He explained to me that I must adopt in paradise the primitive clothing of paradise, and that to appear in other guise would offend the humility and sense of symmetry of his people. The greatest sages had preferred beggardom and a crust to wealth and luxury, and what could any nation do better than to follow their example? And at this point it flashed upon me that the crowds whom I had taken for beggars the night before were representatives of the nation.
When we returned to the temple above, we found all the pillars and niches and roofs free from their chaplets and festoons of sleeping mats, and the whole frippery stowed away in holes and crevices of the walls. The birds had the upper ranges all to themselves and were evidently satisfied with the division of the space, for they had ceased their screaming and uneasy flight. The marble floor was covered with groups standing, or sitting, or lying, engaged in easy conversation or in cooking or eating food. Most of the night’s occupants had evidently gone outside. I now began to see that most of those who cooked were beardless, and although the rags of the two sexes were indistinguishable, I could separate them by the different outlines of the forms and faces. There was little respect or honour paid to the gentler sex; they were jostled and pushed about; they had to look after themselves and their interests. The men had clearly all cooked their morning meal before; the women had to be content with the remains of the fire and the remains of the heap of food that had been piled in one of the corners of the edifice. There was undoubtedly equality of the sexes; gallantry and chivalry had been banished as an insult to their common humanity.
After a time I could see that the women were struggling to seize a share of the food, not for themselves, but for others who were sick or weak or deformed. The stronger men would have had it all but for this, and the helpless would have gone unbreakfasted. The women were most of them as brawny and tanned by the weather as the other sex, and they had come by long struggle and heredity to be able almost to hold their own. They hustled the crowd that stood in their way and gave tit for tat with as lusty a muscle as if they had navvied from infancy. But it was interesting to see in them the survival of their old tenderness for the sick and feeble. It was doubtless their maternal functions that had saved this relic from the general wreck of femininity.
CHAPTER XVI
SNEEKAPE
THERE was one exception to the rule of masculine indifference. I had been watching the figure for some time amongst the women before I discovered it to be that of a man. He had a small, well-proportioned head, even smaller than that of most of the women; and it was poised on his long neck like a bird’s; it had such rapidity and variety and ease of motion as if it were on a universal joint; it wiggled and bobbed, it danced and undulated to every emotion that came into his breast, while the little bead eyes twinkled and leered and winked; no head other than a sparrow’s ever pirouetted and jerked and quivered with such manifest enjoyment and self-admiration. He thought himself a humourist too, for some of the younger women smirked and giggled as he stretched his wide mouth and curved the corners of his eyes and shook and wagged his little head. His themes were evidently the men around, but his voice was too low and his gusto over his own jests too great for any of them to reach beyond his immediate circle; like all wits of the shallow type, he was his own best audience, though I could see he needed a feminine smile somewhere about. At first I had admired his gallantry and kindness, for he was the only man who sided with the women in their struggle for food. But afterwards I hesitated, for I began to see that it was only the women of handsome, stalwart form and finely moulded face, the women who needed no help, that he fidgeted and bustled about; if ever he helped any who could not help themselves, I saw that they had graceful forms and the hectic beauty of the delicate. Another feature of his chivalry that lowered my first opinion of him was that, nimble and sedulous though he was in his attentions, what he did was superfluous; even the women who most smirked at his jokes and innuendoes could not conceal a lurking contempt for his officiousness and feminine vigilance about trifling minutiæ.
Tall and graceful though he was, with an air of brisk intelligence and dapper education, I began to take an inexplicable dislike to him. He seemed to have some magnetic sense of this, for, after appearing unconscious of my glance for a long time, he sidled up to me and with a purring, confidential tone in his voice and a wise wag of his little head and self-appreciative twinkle of his little eyes, he apologised in the Aleofanian tongue for addressing me; but he heard from my accents that I was a stranger, and felt drawn to me, as he was an alien, too, in a strange land. If he felt any recoil against my somewhat brusque rejection of his sympathy, he did not betray it. He wheedled himself by abject subservience and subtle self-abasement into what he thought my confidence. He artfully fished about for topics on which he could agree with me, and ostentatiously paraded a yearning to know my opinions on them; he looked transports of admiration and enthusiasm for them when uttered; and the whole piece of acting was done with such an appearance of candour and amiability that I began to feel myself discourteous and unjust in being so surly to him. His urbanity and sweetness of temper were never for an instant ruffled. He wore his most fascinating smile as if to the manner born. He was bent on being the good Samaritan to my spiritual wounds; he would not probe a single sore; he would apply balm to all my sorrows if only he could get at them, if only I would admit him to my heart of hearts. The kindness, the brotherly love he displayed for all men at last won me over from my thorny silence, although I still inwardly wished the fellow would insult me in order that I might have the pleasure of kicking him. With all his suavity and cooing benignancy and hearty assumption of good-fellowship, he stirred up in me the savage irascibility that lies still in the heart of even the most civilised; and I did not thank him for it.
He had much of the wisdom of the serpent, too, or at least a certain magnetic instinct that stood for it; for he did not follow up what he manifestly thought his victory over my churlishness with any use of it; he went off to his group of feminine worshippers. I could see from the eyes of some of them that his witchery had taken effect.