Duncton Rising (32 page)

“Don’t you feel the joy of the Stone in your heart. Brother Pumpkin?” one of them said, stopping him suddenly and fixing him with a smile that Pumpkin presumed had a spiritual dimension.

“Joyful day that a mole discovers it!” cried out Pumpkin fervently.

“Many more to come, Brother, many, many more, now that you have opened up your heart to the true way.”

“Oh, really? Yes, many more I suppose,” he cried out. “I am so happy to think of them!”

“And we are happy for you, Brother.”

“Oh, galoo galay,” Pumpkin thought to himself, “how happy am I! Happy day, oh happy time. But Stone...” – and here his inner voice took on a grim warning tone quite uncharacteristic of him – “... you had better find a way out of the dilemma in which my continuing and not always whole-hearted service to you seems now to have put me!”

There are too many accounts in moledom’s libraries of the kind of Newborn education and indoctrination to which Pumpkin was now subjected for followers of this history to need another now. The harangues, the rote-learning, the massings, the ritual humiliations, the facile thinking and the profound despairs, the slow and steady destruction of all that is individual in a mole... these were as much in evidence in Duncton Wood as in other systems at that period. The routines varied a little perhaps – in Duncton “difficult” moles were isolated in cells down in the cold damp of the Marsh End, prepared specially for the purpose – but all in all it was little different from elsewhere.

How many of those accounts describe how the strongest moles broke down! How many catalogue the despair of moles who knew that the darkness of a harsh doctrine was closing in on them, from which there was no escape, unless it be ill-health, passivity, and, most tragic of all, self-mutilation and death! Yet no system of mind-repression is perfect and here and there across moledom a pawful of moles succeeded, despite their circumstances of desperate isolation and privation, in resisting all pressure and remaining as true to the Stone in the old way as they had ever been. But only in Duncton Wood, only in Barrow Vale indeed, did something happen yet more remarkable than those cases, an achievement so notable that when a mole remembers it and repeats the tale, others are justified in exclaiming with glad hearts and joyful voices, “Praise be! Praise be for liberty! Praise be for moles of spirit and stout hearts! Praise be for the triumph of humour, common sense, and a faith in what is right over the forces that seek to repress and destroy not just the great things, but the small as well...”

And the mole responsible for this unique and special triumph at that dark time of moledom’s history? Why, Pumpkin himself, library aide and ordinary mole to end
all
library aides and ordinary moles.

The Barrow Vale into which Pumpkin found himself ushered so eagerly by his earnest friends was very different indeed from the one he remembered from those happy days before the coming of the Newborns. Even more different, he now realized, from the distant days of his youth, when timid and not yet sure of his vocation he lingered in the shadows of the busy place, listening to the talk and laughter of the adults, and replying happily to their friendly enquiries after him, his siblings, and his parents. In those days moles were still happy and secure in their system and shared their excitements and sorrows, memories and hopes, openly and with faith that the Stone would see them right in the end.

Now the laughter had gone, as had the free comings and goings of moles who had no master but the needs of family and friends, and a proper duty to themselves. In those happy days, if the sun was shining out on the surface and a mole felt it imperative to go up and warm his snout in it, well, that was his affair, and off he went! If a mole was getting tired of this or that mole’s rendition of a particular tale, he said so truthfully and declared, I’ve had enough of this! My tail’s drooping with boredom! No offence, old friend, but you’d do us all a favour if you’d shut up for a bit and we all tucked into some juicy worms! Here’s one for you to start with!”

Pumpkin could see at once that such easy frankness in social intercourse had been driven out of Barrow Vale by the Newborns. In its place was an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in which moles scurried here and there without a friendly smile or passing word. A few moles, mainly sleek middle-aged males, stanced about the place looking important, and the others went to and from and between them with every show of deference and humility. Pumpkin recognized several moles he had once known to be cheerful individuals now looking as miserable as fox droppings; worse, he saw beneath the sleek and satisfied lines of the Newborn masters of the place the once awkward and appealing forms of moles who had been happy-go-lucky Duncton youngsters before the Newborns had “educated” them.

It was not long before Pumpkin was taken into the education system, now infinitely subtler and more organized than that to which he had briefly been exposed when the Inquisitors had first come to Duncton Wood. Then he had spent a couple of days in the company of a tedious young Newborn before being brought back into service as a “reformed” library aide. Now he was questioned and catechized, and put under the tutelage of one of the sleek moles to whom, routinely, he had to report as he progressed with an education of the vile imposing kind already described.

In fact, Brother Barre’s instinct that Pumpkin was by nature insubordinate was correct, if we mean by it that he was preternaturally quite incapable of altering his basic tenets of truth, decency and faith in the face of any threats, pressure, or brute force. Unlike some rebels, however. Pumpkin had the virtues of greater years and inner modesty, and so was prudent and self-effacing and happy to nod his agreement to one thing while thinking another.

