The Project Gutenberg eBook, Majesty, by Louis Couperus, et al, Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Majesty A Novel Author: Louis Couperus Release Date: September 20, 2010 [eBook #33779] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAJESTY*** E-text prepared by Christine Bell & Marc D'Hooghe (http://www.freeliterature.org) PREFACE TRANSLATOR'S NOTE CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI MAJESTY A NOVEL BY LOUIS COUPERUS NEWLY TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS WITH A PREFACE BY STEPHEN McKENNA NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1921 PREFACE The betting-book in one of London's oldest and most famous clubs contains a wager, with odds laid at one hundred sovereigns to ten, that "within five years there will not remain two crowned heads in Europe." The condition—"in the event of war between Great Britain and Germany"—was imposed by the date of the wager, for one member was venturing his hundred to ten at a moment when another was dining with him to kill time before the British prime minister's ultimatum took effect: the imperial German government had to deliver its reply before midnight, by Greenwich time, or eleven o'clock, by Central European reckoning. Since the fourth of August, 1914, the King of the Hellenes, the Czar of Bulgaria, the Emperor-King of Austria-Hungary, the German Kaiser and a host of smaller princes have abdicated and sought asylum in countries left neutral by the war; the Czar of All the Russias also abdicated, but was executed without an opportunity of escape. Thus, though republican and royalist may protest that the wager was too sanguine or too pessimistic, the challenger must have taken credit for his prescience, as three of the great powers and two of the lesser converted, one after another, their half-divine sovereign into their wholly material scapegoat; by no great special pleading he might claim that the bet was won in spirit if not in fact when the morning of Armistice Day shewed monarchy surviving only in Spain, Italy, Roumania and Greece, in the small liberal kingdoms of Scandinavia and the Netherlands, in the minute principality of Monaco, in the crowned republic of Great Britain and Ireland and in the eternal anachronism of the Ottoman Empire. And the time-limit of five years had been exceeded by only three months. In the peaceful period, four times longer, between the publication of Majesty in 1894 and the outbreak of the Great War, historians were kept hardly less busy with their record of fallen monarchs and extinguished dynasties: King Humbert of Italy was assassinated in 1900; King Alexander of Servia, with his queen, in 1903; King Carlos of Portugal, with the heir-apparent, in 1908; and the Sultan Abdul Hamid was deposed and imprisoned in 1909. Before the year 1894 no ruler of note had removed himself or been removed since the assassination of the Czar Alexander II in 1881; this study of "majesty" in its strength and, still more, in its weakness was published at a time when even the autocrat was more secure on his throne than at any period since "the year of revolution," 1848. If Majesty is to be regarded as a roman à clef, there is a temptation, after six and twenty years, to call Couperus 'prophetic:' to call him that and nothing else is to turn blind eyes to the intuitive understanding which is more precious than divination, to ignore, in one book, the insight which illumines all and to overlook the quality which, among all the chronicles of kings, penetrates beyond romance and makes of Majesty an essay in human psychology. So long as the fairy-tales of childhood are woven about handsome princes and the fair-haired daughters of kings, there is no danger that the setting of royalty will ever lose its glamour; so long as "romantic" means primarily that which is "strange," the writer of romance may bind his spell on all to whom kings' houses and queens' gardens are an unfamiliar world; so long as the picturesque and traditional hold sway, the sanction and titles of kingship, the dignities and the procedure, the inhibitions and aloofness of royalty will fascinate, whether they like it or not, all those in whose veins there is no "golden drop" of blood royal. A romance of kingship, alike in the hands of dramatist, melodramatist and sycophant, is certain of commercial success. The strength of this temptation is to be measured by the number of novels written round the triumphs and intrigues of kings, their amours and tragedies, their conflicts and disasters: King Cophetua and "King Sun," Prince Hal and Richard the Second, Louis the Eleventh and Charles the First, a king in hiding, a king in exile, a king in disguise; so long as he is a king, he is a safe investment for the romantic writer. But the weakness of those who succumb to this temptation is to be measured by their failure to make kings live in literature. Those few who survive beyond the brief term of ephemeral popularity survive more by reason of their office than of themselves and Jan de Witt makes little show beside Louis the Sixteenth; their robes are of so much greater account than their persons that the feeblest German prince cuts a more imposing figure than the strongest president of the Swiss Confederation. Those who stand out in despite of their romantic setting, the human, perplexed Hamlets and vacillating, remorseful Richards, are inevitably few; and few they are likely to remain so long as the frame outshines the picture and the prince is labelled and left a celestial being apart, or labelled and dragged into passing sentimental contrast with men less exalted; it would seem that to regard a king first as a man and afterwards as an hereditary office-holder was to waste his romantic possibilities. This, nevertheless, is what Couperus has set himself to do in Majesty; he presents his family of kings as a branch of the human family; their dignity ceases to be stupefying when all are equally high-born; they wear their uniforms and robes as other men wear the conventional clothes of their trade; and, stripping them of their titles and decorations, he paints his group of men and women who have been born to rule, as