Henry VIII. and His Harem in Hades.
“Quaker worship may be as appropriate as any other kind on Sunday,”
observed William Penn, “but this silence is getting on my nerves. Why
don’t you say something funny, you humorists? What’s the use of having
famous funny men in this society if they cannot enliven Hades on a dull
Sabbath?”
“I’m not in the humor to be humorous to-night,” said Bret Harte, who
was busily engaged in making “Condensed Novels” by tearing to shreds
without reading, their contents from the title page to the finis; book
reviewing they designate it up on earth.
“Do you call that wit?” sneered Eugene Field.
“If you can define the difference between wit and humor, I’ll promise
to laugh the next time you see things at night,” retorted Harte.
“Eternity is too short for definitions, except to a philologist,”
evaded Field. “Ask Dick Whately; the archbishop of Dublin is the only
man who discriminates English synonyms.”
“I know when you don’t ask me,” replied the doctor. “Consult Webster.”
“Mortal cannot live by wit alone,” commented that philologist.
“Being immortal, I can,” said Johnson.
“Mark that down, Boswell, even if Shakespeare does object to the
doctor’s company on the Mount of Parnassus. A man of perpetual
inspiration ought to use a fountain pen, but in the absence of a point
to Johnson’s wit, Demosthenes will lend you a pebble.”
“As I live in a glass hot-house, I never throw stones,” gurgled the
orator, after a vain effort to clear his throat of a pill from the
laboratory of Nature.
“On earth I always kept a box of bon mots on my chimney piece,” put in
Sydney Smith.
“If they had been chocolate bon bons, you would have been a sustaining
favorite among the ladies,” chuckled King Henry the Eighth.
“Where knowledge of women is concerned, I bow to your marital
Majesty,” acquiesced Smith. “Mere man never becomes a post-graduate on
femininology, but he can manage to get up a bowing acquaintance with
women after he is married to six of them. It seems to me that Utah
would be a good place to study her ‘of infinite variety.’ I have often
thought that much of Solomon’s wisdom came from his three hundred
wives.”
“With such a match-making father,” I put in, my newspaper instinct
scenting “copy,” “I have often wondered why good Queen Bess never
married.”
“I’m sorry Elizabeth didn’t keep up the family reputation,” answered
the king, “but I guess she thought I did marrying enough for the whole
family. Besides, Bess had her hands full ruling the kingdom and her
temper without attempting to rule a husband. However, I never could
understand why she turned a deaf ear to Sir Walter’s pleading. He wooed
her so long with his eyes that she asked him one day why he was such a
mute, inglorious Raleigh. He replied that a beggar who is dumb should
challenge double pity. As many another man has done since then, the
silent lover lost his head over a woman.”
“That’s the King James version,” retorted Sir Walter. “It seems to me
that your Majesty should confine yourself to rattling the skeletons in
your own Bluebeard’s closet.”
“I see you have a sharp tongue to match the edge of the axe which
brought you to your knees. You had a reason for what you did on earth,
but you lost your reason along with your head when you left the upper
world. By the shade of Anne Boleyn,” went on the king, becoming more
and more enraged as he proceeded, “were we on earth, your insolence
should cause you to swing from Tyburn’s tree.”
“You can’t string me up,” sneered Raleigh. “No man ever made a monkey
of me.”
“No, but a woman did. You can’t cloak what you did for Elizabeth. Now
Anne—”
“You forget yourself,” angrily interrupted Anne Boleyn, who had just
come upon the scene.
“But you won’t allow me to forget you!” ruefully retorted the king.
“It’s time you came home, Henry. You’ve been keeping altogether too
late hours at the club recently and I’ve come to take you home.”
“But I had promised to take tea with Catharine Parr,” rebelled Henry.
“You know she is rightfully my wife.”
“Really? You forget that decrees of divorce are not binding in Hades,
whether they have been executed by the hangsman or by the justice.”
“I appeal to Judge Blackstone.”
“This is altogether without precedent, but I must support the lady,”
responded the jurist, gallantly.
“Then take her. Bless you, my children. I’ve no hard feelings, Anne.
May no decrees of court or fate terminate your second union. I’ve
sampled the wine of her womanhood, Judge, and as wine improves with
age, it ought to be even better now than it was some hundreds of years
ago.”
“It isn’t every man who would give his wife a recommendation,”
diplomatically remarked Blackstone, alarmed at the construction Henry
had placed on his gallantry, and noting that Anne Boleyn seemed pleased
thereby. “I fear, however, that Satan would object to any but Lucifer
matches in Hades, so until you strike brimstone, Anne here is still
your wife.”
“How about the others?” groaned Henry.
“You must settle that with them,” evaded the jurist. “I think one wife
would be enough for me, but as you have made your harem, you can’t lie
out of it.”
“Henry!” The tone was threatening. The king meekly arose and cast an
appealing glance at me.
“I would be delighted to have your company,” he said. “In the olden
days I should have commanded, but Anne has taken the command from me.
