Othmar went into his house, but before taking his coffee sent for his
steward, and gave him a brief but severe reprimand for having
permitted Duvelleroy and his underlings to use the gardens as a
nursery-ground.
'The grounds may be sacked to please my friends,' he said, in
conclusion. 'But if a single carnation be sold for a single centime,
it is not the seller who will be dismissed, but yourself, who are paid
highly only that you may save your subordinates from those temptations
which kill honesty and should be no more left in the path of poor men
than poisoned mangolds in a sheep-field.'
The notion that his hothouses and gardens had furnished the
flower-sellers of Nice with materials for their myriads of bouquets,
irritated him disproportionately. He would have taken his oath that on
none of his estates did his people steal a farthing's worth. They were
all highly paid, and those set in authority over them were all men
who had been chosen and enriched by his father; he had often spoken of
their probity and affection with pride; and now they cheated him for
sake of selling a bouquet!
It was a mere trifle, no doubt. He would have cleared his gardens at a
stroke to please anyone he liked; and he would have given a poor man
willingly the value of all his forcing houses; but the knowledge that
his hirelings sold his mignonette and his heliotrope to profit
themselves irritated him, and even quite embittered life to him for
the moment. The most generous minds feel the most acutely betrayal in
small things, and resent most vividly the contemptible robberies which
take advantage of trust and opportunity. That the rich man is so
seldom honestly served goes further, perhaps, to redress the balance
between him and the poor man than the latter, in his ignorance, ever
supposes.
'After all,' he thought, 'perhaps I only feed rogues, like Napraxine.'
And the thought was painful to him, for he fed them well.
It was primarily his own fault for so seldom coming to the place;
perhaps it was natural that when years rolled on and they never saw
their master they should learn to consider his possessions as almost
their own. But he had so many places that he could not live in them
all. His fathers had bought them, so, out of respect to their
memories, he could not get rid of them. He had a great house on the
Boulevard St. Germain; another great house in Piccadilly; another in
the Teresian Platz of Vienna; he had estates in France, England,
Germany, and Austria, a Scotch moor, a Flemish forest, a château on
the shores of the Dalmatian Adriatic, a villa at Biarritz, a castle in
dense woods on the Moselle, and whole towns, villages, plains, and
hills in Croatia itself. How was he to live at all these places? He
lent them liberally, but he could hardly sell them; the head of the
house of Othmar could not sell what he had inherited. If he had sold
them he would only have had more millions with which he would not have
known what to do.
When he had drunk a cup of coffee and a glass of iced water, he went
for a long ride, mounting high up into the hills until the sea lay far
below, blue as a great bed of mysotis, and the gilded cupolas of La
Jacquemerille glittered in his sight far beneath the darkening slopes
of pine. When he returned to his one o'clock breakfast, he found that
his house was deserted no more. He was told that his uncle, the Baron
Friederich, had arrived by the _rapide_ from Paris. He was not greatly
pleased, but he prepared to do his duties as a host without betraying
his sense that the new comer was not precisely in harmony with a
romantic retreat amidst myrtles, camellias, and bromelias.
But he also foresaw a tedious day and evening, and he did not care to
have the keen blue eyes of his father's brother fixed on him at a
moment when he was sending telegrams in all directions and commanding
all kinds of novel diversions to amuse and receive the Princess
Napraxine.
'Have your travels tended to convince you that Europeans are wrong not
to let the tails of sheep fatten and appear at their tables?' said his
unbidden guest, coming out of the house as though they had parted the
previous night instead of twenty months before.
There was no figure better known in Paris than that of the Baron
Friederich Othmar, familiar to society all over Europe as Baron
Fritz; a tall and portly figure carried with the ease and vigour of
manhood, though age had whitened the hair, that was still abundant, on
the handsome head above. He never attempted to conceal his age: he
despised all _maquillage_, as all healthy and all clever men do; and
if his skin was as fair and his hands were as white and soft as a
duchess's, it was because nature had made them so, and a life
temperate in indulgence though entirely unscrupulous in morals had
preserved his health and his strength unimpaired save by occasional
twinges of the gout. With old Gaulois blood in him, Friederich Othmar
was a thorough Parisian in habit, taste, and manner; but he was a true
Slav in suppleness, sagacity, and profound secretiveness. Othmar
thought that there was not on the face of the earth another man with
such a hideous power of dissimulation as his uncle; whilst the elder
man, on the contrary, looked upon such dissimulation as the mere mark
which distinguishes the civilised being from the savage.
