Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

Garrulesi had been outside, and his return withdrew my observation from the stranger’s sinuous wiles. We went outside, and my thoughts were caught up by the sight. We stood on a platform that overlooked the tranquil ocean. Not a breath disturbed the morning air. The sun from behind us had not attained his tropic strength; his level shafts still flung colour over the land and sky, and shot the silken fabric of the slope before us with fretted shadow. The great edifice out of which we had come threw a dark and cool sierra out upon the sea; its lofty towers and pinnacles and domes lengthening out in silhouette into gigantic peaks. Above us rose the alabaster cone of Klimarol, the smoke-haloed mountain, along the shoulder of which the great disk of the morning wove his web of shimmering light. Our temple rose from the plateau of the front range, the highest of all that broke the emerald wave of foliage between the sky line and the sea.

He was silent before my delight in the scene. Then we moved out into the forests of palms and fruited trees. I ventured on asking him about the scene inside the temple. He told me that, when the religion had crystallised into the socialism of gods and men, it was felt that the mere difference of a material shell should not exclude the human-divine from the privileges of the divine. Into these great edifices the artist caste, so long as it had existed, had put all their genius and time and all the wealth that they could extract from the people as a whole or from individuals; in fact, half the wealth of the nation had disappeared in them. And, as by universal agreement there was no service or ceremony performed in them, it became obvious in time that they were a monstrous waste, thus unutilised, when half the people or embryo gods slept during the wet season in the open air and suffered from the inclemency of the nights, whilst the other half had only roofless or dilapidated huts, or caves or holes in the rocks to sleep in. It seemed a gratuitous insult to the slumbering divinity within the people to exclude them from the shelter of these great domes built for divinity. The birds of the air with their excrementitious filth were allowed to nest there from year’s end to year’s end; and the gods in human form, only because they were still unfledged and wingless, were fenced off from the use of this buried wealth. Nothing seemed more irrational to the Tirralarians of a former age than such an elevation of the mere beasts and the disembodied gods into a special caste that were to be sheltered and roofed from the weather with the noblest architecture. They shrank in horror from such a violation of their constitution, and thereafter they ranged men with gods and winged beasts. Some of the temples have been set apart for the women and children, who may, however, penetrate by day into any of the others they please. This that we have left is specially occupied by those who are the council of advisers of the people, though others may in emergency set up their sleeping mats in it, and the strangers who are not feared or suspected are housed here. It is called the council-and-guest temple. But guests are excluded during important deliberations.

He had mentioned a council of advisers, and I asked him if this were the government that they had. He looked furtively round, and, seeing some rag-poles lying near under the shade of some trees and others approaching, though at some distance, he struck an oratorical attitude and launched forth on the enormities of all governments. He was wound up for hours, and I saw no chance of rescue; for lazzaroni citizens littered every corner with their slouching, rag-patched fat. I could gather from the loud voice and the rhetorical touches that he was addressing every ear within reach, and giving unctuous vent to the official creed. The gist of what he larded with eloquence was this: government was an insult to full-grown humanity; where reason ruled, every man was a law unto himself; all that was needed was a committee selected from time to time for the distribution of the fruits of the soil and the gifts of nature; there was no labour, and therefore no need of organising labour; there were no lawyers, no police, no professions; for every man attended to his own needs; whilst all worked as they wished for all; nature dealt with the weak and sickly and gave them brief life and swift euthanasia. It was indeed a perfect life, where all were equal and serene in perfect content, and health, and strength.

I was almost glad when the red-haired bewitcher of women approached and rescued me from the declamatory clockwork and his inexorable pendulum of rhetoric. A look of disgust swept like a cloud over the broad self-complacence of the orator’s face; whether it was at the untimely interruption of his speech or at the personality of the intruder I could not tell at the time; afterwards I saw that it was the latter.

The amorous stranger was profuse in apologetic flatteries, and did his best to soothe the injured dignity of the people’s adviser. He resorted to his confidential trick, and sidling up whispered in his ear what seemed some important secret, at the same time throwing me from his agile little eyes a smile that was intended to take me into still deeper strata of his confidence. He succeeded in neither project, and was yet well satisfied with his nimble diplomacy. There was always an air about him as if he were dealing with toy humanity that might be broken by rough usage; he had doubtless acquired it by long handling of the merely amorous elements of life. He moved with such a familiar and confidential superiority even amongst strangers, and such an interlarding of egregious flattery and subtle assumption of special and intimate friendship as implied lifelong engagement in intrigue and the lowest estimate of the intelligence of the women he dealt with.

My gorge rose before he spoke a word to me, and the peddlingly confidential manner had evidently the same effect on Garrulesi, for he abruptly turned his back and walked off. Unabashed, the lath-like diplomat laid his little head close to mine, under the assumption that he had made another conquest. He poured into my ear faint praise of the fast disappearing orator and subtly slid into a faint disparagement. As I held my peace he passed rapidly into the elevation of himself and me into a category by ourselves against all the world. He fixed his bead eyes on me with a bewitching look as if he sought the inmost depths of the spirit and would rest there. I lowered my glance with a certain scorn and loathing that was scarcely full-formed. He clearly assumed the change to mean humble submission to his advances; and he slyly entered on a most abusive and captious analysis of Tirralarian civilisation, wording it in velvet that, lest he should be mistaken in me, he could cover his retreat or involve me in the consequences of his strictures. He was an adept in white lies and ambiguous calumnies that seemed to do honour to the victim.

