The worst thing he had done on Earth was to get a desk job as a technical writer at the age of thirty-eight and then at fifty-one, to become a fulltime fiction writer. He should have stayed in the steel mill. It was monotonous work, but while his body was handling the hot, heavy work, his mind was busy dreaming up stories. At night he would read or write.
It was when he had started to sit on his butt all day that he had begun drinking so heavily. And his reading had diminished, too. It was too easy after working on a typewriter eight hours a day to sit in front of the TV all evening and swill Bourbon or Scotch. TV, the worst thing that had happened to the twentieth century. After the atom bomb and overpopulation, of course.
No, he told himself, that wasn't fair. He didn't have to be a boob before the tube. He could have used the self-discipline which enabled him to write to turn the set off except at highly selected times. But the lotus-eater syndrome had gotten him. Besides, there were programs on TV which were really excellent, both entertaining and educational.
Still, this world was good in that there were no TV's or automobiles or atom bombs or gross national production or paychecks or mortgages or medical bills. Or air or water pollution and almost no dust. And nobody gave a damn about communism or socialism or capitalism, because they didn't exist. Well, that was not quite true. Most states did have a sort of primitive communism.
Chapter 31
* * *
He walked to the river and plunged in, cleaning off the sweat. Then he trotted along the bank (no huts allowed within 30 meters of it) to the dock area. He hung around until dinnertime, talking to friends. In between, he watched the two from the Razzle Dazzle. They were still interviewing, though lubricating their throats with frequent drinks. Wasn't that line ever going to end?
Just before it was suppertime, Farrington stood up and announced in a loud voice that he was taking no more applications. Those still in the line protested, but he said that he'd had enough.
By then the head of Ruritania, "Baron" Thomas Bullitt, had appeared with his councillors. Bullitt had had some small claim to fame in his day. In 1775 he had explored the Ohio River falls by the area which would become Louisville, Kentucky. Commissioned by the William and Mary College of Virginia, he surveyed the area. And thereafter disappeared from history. His aide-de-camp, Paulus Buys, a sixteenth-century Dutchman, was with him. Both invited the crew of the Razzle Dazzle to a party in their honor that night. The main reason for the invitation was to hear the adventures of the crew. River-dwellers loved gossip and exciting tales, since their fields of entertainment were limited.
Farrington accepted, but said that six of the crew would have to stay on the ship as guards. Frigate followed the crowd to a large roofed-over area, the Town Hall. Torches and bonfires drove back the darkness, and an orchestra played while the local variety of square-dancing began. Frisco and Tex stood around for a while, talking to the chief statesmen and their wives and close friends. Frigate, as one of the hoi polloi, was not admitted to the sacred circle. He knew, however, that the event would become much less formal later on. While he was standing in line to get the free liter of pure alcohol allowed per person at such functions, he was joined by his hutmate.
Eve Bellington waved at him and then got into line twelve persons behind him. She was tall, full figured, black haired, blue. eyed, a Georgia peach. Born 1850, died two days before her one hundred first birthday. Her father was a wealthy cotton planter with a distinguished record as a major in the Confederate cavalry. The Bellington plantation was burned down during Sherman's march through Georgia, and the Bellingtons had become penniless. Her father had then gone to California and found enough gold to buy a partnership in a shipping firm.
Eve had loved being wealthy again, but she still had not forgiven him for leaving her mother and herself to struggle through the occupation and the early years of Reconstruction.
During her father's absence, Eve and her mother had lived with her father's brother, a handsome man only ten years older than Eve. He had raped her (without too much resistance, Eve admitted) when she was fifteen. When her mother had found that her daughter was pregnant, she had shot the uncle in the legs and the genitals. He survived a few years as a crippled eunuch in prison.
