Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 537
‘I don’t remember saying it; but it is certainly true. We grow up in the world as a Chinese child grows up in the jar which is to make a dwarf of him. The jar checks our development malgré nous. We cannot be giants, if we would.’
‘I am sure it would not suit you to be a giant, Ralph,’ said his sister. ‘You would never like to release distressed damsels and slay disagreeable dragons. The uttermost you would ever do to the very biggest dragon would be to turn an epigram on his odd appearance. Giants are always very busy people, and you are so lazy — —’
‘That is the fault of the jar,’ said Geraldine.
‘Some people break the jar and get out of it,’ said his sister.
‘No, nobody does,’ said the Princess Napraxine. ‘You mistake there, Wilkes. The world is with us always, and we cannot get rid of it.’
The frank eyes of Geraldine conveyed to her eloquently his conviction that the discontent she spoke of was solely due to her determined banishment of one sentiment out of her life. She gave him an enigmatical little smile of comprehension and disbelief combined, and continued to unroll her philosophies — or what did duty as such.
‘Do you not know the kind of feeling I mean? When we are among the orchids in the conservatories we want to go and gather damp primroses. Do you not remember that queen who, when she heard the gipsies singing under her windows, all in a moment longed to go with them? There is something of the gipsy in everybody — in everybody who has a soul. The time comes when one is tired of the trumpery and folly of it all — the wicked expenditure, the dense selfishness and indifference, the people that call themselves leaders of good taste, and yet like foie gras and the Concours hippique and Kümmel and Londrès, and the atmosphere of Paris theatres.’
‘Interesting, but discursive,’ murmured Lady Brancepeth. ‘Primroses — gipsies — a soul — I do not see the connection.’
‘You know what I mean,’ said her hostess, who always expected to be understood. ‘Our life is silly, it is tiresome, it is entirely selfish, it is even, in a way, monstrous; and yet we cannot live any other. We are dominated by the Frankenstein of pleasure which we have been pleased to create. When we wish to get away we cannot; we are like the queen at the palace windows — we would fain go to the greenwood, and the brook, and the fresh winds, but we cannot, because we are fastened in our gilded chair; there is always our household to shut the window and send the gipsies away. Do we ever get rid of the household, of the galerie, of the routine, of the infinite ennui? I am only twenty-three years old, as you all know, and I feel as if I had lived fifty years. Why? Because it is all over-full, tiresome, high-pressure; and the worst of it is that I could lead no other life if I tried!’
‘I am not sure of that,’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘Marie Antoinette would never have believed that she could mend clothes and darn stockings had not the days of darkness come. In those days it was just the dainty perfumed mignonnes like you, my dear, who were the bravest and handiest in bearing their troubles and earning their bread.’
‘One never knows till one is tried,’ said Princess Nadine. ‘If they would begin to guillotine us I daresay we should know how to behave; dynamite doesn’t do much for us. When one goes into the air without warning in little bits, in company with the plaster of the ceiling, or the skin of the carriage horses, or the stuffing of the railway carriage, there is not much room for heroism.’
‘I am not sure there is no heroism,’ said Geraldine. ‘The certainty of the guillotine must have been much easier to bear than the uncertainty in which you all dwell in Russia — the perpetual spectre always behind your chairs, beside your pillows, under the roses in your gardens — —’
‘Oh, my dear Geraldine, is not death with us always everywhere? May we not kill ourselves every moment we walk downstairs, or eat a mullet like this, or start on a journey, or read a book by a night-lamp? You all wonder how Russians can exist with assassination always keeping step with them, but in reality is it so much worse than the way in which all humanity loves and laughs, and toils and moils, and makes leases for ninety-nine years, and contracts foreign loans for payment in a century, with death hanging over the whole thing ready to swoop down at any minute? If the world realised it of course it would go mad en masse, but it doesn’t realise it though hundreds of people die every second.’
‘Did Nadine ever tell you what she did last year?’ said Prince Napraxine. ‘She saw by chance a queer-looking can which had been placed by some of those miscreants in a niche of the garden wall of our house in Petersburg; the thing looked suspicious to her, and it had a coil of tubing attached to it. She took the whole affair up and dropped it into the fountain. She forgot to mention it till the next morning. Then when we fished it out, and the chemists reported on it, it appeared that the can was really full of nitro-glycerine as she had fancied. I think that was quite as courageous as going to the guillotine.’
