Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (7 page)

‘Why thirteen?’ I asked, trying to be interested.

‘Because we observe the thirteen-month calendar and pick the herbs for use according to the age of the moon and the day of the week.’

‘How charmingly old-fashioned! Do you whisper spells over your herbs and bruise them with a gold pestle in a silver mortar?’

‘That depends on the herb. Quite often we use other metals.’

‘I don’t see any labels stuck in the ground to say which herbs are which.’

‘No, and we don’t write “apple” on the apples we eat; you must have noticed that at breakfast.’

See-a-Bird looked up sharply at Sally and his brow furrowed anxiously. Her answer had been very tart for a New Cretan.

‘That’s a pity,’ I answered smoothly. ‘I confess I can’t distinguish sweet basil from devil’s bit, or turk’s nose from mandragora. They didn’t teach botany at my public school – or very much else, if it comes to that – so without labels, please don’t expect me to admire your lay-out. You’d better lead me out of here again, and show me the vegetables. I know my greens pretty well.’

‘Tell me, what medicines do doctors use in your epoch?’ See-a-Bird was tactfully changing the subject.

‘Animal, vegetable or mineral extracts prepared in sterilized laboratories usually after experiments on rats, rabbits and monkeys, and packed in pill-boxes, or glass bottles, or little china pots.’

‘No herbs?’

‘A few herbalists do business in country towns, but they don’t rank as real doctors. Public medicine is scientific and as most people trust science blindly, it works in most cases. As well as pre-scientific medicine used to work, if not better. When it doesn’t have the right effect, the explanation given is that it isn’t quite scientific enough: doesn’t take into account all the relevant morbid factors. Ask an honest doctor whether such and such a drug is a reliable cure for sciatica, and he’ll tell you: “Use it while it still cures.” We pay no attention to the moon or the day of the week – that would be superstitious. And very little to the temperament, or moral peculiarities or spiritual condition of the patient: most doctors are too busy signing certificates and filling in forms and keeping their accounts to have any time for refinements of that sort.’

‘How utterly loveless!’ said Sally with a little shiver.

‘Oh, we can’t grumble. When the system was introduced into backward countries like India and Egypt it worked almost too well. The native systems discouraged the survival of weakly children or of people too old to do useful work. Now the population’s increasing absurdly, and will go on increasing, I suppose, until war or famine reduces it to a sensible size.’

Beyond the herbary lay parkland with a few cows grazing over it. ‘Magic houses are always surrounded by parkland,’ See-a-Bird explained. ‘We can’t concentrate on our work if a highway runs close by or if a row of cottages is built at our gates. It’s not merely the incidental noises that distract, but the agitation set up by alien rhythms of thought and feeling.’

‘You’re very particular.’

‘What sort of a magician would an unparticular one be?’ Sally asked.

‘What indeed?’ I wished that Sapphire had come with us. When Sally was about I felt the temptation to criticize all I saw, almost to the extent of feeling a loyalty to my own obviously inferior epoch. With Sapphire, it would have been different: I should have accepted everything without question for her sake, as I had once accepted Antonia’s home and family at her own high valuation.

‘I wonder that you allow cows in the parks,’ I said, after a pause.

‘Why not? They make no disturbance.’

‘You misunderstand me. I wasn’t thinking of their mental and emotional rhythms; I meant that their hooves and their droppings spoil the turf.’

‘If you look closely you’ll see that they’re wearing wide leather shoes, and that there aren’t any casual droppings. Cattle are trained to drop into pits – there’s one over there by the wall – and the manure is returned to the land once a year, sprayed over the whole surface, so that the grass grows evenly.’

‘How charmingly scientific!’

Sally pretended not to hear.

We were approaching a group of houses each with its garden and fence; a stream ran around the bottom of the gardens and dark-haired children were bathing and fishing in it. The houses were built of stone with tiled roofs and brightly-painted shutters. Most of the walls were whitewashed, but some were colour-washed in yellow, smoke-grey or pink. A morose-looking man in leather shorts and sandals with criss-cross straps was setting out pea-sticks in a near-by garden. He looked up as we passed, greeting us with his fingers extended in the Latin blessing, and called something to his wife. She looked out of the window in obvious excitement, then disappeared and soon came hurrying to meet us with a basket of plums. She wore a short-sleeved white linen blouse with gold buttons, and a heavily embroidered skirt, and looked rather Moorish.

