by Ouida
The ropes of fresh laurel swung from one electric lamp to another; the national colours and the national flowers of the two nations were displayed everywhere, from triumphal arches to buttonholes; there was all that fictitious enthusiasm which is so easily begotten by the suggestion of the Press and the pressure of the police; martial music resounded everywhere, and the preachers, who are never mute in the land of the Guthones, preached militant discourses from Christian texts. All was love and unity, readiness for war and solidarity in menace; and the newspapers of the world were jubilantly excited, or mournfully envious, according to their geographical situation.
Why serious persons of mature age, and with the cares of public affairs upon them, should be supposed to require amusements and decorations half-childish, half-barbaric; why they should be supposed to be pleased by gilt pennons, artificial wreaths, clusters of lights imitating bunches of grapes, or statues of plaster draped in silks and satins, it would be difficult for any one to explain; but these things are the inevitable accompaniment of all visits by the ruler of one country to the capital of another, just as the sale of cheap toys and gingerbread is the accompaniment of every village fair.
The prisons are filled with suspected people crammed into them as a measure of precaution. In the poor quarters there are hunger, darkness, sickness, famine, misery. The thieves laugh at the law and pillage the crowds; the substratum of the city is still filth, famine, iniquity, vice, suffering; but the tinsel and the gilding and the banners, and the clusters of electric lights, are all there, and are all that visitors and the reporters see. The beautiful horses prance and plunge; the postillions crack their ribboned whips; the massed bands play, the bells vibrate in the air, the cannon boom, and the Powers that Be are delighted, like little boys on a roundabout, with all the noise and stir, and gaudy colour, and gilded pasteboard. And if they want a deeper note in the comic opera, is not the Archbishop of the City there to assure them that they have immortal souls, and are the anointed Vice-Regents of Christ?
Whether the scene be in Gallia, or Guthonia, or Candor, or Helianthus, or the empire of the Septentriones, the spectacle is always the same; more splendid in some, more tawdry in others; more cordial or more conventional; more based on friendship here, or more moved there by fear; but in substance it is always the same. It serves to dazzle the people; to daunt them also by the military display which always accompanies it; and to warn the guest. ‘See, my beloved brother-monarch,’ says each of those who prepare the spectacle, ‘I can be the best of friends, but I can be also the nastiest of foes.’ And each royal visitor, smiling, kissing, making pretty speeches, understands what the welcome to him means.
But uneasy lies the head which wears a crown overshadowed by the superior size of another crown; and when night fell, John of Gunderöde slept ill, although he had the honour of reposing on the same couch which had once been pressed by the revered limbs of the great Gunther of Lillienstauffen, famous as the Ruler of the Iron Hand.
The iron entered into the soul of King John with everything he saw and heard in the Guthonic capital. The perfection of all routine; the precision of every movement; the exactitude of every detail; the matchless manner in which all the interests of the nation were subordinated to the military interest; the perpetual saluting; the manner of course with which the officer treated the civilian as a mixture of ape and ass, jostled him off the curbstone, kicked him off the tram-car, upset him off a chair at a café, and spitted him with a sword as a naturalist runs a pin through an insect — all this was hopelessly unattainable in Helianthus. The way in which Julius swept through the street-crowds on his motor-car as Juggernaut rolls over prostrate multitudes could not have been imitated by his uncle in Helios, where the people, timid and submissive in much, had in them old instincts of free and heroic races which it was dangerous to risk arousing. The aspect of the capital of Julius, which resembled a huge brick barracks, lent itself to an admixture of prison and exercising-ground to which the capital of Helianthus could no more attain than a flower-garden can look like a penitentiary. The very light in Helios laughed like a saucy child, smiled like a happy maiden; whereas the capital of the Guthones was a vast mass of stone and brick and iron, with cold mists sweeping over it from distant seas that were frozen half the year and from plains surrounding it which were scorched like deserts the other half; and its population was armed and drilled and thrashed and put in irons whenever their rulers desired. But it was the ideal State of John of Gunderöde, and he laboured incessantly to make his own realm resemble it; but he had inferior material to work on, and he felt the inferiority bitterly. The Hélianthines had been a polished, learned, and artistic race when the Guthones had been little more than orang-utangs in their fir forests and their airy plains, wearing the skins of wild beasts they killed and eating their flesh; but now the former was a worn-out race in the eyes of the man who ruled over them, and the latter were in his esteem the perfection of drilled, armed, and scientifically-educated humanity. But he could no more make a Hélianthine into a Guthone than he could make a lyre-bird into a barn-door fowl; and the impossibility made him savage.
