by Ouida
‘More whipped-cream flavoured with curaçoa,’ whispered Tyras; and Othyris wondered in secret:
‘Does he really believe what he says? He lies like truth.’
It is true that the power of self-delusion is enormous; and men in high places are saturated with it as the drinker with a drug.
The Crown Prince alone listened with a devout belief and admiration; he would say just such things himself in future years. Great? Doubtless the country would be great — under himself. Great! The word seemed to boom through the air, thrice repeated as it had been in the sovereign’s harsh, rasping, authoritative tones.
Othyris heard in it the grinding roll of cannon wheels, the tramp of young men going to their death, the crash of exploding shells, the rattle of emptying money-bags, the moans of widowed women, of fatherless children.
King John put off his uniform, and Orders, and jewelled sabre, dressed himself in a morning suit of tweed, and sat down to his noonday breakfast. His conscience was satisfied, and his vanity, which mattered more, was pleased. To speak well was not a talent by any means natural to him. In learning to speak in public he had contended with many personal defects; a confused articulation, a slowness of utterance, a halting memory, a tendency to stammer; but he had vanquished these impediments, although he could not alter the unmelodious tones of his voice, which he had, however, disciplined into a certain imperiousness befitting his position, at least in his own eyes and in those of his courtiers. He was gratified at the consciousness that he had spoken well, and that his speech was being telegraphed to the four quarters of the globe. It gave him the sense of being a great monarch; of being one of those who make the fine weather and the sunshine of the world. Also, as far as an ardent desire could be felt in his phlegmatic breast, he wished to try his troops in real war, as a boy, having played with toy soldiers till he is tired, longs to be at more serious pastimes with powder and shot. And as scientific professors make their experiments, as it is said, in corpore vili, so he was glad to make his first trial of the capacity of his army on the inferior opponents of barbaric nations. For in the recesses of his soul he was not sure of his troops; and being a shrewd and capable person he was aware that his commissariat was by no means to be trusted in the all-important office of supplies.
But alas for the illusions of international friendships, Candor (alias Imperia) changed her mind, because she had changed her administration. Moreover Gallia set up her back and showed her teeth, like the fiery creature she is, and the new government in the great realm of Candor was not disposed to irritate her. Gallia was her foe, and Helianthus was her friend; but nations, like individuals, must throw over their friends sometimes, so Candor threw over the Hélianthines. Her diplomatists caused them to understand that the moment had not yet arrived when they could go a-conquering as their villagers went a-maying; that it would be wiser to furl the flags and untie the posies. Helianthus obeyed, la mort dans l’ame. She was not strong enough to stand alone, and to go by herself into the sandy wastes of the land of ruby mines and tsetse-flies.
The King was bitterly enraged, painfully mortified; and he could show neither rage nor mortification. He could shoot blackcock and wild turkeys, indeed, all day long and every day; but there are hours of chagrin and humiliation when even the gun fails to console the sportsman.
The ships were unloading; the trains were taking the regiments back to their home-quarters; the flags were being rolled up and put on stands like umbrellas; the hundreds and thousands of mules and pack-saddles collected were being sold at a tenth part of their cost; the barracks were hearing only the everyday squeak of the bugles. The influential organs of the Press put Bellona back in a drawer and set up in her stead her rival Pax; even as the cheap toy-sellers packed up all their little military playthings, and instead sold ducks and geese, or cats and mice. Only the contractors, although disappointed, were consoled; because if the stores which they had so profusely provided rotted uselessly in the warehouses of the State, the State had already paid for them at ten times their value.
They would not have the hoped-for pleasure of supplying for two or three years, to an entire army, musty flour, mouldy rice, ilex berries for coffee, chemicals for liquors, and all the other luxuries of civilisation; but in a smaller way they always did a good business in these things with the commissariat.
