Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  ‘I quarrel with all privilege.’

  ‘O Lord! Privilege is the rock of ages. If that went, where should we be?’

  ‘Wherever our qualities and our deserts would put us.’

  Tyras gave a dissentient grunt. He had an uncomfortable impression that his own qualities and deserts would not, alone, entitle him to a glass of absinthe. He had no great opinion of his own order; but it seemed to him cutting your own throat, if you were a prince yourself, to assume that a prince could possibly be judged by his merits.

  Tyras was too intelligent, and too cynically frank, not to confess his own worthlessness; but that knowledge did not hinder him from the most devout persuasion that any filth he indulged in was an honour to those whom it bespattered, and, alas, for the baseness of human nature, no one contradicted this belief.

  ‘On triche là haut!’ murmured a gentleman who was once watching the play at a private roulette table where Gavroche was raking his gains in largely; but the glances, the frowns, the signs of other persons, immediately made this too candid person conscious that all that is seen must not be said: that, in the words of the old maxim, ‘Toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire’ It was an understood thing in all the good society of Europe that the Prince of Tyras must always be allowed to win at play.

  ‘This train is altogether new,’ said Othyris, looking up at its ceiling, painted with the story of Europa. ‘It must have cost half a million of francs.’

  ‘I dare say. Max knows where his bread is buttered. He means the King to make him a duke. Fifteen years ago he was a clerk in one of the public pawn-shops. It was there that he got to know where the shoe pinched on people’s feet. He lent little sums out on pawn-tickets; when they were not paid up in time he took the tickets; that was how he made his first money; sometimes he used to get things worth a great deal for a few copper bits he had lent on them. He’s rather a pleasant fellow, but that is how he began.’

  ‘Does he lend to you?’ said Othyris curtly.

  ‘No; he loses to me at cards,’ said Tyras, with one of his suggestive grins.

  ‘In your own house?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Gavroche, who appreciated the question. ‘Theo has him to lunch to-day. But Theo’s motives are immaculate. He wants to float the great Fortification Loan.’

  ‘There is one comfort,’ said Othyris, ‘Herr Vreiheiden will undoubtedly, eventually, rook you both.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll take it out of us certainly,’ replied Tyras light-heartedly; ‘and out of the country too!’

  The train made a sound like a death-rattle as it ran across one of the lofty bridges of the line which were triumphs of engineering science; beneath it roared the deep, green, foaming waters of a river which, happily for its virgin beauty, was too far from the haunts of men for even engineers to dream of violating it for the use of cities or the purposes of electricity.

  Tyras sauntered into the next compartment to get a drink; Othyris was left alone with his own thoughts and the view of the sombre landscape and the furious tumbling waters. His meditations were as dark as the pine-clothed mountains shutting out the sky. He loathed the egotism of his caste, and he was forced to accept its protection and its provisions. He envied an angler, standing bare-legged on a boulder of rock in the midst of the eddying emerald current.

  The Fortification Loan was taken up by Max Vreiheiden, and Max Vreiheiden was lunching with Theo! Theo, who was supposed to be an honest man and to keep his hands clean!

  Max Vreiheiden had seen the light in a poor quarter of the capital of the Guthonic Empire. A mutilation of three fingers of his left hand had spared him the military ordeal. As a boy he had sold daily journals, cheap sweetmeats, wooden toys, or anything else which any one would entrust to him. If he were not always honest in his petty trading, he had at least the adroitness to remember and observe the one necessary commandment ‘Thou shalt not be found out ‘; he was punctual, zealous, intelligent, obedient, silent; he had a wonderful capacity for figures, and could do the most complicated sums in his brain. In a word, he was of the stuff of which the modern world makes its leaders; he would eat any amount of dirt in the service of anybody, provided that the dirt was the washings of a gold-pan. Such a youth is sure to make his way to the front; more slowly in Europe than in the Americas, but still surely. Before he was thirty-five he was a Colossus of the money-market; owned provinces, mines, kingdoms, diamond-fields, pearl-fisheries, and many newspapers; had tens of thousands of Chinese, of negroes, of Kaffirs, of coolies, under his law, in conditions which were slavery in all except name, and something still worse than slavery; and meantime had his health drunk at the banquets of Corporations, and his hand shaken by sovereigns. ‘My Max could buy all their crowns,’ said his little old mother; and they knew it.

