the state passed over to them the power of life and death over these so that their authority should be no mere nominal thing. Ah, freedom was indeed the noblest feature of life; they might as well pass into the grave at once as give it up or allow it to be interfered with.

I was afraid to suggest to them the information I had received from a foreigner in the lower city about a large part of the country people. All the former inhabitants of the island and most of the artisans were in semi-slavery. They saw the hesitation in my face and guessed its purport. And one of my eulogists of liberty launched into a prelection on the necessity of a stage of servitude in the history of all ascensions to civilisation. A people that had not long issued from the animal stage could never become anything better than half-brutes but through bondage to a more advanced race. It was indeed a noble mission of theirs thus to spend ages on the task of assisting a tribe of half-savages to subdue their foul passions. The peasantry would be nothing but wild beasts without such restraint. The process had been going on for centuries, and it showed the great patience and love of the Aleofanians that they persisted in such a repulsive and fruitless task. The artisans were those of them who had improved under the discipline, and so they had been partially freed. But even they were still somewhat savage in their natures; even they needed to be treated with great long-suffering. The marble Aleofanians were as patient with these degraded beings as a mother with her child, never sparing the rod when it was needed, although it lacerated their finer feelings to use such a means of discipline. He compared their conduct in this matter with their treatment of monetary relations. They were equally generous and self-denying and protective of the good of all the other people of the nation in dealing with money; they held it the root of all evil, and to prevent its working havoc widespread they concentrated it in the hands of a few,—the marble citizens,—who could not so easily be harmed by it.

I called his attention to the numerous interferences with liberty of action in the various laws that fenced them in from the indulgence of certain passions. Ah, that was one of the noblest instances of their worship of freedom; so devoted were they to it that they prohibited everything that would lead to a breach of it; no man could be allowed to circumscribe his own liberty; and all vice circumscribed liberty; hence all vice had to be checked. It was only in the interest of liberty that liberty was ever interfered with.

He slid into another eulogy of freedom and instanced the devotion of the Aleofanians to it in their conversation. No one was checked in his criticism of a neighbour or fellow-citizen; their city was indeed a mutual fellowship society in which the freest censure of each other was allowed for mutual benefit. The keen contest of wits moulded their characters and intellects. No one dared be absent from any social or conversational fête, lest he should suffer in reputation from becoming the topic of the meeting. Never would they descend to vulgar depreciation; they were masters of refined insinuation and veiled malignity. They could whisper away a reputation with the grace of a duellist; and at the climax of a mortal combat of wits their serenity remained unruffled. Oh, the grace and beauty of their social life! They were never done admiring it. But without this freedom of criticism it would be nothing. Ah, life in Aleofane was indeed a noble thing, so happy and free were all classes of the people, from monarch to peasant, from the bureaucrat of fame to the poorest artisan!

“Even the criminals were happy” was the climax of his eloquence. I asked him for an explanation. He proceeded to show me how it was failure that constituted crime. To deceive successfully was the highest art of life; for the essence of art was to conceal itself. And to be discovered was to fail in this. Whoever suffered this indignity was convicted of the special vice he had been concealing and sent to the hulks, that is, was turned into a journalist or priest. In these professions they were perfectly happy, for they were allowed in them to revel in their own special vices. The journalists manufactured their news whenever they found events fail them, and the priests manufactured their myths and creed whenever the sacred books failed them. So their capacity of fiction was exercised daily and hourly. And provided it was exercised in accordance with the purpose of the bureau, no one interfered with their enjoyment. The newspapers and the church were the home of fiction; and when truth was told there, it passed unrecognised. In order to keep up the interest of readers the journalists manufactured sensational news one day and contradicted it the next; and in order to draw crowds one priest would preach a most heterodox interpretation of the sacred books in his sermon and another would reply to him in his and contradict him. This neutralised the evil that might arise from journalism and its personalities and from sermons and their heterodoxies. It would never have done to put ordinary citizens or successful deceivers and slanderers into such posts; they would be too astute in deceiving the people; their fictions would not be so palpable and gross or so mutually contradictory that the simplest reader or hearer would discover them. So much had the Aleofanian palate become accustomed to such journalism and pulpit oratory that if the writers ever described facts or indulged in truths, they had to give them the flavour of fiction; and if ever the priests indulged in orthodox doctrines they had to give them the tinge of the heterodox. Ah, surely the whole people were happy, for all were so free as to be able to indulge their special appetites and likings!

I was scarcely convinced by this subtle and eloquent eulogy of Aleofanian life and liberty, and I determined to visit the common people and see for myself. I had already examined the journals intended for them and seen how different they were from the fashionable literature of the marble city. They were generally presented to strangers and must have greatly impressed them, for they were full of noble sentiments and moralisations subtly interwoven with eulogies of the Aleofanian leaders of state and fashion for their great virtues and goodness. It was most edifying to read these sermonised news-sheets, saturated as they were with the highest ethics and deepest piety, and especially the doctrine that it was the duty of every man to adhere to the station in which God had placed him. But I was struck after I came into the marble city with the tone adopted towards them by the citizens of the higher class; they spoke of them with a patronising smile and disinterested approval, as if they were talking of children’s Sunday-school literature or fairy tales. And about all the fiction in these popular journals there was the atmosphere of a child’s fairyland; everything was happy and beautiful and as it should be. After reading a series of them I could easily have concluded that Aleofane was another paradise for the unambitious and lowly, and that death must be looked upon by the common people as an overwhelming catastrophe in that it put a stop to this full current of joy and happiness.

My curiosity was greatly piqued. I wished to see this other Eden upon earth. So with letters and passports and a guide, one of the journalists, I set out. And for the first few days everything was idyllic. But drunkenness, the special vice of my cicerone, got hold of him, and he collapsed by the way. Thereafter I found the whole scene change. It was now nothing but squalor and gloom and the lash of the whip.

