The Long Snake

was once—in a time before history and a place before geography—a certain snake. Displeased with the smallness of his size, and urged by the perpetual sting of ambition, he requested that he might become longer than any snake in the world. By means of black magic, sacrifices, and importunity he succeeded in obtaining his petition. He was assured that he should in very truth become longer than any snake that ever had been or would be. How much longer, was not said. The snake had not at the time thought about that: the other party to the contract had.

Forthwith, he began to grow, and not, in the first instance, with that slow process by which the animal or vegetable is normally prolonged. During the few hours that followed the granting of the petition he came out less rapidly than a rocket, but more rapidly than a telescope. So quickly did he grow that he passed his own mother in a garden, and she never recognised her son. After that the rate decreased slightly, but growth was still continuous. Admired and envied, he at last reached the goal of his ambition.

Yes, he was satisfied. He lay out over the greater part of a two-acre field. The sun shone, and his beautiful chromatic scales flashed brilliantly in the light. An impartial critic would have said that he was very long, but would have been compelled, in common fairness, to add that he was never, for one moment, dull. As he lay there, and surveyed the splendour of his colouring and the magnificence of his size, he said to himself: "This has now gone about far enough, I am the longest snake in the world, and fully prepared to stop growing."

We are fully prepared for many things that never happen. Continuously, night and day, the snake went on growing. In a few months he had become so long that he could pay a call on three different friends simultaneously, though they lived at a distance of a mile from each other. The friends would say, smilingly, that they would like to see more of him, but under this mask of civility the snake—sensitive as the ambitious always are—detected the beginnings of derision. He realised that he was passing from fineness into monstrosity, and he began to shun society. He was still invited to the hospitable board—still urged to come often and stay as long as he liked. Alas! it was the curse of that answered petition that he was totally unable to stay as long as he liked. It was just there that the other party to the contract, so to speak, had him. Besides, there was so much of him that he required an unusual amount of sustenance. What was a banquet to his host was but a snack to him, and only constant self-repression prevented him from eating the other guests—a solecism that he would have been reluctant to commit. So when he was pressed to remain for dinner, he would answer that he was afraid he couldn't stop. Yes, that was the trouble.

Things went to such a length—that is, the snake did—that, for the sake of convenience, some arrangement had to be made. A big reel was constructed, and the snake was kept wound round it, after the manner of a fire-hose, so as to make his huge volume handier for purposes of reference. This arrangement did not last long. He had no wife or family; he felt almost as if he had, because he cost as much to keep as an ordinary domestic establishment, but he was solitary. He grew wearied, too, of what was, after all, a sedentary life—or rather, what was, in a snake, the equivalent of a sedentary life in a man. And he had eaten the neighbourhood, and it was necessary to explore further. So he uncoiled himself.

After a year's wandering, he found, one day, an object in his path that seemed to him strangely familiar. He had a vague idea that he had seen it somewhere before, long ago. What could it be? Gradually light dawned. Experiment further established its identity. He found that when he wagged the tip of his tail, he wagged the object. He bit it gently, and found that he was biting himself. "Yes," he said, "this is the tip of my tail—and the beginning of the end." That, after all, was only what the most normal snake would have expected the tip of its tail to be. Yet, as he turned away, he thought, bitterly: "It has come to this—that I am a stranger to myself."

Needless to say, his satisfied ambition brought him no longer the least feeling of pride. Pity and ridicule were his portion now. And he cost so much to keep up that sometimes he almost despaired. He was toiling hard to support a snake, the greater part of whom he had never even seen; and though he did not wish to shirk his responsibilities to himself or any part of himself, he did feel at times that the magnitude of the task rendered it more a matter for national subscription than for the benevolence of a private individual. Had he lived in this enlightened country and time, humanitarians would have tried to get him into an almshouse. Even so, the very small proportion of him that could have been got into one alms-house would have afforded him but slight relief. As it was, he had no friends. Nobody could have got the whole of that snake on to his visiting list, much less included him in his intimate circle. His lot, speaking generally, was an unhappy one.

