"The loveliest maiden in the world is Elizabeth, daughter of the
greatest of emperors. If you are the sons of poor men how can you ever
hope to lift eyes to her? Look now into these boxes and you shall be
raised to a height by which you shall see the Emperor's daughter and
not be hidden in the dust of her chariot."
They looked into the boxes, and Simon saw in the one a piece of gold,
but Peter looked as well into the other, and in it he saw the face of
his beloved princess and had no thought of all else. Simon asked for
the first box and Peter for the second, and they received them and
went their ways, Simon to the village and Peter out into the world,
each gazing fascinated into his box.
"To him who desireth little, little is given," said the old man. "And
to him who desireth much, much is given; but to neither according to
the letter of his desire."
By the time he reached his village Simon had five gold pieces in his
pocket, and as soon as he took one piece from the box another came in
its place. He lent money to every one in the village at a large rate
of interest and was soon the master of it. There began to be talk of
him in the town ten leagues away and there came men to ask him for
money. He moved to the town and built himself a big house, and it was
not long before he began to look to the capital of the country.
When he moved to the capital he had six houses in different parts of
the country, racehorses, picture galleries, mines, factories,
newspapers, and he headed the list of subscribers to the hospitals
patronized by the Royal Family. At first, in the great city, he was
diffident and shy among the illustrious personages with whom he
fraternized, but it was not long before he discovered that they were
just as susceptible to the pinch of money as the carpenter and the
priest and the bailiff and the fruiterer in his village. It was quite
easy to buy the control of these important people without their ever
having to face the unpleasant fact. More than one beautiful lady,
among them a duchess and a prima donna of surpassing loveliness,
endeavored to cajole him and to discover his secret. In vain; he could
not forget the Princess Elizabeth, and now ambition spurred him on. He
was wearying of the ease with which fame and position and the highest
society could be bought, and began to lust for power. With his native
peasant shrewdness he saw that society consisted of the People, of
persons of talent and cunning above them, of the descendants of
persons of talent and cunning left high and dry beyond the reach of
want, of ornamental families set at the head of the nations, of a few
ingenious minds who (so far as there was any direction) governed the
workings and interlockings of all the parts of the whole. They had
control of all the sources of money except his box, and he determined,
to relieve his boredom and also as a means of reaching his Princess,
to pit his power against theirs.
He was never ashamed of his mother, and she came to stay with him once
a year for a week, but she never ceased to lament the loss of her
other son, Peter, from whom no word had come. One night she had a
dream, and she dreamed she saw Peter lying wounded in a thicket, and
she knew perfectly where it was and said she must go to find him.
Simon humored her and gave her money for a long voyage. She went back
to her own village and out upon the road until she came to the effigy
of the god, for this was the only god she knew, and she prayed to him.
The old man appeared before her and told her to go to her home, for
Peter would return to her before she died. At this she was comforted,
and went home to her husband and sent Simon back his money, because
she was afraid to keep so large a sum in the house.
It was said in the capital that the land of the greatest of emperors
was the richest of all countries, but the people were the stupidest
and had no notion of its wealth. The financiers were continually
sending concessionaires and adventurers, but they came away
empty-handed. Simon had now paid his way into the royal circle, and
for defraying the debt on the royal stable had been ennobled. He
suggested to the King that he should send an embassy to invite the
greatest of emperors and his daughter to pay a visit to the capital to
see the wonders of their civilization.
The embassy was sent, the invitation accepted, and the Emperor and the
Princess arrived and their photographs were in all the illustrated
papers. They did not like this, for in their own country only one
portrait of the Emperor was painted, and that was the life work of the
greatest artist of the time. The Princess was candor itself, and said
frankly what she liked and what she did not like. She liked very
little, and after she had been driven through the capital she sent for
the richest man in the country, and Simon was brought to her. He bowed
before her and trembled and told her that all his wealth was at her
service. So she told him to pull down all the ugly houses and the dark
streets and to make gardens and cottages and to give every man in them
a piece of gold.
"They will only squander it," said Simon.
"Let them," replied the Princess Elizabeth. "Surely even the most
miserable may have one moment of pleasure."
"In your country are there no poor?"
"There are no rich men. There are good men and bad men, and the good
are rewarded, and honored."
As she ordered, so it was done, and the poor blessed the Princess
Elizabeth, but the financiers muttered among themselves, and they
arranged that one of their agents should go to the Emperor's country,
stir up sedition, and be arrested. Then they announced in their
newspapers international complications, said day after day that the
national honor was besmirched, and demanded redress. The Emperor and
the Princess Elizabeth hurriedly left the capital and returned to
their own country. Simon had declared his admiration for the Princess
and she had snubbed him. His newspapers added to the outcry, and he
ordered a poet to write a national song, which became very popular:
_We ain't a fighting nation,
But when we do, we do.