others are born to till the soil; to marry for love or reasons of state, as others marry for love or reasons of convenience; to experience such emotions as are common to all men and to face the special duties and dangers apportioned to their caste by the organization of society: "... The Gothlandic family," says Couperus, "... lived [at Altseeborgen] for four months, without palace- etiquette, in the greatest simplicity. They formed a numerous family and there were always many visitors. The king attended to state affairs in homely fashion at the castle. His grandchildren would run into his room while he was discussing important business with the prime minister.... He just patted their flaxen curls and sent them away to play, with a caress.... From all the courts of Europe, which were as one great family, different members came from time to time to stay, bringing with them the irrespective nuances of different nationality, something exotic in accent and moral ideas, so far as this was not merged in their cosmopolitanism." To this "one great family" the organization of society apportioned with one hand special privileges and exemptions, with the other special hardships and dangers. Revolution, to these professional rulers, was what successful trade rivalry is to a store-keeper; assassination was a daily risk to which store-keepers are commonly not exposed: "... Such is the life of rulers: the emperor lay dead, killed by a simple pistol-shot; and the court chamberlain was very busy, the masters of ceremonies unable to agree; the pomp of an imperial funeral was prepared in all its intricacy; through all Europe sped the after-shudder of fright; every newspaper was filled with telegrams and long articles.... "All this was because of one shot from a fanatic, a martyr for the people's rights. "The Empress Elizabeth stared with wide-open eyes at the fate that had overtaken her. Not thus had she ever pictured to herself that it would come, thus, so rudely, in the midst of that festivity and in the presence of their royal guest...." It is to be understood, none the less, that she had always expected it to come: assassination is one of the special risks attaching to majesty at all times when one form of kingship or the whole institution of kings is debated and criticized. "When the intellectual developments or culture of a race," wrote Heine, in The Citizen Kingdom in 1832, "cease to accord with its old established institutions, the necessary result is a combat in which the latter are overthrown. This is called a revolution. Until this revolution is complete, so long as the reform of these institutions does not agree at all points with the intellectual development, the habits and the wants of the people, during this period the national malady is not wholly cured and the ailing and agitated people will often relapse into the weakness of exhaustion and at times be subject to fits of burning fever. When this fever is upon them, they tear the lightest bandages and the most healing lint from their old wounds, throw the most benevolent and noble-hearted nurses out of window and themselves roll about in agony, until at length they find themselves in circumstances or adapt themselves to institutions that suit them better." So much for the race, in the gripe of growing-pains; but what of the nurses? How little benevolent or noble-hearted soever they be, nurses are bound by the honour of their profession and by personal pride not to forsake their patients. In one passage of Majesty the crown-prince is shaken by fundamental doubts of his own inherited right to rule; he questions and analyses until he is brought to heel by his imperial father who remembers that an excess of "victorious analysis" rotted the intellectual foundations of the old order and prepared the way for the logical French revolution. In another passage the boy realizes without any qualification that he at least is unfitted for the burthen of empire and that it is better to abdicate in favour of his brother or to commit suicide than to play Atlas with a world that he cannot sustain; once more, his imperial father silences any admission that his own flesh and blood can be too degenerate for the task of majesty. And so, at the moral sword-point, this hereditary nurse is held to the duty and privilege of standing by an hereditary patient whom he cannot relieve with "the most healing lint" and who may at any moment throw him out of window. Not even in thought may majesty abdicate: a prince inherits his philosophy as he inherits his title. "Life is so simple," proclaims the collectivist Zanti. "'As you picture it, but not in reality,' objected Herman. "Zanti looked at him angrily, stopped still, to be able to talk with greater ease, and, passionately, violently, exclaimed: "'And do you in reality find it better than I picture it? I do not, sir, and I hope to turn my picture into reality. You and yours once, ages ago, made your picture reality; now it is the turn of us others: your reality has lasted long enough....' "Othomar, haughtily, tried to say something in contradiction; the old man, however, suddenly turned to him and, gently though roughly, with his penetrating, fanatical voice which made Othomar shudder: "'For you, sir, I feel pity!... Do you know why? Because the time will come!... The hour will come. Perhaps it is very near. If it does not come in your father's reign, it will come in your reign or your son's. But come it will! And therefore I feel pity for you. For you will not have enough love for your people. Not enough love to say to them, "I am as all of you and nothing more. I will possess no more than any of you, for I do not want abundance while you suffer need. I will not rule over you, for I am only a human being like yourselves and no more human than you." Are you more human? If you were more, then you would be entitled to rule, yes, then, then.... See here, young man, you will never have so much love for your people as to do all this, oh, and more still and more! You will govern and possess abundance and wage war. But the time will come! Therefore I have pity for you ... although I oughtn't to!'" The dead weight of