The Virgin Throned in the West: A Tabloid Tangle of Love and History.
It was with no little trepidation that I mounted the steps of the
summer palace of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, and knocked timidly at
the door. Had I not been somewhat dazed by the nature of my mission,
I might have noticed an electric bell somewhere around, but who ever
heard of a bell on a palace door? That would be in violation of all
ethics of the made-to-order novel. I had determined to see nothing
but what I wished to see and to brush the dust from my knowledge of
royalty—gleaned from the historical novels which tell of everything
under the sun except history—so I bridled my patience and gave my
imagination a free rein. That’s a hobby of mine.
As I closed my eyes and waited with an unuttered prayer that there
might be no dungeon beneath this castle wall, I felt a queer sensation
in my left side. Twice before I had undergone a similar experience.
Once I had called an imperious maiden “my queen” and the lover who is
in the background of every girl butted into the foreground and knocked
me out of the centre of the stage. The other occasion is too painful to
recall and not at all humorous, so I will lose the thread of memory and
resume the thread of my discourse.
I believe I left myself on the palace portico, with my hands clasped
over the hollow place caused by a missing rib, which is the only legacy
left by an ancestor who was too fond of stolen pippins. Since then I
have become convinced that the ache was owing to an uneasy conscience;
but then I thought it was only my heart. Outside the palace I had one
kind of heart disease; would I contract the other kind within the
walls I had forgotten that it takes two to make a contract and had
reckoned without my queen and with an utter disregard of the rules of
mathematics. But there are exceptions to rules; why not to rulers?
I continued to stand outside the palace. Perhaps you wonder at that,
but the reason is simple: the door was closed and, moreover, it was
locked. I am no Sherlock Holmes, nor do I smoke, so I couldn’t deduce
from the ashes of a cigar how I could get that door between me and the
street. There was nothing to do but wait.
And wait I did. Somehow, I didn’t mind it, for you see I was waiting
on a queen. I had waited on other girls with more impatience and more
candied sweetness. Every woman’s idea of a sensible man is one who
will make a fool of himself over her and if it pleases her, he doesn’t
object to playing court jester. That’s what we men are here for—to
prevent women from being bored by the society of their own sex.
Finally I was admitted. Just how I seem to have forgotten. Let me
recall my lessons in memory-training-by-the-aid-of association:
Rule one is to begin at the beginning. Eve began it; she added Adam;
united they stood: over an apple paring they fell; that’s it—I took a
tumble to myself, which is neither slang nor a figure of speech. I had
been leaning against the door, and as my spirits grew more heavy, it
was more than the door hinged on. We parted company and as I lay upon
the floor I felt quite prostrated over it. I lost my dignity and my
watch; then I lost my time but not my temper, although I had fallen
into a compost of lime and sand left as a trap by one of the palace
workmen.
“Are you hurt?” inquired a man-of-arms, as I picked myself out of the
mortar.
“Oh, no,” I answered, the ready tears starting sympathetically. “I’m
not hurt but I feel rather mortified!”
When I told the man in waiting that I had come to see the queen, he
looked doubtful and made a half audible remark about somebody rushing
in and about downtrodden angels. It was an unfamiliar quotation and as
I had no copy of Bartlett’s handy, I did not take his “posie of other
men’s flowers” to myself. Had there been any stairs on which to fight I
might have emulated the “gentleman of France,” but I come from another
country where elevators have killed romance as well as other things.
Another wait. I still smarted from contact with the lime, and feeling a
humiliating sense of my own unworthiness, I meekly made myself small.
When She entered I began to shrivel until I felt like unleaded agate
after being thrown into the “hell box.”
Good Queen Bess is every inch a queen, even to her feet. “Sweet and
twenty” she was—at one time; I can vouch for the qualifying adjective,
if not for the noun, and to be sweet is better than to be queen, for to
be queen it is only necessary to be born beneath a canopy embroidered
with the regal R. Although I thought of Shakespeare’s phrase, I did not
give utterance to the invitation which preceded it; you recollect the
line: “Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.”
