London seemed to abandon itself to revelry.
The next morning Hogarth went in state to the Chapel Royal for
certificate of Communion, attended by heralds, Sergeants-at-mace,
sword-of-state, the Duke of York; and after “the service” communicated
under a canopy at the hand of the Bishop of London.
Then, on the 14th, Lords and Commons had a final conference over the
Regency Bill, when the Assistant of the Parliaments uttered the worlds:
“_Le Roy le Veult_”; and on the 15th, the swearing-in day, a party
of grenadiers with colours and fifes marched into the palace grounds,
continuously to play “God Save the King”; while yeomen and ushers,
together with servants-in-state of the Lord of the Sea, lined the great
hall and staircase, life-guardsmen lining a vista of state-apartments
ending in a Blue-velvet Room, recently decorated; by 2.30 P.M. Privy
Councillors commenced to arrive, till at 3.45 P.M. the Lord of the Sea
sent Admiral Quilter-Beckett to the President of the Council, ordering
his presence; and presently was himself seen coming up the vista,
accompanied by his own household-officers, to the Blue-velvet Room where
he sat at the table-head, the Royal personages on each hand, his own
officers ranged on each side of the entrance-arch; and now one by one
entered the full-dressed Councillors, with bows which he returned,
taking seat according to precedence--Canterbury, then the Lord
Chancellor, then York; and last came and sat a certain Mr. Forrest,
Keeper of the Records.
Hogarth then rose and said:
“My Lords: I understand that by the Act passed by your Parliament
appointing me Regent of this Empire, I am required to take certain
oaths, as prescribed by the said Act: I am now ready to take these oaths
“.
Whereupon rose the Lord Privy Seal, made a reverence, approached, and
read, while Hogarth pronounced after him:
“I sincerely promise and swear that I will be faithful and bear true
allegiance to His Majesty King George. So help me, God.
“I do solemnly promise and swear that I will truly and faithfully
execute the Office of Regent of the King's Empire according to an Act
of Parliament entitled 'an Act, etc.', and that I will, etc. So help me,
God”.
He then subscribed the two oaths, and after him the Privy Councillors,
the Lord President first, as witnesses. It was then delivered to the
Record Keeper, who deposited it in a box, while Hogarth presented his
Lord's-Supper certificate: whereupon the Lord President bent the knee
and kissed his hand, then the Royal personages, then the Archbishops,
advancing in order on both sides.
It was a week of Hope, the turning over of a new leaf, so the spirit
of festival reigned, and was deepened when the evening papers that day
announced that a _ukase_ of the Sea had reduced rent on British ships by
1s. 9d. per ton, and was heightened when during that and the following
nights Hogarth dispensed three millions in fêting England: his
illuminations having no resemblance to those sickly twinklings,
tremulous at their own cost, previously deemed good enough for the
jubilee-days of an empire; the people were astonished: ample and
planetary his mind, his hand right royal, and London, bursting into
light, flashed tidings of our earth to Mars. It was incredible then that
any had ever wept, or would weep again; the bitterest foes of the Regent
caught the contagion of world-gala; Europe flocked to London; theatres
were gratis; the illusion of the comet of the final night was complete,
her lurid rays sprawling 2000 feet aloft in stiff portentousness,
prophesying Change, the parks all transfigured into universes of moons,
crescents, stars, jerbs, Roman-candles, _pots de brin_, girandoles of
rockets, pagodas, marquees, each tree a net of fireflies, while from
five hundred and thirty balloons, with silent burst, snowed diverse
fires.
The new reign opened with promise.
XLV
ESTRELLA, THE PROPHETESS
For three weeks a Provisional Ministry carried on the Government,
confining itself to Supply; till, on the 3rd March, the Lord Regent
succeeded in forming a Cabinet; and at 9 on the evening of the 5th for
the first time addressed himself to the country in the House of Lords.
That night the world seemed hushed to listen, the peridom of Britain
packing the Gallery with rainbow, and the peerdom those benches and
cross-benches, red as massacre and the Scarlet Woman, where thronged
580, while to Charing Cross spread the crowd without. He, from the
Throne, addressed them, and they, startled by the revelation of a caste
chaster far than Vere de Vere, and a pride far more serenely throned
than Hohenzollern, acknowledged him high-born... “Your lordships will
not fail to perceive my will to invigorate some of our ancient epithets:
thus, the First Estate of the Realm shall, during the present Regency,
be veritably 'First', and in no case last”; anon he blew his bugle: “Let
us play the man!--easy to say, hard to do: yet it was first said by an
Englishman when the doing, I think, was hard enough, his martyr's
shroud already rapt aloft in flame: _that_ was magnanimous, my lords, I
declare! _there_ was the British Lion”....