You know I want you to denounce those hysterical novelists who have
taken liberties with my wives.”
“I’d like to see them take liberties with me,” aggressively brindled
madam.
“They couldn’t do that,” soothingly replied his Majesty. “No, they
painted you in your true colors: a study in black and white.”
“Where do you live?” I inquired.
“On Eighth Avenue, of course,” returned the king, as if that were a
foregone conclusion. “Lucifer named and numbered the streets after
a recent visit to New York. Ward McAllister wanted me to live in
apartments at Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, but the ‘skidoo
set’ was not exclusive enough for me and I said I would live on Eighth
Avenue or go back to England. Charon wouldn’t listen to that, as he
said I had given him only a single trip ticket. So I am domiciled on
Eighth Avenue, which we have now reached. Here I live with my six
wives.”
“Six?” I exclaimed, as we entered the royal palace. “I thought it was
eight wives. Why did they call you Henry the Eighth if it were not
because of the number of your consorts? The only thing we Americans
know about you is that you had more wives than the law allows, and
instituted a church to enable you to get another.”
“America?” muttered the king. “I don’t remember where that is. Down
here, however, we refer all questions of geography to Atlas. My dear,
won’t you ask him to come here if he isn’t too weary from carrying on
his shoulder the chip of a world which no one will knock off.”
But Her Grace did not move.
“Your church was instituted too late to be binding on me,” she said,
her nose becoming an acute retrousse. “The word obey didn’t cut any
figure in our matrimonial contract.”
“If I once chopped off your head, as the historians say, you’ve snapped
mine off since,” grumbled his hen-pecked Majesty.
“My head was divorced from my shoulders. I should have preferred the
courts of law to courting the axe.”
“There! don’t cry or you will cause the carpet to mildew. My dear,
never try to salt down a man’s affections with briny tears.”
A queenly woman entered the room. I arose to greet her. The king’s fat
interfered with his gallantry; besides, the woman was his wife, which
explains while it does not justify.
“My sister and my wife,” said Henry, presenting me to Catharine of
Arragon. “It’s the only case on record where a woman, after promising
to be a man’s sister, became his wife. Do you wonder that I began
to feel quite rich in family relations? Although I murdered my
sister-in-law, I left it to the punsters to murder the mothers-in-law
who came after me.”
“The historians say that my fall from kingly favor was a matter of
conscience,” mused Her Grace. “Didn’t the still small voice make itself
heard when you severed the bonds of matrimony with your little hatchet?”
“Not at all, Catharine. I left my conscience on the executioner’s block
to flirt with yours!”
“And married again!”
“Of course. Matrimony always had much attraction for me, although I
realize that a man had better fall into the sea than fall in love
and marry. A corpse devoured by crabs is no less harrowing than the
spectacle of a man devoured by love, and it is better to multiply
crabs than to multiply sinners and fools. Matrimony is a foretaste of
purgatory to which no man should be called upon to submit before death.”
“No wonder you got dyspepsia and gout from indulging your taste.”
“There you are again, Anne, throwing ancient history in my teeth. Did
you ever hear how I got rid of the gout?”
I shook my head.
“Ah, thank goodness, one incident of my life has escaped the novelists.
Lucifer is compiling a mammoth work ‘Every Man His Own Historian’ to
which we are all contributing. It promises to to be one of the ‘six
best sellers.’ Permit me to read a chapter from my autobiography:
“I must have fallen asleep upon my throne. I dreamed that a great
iron safe had fallen upon my feet and awoke to find a hideous-looking
creature seated complacently upon my bandaged foot. I groaned and tried
to shake him off, but he still clung there and the weight of his body
seemed to be pushing red-hot needles into the swollen flesh.
“He took off his cap with a courtly bow.
“‘Allow me to introduce myself as Mr. Gout, M. D.,’ he said.
“‘What! you are Mr. Gout, who is responsible for my sufferings and you
actually have the impudence to come here! Why, oh my foot!’
“‘Do you know why I am so attentive to you?’
“‘From pure cussedness, confound you! Ow-oh, I wish you would keep your
attentions to yourself.’
“‘That’s the way of the world. A man is indiscreet, and when he has to
pay the penalty, lays the blame on some one else. My duty is to remind
you that you cannot abuse this body with impunity.’
“The hideous creature began to jump up and down on my foot. Maddened by
the pain, I picked up a heavy dictionary lying near and hurled seventy
thousand words bound in calf at him. The aim was too low and Webster
fell over my foot. Then I fainted. The Gout had gone!”
“Now that you have disposed of Dr. Gout, let us go back to our original
subject—women,” I said, smiling. “A man who has had six wives ought to
have some knowledge of the feminine character.”
Just then John Heyward entered. The king turned to him.
“Just in time, fool,” he said. “Answer our American friend: What is a
woman?”
“‘A rag and a bone and a hank of hair.’ That sounds like a
before-treatment advertisement, but is really original with Kipling.