'Dissimulation lies at the root of all good manners,' he was wont to
say in moments of frankness. 'Your friend bores you infinitely; you
smile, and appear charmed! If you do not, you are a boor.
Dissimulation is the essence of Christianity; you are enjoined to turn
one cheek after another, and not to show that you smart. Dissimulation
is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities,
the world would be a bear-garden.'
On the Bourse 'Baron Fritz' was dreaded as the keenest-witted colossus
of finance in all Europe. His acumen was unerring; his mind was as
sensitive to the changes of the political atmosphere as an electric
wire to heat. He perceived long before anyone else the little cloud,
not so big as a man's hand, which was pregnant with storm whilst yet
the sky was clear; he heard long before anyone else the low tremor in
the bowels of the earth which prefaced the seismic convulsion, as yet
undreamed of by a sleeping world. Therefore, with supreme tact and
matchless instinct, he had made the House of Othmar the envy of all
its peers. 'What are statesmen without us?' said Friederich Othmar.
'They cannot move, they cannot strike, unless the financiers enable
them to do so; all their combinations crumble like a dropt bird's-nest
unless we are willing to sustain them. If Germany had had no money,
could she have crossed the Rhine? The finest army in the world is no
more than a child's set of metal soldiers if it be not _roulant sur
l'or_. The statesmen are thought to be the chief rulers and prime
motors of the fate of the world, but they can but act as we who are
behind them permit: they drag the coach; we drive it.'
'That I know,' answered Othmar. 'We have the most gigantic
responsibility united with the most utterly corrupt moral code. I
grant that we are, in a way, the Cæsars of the modern world, but we
are bestially selfish; we are hog-like in our repletion, as all Cæsars
become. No financier ever risked ruin for a noble impulse or for a
lost cause. If he did, he would seem mad to his guild, as Ulysses to
his companions.'
All the enjoyment and sense of power which Othmar contemptuously
rejected his uncle appreciated to the full; he was, in his own way, a
Wolsey, a Richelieu, a Bismarck. Nothing of much importance had been
done in Europe for the last forty years without Friederich Othmar
being beneath it, in more or less degree, for weal or woe. He had
those unerring instincts which amount in their own way to genius.
Endowed with one of those keen, logical, yet imaginative brains, which
are as necessary to the great financier as to the great statesman, he
had worked unweariedly all his life long for the sake and for the
glory of the house of Othmar; he was in no way of his nephew's
opinion; he considered that the world held nothing finer than the
fortunes which had been built up out of Marc Othmar's kreutzers till
it was solid as so many towers of bullion; he considered the position
of the capitalist who can refuse a king, sustain a nation, fructify
great enterprises, and constrain or restrain great wars, was not to be
exchanged with any other power under the sun. In finance he was
inexorable, unerring; full of the finest penetration, and the most
piercing acumen; stern as granite, piercing as steel; in private life
he was an amiable cynic, who cared for very little except the
reputation of his dinners and his collection of water-colours. Baron
Fritz was never really content out of his little hotel, which was as
cosy as a satin-lined bag, and where by stretching out a finger to
touch an ivory button he could put himself in communication with all
the centres of finance in Europe. Without moving from his velvet chair
or taking his foot from its gout-stool he could converse with his
brother capitalists at all quarters of the globe, and change the fate
of nations, and the surface of events in the course of a winter's
forenoon during a pause between two cigarettes. To be able to do so
seemed to him the very flower and perfection of life. It was to play
chess with the world for your board, and to say checkmate to living
and crowned kings.
Whenever he expatiated on that theme to his nephew, Othmar only
replied that he himself did not care for any games.