inheritance, always a psychological fascination for Couperus, becomes doubly fascinating when one generation after another inherits an undwindling legacy of divine, ironic whim. As, in The Books of the Small Souls and in Old People and the Things that Pass, the children and grandchildren are born with minds tainted by prenatal memories, so, in Majesty, a prenatal influence has ordered the life and determined the fate of an infant who first draws breath as Count of Lycilia, eldest son of the Duke of Xara, himself crown-prince and eldest son of the Emperor of Liparia. There is no escape, no lack of heirs to the ironic inheritance: "'If it's a son,'" says the empress mother, on the morrow of her husband's assassination, "'it will be a Duke of Xara....' "And then the Emperor of Liparia ... lost his self-restraint. In one lightning-flash, one zig-zag of terror, he saw again his life as crown-prince, he thought of his unborn son. What would become of this child of fate? Would it be a repetition of himself, of his hesitation, his melancholy and his despair?..." If Majesty be a roman à clef, "this child of fate," with his father and mother and sisters, had his short spell of hesitation, melancholy and despair ended in 1918 by the revolver-shots of his gaolers. If Othomar be not a portrait of the Czar Nicolas II., it is hard to believe that the character was not suggested by him; though the Czar Alexander III. died a natural death, he would seem to have supplied a parallel for the Emperor Oscar, as Alexander II. supplied one for the liberal emperor, Othomar XI. The fanatical Zanti has his model in Count Tolstoi; and even the tragic romance of Prince von Lohe-Obkowitz has its historical counterpart. But the interest and value of the book do not lie in any fancied resemblance, among the characters, to living or dead kings; the study of Prince Othomar does not depend on any likeness to the Czar Nicolas II.; Couperus succeeds or fails not as a court painter, but as a great sympathetic and imaginative artist who does or does not create, in the unfamiliar atmosphere of a court, first the collective life and spirit of a caste long trained to formalize its life and suppress its emotions, then a group of human characters who stand out compelling and vital against the posturing, shadowy kings and queens of romance. To the composition of Majesty go the understanding and the historic sense, the irony and tenderness that enable Couperus in later books to draw with unfaltering touch his exquisite portraits of old age and youth, of men and women, in their moments of solitude and in their reactions upon one another. Few men have stepped so lightly and surely across the confines of the centuries and the continents; his intuition makes him equally at home in Alexandria and the Hague, with women and men, in the second century and in the twentieth; and it is not benumbed by the surface inhumanity of a court. When the Archduchess Valérie had lost her lover, the crown-prince could not understand her being able to talk as usual at dinner. "It irritated him, his want of penetration of the human heart: how could he develop it? A future ruler ought to be able to see things at a single glance.... And suddenly, perhaps merely because of his desire for human knowledge, the thought arose within him that she was concealing her emotions, that perhaps she was still suffering intensely, but that she was pretending and bearing up: was she not a princess of the blood? They all learnt that, they of the blood, to pretend, to bear up! It was bred in their bones." Perhaps it was bred in his bones, perhaps it was his mere desire for human knowledge that gave Couperus his penetration into the emotions which they of the blood were taught to conceal. In none of his books has he lavished more sympathy than in his painting of Prince Othomar's vacillation and passionate good-will, his timidity and desperate courage; nowhere has he used greater tenderness than in his sketch of the chivalry and gratitude which did duty for love in the passionless union of Valérie and the crown-prince. STEPHEN MCKENNA. LINCOLN'S INN, LONDON, 7 October, 1920. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE My first translation of Majesty was written in collaboration with my dear friend Ernest Dowson and published in the year 1895. A small edition was sold by the London publisher to Messrs. D. Appleton & Company and has long been out of print. Messrs. Appleton, with characteristic generosity, have relinquished to the present publishers any copyright which they had established in the book and have thus enabled me to produce this new version. For even a translator's style undergoes notable modifications in a quarter of a century; and I should not have been satisfied to see this novel reissued in its earlier English form. The story should not therefore be regarded as a mere reprint. Incidentally, when collating the old Teixeira-Dowson version with the original, I was struck with the chaste and discreet appearance of the Dutch as compared with the English edition, soiled as the latter was on every page with a splash of capital letters. Is it some innate snobbery or merely lack of intelligence or thought that induces English writers—and for long myself among them—to dab a capital at the head of such nouns as the "emperor," the "crown-prince," the "duke," the "chancellor," "empire" and "state," nay, even the "major," the "professor," the "doctor," or of such adjectives as "royal" and "imperial"? If we are to write of the "Major" and the "Professor," why not be still more lavish with our capitals and write of the "Midshipman," the "Postmistress" and the "Postman"? Anyhow, I felt that a suitable time had come to experiment with an innovation and I decided to reduce my capital letters to a minimum and to affix them to titles only when these were followed by the name. Even the Germans do not distinguish their titles with capitals; they have the more logical habit of beginning every substantive with a capital; and, in their murky language, this habit has one advantage, that it assists the reader to hunt the elusive verbs to their lair. The English have not this reason nor this excuse. My thanks are due not only to Messrs. Appleton but also to Mr. Stephen McKenna, the most acceptable of our younger novelists, who in his admiration for the elder craftsman, has volunteered to write a preface to Louis Couperus' present masterpiece. ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS. VENTNOR, I.W., 1 November, 1920. MAJESTY CHAPTER I 1 Lipara, usually a city white as marble: long, white rows of villas on a southern blue sea; endless, elegant esplanades on the front, with palms whose green lacquer shimmered against an atmosphere of vivid blue ether. But to-day there drifted above it, heavily, a sombre, grey sky, fraught with storm and tragedy, like a leviathan in the firmament. And this grey sky was full of mystery, full of destiny, of strange destiny: it precipitated no thunder, but remained hanging over the city, merely casting faint shadows over the brightness of its palaces, over the width of its squares and streets, over the blue of its sea, its harbour, where the ships, upright, still, anxious, raised their tall masts on high. White, square, massive, amid the verdure of the Elizabeth Parks, in the more intimate mystery of its own great plane- trees—the celebrated plane-trees of Lipara, world-famed trees—stood the Imperial, the emperor's palace, quasi- Moorish, with white, pointed arcades: it stood as the civic crown of the capital, one great architectural jewel, separated from the city, though standing in its very midst, by all that park-like verdure. The empress, Elizabeth of Liparia, sat in the private drawing-room of her apartments in the right wing; she sat with a lady-in-waiting, the Countess Hélène of Thesbia. The windows were open; they opened on the park; the famous plane- trees rose there, knotty with age, wide-spreading, anxious, motionless with their trimmed leaves, between which a dull- green twilight shimmered upon the lawns which ran into the distance, rolling softly and smoothly, like tight-stretched velvet, into an endless violet vista, with just here or there the one strident white patch of a statue. A great silence buzzed its strange sound of stillness indoors from the park; it buzzed around the empress. She sat smiling; she listened to Hélène reading aloud; she tried to listen, she did not always understand. A nervous dread haunted her, surrounded her, as with an invisible net of meshes, unbreakable. This dread was for her husband, her children, her elder son, her daughters, her younger boy. This dread crept along the carpet beneath her feet; it hung from the ceiling above her head, stole round about her through the whole room. This dread was in the park: it came from afar, from the violet vistas; it swept over the lawns and climbed in through the open windows; it fell from the trees, it fell from the sky, the grey, thunder-laden sky. This dread trembled through Liparia, through the whole of Liparia, through the whole empire; it trembled in, in to the empress, enveloping her whole being.... Then Elizabeth drew a deep breath and smiled. Hélène had looked up to her at a certain sentence with a light stress of voice and eyes, pointing the dialogue of the novel; this made the empress smile and she listened afresh. The anxiety smouldered in her, but she extinguished it with abounding acquiescence, acquiescence in what was to happen, in what must happen. The novel which Hélène was reading was Daniële Cortis, a work that was in vogue at court because the Princess Thera had liked it. The countess read carefully and with great expression; the rhythm of the Italian came from her lips with the elegance of very pointed Venetian glass, flowery and transparent. And the empress wondered that Hélène could read so beautifully and that she did not seem to feel the anxiety which nevertheless stole about everywhere, like a spectre. There was a knock at the door leading from the anteroom; a flunkey opened the door; a lady-in-waiting appeared between the hangings and curtseyed: "His highness Prince Herman," she announced in a voice that hesitated a little, as though she knew that this hour of the afternoon was almost sacred to the empress. "Ask the prince to come in," replied the empress: her voice, with all its haughtiness, sounded kind and attractive and sympathetic. "We have been expecting the prince so long...." The door remained open, the lady-in-waiting disappeared, the flunkey waited at the hangings, motionless, for the prince to come. His firm tread sounded, approaching quickly, through the anteroom; and he made a pleasant entrance, with friendliness in his healthy, red face and the joy of meeting in his large grey eyes, with their gleaming black pupils. The flunkey closed the door behind him. "Aunt!" The prince stepped towards the empress with both hands outstretched. She had risen, as had Hélène, and she moved a step towards him; she took his two hands and allowed him to kiss her heartily on both cheeks. Hélène curtseyed. "Countess of Thesbia," said the prince, bowing. "So you have come at last!" said the empress, with jesting discontent. She shook her head, but could not but look kindly at his pleasant, handsome, healthy face. "Why did you not telegraph for certain when you were coming? Then Othomar would have gone to the station, but now...." She shrugged her shoulders with a smile of regret, as much as to say that now it could not be helped that his reception had only been tel quel.... "But, aunt," said Herman—the tone of his voice implied that he would never have demanded this of Othomar—"I have been excellently received: General Ducardi, Leoni, Fasti, our worthy minister and Siridsen...." "Othomar will be sorry all the same," said the empress. "He is out driving now with Thera. Thera is driving her new bays. I can't understand why they went; it is sure to rain!" The empress resumed her seat, with an anxious look at the weather outside; the prince and Hélène likewise sat down. A cross-fire of enquiries after the two families was kindled between the empress and her nephew; they had not seen each other for months. There was much to be discussed; the times were full of disaster; and the empress showed a long telegram which the emperor had