The abandonment of her conquering (alias colonising) projects gave a bad blow beneath the belt to Hélianthine credit, and sent her stocks down on the Exchanges of her neighbours. She had contracted large war loans for which she would have to pay heavily for probably many years to come. Financiers were unkind to her, and made her feel her want of capital and of independence. Her military men were disappointed and sullen. The increase in her taxation had no equivalent in flattered national vanity. She had not even the loot of a barbaric palace, or a captive dusky king with a huge belly and a prehensile jaw, to show in her cities to her populace. Gallia mocked her with unkind raillery, and Candor promised her better luck next time. Helianthus realised the bitter wisdom of the prayer, ‘Save me from my friends, dear God; from my enemies I can defend myself.’
The uncivilised monarch who had escaped the blessings of civilisation at the cannon’s mouth, sent to Helios some living lions and ostriches as a present to the ruler of Helianthus, some ivory, ebony, and uncut gems; but these humble offerings have not about them the glory and glamour of booty, and gave no pleasure to the Gunderöde or the populace. They would have been visited by delighted multitudes if they had been brought in cages and cases by returning and victorious troop-ships; but as mere signs of a grateful barbarian’s relief at having escaped invasion and education, they lacked interest; and the lions roared and raged in impotent wretchedness, and the ostriches rubbed their plumes off against the bars of their cages almost disregarded.
‘Why, whether in our pleasure or our pain, are the poor beasts and birds always sacrificed?’ thought Othyris. It is a question which many have asked before him, but to which none have ever had any reply.
CHAPTER XI
GREAT news was at this period being circulated throughout Helianthus.
The Crown Princess was pregnant after a sterility of ten years! Medical men certified the fact. Journalists glorified it. Ministers went on missions of announcement; ambassadors came on errands of felicitation. The successful advent of the fifth month was proclaimed to an expectant and a delighted people; or a people ordered to be delighted, as they were ordered to be virtuous, by Act of Parliament. Personally Princess Gertrude, a modest, retiring and reserved person, suffered horribly from this publicity. It offended and tortured every innermost fibre of her womanhood. The congratulations of the President of the Council were as painful to her as the bulletins of the Court physicians. But she did not demur to any of it for one moment: it was all part of her duty to endure this exposure.
If she envied the charcoal-seller in her black den the privacy which that den afforded her to pass through her pregnancy and travail in peace, she never said so. She bore this part of her punishment as mutely and meekly as she had borne the rest; she had gone through this ordeal twice before. If only her reward might be at last to bring forth a male child L
This desire, strong in almost every woman, was in her intense; she longed to be the mother of a monarch, and she sighed to have removed from her what she felt was a reproach. She scarcely dared to hope for the gratification of her desire. Both King John and her husband did not conceal their contemptuous conviction that she would be incapable of bearing a son; that when the nine moons should have run their course, another little female creature would bleat in a world where even female royalty does not count as much as male.
The Crown Prince himself felt that he had not deserved such an unaccountable slight from a Deity whom he had always served zealously, and in whose honour he would with pleasure have cheerfully burnt ten thousand unbelievers, if burning had still been in vogue.
If only this time Heaven would vouchsafe to give the throne an heir! It
was extraordinary, inscrutable, and sorely trying to the strongest religious faith, that whilst male infants wailed and squirmed by the million in the dwellings of the poor all the world over, kicked their cold little feet on rotten straw, and sucked with dry, hungry lips at empty breasts, a Prince, most orthodox, most impeccable, the central pillar of the constitution, should have been blessed by no son in a dozen years of wedlock.
‘Ah! the poor soul! ‘thought Madame Ogier, the Gallian ambassadress, looking at Princess Gertrude at a Court ceremony. ‘If she were only a grocer’s wife, she could go away, and unlace her stays, and lie down. But as it is she is just like the poor horses they use at home to tread out wheat in the farmyards: she is under the whip, and she must go round and round, and round and round.’
