by Ouida
In the King’s character there was one supremely useful trait: — it was the power he possessed of keeping back his anger and his appetites in subjection to his interests. Whoever possesses that power is sure, whether in private or in public life, of a considerable measure of individual success. The King had not a great character or great intelligence, but what he had of either he kept well in hand; even his instincts of brutality and authority he could subordinate to the demands of his interests.
The Emperor of the Guthones, his sister’s son, was the one person for whom the King entertained a sincere envy and admiration. Julius had a manner of telling his army that he expected it to massacre its fellow-countrymen, whenever desired, which rivalled the finest times of mediaeval despotism. He had a felicitous familiarity in his relations with the Deity, coupled with a reverential admiration of himself and of his own acts, his own speeches, his own talents and policies, which John of Gunderöde admired respectfully, though the stolid common-sense of his own temper prevented him from equalling them. To rise to those supreme heights of self-adoration it is needful to have more than one grain de folie in one’s moral and mental composition, and the King had no grains de folie in his composition; he was entirely practical and sensible.
Soldiers, police, and the Deity, were the three forces on which both sovereigns relied to keep themselves in power, and their peoples quiet; but John of Gunderöde felt that his nephew was the finer artist of the two in his ability to take so very seriously the last of the trio.
King John certainly believed in a Providence in that vague manner in which most men of the world believe in that which they do not take the trouble to think about, but which is considered a generally received and wholly respectable tradition of considerable utility at certain moments. But to the Emperor of the Guthones his God was a continual presence, like that, in a banking or mercantile house of business, of the venerable senior partner who leaves every initiative to the junior partner, but is always to be relied on for a signature at the necessary moment, and is eminently precious as a quotable authority.
The two views were as dissimilar as are those of a suspicious man and of a confident child. Yet at the back of each of their minds there was one common thought. The Deity to each of them was of great use in impressing the masses and upholding the crown; and if either of them should go to war, the Divine name would be held in front of them like a shield, and make all carnage and looting, and burning and torturing, which the wars might involve, seem necessary, justifiable, and even benevolent measures, to which no one could be opposed except ‘cranks.’
The family of Julius, the Lillienstauffen, had been in their origin, like the Gunderöde, lords of a small feudal fief, high set on stony hills above morass and plain, whence they had descended to kidnap travellers and pilgrims, and wreck convoys and mule-trains. Like the Gunderöde, they had progressed from one rank to another, and turned all their neighbours’ misfortunes to their own account, until they had become first margraves, then princes, then kings, then emperors, distancing the Gunderöde, and finally ruling over an immense and powerful conglomeration of States which regarded the head of the House as their suzerain, or, as Julius preferred to phrase it, ‘Supreme Envoy of God.’
‘I and God,’ said Julius; King John was contented only to say ‘I.’ In his shrewd and practical mind he had an impression that the addition weakened the royal or imperial claim to infallibility. In his own discourses he always kept the Deity far away in the background, as a vague and indefinite potentiality completely eclipsed by its vice-regents, the monarchs. But he nevertheless admired the manner in which Julius flourished his God in the face of Christian and Paynim, whilst instructing his soldiers that their most sacred duty would be to swill the conduits of the capital with the national blood, if he, Julius, should ever order them so to do.
Like all truly great men Julius did not allow his partnership with Providence to prevent his devoting the most minute attention to details, such as the length of his grenadiers’ hair, the device on his fusiliers’ buttons, the colour of a stripe, the quality of a stuff, or the changes in the cut of a tunic. He would get up before dark to sketch a design for a sleeve-cuff; and would consign a guardsman to arrest who had a speck on his pipe-clay. Thus it was with a gaze terrible as Medusa’s, and searching as a microscopic lens, that he had that day sat on his war-horse and inspected his uncle’s forces.
His tongue was glib in compliment and congratulation, but his hawk’s eyes were merciless in the detection of defects in that military machine which in his estimation only existed to be at once the plaything and the thunderbolt of monarchs.
