Toddle Island. Being the diary of Lord Bottsford

Front matter

BEING THE DIARY OF LORD BOTTSFORD ' Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth : and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears ofthe Lord of Sabaoth.' James v. 4. LONDON RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON publishers in ©rtriivarj) to g}cr the (Qnrcn 1894 [All rights reserved] Ipcutsatt-rj TO MV BELOVED AND REVERED MOTHER, WHO, ALWAYS RELIGIOUS AND ALWAYS REAL, TAUGHT ME THE FOLLY OF SUPERSTITION AND SHAMS. n3ook I. ' Although some things are too serious, solemn, or sacred, to be turned into ridicule, yet the abuses of them are certainly not ; since it is allowed that corruptions in religion, politics, and law may be proper topics for this kind of satire. ... I demand whether I have not as good a title to laugh as men have to be ridiculous ; and to expose vice, as another has to be vicious.

If I ridicule the follies and corruptions of a court, a ministry, or a senate, are they not amply paid by pensions, titles, and power, while I expect and desire no other reward than that of laughing with a few friends in a corner ?' — Dean Swift. ' And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep.' — Lord Byron.

Chapter I

Though I had lived forty-five years I had never heard of Toddle Island, and it seems to me rather wonderful that such an obscure corner of the earth was ever brought before my notice. If you carefully study a map of the world, you will find a small group of islands in the Southern Pacific called the Bounty Islands. Toddle Island is almost directly opposite these, and though the careless reader may not see it, yet it is marked on most maps. I have never been able to make out why it was not included amongst the others, but the Bounty Islands lie nearer the Antarctic Ocean than Toddle Island, and may have been kept in a state of savagery by Maori criminals from New Zealand. Their history, how ever, is yet to be written, and I am anticipating far too rapidly with regard to Toddle Island itself.

My visit origin ated in this way : After receiving my title and estates, I went every year to London. Each year seemed duller than the one before it, and after I had spent a calendar month in going to a dinner and three parties each night, I was weary — sick of the whole show. As I returned from the packed rooms of the Duchess of Bromby, I called upon my friend Dick Spooner to tell him I could endure London no longer. Though Dick was ten years my junior, yet he was my only friend in the world. We had lived together in poverty. At that time, about seven years earlier, Dick was a schoolmaster. Poor drudge ! I remember his haggard look when he was starving on a few pence a day, for which he was expected to pour the knowledge of four generations into the sterile young brain in four years. I was not much better off.

I veiled my huckstering life under the sweet fiction of estate agent, whilst my remote cousin, Lord Bottsford, was roaming through the capitals of Europe. At last the estates and title came to me ! Then Dick and I left our drudgery. I made him independent of the world, but we seldom lived apart. The reader will now see how it came to pass that I ever heard of Toddle Island, for in the old dark days Dick used to teach the peasant children geography, and to enlarge their ideas he told them the longest names of the smallest islands in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Those were the days before education was invented. After pouring out my scorn for the dance of death which a rich Londoner calls pleasure, Dick suggested a walk on the Embankment. There we strolled. As the dawn broke and the light showed through the arches of Waterloo Bridge, we halted at Cleopatra's Needle.

Dick is an imaginative fellow, and sometimes melancholy ; but he has had a hard life, and as a child he was soaked in a sour religion. Still, on many occasions he is grand, and I can pour out my pessimism without any fear of injuring him. As we came near the new Sphinxes I was saying that British civilization was chiefly sawdust, and that society was so much mud which had dried on the back of the golden calf. When we stood still, I continued : ' Do let us leave it ; I had rather be a Brummagem Sphinx or a hieroglyph, which no man can read, on the tomb of a dead religion, than take part in a pantomime where the thief and the undertaker are the only serious characters. Will you decide upon some place and come with me, Dick ?' ' What do you want, savagery or solitude ?' ' A mixture of both, or some form of civilization which we have not seen, and which does not play its own pæan on a tin whistle and then ask the public for a collection to defray expenses.' 'What do you say to Toddle Island?

It lies where many seas meet ; it has no climate, and its inhabitants have no ancestry. Like the island itself, they came from nowhere, or everywhere ; and I am told that the Toddlers are highly interesting — no one ever saw them twice alike.' ' Capital ! That sounds better than this life of a blowfly in a bottle, which wears itself out by making music for its own funeral. Is it far away ?' ' Fourteen thousand miles. Let us go, that we may write a history of Toddle Island. One writer can correct the other, and I am told that a true history of the Toddlers would rouse the genuine laughter of a professional clown.' And so it came to pass that we resolved to sail to Toddle Island. We found London somewhat interesting, for the confusion of most London shops gave us infinite sport in hunting for our outfit.

