by Ouida
On the Bourse ‘Baron Fritz’ was dreaded as the keenest-witted colossus of finance in all Europe. His acumen was unerring; his mind was as sensitive to the changes of the political atmosphere as an electric wire to heat. He perceived long before anyone else the little cloud, not so big as a man’s hand, which was pregnant with storm whilst yet the sky was clear; he heard long before anyone else the low tremor in the bowels of the earth which prefaced the seismic convulsion, as yet undreamed of by a sleeping world. Therefore, with supreme tact and matchless instinct, he had made the House of Othmar the envy of all its peers. ‘What are statesmen without us?’ said Friederich Othmar. ‘They cannot move, they cannot strike, unless the financiers enable them to do so; all their combinations crumble like a dropt bird’s-nest unless we are willing to sustain them. If Germany had had no money, could she have crossed the Rhine? The finest army in the world is no more than a child’s set of metal soldiers if it be not roulant sur l’or. The statesmen are thought to be the chief rulers and prime motors of the fate of the world, but they can but act as we who are behind them permit: they drag the coach; we drive it.’
‘That I know,’ answered Othmar. ‘We have the most gigantic responsibility united with the most utterly corrupt moral code. I grant that we are, in a way, the Cæsars of the modern world, but we are bestially selfish; we are hog-like in our repletion, as all Cæsars become. No financier ever risked ruin for a noble impulse or for a lost cause. If he did, he would seem mad to his guild, as Ulysses to his companions.’
All the enjoyment and sense of power which Othmar contemptuously rejected his uncle appreciated to the full; he was, in his own way, a Wolsey, a Richelieu, a Bismarck. Nothing of much importance had been done in Europe for the last forty years without Friederich Othmar being beneath it, in more or less degree, for weal or woe. He had those unerring instincts which amount in their own way to genius.
Endowed with one of those keen, logical, yet imaginative brains, which are as necessary to the great financier as to the great statesman, he had worked unweariedly all his life long for the sake and for the glory of the house of Othmar; he was in no way of his nephew’s opinion; he considered that the world held nothing finer than the fortunes which had been built up out of Marc Othmar’s kreutzers till it was solid as so many towers of bullion; he considered the position of the capitalist who can refuse a king, sustain a nation, fructify great enterprises, and constrain or restrain great wars, was not to be exchanged with any other power under the sun. In finance he was inexorable, unerring; full of the finest penetration, and the most piercing acumen; stern as granite, piercing as steel; in private life he was an amiable cynic, who cared for very little except the reputation of his dinners and his collection of water-colours. Baron Fritz was never really content out of his little hotel, which was as cosy as a satin-lined bag, and where by stretching out a finger to touch an ivory button he could put himself in communication with all the centres of finance in Europe. Without moving from his velvet chair or taking his foot from its gout-stool he could converse with his brother capitalists at all quarters of the globe, and change the fate of nations, and the surface of events in the course of a winter’s forenoon during a pause between two cigarettes. To be able to do so seemed to him the very flower and perfection of life. It was to play chess with the world for your board, and to say checkmate to living and crowned kings.
Whenever he expatiated on that theme to his nephew, Othmar only replied that he himself did not care for any games.
For the rest, his one great social amusement was whist; he could never see why men forsook their clubs because hay was being mown and corn reaped and grapes gathered. You bought forage, you ate bread — very little of it — and you drank wine, but why, because those three things were all in their embryo state every city in Europe should become empty he had not patience to comprehend. No place was cooler, shadier, quieter, than your club. The vast green silent country which his nephew loved was to him an outer darkness; he detested le province with all the maliciousness against it of a born and bred Parisian.
To see a breezy common on a six-inch square of David Cox, or a brook purling amongst rushes by Bonnington, was to have as much of the country as he cared to enjoy. The stones of Vienna, the asphalte of Paris, were the only ground he cared to tread. He had educated his cook into perfect excellence, and never travelled anywhere without him and his battery of silver saucepans. ‘Because you sleep in a strange bed there is no reason why you should let yourself be poisoned by strange dishes,’ he invariably said.
On the whole he had led a happy and enviable life; he was a perfectly selfish man, with one great unselfish loyalty set in the midst of his egotism, like a vein of pure marble amongst a mass of sandstone. ‘To benefit the House Fritz would let himself be brayed in a mortar,’ his brother had often said of him; in private life, on the contrary, he was entirely self-absorbed, as became a man who was one of the most notable persons in Paris; he had never been known to lend a five-franc piece, but he gave choice dinners three times a week, which cost twenty napoleons for each guest.
Sometimes he thought with a pang of terror of what would become of the House of Othmar when he himself should be no more. He was seventy years old; he would be unable to live for ever; his arsenal of wires contained no ivory button by which he could summon eternal life; he had gout in his system, and he did not disguise from himself that any day his cook, with the silver saucepans, his pretty aquarelles, his gigantic operations, his intense love of life, might one and all be powerless to keep him in his place, and then! — all the magnitude and might of the House of Othmar would depend solely and entirely on one capricious and unstable young man, who only cared for a Greek poet or a German opera!
