Erewhon Revisited

S >> Samuel Butler >> Erewhon Revisited


George was furious, but he remained quite calm, and left everything to
his mother.

"I have nothing to do with the Blue Pool," said Yram drily. "My son, I
doubt not, will know how to do his duty; but if you let the people kill
this man, his body will remain, and an inquest must be held, for the
matter will have been too notorious to be hushed up. All Higgs's
measurements and all marks on his body were recorded, and these alone
would identify him. My father, too, who is still master of the gaol, and
many another, could swear to him. Should the body prove, as no doubt it
would, to be that of the Sunchild, what is to become of Sunchildism?"

Hanky smiled. "It would not be proved. The measurements of a man of
twenty or thereabouts would not correspond with this man's. All we
Professors should attend the inquest, and half Bridgeford is now in
Sunch'ston. No matter though nine-tenths of the marks and measurements
corresponded, so long as there is a tenth that does not do so, we should
not be flesh and blood if we did not ignore the nine points and insist
only on the tenth. After twenty years we shall find enough to serve our
turn. Think of what all the learning of the country is committed to;
think of the change in all our ideas and institutions; think of the King
and of Court influence. I need not enlarge. We shall not permit the
body to be the Sunchild's. No matter what evidence you may produce, we
shall sneer it down, and say we must have more before you can expect us
to take you seriously; if you bring more, we shall pay no attention; and
the more you bring the more we shall laugh at you. No doubt those among
us who are by way of being candid will admit that your arguments ought to
be considered, but you must not expect that it will be any part of their
duty to consider them.

"And even though we admitted that the body had been proved up to the hilt
to be the Sunchild's, do you think that such a trifle as that could
affect Sunchildism? Hardly. Sunch'ston is no match for Bridgeford and
the King; our only difficulty would lie in settling which was the most
plausible way of the many plausible ways in which the death could be
explained. We should hatch up twenty theories in less than twenty hours,
and the last state of Sunchildism would be stronger than the first. For
the people want it, and so long as they want it they will have it. At
the same time the supposed identification of the body, even by some few
ignorant people here, might lead to a local heresy that is as well
avoided, and it will be better that your son should arrest the man before
the dedication, if he can be found, and throw him into the Blue Pool
without any one but ourselves knowing that he has been here at all."

I need not dwell on the deep disgust with which this speech was listened
to, but the Mayor, and Yram, and George said not a word.

"But, Mayoress," said Panky, who had not opened his lips so far, "are you
sure that you are not too hasty in believing this stranger to be the
Sunchild? People are continually thinking that such and such another is
the Sunchild come down again from the sun's palace and going to and fro
among us. How many such stories, sometimes very plausibly told, have we
not had during the last twenty years? They never take root, and die out
of themselves as suddenly as they spring up. That the man is a poacher
can hardly be doubted; I thought so the moment I saw him; but I think I
can also prove to you that he is not a foreigner, and, therefore, that he
is not the Sunchild. He quoted the Sunchild's prayer with a corruption
that can have only reached him from an Erewhonian source--"

Here Hanky interrupted him somewhat brusquely. "The man, Panky," said
he, "was the Sunchild; and he was not a poacher, for he had no idea that
he was breaking the law; nevertheless, as you say, Sunchildism on the
brain has been a common form of mania for several years. Several persons
have even believed themselves to be the Sunchild. We must not forget
this, if it should get about that Higgs has been here."

Then, turning to Yram, he said sternly, "But come what may, your son must
take him to the Blue Pool at nightfall."

"Sir," said George, with perfect suavity, "you have spoken as though you
doubted my readiness to do my duty. Let me assure you very solemnly that
when the time comes for me to act, I shall act as duty may direct."

"I will answer for him," said Yram, with even more than her usual quick,
frank smile, "that he will fulfil his instructions to the letter,
unless," she added, "some black and white horses come down from heaven
and snatch poor Higgs out of his grasp. Such things have happened before
now."

"I should advise your son to shoot them if they do," said Hanky drily and
sub-defiantly.

Here the conversation closed; but it was useless trying to talk of
anything else, so the Professors asked Yram to excuse them if they
retired early, in view of the fact that they had a fatiguing day before
them. This excuse their hostess readily accepted.

