Seven Days in New Crete

by Robert Graves

  ‘What are the marriage customs here?’ I asked. (‘That’s the first thing to find out,’ as Knut Jensen the Danish anthropologist had once told me. ‘There are some places, you know, where a man dies of shame if he accidentally catches sight of his sister-in-law’s leaf-skirt hanging out on the line; and others where he’s expected to lead her off into the bush three times a day. One can make dreadful mistakes if one doesn’t discover which place is which.’)

  ‘Horned Lamb is strictly monogamous,’ See-a-Bird told me. ‘The girls and boys here have no sexual experience before marriage, unless they decide to migrate to another monogamous village where that’s permitted – or to a polygamous one. They’re free to go off if they like.’

  ‘If they do go, are they estranged from their families?’

  ‘Not at all. They visit them as often as they like and there’s no ill-will between villages with different moralities. Only, every permanent resident of a village is expected to conform to local custom.’

  ‘What’s that large house beyond the bridge?’ It was built in red brick with quadrangles, like a Cambridge college, and surrounded by a double-line of plane-trees.

  ‘That’s where the recorders live. The commons prefer to live in cottages with gardens and to have neighbours across the garden fence. The recorders prefer flats in a large building with communal dining-rooms, a communal nursery and an orderly routine. The north wing is the library and record-office. That field is their croquet-ground. It’s a tradition with us that recorders play croquet, unlike any of the other estates: croquet and bowls.’

  I saw a couple of elderly recorders coming down a path from the hill. They wore full-skirted coats, knee-breeches. and buckled shoes, which gave them the look of eighteenth-century Quaker merchants.

  ‘Is that the Recorders’ garden?’ I asked, ‘– there to the right of the plane-trees.’

  See-a-Bird nodded. ‘As you can see from here, it’s very formal. Tulips massed in neat beds – one black, one white, one red – bushes clipped flat, lily-pools, delphiniums, espalier-pears, tea-roses – their rose-bushes and fruit trees are pruned pitilessly to get the best fruit and blooms, not left in peace like ours – sundials and a peacock. Peacocks are reserved for the Recorders’ estate.’

  ‘Indeed? Why?’

  ‘A recorder is supposed to be all eyes like the peacock’s tail, and without a peacock such a garden would be a little too severe. The severity of the tulip beds is mitigated by a custom that each bed must contain one flower of a different colour from the rest.’

  ‘Suppose a recorder happened to dislike croquet, peacocks, delphiniums and tulips?’

  ‘Then he wouldn’t be a recorder,’ Sally threw over her shoulder. She said ‘good-bye’ sulkily, and walked off. What was wrong with the woman?

  I was beginning to feel less at home than before: this was something like a visit to the Ideal Homes Exhibition and something like a chapter left out from Alice in Wonderland. The Interpreter was the White Rabbit to the life. A few days before my evocation I had picked up a copy of Alice in Wonderland and read it for the first time for I don’t know how many years. (‘How good it is,’ I thought, memories of a happy childhood surging back into my mind, ‘how amusing, how exquisitely written’ – until suddenly I came on the four pages at the end of the chapter about the Queen’s croquet-ground, which I had always missed because my elder brother had torn them out of our nursery-copy to make paper-boats. ‘How tedious,’ I thought as I read them, ‘how stupid, how out of key!’) So I found myself asking the Interpreter what the Queen of Hearts had asked Alice: ‘Can you play croquet?’

  ‘I am passionately fond of it. I play game after game in my dreams.’

  ‘With flamingoes for mallets, and hedgehogs for balls, and doubled-up soldiers for hoops?’

  ‘Excuse me? I do not understand.’

  ‘That’s how Alice played it.’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course.’

  But I could not be sure whether he really understood the reference, or whether he was bluffing to show off his erudition. What a muff of a man he was! I pitied his colleague Quant.

  ‘Where do the captains live?’ I asked See-a-Bird.

  ‘You see those cloisters leading from the Record House and ending in four or five cells? They live there. Look, one of them is coming out now.’

  A tall, hatchet-faced hero in what looked like naval uniform had swung open a door and was striding masterfully down the cloisters. He might have stepped straight out of an American comic-strip. ‘There goes Nervo the Fearless on the track of the Masked Girl!’ I cried.

