CHAPTER X
Dr Bonito sat isolated at a little table in the self-same Café where he and Louis-Marie had once before consorted. The table stood well in the middle of the room, and under an uncompromising glare of candles. Thus, and in public, your wise plotter will station himself for security. It is a mistake to suppose that, because his plans are obscure, he will seek obscure corners for developing them. Panels have ears; and even a tree, however solitary on a plain, may be hollow. Dr Bonito sat, for all his stale and fusty exterior was worth, in the light.
Judged by it, he seemed, indeed, too spare a vessel to contain much worth discussion. He was like one of those little sticks of grassini, all crust. Each of the tiny sips he took from a tiny glass of vermouth at his side suggested the threading of a needle. There was no question of breadth or openness in him anywhere. Shrewd, wintry, caustic, he was just as cold, as sharp and as bowelless as a needle—a thing all point and eye.
The latter, visionless as it appeared, never lost account of the minutes ticking themselves away on a dingy clock on the wall. They were Destiny’s forerunners to the doctor, few or many; but he had too much wit to question the delays of Destiny. She had to travel by roundabout roads very often.
And she was pretty punctual on the present occasion, arriving in the person of a small, child-faced gentleman, so pacific in expression, that the cloak and brigand’s “slouch” he wore were nothing less than an outrage on credulity. He came up to the isolated table, and claimed its tenant in a voice so little and soft that at a yard distant it might have passed for a purr:—
“Greeting to thee, Spartacus, Provincial of Allobrox!”
Bonito’s acknowledgment was in like tone, but surly and between his teeth—half purr, half spit:—
“Greeting, Maître-d’Hôtel-in-Ordinary to King Priam—or, greeting, Caius Sempronius Gracchus, illuminatus minor!—whichever you like best to be called by.”
“Can you doubt, master?”
“I give myself no concern about it. Sit down, schoolboy.”
The little man obeyed, meek and deferential. Bonito cast a supercilious look at him.
“You grow sleek on plenty, Maître d’Hôtel. Beware! Do you not see the walls of Cosmopolis rising inch by inch to the clouds? We shall put on the roof in a little, and hang our flag from it. How about your office then? There will be no fat sinecures there for such as you.”
“Master, I desire no greater privilege, now or ever, than that of following your footsteps.”
“A pampered pug; a greasy, royal lick-platter. Look at me—Spartacus, Provincial of Allobrox—to thee, as Jupiter to a call-boy! My footsteps, quotha! Art thou not Apicious, pug?”
“No, indeed. My gluttony is all for knowledge.”
“Wouldst be content to dine with me day by day on the liberal air?”
“Ay, assuredly, if I could come by it to thy greatness of vision.”
“Wise Sempronius! How, then, am I great to him?”
“How but in all that he lacks—wisdom, precognition—great in everything.”
“Save in my midriff—as I were a King, great in all possessions but that of a Kingdom.”
“The universe is your scroll: the water is your mirror: the wind is your subject.”
“Yes, I am full of that subject.”
“Your mind can traverse empty space.”
“And does every day, I assure you, thinking on my stomach.”
“To me—little catechumen of our order—you figure for Omnipotence.”
“Alack! and I cannot command a meal. Set all this wisdom against one smoking dish, the scrolls of heaven against a bill of fare, and observe my choice. Beef and ale are the Fates we gods are subject to. You fly too high for us. Why, look you, little man, I am so empty sometimes I could think of insulting a swashbuckler, only that he might force me to swallow my own words.”
“Master, if I might—why will you never let me—?”
“What! Omnipotence stoop to be treated by its scullion!”
“The Pope takes Peter’s pence.”
“The Pope?—swine of Epicurus! No more, Sempronius. At least I’ve learned to walk on air—by so much nearer godhead—go great distances on it too—from Epopt to Regent, from Regent to Magus, from Magus to Areopagite. Nay—let me whisper it—in moments of thrilling venture, even into the heart of the Greater Mysteries, where, supreme and invisible, I take my throne as lord.”
“What! of us all—General of the Illuminati?”
The little man whispered it awestruck, then twittered into ecstasy.
“And why not, great Spartacus, mage and mastermind? What should keep you from even that stupendous goal?”
“Why, indeed, child, I know of no worse obstacle than my poverty. Nor is that to question the pure altruism of our Creed. But promotion to great offices must necessarily depend on one’s material capacity to support them. Reforms, whether to practical republics or moral communisms, require financing; and the long purse will naturally grudge the first credit for that to the short one. To be supreme lord of self-sacrifice, one must be able to exhibit supremely one’s title to the distinction. If that were to be gained by no more than making nobly free with other people’s money, I should have ten thousand rivals to dispute my right to the pre-eminence. And justly. It’s reason, I say, and I don’t complain. Still, the time may come—”
“It must, master; it shall.”
