“Good God!” I said. “What are those terrible little creatures tormenting that wretched young man?”
Anne now smiled at me, as though she could no longer take me seriously. “Of course, I didn’t realize you were joking,” she said. “Are you going to tell me now that you have never seen anyone with indigestion before?”
Indigestion! So that was it! “Oh, I see,” I said to Anne, and smiled back at her in a way which suggested that I was, indeed, playing a little joke on her, and that I knew well enough that no one in their right senses could fail to recognize a case of indigestion when it was put so plainly before them.
We had now reached the big store to which she had been leading me, and we went inside. I saw that the hosiery department was on the third floor, and suggested we should go up there, and, as we had to start somewhere, commence my shopping by buying some socks. We went up in the lift.
We were a very long time getting served, owing to the fact that the very pretty girl behind the counter was attending to a vast woman with the most dominating appearance and rudest manners I have ever seen.15 In addition to snubbing the girl in every possible way, and at every possible opportunity, she seemed to have no intention of making up her mind as to what she wanted to buy. There was already a huge pile, or mountain, of material, at least five feet high, upon the counter, and at the moment of our arrival the girl was still pulling down more to add to it from the shelves.
Standing near this formidable and hateful woman, was a little man in a bowler hat, a high collar, pince-nez, and an overcoat too big for him. This little man wore such a meek and harassed expression that I at once felt sure that he was the husband of the woman, and my heart went out to him.
A couple of this sort (unlike, of course, anything ever seen on earth) is a very common sight in Moribundia—the male being known as a dekcepneh dnabsuh—a term very difficult to render in English, but meaning, roughly, a man dominated, incessantly scolded, and badgered by his wife. A dekcepneh dnabsuh never wears anything but a bowler hat, a high collar, and pince-nez, while the wife is seldom less than three times bigger than her husband. On the surface it would seem that a wretched life is spent by such couples as these—particularly, of course, by the husband—but the latter has an indomitable spirit, combined with certain decidedly mischievous and masculine traits—such as winking at pretty girls, or looking at their legs through opera glasses or telescopes while they are bathing—which give him a satisfaction which may seem exaggerated to the normal man, but which no doubt compensate him for the evils of his domestic life. Also he will quite often go out and get drunk, returning late at night and taking the most elaborate precautions in getting upstairs unheard by his wife, who, on such occasions, waits up in her nightdress to meet him with a rolling-pin taken from the kitchen.
“Er—my dear—er—er—” he now said, seeing that we were waiting to be served, and employing that hesitant, stuttering, slightly fawning style of speech which characterizes the dekcepneh dnabsuh—“er—don’t you think, my pet—that you might make up your mind—as there are other people waiting to be served, my love.”
“Silence, Henry!” she thundered, and then turned to the girl. “I don’t want any of these, young woman,” she said. “I have changed my mind and will take half a yard of ribbon.”
There was no withstanding a woman of this sort, and the poor girl, having exhausted herself in hauling out those masses of material on to the counter, meekly complied with this miserable order for half a yard of ribbon. Then, at the roared command: “Come, Henry!” the husband gathered up a huge mountain of heavy parcels, which practically hid him completely, and stumbled out in the wake of his wife.
I then began my own shopping, which took me something like an hour. Under Anne’s guidance I got everything I wanted with the greatest dispatch, and ordered the goods to be sent without paying for them. When we got outside the morning was still young, and the idea of a walk appealed to both of us.
For this purpose Anne took me to a large park, full of trees and greenery and water which lies very near the centre of Nwotsemaht.
Towards the end of our walk, and near one of the entrances to the park, we came upon a large open space which was filled by a crowd of people. On approaching nearer, I saw that this crowd was collected around three or four speakers who were elevated above the rest and were haranguing them with violent gestures. I asked Anne what they were speaking about and who they were.