Often had she watched those horses, for she had an uncle a small farmer in a central Gallian province, where the young horses are driven in a circle halffrantic, rearing and kicking, to thrash out the ripened corn under their unshod hoofs.
‘The lines of great folks are not laid in pleasant places, as little ones think.’ the good lady who represented Gallia at the Hélianthine Court said to her daughter. ‘We envy them when we see them a long way off; but we mistake, my dear, we mistake.’ Madame Ogier herself was middle-aged; she was stout; she was short of breath; her diamond tiara made her head ache; her ample bosom, displayed under its pearls, made her feel embarrassed; the obligations of etiquette worried her; she sighed for the time when there had been no other palace in their own lives than the Palace of Justice at home, and when she had herself superintended the savoury cooking of the darne de saumon and the entrecote à la Bordelaise for the dinner of her young and hungry advocate. In the odd, topsy-turvy, half-reactionary and half-revolutionary society of the capital cities of our time we may so often see the prototypes of Madame Ogier — excellent women, devoted helpmates in the earlier stages of their lords’ careers; mere hobbles on the foot in their men’s later position; conscious that they are so, yet tenacious of their marital and social rights, wearing their sparkling jewels with heavy head and heart at imperial and royal balls, disfiguring the present and overshadowing the future of their brilliant partners, living witnesses of the angular and melancholy issues of monogamy.
‘I was of use to you once, Ferdinand! ‘this poor lady said, in a rare moment of emotion, on a New Year’s morning in Helios, to her beloved lord.
‘Ah yes, my love, and you are so always,’ said Ogier, with cordial kindness and admirable falsehood.
She shook her head sadly; she was not deceived, and she mourned for the little house of twenty-five years before at Passy.
Meanwhile, whether pitied or envied, the poor Crown Princess bore her burden, and in due time was actually blessed by a male child.
It was a great occasion at the Palace of the Soleia. The President of the Council, the President of the Senate, the Prime Minister, the leader of the Opposition and other notabilities were gathered together in one of the vast tapestried and frescoed salons, with the electric lamps shining above their heads — some of these bald, some white, some grey, some dyed, but all deferentially bent in a listening and humble attitude for the news which another quarter of an hour must bring; so at least a gynecologist, summoned there from Candor for the momentous occasion, had assured them. Now and then one or other of them murmured a sentence, or strove to conceal a yawn; but no conversation could be kept up at such a juncture.
Suddenly the double doors were thrown open by gentlemen-lackeys, and the Crown Prince entered, taller, stiffer, redder than ever, more than ever with the port of a Hercules bearing the world upon his shoulders. As the eminent persons waiting there humbly bent to the ground before him, he announced, in pompous tones of unspeakable elation, that a prince had been born to the nation, a son to him, an heir to the throne. With a certain condescension, added as a courteous colophon, he alluded to the hand of a merciful Creator in the auspicious event, and then he had a sound as of intoning in his voice.
Without, in the early evening, bells began to ring, cannon to fire, bands to play, bonfires to be lit on the hills around, the solemn, vision-haunted, god-forsaken hills of Helios; and the people, with that fatal susceptibility and receptivity which throws a multitude into the dangerous magic of suggestivism, began to shout, to sing, to cheer, to rejoice for they knew not what, and gathered in uproarious thousands before the gates of the Soleia.
In answer to those outcries the short, stout, stiff figure of the King, and the spare, erect, stiff figure of the Crown Prince, appeared together upon the balcony above the great entrance, the light from the open windows behind them; the crowd yelled its congratulations as the banner of the royal House swayed to and fro.
The Municipality presented a gold and tortoiseshell cradle; the Provincial Council a perambulator in ivory and rare woods; illuminated addresses were sent up from hundreds of mayors and prefects; and a golden bowl, set round with pearls of price, for bread and milk, was offered by the Senate.
The King considered all these gifts as witnesses to his own popularity, and as so many gilded nails driven into the dais of his throne to strengthen it. The Crown Prince scarcely went so far as that; he took them as a right.