For the rest, his one great social amusement was whist; he could never
see why men forsook their clubs because hay was being mown and corn
reaped and grapes gathered. You bought forage, you ate bread--very
little of it--and you drank wine, but why, because those three things
were all in their embryo state every city in Europe should become
empty he had not patience to comprehend. No place was cooler,
shadier, quieter, than your club. The vast green silent country which
his nephew loved was to him an outer darkness; he detested _le
province_ with all the maliciousness against it of a born and bred
Parisian.
To see a breezy common on a six-inch square of David Cox, or a brook
purling amongst rushes by Bonnington, was to have as much of the
country as he cared to enjoy. The stones of Vienna, the asphalte of
Paris, were the only ground he cared to tread. He had educated his
cook into perfect excellence, and never travelled anywhere without him
and his battery of silver saucepans. 'Because you sleep in a strange
bed there is no reason why you should let yourself be poisoned by
strange dishes,' he invariably said.
On the whole he had led a happy and enviable life; he was a perfectly
selfish man, with one great unselfish loyalty set in the midst of his
egotism, like a vein of pure marble amongst a mass of sandstone. 'To
benefit the House Fritz would let himself be brayed in a mortar,' his
brother had often said of him; in private life, on the contrary, he
was entirely self-absorbed, as became a man who was one of the most
notable persons in Paris; he had never been known to lend a five-franc
piece, but he gave choice dinners three times a week, which cost
twenty napoleons for each guest.
Sometimes he thought with a pang of terror of what would become of the
House of Othmar when he himself should be no more. He was seventy
years old; he would be unable to live for ever; his arsenal of wires
contained no ivory button by which he could summon eternal life; he
had gout in his system, and he did not disguise from himself that any
day his cook, with the silver saucepans, his pretty aquarelles, his
gigantic operations, his intense love of life, might one and all be
powerless to keep him in his place, and then!--all the magnitude and
might of the House of Othmar would depend solely and entirely on one
capricious and unstable young man, who only cared for a Greek poet or
a German opera!
On these melancholy days when he remembered this, he voluntarily
deprived himself of his burgundy, and ate only of two dishes.
He was much attached to Othmar, but he was impatient of him. He was
annoyed by what he looked upon as his crotchets and caprices; he was
irritated by the unconcealed apathy and even scorn with which his
nephew regarded his own superb position in the world. The
dissatisfaction with which the origin of their House filled the head
of it, was to Baron Fritz almost incomprehensible and whimsical
squeamishness. If he revered anything in life, it was the tradition of
old Marc Othmar amassing his florins in the half-barbaric city of
Agram.
'For aught we know he was a Tchigan, a Romany,' his nephew had said to
him once; and he had replied angrily, 'And if he were a gipsy? Is
there blood more ancient? Is there a people freer? Is there an
intelligence more complex? What are the European races beside the
Oriental? But you know very well that he was a pure Croat,' he had
concluded, with intolerable impatience of such depreciation of the
founder of their greatness.
Although it had been the habit of his life to follow and study the
minds of men even in their more secret thoughts, he had no patience to
attempt to understand the caprices of his nephew's. It was, he
thought, that kind of ingratitude to fate which is almost an
insanity; the same sort of fractious wilfulness which made James of
Scotland love to wander disguised in his own towns, and sent Domitian
to a plot of cabbages.
To Baron Fritz the power and might of the House he belonged to had
ever been in the stead of any other religion, creed, or attachment; he
was not personally an ambitious or an avaricious man; he had effaced
himself for his brother's sake, as he still slaved for his brother's
son; the celebrity of the House of Othmar, their power, heavy as an
elephant's tread, subtle as an electric current, the magnitude of the
operations which they either undertook or impeded, the respect with
which Europe regarded them, the weight of their own smile or
frown,--all these things were the very breath of his life to him. He
had remained, and always willingly remained, a subordinate; he had
never resented the superiority of his elder brother in power and
position; all he had cared to do was to give his years to the service
and aggrandisement of his race; he would have been very astonished if
he had been told that it was in its way, after all, chiefly a form of
sentiment which actuated him.
