We were more comfortable in the royal apartments than might have been
expected. Mr. Hemster had brought his own cook with him, together with
the Japanese boy to wait on us, and he had also taken the precaution
to bring a week’s provisions, so that in spite of the primitive
arrangements of the kitchen placed at our disposal we fared very much
as usual so far as the cuisine was concerned. The officials made no
complaint at this reflection on their hospitality; in fact, they
rather relished our foresight, because, as Hun Woe admitted with great
simplicity, it enabled them to charge our keep to the royal exchequer
and yet incur no expense in providing for us. A system which admits of
collection and no disbursements is heavenly to a Corean official. We
were probably at the outset the most popular party that had ever lodged
in the royal Palace.
Our first dilemma arose, not through any interference from the officers
of the Court, but because of certain objections which Miss Gertrude
Hemster herself promulgated. The Prime Minister did us great honour in
offering to coach us personally regarding the etiquette that surrounds
the approach to the throne. It seemed that both Emperor and Empress
were to receive us in state, and the moment we came in sight of
their Majesties we were to turn our faces aside, as if dazzled by the
magnificence before us and the glory conferred upon us march a dozen
steps to the left, turn again, march a dozen steps to the right, bowing
extremely low at each evolution, advancing, with great caution and
humility, never more than two steps forward at a time, approaching the
throne by a series of crab-like movements and coming very gradually
forward, zigzag fashion, until we stood with heads humbly inclined
before the two potentates. My translation of all this caused great
hilarity on the part of Miss Hemster, and she quite shocked the genial
Prime Minister by giving way to peal after peal of laughter. After all,
he was a dignified man and did not regard the ceremony as a joke, which
appeared to be the way it presented itself to the young lady.
“I’m not going through any of that nonsense,” she exclaimed. “Does he
think I intend to make a Wild West show of myself? If he does, he’s
mistaken. I’ll proceed right up to the Emperor and shake hands with
him, and if he doesn’t like it he can lump it. You translate that to
him, Mr. Tremorne.”
I intimated respectfully to the young woman that Court etiquette
was Court etiquette, and that everything would be much more simple
if we fell in with the ways of the country. This marching and
counter-marching was no more absurd than our own way of shaking hands,
or the Pacific Island method of salutation by rubbing noses.
“‘When in Rome do as the Romans do,’” I suggested; but this
expostulation had no effect whatever upon the determined young person,
who became more and more set in her own way from the fact that her
father quietly agreed with me. Furthermore, when she learned that there
were no chairs in the Royal reception-room, she proclaimed that her
Japanese attendant must carry a chair for her; because, if the Royal
pair were seated, she insisted on being seated also. I was to tell
“His Nibs,”--by which expression she referred to the smiling Prime
Minister,--that she belonged to sovereign America, and therefore was as
much an Empress in her own right as the feminine Majesty of Corea.
“Miss Hemster,” said I, “I don’t know whether what you wish can be
accomplished or not; but in any case it is sure to cause considerable
delay, and, furthermore, it will probably cost your father a very large
sum of money.”
I speedily saw that I would better have preserved silence. The young
lady drew herself up with great dignity and flashed upon me a glance of
withering indignation.
“Will you oblige me by minding your own business?” she asked harshly.
“Your duty is to obey orders, and not to question them.”
To this, of course, no reply was possible, so I contented myself by
bowing to her, and, turning to Hun Woe, who stood smiling first at one
and then at the other of us, not understanding even the drift of our
conversation, but evidently growing somewhat uneasy at the tone it was
taking, I translated to him as well as I could what Miss Hemster had
said, softening the terms as much as possible, and laying great stress
on her exalted position in her own country, of which land the Prime
Minister was enormously ignorant.
Hun Woe became extremely grave; and his smile, unlike that in the
advertisement, at once “came off.”
“If the strenuous Empress of China,” said I, “arrived at Seoul on a
visit, she would certainly be received by His Majesty as an equal, and
would not need to go through the ceremony of advance which you have so
graphically described. Now this Princess,” I continued, “holds herself
to be of a rank superior to the Empress of China, and is considered of
higher status by her own countrymen.”
The Prime Minister very solemnly shook his head and seemed much
disquieted.
“Her father,” I continued earnestly, and in a measure truthfully,
“maintains a much larger fleet than China possesses, and his private
war-ship, now in the waters of Corea, is grander than anything that
empire ever beheld, much less owned. His territories are vast.
