The Pilgrim's Regress Read online

  ‘We have come to the real Island,’ said Media.

  ‘But oh, alas!’ said he, ‘so long our bodies why do we forbear?’

  ‘Else a great prince in prison lies,’ sighed she.

  ‘No one else can understand the mystery of our love,’ said he.

  At that moment a brisk, hobnailed step was heard and a tall young man strode into the room carrying a light in his hand. He had coal-black hair and a straight mouth like the slit in a pillar-box, and he was dressed in various kinds of metal wire. As soon as he saw them he burst into a great guffaw. The lovers instantly sprang up and apart.

  ‘Well, Brownie,’ said he, ‘at your tricks again?’

  ‘Don’t call me that name,’ said Media, stamping her foot. ‘I have told you before not to call me that.’

  The young man made an obscene gesture at her, and then turned to John, ‘I see that old fool of a father of mine has been at you?’

  ‘You have no right to speak that way of father,’ said Media. Then, turning to John, her cheeks flaming, her breast heaving, she said, ‘All is over. Our dream—is shattered. Our mystery—is profaned. I would have taught you all the secrets of love, and now you are lost to me for ever. We must part. I shall go and kill myself,’ and with that she rushed from the room.

  VII

  Non est Hic

  ‘DON’T BOTHER ABOUT HER,’ said the young man. ‘She has threatened that a hundred times. She is only a brown girl, though she doesn’t know it.’

  ‘A brown girl!’ cried John. ‘And your father . . .’

  ‘My father has been in the pay of the Brownies all his life. He doesn’t know it, the old chuckle-head. Calls them the Muses, or the Spirit, or some rot. In actual fact, he is by profession a pimp.’

  ‘And the Island?’ said John.

  ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning. Ain’t the kind of Island you’re thinking of. Tell you what. I don’t live with my father and my precious sister. I live in Eschropolis and I am going back to-morrow. I’ll take you down to the laboratory and show you some real poetry. Not fantasies. The real thing.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said John.

  Then young Mr. Halfways found his room for him and the whole of that household went to bed.

  VIII

  Great Promises

  GUS HALFWAYS WAS the name of Mr. Halfway’s son. As soon as he rose in the morning he called John down to breakfast with him so that they might start on their journey. There was no one to hinder them, for old Halfways was still asleep and Media always had breakfast in bed. When they had eaten, Gus brought him into a shed beside his father’s house and showed him a machine on wheels.

  ‘What is this?’ said John.

  ‘My old bus,’ said young Halfways. Then he stood back with his head on one side and gazed at it for a bit: but presently he began to speak in a changed and reverent voice.

  ‘She is a poem. She is the daughter of the spirit of the age. What was the speed of Atalanta to her speed? The beauty of Apollo to her beauty?

  Now beauty to John meant nothing save glimpses of his Island, and the machine did not remind him of his Island at all: so he held his tongue.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ said Gus. ‘Our fathers made images of what they called gods and goddesses; but they were really only brown girls and brown boys whitewashed—as anyone found out by looking at them too long. All self-deception and phallic sentiment. But here you have the real art. Nothing erotic about her, eh?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said John, looking at the cog-wheels and coils of wire, ‘it is certainly not at all like a brown girl.’ It was, in fact, more like a nest of hedgehogs and serpents.

  ‘I should say not,’ said Gus. ‘Sheer power, eh? Speed, ruthlessness, austerity, significant form, eh? Also’ (and here he dropped his voice) ‘very expensive indeed.’

  Then he made John sit in the machine and he himself sat beside him. Then he began pulling the levers about and for a long time nothing happened: but at last there came a flash and a roar and the machine bounded into the air and then dashed forward. Before John had got his breath they had flashed across a broad thoroughfare which he recognized as the main road, and were racing through the country to the north of it—a flat country of square stony fields divided by barbed wire fences. A moment later they were standing still in a city where all the houses were built of steel.