Between himself and Othmar there was the affection of consanguinity,
but no sympathy whatever. To the elder man the younger seemed almost
blasphemously unworthy of his heritage: the generosities and the
scruples of such a _raffiné_ seemed to him the perverseness of a
child. Usually, Othmar willingly abandoned to him the guidance of
their great argosy, freighted with the gold of the world, but twice or
thrice since his majority he had interfered when he had considered a
loan immoral or an enterprise corrupt, and had made his veto, as head
of the house, obeyed forcibly. Those few times had been unpardonable
to the Baron who had not his eccentric and quixotic principles.
'Affairs are affairs,' he said. 'If you conduct them according to the
follies and phantasies of the Story of Arthur--adieu.'
'I would willingly say adieu--an eternal adieu,' had retorted Othmar.
'But you have told me repeatedly that I cannot withdraw my House from
business without causing ruin on the Bourses of Europe, and
dishonouring our name by annulling and repudiating our engagements.'
'Of course you cannot,' had said the Baron, to whom the mere idea
seemed like a preparation to blow up with dynamite all the mountains
of Europe and of Asia. 'Do you suppose you can efface such an
institution as our financial existence? You might as well say that a
sovereign, by dying, could will his country into non-existence.'
'Then as I cannot touch the engagements of the past, however much I
condemn them, I will at least keep pure the obligations of the
future,' Othmar had answered; and those transactions which his more
delicate sense of honour did not allow him to approve he refused to
permit to be undertaken.
Baron Fritz, who had the ordinary financier's conscience, that is, who
would have done nothing commercially dishonourable, but who cared not
a straw how iniquitous might be the results of an operation, so long
as it was legal, clever, and lucrative, was beyond measure irritated
by this occasional interference of one who was too fine a gentleman,
too indolent a dreamer, to bear any of the frets and burden of
habitual attention to their gigantic operations. But there was no help
for it; Otho Othmar was the head of the House, and, what was a
greater grief still to his uncle, the only living one of the name
besides himself. They, who could have given fortunes and position to a
score of younger branches, who could have had their sons and brothers
objects of power and worship in all the capitals of Europe, had been
so visited by death and destiny that of them all there only remained
the young man who was Othmar to all the world, and the old one who was
Baron Fritz to his intimate associates, and Baron Friederich to all
the Bourses.
'You should marry, Otho,' said the Baron to him now.
'I have no inclination to do so,' he answered, and thought of Nadine
Napraxine.
'Inclination!' exclaimed the other irritably. 'What has inclination to
do with it? Is inclination considered or waited for in the marriages
of princes? You are a prince in your own way. If you died to-morrow,
your race would be extinct.'
'That would not much matter,' said Othmar. 'We have never been
conspicuous for anything except for amassing gold, as a ship's keel
collects barnacles. I suppose I had better make a will. You shall have
everything for your lifetime, and then it shall all go to the French
Republic, which is the only national institution I know of that is
capable of muddling away two hundred milliards in a year, with nothing
whatever to show for it afterwards.'
Baron Fritz made a gesture of irritated contempt.
'You ought to have had legitimate heirs ten years ago. You do not
belong to yourself. You have no right to live and die without raising
up posterity.'
'I do not see the obligation,' said Othmar, 'and I do not care enough
about the name, which you think so very fine, to greatly grieve over
its probable extinction.'
Baron Fritz had heard this often, but he never heard it freshly
without an inward shudder, such as a religious man feels before a
blasphemy. Othmar, merely as a man, seemed to him a fanciful dreamer,
an unsatisfactory anomaly, an unphilosophic thinker, whose theories
were always playing the deuce with his interest, and whose sympathies
ran away with him like half-broken horses. But Othmar, as the chief
of his House, could do no wrong, and had to be obeyed, even if he
rushed on his own destruction.
'You should marry for sake of posterity,' he reiterated. 'You are so
happily and exceptionally situated that you can choose wherever you
please. No living woman would refuse you. You should seek physical
charms for sake of your offspring and high lineage also; the rest is a
mere matter of taste.'
