Land Under England

by Joseph O'Neill

  Then, as I stood there, passive in my disillusionment, her message was able to come through to me, and, with a shock, I began to realise the purport of it. I was getting contact now of a very different sort from that which I was seeking. I was getting contact with the system, an impact from it that was arousing me into a state of full awareness.

  The woman who was standing in front of me was explaining that the purpose of her work was the destruction, in the children placed under her care, of all the essential life of childhood—its joyous curiosity, its wakening intelligence, all that upward surge of life that gives childhood the glory and the beauty of the awakening spring. It was her task, and the task of her fellow-teachers, to root up and destroy the deepest sources of those torrents of vitality.

  I stared at her in amazement. Such a message from so gentle a person was almost incredible.

  She realised nothing of my thoughts, or, if she did, she gave no sign.

  Her message went on, explaining that the music and the dancing were part of the machinery by which the children were drugged into hypnotic suggestion—that the amount of knowledge that was taught was the minimum necessary for the work the pupil would have to do in life. But my mind was becoming too disturbed to record the message clearly. She had ceased to exist for me as any kind of human being, but she had come to life as the priestess of another Moloch.

  I can remember no more of her explanation. Up to this point my memory of everything is quite clear, but from this stage I find it difficult to recall the detailed happenings. I cannot remember, for instance, leaving that enclosure, nor can I remember distinctly my experiences in the other school enclosures that I visited after the first. The reason for this lack of clear memory of events is that something peculiar had begun to happen to myself. It was not merely that my mind was getting clouded with feeling. It was also being confused by fear—not a fear of the system that I was seeing in its workings, but of something deeper.

  My first feeling was, as I have said, a natural revulsion produced by the explanation of the system. But, almost immediately, this feeling of revulsion began to give place to a quite different feeling—a vague but very deep fear of something else that I could not define. It was as if some inherited dread, of which I had never before been aware, was coming up from the depths of my subconsciousness, so that my mind saw everything through a cloud.

  Looking back now, I feel as if an exhalation from some abysmal swamp of the subconscious had taken the place of the ordinary clear atmosphere in which the mind does its work. Whatever it was that caused it, my mind was being seized by panic.

  I found myself moving from school to school like a man who is conscious of some dreadful thing that encompasses him, and is looking on all sides for a road of escape.

  Through the miasma in which I moved I saw the faces of the teachers appearing and disappearing like faces in a dream. They may have been sending messages to me, trying to communicate the explanations of their system, as the first teacher had done. If they did so, I cannot recall any individual message; but, while I can remember no contact with the mind of any one of them, I began to feel a profound conviction that they alone, and the system they stood for, could save me from the thing that threatened me.

  Now at last I understood this and the great thing that they had accomplished.

  Even though I was not getting their explanations, because of the trouble in my mind, the full meaning of their system and of their work was coming to me from them, as if I had entered into their minds. But I was receiving something else from them also—something deeper than knowledge-some emanation of encouragement and protection as if they were impregnating me with their belief, their intense belief, that in their system and in it alone could I find safety.

  When I try to analyse it now, I cannot tell how I was being possessed by this body of conviction, except that I seemed to be receiving it, not through the mind, but through the influence of some pulsation of deep emotion that was welling up from them.

  I know, however, that at every new enclosure to which I was brought I felt the need of them more strongly.

  I felt myself longing to be one with them, to find myself in the shelter that they had provided for me, to be absorbed.

  “Absorbed!” My mind suddenly recoiled from the thought. What was happening to me?

  This urge to run to earth, to give myself up to them—they were hypnotising me!

  The shock of the thought brought me to myself.

  What was happening to me? This dread that was coming up in my mind—what was it that I was afraid of? Nothing. A mere phantom.

  They were causing it in some way, drugging me, frightening me into being one with them. It was they who were the danger—their system that was seeking to seize me, enslave me, possess me.

  They were creating phantoms of fear, mere phantoms.

  Already, now that I was becoming conscious of their unreality, the fears had begun to shrink. They were not gone, but they were not so overpowering.

  There was nothing to be afraid of but these people themselves. I must fight them with all my strength, hold on to the truth against them. Vehemently I told myself again that my doubts were nothing, mere shadows; that it was the people round me that were producing them, in order to frighten me into being one of them; that, if I yielded, I should soon be travelling the most ghastly road ever trodden by a man—the slave of creatures who were mere monsters of concentration, without pity or love or the knowledge that can come only from these things.

  I kept repeating to myself that there was but one thing left for me to do if I were to escape madness—to find my father as soon as possible and rescue him and myself.

  Gradually the alarm died away. My mind cleared. I felt physically free.

  I turned and walked out of the enclosure.

  The drag on my mind ceased. I felt myself panting like a man who has been running away from some danger.

  I was brought to myself by a touch on my arm. The guide who had led me to the schools, or some similar person, was standing beside me.

