Limanora

CHAPTER IV
AN EPIDEMIC

THOUGHT by thought I ejected my old view of death from my mind. I could not forget the scene of triumph which had been enacted on the hill of farewells; and the chanting that rilled through it haunted my imagination, bringing a sense of satisfaction, if not joy. I got into the habit of winging my exercise-flights towards Doomalona. I was there with Thyriel when dawn struck the world into gladness and music. There were we together to see the flaming picture the set of sun drew on Lilaroma. No platform on the island so caught the inspiration of the coming or departing orb. None, I came to feel, was so fitted for the hegira of earth-weary souls. No such launching-ground was there for the voyage through infinity. As I frequented it in my leisure moments, there grew into my system the sense that death was not so much an end as a beginning, not a dissolution, but a birth and perhaps a forgetting. More and more was the idea of it a nucleus of delight; and the old melancholy and sorrow, making it a burden and a terror for the mind, disappeared.

As a proselyte to the new feeling I was eager to talk of it and make much of its surprises. Not with Thyriel and my proparents alone did I discuss its varied aspects; I could listen by the hour to their teachings. But it brought me into intercourse with many whom I had scarcely seen before except in the course of my education as I wandered through the various halls. I was astonished to find how often they sought opportunity to talk to me. They drew me aside as if they had important business with me, and confidentially imparted their views of death which I had heard a hundred times from others, until I grew weary of their chatter, for I wished to talk myself. But they would not allow me to break in on their everlasting torrent of babble; even Thyriel could not endure my interruptions. Though I never grew weary of her talk, I could not restrain the desire to have my say, too. There was no subject on which we could not soliloquise by the hour, but we preferred to talk of death, the freshest and most joyous of topics. And every other youth was just as eager to deliver his opinions to me and to everybody else. However busy they might be with the task in hand, off they would break from it for colloquy, which soon spun itself into the soliloquy of the stronger lungs and the most enduring tongue. Everyone seemed to comport himself as if his views were of the utmost importance to the world. They all seemed bursting with the obvious; out it must come or they would die. In every other corner I would find two or three debating with faces all aglow, sometimes in the most confidential whispers; approaching to listen, I would find their topic trite and stale as last year’s gossip; the speaker was pressing home on his hearers in a voice of portentous awe what no one would think of disputing.

The elders interfered and tried by patient advice to stop this tempest of loquacity. Hurrying from post to post they tried to keep the young at their work, but it was an endless task. On would go the glib current as soon as their attention was turned elsewhere. Matters began to look serious, for the work of the community was being neglected. The ordinary services of life were barely performed. Little or no progress could be made in such a state of affairs. Indeed, it became manifest that the main aim of the race, progress, would soon be forgotten, and retrogression supervene. The faces of the elders became graver every day; their advice was unheeded, their example unfollowed. Babble, babble, babble, on rolled the fluent river of talk, as if the island had been in the midst of Western civilisation. When I closed my eyes so loud and empty sounded the magpie babel I could easily fancy myself back again in my native land, and believe that I had dreamt my recent years and wakened again in Christendom.

The ominous gravity of the elders dispelled the fancy. They looked as if doomsday were near, and were often heard to say that something must be done. For the talkativeness was bringing other vices in its train,—vanity, flippancy, carelessness, and want of reason. The torrent of eloquence was spreading wider every day and seemed to have broken down the pales of their long centuries of civilisation. No one was capable of stopping it either by precept or example.

At last in their despair the elders appealed to the medicants. Nothing like the phenomenon had occurred within the memory of the oldest; nothing in the records could be found that in the least resembled it since the series of exilings had been completed. At the periodical inspection, the medicants made a more minute investigation of the systems of the youth and turned their attention especially to the left side of the brain, which is the great originator and controller of speech. In a few they could see evidences of inflammation and morbid secretion in the brain-tissue of this region; in most cases nothing out of the common revealed itself to their most recent lavolans. So they took careful electrographs of the left side of the brain of most of them, and when they put these under their strongest clirolans, it became plain that all of them were in a diseased condition.

The elders were now convinced that they were on the right track of investigation, and all the young people who had shown symptoms of the passion for eloquence were isolated and brought hourly under the inspection of the medicants. Moving electrographs of the thought-processes in the diseased parts were taken daily by means of modifications of the lavolan; and under still more powerful clirolans, made for the purpose, these revealed a microbe of extraordinary minuteness at work in the tissue. Having found the source of the mischief, they set themselves to remove it. At first they put the patient into profound sleep, and, trephining the skull, they cleansed away under the clirolan all traces of the parasite and its débris. What they removed they carefully preserved and analysed; then, having found the chemical elements of the mischievous spawn and their débris, they reproduced the mixture as a cure of the new and singular disease. For a time this was administered as an internal medicine; but finding that it injured other nerve-centres besides those that they intended to affect, they resolved to apply it only locally, and soon learned how to avoid the necessity of trephining the skull. They invented an electric syringe and injector, which caused the mixture to penetrate through the skull into the part of the brain affected, thus sterilising the tissues that had to do with speech and making them unattractive as a feeding-ground for the microbe of loquacity.

