CHAPTER XXIV
WITLINGEN AND ADJACENT ISLANDS
THE adjacency of Vulpia was the only thing that saved the inhabitants of Witlingen from stark madness. They organised raids upon its shores in order to let off the accumulated wit of the weeks or months in which they had had to repress it. They could all join patriotically in such an expedition against the common enemies, the human foxes and tedium. For weeks they enjoyed the elaborate preparation for the brand-new practical jokelet; whilst its successful consummation saved their reason and gave them laughter for months.
At other times Witlingen was a hell upon earth for them. Here were they gathered together, the professional joculasters of the archipelago, exiled from their favourite hunting-grounds and condemned to the company of the men whom they detested most in the world. It was indeed the most lugubrious of the islands. Everyone knew as thoroughly as his own all the jests of the rest of his fellow-islanders. They had repeated them or heard them repeated till they fled from them like a plague. They knew the whole gamut through which human wit could play, and smiled dismally and sceptically at the idea of a new joke; they had gone back through the jest-books of past times, and seen how every age had merely revamped jests that must have been prehistoric. They were quite convinced (and so had been the fatherland of each before exiling him) that in no realm of human industry was there so close an approach to the automatic. And a Swoonarian, it was said, had once invented a human automaton that could supply any one of all the witticisms that the human brain had been able to hit upon, with a subsidiary movement for adapting it to the circumstances or dialect of any island. The Witlingenites were so enraged at his offer to equip the government of every country with as many as they needed at small cost that they waylaid the ships that carried them and sank them with their cargoes.
Theirs was one of the islands for the wayfarer to avoid; for on landing he was liable to be mobbed, every Witlingenite rushing to secure him for an audience, and if by any chance he was saved and became the personal perquisite of any one inhabitant or section of the inhabitants, he had not the life of a dog; he became the butt of their jests and, still worse, he had to be the appreciator of them. The only way in which he could survive or escape was to feign deafness or, still better, inability to understand their witticisms and so to compel them to explain them.
If any one of the Witlingenites managed to escape back to his fatherland, he was soon recognised by his mosquito-like buzzing round the market-place and his buttonholing of all and sundry, the confidential and sage wag of his head, and the strut of his demeanour after a series of successes; there was nothing in earth or out of it but he could make himself superior to by uttering one of his little jokes upon it; he could tread on the neck of omniscience and omnipotence itself, if only he was allowed to jest about it to his fellow-men. It was this peculiarity of the joculasters that made them the pariahs of the archipelago. When one was found to have escaped from Witlingen, it was the duty of every sane self-respecting man and woman to get him quarantined, like a leper, and sent back. It was only there that they got free and kept free of their terrible disease. Besides Vulpia the Witlingenites had now another recreation-ground, in which they could play off practical jokes much to their own satisfaction. It was the small island of Fanfaronia. The peoples of the archipelago had begun to be plagued with a new type of eccentric, the would-be world conqueror. The success of two or three on military expeditions and the great glory that they gathered to themselves thereby had sent an epidemic of militant brag amongst the youth of the various islands. The manner was most infectious; and, in order to stop the spread of the plague, the saner majorities had to adopt the usual homœopathic cure. Every youth who strutted with head on chest and arms folded, and assumed superiority of genius to his fellows, and to their moral rules and conventions, was exiled to Fanfaronia; and there proximity of likes kept the disease in abeyance. But as soon as a stranger landed, the Fanfaronians struck the stage attitudes of great conquerors and looked for adoration from him. It was on this weakness that the Witlingenites played, and thus found another escape-valve for their own mental malady.
They had rivals for the use of this new arena in the inhabitants of the large island of Simiola, that lay close to their coasts. The particular disease that had brought the Simiolans together was an irresistible tendency to act the shadow or echo of those whom they saw or heard, and especially of those whom others admired. The best and feeblest of them had been useless to the communities in which they had lived; for, though innocent of any malignant purpose, they were mere parrots that depreciated the currency of good words or manners or acts or wisdom by the wear of too frequent repetition. But most of them had been mischievous or even dangerous in their habits. They were by nature backbiters and malicious, with a passion for depreciating and trampling in the mud whatsoever had stirred the praise or admiration of other people or their own envy or jealousy. These had become foul or ape-like in their habit of life and even in their forms. There was nothing they would not condescend to in order to bring down to their level all that seemed to be above them. Their island was seldom approached by voyagers, so dangerous was it to land on it. Yet waggish expeditions frequently made it their hunting-ground; for looked at from a distance their conduct was often laughable, and their growing likeness to apes gave zest to the comedy. But they became violent if the strangers ever attempted to mimic them or laugh at them; and the favourite method of teasing them was to bring an ape and set it beside them; they hated the mere sight of the beast, for in it, it was thought, they discovered their own certain destiny. Yet their chief deity in their central shrine, it was found by a daring traveller who penetrated its mystery, was the representation of an ape, gigantic and monstrous yet man-like. They did their best to put that traveller to death; but he had taken all precautions and escaped. They thought that they worshipped the noblest being in the universe, and seemed quite unconscious that they had made his image in the likeness of an ape. It was only a foreigner and alien who could see the resemblance.
Close by the shores of Simiola, and as like it as isle could be to isle, lay Polaria, a still more favoured hunting-ground for the waggish youth of the archipelago. This was where they fleshed their first intellectual weapons; for the Polarians fell into the traps set for them with exceptional ease. They had been exiled and brought together here on account of a strange but common malady, that of guiding their words and conduct by the rule of contraries; finding themselves with a passion for independence of action, and without the power of origination, they tried to attain the appearance of it by contradicting all they heard and making their actions the opposite of those they saw. They, so to speak, enjoyed each other’s society more than the inhabitants of the adjacent islands; for it made their hearts leap to hear a flat contradiction of what they said; their blood was up, and they had a good run by the rule of contraries. They hated each other most heartily, and would put themselves to infinite trouble to find out what their neighbours or friends did or loved in order to do the very opposite. It was their daily feast to go abroad and especially to wander in the market-place; for, if they met a man who seemed to know something about a subject, they could contradict him to their heart’s content, and make him feel how little he knew of it. They cultivated ignorance of the favourite topics of the day so that they might have a free hand in saying the opposite of anyone who had studied them. Knowledge would shut their mouths and deprive them of the rapture of a good long wrangle.
It was amusing to see one of the wags lay his traps for them. He would find out from neighbours or friends what were their pet opinions, beliefs, or principles, and being fully equipped he would approach and announce in a loud and assertive voice one or other of them; at once would come the recantation; and through the whole range of their creed he would pass and get them to deny all they believed. But it needed some adroitness to escape ultimate detection, and he had to make arrangements for avoiding the tempest of rage that was sure to follow the process of making them eat their own words.