Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (2 page)

The witch, who reminded me strongly of Marlene Dietrich, seemed amused by my open-handed advance but said nothing.

‘Her nickname is “Leaf-of-the-Sallow”, or “Sally” for short.’

‘Miss or Mrs?’

‘I beg pardon?’

I explained.

‘Oh, no. Distinctions of that sort exist only among the commons, not here.’

‘Not among the poets and other magicians, you mean?’

‘Yes, that is right. Here, as we say, the house chooses the man, not the man the house; i.e., the women who rule a house do not derive a title from their congress with men.’

‘Assure the witch that I intended no offence,’ I told the Interpreter.

‘This quiet young lady is – well, she is a nymph – a nymph of the month. But perhaps you will not understand the meaning of nymph? We call her by her jewel title, viz: Sapphire.’

They were speaking a language based on Catalan – my mother came from Catalonia – but it had a good deal of English in it, with some Gaelic and a little Slav, and though they spoke with dignified slowness, I could not at first follow the conversation.

The three men had nicknames that reminded me of the Red Indians: ‘See-a-Bird’, ‘Fig-bread’, and ‘Starfish’. They were poets, and also magicians. See-a-Bird was a tall, gentle, oldish man; Fig-bread and Starfish, who were in their late twenties, looked like brothers – both dark-eyed, broad-shouldered, slim and earnest.

‘You have invited me to answer some questions…’ I said.

Sally caught Starfish’s eye and he asked a question for her: ‘Do you like us?’

‘Very much.’ I meant it.

There was a murmur of relief. The Interpreter explained: ‘Our conversation can continue now. If you had hesitated, or if we had twigged a false note in your voice, we should have apologized and returned you to your epoch without a further question.’

‘Why?’

‘Conversations between persons who do not like one another’s selves are always sterile,’ he said with a consequential cough.

‘Who would have recognized the false note?’

He seemed surprised. ‘Everyone. This company are all magicians.’

Fig-bread looked about him for permission to speak next. ‘How does it feel,’ he asked, ‘to be a poet of the Late Christian epoch?’

This was so wide a question that I was silent for half a minute. Then I answered guardedly: ‘Do you wish me to compare it with the Early Christian or with the pre-Christian epochs? You can’t expect a comparison with your own – by the way, what do you call it?’

‘This is the New Cretan epoch.’

‘– Well, you can’t expect a comparison with your New Cretan epoch, of which as yet I know nothing.’

‘It would be best to avoid comparisons. Nobody can speak for any age but his own.’

‘Then may I say simply that I dislike mine? Or would you regard that as a confession of stupidity?’

‘If you are happy in your personal friendships and still dislike your age, that is merely to indict it as one of violent change. Change must always be painful.’

‘Thank you for putting it like that. By the way, how long is the Late Christian epoch to last?’

They consulted together, and the Interpreter reported: ‘According to the
Brief History,
Sir, you still have several Popes to be elected. We date the end of the Christian Era from that of the Papacy, though Christianity itself persists in multifarious forms for many generations ahead of you.’

‘Oh? And who suppressed the Papacy?’ I asked with rising interest.

‘Its seat was transferred from Rome to San Francisco at a juncture of great wars, and it was suppressed a generation or two later by the Pantisocrats, or Levellers, of North America. Hadrian VIII and Pius XVI were the ultimate Popes. Then a World Council of Churches, convoked at Pittsburgh, agreed to distinguish the Israelite Jesus from Christ the God, whom they abolished by a majority vote, just as he had been established by a majority vote at the Council of Nicaea, and to regard him as the first Pantisocrat. This notwithstanding, the Christ was much longer retained by the heretical
Mystiques,
a French-speaking secret sect of Canada, as the Second Person of their Trinity; though they addressed him as “Peace”, not “Christ”, in part for security reasons, in part because they wished to dissociate themselves from concern with the Israelite Jesus, and because “Jesus” and “Christ” had become synonymous in popular usage. But I now hold my peace, since the future does not interest you, and since all that I was asked to provide was a temporal definition of the Late Christian epoch.’