"Do not let us talk any more now," said Yram as soon as they had left the
room. "It will be quite time enough when the dedication is over. But I
rather think the black and white horses will come."

"I think so too, my dear," said the Mayor laughing.

"They shall come," said George gravely; "but we have not yet got enough
to make sure of bringing them. Higgs will perhaps be able to help me to-
morrow."

* * * * *

"Now what," said Panky as they went upstairs, "does that woman mean--for
she means something? Black and white horses indeed!"

"I do not know what she means to do," said the other, "but I know that
she thinks she can best us."

"I wish we had not eaten those quails."

"Nonsense, Panky; no one saw us but Higgs, and the evidence of a foreign
devil, in such straits as his, could not stand for a moment. We did not
eat them. No, no; she has something that she thinks better than that.
Besides, it is absolutely impossible that she should have heard what
happened. What I do not understand is, why she should have told us about
the Sunchild's being here at all. Why not have left us to find it out or
to know nothing about it? I do not understand it."

So true is it, as Euclid long since observed, that the less cannot
comprehend that which is the greater. True, however, as this is, it is
also sometimes true that the greater cannot comprehend the less. Hanky
went musing to his own room and threw himself into an easy chair to think
the position over. After a few minutes he went to a table on which he
saw pen, ink, and paper, and wrote a short letter; then he rang the bell.

When the servant came he said, "I want to send this note to the manager
of the new temple, and it is important that he should have it to-night.
Be pleased, therefore, to take it to him and deliver it into his own
hands; but I had rather you said nothing about it to the Mayor or
Mayoress, nor to any of your fellow-servants. Slip out unperceived if
you can. When you have delivered the note, ask for an answer at once,
and bring it to me."

So saying, he slipped a sum equal to about five shillings into the man's
hand.

The servant returned in about twenty minutes, for the temple was quite
near, and gave a note to Hanky, which ran, "Your wishes shall be attended
to without fail."

"Good!" said Hanky to the man. "No one in the house knows of your having
run this errand for me?"

"No one, sir."

"Thank you! I wish you a very good night."




CHAPTER XIII: A VISIT TO THE PROVINCIAL DEFORMATORY AT FAIRMEAD


Having finished his early dinner, and not fearing that he should be
either recognised at Fairmead or again enquired after from Sunch'ston, my
father went out for a stroll round the town, to see what else he could
find that should be new and strange to him. He had not gone far before
he saw a large building with an inscription saying that it was the
Provincial Deformatory for Boys. Underneath the larger inscription there
was a smaller one--one of those corrupt versions of my father's sayings,
which, on dipping into the Sayings of the Sunchild, he had found to be so
vexatiously common. The inscription ran:-

"When the righteous man turneth away from the righteousness that he
hath committed, and doeth that which is a little naughty and wrong, he
will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost
in righteousness." Sunchild Sayings, chap. xxii. v. 15.

The case of the little girl that he had watched earlier in the day had
filled him with a great desire to see the working of one of these curious
institutions; he therefore resolved to call on the headmaster (whose name
he found to be Turvey), and enquire about terms, alleging that he had a
boy whose incorrigible rectitude was giving him much anxiety. The
information he had gained in the forenoon would be enough to save him
from appearing to know nothing of the system. On having rung the bell,
he announced himself to the servant as a Mr. Senoj, and asked if he could
see the Principal.

Almost immediately he was ushered into the presence of a beaming, dapper-
looking, little old gentleman, quick of speech and movement, in spite of
some little portliness.

"Ts, ts, ts," he said, when my father had enquired about terms and asked
whether he might see the system at work. "How unfortunate that you
should have called on a Saturday afternoon. We always have a
half-holiday. But stay--yes--that will do very nicely; I will send for
them into school as a means of stimulating their refractory system."