CHAPTER VI
ON his return to his capital, King John, inspired by his nephew, sent the Crown Prince on a visit of State to a part of his dominions named in the pages of Herodotus, as in the columns of Baedeker; the most ancient, poetic, unaltered, and lovely of all the various outlying portions of Helianthus. It consists of a hundred isles, or more: some large, some small, some inhabited, some left solely to the birds of sea and land, to the hares, the wild cats, the squirrels, the moles, the porcupines; some few are rocky and barren crags, but almost all are densely wooded and extremely beautiful and romantic. To scholars they are known by their ancient name, the Isles of Adonis, and in much they remain untouched since the days of the worship of Aphrodite. They form a series of sentinels between the mainland and the open sea; but they also constitute a danger to the country, because they are coveted by all neighbouring nations and have been captured and retaken many a time since the Persian, the Carthaginian, the Ottoman fleets sailed through their channels. The visit to them of the Heir-Apparent was a State visit, designed to show the interest which the Crown and Cabinet took in these outlying but precious possessions. But there were two motives beneath this: one was the desire to know in what degree, for defence or defiance, they were already prepared; the other was to ascertain their possible value for speculation. The first mission, open and announced, was that of the Heir-Apparent; the second, only spoken of sub rosa, was that of the Minister of Marine who accompanied him; the Minister who was a cousin of Deliornis. Theo had a militant soul, not a commercial one; and he was, after his own narrow and vain fashion, an honest man. The King was more modern than he in this respect.
Elim, who knew well these waters and these isles, would have been far more popular and decorative, had he been sent on such an errand. But the King knew the affection which the maritime population everywhere in Helianthus felt for his second son, who loved the sea and seafaring men, and admired these islanders, who were at once so classic and so primitive.
To give them such a chance of offering their favourite a public ovation was the last thing in the monarch’s thoughts. He knew that Theo was disliked; was ungracious, stiff-necked, and harsh; but as he himself was so likewise, he did not perceive the mischief these defects might do. Monarchs and princes who were amiable and smiling on public occasions, seemed to him like cabmen who should give their horses sugar instead of the whip. The passage in history which seemed to him the most discreditable was that which records how Louis Quatorze took off his plumed hat to his gardener. Theo was not likely to err by any similar excess of urbanity.
The Crown Prince, therefore, was not the man for this kind of errand; he was not gracious or good-natured; his personality was not attractive; he had his father’s harsh and hard expression, and the general aspect of a major of an infantry regiment; he put more militarism into a frock coat and a tall hat than any other ma
n into a full-dress uniform.
The archipelago was little altered since the days when the altars of Venus had risen amongst the myrtle and oleanders. It was a feast of beauty for the eyes, of perfume for the nostrils; the islets seemed to float on the waves as swans’ nests on the sedges; the rose of dawn bathed them in its warmth and light; a poet should have reigned there, a Catullus or a Shelley should have dreamed his life away in its paradise; on their rocks and in their shallows the sea-flowers of the dianthus and the gemmae shone like jewels, and the white flowers of the acacias dropped into the white surf of its breakers. To change the sparkling sand into coal dust and slag; to fell the acacias, the laburnums, the araucarias, the ilexes to feed the ever-open maws of factory furnaces; to make the heavy columns of black smoke obscure the atmosphere and hide from view the radiant horizon — this seemed to the Crown Prince and those of his views and epoch an utilitarian work of the first and most worthy order. It would take much time, no doubt, and an enormous expenditure of money, but then what a noble work it would be — almost equal to the black country of Candor or to the oil regions of the great vast West! The isles were an ode of Anacreon; they should become a conspicuous feature in the Share List.
