by Ouida
Again and again he felt tempted to set some of the many panderers to his caprices on her quest; but he never took the decisive step. He felt as though it would be profanity. The likeness he had drawn of her from memory, her face and throat alone bathed in a flood of moonlight, seemed to say to him, ‘Let me be. I have given you an ideal. Is not that much in this world?’
It stood on an ebony easel, and he had fresh flowers set before it as on an altar. A sentimental folly, he knew, or so at least it would have seemed to other men; but was it not of such fancies that the grace and charm of the most innocent affections were made?
To Othyris, who had been satiated by affections far from innocent, there was an infinite attraction in this illusive and spiritual beauty.
‘That is a beautiful head,’ said Gavroche, one day. ‘Who is the original?’
‘It is a Hélianthine divinity,’ replied Othyris. ‘It is a diva ignota. I know not her name.’
Tyras for once did not grin with his usual satyr’s smile.
‘Whoever she is, she is too good for mortal embraces,’ he said. ‘What a fine artist you might be if you chose, Elim; and how well you keep your own counsel! My secrets slip out when I am drunk.’
There was, of course, an immediate agitation in the city for the rebuilding of the Ivory Tower. There are always numbers of people who are ready to profit in various ways by a public calamity.
‘It can never be rebuilt,’ said Othyris, to those who approached him on the subject.
Every one was astonished at such an impression in a lover of the arts; that he should say so surprised even his father.
‘What do you mean? Why cannot it be rebuilt?’ he asked. ‘Do you mean that the foundations have subsided? That the rocks are unsound?’
‘No, sir,’ replied his son.
‘What do you mean, then?’
‘I mean that there is no longer amongst men the mental or moral power to produce such a thing. There is no longer the reverence, the patience, or the devotion necessary.’
The King twirled his moustaches with unutterable contempt.
‘I supposed you meant some practical obstacle! If the resources of modern invention are not equal to renew the constructions of ignorant ages, progress is vain.’
‘It is vain indeed, sir,’ said his son.
This seemed so preposterous to his father that he had scarcely patience to continue the conversation.
‘Vain — vain? ‘he muttered angrily. ‘With the immense resources of modern mechanical and hydraulic power it would certainly be very easy to—’
He left the sentence, as he left most of his phrases, to complete itself in the superior eloquence of silence.
‘Something would no doubt be erected in five years, in ten, in twenty,’ replied Othyris. ‘But it would not be that which we have lost. The Ivory Tower of Isma was one of the artistic marvels of the world; a hundred and seventy years were occupied in the building of it; that is proved by the Coptic manuscripts of the Ismaian monastery.’
His father by a puff of smoke indicated the value of such statements in his sight.
‘Because all the materials were brought by rowers, in galleys, and were carried up on slaves’ shoulders, as the bricks were for the Pharaohs’ Pyramids,’ said the King, with the profound contempt which he felt for such primitive means. ‘A hundred or more steam-tugs would bring all the substances to be used, to-day, direct from the quarries or the foundries by water; and high-pressure engines would at once raise them into position.’
Othyris was silent.
‘That is, if it be worth while to rebuild a mere belfry?’ added his father. ‘The public seem to desire some newer kind of erection. I have suggested a lighthouse.’
‘With an electric lantern, revolving behind red glass?’
‘Precisely,’ said the monarch, who approved the suggestion, but was suspicious of the sarcastic tone in which it was uttered.
‘Your wishes, sir, will of course be law to the Committee,’ said Othyris.
‘Humph!’ said the King. ‘You are not on it?’
‘No, sir, I declined to be so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I should be unquestionably in a minority; a minority perhaps of one.’
‘Because you would oppose those who will be representative of my views?’
‘It is because I could not venture to do so, sir, and because I could not either dissemble my own views, that I have requested them not to place my name on the Committee. I ventured to do this without referring so small a matter to your Majesty.’
‘If I order you to assume the chairmanship of the Committee?’ he said, after a pause.
‘I must no doubt obey; but I would entreat your Majesty not to place me in the painful position of being compelled to dissent publicly from views which are known to be favoured by yourself.’
The King made a guttural exclamation, rendered unintelligible by his teeth being closed on his cigarette. He lighted a fresh one, and dismissed his son and the subject.
He would have had great pleasure in placing Elim in that or any other difficult position, but he felt that the finesse and the obstinacy of his son would be more than a match for his own; they had been so before then.
He felt that Elim’s deference and obedience went just so far as Elim’s own convictions went of what was due from him, and incumbent upon him, and went no farther; and that any attempt at coercion would always and irrevocably fail. Elim was a fool in many ways, his father thought, but there was grit in him.
It was this in Othyris which beyond all other things incensed the King; this deference in form and tone, coupled with opposition in reality. He had rarely been able to accuse his second son of any want of deference either in manner or in act; yet he was always conscious of an actual independence of judgment which entirely escaped him.
