The Mouse That Roared

by Leonard Wibberley

  To her surprise it was David Benter, Dilutionist leader and acknowledged spokesman of the working class, who raised the strongest objection to the plan which took the rest of the delegates completely by surprise. He came of sturdy yeoman stock, and one of his ancestors had accompanied Sir Roger Fenwick when the castle in which they were now sitting was stormed and the duchy founded.

  “My lady,” he said, shaking his big head solemnly, “it will not do. Even if we obtained the loan, we could not pay back the money and so would forfeit some of our independence by being in the debt of another nation. Your ancestors and mine, Your Highness, fought to make this an independent country. It is not a big one. But it is as free as any in the world, and has been free longer than most. It would not be right to lose any of that freedom now. Our forefathers passed liberty onto us with the land we were born in, and it is the part of free men to pass the same liberty on to their children, though we all must live in rags to do it.”

  “But the Americans never take over any of the lands of the nations they lend money to, nor do they insist upon getting the money back,” said Mountjoy. “They are quite different from any other people in the world in this respect. For some reason, which I don’t understand, they are content with their own country and don’t want anybody else’s. So we would be in no danger if we borrowed a large sum from them to save Grand Fenwick from Communism. I move that we accept the suggestion from the throne and organize a Communist party for the purpose of obtaining money from the United States of America.”

  There was an hour more of debate before Mountjoy could get the matter put to a vote. The division found six in favour of the proposal and four against it and the motion was carried.

  “Now,” said the Duchess, pleased at the success of her first test in the position of leader of her people, “who shall we get to be chief of the Communists?”

  “It must be someone from Grand Fenwick,” said Benter, solemnly. “You can’t trust those foreign Communists at all. They have no patriotism even for the place that they come from.”

  “We could ask Tully Bascomb,” said Mountjoy. “He is always against everything, and might be persuaded to be for Communism and against Grand Fenwick if we convinced him that he was really for Grand Fenwick and against Communism. I humbly submit that the leader of the Dilutionist party and myself form a bi-partisan delegation of two to persuade him that he can show no higher patriotism to Grand Fenwick than becoming a Communist and advocating the overthrow of the nation.”

  The Duchess Gloriana XII put a pretty finger to her pretty cheek in deep thought.

  “No,” she said. “On so delicate a mission as this, I believe I should go myself. You and Mr. Benter might be too successful and make a real Communist out of Mr. Bascomb.”

  CHAPTER II

  Tully Bascomb lived in a small and secluded cottage on the outskirts of Fenwick Forest. It was two miles from the City of Fenwick which clustered around the castle and in which most of the duchy’s subjects lived.

  The forest was a national preserve. Perhaps it is really too much to call it a forest, for it comprised no more than five hundred acres, so that anyone who was not from Grand Fenwick would call it a wood, or perhaps even a copse.

  But Grand Fenwick was as proud of its five hundred wooded acres as if it were as large and as varied as the redwood forests of California. The forest had indeed all the features of far more imposing preserves. It counted fifty different varieties of trees, a waterfall twenty feet high, a haunted oak where a mad huntsman had hanged himself, and three miles of walks and paths which were really the same walk and path winding around within a few feet of itself, each portion carefully concealed from the rest by trees and bushes.

  Tully Bascomb was the chief forest ranger of Grand Fenwick. The title suggests a staff of forest rangers of lower degree, and, indeed, he had a staff of one--his father, Pierce Bascomb. The two had lived together on the outskirts of the forest for the whole of Tully’s twenty-eight years, the father resigning the post of chief forest ranger in favour of his son, both to provide him with employment and to insure the preservation of the forest when he died.

  The elder Bascomb, bespectacled, tall, and lean, with eyebrows so bushy that they more than compensated for the lack of a vestige of hair on his pate, was among Grand Fenwick’s most distinguished citizens. He was the only living author in the whole duchy, which boasted but two authors in all its history. His Migratory Birds of Grand Fenwick was held to be a work of the greatest learning, and had been published by popular subscription, while his Grand Fenwick Birds of Prey and Fenwickian Songbirds were reckoned works the equal of anything published in Europe.

  Some quibble had once been raised by an American ornithologist that a nation no more than five miles long and three wide could hardly claim to have any native birds. All, he had been bold enough to assert, must be birds which came from other countries, stopping in Grand Fenwick only for a short while on their way to other places. To this Pierce Bascomb had replied, in a paper addressed to the Audubon Society and published by them, that the only being who could claim to pass with authority on the nationality of a bird, was the bird itself. On the same basis it might be argued that there were no British birds and no American birds, although innumerable books had been written, published, and generally accepted which assigned the nationality of these two countries to the bird life to be found in them.

  That being so, Grand Fenwick could claim to have a native bird life with the same amount of justice as any other nation, however large it might be. The discussion was thereupon dropped and Pierce Bascomb’s books on the bird life of Grand Fenwick accepted.

