Strapped, pomaded, gloved, laced; with patulous beards, with their hair
parted at the backs of their heads; with their cork-screw curls pulled
back from their foreheads to give themselves tone on their medallions;
with helmets against one hip; twirling the musk-balls of their sabres
with their disengaged restless fingers, the hyperborean royalties were
admitted. And the great people received them, in due order: chief
mandarins in clump, the librarian of the palace (Conde de las Navas),
the Arbiter Elegantium, the Curator major of Symbols, the Examiner of
the High Schools, the Supernumerary priest of the Snow Cult, the
Administrator of Death, and the Chief Attendant Collector of
Death-duties.
Their Highnesses bowed and addressed the Tetrarch: "... felicitous wind
... day so excessively glorious ... wafted ... these isles ...
notwithstanding not also whereof ... basilica far exceeding ... Ind,
Ormus ... Miltonesco ... etc. ... to say nothing of the seven-stopped
barbary organ and the Tedium laudamus ... etc. ..."
(Lunch was brought in.)
Kallipagous artichokes, a light collation of tunny-fish, asparagus
served on pink reeds, eels pearl-gray and dove-gray, gamut and series of
compôtes and various wines (without alcohol).
Under impulsion of the Arranger of Inanities the pomaded princes next
began their inspection of the buildings. A pneumatic lift hove them
upward to the outer rooms of Salome's suite. The lift door clicked on
its gilt-brass double expansion-clamps; the procession advanced between
rows of wall-facing negresses whose naked shoulder-blades shone like a
bronze of oily opacity. They entered the hall of majolica, very yellow
with thick blue incrustations, glazed images, with flushed and
protuberant faces; in the third atrium they came upon a basin of joined
ivory, a white bath-sponge, rather large, a pair of very pink slippers.
The next room was littered with books bound in white vellum and pink
satin; the next with mathematical instruments, hydrostats, sextants,
astrolabial discs, the model of a gasolene motor, a nickel-plated donkey
engine.... They proceeded up metal stairs to the balcony, from which a
rustling and swaying and melodiously enmousselined figure,
jonquil-colored and delicate, preceded or rather predescended them by
dumb-waiter, a route which they were not ready to follow. The machine
worked for five floors: usage private and not ceremonial.
The pomaded princes stood to attention, bowed with deference and with
gallantry. The Arranger ignored the whole incident, ascended the next
flight of stairs and began on the telescope:
"Grand equatorial, 22 yards inner tube length, revocable cupola
(frescoes in water-tight paint) weight 200,089 kilos, circulating on
fourteen steel castors in a groove of chloride of magnesium, 2 minutes
for complete revolution. The princess can turn it herself."
The princes allowed their attention to wander, they noted their ship
beneath in the harbor, and calculated the drop, they then compared
themselves with the brocaded and depilated denizens of the escort, after
which they felt safer. They were led passively into the Small Hall of
Perfumes, presented with protochlorine of mercury, bismuth regenerators,
cantharides, lustral waters guaranteed free from hydrated lead. Were
conducted thence to the hanging garden, where the form hermetically
enmousselined, the jonquil-colored gauze with the pea-sized dark spots
on it, disappeared from the opposite slope. Molossian hounds yapping and
romping about her.
The trees lifted their skinned-salmon trunks, the heavy blackness was
broken with a steely, metallic sunshine. A sea wind purred through the
elongated forest like an express-train in a tunnel. Polychrome statues
obtruded themselves from odd corners. An elephant swayed absentmindedly,
the zoo was loose all over the place. The keeper of the aquarium
moralized for an hour upon the calm life of his fishes. From beneath the
dark tanks the hareem sent up a decomposed odor, and a melancholy slave
chantey saturated the corridors, a low droning osmosis. They advanced to
the cemetery, wanting all the time to see Jao.
This exhibit came at last in its turn. They were let down in a
sling-rope through a musty nitrated grill, observing in this descent the
ill-starred European in his bath-robe, his nose in a great fatras of
papers over-scrawled with illegible pot-hooks.
He rose at their hefty salutation; readjusted his spectacles, blinked;
and then it came over him: These damn pustulent princes! Here! and at
last! Memory overwhelmed him. How many, on how many rotten December and
November evenings had he stopped, had he not stopped in the drizzle, in
the front line of workmen, his nose crushed against a policeman, and
craning his scraggy neck to see _them_ getting out of their state
barouche, going up the interminable front stairway to the big-windowed
rococo palace; he muttering that the "Times" were at hand.
And now the revolution was accomplished. The proletariat had deputed
them. They were here to howk him out of quod; a magnificent action, a
grace of royal humility, performed at the will of the people, the new
era had come into being. He saluted them automatically, searching for
some phrase European, historic, fraternal, of course, but still noble.
The Royal Nephew, an oldish military man with a bald-spot, ubiquitarian
humorist, joking with every one in season and out (like Napoleon),
hating all doctrinaires (like Napoleon), was however the first to break
silence: "Huk, heh, old sour bean, bastard of Jean Jacques Rousseau, is
_this_ where you've come to be hanged? Eh? l'm damned if it ain't a good
thing."
The unfortunate publicist stiffened.
"Idealogue!" said the Nephew.
The general strike had been unsuccessful. Jao bent with emotion. Tears
showed in his watery eyes, slid down his worn cheek, trickled into his
scraggy beard. There was then a sudden change in his attitude. He began
to murmur caresses in the gentlest of European diminutives.
They started. There was a tinkle of keys, and through a small opposite
doorway they discerned the last flash of the mousseline, the pale,
jonquil-colored, blackspotted.
The Nephew readjusted his collar. A subdued cortège reascended.