The Bovadium Fragments, page 3
Nevertheless the constipation of the highways did not mitigate the noise and stench in the city; for if halted the Motores belched the more, while they drummed and throbbed inwardly in thwarted rage. No longer could any man converse with another in the streets save in hoarse shouts and at the peril of choking in poisonous fumes. Behind padded doors and doubled windows the consiliarii and magistri of Bovadium lifted up their voices in lamentation and laid their aching heads together; and the Planners brought plans to them. But the only remedy that they had devised was the making of still more roads (for the use of the Motores) by the destruction of ancient buildings, the devastation of fields, and the felling of trees. This all agreed was wise; but on the placing of the roads there was no agreement. For each Planner was most disposed to the destruction of houses, fields and groves that belonged to other men, who could be robbed and ejected ‘for the common good’; and the most plansome were naturally those who possessed none of these things, or had no love for them, since their fame and livelihood depended upon their removal.
Now it came to pass that for the assistance of the consiliarii and magistri many maps of Bovadium were made; and thus those who lived upon the northern side of the Via Maxima (where the din and stench was worst) became aware that those who lived upon its southern side were secretly enjoying a remnant of the peace of old. For their halls looked southward over meadows and groves through which in former days no road had ever been made, and into which, the approaches being guarded by great gates and iron bars, no Motor could enter (save a few belonging to southern magnates). Then the Northerners were filled with hate and envy, holding the opinion that misery should be equal, or if unequal that other men should bear the heavier burden; and their hatred was in no way appeased when the Southerners pointed out that all citizens were free to enter their meadows and there escape for a while the pursuit of the Motores; for the Northerners begrudged to the Southerners the view from their back-windows.
Therefore the Northerners laid the matter before the Minister, who was a man appointed by the King to deal (if he could) with the troubles caused by the Motores; and he had great powers to command the destruction of any land or property, as he saw fit, if thereby the Motores were enabled to continue rolling. This man the Northerners now besought to order the building of a great road and bridges through the southern meadows, so that the Motores, deserting the Via Maxima, might transfer their din and stench to their neighbours, but they themselves might sleep in peace.
The Southerners, however, preferred their own good fortune to the ‘common good’ (or common misery), and filled in their turn with rage they contested this plan with great bitterness. But while this new debate was proceeding, still the Motores increased in size and numbers. Fearing, therefore, that the Minister might yield to the clamour of their enemies (if only to appear to the King an active man, worthy of the very large Motor that had been given to him), the Southerners determined to distract him with other proposals. They therefore brought to his notice plans more attractive, pointing out the obvious advantages of making new roads and bridges in northern territory, or at least in places neither visible nor audible from southern windows. That even larger numbers of habitable houses and fruitful fields would in these ways be destroyed was held to the credit of the plans; for it was well known that Ministers did not count costs (incurred by other people), and favoured plans that were ‘bold’: a term that at that time was applied to any action that hurt someone else.
The Minister, however, took no action one way or the other. The arguments on either side appeared to him equal; and he was in fact in possession of plans even bolder, which would have effectually ruined both the south and the north simultaneously. No doubt he found these attractive. The academy in Bovadium was ancient, beautiful, and even moderately useful, and the damage would, or course, be irreparable; so that if a man ordered it, no one could possibly doubt that he was active, serious, and indeed endowed with ‘vision’. He was, however, engaged with more urgent matters.
* * *
Though in Bovadium this was usually forgotten, similar troubles had arisen in every part of the realm. Many other cities were even more grievously afflicted; while the Capital City itself had become an almost solid mass of Motores. The Minister had accordingly long been occupied – at vast cost and by turning many thousands of acres into permanent desert – in constructing great roads, on which the more expensive kinds of Motores (such as his own) might be able to proceed at full speed. Nonetheless he was unable to reach Bovadium. The new roads at once became blocked with streams of competing Motores, and by those that were derelict at the road-side, overcome by their frantic exertions. In this case the Minister found himself, and after spending a cold night in his Motor he returned, at great hazard, to the Capital City, from which he was not again able to escape.
