Seven Days in New Crete Read online

  ‘Never to commit one’s poems to silver seems an easy way of getting a poetic reputation. In practice, does anyone ever use up his plates?’

  ‘The poet Robnet had used all his twenty within a year of receiving them.’

  ‘The Goddess must have tormented him pretty badly.’

  ‘She did. She also put it into the minds of his poet-friends to present him with twenty-one more plates, three from each, so that she could torment him further.’

  ‘He could surely have kept his poems on clay-boards like Solero?’

  ‘The Nymph Fand, whom he loved, wouldn’t let him do so.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He used all the new plates within six months; and then he took his life and became Fand’s servant.’

  ‘Say that again!’

  ‘When the Goddess torments a man beyond his power to suffer further he goes to her principal shrine, removes his name from her register, and expires. He’s re-born under a new name into the servants’ estate; unless, of course, as sometimes happens, he has expired completely.’

  ‘What did Fand do then?’

  ‘She took another young poet as her lover; and presently disappeared.’

  ‘You mean, that the jealous Robnet strangled her and disposed of her remains?’

  But I had said the wrong thing again and had to make another apology. No: Fand, it seems, simply disappeared.

  The New Cretans, I found, did not mine precious metals, but were still drawing on the huge hoard at Fort Worth in North America which had been discovered and excavated by the Sophocrats. Indeed, they had no need to mine for any metals. Their population was kept stable at a low figure, and large stocks of copper and malleable stainless steel were left over from the Pantisocratic, Logicalist and Sophocratic epochs, which served them for all domestic and agricultural uses.

  Our lane passed over a railway bridge and we leaned on the coping as we talked. After a time, three four-wheeled trucks in close succession crawled slowly and soundlessly underneath. They were graceful boat-shaped structures, with painted timber and basket-work curving down within an inch or two of the track. A man of the servants’ estate – one could tell them by their closely cropped heads – sat in the bows of each heavily-loaded truck, which was not power-propelled, but drawn by oxen. See-a-Bird told me that custom forbade passengers to ride in the trucks, except in special circumstances, and never for more than short distances. Travelling was done on foot or on asses, or by ass-cart in the case of elders. Horses were reserved for the magicians and captains. ‘The railways,’ he explained, ‘are a legacy of the past. The trucks and rails were discussed at a Council of the Five Estates in the time of Cleopatra. It was clear that their construction was not according to the rule of love, yet the principle was a humane one. Cleopatra herself intervened in the debate: “If the principle, which is represented by the track and the flanged wheels, is judged to be humane, let that be preserved. It remains to exert love on the rest, namely the coachwork and the track, and incorporate it in our kingdom.” The making of the new trucks was entrusted to the coach-builders, who copied the flanging of the original wheels.’

  When I climbed down the embankment and poked about with a stick I found that the steel sleepers had not been removed, but covered with a few inches of soil which was then sown with a moss-like, drought-resisting grass. The trucks looked rather like gondolas and the drivers were, indeed, called gondoliers.

  ‘Why the restriction on the use of horses?’

  ‘People who walk feel an instinctive respect for those who are mounted, and this is why we give captains the privilege of riding horses – by custom theirs are any colour but white. Magicians ride on white horses, because magic is connected with the moon, to whom the white horse is sacred. White asses are reserved for high-priestesses, priests and school-mistresses.’

  ‘But why the restrictions on passenger travel? And why not use fast-trotting horses and lighter trucks?’

  ‘The poet Vives wrote:

  ‘With wheels and wings and rockets

  The outlanders have shrunk their territory

  (Which is a thousand times more wide

  Than yours, noble New Cretans)

  To a mere village green and duckpond.

  But ride no faster than a man may run,

  And soar no higher than a man may leap,

  Count distance by the day’s march or day’s sail:

  Respect the fertile spaciousness of earth

  As you respect Her who here reigns.

  ‘Your policy seems to be to cut off your noses to spite your faces.’

  ‘Do you really enjoy long, breathless journeys?’