As for myself, although a fool, I don’t attempt to designate a woman
by a descriptive tag, as if she were a special brand of chocolates. To
man, woman is a sphinx endowed with a voice. He never gets more than
a telephonic acquaintance with her, and the woman always hangs up the
receiver and monopolizes the transmitter.”
“Listen to the words of a wise fool who wears a dunce cap for a crown,”
approved Henry. “Right you are, Heyward, and one woman is very much
like another.”
“I beg to differ,” said the poet. “Women are different, not only in
their baptismal labels, but in that some women have a husband and
others have a cat. Women have often been compared to cats, but did
you ever contrast cats and men? Thomas never throws his mother in the
face of his wife. He keeps his own whiskers trimmed and stays home
nights. He does not come back to the partner of his bosom at three A.
M. with a diagonal gait and an asinine gayety, chewing the butt of a
cigar and talking in a tongue that is as unsteady as his legs. Nor does
Tommy slam the door in fourteen languages when Kitty asks how that
blonde hair came on his coat. But we’re all human. If you’re hunting
for a perfect woman, stop—she’s dead; if for a perfect man, you’re a
fool. Elijahs are no longer translated without being prepared for the
undertaker. Yet methinks that if one could forget other folks’ mistakes
as easily as one’s own, there would be less scandal.”
He turned to Catharine Parr.
“One thing has always puzzled me. Why is it that women prefer to be old
men’s darlings, that you enjoy being clouds in the sunset’s glow rather
than in the noontide glory?”
“The setting sun always gives a golden lining to the clouds it
embraces, but to drop the figurative—we are soaring rather high—and
come down to earth, women marry old men so that they may soon become
widows.”
Henry nervously tried to adjust an imaginary crown that weighed heavily
on his head.
“Seymour plucked the weeds from the garden of your widowed life before
the first blade of grass had pushed up from a newly-made grave. O
Inconstancy! O Woman! Of two things, one. Orpheus went to Hell to find
his wife. He failed to win her from her refuge in the shades because
he looked back to discern her features. Had Euridice retraced the path
from Hell without bringing with her surcease from domestic woe, Orpheus
would have wished her back down that familiar track. I wish he would
pay us another visit. I’d loan him five of mine.”
“Which wife would you retain?” asked Catharine Howard.
“Catharine,” answered Henry, diplomatically.
All three who bore that name beamed with gratification.
“Catharine is always at Parr,” continued the king. His fondness for
punning nearly proved his undoing.
“I’m not below Parr,” angrily exclaimed Catharine of Arragon. “I come
before her.”
“No, you came,” corrected the king. “It’s merely a question of tense.
Many a woman promises to be a sister to the devil who has never
received a proposal.”
“That’s a good one on you!” laughed the fool. “Her Grace of Arragon
promised to be a sister to you! What do you say to that?”
“My answer is written in history. ‘The Lord gave and the Lord hath
taken away,’ for which ‘blessed be the name of the Lord.’ I replaced
my wives, so that the supply would always equal the demand. I believed
that as long as the Lord took, it was my duty to take.”
The king paused long enough to drink a cup of pink tea and to eat some
breaded calves’ brains for inspiration.
“When trouble comes,” continued Henry, “some people fly to matrimony,
thinking drink too vulgar.”
“Your troubles have been many, judging by your marital intemperance.”
“They were, but my troubles always came singly,” chuckled the king. “As
fast as I executed one, another came, but I made sure I was off with
the old head before I coveted the new.”
“The only bright thing an American can remember to have heard Punch
say is ‘don’t’ when matrimony is on the horizon, but then Punch is
English and England has no Ali Ben Theodore—peace to his Strenuosity—to
turn the throne into a pulpit for dissertations on vital statistics
in the hope that he may make census taking an unnecessary burden
of government. Modern philologists were seriously considering the
advisability of eliminating the word ‘papa’ from the dictionary, when
the leading exponent of the life effective raised the question as to
why mamma’s lap wasn’t filled. When the president becomes advance agent
for the stork hope is born, but if the stork continues to be derelict
in its duties, we might give the eagle a trial in an endeavor to have
this statistical indictment set aside.”
“What does Mr. Roosevelt know about the rights of unattached
bachelors?” asked Catharine the Third. “He isn’t a bachelor and never
was one; he was born domestic and to the domestic man nothing ever
happens—except the buying of more cradles.”
“A woman’s tongue is as full of sharp points as a porcupine,” observed
Henry, who was inordinately fond of epigrammes. “But never mind,
Kittens, I am the last man in the world who would deprive you of
woman’s inalienable rights—love, license, and the pursuit of man.”
“Their Majesties are looking well and youthful,” I said, with a gesture
that included all the wives of the much-married king.
“One never grows any older in Hades,” answered Henry. “That explains
its attraction for women, and why the devil has so many votaries among
the fair sex!”
“An exclamation point often hides a pointless period. When a man talks
epigrammatically about woman, it is a sign that he doesn’t understand
her.”
And being a woman, Catharine Parr had the last word.
WHAT METHUSELAH THINKS OF
DR. OSLER.