Across the Zodiac (46 page)

The favourite scenes represent the most striking incidents of Martial
history, or realise the life, usages, and manners of ages long gone
by, before science and invention had created the perfect but
monotonous civilisation that now prevails. One of the most interesting
performances I witnessed commenced with the exhibition of a striking
scene, in which the union of all the various States that had up to
that time divided the planet's surface, and occasionally waged war on
one another, in the first Congress of the World, was realised in the
exact reproduction of every detail which historic records have
preserved. Afterwards was depicted the confusion, declining into
barbarism and rapid degradation, of the Communistic revolution, the
secession of the Zveltau and their merely political adherents, the
construction of their cities, fleets, and artillery, the terrible
battles, in which the numbers of the Communists were hurled back or
annihilated by the asphyxiator and the lightning gun; and finally, the
most remarkable scene in all Martial history, when the last
representatives of the great Anarchy, squalid, miserable, degraded,
and debased in form and features, as well as indicating by their dress
and appearance the utter ruin of art and industry under their rule,
came into the presence of the chief ruler of the rising
State—surrounded by all the splendour which the "magic of property,"
stimulating invention and fostering science, had created—to entreat
admission into the realm of restored civilisation, and a share in the
blessings they had so deliberately forfeited and so long striven to
deny to others.

I spent my days between mist and mist, according to the Martial
saying, not infrequently in excursions more or less extensive and
adventurous, in which I could but seldom ask Eveena's company, and did
not care for any other. Comparatively courageous as she had learned to
be, and free from all affectation of pretty feminine fear, Eveena
could never realise the practical immunity from ordinary danger which
a strength virtually double that I had enjoyed on Earth, and thorough
familiarity with the dangers of travel, of mountaineering, and of the
chase, afforded me. When, therefore, I ventured among the hills alone,
followed the fishermen and watched their operations, sometimes in
terribly rough weather, from the little open surface-boat which I
could manage myself, I preferred to give her no definite idea of my
intentions. Davilo, however, protested against my exposure to a peril
of which Eveena was happily as yet unaware.

"If your intentions are never known beforehand," he said, "still your
habit of going forth alone in places to which your steps might easily
be dogged, where you might be shot from an ambush or drowned by a
sudden attack from a submarine vessel, will soon be pretty generally
understood, if, as I fear, a regular watch is set upon your life. At
least let me know what your intentions are before starting, and make
your absences as irregular and sudden as possible. The less they are
known beforehand, even in your own household, the better."

"Is it midnight still in the Council Chamber?" I asked.

"Very nearly so. She who has told so much can tell us no more. The
clue that placed her in mental relations with the danger did not
extend to its authorship. We have striven hard to find in every
conceivable direction some material key to the plot, some object
which, having been in contact with the persons of those we suspect,
probably at the time when their plans were arranged, might serve as a
link between her thoughts and theirs; but as yet unsuccessfully.
Either her vision is darkened, or the connection we have sought to
establish is wanting. But you know who is your unsparing personal
enemy; and, after the Sovereign himself, no man in this world is so
powerful; while the Sovereign himself is, owing to the restraints of
his position, less active, less familiar with others, less acquainted
with what goes on out of his own sight. Again I say we can avenge; but
against secret murder our powers only avail to deter. If we would
save, it must be by the use of natural precautions."

What he said made me desirous of some conversation with Eveena before
I started on a meditated visit to the Palace. If I could not tell her
the whole truth, she knew something; and I thought it possible on this
occasion so far to enlighten her as to consult with her how the secret
of my intended journeys should in future be kept. But I found no
chance of speaking to her until, shortly before my departure, I was
called upon to decide one of the childish disputes which constantly
disturbed my temper and comfort. Mere fleabites they were; but fleas
have often kept me awake a whole night in a Turkish caravanserai, and
half-a-dozen mosquitos inside an Indian tent have broken up the sleep
earned on a long day's march or a sharply contested battlefield. I
need only say that I extorted at last from Eveena a clear statement of
the trifle at issue, which flatly contradicted those of the four
participants in the squabble. She began to suggest a means of proving
the truth, and they broke into angry clamour. Silencing them all
peremptorily, I drew Eveena into my own chamber, and, when assured
that we were unheard, reproved her for proposing to support her own
word by evidence.

"Do you think," I said, "that any possible proof would induce me to
doubt you, or add anything to the assurance I derive from your word?"

