Land Under England

by Joseph O'Neill

  He paused, when I had finished, as if he were trying to grasp the feelings that lay behind my words. Then his message came clearly again:

  “The significance of even the finest individual is slight, that of the poorer individuals slighter still, compared to the significance of the people as a whole. We could not allow the continued existence of our people to be jeopardised and destroyed for the sake of the petty significance of individuals, each trying to express his own importance, as our fathers did.

  “Even if their acts had been based on proper motives instead of the improper ones that moved them, we could not have permitted that. But their motives were petty ones, like the motive that has caused you to speak in that fashion—mere desires to exhibit their individuality, to show their freedom, to avoid humiliation, to produce love, fear, and other little results, so that they were always driven by a morbid impulse to effort, a mania of effort which was exhausting for themselves and others.

  “Now we give each individual his proper significance from the early stages, by assigning to him definitely the task that he has to perform, enabling him to perform it, and not only preventing any other persons from interfering with him, but pooling the competence of all in one co-operative mind.”

  He paused again, reading my thoughts, then went on:

  “If you become one with us, you will not be, as you are now, a prey to every evil force that surrounds you. You will gain the fullest community with people of the highest powers. You have come here because you need such community, the life and protection it gives those who are in it.”

  “No! No!” I cried. “I have come here for one thing alone—because I want to find my father.”

  “Why do you want to find him,” came the answer, “except because you are seeking for depth of life and emotion? He cannot give it to you. No one person can give it to you. If you remain as you are, you will always be a prey to fear and loss, baffled and beaten by your own insignificance.

  “Like most human beings, you need depth of emotion to give your life a meaning. Like most human beings, you have not sufficient power to enable you to draw on it by yourself or to concentrate it on an object that will not fail you in the end.”

  His message grew faint, died away. My mind was ceasing to receive it.

  It needed to receive it no longer. It knew that it was true.

  It was no longer recording it, because it was itself producing the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings. I could not do without these people. I could not live alone, unfulfilled, unprotected.

  I saw my life as something miserably petty and empty, a little thing surrounded by great powers of evil, from which it must be protected. I must become one with them.

  I was trembling with dread.

  His message was coming to me now, not through thought, but through feeling.

  “We will save you. We will take you into the shelter of our deep, unchanging situation, through which no fear, no loss can come to you. We will absorb you into our unity———”

  Suddenly my mind recoiled.

  Absorb me! No! Never! What was that dreadful thing that came with that thought? Ah! It was the faces, the dead eyes, the other eyes empty of everything too. No! That way was death.

  I drew myself upward. I had been crouching, cowering under the fear that was coming to me. What was this dread that was oppressing me? They were hypnotising me, frightening me. There was nothing to be afraid of, nothing but themselves. They were the thing to fear.

  I flung my head back and stared at the teacher.

  He was staring at me fixedly, but I could feel no power coming to me from him, no feeling.

  A wave of fear seemed to be throbbing through me, but it was not coming from him. He was staring at me, but he was only reading my thoughts.

  My mind was under the scrutiny of his mind, but not under the influence of his will. He had no grip over it. As far as he was concerned, it might as well have been in contact with a sort of mental X-ray, and yet there was something that was filling me with a deep dread. He was offering me help, protection against the thing that was threatening me. That was all. He was not causing it.

  I looked round at the faces of the others. They were not doing it either. They were all concentrated, but they were concentrated in an empty, impassive way. My mind was not even within range of their thoughts.

  As far as I was concerned, they were non-existent, not expressing in the slightest way any intentness, yet I was in the midst of a storm of disturbance.

  Then I understood. Whatever it was that was perturbing me was not coming from any one of them, but from them all as a group.

  Their emotion was seizing me, compelling me to be one with it, to be possessed by it.

  I put forth the strongest effort of my will. But what was there to resist? Nothing.

  Yes! This dread, this deep fear.

  I struggled against it. It was as if I were dragging myself physically from a wave that was engulfing me; only the drag and pull of this wave was not on my body, but on my emotion.

  I glared round at them in a sudden rage. Then, as suddenly, I realised the futility of my anger. Not one of them existed as a live force, as far as I was concerned. Each was nothing in himself or herself—a mere nullity, stripped naked, cleared of all individual life, of all intentions, of every shred and vestige of attitude or behaviour to me. This dread that was engulfing me was a wave of hysteria welling up in myself, generated in me by some deep feeling that was coming to me from them, like the hysteria of an angry mob.

  But how could such a wave of hysteria come from that group that had no feelings, not even the shadow of feeling, nothing but the frozen calm of total immobility?