‘It was the training of that beast Basil which made him like this,’ he thought now, as Othyris withdrew. He had never disliked any one more than his brother-in-law Basil, who had, he thought, thwarted and irritated him throughout life, and after death still annoyed him perpetually through that vast fortune, which by its bequest made its present possessor so largely independent of him.
He had not patience to pursue the subject with his son; but when the Minister of Fine Arts next had audience with him, and ventured to speak of the matter, he suggested to that harassed and bewildered official that an iron lighthouse should be erected in place of the perished tower. (Helianthus Novel)
‘If you try to renew the past you will please nobody,’ he said; and in this he was correct. ‘Be frankly utilitarian; you will at least please utilitarians. The tower was a beautiful thing, or at least people said so, but it was absolutely useless. Replace it by something without beauty, but useful.’
The Minister of Fine Arts felt that he himself and his Department must be equally useless in the estimation of his sovereign.
CHAPTER IX
A FEW days later Othyris had to preside at a charity meeting in Helios for the relief of the famine and general distress in the country. To speak in public was always disagreeable to him; and this kind of gathering never found any favour in his sight. He disbelieved in its efficiency as a means of doing good, and he thought the boastful philanthropy which set it on foot rather more discreditable than no philanthropy at all. He knew that most of those present would go to see himself; would offer their donations because they desired to look well in his sight; and that nine-tenths of the crowd gathered there would care no more for the sufferings of the dying and the dead by hunger, cold, and misery, than a gourmet cares for the sufferings of the crawfish or the turtle which give him his patties and his soup at dinner.
‘It is waste of words, waste of breath, waste of wrath,’ he thought, as he rose to speak, and he knew that what he was about to say would be hateful to his hearers.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Othyris, after the usual greetings of courtesy, the statistics of lives and deaths, and the calculation of required mo
nies, and the necessary accompaniment of conventional phrases without which no public meeting would be orthodox or even possible, ‘ Gentlemen, what can be said of these modern civilisations of which modern language boasts so greatly? The world is rich, exceedingly rich; for waste, for pomp, for display, for self-indulgence, for armaments of all kinds, millions, billions, trillions, are always accumulating, always forthcoming. Yet men and women and children are found dead of hunger in every land, from the snow plains of the Septentriones to our own classic hills of Helianthus, from the crowded cities of Europe to the rice-fields of the East and the gold-fields of the West. What progress can be alleged whilst famine stalks through every quarter of the globe? Whilst you and I eat rich food three times a day, and rare birds and beasts are paid their weight in bullion that they may pass into our kitchens, human beings, ofttimes through no fault of their own, suffer the torture of hunger through days and weeks and months, then drop down and die, worn out by the unequal struggle. ‘You will reply that this is inevitable; that it is the fault of no person and of no system; that it is the natural result of laws beyond men’s control, that the successful wax fat, and the obscure perish for want of what they have not had luck, or talent, or perhaps dishonesty enough, to gain.
‘Gentlemen, it is in this reply, the usual, the orthodox, the stereotyped reply of both the capitalist and the political economist, that the condemnation of modern civilisation lies. Civilisation has solved no one of the problems of life. It has overfed the minority; it has underfed the majority; and a large proportion it has not fed at all.
‘Victor Hugo, in one of his sonorous but fallacious phrases, has said: “He who opens a school closes a prison.” This sounds well and means nothing. The ill-digested and desultory education of the day is the recruiting sergeant of the gaols. That education is alone healthy and profitable which tends to make the human creature do well what necessity and circumstances require him to do at all. But although the technical schools may, perhaps, do this technically, general education, early education, do nothing of the kind; morally, the education of the schools is neutral where it is not mischievous.
‘In a great nation overseas, where the government is nominally democratic, where education is general and enforced, and where every child can read and write, lynch law is the frequent redresser of injuries, and mobs burn accused persons alive and without trial: what has education done for humanity in that great nation? You will say that there good food has been of no use, for the lynching mobs are for the most part recruited from well-fed persons; but they drink still more than they eat — and drink, the curse of man, is in one form or another almost universal in that hemisphere. In all the nations of our own hemisphere drinking and hunger reign side by side. Called absinthe, or beer, or brandy, or wine, or gin, or what it may, it fills with its worshippers the clubs, the music halls, the cafés, the cellars, the public-houses, the boulevards. Of what use is civilisation? It does not turn away one man in a million from the threshold of the drinking shops. The children’s bread is given away to buy the poison of chemically prepared toxines for their fathers and, alas, too often for their mothers also.
‘There is a country well known to us all, lying on cool northerly waters, great in story, strong in enterprise, foremost in commerce; she was a mere barbarian when Helianthus was the glory of the arts and the Venus Victrix of the then known world; now she is far greater than we are. Yet in her metropolis, the largest and the richest of the world, miles on miles of streets are occupied by what in her language are called gin-palaces; crowded every night of the year by half-mad throngs of men and women of the people, insane with drink and spending their last coin upon it. Yet she presumes to send out her religious envoys to convert the heathen!