King John knew that his own machine was far from faultless, despite the pains with which he had consecrated his life to its dressage and dominance. The people of Helianthus were not a race to give full satisfaction to a martinet; they could not be made perfectly rigid, passive, accurate puppets of iron and clock-work. Their blood was hot, their tempers were unsuited to compulsion; their limbs were graceful often, but seldom strong; their natural movements were careless, easy, indolent; they drank when they were thirsty, unbuttoned their jackets when they were hot, fell out of line when anything tempted them on the march; the best amongst them never looked ‘smart’ in the martinet’s sense of the word. ‘It is not an army; it is a rabble in uniform,’ thought Julius, as he sat on his charger beside the flagstaff. If I threw a few thousand of my iron-sides against it, they would double it up like a pancake!’
He had seen it often, and he had always found it the same, and John of Gunderöde guessed the unspoken thought.
The King had done his best: he had spared no brutality, he had shown no clemency, he had punished with unexampled severity every lightest breach of discipline; he had cashiered generals for the smallest indulgence and the most trivial insubordination; he had confirmed the death-sentences of courts-martial, and had spurned the wretched mothers and wives who knelt at his feet to implore mercy for the condemned; he had never yielded for an instant to any weakness, and had never spared either himself or others in his effort to crush all manhood out of three hundred thousand men. Most of his rank and file were peasants: youngsters who had been poorly fed from their cradles; they were slight of muscle, of build, of stamina; they bore ill the weight of their accoutrements, the constraint of their uniforms, the confinement of their barracks; they were children of the valleys and the mountains, used to run with bare feet through the thyme and the wild sage, and pipe on their cut reeds, as their forefathers had done in the days when Pan was god of the woodland world. As modern eyes view soldiers, these conscripts, even after three years under arms, matched ill with the muscular, bearded, Herculean human-engines of war, fed on strong beer and fat meat, who were commanded by the Emperor of the Guthones.
Julius, in speech most flattering, yet always made King John feel that his artillery was six months behind the last invention in ordnance, that his biggest foot guards were short of stature, that his smartest regiments straggled a little in their march past; that, when his grenadiers tramped by in line, some man’s tip of nose, or tip of boot, was sure to be an inch in advance of the rest. Some cavalry horse unlike his fellows in shape or size or colour or breed, some gap in the order of battery following battery, some young trooper visibly uneasy and awkward in his saddle, some driver letting his team buck or his wheels lock — some error, offence, or imperfection, there always was.
The keen gaze of his visitor noted, he knew, every sign of such irregularity; trifles in the sight of an ignorant civilian, but unpardonable offences in the sight of a military monarch. In such hours John of Gunderöde suffered acutely. Therefore, that a break in the march past should have occurred in the presence of Julius, was an unendurable humiliation to him in his own eyes.
The Guthones were a northerly people; they were a beer-filled people; they were a people who had for many generations always been drilled from their cradles; their land had for many centuries been cut up into tiny principalities, but each of these lit
tle pieces had been ruled with a rod of iron; they were used to live with their feet in the stocks and their necks in steel collars. They submitted to be the living pegs of a perpetual game of kriegspiel without protest, and they scarcely grumbled when their masters broke their ribs to teach them to stand straight. These are of course the model subjects of a State, the ideal plebs, the true chair à canon; but they do not exist everywhere.
The King, who had a great deal of Guthonic blood in him, spent his life in the effort to make the Hélianthines resemble the Guthones. But he might as well have tried to make a greyhound a bulldog. The fair shores of Helianthus had been desired, attacked, ravaged, seized, laid desolate, scores of times ever since the ponderous galleys of Asiatic foes had first been driven through the waters of the Mare Magnum by slaves chained to the oars. The King knew that they would be so desired, so attacked, again and again, in the centuries to come, and that by no one else were they so likely to be desired and attacked as by this young man, his well-beloved nephew, who kissed him on both cheeks, and, profiting by an affectionate intimacy, studied and espied every thin armour-plate in his navy, every ill-buttoned tunic in his army.