‘In Mari’s name, all’s well?’ This seemed to be the formal greeting.

‘All’s well,’ Sally returned with a polite smile.

The woman looked inquiringly at me.

‘A poet from the past, who has consented to visit us.’

‘Offer him one of my plums and ask him to swallow the stone.’ She spoke gravely but her mouth twitched.

‘How’s that?’

‘To take the stone back to his own epoch so that it may in time become the ancestress of my plum-tree.’

It was a relief to know that the commons at least made their little jokes; but Sally, See-a-Bird and the Interpreter did not laugh. From the abstracted look on See-a-Bird’s face I guessed that he was working out the logical possibility of the experiment.

‘And your child?’ asked Sally.

‘Mari be praised! I did as you told me, Witch, and to-day he walks without a limp. He ran a race with the cat just now and beat her easily. She ran up a tree.’

‘This is a village of the commons,’ See-a-Bird explained, as we went on. ‘It’s called Horned Lamb. Each village is famous for something; this has a carp-pool and an unusual way of thatching barns with heather and rush. Over there on the green is the totem-pole, the centre of their worship.’

‘What are the marriage customs here?’ I asked. (‘That’s the first thing to find out,’ as Knut Jensen the Danish anthropologist had once told me. ‘There are some places, you know, where a man dies of shame if he accidentally catches sight of his sister-in-law’s leaf-skirt hanging out on the line; and others where he’s expected to lead her off into the bush three times a day. One can make dreadful mistakes if one doesn’t discover which place is which.’)

‘Horned Lamb is strictly monogamous,’ See-a-Bird told me. ‘The girls and boys here have no sexual experience before marriage, unless they decide to migrate to another monogamous village where that’s permitted – or to a polygamous one. They’re free to go off if they like.’

‘If they do go, are they estranged from their families?’

‘Not at all. They visit them as often as they like and there’s no ill-will between villages with different moralities. Only, every permanent resident of a village is expected to conform to local custom.’

‘What’s that large house beyond the bridge?’ It was built in red brick with quadrangles, like a Cambridge college, and surrounded by a double-line of plane-trees.

‘That’s where the recorders live. The commons prefer to live in cottages with gardens and to have neighbours across the garden fence. The recorders prefer flats in a large building with communal dining-rooms, a communal nursery and an orderly routine. The north wing is the library and record-office. That field is their croquet-ground. It’s a tradition with us that recorders play croquet, unlike any of the other estates: croquet and bowls.’

I saw a couple of elderly recorders coming down a path from the hill. They wore full-skirted coats, knee-breeches. and buckled shoes, which gave them the look of eighteenth-century Quaker merchants.

‘Is that the Recorders’ garden?’ I asked, ‘– there to the right of the plane-trees.’

See-a-Bird nodded. ‘As you can see from here, it’s very formal. Tulips massed in neat beds – one black, one white, one red – bushes clipped flat, lily-pools, delphiniums, espalier-pears, tea-roses – their rose-bushes and fruit trees are pruned pitilessly to get the best fruit and blooms, not left in peace like ours – sundials and a peacock. Peacocks are reserved for the Recorders’ estate.’

‘Indeed? Why?’

‘A recorder is supposed to be all eyes like the peacock’s tail, and without a peacock such a garden would be a little too severe. The severity of the tulip beds is mitigated by a custom that each bed must contain one flower of a different colour from the rest.’

‘Suppose a recorder happened to dislike croquet, peacocks, delphiniums and tulips?’

‘Then he wouldn’t be a recorder,’ Sally threw over her shoulder. She said ‘good-bye’ sulkily, and walked off. What was wrong with the woman?