A little later the most splendid pomp, and the most extravagant expenditure, attended the infant’s baptism in the Cathedral of St. Athanasius. He was named John Theodoric, and received the title of Prince of Helios. He was made colonel of a regiment of Guards and military governor of a province. The usual amnesty was granted in honour of his birth to condemned persons whose offences were not too flagrant, although no one, if put to it, could have explained the logic of so odd a connection as that between the birth of a babe and the national prisons and reformatories. An atom of flesh is born into the world, different in no way from all other flesh except in the superstitions and imaginations of men. This event is accompanied by the pardon of several thousands of incarcerated persons, and the cancelling of tens of thousands of punitive sentences and fines. Now it is clear that if the incarcerations were just, and just the fines, they should not be altered; if unjust, that they should not have to wait to be redressed for the incident of an infant’s birth. The usage makes a farce of law, and puppets of a magistracy. But the populace is never logical, and is easily moved to mawkish sentiment; nor does it dislike to see justice in motley, and the gravity of law tricked out in cap and bells.
The winter, usually so mild in Helianthus, had become of great severity at this time. The mountain ranges were covered with snow, the plains were swept by icy and fierce winds, the blue sea was grey and sullen and murderous. So rare was such a season in this country that people were unprepared for it, both in the towns and in the provinces; neither their houses nor their clothes were made to resist its sharpness; the angry waters swallowed up the slender, shell-like fishing boats, and the frozen hills and vales killed the lambs, the kids, the calves, the sheep, and the troops of wild young hares were famished on the frozen plains. Many human lives were also lost through the unfamiliar visitation. Men and women and children were found dead beneath churchyard walls, on ancient temple steps, on solitary shores, in lonely wattle huts, even in the lanes of cities with the cold electric-light shed on them. Cold, unusually prolonged, had already injured the olive and the orange harvest. Corn was taxed so highly that it was out of the reach of tens of thousands, and the chief bulk of it was shut up in huge granaries belonging to syndicates who would not sell, knowing it would go up higher and higher in price as the people suffered more. Children lay dead in the fireless cabins, mere heaps of bones and yellow skin. Feeble throngs, hollow of eye and cheek, and burnt up with fever, collected before the communal palaces in their little towns, clamouring for food, and got enough for two out of two score. The bright yellow discs of the coltsfoot and the celandine filled the ditches in the opening of the year, and amidst them lay dead bodies killed by hunger or from indigestion through eating balls of clay.
There were numerous subscriptions, headed by the donations of th
e king and closed by those of his tradesmen, as a child’s procession of Noah’s Ark animals is headed by the elephant and closed by the rabbit. Large sums of money passed through many hands and many channels, although not much of it reached its destination; and throughout the more northern provinces, and in the mountainous districts, the people lay fleshless and stark on the roads and in the barren fields.
The people should have been reconciled to their fate, no doubt, in thinking of the tortoise-shell and gold cradle, of the pearls, and furs, and laces, and lawns given to the new-born prince; but, alas, they were so ignorant that they did not know of them, and so had not even this consolation. Many of them did not even know that the Prince of Helios had been born, so that the agony of their empty bellies and gnawing bowels was not even alleviated by the national joy. In the far mountains by the lonely lakes, on the solitary plains of the interior, the population was sparse and widely scattered; the news of the new-born Gunderöde did not reach these through any channel until such time as their priest included his hallowed name in public prayer.
Amidst all this flutter and flurry in honour of her son, poor Princess Gertrude pressed the small red crumpled face of her babe to her bosom, of which the milk was denied to him, and regretted that she was not a woman of the people, free to do with her offspring as she chose: the wife of a weaver, of a cobbler, of a tailor, of some worker in sulphur mine or mariner in sailing-brig, only not forced to yield up her little son to an alien breast and to the arms of hirelings.