He called his servant and told him to ring the boys into school. Then,
turning to my father he said, "Stand here, sir, by the window; you will
see them all come trooping in. H'm, h'm, I am sorry to see them still
come back as soon as they hear the bell. I suppose I shall ding some
recalcitrancy into them some day, but it is uphill work. Do you see the
head-boy--the third of those that are coming up the path? I shall have
to get rid of him. Do you see him? he is going back to whip up the
laggers--and now he has boxed a boy's ears: that boy is one of the most
hopeful under my care. I feel sure he has been using improper language,
and my head-boy has checked him instead of encouraging him." And so on
till the boys were all in school.

"You see, my dear sir," he said to my father, "we are in an impossible
position. We have to obey instructions from the Grand Council of
Education at Bridgeford, and they have established these institutions in
consequence of the Sunchild's having said that we should aim at promoting
the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This, no doubt, is a
sound principle, and the greatest number are by nature somewhat dull,
conceited, and unscrupulous. They do not like those who are quick,
unassuming, and sincere; how, then, consistently with the first
principles either of morality or political economy as revealed to us by
the Sunchild, can we encourage such people if we can bring sincerity and
modesty fairly home to them? We cannot do so. And we must correct the
young as far as possible from forming habits which, unless indulged in
with the greatest moderation, are sure to ruin them.

"I cannot pretend to consider myself very successful. I do my best, but
I can only aim at making my school a reflection of the outside world. In
the outside world we have to tolerate much that is prejudicial to the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, partly because we cannot
always discover in time who may be let alone as being genuinely
insincere, and who are in reality masking sincerity under a garb of
flippancy, and partly also because we wish to err on the side of letting
the guilty escape, rather than of punishing the innocent. Thus many
people who are perfectly well known to belong to the straightforward
classes are allowed to remain at large, and may be even seen hobnobbing
with the guardians of public immorality. Indeed it is not in the public
interest that straightforwardness should be extirpated root and branch,
for the presence of a small modicum of sincerity acts as a wholesome
irritant to the academicism of the greatest number, stimulating it to
consciousness of its own happy state, and giving it something to look
down upon. Moreover, we hold it useful to have a certain number of
melancholy examples, whose notorious failure shall serve as a warning to
those who neglect cultivating that power of immoral self-control which
shall prevent them from saying, or even thinking, anything that shall not
immediately and palpably minister to the happiness, and hence meet the
approval, of the greatest number."

By this time the boys were all in school. "There is not one prig in the
whole lot," said the headmaster sadly. "I wish there was, but only those
boys come here who are notoriously too good to become current coin in the
world unless they are hardened with an alloy of vice. I should have
liked to show you our gambling, book-making, and speculation class, but
the assistant-master who attends to this branch of our curriculum is gone
to Sunch'ston this afternoon. He has friends who have asked him to see
the dedication of the new temple, and he will not be back till Monday. I
really do not know what I can do better for you than examine the boys in
Counsels of Imperfection."

So saying, he went into the schoolroom, over the fireplace of which my
father's eye caught an inscription, "Resist good, and it will fly from
you. Sunchild's Sayings, xvii. 2." Then, taking down a copy of the work
just named from a shelf above his desk, he ran his eye over a few of its
pages.

He called up a class of about twenty boys.

"Now, my boys," he said, "Why is it so necessary to avoid extremes of
truthfulness?"

"It is not necessary, sir," said one youngster, "and the man who says
that it is so is a scoundrel."

"Come here, my boy, and hold out your hand." When he had done so, Mr.
Turvey gave him two sharp cuts with a cane. "There now, go down to the
bottom of the class and try not to be so extremely truthful in future."
Then, turning to my father, he said, "I hate caning them, but it is the
only way to teach them. I really do believe that boy will know better
than to say what he thinks another time."

He repeated his question to the class, and the head-boy answered,
"Because, sir, extremes meet, and extreme truth will be mixed with
extreme falsehood."

"Quite right, my boy. Truth is like religion; it has only two
enemies--the too much and the too little. Your answer is more
satisfactory than some of your recent conduct had led me to expect."

"But, sir, you punished me only three weeks ago for telling you a lie."

"Oh yes; why, so I did; I had forgotten. But then you overdid it. Still
it was a step in the right direction."

"And now, my boy," he said to a very frank and ingenuous youth about half
way up the class, "and how is truth best reached?"

"Through the falling out of thieves, sir."

