I am a little alarmed when I consider how closely the Great War followed my prophecy of it and turn to the fables, Gynecologia and Out of Work, which follow logically from the other. A world governed by women as lopsidedly as it has been by men would be much like that depicted here, and the final collapse, if it came, would surely follow the lines indicated in Out of Work. None of us knows exactly of what we are a portent and who can imagine to what Lady Astor’s flight into fame may lead? If I had not already dedicated this book to my friend D. H. Lawrence I would, without her permission, inscribe upon it the name of the first woman to take her Seat in the worst club in London, the House of Commons.
Gilbert Cannan.
New York, 1919.
Samways Island
I: TITTIKER
George Samways awoke one night with a vague distressful feeling that all was not well with his island. The moon was shining, but it was casting the shadow of the palm tree in which he slept over the hollow wherein he cooked his meals, and that had never happened before.
He was alarmed and climbed down his palm tree and ran to the tall hill from which he was accustomed to observe the sea and the land that floated blue on the edge of the sea. The ascent seemed longer than usual, and when he reached the summit he was horrified to find a still higher peak before him. At this sight he was overcome with emotion and lay upon the earth and sobbed. When he could sob no more he rose to his feet and dragged himself to the top of the furthest peak and gazed out upon an empty sea. The moon was very bright. There was no land upon the edge of the sea. He raised his eyes heavenwards. The stars were moving. He looked round upon his island. It was shrunk, and the forests were uprooted and the little lake at the foot of the hill had disappeared. Before and behind his island the sea was churned and tumbled, as it was when he pressed his hands against the little waves when he went into the water to cleanse himself.
And now a wind came and a storm arose; rain came beating, and he hastened back to the hole in the ground he had dug for himself against foul weather. Then, knowing that he would not sleep, he lit his lamp of turtle oil and pith and read Tittiker.
Tittiker was the book left to him by his father whom he had put into the ground many years before, even as he had seen his father do with his mother when he was a little child. He had been born on the island, and could just remember his mother, and his father had lived long enough to teach him how to fish and hunt and make his clothes of leaves, feathers, and skins, and to read in Tittiker, but not long enough to give him any clue to the meaning of the book. But whenever he was sad it was a great solace to him, and he had read it from cover to cover forty times, for it was like talking to somebody else, and it was full of names and titles, to which he had attached personages, so that the island was very thickly populated. Through Tittiker he knew that the earth moved round the sun, that the moon moved round the earth and made the tides, that there were three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, seven days in the week, and that printing is the art of producing impressions from characters or figures.