  ‘No, but I shouldn’t like to feel that if I wanted to go, say, from New York to Hollywood, I’d have to do it in thirty-mile stages instead of flipping across the continent by plane in a few hours.’

  ‘Why should you be in such a hurry to go to Hollywood?’

  Antonia had asked me that very question only a week or so before and I couldn’t think of any better answer than a weak: ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I told See-a-Bird.

  To my surprise we found Sally already at the Record House. She was in the archive-room, reporting my evocation in matter-of-fact detail to the Chief Recorder. I caught: ‘… white bull-hides stretched across hazel wattles; rowan-wood and vine-stocks kindled with need-fire in a gravel pit… the siren call sounded, nine drops of blood drawn from the evoker’s left breast and let fall on the instrument of induction. The charm: “Living, living, live and quick”, five times repeated… After the first appearance of his wraith, its embodiment with the sacred potion; also herb-Edward, sea-anemone and a net of white horse hair.’

  Her voice dropped a little when she saw me come in and there was a line or two of the story she reported in finger language; the whole affair was more sinister than I had been allowed to realize. I hate being the subject of hypnotic experiments and fight the anaesthetic whenever I have an operation; but even ether or chloroform would have been less humiliating than this Druidical nonsense. I felt a sudden intense disgust; why did I ever consent to visit this place? Curiosity had borne down my commonsense. I didn’t belong, and I dislike Utopias.

  The Chief Recorder noted the report in shorthand on a clay-board and handed it to Sally for checking. She read it carefully, made a few alterations and said curtly: ‘It must be engraved on silver by noon tomorrow.’

  As she left us, the Chief Recorder turned to me with a grave bow: ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘yesterday’s events are, I believe, destined for gold.’ Then he stroked his chin meditatively and looked me up and down. ‘This is a day of change. Our engravers have been idle for nearly two years.’

  ‘I’m glad that my arrival has done something to check unemployment.’

  ‘You misunderstand me,’ he answered rather stiffly. ‘The less there is to record, the greater our honour.’

  ‘Very well, then; in that case I’m sorry that my arrival has caused your engravers unnecessary labour.’

  ‘You have no need to be sorry,’ he said in the same stiff tones. ‘The engravers love their work.’

  ‘Indeed? They love their work, yet it dishonours you? Would you mind explaining the paradox?’

  ‘With pleasure. The occurrence of recordable events does not cause positive dishonour, though bright plates are positively honourable. The engravers are pleased to perform a necessary task, as the undertakers of your age took pride in their profession, though they had no greater love for death than anyone else.’

  ‘Thank you for the explanation, though I don’t think your analogy is a very happy one – it makes me feel like an exquisitely groomed corpse in a quilted coffin.’

  Five sleek-haired commoners in white smocks, with brightly polished copper basins slung around their necks, came trooping up the stairs. ‘You will excuse me,’ the Chief Recorder said, ‘but here are the barbers. They come every Sunday afternoon from their villages to repeat the gossip
of their shops. We collate these reports and each barber takes back a summary, which we call the pravda (a word of obscure origin, supposed to be a survival from the Pantisocratic epoch), to his own village for public recitation. Once a month the district pravdas are combined into a regional one; and this is returned to the village in the same way. From the monthly pravdas of our many regions an anecdotal history of the whole kingdom is compiled at irregular intervals. Custom rules that it must not take longer than three, or less than two, hours to recite. It then becomes part of the oral stock-in-trade of the district historian, who is a recorder. The histories of the various kingdoms are reviewed and collated, at irregular intervals again, and their golden elements, if any, combined with those of our magical, meteorological, agricultural and similar records, are incorporated in the Brief History, or the Registers, or the Manuals.’

  ‘The rest is lost?’

  ‘Unless it is preserved by local tradition. One of the duties of the barbers is to memorize the more entertaining anecdotes of their district. We have local records, in rough rhyme, going back for many generations.’

  ‘Do they recite these anecdotes while they’re cutting hair?’

  Certainly not. Custom does not permit us to do two things at a time. We recorders, for example, never discuss our business or listen to music during meals, as I understand is always done in your age.’