A stranger from a neighbouring island, whom I had met in my first hostelry, explained to me the histrionic character of the first few days’ experience and the reality of the last. He took me in hand, and under his guidance I visited one of their provincial cities. Here I saw men and women of the same race as the marble citizens crawling in filth and starvation, prostrate in a magnificent temple before the sleight-of-hand and the mesmerism of the priests. They were bound in the chains of superstition and ignorance, and they were encouraged to do little else than procreate and multiply; for to pauperise by religion was the first rule of the Aleofanian government, and to enslave the soul by pauperism and ignorance was its corollary.

Yet in a cave outside of the town we witnessed from our hiding-place awful and mysterious rites of a revolutionary propaganda proceeding. We saw thousands of the ignorant peasants and artisans getting initiated. And when the ceremony was finished we almost burst into laughter over the pathos as the agitators gathered round a fire and gorged. My guide had evidently something to do with this rising revolution; and he was so enraged to find that an agent from the communistic island of Tirralaria had crept in amongst the revolutionists. The heavens confound his impudence and cant! What he and his beggarly crew from the isle of thieves wanted was to divide the plunder of another island. They had communised Tirralaria into a cipher. Of the wealth that they had counted by thousands, when they landed there, naught remained but the nothings. The growth of the dummy citizen or cipher in the denominator had made Tirralarian property a vanishing point. The game of this Garrulesi was not to establish socialism in Aleofane, but to socialise its property into Tirralaria.

After his burst of anger I tried to elicit more about this socialistic community. Tirralaria was a large island, I got to know, into which had been tumbled some centuries ago a few thousand socialists with considerable wealth to their share. They had increased to tens of thousands, and their wealth had gone down to little more than a shirt to each back. After the besom of a tornado or a famine or a plague had swept the island the population soon reached high-water mark again; every square yard of the soil was littered with a stronger and lazier humanity. The island stank of humanity miles to leeward. There was scarcely room enough for graves, let alone beds. The lubberly and oleaginous let themselves out as mattresses; and so the space was economised, and another increase was possible. The unclean rogues, they never washed, unless they chanced to get hustled off the edge of the island into the sea. The description contrasted so strongly with the rose-coloured picture that I had heard drawn by the socialist agent in the cave that I determined to see for myself.

As we wandered through the forests of the island my guide told me of two saviours that had landed on the coasts of Aleofane and become the protectors of the poor. One refused to resort to the tricks of the charlatan, and, deserted by his followers, perished at the hands of the aristocracy, who then adopted his tenets and worked them into an elaborate hypocrisy. The other, learning by his fate and bettering the jugglery of the marble citizens, put heart and drill into the poor who flocked to his standards, and led them to victory. He seized the throne, but, flattered by the old aristocracy into belief in his own divinity and into desertion of the cause of the poor, he vanished in pomp, luxury, and corruption.

By dint of persistent inquiry I got him to explain his hints about the island from which the ancestors of all of them had come. It was called Faddalesa, or the isle of devils, because of the appalling phenomena they encountered whenever they attempted to return to it. It had, he acknowledged, been called Limanora, or the island of progress; but for thousands of years that name had lapsed. And on the shores of now one island and again another strangers had landed. But as they were wealthy, and taciturn, no questions were asked, and their descendants had vanished into the ranks of the aristocracy. It was many centuries since any had come, though it was generally supposed in the archipelago that I had come from the central island with my fireship. I saw the mistake that they had made would serve my new resolve to make for this mother isle; and I left it unchallenged in their minds.

In the great northern harbour of Aleofane I came across the same filth and a similar rich temple; but I also found clearer evidence of underground revolution approaching consummation. And for the sake of my fireship and its powers of helping on the movement I was initiated into the mysteries of one of their societies. The socialistic agent, Garrulesi, insinuated himself into my acquaintanceship; and for the sake of being able to return with him to his home I endured his eloquence on the perfection of the altruistic life. Competition was the bane of the human race; and its only products were poverty and disease and unhappiness. It was responsible for property, and the only crime was property. Was it not monstrous that one man should taboo what another man needed! Obliterate property, and you wipe out crime too. How gentle and amenable and humane was the true commonweal, where neither property nor class existed! No law was needed, no law could persist. Every natural instinct and passion of the human breast was allowed the fullest scope. There was indeed no further stage to reach; need of progress, of effort was passed. Man under such a rule had become all that he might be, and he felt that whatever is is right. Evil and darkness had fled before the light of primitive happiness, and existence had become the throne of God.

As he dilated on the nobleness of Tirralarian civilisation I saw his eye flicker and his colour change. A stranger had passed. He told me that we were being watched. He wished me to take refuge in Tirralaria with my fireship if anything occurred. But I had promised it to my guide and fellow-traveller. He showed one flash of anger. But it vanished at once. He led me to the shore and pointed out his falla or ship. In it he would hang round the coasts for me, and he indicated an unfrequented point, whither I could flee and find safety on board his ship. He offered to take off to my crew any message that I desired to send; I might instruct it to come to Tirralaria for me after it had been to the isle of dogs. I wrote in English, and sent my orders to my comrades, knowing that the language would be safe from his prying.