  Nor was this the sum total of the achievements of the great literary man of the duchy. He had also published three books dealing with the flora of the nation, and although the total circulation of all his works was less than five thousand copies, he was, next to the Duchess Gloriana XII, Grand Fenwick’s most revered and beloved citizen.

  His son, Tully, however, though widely quoted and regarded as the philosopher and wit of the country, was not held in the same esteem as his father. Partially this was due to the fact that he had no respect for anyone’s opinion, not even his own. He had but to hear a statement to deny it, or if not deny it, at least demand that it be examined scrupulously to see whether it was true or false. Also he was of a roving nature. He had not only been to France and to Switzerland, but even to Italy and England and twice to the United States of America. And all this journeying, far beyond the means of the richest of citizens, he had accomplished without a penny in his pocket.

  He would turn the charge of the national forest over to his father and, with no more credit in the world than a quick tongue and a suit of clothes, leave for some distant part for a month, six months or even a year or two.

  Anyone who left Grand Fenwick to live abroad even for a short while was suspected of lacking loyalty to his homeland, although he might achieve some esteem as a traveller, and there had at one time been a movement to exclude Tully altogether from the country as unworthy to be a citizen. Only the eminence of his father prevented the movement from succeeding, but his position was still one of half citizen and half alien.

  All these things the Duchess Gloriana XII thought of as she rode her ducal bicycle from the castle to Tully’s cottage on the fringe of the forest. She herself could not make up her mind whether she liked Tully or she didn’t. Partially, she had to admit this was the reason why she had elected to see him about the Communist proposal instead of entrusting the matter to the Count of Mountjoy and Benter. It would be a good opportunity for finding out exactly what she did feel about him.

  He was not physically her ideal of a man, she told herself. He had his father’s bushy eyebrows and a rather prominent nose. He was tall and tended to stoop and his limbs seemed to be at odds with each other, as if his frame had been constructed of assorted joints, not one of which was the mate to the other. Also he had a most impolite way of looking you straight in the eyes as if searching
for a hidden motive in even the most innocent conversation. And thinking of this, the Duchess decided that she would come straight to the point in her interview with Tully.

  She found him in the kitchen of the cottage, a leather apron around his waist, soling a pair of stout boots at a cobbler’s last. He rose as she entered, beckoned her to a chair with his hammer, and then took a handful of nails out of his mouth.

  “I was expecting you, Your Grace,” he said, when she was seated. “What can I do for you?”

  “What do you mean, you were expecting me?” Gloriana demanded, colouring a little with pique. “Did somebody tell you I was coming?”

  “No. But the last, election was a draw between the Dilutionists and the Anti-Dilutionists. It is quite impossible for a democracy to work without one side imposing its will on the other. So although you have popular representation, in its truest form, you haven’t got a government. In such circumstances it is usual for someone to form a third party, drawing on voters from both sides. The thing has been going on in France for so long that nobody can say what any particular party stands for. The next step is usually a dictatorship. I presume you want me to form a third party.”

  Gloriana was so taken aback and indeed hurt at being anticipated in this manner that for a minute she couldn’t say anything. She felt cheated. She had wanted to surprise Tully with the plan to form a third party and he had taken the whole éclat of the thing away by telling her of it himself. She decided there and then that she was sure she didn’t like him.

  “Well,” she said at last, “that’s perfectly true. I do want you to form a third party. But I don’t want it to be a successful party. At least, I don’t want it to be really successful, but only to appear successful. You see, we’re short of money.”

  “Who isn’t?” said Tully. “As you see, I was mending my own shoes when you called, though it’s so interesting a job, now I know how, that I don’t know why anybody should pay someone else to do the work. If Your Grace is in need of the services of a cobbler, I will be completely happy to place myself at your disposal as perhaps cobbler extraordinary to the duchy of Grand Fenwick.”

  “This is nothing to joke about,” said Gloriana, sharply. “It’s serious. Grand Fenwick needs money. There are too many people here now to be supported by our own products. So we have to import food and clothing. And we have to have money to do that. Mr. Benter believes we can make enough by adding water to the Pinot to increase our exports of wine. But Count Mountjoy says that would spoil the market for the wine and be disastrous in the long run.

  “That’s why we want you to form a third party. We want you to form a Communist party. Hold a meeting next Sunday --we can get permission from Bishop Alvin--and tell people that the government must be overthrown, and so on. Then we will tell the Americans that the government is threatened by Communist infiltration and they will lend us all the money we need.”

  Tully had been lighting his pipe during this explanation, for outside of official meetings in the castle formality was dropped in Grand Fenwick in the presence of the Duchess. This was not through lack of respect, but because if formalities were insisted upon, half a day’s work might be lost if she decided to take a tour of the country. And she couldn’t be expected to remain locked up in the castle all day in the interests of maintaining production.

  Tully’s match went out in his hand, he was so interested in what Gloriana was saying.