The plague soon vanished and the babel ceased. There was comparative silence throughout the island. Only such words were spoken as were essential and relevant to the business in hand. It was, indeed, accepted as the surest mark of the sanity of a nature that it was never betrayed into speech unless that which conveyed necessary information, forceful reasoning, or fresh thought. The trite was avoided as mephitic vapours or an exhausted atmosphere would be. The utterance of truisms immediately led to a microscopic examination of the brain of the speaker in expectation of finding disease there. The habit of expression merely for its own sake and not for what it expressed, for its beauty or wit or pungency, was considered a sure indication of a diseased or morbid condition of the brain-tissue, and the sufferer was at once isolated for treatment, lest he should spread the contagion.

For the whole phenomenon was scientifically investigated, and precautions were carefully taken against a return of the plague. It had been noticed that, after any age of exceptional progress, there generally occurred some epidemic connected with the brain-tissues or nerve-centres, sometimes appearing in excess of emotion, sometimes in various forms of feebleness of thought. It was due, they found, to the comparative exhaustion of the brain and nerves by exceptional strain upon them. As long as the enthusiasm of the new ideas and rapid advance inspired the people, they worked with a will, nor ever thought of sparing any part of their system. The more mature amongst them knew how to bridle this passion for work, and took the necessary precautions against its evil effects; from experience they had found out that they needed more sustenance and more sleep in such periods, and they knew almost by instinct when to rest and how often, and what halls of sustenance and medication they should frequent. The young had not their instincts checked or confirmed by experience, and carried even the best of movements and impulses to abuse. In spite of inspection and superintendence they ignored the rules laid down for their guidance, and took their inspiration to work as better than the wisdom of their elders, knowing that progress was the ideal and law of their race, and thinking that everything done for progress was right.

It was thus the young and immature who generally suffered from these epidemics. The impulse of their enthusiasm carried them far beyond the limits of fertility of their tissues, and the ebullience of their delight, as they saw the work grow before their eyes, obscured from them the gradual exhaustion of their powers. They grew oblivious to everything but the end they had immediately in view, and thus became short-sighted in their enthusiasm for progress; they sacrificed the demands of the future for the sake of the present, and it was difficult for even the elders at the medical inspection to get at the real state of the case, such an appearance of new vigour did the impetuosity of their passion and the tumult in their blood give to their systems. Only when the wandering germs of emotional disease had fixed on the exhausted tissue did the result become apparent.

The wide area and serious effects of the plague of verbosity awakened the medical elders to the necessity of special precautions. A section of them was organised as a medical police to guard against the invasion of such pestilences, and to prevent such exhaustion of youthful tissues as would invite the vagrant germs or fail to repel their attacks. A science was specialised for this purpose,—the pathology of epidemic emotions; and a special art grew up to correspond,—the hygiene and therapeutics of emotional infection.

The elders who attended to this periodically made careful examination of all the tissue of the immature that had to do with emotion or with any crude spiritual moods inapt to the control of reason and will. And it was astonishing how rapid was the growth of the new science and art in their hands. Delicate instruments were invented responding to the presence even in the air of deleterious germs that tended to settle in the nerve-centres. Still finer instruments revealed the state of the tissues underneath the skull. The symptoms of every disease of the emotions were classified, and the means of checking each was investigated scientifically. Before the next period of exceptional florescence and harvest arrived, the hygiene of all the epidemics that had been known to follow on ages of great exertion was completely organised; and it was chiefly an art of prevention rather than of cure. Precautions were taken by the new section of the medicants against the abuse of the enthusiasm natural to such a period; they examined the nerve-tissues of the immature almost daily, and pointed out everyone that was getting overworked, and the remedies that should be adopted for checking the evil. The result was that no abuse could proceed for longer than a day, and no moral or emotional epidemic unless of the mildest type could settle in the community.

What roused them to such a step as the foundation of a new science and art was the seriousness with which they viewed the last plague, that of loquacity. In the series of exilings no evil had given them such trouble as that of oratory, and they were afraid lest it was about to return in all its virulence. At first they feared this plague to be a case of atavism; for those whom it attacked earliest were descendants of ancestors, or closely related to families, that had been famous in the far past for power of expression. But it soon spread to strains of blood that had been marked by great reticence, if not taciturnity, and ultimately it was completely impartial in its choice of victims. It was manifest, however, that those who had ancestral oratory in the blood were first open to the attacks of the plague and were most difficult to cure; and the phenomenon sent alarm to the very heart of the community. All the mature citizens and especially the elders looked graver than I had ever seen them look, even at the prospect of Choktroo’s invasion; they came nearer to the appearance of dejection than I had imagined they could come.