  At first I thought that he wanted to bring me back. I resolved not to go, but he turned in the opposite direction, and I followed him. I was breathing more freely. The jaws of the trap had almost closed on me, but I had escaped. The trouble that had lain like a heavy weight on my mind was gone.

  I raised my head and looked round me. We were coming to a very large enclosure, brightly lit. In front of us a gateway opened into it. We crossed the path. I thought that it might be another of the schools, and I stopped at the entrance.

  It was not a school but an enormous square in which a great number of men were sitting at tables, eating.

  I went in. The tables were in long parallel rows, and my guide brought me to a vacant space in the row nearest to us and sat down, motioning me to sit beside him.

  I felt a sense of liberation, of great relief.

  I hadn’t expected that danger, and so I had almost been trapped. It would not be so easy for them to get me, now that I was forewarned, but, even here, I must watch.

  I looked closely at the faces of those nearest to me. They were automatons. There was not a single concentrated face to be seen, nor even the semblance of power in one of them. There could be no serious danger here.

  I breathed more freely.

  After the schools the place looked human and almost familiar. There were no cloths on the tables, which were of some sort of soft-looking wood, but they were very clean, and the whole scene would have looked comforting and familiar were it not for the row of blank, silent faces, like faces from which the eyes had been plucked, and the awareness of those lives from which the minds had been torn with the eyes.

  I dragged my mind away from its thoughts and tried to concentrate it on outer things.

  A man brought us basins to wash our hands, and towels to dry them. After that, servers brought round wooden plates with the same sort of pale meat on them and a collection of vegetable stuffs. There was a knife beside my plate, and
with the help of the knife I began to eat.

  The food was hot and satisfying, and though here, as on the ship, I found it tasteless compared with our food on earth, the eating of it helped me in my effort to return to a normal condition.

  The memory of that strange fear which I had felt in the schools was still in my mind. I tried to shake it off. I spoke to my guide, who was eating beside me. I have no memory of what I said, but I know that it was a question about something. He merely stared at me when I asked the question, as if the noise of my voice mildly surprised him, and made no answer.

  Even to myself my voice sounded loud and absurd in that silence, as when one talks aloud deliberately when alone. But, though the people at the table actually looked towards me when I spoke, they showed no real sign of surprise or of any human feeling in their eyes. Indeed, though they looked towards me as the source of the sound, they gave the impression of looking through me, as if I were invisible.

  I felt inclined to cry out, to laugh, to produce any sort of noise that would fill the emptiness and drive away that fear that seemed to be hovering in it.

  There was nothing visible to prevent me, no person of Will or Knowledge to constrain me, yet I felt constrained to silence, as if the communal atmosphere of the place had as compelling an effect on me as the hypnotising will of a single powerful personality.

  This was no collection of powerful single forces like the collection of teachers in the schools.

  It was evident from the faces near me that I was in the presence of a crowd of the lower type of automatons. The feeling of undefined dread was gone. Yet, though the atmosphere these people were creating was not as powerful and sinister as that of the schools, some influence that emanated from them as a body was fettering me, as if a force had fused them into a single organic unit and was now working upon me, from them, to draw me into its orbit.

  After the powerful pull that had been exerted on me in the schools, I felt this constricting atmosphere less than I had done on the ship, but it was sufficiently powerful to force me to conform outwardly to its rhythm. I made no more effort to break through that circle that enclosed me or to detach any other from its influence, but finished my meal in silence.

  When I had finished, my guide got up and motioned me to follow him out. We came on to the paths between the enclosures again, and, keeping to the right, arrived in a short time at a very large enclosure from which a soft music was coming.

  We passed through an opening and found ourselves in a very large space, paved with stone and with baths let into the floor, and basins, with running water, along the walls.

  Immediately my spirits arose. This was the first instance where I had met modern appliances and anything approaching a house. It is true there was no roof, and the walls were not high, but the space was a room excellently floored, and furnished with all bathroom necessities, and the sight of these familiar things had a healing and restoring effect on my mind.

  There were only men in the room, and several of them were lying naked in the baths. I went over to one that was empty and, on turning a sort of metal tap, water gushed forth.

  I looked at my guide. He motioned towards a little cubicle at the end of the bath. I went to it, and found a mixture of dressing-room and lavatory such as I had found on the ship.

  I noticed that here, too, everything was scrupulously clean, and, indeed, under the soft greenish light, the room looked like a scene in fairyland.

  To me, whose whole associational self was longing for something like the dwellings of men on the upper earth, it was an unexpected relief to be back again in rooms with floors and walls and baths. The music that I had heard outside the enclosure filled the air with a dreamy softness. My mind, exhausted by the emotions of the day, had fallen into itself. It was becoming numbed into calmness, and an impelling desire to sleep was coming over me.

  At the back of the cubicle there was an opening, and, when I looked through this, I saw a very big enclosure with couches, on which men were sleeping.