‘Perhaps that’s just as well. But you mustn’t think that what I said about the future implies that I don’t enjoy this future. I meant that, in my age, to speculate on a futurity to which we don’t belong and which we have no means of forecasting – we can’t even forecast the prevailing winds for more than a day ahead – distracts attention from the present and often deranges people’s minds. To have foreknowledge of even unimportant events, such as the results of horse-races not yet run, would put me at an embarrassing advantage over my contemporaries.’

‘None of us will volunteer any unsettling information,’ said Sally.

‘You must understand,’ I began a little nervously, ‘that to be a poet is something of an anachronism in my age, when none of the people’s main interests have anything even indirectly to do with poetry. I mean, for example, money and sport and religion and politics and science.’

‘Are all these exclusive interests?’ Fig-bread asked heavily, leaning forward in his leather armchair.

‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘not exclusive, certainly not exclusive.’ Fig-bread’s dark serious eyes made me feel rather a cheap-jack as I rattled on. ‘In theory, a businessman puts money before everything in the world: in war-time he might even sell arms to an enemy power for use against his own country. An out-and-out communist, the most active type of politician, puts communism before everything: he is prepared even to denounce his own parents or children for “bourgeois activities”. A religious fanatic will give all he has to the poor and die happily in a ditch. An out-and-out scientist would be pleased to blow up the earth on which he lives, merely to demonstrate a particular theory of atomic energy. But, in practice, the communist may also be a scientist, the businessman may teach in a Christian Sunday-school, the Christian may also be a communist, the scientist may be in trade. And all may be sportsmen. It is confusing, I admit. Well – poetry is not worth buying and selling on a large scale, so the businessman shows no interest in it. The communist condemns it as an individualistic divergence from marxist principles. The religious fanatic shuns it as frivolous. The scientist disregards it because it can’t be reduced to mathematical equations and therefore seems to lack a principle. It bears no relation whatever to sport, being non-competitive.’

‘Then how can anyone continue as a poet?’

‘I often wonder about that myself; but at least the opposing interests are not united. It’s the mechanization of life that makes our age what it is: science and money combine to turn the wheels round faster and faster. In communist theory the tractor is glorified as an emblem of prosperity; and no Pope has so far published an encyclical against the internal combustion engine or the electric turbine. But mechanization, and what is called standardization, are felt to have their disadvantages and dangers, and the poet is tolerated because he’s known to be opposed to them. So the stream of true poetry has never dried up, though it’s reduced to a very small…’

Here I suddenly broke off. What I had been saying sounded too much like a contribution to a professional brains-trust to make proper sense. I always switch off the radio when it sputters words like ‘standardization’ and ‘mechanization’ at me.

Old See-a-Bird broke an uncomfortable silence: ‘According to the Interpreter, you have lived through two World Wars. Did any poets take part in the fighting?’

‘Most of the best ones. Does that shock you?’

‘With us a poet may do whatever he pleases so long as he preserves his dignity. Both Fig-bread and myself have taken part in wars. But your sort of warfare appears to have involved loss of life and damage to property as well as other indignities.’

‘Naturally. A commander-in-chief’s task is to destroy the armies opposed to him and force the enemy’s government to unconditional surrender.’

‘Not at all a pleasant form of warfare. With us, a war is always great fun – apart from the defensive fighting in which our travellers sometimes get involved when they cross the frontier of New Crete – and if anyone were killed we should end it at once.’

‘Our wars are altogether hateful.’

‘Then is it really true that your armies show no respect for women and children? Surely no poet could kill a woman? That wouldn’t make sense.’

‘I never killed one,’ I said lamely. ‘At least, not so far as I know.’

Another silence followed, broken at last by Fig-bread, who said: ‘Your voice carries unfamiliar undertones. I suppose that life with you is so complex that it’s never easy to speak the truth. When you’re discussing the institutions and events of your age the uncertainty in your voice contrasts strangely with the firm way in which you spoke first – when you said you liked us.’

‘Well, we like you too,’ said Sally. ‘Would you care to stay with us a little longer, or do you feel uncomfortable, carried so far ahead of your age?’

‘If I could be sure that my absence from home was causing no anxiety, I’d stay for as long as I was welcome.’

