by Ouida
The fortifications of the archipelago became immediately the burning question of the day. All the military and conservative party sided with the Crown Prince, and of course all the radical and socialistic party rushed into opposition of the project; neither party wasting either time or trouble in looking into the question as it stood on its own merits. This is the characteristic modern fashion of dealing with all public problems; and it has at least simplicity to recommend it. Does X. favour a project? That is enough. X.X. immediately goes against it, tooth and nail. Does X. oppose it? Then, incontinently, X.X. proclaims that it is the one measure imperatively necessary to the national existence. This is called, in monarchies, ‘Government by Parliamentary Representation.’ and in republics is entitled ‘Government by the Will of the People.’ Both these names sound nicely; but what they describe is not quite so nice as to be entirely satisfactory to students of modern history. Nor will they be so to the Gibbons, Tocquevilles, and Rankes of the future, who may very possibly irreverently call it government by interest, caste, temper, envy, greed, hatred, and all uncharitableness; government, indeed, by the purse and the passions of humanity, instead of by its reason and its justice.
The project of the fortifications had one result which was good, and one result which was either good or bad according to the views of those who judged it. The first was that the scheme occupied the Crown Prince to the temporary exclusion of all other interests; the second was that it made the Ministry unpopular. Theo ceased temporarily to worry the life out of his aides-de-camp and his tormented colonels, and his poor soldiers slept in comfort for a time in their barracks, their dormitories being for once in a while undisturbed by bugle-calls of alarm in the small hours of the night; and the Ministry, being forced, to please the King, to prepare and put forward plans which proposed the expenditure of several trillions of francs, to be necessarily followed by additional taxation, played its best cards into the hands of vigilant and merciless opponents, and lost them. For the best card of the Prime Minister, Kantakuzene, was that which, though in part mere policy, was also in part a genuine desire in him to better the conditions and lighten the burdens of the poor of his nation. The general belief that he was sincere in this had made him popular with the people, even with those sections which condemned him as a turn-coat, and considered that, in view of his earlier life and professions of faith, he should never have become a Minister of the Crown. But when he and his Cabinet fathered so monstrous a proposal of expenditure as the sea and island fortifications, his best friends were aghast, and his defeat was assured.
Viewed merely from a technical point of view, the project was sound. In an epoch when fair-faced Peace sinks under the weight of her armour, and scowls like a Medusa at her neighbours, it is undoubtedly wise for a nation to arm everywhere and in every way. No one can be the first to disarm, under penalty of being the first to fall; or, at least, such is the opinion alike of soldiers and of sages, and of those youngest sons of Athena, newspaper correspondents.
There was also not a doubt that the sea-washed chain of the Hundred Isles was, as it had been for so many centuries, one of the fairest and most attractive portions of the globe, and as a possession was desired by all. Hitherto, indeed, precisely because it was coveted by all, it had been safe from any one ravisher in especial. They all cried ‘Hands off!’ to each other; and it was felt that the terrible bugbear and Jack-in-the-Box, called an European war, would inevitably follow any attempt on the part of any single Power to trouble the peace of the Hélianthine Archipelago. But who could say how long this suspension of hostilities might last?
‘I am always reluctant to give any expression of my views on subjects which are before Parliament,’ said Othyris to a friend, who pressed him to give his opinion on the matter, ‘and this is in especial my eldest brother’s project. But I fear that we are doing what every nation does at this time of the world’s history — trusting for defence to money, stone, metal, and projectiles, whilst we enfeeble the temper and the spirit of the people without whom those defences are useless. It is impossible that you can incessantly hustle and worry and unnerve a populace with innumerable by-laws, fines, threats, and taxes, and leave them a spirited and dauntless community. The tyrannical minutiae of modern government, of municipal activity, of police supervision, of medical regulations, of house-to-house espionage, of perpetual interrogation, investigation, and interference, must cow a populace; its effect is the same on men as that of the muzzle on dogs. Until now the population of the Isles has been let alone in a great measure. They have been allowed to rule themselves to a large extent, taxation and conscription apart. They are primitive, not ungentle, but wild and little touched by the life and laws of the mainland. They form the best ægis to the archipelago. I do not think they will willingly be shut up within sea-walls and fortresses, or easily be forced to congregate in little walled coast towns. Their origin is, I believe, Phoenician. They are children of the sun, and the waves, and the storm. They shout and chant as they ride the white horses of the surf. They dive down to the coral reefs, and climb the stems of the palms to the crowns. They would fight till the sea ran red against invading foes; but shut up behind mortised blocks of stone they will grow either sullen and savage, or anaemic and tuberculous. My brother sees his fortifications and nothing else; but the men who come behind him, to carry out his plans, see their mills, their mines, their million-volt power-stations, their huge barracks full of workers grinding gold for them; and as behind the soldier struts the engineer, so behind the engineer stalks the syndicate, and the archipelago will become what Bombay has become — one vast factory. My brother is entirely sincere, he is perfectly singleminded; he would no more carry two minds than he would wear two sabres. But those behind him are neither simple-minded nor single-minded, and they use him to their own ends. They have one sole intention — to make money; and he is one of the mints in which they coin it. He has no idea whatever that he is being used as a mere tool by projectors, contractors, financiers, and all the rest of the gang: he honestly believes that he is doing a patriotic act, and endeavouring to strengthen the country where she is weakest and most vulnerable. He looks forward to an honest and useful expenditure of subscriptions voluntarily given by the nation. He does not as yet imagine, and (if he ever comes to know it) he will never admit, that he will be only made the decorative handle to a gigantic job.’
