The Pilgrim's Regress (13 page)

‘The young gentleman is asleep, sir,' said Drudge: and indeed John had sunk down some time ago.

‘You must excuse him,' said Vertue. ‘He found the road long to-day.'

Then I saw that all six men lay down together in the sacking. The night was far colder than the night they passed in Mr. Sensible's house: but as there was here no pretence of comfort and they lay huddled together in the narrow hut, John slept warmer here than at Thelema.

III

Neo-Angular

W
HEN THEY ROSE
in the morning John was so footsore and his limbs ached so that he knew not how to continue his journey. Drudge assured them that the coast could not now be very far. He thought that Vertue could reach it and return in a day and that John might await him in the hut. As for John himself, he was loth to burden hosts who lived in such apparent poverty: but Mr. Angular constrained him to stay, when he had explained that the secular virtue of hospitality was worthless, and care for the afflicted a sin if it proceeded from humanitarian sentiment, but that he was obliged to act as he did by the rules of his order. So, in my dream, I saw Drudge and Vertue set out northwards alone, while John remained with the three pale men.

In the forenoon he had a conversation with Angular.

‘You believe, then,' said John, ‘that there is a way across the canyon?'

‘I know there is. If you will let me take you to Mother Kirk she will carry you over in a moment.'

‘And yet, I am not sure that I am not sailing under false colours. When I set out from home, crossing the canyon was never in my thoughts—still less was Mother Kirk.'

‘It does not matter in the least what was in your thoughts.'

‘It does, to me. You see, my only motive for crossing, is the hope that something I am looking for may be on the other side.'

‘That is a dangerous, subjective motive. What is this something?'

‘I saw an Island—'

‘Then you must forget it as soon as you can. Islands are the Half-ways' concern. I assure you, you must eradicate every trace of that nonsense from your mind before I can help you.'

‘But how can you help me after removing the only thing that I want to be helped to? What is the use of telling a hungry man that you will grant him his desires, provided there is no question of eating?'

‘If you do not
want
to cross the canyon, there is no more to be said. But, then, you must realize where you are. Go on with your Island, if you like, but do not pretend that it is anything but a part of the land of destruction this side of the canyon. If you are a sinner, for heaven's sake have the grace to be a cynic too.'

‘But how can you say that the Island is all bad, when it is longing for the Island, and nothing else, that has brought me this far?'

‘It makes no difference. All on this side of the canyon is much of a muchness. If you confine yourself to this side, then the Spirit of the Age is right.'

‘But this is not what Mother Kirk said. She particularly insisted that some of the food was much less poisonous than the rest.'

‘So you have met Mother Kirk? No wonder that you are confused. You had no business to talk to her except through a qualified Steward. Depend upon it, you have misunderstood every word she said.'

‘Then there was Reason, too. She refused to say that the Island was an illusion. But perhaps, like Mr. Sensible, you have quarrelled with Reason.'

‘Reason is divine. But how should you understand her? You are a beginner. For you, the only safe commerce with Reason is to learn from your superiors the dogmata in which her deliverances have been codified for general use.'

‘Look here,' said John. ‘Have you ever seen my Island?'

‘God forbid.'

‘And you have never heard Mr. Halfways either.'

‘Never. And I never will. Do you take me for an escapist?'

‘Then there is at least one object in the world of which I know more than you. I
tasted
what you call romantic trash; you have only talked about it. You need not tell me that there is a danger in it and an element of evil. Do you suppose that I have not felt that danger and that evil a thousand times more than you? But I know also that the evil in it is not what I went to it to find, and that I should have sought nothing and found nothing without it. I know this by experience as I know a dozen things about it which of you betray your ignorance as often as you speak. Forgive me if I am rude: but how is it possible that you can advise me in this matter? Would you recommend a eunuch as confessor to a man whose difficulties lay in the realm of chastity? Would a man born blind be my best guide against the lust of the eye? But I am getting angry. And you have shared your biscuit with me. I ask your pardon.'

‘It is part of my office to bear insults with patience,' said Mr. Angular.