"Quite so. Then it will be necessary that the more earnest, careful,
patient, self-sacrificing, enquirers after truth should have a good deal
of the thief about them, though they are very honest people at the same
time. Now what does the man" (who on enquiry my father found to be none
other than Mr. Turvey himself) "say about honesty?"

"He says, sir, that honesty does not consist in never stealing, but in
knowing how and where it will be safe to do so."

"Remember," said Mr. Turvey to my father, "how necessary it is that we
should have a plentiful supply of thieves, if honest men are ever to come
by their own."

He spoke with the utmost gravity, evidently quite easy in his mind that
his scheme was the only one by which truth could be successfully
attained.

"But pray let me have any criticism you may feel inclined to make."

"I have none," said my father. "Your system commends itself to common
sense; it is the one adopted in the law courts, and it lies at the very
foundation of party government. If your academic bodies can supply the
country with a sufficient number of thieves--which I have no doubt they
can--there seems no limit to the amount of truth that may be attained.
If, however, I may suggest the only difficulty that occurs to me, it is
that academic thieves shew no great alacrity in falling out, but incline
rather to back each other up through thick and thin."

"Ah, yes," said Mr. Turvey, "there is that difficulty; nevertheless
circumstances from time to time arise to get them by the ears in spite of
themselves. But from whatever point of view you may look at the
question, it is obviously better to aim at imperfection than perfection;
for if we aim steadily at imperfection, we shall probably get it within a
reasonable time, whereas to the end of our days we should never reach
perfection. Moreover, from a worldly point of view, there is no mistake
so great as that of being always right." He then turned to his class and
said--

"And now tell me what did the Sunchild tell us about God and Mammon?"

The head-boy answered: "He said that we must serve both, for no man can
serve God well and truly who does not serve Mammon a little also; and no
man can serve Mammon effectually unless he serve God largely at the same
time."

"What were his words?"

"He said, 'Cursed be they that say, "Thou shalt not serve God and Mammon,
for it is the whole duty of man to know how to adjust the conflicting
claims of these two deities."'"

Here my father interposed. "I knew the Sunchild; and I more than once
heard him speak of God and Mammon. He never varied the form of the words
he used, which were to the effect that a man must serve either God or
Mammon, but that he could not serve both."

"Ah!" said Mr. Turvey, "that no doubt was his exoteric teaching, but
Professors Hanky and Panky have assured me most solemnly that his
esoteric teaching was as I have given it. By the way, these gentlemen
are both, I understand, at Sunch'ston, and I think it quite likely that I
shall have a visit from them this afternoon. If you do not know them I
should have great pleasure in introducing you to them; I was at
Bridgeford with both of them."

"I have had the pleasure of meeting them already," said my father, "and
as you are by no means certain that they will come, I will ask you to let
me thank you for all that you have been good enough to shew me, and bid
you good-afternoon. I have a rather pressing engagement--"

"My dear sir, you must please give me five minutes more. I shall examine
the boys in the Musical Bank Catechism." He pointed to one of them and
said, "Repeat your duty towards your neighbour."

"My duty towards my neighbour," said the boy, "is to be quite sure that
he is not likely to borrow money of me before I let him speak to me at
all, and then to have as little to do with him as--"

At this point there was a loud ring at the door bell. "Hanky and Panky
come to see me, no doubt," said Mr. Turvey. "I do hope it is so. You
must stay and see them."

"My dear sir," said my father, putting his handkerchief up to his face,
"I am taken suddenly unwell and must positively leave you." He said this
in so peremptory a tone that Mr. Turvey had to yield. My father held his
handkerchief to his face as he went through the passage and hall, but
when the servant opened the door he took it down, for there was no Hanky
or Panky--no one, in fact, but a poor, wizened old man who had come, as
he did every other Saturday afternoon, to wind up the Deformatory clocks.

