Seven Days in New Crete Read online

  ‘In a way, that makes it worse.’

  But, of course, he refused to see my point. ‘You cannot prefer tyrants to friends?’ he asked, wide-eyed.

  ‘No, but I prefer potshots to pijaws.’ While he was trying to work this out, I asked him: ‘But what would happen if the captains were to fail in keeping the commons up to scratch?’

  ‘The magicians would then be consulted. They would diagnose the malady and prescribe a cure.’

  ‘And if that failed, too? If there were a general malaise? If even the magicians lost their interest in maintaining the good life?’

  He stopped, took off his yoke, and sat down under a service-tree. ‘Excuse me, Sir,’ he said, ‘but I find this last question difficult to answer while walking.’

  ‘Take your time.’

  He opened and shut his mouth two or three times, as if afraid of divulging a secret, yet at the same time anxious to tell me the truth. Suddenly his eye caught something in the distance and his face lighted up. ‘Look!’ he said excitedly. ‘Look yonder!’

  ‘I don’t see what you’re pointing at.’

  ‘Flapping through the air across the hill, with her legs stuck out behind her!’ He bowed his head nine times.

  ‘Oh, that heron. What of it?’

  ‘It is no heron. It is a crane.’

  ‘Well then, that crane.’

  ‘She brings the answer to your question.’

  ‘I’m very dense. Explain.’

  ‘It is the Goddess.’

  ‘The crane is your Goddess?’

  ‘No, but evidence of her presence. When four estates fall spiritually sick and the fifth cannot heal them, the Goddess must intervene in person.’

  ‘How? With a thunderstorm, or a flood, or an earthquake as the gods used to do in the old days?’

  ‘No, I tell you that she appears in person, taking whatever form she pleases. She alone is free of custom. At her first theophany she declared from an acacia-tree: “I am whatever I choose to be.”’

  ‘You mean that we might meet the Goddess walking in disguise along this railway track?’

  ‘If we were so honoured.’

  ‘Let’s hope we recognize her at once. But I want to get this straight: briefly, what keeps your system going is the force of custom, based for the most part on inspired pronouncements of poets and reinforced by fear of the Goddess’s sudden, capricious appearance?’

  ‘Not fear alone, but love answering her love. As Cleopatra wrote, speaking in the Goddess’s name:

  When water stinks I break the dam,

  In love I break it.

  which is entirely different behaviour from that of the Thunder-god to whom for a while she delegated her authority. According to our Myths of the Ancient World he used to cause natural catastrophes in sheer ill-temper, whether the people were living virtuously or not.’

  ‘Yes, he was a terror, wasn’t he? I always think of him as M. le Générale le Vicomte de Martinbault, my former landlord, a bearded monster with the rosette of the Legion of Honour in his button-hole, who used to fling his valets downstairs when he was drunk and crunch brandy glasses until the blood from his mouth stained his dress shirt and white waistcoat: M. le Vicomte seated on a cloud, drunkenly wagging his thunderbolt, with a terrified Ganymede in white velvet plying him with more Hennessey. I’m all for Goddesses; they do at least keep the peace.’

  He went on to explain that trade between kingdoms was arranged on much the same principle as trade between villages: each kingdom exported its superfluous products by sea and sent buyers to bring back in exchange whatever goods would be welcome at home. There was no bargaining; only a grateful exchange of gifts. It was a New Cretan principle that one’s debt of hospitality to a stranger increased with the distance that he had travelled, so only the choicest products of a kingdom were considered good enough for export. Apparently the system worked well enough, I suppose because the world population had been stabilized at a sensible figure and there were no shortages of food or metals or textiles or labour – and, of course, no bills or receipts or ledgers or customs or tariffs or taxes or trade balances or any other technical obstacles to free exchange of superfluities. Economically speaking, it was the unsoundest system ever invented: it did not even provide for the study of economics, being wholly without statistics.

