South Wind Part 27

"Why, possibly. He had the professorial temperament; there was not much poetry in his composition. If you were to ask him, 'What are those wonderful rocks over there, shaped like some t.i.tanic organ and glowing with a kind of violet flame?' he would say, 'Organ be blowed. It's columnar lithoidite.' I learnt a little from him, but not enough. I wish we had him here. He could have told us something."

And Mr. Keith, ever avid of fresh things, regretted his lost opportunities. He was in one of this acquisitive, Corsair moods. He said:

"I could take geology by the throat just now. It's disgusting, not to know things!"

His companion, meanwhile, beheld the panorama in all its nightmarish splendour, as it drifted past him. He saw the bluffs of feathery pumice, the lava precipices--frozen cataracts of white, black, blood red, pale grey and sombre brown, smeared over with a vitreous enamel of obsidian or pierced by oily, writhing d.y.k.es that blazed with metallic scintillations. Anon came some yawning cleft or an a.s.semblage of dizzy rock-needles, fused into whimsical tints and att.i.tudes, spiky, distorted, over-toppling; then a bold tufa rampart, immaculate in its beauty, stainless as a curtain of silk. And as the boat moved on he looked into horrid dells which the rains had torn out of the loose scoriae. Gaping wounds, they wore the bright hues of corruption. Their flanks were blotched with a livid nitrous efflorescence, with flaring sulphur, unhealthy verdure of pitchstone, streaks of a.r.s.enical vermilion; their beds--a frantic maze of boulders.

He beheld this crazy stratification, this chaos of incandescent nature, sent in a flame of deep blue sky and sea. It lay there calmly, like some phantasmagoric flower, some monstrous rose that swoons away, with upturned face, in a solar caress.

He saw it with the eye. His mind was elsewhere. He was trying, in honest and relentless fas.h.i.+on, to discover himself. What if his human values were really wrong?

Thomas, the doubting apostle....

Africa had made him think; had made him more silent and reflective than ever. And now this sudden strange stimulus of Nepenthe--it was driving his thoughts headlong, out of their old grooves.

Here was Keith, a man of altogether different stamp, drawing conclusions which he dared not formulate for himself. How far were they applicable, those old Hebrew precepts, to modern conditions? Were they still availing as guides to conduct?

"You are a candid person, Keith, and I think I am. I sincerely try to be. Will you tell me what you think? You seem to have a quarrel with Moses and his commandments, which we are taught to regard as the keystone of ethics. I don't want to discuss things. I want to listen to the opinions of a man so different from myself as you are. It may do me good. And I think I could stand almost anything," he added, with a laugh, "in this landscape--in this clear pagan light, as you call it."

"I used to be interested in such things as a boy. I suppose all respectable boys are; and I was respectable even at that tender age.

Nowadays, though I still pick up an Oriental rug now and then, I have no further use for Oriental G.o.ds."

"What is your objection to them?"

Mr. Keith paused before replying. Then he said:

"The drawback of Oriental G.o.ds is that they have been manufactures by the proletariat for the use of the aristocracy. They act accordingly; that is, they distil the morality of their creators which I consider a noxious emanation. The cla.s.sic G.o.ds were different. They were invented by intellectualists who felt themselves capable of maintaining a kind of comrades.h.i.+p with their deities. Men and G.o.ds were practically on a level. They walked hand in hand over the earth. These G.o.ds belonged to what one might call the horizontal or downstairs variety."

"And those others?"

"Oh, they are the upstairs or vertical type. They live overhead. Why overhead? Because they have been created by the proletariat. The proletariat loves to humiliate itself. Therefore they manufacture a G.o.d who approves of grovelling, a G.o.d who can look down upon them. They exalt this deity to an infinite degree in point of goodness and distance, and in so doing they inevitably abase themselves. Now I disapprove of grovelling. That means I disapprove of upstairs G.o.ds."

"Upstairs G.o.ds--"

"If you walk into my front door as a distinguished visitor I am happy to show you the place. You can prowl about the garden, poke your nose into the pantry and learn, if it amuses you, all about my private life.

But if you rent a high attic overlooking my premises and stair out of your window all day long, watching my movements and noting down everything I do, why, d.a.m.n it, I call that vulgar. Staring is bad form.

Vertical G.o.ds are inquisitive. I don't like to be supervised. I don't care about this DOSSIER business. My garden is for you and me to walk about in, not for outsiders to stare into. Which reminds me that you have not been to see me lately. You ought to come and look at my cannas; you really ought! They are in magnificent bloom just now. When shall it be?"

Mr. Keith seemed to be already tired of the subject. In fact he was as near being bored as ever he allowed himself to be. But the other refused to let the conversation be side-tracked. He wanted to know.

"Vertical and horizontal G.o.ds.... Dear me. Sounds rather profane."

"I have not heard that word for quite a long time."

"You don't feel the need of any kind of superior being to control human affairs?"

"Not up to the present. I can find no room in my Cosmos for a deity, save as a waste product of human weakness, an excrement of the imagination. If you gave me the sauciest G.o.d that ever sat on a cloud or breakfasted with the Village Idiot--'pon my word, I shouldn't know what to do with him. I don't collect bric-a-brac myself, and the British Museum is dreadfully overstocked. Perhaps the d.u.c.h.ess could make some use of him, if he specialized in lace vestments and choral ma.s.s. By the way, I hear that she is going to be admitted into the Roman Church next week; there is to be a luncheon after the ceremony.