We've got the ships, we've got the cash,
We've got the soldiers, too._
_So look out there and mind your eye,
We're out to do, we're out to die,
For God and King and country._
But in the Emperor's country all the songs were in praise of the
Princess Elizabeth, and when she heard that ships of war were on the
seas and huge vessels transporting soldiers, she consulted with the
Minister and gave orders for all weapons to be buried and for all
houses to be prepared to receive the guests and the great hall of the
palace to be made ready for a banquet.
Her Minister was Peter, and she delighted in his wisdom and never
wearied of listening to the tale of his adventures, how in his quest
he had been cheated, and robbed, and beaten, and cast into prison, and
scourged, and bastinadoed, and incarcerated for a lunatic, and mocked
and despised, nearly drowned by a mountain torrent, all but crushed by
a huge boulder that came crashing down a hillside and carried away the
tree beneath which he was sleeping; and how all these afflictions did
but intensify his vision of that which he loved, so that the pain and
the terror of them fell away and he was left with the glorious
certainty of being near his goal. He did not tell her what that was
because it was very sweet to serve her, and he knew that she was proud
and had rejected the hands of the greatest and handsomest princes of
her father's dependencies. It was very pleasant for him to see her
emotion as he told his tale, and when she almost wept on the final
adventure, how, as he neared her father's city, he was set upon by a
band of peasants, who believed him to be a blasphemer and a wizard
because of his box, and left for dead, and how he awoke to find her
bending over him, then he could scarcely contain himself, and he would
hide his face and hasten from her presence.
He had a little house in one of her private parks, and whenever she
was in any difficulty she came to consult him, for his sufferings had
made him sensible, and his devotion to a single idea gave him a
nobility which she found not in her other courtiers.
It was he, then, who advised the cordial reception of the hostile
armies, for he had observed, in the numerous assaults of which he had
been the victim, that when he hit back he only incensed his adversary
and roused him to a madder pitch of cruelty. Also he had lived among
soldiers and knew them to be slaves of their bellies and no true
servants of any cause or idea. Therefore, he gave this counsel, and it
was followed, and the army was disbanded, and the citizens prepared
their houses and decorated the city against the coming of the army.
When they arrived, all the populace turned out to see them, and the
generals and captains were met by the chief men, the poets, and the
philosophers, and the scholars, and made welcome. There were feasting
and fireworks, and the harlots devoted themselves to the service of
the country, and by night a more drunken army was never seen. Their
guns and ammunition were thrown into the harbor, and next day they
were allowed to choose whether they would return to their own country
or stay and become citizens of this. Nine-tenths of the soldiers chose
to stay, many of them married and made honest women of the devoted
creatures who had been their pleasure, and thus the causes of virtue
and peace were served at once. The soldiers and their wives were
scattered up and down the country, work was found for them, and both
lost the rudeness and brutality induced by their former callings.
The other tenth returned to their own country. Simon and the
financiers heard their galling story and told the people that a
glorious victory had been won and the nation's flag, after horrible
carnage, planted over yet another outpost of the Empire. There was
immense enthusiasm. Shiploads of Bibles were sent out, and a hundred
missionaries from the sixty-five different religious denominations.
Peter's advice was sought, and he ordered a cellar to be prepared. The
Bibles were stored in this, and the missionaries were set to translate
them back into the original languages. They had got no further than
the twentieth chapter of Genesis when they declared their willingness
to be converted to the religion of the country; but there was no
professed religion, for, when the Princess had asked Peter what her
father could best do to serve his subjects and make his name blessed
among them, he had replied:
"Let him abolish that which most engenders hypocrisy. Let him
establish the right of every man to be himself. Let there be good men
and bad men--since there must be good and bad--but no hypocrites. Let
him withdraw his support from that religion which maintains priests,
superstition and prejudice, and it will topple down. Faith is an act
of living, not a creed."
At first the Emperor was afraid that if the State religion toppled he
would come crashing down, but he could deny his daughter nothing, and
he withdrew his support. In less than a year there was not a sign of
the professed religion, and no one noticed its absence. There was a
marked improvement in the behavior of the people and their good sense,
which made it possible for Peter's advice to be followed in dealing
with the foreign army. There was a notable decrease in crime, and
litigation became so infrequent that half the Courts of Justice were
closed, and the Attorneys and Advocates retired into the country or
adopted the profession of letters. With the money released by the
disestablished religion and the reduced Courts of Justice the Emperor
founded universities and schools and set apart money to endow
maternity and medicine, saying: "We have all money enough for our
pleasure, but it is when the shadow of a natural crisis comes over us
that we are in need."
The Princess was loud in praise of her Minister, and the people and
the men of letters declared that the Emperor really was the greatest
ruler the world had ever seen. The Emperor swallowed it all as a good
monarch should, but Peter was overcome with tenderness for his
Princess, and, dreading lest he should betray his secret, he asked her
leave to depart for a while, and betook him to his own country and his
village to see his mother.