  ‘Nervo?’ echoed the Interpreter doubtfully.

  ‘He looks as though he were syndicated in about five thousand provincial dailies.’

  ‘Syndicated?’

  ‘Oh, nothing! I was merely admiring his perfect he-manship. Does his wife have a lot to make her jealous?’

  ‘He has no wife,’ See-a-Bird said. ‘Captains have no home-life, because they’re so busy with other people’s business; and though a few energetic young women belong to this estate they don’t marry within it. As soon as they decide to have children and settle down they resign and become ordinary members of the commons.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t the estate die out?’

  ‘The captains have a marriage agreement with villages of the commons where pre-marital promiscuity is practised. Since they’re men of vigorous physique and compelling character – as you noticed at once – new recruits to the estate always get born. In fact, it was once a problem how to keep the estate from growing too large. The solution found was to forbid captains to mate with women either of whose parents had belonged to the estate, or who had themselves been captains.’

  ‘And do the recorders breed satisfactorily in proportion to other estates?’

  ‘They’re so conscious of the need for proportional breeding that they regulate their birthrate with great exactitude.’

  ‘And the commons? And the servants?’

  ‘Those are the estates most susceptible to what in past epochs were called “the imponderable factors of genetics”: but imponderable meant no more than that they couldn’t be weighed in the scales of science. The birthrate can be accelerated or decelerated easily enough by simple me ans. The servants present less of a problem than the commons; they are always over-fertile, so we reduce their pulse-rate, and their sexual inclination, by giving them cola to chew. This has the additional advantage of making them content to perform monotonous tasks day after day without diversion. And we don’t bother about slight variations in the birthrate of the commons: if one village has a few vacant houses or more land than it needs, it invites settlers from another village of the same marriage system as itself, and these “grafts”, as we call them, make for movement and animation. But if a whole district becomes depopulated or over-populated, that’s another matter. Since cola is reserved for the servants’ estate, the usual remedy is a change in the regional costume, or music. Melancholy music stimulates breeding, serene music discourages it. As for costume, the more sombre and restrictive the clothes, the higher the birthrate.’

  ‘Surely not?’

  ‘But indeed! Melancholy music produces a vague anxiety in its hearers, vague anxiety carries with it a presentiment of death, presentiment of death suggests the need for breeding children. Sombre restrictive clothes have a similar effect on their wearers. The greater the sense of bodily freedom and exhilaration the lower the birthrate.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have expected that. Who prescribes these changes?’

  ‘We magicians do. This is a matter that can’t be left to custom. The recorders can be trusted to find the appropriate treatment for simple local mishaps, such as a plague of caterpillars or the burning down of a village or an outbreak of typhoid fever. But fluctuations in the birthrate may be due to so many causes that we’re always consulted before any action is taken; we diagnose and prescribe. The prescriptions are announced by the priests, which gives them religious force. The commons a
ren’t told why their customs are changed, but they accept the orders out of respect for their priests and the captains see that they’re carried out.’

  ‘Do the commons envy the captains their power and superior talents?’

  ‘On the contrary, they pity a man like the one you saw just now for having to live without home or family; and they know that he’s entered the estate only because of a talent or obsession for leadership – to which they feel the instinctive need for obedience. I imagine that the same sort of feeling must be aroused in your age by celibate priests?’

  ‘Well, yes – I suppose so – by those who are serious in their profession and live free from scandal. Are your priests celibate too?’

  ‘A few. A film of oil, as we say, separates the priest from his congregation, if only because he belongs to a different estate. You see, in the servant class the prevailing system is three-clan marriage: a woman sleeps with members of an associated clan, without having a constant mate. Her children remain in her own clan, but form alliances with a third clan, to avoid incestuous unions. Servants’ children, once they’re weaned, aren’t left with their mothers, though the tie of affection remains fairly strong, and they don’t know their fathers: they’re communal property and begin their life of service at an early age. The most devoted, slow-pulsed, tractable and simple-minded of all are directed to the priesthood. In regions where the commons are unusually high-spirited and need a steadying influence we give them a celibate priest; they seem to have greater respect for a celibate priest than for a three-clan marriage one.’

