Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (3 page)

‘None.’

‘How are the estates chosen?’

‘I don’t quite understand your question.’

‘Is the classification, for example, by birth and property? Or by attainments?’

‘By capacity, of course. Birth is never a clear indication of capacity; parents of one estate may have children who properly belong to another. And property is an indication of a man’s estate, not his qualification for belonging to it. And attainments are the result of capacity.’

‘But who judges capacity? Local committees appointed by your Royal Psychological Society? You don’t still use the Funck-Hulme intelligence test, do you – the one with jigsaw puzzles and coloured electric light-bulbs and a trick slot-machine?’

A gasp went up from the Interpreter. ‘Please, Sir,’ he protested, ‘it would take me a sadly long time to translate the second part of your question, the answer to which I can give you myself. It is “no”. May I be permitted to ask the witch on your behalf merely: who judges capacity?’

‘Very well, who does judge it?’

He translated this, and Sally answered: ‘Parents and playmates and neighbours. The child remains in his mother’s estate until there’s general agreement that he belongs somewhere else. A misfit is almost always recognized before his education begins in earnest. Then representatives of the estate to which he properly belongs come to claim him.’

‘Don’t the parents ever protest?’

‘Why should they? It’s painful to lose a child, but it’s worse to have one who doesn’t belong in the house. The parents are the first to reject him. usually they get another of the right kind in exchange – an orphan, or a misfit from some other estate. I myself was hatched in the wrong nest, as we say; my parents were recorders. On the whole the magicians breed true; but then we have small families and about one in every three of us was born in another estate.’

‘There are five estates, you said? We English had five once: nobles, clerics, yeomen, tradesmen and serfs. What are yours?’

‘We reckon them on the hand, beginning with the thumb. Look,
thumb
, the captains, who roughly correspond with your nobles;
forefinger
, the recorders;
third finger
, the commons – do you follow?’

‘I understand why the thumb is the captain: it comes first and it’s the strongest, and it combines easily with any of the other fingers. And the forefinger is the recorder because it directs the pen. But the third finger?’

‘That’s the middle one and the tallest; you see, the commons are the middle estate and the most numerous. Here it’s called the fool’s finger. The fourth finger stands for the servants, because of all the fingers it’s the least capable of independent movement.’

‘Palmists make it the Apollo finger.’

‘I know, and Apollo, you remember, was once a servant. The poet Cleopatra says in her tercet,
Three Costly Errors
: “The first, when Apollo forgot that he was a servant and played the master.” Servants, as you’ll agree, make the worst masters. Well, that leaves the little finger, which stands for the magicians, and that’s because –’

‘Because in fairy stories it’s always connected with magic?’

‘If you like to put it that way. And because ours is the smallest of the five estates. They’re all interdependent, like the five divisions of a plane-tree leaf. Each kingdom has its five estates, each kingdom is a leaf on the New Cretan plane-tree: that’s about the first thing one learns at school.’

‘Very neat; but I should like to hear how a child reveals his natural estate to his playmates. It sounds rather mysterious to me.’

‘It’s not at all mysterious. Take a ball-game, for example. Did boys play baseball in the Late Christian epoch? I forget. Or won’t that happen until Pantisocratism comes in?’

‘They play it quite a lot. Men too.’

‘Well then, in a ball-game, if a boy’s timorous, unenterprising and quiet, and if he prefers taking orders to making decisions, and doesn’t care on which side he plays, and prefers fielding to hitting or pitching, then he’s obviously a servant. If he’s more interested in discussing the fine points of the game, or keeping the score than in playing it, then he’s a recorder. If he’s more interested in organizing it than playing it, then he’s a captain. If he prefers hitting and pitching to fielding and shows strong partisan feeling, then he’s one of the commons. But if he plays without really taking part in the game, so that other players are made uncomfortable by his presence, even if he plays it well, then he’s a magician.’

‘What exactly do you mean by magician?’

‘Magicians think in an active way; everyone else thinks passively.’

‘I see. So mathematicians, philosophers and scientists are magicians?’