Therefore day by day the uproar and stench went on increasing in Bovadium, until the voices of the debaters and the lamentation of the afflicted, and even the shouts of the Planners, could be heard no more. And so the matter ended. There came at last a day when every street, every road, lane, alley, court, and byway was blocked: nothing could move either forward or backward. All Motores stopped dead. Silence fell. The silence of a tomb. For when at length men came to the city, walking over the tops of the inert Motores, they found that all the inhabitants were dead. Slain by the poisonous fumes, their shades had fled to seek a cleaner air in Hell.
There now (it is said) they stood, deaf ghosts, upon the shores of Styx;[5] and they saw to their dismay that they were only part of a great host.
They began to murmur; but a large Shade stood forth and ordered them to form themselves into lines: and they saw that this was the Minister.
‘You can rely on me,’ he said. ‘Charon[6] has been removed for inefficiency. By arrangement with the Daemon a fleet of cymbae motrices[7] has been prepared. I regret that the fare has been raised to six obols.[8] Please have them ready. Keep your places. There is no longer any hurry, and there is plenty of room for all, on the other Side.’
No ghost paid any attention to him.
* * *
Editorial notes on Fragment II
[1] The spelling Daemon represents the Greek and Latin form of the word from which demon is derived, and was often used in English to indicate the ancient meaning, an attendant or indwelling spirit, a guardian god that guides a man in his life. It may be thought that this was my father’s intention. See further the reference to the Daemon in Fragment III.
[2] Pius represents the name Godley.
[3] consiliarii: ‘counsellors, advisers’.
[4] emporia: The word emporium was derived from Greek emporion, Latin emporium, meaning a place of commerce, a market. My father sometimes used it, in mild derision, of very large department stores, and that is no doubt the force of the word even here.
[5] Styx: In Greek mythology, the chief river of Hades, the underworld, the realm of the dead.
[6] Charon was the ferryman who carried in his boat the shades of the dead across the river Styx to Hades.
[7] cymbae motrices: ‘motor boats’. My father clearly used the rare word cymba (also cumba) here because it was specially associated with Charon’s boat, as in Virgil, Aeneid VI.303.
[8] six obols: Charon received a fee of one obol for each ghostly passenger; and for payment of this fare the dead were buried with a coin of this value in their mouths.
FRAGMENT III
[Note. Dr. Gums remarked (p. 7): ‘F III contains two chants, one in A and the other in B, while the context suggests that the second (in B) is a version or paraphrase of the former.’]
[Here on three further attached pages a third somewhat larger but equally regular hand adds the following legend.]
It is said that in that time an old man stood and gazed at the desolation about him; and after a while he lifted up his voice in a chant, made in the elder tongue and after the manner of the chants that in former days had been heard in the temples of Bovadium; and it purports to relate the answer given to the cry of the magistri: Domine defende nos. Thus he sang:
Dixit Dominus dominis et magistris: ‘Quare tristes estis, et quare conturbatis aurem meam?
Nonne locuti estis in vanitate: velociores ventis erimus; quaecumque volumus faciemus illico?
Ecce, pedes habetis et non ambulatis; titubatis in cluribus vestris.
Stridore rotarum vehimini; motiones vestras sine consilio.
Pax deseruit hortos vestros, et quies dereliquit cubilia.
Deus vester facta est Machina quam machinamini ipsi; idola eius multiplicata sunt
Ferrum in cordibus eorum; in ventribus comprimuntur ignes.
Foetor procedit e visceribus; cornua eorum spargunt fremitum.
Similes iis fient qui faciunt ea, et omnes qui diligunt illa.
Servient operibus manuum suarum, in omnibus diebus suis servi.
Aures habent et fient surdi; nares habent et non odorabuntur.