‘Oh, no, my dear Platon!’ said his wife, with some annoyance. ‘Nothing you have no time to think about is really courageous. The can was suspicious and the children were playing near it, so I thought the fountain was the safest place; it might have been only milk, you know. Pray do not let us attempt to compete with those people of ‘89. We shall fail dismally.’
Geraldine looked up with a startled apprehension in his eyes.
‘Good heavens, do you mean it? Has she actually been — been — in such awful danger as that, and never told me?’
‘We were all in the same danger,’ said Prince Napraxine, a little drily; ‘but the Princess alone had the beau rôle out of it.’
‘Who put the can there?’
‘Oh, how should I know. The police never traced it. I do not suppose it was any special design against us as individuals; only as items of a detested whole. And two of the Grand Dukes were coming to breakfast with us that day.’
‘What a fuss about an ugly little tin can!’ said his wife. ‘The really courageous person must have been the person who brought it there; misguided, perhaps, but certainly courageous. To drive through a city in a droschky embracing certain annihilation, in the form of a little tin pot held on your knee, is a combination of absolute awfulness and grotesque bathos, which must try all one’s nerves without any compensating sense of grandeur in it. A jolt of the wheel over a stone and away you fly into the air, a blurred nothing in a stream of blood and dust! No; I respect the Nihilists when I think of all they risk for a purely abstract idea without any sort of personal hope or triumph.’
‘They have hatred,’ said Lady Brancepeth; ‘I think you forget what an invigorating, self-sustaining, all-compensating sentiment that is. Its ecstasy is its own reward. You underrate, too, the immense fascination of the power to destroy; on se grise with that sense of holding the annihilation of a whole community in their hands. What made the Roman Emperors mad, — the unlimited power of destruction, — now intoxicates the mechanic or the clerk who has the task of planting a can of nitro-glycerine. When statesmen, and even philosophers, theorise about human nature and all its disorders, they never give weight enough to the tremendous attraction which pure destruction alone exercises over so many minds.’
‘But they have love, too; love of the poor and of a lofty ideal,’ said the Princess. ‘Myself, I forgive their little tin cans, though they are extremely unpleasant, when I think of their impersonal devotion. All I wish is, that their warfare was not conducted by tin cans; the thing has a ludicrous, comical, vulgar side; death dropped in a little box labelled “glass, with care”! There is no dignity in it, no grace. Pallida Mors should not crouch under a cab-cushion!’
‘How can you make a jest — —’ began Prince Napraxine. She interrupted him:
‘I am not in the least jesting, I am entirely in earnest. I do not like being made war on by chemists; I do not like annihilation left in a paper parcel; it makes one feel absurd, fate seems trifling with one. A Jacquerie hewing at one with their scythes one would know what to do with, but who can extract any Sophoclean tragedy from a Thanatus that looks exactly like a box of sardines or a pot of foie gras? It is not the war that I object to, it is the form it takes; and our great, grim, ghostly Russia should evolve out of her soul of ice something much more in consonance with her. Beside the burning of Moscow, the little tin cans and the burrowing like moles underground are commonplace and a little vulgar. Russia is so awful in herself. One thinks of the frozen world of the Inferno, and Dante and Virgil walking in the spectral silence; and then, after all, in hard fact there is nothing but the police, and the drunken moujik, and the man who carries his nitro-glycerine as a baker’s boy carries his rolls of bread! It is bathos.’
‘One never knows what you mean, Nadine,’ murmured her husband. ‘If you talk so at Petersburg they will think you are a Nihilist at heart.’
‘I imagine half the noblesse are,’ said the Princess. ‘The noblesse have always dug their own graves before all revolutions everywhere. They call it “going with the times.” They did it in France, they are now doing it in England, they are doing it (more secretly) in Russia. No one should forsake their order; it is a kind of desertion, like that of a soldier who runs away before the enemy. That is why I like the party obedience of your country, Wilkes; it is entirely unintelligent and profoundly immoral; to a generally intellectual nation it would be impossible, but it is loyal. I think when one has to choose between a crime and a disloyalty one must take the crime as the lesser evil of the two.’
