Seven Days in New Crete Read online

  ‘Hullo, there goes Nervo the Fearless on his mustang,’ I said to See-a-Bird, looking out of the window. ‘Do you mind if I follow him and watch him at his job? The man fascinates me.’

  ‘By all means. We have a rule: “Never gossip with a captain,” but so long as you follow him at a decent distance, say fifty paces or so…’

  ‘Is he sensitive too?’

  ‘No, captains are the least sensitive of people both by nature and training. Still, it’s considered very bad manners to distract one of them in the execution of his duties by catching his eye or carrying on any conversation that he may happen to overhear.’

  ‘I shan’t even cough. What’s he doing to those little boys?’

  ‘Let’s go and see.’ We went out into the park and towards the stream. Nervo had hitched his chestnut horse to a post and was haranguing four or five little black-overalled boys who had stopped by the bridge on their way home from school to take off their shoes and race bits of sticks in the stream.

  ‘What’s he saying to them?’

  ‘He’s telling them how to go about it. He says: “First be sure that all the boats are of equal size and weight, and that none has an unfair start; and, before you begin, agree on the winning-post, and put your shoes in a dry spot on the bank –”’

  ‘Arranged neatly in pairs?’

  ‘Yes, how did you guess that?’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘And “hang your raincoats over the rail and never say ‘my boat’, but only ‘the black boat’, or ‘the brown boat’, or ‘the crooked boat’ – so as to avoid quarrels.”’

  ‘Doesn’t anyone ever tell Nervo to mind his own business and let the kids work things out in their own way?’

  ‘Certainly not. Parents are only too pleased for their boys to be taught good manners and fair play and the right way of going about things, which it’s the captains’ business to teach.’

  ‘Well, yes… But the boys themselves? Do they like being ordered about, even in their private play?’

  ‘He’s a captain, remember, not a busybody from some other estate.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question. Do they really like being ordered about?’

  ‘What does it matter whether they like it or not? They’re young and they must learn. Obedience is the mother of custom; custom of good manners; good manners of peace.’

  ‘And peace?’ I asked. ‘Of what is peace the mother?’

  ‘Peace is a virgin.’

  ‘You’re lucky then. With us she’s got a long line of descendants: in fact, her genealogy turns round in an endless circle. Peace is the mother of prosperity, prosperity of idleness, idleness of boredom, boredom of mischief, mischief of slaughter, slaughter of terror, terror of obedience – and there you are back again at the beginning. One, two, three, four, five… yes, I make it ten generations.’

  ‘Peace is a virgin!’ he repeated in firmer tones than before.

  Meanwhile Nervo had mounted Red Thunder and cantered off with a cheery farewell. I watched hopefully, waiting for the biggest boy to put out his tongue and for the smaller boys to snigger and shout something rude. But all that happened was that after waiting until he was out of sight, they stood about for a while in an undecided way. Then one of them took up the carefully graded and impersonal sticks that Nervo had cut for them, laid them out in a neat row on the bank beside the pairs of shoes and went off to make mud pies under the bridge. The others joined him. When they had made about a dozen, they recovered their spirits and were soon pelting the row of raincoats on the rail and shouting: ‘Mine’s the dirtiest now. No, mine is!’

  ‘They’ll learn good manners in a year or two,’ See-a-Bird sighed. ‘Theirs is the rebellious time of life.’

  From two fields away, close to the Doctor’s house, Nervo’s fine baritone voice was raised in protest and exhortation.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ I asked.

  ‘He says there’s a swampy patch at the end of the meadow that badly needs ditching; he’s urging the farmer to fetch two men with spades. No… I don’t think he’ll get them. The farmer is shouting back that there’s a brutch on that spot, and that it’s against custom to meddle with brutches.’

  ‘A brutch?’

  ‘A local emanation of bad luck. Occasionally the result of a contemporary spell, but nearly always a relic of the distant past.’

  ‘And is there really some brutch there?’

  ‘None has been reported to us so far.’

