Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  On the silver field of the serene water of the gulf there was a vessel, dark in the luminous blue of the early night. It was a fishing-vessel, and on a wooden gallery in its bow a man was standing, whilst other boatmen rowed. In his raised hand was a long spear. The barque was moving swiftly, turning now to leeward now to windward.

  ‘They are chasing a sword-fish.’ said Othyris.

  ‘We cannot see the fish, but they can. To think that this chase has gone on for twenty centuries and more, in precisely the same manner in these same waters!’

  The vessel glided out of the light into the shadow, and the figure of the spear-thrower was lost in the deeper blue of the shade; there only remained visible the two starboard oars dipping into and flashing with the phosphorescent water.

  ‘They do not often succeed in taking him,’ said Othyris. ‘He is difficult to see even by day, kind nature made him so blue. But the kindness of nature is generally thwarted by the ingenuity of man, by the devilry of mankind.’

  ‘Poor Xiphias! ‘he added: ‘he is a soldier too in his way, but he fights with the weapon which nature gave him, and he attacks bigger creatures than himself. He is a chivalrous knight compared to the war-makers of our time. I wish the fishermen would leave him alone. Yet those men yonder are to be excused. They are hungry, they have children as hungry at home. But what do you say to our sister Ottoline, who goes out with them for the sheer pleasure of seeing the agonies of the poor gallant Xiphias? She has even learnt to throw the harpoon herself!’

  ‘There is nothing to excuse it. For, in her choice, there is neither ignorance nor compulsion,’ said the Princess sadly, and looked at her watch by the light of the moon. ‘I fear I must go in, my dear; there will be only twenty minutes left for me to put on my war-paint.’ ‘I have a mind to stay here,’ said Othyris gazing wistfully at the sea. ‘What would happen if I failed to appear?’

  ‘For goodness’ sake do not have such freaks of fancy,’ said his sister-in-law in anxiety. ‘You would see the sun rise from the barred window of some fortress.’

  ‘Because I did not show at a banquet? What an idea!’

  ‘But the Emperor is our guest, our cousin, our ally!’

  ‘Our suzerain,’ said Othyris bitterly. ‘Do not say such things, dear Elim,’ murmured his sister-in-law. ‘Here statues have ears, and trees have tongues. Come, dear; do come, to please me.’

  Othyris looked with regret to the beauty of the early night, to the phosphorescent sea, the violet sky, the dark outline of the fishing-barque, the marble balustrades and statues pale and cool in the shadow, then reluctantly accompanied her back towards the palace by the avenue of tulip-trees.

  ‘If I were only the man with the lance on the boat.’ he said, ‘but without the penal obligation of slaying the sword-fish!’

  And do you not think the man with the lance says or thinks, “If I were only that great Prince yonder amongst his roses”?’

  ‘Perhaps he does, poor ignorant! He does not know that the Prince has not a moment to enjoy the scent of the roses!’

  ‘But, Elim.’ said his sister-in-law with that timidity which always characterised her utterance of any opinion of her own, ‘do you not think that, as you fill a position which you cannot change, and as you may possibly be called to fill one still more trying and arduous, it would be wiser, merely from a common-sense point of view, to cease to struggle against what you cannot possibly alter? — neither you nor any one who lives.’

  He did not reply. His thoughts went farther than he chose to say even to this good and loyal woman.

  ‘Acquiescence is the hardest of all duties to any one of your temperament,’ she added. ‘But if a duty be not hard what merit is there in accepting its yoke?’

  ‘I do not see either duty or merit in this instance!’

  ‘My dear Elim!—’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘Then where — ?’

  ‘Where shall I look for them? Is that what you would say? What a pity I cannot find them as Theo does in regulation belts and regimental buttons!’

  ‘Theo is conscientious,’ said Theo’s wife with reproach.

  ‘All disagreeable people are!’ said Othyris with a little laugh.

  ‘I wish you would not laugh at Theo,’ said Theo’s wife uneasily, with a little red spot in each thin cheek.

  ‘Il s’y prête!’ said Othyris with careless waywardness.