It isn’t given to every man to be as bold as Shakespeare, even though
he may be more alive to present opportunities.
Now, according to court etiquette, a subject dare not address his
sovereign until he is spoken to, so I simply stood and looked
unutterable things. Her gaze fell. The pause was becoming embarrassing.
“Well,” she said finally.
That wasn’t what I had expected at all. All the books I had ever read
about queens had quoted the ruler thusly: “Her Majesty is graciously
pleased to incline her ear that she may hear the prayer of her
servant.” I noticed that her ears kept their normal position, but I was
not inclined to be fastidious: the queen had spoken!
My lips being now unlocked, I told who I was.
“Oh, to be sure,” Her Grace said, with ready recollection. “You are
the novelist who said so many nice things about me in ‘The Virgin
Throned in the West.’ You possess the first requisite of a courtier: a
knowledge of the gentle art of flattery. Your compliments—”
“Spare me, good Queen,” I interrupted. “I must confess that I wrote
that eulogy before I had seen your Majesty.”
The queen frowned just a little.
“Why need you have said that?” she asked. “Even an immortal queen is
enough like her mortal sisters not to relish a stab at vanity. You men
praise us women and then ruffle our hair by saying you didn’t mean it.
Of course, we forgive you, but to forget is not so easy. Under the
scar, the wound still aches.”
Ever since then I have believed that a man should be arrested for
exposing the naked truth.
“In that book you also paid tender tribute to the babies, though I fail
to see what they have to do with an old maid queen who achieved fame
but not matrimony. Let us hope that tribute, at least, is sincere.”
“No, only sentimental. I wrote that eulogy far from the maddening
child, with naught but memory to lend wings to the imagination. I love
to play with other people’s toddling darlings until there is a cry of
distress from the interior department, in which case distance lends
enchantment to the point of view. I have not always said nice things
about babies, for, as I heard Methuselah say, there comes a time in the
life of every man when he sighs for the power of Herod that he might
order all children killed. Methuselah excepted his own; I don’t.”
“That is cruel,” Her Serenity observed.
“I crave Your Grace’s pardon,” I disagreed; “it is true: that is all.”
“Truth never masquerades in the domino of drollity.”
“Thy reproof, O Queen, is deserved. Would that I were Boswell to
preserve in the amber of biography the gems which fall from the lips of
a Doctress Johnson.”
“Scribe, know you not that a woman would rather you praised her face
than her mind, and her bonnet rather than her ‘blue stockings’? Why
write what you don’t believe?”
“Had my eyes been gladdened by the sight of your charms, fair Queen,”
I boldly asserted, “I should have thrown off the fetters of prose and
soared to the Mount of Parnassus, there to coronate you in verse with
feet iambic.”
“Perhaps the feet might limp—I mean they would, of course, be limpidly
lyrical. But my poet laureate, don’t metrically measure My Majesty.
Cork the rhythmic bottle and all shall be forgiven. And now you may
tell me your mission.”
“I’ve come to interview you,” I blurted out, instinctively putting my
hand on my vest pocket, in which was a bottle of aromatic spirits of
ammonia. But Her Grace has a spirit of her own and needed none of mine.
There was no evidence of vertigo.
“Don’t be alarmed,” I hastened to say. It was a needless assurance, but
according to all precedent, I was expected to make the observation. “I
wrote the interview before I came down here to see you, and it is now
in type with a turn rule at the end for fear it should not measure up
to expectations. This call is a mere matter of form.”
“But how”—
“That’s a secret. Instead of answering your question, allow me to ask
you another. Suppose you were again an earthly ruler with unlimited
power, what would you do?”
“I hardly know,” she confessed naively and added: “But I think my first
move would be to curb the freedom of the press by pensioning off all
the newspaper men, so that we celebrities might have our fanciful fads
without being interviewed. Not that I object to the interview or to the
interviewer. ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’—to most men.”
“And fiction is more interesting than truth and much more believable—to
most women,” I retorted. “You know Heine says that woman is at once
apple and serpent. I have never dissented from that view, for apple
sass and serpents’ tongues have always been the desserts woman serves
up to man. Eve plucked the first fruit from the forbidden tree, but
many another fair hand has since robbed the genealogical orchard. Thus
do we ape our ancestors.”
