Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

  “What you predict is possible,” said Mr. A. deliberately, “if the subject races learn nothing from us. But the Japanese seem clever little pupils, and Germany’s industrial strength has almost overtaken Britain’s.”

  “You sort out the Prussians and leave the Nippons to us, for in our school the pupils can never become masters— their smaller skulls prevent it. I admit the German cranium is on a par with yours and mine, but it lacks flexibility. The point I want to make, Mrs. Wedderburn, is this. Another century of fighting will elapse before the world is finally civilized, but the fighting should not be regarded as warfare. When the British invade Egypt— when the States go into Mexico or Cuba—they are policing and civilizing the natives, not hurting them. Yes, the Anglo-Saxon police-force may take a century to rid the world of bullies, but we will do it. By the year 2000 the Chinese teacup-maker, Indian pearl-diver, Persian carpet-weaver, Jewish tailor, Italian opera-singer et cetera will at last pursue their occupations in peace and prosperity, for Anglo-Saxon law will have at last allowed the meek to inherit the earth.”

  There was a long pause while Dr. H. looked eagerly from me to Mr. Astley and back, but chiefly at Mr. Astley, who at last said, “Ah.”

  Dr. H. said sharply, “Sir, do you disagree with my prediction?”

  “Not if it pleases Mrs. Wedderburn.”

  Both of these clever men looked hard at me. I suddenly felt very warm and saw from my hands that I was blushing. I said awkwardly, “You said a thing that surprised me, Dr. Hooker. You said brainy people find it easier to control their evil animal instincts. I have seen and played with a lot of animals, and none of them were evil to me. A bitch with a broken leg growled and snapped while I fixed the splint, but only because I was hurting her. When she felt better she treated me like a pal. Are there many evil animals?”

  “There are NO evil animals,” said Dr. Hooker warmly, “and you are right to correct me on that point. Let me explain it another way. Human beings contain two natures, a higher and a lower. The higher nature loves clean, beautiful things: the lower one loves dirty, ugly ones. You are a well-bred young lady so have no lower impulses. You have received an Anglo-Saxon education suited to your sex and class, which has protected you from the degrading spectacle of human filth and misery. You come from Britain, where a fine police-force keeps criminals, the unemployed and other incurably dirty creatures away from places where the nobler natures, the Anglo-Saxon natures live. I hear that in Britain the lower class is predominantly Irish.”

  I said indignantly, “I am a woman of the world, Dr. Hooker. My guardian took me all round it while I was recovering from my accident. I saw all sort of people, and some wore cracked boots and patched coats and grubby underwear, just like the poor people we laugh at in Punch. But none were ever as horrid as you suggest.”

  “You have been to China and Africa?”

  “Parts of them. I have been to Cairo, in Egypt.”

  “And you have seen the fellahin whining for Baksheesh?”

  “Change the subject, Hooker!” said Mr. Astley sharply, but I would not allow that. I said, “When God took me to see the pyramids we left the hotel in the middle of a crowd. Some people were shouting words like aaa-ee, aaa-ee at the edge of the crowd, but I did not see them. What does Baksheesh mean, Dr. Hooker? I never asked at the time.”

  “If you disembark with me in Alexandria tomorrow I will show you what it means in fifteen minutes or less. The sight will shock but educate you. When you have seen it you will understand three things: the innate depravity of the unredeemed human animal; why Christ died for our sins; why God has sent the Anglo-Saxon race to purify the globe with fire and sword.”

  “You have broken your word, Hooker,” said Mr. Astley coldly. “You have not kept our bargain.”

  “I am sorry for it yet glad of it, Astley!” cried Dr. H. (and I had not seen a man so excited since Candle proposed to me and Wedder won at roulette). “Mrs. Wedderburn’s speech shows she has recovered from the worst effects of her railway accident. Though she has not regained her earliest memories her speech displays a mind as clear and logical as yours and mine, but if we do not provide the information she craves it will remain the mind of a precocious infant. You English may prefer to keep your women in that state, but in the American West we want our women to be equal partners. Do you accept my invitation to see the seamy side of Alexandria, Mrs. Wedderburn? Perhaps you could persuade your husband to come.”

  “I will accept whether my poor man comes or not,” I told him, feeling fearfully excited.

  “You come too, Astley,” said Dr. H. “Let us give our fair companion a joint Anglo-American escort.”

  Mr. A. blew out a thoughtful-looking stream of smoke, shrugged and said, “So be it.”

  I left the table at once. I needed quietness to think of all the new strange things I had heard. Maybe my cracked knob is to blame but I feel less happy since Dr. H. explained there is nothing wrong with the world which the Anglo-Saxons are not curing with fire and sword. Before now I thought everyone I met was part of the same friendly family, even when a hurt one acted like our snappish bitch. Why did you not teach me politics, God?

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  At this point Baxter’s voice faltered into silence and I saw him struggling to overcome a very deep emotion.

  “Read the next six pages for yourself,” he said suddenly, and passed them over. I give the pages here as they were given to me:

  They are printed by a photogravure process which exactly reproduces the blurring caused by tear stains, but does not show the pressure of pen strokes which often ripped right through the paper.