Mrs. Bellington then moved to Richmond, Virginia, where her husband joined them. Eve's son by the uncle grew up to be tall and handsome, dearly beloved by his mother. After a furious quarrel with his uncle-grandfather, he left to seek his fortune in the West. A letter from Silver City, Colorado, was the last Eve ever heard from him. He'd disappeared somewhere in the Rockies, according to a report sent by a detective.
Her mother had died in a fire, and her father had died of a heart attack while trying to rescue her mother. Eve's first husband died of cholera shortly thereafter, and before she was fifty she had lost two more husbands and six of her ten children.
Her life was that of a heroine of a novel on which Margaret Mitchell and Tennessee Williams might have collaborated. She didn't think it was very funny when Peter had told her that.
After thirty-plus years on The Riverworld, Eve had gotten over her prejudice against niggers and her hatred of bluebellies. She had even fallen in love with a Yankee. Peter had never told her that his great grandfather had been with an Indiana regiment on that "infamous" march with Sherman. He hadn't wanted to strain her affection.
Peter moved on up the line and received the alcohol in his soapstone mug. He mixed one part of alcohol with three parts of water in a bamboo bucket and walked back to talk to Eve, who was still in line. He asked her where she had been all day. She replied that she had been wandering around, thinking.
He didn't ask her what her thoughts had been. He knew. She was trying to think of a way to break off their relationship without pain. They'd been drifting apart for some months, their love suddenly and unaccountably cooled. Peter had done some thinking on this subject himself. But each was waiting for the other to take the initiative.
Peter said he would see her later, and he pushed through the noisy crowd toward Farrington. Rider was on the dance floor, whooping and whirling with Bullitt's woman. Peter waited until the captain was through telling about his adventures in the 1899 Yukon gold rash. Farrington's tale, which involved losing some of his teeth from scurvy, somehow became a hilarious experience.
Peter said, "Mr. Farrington, have you made up your mind yet?"
Farrington paused, his mouth open to launch on another story. His reddened eyes blinked. He said, "Oh, yes! You're . . . ah . . . um . . . named Frigate, right? Peter Frigate. The one who's read a lot. Yes, Tom and I've made up our minds. We'll announce our choice some time during the party."
"I hope it's me," Peter said. "I really want to go with you."
"Enthusiasm counts for a great deal,'' Farrington said. "Experience counts for even more. Put the two together, and you have a fine jack-tar."
Peter breathed deeply and took the plunge.
"This uncertainty is getting me down. Could you at least tell me if I've been eliminated? If I have been, I can drown my sorrow."
Farrington smiled. "It really means that much to you? Why?"
"Well, I do want to get to the end of The River."
Farrington cocked his eyebrows. "Yeah? Do you expect to find the answers to all your questions there?"
"I don't want millions, I want answers to my questions," Peter said. "That's a quotation from a character in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov."
Farrington's face lit up.
"That's great! I'd heard of Dostoyevsky but I never had a chance to read him. I don't think there was an English translation of his books in my time. At least, I never ran across any."
"Nietzsche admitted that he'd learned a lot about psychology just from reading the Russian's novels," Peter said.
"Nietzsche, heh? You know him well?"
"I've read him in both English and German. He was a great poet, the only German philosopher who could write in anything but waterlogged prose. Well, that's no
t fair, Schopenhauer could write stuff that wouldn't put you to sleep or give you a nervous breakdown while you were waiting for the sentence to end. I don't go along with Nietzsche's conception of the Ubermensch, though. Man is a rope across an abyss between animal and superman. That may not be the exact quotation; it's been a hell of a long time since I read Thus Spake Zarathustra.
"Anyway, I do believe that man is a rope between animal and superman. But the superman I'm thinking of isn't Nietzsche's. The real superhuman, man or woman, is the person who's rid himself of all prejudices, neuroses, and psychoses, who realizes his full potential as a human being, who acts naturally on the basis of gentleness, compassion, and love, who thinks for himself and refuses to follow the herd. That's the genuine dyed-in-the-wool superman.