This should not be mistaken for simple hypocrisy; it was rather the wise discretion of a modest old mole who had heard (and kenned in texts) a lot of blathering and nonsense in his time and was not inclined to argue. If some mole or other wished to lecture him on the proper way to pray to the Stone, or on the nine tenets of the Newborn way, let him do so, it would have little effect on what he himself thought – “unless of course he’s right, in which case I’ll change my mind,” as he told himself But then, as Pumpkin had observed amongst the often unpleasant and bullying scholars in the Library, moles will use any means to persuade others they are right, or wrong. Or, put another way; it’s how a mole gets to his destination that reveals the true nature of a mole, not the destination itself

Pumpkin, then, was unusually well able to withstand the pressures of Newborn education, but it was not quite this that was to win him such admiration in the heart of allmole, but rather something that arose from a fortuitous meeting some days after his arrival in Barrow Vale. He had already been puzzled by the seemingly disproportionate jubilation of the Newborns at his conversion; and now something else surprised him – the fact that moles seemed to come out of their way simply to
look
at him. Why he was a curiosity he could not imagine, and in the hurried and harried Barrow Vale of those days, when moles were fearful of saying anything to each other lest they be spied on, reported, and admonished, it was impossible to easily find out.

Several long days after his arrival, and after spending the whole night and half the day in a mass chanting session interspersed with the rote-learning of names spoken one by one by a brother – the idea being to cleanse the mind of wasteful thinking – he returned to the little cell they had allocated him on the Westside, and found a female of four Longest Nights waiting for him, all furtive and frightened in the shadows.

“Brother Pumpkin?” she whispered, coming forward into the light as he stopped and turned her way.

“Yes, Sister?” he said with that mock good cheer which the brothers were expected to affect.

“Brother, do you recognize me?”

He stared hard at her, thinking immediately it was some kind of Newborn trick to catch him out.

“Should I, good Sister?” he said, rather proud of this answer, but sad that fear and doubt breeds evasion and half-truths. In fact he did not recognize her.

She said her name was Elynor and told him they had once met in “easier days”. He had learnt enough to know that this was a coded way of saying “in the days before the Newborns came’, but a mole could not be too careful.

He looked dubious and said, “Well, Sister?”

“Brother Pumpkin, are you truly Newborn?”

He hesitated before he replied. She was a well-made mole, with good features and intelligent eyes, though her face betrayed a fatigue and anxiety that made her look older than she was. Whilst it was clear that this was more than a simple question, he could not tell what lay behind it. Nor could he risk enquiring further without undermining his pose as a believer.

“Praise be, good Sister, but I am, for I have seen the light and the only way.”

“The Newborn way?” said Elynor.

“If you have any doubts I fear I am not the brother to discuss them with. Now I am tired —”

“I have no doubts, none at all,” she said hastily. “I was just, well, glad to hear of your conversion.”

“I am not so famous a mole that others would hear of
my
conversion. Sister, or be interested in it now.”

“Oh, but you are. Brother Pumpkin. You are
very
well known. All over Duncton moles have been speaking your name.”

“Surely, my conversion is not a matter for others’ talk!”

“Oh but it is, Pumpk —, Brother Pumpkin, it is!”

“Oh dear,” Pumpkin muttered to himself, “she is trying to tell me something but I don’t know what. And I have had my instructions – none but Sturne must know what I am.”

“Well then. Sister,” he said, turning from her, “I would prefer it if it were not. We are nothing before the Stone.”

Whether or not this last comment was a Newborn sentiment he was not sure; probably not. As he left her he heard her whisper, “May the blessings of the Stone be on thee always.”

“Well, one thing is certain!” he said to himself as he entered his clean, mean little cell.
“She’s
not Newborn – that was the old way of giving a blessing. She’d better watch out for herself, she’d better... oh botheration, what
was
it she wanted?”

In the space of a few moments his mood shifted from satisfaction at having maintained his Newborn pose to a feeling of deep dismay at having missed something important. The way she had said “May the blessings of the Stone...” The eagerness with which she claimed so many had heard of him, her final disappointment...

“Pumpkin, you have done wrong and must make amends!” he said to himself. “This mole needed support, not evasion. The pose is not as important as the faith it hides. Come, before it is too late!”

He turned back out of the cell, and thence up on to the surface in the direction he hoped she had gone.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” he muttered as he hurried amongst the trees of the Westside, “if I don’t find her soon I never will.”

But there she was, round a root and across between two trees, and the reason she had not got far was because she was hardly moving at all, so wan and defeated she felt.

“Mole! Mole! It is I, Brother Pumpkin.”

She turned, stared, and a glimmer of hope came to her eyes. At that moment Pumpkin decided to declare himself openly and not prolong the lies. There is a time when a mole must say what he is and risk the consequences, for denial is a kind of self-mutilation from which there is no full recovery.

“Er... Elynor...” began Pumpkin as he reached her, his eyes warm and his face kind, “you were good enough to ask if I was Newborn.”

“Yes,” she faltered.

“Well, now, you put me in a quandary, you really did. On the one paw I have my own task to fulfil for which it is better I am Newborn, but on the other it is very plain to me that you are hoping that I am a follower in the old way. I shall tell you at once that I am not Newborn now, never was in the past, nor shall I ever be so.”

Elynor’s reaction took Pumpkin by surprise, for she reached out and clasped him to her, crying out through tears and laughter as she did so, “I knew it, Pumpkin, I
knew
you were not Newborn!”