  BOOK THREE

  THROUGH DARKEST ZEITGEISTHEIM

  And every shrewd turn was exalted among men . . . and simple goodness, wherein nobility doth ever most participate, was mocked away and clean vanished.

  THUCYDIDES

  Now live the lesser, as lords of the world,

  The busy troublers. Banished is our glory,

  The earth’s excellence grows old and sere.

  ANON

  The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up.

  SHAW

  I

  Eschropolis

  THEN I DREAMED THAT he led John into a big room rather like a bathroom: it was full of steel and glass and the walls were nearly all window, and there was a crowd of people there, drinking what looked like medicine and talking at the tops of their voices. They were all either young, or dressed up to look as if they were young. The girls had short hair and flat breasts and flat buttocks so that they looked like boys: but the boys had pale, egg-shaped faces and slender waists and big hips so that they looked like girls—except for a few of them who had long hair and beards.

  ‘What are they so angry about?’ whispered John.

  ‘They are not angry,’ said Gus; ‘they are talking about Art.’

  Then he brought John into the middle of the room and said:

  ‘Say! Here’s a guy who has been taken in by my father and wants some real hundred per cent music to clean him out. We had better begin with something neo-romantic to make the transition.’

  Then all the Clevers consulted together and presently they all agreed that Victoriana had better sing first. When Victoriana rose John at first thought that she was a schoolgirl: but after he had looked at her again he perceived that she was in fact about fifty. Before she began to sing she put on a dress which was a sort of exaggerated copy of Mr. Halfways’ robes, and a mask which was like the Steward’s mask except that the nose had been painted bright red and one of the eyes had been closed in a permanent wink.

  ‘Priceless!’ exclaimed one half of the Clevers, ‘too Puritanian.’

  But the other half, which included all the bearded men, held their noses in the air and looked very stiff. Then Victoriana took a little toy harp and began. The noises of the toy harp were so strange that John could not think of them as music at all. Then, when she sang, he had a picture in his mind which was a little like the Island, but he saw at once that it was not the Island. And presently he saw people who looked rather like his father, and the Steward and old Mr. Halfways, dressed up as clowns and doing a stiff sort of dance. Then there was a columbine, and some sort of love-story. But suddenly the whole Island turned into an aspidistra in a pot and the song was over.

  ‘Priceless,’ said the Clevers.

  ‘I hope you liked it,’ said Gus to John.

  ‘Well,’ began John doubtfully, for he hardly knew what to say: but he got not further, for at that moment he had a very great surprise. Victoriana had thrown her mask away and walked up to him and slapped him in the face twice, as hard as she could.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the Clevers, ‘Victoriana has courage. We may not all agree with you, Vikky dear, but we admire your courage.’

  ‘You may persecute me as much as you like,’ said Victoriana to John. ‘No doubt to see me thus with my back to the wall, wakes the hunting lust in you. You will always follow the cry of the majority. But I will fight to the end. So there,’ and she began to cry.

  ‘I am extremely sorry,’ said John. ‘But—’

  ‘An
d I know it was a good song,’ sobbed Victoriana, ‘because all great singers are persecuted in their lifetime—and I’m per-persecuted—and therefore I must be a great singer.’

  ‘She has you there,’ said the Clevers, as Victoriana left the laboratory.

  ‘You mustn’t mind her being a little bitter,’ said Gus. ‘She is so temperamental and sensitive, and she has suffered a great deal.’

  ‘Well, I must admit,’ said one of the Clevers, ‘now that she had gone, that I think that stuff of hers rather vieux jeu.’

  ‘Can’t stand it myself,’ said another.

  ‘I think it was her face that needed slapping,’ said a third.

  ‘She’s been spoiled and flattered all her life,’ said a fourth. ‘That’s what’s the matter with her.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the rest in chorus.

  II

  A South Wind

  ‘PERHAPS,’ SAID GUS, ‘someone else would give us a song.’