The Crown Prince saw a great mercantile centre planted like a Buddha amongst avarice, amid its own clouds of dust and smoke; and the trees would burn in the ovens, and the waters be oily and greasy and black, and the people would sweat and suffer just as in the most prosperous regions of the new world. Theo, though a prince, was extremely modern; for he was a man of his time. He cared nothing for the flamingo poised like a rose and white lily amongst the reeds; or for the honeysuckle and clematis throwing graceful sprays from tree to tree; or for the radiant fish darting through the translucent waters of the rock-pools; or for the nude and gleeful children leaping through the foam, and plunging headlong down the roaring breakers. Here was a multitude of islets, which artists admired and historians talked of, but which otherwise had no more value than the mesembryanthemum on its ledge of surf-washed rock. What could be more patriotic than to change it into an ocean Manchester, a nautical Pittsburg? He was by no means an imaginative man, but as his steam-pinnace raced between the isles, he instinctively began to compose the opening lines of a prospectus.
Elim would have been in a congenial atmosphere in these isles; he would have been far more intelligent, far more sympathetic, far more distinguished; but a second son has not the same prestige as the Heir-Apparent, and his already widespread popularity, joined as it was to his extreme and unorthodox opinions, made him unsafe in the King’s estimation. Who knew what he would not say to the people of the Isles, well-known as those people had been for many ages for their maritime daring, for their insubordinate disposition, and, of later times, for their conspicuous part in the War of Independence? Theo, on the contrary, stamped out free and individual opinions wherever he went, as a mastiff may stamp on glow-worms.
For the King had not wanted an Anacreontic or Tibullian ode; he had wanted a report for a parliamentary committee, a cut-and-dried array of figures for a future Board of Green Cloth, and these he obtained from his Heir-Apparent, though it hurt the conscience of the Crown Prince to limit himself to arithmetic, and nautical mathematics, and statements of soundings, and statistics of exports, without expressing the sense of shame which he felt that any part of his father’s dominions should be in so morally benighted yet singularly contented a state.
King John, when it was expedient, could dismiss morality as an unimportant item. To his eldest son morality always ranked before anything else — except indeed privilege, and the Brahminic holiness of his caste.
But he was sent to cement unity, and to uphold prestige, with an imposing escort of men-of-war. The cost to the country of the cruise would be considerable, but no one thought about that; even if the expenditure were large, it would be easily covered by an extra fraction upon hemp or flax, or upon corn or maize or other article of food chiefly used by the poor. Additional taxation was easy in Helianthus to those who imposed the taxes; it was based, as indeed it is in all countries, on two simple rules: where the shoe pinches already, pinch again, and squeeze those throats which are already safely aphonic. A great deal may be added to the Exchequer by adhering to these simple rules; there is no disturbance, and the superior classes are left unruffled. And in all countries it is these classes which most require to be conciliated; the classes which a government cannot shoot, cannot put in the lock-up, cannot charge with seditious conduct, cannot send to pick oakum or make wooden pegs, but which, on the other hand, can, rising from their dinner-tables and feeling pleasantly warmed with good wines, turn out the Ministry.
So the Crown Prince sped on his way, quite sure that the bill for his wanderings would be paid without any unseemly squabbling over it in either House; and Tyras drew caricatures of him as droll as anything ever drawn by Caran d’Ache. Meantime Europe discussed excitedly the probabilities that a cession of some of the isles was intended to some other Power, or else that some other isles lying outside the archipelago were to be annexed and included in it; or else that it was intended to cede the whole archipelago to an international syndicate, which would work the mines, fell the forests, clear the flowery wilderness, build towns of corrugated iron, make heaps of slag and cinders where now orchids bloomed and wild camélias towered, and do the general work of international syndicates everywhere.
The Crown Prince, however, did not go upon such an errand, though the vision of such a syndicate for the future certainly floated seductively before, the minds of the King and his Ministers. He went harmlessly on an errand of what is called in vulgar English, brag: a perfectly natural and innocent flourish of trumpets in the name and the interests of the nation, such as good and patriotic princes are sent upon by their government in all States of the world, gathering popularity and sowing prestige.
