‘Capital! By all means.’ Quant turned to the Interpreter: ‘Cut along now, or you’ll be late.’
‘Are you sure that I can be of no further service, my dear?’ the Interpreter pleaded.
‘Your duty lies in the concert room,’ said Quant with decision. ‘I should never forgive myself if I thought that you had held up the performance for my sake.’ Turning to me again, he explained: ‘My colleague Mallet-head plays the oboe. He plays it correctly and dispassionately. However, he’s a superb croquet-player, and in croquet those are the qualities that win matches.’
The Interpreter took his leave, smiling happily: it was clear that he had missed the critical force of Quant’s ‘however’.
‘Sapphire’s not gone to Dunrena,’ said Quant, when we were alone.
‘She’s not even left the village – I was to tell you so privately. You’ll not be needing either of those horses. Why not take them up the side of that wood and through the gate into the paddock beyond, unsaddle them, and then come back here?’
I did as he suggested. The paddock contained a set of hurdles for jumping-practice and I left the horses going faultlessly round the course together, whinnying for pleasure at the turns. Then Quant and I crossed the road by the stile and struck across country until we came to a small weatherboarded hut in a quince-orchard.
‘We can talk here undisturbed,’ he said, pushing open the door, ‘and I don’t mean about past participles.’
The hut was furnished with a table, two chairs, a charcoal stove and a bunk.
‘Make yourself at home,’ he added, sitting down.
‘Whose place is this?’ I asked.
‘It’s a painters’ hut; that’s why it’s in a quince-orchard.’
‘I don’t see the connexion.’
‘Quinces are sacred to Mari, who inspires our painters of magical pictures. As you may know, we have two kinds of painting, the magical and the popular. The commons paint their house-signs and decorate their fire-boards and chests with flowers, fruit and animals, or with lively illustrations of barber-shop ballads; but that’s about all. No, they aren’t allowed to paint portraits of living people; not even magicians may do that, for fear of bringing ill-luck. The magical painting is done in quince-huts. Colours, brushes and boards are on the shelf above your head, if you feel inspired.’
‘I won’t; but tell me about magical painting.’
‘It’s a way of consulting the Goddess. The magician paints a picture on a mythical subject, and when it’s done the answer to the problem, whatever it was, is found on the board.’
‘What sort of a problem?’
‘Every sort. It may be diagnostic: for example the cause and cure of an epidemic. Or it may be about love. Or about some question of public morality. I’ll give you a simple instance. A few years ago, a body was found in a peat-marsh, well-preserved and wearing a waistcoat with gold buttons, one of which was missing. There was a bottle in his pocket, also a snuff-box. The buttons were made from coins, but the finder asked permission to wear them. He claimed that they had long been converted from money into buttons and that, since they were struck by hand, they were not against custom. The problem was referred to a council of magicians and one entire morning its fifteen members sat staring at the buttons, but not one of them felt inspired to say a word. At last Bee-flight – who is the mother of See-a-Bird’s children and an elder now – stood up. “Perhaps the quince-trees have a message for us,” she said. The others then went out into the garden and played cambeluk; it was a Thursday.’
‘What’s cambeluk?’
‘A game not unlike chess or draughts for two players, played with nine pieces a side – eight commoners and a captain: you’ll have to learn it. Bee-flight went off at once to this very hut, said a prayer to Mari, and got down to work. She painted the legend of Nimuë, Dobeis and the golden wheels and when she had come out of her trance, she tied the board behind her and rode home. She waited until the cambeluk tourney was finished, because we never interrupt a game unless in an emergency, and the council reassembled to look at the picture. There stood Nimuë, her hand poised in the act of killing Dobeis, and in the background was a liquor shop. The man in the waistcoat, his face bloated with drink, had cut off one of the buttons and was handing it over the counter with his left hand, while with the other he reached for a bottle. From the shop a path wound across a marsh, and a raven hovered in the sky. That, of course, was decisive. Clearly, the buttons had served as money and one of them had caused the man’s death – he had got drunk on his way home and the marsh had swallowed him up.’
‘What happened to the buttons in the end?’
‘They were sent to the Queen of the Witches for purification, and afterwards beaten out into a gold sheet for the archives. However, the finder was allowed to keep the snuff-box, which was judged to be a work of love.’
‘And why have you brought me to this hut? I can’t paint, and you’re no magician.’
‘I’m hoping that Sapphire will come here.’
‘Very well, tell me about her.’
‘But first, if you’ll excuse me, a little about myself. Or do you want to ask me something before I begin?’
‘Yes; I’d like you to put your hand on this locket and swear that you’re the Interpreter’s colleague Quant, and not just another of those annoying illusions that have fooled me these last few days. Your English is so correct and idiomatic that I’m a little suspicious of you.’
He smiled and took the oath in New Cretan.
‘Did She give you that?’ he asked, greatly impressed by the locket.
I nodded. ‘In the alder-grove,’ I said.
‘Did she seem pleased with you?’
‘She was good enough to tell me that I was doing very well.’