She lay upon her deathbed and was very feeble. Simon had sent her some
calf's-foot jelly, but was too deeply engaged to come. Peter sat by
her bedside and told her about his Princess, and she patted his hand
and laughed merrily, and said:
"You always were a bonny liar, laddie. Kiss me and take my blessing."
Peter kissed her and took her blessing, and she died.
He went to the roadside where he had come by his box and his vision,
but the old man was not there, the trees were cut down, and the effigy
of the god had rotted away and only the stump of it was left. He
planted an acorn in the place to mark the beginning of his joy in
life, but, knowing that the act of breathing is prayer enough, he
decided to go away and think no more about his good fortune or his bad
fortune, or the profit he had drawn from both. He sighed over the
thousands of miles that separated him from his Princess, and decided
each day to reduce them by at least thirty.
The news of the war had only just reached that part of the country,
and he heard men talking of the glorious victory. At first he was
alarmed, but when he heard more he laughed and told the men the truth.
They took and ducked him in the horse pond for a spy and a traitor,
and when he crawled out they thrashed him with whips until they had
cut his clothes in ribbons and his flesh into weals. Then they put him
in the old stocks and left him there for a day and a night. He was
cold and hungry, and his bones ached, but when he found himself near
to counting his miseries and wishing himself dead, then he took out
his box and gazed at the image of the Princess and said to it:
"Yet will I live to serve you. My life is nothing except it go to
sustain the wonder of yours."
So he bore this calamity, as he had borne so many others, for her
sake.
He had no other clothes, and when he was released he patched and
mended his suit and made his way, working and singing for his bread,
to the capital. There he inquired after his brother, and men looked
awed as they pronounced his name, and they all knew his house and the
names of his racehorses, but of the rest they could tell very little.
Peter went to the magnificent house, ragged as he was, and asked to
see his brother. Two lackeys and a butler opened the door, and they
lifted their noses at him. The butler said his lordship had brothers
and fathers and cousins coming to see him all day long, but Peter
persisted, and was told he might be his lordship's brother, but his
lordship was away on his lordship's yacht and no letters were
forwarded.
Having no other interest in the capital, Peter set out on his return,
and when he came to the frontier of the fortunate land that had nursed
his Princess he was greeted with tidings that made his heart sink
within him. A handsome stranger told him that the Emperor had enclosed
the commons and great tracts of forest, and prospected the whole
country for coal and oil and metals and precious stones, and how the
poets and the philosophers and the scholars were cast down from their
high places, and, most lamentable of all, how the Princess was
imprisoned because she would not marry the new Emperor of Colombia,
who had arrived in his yacht with untold treasures, and how her
private parks were taken for menageries, racecourses and football
grounds. Peter buried his head in his arms and wept.
With the stranger he journeyed toward the capital. Over great tracts
of the country there hung black clouds of smoke; new cities meanly
built, hastily and without design, floundered out over the hills and
meadows; pleasant streams were fouled; sometimes all the trees and the
grass and plants and hedgerow bushes were dead for miles; and in those
places the men and women were wan and listless and their poverty was
terrible to see: there were tall chimneys even in the most lovely
valleys, and in them were working pregnant women and little children,
and Peter asked the stranger whose need was satisfied by their work.
"There are millions of men upon the earth," answered the stranger,
"and what you see is industrial development. It drives men to a frenzy
so that they know not what they do."
And when they came to the capital they found the frenzy at its height.
It was no longer the peaceful and lovely city of Peter's happiness;
gone were the gardens and groves of myrtle and sweet-scented laurel;
gone the beautiful houses and the noble streets; tall buildings of a
bastard architecture, of no character or tradition, towered and made
darkness; huge hotels invited to luxury and lewdness; the Emperor's
ancient palace was gone, and its successor was like another hotel, and
in the avenue, where formerly the most gracious and distinguished of
the citizens used to make parade amid the admiration and applause of
their humble fellows, was now a throng of foreigners and vulgarians,
Jews, Levantines, Americans, all ostentation and display. . . .
Beneath the splendor and glitter linked a squalor and a sordid misery
that called aloud, and called in vain, for pity. And in the outskirts
were again the chimneys and the factories with the machines thudding
night and day, and round them filth and poverty and disease. . . . The
priests were back in their place to give consolation to the poor, who
were beyond consolation, and the Courts of Justice were housed in the
largest building in the world. At every street corner newspapers were
sold.
