Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (16 page)

‘It is most unlucky to make a count of heads, or even an approximation to a count. E.g., we never say “a crowd of about a thousand people”. We say: “about as many people as would fill Sanjon church”. What the poet Vives wrote long ago has acquired legislative force. His
Satire on Numbers
begins:

To count heads was a felony.
It was to give each man a number
And rob him of his name,
The name that was his soul.
When all were known by numbers,
Behold a featureless mass,
Each face a hapless zero,
Filled with the blind emotion
Of collectivity!

Vives had come to a sensible solution, viz., that the most destructive social force of past epochs had been a mass emotion that exhibited itself in nationalism, fascism, communism, neo-communism, pantisocratism, logicalism and so on, and which was derived from thinking in terms of collective interests rather than of individual ones. In periods when the rich man oppressed his poor neighbours, who cried out in vain for justice, these collective interests had seemed more virtuous than individual ones, and it had also seemed necessary to count heads to demonstrate that these poor people greatly outnumbered the rich and were therefore deserving of consideration. But once people accepted the principle, viz. that the individual, whether rich or poor, must subordinate himself to the million-fold State, regarded as the repository of collective interests, then, Sir, everything went awry. Since this State was a social not a religious concept, and based upon law not upon love, it had no natural cohesion. It was too unwieldy an aggregate of diverse and unrelated elements for any single person to comprehend it; and therefore only charlatans came forward to govern it:

Charlatans came forward,
Boldly adopting titles
Of mathematic virtue.
Square Root of Minus One
Proclaimed himself Dictator
And swelled a private grudge
By arithmetical progression
Into a mad crusade.

Thus through Vives’s influence our world has been kept as a network of small communities where everyone is known to his neighbour by nickname and face, and no count of heads is ever taken. States exist only in so far as these communities are bound to one another by common ties of custom and acknowledge the same king.’

‘But you count the number of districts and regions and kingdoms?’

‘As we count the days of a month or the stitches in a row of knitting. But people must not be counted, except as one is aware, without enumeration, of how many people are present in a room. Thus, not being headless millions but known individuals with names, we are swayed by no passionate political or economic theory, as in your epoch. Only local events stir our emotions.’

‘There goes that crane again,’ I said. ‘Look, it’s flying up the mill stream and, wait! – yes – it’s perched on the roof of the Nonsense House. What does that mean?’

The Interpreter’s face was grey with alarm. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!’ he said, bowing like a marionette. ‘Oh my good Sir, I hope that the Goddess’s heart shall prove to be merciful!’

I tried to find out what all the fuss was about, but he grew incoherent in his distress, and when we reached the bridge he sat on the parapet with his head buried in his hands.

‘Can I help you up the hill with the yoke?’ I asked. He only stared back at me miserably, as though he had never seen me before in his life, so I said goodbye and returned to the Magic House, where the servants brought me a solitary lunch of bread, cheese and salad.

Afterwards I tried to write a poem in my head, but found that without pen and paper I couldn’t get past the first three lines.

My friends seemed subdued and pale when they came in for the evening-smoke, especially Sapphire, but I put that down to their exhausting studies. I was greeted as warmly as usual.

‘How did you like Sanjon?’ asked See-a-Bird, when the cigarette stubs had been burned.

‘It’s perfect in its way,’ I said, without much enthusiasm. ‘If I were an elderly ex-army officer with an inadequate pension, who never read nor smoked, and avoided the company of other elderly ex-army officers, and set great store on good manners and cheerfulness, and liked his pint of beer in the sun, and made a hobby of studying native customs, I suppose Sanjon would suit me down to the ground… How did your studies go?’

See-a-Bird shook his head resignedly. ‘A small cloud obscured the sun in the middle of the morning and pursued it across the sky all day.’

‘That’s why I failed to compose the last line of my poem,’ added Fig-bread sadly. ‘I’d hoped to be favoured today; it has eluded me Monday after Monday ever since mid-winter.’

‘How long is your poem?’

‘The customary five lines. In these days of peace, we never attempt poems of greater length. It’s about stars seen through the branches of an olive-tree.’

