I had been urged many times to visit Mr Censor and have a talk with him, but I had always put it off, for I felt a vague sense of dread at the thought of the man. I may say that I suffered from the fixed idea that he would cross me out.
I cannot explain exactly how I imagined this happening, but it was a most unpleasant sensation, invariably accompanied by a shiver down my spine.
At last, however, I made up my mind to visit him and ask him about his general views. I had assumed he must be a sinister-looking man, capable of anything, but I was mistaken, for I found a polished gentleman who smiled at me mournfully and asked me kindly to take a seat.
“We can have a perfectly quiet talk,” he said, “and I hope you will revise your opinion of me somewhat. I admit that sometimes I do foolish things…”
I waved my hand and made a dismissive gesture.
“No, believe me, I tell you quite frankly that I sometimes commit all sorts of foolish blunders, but I cannot help it!”
He smiled sadly and asked me to take a closer look at his skull.
He had a very low forehead and a flattened head.
“They have written about me,” he said, “that when I was young I fell out of a tree and struck my head on the ground—that I landed on my head—but that is not true. My head was crushed shortly after I was born, because a short-sighted doctor sat on it, and that accounts for the characteristic flattening of my skull. At first they thought I would not survive, and that if I did, I should be extremely feeble-minded; but thank God I came through it all, and today I am a censor.
“Even now I sometimes suffer from headaches, and when that happens I do foolish things. Why, sir, sometimes I fail to confiscate outright insults against the Church and other such things. About four years ago, for instance, I allowed the sentence: ‘He bore his cross patiently.’ Sir, you know who bore the Cross: it was our Saviour. But in this particular case they were talking about a shoemaker.
“As soon as I recover, however, no obstacle frightens me, and I set to work with gusto. You have no idea, my dear sir, how sly and cunning these writers and journalists are nowadays. They write things that look so perfectly innocent that only after prolonged reflection does one discover the catch; for, as Tolstoy says, ‘Once the claw is caught, the whole bird is trapped.’ Incidentally, I confiscated that sentence too, because it was published at a time when a certain exalted personage had torn his hunting coat on a thorn.
“To show you just how cunning they are, consider, for instance, this sentence: ‘He stood leaning against a tree, looked into the storm, and remembered.’ At first sight the sentence is insignificant, inoffensive—but only at first sight.”
He rose and began pacing the room.
“Observe, however, that the words ‘storm’ and ‘remembered’ occur close together. Very well. To you this may appear perfectly harmless, but I could not let that sentence pass. I had to confiscate it, because the word ‘storm’ will lodge most strikingly in the reader’s mind, and then the reader, led onward by a psychological process, will begin remembering storms in general and eventually say to himself that there are other kinds of storms besides natural atmospheric phenomena: there are political storms too—riots, sir, demonstrations.”
He continued pacing the room.
“They smash windows, they shout: ‘Shame on the government! Down with them! Shame on the police!’ They throw stones—and you expect me to let that pass, sir? Me, a government official? So I simply take my blue pencil and cross the sentence out.
“I do not like it at all when someone writes, for example: ‘And then he thought all sorts of things.’ Sir, there is an enormous amount concealed in ‘all sorts of things.’
“To think all sorts of things is blatant incitement. It is an offence against public peace and order. Thinking all sorts of things may even constitute an act of high treason committed in thought. They imagine a man can think whatever he pleases because only expressions of thought are punishable. And what the devil is a thought? A thought is an expression of mental activity. An expression, I say—and for expressions we have the law.
“Believe me, I have to be extremely careful if I am to get to the bottom of everything hidden in these things. I must not even neglect the sports pages of the newspapers.”
“Forgive me, maestro, but if I am not mistaken, you recently confiscated the sentence: ‘These are truly Chinese conditions.’”
“Certainly. I crossed it out with my blue pencil, because I am well informed by the newspapers that there is at present a revolution in China. Now, if someone writes, at a time when this accursed Chinese revolution is triumphing, ‘These are truly Chinese conditions,’ I think anyone can see that this amounts to an invitation to revolt. And since the troops in Nanking have sided with the revolutionaries, I simply have no choice: the following day I must confiscate every report about the progress of the Chinese revolution, because that is antimilitarism.
“Someone may say: what do we care about China? And he is right. But he devours those reports all the same—and how he devours them! And then newspapers are made out of reports like these. Isn’t it enough to drive a man mad?
“For instance, you receive a report saying that the people of China are in the hands of the revolutionaries. That is insurrection, sir, that is rebellion—and now you are supposed to put it into people’s hands. Newspapers, sir, are filth, first-class filth, like everything printed; but I shall put my foot on their necks, all of them.”
He took down from the wall an enormous pencil which hung there as an ornament beneath the pictures and said:
“Look at this pencil. That is all there is to it. Some fellow has ink and a pen, but I have a pencil—a devil of a pencil. With this I can smash the whole lot to pieces, cross everything out, and I’ll teach them a lesson. I’ll show them how I deal with their sort.”
I left him in haste, for he was brandishing the pencil under my nose, and I could see that he would have crossed me out with it too, without the slightest mercy.
