After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (28 page)

W
ITH
a deafening shriek the electric smoothing tool whirled its band of sandpaper against the rough surface of the wood. Bent over the carpenter's bench, Mr. Propter did not hear the sound of Pete's entrance and approach. For a long half minute the young man stood in silence, watching him while he moved the smoothing tool back and forth over the board before him. There was sawdust, Pete noticed, in the shaggy eyebrows, and on the sunburnt forehead a black smear where he had touched his face with oily fingers.

Pete felt a sudden twinge of compunction. It wasn't right to spy on a man if he didn't know you were there. It was underhand; you might be seeing something he didn't want you to see. He called Mr. Propter's name.

The old man looked up, smiled and stopped the motor of his little machine.

“Well, Pete,” he said. “You're just the man I want. That is, if you'll do some work for me. Will you? But I'd forgotten,” he added, interrupting Pete's affirmative answer, “I'd forgotten about that heart of yours. These miserable rheumatic fevers! Do you think you ought to?”

Pete blushed a little; for he had not yet had time to live down a certain sense of shame in regard to his disability. “You're not going to make me run the quarter mile, are you?”

Mr. Propter ignored the jocular question. “You're sure it's all right?” he insisted, looking with an affectionate earnestness into the young man's face.

“Quite sure, if it's only this sort of thing.” Pete waved his hand in the direction of the carpenter's bench.

“Honest?”

Pete was touched and warmed by the other's solicitude. “Honest!” he affirmed.

“Very well then,” said Mr. Propter, reassured. “You're hired. Or rather you're not
hired,
because you'll be lucky if you get as much as a Coca-Cola for your work. You're conscribed.”

All the other people round the place, he went on to explain, were busy. He had been left to run the entire furniture factory single-handed. And the trouble was that it had to be run under pressure; three of the migrant families down at the cabins were still without any chairs or tables.

“Here are the measurements,” he said, pointing to a typewritten sheet of paper pinned to the wall. “And there's the lumber. Now, I'll tell you what I'd like you to do first,” he added, as he picked up a board and laid it on the bench.

The two men worked for some time without trying to speak against the noise of their electric tools. Then there was an interim of less noisy activity. Too shy to embark directly upon the subject of his own perplexities, Pete started to talk about Professor Pearl's new book on population. Forty inhabitants to the square mile for the entire land area of the planet. Sixteen acres per head. Take away at least half for unproductive land, and you were left with eight acres. And with average agricultural methods a human being could be supported on the produce of two and a half acres. With five and a half acres to spare for every person, why should a third of the world be hungry?

“I should have thought you'd have discovered the answer in Spain,” said Mr. Propter. “They're hungry because man cannot live by bread alone.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“Everything,” Mr. Propter answered. “Men can't live by bread alone, because they need to feel that their life has a point. That's why they take to idealism. But it's a matter of experience and observation that most idealism leads to war, persecution and mass insanity. Man cannot live by bread alone; but if he chooses to nourish his mind on the wrong kind of spiritual food, he won't even get bread. He won't even get bread, because he'll be so busy killing or preparing to kill his neighbours in the name of God, or Country, or Social Justice that he won't be able to cultivate his fields. Nothing could be simpler or more obvious. But at the same time,” Mr. Propter concluded, “nothing is unfortunately more certain than that most people will go on choosing the wrong spiritual food and thereby indirectly choosing their own destruction.”

He turned on the current and once more the smoothing tool set up its rasping shriek. There was another cessation of talk.

“In a climate like this,” said Mr. Propter, in the next interval of silence, “and with all the water that'll be available when the Colorado River aqueduct starts running next year, you could do practically anything you liked.” He unplugged the smoothing tool and went to fetch a drill. “Take a township of a thousand inhabitants; give it three or four thousand acres of land and a good system of producers' and consumers' co-operatives—it could feed itself completely; it could supply about two-thirds of its other needs on the spot; and it could produce a surplus to exchange for such things as it couldn't produce itself. You could cover the state with such townships. That is,” he added, smiling rather mournfully, “that is, if you could get the permission from the banks and a supply of people intelligent and virtuous enough to run a genuine democracy.”

