Land Under England

by Joseph O'Neill

  “You will see the happiness of our people, and, having seen it, you will also wish to be as happy as they are.”

  “And if I do not wish for that happiness?” I asked.

  “Then we may have to rearrange your mind, take away from it those parts that cloud it and make you unwise. You will then desire real happiness.”

  “Even if I refuse to submit to your will?”

  “You cannot refuse, if we will it. No single will can resist the power of the combined will of the people. The cure is more perfect when it is made with the acquiescence of the subject, but, if the subject is so ill as to desire to remain ill, we cure him by depriving him of the diseased will that is killing him.”

  It had come at last! My sentence had been passed! If my mind would not commit suicide, they would murder it, efface my personality, and take over such of my powers as suited them, using my body as a tool for their purposes.

  I made no answer. I couldn’t speak. I could only stare at the being in front of me.

  He watched me with fixed, expressionless eyes. If he could not read my thoughts or my feelings from my expression, he must have been a thing of stone, but I knew that he could see them as clearly as the eyes of men see objects under a bright light. Yet he made no sign. No slightest flicker of feeling of any sort came into his eyes—neither anger, nor pity, nor surprise.

  As I looked at him, I got an overwhelming desire to hurl myself on the inhuman mask, to smash it, trample on it, tear the heart and brains of the creature that had dared to pronounce such a doom on me.

  He must have read my thoughts at the moment they came to me, for instantly I felt my will gripped and held.

  There was no struggle. Something powerful had been launched at me from those eyes—not merely a power that searched my thoughts, but a force that struck my will down, held it there, and made it impossible for me to move.

  My passion was gone, my impulse to act violently, paralysed.

  Then the grip on me was released. I was free to will again, but my feeling of rage was gone. I did not desire to act any longer against the being in front of me. My mind was calm.

  I looked at the position clearly. He had no choice but to do what he was doing. He could have paralysed my will from the beginning, but he had not tried to do so. He had tried to appeal to my wisdom. I also had no choice. He had offered to allow me a respite, to go and study the lives of the people. I had no other choice but to take his offer. I did not know what I might find. Perhaps I should discover my father. I should at least get some knowledge of the circumstances of this world and the conditions that I should have to face. My only hope of safety lay in getting such knowledge.

  His mind was speaking to me again. “You are free to go; you have learned that physical violence, such as men used of old, is not possible here. We are not the slaves of our passions. We are no longer like animals. Love of the common good directs our minds, controls our wills, and rules our bodies. You will learn by watching our world how that is so.”

  I bowed, turned, and went out.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The School

  I CANNOT REMEMBER passing through the outer enclosure or seeing the men who stood there. Something had happened to me that had made the outer world invisible to me. A darkness more profound than the darkness that enveloped the world around me had fallen on my mind. My dreams of a human city, of all the outer external things that I had been hungering for, were gone, swept away as something childish and irrelevant. All the knowledge that I had got on earth, all the associations of my life there, seemed to me now remote and absurd—as meaningless as the collection of rubbish in a small boy’s pocket.

  I pulled myself together and tried to think out the situation. They had seized my father, and they intended to seize me in the same way, mind as well as body. If they had been able to seize my father, who was so strong in his will, how could I succeed in resisting them? Then I remembered suddenly the words of a doctor who had come to see us after the war, an old comrade of my father’s. This doctor had served in the East, and was talking of the psychic powers of some Orientals. I remember his saying that my father would be a good subject for hypnotists and I myself a bad one.

  “If they got you on your emotional nerve,” he said to my father, “they could do what they liked to you.”

  At once the matter became clearer to me. They had got my father on his one deep emotional ground—the Roman State. They were the Roman State that he had dreamed of and lived for. He had willingly given himself up to it and them. The last words of the doctor that evening came back to my mind:

  “Yes, yes, Mrs. Julian,” he said, “a man of most unusual powers, your husband, but a neuropath. Subject him to great emotion or profound fatigue and you may get a dissociation of his personality. I would try to keep him engaged with ordinary things, if I were you. Get him away to some city and the common life of man.” He turned to me:

  “You too will gain by leaving here, young man, though I will not pretend that it would be easy to knock you off your perch, wherever you settle.”

  I tried to think back on earlier parts of his talk.

  “Not more than a quarter of our Western people can be completely subdued by those hypnotic dominators,” he had said; “that is, deeply invaded and subdued. The rest are safe if they don’t get afraid. Once you get panicky and afraid in face of the master, you are in his hands. Have confidence in yourself and you can defend your personality—at least seventy-five per cent of white men can do it, for the stuff of the race is tough and strong.”

  If these words of his were well founded, there was still hope for me, even if my father had failed to save himself. But how to save him if he had been absorbed? I hadn’t come down to save myself. I had come for him. He didn’t want to be saved, they had said; he was happy; he belonged to the Roman State; I couldn’t find him, since he wasn’t there, and, even if he had been, I couldn’t have found him.