“Oh,” she replied, with an amused and tolerant smile. “They’re not really speaking about anything. They’re just letting off steam.” I was curious to hear what they were saying, however, and we approached nearer. I noticed now that each of the orators was mounted upon a wooden box which had once contained soap, wore a dishevelled beard, and exuded an atmosphere of dirt and venom which I wondered the crowd could tolerate. The crowd, however, which was mostly composed of working men of the Yenkcoc type depicted by the artist, Treb Samoht, was listening with the utmost tolerance and good humour, its members making extremely funny comments from time to time, which were received with delighted laughter.
As to what the speakers were saying, we listened for some time to one of them, and I soon discovered that Anne was right, he was not speaking about anything. In fact, he was talking such extraordinary nonsense, in such an extraordinary jargon, that I find it extremely difficult to remember now and to put it down on paper. I must make the attempt, however, as some knowledge of this subnormal type is most important, as we shall see later, to a proper comprehension of the structure and ideology of Moribundian society as a whole.16
“Comrades and workin’ men,” I can remember hearing him say, “’oo grind the face of the poor, ’oo sweats the toiler and snatches the bread out of the labourer’s mouth? The capitalists, comrades, the bleedin’ capitalists! Dahn with the dirty capitalists, I say, dahn with ’em all—the dirty exploiters! Comrades, our task is liquidate the bourgeoisie! Look at ’em, comrades!” Here he pointed to a row of very fine-looking hotels and residential houses that ran alongside the park. “Look at ’em in their luxury, wallowing in their jewellery and caviare! Look at their cars, their servants, their chauffeurs—idlers all of ’em—never done a stroke of work in their lives. And where do they get their dirty money? From you and I, comrades—the poor starving worker without a shirt to his back. It’s we ’oo ought to ’ave the money, and they wot ought to do the work! Everybody ought to be equal! Dahn with ’em, comrades, that’s what I say. Dahn with the capitalists! Dahn with the King! dahn with the Constitution! dahn with Parliament! dahn with everybody and everything!”
“There,” said Anne, smiling at me as this illogical and ridiculous peroration was reached, “there’s a tsinummoc for you! Shall we go on?”
As we moved on I asked her what she exactly meant by a tsinummoc, and she said that she would have thought that the speaker had made that evident himself. But her answer did not quite satisfy me and I asked her whether the word had no political significance of any kind. To this she replied that the actual word did suggest something—advocacy, perhaps, of ‘everybody sharing everything with everybody.’ This, I gathered, would include women and toothbrushes, and the notion, in any case, was only a screen to hide the unreasoning hatred, fanaticism and bitterness which I had seen.
She spoke of these matters with the same air of calm certainty and wonder at my questions, as she had adopted towards my ignorance with regard to the rheumatism lightning-flashes and the indigestion devils, and it was impossible to doubt the objective truth of her statements. She knew her Moribundia, and I did not.
All the same, I could not refrain from pressing the matter a little further. I asked her whether what she had said was universally true; whether there might not be certain people who genuinely held, perhaps, some milder and more reasonable views on economic equality. To this she replied that such an idea was absurd as no one in their right senses could do so; that it had been ‘proved’ time and again that such a thing did not ‘work’; that i
n Moribundia it had actually been ‘tried,’ and shown itself a ‘failure.’
She went on to hard facts of Moribundian History. At one time, it seems, in the past, Moribundia had made this drastic experiment of sharing out its wealth to everybody, but it had all, after a very short time (according to her), got into the hands of the Jews. And so the scheme was found to be valueless from the very beginning.
Seeing my interest in these matters, she asked if I would like to see an amusing little experiment, in proof of her assertions, which she could perform here and now. We retraced our steps, and listened again to the speaker. Presently he finished, and as he was slinking away through the good-natured crowd, Anne stopped him and slipped a money note (which I saw was for no smaller sum than a thousand pounds!) into his dirty hand. He looked dubiously at her for a moment, glancing suspiciously around to see that no one else had witnessed the transaction, and then moved hastily from the scene.