CHAPTER XIII
IMPRISONMENT AND ESCAPE

HE went on board and I returned to my guide, whom I found greatly disturbed. An official spy had come down from the marble city; and this meant that a whole army of them in covered armour were in the neighbourhood and on the alert. He had scarcely ears for an account of my interview with Garrulesi till I reached the story of his blanching at the sight of a stranger. His alarm grew, and he was concocting a scheme for getting to my fireship, though he knew it would be almost impossible to pass through the cordon of state guards that was, he was certain, drawn round us. Just as dusk shuttled into dark he had matured his scheme, and we were about to put it into effect when the door of our room in the hostelry opened and a missive was delivered to each of us. We were invited by the monarch to return to the marble city and sojourn with him in his palace. Nothing could be clearer than that the bureaus had received information of our movements and suspected that we were engaged in stirring the artisans and peasants to revolution. And this was a pleasant invitation to euthanasia. Our doom was fixed if we could find no other way out of the noose.

Early in the morning a car of triumphal proportions drew up at our door and we were bowed by the town officials with great ceremony into it. It went off at funereal pace by a coast road to the marble city, accompanied by an escort of royal guards. It was plain from the faces of the wayfarers of the ruling class that there was something portentous in our procession, for they looked back at us with glances full of pity. My guide, who came to be more self-controlling in his manner and more confidential and intimate in his tone, told me how often he had feared such a result; but they had followed their own diabolical style of letting him have complete freedom till he had become reckless, and now they had pounced upon him. He asked me, if I escaped, to make for Broolyi, his native country, and inform the authorities of his fate; they would give me full protection and treat me with the greatest hospitality, I might be sure. He told me his own name—Blastemo—and said that the mention of it would turn all his relatives into my friends. But lest the devils should, with their usual pharisaic inhumanity, make their refined methods of torture take the place of euthanasia, he gave me a small nutful of a most potent drug, a pinch of which, small enough to be hidden under the nails, would launch me in a few seconds into the tide of unconsciousness that leads to death. In the palace we would be watched by a hundred eyes that we could never see. Unseen, unguessed-at espionage was one of the secrets of the mysterious power that the bureaus had over all. They seemed to know almost what was transacted in the depths of the soul in the darkness of midnight. The only safeguard in the Isle of Liars (thus he translated the name) was the universal suspicion that tortured the marble citizens. None of them felt sure of even his nearest relative or closest friend. And if any chance of escape came to us, it would be through some official of the palace who was getting uneasy about his own fate.

We were welcomed at our destination with great and effusive ceremonies as if we were about to be enthroned. And for days we seemed to be the centre of all its hospitalities; we were fêted and banqueted and amused in the most elaborate style. And through the whole series of festivity and pomp we were without any apparent caution kept strictly apart, so that we were not able to pass even a word.

The monarch showed himself greatly interested in me and asked me innumerable questions about my people and country, being especially amused at my description of the use of steam in doing work, and of the use of firearms. His little six-year-old boy was even more entranced by my pictures of the steam-engine and of our warfare. He was the one weakness of his father. He clung to my side, especially when in disgrace, and that was very often. It was he who told me that my fireship was off the mouth of the estuary where I had landed. I stimulated his curiosity to the utmost, seeing a possible way of escape. He kept begging the king to let him go to it. But clearly the bureaus were against such a venture.

At last the child fell ill. The physicians declared the illness to be one of the heart, and after a time warned his father of its dangerous character if the boy were in any way thwarted. He whined every day his old request that he might be taken on board my fireship. The king pleaded with the heads of the bureaus to let him go; and they at last grew alarmed too, for he was the only heir to the throne, and the father’s life was by no means certified by the physicians as likely to be long. They saw the risk of getting thrown out of power. And they consented to the expedition, but under the most stringent conditions. I was to remain on shore whilst Blastemo and the little prince should go on board with his father and a royal escort.

We set out, and after much floundering in the mud and grappling with the current they swept over the bar under the guidance of a fisherman who knew every sand-bank and could prevent such a mishap as befell me when I landed. I had sent a note with them, and I could see that the three were received on board with every sign of friendliness. But the boats containing the escort drew out to a distance from the steamer.

Everything seemed to go well for a time; the sea was calm, with a slight breath and ripple off the shore. Suddenly I saw a whiff of smoke shoot out from the bow of my yacht, and with a loud report reverberating from the cliffs behind, a ball landed in the midst of a troop of guards that was stationed to cut off my retreat towards the north, the only possible way of escape; on the other side was the river with its acres of mud, and behind was the road to the city, well guarded at all points. The result was as sudden as the shot. I had just time to collect my senses and look round; and away on the highway I could see the tails of the guard in the wind. Another shot and another ploughed the earth or flapped into the mud, and cleared the lowlands of every Aleofanian.

I soon realised the situation and quietly walked off to the north over a long spit. I made no attempt to run as if I were escaping. But as I moved higher and higher on the rising ground I could see the shot strike the flat I had left. When I reached the highest part of the promontory I found the reason for the demonstration. A falla lay in the offing, sheltered from sight of the retreating troops by the high bluff in which the spit terminated. Garrulesi’s instructions flashed into my mind; and I remembered that this was the point he had indicated for my safety if ever I needed to escape.

I got over the ridge, and as I looked back I could see the sand occasionally pirouetting in the air and I could hear a reverberation sound in the rear. I then ran as quickly as legs would carry me towards the shore. In a sheltered nook of quiet water lay a native boat, with the men sitting paddles in hand. They gave me the signal agreed upon, and I readily jumped on board. The canoe shot out from the rocks. And it was not too soon. For a troop, recovering from their panic, were making down the sheltered side of the spit, unnoticed by the yacht. And we were not out of reach when the first arrows sliced the water. The men redoubled their efforts, and only half a dozen missiles struck the boat before we were safe on board Garrulesi’s falla.