  Theo was an honest man, as Gavroche had said; he had up to the date of his inspection of the Isles of Adonis never been touched by that form of covetousness and unscrupulousness which makes the speculator, whether the speculation be a cocoanut at a fair-raffle or a gigantic scheme on the Exchanges of the world. His mind and character were narrow, hard, unreceptive, cramped by prejudice and by privilege, but honourable in their own dull fashion. Yet for the first time some virus of the modern disease of acquisitiveness was instilled into him when he heard and read the prospectus of Max Vreiheiden concerning the Hundred Isles.

  He believed sincerely that his patriotism alone moved him in his desire to see the archipelago fortified, and that his decency and enlightenment alone inspired schemes for the civilisation of the picturesque and scandalous Islanders. But he was unconsciously tempted by the golden bait hung out to him. Like most heirs to thrones, the demands on him were much in excess of his means of expenditure. Economical as both he and his wife were, they were almost painfully harassed by the tenuity of their resources; and to make ends meet was as hard to them at times as to any village shopkeeper or shoemaker.

  So Max Vreiheiden lunched with them on this day. And the Crown Princess, who knew all about him, was not pleased; although she smiled, as she was ordered to do, and exchanged reminiscences with him of their mutual country, which was once defined by a royal lady, exiled to it by her marriage, as a land of fir-trees and potatoes.

  Othyris was roused from his thoughts by the shrill voice of Gavroche.

  ‘And our venerable Gregory? Has he not enjoyed life ninety odd years? And have not all the good physicians been busy all the world over in brewing serum to put sap into his worn-out trunk? Oh, my good Elim, so long as we can buy men at their own price they will always make life pleasant to us.’

  ‘Perhaps: but if we be of the type which does not care to buy, or will not stoop to buy them?’

  ‘Oh, then, we are irreconcilables,’ said Tyras, with his little thin uncanny laugh; ‘then we are doomed to have a bad time of it from our cradles. There is nothing so diverting as le marché aux hommes, and most amusing of all is the persuasion of men that they remain incorruptible, when one has just paid for them body and soul! But if, like you, we are irreconcilables, who don’t see the fun of the fair, of course it is all lost upon us.’

  ‘In that sense I am, I confess, an irreconcilable. The baseness of my fellow-creatures does not amuse me.’

  ‘Then you lose the best part of the eternal Comédie Humaine.’

  ‘I see but little comedy, for over it all — there is death.’

  ‘Eh, that is the biggest joke of the whole! All the pother and bother, the cheating and intriguing, the lying and the toadying, the scrimmage and the scoundrelism of it all, only to end in a handful of ashes, or a shell of wood, after a tale of years not so long as an elephant’s when he is allowed to live out his natural life. To see men taking ground-leases for nine hundred and ninety years when their own measure is at most fourscore, is there any droller farce than that? Or the fellow who begins life as a labourer, or a clerk, and by sharpness and gambling in stocks gets to be owner of millions before he is thirty-five, and dies at forty of an aneurism from over-strain, just
as he is beginning to lick his lips and enjoy himself? What is that if not the most delicious comedy one can see?’

  ‘My dear Gavroche,’ said Othyris, ‘whether a theatre amuses one or not, depends more on one’s own mood than on the stage one watches. It is so with the theatre of life. It diverts you. It saddens me. You have, I admit, the better part.’

  ‘And yet your liver is sound and mine is spavined!’ said Tyras enviously. ‘By all the rules of physiology it is you who should laugh and I who should weep.’

  ‘Do you think pity is only born of a bad digestion? It is the pity I feel for men which makes me unable to grin as you do at the sight of their struggles. The other day, at a social congress in the city of London, a speaker gave it as his deliberate opinion that the increase of wages had only led to the increase of drunkenness. Is that not a fact to make even you serious? To me it seems that nothing more sad was ever said. It is true,’ he added, with an inflection in his voice which Gavroche understood, ‘that it is perhaps still more sad, as it is certainly less excusable, when a gentleman burns up his viscera with alcohol and kills his brains with absinthe.’