"But," she urged, "that cannot be just to others. They must feel it
very hard that your love for me makes you take all I say for truth."
"Not my love, but my knowledge. 'Be not righteous overmuch.' Don't
forget that they
know
the truth as well as you."

I would hear no more, and passed to the matter I had at heart....

Earnestly, and in a sense sincerely, as upon my second audience I had
thanked the Camptâ for his munificent gifts, no day passed that I
would not thankfully have renounced the wealth he had bestowed if I
could at the same time have renounced what was, in intention and
according to Martial ideas, the most gracious and most remarkable of
his favours. On the present occasion I thought for a moment that such
renunciation might have been possible.

The Prince had, after our first interview, observed with regard to
every point of my story on which I had been carefully silent a
delicacy of reserve very unusual among Martialists, and quite
unintelligible to his Court and officers. To-day the conversation in
public turned again upon my voyage. Endo and another studiously
directed it to the method of steering, and the intentional diminution
of speed in my descent, corresponding to its gradual increase at the
commencement of the journey—points at which they hoped to find some
opening to the mystery of the motive force. The Prince relieved me
from some embarrassment by requesting me as usual to attend him to his
private cabinet.

He said:—"I have not, as you must be aware, pressed you to disclose a
secret which, for some reason or other, you are evidently anxious to
preserve. Of course the exclusive possession of a motive power so
marvellous as that employed in your voyage is of almost incalculable
pecuniary value, and it is perfectly right that you should use your
own discretion with regard to the time and the terms of its
communication."

"Pardon me," I interposed, "if I interrupt you, Prince, to prevent any
misconception. It is not with a view to profit that I have carefully
avoided giving any clue whatever to my secret. Tour munificence would
render it most ungrateful and unjust in me to haggle over the price of
any service I could render you; and I should be greedy indeed if I
desired greater wealth than you have bestowed. If I may say so without
offending, I earnestly wish that you would permit me, by resigning
your gifts, to retain in my own eyes the right to keep my secret
without seeming undutiful or unthankful."

"I have said," he replied, "that on that point you misconceive our
respective positions. No one supposes that you are indebted to us for
anything more than it was the duty of the Sovereign to give, as a mark
of the universal admiration and respect, to our guest from another
world; still less could any imagine that on such a trifle could be
founded any claim to a secret so invaluable. You will offend me much
and only if you ever again speak of yourself as bound by personal
obligation to me or mine. But as we are wishful to buy, so I cannot
understand any reluctance on your part to sell your secret on your own
terms."

"I think, Prince," I replied, "that I have already asked you what you
would think of a subject of your own, who should put such a power into
the hands of enemies as formidable to you as you would be to the races
of the Earth."

"And
I
think," he rejoined with a smile, "that I reminded you how
little my judgment would matter to one possessed of such a power. I
have gathered from your conversation how easily we might conquer a
world as far behind us in destructive powers as in general
civilisation. But why should you object? You can make your own terms
both for yourself and for any of your race for whom you feel an
especial interest."

"A traitor is none the less a despicable and loathsome wretch because
his Prince cannot punish him. I am bound by no direct tie of loyalty
to any Terrestrial sovereign. I was born the subject of one of the
greatest monarchs of the Earth; I left his country at an early age,
and my youth was passed in the service of less powerful rulers, to one
at least of whom I long owed the same military allegiance that binds
your guards and officers to yourself. But that obligation also is at
an end. Nevertheless, I cannot but recognise that I owe a certain
fealty to the race to which I belong, a duty to right and justice.
Even if I thought, which I do not think, that the Earth would be
better governed and its inhabitants happier under your rule, I should
have no right to give them up to a conquest I know they would fiercely
and righteously resist. If—pardon me for saying it—you, Prince,
would commit no common crime in assailing and slaughtering those who
neither have wronged nor can wrong you, one of themselves would be
tenfold more guilty in sharing your enterprise."

"You shall ensure," he replied, "the good government of your own world
as you will. You shall rule it with all the authority possessed by the
Regents under me, and by the laws which you think best suited to races
very different from our own. You shall be there as great and absolute
as I am here, paying only an obedience to me and my successors which,
at so immense a distance, can be little more than formal."

"Is it to acquire a merely formal power that a Prince like yourself
would risk the lives of your own people, and sacrifice those of
millions of another race?"

