The Keepers of the People

KEY WORDS OF THE NOVEL

Twelve words that carry the argument. They are chosen not because they are frequent but because the obvious modern reading of each is the wrong one, and because a reader who takes them at face value will misread the scene they appear in. The order is the order in which they first matter.

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RUM

Lord Lisdor's word, and worth settling at once because it turns up in the second chapter and again at every hinge of the plot. In 1890s upper-class slang rum means odd, queer, not quite accountable for — with an undertone of the faintly disreputable, but no suggestion of the sinister. "I think, Ralph, that you partake of the nature of the distinctly rum" (I.vi) is not an accusation; it is the strongest word a man of Lord Lisdor's kind possesses, and he applies it, in turn, to a cousin who trains mute servants, to the news that the cousin proposes to kill a man, and to the whole constitution of Varandaleel. The joke Jepson is making is that English good manners have no vocabulary for what is in front of them, and that the absence of the vocabulary is itself a political fact. Lord Lisdor sees everything and can name none of it. When at last he is moved to real protest — over the six hundred prisoners — the best he can manage is "By Jove, that's pretty thick!"

KEEPER

The title word, and used sparingly on purpose. It is not a synonym for ruler or king, and the novel never lets it become one. Three senses are working at once.

The first is the shepherd's, which the Varandals take: "the Princes were their keepers," and the worship of the Princes has "become a part of their religion" (II.iii). The second is Cain's — "Am I my brother's keeper?" at Genesis iv. 9 — which is the question the whole book is answering, and answering yes, with the consequence that the keeper may also kill. The third is the gamekeeper's, and Jepson means this one literally. The first Prince "had left in the North a large tract of waste land, marsh, and forest where the wild beasts might increase, untroubled by any but himself"; the Princes keep a preserve, and they manage their people by the same arts — stock improved by outcrossing, numbers thinned when they grow "too thick on the ground," the herd moved between districts after a war to even out the breeding stock. The verb form, to keep the people, is Althea's and Ralph's habitual phrase for the work of government, and it should be heard with all three senses live.