by Ouida
There was racing all over Helianthus: there had been racing of all kinds in the land for over two thousand years, and the ruins of many a great hippodrome towered on lonely wastes and amidst crowded streets, in witness of the national pastime and its universal fascination. Elim’s dislike to it, and his refusal ever to enter a horse for a race, or to keep a racing-stable, was one of the few unpopular traits in his character.
‘Go against a nation’s best interests, and as likely as not it will lick your feet,’ his uncle Basil had said once to him. ‘But oppose its amusements and its appetites, and it will gibbet you.’
‘I will take the risk,’ said Elim. ‘At least, I shall not oppose them; but I shall not share them.’
The King did not interfere in this matter; he felt obliged to attend the great races of the year for the sake of popularity, but he had a good deal of common-sense about certain things, and he considered the Turf guilty of the deterioration of the equine race, by the substitution of mere speed for staying power. Races could do nothing to improve the breeds of cavalry horses; he would have revived the massive destrier of Philippe Auguste and of Barbarossa had he been able.
So Othyris, unmolested in this matter, used his horses only for exercise; and, although he rode far and fast, never brought them back distressed or in a lather. What he especially enjoyed was to escape from the gentlemen riding after him, and get out by himself into the solitudes of the more distant country, taking his chance of the banded robbers whose exploits still gave a dramatic colour to the thickets of oleanders and pomegranates by the sea shores, and to the ilex and olive woods of the more remote hillsides.
‘Your lonely rides are very dangerous,’ his elder brother said to him one day.
‘Yes, perhaps,’ said Othyris. ‘But not much more dangerous than to get into an electric tram-car, or to walk across the lines of light railways; and how much more agreeable! Besides, the brigands would not hurt me; they would know I should be worth money; they would even, perhaps, leave me my clothes and give me smoked kid and smuggled cigars. But the trains and the trams are democratic institutions: they would crush me as impartially as they crush counterjumpers or bankers’ clerks.’
‘You always jest,’ grumbled Theo. He himself never jested: it was said that he had never even played in his nursery days except with tin soldiers.
Between him and Othyris militarism was built up like a stone wall.
No conscript, sweating in a forced march under the weight of arms and knapsack, hated the military-service as the second son of the King hated and despised it. He wrote some poems which were called ‘Dum spiro, suspiro’; they were sent anonymously to an independent journal, and caused much wonder and comment; they caused, too, the sequestration of the newspaper at the issue of the fifth poem. As he kept his own confidence, nobody betrayed him, and when the editor received a bank-note for double the amount of the fine imposed on him, he was too wise to try to find out who was the sender.
Not less burdensome than the military obligations was the possibility that any day, any year, he might be called to occupy the throne. The Crown Prince was a sportsman, untiring and reckless; there was always the chance of some violence cutting short his life, for he was brave to fool-hardiness. When he did think of this very possible contingency, the Heir-Presumptive to the crown shrank as from a far greater calamity than death.
Othyris had no dreams or vanities to console him. He knew that kings who refuse to accept the illusions which surround them from their birth are of all mortals the most miserable; that for them, beyond all men, to issue from the web of existing circumstance is impossible.
