THE COUP D’ÉTAT
The carriages that rolled to the Buckingham Palace ball about a year
later rolled through snow, and snow was falling when, some minutes
after Her Majesty had danced the square-dance, a lady came to breathe
near her ear: “I understand, Ma’am, that His Royal Highness the
Prince of Wales has arrived, and craves to know if Your Majesty will
graciously grant him a ten-minutes’ interview where he waits alone in
the Picture Gallery.”
The Queen’s heart went a beat quicker. “I will do so,” she gave answer
with that gracious smile which distinguished her; and her steps set out
slow but grew hurried.
The Prince in a splashed mackintosh, pilot cap in hand, half knelt, and
then felt her heart on his.
“So here you are!”
“Here I am, Mother: straight from Paddington with Manning and Sir
Martin Raine.”
“I had my eyes on my watch!”
“Oh, aye, I thought I’d see if you’d see me straight away.”
“Have you succeeded?”
“That’s all right.”
“So this is the end of Brockweir?”
“So it seems.”
“Did I do well to send you to Brockweir?”
He lowered his lids to say: “You are always my lucky star, Mother.”
“Sit here: I give you ten minutes, and two more for love—Oh! and I have
won about Dartmouth!”—she clapped her finger-tips—“you’re to travel
first!”
“You always win, Mother, when I’m the stake.”
“Haven’t I made you a credit to your country? Haven’t I? Tell me.”
“Well, I think so, though I’m something of a duffer in some things.”
“But you never say ‘heavy as lead,’ lead being rather light? you know
where your pancreas is, and some little something of the Divinity of
the universe you live in?”
“Oh, aye, that’s all to the good.”
“And you have been good, too.... _Have_ you been?”
The Prince rushed red as a rose. “Well, I hope so.”
A little pause now—a rising of alarm in Her Majesty’s eyes. She said:
“Edward the Red Prince.”
“Ha, ha. Really, Mother——”
“_A girl?_”
Now he looked her straight, saying: “I may have met a girl, mother.”
Her eyes shut, she moving her face intolerantly, making a little
lip-sound of vexation. The thing that she feared had come upon her. And
there was silence.
Then: “Oh, well, Teddy, it won’t do.”
“Mother, I hope you are not cross. Possibly, if you knew the lady——”
“_I?_ Milk-maid? Frizzy hair?”
“Oh, Mother, we have only a few minutes, and here we are out of step——”
“But stay—is it to be supposed that you are what is called ‘in love’?”
“I do seem to think of one——”
“Now, how annoying. And the lady knows this? and who you are?”
“She doesn’t happen to know who I am. I did tell her once that there
were immense obstacles to our uni——”
“Union forsooth, Your Royal Highness!”—Her Majesty’s eyes flashing like
that Star of South Africa which bathed her brow in its blaze—“pray
select your words to me with greater circumspection! _There_ is the
Union that concerns you”—she pointed to that huge picture of the first
sitting of the Union Convention at Cape Town—“for your so ‘democratic’
colonies want their ‘Royalty’ royal, let me tell you, and Kings are not
masters of themselves, but servants of the world. I am astonished that
you venture to say such things to me!”
“Mother, I attend to what you say.”
“But stay,” said the Queen; “when you mentioned to the lady that there
were immense obstacles—what did the lady say?”
“She said that as I conquered Li Ku, so I should conquer the obstacles.”
The Queen smiled a little now, saying: “I see! Poor little thing, I’ll
think of it, and see what can be done to let her down gently. But you
should have told her plainly, Teddy. Li Ku was yellow, the obstacles
blue.—When, by the way, did all this rapture happen?”
“Year ago. We met just after I had fought Li Ku; then—twice;
then—thrice.”
The Queen thought that an odd way of putting it—twice, then thrice: why
not ‘five times’? But she only said: “And, Teddy, you never told me.”
“Mother, I longed to. But I knew there would be a frown, and I thought
that if I could first manage somehow to get you to see her—then
you might—I can’t quite explain—there are natural aristocrats, as
you know—cellularly select—essentially precious somehow—strangely
rare—gentle——”
This praise afresh alarmed Her Majesty. Her next words were: “And the
lady lives—where?”
Now the Prince’s eyes sprang into wide-awakedness. “Had I better tell,
Mother?”
“Well!—I think so.”
“Scott, Mother, I don’t want to have the poor girl appalled and
thundered upon.”
“Well!—But if I command?”
“Your Majesty is seventy times seven my Queen——”
“And you my little king of kings. Tell.”
“Teddy” moaned. “She lives at Nottingham.”
“And her name?”
“Eulalia.”
“Eulalia what?”
“She told me Bayley.”