IV

Humanist

I
N THE AFTERNOON
Mr. Humanist took John out to show him the garden, by whose produce, in time, the new culture was to become self-supporting. As there was no human, or indeed animal, habitation within sight, no wall or fence had been deemed necessary but the area of the garden had been marked out by a line of stones and sea-shells alternately arranged: and this was necessary as the garden would else have been indistinguishable from the waste. A few paths, also marked by stones and shells, were arranged in a geometrical pattern.

‘You see,' said Mr. Humanist, ‘we have quite abandoned the ideas of the old romantic landscape gardeners. You notice a certain severity. A landscape gardener would have had a nodding grove over there on the right, and a mound on the left, and winding paths, and a pond, and flowerbeds. He would have filled the obscurer parts with the means of sensuality—the formless potato and the romantically irregular cabbage. You see, there is nothing of the sort here.'

‘Nothing at all,' said John.

‘At present, of course, it is not very fruitful. But we are pioneers.'

‘Do you ever try
digging
it?' suggested John.

‘Why, no,' said Mr. Humanist, ‘you see, it is pure rock an inch below the surface, so we do not disturb the soil. That would remove the graceful veil of illusion which is so necessary to the
human
point of view.'

V

Food from the North

L
ATE THAT EVENING
the door of the hut opened and Vertue staggered in and dropped to a sitting position by the stove. He was very exhausted and it was long before he had his breath to talk. When he had, his first words were:

‘You must leave this place, gentlemen. It is in danger.'

‘Where is Drudge?' said John.

‘He stayed there.'

‘And what is this danger?' asked Mr. Humanist.

‘I'm going to tell you. By the by, there's no way over the gorge northward.'

‘We have been on a fool's errand, then,' said John, ‘ever since we left the main road.'

‘Except that now we know,' replied Vertue. ‘But I must eat before I can tell my story. To-night I am able to return our friends' hospitality,' and with that he produced from various parts of his clothing the remains of a handsome cold pie, two bottles of strong beer and a little flask of rum. For some time there was silence in the hut, and when the meal was finished and a little water had been boiled so that each had a glass of hot grog, Vertue began his story.

VI

Furthest North

‘I
T IS ALL LIKE
this as far as the mountains—about fifteen miles—and there is nothing to tell of our journey except rock and moss and a few gulls. The mountains are frightful as you approach them, but the road runs up to a pass and we had not much difficulty. Beyond the pass you get into a little rocky valley and it was here that we first found any signs of habitation. The valley is a regular warren of caves inhabited by dwarfs. There are several species of them, I gather, though I only distinguished two—a black kind with black shirts and a red kind who call themselves Marxomanni. They are all very fierce and apparently quarrel a good deal but they all acknowledge some kind of vassalage to this man Savage. At least they made no difficulty in letting me through when they heard that I wanted to see him—beyond insisting on giving me a guard. It was there I lost Drudge. He said he had come to join the red dwarfs and would I mind going on alone. He was just the same up to the end—civil as ever—but he was down one of their burrows and apparently quite at home before I could get in a word. Then my dwarfs took me on. I didn't care for the arrangements much. They were not men, you know, not dwarf men, but real dwarfs—trolls. They could talk, and they walk on two legs, but the structure must be quite different from ours. I felt all the time that if they killed me it wouldn't be murder, any more than if a crocodile or a gorilla killed me. It
is
a different species—however it came there. Different faces.

‘Well, they kept taking me up and up. It was all rocky zig-zags, round and round. Fortunately, I do not get giddy. My chief danger was the wind whenever we got on a ridge—for of course my guides, being only some three feet high, did not offer it the same target. I had one or two narrow escapes. Savage's nest is a terrifying place. It is a long hall like a barn and when I first caught sight of it—half-way up the sky from where they were leading me—I thought to myself that wherever else we were going it could not be
there
; it looked so inaccessible. But on we went.

‘One thing you must get into your heads is that there are caves all the way up, all inhabited. The whole mountain must be honeycombed. I saw thousands of the dwarfs. Like an ant-hill—and not a man in the place except me.