“Poor Eve!” sympathized the queen. “Her daughters have often taken a
bite of the enticing apple, but unlike their mother, it does not open
their eyes to man’s true nature.”
“I have often wondered,” I went on, not heeding the amused smile of
her Majesty, “why God didn’t make a dozen women instead of one out of
Adam’s rib, but I’ve come to the conclusion that Eden would no longer
have been Paradise to Eve if she had had a rival.”
“Where is man’s boasted chivalry?” suddenly asked Elizabeth. “Sir
Walter never struck a woman with the whip of sarcasm.”
“With his cloak wrapped about her, she couldn’t feel the sting of
satire,” I retorted.
“Did you ever hear how I repaid Sir Walter for his gallantry? We had
gone to London to attend the coronation of King Edward the Seventh. One
of the streets we had to cross was so muddy that we paused in dismay. A
newsboy brushed up against me. Taking the papers from under his arm I
tossed them into the street.”
“‘Tut! tut! keep on your coat, Sir Walter,’ I said. ‘Allow me to pilot
you to yonder pavement dryshod.’”
“‘Who says that chivalry is dead?’ quoth Sir Walter.
“‘Am I not dead?’” I asked.
“‘Good Queen Bess will never die,’ responded the baronet, with ready
wit. Then he laughed as the newsboy picked up his papers from the muddy
street, loudly bewailing the prank of the wind which had spoiled his
stock in trade.”
Elizabeth again did violence to my conceptions of royalty by laughing
at her own wit; then she said:
“Sir Scribe, it seems to me that you haven’t progressed well with your
interview. You haven’t once indulged in those misfit personalities
which bring your American papers so many libel suits. When I received
your card I anticipated that I should be discussed by myself and
dissected by you. I expected you would be concerned as to whether my
ancestors belonged to that little company of gentlemen who jumped from
tree to tree in Africa and was prepared to tell you, as I have told
Darwin, that even a baboon can have a respectable daughter!”
Being a blue point is not conducive to successful interviewing, so I
shook off my lethargy and asked as to her favorite flower.
“That is better,” approved her Grace. “I have two favorites—bachelors’
buttons and mock orange blossoms.”
“If not yourself, who would you rather be?”
“The author of one of the six ‘best sellers.’”
“Who is your favorite character in history?”
“I really must decline to answer.”
I did not press the point, for one naturally looks for modesty in a
Virgin Queen.
“Do you mind telling me in what epoch you would have chosen to live?”
“The reign of Terrible Teddy, by all means. Hesiod says there are five
ages of the world; how is yours designated: golden, brazen, or—?”
“This is the age of folly—the folly of flesh,” I answered. “Higher
critics deny the decalogue and bone Jonah’s fish until it resembles
an eel. Even our modern writers play ping pong with hearts and the
seventh commandment, for to them love is nothing unless it brings
in ten per cent royalty. Society has become sensuous; we are having
rather too much of the body. The corsage serves no purpose but to
hide the heart; bosom and back are bared before the footlights while
gartered grace trips tantalizingly in the limelight. Soul has sunk
beneath the seductions of the senses. The demon of desire so entices
men that for the amorous allurement of Kipling’s Vampire—the woman who
did not care—they would go to Hell and consider the trip an enjoyable
excursion. Has virtue fled to hide its blushes in a nunnery and is
there no longer a shrine of sex? Is ‘Don Juan’ to be deified and
‘Camille’ to be glorified? Will—but in deference to Colonel Comstock, I
really must desist.”
“Wherefore so pessimistic—jaundiced or jilted?”
“More likely I’m dyspeptic.”
“Don’t deny it; a lost love is the only justification of a man’s being
a misanthropist and a misogynist.”
“Won’t you kindly translate or at least tell me the language? Emerson
always was a voiceless sphinx to me and foreign tongues are not
articulate to ears deafened by the slang of the streets.”
