CHAPTER X:  MY FATHER, FEARING RECOGNITION AT SUNCH’-STON, BETAKES HIMSELF TO THE NEIGHBOURING TOWN OF FAIRMEAD

I will now return to my father.  Whether from fatigue or over-excitement, he slept only by fits and starts, and when awake he could not rid himself of the idea that, in spite of his disguise, he might be recognised, either at his inn or in the town, by some one of the many who had seen him when he was in prison.  In this case there was no knowing what might happen, but at best, discovery would probably prevent his seeing the temple dedicated to himself, and hearing Professor Hanky’s sermon, which he was particularly anxious to do.

So strongly did he feel the real or fancied danger he should incur by spending Saturday in Sunch’ston, that he rose as soon as he heard any one stirring, and having paid his bill, walked quietly out of the house, without saying where he was going.

There was a town about ten miles off, not so important as Sunch’ston, but having some 10,000 inhabitants; he resolved to find accommodation there for the day and night, and to walk over to Sunch’ston in time for the dedication ceremony, which he had found on inquiry, would begin at eleven o’clock.

The country between Sunch’ston and Fairmead, as the town just referred to was named, was still mountainous, and being well wooded as well as well watered, abounded in views of singular beauty; but I have no time to dwell on the enthusiasm with which my father described them to me.  The road took him at right angles to the main road down the valley from Sunch’ston to the capital, and this was one reason why he had chosen Fairmead rather than Clearwater, which was the next town lower down on the main road.  He did not, indeed, anticipate that any one would want to find him, but whoever might so want would be more likely to go straight down the valley than to turn aside towards Fairmead.

On reaching this place, he found it pretty full of people, for Saturday was market-day.  There was a considerable open space in the middle of the town, with an arcade running round three sides of it, while the fourth was completely taken up by the venerable Musical Bank of the city, a building which had weathered the storms of more than five centuries.  On the outside of the wall, abutting on the market-place, were three wooden sedilia, in which the Mayor and two coadjutors sate weekly on market-days to give advice, redress grievances, and, if necessary (which it very seldom was) to administer correction.

My father was much interested in watching the proceedings in a case which he found on inquiry to be not infrequent.  A man was complaining to the Mayor that his daughter, a lovely child of eight years old, had none of the faults common to children of her age, and, in fact, seemed absolutely deficient in immoral sense.  She never told lies, had never stolen so much as a lollipop, never showed any recalcitrancy about saying her prayers, and by her incessant obedience had filled her poor father and mother with the gravest anxiety as regards her future well-being.  He feared it would be necessary to send her to a deformatory.

“I have generally found,” said the Mayor, gravely but kindly, “that the fault in these distressing cases lies rather with the parent than the children.  Does the child never break anything by accident?”

“Yes,” said the father.

“And you have duly punished her for it?”

“Alas! sir, I fear I only told her she was a naughty girl, and must not do it again.”

“Then how can you expect your child to learn those petty arts of deception without which she must fall an easy prey to any one who wishes to deceive her?  How can she detect lying in other people unless she has had some experience of it in her own practice?  How, again, can she learn when it will be well for her to lie, and when to refrain from doing so, unless she has made many a mistake on a small scale while at an age when mistakes do not greatly matter?  The Sunchild (and here he reverently raised his hat), as you may read in chapter thirty-one of his Sayings, has left us a touching tale of a little boy, who, having cut down an apple tree in his father’s garden, lamented his inability to tell a lie.  Some commentators, indeed, have held that the evidence was so strongly against the boy that no lie would have been of any use to him, and that his perception of this fact was all that he intended to convey; but the best authorities take his simple words, ‘I cannot tell a lie,’ in their most natural sense, as being his expression of regret at the way in which his education had been neglected.  If that case had come before me, I should have punished the boy’s father, unless he could show that the best authorities are mistaken (as indeed they too generally are), and that under more favourable circumstances the boy would have been able to lie, and would have lied accordingly.

“There is no occasion for you to send your child to a deformatory.  I am always averse to extreme measures when I can avoid them.  Moreover, in a deformatory she would be almost certain to fall in with characters as intractable as her own.  Take her home and whip her next time she so much as pulls about the salt.  If you will do this whenever you get a chance, I have every hope that you will have no occasion to come to me again.”

“Very well, sir,” said the father, “I will do my best, but the child is so instinctively truthful that I am afraid whipping will be of little use.”