Even I almost found the Metropolis pleasant. By the time we were ready to sail London was like a gingerbread man with the gilt sucked off. The fashionable magnates, whether philanthropists or flirts, had fled like a swarm of locusts, and left the place to the beggarly people who work for a living, together with a few clerks and stray curates. As we got out into the ocean, our spirits rose and our joy was great. We stored up any scraps of information regarding the manners and customs of the Toddlers, yet we carefully avoided their histories, for we were advised that those books were samples of partisan mud-throwing, and no more to be believed than a modern sermon in England. I am compelled to say that Dick perpetrated some verses, otherwise he was often brilliant. He treated the tumbling waves as if they were familiar friends who had never deceived him, and at night he seemed to have a secret language by which he communed with the stars.

I sometimes wish I could trust Nature as Dick does ; but then I might become a Pantheist, and that would shock my tenantry — at least, they would be frightened at the word. There were few people on board, as it was not the season to visit Toddle Island, and these few were mostly traders. The only intelligent man amongst them was Mr. Gane, an agent for an automatic bubble-blowing machine. He marked my astonishment at this announcement. Then he explained that he had been ' called to the Bar,' but no one would give him a brief, because he lived at that time with his grandmother, and she did not give dinners ; so he took to trade, and he had found that the Toddlers are fond of buying bubbles, only they must be perfectly round, sea-green, and reflect the owner's face with added beauty. I listened with admiration to Mr. Gane.

He told me most amusing things about the islanders and their customs. He especially tried to impress me with the fact that they were a mercantile race, and that their shopkeeping instincts pervaded everything they did ; upholstered every hope and regulated every affection. Nothing was so dear to the Toddlers as to seem stolidly respectable ; for the respectability itself they had no desire. I observed Mr. Gane on many occasions engrossed in his favourite amusement of cards with the other passengers. He seemed very much puzzled with my companion, and was utterly unable to comprehend the nature of a man who could sit still for three hours gazing on the sea. When we arrived at our destination we found a busy harbour, and landed after much delay. In my folly I had taken piles of luggage, for which there seemed no arrange ment.

Three or four fellows pounced upon it, and after a hand-to-hand struggle my best portmanteau fell into the water. Had I been aware how completely our language resembled theirs, I certainly should have relieved my feelings. I never spent a more trying time than those few minutes, when we were ordered about by officials and hustled by savages. Certain fellows were exceedingly rude and opened our boxes, and when they had turned their contents topsy-turvy, we were allowed to reclaim them. This is undoubtedly a survival of barbarism, and probably dates from the time when the inhabitants of the island murdered all who landed, and seized their goods. It seemed strange to me that they should insist upon this imitation butchery and plunder, but I knew not the crooked ways of the Toddler then. Once free and in a sort of public carriage, we hastened to our hotel, greatly surprised to find that English was understood by the natives.

Chapter II

Next morning I called upon the English Consul, and pre. sented my introduction. When he appeared, I conferred with him as to the best means of becoming intimately acquainted with the customs, politics, and religion of the Toddlers. He smiled frigidly at my inquiry, and said : 'You can hardly be aware that it is extremely difficult to know these people. In fact, I sometimes feel convinced that they know nothing themselves of their own morals or religion. These people are the odds and ends of the earth, and if you take the trouble to understand one class, say the bootmakers, and thoroughly master their religion and prejudices, then you will come upon another class — hatters, for instance — who have entirely different customs and notions, and who probably are descended from a different tribe altogether.' I assured the Consul that it was this absence of uniformity, or, to put it more clearly, this wholesale contradiction, which had tempted me to visit the island.

I pointed out to him that if the islanders had possessed the ordinary uniformity either of wild animals or civilized men, I never should have taken the trouble to come so far. He said : ' I will invite a few of the leading men to meet you, and some of them may forward your plans.' I had to wait till the promised party could be arranged, and during the time I tried to read their current literature. They had certain newspapers ; and though they were hundreds of years behind the English press both in ubiquity and omniscience, still, there was a daily literature. I was greatly perplexed by the climate, which seemed to change every morning, and always for the worse. At last the evening arrived for this small party at which I was to be introduced to the manners and customs of the Toddlers. To my great surprise, although it was a cold night, the guests had taken special pains to be less clad than usual.