He took his departure from the harbour of Helios with much display of bunting, roar of powder, applause of loafing crowds; he was on board the largest royal steam-yacht, and was accompanied by various ships of war, from the huge and hideous Polyphemus to the last new miniature destroyer, Hecate.
The Hundred Isles — the Isles of Adonis — were in the south-eastern waters of the Mare Magnum, and their population was Oriental in its habits rather than European; the Argonauts must have threaded their labyrinth, and Theseus have sailed on their waters; the Liberalia must have been held on their golden sands, and the Floralia under their clematis-hung trees. It was a shocking blemish to the State in Theo’s eyes that there should be such a set of semi-savages on the coast of Helianthus. That they were admirably made, classically graceful, naturally gay as young dogs, and as good-natured, and that they had probably retained unchanged the morals and the manners of twice a thousand years before, was nothing in the estimation of their royal visitor, except a lamentable survival of indecent paganism. They revolted him, as did nude statues in the galleries of the Soleia or the museums of the city.
The people of the Hundred Isles certainly did not lend themselves very harmoniously to the spectacle; on most of the beautiful, sea-rocked, separate worlds of fruit and flower and fern, of silver sand, and deep, soft, shadows, and red rocks, and creeks changeful in hue as opals, the people were half-barbaric, wholly classic still, mirthful, wild, and ignorant of all outside their isolated homes; lithe, handsome, brown, half-naked, as little fed as clothed, but well-grown and healthy from the freshness of the air, the freedom of their lives, and the tonic of the salt water in which half their time was spent. The inhabitants of the Isles could never be thoroughly broken in to military discipline. Their youths were sent by force to the navy, where they made brave sailors, but were restive under coercion, and passed half their time in chains.
These semi-nude, amphibious sons of the surf and the sand were a race that shocked Theo in his innermost feelings of propriety and correctness. But an official posse of decorators had preceded him, as the upholsterer and the florist and the manager prepare a royal box at t
he Opera House before some great gala visit of crowned heads. Persons from the larger isles, which were somewhat more civilised, were temporarily deported to the smaller isles to leaven their barbarism; deputations were formed on the approved modern model, addresses composed and presented, presents prepared and received, the leaven from the mainland was sedulously worked into the original, oceanic, primitive conditions; great care was taken that the young mothers with children at boldly-bared breasts, that the little lads and lasses dancing naked in the surf, that the men leaping and wrestling like statues of pale bronze, unchanged in shape and habit since the days of Phidias, should be kept to the green gloom of their native woods, and all, or almost all, that the Crown Prince should see should be the orthodox broad-cloth, the modern trouser, the silk hat, the shaven chin, the starched shirt, the national flag, the striped marquee, the consecrated red carpet, — everything, indeed, that royal personages seem to create with their breath wherever they go, as the insignia of civilisation, and will expect to find ready for them likewise in the moon if a flying machine ever take them there.
Of the true Isles and life of the Islanders Theo — was allowed — to — see — but little. — But what — he did really — see — for — himself, with — his sharp soldier’s eyes, and without instruction from any one, in addition to the heathenish habits which horrified him, was that the Hundred Isles were almost utterly defenceless: that they constituted an ever-open gate, through which any enemy could pass into the home waters of Helianthus, and assail her fertile and accessible southern mainland, which had scarcely changed since two thousand years before.
Of course a portion of the fleet always guarded this channel, where the last of the isles marked the juncture of the archipelago with the high seas. But Theo had a soldier’s incredulity as to the use and power of a fleet, unsupported by land forces, to protect a country from invasion; and he concluded at once that what was needed was a line of sea-walls, and strong additional fortifications at intervals, in various places, heavily armoured and armed, which should be able to prevent any seizure by a coup de main of the most distant Isles. He came also to the conclusion that all the maps and plans of the archipelago already existing in the War Office and the Admiralty in Helios were defective and misleading. He returned to the capital with the determination to make the nation spend many millions on the necessary works of survey and defence; and the King was never averse to expenditure, if he himself were not asked to contribute to it.