'The rest is only a trifle! Only character, mind, and feeling--the
three things which determine happiness and influence life more than
anything else.'
Baron Fritz made a little gesture of indifference: 'I imagine anyone
_bien élevé_ would not err in any of these points. Happiness one
usually finds with the wives of others. Not that I would discourage
you if you be inclined----'
'I am not inclined,' said Othmar, brusquely. 'I only say that
character is never considered by men and women when they marry; yet it
is what makes or mars a life. When a marriage is announced, what is
discussed? The respective fortunes of those concerned, then their
good looks or their lack of them; perhaps someone adds that he is _bon
garçon_, or someone says _sa taille est jolie_, or, on the other hand,
they may say he is a fool, or she has ugly feet; but you never hear a
word as to their characters, their sympathies, or their principles. It
is why all marriages are at best but a compromise between two
ill-assorted dispositions.'
'Make yours well-assorted,' said Baron Fritz. 'If you attach so much
to character, let character be your study; myself, I have always
considered that marriage is a means of continuing a race, so that it
legally can continue to transmit property; I have never known why
people imported fine sentiments into a legal transaction. It is taking
a false view of a social duty to look for personal pleasure out of it;
indeed, if a man be in love with his wife he will probably communicate
his passion to her, which is undesirable, because it awakens her
senses, and ultimately leads to her taking a lover, or lovers, which
again introduces uncertainty into the legal enjoyment and transmission
of property.'
Othmar smiled: 'Really, Baron, you are the most profoundly immoral
man I ever met. You would always, too, subordinate humanity to
property. All human actions should, according to you, only tend to the
consolidation and concentration of fortune; now, there is no possible
theory of human action more demoralising.'
'That is a matter of opinion,' said the Baron. 'But unless your
forefathers had carried that theory into practice, you would now be
taming wild horses in Croatia, or probably you--Otho Othmar in your
entity as you are--would not exist at all, for certainly your father
would not have wedded with an English aristocrat.'
'It is a humiliating reflection,' said Othmar, 'that one's existence
depended on the accidental union of two persons; indeed, I decline to
believe it. I am convinced that the real _ego_, the impersonal entity
which has been called the soul for want of knowing what to call it,
must have had its own independent existence; the envelope it is
slipped into is the accident; let us think so at all events. It is
more consoling than your notion that the entire life of A. depended on
the chance of B. cohabiting with C.; and that if B. had wedded D.
instead, A. would never have existed at all, but another and totally
different being would have done so--say Z.'
The Baron shrugged his shoulders. Why, he wondered, why on earth
should a man care about a pre-existence, or a spiritual existence, at
all, who had everything that his heart could desire in his terrestrial
life? He could imagine that starving poets or hungry theologians
comforted themselves with those fancies, but Othmar!----
'You should have been a Montalembert or a Lamennais,' he answered,
which was a polite way of saying that he was an imbecile.
'Without being either the one or the other, one may carry into public
life the same sort of honour which even you think incumbent on one in
public life,' said Othmar.
'Not at all,' said his relative. 'The code for one has never been the
code for the other. A man in private life may not send another man to
be slain because it suits his purpose; a man in public life, that is,
as a war minister or as an officer commanding-in-chief may send ten
thousand, fifty thousand, men to certain slaughter. So has a
diplomatist every title to lie as much as he may need to do in the
public service, but he has no right to deceive his personal friend in
a private matter. This is not mere casuistry; it is common-sense.
Indeed, all effective casuistry is based on common-sense.'
'The most dangerous casuistry is so, no doubt,' said Othmar. 'Because
when it is so based it is irresistible in its appeal to egotism.'
'I do not know why you use the word dangerous,' replied the Baron.
'Nothing is so wholesome as to teach men to take care of their own
interests. If that lesson were universally understood, there would be
neither paupers or criminals.'
'We should have a world of bankers,' said Othmar. 'With all deference
to you, even that would not be a Millennium.'