Are you going?"

"Vertical and horizontal G.o.ds.... I never heard that distinction made before."

"It is a difference, my dear Heard. Mankind remains in direct contact with the downstairs variety. That simplifies matters. But the peculiar position of those others--perpendicularly overhead at a vast distance--necessitates a troublesome code of verbal signals, unintelligible to common folk, for the expression of mutual desires.

You cannot have any G.o.d of this kind without some such c.u.mbrous contrivance to bridge over the gulf and make communication possible. It is called theology. It complicates life very considerably. Yes," he pursued, "the vertical-G.o.d system is not only vulgar; it is perplexing and expensive. Think of the wastage, of the myriads of people who have been sacrificed because they misinterpreted some enigmatical word in the code. Why are you intent on these conundrums?"

"Well, partly at least, it's quite a practical matter. You know that American millionaire, van Koppen, and the scandal attached to his peculiar habits? It made me wonder, only yesterday--"

But at this juncture the tiresome old boatman lifted up his voice once more.

"See that high cliff, gentlemens? Funny thing happen there, very funny.

Dam-fool foreigner here, he collect flowers. Always collecting flowers on bad rocks; sometimes with rope round him, for fear of falling; with rope, ha, ha, ha! Nasty man. And poor. No money at all. He always say, 'All Italians liars, and liars where go? To h.e.l.l, sure. That's where liars go. That's where Italians go.' Now rich man he say liar to poor man. But poor man, he better not say liar to rich man. That so, gentlemens. One day he say liar to nice old Italian. Nice old man think: 'Ah, you wait, putrid puppy of b.a.s.t.a.r.d pig, you wait.' Nice old man got plenty good lot vineyards back of cliff there. One day he walk to see grapes. Then he look to end of cliff and see rope hanging. Very funny, he think. Then he look to end of rope and see nasty-man hanging.

That so, gentlemens. Nasty-man hanging in air. Can't get up. 'Pull me up,' says he. Nice old man, he laugh--ha, ha, ha! laugh till his belly hurt. Then he pull out knife and begin to cut rope. 'See knife?' he shout down. 'How much to pull up?' Five hundred dollar! 'How much?'

Five thousand! 'How much?' Fifty thousand! Nice old man say quite quiet: 'You no got fifty thousand in the world, you liar. Liars where go? To h.e.l.l, sure. That's where liars go. That's where you go, Mister.

To h.e.l.l.' And he cut rope. Down he go, patatrac! round and round in air, like firework wheel, on to first rock--pa-pa-pa-paff! Six hundred feets. After that he arrive, all messy, in water. That so, gentlemens.

Gone where to? Swim to Philadelphia? I don't think! Him drownded, sure.

Ha, ha, ha! Nice old man, when he come home that morning, he laugh. He laugh. He just laugh. He laugh first quiet, then loud. He laugh all the time, and soon family too. He laugh for ten days, till he nearly die.

Got well again, and live plenty good years after. In Paradise to-day, G.o.d rest his soul! And never found out, no never. Fine judge on Nepenthe. Always fine judge here. He know everything, and he know nothing. Understand? All nice people here. That so, gentlemens."

He told the tale with Satanic gusto, rocking himself to and fro as though convulsed with some secret joy. Then, after expectorating violently, he resumed the oars which had been dropped in the heat of gesticulation.

The bishop was pensive. There was something wrong with this story--something fundamentally wrong. He turned to Keith:

"That man must be a liar too. If, as he says, the thing was never found out, how can he have learnt all about it?"

"Hush, my dear fellow. He thinks I don't know, but I do. It was his own father to whom the adventure occurred."

"The adventure?" said Mr. Heard.

"The adventure. Surely you are not going to make a tragedy of it? If you cannot see the joke of that story, you must be hard to please. I nearly died of laughing when I first heard it."

"What would you have done?"

"If I had been the botanist? I would not have made myself disagreeable to the natives. Also, I would not have got myself into a tangle with that rope."

"You think he ought to have cut it?"

"What else could the poor fellow do? It strikes me, Heard, you attach some inordinate importance to human life."

"It's all rather complex," sighed the bishop.

"Now that is really interesting!"

"Interesting?"

"Why should you find it complex, when I find it simple? Let me see. Our lives are perfectly insignificant, aren't they? We know it for a fact.

But we don't like it. We don't like being of no account. We want some thing to make us feel more valuable than we are. Consequently we invent a fiction to explain away that insignificance--the fiction of a personality overhead everlastingly occupied in watching every single one of us, and keenly engrossed in our welfare. If this were the case, we would cease to be insignificant, and we might try to oblige him by not killing each other. It happens to be a fiction. Get rid of the fiction, and your feeling of complexity evaporates. I perceive you are in an introspective mood. Worrying about some pastoral epistle?"

"Worry about my values, as you would say. Up to the present, Keith, I don't seem to have had time to think; I had to act; there was always something urgent to be taken in hand. Now that I am really lazy for the first time, and in this stimulating environment, certain problems of life keep cropping up. Minor problems, of course; for it is a consolation to know that the foundations of good conduct are immutable.

Our sense of right and wrong is firmly implanted in us. The laws of morality, difficult as they often are to understand, have been written down for our guidance in letters that never change."