'They are unfathomable,' smiled Holsten.
'Man,' said the American, with a manifest resolve to justify and
reinstate himself after the flickering contradictions of the
king, 'Man, I say, is only beginning to enter upon his heritage.'
'Tell us some of the things you believe we shall presently learn,
give us an idea of the things we may presently do,' said the king
to Holsten.
Holsten opened out the vistas…
'Science,' the king cried presently, 'is the new king of the
world.'
'OUR view,' said the president, 'is that sovereignty resides with
the people.'
'No!' said the king, 'the sovereign is a being more subtle than
that. And less arithmetical. Neither my family nor your
emancipated people. It is something that floats about us, and
above us, and through us. It is that common impersonal will and
sense of necessity of which Science is the best understood and
most typical aspect. It is the mind of the race. It is that
which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to its
demands…'
He paused and glanced down the table at Leblanc, and then
re-opened at his former antagonist.
'There is a disposition,' said the king, 'to regard this
gathering as if it were actually doing what it appears to be
doing, as if we ninety-odd men of our own free will and wisdom
were unifying the world. There is a temptation to consider
ourselves exceptionally fine fellows, and masterful men, and all
the rest of it. We are not. I doubt if we should average out as
anything abler than any other casually selected body of
ninety-odd men. We are no creators, we are consequences, we are
salvagers-or salvagees. The thing to-day is not ourselves but
the wind of conviction that has blown us hither…'
The American had to confess he could hardly agree with the king's
estimate of their average.
'Holster, perhaps, and one or two others, might lift us a
little,' the king conceded. 'But the rest of us?'
His eyes flitted once more towards Leblanc.
'Look at Leblanc,' he said. 'He's just a simple soul. There are
hundreds and thousands like him. I admit, a certain dexterity, a
certain lucidity, but there is not a country town in France where
there is not a Leblanc or so to be found about two o'clock in its
principal cafe. It's just that he isn't complicated or
Super-Mannish, or any of those things that has made all he has
done possible. But in happier times, don't you think, Wilhelm, he
would have remained just what his father was, a successful
epicier, very clean, very accurate, very honest. And on holidays
he would have gone out with Madame Leblanc and her knitting in a
punt with a jar of something gentle and have sat under a large
reasonable green-lined umbrella and fished very neatly and
successfully for gudgeon…'
The president and the Japanese prince in spectacles protested
together.
'If I do him an injustice,' said the king, 'it is only because I
want to elucidate my argument. I want to make it clear how small
are men and days, and how great is man in comparison…'
Section 4
So it was King Egbert talked at Brissago after they had
proclaimed the unity of the world. Every evening after that the
assembly dined together and talked at their ease and grew
accustomed to each other and sharpened each other's ideas, and
every day they worked together, and really for a time believed
that they were inventing a new government for the world. They
discussed a constitution. But there were matters needing
attention too urgently to wait for any constitution. They
attended to these incidentally. The constitution it was that
waited. It was presently found convenient to keep the
constitution waiting indefinitely as King Egbert had foreseen,
and meanwhile, with an increasing self-confidence, that council
went on governing…
On this first evening of all the council's gatherings, after King
Egbert had talked for a long time and drunken and praised very
abundantly the simple red wine of the country that Leblanc had
procured for them, he fathered about him a group of congenial
spirits and fell into a discourse upon simplicity, praising it
above all things and declaring that the ultimate aim of art,
religion, philosophy, and science alike was to simplify. He
instanced himself as a devotee to simplicity. And Leblanc he
instanced as a crowning instance of the splendour of this
quality. Upon that they all agreed.
When at last the company about the tables broke up, the king
found himself brimming over with a peculiar affection and
admiration for Leblanc, he made his way to him and drew him aside
and broached what he declared was a small matter. There was, he
said, a certain order in his gift that, unlike all other orders
and decorations in the world, had never been corrupted. It was
reserved for elderly men of supreme distinction, the acuteness of
whose gifts was already touched to mellowness, and it had
included the greatest names of every age so far as the advisers
of his family had been able to ascertain them. At present, the
king admitted, these matters of stars and badges were rather
obscured by more urgent affairs, for his own part he had never
set any value upon them at all, but a time might come when they
would be at least interesting, and in short he wished to confer
the Order of Merit upon Leblanc. His sole motive in doing so, he
added, was his strong desire to signalise his personal esteem.
He laid his hand upon the Frenchman's shoulder as he said these
things, with an almost brotherly affection. Leblanc received this
proposal with a modest confusion that greatly enhanced the king's