Thousands of people,--yes, millions,--pay tribute to him. He has waged
commercial war against those who dared to dispute his authority, and
has invariably defeated them. His revenue exceeds that of the kingdom
of Corea twice over, so is it likely,--I put it to you as man to
man,--that such a potentate will consent to the dozen steps this way,
and the dozen steps that? His only daughter is the Crown Princess,
and will be heiress to all his powers and emoluments. I pray you,
therefore, put this matter in its right light before His Majesty of
Corea, and I can assure you, if you succeed, your own income will be
largely augmented.”
This speech undoubtedly impressed the Premier, who bowed low to Mr.
Hemster and his daughter time and again as I went on. The girl’s anger
had subsided as quickly as it had risen, and she watched us both
intently, seeming at first to doubt that I translated accurately what I
had been so curtly ordered to say; but as our conversation went on the
increasing deference of the Prime Minister showed that I was at least
doing my best. The old gentleman, too, regarded us shrewdly from under
his bushy eyebrows, but seemed rather tired of the game, as if it were
not worth such a pow-wow. He evidently wished to get the whole thing
over as quickly as possible, and return to the comforts of his yacht,
and in this I entirely sympathized with him.
The Prime Minister replied that he would present the new facts before
His Majesty, and averred that if they had the same effect upon the
Emperor of Corea as they had produced upon the Prime Minister the
impediment would be speedily removed. He assured me I could count on
his utmost endeavours to find a solution for the unexpected exigency,
and I was well aware that my tale would not decrease in the retelling.
With many and most profound obeisances to the two Western grandees, the
Prime Minister took his departure, and I accompanied him outside, where
I made him a payment on a gold basis.
The Royal audience had been appointed for two o’clock of the afternoon
on the day succeeding our arrival at Seoul, but this new question that
had arisen caused the ceremony to be postponed, much to my annoyance,
for I knew the habitual delay of these people, especially where
money was in question, and I feared that the inconvenient assumption
of dignity on the part of the young woman might land us in trouble
of which neither she nor her father had the least appreciation. I
communicated my fears of delay and complications to the old gentleman
when I got him alone, hoping he might use his influence with his
daughter to modify what seemed to me her ill-timed assertion of
high rank; but Mr. Hemster, though a resourceful man in every other
direction, always proved a broken reed so far as his daughter was
concerned, and he pathetically admitted his inability to curb either
her actions or her words.
“All we can do, Mr. Tremorne,” he said, “is to fork over the cash.
Don’t you spare it. I can see very well you are handling this situation
as expertly as a ward politician. You’re all right. If you can talk to
this here King as you talked to his Prime Minister, I think you’ll fix
up the thing in five minutes, and remember this is a game of bluff in
which there is no limit. I don’t restrict you in the cash you spend, so
go ahead.”
And this indeed proved to be the way out of the muddle, although I
explained to him that too lavish distribution of cash was not without
its own danger. But at this juncture a message arrived to the effect
that the Prime Minister wished to see me, and I at once departed to
learn what had been the outcome of his mediation. I found that he had
made little progress, but by a curious coincidence he put forth the
same suggestion previously offered by Mr. Hemster. He had arranged
a conference for me with the King, and advised me, as Mr. Hemster
had done, to lay it on thick. Hun Woe was somewhat encouraged by the
orders he had received from his royal master in regard to my audience.
The King would receive me entirely alone; not even his Prime Minister
was to be present. From this condition Hun Woe surmised I was to be
successful in my quest, and I was well aware that this unwitnessed
reception of me was as much contrary to Corean customs as was the
proposal Miss Hemster had made.
I saw his Majesty in one of the private apartments of the Palace, and
speedily realized that he did not care a rap what honours belonged
to Mr. Hemster. The sinister, shifty eyes of his Majesty were filled
with greed. Never was there such a picture of avarice presented to me
as the countenance of the King showed. His claw-like hands had been
withdrawn from the voluminous bell sleeves of his robe of red silk and
yellow gold, and were twitching nervously on the table before him. His
tremulous attitude of uneasy eagerness reminded me of the Miser in the
“Chimes of Normandy.” Impatiently he waved aside the recital touching
the claims of my employer to the most-favoured-monarch treatment, and
gasped out the Corean equivalent for “How much, how much?”