He would have renounced his place in the succession without hesitation, had not the man who would come after him been a worthless scamp. Who could, with any conscience or sense of human responsibility, deliver a nation into such hands as those of Tyras? His own, he knew, were weak, but at least they were clean. He did not believe that he would be able to do any good if he became king, because vested interests would be stronger than he. Ministers would thwart, courtiers conspire, women intrigue; when he would desire to bless he would be forced to curse; between him and the people there would be always the misrepresentations of the Press, or that gross flattery which defiles more than its abuse. He had no illusions; he was no Hercules that he would be able to slay the Hydra; instead, the Hydra would stifle him in feigning to embrace him. Yet he felt that he could not in common courage and decency pass the crown to such a one as the man whose nickname was Gavroche. Nor could he ever do as he would have liked to do, should he ever succeed to the throne — abolish the constitution and the monarchy, and change the country into a republic based not on transatlantic but on ancient precedent. His brothers would most certainly take up arms against him in such an event; there would be civil war in the streets, and in the provinces the land would be delivered over to all the furies. To let Hell loose in such a manner would not be a thing to be thought of for a moment. Therefore if called to the succession he would be compelled by circumstance to enter, and remain in, the groove which he abhorred, to sacrifice his existence to formula, to ceremony, to vain pomp, and to silly shibboleth. A friend had once said to him, ‘Make your personality felt.’ But he knew, he who had been born and reared in a Court, that around every prince, every monarch, there are influences far stronger than his own, which paralyse his influence, intercept its action, and transmute its power into impotence wherever, however, it may cross and menace established claims, precedents, rights, privileges, conventionalities, and customs.
He knew that the Ministers who would kneel to him would be his masters, that their shadows would be always between him and the people; that, change them as he might, they would be of the same eternal type: their religion, office; their evangel, a tax-paper. He would be no more able to alter the poverty, the injustice, the agonies of human life in his kingdom than any peasant who dragged bare limbs over scorched sods in the wake of the ploughshare. Individual charity he might give, individual lots he might alleviate; but to the vast mass of hopeless misery he would be able to give no comfort. The great engines of torture, the great grindstones of pressure, militarism, commerce, taxation, cheap labour, the dropsy of capital, the exploitation of misery; all these, and all the ills which they engender, he would be no more able to touch than if he were a stevedore labouring in the hold of a steamship in the harbour. The makers of phrases, the grinders of souls, the drivers of hunger, would always be stronger than he. They would leave his multitudes in the death-pits, on the battlefields, in the dens of the sweaters, in the black tunnels of the mines, in the stricken, blighted fields, in the huts without light, or fire, or food; and he would be powerless to rescue those who would be called his people.
The contrast between a monarch’s semblance of dominion and his absolute impotence in reality, seemed to him the most cruel and cynical antithesis the world contained. His father was content with the only real power which royalty confers on royalty — the power of gathering riches, and placing them in safety out of reach of evil chance; but he would not be so content. Nor would the lesser privileges of authority satisfy him without the power to alter laws, to divide capital, to reconstruct society, to humanise criminal punishment, to guide the people to the light as it was visible to him; and what king could do aught of this? Nay, in modern life, could Krishna, or Christ, or Mahomet, do it?
Even in the affairs of daily life he was constantly met and checked by an absolute powerlessness to do what he desired for the welfare of the people. Money he could give, and did give; but there are evils and sorrows which money, magician though it be, cannot cure. If you give money you create a proletariate amongst the poor, and a crowd of toadies amongst those whose god it is; and you can only give; you cannot ensure, or even control, the effects of your gift. He knew that well. He could alleviate physical ills indeed, but he could not alter moral ills. He could not follow the course of his gifts any more than a florist can follow the fate of flowers he cuts and sends away to strangers. T
here was no Poor Law in the country to diminish, however feebly, the suffering of the poor. There was only the tax of the State on the youth of the State: the hateful and almost universal law of conscription which seized from two to three years from the life of nearly every young man born in the kingdom. He felt this most acutely when the lads on his own estates were taken; he could not save them, he could not ask for any exemption for them; and they who believed in his omnipotence supposed that he would not help them because he thought the blood-tax just and righteous. He loathed it, but he could no more change it than he could have moved the range of the Rhætian Mountains. If ever he reigned, would the political parties permit him to abolish compulsory-military service? He had no hope of it. The populace would have rejoiced if the weight of arms had been lifted off their sons’ shoulders; but the ruling classes would never have allowed a voluntary and paid force to be substituted for the conscripts so numerous, and, by comparison, so cheap. Europe has swept her youth into the dragon’s maw of militarism and is not inclined to let them escape. War is the plaything of governments. They are not likely to give it up merely because the playthings get broken.