‘No, people of that sort, if we had them (but we don’t) would be recorders. One doesn’t need an active mind to record.’

‘But surely, you’d distinguish a man who adds up columns of figures from a man who invents a complex mathematical formula or generalizes about the nature of the universe?’

‘There’s no magic in a mathematical formula, however complex. It’s only a recorder’s convenience for his fellow-recorders: it’s part of accountancy, or history. A philosophic concept about the nature of the universe is of the same order: it’s part of history.’

‘I don’t follow you, Sally. What is active thought, as opposed to passive?’

‘Active thought is to passive as rhythm is to metre; or as melody is to harmony. It’s an event, not a condition. It’s a proof of life, not a description of the limits within which life moves.

I let this go by, and changed the subject: ‘Do your kings actively govern their kingdoms?’

‘No, do yours?’

‘Only in name. Who does govern then? The captains? Or you magicians?’

‘There isn’t any governing estate. Custom is the governing principle, and each estate has its obligations to it.’

‘In the short run that’s all very well, but aren’t you asking for trouble in the long run? Suppose some unforeseen natural disaster occurs? You still have droughts, floods and so on?’

Before she answered, Sally touched wood to avert ill-luck, but did this seriously and religiously, not with an apologetic smile. ‘The recorders keep detailed accounts of past disasters and if a new one happens, the captains consult with them at once on the best way to meet it. There’s always a precedent of sorts. Then they set the commons to work. They work until the danger has passed. The less responsible tasks are performed by the servants. The magicians stand by; they aren’t consulted unless the disaster concerns public health or morals, when they’re expected to intervene.’

‘You’re priests of a sort, then?’

‘Oh, no, all the priests belong to the servants’ estate. That seems to surprise you, but surely it’s only commonsense. The priest’s function is to give his deity faithful service. He doesn’t need to improvise, or take decisions, or perform magic. He memorizes his ritual and loyally and unthinkingly carries out his duties. It was once proposed that our kings should belong to the servant estate, too, because the king is the supreme servant, capable of the most utter self-sacrifice; but that was a mistake. The commons were conceded the right, on the plea that “the fool’s finger wears the crown” as the poet Vives had written, and that the priesthood and the kingship ought to be kept separate.’

‘A sensible decision. You get a more interesting set of kings that way and it must give the commons a sense of pride.’

‘It’s a fine foolish thing to wear a crown; while it lasts.’

‘Where do women come into this system?’

‘We maintain it, because we act directly on behalf of the Goddess. We appraise men; we don’t compete with them. Naturally, they treat us as the superior sex.’

‘But more men than women are capable of active thought.’

‘That’s irrelevant. We don’t regard magicians as more important than recorders because they think actively rather than passively; we regard them only as different.’

‘Well, as the superior sex (in the eyes of the men at least) I suppose you do no work?’

‘Of course we work. But in every estate women have different fields of action from men. There’s no competition between the sexes.’

‘Do men never appraise women?’

‘That isn’t the custom.’

‘It seems a rather one-sided arrangement.’

‘Yes, but the men are satisfied and we don’t complain.’

Feeling a little crushed, I asked Sally to explain the difference between women magicians and men magicians. She said that evocatory magic was the women’s field. ‘That means removing spirits from where they have no right to be –’

‘For example?’ I asked.

‘For example, in cases of demonic possession and haunting. Or summoning people from elsewhere in time or space for consultation. Invocatory magic is the men’s field. That means calling the Goddess to witness and sponsor some magical action.’

‘As a poet invokes the Muse?’

‘Is your Muse a living woman?’

‘I think of her as the woman with whom I’m in love as I write.’

‘Is that usual in your epoch?’

‘I don’t think so. But it’s my way, at any rate.’

‘I’m glad; that will help you to understand us better. Custom here is based not on a code of laws, but for the most part on the inspired utterances of poets; that is to say, it’s dictated by the Muse, who is the Goddess.’

At this point Starfish caught Sally’s eye and began rolling cigarettes. He rolled six neatly and rapidly, using some sort of leaf instead of paper. He handed one to each of us, except the Interpreter, and kept the last for himself.

