It was almost a painful spectacle for me after the admiration I had felt for their self-abnegation. They had such a horror for all fermented liquor that they called their devil and it by the same name, pyrannidee. And one of the wise men philosophising over the annual outbreak of high spirits said that, according to their own proverbial philosophy, the best way to confine a devil was to swallow him and to keep him down; he might pester the man who formed his prison-house, but he would be kept from all other wickedness. Thus the autumn revel of merriment was perhaps but another instance of the great virtue of the people, their eagerness to save their neighbours from evil. They annually swallowed the devil to prevent him, for a short time at least, from going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he might devour.
At other times of the year I often found them, men as well as women, sitting in their houses and shedding copious tears over the sadness of this mortal state; so overwhelmed were they with the thought that their words jostled one another in strange confusion; and if they rose to bid me farewell, they fell upon my neck and wept, or collapsed in the greatness of their grief upon the couch or floor. This tenderness of heart was widespread amongst the upper classes; for days would they weep thus over the woes of existence. And still more unmanning was their sorrow for the death of friends; they would sit stupefied by the blow for hours together, unable to speak articulately; and a whole week or month of sickness and silent confinement to their bedroom would follow the stroke. How sorely stricken this people were I could not have realised but by my experience; the death of a dear friend occurred on an average once a month in the life of some fashionable Aleofanians at certain periods of the year, but especially during the severe season, winter. And when they rose from bed and appeared in public, their haggard, woebegone faces told the agony through which they had passed. Surely fate was too hard upon this much-bereaved nation. As hard was it upon their teeth; for the loss of a tooth under ether or stupefying gas was equally frequent; one friend, whom I had to see often, suffered grievously. I counted during my acquaintance with him forty-five losses of a tooth under ether. But nature was strangely beneficent to the Aleofanian jaw; she seemed to compensate for the losses almost immediately: my friend had as many teeth when I left as when I saw him first.
And with all these recurrent bereavements and the illnesses that followed, you may imagine how important a functionary was the physician in social life. He was the father-confessor of the household. He was generally a soft-voiced, stooping-shouldered, silent-footed man. He condescended and yet he flattered; he insinuated himself into a man’s confidence, and still more into a woman’s, by veiled compliments; he mastered by seeming to accept his patient’s opinions; he prescribed what suited the appetites and desires; the subtlety of the race rose to its highest in his profession, so skilfully had he to adapt himself to the weaknesses of his clients; he knew all the secrets of the household and built his omnipotence upon them; he had a feminine manner and a feminine vein in his character, judgment and action through instinct, and a passion for the minutenesses of life; and yet he piloted his way into the mastery of the family through the women, who, in spite of his womanliness, adored him; for he had learned by long tradition and training how to make them abandon themselves body and soul to his direction; their pains he knew how to soothe by anodynes; their troubles and sorrows he made them forget by either spiritual or physical consolation; he surrounded them with an atmosphere of belief in themselves and him as the two select of the world; he quarantined them from all other influences by flattery or pyrannidee; he dosed them with well-sweetened gossip made powerful by being communicated in confidential whispers and with oaths to secrecy; for he had command of all the inner workings of the private life of a neighbourhood; and it was one of the wonders of his power that most of the families which he confessionalled were not on speaking terms with one another; he was always sacrificing himself to bring about peace, and each of them trusted him entirely; yet human nature is so prone to jealousy that they refused his mediation and only listened to his soft-voiced details of the inner life of their foes. What would the higher social life have been in Aleofane without this silent-footed intermediary!
The chemist fulfilled the same important function for the poorer classes. He sold the pyrannidee that the government factories made; but he was restricted to using it for the cure of disease and the assuagement of pain. And most of the grown-up population had a disease to be cured and a pain to be assuaged every day, so sorely smitten were they by fate, so long-suffering were they. It was one of the sights of the city to see the kolako or the warehouses of the chemists at night; crowds pressed into them by one door with agony depicted on their faces, whilst out from the other sauntered patient after patient with a wandering, nerveless smile upon his face, a jaunty, loose-gaited fashion of throwing his limbs, and a whiff of pyrannidee in his breath; for if it was not the medicine itself it was the medium of it, and he had left his pain behind him in the store. Little wonder that the chemist was a man of such power in Aleofane; he was generally of strong build and swaggering gait and showed his masterfulness in every gesture; for he had often severe muscular duties to perform; it seems that some of his patients of the most abandoned and criminal classes, after being cured of their pain or sickness, refused to leave his warehouse; seized by an evil spirit, I was told, they would foam at the mouth, kick, and bite; and it took great strength to tie them hand and foot and eject them. Some of my friends in the marble city mourned over this possession by wandering demons of the air; but they said it was only the degraded whose bodies they entered.