  A man came up and motioned me to a low bed with some silken stuff over it. I went to it and lay down.

  So ended my first day in that strange city where there were neither streets nor houses nor buying nor selling nor transport of any sort, nor any animals except human beings, nor indeed any human beings in our sense of the word. Yet in it there were government and education so fundamental that they had seized on profound abysses of the mind and drawn forth from them forces that remain hidden in men of the upper earth.

  I was surrounded now by its silence, its extinguishing silence, which made the life of men on earth seem a noisy heap of selfishness and absurdities and vulgarities, without manners or meaning.

  Those were two of the menacing things about it, that stillness—a quietness such as humanity has never known—and the forces that lurked in the silence, like wild beasts in the darkness. I could feel it all round me, encompassing me, compelling me. I felt as a creature of the upper earth might feel in the depths of the ocean, and, under the pressure of these depths, subjected to a calm that was more violent than the worst storm. It was through the silence that they were invading me and shaking my mind.

  The thing was so preposterous that I felt easier. The idea that this dumb show, or the silent depths that lay beneath—whatever powers they had dragged up from the primordial abysses— could draw me away from the life of men, the multitudinous sunlit life of humanity that was racing through my body, was so preposterous that it could not trouble me.

  But they had seized my father. If what they had told me was true, he had willingly allowed himself to be sucked into the depths of this human swamp, and, if I yielded, they would overpower me and drag me down into it with them. Whether I yielded or not, they would try to drag me down. I must keep calm. There was only one way in which I could defeat them—by knowledge. There was no other way of escape. No use dashing myself against the hard fact that they had me, and they would hold me, unless I could get enough of their own knowledge to use against them.

  They were giving me a chance to get this knowledge, because they were so circumscribed by their own feelings that they could not imagine their hypnotic tentacles failing to get me if I were long enough under the influence of their powers.

  They would prefer me to come in of myself, the Master of Knowledge had told me. That was why I had been sent to the schools. These were the shapers, the creators of desires. It was in them that the atmosphere which was to destroy and remake me was stored. I had felt its powers and had barely escaped….

  Should I be able to escape the second time? I thought it likely. I had already escaped when I had been taken unawares. That was a thing to hearten me. They had failed to gauge my full powers. That should be a help to me. It betrayed a weakness in their strength. If I got to know more about them, I might find other weaknesses. They might not be as formidable as I had assumed from their silence and calm. They had penetrated to depths of which I knew nothing, but there were resources in the individual mind of which they were not aware, or which they had forgotten.

  I must crush down my feelings. That was the mood through which they would try to get me, if I gave way to feeling. I must keep away from feeling and try to get knowledge, see everything I could, learn everything.

  I was again staggered to think that only a week ago I had been living the life of earth. It seemed unbelievable that, above that dome of darkness over my head, men and women of my own race were still living in the sunlight, working and playing, travelling in trains, reading newspapers!

  Perhaps it was night-time, and they were hurrying to dances, to theatres, or sitting happily round their own firesides, while I, who had been one of them, was now lying in the grip of this monstrous thing bred of the primeval darkness and the dreadful abysses of the human mind.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I Resist Invasion

  I THINK that I must have lain on that bed for a long time, for, when I awoke, I felt as if many days had passed. Also I felt extraordinarily
refreshed. There was that same electric quality in the air of the underworld which had a most bracing effect on my nerves, whenever I could fling off the trouble and fears produced by my situation.

  When I awoke now I felt this stimulation. I did not awake, as on other ‘‘mornings,” to a dream of the upper earth from which my mind had to be translated into a very different reality. I woke to an immediate realisation of my position. I remembered my experience of the previous day. In my present calmer mood I could hardly believe that it had been real. It seemed strange that I should have felt such panic or experienced such a craving to give myself up to these people. Yet my whole experience of them hitherto was so fantastically unlike all other experience that nothing was incredible.

  One thing was certain—I must be constantly on my guard. If I allowed myself to be shaken, to be hypnotised into panic or hysteria, they would have me at their mercy. I must keep calm, guard myself against their atmosphere, but not allow myself to be frightened by it. I must avoid emotion, gather knowledge as to the extent of their powers and their resources, try to get some clue to the whereabouts of my father.

  I had already learned that he was still alive—changed, according to them; transformed in such a way that he had lost his identity, but still alive. If I could only find him, I might re-awaken his memories, re-create his individuality, if indeed it were lost. But it might not be lost. He might have merely taken refuge in pretence. If that were so and I could find him, he might have knowledge that would enable both of us to escape.

  Perhaps he was quite near me, waiting for me. He would know that I would not have left him to his fate.

  But how to go about finding him? I must tackle that problem at once. I must put away all fear. I must learn at once everything that I could about this new world and its people, in order that I might start my quest. Every day lost might prove an irreparable loss, since I was only on respite, and I was up against an undefined time-limit which might be near or distant.