On these melancholy days when he remembered this, he voluntarily deprived himself of his burgundy, and ate only of two dishes.
He was much attached to Othmar, but he was impatient of him. He was annoyed by what he looked upon as his crotchets and caprices; he was irritated by the unconcealed apathy and even scorn with which his nephew regarded his own superb position in the world. The dissatisfaction with which the origin of their House filled the head of it, was to Baron Fritz almost incomprehensible and whimsical squeamishness. If he revered anything in life, it was the tradition of old Marc Othmar amassing his florins in the half-barbaric city of Agram.
‘For aught we know he was a Tchigan, a Romany,’ his nephew had said to him once; and he had replied angrily, ‘And if he were a gipsy? Is there blood more ancient? Is there a people freer? Is there an intelligence more complex? What are the European races beside the Oriental? But you know very well that he was a pure Croat,’ he had concluded, with intolerable impatience of such depreciation of the founder of their greatness.
Although it had been the habit of his life to follow and study the minds of men even in their more secret thoughts, he had no patience to attempt to understand the caprices of his nephew’s. It was, he thought, that kind of ingratitude to fate which is almost an insanity; the same sort of fractious wilfulness which made James of Scotland love to wander disguised in his own towns, and sent Domitian to a plot of cabbages.
To Baron Fritz the power and might of the House he belonged to had ever been in the stead of any other religion, creed, or attachment; he was not personally an ambitious or an avaricious man; he had effaced himself for his brother’s sake, as he still slaved for his brother’s son; the celebrity of the House of Othmar, their power, heavy as an elephant’s tread, subtle as an electric current, the magnitude of the operations which they either undertook or impeded, the respect with which Europe regarded them, the weight of their own smile or frown, — all these things were the very breath of his life to him. He had remained, and always willingly remained, a subordinate; he had never resented the superiority of his elder brother in power and position; all he had cared to do was to give his years to the service and aggrandisement of his race; he would have been very astonished if he had been told that it was in its way, after a
ll, chiefly a form of sentiment which actuated him.
Between himself and Othmar there was the affection of consanguinity, but no sympathy whatever. To the elder man the younger seemed almost blasphemously unworthy of his heritage: the generosities and the scruples of such a raffiné seemed to him the perverseness of a child. Usually, Othmar willingly abandoned to him the guidance of their great argosy, freighted with the gold of the world, but twice or thrice since his majority he had interfered when he had considered a loan immoral or an enterprise corrupt, and had made his veto, as head of the house, obeyed forcibly. Those few times had been unpardonable to the Baron who had not his eccentric and quixotic principles.
‘Affairs are affairs,’ he said. ‘If you conduct them according to the follies and phantasies of the Story of Arthur — adieu.’
‘I would willingly say adieu — an eternal adieu,’ had retorted Othmar. ‘But you have told me repeatedly that I cannot withdraw my House from business without causing ruin on the Bourses of Europe, and dishonouring our name by annulling and repudiating our engagements.’
‘Of course you cannot,’ had said the Baron, to whom the mere idea seemed like a preparation to blow up with dynamite all the mountains of Europe and of Asia. ‘Do you suppose you can efface such an institution as our financial existence? You might as well say that a sovereign, by dying, could will his country into non-existence.’
‘Then as I cannot touch the engagements of the past, however much I condemn them, I will at least keep pure the obligations of the future,’ Othmar had answered; and those transactions which his more delicate sense of honour did not allow him to approve he refused to permit to be undertaken.
Baron Fritz, who had the ordinary financier’s conscience, that is, who would have done nothing commercially dishonourable, but who cared not a straw how iniquitous might be the results of an operation, so long as it was legal, clever, and lucrative, was beyond measure irritated by this occasional interference of one who was too fine a gentleman, too indolent a dreamer, to bear any of the frets and burden of habitual attention to their gigantic operations. But there was no help for it; Otho Othmar was the head of the House, and, what was a greater grief still to his uncle, the only living one of the name besides himself. They, who could have given fortunes and position to a score of younger branches, who could have had their sons and brothers objects of power and worship in all the capitals of Europe, had been so visited by death and destiny that of them all there only remained the young man who was Othmar to all the world, and the old one who was Baron Fritz to his intimate associates, and Baron Friederich to all the Bourses.
‘You should marry, Otho,’ said the Baron to him now.
‘I have no inclination to do so,’ he answered, and thought of Nadine Napraxine.
‘Inclination!’ exclaimed the other irritably. ‘What has inclination to do with it? Is inclination considered or waited for in the marriages of princes? You are a prince in your own way. If you died to-morrow, your race would be extinct.’
‘That would not much matter,’ said Othmar. ‘We have never been conspicuous for anything except for amassing gold, as a ship’s keel collects barnacles. I suppose I had better make a will. You shall have everything for your lifetime, and then it shall all go to the French Republic, which is the only national institution I know of that is capable of muddling away two hundred milliards in a year, with nothing whatever to show for it afterwards.’
Baron Fritz made a gesture of irritated contempt.