  “A catastrophic reversion to an earlier phase with a brisk recovery at the end,” I said. “What do the scrawls mean, Baxter? Here—take them back. Only you can decipher them.”

  Baxter sighed and in a steady, uninflected voice told me, “They say, no no no no no no no no no, help blind baby, poor little girl help help both, trampled no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no, no where my daughter, no help for blind babies poor little girls I am glad I bit Mr. Astley.”

  Baxter then laid the letter down, pulled out a handkerchief, folded it into a cushion (his handkerchiefs were a quarter the size of a bed-sheet) and pushed his face into it. For a moment I feared he was trying to smother himself, then muffled eruptions showed he was using it to absorb glandular evacuations. When he removed it his eyes were extra bright.

  “What then?” I asked impatiently. “What then? Does the next entry explain all that?”

  “No, but what happened emerges eventually. The remaining entries are written weeks or months after her romance with Harry Astley—“

  “ROMANCE!” I screamed—

  “Calm yourself, McCandless. On her side it was a Platonic affair. That it helped her mental growth is shown in the writing which suddenly becomes small, regular and upright; in her spelling which rapidly conforms to the standard dictionaries; in the separation between her entries, where a straight horizontal line replaces the playful row of stars. But her growth appears most clearly in the quality of her reflections. From now onward these blend the spiritual insights of an oriental sage with the analytical acuteness of David Hume and Adam Smith. Attend!”

  16

  Alexandria to Gibraltar: Astley’s Bitter Wisdom

  Thinking has maddened me for weeks. My one relief has been argument with Harry Astley. He says I will only find peace by embracing his bitter wisdom—and him. I want neither—except as enemies. He says cruelty to the helpless will never end because the healthy live by trampling these down. I say if this is true we must stop living so. He has given me books which he says prove this is impossible: Malthus’ Essay on Population, Darwin’s Origin of Species and Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. They make my head ache. I was changing the dressing on his hand today when he told me his wife had died a year ago, then said, “You are not legally married to Wedderburn, are you?”

  “How clever of you to guess, Mr
. Astley.”

  “Please call me Harry.”

  His hand is almost healed though the thumb is very stiff—my teeth have left a circular scar where they nearly met in the ball of it. He said thoughtfully, “That mark will be with me for ever.”

  “I am afraid so, Harry.”

  “May I regard it as an engagement ring? Will you marry me?”

  “No, Harry. I am engaged to another.”

  He asked about my fiancé so I told him of Candle. When I had finished fixing the new bandage he said he knew many women of rank and title, the Duchess of Sutherland and Princess Louise of Connaught among them, but I was the purest aristocrat he had met.

  Dr. Hooker has left the boat in Morocco without saying good-bye or asking for his New Testament. He lent it to me so I could find peace in Jesus, but there is none. Jesus was as maddened by all-over cruelty and coldness as I am. He too must have hated discovering he had to make people better all by himself. He had one advantage over me—he could do miracles. I asked Dr. Hooker how Jesus would have treated my starving little daughter with the blind baby.

  “Jesus made the blind to see,” said poor Dr. Hooker, looking uncomfortable.

  “What would Jesus have done for them if he could NOT have made them see?” I asked. “Would he have hurried past like a bad Samaritan?”

  I think that was why he left the Cut-use-off this afternoon. He does not want to live like Jesus, but unlike Harry Astley dare not say so.

  Astley, Hooker, Wedder, all made miserable by one cracked Bell. The damage to Wedder was done after I returned from Alexandria. I rushed into our cabin and wed wed wed wed him, wedding and wedding and wedding until he begged me not to, said he could give no more but he could and did—it was the only thing which stopped me thinking about what I had seen. I sickened him of weddings, sickened myself too and in the end the thoughts still came back. I brooded for days without saying a word to him. Last night my silly man burst into tears, begged to be forgiven.

  “For what?” says I. It seems he did not believe my tears and brooding were caused by the sight of beggars in Alexandria—he thought I was sulking because he had driven me to prostitution in Germany. I laughed out loud and told him I had done no such thing; that the money I had got for us was his own, taken when he fell asleep on the night when he won so much. At first he could not believe me, then he scowled straight ahead for a long time muttering “MY money! MY money!” I tried to cheer him up by starting to wed us again but he yelled “I SHALL NOT SERVE” and turned upside-down and the wrong way round with his back toward me and feet on the pillow. And all night long I heard the little whisper, “My money. My money,” coming from the bottom of the bunk.

  Harry is bad because he enjoys how cruelly folk act and suffer, wants to persuade me bad is needed. If he succeeds he will have made me bad too. I listen to him because I need to know all he knows. He is as honest as God and teaches facts God never taught—all the things I must change, so had better note down.