  As we rested, a party of five villagers, two women and three men, overtook us. They were in holiday dress; the women walking ahead, the men, with yokes on their shoulders, following in single file. They were singing a melancholy catch about the sorrows of love, but broke off when they saw us and called out a greeting. Evidently they knew who I was, because one of the men said: ‘I deny that he’s a phantom, sister – I can’t see through him!’ and the leading woman reproached him: ‘Silence! He’s said to understand our language.’ They would have stopped, but the Interpreter signed to them that we were engaged in an important conversation, so they passed on, but turned about and walked backwards, still watching us, until they passed out of sight around a curve. Their baskets were full of small scarlet radishes.

  ‘They are from Rabnon,’ said the Interpreter. ‘Good people, but very hot-blooded and so amorous that their football team spend the half-time interval in bed with their sweethearts, when the match is an important one.’

  ‘Do you mean: “even when the match is an important one”?’

  But he shook his head blankly. ‘No, I do not.’ Then he said: ‘When we reach the town I fear you will be the cynosure of every eye unless you protect yourself by disappearance.’

  ‘That sounds a useful trick. How is it done?’

  He took a small stick of grease-paint from one of his many pockets and drew something on my forehead.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘It is a mouth with a protruding tongue, the sign that we use for “Look away!” If a man is in grief, or in deep thought, or does not feel well enough to converse with those whom he may meet, he puts this sign on his forehead and disappears, for nobody dares pay attention to him while he is so marked.’

  ‘Excellent! I must try to introduce that custom into my age when I get back.’

  He rose, resumed his yoke, and we went on. I commented on the kitchen-garden richness of the fields. ‘Nothing is ever taken from the soil without subsequent restoration,’ the Interpreter said. ‘What all but destroyed the human race in your epoch was the sewage system. Half the population of the world lived in big towns; the other half provided them with food in exchange for manufactured goods. The food, in the form of excrement, flowed down the sewers to the sea, and was lost. The fields were given artificial fertilizers in exchange and in process of time became denatured. There followed a shortage of food, which made for wars; and the wars did further damage to the soil. It was the Sophocrats who first realized that the greatest enemies of the human race were three: viz. the water-closet and incinerator which robbed the earth of its richness, and the tractor which enabled farmers to plough up and turn into desert a vast acreage of inferior land that should have been relinquished to grass or forest in the Goddess’s honour. But they left it to us to embody the principle of soil-worship in our religion. We boast that with every new generation the top-soil grows blacker and deeper.’ His lecture on agricultural customs continued until we reached the end of the line. Apparently the New Cretan farmers had much in common with the Moors of Granada, the most enlightened husbandmen of the middle ages, whose work the Spanish Christians wrecked with such fanatic zeal; and New Crete had also been fortunate enough to inherit the best strains of fruits, fodder and vegetables from the intervening scientific age. But some of their methods seemed to me perversely old-fashioned. I challenged the Interpreter’s praise of the ox as a draught-beast, though as usual he quoted an ungainsayable authority, this time a fairly modern poet called Dodet:

  The ox though slow

  Is willing and unwearied.

  His pace keeps time

  With the Earth’s breathing.

  Strong are h
is shoulders,

  Sweet his breath,

  Richly he dungs the fields.

  ‘But the horse is a much better farm-animal in every way,’ I said.

  ‘Horses are reserved for captains and magicians to ride upon,’ he said stiffly. ‘Would you dare put a horse between the shafts of a hay-wain? A horse, indeed! The idea!’

  He went on muttering indignantly to himself: ‘The very idea! Horse – hay-wain!’

