Gulliver of Mars - Edwin Lester Linden Arnold (great novels of all time txt) 📗

with anger, “and if you think because I am what I am you can safely taunt me, you are wrong. See! I have a sting,” and like a thwarted child my companion half drew from the folds of the yellow tunic-dress the daintiest, most harmless-looking little dagger that was ever seen.

“Oh, if it comes to that,” I answered, touching the Navy scabbard still at my hip, and regaining my temper at the sight of hers, “why, I have a sting also—and twice as long as yours! But in truth, An, let us not talk of these things; if something in what I have said has offended nice Martian scruples I am sorry, and will question no more, leaving my wonder for time to settle.”

“No,” said the other, “it was my fault to be hasty of offence; I am not so angered once a year. But in truth your question moves us yellow robes deeply. Did you not really know that we who wear this saffron tunic are slaves,—a race apart, despised by all.”

“‘Slaves,’ no; how should I know it?”

“I thought you must understand a thing so fundamental, and it was that thought which made your questions seem unkind. But if indeed you have come so far as not to understand even this, then let me tell you once we of this garb were women—priestesses of the immaculate conceptions of humanity; guardians of those great hopes and longings which die so easily. And because we forgot our high station and took to aping another sex the gods deserted and men despised us, giving us, in the fierceness of their contempt, what we asked for. We are the slave ants of the nest, the work-bees of the hive, come, in truth, of those here who still be men and women of a sort, but toilers only; unknown in love, unregretted in death—those who dangle all children but their own—slaves cursed with the accomplishment of their own ambition.”

There was no doubt poor An believed what she said, for her attitude was one of extreme dejection while she spoke, and to cheer her I laughed.

“Oh! come, it can’t be as bad as that. Surely sometimes some of you win back to womanhood? You yourself do not look so far gone but what some deed of abnegation, some strong love if you could but conceive it would set you right again. Surely you of the primrose robes can sometimes love?”

Whereat unwittingly I troubled the waters in the placid soul of that outcast Martian! I cannot exactly describe how it was, but she bent her head silently for a moment or two, and then, with a sigh, lifting her eyes suddenly to mine, said quietly, “Yes, sometimes; sometimes—but very seldom,” while for an instant across her face there flashed the summer lightning of a new hope, a single transient glance of wistful, timid entreaty; of wonder and delight that dared not even yet acknowledge itself.

Then it was my turn to sit silent, and the pause was so awkward that in a minute, to break it, I exclaimed—

“Let’s drop personalities, old chap—I mean my dear Miss An. Tell me something about your people, and let us begin properly at the top: have you got a king, for instance?”

To this the girl, pulling herself out of the pleasant slough of her listlessness, and falling into my vein, answered—

“Both yes and no, sir traveller from afar—no chiefly, and yet perhaps yes. If it were no then it were so, and if yes then Hath were our king.”

“A mild king I should judge by your uncertainty. In the place where I came from kings press their individualities somewhat more clearly on their subjects’ minds. Is Hath here in the city? Does he come to your feasts today?”

An nodded. Hath was on the river, he had been to see the sunrise; even now she thought the laughter and singing down behind the bend might be the king’s barge coming up citywards. “He will not be late,” said my companion, “because the marriage-feast is set for tomorrow in the palace.”

I became interested. Kings, palaces, marriage-feasts—why, here was something substantial to go upon; after all these gauzy folk might turn out good fellows, jolly comrades to sojourn amongst—and marriage-feasts reminded me again I was hungry.

“Who is it,” I asked, with more interest in my tone, “who gets married?—is it your ambiguous king himself?”

Whereat An’s purple eyes broadened with wonder: then as though she would not be uncivil she checked herself, and answered with smothered pity for my ignorance, “Not only Hath himself, but every one, stranger, they are all married tomorrow; you would not have them married one at a time, would you?”—this with inexpressible derision.

I said, with humility, something like that happened in the place I came from, asking her how it chanced the convenience of so many came to one climax at the same moment. “Surely, An, this is a marvel of arrangement. Where I dwelt wooings would sometimes be long or sometimes short, and all maids were not complacent by such universal agreement.”

The girl was clearly perplexed. She stared at me a space, then said, “What have wooings long or short to do with weddings? You talk as if you did your wooing first and then came to marriage—we get married first and woo afterwards!”

“‘Tis not a bad idea, and I can see it might lend an ease and certainty to the pastime which our method lacks. But if the woman is got first and sued subsequently, who brings you together? Who sees to the essential preliminaries of assortment?”