The two or three ladies present were remarkably unclothed. I was told afterwards by the Consul that in this way the fashionable women of the island show their respect for a distinguished visitor, and that on great occasions they make it a point of honour to disclose them selves as much as possible. I was introduced to the Mayor of Cable, Sir George Blandford, to Professor Planet, and to many others. I could only hear part of the conversation during the banquet on account of the confusion of so many people talking across the table at the top of their voices. The chief features of a dinner-party appeared to be to drink a large amount and to talk without ceasing. I look back now with amusement upon that dinner-party. Professor Planet got into a very heated discussion with the Mayor. In fact, I should have thought that they both lost their tempers ; only I was assured afterwards that it is absolutely impossible in Toddle Island for any mayor to lose his temper, or for any professor to be angry on a public occasion.

The Mayor had said that in this seaport town of Cable crime had increased during his term of office, and he felt it to be a personal insult. He thought he could prevent this by a kind of automatic whipping - post. Professor Planet held entirely different views. He admitted that crime was on the increase in Cable, that it was no longer safe to walk in many parts of the town after sunset ; but he was of opinion that the people did not commit crime of their own accord — in fact, it was due to their ignorance, probably because they had never heard of the exact posi tion of the Milky Way ; and the Professor maintained that if astronomy were introduced into the schools of the island, so that every child before he was five years of age could explain the difference between the sun and the moon, crime would disappear.

To my great astonishment, the Mayor did not answer this, but merely settled the question by languidly affirming that such education would endanger the Sacred Ass ! Professor Planet was a communicative man, with a con siderable amount of leisure. So on the following day I called upon him, fully intending to solve some of the mysteries of the previous night. Dick had not been present at the dinner-party, and I succeeded in so thoroughly confusing his mind by my account of it that he went with me to see Professor Planet. We called in the middle of the morning, and were shown into a large room packed with books, and strewn with photographs and pamphlets. Being encouraged by his kindness of manner, I immediately told the Professor that I had been puzzling over the conversation of the night previous. 'Are you aware, sir,' I asked, 'that I come from a country where we have solved every problem except the problem of the criminal ?

Just before I left England a new and brilliant attempt was mooted. It was proposed to take the criminals, clothe and feed them, and let them live in magnificent palaces, if tliey would, because the first element of all regeneration with the Northern nations is " to respect the sacredness of the human will." ' The Professor looked with wonder upon me. I con tinued : ' There seemed something so original in your plan last night, that crime was due to ignorance of the planets and the Milky Way, that I beg you to explain your proposal for the prevention of crime.' The Professor answered: 'It is indeed gratifying to find that a gentleman who has come from the greatest country in the world has the same interest in crime as a quiet student at the shrine of humanity. The first fact we have to grasp is the totality of the universe.

I know very little about the Milky Way, and I know nothing about crime ; but I am sure that in the individual crime-child, and in the hazy, infinite glories of the Milky Way, we have the two extremes of the universe, and in this island we know that extremes meet, therefore I suggested my cure of crime to the Mayor. He possesses power and money, and has risen from a rank in life which would make it less difficult for him to comprehend the workings of the criminal instincts, because at one time he was a tradesman.' I did not understand this, and in order to get the smallest ray of light from the infinite Milky Way, I asked him why the Mayor had so suddenly and so completely refuted his argument by a reference to the Sacred Ass. He smiled, saying : ' I had forgotten that you are a stranger, and that probably you may not have heard of the Sacred Ass.

Now, we in this island are a people composed of many tribes, and the points on which we agreed originally were remarkably few. But centuries ago a powerful man came to the island, and slew the kings and nobles. It is said that his totem was an animal remarkably like an ass. You must remember that this was thousands of years ago, when men could neither read nor write. The conqueror died, and other kings succeeded him ; but the people always inquired before making a new law whether it would have had the approval of the king and his Sacred Ass. By degrees every reference to the king disappeared ; only the ass remained. One or two officials ventured to say that they had seen the Sacred Ass. Be this as it may, the whole history of the island is bound up with that of the Sacred Ass, which is one of the few things that no foreigner has ever understood.' Dick and I remained a long time with Professor Planet.

We asked many questions about the wonderful animal which seemed to be their guardian saint. I am afraid that neither of us fully comprehended what it was all about. I have, unfortunately, a practical turn of mind, which prevents my dealing with mysteries, and all I could do for the rest of the day was to sit and smoke, and draw caricatures of short-tailed, long-eared asses, and worry Dick to tell me which he thought looked the most sacred.