‘Voting for party is a crime very often,’ said Geraldine. ‘It is one of the many things as to which I have never made up my mind. Ought one to sacrifice the country to what one believes a bad measure for the sheer sake of keeping one’s party in office? Surely not.’
‘You solve your doubts by having no party, and never going into the Lords.’
‘At least, I can do no mischief.’
‘Are you certain of that?’ said his sister. ‘I think you place voting for party on too low a plane. If we believe, generally, that one party — say it is Conservative, say it is Liberal — is necessary to the preservation or the progress of the nation, then I think we are bound to do our best to keep it at the helm of the vessel of the nation, even if in certain minor matters we are not always in accord with the course it takes.’
‘Admirably reasoned; but are not politicians always as great sophists as priests?’
‘Sophists! always that cruel charge,’ said a mellow and manly voice, as there entered the dining-room a person of handsome and stately presence, in a picturesque costume, with knee breeches and buckled shoes, whom the servant announced as Monsignore Melville. He was welcomed by all with cordiality and delight, and the Princess bade him draw his chair beside her, though he alleged that he had breakfasted.
‘I came to see if you had arrived,’ he said, as he seated himself. ‘Princess, I hope La Jacquemerille is fortunate enough to please you?’
‘I have been abusing it; it is a very ridiculous house, but it grows upon one; and if you will come often enough, Monsignore —— No, I never make compliments. You know you are a delightful companion, and of how many people can one say that?’
Monsignore Melville bowed low.
‘You are too enchantingly kind. But all are not so kind. Lord Geraldine was accusing priests of sophism. What was he saying?’
‘He was saying that politicians are the sophists, and Wilkes the head of them.’
‘Because I defended “voting straight,”’ said Lady Brancepeth. ‘Is it not the very root and essence of English constitutional life? Monsignore Melville, who is an Englishman, will, I am sure, say so.’
‘To serve the Church is only a superior kind of voting with party,’ said Geraldine.
‘Do not be profane, Ralph,’ said his sister. ‘It does not suit you. You were created with a reverential nature, and you have endeavoured to ruin it, as most men always do try to destroy what is best in them. Monsignore, answer me, is it not the highest morality to vote straight?’
‘That is a very unlimited laudation, Lady Brancepeth,’ returned Melville, with a charming smile. ‘I should be scarcely prepared to go so far, though I am aware that there is no salvation outside such morality in the political creed of our country.’
‘Ecclesiastics have no country, my dear Monsignore,’ said the Princess Napraxine, ‘except a heavenly one. What a comfort that must be! Platon is always being worried to return to the mater patria, and his conscience is so peculiarly constituted that it will never allow him to admit how intensely he hates it. As if life were not tiresome enough in itself, without everyone being burdened with the obligation to like, or pretend that they like, their country, their relatives, their children, and their church! —— .’
Napraxine looked distressed:
‘You have liked Russia, too, sometimes,’ he said wistfully; ‘and poor little Sachs and Mitz!’
His wife cast upon him a glance of sovereign disdain: ‘There are only two things I like in Russia, they are the steppes and the wolves: that limitless expanse, stretching away to the dim grey sky on every side, and the sight of a pack of the gaunt grey beasts on the snow as one’s sledge flies by; those two things give one a sensation which one does not get elsewhere. But it is monotonous, it soon ceases to move one; the wolves never attack, and the great, awful, white plain never leads to anything better than the posting-house, the samavàr, and the vodki, and the group of drunken coachmen.’
‘The human interest, in a word,’ suggested Melville.
Madame Napraxine smiled:
‘Ah! my dear Monsignore, the human interest is quite as dull as the steppe and quite as ravenous as the wolf! How delightful it must be to be a priest to see all that raw material through rose-glasses!’
‘May not the interest be in subduing the wolf?’ murmured Melville. ‘And even the steppe, under the fostering touch of May dews and June sunlight, will put forth blossoms. Is there no allegory there that Madame Napraxine will deign to accept?’