  ‘Oh, my dear Elim, hush!’ said Theo’s wife in distress. ‘We must really go indoors,’ she said nervously. ‘It is a pity, yes; like you I should willingly spend the evening here. But one has no right to expect to be idle.’

  ‘We are worse than idle; we are actively mischievous. Can there be a greater waste of time or a more unpleasant form of ennui than a dinner of sixteen courses for persons already over-fed?’

  She did not reply, but hurried back towards the terrace; such remarks almost seemed to her to suggest softening of the brain; to her a great dinner was a function, like a church ceremony, or the opening of a new session, or a royal baptism.

  Othyris left the Soleia, as he had come there, by a private gate which opened on a side street; he was unattended, and hoped to reach his own palace unrecognised. But when he had passed through the two other small streets lying between the Soleia and his own residence he was seen by some of the people standing about the principal road leading to the Square of the Dioscuri, and a cheer was raised; his name was spoken; others joined in the cheering; soon the applause grew deafening; men, women, and children ran thither from all parts, and the rough rejoicings rose tumultuous like the cawing from a rookery.

  He was provoked with himself for his forgetfulness of the probability of such a demonstration. There was nothing which he more greatly disliked, and nothing which more incensed the King and his elder brother. It was now impossible to avoid the people; they had recognised him. He saluted the populace courteously, but signed to them to disperse. In the noise from their lungs no speech of his could be heard. He was vexed with himself for his own heedlessness in coming on foot from the gardens to his own house. He knew how intensely these evidences of his own popularity offended and irritated his father and his brothers; that advantage was taken of them by those jealous of him; that exaggeration was used by the socialistic and subversive journals concerning them.

  He had acted on an impulse of humanity that day on the Field of Ares, and he would have done the same thing if he had acted on reflection; but he knew that in the eyes of his family his action could only seem like a studied attitude to please the people, a politic bid for public favour. All his actions took that complexion in their sight.

  The numbers in the Square increased with every second; the municipal police, alarmed at a demonstration which they might have, but had not, foreseen, endeavoured to push their way towards him; he himself was annoyed, for if anything would have made him an enemy to the populace, it would have been their methods of showing their enthusiasm for himself.

  He motioned aside the guards when they at last succeeded in reaching him; communal guards with their revolvers in their hands ready to use them and happy to do so.

  ‘Put up your arms.’ he said sharply. ‘There is no occasion for them.’

  The multitude heard and cheered more lustily, their voices pealing over the wide space, the shrill outcries of the women sounding like the sound of fifes, the chest notes of the stronger men like the roll of drums.

  Fact had already become legend, and the versions of his recent action on the Field of Ares were rapidly swelling into a Heraklean fable.

  ‘Elim! Elim! Long life and Heaven’s blessing to Elim, the friend of the people!’ they cried in their rhythmical roar.

  By signs to the crowd, and with a smile, he made a path for himself towards his residence, the guards closing in behind him, forbidden by him to do more. Sundry of his gentlemen and some of the officers of his division came out to meet him, elbowing their way to release him.

  The electric light was now lit and illumine
d the palms, the statues, the parterres of flowers, the great fountains, the agitated, many-coloured, dense throng of the people.

  ‘Speak to us! speak to us!’ they shouted. ‘Speak to us, Elim!’

  He turned round before his own gates, and again raised his hat to them.

  ‘Not now, my friends,’ he said. ‘Thanks for your good-will; and good-night to you.’

  The people murmured loudly and many swore in their wrath; but the great bronze gates closed behind him, and they could only shout, and wave their caps, and trample on one another in the cold, clear light shining on the steel tubes of the guards’ revolvers. One by one, little by little, they tired of waiting, and dropped away into the streets leading from the Square; a few hundred remained to see their idol pass in his carriage to the Soleia, to the banquet given there for the Emperor of the Guthones.