I asked Anne what all this meant, and she replied, with the same amused smile: “Now he is a capitalist himself, you see.” She said we would see him again before long, and there the matter, for the moment, was dropped.
In accordance with Anne’s prediction, I did see this man again, though, as it happened, I was not with her at the time. I had been in Moribundia about two weeks by then, and had taken a stroll by myself in the park.
I had gone again to listen to these speakers, and was standing on the edge of the crowd, that is, almost in the road, when I heard the soft purring of a motor engine behind me, and turning round saw a huge car, driven by a uniformed chauffeur, and built on the most magnificent and luxurious scale. Sitting in the back, dressed in a frock coat and top hat, and smoking a big cigar (from which the band had not been removed), was a man whose gross and overfed demeanour was so unpleasant as to be almost fascinating. I looked at him for quite half a minute before it slowly dawned upon me that his features were familiar, and before I at last realized that he was none other than the ragged and filthy orator of less than a fortnight ago! Lying back in a plush seat he was looking with a mixture of amusement and contempt at the scene in front of him. I could hardly believe my eyes at first, but as soon as I heard his voice, there was no room for further doubt.
It happened that a beggar passed at that moment and, seeing this ostentatiously rich man, went up to the side of the car and humbly asked him if he could spare a copper.
“Certainly not, my man,” our friend replied. “I don’t believe in encouraging idleness.” He then addressed the chauffeur in the same haughty tone: “Home, James,” he said, “and make it quick, or you’ll find yourself out of a job, my fine fellow.”
When I related this repulsive episode to Anne, she merely laughed and said: “I told you so.” She said that it was simply a case of ‘Moribundian nature’ (which she spoke of in the same way as we would speak of ‘human nature’), and that such an experiment could be repeated any amount of times with the same result.
Such is ‘human nature’ in Moribundia, and incredible as it was I had to accept it, along with all the other marvels and miracles.
In addition, however, to the light which it threw upon questions of the Moribundian character, this episode, properly understood, clarifies much of the whole sociological, economic, and ideological structure of Moribundia, and I feel it is now time that I devoted some attention to these general matters, without some knowledge of which these isolated and somewhat patchy narrations of my adventures as they happened to me can have no fuller significance.
Notes
14. Egdirrah: presumably an amalgam of Harrods and Selfridge.
15. The following scene, as with that involving drunken Moribundian men later, is based on the comic picture-postcard images of the immensely popular English cartoonist, Donald McGill (1875–1962). A master of the huge-bottomed virago, weedy henpecked husband and red-nosed drunkard, he was to receive critical notice in George Orwell’s essay, ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, published in Horizon in 1941.
16. The point of the following episode with the Hyde Park Corner tsinummoc orator, who himself becomes a capitalist towards the end of the chapter having been given a thousand pounds, is not, of course, to underwrite this (common bourgeois) view of communists, but to illustrate the way in which characters in Moribundia act out — and thus confirm — the stereotypes attributed to them in the first place.
CHAPTER VIII
To begin where it is always wise to begin—in the department of economic facts17—it must be understood that in Moribundia wealth is not created by labour.
It may be said that there is nothing remarkable in this, that there are plenty of economists in our own world who can and have described the origin and motions of wealth with hardly any reference to this quality—but in Moribundia the thing goes much further. Indeed, it is true to say that, up there, it would not occur to anyone in their right senses in any way to relate or mentally associate wealth with labour.
What, then, causes wealth in Moribundia, and puts it into the hands of the individual? The answer is known by everyone there—virtue and industry. But by industry I do not, of course, mean an industrial system, objective labour in a social scheme; I mean purely subjective industry on the part of the individual. Those who are virtuous and work hard, make money and get on; those who are bad and lazy, sink into lower social depths. There are no questions of markets, of over-production, of booms and crises to interfere with this unerring and absolute law, to put an excess of money into the hands of the undeserving, or to snatch it from those who have gained it by their virtue and industry.