  ‘You mean that the farmer’s been lazy and that he’s trying to excuse himself for having neglected his field?’

  ‘That would be dishonest – the behaviour of a five-year-old!’

  ‘Perhaps. But if I were the farmer and Nervo talked to me in that tone of voice I’d consider it my duty to be dishonest.’

  ‘Sir,’ See-a-Bird asked simply, taking me by the hand, ‘you can’t possibly mean that you’d tell a lie to conceal your laziness?’

  There were actually tears in his eyes. ‘No,’ I said, soothingly. ‘Perhaps I didn’t mean exactly that. What I meant was that, in my epoch, if a farmer got bawled at by a captain for not having ditched his field, he’d consider it his duty to lie to him. One of the reasons why we fought the Second World War was that Hitler had founded schools for captains of the Nervo sort – captains to order us about when he’d conquered us – and we valued our personal freedom.’

  ‘Hitler? But surely Hitler didn’t belong to the Second World War? I suppose you mean the one-armed Orthodox Commander-in-Chief who put the poet Horsch to death?’

  ‘No, no. Adolf Hitler… the paper-hanger with the silly moustache who made himself Führer of Germany.’

  ‘Oh, him! Yes, I remember now. The Brief History says very little about that Hitler, except to describe the glass castle under the Kyffhäuser Mountains where he waited thirty years for revenge. His one-armed grandson of the same name is the better remembered of the two. And his great-grandson, nicknamed “The Pander”…’

  ‘Please, please, I don’t want to hear about any more Hitlers. I couldn’t bear it. One’s enough for a lifetime. So far we’re labouring under the pleasant delusion that the original Adolf committed suicide in a dugout under the Chancellery at Berlin, and that his only virtue was that he died without issue. Let’s go along to visit the Recorders’ house and leave Nervo and Red Thunder to deal with the brutch.’

  ‘Captains are not qualified to deal with brutches.’

  ‘Even with imaginary ones, invented by lazy farmers?’

  ‘Sir,’ See-a-Bird said, ‘do be serious. You must know by this time that it isn’t the custom here for grown men to tell lies or make excuses.’

  ‘Something put me in a bad humour,’ I explained. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He made no comment, but I could see that he was feeling the strain of my company.

  I pointed casually at the Doctor’s house: ‘Can you tell me who lives there?’

  ‘No one lives there permanently. It’s what we call a nonsense house: a club-house for elders.’

  ‘Why the name?’

  ‘I have just explained: it’s the elders’ club-house.’

  ‘Do you mean to tell me that elders habitually talk nonsense, that one’s brain softens here at the age of sixty or so?’

  ‘No, it isn’t that, but they have the privilege of saying and doing almost anything they please within the four walls of their nonsense house: they have ceased to be bound by custom. But the condition of this “inward freedom”, as it’s called, is not only that they must behave with exemplary gravity elsewhere but that none of their opinions or statements has any relevance in the younger world of custom.’

  ‘May I visit the house some time?’

  ‘I fear not. Nobody who’s not an elder may enter a nonsense house; it’s strictly forbidden.’

  ‘But this very morning I saw a girl going into that house.’

  ‘You’re mistaken.’

  ‘I tell you, I saw her go in, just before I came
back from my stroll. She was young and beautiful and wore a white… a white…’ I fought for the word.

  ‘You’re mistaken. You saw a nonsense. No one here pays any attention to the sights and sounds that reach him from a nonsense house.’

  ‘But this girl was outside and went in. She stood for a time by that swampy patch where the brutch…’

  He took me by the arm and led me firmly away.

  We dawdled along the lane towards the Record House, and See-a-Bird gave me an idea of what I should find there. No files, no blue-books, no forms, no blotting-pads, no wastepaper baskets; because Vives, a famous New Cretan poet who flourished towards the close of the Sophocratic Epoch, had written:

  Paper feeds on paper

  And on the blood of men.

  Engrave the durable

  On plates of gold and silver,

  Lest memory of it wavers.