As far as I could gather from his insinuations, the island was nothing but an organisation of thieves, who, when they could not get any foreigner to steal from, had to pass their time in enforced but delightful idleness. There was nothing to steal amongst themselves. That was the meaning of the rags they wore. He always landed in a dress that was a harmony of worthless fragments. His first few visits had been a painful experience; piece by piece his garments and possessions had vanished no one knew whither till he was left naked on his sleeping mat, and only the vanity of a Tirralarian buck, who wished to show him his skill in pilfering, gave him shreds enough to make a loin-cloth. No one of them cared to have anything above rags and a bare subsistence, for he knew that if he had, it would disappear mysteriously. Their skill in purloining seemed like a magician’s. It was the only talent that had remained from their old civilisation; into this their inherited cleverness had run; and any one of them would make a fortune either as a juggler or as a thief in any other nation; but none of the other islands of the archipelago would admit them, knowing well which of the two professions would be the more lucrative and fascinating for a Tirralarian. So their wonderful gift was hidden under a bushel.

Of course I knew the principle of the constitution—that there should be no private property. Property, they held, is theft; and so to abolish theft they abolished property, and law with it. Everything that anybody got or made or produced was anybody’s, and they were magpies at concealment. The first trick Garrulesi taught me was to stow away my valuables; he saw Sneekape lead me off, and I might be quite sure that for further safety he had bestowed it in another crevice that he alone would know. Work had ceased generations ago, for no one could secure what he produced unless he were as sharp in pilfering and concealing as his neighbours; and he had not time to learn the secrets or the skill of these arts when he was busy with other things. Every trade and craft vanished into legerdemain and light-fingeredness. Their existence was only hand-to-mouth; and winter or a hurricane or any blight on the fruits of nature sent all who had not an extra store of fat on their bodies into the grave. They had now grown too indolent to fish or make raids on the wealth of their neighbours. An occasional atavistic survival like Garrulesi, with a gift of talk and a restless energy, went out secretly and tried a mission on other islands that the converts might bring their goods with them and help to stave off the ever-recurrent evil day. It was supposed to be the duty of the advisers of the people like him to supply everyone with food and clothing and roofage. But it was difficult to divide nothing. Not long after the abolition of private property, all property vanished that could be stolen or could retain its value only by labour. They could not tax, they could not compel the labour that everyone was supposed voluntarily to contribute to the community; and their position had become no enviable one. In fact it was difficult to find advisers; a few revealed in their green youth, before they knew the relationships of things, a talent for glib talk, or for governing, or muddling, and were thrust into the position; and they found it no easy task to relinquish it, hard and slavish though they came to count it. When they grew older and wiser they were eager to get out of it, but flattery or persecution kept them at the helm till they dropped from old age or disease. They were the real martyrs of Tirralaria, though many of them, like Garrulesi, enjoyed their martyrdom for a time, as long, in fact, as the atavistic energy burned brightly in their veins. A few were so goaded by the slavery of the position that they feigned paralysis of the tongue in order to be clear of it, and they remained dumb till death; and one or two had been driven to the extraordinary activity of suicide.

What made the duty particularly difficult and offensive was that where there was no law every man was his own policeman. Of course they declared and proved that there was no crime amongst them. But it depended on the meaning of crime; crime was a breach of the law; and where there was no law there could be no breach of the law. Instead of wiping out the old outrages against human nature, their socialism had greatly increased them, and they called them peccadilloes. I would see the ragged savages fight like wild beasts over any accidental find, or even what one had failed to steal from another; and when they had come to blows, one of the combatants had to die unless a crowd was near and could separate them. Each knew that the other, if beaten, could not live and leave the insult unavenged; indolence might postpone the day of revenge for a time, but it was sure to come. For his own protection he had to wipe out his opponent, and if he buried the body there would never be any question. For there was no family life or family love. The unions were only temporary. The fundamental principle of their society was that they lived by love. But they more often died by it. The most fertile source of fatal quarrels was the appropriation of members of the opposite sex. The women had their combats, and counted their scalps as well as the men, for the two sexes were supposed to be on an equality.

For many generations after they had socialised property, they kept up households and family life and monogamy. But idleness produced libertinism, and libertinism became concubinage, and then gave place to polygamy and polyandry. A great rebellion of the younger and unprivileged in matrimony, both male and female, against the older who monopolised the best and fairest of the other sex swept away the last traces of marriage. It had always been felt to be an inconsistency that there should be allowed in their state the private possession of affection or of children. Children were now common property after they could run without their mothers. They had to look after themselves if maternal care deserted them, and that generally occurred after the first year. The female advisers were supposed to attend to them; but when they had no common stock they had little to give; they had enough to do to keep an eye on their own and to keep the life in.