Chapter III

I called upon the Mayor. He immediately offered me cigars of the choicest brand, smiling with an infinitude that would have sufficed to annihilate, not only Professor Planet, but also the Milky Way. Thus encouraged, I said : ' Sir George Blandford, I do not understand your country ; will you kindly help me to the true meaning of that remarkable phrase of yours, which acted like a charm? Is it true that the islanders have no respect for the lives of others, but yet that everyone regards the Sacred Ass with feelings of the deepest awe ?' The Mayor took a long breath, and whispered : ' I suppose you are aware that the Sacred Ass is never discussed by us? But as you are a stranger, I will tell you what I know of it : Whether it symbolizes the origin of power in this nation, or whether it is a confused tradition of some memorable battle, I cannot say.

It is said that two classes of servants divide the grooming of him between them ; one set grooms his tails, and the other his ears. That is why, in all pictures you see of the Sacred Ass, his ears and his tails are so remarkably long. It ought to be possible to find out how far this is true, because, in the capital, there are two stables into which the animal is taken to be groomed ; one is called the lower stable, and the other the upper. We owe our greatness to this animal, and every right-minded man in the island would outrage his nearest friends rather than hear anything which might disturb the Sacred Ass. All our patience, our endurance, our simplicity of life, our content ment with the poorest circumstances, our pure Christianity, our universal justice, and many other virtues and blessings, are due to this noble animal.' I grew more bewildered the more Sir George explained, but I left him with a smiling face.

For a long time after my interview with Professor Planet and with the Mayor, I avoided the subject of religion, or politics, or whatever it was, which led them to venerate the Sacred Ass. Dick and I suspected that these two people were oddities of the island. It seemed to us altogether unlikely that their statements were true. We resolved, however, not to make ourselves ridiculous in the eyes of our new friends, but to wait and examine. Meantime, I had found lodgings. There is a remarkable charm in living in a country whose institutions, religion, and rate-paying are entirely outside of one's own experience, and I feel sure that this is the sole cause of our success in discovering the true history of the Toddlers. We entered into their pursuits without the fatal bias of hereditary tendency.

I never quite made out how Dick spent his time, for, in spite of a good deal of ex perience, it was almost impossible to keep him from taking everything in earnest, and I feel sure that the first requisite to understand the life and character of the Toddlers is a sense of the ridiculous. They, of course, do not laugh at their own blunders and inconsistencies, but enlightened and scientific Europe, when their customs have been under stood, will confirm all that I have said in this diary. The ancestors of the Toddlers were probably thrown up by the sea and drifted on to the marsh or rock of this little island, and, finding themselves face to face with starvation, they glared at each other fiercely, and then subdued their desire for a dinner with a cynical smile; that smile was the dawn of their civilization.

I feel sure it was the burlesque of it that led these savages to refrain from devour ing each other. So they abandoned all their succeeding history to these two forces. As a rule they drift. If the drifting should on any occasion become serious, they immediately laugh the old cynical laugh of the hungry cannibal, and call it compromise. Dick and I spent many an hour trying to arrange the disorganized fragments which legend furnished with regard to the Sacred Ass. At one time he thought he had solved the whole difficulty by pointing out that it was a form of religion. However, when we got to know them better, we found that this could not be, because, in a dim and confused sense, many of these people were Christians. I went to a kind of party, which the Mayor's wife used to give, and here I gathered information about the customs of her class.

I remember on one occasion I got into difficulties by trying to understand the worship of the Sacred Ass. This was most unfortunate, and I think it was the word ' worship ' which roused the anger of Mrs. Feather, the leader of fashion in Cable. She was immensely rich, through some process which her father could have easily explained, or any of the dock navvies, for he had beguiled hundreds of these men to work for years at low wages, whilst he put money into his bank, and persuaded the wretches that they enjoyed a great privilege in being allowed to toil on his behalf. The result was that when he died Mrs. Feather and her brothers and sisters found themselves the richest people in Cable. Now, the Toddlers regard a banker as the source of intelligence and morality. Yet I found afterwards that, in order to avoid the difficulty of any fixed principles, they take care not to leave the gift of intelligence entirely in the hands of the bankers.

The trick is ingenious. They must have intelligence and morality, so, in addition to that which is invented by the bankers, they create a lighter kind by appealing to chance. They select certain children before they are born to wear a gold thread on their necks. This gold thread confers all virtues on the wearer. When one finds a person with a gold thread round his neck, that person is known to be intelligent, and is recognised as powerful. Mrs. Feather drew her intelligence and power from the bank. I ventured to say to her that I thought there was a great deal of mystery about the Sacred Ass. She gave me a detailed account of his virtues. She showed me that he was the noblest thing in creation, that but for him this world would have been a swamp of stagnant tears, and, in fact, to be allowed in any way to serve such an animal was the highest privilege of the most aristocratic Toddler.