“You certainly wouldn't get the banks to agree,” said Pete.

“And you probably couldn't find more than quite a few of the right people,” Mr. Propter added. “And of course nothing's more disastrous than starting a social experiment with the wrong people. Look at all the efforts to start communities in this country. Robert Owen, for example, and the Fourierists and the rest of them. Dozens of social experiments and they all failed. Why? Because the men in charge didn't choose their people. There was no entrance examination and no novitiate. They accepted any one who came along. That's what comes of being unduly optimistic about human beings.”

He started the drill and Pete took his turn with the smoothing tool.

“Do you think one oughtn't to be optimistic?” the young man asked.

Mr. Propter smiled. “What a curious question!” he answered. “What would you say about a man who installed a vacuum pump in a fifty-foot well? Would you call him an optimist?”

“I'd call him a fool.”

“So would I,” said Mr. Propter. “And that's the answer to your question; a man's a fool if he's optimistic about any situation in which experience has shown that there's no justification for optimism. When Robert Owen took in a crowd of defectives and incompetents and habitual crooks, and expected them to organize themselves into a new and better sort of human society, he was just a damned fool.”

There was silence for a time while Pete did some sawing.

“I suppose I've been too optimistic,” the young man said reflectively, when it was over.

Mr. Propter nodded. “Too optimistic in certain directions,” he agreed. “And at the same time too pessimistic in others.”

“For instance?” Pete questioned.

“Well, to begin with,” said Mr. Propter, “too optimistic about social reforms. Imagining that good can be fabricated by mass production methods. But, unfortunately, good doesn't happen to be that sort of commodity. Good is a matter of moral craftsmanship. It can't be produced except by individuals. And, of course, if individuals don't know what good consists in, or don't wish to work for it, then it won't be manifested, however perfect the social machinery. There!” he added, in another tone and blew the sawdust out of the hole he had been drilling. “Now for these chair legs and battens.” He crossed the room and began to adjust the lathe.

“And what do you think I've been too pessimistic about?” Pete asked.

Mr. Propter answered, without looking up from his work, “About human nature.”

Pete was surprised. “I'd have expected you to say I was too optimistic about human nature,” he said.

“Well, of course, in certain respects that's true,” Mr. Propter agreed. “Like most people nowadays you're insanely optimistic about people as they are, people living exclusively on the human level. You seem to imagine that people can remain as they are and yet be the inhabitants of a world conspicuously better than the world we live in. But the world we live in is a consequence of what men have been and a projection of what they are now. If men continue to be like what they are now and have been in the past, it's obvious that the world they live in can't become better. If you imagine it can, you're wildly optimistic about human nature. But on the other hand you're wildly pessimistic if you imagine that men and women are condemned by their nature to pass their whole lives on the strictly human level. Thank God,” he said emphatically, “they're not. They have it in their power to climb out and up, on to the level of eternity. No human society can become conspicuously better than it is now, unless it contains a fair proportion of individuals who know that their humanity isn't the last word and who consciously attempt to transcend it. That's why one should be profoundly pessimistic about the things most people are optimistic about—such as applied science, and social reform, and human nature as it is in the average man or woman. And that's also why one should be profoundly optimistic about the thing they're so pessimistic about that they don't even know it exists—I mean, the possibility of transforming and transcending human nature. Not by evolutionary growth, not in some remote future, but at any time—here and now, if you like—by the use of properly directed intelligence and good will.”

Tentatively he started the lathe, then stopped it again for further adjustments.

“It's the kind of pessimism and the kind of optimism you find in all the great religions,” he added. “Pessimism about the world at large and human nature as it displays itself in the majority of men and women. Optimism about the things that can be achieved by any one who wants to and knows how.” He started the lathe again and, this time, kept it going.