  WOMEN OF LEISURE— “Napoleon regarded women as the relaxation of the warrior. In England wives are treated as the public ornaments and private pleasure parks of wealthy landowners, industrialists and professional men. The joys of motherhood are closed to them, for after the pains of childbirth their offspring are caressed and cared for by servants. They are supposed to be superior to the animal pleasure of breast-feeding—supposed to be superior to the sexual act itself—yet all the time they are as much parasites, prisoners and playthings as odalisques in a Turkish harem. If an intelligent woman of this class does not find an unconventionally sensitive husband her life can be as painful as that of the women who spend years dying of slow suffocation while drudging in the Lancashire weaving-sheds. And that is why you should marry me, Bella. You will be my slave in law, but not in fact.”

  EDUCATION— “Very poor children learn to beg, lie and steal from their parents—they would hardly survive otherwise. Prosperous parents tell their children that nobody should lie, steal or kill, and that idleness and gambling are vices. They then send them to schools where they suffer if they do not disguise their thoughts and feelings and are taught to admire killers and stealers like Achilles and Ulysses, William the Conqueror and Henry the Eighth. This prepares them for life in a land where rich people use acts of parliament to deprive the poor of homes and livelihoods, where unearned incomes are increased by stock-exchange gambling, where those who own most property work least and amuse themselves by hunting, horse-racing and leading their country into battle. You find the world horrifying, Bell, because you have not been warped to fit it by a proper education.”

  KINDS OF PEOPLE— “There are three kinds of people. The happiest are the innocent who think everyone and everything basically good. Many children are like that and so were you until Hooker (very much against my will) showed you otherwise. The second and biggest kind are half-baked optimists: people with a mental conjuring trick which lets them look at hunger or mutilation without discomfort. They think the wretched deserve to suffer, or that their nation is curing—not causing—these miseries, or that God, Nature, History will make everything right one day. Doctor Hooker is one of that sort and I am glad his rhetoric did not blind you to the facts. The third and rarest sort know human life is an essentially painful disease which only death can cure. We have the strength to live consciously among those who live blindly. We are the cynics.”

  “There must be a fourth kind,” I said, “because I am no longer innocent and hate what Dr. Hooker and what you think equally.”

  “That is because you are searching for a way which does not exist.”

  “I will search as long as I live rather than be a childish fool or selfish optimist or equally selfish cynic,” I told him, “and I will make my husband a searcher too.”

  “You will be a tiresome couple.”

  HISTORY— “Big nations are created by successful plundering raids, and since most history is written by friends of the conquerors history usually suggests that the plundered were improved by their loss and should be grateful for it. Plundering happens inside countries too. King Henry the Eighth plundered the English monasteries, the only institutions in those days which provided hospitals, schools and shelter for the poor. English historians agree King Henry was greedy, hasty and violent, but did a lot of good. They belong to a class which was enriched by the church lands.”

  THE BENEFITS OF WAR— “Napoleon gave Britain our advantage as an industrial nation. To fight him all around Europe the government introduced heavier taxes which chiefly oppressed the poor, and used much of this money to buy continual supplies of uniforms, boots, guns and shipping. All kinds of factories were built. Many able-bodied men were abroad with the army, but new machines made it possible to run factories with the cheap labour of women and children. This enhanced the profits so much that we could invest in trains, iron-clads and a big new empire. We owe a lot to Boney.”

  UNEMPLOYMENT— “When the Napoleonic war ended it left so many people unemployed and hungry that a parliamentary committee met to discuss the matter—the government feared a revolution. A socialist factory owner called Robert Owen suggested that every firm or business whose profits exceeded five per cent should spend the extra money on the better feeding, housing and schooling of their workers, instead of using it to undercut competitors. However, the Malthusians proved that the better you feed the poor the more they breed. Poverty, hunger and disease may drive some people to steal loaves from bakeries and dream of revolutions, but make revolutions less likely by weakening the bodies of the desperately poor and keeping down their number through infant mortalities. Do not shudder, Bell. What Britain needed—and got!—were military barracks beside every industrial city, a strong police-force, huge new jails; also poor-houses where children are divided from parents and husbands from wives—places so deliberately grim that people with a spark of self-respect spend their last few pennies on cheap gin and die of exposure in ditches rather than enter them. That is how we have organized the world�
�s richest industrial nation and it works very well.”

  FREEDOM— “I am sure there was no word for freedom before slavery was invented. The old Greeks had every sort of government—monarchies, aristocracies, plutocracies, democracies—and argued fiercely about which system gave people most freedom, but all of them kept slaves. So did the ancient Roman republic. So did the stout squires who founded the U.S.A. Yes, the only sure definition of freedom is non-slavery. You may have heard it in a popular song:

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves!

  Britons never never never will be slaves!

  In the days of Good Queen Bess we English were so disgusted by the cruel way the Spaniards enslaved the American Indians that we plundered their treasure ships whether at war with them or not. In 1562 Sir John Hawkyns (who became paymaster of the navy and hero of the Armada fight) started the British slave trade by stealing black slaves from the Portuguese in Africa and selling them to the Spaniards in the New World. Parliament made that trade a criminal offence in 1811.”

  “Good!” I said, “and now the Americans have abolished it too.”

  “Yes. It only profited their southern farmers. Modem industry finds it cheaper to hire hands for days or weeks—when not needed they are free to beg work from other masters. When many free men are begging for work the masters are free to lower wages.”