“Good old Teddy—hero of all my novels,” the Queen fondly said, hardly
noticing the queerness of that “she told me.” “And don’t think,” she
added, “that I am going to thunder upon her. We’ll see how things go:
and it is just as well that I should have her name and place. But how
could she possibly like you the day you fought Li Ku? You must have
been so Chineaten, Manchewed, and Sky-Blued! And, by the way, talking
of Li Ku Yu, do you know what he now is? I have a letter from Sir John
Pilkinton at Peking.”
“What is Li Ku, Mother?”
“A Sub-Chancellor of the Grand Secretariat. Now, think what that
means—that in about a year he has romped through Pundit ‘learning,’
such as it is—has, in fact, got an Optimus in the Peking Chin Shih
exam. (Doctor’s Degree)—a stiff physical ordeal, apart from the cram.
So you see.”
“Oh, aye, he will do something or other,” said the Prince—“says I must
get up early, and I mean to. Perhaps we haven’t seen the last of each
other, Mr Chin-chin and I.”
This was to come true only four months later when the Prince got a
sight of Li Ku Yu going robed in a green (official) chair through the
East Gate Glorious of the Forbidden City—for before his Investiture, or
his actual cadetship, “Teddy” had eaten with chop-sticks, had learned
buck-jumping and stock-whip cracking in the Australian Bush, had
collected uniform-buttons of Cossacks and Redifs, had bagged big game
in Somaliland, and been half drowned in a flood of the Great Fish River.
By the time he was leaving Dartmouth, Li Ku Yu was carrying out a
bloody reform in the administration of the Yu Chuan Pu (Post-Office);
and when the Prince had been six months on the _St Vincent_, Li Ku was
a Chargé d’Affaires, making frequent trips between Peking and Tokio.
This man never lost an hour. Steadily, like a rat darkly gnawing a hole
through the night-watches, he was gnawing at the old condition of the
world, with the plan of a new world ready in his head: and as at an
electric shock Asia thrilled at the presence of his vigour.
His first high attempt was a secret treaty, frankly framed against the
white races, between the Dragon-flag and the Rising Sun.
But in this he failed. The Anglo-Japanese alliance, though very
thin-worn, still existed; and in the eyes of the Japanese Chancellery
that very young diplomat, Li Ku Yu, had rather the character of a
dreamer. Now, though every great man may be a dreamer, not every
dreamer is a great man; and to distinguish between the two sorts of
dream is not always easy. But he smiled at all contradiction with his
ordinary patience, for no being ever had so unshakeable a faith in his
innate kingship, trickiness, and luck.
He was always sure, too, of his Dowager. Tea-room gossip in the Capital
persistently said that she was his _bonne amie_; but, then, Li Ku Yu
was little of a lover, though he certainly provoked women by his very
aloofness, as the sparrow attracts the cat.
Anyway, Lung Lü from the first saw in him her master; and it is
probable that from the first she and he had doomed her son, the young
Emperor, to death.
Lung Lü was then about thirty-five, a woman of strong mind, though much
under the influence of eunuchs, and not less notorious for her orgies
in the dark seclusion of her palaces than the Empresses Wu and Tzu Hsi.
Her powers were again now fairly absolute, for though the Throne had
been utterly overthrown by the Constitution of a few years before, the
pendulum as usual had swung anew, and the Heavenly Empire was again
governed by the “Decrees” and “Edicts” of a woman’s moods.
Now, the Emperor, who was sixteen, and nearly ready to take the reins,
detested his mother and Li Ku Yu.
He knew well that they had sentenced him to death, if not by drug or
dirk, then by the life of riot to which they pushed him, a hated life
from which his frail nature was helpless to escape: for they two took
care that each of the eunuchs, and even his tutors, should be his
teachers in evil.
Besides, the young Emperor, who had some spirit, felt himself a fly in
the presence of Li’s smile, of Li’s bulk of skull, whose lines bulged
largely as at the horse-power of some engine pumping within: and in his
head on his bed at night he meant no good to Li Ku Yu.
And there were many on his side to plot with him—Censors, Grand
Councillors, the Manchu Clansmen, who all abhorred the scholar from
Brockweir, the pigtail with opinions more hairy-devil than the hairy
devils’.
Accordingly, upon the failure of Li Ku Yu’s mission to the Court of
Japan, his assassination was determined upon as soon as he should
return; and, meantime, Memorial after Memorial was presented to the
Throne, urging his cashiering and impeachment before the Board of
Punishments.
But he did not return—to Peking. Before he left Tokio, a rebellion had
broken out, once more, among “the Turbans” (Turkestan Mohammedans); and
an Edict from the Throne—which Li Ku Yu wrote—gave him the Governorship
of Shensi, with the command to suppress the rebellion—for he danced
from office to office like dancers dashing through “the daisy-chain,”
changing hands in an entanglement of arms, with laughter; and, having
some instinct of the intrigue against him in the Imperial City, he
passed straight on to his Yamên at Sianfu.
There he raised some militia; and with 17,000 raw levies, and one
brigade from the Northern Army, started out westward—without the least
experience in the handling of masses of troops.