The favourite place of his uncle Basil had been the great estate called Ænothrea, which lay on the southwest coast of Helianthus and which was as nearly an earthly paradise as nature and art, land and sea, unlimited wealth and perfect taste, could make it. Its views were incomparable, its treasures were endless, its gardens were dreams of loveliness; and from its terraces the Mare Magnum was seen to unroll its mighty waters, an azure plain when summer smiled, a chaos of storm and wind and mountainous waves, and vessels tossed to and fro like cockle-shells in its mad riot, when the clouds touched its purple.
Othyris loved the place with an artist’s passion for its beauty, and with the gratitude for its solitude of one who would willingly have been a recluse if life had so permitted. He would gladly have exiled himself for ever to Ænothrea and there have dwelt, leaving the clash and clangour of the world to others.
There are so many of these beautiful places, lying in the lap of the world like jewels on a woman’s breast, and how seldom — how little — do those who possess them care for them! They may care for them with the pride of possession, care with the vanity of wealth, care with the sense of the owner’s omnipotence, with the appreciation of cultivated taste, with the power and pomp of hospitality; but care for them with the love of the heart for the home they do not, for they leave them frequently; when forced to stay in them they are soon aweary; all their glories for the sight, all their treasures for the mind, soon pall on them. If it were not for the charm of sport which their coverts offer, their owners would not sleep as often as they do beneath their roofs! They prefer the express-trains, the transatlantic steamers, the fashionable spa, the crowded hotel, the gorgeous gambling-place, and even other people’s roof-trees to their own! And the grand houses are left to solitude and servants, sometimes even are let to strangers, sometimes are opened to entertain royalty and provide some great prince with whatever sport he likes the best; and that is all, until, perchance, some day the owner of one of them is embarrassed in his affairs, and sells — last ignominy of all!
Ænothrea was safe from such a fate; but it was, perforce, visited too little by its lord, who would so willingly have passed all his days under its roof. The chain of the social, military, filial duties which bound Othyris to a routine so hateful to him rendered most of his time as heavy to him as the daily labour of any poor man could be. Even when on his estates he had seldom the luxury of solitude, and as he regarded these vast properties as what Tyras called in ridicule une charge d’âmes, the welfare of them was to him a grave preoccupation.
Une charge d’âmes! Well, was it not so? Was not the sole excuse for power and possession the use of them in behalf of those who had neither? His family thought such a view of rank and property a monstrous compound of communism and conceit, but his conscience held to it.
Only he could do so little which satisfied himself; he was always stopped in his actions by some of the wire fences of law or usage, some of the immovable rocks of prejudice or regulation. One day as he walked down one of the beautiful avenues at Ænothrea, an avenue of great ilex-trees which met in impenetrable darkness overhead and were bordered by those humble and hardy flowers which he cherished more than all the glories of horticulture, he came across a boy who was employed on the estate. He was a pretty lad, with an innocent face and a classic form; the tears were falling down his cheeks, and as he stood aside bareheaded to let Othyris pass a sob heaved his chest.
‘Why, my boy, what ails you?’ asked Elim, knowing the lad by name and sight. ‘Come, Eusebius, do not be shy of me; tell me your sorrow.’
The boy looked up wistfully.
‘Sir, oh, sir,’ he murmured, ‘I drew a bad number yesterday. I must serve!’
‘Ah! Is that your trouble?’ said Othyris, understanding only too well. The boy was bound to go to military service; very few, indeed, in the rigour of his father’s reign, escaped the iron yoke of conscription.
‘Alas! my poor child, I can do nothing for you. It is the law. You must obey it.’
Eusebius looked up timidly, his cheeks wet with tears.