CHAPTER XIV
THE VOYAGE TO TIRRALARIA

I ASKED him to sail round the bluff and communicate with my yacht. But he would not hear of it. He said that this would endanger the safety of all, for the Aleofanian king would see at once how elaborate had been the conspiracy and how treacherous we had been, and he would take every means to frustrate our departure, or, if we got safely off, to avenge the insult. I had to accept his reasons, for I was in his power. But I was sure that there were others; he was afraid that if I got on board my own ship, Blastemo would persuade me to go off with him to Broolyi; on the other hand, if he secured me for his island, my fireship would soon be in Tirralaria too.

I found out afterwards from my sailors that the king had fallen into great consternation at the firing of the guns, especially when the boats with his guards made off towards the shore. One of the shot had opportunely ploughed up the sea not far from their station and had evidently filled them with panic. My men knew that Garrulesi was waiting for me on the other side of the point, and they kept firing towards the beach till they thought that I should be on board. Then, in order to quiet the fears of the king, they put him and his boy into the yawl, and pulled him on shore. In his excitement he had forgotten all about Blastemo, and, before he had regained the upper reaches of the road and joined his troops, the yacht had lifted anchor, picked up her boat, and steamed out to sea. They saw my signal on board the falla, and knew that I was safe. So they followed my instructions and made for Broolyi, whilst the wind bore us in the opposite direction.

But the shadows thickened, and before night fell we had run into the shelter of some high land and anchored. The men hung a dirty guttering lamp in the main room of the high poop, and by its light I could see how slovenly and foul was the whole cabin. It smelt of fish-oil and of unnumbered meals past. The floor was littered with garbage, so that I had to clear a path through it to prevent slipping. I could find no convenient ledge to sit on that was not embossed with grease and oil. I was glad to reach the night air again, for it at least helped to deodorise the deck. I got them to hang me a hammock in the shrouds, resolved to keep out of the cabin as long as I could.

I was awakened at early dawn by the movements of the seamen, and through the grey light I saw that we were lying off the bleak, rocky shore of an islet. We hoisted sail and were off before a whistling wind that sang violence to come. They had considerable skill in handling the falla, and we left a long scar behind us across the crests of the emulous waves. Swift though the current and surge ran with us, we outstripped them, rising like a sea-bird to the full impulse of the wind. I could tell at a glance that the ancestors of these seamen had been accustomed to rough waters through countless ages.

My host came on deck after we were fully under way and at once joined me. He launched again into eulogies of the socialistic community. I was at the mercy of his eloquence, and resigned myself to my fate. Yet before the voyage closed and we ran into port I was rewarded for my talent of listening. He got weary of tempting my admiration by his praises, and soon slipped into what looked like fact. He gave me a picturesque description of the island when its rude outline began to sierra the horizon. There were miles and miles of lawns and orchards that terraced the lowlands from the lapping water on the beach to the roots of the mountains that I saw dim white against the sky rim. Gleaming rivers streaked the meadows with their silver, or hid beneath the blossoming or fruiting trees. Here and there they swelled into sylvan lakes whose surface was spidered into moving gossamer by flocks of tame sea-birds and by canvas bent on pleasure and ease. Towering above the tallest trees stood vast temples that seemed in their shining marbles to outstrip the snowy giants that were every hour revealing to me more and more of their stupendous proportions.

I piloted him by judicious admiration and questions into a description of their faith. It seemed to be a polytheism that was practically a pantheism. Every spirit that existed in the universe apart from body was equal to every other spirit. As soon as a man died his soul became a god, as worthy of worship as any other god that had existed from the beginning. Through the whole of space, and even permeating matter invisibly, impalpably, gods lived and moved and had their being. They needed no sustenance, no addition of energy, no extension of space to live in. The universe was full of them, immortal generators of other spirits, other gods. It was indeed an Olympus that was so united, so free from all jealousy and enmity that it formed but one god, just as the living cells of the human body, though each having its own individuality, made but one human life. And there was still infinity to fill. Worlds died every hour, having fulfilled their purpose of producing all the divine life whereof they were capable. Every hour worlds were born evolving energy and at last life, which rose by stages up to the human that dying might be divine. The stellar system is but a great god-factory. Not an atom that lives is wasted. Everything that comes into existence rises up and into the nobly human; then the physical sequence ceases and the divine begins. Death deifies all men; evil falls away from them with their bodies; and, winged through the vault, the souls flit, rid of passion and whatsoever clogs pure thought. They have no desire to materialise again; they have no desires at all. They can interpenetrate and unite and disunite without the sense of disunion. They are one with existence that is not bound to what is matter or has senses. They make the final all; and yet this all increases every moment with transcendent growth. Its one imperfection is that it cannot fill the whole of space; its one aspiration is to colonise infinity. Life is too poor to satisfy it. It must grow for ever and for ever through new systems and oceans of worlds that evolve myriads of new gods ready to people the still unmastered regions beyond its ken. Its energy is not diminished by the stupendous labour at the unceasing birth of worlds. Every new effort means increased possibility of energy. It is of the nature of pure spirit to develop its potence of energy by energising. Once freed of cumbering matter, its life grows fuller and freer the more it operates on the atoms of the ether to raise them nearer and nearer to its own nature and being. Nor can it work except through this laborious ascent; this is the only hierarchy of life, the only altar-stairs in the universe, whereon being of lower grade clambers up to godhead. Once the altar is reached there is nothing but equality. There is only imperfection and perfection in existence. Of imperfection there are as many gradations as there are kinds of being; in perfection or godhead there is no differentiation; there degree, class, distinction cease. For all gods are one in the all. In the stage just precedent to godhead, in humanity, gradation has begun to vanish. It is only the adulterate nature that still keeps distinction. The higher the range of the men the less the difference between them; and at last death obliterates it; they are perfect in freedom from the long-obstructive matter, perfect in godhead, united to the all.

