The Princess has a hill almost entirely to herself. She lives there in
a castle almost entirely made of stone, with turrets and battlements.
Her affectionate subjects cluster about her feet in domiciles walled
with mud and principally roofed with kerosene tins, but they cheerfully
acknowledge this to be right and proper, and all they can pay for. One
of the many advantages of being a princess is that you never have to
put down anything for house-rent; there is always a castle waiting for
you and a tax-payer happy to paper it. The world will not allow that it
is responsible to a beggar for a crust; but it is delighted to admit
that it owes every princess a castle. It is a curious world; but it is
quite right, for princesses are to be encouraged and beggars aren’t.
The Princess is married to the Roy-Regent, who puts his initial upon
Resolutions and writes every week to the Secretary of State; but it is
the Princess who is generally “at home,” and certainly the Princess who
matters. The Roy-Regent may induce his Government to make Resolutions;
the Princess could persuade it, I am sure, to break them--if she wanted
to. Unfortunately we are not permitted to see that comedy, which would
be adorable. She does not want to. She is not what you would call a
political princess; I have no doubt she has too much else to do. To
begin with, only to begin with, she has to go on being beautiful and
kind and unruffled; she has to keep the laughter in her eyes and the
gentleness in her heart; she has to be witty without being cynical, and
initiated without being hard. She has to see through all our little
dodges to win her favour and not entirely despise us, and to accept our
rather dull and very daily homage without getting sick and tired of us.
To say nothing of the Roy-Regent and the babies who have some claims,
I suppose, though we are apt to talk about the Princess as if she were
here solely to hold her Majesty’s vice-Drawing-rooms and live up to a
public ideal. All the virtues, in short, which the rest of us put on of
a Sunday, the Princess must wear every day; and that is why it is so
difficult and often so tiresome to be a real princess.
Fortunately the Simla Princess is not expected to hold her commission
for life. Her Majesty knew, I suppose, from her own royal experience,
how it got on the nerves, and realized that if she required anything
like that it would be impossible to get the right kind of people. So
at the end of every four or five years the Roy-Regent goes home to
his ordinary place in the Red Book burdened for life with a frontier
policy, but never again compelled to drive out in the evenings attended
by four cantering Sikhs, each Sikh much larger than himself and shaking
a lance. He may go on to greater things, or he may simply return to the
family estates; but in any case the Princess can put her crown away in
a drawer and do things, if she likes, in the kitchen, which must be a
great relief. Of course she can never quite forget that she has been
a princess, in commission, once. The thought must have an ennobling
effect ever after, and often interpose, as it were, between the word
and the blow in domestic differences. For this reason alone, many of us
would gladly undertake to find the necessary fortitude for the task;
but it is not a thing you can get by merely applying for it.
To the state of the Princess belongs that quaint old-fashioned
demonstration, the curtsey. The Princess curtseys to the
Queen-Empress--how I should like to see her do it!--and we all curtsey
to the Princess. This alone would make Simla a school for manners, now
that you have to travel so far, unless you are by way of running in
and out of Windsor Castle, to find the charming form in ordinary use.
How admirable a point of personal contact lies in the curtsey--what
deference rendered, what dignity due! “You are a Princess,” it says,
“therefore I bend my knee. I am a Person, therefore I straighten it
again,” and many things more graceful, more agreeable, more impertinent
than that. Indeed, there is a very little that cannot be said in the
lines and the sweep of a curtsey. To think there was a time when
conversation was an art, and curtseying an accomplishment, is to hate
our day of monosyllables and short cuts, of sentiments condensed,
and opinions taken for granted. One wonders how we came to lose the
curtsey, and how much more went with it, how we could ever let it go,
to stand instead squarely on our two feet and nod our uncompromising
heads, and say what we have to say. I suppose it is one of the things
that are quite gone; we can never reaffect it, indeed our behaviour,
considered _as_ behaviour, is growing steadily worse. Already you may
be asked, by a person whom you have never seen before, whether you
prefer Ecclesiastics or Omar Khayyám, or how you would define the
ego, or what you think of Mr. Le Gallienne--matters which require
confidence, almost a curtain. We have lost the art of the gradual
approach; presently we shall hustle each other like kinetic atoms. A
kinetic atom, I understand, goes straight to the point.
We all love curtseying to the Princess therefore, partly because it is
a lost art, and partly because it is a way in which we can say, without
being fulsome or troublesome, how happy we are to see her. There is
only one circumstance under which it is not entirely a privilege. That
is when, dismounted, one meets her in one’s habit. Whether it is the
long boots or the short skirt, or the uncompromising cut, I cannot say,
but I always feel, performing a curtsey to the Princess in my habit,
that I am in a false position. Every true woman loves to stalk about in
her habit, and tap her heels with her riding crop; there is a shadow
of the privileges of the other sex about it which is alluring, and
which, as the costume is sanctioned, one can enjoy comfortably; but it
is not arranged for curtseying, and there ought to be a dispensation
permitting ladies wearing it to bow from the waist.
Then the Princess passes on, leaving you smiling. I have seen people
continue to smile in a lower key for twenty minutes after the Princess
has gone by, as water will go on reflecting a glow long after the
sunlight has left it. The effect is quite involuntary, and of course
it looks a little foolish, but it is agreeable to feel, and nobody,
positively nobody, can produce it but the Princess. Indeed the power to
produce it would be a capital test for princesses.