‘You’re a lucky man. Now, listen and interrupt me whenever you like. First about myself. I’m what they call a margoton here: so far as I know there’s no English equivalent. It means someone who, though a reputable member of one estate, has the capacity of belonging to another. We margotons are extremely rare, but the poet Vives was one of us, and that provides the necessary precedent. He was born in the magicians’ estate, but at the time of the Cyprian Flood, when all the captains of his district lost their lives, he assumed command and carried on the rescue work to everyone’s admiration. “Thereafter Vives rode a skewbald,” the Brief History says. I was born in the magicians’ estate but had all the earmarks of a recorder, except a temperamental incapacity for croquet, which I have never been able to overcome; then when I had already been initiated as a recorder, at the same time as my sister, I suddenly discovered that I was also a poet. I debated with myself whether I ought to ask for a transfer to my original estate; but decided that I was as much recorder as I was poet, so that there could be no advantage in changing. Besides, when I came to specialize in English – a language, I find, which can’t be read without poetic intuition – I realized that the time had passed when it was possible to write true poetry in my own language… I think Mallet-head mentioned our recent find – the Liverpool hoard of Christmas-cards?’
‘He did; it was about the first thing I was told after my evocation.’
‘Adventurers found the box in a cave. I gave him the task of transcribing the texts before they were destroyed – all paper has to be destroyed when the year ends. In the same collection was a manuscript book of poetry which I intended to transcribe myself. When I deciphered the poems – the ink was badly faded in places – I found that they had far greater bite and poignancy than any of those included in our English Canon; but I realized at the same time that their inclusion would have had a disruptive effect on New Cretan thought. The book had two names on the fly-leaf – your own and Erica Turner’s.’
‘It had a speckled cover, hadn’t it?’
‘No, the cover was missing.’
‘Well, anyhow, I remember it well.’ (How the hell did it get to Liverpool? – that must have been long after my time. I bought it in Algiers whe
n I was there with Erica in 1932. I had brought my books with me and one day, after we’d had an argument about poetic integrity, she challenged me to copy out all the English poems I knew in which the poet had really come clean about himself without holding anything back. There weren’t very many, I found. But even so, Erica was scathing about my choice. She said: ‘There’s not a man among them who’d have died twice running for the same woman.’ I asked her: ‘Why twice?’ ‘Once is no proof of integrity,’ she said. Erica was a queer girl.)
‘I didn’t show them to Mallet-head or anyone else, but I began to write English poetry myself. Since English is a dead language and my poems were not intended for anyone’s eye, I could see no harm in this. At any rate, it solved my personal problem as a margoton, and I was pleased that I hadn’t changed my estate again: as a magician I would have been obliged to write in New Cretan and hand my poems around. Then one day the Goddess came to talk to me about you.’
‘Look here, Quant! You’re now in the position of being able to think and talk in terms of my age as well as of your own: no other man in New Crete can do that. So you owe me a commonsense explanation of what you mean, when you say: “The Goddess came to talk to me.”’
‘But you’ve had the same experience yourself. She gave you that locket in the alder-grove.’
‘Experience isn’t the same as explanation. I took the Hag for a representative of the Goddess, not the Goddess herself.’
‘That’s a distinction without a difference. She always assumes the form of a living creature. Do you happen to know the Iliad, one of the myths of the ancient world?’
‘I do, as a matter of fact: I read it in Greek at school.’
‘Then perhaps you’ll remember that the Goddess – there’s really only one Goddess, not several – sometimes appeared in human disguise during the Trojan War, and even on one occasion as a man: as the Trojan Prince Deiphobus, just before Hector’s fight with the Greek champion?’
‘With all respect to Homer, it never occurred to me to take the story literally.’
‘You would have done if you’d served in the Trojan War.’
‘That’s possible. Go on.’
‘Well, you’ll admit that it isn’t natural for you to worship a Father-god?’
‘Wait a moment, that’s a rather sweeping statement. It came naturally enough to my father, for instance.’
‘Indeed, and was he a happy man?’
‘When he wasn’t worrying about his soul or his accounts.’
‘Yes, what I mean is that the Father-god isn’t in the blood like the Goddess; he’s an artificial concept which your ancestors have done their best to naturalize, but you should have abandoned him long ago in the interests of sanity. Your chief trouble in the Late Christian epoch is unlimited scientific war which nobody likes but everybody accepts as inevitable; that’s a typical by-product of God-worship. In the archaic days, whenever tribal life grew too monotonous the Goddess used, of course, to allow her peoples to go to war; but she kept it within decent bounds, though not perhaps as strictly as now. When your ancestors rebelled against her they invented a Father-god whose sole business was war – Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and all – a ferocious demon who stole her battle axe and set out to conquer mankind. He ousted the Goddess from sovereignty, made her his bond-woman, and eventually announced that she no longer existed.’
‘If she’s as powerful as you New Cretans believe, I wonder she submitted to that.’
‘She not only submitted to it, she arranged it. You see, a few millennia of chaos can mean very little to an immortal, and she had two objects clearly in mind. The first was that she loved man and didn’t want him to feel fettered and repressed: she would emancipate him and allow him to fulfil his destiny (as she ironically expressed it) by letting him find out the absurdity of creating a supreme deity in his own phallic likeness. In the end he would voluntarily return to her rule. Her second object was to demonstrate the existence in him of certain intellectual capacities hitherto unsuspected by woman: woman was taking her sexual superiority too much for granted and treating him as a plaything.’
