He sat down and raised a curled paw to his mouth to lick it and rub it comfortably over the top of his head. Then he washed his flank, and up went a hind leg catstyle so he could lean down and nuzzle his privates. He lost balance comically because of the slope of the rock, righted himself with a comedian’s ease, and lay down and rolled with his feet in the air. And when he tired of that he yawned, and jumped down, and strolled across the road into the woods, and for a while he was gone.
16
That was the first time I had seen the inside of a village. Since then I’ve seen more than I can plainly remember, for when I was with Rumley’s Ramblers we visited one after another throughout Levannon, Bershar, Conicut, Katskil, more than a year in Penn; the atmosphere and the people may vary a great deal, but the general pattern is much the same in all the nations. Wherever you find them, such villages are designed for one fundamental purpose, to give a small human community a bit of safety in a world where our breed is no longer numerous, not rich and sleek as in Old Time, not wise, and not very brave.
They are usually laid out in a square, in some location where a stream crosses fairly level ground. The drinking water comes from the upstream end, and the rest of the stream is regarded as a sewer — saves digging. Main Street , running down the midline of the village, will be rather wide and ordinarily straight, so that when you enter by the front gate you look all the way to the one in the rear; the other streets will be narrow except for the area, not always called a street, formed by a cleared space just inside the stockade. Often a green occupies the center of the village facing Main Street , with the usual equipment — bandstand, whipping post, stocks, pillory and maybe a nice wading pool for the children. You’ll notice one block of houses better than the rest — bigger yards, maybe flower-beds along with the necessary vegetable patch, eveit a slave hut out back next the privy demonstrating that the family owns a servant or two instead of renting them out from the slave barracks on the downstream side of town. On that downstream side, beside the barracks, you can find what the people sometimes call the “factory,” really a warehouse, for the village industries — home weaving, baskets, cabinet-work or whatever. The policer station will be on that side, and the jail, the public stable, the legal whorehouse, blacksmith shop, probably the baitingpit if the village can afford to maintain one; and there will be several blocks on that side where the houses sag together in dejection, the drunks would rather sleep it off in their front yards than indoors, being independent freemen, and if any pigs from the prosperous neighborhood go hunting garbage on that side of town they prefer to travel in pairs.
In between those extremes stand the middle-class blocks, where the ideal is a harking back to Old Time, with all the houses exactly alike, all yards and gardens exactly alike, all the privies exactly alike with small crescent windows of precisely the same size emitting the same flavor of socially significant togetherness.
Now that I’d made Sam a Mister in my hasty way, he couldn’t get out of it, and figured he might as well r’ar back and enjoy it. He was still carrying himself like God’s favorite adviser when we blew in at the Black Prince. As a result, the weedy ancient in charge of the flea-bag fawned all over us, charging twice the normal rate for two of his best rooms which would have done credit to a hog fann anywhere; Sam wanted to bargain, but was afraid it might damage the picture of ourselves as slightly important nobs. He said later that this was a considerable grief to him, descended as he was from a long line of illustrious chicken-thieves. He caught up on the bargaining later, with Rumley’s Ramblers. I’ve heard Pa Rumley say that Sam could have bargained the beard off a prophet, and he meant Jeremiar himself, which was near-about the finest praise Pa Rumley could give any man. You know how attached prophets get to their beards, and Jeremiar was a vigorous type, who worked up such a thriving trade in woe and lamentations that the opposition finally crowded him into an ark and sent him down-river among the bull-rushers to get rid of him.
A group of pilgrims from up north had already got the very best rooms at the Black Prince, overlooking Main Street; our two were second best, I guess, each with a slit of window looking north; I would have hated to see the worst. Beside the rickety cots they called beds the walls displayed dark smears telling of collisions between the human race and one of its closest, sincerest admirers. And over all things like a saintly benediction lay the smell of cabbage.
In a bedbug, so far as I understand him, there is not a trace of mirth or loving-kindness. Even their admiration for humanity is based on deep-seated greed. They have intellect, to be sure — how else would they know the exact moment when you’re about to fall asleep, and select that moment for a stab? Dion says bugs go by instinct. I asked him: “What’s instinct?” He said: “Oh, you go to hell!” Then Nickie flung in the statement that when you do something p’ison clever without a notion of what it’s all about, that’s instinct. But I still think they have intellect, and they probably brood too much until it curdles their dispositions, for note this: I never met a bug who showed me a trace of liking or respect, no matter what I’d done for him. Contempt is what they show, contempt. I’ve known a bug to stare me in the eye with my gore dripping from his jaws, and anyone could tell from his vinegary face that he was comparing me with other meals in the past and finding fault with everything — too salt, too gamy, needing more sass, something. He wouldn’t have complimented me if I’d spiced my ass and put butter on it. So I contemptify ’em right back. I hate bugs. Damn a bug.
The vital philosophic point I’m trying to ram home through the fog of your incomprehension is this: If the human race should perish completely, what would become of the bedbug? I’m sorry I cursed them. We must return good for evil, it says here.
In the evolutionary sense, they must have grown up with us, and now they can’t get along without us. Fleas are all right. Fleas don’t need us. They’d eat anything, even a taxcollector. But the bedbug is our dependent, our responsibility. We made him what he is. He cries to us: “Strive on, lest we too perish!” Let us therefore—[19]
I was about to digress anyway, before I began to notice how the fermented essence of an attractive grape that grows wild here on the island Neonarcheos has a curious side-effect, namely intoxication. According to the best information I can get together, that was last night; this is the following morning, somewhat late — any time now I expect to begin thinking that I shall live.
Captain Barr returned yesterday, which made it one of the days we celebrate, after sailing hither than he had intended. He was driven partly, he says, by a reluctance to believe what he was finding out.
There’s no longer any doubt that this island where we have settled is the smallest and most westerly of the archipelago that in Old Times was named the Azores. The islands — smaller and differently shaped of course because of the rise in sea level — are all accounted for where the old map says they should be. And nowhere in all the group could Captain Barr discover any token of humanity. Goats, wild sheep, monkeys; on one island the men glimpsed a pack of what looked like wild brown dogs chasing a deer. Birds were everywhere, and in a bay where the Morning Star anchored, enormous sea snakes were playing in the shallow water, creatures I can’t find described in any of the old books. Never a human figure, never any smoke against the sky. In the night hours at anchor, never a light on land, nor any sound but insects and frogs and night birds, and the talk of breakers on the sand. In the best natural harbors, jungle grows to the water’s edge, hiding the debris of whatever men might have built there in Old Time.