There was no security in the future. What the world calls peace is but a suspension of hostilities, a jealous watching of wild beasts. King John knew, as his nephew knew, that the army of Helianthus would not be able to stand against an invasion of the Guthones; that, if unsupported, its young battalions, ill-fed and with no naturally martial instincts, would immediately, however commanded or however incited, give way before the brawny and beer-filled ironsides of Julius. It was one of those anxieties of which no man can speak, which put into words would seem to disgrace the speaker. But it was in the King’s mind at all times. Who could be sure that a turn in the wheel of fortune might not give to Julius the excuse, the opportunity, the pretext which he craved?
For the King did not believe as solidly as he would have wished to do in the future independence of Helianthus. The national unity of the Hélianthines was more a phrase than a fact. A running stream between two villages, a crest of hills between two communes, was enough to make each the enemy of the other in a blood-feud lasting for centuries. At the first scream of hostile shells it was probable that the national solidarity, which existed chiefly on paper and in oratory, would fall in pieces like an unbound faggot. King John felt that if Julius himself did not live to carry out his desire, some scion of his would sooner or later send his ironclads into the Mare Magnum and his armies over the mountains of Rhætia, and the classic land would become a mere southern portion of the Guthonic realm. True, socialism in an acute form mined the Guthonic empire, but its militarism was stronger; the vanity and strength of the Guthonic people would always, or at least for a long time to come, be unable to resist the national instinct towards war and conquest, and the geographical position of Helianthus offered it as the first victim.
‘Our War-lord exacts no tribute as yet. Let us be grateful!’ thought Othyris, who was chafed and irritated in an unspeakable degree by those annual visits, ostensibly of friendship and family sentiment, in reality of inspection and criticism. He always saw, in imagination, his cousin riding on a snow-white charger down the central street of Helios at the head of victorious troops.
But that time had not then arrived.
The Emperor Julius stood by one of the windows of the apartments allotted to him in the Soleia, and smoked, and gazed over the sea, and felt with impatience that the time was not even near.
His balconies overhung the marble terraces and stairs facing the western sea; beneath them was the safe and sheltered harbour in which his yacht was anchored and pleasure-boats awaited his choice. The air was odorous with the scent of orange and lemon flowers, and of the great white cups of magnolias; deep-toned bells were chiming; rose-coloured clouds floated in the sky; the tread of a sentinel pacing the pavement beneath was the only discordant sound, but to him it had no discord — it was the welcome sound which accompanied his whole life, sleeping or waking, the assurance that his guardian angel in uniform was watching over him, the armed shape that his Heavenly Father’s protection of him assumed. He saw no absurdity in this; it was to him quite natural; he had the same belief in his especial favour by Heaven as Mahomet had; he did not reason, he believed; in himself first, and then in the Deity as the creator and defender of himself.
But Heaven, favourable to him in so much, denied him the Mare Magnum.
In his few minutes of solitary reflection he looked over those beautiful waters, violet in some lights, azure in others, a malachite green or a dusky peacock-purple, farther away. Why did Providence deny him that sea? What a harbour it would be for his battleships! What an open portal to the conquest of Asia and of Africa! What an outlet to his legions and to the commerce of his empire!
For there is always commerce in the dreams and ambitions of the modern monarch. The Cæsar of the twentieth century, even in his most romantic visions, always wears the grocer’s apron, holds the draper’s rule, loads the cattle-ship and the coal-truck; ‘6
HELIANTHUS
CHAP.
his flag flies from a grain-elevator, his trumpet sounds from a co-operative store; be he as martial as he may, he cannot escape the mercantile taint of his time.