  The rest, impress on clay,

  Or cut on tally-sticks –

  Though sparing even of these.

  Cretans, have done with paper

  And with parchment, its dour brother.

  This poem, intended to warn the New Cretans against bureaucratic civilization, made so strong an impression on them that its exhortations acquired the force of custom. The manufacture of paper and parchment was discontinued almost at once – paper was no longer used even for wrapping or for toilet purposes – and all records of real importance were thereafter engraved on thin plates of gold or silver. For the rest they used slates, clay-boards, tally-sticks and their memories; but mainly their memories.

  ‘Real importance!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve long thought what a blessing it would be to reduce the corpus of learning to manageable proportions. Four centuries before my time it was just possible for someone of unusual intelligence and industry to be well educated in all the subjects of knowledge then available. The Church had always limited and coordinated learning; but once Papal authority was defied in Germany and England these subjects grew in number and complexity until soon no one could hope for more than a smattering of some of them and perhaps a specialized knowledge of one. This, of course, led to intellectual disunity – I don’t know whether you realize how much my age suffers from unrelated and often contradictory developments of such subjects as, for instance, biology, physics, aesthetics, philosophy, theology and economics. This led to moral disunity, social unrest, civil wars and commercial wars which gradually increased in bloodiness and horror. I’ve often thought that if the essentials of each subject of knowledge could be preserved and the rest jettisoned, it might once more be possible for people to be generally well educated, and for the contradiction between the subjects to disappear, and so for international peace to be restored. “And what’s to prevent that happening?” I’ve asked myself.’

  ‘Well, what did prevent it?’

  ‘The cards were stacked and the dice loaded against any project of that sort.’ (I was speaking more to myself than to See-a-Bird who, at the best of times, could only catch my general drift.) ‘To begin with, every specialist would be loyal to his own branch of learning and insist that every least part of it was of the utmost importance and that practically nothing could be jettisoned. They’d quarrel as bitterly as assistant masters in a public school when the Headmaster tells them that he’s decided to simplify the curriculum because of the parents’ complaints about the boys’ being overworked: “Head Master, if you ask me to give up my Special French Class, I shall resign!” “Head Master, if you think that I can get my boys up to Certificate standard on only three hours’ Maths a week, you are sadly mistaken.” So in their competitive efforts to cover each particular field decently they’d inflate, rather than deflate, the corpus. They’d also emphasize the contradictions between subjects. (Oh, what surly good-mornings used to pass between my Science master and my Classics master, and what spiteful remarks each used to make in class about the other!) But if the task of deflation were given to a committee of mere smatterers – men without a bias in favour of any one subject of knowledge – they’d not have the least idea where to stick in the pin, or how to gather up the slack afterwards. How did your people solve the problem?’

  ‘It was easier for us. When we first came to Crete we carried no dead weight of learning with us; the Sophocrats had seen to that. And once our system was well established, without intellectual or moral disunity, because we were all bound together in religious awe of the Goddess, we began to import useful knowledge from the outside world. But we imported it in concentrated form, a little at a time. For example, the outside world boasted of their poet Shakespeare. On inquiry we found that two hundred and seventy-four thousand books had been written about him, two or three thousand of which were extant, besides I don’t know how many articles and pamphlets. We asked for only three books. They were a complete original text of the Plays and Poems, with concordance, glossary and variorum readings; a well-documented Life; and a Digest of Shakespearean Criticism. Later, the Life and Digest were reduced to three pages, and the Plays and Poems to thirty, apart from the New Cretan translation. We kept only what Shakespeare had written when inspired. Usually, as you know, he wrote as a talented theatrical hack.’

  ‘Then no complete plays of his survive?’

  ‘It would go against custom to stage them.’

  ‘But you could read them. They read wonderfully.’

  ‘A play, by its nature, has no existence except on the stage.’

  ‘You don’t seem to admire Shakespeare very much.’