  ‘Are there any women priests?’

  ‘No, only High Priestesses. All ordinary priests are men; but religious instruction, which consists in teaching children prayers and myths and other religious formulas, is given only by women, also of the servants’ estate. All children without exception have to learn these rudiments by heart, and the teachers explain them in the same set words, revised every three generations or so to conform with changes of language.

  ‘I should like to see a school of that sort in action.’

  ‘There’s one behind those houses over the stream. The children have only just gone in.’

  The school-room walls were white-washed and bare – no blackboard, no maps, no pictures – nothing to distract the children’s attention from their lessons, which were given orally. They sat in a semi-circle around the schoolmistress – the boys in black overalls, the girls in white and blue ones – and behind them a window opened on a hill crowned with a circle of trees. The schoolmistress was installed in a high-backed chair; on one side of her was the fire-place, filled with the flowers of midsummer; on the other a carved and painted statue of the Goddess Mari, in white robe and blue mantle. The Goddess nursed a fair-haired, blue-eyed child in the crook of the right arm, a dark-haired, brown-eyed child in the crook of the left; the head and hands of a wrinkled hag appeared over her shoulder; a girl about twelve years old nestled against her skirt. Her breasts were bare: she held a snake in the left hand and a cross-cut apple in the right, and on her yellow hair was a coronet of stars. The hag wore a high, black conical cap like the one used by Sally at my evocation; the girl was garlanded with flowers and carried a bow and arrows.

  The schoolmistress, a fat middle-aged woman with a deep emotionless voice, seemed not so much to be instructing as delegating for an unseen instructress – who, as I soon found out from her frequent sideway glances, was the Goddess Mari. The children, who were all between the ages of five and eight, addressed their replies to the statue rather than to her.

  ‘Chant, children, after me, the story of Dobeis and Nimuë!’ said the schoolmistress.

  She struck the lowest bell of a chime fastened beside her chair, which acted as a tuning-fork for the chant. The story was in verse, of which this is a rough rendering. It is not my fault that it reads, in part, like a passage from one of Blake’s Prophetic Books.

  Dobeis was a young man, fat, bald and bad.

  Dobeis did magic with wheels of gold,

  Stamping them with pictures of creatures and men.

  He lay on his bed at the open window,

  He said to the gold wheels: ‘Out into the world,

  Be the world’s ruin!’

  Everywhere they rolled, into every house and farm,

  Bewitching the people, rousing them to hate,

  Death was in those wheels, plague and misery.

  They rolled against custom, they rolled over love,

  All the five estates into confusion fell.

  The wheels assumed captainship,

  The wheels recorded all,

  The wheels clamped the commons in golden fetters,

  The wheels forced the servants to serve without love,

  The wheels annulled the magic of the magicians.

  Dobeis, lying there by the open window,

  Laughed as he saw the ruin of the land

  Cut up and wasted by the golden wheels,

  Laughed as he saw the ruin of the town

  Crushed into rubble by the golden wheels,

  Laughed as he heard the discordant cries

  Of hate and despair that rose all about.

  Nimuë awakened, Mari’s daughter,

  From her sleep in the branches of the catkin-willow,

  Soon she was aware of what Dobeis had done.

  Her beautiful face grew pallid and stern.

  Slinging her bow across her slender back,

  She strode along the path to the house of Dobeis,

  The golden wheels circling giddily about her

  And locking together, wheel with wheel,

  As a shield to protect the house of Dobeis.

  Nimuë leaped across the gold shield,

  Her white foot alighting on the window sill.

  She addressed fat Dobeis in reproachful words:

  ‘Dobeis, Dobeis, what mischief is this?

  What have you contrived against the five estates?

  Call back your wheels while yet there is time,

  Lest you forfeit the pardon of Mari and Ana.’

  Dobeis laughed loudly from his silken bed,

  Reclining at ease upon his left elbow:

  ‘I am bad, I am bad, I am bad,’ he said.

  ‘I would have all the world resemble myself.

  Away, little Nimuë, lest I do you harm.’

  Nimuë called to the blackthorn-tree:

  ‘Blackthorn, lend me a white-flowered branch

  To humble the power of Dobeis the bad!’