There were other cases, none of them serious, which in the old days would have been treated by a straightener.  My father had already surmised that the straightener had become extinct as a class, having been superseded by the Managers and Cashiers of the Musical Banks, but this became more apparent as he listened to the cases that next came on.  These were dealt with quite reasonably, except that the magistrate always ordered an emetic and a strong purge in addition to the rest of his sentence, as holding that all diseases of the moral sense spring from impurities within the body, which must be cleansed before there could be any hope of spiritual improvement.  If any devils were found in what passed from the prisoner’s body, he was to be brought up again; for in this case the rest of the sentence might very possibly be remitted.

When the Mayor and his coadjutors had done sitting, my father strolled round the Musical Bank and entered it by the main entrance, which was on the top of a flight of steps that went down on to the principal street of the town.  How strange it is that, no matter how gross a superstition may have polluted it, a holy place, if hallowed by long veneration, remains always holy.  Look at Delphi.  What a fraud it was, and yet how hallowed it must ever remain.  But letting this pass, Musical Banks, especially when of great age, always fascinated my father, and being now tired with his walk, he sat down on one of the many rush-bottomed seats, and (for there was no service at this hour) gave free rein to meditation.

How peaceful it all was with its droning old-world smell of ancestor, dry rot, and stale incense.  As the clouds came and went, the grey-green, cobweb-chastened, light ebbed and flowed over the walls and ceiling; to watch the fitfulness of its streams was a sufficient occupation.  A hen laid an egg outside and began to cackle—­it was an event of magnitude; a peasant sharpening his scythe, a blacksmith hammering at his anvil, the clack of a wooden shoe upon the pavement, the boom of a bumble-bee, the dripping of the fountain, all these things, with such concert as they kept, invited the dewy-feathered sleep that visited him, and held him for the best part of an hour.

My father has said that the Erewhonians never put up monuments or write epitaphs for their dead, and this he believed to be still true; but it was not so always, and on waking his eye was caught by a monument of great beauty, which bore a date of about 1550 of our era.  It was to an old lady, who must have been very loveable if the sweet smiling face of her recumbent figure was as faithful to the original as its strongly marked individuality suggested.  I need not give the earlier part of her epitaph, which was conventional enough, but my father was so struck with the concluding lines, that he copied them into the note-book which he always carried in his pocket.  They ran:-

   I fall asleep in the full and certain hope
   That my slumber shall not be broken;
   And that though I be all-forgetting,
   Yet shall I not be all-forgotten,
   But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds
   Of those I loved,
   Into which, while the power to strive was yet vouchsafed me,
   I fondly strove to enter.

My father deplored his inability to do justice to the subtle tenderness of the original, but the above was the nearest he could get to it.

How different this from the opinions concerning a future state which he had tried to set before the Erewhonians some twenty years earlier.  It all came back to him, as the storks had done, now that he was again in an Erewhonian environment, and he particularly remembered how one youth had inveighed against our European notions of heaven and hell with a contemptuous flippancy that nothing but youth and ignorance could even palliate.

“Sir,” he had said to my father, “your heaven will not attract me unless I can take my clothes and my luggage.  Yes; and I must lose my luggage and find it again.  On arriving, I must be told that it has unfortunately been taken to a wrong circle, and that there may be some difficulty in recovering it—­or it shall have been sent up to mansion number five hundred thousand millions nine hundred thousand forty six thousand eight hundred and eleven, whereas it should have gone to four hundred thousand millions, &c., &c.; and am I sure that I addressed it rightly?  Then, when I am just getting cross enough to run some risk of being turned out, the luggage shall make its appearance, hat-box, umbrella, rug, golf-sticks, bicycle, and everything else all quite correct, and in my delight I shall tip the angel double and realise that I am enjoying myself.

“Or I must have asked what I could have for breakfast, and be told I could have boiled eggs, or eggs and bacon, or filleted plaice.  ’Filleted plaice,’ I shall exclaim, ‘no! not that.  Have you any red mullets?’ And the angel will say, ’Why no, sir, the gulf has been so rough that there has hardly any fish come in this three days, and there has been such a run on it that we have nothing left but plaice.’

“‘Well, well,’ I shall say, ‘have you any kidneys?’

“‘You can have one kidney, sir’, will be the answer.

“’One kidney, indeed, and you call this heaven!  At any rate you will have sausages?’

“’Then the angel will say, ’We shall have some after Sunday, sir, but we are quite out of them at present.’

“And I shall say, somewhat sulkily, ’Then I suppose I must have eggs and bacon.’