“You know the pessimism of the New Testament,” he went on through the noise of the machine. “Pessimism about the mass of mankind: many are called, few chosen. Pessimism about weakness and ignorance: from those that have not shall be taken away even that which they have. Pessimism about life as lived on the ordinary human level: for that life must be lost if the other eternal life is to be gained. Pessimism about even the highest forms of worldly morality: there's no access to the kingdom of heaven for any one whose righteousness fails to exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees. But who are the Scribes and Pharisees? Simply the best citizens; the pillars of society; all right-thinking men. In spite of which, or rather because of which, Jesus calls them a generation of vipers. Poor dear Dr. Mulge,” he added parenthetically, “how pained he'd be if he ever had the misfortune to meet his Saviour!” Mr. Propter smiled to himself over his work. “Well, that's the pessimistic side of the Gospel teaching,” he went on. “And, more systematically and philosophically, you'll find the same things set forth in the Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. The world as it is and people on the strictly human level—they're beyond hope: that's the universal verdict. Hope begins only when human beings start to realize that the kingdom of heaven, or whatever other name you care to give it, is within and can be experienced by anybody who's prepared to take the necessary trouble. That's the optimistic side of Christianity and the other world religions.”

Mr. Propter stopped the lathe, took out the chair leg he had been turning and put another in its place.

“It isn't the sort of optimism they teach you in the liberal churches,” said Pete, thinking of his transition period between Reverend Schlitz and militant Anti-Fascism.

“No, it isn't,” Mr. Propter agreed. “What they teach you in liberal churches hasn't got anything to do with Christianity or any other realistic religion. It's mainly drivel.”

“Drivel?”

“Drivel,” Mr. Propter repeated. “Early twentieth century humanism seasoned with nineteenth-century evangelicalism. What a combination! Humanism affirms that good can be achieved on a level where it doesn't exist and denies the fact of eternity. Evangelicalism denies the relationship between causes and effects by affirming the existence of a personal deity who forgives offences. They're like Jack Spratt and his wife: between the two of them, they lick the platter clean of all sense whatsoever. No, I'm wrong,” Mr. Propter added, through the buzz of the machine, “not
all
sense. The humanists don't talk of more than one race, and the evangelicals only worship one God. It's left to the patriots to polish off that last shred of sense. The patriots and the political sectarians. A hundred mutually exclusive idolatries. ‘There are many gods and the local bosses are their respective prophets.' The amiable silliness of the liberal churches is good enough for quiet times; but note that it's always supplemented by the ferocious lunacies of nationalism, for use in times of crisis. And those are the philosophies young people are brought up on. The philosophies your optimistic elders expect you to reform the world with.” Mr. Propter paused for a moment, then added, “As a man sows, so shall he reap. God is not mocked. Not mocked,” he repeated. “But people simply refuse to believe it. They go on thinking they can cock a snook at the nature of things and get away with it. I've sometimes thought of writing a little treatise, like a cook-book. ‘One Hundred Ways of Mocking God,' I'd call it. And I'd take a hundred examples from history and contemporary life, illustrating what happens when people undertake to do things without paying regard to the nature of reality. And the book would be divided into sections, such as ‘Mocking God in Agriculture,' ‘Mocking God in Politics,' ‘Mocking God in Education,' ‘Mocking God in Philosophy,' ‘Mocking God in Economics.' It would be an instructive little book. But a bit depressing,” Mr. Propter added.

T
HE
news that the Fifth Earl had had three illegitimate children at the age of eighty-one was announced in the note-book with a truly aristocratic understatement. No boasting, no self-congratulation. Just a brief, quiet statement, sandwiched between the record of a conversation with the Duke of Wellington and a note on the music of Mozart. One hundred twenty years after the event, Dr. Obispo, who was not an English gentleman, exulted noisily, as though the achievement had been his own.