“Don’t be silly! Your idiomatic Americanisms make muddy the well of
English undefiled, but methinks the water is the clearer and the more
sparkling after each stirring up.
“If you will promise no more interruptions, I will continue my lecture:
Your eyes are too far gazing into the bygone to know to-day’s bliss
or to foresee a confident tomorrow. You are forgetting that while
life roots in the past, it flowers in the present. To never exchange
loving glances with the maiden of the moment, but to dishonor the day
by looking off into the eyes of some dream darling who cannot come to
your bosom is like another Enoch Arden’s hopeless gaze for a sail that
never brings him again to the kisses of Annie Lee. If I mistake not,
your name is a patent of your English ancestry, but without that leaf
from your family tree, I should recognize you as a countryman; to be
loyal to a sweetheart clasped and lost is possible only to the man
whose cradle rocked between the English Channel and the Irish Sea. The
Anglo-Saxon alone of all peoples can become a martyr to a memory.”
Whatever will power I possessed was necessary to keep my eyes away from
the “maiden of the moment.” English blood may be phlegmatic enough to
turn into ice water, but a twenty-years’ acquaintance with American
girls will thaw the most frozen cardiac organ and render it susceptible
to the wiles of any witch of a woman who in other days might have
hanged at Salem. Elizabeth’s very voice was a caress and sometimes a
man forgets to pray, “Lead me not into temptation!”
“The sweeter memories are in themselves,” I murmured, “the more loth
one is to share them with another. If it please Your Grace, we won’t
discuss the—the ‘other girl.’ When a man proposes and the woman
disposes of him by a verbal spanking, sending him away, it may be to
the embraces of another girl, it may be to cherish a memory, he is
seldom in a frame of mind inculcated by gospel precepts. Gratitude
comes later. Yet whether a man marries or whether he remains true to
his ideal, he never loves any other woman quite so much as she who was
pitiless to his pleading. Man’s heart is not like a Manhattan hall room
with space for only one pair of shoes under the bed, but it is a St.
Regis, in which there are no vacant guest chambers. The cosiest corner
of a man’s heart is always reserved for the woman who has refused his
hand.”
Her Majesty threw up her hands in a pretty gesture of mock dismay.
“A misogamist also! I am just dying with curiosity to know what
terrible things my sex have done to you to make you a hater of men,
of women and of marriage. Because some sunflower of a girl has turned
her face to another son is no excuse for you to sulk behind a cloud.
This may be the age of folly, as you claim, but don’t you think that
the greatest fool is he who allows a slip of a girl to rob him of his
_couleur de rose_ spectacles? Come now, ’fess up! Aren’t you making a
hobby of being a hypochondriac? If you linger among the graves of the
gloaming with a heart so full of shadows and eyes so abrim with tears
that you cannot see beauty as it is born, you corrupt the present. If
you fellowship with to-day, it will bestow upon you its purple. If you
bid away the hour that is here to make you happy, all the grief of
Niobe will not win it back again. To-day is a nomad who tarries awhile,
then folds his tent and whistles away on his happy gypsy journey, never
to return.”
“Aren’t we getting rather too philosophical for actors in an _opera
bouffe_ and too solemn for characters in an hysterical novel; nobody
takes history seriously nowadays. This is the hour of hyperbole as
well as the age of folly and my indictment of fleshly fools should be
taken _cum grano salis_. I am not so wrapped about by the despairs of
night that I can get no glimpse of the dawn. I despise not the outward
beauty, nor do I put contempt upon flesh nor call it unclean. I wield
no surgeon’s scalpel to dissect desires which passion into degeneracy.
Yet I deplore that man, who may stature divinely great, should stoop
to crucify the mystery of the flesh in permitting the sanctities of
the soul to be overshadowed by sensuality, in making vulgar that which
should be hallowed. Yet humanity is no windfall apple; despite the
blemishes on the rind, the core continues sound. However pessimistic a
man may be, he must acknowledge that the influence of virtue is more
far reaching than the contagion of vice. Jean Valjean in the Paris
sewer was the optimist who originated the New Thought movement; like
him, I feel instinctively that somewhere beyond the present darkness is
the sunshine of life and safety.”