  ‘Not quite always,’ I said. ‘But don’t your ploughmen whistle as they follow their team?’

  This suggestion seemed to surprise and shock him. ‘Here only certain women whistle,’ he answered, ‘and then only on solemn occasions.’

  Chapter VIII

  The Brutch

  Shortly after the evening curfew, I heard the sound of horses’ hooves on the road and leaned out of my bedroom window. Sapphire and the two brothers were returning from Court. She rode side-saddle and looked splendid: not in the least like one of those berry-faced women in long riding habits who used to ride side-saddle in the days of my childhood, but rather like ‘the lady upon a white horse in the Caldecott picture book. The childish simplicity of the New Cretan scene and the stern rules of propriety that guarded it invited constant quotation from the nursery classics. ‘Rings on her fingers and bells at her toes!’

  I waved to the party but nobody looked up; they were all too busy soothing their jittery horses.

  ‘Strange,’ I thought. ‘After a longish trot to Dunrena in the morning and back again in the afternoon, those hacks ought to be manageable enough. They look as though they’d suddenly run into a steam-roller – how horses hate steam-rollers! – but there could hardly be one on the roads in this post-civilized age.’

  They turned into the yard, dismounted, and handed the horses to the grooms. See-a-Bird and Sally had come out to greet them in the Goddess’s name and Sally asked: ‘Whatever’s wrong with the beasts?’

  ‘We ran into a brutch,’ Fig-bread answered shortly.

  ‘Where? Not near home, surely?’

  ‘In the village itself, just outside the Nonsense House,’ Sapphire answered. ‘We cut across the corner of the mill-field and suddenly my mare reared as though a snake had bitten her. And then the other beasts plunged about like mad things. Starfish took a toss, and we had to chase his horse twice round the park before we caught him.’

  Sally nodded. ‘The farmer tells me that he’s suspected a brutch at that spot for some time: he came to report it formally not long before you came back. He says it’s suddenly flared up. I told him we’d inspect the place as soon as you returned.’

  ‘Let’s all go, as soon as we’ve had our smoke,’ Sapphire said, frowning a little.

  I spent the quiet quarter of an hour over my cigarette, thinking about the brutch. Was a brutch a malevolent spell deliberately cast – no, it could hardly be that, because Sally had made it clear that witches here were naturally benevolent – or could it be what, in our epoch, is called a ghost? Being a poet, not a scientist, I have a commonsense attitude to ghosts. I think that one should accept them very much as one accepts fire – a more common but equally mysterious phenomenon. After all, what is fire? It is not really an element, not a principle of motion, not a living creature – not even a disease, though a house may catch it from its neighbours. It is an event rather than a thing or a creature. Ghosts, similarly, seem to be events rather than things or creatures – and nearly always disagreeable events.

  I reckon among ghosts the nameless and disembodied hauntings of particular stretches of road, clearings in forests, bare hill-tops. I have twice met with powerful examples of this phenomenon. The first occasion was on a North Welsh ridge crowned with an ancient earthwork; the second was in the Balearics on a lonely coast road, near a village where a temple of Diana had once stood. On each occasion it was dusk with a waxing moon, and I felt that sudden inexplicable dread that makes the hair of one’s scalp rise like the fur of an angry cat and one’s legs run with no sense of effort, as if they were skating. Previously I had thought that when Shakespeare wrote about the haunted ship in The Tempest:

  … not a soul

  But felt a fever of the mad and played

  Some trick of desperation… Ferdinand

  With hair upstaring – then like reeds, not hair –

  Cried ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here!’

  he was writing poetical nonsense. Since then, I know that he was giving a not exaggerated account of a disagreeable physical fact. The Greeks had a word for this sort of dread – ‘panic’ – meaning the fear that suddenly struck them in the woods or on the hills when the God Pan was loose. In Ferdinand’s case it was not Pan, of course, but St Elmo; and the only way I can account for my two hauntings is that both places had once been the scene of horrific religious rites, and that the rocks and stones still periodically sweated out that horror.