  Suddenly I understood. This hypnotic calm was the result of the most profound form of hysteria, a hysteria so deep and compelling that it had drowned the personality. This thing that was invading me and oppressing me, compelling me to conform to it—this force that was emanating from the group—was a wave of feeling that was welling up from depths of fear; the panic, not of an individual, but of a whole race, a permanent dread that had seized the depths of its life. It was through this that rulers, driven mad by it themselves, had been able to hypnotise a nation.

  Now it was beating on me, calling upon that hidden fear that lies in the depths of the mind of every man, and of which most men, happily, never become aware. It was calling this nameless dread from the depths of my own mind. It was a mass-agony that was encompassing me, engulfing me, drowning my personality in its waves.

  I pulled myself together. Already I felt freer. It was receding.

  Now that I understood it, I would not give way. It would not get me, any more than the impact of one of their single master-minds would hypnotise me. They would not get me either way.

  I kept on affirming this to myself. If it got me, I should be like a man engulfing in a marsh.

  Even though I might escape in the end, I should be maimed—distorted.

  I called on all my memories and my associations to help me. I must get back to my mother, to the sunlight.

  I recalled the story of the man who had found himself in a mob that had lynched a negro and who had never recovered from it, remaining insane—permanently contorted in his mind—not by reason of the fact that he had been swept into some sort of complicity with a deed that he loathed, but because the pulsation of feeling that had come from the mob, and had struck him like a wave, had permanently twisted his mind.

  I wrenched my body round with an effort towards the opening of the enclosure and began to walk towards it.

  Immediately I felt free—physically free, and almost free of fear.

  At the opening I turned and looked back. Neither the teacher nor the class seemed aware of my going.

  I walked out. My guide appeared beside me and led me away.

  I was panting like a quarry that has just escaped from the hounds, but my breath was coming easier with every step.

  We were going into an enclosure for eating.


  I breathed more freely. Once again they had almost got me, but I understood them now. I understood and I pitied them. It was not they that had oppressed me. It was their pitiful fear.

  They had no powers over me, if I could only hold down the fear that lay in the depths of my own mind.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mind-Murder

  FOR FIVE MORE of their days they brought me around the schools, but the critical period had passed. Fear encompassed me, pressed in on me, but I was not at any time in serious danger of being overcome by it.

  The understanding that had come to me on the second day had given me a psychological strength to meet it, and I walked amongst them much more securely.

  It was clear now that their system had arisen from the deep fear of the darkness, and the forces of destruction and death that they dreaded in the darkness. Under the pressure of this fear they had gradually withdrawn themselves from ordinary life by putting away all thought and feeling about everything except the things that were needed to protect them.

  When they had once entered on this downward course, the rest of their story was easy to understand. The system that had been created by their fear grew, until, in the end, it began to function for its own sake and to suppress, not merely irrelevant or unnecessary things, but all tendencies, emotions, actions, whether essential or not, so that it might control completely the social, mental, and emotional life of its people.

  The driving-force behind it was the throb of this dread, the mass-hysteria of the race, that kept welling up through the ever-present darkness. It was that fear that had been encompassing me in the schools and in all their gatherings, calling to the dread and the hysteria that lay deep in the abysses of my subconscious mind, urging, compelling me to come into this shelter they had built, away from the storms and agonies of individuality.

  This was the force on which the Master of Knowledge had counted to draw me into their orbit. It might have done so if I had been of a more sensitive, a less tough and resistant, fibre. It had failed, and, now that I had a rational attitude to it, as well as experience of its effects, it would have little chance of succeeding, unless other forces, of which I knew nothing, were brought into action.

  If they were to get me, they would have to seize me through the attack of a powerful individual mind—a mind, like that of the Master of Knowledge, so overwhelming in its powers of concentration that I should not be able to resist.

  That attack was coming. The Master had left me in little doubt about it.

  At the end of my respite I should have to meet the assault of his mind, and that might mean either madness or death.

  The alternative was absorption, and I felt that, if I were driven to it, I should certainly choose death rather than live as an automaton.

  If only I could find my father, I felt that I should make some headway in my struggle to rescue him and myself from this peril, but, although every hour that passed was bringing the end of my respite nearer, I was making no progress in my quest.

  During the days I spent in the schools I had not succeeded in finding the slightest clue that could help me to trace him. In that, the chief thing that I had hoped to gain from my visits, they were yielding me nothing, and, before the end even of the third day, it became obvious to me that they could never yield me anything.

  Even if the teachers had known something about my father, they could not have given me the information, since they had no volition other than that supplied them by the State. But, even if they had volition of their own, they had not, and could not have, any knowledge of him, since he did not come within the radius of their particular task.

  Even if they had ever met him, they would have been aware of him only to the extent required for the explanation of their work to him. Any memory or knowledge of him would have been sectional, and my attempts to get information from them about him or any other matter unrelated to their task could, therefore, have no result.

  So I went my round in a cold waiting mood, with the end drawing in on me.