  ‘We admire no poets. We say: “The Goddess alone is worthy of admiration.” But Shakespeare still figures at length in the English Canon. It is said of him there: “he climbed painfully by night up a broken stair lighted only by the Goddess’s cruel smile; he loved her, though against his will.”’

  ‘How does the English Canon begin?’

  ‘With Thomas the Rimer who wrote the early English Carols in the Goddess’s honour, and Robin Hood the archer, who wrote ballads in the same style, some of them about his own exploits. Next comes the witty court-poet Henry Tudor, who defied the Pope and died in sanctuary. Next…’

  I did not bother to put him right. The post-Exilic Jews had shown an equal disregard for historical fact, in ascribing all ancient religious poetry to King David and all ancient amatory verse to King Solomon, and in rewriting their national annals for the purpose of moral edification. I found later that the New Cretans, who never gave dates for anything, telescoped history whenever they pleased. They had created such composite historical characters as the court-poet Henry Tudor, to whom they attributed, so far as I can remember, the best work of Wyatt, Skelton and Dunbar, as well as a couple of poems by Henry VIII, and for whom they wrote a plausibly dashing early-Tudor Life. Robin Hood was the English Homer – the Greeks had similarly fathered all early ballad-poetry on the semi-legendary Homer – and became the secret lover of Queen Berengaria, whose gallant husband, King Richard Lion-heart, was credited with the moralistic anecdotes of Alfred and the cakes, Bruce and the spider, Sidney and the drink of water, and with a great many more. Similar liberties were taken with the life of Shakespeare, which incorporated those of Sir Francis Drake, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh and Christopher Marlowe. I can’t say that I approved of all this. As the son of a Shakespearean scholar who spent four years and a lot of money on a book called Broken Letters as a Help to Establishing the Date of Certain Eighteenth-Century Shakespearean Forgeries, I felt that this was carrying simplification a little too far.

  ‘Tell me, what do your Golden Archives contain, more or less?’

  ‘A hundred volumes exactly. The Myths of Crete. The Myths of the Ancient World. The Brief History of the World in nine volumes. The Canon of Poetry in fifteen. Four books of ancient melodies: two of recent ones. The Book of Sums and Numbers. Twenty-eight Registers – of plants, birds, fishes, stars and so on. Thirteen Manuals – of surgery, dyeing, metallurgy, navigation, meteorology, apiculture and so on. Twelve dictionaries. Three Books of Maps. Five
volumes of The Book of Precedents. Five volumes of The Book of Secrets. The Book of Death. And that’s all. It took a century or more for these records to be gathered, sorted, simplified and engraved on gold plates, but once this had been done the subsequent additions and emendations weren’t very numerous. The editors spent as much thought on discussing what didn’t need to be included, as on what did. They argued that it was better to record too little than too much.’

  When I questioned See-a-Bird further, he told me that the archives gave no information whatever about philosophy, advanced mathematics, physics or chemistry, nor about the motivation of any machine more complicated than the water-wheel, pulley or carpenter’s lathe. Silver plates, he said, were used for records which, though believed to be durable, were still on probation. For example, every poet on the occasion of his ‘acceptance’ was given twenty small silver plates on which to record his life’s poems; it was assumed that no poet could write enough true poems in his lifetime to cover more than twenty. He was expected to keep a record on clay-boards of all he wrote and consult his friends, from time to time, as to which of them, if any, should be transferred to silver. He might take their advice or not, as he pleased, and everyone respected him if he ‘kept his plates bright’ until he was about to become an elder, when he could judge the value of his work more objectively. If he kept his plates bright to the end, this earned him posthumous praise, whether or not a poem worthy of engraving on either silver or gold was found among his clay-boards. See-a-Bird quoted the record of Solero: ‘the Goddess tormented him greatly and when he was killed by the fall of a poplar at the shrine of Mari the Silent, a pile of clay-boards and slates were found on his cupboard-top. There now are forty plates in gold of Solero, who had kept his silver plates bright.’