Oculos habent at videbunt mortem: cadavera in viis bituminatis.
In vanum fugient pestem quam meditati sunt; ipsa deducet eos in infernum.’
Sed nos qui vivimus laudabimus opera Domini nostri: Deus vivus omnia viventia
Domine, a machinis defende nos, qui dileximus terram quam tu fecisti.[1]
Thereupon a number of the ‘rescuers’, being mostly country-folk who had crept into Bovadium to see what they could see and find what they could find, drew near, attracted by the strange singing. Seeing them the old man took off his hat, and began to chant again in the popular speech; for the bystanders did not look the sort of men to understand the elder tongue; and the members of the Academy were now on the far side of Styx. Thus he sang again:
‘The Lord said unto the doctors and masters: “Why are ye sad, and why do ye trouble my ear? Did you not speak in your folly, saying: we shall be swifter than the winds; whatsoever we wish we shall do straightway? Lo! ye have feet and ye walk not; ye totter upon your legs. With a great din of wheels ye are borne about; your motions are without purpose. Peace hath deserted your groves, and rest hath forsaken your couches. Your god ye have made a Contrivance which ye yourselves contrived; its likenesses are multiplied exceedingly. Iron is in their hearts, and in their bellies fires are imprisoned. Stench proceedeth from their entrails; their horns cast abroad a great noise. Like unto them shall become those who make them, and all those who hold them in esteem. They shall serve the works of their own hands, slaves in all the days of their life. They have ears, and they shall be made deaf; they have nostrils, and they shall perceive no odour.Their eyes shall see only death: the corpses on the roads of pitch. In vain shall they flee from the plague which they have devised; it shall bring them down upon the way to Hell.”’
At that point many of those that stood by became angry, crying out that the singer was mad, or that he blasphemed; and some said to him: ‘Why do you not mention the Daemon? And why do you attribute to men the devising of the Motores, which were His? He will be ill pleased if He hears you. As well He may. For is not one of his great places nearby, even in Vaccipratum,[2] as we have been told?’
But the singer looked at them with pity, saying: ‘Nay, he will not be displeased; for this work of his is finished to his liking. And as for Vaccipratum, and other places like it, he did not dwell there. Men worked there, to make the things that you clamoured for. Now they are buried under piles of Motores, made and half-made, which no man can move.There they will rot; for the Daemon is no longer interested in them. His phrontisterium[3] is elsewhere, and that workshop at least is not yet closed; its products are easily transported. No doubt it will produce some new Plan to persuade you to use your skill in some other lunatic fashion – one day. But be of good cheer! It may be a long time before your children’s children hear of it.You yourselves will be too hungry, scraping your living (like animals) among the ruins, to give thought to such follies. Go and look for some food!’
Then the bystanders scratched their heads. His last remark was the only one that they understood. Some, therefore, went to look for food; but a few of the more foolish went to look for Motores of the better sort, hoping to get them out of the deadlock, for many of the monsters still had fuel in their bellies. But some could not be roused again, and the others, though they spluttered and roared, could not move a foot in any direction. Whereupon one of the men in a rage cast a lighted match into the belly of one of the monsters; and there was a sudden thunder and a great blaze, in which he and his fellows perished. For the fool had thrown his match into a Motor that had been bearing a huge load of fuel for the feeding of other Motores. Then the fire leaped from belly to belly among the monsters, until throughout the city there was a great burning. So ended Bovadium.
Later it came to pass even as the singer had said. There was a great dearth of food: because of the devastation of fertile lands by roads and by the excavation of materials for roads. There were no horses left to help men; and for the Motores that had driven them out there was no fuel, and no slaves to tend them. So that such lands as remained were poorly tilled, or not at all. Thus to dearth succeeded famine, in which most of those who remained alive in the beautiful country finally perished. Then most of the survivors fled into the wilds far from the roads and shunned the sight of the Motores, which were hideous in decay. But here and there the rude villagers used them for the housing of their starveling fowls; and so at last they produced something for the common good, for the hens on their seats laid a few eggs: small, but at any rate fresh.