  CHAPTER III

  MEANWHILE Elim’s father, John, King of Helianthus, sat in his study and thought over the matter with extreme offence and irritation. He was a short, stout, well-made man of nearly sixty years of age; he had a plain face, a dark skin, bristling iron-grey hair, and a high narrow forehead with thick, straight eyebrows. Under those straight, dark brows his eyes looked out like two ever-vigilant vedettes; they were small grey eyes, pale in colour, half-hidden by heavy lids; the iris was touched by the inflamed thread-like veins of the cornea; but they were eyes, which left in the minds of those at whom they looked sharply an indescribable impression of discomfort; they made the most simple and sincere of persons feel embarrassed with an uneasy sense of being detected and read through unpleasantly. For the rest he was without distinction of any kind; he looked a gentleman, but of the wealthy bourgeois type; there was nothing of the patrician in him except his fine hands and slender wrists; he was inclined to corpulence, and only overcame that royal defect by active habits and his devotion to the exercise of sport; he smoked almost constantly, indoors and out, for he knew the value of tobacco to save speech. He was a person of few words; words compromise oneself, silence embarrasses others — he never compromised himself, but he frequently embarrassed others.

  He ate largely, as most rulers of men do; and he drank with great moderation, at such times, at least, as he was not in wrath; then he drank brandy copiously. After his mid-day meal he slept for an hour; then he transacted business and conversed with the Ministers of the moment; then he went out riding or driving, usually driving himself, with fine young thorough-bred horses, whose nerves, under their shining over-groomed skin, trembled when they saw him approach and take up the ribbons.

  He was an incongruous figure in the classic palaces, the grand, silent, romantic gardens, the majestic galleries, the tapestried corridors of his many residences in Helianthus; as incongruous as a British sentry on duty on a palm terrace of Benares. But he did not see it; or rather, the contrast, so far as he perceived it, seemed to him entirely to his own advantage.

  Outside his apartments, avenues of cratægus and paulownia, masses of roses and datura, fountains shining through the glorious gloom of secular cedars, wide lawns sloping down from sculptured marble staircases, deep pools sleeping under water-lilies, the golden and silver armour of fish glancing under the arum and nenuphar leaves where sunrays touched the water, statues which had been there in the same places since first called into being by classic sculptors — all offered their enchantment to his sight. But he never looked at them, nor walked amidst them; the electric bells, the telephone tubes, the innumerable scientific devices and appliances disfiguring the frescoed wall at the back of his writing-table, were far more interesting in his sight.

  John of Gunderöde was not a man of great abilities; but he was a great egotist, which is a form of talent, and he was exceedingly shrewd in all questions which regarded his own advantage. As his own advantage was often identical with that of his kingdom, he was considered a patriotic monarch; but when his own advantage clashed with that of his kingdom, the latter went to the wall, as in loyalty a kingdom is bound to do. He had a sincere belief in his own utility to the country: he was perfectly honest in his conviction that his grip held it together, that he was the keystone of its arch, the mortar of its bastions. He took himself very seriously. He believed in himself, which is the surest mode of making others believe in you. Born in a private station, he would have made an admirable artillery or infantry officer, or, perhaps, a still better merchant or stockbroker; that he impressed many persons as being a potential Caesar was due entirely to his own belief in his Caesarism. Called to be the constitutional sovereign of a liberty-loving and republican nation, he had made himself an autocrat and the nation a servant. The alteration had been gradual, and not violent, for he was a man who could control his desires in his own interests. This power of self-restraint was the conspicuous quality of his race.

  Nothing, now, would have given him greater pleasure than to have had his son put under arrest immediately on his return from the Field of Ares; nothing would have been more just or correct as he viewed justice and correction. But he hesitated to carry out his views: he knew that his son was popular, and that the populace of Helios might rise in his defence.

  So far as the King had nerves to suffer from, he was nervous during any visit of the War-lord of the Guthones. He was constantly apprehensive of something which might happen to disgrace his army or his police in his guest’s sight. This action of his second son was such a heinous breach of military etiquette as it would have been impossible ever to have seen on the sandy plains where the hosts of Julius manoeuvred. It was natural that all the sullen, savage rage of which his reserved temper was capable, growled within him like a muzzled mastiff’s. If he had followed his impulses, and his sense of duty, Elim would have had short shrift.