sent from Altara about the inundations. Her fingers shook as they held the message. She was still a woman of remarkable beauty, in spite of her grown-up children. But the charm of her beauty was apparent to very few. In public that beauty acquired a hardness as of a cameo: fine, clear-cut lines; great, cold, brown eyes, without expression; a cold, closed mouth; before people her slender figure assumed something stiff and automatic; she even showed herself thus before the more intimate circles of the court. But when she was seen, as now, in the seclusion of her own drawing-room, with no one except her nephew, whom she loved almost as much as her own children, and one little lady-in-waiting whom she spoilt, then, in spite of the dread which she repressed deep down in her heart, she became another woman. In her simple grey silk—she was in slight mourning for a relation—what was stiff and automatic in her figure changed into a gracious suppleness of carriage and movement, as spontaneous as the other was studied; the cameo of her face became animated; a look almost of melancholy came into her eyes; and, above all, a laugh about that cold, hard mouth was as a gleam of sympathy that rendered her unrecognizable to one who had seen her for the first time cold, stiff and austere. Prince Herman of Gothland was the second son of her sister, the Queen of Gothland. A tall, sturdy lad in his undress uniform as a naval lieutenant, with the healthy, Teutonic fairness of the house of Gothland: a firm neck, broad shoulders, the swelling chest of an athlete, the determined quickness of movement of a lively nature, more than sufficient intelligence in his large grey eyes with the black pupils and with now and then a single pleasant, soft note in his baritone voice, a note that caused a momentary slight surprise and rendered him attractive when it sounded gently in the midst of his virility. And now that he sat there, easily, simply, pleasantly and yet with a certain dignity that did not permit him an absolute excess of joviality; now that he spoke, with his sweet voice, of his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters and asked after his uncle, the Emperor Oscar of Liparia, asked after Othomar, Thera: now, yes, now he aroused in the empress a delicate feeling of family affection, something of a secret bond of blood, a very solid support of relationship amid the isolation of their respective grandeurs, the grandeurs of Liparia and Gothland. Yonder, at the other side of Europe, far, far away from her and yet so near through the magnetism of this delicate feeling, she felt Gothland lying as one vast plain of love, whither she could allow her thoughts to wander. She was no longer giddy with melancholy and dread in that she was so high together with those whom she loved, her husband and her children, for she was not high alone: in her highness she leant against another highness, Liparia against Gothland, Gothland against Liparia. It brought moist tears to her eyes, it brought a melancholy that was like happiness clinging to her breath. The spectre of dread had disappeared. She could have embraced her nephew; she would have liked to tell him all this: his mere presence gave her this feeling, a feeling of comfort and of strength; she had not known it for months. 2 The door was opened; the flunkey stood stiff and upright, with a fixed look that stared straight before him, in the shadow of the hangings. Princess Thera and Othomar entered. The princess went up gaily and kindly to her cousin, they kissed; Othomar also embraced Herman, with a single word. But, in comparison with the natural utterances of the empress and of Thera, this single word of the Duke of Xara sounded studied and smilingly cold, not intimate, and carried a needless air of etiquette. It failed to conceal a translucent insincerity, a transparent show that made no effort to simulate affection, but seemed quite simply what at this moment it could not but seem, a greeting of feigned kindness between two cousins of the same age. Prince Herman was accustomed to this: there was no intimacy between him and Othomar; and this was the more striking when they saw each other for the first time after several months; it affected the empress keenly, disagreeably. The conversation again turned upon the inundations in the north. The empress showed her children the latest telegram, the same that she had shown to Herman; it mentioned fresh disasters: still more villages swept away, towns harassed by the swollen and overflowing rivers, after a month of rain that had resembled the Flood. It had caused the emperor to proceed three days ago to the northern provinces; but they at court were now every moment expecting his orders that the crown-prince should replace him there, as he himself was returning to Lipara because of the cabinet crisis. The crown-prince discussed all this a little coldly and formally. He was a young man of twenty-one, slender and of short stature, very slightly built, with delicate, melancholy features and dull, black eyes, that generally stared straight before him; a young moustache tinted his upper lip as with a stripe of Indian ink. He had a way of drooping his head a little on his chest and then looking up from under his eyelids; he generally sat very quiet; his hands, which were small and broad but delicate, rested evenly upon his knees; and he had a trick of carrying his left hand to his eyes and then—he was a little short-sighted—just peering at his ring. He was tightly girt in the blue-and-white uniform of a captain in the lancers, the uniform which he generally wore in public: its silver frogs lent a certain breadth to his slenderness; on his right wrist he wore a narrow, dull-gold bracelet. "This is the first letter," said the empress. "Read it out, Thera...." The princess took the letter. The emperor wrote: "It is heartrending to see all this and to be able to do so little. The whole district south of the Zanthos, from Altara to Lycilia, is one expanse of water; where villages stood there now float the remains of bridges and houses, trees, accumulations of roofs, dead cattle, carts and household furniture and, as we were going along the Therezia Dyke, which—God be praised!