Nevertheless, he had been scared, and was in a very wicked-fleeth-when-no-
man-pursueth frame of mind. He went to his inn, and shut himself up in
his room for some time, taking notes of all that had happened to him in
the last three days. But even at his inn he no longer felt safe. How
did he know but that Hanky and Panky might have driven over from
Sunch'ston to see Mr. Turvey, and might put up at this very house? or
they might even be going to spend the night here. He did not venture out
of his room till after seven by which time he had made rough notes of as
much of the foregoing chapters as had come to his knowledge so far. Much
of what I have told as nearly as I could in the order in which it
happened, he did not learn till later. After giving the merest outline
of his interview with Mr. Turvey, he wrote a note as follows:--"I suppose
I must have held forth about the greatest happiness of the greatest
number, but I had quite forgotten it, though I remember repeatedly
quoting my favourite proverb, 'Every man for himself, and the devil take
the hindmost.' To this they have paid no attention."

By seven his panic about Hanky and Panky ended, for if they had not come
by this time, they were not likely to do so. Not knowing that they were
staying at the Mayor's, he had rather settled it that they would now
stroll up to the place where they had left their hoard and bring it down
as soon as night had fallen. And it is quite possible that they might
have found some excuse for doing this, when dinner was over, if their
hostess had not undesignedly hindered them by telling them about the
Sunchild. When the conversation recorded in the preceding chapter was
over, it was too late for them to make any plausible excuse for leaving
the house; we may be sure, therefore, that much more had been said than
Yram and George were able to remember and report to my father.

After another stroll about Fairmead, during which he saw nothing but what
on a larger scale he had already seen at Sunch'ston, he returned to his
inn at about half-past eight, and ordered supper in a public room that
corresponded with the coffee-room of an English hotel.




CHAPTER XIV: MY FATHER MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MR BALMY, AND WALKS WITH
HIM NEXT DAY TO SUNCH'STON


Up to this point, though he had seen enough to shew him the main drift of
the great changes that had taken place in Erewhonian opinions, my father
had not been able to glean much about the history of the transformation.
He could see that it had all grown out of the supposed miracle of his
balloon ascent, and he could understand that the ignorant masses had been
so astounded by an event so contrary to all their experience, that their
faith in experience was utterly routed and demoralised. It a man and a
woman might rise from the earth and disappear into the sky, what else
might not happen? If they had been wrong in thinking such a thing
impossible, in how much else might they not be mistaken also? The ground
was shaken under their very feet.

It was not as though the thing had been done in a corner. Hundreds of
people had seen the ascent; and even if only a small number had been
present, the disappearance of the balloon, of my mother, and of my father
himself, would have confirmed their story. My father, then, could
understand that a single incontrovertible miracle of the first magnitude
should uproot the hedges of caution in the minds of the common people,
but he could not understand how such men as Hanky and Panky, who
evidently did not believe that there had been any miracle at all, had
been led to throw themselves so energetically into a movement so
subversive of all their traditions, when, as it seemed to him, if they
had held out they might have pricked the balloon bubble easily enough,
and maintained everything _in statu quo_.

How, again, had they converted the King--if they had converted him? The
Queen had had full knowledge of all the preparations for the ascent. The
King had had everything explained to him. The workmen and workwomen who
had made the balloon and the gas could testify that none but natural
means had been made use of--means which, if again employed any number of
times, would effect a like result. How could it be that when the means
of resistance were so ample and so easy, the movement should nevertheless
have been irresistible? For had it not been irresistible, was it to be
believed that astute men like Hanky and Panky would have let themselves
be drawn into it?

What then had been its inner history? My father had so fully determined
to make his way back on the following evening, that he saw no chance of
getting to know the facts--unless, indeed, he should be able to learn
something from Hanky's sermon; he was therefore not sorry to find an
elderly gentleman of grave but kindly aspect seated opposite to him when
he sat down to supper.

The expression on this man's face was much like that of the early
Christians as shewn in the S. Giovanni Laterano bas-reliefs at Rome, and
again, though less aggressively self-confident, like that on the faces of
those who have joined the Salvation Army. If he had been in England, my
father would have set him down as a Swedenborgian; this being impossible,
he could only note that the stranger bowed his head, evidently saying a
short grace before he began to eat, as my father had always done when he
was in Erewhon before. I will not say that my father had never omitted
to say grace during the whole of the last twenty years, but he said it
now, and unfortunately forgetting himself, he said it in the English
language, not loud, but nevertheless audibly.