This outline of the socialistic religion came on me with the surprise of one who should see wine flowing in the bed of a torrent instead of water. I began to have a certain respect for this eternal talker whose verbal bubbles had suddenly turned to pearls. He stopped just when I had wished him to go on; and, to tap the same vein, I asked him how his countrymen worshipped their god.

He came dangerously near to winding up his eloquence clockwork, for he pointed to the sky and then to the snowy bulwark that loomed along the horizon; and he straightened himself out and cleared his throat. I feared the complacent glitter of his eye, and I rushed to the water-vat and drank. The interruption seemed to switch off his energy from his almost automatic word machine. He had grown meditative and rested his head on his hands as he looked over the rail into the sea.

I approached him when I saw his new attitude, and he began in a soft, reluctant voice: “We are all priests as we are all kings in our community. To have a hierarchy or even an intermediary who should be supposed to be in more direct sympathy and communication with the gods than the rest is the worst of insults to the divine energy of the soul. To make a special profession of that which is the aim of embodied life is but to commercialise the divine and embrute the human. The priests place their feet on the necks of the ignorant, and it is their interest to reduce all to ignorance. Instead of the equality, which is the true principle of life, we should have a double tyranny; we should grovel before our gods, whose superstitions would weigh us to the ground; and we should have their professional agents introducing the caprice and imperfection of the human into their yoke. I know not which is the worse: the purely spiritual slavery of timid, startled worship, or the mingled slavery of priestcraft that makes the divine mysterious and terrible in order that the worshippers may bow before it body and soul.

“It was a question with our ancestors when they were apportioning the wealth they had brought with them to general purposes, whether they should build temples to their new and universal god or take the dome of immensity as his shrine. They had brought with them a love of art devoted to divine service, and a traditionary love of temples as the symbols of the divine dwelling-place. And yet temples would imply attendants who would soon raise themselves into a spiritual tyranny. Whilst there around them was the free ether wherein dwelt members of the godhead; there above them was the marvellous roof of night frescoed with worlds. Surely it was better that the chrysalids of gods should live in the same temple as the gods. There was no sanctuary like that which the divine had chosen and made for itself. To set apart any portion of it as a holy of holies would sully the nobleness of its workmanship. Fane there was none but the universe; and any poor chantry erected by man, however stupendous it seemed to him with his span of life to build it in, would be a mockery of the Infinite. How pigmean it would seem beneath the vault of night, wherein distance was fenced by the penetrative impotence of human eyes, how atomic when gauged by thought, the true instrument of worship!

“At first schism threatened over this burning question. But at last yon steaming censer of the mountains gave the solution. The first night fell, and they saw a strange glow above the ranges as if it were a fire amongst the clouds. Superficial thought would fain explain it as the after-sheen of sunset. But the hours advanced and still the radiance flushed and faded, flushed and faded, and often with fuliginous and lurid glare. At times a pillar as of smoke and flame seemed to unite earth and heaven. Every eye was fixed on the turbid glimmer as it enhaloed the sombre beauty of the night. The still lingering superstitions that lurked in the graveyards of many minds took it as a sign from the world beyond death. In the dusky aisles of night, as they discussed the theme in low and reverent voices, there spread the magnetic power of resurgent superstition in a crowd touched with the mystery of the universe; and before the dawn suffused the sky or flooded the ancestral recesses of the mind, it was resolved to take this fiery peak as the altar of their worship.

“But the elements had decided otherwise; the searing, blinding power of its everlasting snows, the torrid ebullience of its great cup, and the ruthless fury of the clouds that so often blotted out its heaven, drove the worshippers to the lowlands; and there the frequent austerity of the elements, aided by the old love of art, compelled the erection of the temples you see beginning to fleck the dusky background of the rocks and forests. But the more progressive section of the community, who favoured no temple but the open heaven, had their fears as to the future allayed by a written agreement signed by all that it should be a penal offence to propose a priesthood or a service for them. Everyone may worship where he pleases, within these tabernacles made with hands or without in the pantheon of all men and all gods, in the star-vaulted minster of infinity.”

It was indeed an impressive sight as we approached and the dim sierra grew into a stupendous range that overshadowed us; in its midst rose gigantic the gleaming peak of their fiery monarch dominating all. Above him hung, as if to shade him from the rude fire of the sun, a great tree of smoke whose leafage touched the heaven, and majestically swung in the wind. At its roots the forests and marble fanes were dwarfed. No eloquence of gesture or of word could make me turn my gaze from him to them; but a lower bastion of mountains in front moved upwards and blotted out his serenity. Then I saw the magnitude of the temples, dwarfing as they did the loftiest trees of the forest.

I asked him where the houses were, and with some reluctance he pointed off to the right, where nothing could be distinguished. Then my mind ran on to the symbols of civilised life, and I inquired for the schools and other educational institutions.

“There are none,” he said. “They are only symbols and nurses of inequality. After we had abolished caste and class and social distinctions, we soon came to see that the most offensive of all was culture, and especially scholarship and learning. Who contemns his neighbour so much as the pedagogue that knows a language or a series of facts more than other men? Academic snobbery is the most pernicious, most galling; for it can immediately put in its proofs of the superiority it claims; it can rout all but its equal and rival. It is the most exclusive, most presuming, most irritating. We started with universities and academies and technical schools, under the impression that, by making them free to all, we should give all equal privileges. Before we were through a generation of our new history the fallacy became transparent. We were rapidly manufacturing a class of intellectual peacocks, or at least men and women who sneered at the vulgar herd. By our constitution every citizen was entitled to a certain minimum of food and clothing in the year. The scholar could always live on less than this, and, by offering the surplus as payment, he could get others to perform the mechanical duties of his life. He had what he wanted in free libraries and laboratories and lectures. So he came to have an inordinate share of happiness; and in many cases he had an inordinate scorn for the bulk of the people, who took no advantage of these privileges. A yearning for books and for exercise of the mind is anything but natural to most men, and the nation was rapidly sorting itself out into a small class who were happy and prided themselves on having everything they wanted, and a majority who envied these their content and grumbled at the enormous wealth they had accumulated in their minds. It was true that these men wrote books and made discoveries and inventions; but what good were their books and facts and machines to any but themselves? Nobody else used them or wished to use them. They might talk of the advances of science and the nobleness of art and the glories of literature. But their talk was unreal to all but their own narrow circle; for the rest of the people it was like descanting on colours to the blind.