I was beginning to feel less at home than before: this was something like a visit to the Ideal Homes Exhibition and something like a chapter left out from
Alice in Wonderland.
The Interpreter was the White Rabbit to the life. A few days before my evocation I had picked up a copy of
Alice in Wonderland
and read it for the first time for I don’t know how many years. (‘How good it is,’ I thought, memories of a happy childhood surging back into my mind, ‘how amusing, how exquisitely written’ – until suddenly I came on the four pages at the end of the chapter about the Queen’s croquet-ground, which I had always missed because my elder brother had torn them out of our nursery-copy to make paper-boats. ‘How tedious,’ I thought as I read them, ‘how stupid, how out of key!’) So I found myself asking the Interpreter what the Queen of Hearts had asked Alice: ‘Can you play croquet?’

‘I am passionately fond of it. I play game after game in my dreams.’

‘With flamingoes for mallets, and hedgehogs for balls, and doubled-up soldiers for hoops?’

‘Excuse me? I do not understand.’

‘That’s how Alice played it.’

‘Ah, yes, of course.’

But I could not be sure whether he really understood the reference, or whether he was bluffing to show off his erudition. What a muff of a man he was! I pitied his colleague Quant.

‘Where do the captains live?’ I asked See-a-Bird.

‘You see those cloisters leading from the Record House and ending in four or five cells? They live there. Look, one of them is coming out now.’

A tall, hatchet-faced hero in what looked like naval uniform had swung open a door and was striding masterfully down the cloisters. He might have stepped straight out of an American comic-strip. ‘There goes Nervo the Fearless on the track of the Masked Girl!’ I cried.

‘Nervo?’ echoed the Interpreter doubtfully.

‘He looks as though he were syndicated in about five thousand provincial dailies.’

‘Syndicated?’

‘Oh, nothing! I was merely admiring his perfect he-manship. Does his wife have a lot to make her jealous?’

‘He has no wife,’ See-a-Bird said. ‘Captains have no home-life, because they’re so busy with other people’s business; and though a few energetic young women belong to this estate they don’t marry within it. As soon as they decide to have children and settle down they resign and become ordinary members of the commons.’

‘Then why doesn’t the estate die out?’

‘The captains have a marriage agreement with villages of the commons where pre-marital promiscuity is practised. Since they’re men of vigorous physique and compelling character – as you noticed at once – new recruits to the estate always get born. In fact, it was once a problem how to keep the estate from growing too large. The solution found was to forbid captains to mate with women either of whose parents had belonged to the estate, or who had themselves been captains.’

‘And do the recorders breed satisfactorily in proportion to other estates?’

‘They’re so conscious of the need for proportional breeding that they regulate their birthrate with great exactitude.’

‘And the commons? And the servants?’

‘Those are the estates most susceptible to what in past epochs were called “the imponderable factors of genetics”: but imponderable meant no more than that they couldn’t be weighed in the scales of science. The birthrate can be accelerated or decelerated easily enough by simple me ans. The servants present less of a problem than the commons; they are always over-fertile, so we reduce their pulse-rate, and their sexual inclination, by giving them cola to chew. This has the additional advantage of making them content to perform monotonous tasks day after day without diversion. And we don’t bother about slight variations in the birthrate of the commons: if one village has a few vacant houses or more land than it needs, it invites settlers from another village of the same marriage system as itself, and these “grafts”, as we call them, make for movement and animation. But if a whole district becomes depopulated or over-populated, that’s another matter. Since cola is reserved for the servants’ estate, the usual remedy is a change in the regional costume, or music. Melancholy music stimulates breeding, serene music discourages it. As for costume, the more sombre and restrictive the clothes, the higher the birthrate.’

‘Surely not?’

‘But indeed! Melancholy music produces a vague anxiety in its hearers, vague anxiety carries with it a presentiment of death, presentiment of death suggests the need for breeding children. Sombre restrictive clothes have a similar effect on their wearers. The greater the sense of bodily freedom and exhilaration the lower the birthrate.’

‘I shouldn’t have expected that. Who prescribes these changes?’

‘We magicians do. This is a matter that can’t be left to custom. The recorders can be trusted to find the appropriate treatment for simple local mishaps, such as a plague of caterpillars or the burning down of a village or an outbreak of typhoid fever. But fluctuations in the birthrate may be due to so many causes that we’re always consulted before any action is taken; we diagnose and prescribe. The prescriptions are announced by the priests, which gives them religious force. The commons aren’t told why their customs are changed, but they accept the orders out of respect for their priests and the captains see that they’re carried out.’