‘Gentlemen, there are other cancers in the body politic of which it would take many hours to make the diagnosis. Take one only: the deadly trades. Many trades exist, enrich the manufacturer, and contribute to the comfort or the luxury of society, in the pursuit of which the man or woman employed in them dies almost certainly before reaching his or her thirty-fifth year. Reflect upon this fact. Do you seriously think that the capitalists who make their fortune by trades which cause this mortality amongst the workers are really so greatly superior to the Hélianthine of two thousand years ago, who killed a slave to feed the fish of his piscina?
‘You murmur? Well, sirs, reflect instead.
‘In the course of last year I visited our classic and romantic island of Philyra, daughter of Oceanus, nourished on sun and sea and burning lava, as she has been from all time. I saw the chief sulphur mines of the isle. I need not remind you, sirs, of the many and precious uses to which sulphur is put; or that the sulphur of Philyra is esteemed the best in the world. Has it ever occurred to you to ask how that sulphur is obtained? It is chiefly obtained through the labour of young children, whose eyes smart and grow blind under the stinging irritation of the mineral they carry up and down the ladders all day long. Was it worse, gentlemen, to sell for slaves the fair-haired children of the conquered barbarians here in the market-place of Helios? I doubt it. These children are slaves; they cannot escape from their lot; they are as helpless as their sisters sold for a trifle to follow their foreign buyer into the cities of other lands to gain money for him by their suffering and debasement. All these young and innocent lives are mercilessly sacrificed to the interests of others. One can do no more for them than for slaves; they are slaves in all except the name. What faces one? A vested interest; the force of commerce; the might of trade.
‘Sulphur is of great utility — of more utility than such children’s lives. It must be procured in the cheapest way possible. The cheapest way is to use children. What can I do to save them? Nothing. Nothing more than I can do to stop the seismic convulsions in the bowels of the earth. I may call meetings, upbraid their employers, rebuke their parents, call on the Press to rouse the public. What use is what I do? It is none. Regulations are made, leading articles are written, ladies weep, orators declaim, and then it all — the misery of it — goes back into the same groove. Trades must not be interfered with; commerce must not be hampered; sulphur must not be made dear.
‘It is one of the chief supports of the trade of Helianthus. Brigs and merchantmen carry it out of our ports all over the world. It has innumerable uses, immeasurable values; and the children — who have no value, for there are so many of them — the children must pass and perish. Gentlemen, what is a civilisation worth in which such things are possible, are indeed of habitual occurrence, of accepted usage? Sirs, I doubt greatly whether the greatest criminal amongst us is the criminal who meets his fate in the prisoner’s dock, and not the rich and prosperous person who, seated in his armchair, signs his cheques with his gold pen, eats and drinks, and enjoys and praises this world as the most admirable issue of the intellect of man and of the will of God.
‘It is impossible for the governing classes to have influence on the governed, because our morality (or the self-interest which we substitute for it) is a mass of contradictions, a chaotic jumble of anomalies. We condemn murder; but we deify war. We kill the criminal who poisons one person; we do not touch the manufacturer who poisons many workmen. We condemn theft; but we approve annexation. We punish a carter cruel to his horse; we applaud a general who kills two hundred thousand horses. We imprison the drover who wounds a bullock; we decorate the contractor who tortures on land and sea a million of cattle. We abhor alcohol in the throats of the poor; we find it a perfume in the mouths of the rich. We worship education; and we leave children to be prostituted in brothels and worked to death in mines. We imprison the cut-purse; we honour and decorate the usurer. We have no clear knowledge or consistent treatment of crime. When it is naked and isolated, we punish it savagely; when it is cloaked, and goes in well-armed companies, we do not dare to touch it; we take off our hats to it, we seat it in our banqueting-halls.
‘You will say that this has always been so in all ages. Perhaps that is the reason why crime has always been general.
‘It is impossible for the masses to be impressed by rulers and teachers who, whatever their theories, do in practice show that crime is, in their code, no crime at all if it be large enough and successful enough to dominate its generation. The multitude does not reason, but it perceives, if slowly; it feels, if dully; it is stirred, if obscurely; and is guided by conclusions which it draws by blind instinct, as the mollusc sucks in sea-water and sun-light. It is unconsciously penetrated by a sense of the untruth and the hypocrisy of the morality which is preached to it, and of the laws which are laid down for it. For that reason the one has little influence on it, and the other has little awe for it; and after thousands of years of various kinds of successive civilisations and of contradictory religions, we see that the political and social forces of the world are absolutely impotent, either to prevent crimes, or to lead criminals back to virtue. The fault lies more with the rulers than with the ruled.’
A dead silence followed on his concluding words. They were all thinking: ‘If he should ever be king, good Lord, deliver us!’
His speech grated on the nerves of his hearers; for the most part, they felt that it was unjust to be summoned by a chairman who was a prince of the reigning House, and then be made to listen to a discourse worthy of a Liebknecht or a Karl Marx.