“The worst was to come; there afterwards grew up a class of sham scholars and æsthetes and critics who learned the shibboleths of the scientists and artists and writers, and used these shibboleths as instruments of offence against what they called outsiders. There were two primitive languages that had, in earlier ages before the migration and before the growth of a native literature, taken deep root in education. These were treated as the marks and symbols of culture; and their rudiments were laboriously shuffled through and promptly forgotten by a large section, who thereupon assumed great airs of superiority to their neighbours. These counterfeit scholars and critics made the two languages into a fence and stockade that would defy the assaults of the mob; within it they fell down and worshipped as the gods of the earth the few who did know them well and could speak them. Most of them had learned by rote some passages from one or two of the favourite books in them; and they were accustomed, when they were worsted in any conversation or discussion, to roll off, relevantly or irrelevantly, one or the other of these, and thus silence their opponents. Only the mock scholars ever did this; the real scholars knew too much of these languages and had too much to occupy their minds otherwise to resort to such trivial weapons. The contemptuous manners of the charlatans of culture became insufferable. You would have thought that there was something divine in these tongues, so fiercely did these bastard scholars bridle up at any disparagement of them or any comparison of them with the vernacular.

“The growth of this charlatanism became a serious danger to our socialistic community, and it was thought that by its removal the danger would be over. Accordingly it was resolved, only the scholars and their mimics dissenting, that the study and use of these primitive languages should be interdicted. The books written in them were burnt,—to the great joy of the boys and girls in the seminaries,—and it was made a penal offence to write or speak any word of them. There was much sophistry used to get round the law, as a good deal of Tirralarian phraseology was derived from them. But this difficulty was surmounted by a clearer and more detailed definition, and the cultured hung their heads defeated.

“It was not for long. Before another generation had passed, the scholars had invented other claims to pre-eminence, other shibboleths. Now it was the laws of nature and the laws of beauty that supplied the platform for scorn of neighbours. The scientists and artists and critics of art became the small privileged class, who had more than their fair share of happiness and content. They produced something that seemed to be of more value than the musty books of the scholars written in languages that none but themselves could read. And their humours and superiority were borne with at first for the sake of their discoveries and useful contrivances and beautiful works. It was they who built the temples and decorated them with such splendour and filled them with such machines and expedients for the use and comfort of the citizens. They were few, and not very obtrusive in their contempt for the multitude, and their superior airs were counterbalanced by their usefulness.

“This tolerance was a mistake. The idea of having exclusiveness without detriment to the socialistic principle was only a dream. There sprang up the fringe of insolent make-believe again. Herds of pretenders to art or science or criticism flocked into the universities and technical schools. They gabbled of genius and talent, of principles and laws, of elements and atoms, of cells and tissues, and of ideals and the spirit of beauty. The trick was more transparent than the other, for they had to use the vernacular in their patter; and a good deal of it was manifest nonsense to the simplest mind, whilst the astuter amongst the uneducated stripped even their most high-sounding maxims and laws into the nakedest of truisms. But the empiric scientists and artists and æsthetes shifted their ground every year and manufactured other and more mystic phraseology. It was difficult to follow them through their thickets and labyrinths of gibberish by which they kept off those whom they were pleased to call the rabble. They became almost as stupidly contemptuous and insolent as the possession of the rudiments of the most unintelligible languages could have made them.

“It came to be clear that the old danger to equality had only taken a new form. The mass of the nation clamoured against the new pretensions of culture. They would hear of nothing but the abolition of its factories, as they called the universities and schools of art. What would come of the principle of socialism if this aristocracy of genius and talent, brummagem or real, was to be let alone with its capacity to blow itself out with its limitless vanity about its own importance? No sane man would answer for the consequences if the wild rage of the uneducated was allowed to vent itself on this superficial pretence and shallow scorn. Scholars, scientists, artists, critics, and the parasitic crew that battened on their results and used them offensively against the multitude would fall in one great welter of blood. The gentler section of the community could not look on this risk to their ideal of society without a shudder. They convened the whole nation, and by an overwhelming majority it was resolved to abolish the institutions that fostered science and art, learning and criticism; it became high treason to establish a library or university, or a school of art or science, or a seminary of literature or criticism. There were the same attempts as before to elude the provisions of the law and get round it by quibble and sophism; but this led only to greater stringency and detail in its clauses. It was made penal to write a book, or make a scientific discovery, or invent any contrivance, or produce any work of art; and you may be quite sure that, with the bulk of the people acting policeman and spy for the law, it was soon carried into force, and pictures and statues and books and machines ceased to be made. The insolence and contempt of the intellectual parasites had no soil to fatten on, and ultimately vanished from the state.”

He stopped with a snap of the jaw that said plainly: “There now; are you satisfied? If not, you are a most unreasonable being. Where will you find a civilisation grander than ours on the face of the earth?”

I was by no means satisfied. He had left one of the main branches of my question unanswered. He had explained the history of the higher institutions and the fate of the sciences and art and literature; but I had asked him about the schools. I still pressed the question.

