VULPIA
THE only chance of restraining and correcting these furious scenes of
debate, and preventing them from ending in complete annihilation of the
Jabberoons, was to turn the inhabitants of a neighbouring island loose
upon them. These were the Vulpians, exiles from the rest of the
archipelago for over-astuteness in diplomacy. They were hated by the
Jabberoons as the most deadly enemies they could encounter; for they
exploited their loquacious neighbours in the most heartless and
shameless way. For years they had been almost enraged at the simplicity
with which these orators fell into their snares. They would go over in
troops, and each fleece his man of all his goods, if not of his wife and
daughters, without making him feel anything but gratitude at his
friendship and patronage. Time after time these expeditions had gone
unsuspected. These wily flatterers would insinuate themselves into the
good-will of the Jabberoons and leave them naked, and yet with the sense
of having received unmeasured favours and advantages. They fooled their
victims to the top of their bent, applauding their feeblest gabble as
matchless eloquence and persuading them by their attitude of admiration
and their ambiguous phrases that they had only to go out into the world
to have it at their feet. They had but to listen in silence or with an
occasional cunning question or implication of reverence and enjoyment in
order to get the orators to accede to all their requests or desires.
The game was laughably simple and unworthy of the great powers of the
Vulpians. But, as years went on, a sense of being cheated of what they
had earned by hard and repulsive work grew in the minds of the
Jabberoons underneath the soothing flattery. They became uneasy and
timid at first, and afterwards furiously hostile to Vulpian approaches.
Though they were passionate for listeners and for flattering applause,
whether loud or silent, they rose in a body whenever they saw a Vulpian
expedition near their shores. Nothing so united them or so froze them
into taciturnity and action as the appearance of boats from the
neighbouring isle. Yet they were exploited and fleeced as much as they
had been willing to be before. A stranger would land on the opposite
side of Jabberoo, and rouse them into still greater fury against the
Vulpians; he would head them in their attack on the expedition. In the
enthusiasm of victory he would persuade them to provision their own
fleet and sail out to the conquest of the other islands of the
archipelago. As a preliminary they made first for Vulpia, which, they
were convinced, would fall an easy prey to their prowess. It ended in
their tumbling into the trap laid for them. Their fleet was piloted on
to shallows, where it had to be abandoned, and their enemies kindly
ferried them back to their homes. The supplies for the long voyage of
conquest were secured by the Vulpians; and their temporary leader
vanished, no one knew whither.
That was one of the Vulpian methods of warfare; but they had the
astuteness never to use any one too often; and, as the Jabberoons began
to feel dupe written broadly over their natures, their neighbours had to
exercise to the full their mania for diplomacy. Their schemes for
deceiving them were absurdly labyrinthine, till at last even the
simplest of the Jabberoons could entangle them in their own deceits.
They generally aimed so far ahead of their machinery that it was the
easiest thing in the world to cut the connection and bring the scheme to
naught; in fact, so far-seeing in their diplomacy did they become that
the mere development of events often destroyed the interest in their
aim.
Amongst themselves the Vulpians had long ago reached this point. They
were so astute and so elaborate and far-seeing in their schemes for
attaining even the most trivial object in life that they ceased to vex
themselves about the lives of each other. No one ever thought of finding
out the purpose of his neighbour’s moling and undermining. They grew
weary of the effort after so often discovering the paltry nothing that
lay at the end of the machinations. They took it as their own natural
habit of mind to follow out their aim by many a circumflexion and twist.
At last, if a Vulpian wished to cheat his fellows he adopted the
simplest and most direct way of getting at his object; and he had
reached it whilst they were fumbling in the dark and floundering in a
slough of conjecture and far-reaching guess. It came about that these
born diplomatists acquired in dealing with one another the direct and
simple methods of the most ingenuous people. The homœopathic cure of
lunacy and eccentricity adopted by the archipelago worked its usual
miracle. The caging of men of the same weakness or vice made them sick
of it and resort to its opposite. It was only against a people who were
off their guard that their old diplomacy became a passion in them again.
And Vulpia was one of the favourite hunting-grounds of the wags of the
archipelago. They delighted in sending this nation of cunning
diplomatists on a wrong scent or on a track that would lead them into a
ridiculous position or in pursuit of something they detested. There was
nothing in the world that so pleased the youths of the neighbouring
island of Witlingen.
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