The whole matter drove my thoughts to work. When I reflected on the occasion, the attitude my mind had been accustomed to in my forgotten life returned, and it seemed to me as if there had been a storm over nothing. Talkativeness had been one of the commonest features of the men and women I had known in Europe; and loquacity was as little noticed as a red head or a pug nose. Indeed the chatterbox was ranked among the innocents who did little harm except to their own reputations. It became a complete puzzle to me, when I saw the horror with which the Limanorans looked on oratory. Had it not been one of the greatest of the arts of Christendom? Were not the great orators of my own nation looked upon as little short of inspired, and their statues placed in the noblest niche of our temple of fame? Did we not rush by the thousand to hear any one of them, when he was about to perform, and stand breathless by the hour, laying up for ourselves fatigue and faintness and asphyxia, merely for the delight of hanging on his lips? In life he roused hurricanes of enthusiasm; and when he died thousands who had never known him personally followed him mourning to the tomb, and on the most revered page of our literature was his name written. What could be the meaning of so hearty a detestation of so noble an art on the part of this progressive race?

As usual I had not long to wait for a solution. My bewilderment had already stirred the curiosity of my proparents and Thyriel; and they had been watching my thoughts for some time before I put my questions, simple enough for my young comrade and betrothed to answer. She spent a whole afternoon that was devoted to flight-exercise, in discussing and solving my difficulties, and the struggle ended in strengthening my admiration for this noble people.

Their abhorrence of the vice of oratory was not the growth of any sudden revolution, or the unreasoning prejudice often originating amongst a long-established nation in some great personal hatred or fear now buried in oblivion. It was the result of ages of the most patient scientific investigation. And it found its way into practice so slowly that the steps up to the final one are scarcely noticeable on the pages of their history. It had an inborn prejudice in favour of oratory to combat, all the deeper that it could not explain itself or its origin. The reputation of some of the ablest and most influential sections of the community was based upon the art. The orators of the nation had acquired a fame almost greater than that of the soldiers. They had been its leaders and founders; they had developed and mastered its politics; they had moulded the people at certain crises in their history into a unity. Their art had been enrolled for ages amongst the noblest they had. It was the only civilised force which could move great masses to enthusiasm, or fuse their varied purposes and thoughts together to form a single ideal and aim. It was the only means their statesmen had had for accomplishing their schemes, the only stepping-stones by which their lawyers and preachers and politicians could rise to fame. It seemed for ages a hopeless task to unseat it from its place in their civilisation, or eradicate the prejudice in its favour from the people’s minds.

The wisest Limanorans had watched its evil influence through many ages; although they had often themselves to make use of it for their purposes of reform and although some of the best men had been successful in its employment, yet they were certain that it sapped the finer sense of truth. So easily could the orator persuade a crowd to accept all he said as true and noble that he came to think there was little difference between the true and the false, the noble and the ignoble; his own aim was all that was of significance, and it was, however selfish or mean, just as good as anybody else’s aim. He needed as little to persuade himself of the justice of an evil cause, provided it was his own, as to persuade an assembly. He had but to isolate certain facts and phases, and what were antagonistic to them fell into shadow; the unjust course began to appear just, and those who opposed it were the enemies of justice and of the orator. It mattered not what side he took, if only it stirred his interest; he could rouse thousands to enthusiasm for it by touching their emotions and awakening the passions that were connected with their own self-interest. This power of moving great masses to whatever tune he pleased gave the orator a sense of omnipotence; after a stirring speech he felt like a Jove who held in his hand the destinies of the world. Happily for the welfare of the state, the tongue-doughty was hopelessly incapable when he turned to practice; he could not organise the crusade he had preached; everything he did with his crowd of followers tumbled to pieces as soon as he had to do anything further than speak; a few days or even hours of cool action revealed the hollowness of his cause or his power; the omnipotent Jove of yesterday appeared the skulking slave of to-day. The only crusades that ever prospered under his influence were those which aimed at destruction; for the work of destruction is brief and sharp; it needs but the passion of the moment to accomplish it; and the love of demolition is the most primitive of all savage desires, and the most unbridled when let loose; its own action as it proceeds kindles into a conflagration the fires that give it strength. Creation is a calm and gradual process, the last conquest of the human mind, as it is the highest function of the energy of the cosmos. The wrecking Omnipotence of oratory is parted from this by the eternity of cosmic development; it is kin with the clashing of worlds and systems that may come before the birth of a universe; but it is as opposite in nature to the slow building up of a world and the slow evolution of its life-energy as hell is to heaven.