An, looking at my shoes as though she speculated on the remoteness of the journey I had come if it were measured by my ignorance, replied, “The urn, stranger, the urn does that—what else? How it may be in that out-fashioned region you have come from I cannot tell, but here—‘tis so commonplace I should have thought you must have known it—we put each new year the names of all womenkind into an urn and the men draw for them, each town, each village by itself, and those they draw are theirs; is it conceivable your race has other methods?”

I told her it was so—we picked and chose for ourselves, beseeching the damsels, fighting for them, and holding the sun of romance was at its setting just where the Martians held it to rise. Whereat An burst out laughing—a clear, ringing laugh that set all the lighthearted folk in the nearest boats laughing in sympathy. But when the grotesqueness of the idea had somewhat worn off, she turned grave and asked me if such a fancy did not lead to spite, envy, and bickerings. “Why, it seems to me,” she said, shaking her curly head, “such a plan might fire cities, desolate plains, and empty palaces—”

“Such things have been.”

“Ah! our way is much the better. See!” quoth that gentle philosopher. “‘Here,’ one of our women would say, ‘am I to-day, unwed, as free of thought as yonder bird chasing the catkin down; tomorrow I shall be married, with a whole summer to make love in, relieved at one bound of all those uncertainties you acknowledge to, with nothing to do but lie about on sunny banks with him whom chance sends me, come to the goal of love without any travelling to get there.’ Why, you must acknowledge this is the perfection of ease.”

“But supposing,” I said, “chance dealt unkindly to you from your nuptial urn, supposing the man was not to your liking, or another coveted him?” To which An answered, with some shrewdness—

“In the first case we should do what we might, being no worse off than those in your land who had played ill providence to themselves. In the second, no maid would covet him whom fate had given to another, it were too fatiguing, or if such a thing DID happen, then one of them would waive his claims, for no man or woman ever born was worth a wrangle, and it is allowed us to barter and change a little.”

All this was strange enough. I could not but laugh, while An laughed at the lightest invitation, and thus chatting and deriding each other’s social arrangements we floated idly townwards and presently came out into the main waterway perhaps a mile wide and flowing rapidly, as streams will on the threshold of the spring, with brash or waste of distant beaches riding down it, and every now and then a broken branch or tree-stem glancing through waves whose crests a fresh wind lifted and sowed in golden showers in the intervening furrows. The Martians seemed expert upon the water, steering nimbly between these floating dangers when they met them, but for the most part hugging the shore where a more placid stream better suited their fancies, and for a time all went well.

An, as we went along, was telling me more of her strange country, pointing out birds or flowers and naming them to me. “Now that,” she said, pointing to a small grey owl who sat reflective on a floating log we were approaching—“that is a bird of omen; cover your face and look away, for it is not well to watch it.”

Whereat I laughed. “Oh!” I answered, “so those ancient follies have come as far as this, have they? But it is no bird grey or black or white that can frighten folk where I come from; see, I will ruffle his philosophy for him,” and suiting the action to the words I lifted a pebble that happened to lie at the bottom of the boat and flung it at that creature with the melancholy eyes. Away went the owl, dipping his wings into the water at every stroke, and as he went wailing out a ghostly cry, which even amongst sunshine and glitter made one’s flesh creep.

An shook her head. “You should not have done that,” she said; “our dead whom we send down over the falls come back in the body of yonder little bird. But he has gone now,” she added, with relief; “see, he settles far up stream upon the point of yonder rotten bough; I would not disturb him again if I were you—”

Whatever more An would have said was lost, for amidst a sound of flutes and singing round the bend of the river below came a crowd of boats decked with flowers and garlands, all clustering round a barge barely able to move, so thick those lesser skiffs pressed upon it. So close those wherries hung about that the garlanded rowers who sat at the oars could scarcely pull, but, here as everywhere, it was the same good temper, the same carelessness of order, as like a flowery island in the dancing blue water the motley fleet came up.

I steered our skiff a space out from the bank to get a better view, while An clapped her hands together and laughed. “It is Hath—he himself and those of the palace with him. Steer a little nearer still, friend—so! between yon floating rubbish flats, for those with Hath are good to look at.”

Nothing loth I made out into mid-stream to see that strange prince go by, little thinking in a few minutes I should be shaking hands with him, a wet and dripping hero. The crowd came up, and having the advantage of the wind, it did not take me long to get a front place in the ruck, whence I set to work, with republican interest in royalty, to stare at the man who An said was the head of Martian society. He did not make me desire to renounce my democratic principles. The royal fellow was sitting in the centre of the barge under a canopy and on a throne which was a mass of flowers,