The Baron assented with good humour that it would certainly not be
one, since there would be no investments of any kind possible.
The day was tedious to Othmar. He had to examine many projects, and
append his signature to many documents. He had not disappeared into
Central Asia for eighteen months without having brought upon himself
the penalty of many arrears of affairs. His assent was merely _pro
formâ_, but the formula was necessary.
'He is in love still with Madame Napraxine,' thought his uncle,
finding his attention hard to fix. He was not sorry for that. At
Othmar's age he was sure to be in love with someone, and the more he
was in love the less likely was he to meddle with the transactions of
the House.
The Baron could be excessively amusing, and was so this day of his
arrival at S. Pharamond; but Othmar would gladly have been free of his
presence. He knew that the old man would see at a glance, if he and
Nadine Napraxine met before him, that time had not cured him of
passion; and the malice and the contempt of his uncle were both
disagreeable to him. Moreover, Othmar had been too perpetually agreed
with all his life to be pleased by the constant enunciation of
opinions and sentiments the reverse of his own. There was that in the
tranquil cynicism of Baron Friederich which left him with a sense of
moral nausea. Men, it is true, were not worth much; but he could
never get accustomed to the calm manner in which his uncle was
habitually ready to sacrifice all their interests--their bodies, too,
had there been any question of them--to what he considered
advantageous to himself and to his house in public life and finance.
He did not care for the new Russian loan, for the new Turkish loan,
for the great naval dockyards to be made by Germany on the Baltic, for
the railway that was to be driven along the ancient bed of the Oxus,
nor for the necessities of the empire of Brazil, nor for the
development of Canadian forests. It did not interest him that such and
such a sovereign would be a cripple without his help, or such and such
a country as virtually in pawn to him as though it had been a pledged
estate; that the assistance of his gold could enable a Ministry to
keep its tenure of office, or the refusal of it could precipitate a
State into revolution; to Baron Fritz it was like holding the reins of
the universe, but to Othmar himself it was excessively dull work. The
heir of four generations of money-lenders, he was absolutely
indifferent to the immense power which lay in the stroke of his pen;
the genius of finance was inherited by him, though dormant in him;
even his uncle did justice to the accuracy of his vision, to the
certainty of his instinct; but it was genius unused; he had no taste
to employ its capacities. Europe was as indifferent to him as a mound
of clay.
'We only do mischief, unmitigated mischief,' he asserted very often.
'Look at the Canal of Suez; it has only bred wars and pretexts for
wars, and will probably embroil England and France for the next
century,--until indeed India shall have become Russian, or the African
negro have avenged Abd-el-Kadir. Then again take the Panama project:
it will set Great Britain and the United States at each other's
throats like two bull-dogs.'
'You are enough to make your father rise from his grave,' said Baron
Fritz.
'It is only aristocrats who do that,' returned Othmar. 'The financier
sleeps sound on the remembrance of his own virtues--and loans.'
The memory of his father was bitter to him; he could not forget the
injury done to him in his earliest youth by subjecting him to the
charms and the corruptions of Sara Vernon.
'You must marry, and then you will see things differently,' his uncle
insisted, reverting to the simplicity of reiteration.
What a cruel thing was destiny! Thousands of men who had not a crust
of bread begat legitimate offsprings in the most reckless and profuse
manner; and the one man for whom lawful heirs were an absolute
necessity and duty obstinately neglected his obligations to family and
to the world.
It was possible, even probable, that the last of the Othmars would
remain the last of his race.
'Marry for me,' said Othmar. 'I will give all we possess to any
cousins you may give me, and keep only enough myself to live peaceably
in Arabia Felix. I have always wished to live there; the climate is
divine; and, after all, there is nothing that is of so much
consequence as climate.'
'You will always jest!'
'Most people say I am too serious. I am not jesting at all. We have
all a sort of superstition that we must live in Europe, but it is
only a superstition. There is a great deal finer weather elsewhere,
and without fine weather life is intolerable.'
'Have you never seen a woman you would marry?' asked Baron Fritz.
