The Kings of the East: A Romance of the Near Future — Reading Notes

MOVEMENT AND THE MAN.

It was a brilliant afternoon in late spring, and Vindobona was taking its pleasure joyously out of doors, as is its wont. The many parks and gardens of the city were crowded with holiday-makers in every variety of national costume and speaking the tongues of all the earth, and in the boulevards of the Ringstrasse a well-dressed throng made the pavements almost impassable. There was not a vacant seat to be found at the rows of tables outside each café, where strange and wonderful liquids were being consumed in vast quantities, but with a deliberation that implied the possession of unlimited leisure. No one seemed to have anything to do but to walk and talk, salute his acquaintances and criticise the rest of the world, pause for a while to refresh the inner man and then saunter on again, and this was indeed the case. The true citizen of Vindobona always has time for holiday-making, whatever other duties he may neglect, and those who make a study of his weaknesses calculate confidently upon this amiable peculiarity. This saint’s day afternoon, for instance, there were gathered, in a room on the second floor of one of the palatial mansions in the Opera Ring, four men, whose meeting had been facilitated by the absorption of the populace in its pleasures. One by one they had made their way to the appointed spot, the private office of the great financier Israel Goldberg, and here, where a business-like severity strove with a certain barbaric splendour in the appointments, they had refreshed themselves with fruit sherbets and perfumed Eastern tobacco before turning their attention to the matter upon which they had come together. Some signing of papers and a good deal of low-toned conversation followed, until at last the host leaned back in his chair and threw down his pen.

“That is well over,” he said, speaking in German. “The movement is on the verge of realisation; we only await the man.”

“Just so,” said the venerable Scythian Jew at his right hand; “we need our Moses.”

“But where is he to be found in this age of doubt and depression?” asked a sallow-faced young man, with large vague wandering eyes.

The remaining person at the table snorted fiercely. “This is the age of limited liability,” he said. “Our Moses will take the form of a syndicate.”

“With the excellent Texelius as managing director?” asked the Chevalier Goldberg, with a sympathetic smile. “I think not, my dear friend.”

“I rejoice to hear you say that, Israel,” said the old Rabbi, whose susceptibilities had been much ruffled by the irreverent remark of Dr Texelius.

“No,” said the Chevalier, “although we are business men and this is a business matter, we must return, I fear, to the old ways. Without the man to whom I hope to present you this afternoon, our movement would be like a ship without a captain. You, my good Texelius, bring us the help of science, in my young friend Rubenssohn we have the support of literature, and our venerable Rabbi Schaul assures us of the blessing of orthodoxy, while I myself supply the not unnecessary item of money. But we must, besides all these, have brains.”

Dr Texelius was understood to reply that no gathering which included himself could be considered deficient in that particular, whatever might be said of the rest of the company, but his host smiled with pitying gentleness.

“My good Texelius, we all admit that you are unapproachable in your own line. You have enabled all the half-educated people in Europe to gabble a parody of your philosophy with more than your own brutality of language, and have taught them new bad names to call their neighbours by. But when it is a matter of conducting diplomatic negotiations of the highest delicacy, something more is needed.”

“I see no need of diplomacy,” protested Dr Texelius. “We have the Grand Seignior’s promise, and we hold the money-bags. The Land is ours, and we have only to keep it, which is an affair of the sword, not of the tongue.”

“And surely,” said young Rubenssohn, “it is the Gentiles who will sue for our favour, not we for theirs?”

“Israel will become at once the exemplar and the monitress of the world,” said the Rabbi. “Her central position, separated from the nations and yet vitally connected with all of them, her theocratic government, and the purity of her family life, will make her not only the model state of the new century, but the natural arbitrator in international quarrels.”