This business occupied him fourteen months.
He had to sit down before garrisoned towns with disgraceful guns and
ragged brigades; once he had to grow the millet that gave porridge to
his troops; and, meantime, his discipline was so grim and rigid, that
very many of his men perished on the way.
During all which, in the Throne-Hall of Exalted Peace, the young
Emperor had begun to govern; Lung Lü had retired with her eunuchs and
ladies to her lake-picnics, stage-plays and other delights to her
I-Ho-Yüan or Summer Palace (five miles out); and at once by a Vermilion
Rescript the Emperor dismissed Li Ku Yu, “permitting him to commit
suicide,” and despatching another General to take his place.
The body-guard of “Old Style” soldiers, carrying great two-handed
swords, who surrounded this General, were pounced upon by the rank
and file of Li Ku Yu’s soldiers, who adored him, and were killed by
the “slicing” process, then dismembered. The heads of the General and
of the Commissioner who had come to inspect Li Ku Yu’s suicide, were
carried for days on the markers’ standard-staffs of two rear-guard
companies.
Thus Li Ku Yu crossed the Rubicon, and broke with the Throne of his
country.
By this time his military advance had grown more rapid—it gradually
grew rapid to a ravaging avalanche. He scourged Turkestan as far as
Kashgar of man, cattle and plant. Never did regiments leave in their
rear so complete a desert. In captured cities his troops ran riot like
terriers let loose on rats; they cracked the skulls of the young upon
rocks; they hacked off the bosoms of mothers before they stabbed them;
for intervals of three hundred miles not a thing was left alive where
their withering fire had run.
It was on his return march from Kashgar that he despatched couriers to
make the vast order of 125,000 cinematographs through the agency of a
German firm at Shanghai.
As his victorious host approached the Capital, crackers spattered in
every town, and the Dowager despatched him a poem of congratulation,
a Dragon-robe, four rolls of “auspicious” silk, twenty pounds of
swallow-nests, and a tablet bearing the inscription: “Backbone of the
State.”
Now, on the Emperor’s seventeenth birthday, his mother had summoned
before her the most beautiful of the daughters of noble Manchu
families, from whom to select a score of ladies for her son’s harem;
and among those selected had been a certain Niuhulu, a half-sister
of Li Ku Yu—Li’s own mother being a Chinese woman, though his father
was Manchu. And this Niuhulu contrived to send him out a message when
he was still ninety miles from Peking, saying that his death was a
settled thing, if he once entered the city.
The next morning at the Hour of the Hare (six) Li Ku Yu entered the
city by the Shih Che (N.W.) Gate—apparently alone—in peasant’s dress:
he had come flying through the night, as the vulture stoops: and he
proceeded southward toward the Imperial City.
At that early hour the Supernal Countenance was granting audience to
the Grand Councillors, Princes, and Ministers of the Presence in the
Pavilion of Ceremonial Phœnixes in the Lake Palace; and there they were
kneeling, looking pigmy in a room most gloomily grand, grouped round
the Dragon Throne, on which sat the Glorious One, his face to the south.
Li Ku Yu was still felt to be at a safe distance away, and they
were discussing the disposing of the troops at their command in the
Capital, when suddenly Li Ku Yu, two pistols in his hands, was among
them like the typhoon’s swoop—darted in howling, astounding the heart,
a sort of laugh distorting his bawling mouth, as he howled: “I am
here to save Your Majesty from your enemies!” in shouting which he
half-knelt—without kow-towing, and instantly was up again.
Now, one may not enter unsummoned, nor stand up. So, pallid as death,
the boy-Emperor sprang to his feet, frantically pointing, screaming
out: “Why, that man has designs upon my life! You see him there, that
man? My Guards! My Guards!”
In flocked a mob of guards and eunuchs; but at the same time revolvers
were crackling outside; and almost at once a half company of infantry
in civilian garb darted into the hall.
A few shots were exchanged, a few corpses dropped, while Li Ku Yu,
grasping the Emperor, held him behind his body, as if to protect him;
and then Guards, Ministers, eunuchs, fled pell-mell. But only to
be everywhere captured outside by the battalion in mufti which now
surrounded the Imperial and Forbidden Cities. They were Li Ku Yu’s
veterans.
At the same time Lung Lü was reclining on the lofty deck of a large
barge-of-state carved with dragons and phœnixes, coming along the canal
that leads from Summer Palace to Imperial City: for she was duly in the
secret of the _coup d’état_; and she issued an Edict that day in her
son’s name:—“ill-health had moved him to implore his Most Holy Mother
to resume the onerous duties of a ruler for him.”
Four months later the poor boy robed himself in the Ceremonial Robes of
Long-life, turned his face to the south, mounted the Dragon, and was
carried rotten to the stars.
He had been put into semi-imprisonment in the South lake Palace,
surrounded by a foul crew of eunuchs and scoundrels, and died of many
things.