One day, a porcupine happened to observe the snake's tail in a field, he saw that it was continued in the next, and became very eager to see how it would end. For this reason he ascended an eminence, from which a fair view of the surrounding country was to be obtained. He could trace the body of the snake stretching far down a valley, passing out of sight, and then reappearing on the further side of a hill. Further than this his unassisted vision would not take him, but he concluded that the snake's head was quite far enough away to make it a safe thing to bite the tip of the snake's tail, and this, descending from the eminence, he forthwith did. He bit it hard—less from cruelty than from a natural curiosity—and to prevent the snake from being in any uncertainty as to what precisely was happening, he bit it twice. He then ran away. Had he known exactly how long the snake was, he would have known that there was no need to hurry. Along the path from the part affected to the snake's brain sensation travelled with its usual and inconceivable rapidity. Nevertheless, it was a matter of hours before the snake received the information of his senses that his tail had been bitten. He then felt not only pained but surprised. One of the few advantages that he had reaped from his excessive prolongation was an immunity from overt acts of hostility. It was the work of a moment for the snake to dash off at full speed to capture and chastise the aggressor; but with all his speed it was the work of months for his head to reach the spot where his tail was. By this time the porcupine had reached a distant country, started housekeeping, and was doing well. The snake felt all the poignant and serious displeasure of one who has answered a runaway knock.

It was late in the day; in the course of his journey he had got hopelessly entangled with a virgin forest, and saw no way to put an end to the intrigue; tired and humiliated he fell asleep.

He laid the blame for his failure upon a totally wrong cause. This tendency to blame the wrong thing is not uncommon. For instance, a piece of orange-peel, lying on the pavement, trips you up. You fall and hurt yourself. What happens then? You say, in a few well chosen words, how much you dislike incidents of the kind, get up again, and brush yourself. But after that you blame the wrong thing—you blame the man who threw the orange-peel. It is almost certain that the man had no intention in the matter, right or wrong; it was merely an act of carelessness. But, on the other hand, the man who put the pavement there did so intentionally, well knowing that people would walk upon it, and meaning them to walk upon it. Had the orange-peel been there but the pavement elsewhere, you would never have slipped up. The right person to blame is, obviously, the man who laid the pavement. So, now, the snake was wrong in blaming centralisation. He considered that it was a mistake that the whole business of his body was under the control of one head; if he had had an indefinite number of heads, ranged at distances of half a mile down his back, the head which was nearest to his tail-end would infallibly have caught that porcupine. He should, in reality, have blamed his own excessiveness; he had asked to become excessive, and he had been made so excessively excessive that he should, by this time, have seen the error of his petition.

He had made up his mind before he fell asleep that he would get himself disentangled from that forest before he had breakfast. One often makes such resolutions. One says that one will do a thing on the morrow—a little thing, perhaps—some irksome task—some trivial duty. It is so easy to make resolutions. And then when the morrow has come and gone, you ask yourself, "Have I done what I intended to do?" And you find that you have, and it surprises you a good deal. This is what happened to the snake. He actually did get himself disentangled before breakfast, though he was tied in some peculiarly complicated knots round some peculiarly gigantic trees. But the task was a tedious one. Long, long before he had finished it he grew very hungry. He refused, however, to eat. He had said that he would unravel himself before breakfast, and he was too firm and too tidy to break his word. The result was tragic.

When at last he found himself free to eat, it was too late. Before the first rabbit that he swallowed could reach his digestive apparatus (which was far away on the horizon) he had died—died of starvation. He died, moreover, in so very many different parishes that there were grave doubts as to which were really responsible for his burial. The matter was compromised. He was not buried at all, but a syndicate was formed to cut him into lengths and throw him into the sea. Hence the stories of the sea-serpent. It was an inglorious end. He had hoped in his lifetime that when he came to die he might be put round the world to mark the position of the equator.

His lot was, as I have said, an unhappy one; but if he had known that it might be the means of enforcing upon the young mind one simple moral lesson, he would have been no better contented with it.