‘None of us made any headway,’ said Starfish. ‘My strings were out of tune; the Goddess withheld her presence.’

Sally frowned. ‘It would have been stupid to expect anything else, with this trouble in the house,’ she said.

‘Is anyone ill?’ I asked.

‘No one is ill, Nimuë be praised!’

‘Servant trouble?’

‘The servants never give trouble: they alleviate it.’

I looked searchingly at their faces. Sally’s was indignant, See-a-Bird’s worried but kindly, Fig-bread’s plainly scared, Starfish’s excited, and Sapphire’s utterly miserable.

I thought it was my duty as a guest to put them at their ease. ‘Well, you
are
a glum-looking lot,’ I said teasingly. ‘You look like relatives at a French funeral when the lawyer has just broken the news to them that the old girl has left all her money to the young curé with the lisp.’

Nobody so much as smiled politely.

I turned to Sapphire: ‘I suppose, darling, I ought to have brought you a present from Sanjon,’ I said nervously. ‘Some sort of a jewel. There were some really lovely things in the shops. But the Interpreter told me that I’d have to pay with a prayer or a poem and, though I suppose the Goddess would have accepted one in English, I didn’t want to risk offending the priest on duty, so I kept quiet. In any case, I had no idea what you’d like: I might have brought you something altogether unsuitable. You’re all so conventional here in matters of taste.’

‘Not all of us,’ said Sally, carefully not looking at Sapphire.

‘Do, for Heaven’s sake, tell me what’s wrong with everyone this evening,’ I said in exasperation. ‘Has the brutch returned?’

Sally signed to the others that she wanted to make the disclosure herself without interruption; but she had hardly said three words when a servant came in with a verbal message, which he repeated a second time to make sure that he had delivered it correctly. It was a request for them all to ride out at once to the village green at Rabnon and assist at a Council of Five Estates.

‘Whatever’s happening there?’ I asked.

See-a-Bird said: ‘Probably the war about which we were telling you will now break out. Between Rabnon, the next village but one up the railway line, and Zapmor, which lies half-way between us and the sea. I’m afraid we can’t very well refuse to go, though the request comes at a most inconvenient moment. Would you care to come with us?’

So the disclosure was postponed.

They lent me a horse and we set off at once. As we trotted along the tree-shaded bridle path to Rabnon, Starfish cleared his throat and began: ‘Part the First – Rabnon is a gay, red-tiled, green-shuttered, polyandrous village –’

‘Famed for its radishes and its hot blood?’ I put in.

‘Yes, that’s well said – and Zapmor is a dour, slate-roofed, brown-shuttered, monogamous village, famed for its manufacture of square-toed shoes.’

This was his story. Three little boys had run away from their homes at Zapmor one evening about a fortnight before and were found wandering in a wood near Rabnon long after supper-time. When questioned, they said that they did not want to go home for supper.

‘But why not?’ asked the Rabnon woodman who had found them. ‘Are your parents not kind to you?’

They shrugged their shoulders politely.

What was it then?

It appeared that they were always given the same supper of bread and milk and damson jam, and that they were sick to death of it.

Rabnon sent a runner to Zapmor at once with a message that the boys were safe, and would be brought back after they had been fed. They were given tea, cheese-straws, lettuce and radishes, and taken home happy and overfed just before midnight. End of Part the First.

Part the Second. A week later at supper-time the boys turned up again in Rabnon village at the house where they had been fed before. ‘What, damson jam for supper again?’

‘Yes, always the same damson jam.’

‘Do you like it any better now?’

‘It comes out of our ears when we eat.’

Then their parents had not taken the hint! They must now be made to realize the seriousness of the situation. Rabnon brooded over the affair for a week and then called the Council of Five Estates to which, as the nearest neutral magicians, we were now invited.

‘End of Part the Second,’ said Starfish, and fell silent again.

‘If I may be allowed to make a comment,’ I said, ‘without prejudice to the deliberations of the Council, the story sounds a bit fishy to me.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Little boys are conservative about food; if it were a case of a single problem child with a grudge, that would make sense, but three is too many.’