“Ay, that was another danger to the social constitution. The energy of talent and genius, and the sham intellectualism chased from one post of vantage took refuge in another. A pedagogic class sprang up that would have grown into a most contemptuous and insolent aristocracy. The loud and haughty arrogance and overbearing dogmatism of the charlatan fringe of the profession were beginning to impress the bulk of the nation with disgust and alarm, when there arose a fierce rebellion among the scholars. The hundreds of mean-spirited empirics that had crept into the ranks of teachers for the sake of the emoluments in the shape of prestige and opportunity for the scorn of neighbours had had to resort to the most tyrannical and cruel methods in order to keep discipline. A few genuine instructors there were, who were able to cope with the knavishness of the worst of pupils by means of their strength of character and power of sympathy and imagination; they always elicited what was best in the embryo humanity that came into their hands to be moulded; they could use the laughter and sympathy of the majority to whip the offensive disposition and will out of the laggards and would-be rebels; and the latter were cowed and disciplined without any sense of unfair treatment. But the closing of the channels of science and art and criticism to the aristocratic quackery, that flows, if unchecked, from the corrupt fountains of human nature, flooded the profession with supercilious pretenders. Their scholars easily measured their intelligence and sincerity, and turned the school-rooms into pandemonium. The high-flying charlatans conferred together and invented new and cruel modes of punishment. They introduced a reign of terror into the schools. The boys and girls formed secret societies which combined into one great brotherhood all over the island. They drilled in darkness and armed every member with a catapult and pea-shooter. They wrote the agreement and signed it in their own blood, and managed to keep the proposed rebellion shrouded in mystery for five whole days, for it was strictly confined to those above the age of twelve. But the fear that it would leak out precipitated the rising; and they drove the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses out under a fierce fire of peas and pebbles, till wounded and bleeding the charlatans took refuge up the mountains amid the snow, or in the waves of the beach, ducking to avoid the missiles. The rout was most ignominious, and the scholars were able to dictate their own terms. It was agreed that they should be exempted from school and family discipline and be admitted to the full citizenship. For it was seen that the exclusion of children above the age of twelve from the schools would so reduce the numbers of the insolent parasites and shams in the profession as to remove the forefront of the offence.

“But it was found that twelve was a mere artificial limit. Inspired by the example of their predecessors, the ten-year-olds made a successful revolution and had the minimum age of citizenship reduced to ten. Still the pedants were felt to be a most offensively arrogant class; the smaller their numbers grew, the more they plumed themselves on their superiority. And every new rebellion against their authority was aided and abetted by the multitude, who huzzaed as the catapults of the pigmy forces swept the field and the volleys from their pea-shooters told with deadly effect, and after the defeat of the pedagogues granted citizenship to every child of a certain age. Victory followed victory till at last it seemed a farce to have schools at all. They were turned into playhouses for stormy or wet weather, and the limit of age was removed from citizenship. Every child, as soon as his legs would carry him and his tongue would wag, could come to the conventions of the people and record his vote. It greatly encouraged marriage and the increase of families, for a man or woman with a dozen or score of children had become a power in the state. Thus the last vestige of privilege disappeared, and with it the last chance of intellectual charlatanism forming an aristocracy. Every man was like his neighbour, and for that matter so was every child. Sex, age, genius, talent, profession, trade had ceased to form the basis of caste. Equality within the nation had at last been reached.”

There was unspeakable complacence on his face; and yet my look of interrogation broke it up. I had heard much about the professions and their history in Tirralaria. I had heard nothing of the medical profession. I wondered how they guaranteed the healing art.

“Oh, as for that, it disappeared in the earliest jetsam of the community. Of the charlatans and nose-elevators the privileged doctors were the worst. They blundered and buried their blunders, and wildly resented every question. They kept up a mysterious patter that was of the very essence of aristocracy and privilege. The atmosphere of superstition that they threw round their old-wives’ remedies imposed upon men when they were sick; but as soon as they were well their fear vanished, and they determined to be clear of the empiricism and mummery of the profession. And at last, after a great plague had laughed at their charms and talismans and skill, and swept half the nation down to the worms, their quackery had become too apparent. One third of them had taken boat and migrated to other islands of the archipelago. Another third had died of their own plague-nostrums and salves. The remainder had lost their self-confidence and dogmatism and were willing to acknowledge that they knew little if any but the simplest diseases, and to these they applied the herbs and salves that every old woman tried. The nation took them in their mood of humility and destroyed the fences round the profession. Everyone was left free to use his own remedies. In a fit of generosity they handed over the secrets of their trade to the public, and salves and medicaments and pills and powders were manufactured wholesale by the state chemists and issued free with instructions for their use. Whether it was the abolition of the caste or not, the death-rate has, if anything, decreased, and plagues are no more frequent than they were before. Everyone who treats another and kills him is liable to punishment by the state. So, few undertake to prescribe, and every citizen is responsible for his own treatment. In times of privilege a doctor was licensed to kill with impunity; he and his brethren could always throw dust in the eyes of any inquiry by technical terms and abracadabra. We are rid of that chicanery, and in health and death-rate we are no worse off than before. So much for physic.”