The Crown Prince was, indeed, primarily occupied with the moral side of the question, being a person to whom moral questions were, as they were to his cousin Julius, directly delegated by Heavenly Powers for observation and enforcement upon the nation. But almost equally precious and important to him was the necessity of losing no time in putting in a state of defence these romantic isles and islets which ran out into the open sea like children racing in the waves. He really scarcely knew which was the more horrible of the two, the open sensuality of the people, or the open peril of these undefended and scattered places on which they dwelt. He, indeed, on his return to the capital, did not any longer conceal the horror which he had felt at the moral condition of the Islands; however discreetly it had been veiled from him, he had seen much which seemed to him the nudest paganism.
‘Their sexual intercourse is often promiscuous, he said, in an awed whisper of horror, when he returned to the capital.
‘And our houses of ill-fame,’ said Othyris, ‘what are they?’
Theo did not reply.
There were many offences in his generation, in his country, in his barracks, in his military colleges, which he could neither alter nor chastise, and which he preferred to ignore.
The greatest martinet must be content to ignore sometimes; he cannot always be sitting on court-martial.
Whitewash, religion, and legal marriage appeared to him to be urgently required in these sea-rocked nests of immorality. The long, low, wooden houses, thatched with sea-rushes, and covered by creepers, were hotbeds of vice and of sin in his eyes. Square sanitary dwellings, built of brick and stuccoed, roofed
by tiles or slates, with fireproof floors, patent kitcheners, sinks, safes, and water-pipes, with the surrounding trees well cleared away on all sides of each habitation, would make of the Island-population who should inhabit them a wholly different kind of people. It would take time; no doubt it would take time; but such changes were absolutely necessary. The people would rebel, no doubt; had they not rebelled in Helios when the rookeries of the old quarters had been broken up and cleared away? Was not, unto this very day, the law of decency, which forbade the bathing in the sea at Helios of persons without bathing-clothes, resisted violently by many people, even by people who were otherwise respectable?
The advice of Herbert Spencer, ‘Govern me as little as you can,’ was the opposite of Theo’s rule of conduct and of wisdom. To govern the public in every small matter, in every insignificant trifle, was his ideal of good government. He had once with his own august lips ordered a cottager to turn a cat and her kittens off a child’s bed one day when he had looked in at a cottage doorway as he waited for a village smith to replace a lost nail in one of his horse’s shoes.
‘Cats are subject to many contagious diseases, contact with them is most perilous,’ he had observed; and, terrible to relate, the cottager, who did not know who the visitor was, had bawled at him: ‘The child and the cat have slept together five mortal years, and you gentry had better not come meddling here’ — a reply which led to a domiciliary visit from the police of the nearest station, and the ejection of the man by his employer from the farm on which he worked.
Theo certainly had intended no such results to the family when he made his remark about the ante-hygienic properties of the feline race; and he had never given another thought to either the cat or its owner after he had bidden one of his gentlemen acquaint the Syndic of the district that a certain labourer in a certain place appeared to be a person who required some admonition in regard to his want of respect and of cleanliness. But a hint to an official mind against a man who is of no account and is always in arrears with his hearth-tax, is like a hot cigar-end thrown into a heap of dry maize stalks. It flames alight and consumes everything the flame can reach, until there is nothing left except a little charred ash on a burnt piece of ground.
Theo never gave another thought to the insolent cottager, but his suggestion to the Syndic bore fruit.
A man does not like interference in his own house.
A man is rough with his tongue.
A man is slow in paying the sum called, so sympathetically, the hearth-tax.
A man harbours the subversive and intolerable belief that on his own mud floor, between his four wattled walls, he is master.
To the official or bureaucratic mind all these beliefs are of a damnable iniquity, seed of all poison and peril. They are, to that mind, the root of all evil, and to hunt them down and stamp them out is a religious duty, as the burning of heretics was to the Inquisition.
‘Kill the cat,’ said his wife. ‘She’s been our curse.’
‘No,’ said the man, ‘she is a good cat. She has fed with us, and she shall starve with us, since starve we must.’
‘She will get mice for herself,’ said the wife.
‘Not here,’ said the man. ‘Mice run away from a cold hearth and an empty platter. They are just like human-folks.’