I said to her : ' Madam, have you ever seen this animal ?' She grew pale with a sacred horror, and declared she never had. ' Do you know anyone who has seen him ?' ' No,' she replied, ' but we know the Stables where he is kept, and I am spending fabulous sums that my eldest son may become a Groom in the Stables.' I accepted this as final. Here I must inform the reader that to be a Groom to the Sacred Ass was considered a great honour, for the Grooms and the Jockeys were the two classes who governed the whole island. They had so much power and so many privileges that it was impossible to withstand them. There were a few of the old islanders who fancied that the Grooms were their own servants, and that the Jockeys could be destroyed, but I never found any proof of either of these statements.

By some extraordinary arrangement, if a man once became a Jockey he was a Jockey for life, and his eldest son was also a Jockey, but the other sons were not. If the eldest son died childless, the second son would be the Jockey, but the others would not. This was a piece of mystery suited to a Sacred Ass. In selecting their rulers, the islanders apparently took the utmost trouble to find those persons who knew nothing about the people ; and whenever they discovered a man who, by his birth, surroundings, and education, was entirely ignorant of the daily life and wants of the people, this man would be made a ruler. It was a clever device, but I have not been able to discover by whom it was invented. Their object was to prevent any change by which the people should obtain a better position ; for the Jockeys regarded them selves as belonging to an entirely different race, and many of the Grooms were of the same opinion.

In order to hoodwink the Grooms and keep them quiet, the Jockeys would occasionally invite a Groom into their own Stable and call him instantly a Jockey. I would not take the trouble to give these wretched details, but that to the Toddlers they were of the utmost importance. We can have no idea how the little life of this little island experienced all the shocks of earthquakes and volcanoes merely by changing the colour of a ribbon. I was told that the Royal Family of the island paid great attention to these details.

Chapter IV

Cable followed the fashions of the capital, and it was marked by the class distinctions and the party strife, the luxury and the starvation, which are the peculiar glory of the capital of the island. Nothing shocked the Toddlers so much as to have their poor frozen to death. They did not care how many of them were killed in any other way — as, in fact, many were day by day by their various employments! and owing to their being unable to procure sufficient food — but if it happened that, during a winter of extreme severity, one or two of them were frozen to death, this created a great sensation. So that the clever, poor Toddlers, who felt instinctively that they were intended for the peerage, and who consistently refused to work for their living, prospered on those occasions. It was not considered a bad thing to be poor on this island, if they were poor enough, and poor long enough, for then they belonged to the Lower Peerage.

The State built large palaces, in which the Lower Peerage were placed. The Lower Peerage and the Upper Peerage closely resembled each other, their chief difference being in name. They called the Upper Peerage the aristo cracy, and the Lower Peerage the paupers. For each peerage large houses were provided in which they could live, spacious rooms, warm and well lighted, and a neverfailing stock of food, for all of which they were in no wise responsible. By the kindness of Professor Planet, I had been intro. duced to the few learned people of Cable. Never have I heard of a race so dominated by one illusion as were these poor Toddlers by their Sacred Ass. It entered into all their thoughts and speculations ; it altered the alliances and relationships of life, and in the moments of their highest exultation you could detect the bray of this strange animal.

Professor Planet had introduced me to a distinguished young man of the wealthier people called Richard Rope. Mr. Rope was aspiring to be a Groom, that is, something answer ing to our Member of Parliament. He was learning how to be ' elected.' In theory such a man, when elected, had to look after the interests of those who had chosen him. I never discovered that this theory had been carried out ; in fact, it was one of those numerous instances of the survival ofthe cannibal burlesque to which I have already referred. A man obtained the position of a ruler in this way : First of all he promised to do everything that the people in Cable wished him to do. Secondly, he had a home some distance away where he could go and live, fish and shoot, and forget the dirty back-streets of Cable ; but on certain necessary occasions he would pay a visit to the town, and he would invite a few of the privileged class to a banquet, and if he gave them very good food and very strong wine, they would all stand round him and sing, ' He is a jolly good fellow.' This must strike an Englishman as a bad pantomime and it must fill our hearts with thankfulness that never in our struggle for British freedom did we present to the world a spectacle of such nude and grotesque jugglery.