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.”