The cat found mice in the fields, but the man did not find work there. The farmers were shy of a labourer who had been visited by the police from the town, and who had incurred the displeasure of a high personage. The country round was sparsely populated; the land was poor, the landowners were poor, the harvests were poor; it was a part of the eastern provinces. There were at all times more workers on the soil than there was work to give them. Moreover, when you can only do a humble kind of work, which many can do as well as you and many others can do better, you can create no demand for yourself, you are quickly replaced, no one wants you. If you are pushed out of the one groove in which you have always run, you will be as helpless as an engine lying on its side at the bottom of an embankment. This man, out of work, grew desperate. He begged on the roads. He even threatened those he met. His wife was in her seventh month with her fourth child. The owner of the cottage turned them out of it, and kept the little furniture they had in the place for rent which was overdue. Misery never visits you by herself: she always brings a tribe of followers.
They slept under stacks of cut wood on a moor.
This was vagabondage according to the law. The man was taken up by the rural guards, who had a black cross against his name. The woman was left half-dead, with a still-born babe; her couch was the rough turf. The little children wandered over the moor to try and find something to eat on bush or briar. They lost themselves, and were discovered by a shepherd days afterwards, their bodies and limbs cleaned of their flesh by birds of prey. When the man was let out of prison he had no longer either wife or children; he had neither home nor work; he lost his mind and became violent; the authorities had him removed to a lunatic asylum. What becomes of poor friendless men who pass such gates no one ever knows; all that is certain is that they leave all hope behind them, and are as completely blotted out from memory as the dead who lie nameless under sand or sod.
It was, perhaps, almost an excessive punishment for having been rude to a prince about a cat.
CHAPTER VII
IT is an established theory with royalties that their families must always be in movement, circulating like the gold at a roulette table. Accordingly, in the early spring of the following year, another royal train was running across one of the most northern and mountainous provinces of Helianthus; a region overshadowed by the range of the Rhætian Alps, and swept by their storms and snows. A line of railway had been driven across it, up its slopes, along its ravines, under its forests, through its gorges, and was a part of the direct route which led to the old Emperor Gregory’s dominions, where the aged Caesar’s ninety-seventh birthday was about to be celebrated with all the pomp and rejoicing possible on such occasions.
It was a dangerous line, because the strength of the floods in winter, the frequency of landslips on the hills, the suddenness with which huge rocks were loosened by snow melting in spring and were hurled down on to the metal rails, all combined with the boisterousness of the rivers, and the ferocity of the hill-population, to render the passage of a royal train at all times a thing to be environed with constant and minute precautions. The people living in the desolate villages, in huts which clung to the stone ledges of the rocks like swallows’ nests, or in moss-grown lairs under the pine woods like wolves, had been known, in their hatred of the railway, to roll great blocks of gneiss across the rails, or to fire their rude carbines at the engine-driver or the passengers. Therefore when a train carried members of the imperial family to the Gunderöde, or members of the Gunderöde family to their imperial relatives, the whole permanent way was alive with officials and workmen on the watch for danger.
‘Are we worth all that?’ said Othyris, who was, with his brother Gavroche, the object of this train’s especial journey, as he saw guards and operatives patrolling the lofty bridges and the narrow ledges of one of the mountain gorges through which they passed. ‘If all this be necessary to save us from an accident, why is it not done every day? The life of any other passenger is worth as much to him as ours to us.’
‘But it is to the nation that ours is so precious!’ said Tyras, with his worst grin.
‘Pshaw!’ said Othyris.
‘The dear stupid ass of a nation!’ said Gavroche. ‘It is so sweet of it to set our lives so high above its own! And it is very comfortable to journey along like this, with thousands of guardian angels on the look out for us, like the English poet’s little cherub that sits up aloft to watch over the life of poor Jack.’
‘But there is no cherub for poor Jack when he goes by this line; and if he crashes into petroleum waggons, or gets buried under boulders, or is crushed into pulp by a goods train, who cares?’
‘Why do you want to be crushed?’
/> ‘I do not want to be crushed, but neither do the travellers of every day in ordinary trains; and if these precautions are needed for us, similar precautions should be taken for them. And they are not taken.’
‘Of course they are not taken. Where would the shareholders’ dividends be? This is a superb line in its engineering, but the promoters went bankrupt, you remember, and Max Vreiheiden got it for next to nothing. It is he who runs it, and he is not the sort of man to keep the guardian angels all along the road for everyday travellers.’
‘Yes: every mile of the line is being sentinelled, sounded, looked over, strengthened, cleared, guarded for us — for us alone. Look at those men running along that ledge; there is scarcely space for a cat to pass safely; a slip of the foot, and one of them will be hurled into the torrent; yet they are risking their lives for us — at how much a day, I wonder? Enough to buy a maize loaf, a curd cheese, and a little tobacco?’
‘That is their business! I have heard that when this line was made, a good many hundreds of workmen were killed in making it; so the droves of slaves were killed in building the Pyramids. Only we call them “operatives,” to sound -pretty, and make believe that theirs is all free labour. Of course I know the injustice of the thing as well as you do, only I approve of it, and I like to have all these ants running about, above there, to tap the rocks and make sure that a loose one won’t come toppling down in our path. They are a kind of visible Providence, which is comfortable to ourselves and reassuring to the insurance offices. Even the clergy think that Providence is not quite to be trusted alone! Well, you don’t quarrel with that, do you r It’s privilege.’