‘As a visitor you won’t be able to bring this up at the Council, I fear.’

‘Perhaps someone else will.’

Part the Third. We found all Rabnon assembled on the green, squatting in a semi-circle in front of the totem-pole, and talking in low voices, the elders seated on rush-bottomed chairs at the back. An austere-looking priest in a white robe, golden sash and scarlet cloak, broke a branch from a tree and walked round the inside of the semi-circle sprinkling everyone with water from a green-glazed pot. When a part-song in honour of the Goddess had been sung, business was opened by the local captain, who pointed with his thumb at a man called Hammer-toes. ‘Speak!’ he said, curtly.

Hammer-toes was the woodman. He sprang to his feet and gave an impassioned account of how he had found the boys wandering in his wood, eating dewberries. He reported the ensuing dialogue dramatically, using deep solemn tones for his own questions and a squeaky little voice for the boys’ guarded answers. His main refrain was ‘damson jam’, more and more passionately repeated.

Other witnesses were called in turn, until the whole story had been told. A long silence that followed was broken at last by Open-please, the tall, loose-jointed Rabnon goalkeeper, who said in a ruminative voice: ‘Damson jam is good when you eat it two or three evenings of the week. Enthusiasts may even say “four evenings”.’

When this remark had been well pondered, a fat, jolly woman in a partridge-feather hat slapped her thighs decisively and said: ‘It’s a shame when boys have to leave their homes at supper-time to go berrying in the woods; a shame on the whole neighbourhood! Has anything like this ever happened here in Rabnon?’

No answer. Obviously nothing quite like this had ever happened in Rabnon.

Presently an old man called Randy, who looked venerable enough to be an elder but was still the most incorrigible playboy of the village, introduced the topic that nobody had yet ventured to discuss. ‘At Green Hill, in my grandmother’s day, a war was fought for less provocation than this.’

The captain pointed to the Chief Recorder, who rose to give a rapid, passionless summary of the Green Hill War which had been fought because of a howling dog. Randy supplemented this with salacious by-play, greeted by ripples of laughter. The captain then called for order, and pointed to a pretty, pig-tailed girl called Peaches, who rose and said sadly: ‘There’s much danger in war, both for those who declare it and for those on whom it is declared.’

The fat woman with the partridge-feather hat took her up: ‘It’s a worse danger, by far, to let still waters rot.’

‘Personally, rather than cause my parents trouble,’ Peaches continued, ‘I should have been content merely with bread and milk on evenings when I grew tired of damson jam.’

Here Peaches’ mother broke in: ‘You forget, my dear, how difficult it was to feed you as a child. You wouldn’t eat vegetables or fruit or even sweets unless I sat over you with a spoon for hours. You even disliked radishes and cheese-straws.’ There was general laughter, in which Peaches joined. The tension relaxed, the captain sat down and meditatively polished his finger-nails; presently people began to chat about football and skittles. The elders hobbled home.

‘Is that all?’ I asked in disappointment.

‘What more do you want?’ Sally snapped.

‘I expected them to decide whether to declare war or not.’

‘But they did decide.’

‘When?’

‘When Peaches’ mother had spoken.’

‘But there was no show of hands or anything of the sort.’

‘And why should anyone show his hands?’

I explained the system of majority voting in English parish councils.

‘Didn’t you tell us yesterday that in your country hardly one person in five is well enough educated to think sensibly on a political problem? This means that, whenever you take a show of hands, the minority is more likely to be right than the majority? And in any case, I don’t see how a parish council can hope to get any decision properly carried out when the voting shows that it’s not wholeheartedly reached. Just now,
if
even a single person, for whatever reason, had stood out against Randy’s proposal it would have been dropped at once. We all know that unless a village is unanimous in its declaration of war, it’s beaten before the fighting begins.’

‘But how was the decision taken?’

‘Didn’t you feel it? As soon as they laughed, discussion naturally ended. There was no more to be said. Unless Zapmor owns itself in the wrong the war will start at dawn. We always fight our wars on Tuesdays.’

‘Does it ever happen that one kingdom declares war on another?’ I asked.