In a new thoroughfare driven boldly through the most ancient part of
the city and flanked absurdly with common terraces of houses, they
found a thin crowd standing in expectation. The two Emperors were to
go by on their way to open the new Technical College and Public
Library. They passed swiftly in an open carriage, and a faint little
cheer went up, so different from the vast roar that used to greet the
Emperor and the Princess in all their public appearances. The Emperor
looked haggard and nervous, as though he were consumed with a fever,
but the Emperor of Colombia was fat as a successful spider. Peter
gasped when he saw him, for he was Simon. But he said nothing, and
they passed on.
Saddest sight of all were the prosperous, well-fed women gazing with
dead eyes into the shop windows wherein were displayed fashionable
garments and trinkets, overwhelming in their quantity.
Preferable to that was the avenue with the Jews and the Levantines and
the Americans. Thither with the stranger Peter returned, and he met a
poet, lean and disconsolate, who had been his intimate friend. They
three talked together, and the poet asked if there were no power to
cool the heat and reduce the frenzy in the blood of the inhabitants of
the country. Said the stranger:
"There is a power which makes the earth a heaven; a power without
which the life of men is no more than the life of tadpoles squirming
in a stagnant pond."
Peter said the power must be Love: the poet declared it was
Imagination.
"Love in itself," said the stranger, "is a human, comfortable thing;
with the light of imagination, love is the living word of God in the
heart of man."
And behold the stranger stood before them, an angel or genius clad all
in white with wings of silver that rose above him and beat to flight,
and away he soared to the sun. And the poet raised his head, and in a
loud voice declaimed musical words, and Peter sobbed in his joy, but
the Jews and the Levantines and the Americans had seen nothing, and
wearily they drove and walked along the avenue, scanning each other in
sly envy.
Hard and bitter was the lot of the people, and their loyalty to the
Emperor was shaken. There were none now to bless his name, none to
call him the greatest of rulers, and only the priests praised him for
his wisdom in yielding to the tide of progress. There was little
happiness anywhere: the old superstitions and prejudices were restored
to currency, the tyranny of public opinion was enthroned again, and
books were written and plays performed to fortify its authority.
Every day Simon sent the Princess richer presents and messengers to
crave the boon of an audience; but the Princess made no reply and
would never leave her apartments. Every day she used to stand at her
window and gaze in the direction where Peter's country lay and pray
for his return. One day her ape was with her, and he chattered
excitedly and hurled himself into the sycamore tree that grew beneath
her window. He returned in a moment with an empty box. She looked into
it and saw the image of Peter, as he was, ragged and unhappy, but with
adoration in his eyes. Then she could no longer dissemble, but, with
happy tears, she confessed to herself that she loved him. . . . Next
day she walked in her garden, and on the other side of the little
stream marking its boundary she saw Peter. They told their love, and
he swore to deliver her and not to see her again until he had done so.
With a brave heart she wished him Godspeed and threw him back his box,
in which she had concealed three kisses and a lock of her hair.
For forty days and forty nights did Peter remain in solitude,
wrestling with himself and cogitating how he might best accomplish the
salvation of his adored Princess and the country that was dearer to
her even than himself. Step by step he followed Simon's career from
the time when he had chosen the box with the piece of gold to the
golden ruin he had brought upon thousands of men. Then he resolved to
send his own box to his brother; nay, himself to take it. He procured
gorgeous apparel, and immense chests, and camels and horses and
elephants, disguised a hundred and fifty of his friends in Eastern
apparel, and in this array presented himself at the Summer Palace,
where his brother was lodged. The doors were opened to him, and he was
passed on from lackey to lackey until he found himself in his
brother's presence. Simon greeted him cordially and asked for his
news, and how he had fared.
"I have all my desires," said Peter. "I have fulfilled my destiny, and
I am come to give you my box. It has served me well."
Greedily Simon snatched the box and opened it to see what treasure it
might contain. He saw no image of beauty therein, but only himself,
and the vision of his own soul crushed by the weight of his
possessions, and the pride died in him and all the savage lusts to
gratify which he had plotted and schemed and laid waste, and he
groaned:
"All my power is but vanity and my hopes are in the dust. I am become
a monster and unworthy of the Princess Elizabeth."
His words rang through the Palace, and his servants and those who had
called themselves his friends fell upon his possessions and divided
them and fled from the country. So deserted, he embraced Peter and
vowed that his brother's love was now a greater treasure to him than
all he had sought in his folly. They took counsel together and decided
that they had best persuade the greatest of emperors to grant his
people a Parliament so as to avert the imminent revolution. They did
that, but it was too late. Peter's procession through the streets to
the Summer Palace had alarmed the people with the dread of another
Imperial visitor as injurious as the last, and they had made
barricades in the streets, and sacked the great hotels, and dragged
the Emperor and all his counsellors and courtiers into the stews and
there slaughtered them. The Princess Elizabeth was released and
loyally acclaimed, and it was only on her intercession that Peter and
Simon were spared. She granted the people a Parliament, and the Courts
of Justice were taken for its House, and she opened and prorogued it
in the regal manner.