Brian Aldiss - Greybeard

An old bent man was masturbating in a ditch and drunkenly cursing his seed before they came to the next stall. It was little more than a wooden platform. Above it fluttered a banner with the words ETERNAL LIFE on it.

“This must be Jingadangelow’s pitch,” Greybeard said.

Several people were here; some were listening to the man speaking from the platform, while others jostled about a fallen figure that was propped against the platform edge, with two aged crones weeping and croaking over it. To see what was happening was difficult in the flapping light of unguarded torches, but the words of the man on the platform made things clearer.

This speaker was a tall raven figure with wild hair and a face absolutely white except for quarries of slatey grey under his eyes. He spoke in the voice of a cultured man, with a vigour his frame seemed scarcely able to sustain, beating time to his phrases with a pair of fine wild hands.

“Here before us you see evidence of what I am saying, my friends. In sight and hearing of us all, a brother has just departed this life. His soul burst out of his ragged coating and left us. Look at us — look at us, my dearly loved brethren, all dressed in our ragged coating on this cold and miserable night somewhere in the great universe. Can you say any one of you in your hearts that it would not be better to follow our friend?”

“To hell with that for a lark!” a man called, clasping a bottle. He drew the speaker’s accusing finger.

“For you it might not be better, I agree, my friend — for you would go as our brother here did, loaded before the Lord with liquor. The Lord’s stood enough of our dirty nonsense, brethren; that’s the plain truth.

He’s had more than He call stand. He’s finished with us, but not with our souls. He’s cut us off, and manifestly He will disapprove if we persist till our graves in perpetuating the follies we should have left behind in our youth.”

“How else are we to keep warm on these mucking winter’s nights?” the jolly man asked, and there was a murmur of approval about him. Charley tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Would you mind keeping quiet while this gentleman speaks?”

The jolly man swung round on Charley. Though age had withered him like a prune, his mouth was spread red and large across his face as if it had been plastered there by a fist. He worked this ample mouth now, realized that Charley was stronger than he was, and relapsed into silence. Unmoved, the parson continued his oration.

“We must bow before His will, my friends, that’s what we must do. Soon we shall all go down on our knees here and pray. It will be fitting for us all to go together into His presence, for we are the last of His generations, and it is meet that we should bear ourselves accordingly. What have we to fear if we are righteous, ask yourselves that? Once before He swept the Earth clean with a flood because of the sins of man. This time He has taken from our generative organs the God-given power to procreate. If you think that to be a more terrible punishment than the flood, then the sins of our century, the Twenty-First Century, are more terrible sins. He can wipe the slate clean as many times as He will, and begin again.

“So we do not weep for this Earth we are to leave. We are born to vanish as the cattle we once tended have already vanished, leaving the Earth clean and new for His further works. Let me recall to you, my brethren, before we sink upon our knees in prayer, the words of the scriptures concerning this time.”

He put his fluttering hands together and peered into the darkness to recite: “‘For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth the beasts — yea, even one thing befalleth them. As the one dieth, so dieth the other, and they have but one breath. So that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is vanity. All go unto one place, all are of the dust, and all turn again to dust. Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in the Lord’s works, for that is his portion. And who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?”

“My old missus will be after me, if I don’t get home,” the jolly man said. “Good night to thee, parson.” He began to straggle up the road, supported by a crony. Greybeard shook Charley’s arm, and said, “This man isn’t Bunny Jingadangelow, for all that he advertises eternal life. Let’s move on.”

“No, let’s hear a bit more yet, Greybeard. Here’s a man speaking truth. In how many years have I heard someone so worth listening to?”

“You stay here then, I’ll go on.”

“Stay and listen, Algy — it’ll do you good.”

But Greybeard moved up the road. The parson was again using the dead man by his platform for his text. Perhaps that had been one of the ineradicable faults of mankind — for even a convinced atheist had to admit there were faults — that it was never content with a thing as a thing; it had to turn things into symbols of other things. A rainbow was not only a rainbow; a storm was a sign of celestial anger; and even from the puddingy earth came forth dark chthonian gods. What did it all mean? What an agnostic believed and what the willowy parson believed were not only irreconcilable systems of thought: they were equally valid systems of thought because, somewhere along the evolutionary line, man, developing this habit of thinking of symbols, had provided himself with more alternatives than he could manage, more systems of alternatives than he could manage. Animals moved in no such channel of imagination — they copulated and they ate; but to the saint, bread was a symbol of life, as the phallus was to the pagan. The animals themselves were pressed into symbolic service — and not only in mediaeval bestiaries, by any means.

Such a usage was a distortion, although man seemed unable to ratiocinate without it. That had been the trouble right from the beginning. Perhaps it had even been the beginning, back among those first men that man could never get clearly defined (for the early men, being also symbols, had to be either lumbering brutes, or timid noble savages, or to undergo some other interpretation). Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality. It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of the woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac; it had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the Earth.

Greybeard abandoned this line of thought as he came to the next pitch along the road. He found himself looking at another banner that said “Eternal Life”.

The banner hung across the front of a garage standing drunkenly beside a dilapidated house. Its doors had fallen off, but were propped inside to screen off the back half of the garage. A fire burned behind this screen, throwing the shadows of two people across the roof. In front of the screen, nursing a lantern in chilled hands, was a shrivel-gummed old girl perched on a box. She called to Greybeard in a routine fashion, “If you want Eternal Life, here’s the place to find it. Don’t listen to the parson! His asking price is too high. Here, you don’t have to give anything, you don’t have to give anything up. Our kind of eternal life can be bought by the syringe-full and paid for without any trouble over your soul. Walk in if you want to live for ever!”

“Shot in the arm or shot in the dark, I don’t know that I entirely trust you or the parson, old lady.”