  To him the action of Othyris was the most contemptible melodrama, as well as the most intolerable breach of discipline. That break of a few minutes in the march past, of which Elim thought so lightly, was to him a direct offence against military etiquette and law. No punishment would have seemed to him too severe for it, viewed from a military standpoint. But that the abominable act had pleased the people he was aware; the rapturous cheering with which his son had been greeted in the streets had told him that; and he doubted whether public opinion, either in the country or outside it, would go with him in heavy chastisement of an infraction of discipline which had as its excuse the sentimental plea of humanity.

  The King was a strong man and in nothing stronger than in his capability of taking into account the weight in public opinion of feelings which he himself despised as absurd and hysterical vapours.

  With him, in this distressing hour, were the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, the War Minister, and the Prefect of the Palace.

  The theories and the temper of the first of these officials, General Lipsahl, made him abhor such an action as that of Othyris on the Field of Ares. It was in his sight a treason to the flag, to the King, to the dignity of the military calling. Who could excuse it? No one who had any sense of duty. At the same time, although the mind of Lipsahl was like an armoured waggon, closed by iron shutters to projectiles as to daylight, yet Kantakuzene, the Prime Minister, had seen him for ten minutes, secretly, and had said to him:

  ‘For God’s sake remember this thing is popular; restrain the King from public blame of it.’

  This was the evil which ensued from Helianthus being nominally at least a constitutional State; monarch and Ministers had still sometimes to consider popular feeling.

  The ideal of Lipsahl was the adjacent little kingdom of Barusia, where the guards arrested a poodle for wearing national, i.e. revolutionary, colours; or the empire of the Septentriones, where one soldier’s life was esteemed worth the lives of one hundred civilians. But he had the misfortune to be in command of the army in a country in which certain anti-military fictions were still necessarily maintained. They were merely fictions; yet he, like his royal master, was obliged to pretend to consider them realities, and, as such, to be influenced by them! He considered that the
Duke of Othyris deserved punishment without bias or mercy, but he knew that such punishment would arouse dangerous resentment in the city and in many parts of the country. He felt also that the national mind was so feeble and so prejudiced that if an act were humane it was considered laudable. No government (as no war) could be conducted on humane principles; but the public everywhere, though in war it realises this great truth, in peace ignores it, even considers it horrible.

  Ionides Aracoeli, the War Minister, a civilian who knew as much of war as a child of therapeutics, and whose mind always trotted humbly after the superior minds of his sovereign and of Lipsahl, and indeed only existed to be their echo in the Chamber and their instrument at the War Office, was perfectly ready to do or to say whatever he might be told to do or say. But in his innermost soul he hoped that no severity would be used. For the civilian mind, however indoctrinated by a warlike Press, remains feminine, or at least appears feminine to the military mind, which considers itself alone truly masculine; and the feminine mind is always captivated by the sensational charm of such an altruistic action as this folly on the Field of Ares.

  There only remained the Prefect of the Palace, Baron Zelia, the King’s favourite and confidant, if the monarch could be supposed to admit those crutches of the feeble, either favourites or confidants, into his robust and all-sufficing existence. Baron Zelia ventured to say openly in a few well-chosen and delicate words that the act on the Field of Ares had pleased the people of Helios; that no doubt it merited censure in many ways, but that the people approved of it, and the approval of the people should not be completely disregarded.

  Why, the King wondered, was what was idiotic always popular? Who ever heard of a sound and sensible action being so? What was hysterical, high flown, hyperbolic, always captivated the public fancy. Why was his second son popular? Because he was a visionary and a fool. Zelia affirmed that the absurd and offensive action of his second son had been warmly admired and applauded by the people; there was no doubt about that; and though the people were no more in his own sight than a herd of swine, he knew that if the swine took to running amuck they might carry with them him and his over the precipice. The precipice was always there, dark, deep, unpleasant, an ever-yawning tomb; dynasties older, safer, stronger than his, had been hurled into such a pit before then.