  “Communist party!” he exclaimed. “But Communism wouldn’t work here. It’s a philosophy completely unsuited to agricultural areas. You can force poor beggars in factories to produce more products, but a farmer can’t force the land to produce. He can’t preach Marx to the weather so that it rains at the right time. And in the whole of Russia the sun has never been known for as much as one day to listen to the economics of the late Joseph Stalin. Communism could never make any headway in Grand Fenwick.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it,” retorted Gloriana, smugly, “because as I said, I don’t want it to be successful. We just want it to appear successful so that the Americans will lend us the money we need.”

  “Besides,” continued Tully, as if he had not heard her last remark, “I don’t like Communism. I don’t like to think that anyone’s my equal. Nobody is. I’m superior to a great number of people and inferior to others, and for that reason I’m not at all sure that I’m in favour of democracy either. It’s nonsense to have the vote of someone who only after enormous struggle achieves the ability to read, be the equal of the vote of another who can read in twenty-four languages, though reading is no criterion. I merely cite it as an example.”

  By this time the Duchess had completely lost sight of the main topic. “Just what kind of a government do you favour?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Tully. “I toyed with anarchy once, but on reading into the subject found that there were as many kinds of anarchy as there are of democracy. There are plain anarchists and syndicalist anarchists, and deviationist anarchists and, for all I know, syndicalist deviationist anarchists. There’s as much anarchy in anarchy as there is in any political philosophy. But I’m still looking around.”

  “Well, while you’re looking around, wouldn’t you like trying to be a Communist for a while? Even if you don’t like it, remember that it’s for your country. It’s an act of patriotism to help us survive. We have as much right to survive as bigger nations have. We have been a free nation for about six hundred years and hundreds of thousands of people have been born and grown up and died happily in Grand Fenwick. Just because we are a little nation doesn’t mean that we should surrender our own liberty and our own pride and all our traditions and heritages and unite with some other country in order to live. It’s not our fault that we haven’t got any money. We’ve lived courageously and honourably for six centuries, but times have changed against us.” She was not too far from tears when she finished.

  Tully looked at her softly, almost with devotion, which was something he extended to no one but his father. “You really love Grand Fenwick, don’t you?” he asked, gently.

  “Yes,” replied the Duchess, “and so does everyone here. It is our earth and our air. You do, too, don’t you?”

  Tully walked over to the window. “Sometimes,” he said, slowly, “in places like Seattle or London or the Black Forest in Germany, when I have supposed myself happy, I have thought suddenly of this valley and those mountains, which hold their own blue mist in the evening, and my heart has become so hungry that I had to come back. It is a madness really, for all mountains have their mists and the evening voices in all valleys are the same.”

  “Would you love the mountains if they were part of France or Switzerland?”

  “I believe I would die rather than that.”

  “Then I know you love Grand Fenwick. It is not just the mountains. It is the country, and the country is in danger now. Once we could survive with our longbows and our spirit of independence. But now neither are of any avail. We have to have money. Will you do what I ask and pretend to be a Communist?”

  Tully turned to face her and shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “Even if I agreed to do it and the ruse was successful and we got the money, the country would not be saved. We would have sold, indeed, the better part of it, for we would have sold our honour. We, as a nation, would have deliberately defrauded another and generous nation, filching money from it merely because it has plenty.”

  He paused for a minute, tamping the tobacco in his pipe with a long forefinger. “You said that little nations have a right to survive as well as big ones,” he continued. “That is true. But big and rich nations should not be victimized just because they are big and rich. Because the United States has money and to spare does not make it any less wrong to trick some of that money out of her. To rob the millionaire is as dishonourable a thing as to rob the widow. We cannot hold our head up as a nation if we have survived by fraud; we can no longer talk of national pride if we have stooped to international thievery.
If by such methods we obtained enough money from the United States to make every man, woman, and child in Grand Fenwick a millionaire, they would be blackguard millionaires, all guilty of selling their country’s honour for their own individual survival.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” said the Duchess, slowly. “All I was thinking of was to get the money, so we could go on as we have in the past. Maybe you are right. But we must hit on something. Isn’t there some honourable way of making ends meet?”

  “There’s emigration,” Tully replied. “We could encourage people to leave and find work in other countries.”

  Gloriana shook her head. “Everybody in Grand Fenwick has a right to stay here if they want,” she said. “It’s their country. They shouldn’t be forced to leave it to earn a living. And besides, emigration used to work, but it doesn’t any longer. I read somewhere that Italy tried to solve its population problem by emigration to the United States. But now there are more people in Italy than there were before the big migrations started and all as poor as ever. And the United States is getting so full that they’ve established quotas. The quota they would fix for Grand Fenwick would probably be only one or two every five years. That wouldn’t help. We’ll have to think of something else.”

  They were silent for a while. Gloriana glanced at Tully and, disturbed as she was by the country’s economic problems, found herself thinking that there was something about this man that set him off from and, indeed, above his fellows. He was of the common clay, but the common clay in a different mould. His face was turned halfway from her, the head held up, and with a start she caught, for just a second, a remarkable resemblance between Tully Bascomb and the portrait of her ancestor, Sir Roger Fenwick, in the castle of the duchy. He turned towards her and the likeness was gone.