'Perhaps I have,' said Othmar, who never lied. 'But never one I could
marry.'
'Ah!--someone else's wife! That is just like you. If she were not
unattainable she would have no more attraction than anyone else. You
are so whimsical.'
'I hope not. I dislike whimsical people. They are always asking for
the windows to be shut, or imagining that there is a drainpipe open.
Oh, some day I may marry. I do not pledge my future. But I have no
inclination to marriage, and you will confess that you preach what you
do not practise.'
'I am seventy-one and you are thirty-two,' said Baron Fritz; 'I should
have married fifty years ago if I had been as you are, the head of the
House.'
'Curse the House!' said Othmar, though he was a man who never used any
oaths, great or small. But it seemed to him that the House of Othmar
was for ever on his shoulders like Sindbad's burden; that he could do
nothing freely as other men did; that go where he would he could never
wholly escape from the mephitic acid which adulation and importunity
exhale, and could never gain that simplicity of existence which,
precisely because it was denied to him, seemed to him the chief good
on earth.
'You speak as if the Othmars had been Plantagenets or Comneni!' he
continued. 'It is not quite two centuries ago that the world did not
even know that a Croat horse-dealer bore that name! The last time I
was at Agram, I looked into the archives of the city; nobody ever did
so; they were crabbed and hard to decipher; but I passed a day over
them when it was raining and blowing so hard that there was not a soul
abroad in the streets except the sentries. In the municipal documents
for the year 1730 I found an account of a famine which had been the
result of floods such as we have seen in our own day, for science,
after all, makes little way against natural catastrophes. It was
during this famine, when every grain of wheat was worth treble its
weight in gold, that your hero Marc Othmar made his first great
_coup_. He had amassed money before, but this was the grand
conception which first largely enriched him. He had bought enormously
in corn, foreseeing a wet season and bad harvests. He had more than he
had hoped for--he had the whole country under water. He had almost a
monopoly of grain. In those days government aid could not come by
steam, and besides, Croatia had just then no government. In these
records it is stated that upwards of forty-five thousand persons,
chiefly women and children, died of starvation; and all the while they
were dying Marc Othmar shut up his grain and only sold it sack by
sack, at an average rate of a death a bushel. You find that admirable;
I do not. I confess, ever since I put these facts together out of the
fragments of public history, it has seemed to me as if there were an
earthy smell about all our money; you know the lungs of people who die
starved always do smell like decaying mould. It is pure fancy--I am
quite aware of that. But even, putting fancy out of the question, I do
not see anything heroic about the figure of our founder. He is not
Hugh Lupus or Godfrey de Bouillon.'
Baron Fritz's patience had scarcely endured the strain upon it.
'I never heard the story. I believe you have invented it,' he said
irritably. 'If it be true, we have no explanation, so we cannot form a
correct judgment. At the most, accepting it as you relate it, no more
was done then by Marc Othmar than every farmer or peasant proprietor
in Europe and America does whenever he gets a chance. Not so much as
was done by Ferdinand de Lesseps when he sacrificed the fellahs to
make his Egyptian Canal. You cannot conduct any trade on abstract
principles or æsthetic moralities. You must buy cheap and sell dear,
or commerce falls to the ground, and the whole superstructure of
society falls with it. As the lawyer cannot refuse to conduct a case
because he disapproves of the morality of it, so a financier cannot
let pass a favourable operation because he may not approve entirely of
its scope; all he has to examine are its wisdom and utility. When once
you enter the region of motives and of principles, all is confusion.
No two men have the same views as to what is right; you must proceed
on broader lines than those of fanciful ethics. For instance, nothing
is more clearly immoral than the marriage of two diseased persons, but
the priest or the mayor who should refuse to perform the ceremonies
demanded of him because he conceived that the bodily health of the
people came before him was unsatisfactory would be clearly overpassing
the boundaries of his functions, which are limited to the
consideration of simply legal obstacles. So, a man of business who
once concerns himself with the vague moralities of his speculations is
lost; all he has to occupy himself with is their solvency, their
legality, and their probabilities of success or failure. Marc Othmar,
no doubt, regarded his investments in corn in that purely practical
light.'