* * *
Editorial notes on Fragment III
[1] The last two sentences of the Latin text are not translated into the ‘popular speech’. They read in English: ‘But we who live will praise the works of our Lord: the living God made all living things. Lord, from these devices deliver us, who have loved the earth which thou hast made.’
[2] Vaccipratum: ‘Cow-pasture’ (Latin vacca ‘cow’, pratum ‘meadow’), a name devised by my father to represent the English name Cowley, which he derived from Old English Cū-lēah of the same meaning. Later he pencilled this note on the typescript: ‘Vacciprata was, curiously, the actual name of some gardens in Rome.’ Cowley was the village to the south of old Oxford where William Morris (Viscount Nuffield) went to school and where he built his huge motorcar factories.
[3] phrontisterium: This arcane word carries a memory of Athens in the fifth century B.C., when there appeared the play The Clouds by Aristophanes. This was an attack on Socrates and his school, which was ridiculed as the φροντιστήριον, a ‘thinking-shop’ (the usual translation). Behind this name are the words φροντίς; ‘thought’, ‘meditation’, φροντίξω ‘to think; think out, devise’, and φροντιστής; ‘a deep thinker’, as Aristophanes derisively called Socrates. For the occurrence of phrontisterion (or Latinised phrontisterium) in English see the Oxford English Dictionary, entry Phrontistery.
POSTSCRIPT BY THE EDITOR
I feel confident that those who have read these curious documents will have discovered in them more than a mere linguistic interest. They throw a considerable light on the ‘lost culture’. How far they can be regarded as historical is another matter. Although several of the younger school have already assumed that Bovadium was the ancient A-name of Vasti, the assumption is rash.When the A ‘chronicle’ was written Vasti must have been still flourishing. Bovadium must, therefore, refer to some other place, most probably to a place and time that never existed outside the morbid fancy of some late writer among the decadent A-people. His tale is quite incredible. It is hard to believe that there were ever in this country so many men or so rich. It is impossible to believe that, if so, they would squander all that they had in such a ‘lunatic fashion’.
We at any rate are not likely to fall into such folly. We do not believe in any Daemon; and if we did, we should give no ear to one that prompted us to the making of large machines. For happily we value peace, and food, and the visual arts; and the science to which we are most devoted is Medecine, somatic and psychic. At present, indeed, as we all know, we are on the brink of great advances; and the hope is now near that we shall at last conquer mortality, and not ‘die like animals’: to quote the words of our leading Thanatologist. Some think that he is inspired.
GUMS.
OTHER TEXTS OF FRAGMENT II
The two texts that follow, a poem in octosyllabic couplets and a passage of Latin prose, are very closely related in narrative content. Both are written in a good clear hand, and may well have been composed at the same time: the Latin prose, I would suggest, being based on the poem.
It will be seen that both texts take up at the point where, after the last lines of the ‘Motor Bus’ poem, which are cited in both, Fragment I has ‘Deus autem preces eius non exaudivit’ (p. 15) and Fragment II ‘The prayer of Pius was not answered’ (p. 19); but then they move almost at once to the estrangement and hostility of those that dwelt to the north and to the south of the Via Maxima, to the total paralysis of the city, and the gathering of the dead ‘motorists’ on the shores of the Styx.
At the end, where in Fragment II (p. 31) the ‘Shade of the Minister’ informed them that Charon had been dismissed and that ‘by arrangement with the Daemon a fleet of cymbae motrices has been prepared’ to ferry them across the dismal river, in the present texts Charon, still present, beckons them to his Motor-boat: and in the text of M (see pp. xxi–xxii) the same is told: ‘There now (it is said) they stood, deaf ghosts, upon the shores of Styx, and saw to their dismay grim Charon beckoning them – to his “motor-boat”.’