—still stands firm at Altara, a cluster of corpses was slowly washed straight before our feet in one gigantic embrace of death...." The crown-prince had suddenly turned pale; he remained sitting in his usual attitude, peering at his ring, with the trick that was his habit. Thera read on. When the crown-prince looked up he met his mother's eyes. She nodded to him with her eyelids, unseen by the others, who were listening to the letter; he smiled—a smile full of heartbreaking melancholy— and answered her with the same invisible quiver of the eyelids; it was as though he understood that gentle greeting and drew a scrap of comfort from it for a mysterious, silent sorrow that depressed him within himself, that lay on his breast like an oppression of the breath, like a nightmare in his waking life. But Prince Herman was already talking about the ministerial crisis: it was momentarily expected that the authoritative government, rendered powerless, since the new elections, in the house of deputies with its majority of constitutionals, would proffer its resignation to the emperor. The question, as always, was that of a revision of the constitution, which the constitutionals desired and the authoritatives—taking the side of the emperor—opposed. The Empress Elizabeth heaved a sigh of fatigue: how often had not this question of a revision of the constitution, which in Liparia always meant an extension of the constitution and a restriction of the imperial authority, come looming up during their twenty years' reign as a personal attack upon her husband! Resembling his long line of Liparian ancestors, hereditarily autocratic, Oscar could never forgive his father, Othomar XI., for allowing a constitution to be passed in his more liberal reign. And now, at this crisis, it was no small thing that they were asking, the constitutionals. The house of peers, hereditary and authoritative, the emperor's own body, which cancelled every proposal of a too constitutional character sent up from the house of deputies, was no longer to stand above them, hereditary and therefore, because of its hereditary nature, invariably authoritative: they wanted to make it elective! Even Othomar XI., with his modern ideas in favour of a constitution, would never have suffered this attack upon one of the most ancient institutions of the empire, an attack which would shake Liparia to its foundations.... While Herman was debating this, casually, his words lightly touching this all-important question, it seemed to Othomar as though he were turning giddy. A world passed through his head, rushing with rapid clouds through his imagination; and out of these clouds visions loomed up before him, pale-red, quick as lightning, terrible as a kind of apocalypse, the universe ending in a dynamite explosion. Out of these clouds there flashed up for an instant a scene, a recollection of the history of his imperial inheritance: an emperor of Liparia murdered centuries ago by one of his favourites at a court festival. Revolutions in other countries of Europe, the French revolution, flickered up with a blood-red reflection; the strikes in the quick-silver mines of the eastern provinces grinned at him out of them, out of the clouds, the world of clouds storming through his thoughts.... And so many more, so many more, all so rapid, with the rapidity of their lightning-flashes; he could not grasp them, the ruddy lightning-flashes; it all just flickered through him and then away: it flickered away, far away!... And it seemed strange to him that he was sitting there, in his mother's drawing-room, with the stately park swarming behind the plate-glass windows, with tints of old, medieval gold-leather, now, in the lowered gleam of the sun-rays; with his mother opposite him, so sweet, so daintily gentle in the intimacy of this short, uninterrupted meeting: his cousin talking and his sister replying and the little lady-in-waiting listening with a smile.... How strange to sit like this, so easily, so peacefully, so serenely, in the seclusion of their palace, as though Liparia were not shaking like an old, crazy tower!... Yes, they were talking about the crisis, Herman and Thera, but what did talking amount to? Words, nothing but words! Why this endless stringing together of words, beautiful, empty words, which a sovereign is obliged to string together and then utter to his subjects, now on this occasion, now on that? No, no, they were not in his province, speeches! For what, after all, were they supposed to express, this or that? What was right, what was just, what was right and just for their empire, this or that? How could one know, how could one be certain, how could one avoid hesitating, seeking, groping, blind-folded? Even if he had a thousand eyes all over the empire, would he be able to see everything that might happen? And, if he were omniscient, would he always be able to know what would be right? The constitution: was it good for a country to have a constitution or not? In Russia: was it good in Russia? A republic: would a republic be better? And who was right? Was his father right in wanting to reign as an absolute monarch, with his hereditary house of peers, in which he, Othomar, now recalled his admission, as Duke of Xara, at his eighteenth year, with the ducal crown and the robes and chain of the order of the Imperial Orb? Or was the house of deputies right? Would it be a good thing to place a restriction upon absolute sovereignty? It was difficult to decide.... The inundations: "It is heartrending to see all this and to be able to do so little.... An expanse of water all the way to Lycilia, a cluster of corpses in the embrace of death...." It lightened. Dull, heavy rumblings rolled through the sky; thick drops fell hard as liquid hail upon the leaves of the plane-trees; the whole park seemed to shiver, dreading the threatening cloud-burst. Hélène rose and closed the open window. Then Othomar heard a strange sound: Syria.... Had they ceased talking of the house of peers? Syria, Syria.... "The king and queen were to have come next week, but they have now postponed their visit," said the empress. "Because