The profession was one of the most lucrative in Aleofane, for one of its essentials was great physical strength, and this was rarely to be found in the gilded classes. I could pick out chemists in a crowd by their brawny frame, bold gait, and short, well-knit stature. Their faces were as a rule strong and corrugated with muscle and tense self-control; they looked with an open and almost arrogant light in their eyes. Most of them, I was told, were descendants of a few survivors from a wreck on the coast, and there was occasionally a lurking fear that, with their great influence over the lower part of the city, their strong will, and their powerful squat frame, they might seize the reins of government; but this was prevented by dividing their interests and sowing dissensions and jealousies amongst them; the very largeness of the incomes they made lowered their ambitions towards money-making; and this made them fly asunder like globules of quicksilver.
But the contrast between them and the rest of the upper classes in physical appearance was very striking. The Aleofanians proper stooped in the shoulders of their long, thin bodies like bulrushes before the wind; not for weight of the head they bore; for it was small though well proportioned, and by various fashions and contrivances they managed to convey a false impression of its size; of their eyes it was impossible to make out the shape or colour; for they peeped through a thin slit between the eyelids, doubtless afraid of the glare of the sun; their nose ran like a sharp promontory down towards the middle of their upper lip, as if to help in covering the enormous aperture of the mouth and its thick, sensuous lips; these last I could see in the women, but the men concealed them by all the hair they could grow on their long-drawn faces; and their hair inclined as a rule to red. Their gait formed perhaps the deepest contrast to that of the chemists; they walked like ghosts, with a feline, scarcely perceptible footfall; and nothing could take them unawares or startle them out of it; yet ever and again some of them would pull themselves up and put on a bustling gait and bluff demeanour that completely belied their personal appearance; it was like a cat masquerading as a lion.
But they conducted themselves with great dignity in all the relations of their life. They would have no part in the gross candour of the chemists. Their whole demeanour and language were ordered with full regard to decency and decorum. They shrank with horror from lewdness and intrigue, and refused to acknowledge the existence of libertines amongst them. I never heard so much solemn and devout feeling expressed as on this topic; and at the corner of every street the attention of the passer-by was arrested by placards quoting in huge letters from their sacred books the noblest maxims on the sweetness of a chaste life. I could find no one to confess that there was such a thing in the island as a man who was libidinous, but every girl who broke this rule of morality was thrust forth from house and home. Scores of such outcasts I saw flaunting in brilliant robes along the streets. They had all the appearance of living in great luxury. But I was assured they were supported by secret funds sent by the inhabitants of a vicious island close at hand. And I could believe it. For no one ever spoke to them, and ladies as they passed drew their skirts in, whilst gentlemen after brushing past them would rub their coatsleeves as if from contamination. It was only the great chastity of the people that permitted these creatures to remain in their island. Nothing could surpass the horror and loathing which the Aleofanians exhibited towards them. It was painful indeed to see the agony the notables had to endure in suffering them to remain.
How devoted they were to charity! It was, I felt, their life, their all. They refused to do half the mischief that there was opportunity of doing to others. Every moment, every energy, was spent in restricting it to this fraction. So much destructive force was latent in them, so much destructive opportunity lay to hand, that they might have annihilated the reputation and peace of mind of all their fellow-citizens. How proud they were of their fraternal love in sowing only a few slanders and dissensions per day, and these, too, only to discipline the haughty and too fortunate, or to keep their own faculties from rusting! It was the same with their benevolence; nothing could surpass the nobleness and care with which they dispensed it. Half their revenues they gave away, but not in reckless alms; they were too wise and self-controlling for that; they knew too much of the economic laws of life, and respected them too well to violate even the least of them. So they never forgot discipline in giving to those who needed; they carefully exacted as much work from them as would pay the principal, and, lest the kindness should lapse from memory and leave no impression on the life and conduct, half as much again. To what infinite trouble they put themselves to see that these laws of nature should never be outraged by them! Great troops of the lower classes were fed and clothed and cared for by each of them for years, whilst they were trying to repay those noble eleemosynary gifts, and satisfying the laws of economics.
Nor must it be held an inconsistency in them that they thought money the root of all evil as against those very laws. They despised it and hated it. And lest it should do to their neighbours the harm for which they feared it and loathed it, they gathered as much of it into their hands as they could. “They swallowed the devil” again, according to their own proverbial phrase, as the best means of preventing the mischief he might do to others. It was one of the most altruistic of their principles, they considered, this accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, lest the many should suffer. They could hedge the monster round and narrow his sphere of operations. And every provision had been made by the state for centuries that he should not approach the masses with his foul influence. It was the gilded classes of the marble city that could alone withstand the evils he worked, and amongst them therefore was he imprisoned. They were, so to speak, the turnkeys of this vampire of commercial races; and in their duties they were all vigilant lest he should escape and work irremediable havoc amongst the rest of the nation.