  My thoughts kept going round in a circle—“absorbed”; “happy”; “belonging to the State.” The words had no meaning for me. I knew that they had a meaning but I couldn’t feel it. It wasn’t that I was excited now—I had never felt less excited—but I was so full that I could feel nothing—I couldn’t even feel the meaning of the words, “there is no such man.”

  My father was somewhere near me—paralysed in his mind perhaps; silent and staring and empty like one of the automatons; but perhaps not—perhaps empty and staring like a hawk.

  Even before he had come down his eyes had got empty, vacuous, powerful, inhuman almost. How long I stood outside that enclosure I cannot tell. Again and again in that land, in periods of waking, I seemed to lose outer consciousness, so that time and space ceased for me, as if I were in a deep sleep. This occurred usually if I got a heavy defeat in my hopes, or was faced by so fundamental a difference of belief that I could not even begin to grasp it. It also occurred when I was profoundly fatigued, and in a sort of physical as well as mental despair. This was one of these moments. I had gone back to the depths of my own life in my effort to grapple with this monstrous life that was encircling me like a great silent bird of prey. In the search in the depths of my own soul for what was real in me, I had lost consciousness of outer things.

  I was called back to consciousness by a message from another mind that was trying to communicate with me. I woke up and looked round me. There was a man at my right-hand side with eyes that called to me to follow him. He went forward. I walked in the rear. I noticed the poise of his body, the little head; the softness of the movements, supple as those of a cat; the silence. My mind was circling round, still circling round and round. Was my father beyond saving? Could it be true?

  The man’s mind was speaking to me: “We are going to the schools for the young.”

  My feeling sprang from the depths into which it had been plunged. “Schools for the young.” The thought brought back the familiar things in a flood—the faces of children, the joyous cries of them as they poured out of the schoo
ls above and filled buses and trams with their chatter. Then, as suddenly, it stopped. It could not be possible that the children here below could be such as these. There would be the same silent emptiness, the same shock, if I let myself hope for anything; the same despair. I closed my mind and moved forward beside him.

  There were no people on our path—nothing but the enclosures on each side, these and an automaton or two on the roads. No women. A strange “city.”

  The enclosure on the left ended abruptly, and I stopped short, staring at a sight I had not expected. In a broad open space, lit by a multitude of phosphorus globes, a number of children were coming out of an enclosure on the far side from us. As I looked, a very soft music came to me. The children began to move to it, to sway, to form lines and curves and melt in and out in circles that came together and dissolved like smoke-rings. Their movements were like the movements of shadows—or water under shadows. The music was so low that I could scarcely hear it, and their movements seemed to be part of it—unreal, shadows in a dream. They were weaving rings in a dance that made me think of the dancing of snakes under the spell of Indian snake-charmers. Now they were whirling round like autumn leaves. I could see their faces—not very clearly, but clearly enough to note that they were not the faces of European children. Even from where I stood I could see that they were impassive, yet it seemed to me that they were live faces, quite different from the faces of the automatons or of their masters.

  As I stood watching them, a murmuring voice came to me. I started in surprise. A woman was coming towards the centre of the space, saying something on a low piping note, like the first call of a bird at dawn, or its last sleepy twitter—the first human voice I had heard here below! I listened, entranced. A human voice at last! Strangely thin and quite unintelligible to me, but a human voice!

  I stared at the woman with extraordinary joy. She was, except for the rounded breasts and softer cheeks, little different from the men that I had already seen. She had the same earthy colouring, the same large, prominent eyes with the light gleaming through them, the same little head and slender body. But she was speaking, and it seemed to me that her face was not as empty—not altogether as empty.

  I came nearer, staring at her and listening. No; she was not different from the others after all. The eyes were not our eyes. They were vacuous—empty except for their gentleness, and as alien, in their remoteness, as the eyes of a tortoise or a serpent—incredibly remote. But she was a woman in charge of children, and she was actually speaking.

  I moved forward, very quietly, and strained my ears to listen.

  The class was speaking now, answering her. I couldn’t catch their speech, it was so thin and strangely pitched and so low in tone, but it was certainly human speech. It seemed, indeed, to be a training in the practice of speech, for now three children were acting some sort of scene, and as they did this, the other children seemed to be describing it.

  I kept on moving nearer to them, ever so gently, with my ears strained to catch the sounds.

  Not a syllable of what they said could I understand. Then the sounds stopped. I stopped also. The children were going through a sort of dumb show in which each came out in front of the teacher and stared at her. Possibly this was some sort of training in the sending and receiving of thought without the medium of words, but I was hardly taking it in. I was strangely confused. The sight of a woman, the sound of human speech in this dreadful place, had stirred up depths of memory and of association that were shaking me with emotion.

  How long ago was it since I had been on the earth? Less than a week ago! It was incredible that only a week ago I had been coming up to the Pond to spend the week-end with my mother and explore the Wall again, and see the May flowers blowing on it—away from the smoke of the towns. That all this could have happened in a week—happened in England! When I had arrived I had gone out with my mother to the garden. The pear-trees were in blossom there—and a cherry- tree; she had wanted me to come to see them before the blossoms fell. She had stood with her head thrown back, beside the cherry-tree, looking up at the ash, where a thrush was singing as if his speckled throat would burst.