  The blackthorn lent her the white-flowered branch;

  A magpie brought it to Nimuë.

  Dobeis watched laughing as she trimmed the point

  With a flint knife knapped in the crescent shape.

  ‘Back to your dolls, little Nimuë,

  Back to your dolls, before worse befalls.’

  Suddenly she struck, weeping for sorrow.

  Since never before had she taken life.

  She struck at the hollow under his breastbone.

  She did not pierce Dobeis, she drew no blood,

  The magic lay in the wind of the blow.

  Dobeis lay back upon the silken bed

  His face was doleful, his frown was deep,

  Dilated his nostrils, his dark eyes dull,

  Profoundly sunk within their orbits;

  Black shadows gathered all around.

  His face and arms were white as marble,

  His lips turned blue, his brow cold-sweated,

  A chill spread over his trunk and limbs.

  Then, in a voice, that was weak and hollow

  ‘Alas,’ he cried, ‘Little Nimuë,

  Who would have thought that the wind of the blow

  Struck by a girl could have caused my death.’

  Nimuë, weeping, addressed Dobeis:

  ‘Let your vengeance fall on the blackthorn-tree,

  On the magpie’s claws, on the crescent knife;

  But recall the course of your golden wheels,

 
I conjure you in my Mother’s name.

  Do so, and I will bury you.’

  Dobeis called back the golden wheels,

  And the ruin of man was thus arrested,

  When the last bright wheel came rolling home

  He died, and Nimuë buried him.

  She brought the wheels to the witches’ queen,

  Who rid them, by long evocation,

  Of the evil magic of Dobeis.

  Then smiths with hammers beat them flat,

  Into sheets of gold, into books of gold,

  Of the sort that noble poets use

  To make a record of Nimuë –

  Of Ana, Mari and Nimuë.

  How much of this piece of mythology – it was repeated three times – the children were capable of understanding, I could not judge. Certainly they seemed to be word-perfect by the time that the lesson was over. I noticed a girl of the magician estate weeping in sympathy with Nimuë each time that the line recurred: ‘Never before had she taken life.’

  The estate of the children was shown by the number of bands on the cuffs of their overalls. Estates sat together, though I noticed that one or two girls were sitting out of place. At a signal from the mistress all shouted a greeting to the statue of the Goddess and ran into the playground, where they began to play games in the same disorganized way that children do now. The mistress stayed behind, praying. She did not kneel, however, nor pray upright with palms spread out at the height of the thigh, as I later saw the priests pray, but stood with arms akimbo and a pleasant smile on her face as if respectfully chatting with the Goddess. She reminded me of fat Fanny, my grandmother’s faithful cook, respectfully asking her permission to make the mushroom-sauce according to my great-grandmother’s favourite recipe. I found that it was a general rule for men to address the Goddess with an adoration compounded of love and fear, whereas women addressed her familiarly as a friend, colleague or mistress, according to their estate.

  See-a-Bird told me that education after the age of eight was the affair of the estates to which the children belonged. By then it was usually clear from the child’s performance and preferences whether he was to continue in the estate into which he had been born; though some children developed unexpected powers or inclinations some years later when they had already been provisionally accepted as working members of a particular estate. It was a practical education outside the schoolhouse, the children being free – within the limits of custom, which exacted a very high standard of good manners from them – to wander through the villages and observe all that was going on in field, workshop, office or kitchen, and acquaint themselves with their neighbours for miles around. This freedom was conceded only for a few hours a day; the rest of the time they picked up, orally, the traditions of their estates and ran errands, or helped their parents or guardians. At puberty they were apprenticed to a trade or, if they belonged to the magicians’ or recorders’ estates, taught to read or write. (The captains, the commons and the servants were forbidden by custom to do either and both the magicians and recorders were strictly limited in their use of writing.) At sixteen or so they were free to start their love life, and when fully grown to travel or engage in wars, becoming full citizens. When they had ‘more white hairs than coloured’ they could become elders if they pleased and were then treated with peculiar respect; they were emancipated from custom while in their club-houses but required to behave, elsewhere, with appropriate dignity and reserve.