'For a very clever man as you are,' returned Othmar, 'you are
curiously unconscious of what a satire your theories are on all that
you most admire. I am as entirely convinced as you can be that Marc
Othmar never gave a thought to the twenty-five thousand people who
starved to death while his corn was shut up in granaries and barges;
all the difference between us is, that you think this singleness of
eye for his own interest was heroic, and I think it was not so,--that
it was even as near true hellish wickedness as humanity can go.'
'There is neither wickedness nor virtue in questions of finance,' said
Baron Friederich, with distress at his nephew's obtuseness.
'There is certainly no virtue,' said Othmar.
'Neither wickedness nor virtue,' repeated the Baron. 'They are pure
abstractions, like political economy. To talk of the immorality of a
speculation is like talking of the vices of a rock-crystal. There is
only one sin in a financial operation; it sins if it be unsound.'
'Financial morality,' then said Othmar, 'has at least this advantage
over social morality, that it is very much simplified!'
'It is simple as your stable's doctrines,' replied the Baron. 'If a
horse be sound, he is a good horse; if he be not sound, he is a screw;
nothing can be simpler. And the moment that a man begins to confuse
himself with asking any more complex questions than this one, "Is it
sound?"--whether he engage in a great operation of finance, or whether
he be only buying a roadster, he will be inevitably bewildered with
his own multiform requirements and will fall into the hands of mere
persuasive sharpers.'
'I can buy a horse,' said Othmar, 'but I will leave finance to you.'
'Not always,' said Baron Fritz, grimly, with vivid recollections of
more than one occasion on which his nephew had interfered with a
peremptory veto to prevent some contemplated operation of which the
morality was more doubtful than the expediency. The occasions had been
rare indeed; but they had left an ineffaceable soreness on the mind of
the elder man; nay, he would scarcely have forgiven them had it not
been that his devotion to Otho as to the head of the House had
something of the irrational and patient loyalty which the Russian
nation renders blindly to its unseen Tzar.
As for Othmar himself, he was too impatient of his uncle's laxity of
principle and conscience to do full justice to the fine qualities
which accompanied these.
Those huge stone palaces whose portals bore the magic name of Othmar
were sacred to Baron Fritz as his temples to a Greek. His nephew never
passed through the great doors of any one of them without a sense of
impatience, of distaste, without a remembrance of the twenty-five
thousand people who had died of hunger in Croatia whilst Marc Othmar
was building up his piles of ducats and florins. The very homage with
which he was himself met within their walls irritated him. He thought
of all the debasing worship the earth has seen the worship of riches
was the most corrupt. 'If I were a leper they would kiss my ulcers so
long as my hand could sign a cheque,' he thought. After all, when Marc
Othmar had used up human lives in the furnace of his speculations he
had used up material which was but of little worth.
Yet despite the disdain which human nature cannot do otherwise than
awaken in those who are the objects of its adulation if they keep
their senses clear amidst the incense fumes, his heart was empty.
'You have people here to-night?' asked the Baron, a little later, his
vigilant eyes perceiving the preparations which were being made in the
little theatre attached to the château.
'To-morrow night,' answered Othmar. 'A small dinner; I hope you will
remain for it. And as Talazac, Sembrich, and other good singers are
at Nice _disponibles_, we shall have some music afterwards and a few
people; for that you will not care.'
'The Napraxines are here?' enquired his uncle, with a little smile.
Othmar was annoyed to feel that he changed colour despite himself, as
he answered in the affirmative.
'Have you seen her?' said Friederich Othmar, carelessly. 'How do you
find her? _Maladive_ as usual?'
'There is no woman living less _maladive_,' said Othmar, with some
irritation. 'She is glad to make the care of her health a pretext when
she is disinclined for the world; that is all.'
'Ah, indeed?' said the elder man. 'All great rulers are allowed to be
ill at their own convenience. Will she be ill or well to-morrow
night?'
'Time will show,' replied Othmar, in a tone which closed the subject.