  The town of Sanjon – when we came to it – was smaller, neater, and built higher up the hill than in the old days. It was also a great deal cleaner, and the Alys, the stream that ran through it, looked surprisingly drinkable. The filthy French habit of throwing every sort of rubbish and refuse into streams had been given up for religious reasons. Running water was particularly sacred to the Goddess. But when we climbed the hill I missed the yellow brick railway station, the police-barracks, the Cinema Moderne, the cement works, the soda-water factory, the church of St Nicholas with its over-crowded cemetery, the fourteenth-century Château, and the Departement Lunatic Asylum, which had all contributed to the rich, muddled charm of St Jean-des-Porcs. However, we passed a magnificent football field and the Interpreter told me that since games had been brought within the framework of religion, Rugby football had become an obsession of the commons. ‘There can’t be much wrong with a place where Rugger’s played seriously,’ I reassured myself. Nor could I quarrel with the architecture of the houses in the streets and squares. They were solid and well-proportioned, built in the local stone without meaningless excrescences or petit bourgeois fantaisie. No two of them were alike and, since the commons could not read, every front door had its painted sign-board, or carved figurehead, or group of statuary.

  The symbol on my forehead was so effective that on my way to market I had to be continually dodging stupid people who would otherwise have tried to walk through me. The market itself suggested a flower show held in a church. All sorts of wonderful fruit and vegetables were artistically heaped in painted stalls; but since there were no prizes, no prices, no bargaining and no competition, and since the people in charge of the stalls were public servants, not the owners, and had nothing to do but to replenish stocks as they were exhausted, the dramatic element was lacking. We buyers went in at one door, leaving our gifts at a convenient shrine near the vaulted entrance, drifted round with our baskets, silently helping ourselves to whatever we wanted, not even taking the trouble to weigh our purchases; and when we had completed the circuit, came out again. The procedure recalled that of an American super-market, except that when we left no watchful accountant stopped us at the gate to add up our purchases and collect our cash. Personally, I disliked haggling over centimes with vegetable sellers. I had always left that to Antonia, who was good at it, while I bought at the prix-fixe stalls. But I disliked still more the feeling of getting things free; it made me feel as though my personal liberty were threatened.

  No, the market was not nearly as lively as it had once been. Where was the Veuve Koko, the pox-scarred old woman who used to bring a pet monkey and a Bombay duck with her, to help sell her late husband’s patent medicines? Where was the lame boy, Le Petit Vulcain, who sold fireworks and mechanical toys? Where was Old Monsieur Démosthène with his boxes of second-hand books, and his pretty grand-daughter selling papers at the kiosque? New Cretan custom had done away with them all. On the other hand, it had done away with congenital idiots, drunkards, stray dogs, policemen, dirt, smells, fist-fights and knee-length pissoirs plastered with advertisements for anti-syphilitic compounds. Still…

  Silently I helped the Interpreter fill his baskets, and silently followed him out of the market to the Refectory Square, set with a couple of hundred tables, where visitors from the villages were provided by public servants with free lager and pretzels. We sat down at a table and listened to the extraordinarily polite and musical conversation around us; but the only subject that had ever really interested the people of St Jean in the old bad days, money and prices, did not come up now, and though farmers exchanged information about the weather, the hay harvest, and pigs, their remarks had little edge to them. Not even when yesterday’s hard-fought Rugger match and the captains’ horse-race came up for discussion; because in a moneyless world there is, of course, no betting.

  I had never before realized how much I enjoyed spending money; I always prided myself on having a soul above it. Though intellectually I agreed with the New Cretans that the supersession of the religious motive by the profit motive in human dealings had been a disaster of the first magnitude, emotionally I agreed with the Fool in the Old English Christmas Play who cried to his sons Pickle-herring, Pepper-breeches and Ginger-breeches: ‘Boys, times are hard! I love to have money in both pockets!’

  Yet what dignified old men and women, what serene girls, what handsome, courteous young men were seated all around me at their lager and pretzels. My great-great-etc.-etc.-grandchildren, bless their hearts. Human equivalents of the prize exhibits artistically grouped on the market stalls. I remembered Coleridge’s lines:

  And though inveterate rogues we be,

  We’ll have a virtuous progeny

  And on the dung-hill of our vices

  Raise human pineapples and spices.

  ‘Let’s be going home,’ I said to the Interpreter. ‘I feel unworthy to drink in company like this.’