As the acquiring of money is simply a question of personal merit totally unrelated to any objective facts in the social scheme, it would not be true to say that money is earned in the ordinary way. It simply ‘comes.’ You have it or you do not have it. It is ideal in origin and ideally distributed. In my case I found twenty-five pounds in my pocket every morning of my life. Apparently, in the working of ideal laws, I was ideally worth just that amount. To me there is nothing extraordinary in this in a land in which people with indigestion are prodded by devils. For all I know, the money may have been put into my pocket by angels or fairies.
One ideal state of affairs creates another. Because there is no conceivable connection in Moribundia between the wealth and the labour of society, it is easy to see there can be no such thing as ‘labour trouble.’ As we know, the labouring man in our own world, believing, rightly or wrongly, that wealth is somehow caused and created by labour, his own labour, is liable to suppose that he should have a due ‘share’ of that which he has created, and to make trouble if he feels that he is getting something less than that share. The circumstances being so entirely different, such an idea would never even cross the Moribundian working man’s mind.
From this it follows that the Moribundian working man is utterly happy and contented, and this in spite of the fact that Moribundians admit, in fact insist, that he is ‘always grumbling.’ This contradiction is easily understood when one realizes that this ‘grumbling’ is merely a charming affectation on the working man’s part, by which he attempts to screen, but actually reveals, his inner feelings. He grumbles in the same way as one might growl at a child one loved, in excess of affection. If he ceased to grumble he would certainly be less lovable, and it might be taken as a sign that he was less delighted, deep down in his heart, with his lot.
I will not say that there are not certain cases when a Moribundian working man brings a slightly more serious note into his grumbling, as when, for instance, he ‘genuinely thinks he has a grouse’—a form of hallucination very similar to that of a hypochondriac who reads a medical book and genuinely thinks he has cancer. Patient explanation and cold facts prove that he has nothing of the kind, and he is quite unable to infect his companions with his pessimism.
In this state of affairs, this relationship, or rather non-relationship, of labour to wealth, is the employer as well off and as happy as the working man? Superficially it would seem that he
is not. For whereas to him, as to the working man, money comes according to his personal merit, there is an extra and gratuitous burden on his shoulders all the time—the burden of responsibility. The sum of sleeplessness, worry, and misery caused in Moribundia by responsibility at first sight seems incalculable. In addition to this, or as part and parcel of this, there are the ‘risks’ he has to take with his money. Moribundian concerns have got to be started somehow and it is the employer’s money, owned, remember again, by virtue of his own merit, which has to be risked.
I was puzzled for a long while by this apparent unfairness, but finally came to see that the employer, being what he was, was compensated in other ways. Bred in certain traditions, and educated at schools like the one at which I saw the cricket match on the day of my arrival, he is not the type to shirk responsibility, or to be afraid of living dangerously. To take risks of this sort is nothing to him. He is more than likely to regard it as a privilege. Notice, too, that in shouldering these responsibilities and running these risks, he is automatically acquiring fresh spiritual merit, and therefore increasing his income under the dispensation of the ideal economic law I have already described; and so everything works out and round, in the long run, to a just and equitable state of affairs.
As Moribundia is an economically ideal world in which everybody is economically happy, how is it, you will ask, that a dissentient voice is ever raised, how should such a type as was represented by that man in the park, that tsinummoc, have ever come into being, or been allowed to exist? Why should anyone, with no concrete reason, out of the blue, in an ideal state of affairs, of which they are a part, wish, as these people do, to ‘sow unrest,’ to ‘spread trouble and discontent,’ to ‘create bad feeling,’ to ‘stir up passions,’ etc. This is a problem, but I think there is more than one way of explaining it, even if we do not care to remember that there is, and always has been, such a thing as pure evil for its own sake.
Impromptu in Moribundia Page 9