CHAPTER XV
TIRRALARIA

I HAD other questions; but we had run into a basin that had once been a harbour. Every bastion and rampart had been pounded and bruised by the billows till the débris lay scattered along the beach. Every house and building stood in dilapidation. Yet to look upwards over the terraced slopes of the lower hills was still to think of paradise. Magnificent temples, pure with marbles and broken in outline with minarets and towers and niched statues, dwarfed the forest trees or the cliff over which they stood. There was not a meaner building to be seen. It looked as if only the gods dwelt here amid blossoming or fruited trees; and streams flashed at intervals athwart the verdant slopes; and over a precipice or down a ravine they smote the dark rock with the noise of their silver sword; and at every impulse from the capricious fan of the wind the emerald face of the cliff shone faintly through the silver veil of water that twisted back into a single thread again. Up for hundreds of feet the great stairs of the hills mounted, each step crowned with a gleaming fane and enriched with meadow and orchard. And Time, the supreme artist, had been there with his brush. I could see the moss and ivy and other coloured creepers brocade the human architecture and soften the gleam of the marble with their cool tracery. Beneath the warm passion of the setting sun the picture was most entrancing. Nothing was too new. There was a quaint tone from the centuries even about the motley garments that clothed the throng of beggars in the roads and lanes; for there were no streets and no comfortable looking citizens and burghers to be seen, unless the loungers that crowded the arcades and piazzas of the temples and leaned against the pillars up the hill were of that class. I supposed that some convulsion of nature had wrecked the edifices of the flat by the beach and the piers of the harbour, and that there had been no time or purpose for rebuilding them, and as the sun flared up from beneath the turban of clouds that hid his disk, the softened colours stole into the rents and crevices of the ruins and raised them into beauty. The dim suffusion of rose lent a picturesque warmth even to the rags and patches of the lazzaroni that smeared with unctuous indolence every available resting-place.

I was glad to get on shore; for the rancid food of the falla had not been to my taste, and the foul odour and sluttishness of the cabin were alone enough to close the pores of appetite. There was at least power to move away from these on land.

Yet the change was not altogether for the better. Dry though the roads and earth underfoot were from long absence of rain, the nose was still assailed by something that seemed to strike out from all quarters. A whiff of the sea wind would now and again beat it down only to make it more obtrusive. The whole putrescence of the earth seemed to have found here a lay-stall. Garrulesi looked quite unconscious of it. We hurried along over prostrate bodies that as the shadows clotted into night often tripped me up. They might have been logs, so irresponsive were they even to the impact of my toes. I soon learned to jump over everything that seemed to gather more darkness to it, and after a time we began to ascend, and the streaks of moveless humanity lay along instead of athwart our path. An occasional snore or groan or sigh told us of layers of it beneath the trees to right and left. One consolation was our gradual escape from the purgatory of stenches as we rose. What surrounded us I could not see, but it seemed heaven to all the senses, so keenly did they sympathise with that of smell in its new freedom.

We wound and zigzagged ever upwards till at last we reached the portico and arcade of one of the great edifices I had seen from the sea. Time and the seasons, I could perceive, even in the underlight of the stars, had carved and wrought its walls with eccentric design. And no human hand, as far as I could see, had interfered with their workmanship. They had been analytic more than synthetic architects, for, when we went inside, the stars peered down on us through chinks and rents with impudent curiosity.

It was indeed a strange building. A great torch flared over what had once been the altar, and moved and guttered in the baffling draughts. As the eyes focussed themselves to the sandwiched light and gloom, I saw a great tablet of marble with a raised map of some mountainous country upon it in spent grease and resin; and the huge fagot of pine splinters and pitch that was stuck into a rent in it was still at its work of mapping in relief. I followed the flicker of the lambent flame upwards and was amazed by the height of the roof or dome above the pillared nave and aisles. Even yet beneath the grime and smoke of ages and the litter of myriads of birds I could see carved woodwork of graceful or fantastic shape and an occasional dim relic of some gigantic fresco. The windows were choked with logs and branches of trees and débris of all kinds, and yet they showed how marvellous they were in their grace and magnitude. How the architects could have raised that stupendous mass of stone to resist the centuries, how they could have hung that sea of stone foliage and flower in mid-air, were bewildering questions. I could see the graceful floral shapes even underneath the guano of ages.

It was the scurviest sight I had seen for many a day; but the worst was to come. The crowd of rather noble-featured beggars that jostled each other on all sides were evidently preparing for rest. Mats of tree bark or dried leaves of a tough texture were being slung like hammocks from every corner of vantage. Garrulesi handed me one from a niche in the wall and some cordage, and led me to a space between two pillars that was still unoccupied. Dozens came in afterwards and hung their mats above me and below me and on both sides of me till I felt stifled by the slung and snoring humanity that festooned me round. He also pitched into my hammock some hard fruits and dried meats, which I munched till I fell asleep with the fatigue of the unwonted exercise. When I awoke in the morning this great ecclesiastical dormitory was unslinging itself. Unfledged deities were sitting in their hammocks as far up into the clustering darkness of the dome as my eye could reach, and yawning and rubbing their grimy eyelids with their grimy hands. They did not seem to notice the stercoraceous volley from the restless birds as the winged multitude flashed and screamed athwart the shadows or rustled and tore through the withered branches that filled the windows. Some of these callow gods descended the pillars or the festoons of sleeping mats by finger and toe as nimbly as monkeys. Others were gathered round a great fire by the altar roasting grains or kernels of fruit, whilst in corners lounged groups munching ugly viands that they held in their hands.

I was marvelling over this stupendous rookery, watching its antics as it unrolled itself out of the coil of dreams and descended with its mats by ledges out into the foliated and clustered pillars, when Garrulesi appeared. I scarcely recognised him, so transformed was he by his change of dress. Instead of the spruce garments of Aleofane that added such neatness to his oratory, he had clothed himself in a motley collection of rags of varied colour and texture. His beard hung in smeary locks, his hair was a mop, and by some process that was almost artistic he had begrimed his features and hands. He did not leave me time to question or reflect on the transformation of the divine demagogue into the beggar, for he threw into my mat a bundle of choice antiquities that might perhaps have brought twopence in any rag market. He assisted me to disentangle the foul and rent miscellany and to tack them together over my nakedness. My other garments he took from me, and, bidding me follow, hid them, I alone present, in a secret crevice of a vault under the edifice; he rolled a huge stone in order to conceal the aperture.