“It seems to me, sirrah, that you are rather inconsistent.”
“You women have enjoyed a monopoly of that comfortable privilege
altogether too long, and the time has come when man can dispute your
prerogative.”
The asbestos tablets I had brought with me were rapidly being filled
with hieroglyphics which looked like the original Greek and to
understand them needed an acquaintance with Pitman; I must economize on
my questions.
“The one indispensable interrogation in an interview is how you spend
each waking moment of the day,” I hinted. “No post-mortem recollections
would be complete without that.”
“To be a queen is to lead the life effective as well as the life
strenuous. This is one day’s doings in the role of Regina, as ticked
off by the hours—figuratively, of course, for you are aware that there
are no clocks in Hades:
“10 A. M.—‘Good morning.’
“11 A. M.—Sampling new breakfast foods.
“12 M.—Reading the Cimmerian Chatterbox and the Stygian Smart Set.
“1 P. M.—Writing autographs to be auctioned off at New York sales rooms.
“2 P. M.—Dinner.
“3 P. M.—Yachting on the Styx.
“4 P. M.—Sixty minutes with Her Majesty’s diary.
“5 P. M.—Dictating an historical novel to Sir Isaac Pitman.
“By-the-bye,” she broke off suddenly, “Sir Isaac has become afflicted
with writers’ cramp and I need someone to take his place. You are that
someone.”
I knelt, expecting to feel the flat end of a sword laid upon me, but
her Grace simply twined a lock of my blonde hair around her finger.
“Arise, Sir Scribe,” she said, glancing around apprehensively. “Your
attitude is that of a lover proposing to his mistress, and as a penalty
for posing in the upper world, Mephisto has decreed that whatever
attitude a man assumes in Hades, he must set it to words or to music. I
am going to be merciful and you may make of your proposal a frayed-out
phonograph record which will repeat ‘I love you’ without variation. The
warmth of your protestations may melt the wax? You need have no fear of
that. You would be more likely to break the record; we do not use wax
cylinders, but rubber. As for making you my official scribe, the touch
of royalty is sufficient to confer knighthood. Since poor Walter took
that ‘sharp remedy’ for all diseases, I have shunned the sword.”
Curiosity is my besetting sin—it is by no means a woman’s
prerogative—and as it has been one of my fads to read a person’s
character by a glance at his or her hands, I bowed in humble gratitude
at the honor conferred upon me, but not without an upward look at the
fair hand poised gracefully above me. That fleeting glance told me
much. Certain chroniclers of the period Before Darwin tell us that
marks were made on the hands of men—and women?—that the sons of men
might know them. As the passage occurs in Job, some higher critics
interpret the marks to mean boils, but we palmists know better.
Palmistry is Cupid masquerading in a scientific costume; it gives a man
a valid excuse for holding a girl’s hand. Of course even a scribe can’t
take such liberties with a queen, although the cunning of chiromancy
prompted me to attempt a revelation of Her Majesty’s character. Just
what I found in the hand that swayed the destinies of the world She
made me promise not to tell. “God save the Queen—” and the Gentle
Reader!
After detailing her destiny, I arose with a muttered apology for
consuming so much of her time.
“It isn’t only time that is consumed in Hades, but if you wish to go,
you may,” assented Her Grace. “I never argue with a bored sign post
about the distance to the street.”
I bowed and left. Outside was a sign which read: “To New York—twenty
miles.” I stood a moment and pondered. Twenty miles expressed a
nearness which made Hades a suburb of the metropolis! The call of the
city was insistent, the lure of Broadway beckoned to the white lights
and the clang of trolleys, but all about me were unfolding the wonders
of the unknown Stygian country. I did not dispute the distance, nor did
I heed the mute command. I simply turned my back on the sign post and
walked away from the imperative pointing finger.
“BOSS” TWEED ON TAINTED
MONEY, WITH SOME NONSENSE
DEFINITIONS OF FADS
AND FINANCE.