CHAPTER XXIIIVULPIA
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.