  If it were not that I knew that my father was somewhere amongst them, I should have tried to escape and face whatever ordeals my attempts might bring upon me, whether it succeeded or failed. But, with my father in their clutches, any attempt to escape was out of the question. It would be too great a desertion and betrayal. It might even worsen his fate, whatever that was. That was no way out. I must remain, and await whatever was in store for me.

  Had I, while waiting and watching, been able to learn something of the methods by which the Masters seized domination over the minds of men, it would have given me some hope. The higher schools were the places where I could see these methods at work, but, even where the teachers could give me some aid, I had made no progress.

  I saw clearly the importance of trying to get an insight into their methods. I realised that, if I could do so, it might enable me to offer a better resistance when they turned these methods against myself. With this in my mind, I applied myself as best I could during the last five days in the schools to discover the actual manner in which they obtained such power over others, but, in spite of all my efforts, I failed to grasp their processes.

  Not that they made any attempt to conceal them from me. On the contrary, they answered all my questions, in so far as they could understand them, but their explanations were of little use, since I could not see their processes in operation owing to the fact that, at this stage of the training, the directions and the work were done without words.

  There were, they told me, exercises in isolating the attention, checking and controlling tendencies and holding them in suspense, atrophying and destroying thought and emotion, developing selected powers, receiving or conveying thoughts, focusing the will on the minds and wills of others. Their information stopped at that.

  If I had been willing to submit myself to their operations I should have some experience of how they translated their methods into acts. Otherwise I could obtain no real knowledge of them.

  I could see that their knowledge of tendencies, psychic reflexes, and the various automatic reactions of the mind, made it possible for them to turn into account the different forms of suggestion which produce an automatic functioning of this or that tendency. The power they showed in handling these automatisms of the mind deepened my apprehensions, but of its secrets I could learn nothing.

  In the schools for the workers I saw them take control of the mind of the victim as a surgeon takes control of a body under an ansesthetic, and remove or atrophy every capacity, tendency, interest, or emotion that was not necessary for the work that he or she had to do.

  In the higher-grade schools I saw them isolating the will, and developing it to a remarkable degree by the destruction of all those individual reactions and collateral thoughts and feelings that the events of life call up in normal human beings, and that make life so rich and complex. In these latter schools also I saw the pupils being trained to focus their will on the wills of lower-grade pupils, who were brought there specially to be experimented on and have their minds vivisected.

  In both schools there were lessons of the most profound importance to me, if I could have learned them, but I could not learn without submitting myself to the processes, and I did not dare to do so.

  The result was that, even from the point of view of discovering the secret of their powers, I learned nothing in the schools that I could have turned to the slightest use as a protection. I learned enough merely to realise the thoroughness and effectiveness of their methods, and to marvel that such efficiency and such slavery could be produced in man even by the hysteria of overwhelming fear.

  Their calm was for me no longer a sinister symbol of their power, but a warning as to the depths of flight into which panic can drive the mind of man. It made me long, while I was in those silent schools, for anything that would express the protest of individual life. Better the most senseless form of life than that flight from it.

  It was in those schools that I first began to understa
nd, with sympathy, the aspects of our social life that had seemed to me most absurd on earth—our noisy clamour, our need for the sensational, all those pathetic attempts of ours to obtain stimulation to face life and its end, by social gatherings, gambling, drink, love-making, games, competition in work and play; our mania for making ourselves prominent, for producing melodramatic outbursts, for society taboos, for belonging to something exclusive or secret or mysterious.

  All such attempts of our humanity to strengthen and emphasise our individual position, and to call up latent powers in ourselves to ward off the forces of destruction and darkness—all these now became dear and significant to me, as I stared into the abyss into which those men had fallen, through taking the opposite road. That, indeed, was one of the chief things that I learned in those extraordinary schools.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Fuel Supply

  TOWARDS THE END of my visit to the schools I had begun to feel that my respite was drawing to a close.

  Though nobody that I had met had seemed to watch me, I had little doubt that the Masters of Knowledge would by now have come to the conclusion that their plans for drawing me into their system, through the atmosphere of the schools, had failed; and, since the schools were their most potent centres of influence, I felt that they would hardly trouble to show me any other part of their system before dealing in other ways with my resistance.

  I almost hoped that this would be the case. I had by now realised fully that I had no chance of getting any information about my father, and very little chance of getting any other sort of information of any practical value, and when, on the sixth day, I was told that I was to be brought to see the industrial quarters, the news aroused little hope and little interest.

  It meant that I was to have a further respite, but, in the circumstances, a further respite merely meant further suspense.

  If the teachers could not give me any information about my father, what possibility was there of my being able to get it from the industrial grades, who were bound to be much more circumscribed in their knowledge than the teachers, and of much lower grade of intelligence? And, if I could get no information and make no progress, what was the use of the postponement of that final struggle that was coming upon me?