If I were in any way in a position to submit princesses to tests, I
should offer that of the single pea and the twenty feather beds with
confidence to ours. Which is a pride and a pleasure to be able to
say in these days, when ladies thus entitled are so apt to disguise
themselves in strong minds or blunt noses or irritating clothes. It
is delightful to be assured that, in spite of this tendency, the
Princess has not yet vanished, the Princess of the fairy tales, the
real Princess, from among us, that such a one is sitting at the moment
in her castle, not ten minutes’ walk from here, eating marmalade
with a golden spoon, or whatever she likes better than marmalade,
and bringing to life day after day that delight in living which you
must have, or there’s no use in being a princess. It is possible that
she may not put on her diadem every morning; there is no necessity
for that, since you could not imagine her without it; and if she
prefers reading her Browning to watching her gold-fish, it is not in
any way my affair. Indeed, although she occupies a public position,
there is no one who more readily accedes her right to a private life
than I, though, of course, with the rest of her subjects, I would
prefer that she had as little of it as possible. It is said that the
Roy-Regent, knowing what would be expected of her, was not content
until he had found the most beautiful and agreeable Princess there
was; and I can well believe that he sailed over seas and seas to
find her, though it is probably only a tradition that they met at
George Washington’s country seat where the Princess was looking for
trailing arbutus,--another lovely thing whose habitat is the banks of
the Potomac. And an improbable tradition, as George Washington never
encouraged princesses.
Last night there was an entertainment at the castle and among the
guests a chief of one of those smaller Indias that cluster about the
great one. He wore his own splendid trappings, and he was a handsome
fellow, well set up; and above his keen dark face, in front of the
turban, set round with big irregular pearls, was fastened a miniature
of the Queen-Empress who holds his fealty in her hand. To him the
Princess, all in filmy lace with her diadem flashing, spoke kindly.
They sat upon gold-backed chairs a little way apart, and as she leaned
to confer her smile and he to receive it, I longed to frame the picture
and make perpetual the dramatic moment, the exquisite odd chance.
“Surely,” thought I, “the world has never been so graciously bridged
before.” Talking of George Washington, if the good man could have seen
that, I think he might have melted toward princesses; I do not think,
from all we know of him, that he would have had the heart to turn
coldly away and disclaim responsibility for this one. I wish he could
have seen it; yes, and Martha too, though if anybody thought necessary
to make trouble and talk about sacred principles of democracy, it would
have been Martha. Martha, she would have been the one. Her great and
susceptible husband would have taken a philosophic pinch of snuff and
toasted posterity.
I see that I have already admitted it, I have slipped in the path of
virtuous resolution and lofty indifference; I have gone back, just for
a minute, into the world. The reason I have neglected every flower in
the garden this morning to write about the Princess is that I have
been dining with her. It is so difficult to be unmoved and firm when
you know the band will play and there will be silver soup-plates, to
say nothing of the Roy-Regent smiling and pleased to see you, and the
Roman punch in the middle of the menu. At home, one so seldom has Roman
punch in the middle of the menu. Besides, now that I think of it, it
was a “command” invitation, and I did not go for any of these reasons,
or even to see the Princess, but because I had to; a lofty compulsion
of State was upon me, and nobody would place her loyalty in question
on account of a possible draught. If there had been a draught and I
had taken cold I should have felt an added nobility to-day; somewhat
the virtue, I suppose, of the elderly statesman who contracts a fatal
influenza at a distinguished interment, and so creates a vicious circle
of funerals; but there was no draught.
The Princess lives in splendid isolation. If it were not for the
Roy-Regent and the babies, and the Commander-in-Chief and _his_ family,
she would die of loneliness. And of course the Bishop, though I can’t
understand in what way one would depend much upon a bishop, except to
ask a blessing when he came to dinner. Kind and human as the Princess
is she lives in another world, with an A.D.C. always going in front
to tell people to get up, “Their Excellencies are coming.” You cannot
ask after the Princess’s babies as you would ask after the babies
of a person like yourself; you must say, “How are Your Excellency’s
babies?” and this at once removes them far beyond the operation of
your affectionate criticism. When it is impossible even to take babies
for granted the difficulties of the situation may be imagined. The
situation is glorious but troubling, your ideas often will not flow
freely in it, and is there anything more dreadful at a supreme moment
than to have your ideas stick? You find yourself saying the same thing
you said the last time you had the honour, which is the most mortifying
thing that can happen in any conversation.
I often wonder whether the Princess does not look at our little mud
houses and wish sometimes that she could come in. The thought is a
reckless one but I do entertain it. If you take a kind and friendly
interest in people as the Princess does in us all, you cannot be
entirely satisfied merely to add them up as population and set them a
good example. Nor can it be very interesting to look at the little mud
houses and observe only that they have chimneys, and not to know how
the mantelpieces are done or whether there is a piano, or if anybody
else’s sweet-peas are earlier than yours. In my dreams I sometimes
invite the Princess to tea. An A.D.C. always comes behind her carrying
the diadem on a red silk cushion, but at my earnest prayer he is
made to stay outside on the verandah. We have the best china; and in
one dream the Princess broke a cup and we wept together. On another
occasion she gave me a recipe for pickled blackberries and told me of
a way--I always forget the way--of getting rid of frowns. There is
generally something to spoil a dream, and the thing that spoils this
one is the A.D.C., who will look in at the window. All the same we have
a lovely time, the Princess ignoring all her prerogatives, unless I say
something about the state of the country, when she instantly, royally,
changes the subject....