‘Oh, sir, oh, my gracious lord.’ he murmured, ‘could you not say a word for me? The others — my brothers — are all so little. They earn nothing, and my father has been ten months helpless since he broke his arm, the bones do not join well—’
Then frightened at having dared to speak so much, he broke down into uncontrollable weeping, and covered his face with his hands.
‘I know, I know! ‘said Elim. He knew only too well these sorrows that were all over the land, that overshadowed the lives of the young from their birth, and made bitter as gall the rough, black bread eaten by the hearths of the poor.
‘Oh, sir, your Highness is so mighty in power. If only — if only—’ murmured the boy, trembling in every limb with hope and fear. To him it seemed if only the lord of Ænothrea would speak but a word, they would let him stay in his little home amongst the wide green fields and fragrant woodlands where he had been born.
But Othyris knew otherwise. ‘They found you healthy and well made?’ he said. ‘They have passed you as fitted for service?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then, my lad, no power of mine can do anything for you.’ And he thought bitterly: ‘It is the best fruit that is first plucked; it is the soundest lamb that is sent first to the slaughter!’
‘Believe me, my boy,’ he said with great gentleness, ‘if it were possible for me to help you, I would do so unasked. But in some things I am entirely powerless, and this is one of them. What I can do is to see that your family does not suffer in your absence, and that your wages are paid to your father during your absence on military service as though you were still in these gardens. That is all I can do. For the rest, take courage, my child. When you come back your place will await you.’
Then he went on his way down the avenue, and his heart was heavy for the weeping lad. Could he have had his way none of this young flesh would have been eaten by the dragon of war.
He knew how the enforced military service took the elasticity out of youth as the slip and chain cow the young dog; how it made coarse and harsh and evil those whom it did not make miserable; how as it hardened the hands and callosities on the feet, so it blunted the sensibilities, killed the individuality, and reduced the man to a machine.
This boy was good, simple, dutiful, affectionate, ignorant of much of the vice and the sin of cities. He would go to the barracks, to the camp, to the chamber with its rows of straw or of sacking for beds, to the drinking booth and the brothel; and the long forced marches, and the constant gnawing of hunger, and the dreary empty hours without either work or play, and the coarse and brutal bullying of corporal and of comrade, would be his portion for ten long seasons and would make him weary and sullen, and he would get drunk whenever he could.
There was no help for it. Othyris might h
ave tried to bear the world upon his shoulders with as much chance of success as to change the military tyrannies of Europe.
But as he walked through the soft green shadows of the avenue he seemed to hear the dragging of the young tired feet through the dust over the stones, the heaving of the strained lungs under the heavy leathern belts, the pressure of the blood on the valves of the heart in the panting march in the noonday sun; — for many a long year the sons of Helianthus had gone thus over its earth, under its hills, beside its waters, and none had pitied them. The weakest had always dropped out of line, and sunk down on the soil, and swooned or died there.
Who had cared? No one, except the wolves and wild dogs who had stolen over the sand-hills, or through the cistus bushes, and waited.
CHAPTER V
His EXCELLENCY ALEXANDER DELIORNIS, Minister of Grace and Justice in Helianthus, had been in early life a rag-merchant. He had made a considerable fortune in that unsavoury trade, and had entered on the not much cleaner trade of politics as one of the conservative deputies of his native seaport town, in whose harbours innumerable crafts, of all kinds of construction and degrees of tonnage, and coming from all manner of countries, brought to his yards the rags of innumerable filthy multitudes which, when Helianthus was healthy and medical science was out of work, could always afford to its professors the germs of diseases wherewith to create a useful and profitable scare. Deliornis and the medical scientists had had many transactions; his warehouses, become in later years vast buildings on the quays, were not dear to the goddess Hygeia; they had not a sweet fragrance as of the rose; indeed they stank in the nostrils of the city, and of those who landed and embarked at its port. Hygeia frowned on them; but the high priests of science hurried to the rescue with sulphates and sublimates, and they and Deliornis agreed that the rags were, if not inodorous, innocuous.