Bonito pondered, with some indulgent condescension, the other’s mild, fanatic face. The creature was but a “minerval”—an Illuminatus, that is to say, having his foot on the lowest rung of that ladder on which he himself stood relatively exalted. But it is pleasant to be apotheosised, even by an insignificant groundling; and the pleasure, though to a philosopher, may lose nothing from the fact of that groundling’s social superiority. For, indeed, if Caius Sempronius Gracchus was not the rose, he could say, with Benjamin Constant, he lived near it. He was a house-steward in the royal palace, in fact, and, as such, a useful humble auxiliary to these forces of anti-monarchical transcendentalism, whose policy it was to titillate the ears of their neophytes with a jargon of classical pseudonyms, and, by endowing mediocrity with resounding titles, to stimulate it to a fervid emulation of its prototypes. Caius Sempronius Gracchus, an enthusiastic, well-meaning little rantipole, could conceive for himself no more flattering destiny than to be some time Tribune under this omniscient Praetor in the coming Cosmopolis. He lived for ever, for all his little albuminous brain was worth, in that cloudy castle. And Bonito found him useful.
This strange man, indeed—who let himself be supposed of the Rosicrucians, a discredited sect, merely to cover his connection with the later and much more formidable Society of the Illuminati—desired wealth only as a means to his personal advancement in his own mysterious Order. All his plans were directed to that end and to none other. Money, for its own sake, he despised; but money alone could direct his line of curvature towards the heart, the holy of holies, of that great centrifugal force, which, under the name of Illuminati, or the Enlightened, was destined—in its own conception, at least—to revolutionise the political systems of the world.
And what was that heart? And why did its attainment figure so covetable to this close-locked, thin-blooded misanthrope? It represented to him, one must suppose, an ideal of power to which no existing autocracy could afford a parallel—a power to be likened only to the sun of one of those starry systems which his brain had warped itself in considering—a power, the focus of countless satellites humming harmonious worship about it in revolving belts of light—a power, in short, which was vested, solely and indivisibly, so far as mundane affairs were concerned, in the person of the General of all the Illuminati.
Well, as to this General, this veiled prophet, “old nominis umbra,” mystic, unapproachable. A plain word in season, as to him and his system, must suffice for an irreverent generation. He was a stupendous mystery to his creatures; and was designed to be. Like an unspeakable spider, he commanded, from their middle point of contact, the radiations, with all their concentric rings, of a vast web of political intrigue, every touch on which was communicated to, and answered by, him automatically. He was elected, in the first instance, from amongst themselves, by a council of twelve, called the Areopagites. These were the virtually absolute, analogous to the Roman Decemviri. Thence, in successive gradation, extended the inferior orders: the national directors, each, also, entitled to his council of twelve; the provincials, or magistrates of provinces, having their courts of regents; and the deans of the Academies of priests, or epopts, who were seers and star-gazers to a man. Beyond these, the Mysteries diffused themselves by way of the Chevalier ecossais, or first initiate, to the noviciates of illuminatus dirigens, illuminatus major and illuminatus minor, until they touched limit in the simple proselyte or freshman, of whom is a boundless credulity in the forces of secrecy.
That was exacted of him, as were also an unquestioning obedience and inviolable devotion to the mandates of his order—blind faith, in fact. He took an absurd name, foreswore his will, and mastered the calendar of the brotherhood—if he was wise enough. Great folly, to be sure, but folly is wisdom’s catspaw. The gods know the value of gilding a fool’s eyes. These Asphandars and Pharavardins, these pseudonyms and Allobroxes (which last, by the way, meant the Province of Faissigny), were only so much harlequin tinsel irradiating the body of a stern purpose. Behind all the glittering foppery was existent a very resolute and far-reaching design—one no less than the universal decentralisation of governments, and the qualification of the world-citizen. It was no small ambition, perhaps, that of aspiring to the generalship of the Illuminati.
And, if Fortune had fooled Dr Bonito by a quibble, money still remained to him the sovereign test of truth. The stars had read him his destiny, for all that that earthly goddess, being earthy, had delighted to falsify their calculations. It was her way. It was his to trust a higher ruling, and to have faith in its verification by the way the stars had pointed. Money, money! by whatever means he must obtain it. His present interview was only a step in that direction.
“Well, well,” he said, “the future’s in the womb of Destiny. Enough, Sempronius—say no more; but deliver your report. We treat of Paris and of Helen in the Court of Priam.”
The other looked cautiously about him before he answered,—
“She’ll not have Paris, master: she has refused him.”
“What!”
“Yes, yes—the King despite; and out of favour, by the token—she and her father—and retired to her own villa in the Via della Zecca, while Paris has taken his outraged heart to Allobrox, there to vent its dudgeon in our suppression.”
“We’ll see to that. A fine Prefect! Worthy of such a Priam! But, for the other—she has not refused him, I say.”
“She has, indeed.”
“Yet he proposed for her?”
“That’s certain.”
“And enough for me. Acute Sempronius, thou little wise and worming man! We’ll have thee on the Council some day. Now, go; I have my cue. Refused him, has she? Well, he’ll be gone indefinitely—and time to act. Vale, Sempronius!”