of the inundations," added Thera. "They are going to Constantinople first. I only wish they would remain with the sultan...." "This visit seems to me at least to be something of an infliction," said Herman, laughing. "And how long do they stay, aunt?" The empress raised her shoulders to say that she did not know: the approaching visit of the King and Queen of Syria pleased neither her nor the emperor, but it was not to be avoided.... However, not wishing to say much on this subject before Hélène, she replied: "All the court festivities are now postponed, as you know, Herman, because of these terrible disasters. You will have a quiet time, my boy. You had better go with Othomar to Count Myxila's this evening...." Count Myxila, the imperial chancellor, was that day keeping his sixtieth birthday. He was the emperor's principal favourite. That morning he had been to the empress to receive her congratulations. The crown-prince was, by the emperor's desire, to appear for a moment at the reception in the chancellor's palace. Prince Herman glanced at Othomar enquiringly, as though expecting a word from him too. "Of course," the Duke of Zara hastened to say. "Myxila will reckon on seeing Herman...." 3 When, at half-past ten in the evening, Othomar and Herman returned from the chancellor's palace in a downpour of rain, it was known among the empress' entourage also that the government had resigned; the princes had met the ministers at Count Myxila's; the crisis had thrilled through the outward ceremonial of the reception like a threatening shudder of fever. Also there was a telegram from the emperor for the Duke of Xara: "I wish your imperial highness to proceed to Altara to-morrow. "OSCAR." The telegram did not come as a surprise, but was the natural consequence of the resignation of the government and of the emperor's return, for the emperor did not wish to leave the scene of the disasters without the consolation that the heir-apparent was about to replace him. After a moment spent with the empress, Othomar withdrew to his own apartments. He sent for his equerry, Prince Dutri, and consulted with him shortly and in a few words, after which the equerry hurried away with much ado. In his dressing-room Othomar found his valet, Andro, who had been warned by one of the chamberlains and was already busily packing up. "Don't pack too much," he said, as the valet rose respectfully from the trunk before which he was kneeling. "It would only be in the way...." So soon as he had said this, he failed to see the reason. Nor did the valet seem to take any notice of it: kneeling down again before the trunk, he continued to pack what he thought fit. It would be quite right as Andro was doing it, thought Othomar. And he flung himself into a chair in his study. One of the windows was open; a single standard lamp in a corner gave a dim light. The furious downpour raged outside; a humid whiff of wet leaves drifted indoors. The prince was tired, too tired to summon Andro to pull off his tight patent-leather boots. He was wearing the white- and-gold uniform of a colonel of the throne-guards, the imperial body-guard; the chain of the order of the Imperial Orb hung round his neck; other decorations studded his breast. The reception at the imperial chancellor's still whirled before his eyes; in his brain buzzed, mingling with the rain, the inevitable conversations about the crisis, the government, the house of peers. He saw himself the crown-prince, always the crown-prince, always too condescending, too affable, not sufficiently natural, not simple, not easy like Herman; and he saw Herman moving easily through the rooms of the chancellor's palace, asking quite simply to be introduced to the ladies, now by Count Myxila and again by an equerry. And he envied his cousin, who was a second son. Herman did not cause the atmosphere around him to freeze at once, as did he, with the cold imperial look of his crown-princedom. He saw the ministers, the ministers who were about to retire, each with his own interests at heart instead of those of Liparia. He suspected this from their humble attitudes before him, the crown-prince, when he had spoken to all of them.... He felt that they were only playing a part, that there was much in them that they did not allow to transpire; and he suddenly asked himself why, why this should all be so, why so much show, nothing but show.... And he was suffering now, deep in his breast; the tightness of his uniform, loaded with decorations, oppressed him.... He saw old Countess Myxila and some other ladies, whom he had seen curtseying amid the crackling of their trains and the sudden downward glitter of their diamonds, whom he had seen flushing with pleasure because the Duke of Xara had taken notice of them. And the wife also of the court-marshal, the Duchess of Yemena, who had so long been absent from court in voluntary exile at her estate in Vaza: he saw her approaching on Prince Dutri's arm. For he did not know her: years ago, when she was at court, he was a boy of fifteen, undergoing a strict military education, seldom with the empress and never at the court festivals; he had never seen the duchess at that time. Now, in the twilight of that one lamp, with the weather raging outside, he saw her once more and she became as it were transparent in the lines of the rain; she looked strange, seen through the rain, as through a curtain of wet muslin. A tall woman, voluptuously formed, half-naked under the white radiance of her diamond necklace, that was how she approached him: her hair blue-black with a gleam in it, her face a little pale under a thin bloom of rose powder; she came nearer, slowly, hesitating, in her yellow-gold figured satin, edged with heavy sable; she bowed before him, with a deep, reverential curtsey before the imperial presence: her head sank upon her breast, the tiara in her black hair shot forth rays, her whole stature curved down as with one serpentine line of grace in the material of gleaming gold that shone about her bosom and seemed to break over the thick folds of her train with a filagree of light. He had spoken to her. She rose from the billows of her reverential