  ‘Damn you!’ said Tyras.

  ‘Damn me, certainly, if it please you to do so. But why damn yourself?’

  ‘I enjoy myself. I wallow in the mud; lots of creatures like to do that; we have as much right to our mud as you have to your spring-water.’

  ‘What we have a “right” to is very questionable. The rough in the crowd and the prince in the carriage both think they have a right to be maintained by the ratepayers, but I doubt it in either case.’

  ‘Oh, we know you do; you’re an anarchist!’

  ‘I am an anarchist if it be one to find the world in a most disreputable state of carnage and confusion. But I fear I am not even an anarchist, for I do not believe in the heaven-compelling powers of revolvers, or in the goddess Justitia being carried in a bomb. What I do understand, however, is why poor, desperate, and foolish men do think so, especially when they see un grand de la terre like the Prince of Tyras wallowing in the mud, which he prefers to spring-water.’

  ‘Damn you!’ said Gavroche a second time.

  ‘You are such an imbecile,’ he added. ‘You have everything you can desire. You are not a Hercules, but you have sound health. You are so good-looking that the women would go mad about you if you were a peasant. You have immense riches, and can do what you like with them. You have talents which are very nearly genius. Yet you enjoy nothing, because you have Hamlet’s disease in you: the craze to set a wrong world right, and turn a whirligig of lunatics into an academy of philosophers.

  What the deuce does the world matter to you? You did not make it. Why don’t you amuse yourself, and let other men go hang as they please?’

  ‘Why did Hamlet trouble himself about other people’s sins? He was not responsible for them.’

  ‘Nor are you responsible for the country’s misgovernment, if it be misgoverned. If you were king to-morrow what could you do to make it better governed? Nothing. The whole thing is cut and dried, and unalterable. You have too much brain to believe you could change it. You could not put a fowl into every pot as Henri Quatre wished to do. You could only go on in the groove in which others have gone before you.’

  ‘I am well aware of it! And then you wonder that I am rebellious against fate?’

  ‘I wonder why you kick against the pricks instead of taking the goods the gods give you. Hamlet could have been as happy as a grig if he had liked. But he was Hamlet — unfortunately for himself.’ Othyris smiled.

  ‘O cursed spite,

  That ever I was born to set it right!

  ‘I assure you I have not Hamlet’s belief; I do not think I was born to any such high end or aim. But, as I told you, what makes you grin makes me sigh; just as you like brandy and I like hock. There is no accounting for the diversity of tastes, my dear Gavroche. However, I do not think I am like Hamlet. My disease, if it be one, is of a different kind. What weighs on me is the sense of an immense responsibility and of an equally great impotence.’

  ‘Enjoy yourself!’

  Othyris was silent.

  ‘But what will you do when you reign, if you reign?’ Tyras said, seriously for once. ‘A liberal king is a contradiction in terms. A king or an emperor cannot be liberal, because to preserve himself, and what are called the institutions which go with him, he must sanction the shooting and imprisoning of persons who would upset him and the institutions. If you are ever king, either you will have to abolish yourself and disappear, or drop down into the comfortable selfadmiration and self-acceptance in which your ancestors have been content to dwell with so much complacency. One or the other you must do.’

  ‘Do you suppose that the problem you propose as a novelty has not been the torment of my soul ever since I could think the thoughts of a man at all?’ said Othyris, with some impatience. ‘There is one consolation. Theo’s life is a better one than mine.’

  ‘Physically, perhaps, but he is hated by the people. He is more likely to have a bullet put in him than you are. I wouldn’t count too much on his outliving me, if I were you. Besides, you know, with your views, it is absolutely immoral in you to wish him to live. When he gets into saddle, won’t he use the spurs! The good horse Populus will bleed from both flanks when Theo sits astride on its back.’ Othyris was silent. He knew it only too well. Theo had all his father’s hardness and cruelty, without his father’s cool and shrewd intuitions.