‘You needn’t worry about that. You’re asleep in your epoch, and at liberty to spend months or years here in a dream lasting no longer than from one breath to the next.’

‘Very well; but I shouldn’t like to return and find my house in ruins and my two-year-old son with a long white beard being pushed in a bath-chair.’

I settled back comfortably and we talked until sunset, when a bell tolled in the distance and candles were lighted. They were made of bees’ wax and set in heavy gold sconces. Somehow I had expected to find a more advanced form of lighting.

Most people from our epoch would have resented my new friends as altogether too good-looking – physically thoroughbred and with a disconcerting intellectual intensity. They seemed never to have had a day’s illness; their faces were placid and unlined and they looked almost indecently happy. Yet they lacked the quality that we prize as character: the look of indomitability which comes from dire experiences nobly faced and overcome. I tried to picture them confronted with the problems of our age; no, I thought, they would all be haggard and sunken-eyed within a week. Not only did they lack character, which the conditions of their life had not allowed them to develop, they lacked humour – the pinch of snuff that routs the charging bull, the well-aimed custard pie that routs the charging police-constable. For this they had no need, and during the whole of my stay there I heard no joke that was in the least funny. People laughed, of course, but only at unexpectedly happy events, not at other people’s misfortunes. The atmosphere, if it could be acclimatized in an evil epoch like ours, would be described as goody-goody, a word that conveys a reproach of complacency and indifference to the sufferings of the rest of the world. But this happened to be a good epoch with no scope for humour, satire or parody. I remember an occasion when See-a-Bird absent-mindedly hung up a mirror on what he thought was a nail but what was really a fly that had settled on the wall. Everyone laughed loudly, but not because of his mistake: it was a laugh of pure pleasure that he caught the mirror on his toe as it fell, and saved it from a crash.

I am no student of fashion, and careless, usually, about the way I dress. Since nobody on this occasion was either naked or wearing anything really eccentric, such as painted wooden armour, or a cloak made of old newspapers, I paid little attention to their clothes, except to Sally’s. She was dressed in the witch costume in which she had officiated at my evocation ceremony: a conical moleskin cap, straw sandals, and a long-skirted, long-sleeved dark blue robe, embroidered in silver thread with an interlace of serpents and willow wreaths, and caught at the waist by a girdle of large lapis lazuli pentagons set in silver. For ritual reasons she had stained her feet dark blue. She sat opposite me and most of my talk was with her. But it was of Sapphire’s presence – she sat between me and the fire, dark-haired, slim, grey-eyed, delicate-fingered – that I was most conscious.

‘If my clothes embarrass you,’ Sally said, ‘I could change. ‘It wouldn’t be much trouble.’

‘No, certainly not. They’re very becoming. By the way, that isn’t woad on your feet, is it? You don’t mean to say that you New Cretans have gone back to woad?’

She nodded. ‘It’s a nasty-smelling stuff to make, but we witches have to use it every now and then.’

‘May I ask what sort of a blue-stained witch you are? A black one? Or a white one?’

‘We don’t use those distinctions.’

‘I mean: do you specialize in destruction or in healing?’

‘There’s no healing without destruction.’

‘But do you sometimes kill people?’

She looked serious. ‘Sometimes. That’s the least pleasant part of our calling.’

‘Whom do you kill? Personal enemies? Or public ones?’

‘Bad people.’

‘What do you mean by bad?’

‘Bad is when, for example, a calf is born with two heads, or a hen crows and doesn’t lay eggs. Or when a man behaves like a woman –’

‘– What, you kill your poor homosexuals? That seems a bit hard.’

Sally went on unperturbed. ‘Or when a man deliberately violates custom, and his estate, that is to say his class, repudiates him.’

‘Oh yes, the Interpreter said something about estates. How many are there?’

‘Five.’

‘By the way, do you have kings? I’ve always had a weakness for kings.’

‘Yes, indeed. Without kings there can be no true religion. The New Cretan world is divided into kingdoms.’

‘Real kings, with gold crowns?’

Everyone laughed. ‘Yes, kings with real gold crowns, entrusted to them by their queens.’

‘What a stable world it must be! No classless state? No republic?’