grace; she replied, he forgot what; her eyes sparkled upon his like black stars. She had made an impression upon him. He thought it was because he had heard her much spoken of as a woman with a life full of passion, a thing that was a riddle to him. His education had been military and strictly chaste, his youth had remained uncorrupted by the easy morals of the court, perhaps because his parents, after a long and secret separation, known to none but themselves, had come together again from a need of family-life and mutual support; the Empress Elizabeth had forgiven the Emperor Oscar and submitted to his infidelities as inevitable. Round about him Othomar had never had occasion to observe the life of the senses. At the university of Altara, where he had studied, he had never taken part, except officially, in the diversions of the students; he had always remained the crown-prince, not from haughtiness, but because he was unable to do otherwise, from lack of ease and tact. And something in the duchess had made an impression on him, as of a thing unknown. He felt in this woman, who curtseyed so deeply before him with her sphinx-like smile, a world of emotion and knowledge which he did not possess; he had felt poor in comparison with her, small and insignificant. What was it that she possessed and he not? Was it a riddle of the soul? Were there such things, soul-enigmas, and was it worth while to try to fathom them? Such a woman as she, was she not quite different from his mother and sisters? Or did his equerries, among themselves, speak of his sisters too as they spoke of the duchess? And this life of passion, this life of love for so many, was that then the truth? Did they not slander her, the equerries, or at least did they not make truth seem different from what it was, as they always did in everything, as if the truth must always be made to seem other to a prince than to a subject? He felt tired. And he sat on, striving in vain to drive from him the whirl of the strange figures of that reception seen through a transparency of rain. Before him, as though in his room, they all walked through one another: the ministers, the equerries, Count Myxila and the duchess.... A knock, a chamberlain: "Prince Herman is asking whether he may intrude on your highness for a minute." He nodded yes. After a moment Prince Herman entered. "You are always welcome, Herman," said Othomar; and his voice sounded cold in spite of himself. "I have come to ask you something," said Herman of Gothland. "I should much like to go with you to Altara to-morrow; but I want to be certain that you don't mind. I would not have asked it of my own accord, if my aunt hadn't spoken of it. What do you think?" Othomar looked at Herman; Othomar did not like his cool voice: "If you do so out of sympathy, because you happen to be at Lipara, by all means," he began.... "Let me tell you once more: I am doing this chiefly because of ... your mother." His voice sounded very emphatic. "Do it for her then," replied Othomar, gently. "It will give me great pleasure if you go with me for my mother's sake." Herman realized that he had been unnecessarily cool and emphatic. He was sorry. The empress had asked him to accompany Othomar. He had hesitated at first, knowing that there was a lack of sympathy between Othomar and him. Then he had yielded, but had not known how to ask Othomar. His usual ease of manner had forsaken him, as it always did in Othomar's presence. "Very well, then," Herman stammered, awkwardly. Othomar put out his hand: "I understand your intention perfectly. Mamma would like you to go too, because she will then be sure that there is some one with me whom I can trust in everything. Isn't that it?" Herman pressed his hand: "Yes," he said, pleased, contented, feeling no annoyance that Othomar had had the best of the conversation, delighted that his cousin took it like this. "Yes, just so; that's how it is. Don't let me detain you now: it's late. Good-night...." "Good-night...." Herman went. It was still pouring with rain. Othomar sat down again; the chill of the rainy night pressed coldly into the room and fell upon his shoulders. But he remained staring motionlessly at the tips of his boots. Andro entered softly: "Does your highness wish me to...." Othomar nodded. The valet first closed the window and drew the blind and then knelt before the prince, who, with a gesture of fatigue, put out his foot to him and rested the heel of his boot on the man's knee. 4 The downpour ceased during the night; but it was raining again in the morning. It was seven o'clock; a sultry moisture covered the colossal glass roof of the station, as though it had been breathed upon from end to end. The special train stood waiting; the engine gave short, powerful snorts, like a discontented, tired beast. A great multitude, a buzzing accumulation of vague people filled the glass hall; a detachment of infantry—two files, to right and left; the uniforms, dark-red and pale-grey; above, a faint glitter of bayonets—drew two long stripes of colour diagonally through the sombre station, cut the crowd into two and kept a broad space clear in front of the imperial waiting-room. Dissatisfaction hovered over the crowd; angry glances flashed; rough words crackled sharply through the air, mingled with curses; a contemptuous laugh sounded in a corner. There was a long wait; then a cheer was heard outside: the prince had arrived in front of the station. The waiting-room became filled with uniforms, glistening faintly in the morning light; brief sentences were exchanged in a low voice. Othomar entered with Herman and the Marquis of Dazzara, the governor of the capital, the highest military authority, whose rich uniform stood out against the simpler ones of the others, even against those of the princes; they were followed by adjutants, Liparian and Gothland equerries, aides-de-camp. The mayor of the town and the managing director of the railway stepped towards Othomar and saluted him; the mayor stumbled through long phrases before the two princes. "Why wasn't the approach to the platform closed to the public?" asked General Ducardi of the director, after the adjutant-ge...