  I sighed heavily, expelling the weight that had been lying on my heart. At the sound the children stopped and looked at me. The teacher paid no attention but they had reacted.

  I pulled myself together. It was the first human reaction that I had seen here. These children were still human beings; they were like myself—victims waiting to be slaughtered—but still alive, like lambs at play before they are ready for the butcher. I felt an intense pity for them. How could I have patience, hold myself in, wait and watch and learn, when this thing was rushing at me, rushing at them? I wanted to run over to them, to put my arms round them, to hug them, to take them away from this horror that was advancing on them and on me.

  I began to move towards them again, gently, like a man who is afraid to break a dream. As I came near, the illusion began to vanish; they were so alien, so vacant and aloof—they were part of their people.

  I stopped. The teacher was looking at me, and, when I looked at her, I knew that she had willed me to stop. Her message came to me:

  “What do you want to know?”

  I looked at her in despair. What was the good of telling her that what I wanted was to feel the touch of children and hear their voices, to see the expression in a woman’s eyes? Her eyes were not a woman’s eyes—they were gentle, full of a calm, deep gentleness, but it was not the gentleness of a woman’s eyes, it was a gentleness that was desolating because of its emptiness.

  Again my confusion was settling down on me like heavy fog. I pulled myself together. She was right. It was knowledge I needed—I must get knowledge to escape from those eyes—and I should begin now, not waste any more time in brooding. But where was I to begin?

  There was no use asking her about my father. What else did I want to know—where could I begin? Yet I must begin somewhere. I must ask her questions—about anything; it didn’t matter what—so as to make some beginning. I heard my own voice—a loud voice—asking, in slow, distinct Latin, what language it was that she and the children had been speaking. There was a pause, as if she were trying to get clearly the meaning of my words. Then her answer came—not in speech, as I had hoped, but in silence:

  “We were speaking Latin. There is no other human speech.’’

  “Will you not speak it to me, then?” I cried. “I am lonely for the sound of a human voice. Will you not speak to me with your voice?”

  Again there was a pause. I waited eagerly. Would she speak to me?

  If she did, could I follow her Latin speech? I was full of expectancy. Perhaps, if she would deal with me through human speech, I might make real contact at last.

  In a moment my new hopes were dashed. Her answer was coming to me, not through speech, but through thought transmission, recording itself on my mind as if it were tapped out on a machine. She was telling me why she would not speak to me. She was communicating with me, but handing me the answer as if it had been made up in a packet for her and she was merely the machine that ran it off.

  “There is no need for oral speech between adult people,” came her message, “unless they are so feeble in their mind that they cannot transmit their thoughts without it. Oral speech is merely a gesture to help the sending of thought in the case of those who cannot send it without such help.”

  “But,” I cried, “you spoke aloud to the children just now. Why will you not speak aloud to me?”

  “I have used speech with the children,” came her answer, “because human thought has been so accustomed to shape itself through the gestures which are words that children still have to learn to think first through words. But, when we have taught them how to think by the use of word-gestures, we make them put aside such clumsy methods of communication. They can do without them if they become Masters of Will or Knowledge, but not always if they remain in the lower grades of mind.”

  It was a good answer—clear and s
trong—and it came to me as it might have come from a penny-in-the-slot machine. For all the human contact I received through it, I might as well have been listening to a speaking robot.

  If the woman were capable of astonishment, she must have been astounded by the strangeness of my voice, so loud and strident compared with theirs. She must have been surprised at my question and my request, since both showed that I was completely strange to their system, and she could not have met many such strangers. She must have been surprised by my appearance, by my curious Latin, by my movements and gestures and expression. But she showed no sign of noticing any of these things, as if her brain were boxed up in some compartment in which it could busy itself only with one thing.

  I felt baffled, beaten down, once again encompassed by the thing from which there seemed to be no escape. I had failed in my most hopeful effort to make contact. I must give up that hope. But, if I could not get contact, I could at least get knowledge, and I must get it. I must learn what these people were doing, and I must begin with the knowledge of how they were shaping the human material before it had become absorbed. This was the road that I, too, would go, if they could get me.

  I heard myself questioning her about the nature of her work, the purpose that she was to attain through her teaching. I was forcing myself to talk about these things, not because I wanted to know about them, but because I felt impelled to ask her questions such as she could answer. But, although I was asking her these questions, my mind was not in a condition to receive her answers. I was in too emotional a mood to be interested in them at the moment. What I wanted was not information, but some touch with a human being, and, instead of leaving my mind open to her answers, I was watching her face, her eyes, every movement of her, with a craving for some little gesture, attitude, expression, that would link us through our common humanity.

  As I watched and listened, my hopes died. There was not the slightest response on her part, not the slightest awakening of any human expression, or of any awareness of me as anything but material on which a message was to be recorded. As a human being I had for her as little personal existence as I had for the other automatons.