"Now, you take the Nietzschean concept of the superman as embodied in Jack London's novel The Sea Wolf."
Peter paused, then said, "Have you read it?"
Farrington grinned. "Many times. What about Wolf Larsen?"
"I think he was more London's superman than Nietzsche's. He was London's idea of what the superman ought to be. Nietzsche would have been appalled by Larsen's brutality. However, London did kill him off with a brain tumor. And I suppose that London meant to show by this that there was something inherently rotten about Larsen as superman. Maybe he meant to tell the reader that. If he did, it went over the heads of most of the literary critics. They never got the significance of Larsen's manner of death. Then, too, I think London was also showing that man, even superman, has his roots in his animal nature. He's part of Nature, and no matter what his mental attainments, no matter how much he defies Nature, he can't escape the physical facts. He is an animal, and so he's subject to disease, such as brain tumors. How are the mighty fallen.
"But I think that Wolf Larsen was also, in some respects, what Jack London would have liked to be. London lived in a brutal world, and he thought that he had to be a superbrute to survive. Yet, London had empathy; he knew what it was to be one of the people of the abyss. He thought that the masses could find relief from their sufferings, and realize their human potential, through socialism. He fought for it all his life. At the same time, he was a strong individualist. This conflicted with his socialism, and when it did, his socialist beliefs lost out. He wasn't any Emma Goldman.
"In fact, his daughter Joan criticized him for that in her study of his life."
"I didn't know that,'' Farrington said. "She must have written it after I died. Did you know much about her, what happened to her after London died, how she died?"
"I knew a London scholar who knew her well," Peter said.
Actually, the scholar had only corresponded with her a little and had met her briefly. Peter didn't mind exaggerating if it would get him a berth on the ship.
"She was a very active Socialist. She died in 1971, I think. Her book about her father was very objective, especially considering that he had divorced her mother for a younger woman.
"Anyway, I think that London wanted to be a Wolf Larsen because that would have made him insensitive to the world's woes. A man who doesn't feel for others can't be hurt himself. At least, he thinks he can't. Actually, he's hurting himself.
"London may have realized this and was, in fact, trying to put this idea across. At the same time, he wished to be a Larsen, even if this meant being frozen inside, that is, a superbrute. But writers have countercurrents in their psychic sea, as all humans do. That's why, when the critics have done with them, great writers are still enigmas. When skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man."
"I like that!" Farrington cried. "Who wrote that?"
"e.e. cummings. Another line of his that's a favorite of mine is: Listen! There's a hell of a good universe next door. . . Let's go!"
Peter thought that he might be pouring it on too thick. Farrington, however, seemed to be enjoying it.
Once Frigate was on the ship, he could bring up subjects which might anger and would certainly irritate Farrington. For instance, the man's knowledge of Nietzsche had been gotten mostly from dialogs with a friend, Strawn-Hamilton. He had apparently made some attempt to read the philosopher in English. But he had been so taken by the poetic phrases and the slogans that he had not taken in the full philosophy. He had picked what he liked from Nietzsche and ignored the rest – as Hitler had done. Not that Farrington was any Hitler.
What was it his daughter had said?" ′The glad perishers,′ ′the Superman,′ ′live dangerously! – these were more potent than wine.' "
As for Farrington's knowledge of socialism, he had not read anything of Marx's except The Communist Manifesto. But, as his daughter had said, ignoring Marx was a common practice among American Socialists then.
There were many other things to discuss – and contemn. London had wanted socialism only for the benefit of the Germanic peoples. He firmly believed that men were superior to women. Might made right. And he was not, in one sense of the word, a true artist. He wrote only for money, and if he had enough money would have quit writing. At least he had claimed he would. Frigate doubted this. Once a writer, always a writer.
"Well," Peter said, "whatever else can be said against London, Fred Lewis Patton probably had the final word. He said it was easy to criticize him, easy to deplore him, but impossible to avoid him.''