‘From Savage's nest you look straight down to the sea. I should think it is the biggest sheer drop on any coast. It was from there that I saw the mouth of the gorge. The mouth is only a lowering of the cliff: from the lowest part of the opening it is still thousands of feet to the sea. There is no conceivable landing. It is no use to anyone but sea-gulls.

‘But you want to hear about Savage. He sat on a high chair at the end of his barn—a very big man, almost a giant. When I say that I don't mean his height: I had the same feeling about him that I had about the dwarfs. That doubt about the
species.
He was dressed in skins and had an iron helmet on his head with horns stuck in it.

‘He had a woman there, too, a great big woman with yellow hair and high cheek-bones. Grimhild her name is. And the funny thing is that she is the sister of an old friend of yours, John. She is Mr. Halfways' elder daughter. Apparently Savage came down to Thrill and carried her off: and what is stranger still, both the girl and the old gentleman were rather pleased about it than otherwise.

‘As soon as the dwarfs brought me in, Savage rapped on the table and bellowed out, “Lay the board for us men,” and she set about laying it. He didn't say anything to me for a long time. He just sat and looked and sang. He had only one song and he was singing it off and on all the time I was there. I remember bits of it.

‘Wind age, wolf age,

Ere the world crumbles:

Shard age, spear age,

Shields are broken. . . .

‘Then there was another bit began:

‘East sits the Old'Un

In Iron-forest;

Feeds amidst it

Fenris' children. . . .

I sat down after a bit, for I did not want him to think I was afraid of him. When the food was on the table he asked me to have some, so I had it. He offered me a sweet drink, very strong, in a horn, so I drank it. Then he shouted and drank himself and said that mead in a horn was all he could offer me at present: “But soon,” he said, “I shall drink the blood of men from skulls.” There was a lot of this sort of stuff. We ate roast pork, with our fingers. He kept on singing his song and shouting. It was only after dinner that he began to talk connectedly. I wish I could remember it all. This is the important part of my story.

‘It is hard to understand it without being a biologist. These dwarfs
are
a different species and an older species than ours. But, then, the specific variation is always liable to reappear in human children. They revert to the dwarf. Consequently, they are multiplying very fast; they are being increased both by ordinary breeding among themselves and also from without by those hark-backs or changelings. He spoke of lots of sub-species besides the Marxomanni—Mussolimini, Swastici, Gangomanni. . . . I can't remember them all. For a long time I couldn't see where he himself came in.

‘At last he told me. He is breeding and training them for a descent on this country. When I tried to find out why, for a long time he would only stare at me and sing his song. Finally—as near as I could get it—his theory seemed to be that fighting was an end in itself.

‘Mind you, he was not drunk. He said that he could understand old-fashioned people who believed in the Landlord and kept the rules and hoped to go up and live in the Landlord's castle when they had to leave this country. “They have something to live for,” he said. “And if their belief was true, their behaviour would be perfectly sensible. But as their belief is not true, there remains only one way of life fit for a man.” This other way of life was something he called Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. “All the other people in between,” he said, “are ploughing the sand.” He went on railing at the people in Claptrap for ages, and also at Mr. Sensible. “These are the dregs of man,” he said. “They are always thinking of happiness. They are scraping together and storing up and trying to
build.
Can they not see that the law of the world is against them? Where will any of them be a hundred years hence?” I said they might be building for posterity. “And who will posterity build for?” he asked. “Can't you see that it is all bound to come to nothing in the end? And the end may come to-morrow: and however late it comes, to those who look back all their ‘happiness' will seem but a moment that has slipped away and left nothing behind. You can't gather happiness. Do you go to bed with any more in hand on the day you have had a thousand pleasures?” I asked if his “Heroism” left anything behind it either: but he said it did. “The excellent deed,” he said, “is eternal. The hero alone has this privilege, that death for him is not defeat, and the lamenting over him and the memory is part of the good he aimed for; and the moment of battle fears nothing from the future because it has already cast security away.”