On each of his annual or biannual visits — which Elim called the ‘inspections of the War-lord’ — Julius envied the possession of the Mare Magnum with all the keenness of his appetite and ambitions; and no year brought him nearer its conquest. It would not have been difficult for him to take it; to sweep down with the molten iron of his mobilised forces over the mountains on the north, whilst his fleet steamed into the Hélianthine waters and shut the sea-gates on Helios. He would have had no fear of the result if — if Europe could have been trusted to remain neutral. But he could not trust Europe so far. Nay, he was certain that she would stop him in the defiles of the northern Alps, as a great Power had once been stopped within reach of Stamboul. Europe was not ripe for a single dominant master. She had no individual love for the King of Helianthus, but he was a stop-gap, a buffer, a safety-valve. She had no desire for a single conquering hero, for a second parterre des rois disarmed and made ridiculous at a second Tilsit. The condition of the nations is bad; but a single autocrat, even such a vice-regent of Christ as Julius Imperator, would be, Europe thinks, infinitely worse.
So, impotent to realise his vast ambitions, yet hovering over them as the hawk over the pigeon’s cote, Julius came every year or two to visit his relative and ally, and to look with longing eyes and futile wishes over the luminous waters whence, ever since the days of Homer and of Hesiod, many a fleet of fable and of history has sailed away into the golden glory of the setting sun, or issued with swelling canvas from out the rosy dusk of dawn. Who could say that some time might not come when Europe, exhausted, over-burdened, or grown indifferent, might not let the hawk loosen the hasp of the pigeon-cote with his beak?
It is said that a monarch, being asked who he would be, if he could choose, replied: ‘If I were not myself, I would be my nephew Julius.’ But Julius was not greatly to be envied; the torment of an insatiable and unrealisable ambition was like a perpetual fire in his blood; he wanted worlds to conquer; he wanted the chariot of the sun to take him to the capture of new solar systems.
When the earth is mapped out on a papier-mâche globe for the use of schools, and travelling tickets to go round it are things of daily life, it has ceased to be a sphere sufficient for great ambitions. A great ambition requires the immeasurable, requires a vague distance of golden vapour which can give it a horizon, and allure it with a mirage. The earth was too small a sphere for Julius, and, unwisely, he had hampered himself in the use of such space and opportunity as it offered, by having called himself publicly and often an apostle of peace. He had a fine engine of war at his elbow, but he had told mankind that he loved them too well to use it, which was a superfluous and paralysing assertion.
True, it is possible to eat your own words, if you have a good
digestion and good teeth; but it is better not to have any words which require eating. It is better not to compare yourself with Christ, if you are desirous of behaving like Attila.
Julius turned from the balcony with an impatient sigh, and flung his cigar into the magnolia grove which faced it; his attendants hastened to make his evening toilette, and array him in the glittering uniform of that Hélianthine regiment of Cuirassiers of which he was the Honorary Colonel.
Helianthus was not for him. Not yet, at least; not yet, he thought, as the Hélianthine Orders were fastened on his breast. All things come to those who know how to wait, says the proverb. Alas, no! not all things. Only one thing is certain, — death. Of that no one will cheat us, whether we be emperors or beggars; and the omnipotent Julius sighed.
A little later, after dinner that evening, he solved the problem of the treatment due to the offender on the Field of Ares. In a quarter of an hour’s chat with his uncle in the smoking-room, with that tact and grace which characterised him when he chose to call them to his aid, he entreated as a favour to himself that nothing should be said or done regarding his cousin’s breach of discipline. ‘One must not blame an error of the heart,’ he said; and he combined with true diplomatic skill the pleasure of interceding for a man to whom such intercession would be very bitter, and of conveying in honeyed phrase his sense that the classic Helianthus had many a lesson still to learn from the juvenile empire of the Guthones. In the art of presenting a rose for the buttonhole with a pin carefully adjusted to prick the skin under the buttonhole, Julius of Lillienstauffen had no superior. His rose was always sweet; his pin was always sharp.