‘So you still smoke?’ I said.

‘Every evening at about this time,’ said Fig-bread. Sapphire rose, lighted each cigarette with a wooden spill and spoke what seemed a traditional formula: ‘Smoke, enjoy, be silent!’ The Interpreter bowed slightly, took a meerschaum pipe from his pocket, and went out to smoke on the porch. Afterwards I found out that each estate used a different type of tobacco and kept strictly to itself while smoking or, in the servants’ estate, chewing. ‘Smokes do not mix,’ was a proverb I was to hear many times in different contexts during my stay. There was no careless, nervous tobacco-taking at odd hours. Everyone smoked, or chewed, calmly and deliberately, once a day only. Before I had been there a day I got tobacco-hunger and used to long for the evening.

When we had finished, the cigarette ends were burned in the fire and Sapphire said: ‘Now we may speak!’

See-a-Bird had apparently been considering what I had told him earlier in the evening about the population of London.

‘How terrible it must be to live there,’ he said, ‘with some ten million people occupying territory that here would support only five or ten thousand! Whenever you leave your house to visit a friend in another part of the town, you must pass hundreds of new people.’

‘What’s so terrible about that?’

‘Well, surely, whenever you see a new face in the street, even if no greeting is exchanged there is always a sort of contact, a recognition: you not only notice the face but you sum it up mentally and store it in your memory. Every personal contact is an expense of mental energy. Here we know practically everyone by sight, so our casual meetings make little demand on our energies, and on grand festival days we dull our sensibilities with drink. But we find visits to other regions exhausting; the brain dizzies after a time from the demands put upon it. That’s why we travel little, and why, when we go abroad, our hosts take care to expose us to as few personal contacts as possible. When I try to imagine thousands and thousands of people all in different clothes and with thoroughly disorganized minds, threading in and out of one another’s lives without knowing or greeting, each pursuing a private, competitive path – I think it would kill me.’

‘Oh, no. One can get used to almost everything. The Eskimos who were brought to London in the eighteenth century didn’t die of seeing too many faces. So far as I remember, they just caught bad colds and died that way.’

‘Nobody dies of a cold,’ Sally insisted. ‘Seeing too many faces must have undermined their strength.’

‘Have it your own way. At any rate, we treat people as if they were trees: when you’re walking through a forest, you don’t study every tree, but only the striking ones that will serve as landmarks to guide you back. In the same way we don’t study people’s faces as they go by. Old friends, relatives, even lovers may pass each other and not know it. We’re conscious only of the policeman who regulates traffic, and of the ticket-collector in the bus or railway station. But unless the policeman pulls us up for breaking some traffic rule we don’t study his face; and we know nothing of the ticket collector, unless he questions the validity of our ticket.’ Here it took me a long time to explain policemen and ticket-collectors.

‘But if a beautiful woman goes by?’

‘The impression is as transitory as a picture in the fire. Women go by with their faces set in the same sightless mask as men: no true beauty is apparent.’

‘This self-protective habit of not-seeing must blunt your poetic sensibilities and impair your memory.’

‘Perhaps it does. Little poetry worth the name has been written in London ever since it ceased to be a country town; but Londoners are in general long-lived, and they keep their memories in notebooks and ledgers. For me, the worst is the noise.’

‘What sort of noise?’

‘I don’t mean the incidental noise of traffic – throbbing of motors, rumbling of buses and trains. One gets as inured to that as the Sudanese who live near the Cataracts get to the noise of falling water. It’s the distractive ringing of the telephone, and the music blared out by a million radios from early morning till late at night. One can never escape that for long.’

‘Do you mean to say that anyone can play what music he likes at any hour of the day he likes?’

‘Anyone who has a gramophone or can strum on a musical instrument. Otherwise he has to rely on the radio programmes. Most Londoners like to listen to music while they work, and don’t much care what sort of music it is. When they have to live in a village for more than a week or two, they get desperately bored and lonely without the noise of traffic and the interminable stream of faces and the constant summons of the telephone. So they keep the radio going all the time.’