  ‘I will,’ cried thirty voices all together: but one cried much louder than the others and its owner had stepped into the middle of the room before anyone could do anything about it. He was one of the bearded men and wore nothing but a red shirt and a cod-piece made of the skins of crocodiles: and suddenly he began to beat on an African tom-tom and to croon with his voice, swaying his lean, half-clad body to and fro and staring at them all, out of eyes which were like burning coals. This time John saw no picture of an Island at all. He seemed to be in a dark green place full of tangled roots and hairy vegetable tubes: and all at once he saw in it shapes moving and writhing that were not vegetable but human. And the dark green grew darker, and a fierce heat came out of it: and suddenly all the shapes that were moving in the darkness came together to make a single obscene image which dominated the whole room. And the song was over.

  ‘Priceless,’ said the Clevers. ‘Too stark! Too virile.’

  John blinked and looked round; and when he saw all the Clevers as cool as cucumbers, smoking their cigarettes and drinking the drinks that looked like medicines, all as if nothing remarkable had happened, he was troubled in his mind; for he thought that the song must have meant something different to them, and ‘If so,’ he argued, ‘what very pure-minded people they must be.’ Feeling himself among his betters, he became ashamed.

  ‘You like it, hein?’ said the bearded singer.

  ‘I—I don’t think I understood it,’ said John.

  ‘I make you like it, hein,’ said the singer, snatching up his tom-tom again. ‘It was what you really wanted all the time.’

  ‘No, no,’ cried John. ‘I know you are wrong there. I grant you, that—that sort of thing—is what I always get if I think too long about the Island. But it can’t be what I want.’

  ‘No? Why not?’

  ‘If it is what I wanted, why am I so disappointed when I get it? If what a man really wanted was food, how could he be disappointed when the food arrived? As well, I don’t understand—’

  ‘What you not understand? I explain to you.’

  ‘Well, it’s like this. I thought that you objected to Mr. Halfways’ singing because it led to brown girls in the end.’

  ‘So we do.’

  ‘Well, why is it better to lead to black girls in the beginning?’

  A low whistle ran round the whole laboratory. John knew he had made a horrible blunder.

  ‘Look here,’ said the bearded singer in a new voice, ‘what do you mean? You are not suggesting that there is anything of that kind about my singing, are you?’

  ‘I—I suppose—perhaps it was my fault,’ stammered John.

  ‘In other words,’ said the singer, ‘you are not yet able to distinguish between art and pornography!’ and advancing towards John very deliberately, he spat in his face and turned to walk out of the room.

  ‘That’s right, Phally,’ cried the Clevers, ‘serve him right.’

  ‘Filthy-minded little beast,’ said one.

  ‘Yah! Puritanian!’ said a girl.

  ‘I expect he’s impotent,’ whispered another.

  ‘You mustn’t be too hard on him,’ said Gus. ‘He is full of inhibitions and everything he says is only a rationalization of them. Perhaps he would get on better with something more formal. Why don’t you sing, Glugly?’

  III

  Freedom of Thought

  GLUGLY INSTANTLY ROSE. She was very tall and as lean as a post: and her mouth was not quite straight in her face. When she was in the middle of the room, and silence had been obtained, she began to make gestures. First of all she set her arms a-kimbo and cleverly turned her hands the wrong way so that it looked as if her wrists were sprained. Then she waddled to and fro with her toes pointing in. After that she twisted herself to make it look as if her hip bone was out of joint. Finally she made some grunts, and said:

  ‘Globol obol oogle ogle globol gloogle gloo,’ and ended by pursing up her lips and making a vulgar noise such as children make in their nurseries. Then she went back to her place and sat down.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said John politely.

  But Glugly made no reply, for Glugly could not talk, owing to an accident in infancy.

  ‘I hoped you liked it,’ said young Halfways.

  ‘I didn’t understand her.’

  ‘Ah,’ said a woman in spectacles who seemed to be Glugly’s nurse or keeper, ‘that is because you are looking for beauty. You are still thinking of your Island. You have got to realize that satire is the moving force in modern music.’

  ‘It is the expression of a savage disillusionment,’ said someone else.