A tangible object-lesson is better than talk even in the Orient; so,
bringing my eloquence to an abrupt conclusion, I drew from my pocket
another bag of gold, similar in weight to the one I had previously
presented to him, and, seeing he was impatient for touch as well as
for sight, undid the string and poured the stream of shining metal
discs before him on the table. He thrust his vibrant hands among the
coins, and gave utterance to a low guttural sound of satisfaction which
resembled the noise made by a pig thrusting its snout into a trough of
slops, rather than any exclamation I had ever before heard from human
lips. I assured him that no word of all this would be spoken by me, and
promised that as soon as the conference was safely over on the terms
that Miss Hemster and her father had laid down, a similar amount would
be privately paid to his Royal self in an equally secret manner; and
so my mission terminated in a glorious success, and it was arranged
that the reception should take place the next day at two o’clock. The
process was costly, but effective; and effectiveness, after all, was
the main thing.
I reported my victory to Mr. Hemster and his daughter, and almost
immediately after this the Prime Minister came in to offer his
congratulations. The good man had seen his royal master for a few
moments, and was evidently delighted that everything was going on so
smoothly. It meant money in his pocket, and he was becoming rich with
a celerity which left stock-exchange speculations far in the rear.
He had received his commands regarding next day’s reception, and the
Emperor had been pleased to order that the audience should take place
in the same room where I had seen him, with none of the nobles of the
Court present except the Prime Minister. This was a good example of
his Majesty’s craftiness. The Premier already knew that the etiquette
of the Court was to be put aside for the occasion; but the monarch
had no desire for further witnesses, and was evidently not going to
set a precedent in the realm of Corea that might produce inconvenient
consequences thereafter.
I had had little opportunity of talking with Miss Stretton since the
night of our walk on deck,--the night of the proposal, as I called it
to myself, as amidst all these negotiations I kept continually thinking
of it. Without exactly avoiding me, Miss Stretton never seemed to be
alone, and although very rarely I caught a glance of her eye I had
no opportunity of private speech with her. She kept very much in the
background and was more than usually quiet and thoughtful.
We had dinner early that night, somewhere about six o’clock, for
there were neither candles nor lamps in the Palace, and if we waited
until nightfall we had to “grope,” as Mr. Hemster termed it. In spite
of the success of her plans, Miss Hemster was distinctly snappy at
dinner, if I may use such a term regarding a person so beautiful. She
shut me up most effectually when I ventured a little harmless general
conversation, and I think she made Miss Stretton feel more than usual
the bitterness of a dependent’s bread. Mr. Hemster said nothing. I
could see the poor old gentleman was hankering for a daily paper,
and from my soul I felt sorry for him as he listened with the utmost
patience to the querulous fault-findings of his lovely daughter.
Toward the end of dinner something that was said did not please the
young lady, and she rose abruptly and left the table, with a gesture
of queenly disapproval of us all. Anger appeared to fill her as
electricity fills an accumulator, and until the battery was discharged
we never knew who would suffer the next shock. When the young woman’s
ill-temper had been aroused by my opposition earlier in the day,
perhaps we would have spent a pleasanter evening if it had been allowed
to run its course. But as it was checked by her interest in the
negotiations it now filtered out in very palpable discontent. When Miss
Stretton arose to leave I took the liberty of begging her to remain.
“I should like very much,” I said, “to show you the light on Nam-san.”
“And what is the light on Nam-san?” she asked, pausing with her hand on
the back of the chair.
“Beacons are lighted all along the coast of Corea, on the mountain
tops,” I replied, “so that peak calls to peak, as it were; and the last
one to be lit is that on Nam-san, which is the name of the highest
mountain near Seoul. They kindle it at eight o’clock, and its blazing
up shows that the kingdom of Corea is safe and at peace with the world.”
“Very well,” said Miss Stretton after a pause; “I will return here
about ten minutes to eight.”
She was as good as her word, and we took a stroll together in the great
courtyard of the Palace, which is a city within a city. The gates of
the Palace grounds were now closed and guarded, and we could not have
got out into Seoul if we had wished to do so. But it was all very still
and pleasant in the broad square surrounded by the low, strangely
roofed buildings that constituted the Palace. We saw the beacon light
flash out and then die away. I cannot remember that we talked much,
but there was a calm and soothing sense of comradeship between us
that was very comforting. She told me, when I had tried to warn her
against expecting too much on seeing the Emperor next day, that she did
not intend to accompany our party, and I suspected that she had been
ordered to remain away. Moreover I could see that she was very tired of
it all, and, like Mr. Hemster, wished herself back in her own country.