  He went off to buy his pearlies and order his wrought-iron gates, while I looked in at the windows of a china-shop and a jeweller’s. It was a relief to see new things for sale not mass-produced to a mean and conscienceless design; in my age anyone with sensibility had been forced to shop in the past. If only I could buy that little dove-in-bush pendant, or that oval gold brooch with the red and green enamel inlay, and take it back with me as a present to Antonia. Red and green, should never be seen, except upon an Irish Queen. Antonia, who is Irish, though not particularly queenly, has a sincere passion for red and green in which I always humour her. Or that splendid Spanish-looking plate striped in yellow, blue and chocolate with the sailing ship in the middle and the three tunny-fish sporting around it! She’d simply love that. But when the Interpreter appeared, he told me that they were designed for the commons. I gathered that, as a poet, I was not supposed to admire them.

  As we passed the football field on our way home, taking turns to carry the yoke, a match was about to start. The players were naked except for coloured shorts and wore no boots. The visiting team, in daffodil yellow, were singing a familiar hymn in honour of the Goddess as they tossed the ball from one to the other.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’ asked the Interpreter.

  ‘For pleasure,’ I answered. ‘The best match I ever watched was at Murrayfield, near Edinburgh, when Wales beat Scotland by a dropped goal to a try on the stickiest ground you ever saw. The visitors sang “O Land of our Fathers” too.’

  ‘“O Land of our Mother, the footballers’ Queen”,’ he corrected me. ‘But do not dally here unless you wish to see the match out. It is not respectful to stay only for a short time…

  On we went.

  ‘What’s the population of Sanjon now?’ I asked after a while.

  ‘That is a question which you should not ask, even if I could answer it.’ ‘Why?’

  ‘It is most unlucky to make a count of heads, or even an approximation to a count. E.g., we never say “a crowd of about a thousand people”. We say: “about as many people as would fill Sanjon church”. What the poet Vives wrote long ago has acquired legislative force. His Satire on Numbers begins:

  To count heads was a felony.

  It was to give each man a number

  And rob him of his name,

  The name that was his soul.

  When all were known by numbers,

  Behold a featureless mass,

  Each face a hapless zero,

  Filled with the blind emotion

  Of collectivity!

  Vives had come to a sensible solution, viz., that the most destructive social force of past epoch
s had been a mass emotion that exhibited itself in nationalism, fascism, communism, neo-communism, pantisocratism, logicalism and so on, and which was derived from thinking in terms of collective interests rather than of individual ones. In periods when the rich man oppressed his poor neighbours, who cried out in vain for justice, these collective interests had seemed more virtuous than individual ones, and it had also seemed necessary to count heads to demonstrate that these poor people greatly outnumbered the rich and were therefore deserving of consideration. But once people accepted the principle, viz. that the individual, whether rich or poor, must subordinate himself to the million-fold State, regarded as the repository of collective interests, then, Sir, everything went awry. Since this State was a social not a religious concept, and based upon law not upon love, it had no natural cohesion. It was too unwieldy an aggregate of diverse and unrelated elements for any single person to comprehend it; and therefore only charlatans came forward to govern it:

  Charlatans came forward,

  Boldly adopting titles

  Of mathematic virtue.

  Square Root of Minus One

  Proclaimed himself Dictator

  And swelled a private grudge

  By arithmetical progression

  Into a mad crusade.

  Thus through Vives’s influence our world has been kept as a network of small communities where everyone is known to his neighbour by nickname and face, and no count of heads is ever taken. States exist only in so far as these communities are bound to one another by common ties of custom and acknowledge the same king.’

  ‘But you count the number of districts and regions and kingdoms?’

  ‘As we count the days of a month or the stitches in a row of knitting. But people must not be counted, except as one is aware, without enumeration, of how many people are present in a room. Thus, not being headless millions but known individuals with names, we are swayed by no passionate political or economic theory, as in your epoch. Only local events stir our emotions.’