‘You always say pretty things, in the pulpit or out of it,’ she replied; ‘but you cannot lend me your rose-glasses to see them through, so I fear they do not convince me. The astronomers who are now busy seeing canals in the planet Mars, would see nothing if they had not their glasses; no more would you. You see a soul in a drunken dvornik; that is quite as astonishing, and probably quite as imaginary, as the network of canals in Mars. Will you really eat nothing, Monsignore? Let us go out and sit under that awning there; a bath of sunshine always does one good, and you need not grudge yourself a half hour of leisure. I have no doubt you have been passing the forenoon somewhere with cholera or typhus or some other plague of this sanitary century. You know, Geraldine, that is Monsignore’s way. He is S. Francis Xavier all the morning, and then turns himself inside out and becomes an Abbé galant for society.’
‘I have not been to anything typhoid or choleraic this morning, or I should not be here to endanger your loveliness, Princess,’ answered Melville. ‘I have been where Poverty is — alas! where is she not? — and in our day those who wed with her regard it as a forced marriage, wholly joyless; and we cannot persuade them that there may be graciousness where she dwells if only cleanliness and content will sit down with her.’
‘Oh, Monsignore, it is not only poverty that scares content, I can assure you,’ said Madame Napraxine.
‘If you be not content, who should be?’ murmured Melville. ‘With every possible gift of nature, culture, fate, and fortune showered upon you, why will you always persuade yourself, Princess, that your doubled rose-leaf mars everything? I do not believe the rose-leaf even exists!’
‘I am not sure that it does, either,’ replied Madame Napraxine; ‘but I never remember to have felt contented in my life. Is content an intellectual quality? I doubt it. Perhaps it is a virtue; I dislike virtues.’
Melville was a sincerely pious Churchman, but even he did not dare to take up the cudgels in honour of poor virtue before this merciless speaker. He was satisfied with replying that content was not a quality which the tendencies of the waning nineteenth century were likely to foster.
‘No!’ said the Princess Napraxine. ‘The note of our time is restlessness, and its chief attainment the increase of insanity.’
‘If it did not sound too much like moralising, I should say that there was never any time in which there was so much self-indulgence and so little real rest,’ said Melville, who had the sensitive fear of a man of the world of appearing to obtrude his own convictions, and to preach out of season and out of church.
‘People require to have their brains and their consciences very clear and very calm to enjoy rest. It is the reward which nature reserves for her good children,’ said Lady Brancepeth.
‘I must be very good, then,’ said Madame Napraxine with her little mysterious smile, ‘for I rest absolutely. To know how to do nothing is a great secret of health and of comfort; but you must not wait till you are fatigued to do nothing, or you cannot enjoy it.’
‘And I suppose you must occasionally be deaf to duty knocking at the door?’
‘Duty! She should have her proper moments of audience, like the steward, the piqueur, the secretary, and other necessary and disagreeable people; that is to say, if she really exist. Monsignore Melville evidently is in the habit of listening to her.’
‘I may say with Josef II., “C’est mon métier à moi,”’ said Melville, with good humour. ‘But believe me, Princess, it is not duty which prevents repose; it is far more often worry, the hateful familiar of all modern life. Worry takes a million forms; very often it is dressed up as pleasure, and perhaps in that shape is more distressing than in any other.’
‘Yes, the age has invented nothing that does not result in worry. Only look at the torture to diplomatists from the telegrams,’ replied Madame Napraxine, while she tendered him a cigar. ‘In other years an ambassador had some pleasure in disentangling a delicate and intricate embroglio, some chance of making a great name by his skill in negotiation. An able man was let alone to mingle his suaviter and his fortiter, his honey and his aloes, as he thought fit; his knowledge of the country to which he was accredited was trusted to and appreciated; nowadays, telegrams rain in on him with every hour; he is allowed no initiative, no independent action; he is dictated to and interfered with by his home government, and cypher messages torture him at every step. What is the consequence? That there is scarcely a diplomatist left in Europe — they are only delegates. Where there is one, he is incessantly controlled, hindered, and annoyed, and all his counsels are disregarded. Meanwhile the world’s only kind of peace is a permanent armed truce. But let us go into the garden.’