‘You ought to have had legitimate heirs ten years ago. You do not belong to yourself. You have no right to live and die without raising up posterity.’
‘I do not see the obligation,’ said Othmar, ‘and I do not care enough about the name, which you think so very fine, to greatly grieve over its probable extinction.’
Baron Fritz had heard this often, but he never heard it freshly without an inward shudder, such as a religious man feels before a blasphemy. Othmar, merely as a man, seemed to him a fanciful dreamer, an unsatisfactory anomaly, an unphilosophic thinker, whose theories were always playing the deuce with his interest, and whose sympathies ran away with him like half-broken horses. But Othmar, as the chief of his House, could do no wrong, and had to be obeyed, even if he rushed on his own destruction.
‘You should marry for sake of posterity,’ he reiterated. ‘You are so happily and exceptionally situated that you can choose wherever you please. No living woman would refuse you. You should seek physical charms for sake of your offspring and high lineage also; the rest is a mere matter of taste.’
‘The rest is only a trifle! Only character, mind, and feeling — the three things which determine happiness and influence life more than anything else.’
Baron Fritz made a little gesture of indifference: ‘I imagine anyone bien élevé would not err in any of these points. Happiness one usually finds with the wives of others. Not that I would discourage you if you be inclined — —’
‘I am not inclined,’ said Othmar, brusquely. ‘I only say that character is never considered by men and women when they marry; yet it is what makes or mars a life. When a marriage is announced, what is discussed? The respective fortunes of those concerned, then their good looks or their lack of them; perhaps someone adds that he is bon garçon, or someone says sa taille est jolie, or, on the other hand, they may say he is a fool, or she has ugly feet; but you never hear a word as to their characters, their sympathies, or their principles. It is why all marriages are at best but a compromise between two ill-assorted dispositions.’
‘Make yours well-assorted,’ said Baron Fritz. ‘If you attach so much to character, let character be your study; myself, I have always considered that marriage is a means of continuing a race, so that it legally can continue to transmit property; I have never known why people imported fine sentiments into a legal transaction. It is taking a false view of a social duty to look for personal pleasure out of it; indeed, if a man be in love with his wife he will probably communicate his passion to her, which is undesirable, because it awakens her senses, and ultimately leads to her taking a lover, or lovers, which again introduces uncertainty into the legal enjoyment and transmission of property.’
Othmar smiled: ‘Really, Baron, you are the most profoundly immoral man I ever met. You would always, too, subordinate humanity to property. All human actions should, according to you, only tend to the consolidation and concentration of fortune; now, there is no possible theory of human action more demoralising.’
‘That is a matter of opinion,’ said the Baron. ‘But unless your forefathers had carried that theory into practice, you would now be taming wild horses in Croatia, or probably you — Otho Othmar in your entity as you are — would not exist at all, for certainly your father would not have wedded with an English aristocrat.’
‘It is a humiliating reflection,’ said Othmar, ‘that one’s existence depended on the accidental union of two persons; indeed, I decline to believe it. I am convinced that the real ego, the impersonal entity which has been called the soul for want of knowing what to call it, must have had its own independent existence; the envelope it is slipped into is the accident; let us think so at all events. It is more consoling than your notion that the entire life of A. depended on the chance of B. cohabiting with C.; and that if B. had wedded D. instead, A. would never have existed at all, but another and totally different being would have done so — say Z.’
The Baron shrugged his shoulders. Why, he wondered, why on earth should a man care about a pre-existence, or a spiritual existence, at all, who had everything that his heart could desire in his terrestrial life? He could imagine that starving poets or hungry theologians comforted themselves with those fancies, but Othmar! ——
‘You should have been a Montalembert or a Lamennais,’ he answered, which was a polite way of saying that he was an imbecile.
‘Without being either the one or the other, one may carry into public life the same sort of honour which even you think incumbent on one in
public life,’ said Othmar.
‘Not at all,’ said his relative. ‘The code for one has never been the code for the other. A man in private life may not send another man to be slain because it suits his purpose; a man in public life, that is, as a war minister or as an officer commanding-in-chief may send ten thousand, fifty thousand, men to certain slaughter. So has a diplomatist every title to lie as much as he may need to do in the public service, but he has no right to deceive his personal friend in a private matter. This is not mere casuistry; it is common-sense. Indeed, all effective casuistry is based on common-sense.’
‘The most dangerous casuistry is so, no doubt,’ said Othmar. ‘Because when it is so based it is irresistible in its appeal to egotism.’
‘I do not know why you use the word dangerous,’ replied the Baron. ‘Nothing is so wholesome as to teach men to take care of their own interests. If that lesson were universally understood, there would be neither paupers or criminals.’
‘We should have a world of bankers,’ said Othmar. ‘With all deference to you, even that would not be a Millennium.’
The Baron assented with good humour that it would certainly not be one, since there would be no investments of any kind possible.
The day was tedious to Othmar. He had to examine many projects, and append his signature to many documents. He had not disappeared into Central Asia for eighteen months without having brought upon himself the penalty of many arrears of affairs. His assent was merely pro formâ, but the formula was necessary.