Farrington liked that even more. But he said, "Enough of London, though I would like to meet him some day. Listen. Your idea of the superman sounds a lot like the ideal man of the Church of the Second Chance. It sounds even more like that of one of my crew, you know, the little Arab, though he isn't really an Arab. He's a Spanish Moor, born in the twelfth century A.D. He's not a Chancer, though."
He pointed to a man Frigate had seen among the crew of the Razzle Dazzle. He was standing in the center of a circle of Ruritanians, holding a drink and a cigarette. His speech seemed to be amusing; at least those around him were laughing. He was about 163 centimeters or a little less than 5 feet 5 inches tall, thin but with a suggestion of wiry strength, very dark, and big nosed. He looked like a young Jimmy Durante.
"Nur-ed-din el-Musafir," Farrington said. "Nur for short."
Frigate said, "In Arabic that means Light-of-the-Faith, the Traveler."
"You know Arabic?" Farrington said. "I never could get the hang of any foreign language except Esperanto."
"I picked up a lot of words from Burton's Arabian Nights."
He paused. "Well, what about it? Am I eliminated?"
Farrington said, "Yes and no." He laughed at Frigate's puzzled expression, and he clapped him on the shoulder.
"Can you keep your mouth shut?"
"Like a Trappist monk."
"Well, I'll tell you, Pete. Tom and I had picked out that big Kanaka there." He pointed at Maui, a giant Marquesan, looking very Polynesian in a white cloth around his waist and a big dark-red bloom in his thick, black, curly hair.
"He was top's'l man in a whaler and then a harpooner for thirty years. He looks like he'd be a hellcat in a fight. Tom and I agreed that he was easily the best qualified. But he doesn't know anything about books, and I need educated people around me. That may sound snobbish, but so what?
"I'll tell you now. I just changed my mind. You're signed up – as far as I'm concerned. No, wait a minute! Don't look so happy. I have to talk to Tom about this. You wait. I'll be right back."
He plunged among the dancers, caught Rider by the hand, and dragged him off protesting to one side. Peter watched them talking. Rider looked at him several times but did not seem to be arguing.
Peter was glad that he had not had to play his trump card. If he hadn't been chosen, he would have told the two that he knew their true identities. What would have happened then, he couldn't guess. The two had some good reason to go under fake names. Perhaps they would have rushed off, leaving him behind if he had threatened to expose them. Or perhaps they would have taken him along, just to keep his mouth shut, and then thrown him overboard far up The River.
; Possibly Farrington had caught on to what he was doing. He must have wondered why a man so familiar with London's works would not recognize him. In which case, Farrington would have decided that Frigate was playing some kind of game. He would go along with it until they were well up The River and then find out just what he was up to.
However, Peter did not think he was in any danger of being killed. Neither Farrington nor Rider were murderers. Still, if some changed for the better on this world, others changed for the worse. And he had no idea how deep and desperate this game was.
Rider came over, shook his hand, and told him he was welcome aboard. A few minutes later, Farrington stopped the music and announced his choice of the new deckhand. By then, Peter had taken Eve outside and given her the news.
Eve was quiet for a while. Then she said," Yes, I knew you were trying to get on that ship. It's not easy to keep a secret here, Peter. I do feel bad, though mostly because you hadn't told me you were going to go away."
"I tried to get hold of you," he said. "But you had gone off without telling me where."
Eve began to cry. Peter's eyes were moist. But she wiped the tears, sniffled, and said, "I'm not grieved because you're leaving me, Pete. I'm full of sorrow because our love died. I once thought that it would last forever. I should have known better, though."
"I'm still fond of you."
"But not fond enough, is that it? Of course it is. I'm not blaming you, Peter. I feel the same way. It's just that. . . I wish we could have gone on feeling like we first did."
"You'll find someone else. At least, we didn't part with hatred.''
R.W. III - The Dark Design Page 22