‘In theory it seems to me as natural to worship a male God as a Goddess.’
‘Exactly: she had to grant man the power to theorize and that was one of his theories. But in practice a male deity is a contradiction in terms. Presently your ancestors lost all faith in the Father-god’s wisdom and justice, and even began to doubt his existence; a few secretly returned to Goddess worship. But others turned rationalist and created a God of Reason and Learning as a substitute for the Goddess of Love and Wisdom.’
‘To what point in history does that bring the story?’
‘To the time of Socrates and Aristotle. You may already know the lines:
Socrates and his demon
Made insurrection…
I’ll give you them later, if you don’t. The War-god still maintained his sovereignty and since love had ended between man and man – except in the secret fraternities still sponsored by the Goddess – he also became the God of Robbers. The third place in the Rogue Trinity was taken by the God of Money, whom we call Dobeis.’
‘You seem to be by-passing Christianity.’
‘It’s not important, except as a symptom of man’s spiritual fever: it brought diversion, rather than change. Christianity grew out of the fore-doomed attempt of a few Jewish sages to regularize and purify the worship of the Father-god by a complete suppression of Goddess-worship; they anathematized the God of Money and identified the Father-god with supreme Love, Wisdom and Justice. But the sages were soon shouldered aside by Gentile converts to Christianity, which came to comprise all sorts of contradictory beliefs – everything, from a perverse philosophical theory of not-being, and a half-hearted cult of the Goddess as a chaste Virgin, to pure War-god worship. By your epoch, the Rogue Trinity was supreme in every practical sense. There’s a famous verse passage in our Myths of New Crete:
“The sword decides,” rumbled the God of Robbers;
“Science is Truth,” the God of Reason piped;
“And each man has his price,” chanted Dobeis;
“All else is superstition,” roared the Rogues.
Nimuë heard their chorus…
It seems to me that a Late Christian poet was committed in the name of integrity to resist, doubt, scoff, destroy and play the fool; it was only when he met with a like-minded fellow-poet, or with a woman on whom the spirit of the Goddess had secretly descended, that he felt all was not yet lost. Is that right?’
‘More or less.’
‘Mallet-head has told you of the origins of New Crete. When the Sophocrats came to power at a time of almost universal despair, they were persuaded by ben-Yeshu’s arguments to plant the colonies from which our present social system has developed. The Anthropological Council accepted the contention with which ben-Yeshu’s famous, though heavy-handed, book opened: “Civilization has suffered a global crise des nerfs resultant on an attempt to eradicate a vital religious element from the psychological inheritance of the dominant Alpine blood-group.” In other words, they agreed that, if mankind were to survive at all, the Goddess must be re-instated in power, and they had collected sufficient archaeological data to be able to restore her worship in convincing detail.’
He paused and drew three stars in the air with his finger, to show that he had finished his historical introduction.
‘So now you’re back again in pre-Trojan War times,’ I said, ‘but with the advantage that man has learned the danger of rebelling against the Goddess; and that in the course of his rebellion he’s made a number of useful inventions from which you still benefit.’
‘That’s the credit side of the balance sheet: “For here five-fingered custom rules us well,” as Solero put it; but there’s also the debit side, which I was able to assess only after reading your manuscript book. I realized then that ever since the last three abortive attempts to overthrow the New Cretan system from outside – there’s never been an int
ernal revolt – we have lived what your age in idealistic prospect, called “the good life”, and that is a very easy life indeed. I don’t mean that we haven’t worked hard and played hard, kept in good physical and spiritual health, fought our one-day wars with enthusiasm, and gone for occasional adventures in the Bad Lands. But somehow that’s not enough.’
‘Did you ever come across Bernard de Mandeville’s Grumbling Hive? Ben-Yeshu seems to have overlooked that in his list of Utopias.’
‘No, it hasn’t survived.’
‘Well, it’s pretty much to the point. He held that virtue – which he defined as every performance by which man, contrary to the impulse of nature, tries to benefit his fellowman out of a rational desire for goodness – is in the long run detrimental to mankind. He describes a society possessed of all the virtues which falls into apathy and paralysis, and insists that private vices are public benefits.’
‘That, of course, was an over-statement of the case, an invitation to chaos. But it’s true at least that the thrilling intensity of the love that your poets felt for the Goddess in the Late Christian epoch can have no equivalent as things are now. When Cleopatra wrote her poems the issue here was still in doubt; the old civilization still existed side by side with the new, and our traders were still sailing to Corinth and bringing back doubtful merchandise. Cleopatra’s poems are a passionate plea not to relapse into humanity’s former madness. But ever since the days of Solero and Vives and our other legislative poets, what have we to show? There’s Robnet, who lived a good deal later, but he was brought here as a child from the American Bad Lands and kept something of his natural wildness until his death; and he died young. Who else is there?’
‘The other night at the Santrepod, Erica Turner came into the room – well, you know about Erica.’
He nodded. ‘But I haven’t yet heard this part of the story.’
Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 19