“But in the morning there will come up a red mullet, beautifully cooked, a couple of kidneys and three sausages browned to a turn, and seasoned with just so much sage and thyme as will savour without overwhelming them; and I shall eat everything.  It shall then transpire that the angel knew about the luggage, and what I was to have for breakfast, all the time, but wanted to give me the pleasure of finding things turn out better than I had expected.  Heaven would be a dull place without such occasional petty false alarms as these.”

I have no business to leave my father’s story, but the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn should not be so closely muzzled that he cannot sometimes filch a mouthful for himself; and when I had copied out the foregoing somewhat irreverent paragraphs, which I took down (with no important addition or alteration) from my father’s lips, I could not refrain from making a few reflections of my own, which I will ask the reader’s forbearance if I lay before him.

Let heaven and hell alone, but think of Hades, with Tantalus, Sisyphus, Tityus, and all the rest of them.  How futile were the attempts of the old Greeks and Romans to lay before us any plausible conception of eternal torture.  What were the Danaids doing but that which each one of us has to do during his or her whole life?  What are our bodies if not sieves that we are for ever trying to fill, but which we must refill continually without hope of being able to keep them full for long together?  Do we mind this?  Not so long as we can get the wherewithal to fill them; and the Danaids never seem to have run short of water.  They would probably ere long take to clearing out any obstruction in their sieves if they found them getting choked.  What could it matter to them whether the sieves got full or no?  They were not paid for filling them.

Sisyphus, again!  Can any one believe that he would go on rolling that stone year after year and seeing it roll down again unless he liked seeing it?  We are not told that there was a dragon which attacked him whenever he tried to shirk.  If he had greatly cared about getting his load over the last pinch, experience would have shown him some way of doing so.  The probability is that he got to enjoy the downward rush of his stone, and very likely amused himself by so timing it as to cause the greatest scare to the greatest number of the shades that were below.

What though Tantalus found the water shun him and the fruits fly from him when he tried to seize them?  The writer of the “Odyssey” gives us no hint that he was dying of thirst or hunger.  The pores of his skin would absorb enough water to prevent the first, and we may be sure that he got fruit enough, one way or another, to keep him going.

Tityus, as an effort after the conception of an eternity of torture, is not successful.  What could an eagle matter on the liver of a man whose body covered nine acres?  Before long he would find it an agreeable stimulant.  If, then, the greatest minds of antiquity could invent nothing that should carry better conviction of eternal torture, is it likely that the conviction can be carried at all?

Methought I saw Jove sitting on the topmost ridges of Olympus and confessing failure to Minerva.  “I see, my dear,” he said, “that there is no use in trying to make people very happy or very miserable for long together.  Pain, if it does not soon kill, consists not so much in present suffering as in the still recent memory of a time when there was less, and in the fear that there will soon be more; and so happiness lies less in immediate pleasure than in lively recollection of a worse time and lively hope of better.”

As for the young gentleman above referred to, my father met him with the assurance that there had been several cases in which living people had been caught up into heaven or carried down into hell, and been allowed to return to earth and report what they had seen; while to others visions had been vouchsafed so clearly that thousands of authentic pictures had been painted of both states.  All incentive to good conduct, he had then alleged, was found to be at once removed from those who doubted the fidelity of these pictures.

This at least was what he had then said, but I hardly think he would have said it at the time of which I am now writing.  As he continued to sit in the Musical Bank, he took from his valise the pamphlet on “The Physics of Vicarious Existence,” by Dr. Gurgoyle, which he had bought on the preceding evening, doubtless being led to choose this particular work by the tenor of the old lady’s epitaph.

The second title he found to run, “Being Strictures on Certain Heresies concerning a Future State that have been Engrafted on the Sunchild’s Teaching.”

My father shuddered as he read this title.  “How long,” he said to himself, “will it be before they are at one another’s throats?”

On reading the pamphlet, he found it added little to what the epitaph had already conveyed; but it interested him, as showing that, however cataclysmic a change of national opinions may appear to be, people will find means of bringing the new into more or less conformity with the old.

Here it is a mere truism to say that many continue to live a vicarious life long after they have ceased to be aware of living.  This view is as old as the non omnis moriar of Horace, and we may be sure some thousands of years older.  It is only, therefore, with much diffidence that I have decided to give a resume of opinions many of which those whom I alone wish to please will have laid to heart from their youth upwards.  In brief, Dr. Gurgoyle’s contention comes to little more than saying that the quick are more dead, and the dead more quick, than we commonly think.  To be alive, according to him, is only to be unable to understand how dead one is, and to be dead is only to be invincibly ignorant concerning our own livingness—­for the dead would be as living as the living if we could only get them to believe it.