  ‘Enjoy yourself!’ said Tyras, for a second time. ‘You may worry yourself into tuberculosis, but you will not make anybody or anything any better. Enjoy yourself.’

  But to Othyris the power of enjoyment was pressed out of him by the weight and weariness of his position.

  At the frontier Tyras left the royal train to go westward across Europe to that capital of Gallia which was the centre of his chief delights, and where he was known by a petit nom more suggestive than complimentary, in society more amusing than correct. Othyris continued his journey northward; he was sent to represent his father and his family at the celebration of the ninety-seventh birthday of the Emperor Gregory at the greatest city of the great empire of the Septentriones, where frost still held ice-bound all the rivers, and icicles hung from all the roofs, whilst in Helianthus the warmth and the sunshine of early spring was flooding the land with light, and filling the saddest soul with that hopefulness which is born with the renascence of the earth.

  He went, unwillingly, on a mission in all ways distasteful to him; he disliked show, pomp, crowds, publicity; and he went with especial reluctance, for a parental desire to make him wed his young cousin Xenia was being urged into a formal betrothal.

  The vast empire of the Septentriones, over which the Emperor Gregory ruled in undisputed autocracy, was at once Oriental and barbaric, stretching from the ice of frozen seas to the hot sands of parching plains. It was a giant with ponderous mace and mailed fist, and it was a cripple with frost-bitten feet and empty belly; it was ruled by the whip and the sabre; and when tens of thousands died of famine on its lands, it let them die: they mattered less than the murrained fields of wheat.

  Old Gregory had led an elegant, a joyous, and an accomplished life; he had been a patron of the arts, a procreator of many children, a free liver, an amiable gentleman, popular wherever he was seen, with a suave smile and a gracious phrase for all, especially for those who were not his subjects.

  His life had been long, prosperous, and little troubled. He was compared by preachers and publicists to Solomon in all his glory and wisdom; and if his mind were rather that of the boulevardier, this condescension in him was only the more affable. He was now crystallised by extreme age into legendary virtue and wisdom, and all the nations vied in doing him honour and admiring his longevity. Longevity, which in the poor is an annoying impertinence, seems in the rich and the royal a kind of condescending talent. His throne was planted on a solid bed of gun-metal, set round with half a million bayonets. Zeus himself could never have been
more completely aloof from mortal struggles. Revolution offended him because it was rude, because it was silly, because it was impertinent; but it was too far away from him really to matter. Blood had run like water in his chief cities many a time; gangs of young men had been carried in irons out to exile and captivity; women had been beaten with rods; unarmed crowds had been mown down by grape-shot, and driven before bayonets; but all these things had not disturbed him greatly: nay, the sound of the cannonades had seldom even reached his arm-chair at the opera, his tribune at the law meeting, his supper-table, his slumber in a woman’s arms. Revolution annoyed him as the grinding of a barrel-organ or the quarrelling of cats may annoy a gentleman sitting in his library reading Horace: no more.

  But now the Emperor was very old; old as Nestor, old as Priam, old as Lear; his swollen legs had long refused to move; his chin was sunk upon his breast; his false teeth rattled and moved when he spoke; his eyes were very dim, and his skull was as bald as a new-born babe’s. Four attendants carried him in a chair contrived with the utmost ingenuity to make his helplessness as little visible as possible. Ninety-seven long years stretched behind him; and their length had left him little taste or understanding for anything except the pleasures of the table and the amassing of gold, with some little relish still for the adroitness and innuendo of the wit of the Paris boulevards.

  The Emperor’s chief interest, now, was his white Persian cat, Blanchette, and his sole counsellor was his favourite physician, Seychelles. Wars and rumours of wars had long lost their meaning for him; he was even indifferent to the state of the Bourses; the state of his own pulse alone concerned him. When he was wheeled into the room where his Council of State awaited him, he sat with his chin on his chest, sniffing the odorous blossom placed in his buttonhole; but he neither knew nor cared what decisions were taken round the table.