The barrenness of the art in all that would develop humanity struck even the less mature minds of Limanora forcibly as soon as vast schemes of reform like socialism began to be discussed. These schemes meant the devastation or the dismantling of existing institutions and systems of life. A plague of demagogues spread throughout the nation. Hitherto orator had neutralised orator as in a debate. Now it was the idle and indolent who grew most tongue-valiant. They, who had before been so discredited, now found themselves on the way to fame. They, who had before been able to gather only a few embeggared discontents at the street-corners to listen, and perhaps to sniff at their eloquence, could now stir masses to action. They had been despised even by their out-at-elbows followers for their impotence in face of the problem of making a bare living for themselves. Now they saw before them place and power, fortune and fame, and all through this poor member of theirs that had not been able to earn enough to lick. Beggarly grovellers, none so poor as not to scorn them, they were now omnipotent, with all the work of devastation before them that these new vast political schemes implied. When the revolution was in full blaze, they were at their best, they thought. But it was just at this point they found their limit. The conflagration they had kindled their eloquence failed to control or even guide; it swept past them through institutions and sections of the community that they specially favoured; and at last even they, many of them, fell themselves victims to its undiscriminating ravage. And, when it had burned itself out, not one of them but skulked away in fear, unable to face the task of building up again. Then it was the man of action that stepped in, the silent, masterful disciplinarian, moulded in war and accustomed to no other means of solving human problems than war; he it was who reaped the dragon’s-teeth harvest sown by tongue-bravery: he seized all the glory and place and fortune that the mob-spaniels had thought within their grasp. Some of their ancient folk-maxims embodied this experience: The breath of the demagogue blows the warrior to his fortune; The mouth of the orator is the banqueting-chamber of the soldier; Tempests of eloquence and torrents of blood; Spout, vain tongue, you invite your tyrant; Sow a country with the teeth of haranguers and they will come up the swords of despots; Loquacity is eaten up by her son pugnacity.

In spite of the fear of the art indicated in such folklore, it continued to flourish; for the upper classes, who delighted in war, flattered themselves that they would ever be the best orators, and it is the inevitable tendency of human nature to run to tongue. Not till the age of unbridled freedom of speech did they begin to change their opinions. Then were they easily outfaced and out-harangued by any idler of the poverty-stricken districts. Even in their own assemblies they were no match for the spouters from the slums; with all their high-toned irony and scornful superiority, they were beaten into silence at the public palavers; they were mere stammerers beside the glib orators of the unwashed. This age of tongue-exploits was naturally an age of single ideas, too. When their energy had gone into speech, they had none left for thoughts. One-idea crusades became the order of the day. Every tongue-quixote had his scheme wherewith he would sweep all evils out of life. He was so enamoured of his own that he could not bear to listen to any other. And therein lay safety.

But there came a time when the wordy bravos joined forces; one vast socialistic scheme included all theirs. The institutions of the island were to be wiped out, and something undefined that was to make men equal and prosperous and happy was to be put in their place. Their tongues now wagged in unison with wonderful velocity. Each was still for his own special constructive scheme, but they were at one in their scheme of demolition; they must have a clear space to build on, and their ideal was the same, to make all equal and happy. The babel of eloquence drowned the sounds of other industry. Another revolution was almost within earshot.

Some of the wiser hearts of Limanora anticipated the danger, and saw that it would be better to give the discontented all than to let destruction ravage unmuzzled again. The whole of the property of the island was estimated, land, houses, furniture, and luxuries; and money equivalent to its full value was handed over to the malcontent socialists to divide amongst themselves, provided they migrated to another island. The offer was readily accepted; for it was clear that nothing would then be left in Limanora worth plundering. The ships landed the enraptured equalisers of human goods with their belongings on the shore of their new Eden, and returned.

When the decks were cleared, and a census was taken of all that remained, it was found that the island in purging out the socialists was rid of the plague of orators. The price they paid for their deliverance was small indeed, they felt. They soon recreated the wealth they had surrendered. Everyone grew ashamed and afraid of anything that approached to oratory. Eloquence became a word of evil omen. To prate was now the greatest offence against the commonwealth. And for generations there reigned comparative silence and complete peace over the land.

In the series of purgations every remaining trace of tongue-ambition was swept out. Much of the flattering kind was found to have migrated with the lecherous; much of the haughty kind with the aristocratic warriors; but most of it went with the liars. There remained a horror of all prating and tongue-valiance, and this repressed every atavistic tendency in that direction that appeared.