  ‘Reality has broken down,’ said a fat boy who had drunk a great deal of the medicine and was lying flat on his back, smiling happily.

  ‘Our art must be brutal,’ said Glugly’s nurse.

  ‘We lost our ideals when there was a war in this country,’ said a very young Clever, ‘they were ground out of us in the mud and the flood and the blood. That is why we have to be so stark and brutal.’

  ‘But, look here,’ cried John, ‘that war was years ago. It was your fathers who were in it: and they are all settled down and living ordinary lives.’

  ‘Puritanian! Bourgeois!’ cried the Clevers. Everyone seemed to have risen.

  ‘Hold your tongue,’ whispered Gus in John’s ear. But already someone had struck John on the head, and as he bowed under the blow someone else hit him from behind.

  ‘It was the mud and blood,’ hissed the girls all round him.

  ‘Well,’ said John, ducking to avoid a retort that had been flung at him, ‘if you are really old enough to remember that war, why do you pretend to be so young?’

  ‘We are young,’ they howled; ‘we are the new movement; we are the revolt.’

  ‘We have got over humanitarianism,’ bellowed one of the bearded men, kicking John on the kneecap.

  ‘And prudery,’ said a thin little old maid trying to wrench his clothes off from the neck. And at the same moment six girls leaped at his face with their nails, and he was kicked in the back and the belly, and tripped up so that he fell on his face, and hit again as he rose, and all the glass in the world seemed breaking round his head as he fled for his life from the laboratory. And all the dogs of Eschropolis joined in the chase as he ran along the street, and all the people followed pelting him with ordure, and crying:

  ‘Puritanian! Bourgeois! Prurient!’

  IV

  The Man Behind the Gun

  WHEN JOHN COULD RUN no further he sat down. The noise of the pursuers had died away and, looking back, he could see no sign of Eschropolis. He was covered with filth and blood, and his breathing hurt him. There seemed to be something wrong with one of his wrists. As he was too tired to walk he sat still and thought for a while. And first he thought that he would like to go back to Mr. Halfways. ‘It is true,’ he said, ‘that if you listened to him too long it would lead you to Media—and she had a trace of brown in her. But then you had a glimpse of the Island first. Now the Clevers took you straight to brown girl
s—or worse—without even a glimpse of the Island. I wonder would it be possible to keep always at the Island stage with Mr. Halfways? Must it always end like that?’ Then it came into his head that after all he did not want Mr. Halfways’ songs, but the Island itself: and that this was the only thing he wanted in the world. And when he remembered this he rose very painfully to continue his journey, looking round for the West. He was still in the flat country, but there seemed to be mountains ahead, and above them the sun was setting. A road ran towards them: so he began to limp along it. Soon the sunset disappeared and the sky was clouded over and a cold rain began.

  When he had limped about a mile he passed a man who was mending the fence of his field and smoking a big cigar. John stopped and asked him if he knew the way to the sea.

  ‘Nope,’ said the man without looking up.

  ‘Do you know of any place in this country where I could get a night’s lodging?’

  ‘Nope,’ said the man.

  ‘Could you give me a piece of bread?’ said John.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Mr. Mammon, ‘it would be contrary to all economic laws. It would pauperize you.’ Then, when John lingered, he added, ‘Move on. I don’t want any loiterers about here.’

  John limped on for about ten minutes. Suddenly he heard Mr. Mammon calling out to him. He stopped and turned round.

  ‘What do you want?’ shouted John.

  ‘Come back,’ said Mr. Mammon.

  John was so tired and hungry that he humbled himself to walk back (and the way seemed long) in the hope that Mammon had relented. When he came again to the place where they had talked before, the man finished his work without speaking and then said:

  ‘Where did you get your clothes torn?’

  ‘I had a quarrel with the Clevers in Eschropolis.’

  ‘Clevers?’

  ‘Don’t you know them?’

  ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘You know Eschropolis?’

  ‘Know it? I own Eschropolis.’