  Haunted houses, again. They seem either to enclose a sharp individual horror that centres in some particular room, or else a general feeling of misery, sorrow, boredom or vice pervading the whole building. Sensitive people can tell the difference between a happy house and an unhappy one as soon as they cross the threshold. But, in our epoch, most of them would be ashamed to tell the house-agent: ‘I’d rather pay a thousand pounds than rent this place – it has an evil atmosphere.’ Instead they would say: ‘I’m afraid, you know, that my husband would find that dressing-room far too small, and there isn’t enough space for his books in the sitting-room. Besides, the garden is much too large for just the two of us.’ But perhaps haunting of the disembodied sort is a matter of degree. Every house that has had a previous occupant is, in a sense, haunted.

  That horrible flat in Heliopolis, which Mr Angelides the house-agent found me when I went to Egypt to write a book. Antonia and I rented it for a month from an Assyrian widow, because it was the only vacant one to be had – the top flat of a modern block built by a Belgian firm. It was crammed with gaudy furniture in bamboo and red brocade; and I remember particularly a glass bookcase containing Hebrew books and a small French legal library. Hassan, our Sudanese servant, said at once that he didn’t like the place and, later, complained that there were afreets about. I told him that it was only for a month, so he did not give notice; he slept out, of course. But the sense of evil grew thicker and thicker as the days passed. Soon the afreets were almost visible, as tall bright phantoms that appeared between sleeping and waking, or as little black creatures, seen only from the corner of my eye, that did nasty things at dusk in the shadow of the sofa or bookcase. The most alarming phenomenon was the sudden whiff of burning that constantly spread through the flat even when there was no fire in the kitchen. Hassan afterwards told me – I don’t know how truly – that the Assyrian husband had been burned to death in the flat some months before, and that it had since been used as a brothel. But even this was not enough to account for the strength of our impressions. Perhaps someone had been monkeying with black magic there; black magic is a means of reviving and focusing ancient evil, and anyone sufficiently idle, cru
el and curious can achieve horrible results with little effort. Since it was not worth while to attempt a reclamation of the flat, we cleared out after ten days and took a room in a hotel.

  But that charming château which she and I and a couple of friends once rented near Rennes. Though five of the chimneys were full of bees, and there were crickets behind the library fire, bats in the attics and rats in the cellars, the atmosphere was excellent. One day I found an ancient sheet of cooking recipes in a box full of rubbish, which I began to decipher and translate. There was one for Blanc-Manger, which began: ‘On the evening before, put two pieces of fish-glue as big as your thumb (or else gelatine) to melt on the embers. The next morning bring it to the boil. Take one and a half quintons of sweet almonds and half a quinton of bitter almonds…’ Late that night, when I was crouching over the kitchen fire, blowing up the embers with the bellows to heat a coffee-pot, I said to myself: ‘“Melt the fish-glue on the embers…” but gelatine, I think, would taste nicer… and I wonder how much a quinton of almonds is…’ When suddenly a woman’s voice behind me called out sharply ‘Marthe!’ ‘Oui, Madame,’ I answered automatically. But, of course, no one was there. And as I do not believe in the absolute reality of time this did not greatly surprise me. It may have been a cosmic coincidence. Somehow, by thinking about the fish-glue and the embers and the almonds, I had strayed into another level of time. Marthe’s mistress, seeing me squatting over the fire in the half-light with my back turned, naturally thought I was Marthe. She must have got a shock when I stood up and she saw a tall, pale man in black corduroy trousers. In fact, I was probably her ghost, not she mine…

  On the whole, I decided, ghosts are an unimportant and far less mysterious phenomenon than many others – for example, poetry and love. People who manage their lives well leave only gracious emanations behind them. It is the wastrels, the bores and the deliberately evil who give a place a bad name: those and the self-tortured victims of their own folly. One should sternly disregard the ghosts that they leave behind, as one disregards drunks who stop one in the street and begin a rambling hard-luck tale mixed with threats and hiccoughs. In neither case should one show either sympathy, embarrassment or alarm.