"To tell you the truth," he replied, "I count on commanding the
expedition myself; and perhaps I care more for the adventure than for
its fruits. You will not expect me to be more chary of the lives of
others than of my own?"

"I understand, and as a soldier could share, perhaps, a feeling
natural to a great, a capable, and an ambitious Prince. But alike as
soldier and subject it is my duty to resist, not to aid, such an
ambition. My life is at your disposal, but even to save my life I
could not betray the lives of hundreds of millions and the future of a
whole world."

"I fail to understand you fully," he said, abandoning with a sigh a
hope that had evidently been the object of long and eager day-dreams.
"But in no case would I try to force from you what you will not give
or sell; and if you speak sincerely—and I suppose you must do so,
since I can see no motive but those you assign that could induce you
to refuse my offer—I must believe in the existence of what I have
heard of now and then but deemed incredible—men who are governed by
care for other things than their own interests, who believe in right
and wrong, and would rather suffer injustice than commit it."

"You may be sure, Prince," I replied, perhaps imprudently, "that there
are such men in your own world, though they are perhaps among those
who are least known and least likely to be seen at your Court."

"If you know them," he said, "you will render me no little service in
bringing them to my knowledge."

"It is possible," I ventured to observe, "that their distinguishing
excellences are connected with other distinctions which might render
it a disservice to them to indicate their peculiar character, I will
not say to yourself, but to those around you."

"I hardly understand you," he rejoined. "Take, however, my assurance
that nothing you say here shall, without your own consent, be used
elsewhere. It is no light gratification, no trifling advantage to me,
to find one man who has neither fear nor interest that can induce him
to lie to me; to whom I can speak, not as sovereign to subject, but as
man to man, and of whose private conversation my courtiers and
officials are not yet suspicious or jealous. You shall never repent
any confidence you give to me."

My interest in and respect for the strange character so manifestly
suited for, so intensely weary of, the grandest position that man
could fill, increased with each successive interview. I never envied
that greatness which seems to most men so enviable. The servitude of a
constitutional King, so often a puppet in the hands of the worst and
meanest of men—those who prostitute their powers as rulers of a State
to their interests as chiefs of a faction—must seem pitiable to any
rational manhood. But even the autocracy of the Sultan or the Czar
seems ill to compensate the utter isolation of the throne; the lonely
grandeur of one who can hardly have a friend, since he can never have
an equal, among those around him. I do not wonder that a tinge of
melancholo-mania is so often perceptible in the chiefs of that great
House whose Oriental absolutism is only "tempered by assassination."
But an Earthly sovereign may now and then meet his fellow-sovereigns,
whether as friends or foes, on terms of frank hatred or loyal
openness. His domestic relations, though never secure and simple as
those of other men, may relieve him at times from the oppressive sense
of his sublime solitude; and to his wife, at any rate, he may for a
few minutes or hours be the husband and not the king. But the absolute
Ruler of this lesser world had neither equal friends nor open foes,
neither wife nor child. How natural then his weariness of his own
life; how inevitable his impatient scorn of those to whom that life
was devoted! A despot not even accountable to God—a Prince who, till
he conversed with me, never knew that the universe contained his equal
or his like—it spoke much, both for the natural strength and
soundness of his intellect and for the excellence of his education,
that he was so sane a man, so earnest, active, and just a ruler. His
reign was signalised by a better police, a more even administration of
justice, a greater efficiency, judgment, and energy in the execution
of great works of public utility, than his realm had known for a
thousand years; and his duty was done as diligently and
conscientiously as if he had known that conscience was the voice of a
supreme Sovereign, and duty the law of an unerring and unescapable
Lawgiver. Alone among a race of utterly egotistical cowards, he had
the courage of a soldier, and the principles, or at least the
instincts, worthy of a Child of the Star. With him alone could I have
felt a moment's security from savage attempts to extort by terror or
by torture the secret I refused to sell; and I believe that his
generous abstinence from such an attempt was as exasperating as it was
incomprehensible to his advisers, and chiefly contributed to involve
him in the vengeance which baffled greed and humbled personal pride
had leagued to wreak upon myself, as on those with whose welfare and
safety my own were inextricably intertwined. It was a fortunate, if
not a providential, combination of circumstances that compelled the
enemies of the Star, primarily on my account, to interweave with their
scheme of murderous persecution and private revenge an equally
ruthless and atrocious treason against the throne and person of their
Monarch.