That same night a new Land Bill was introduced by Sir Robert Wortley,
the Prime Minister--a bill drafted, criticized, and re-altered during
two years by the legal experts of the Sea, proposing the “purchase” of
Great Britain at a price of twice the annual value for inherited land,
and seven times for land held by purchase: this to be paid in two and
seven years respectively, without interest, lands yielding no revenue
to become crown-lands from the date of the Bill, which was called: Land
Department (Creation) Bill.
It passed first reading; but the question was: would the Jews vote for
the second reading? Reluctant enough the Jewish members, but there
were rumours that the Jewish electorate were instructing their
representatives to repent and vote for.
And now spread far the League of Resistance, so did the Adair Street
Society, its secret daughter, of which Admiral Donald (O'Hara) had now
been elected Honorary Vice-Master, and whose Roll contained the names of
an extraordinary number of Territorial officers.
The Society was busy: had building four yachts, all models of the
Admiral's yacht attached to the _Mahomet_, which was called the _Mahomet
II_; every dusk companies of 25 to 40 men drilled darkly in the back
yard at Adair Street, some of them Territorial officers: in rotation
they came, they drilled, over 1000; a top room piled with revolvers,
swords, bowie-knives...
For the land-magnates laughed at the notion of submitting to the Bill:
rather, said they, “rivers of blood”. The mention by Hogarth of Ridley
and Latimer they considered irrelevant; their fathers' heroic mood was a
detail: not an entail.
In secret they met. Anarchists of the reddest hue.
One night when the Bill was approaching second-reading Frankl introduced
Harris as a member; and wide-eyed stood Harris, though still cynical,
with elegant walking-stick, hat cocked, and “I sye”, he whispered, “are
all these real, living lords?”
“Large as life”, answered Frankl.
“Strike me dotty! The Lord said unto my lord, sit thou at my right
hand”...the reason of this introduction of Harris being a relation which
had arisen between the Army and the Lord Regent, who had been taking
a startling interest in this branch of the services, had visited
Aldershot, and held five reviews, flattering the soldier by private
notice, shifting officers. By an Order in Council of the 3rd March, a
reorganization was effected in the Army Board and Consultative Council,
of the new men the Adjutant-General being General Sir Merrick Parr,
uncle of Admiral Parr of the sea-fort _Shakespeare_, while the
Commander-in-Chief and Inspector-General were the direct creations of
the Regent, and the whole Headquarters Staff bound to follow him through
thick and thin; and that “second reading” was near, which, if the Jews
would vote against, well and good for Adair Street, but, if not, there
remained either (1) the prompt execution of O'Hara's scheme without
waiting for the four yachts, copies of the _Mahomet II_, which were slow
in building; or (2) the knife of Harris.
But, as to (1), when three delegates from the Society had waited upon
O'Hara in the _Mahomet_ to urge immediate action, O'Hara had replied:
“No, my lords, I cannot enter into this undertaking until preparations
are complete, since the troops we send would never be allowed to land
on the forts, if they arrived in ships not apparently our own. Your
lordships cannot be more anxious than I to rid the earth of a devouring
lion like Richard Hogarth, I do assure you; but, tut, is there nothing
else meanwhile? Just let me introduce to your lordships a little young
man whom I know”--he had summoned Harris.
But when the three delegates had gone, he had struck his brow,
exclaiming: “Wretch that I am!--that great and good fellow, the fairest
of the sons of men!...what a black depravity must be in this heart--”
he had underlooked in the mirror, and cut a face; “but ah, Hogarth! this
heart is in your net; and I loved the mother, too”....
He had sought the altar, and that night had written piteously to
Hogarth, appealing for fresh friendship and reconsideration of his
sentence of dismissal.
So, at any rate, was Harris introduced to Adair Street, became its chief
minister, and ten days before the second-reading debate had won, by
O'Hara's recommendation, an _entrée_ into the Palace as servant to a
gentleman-usher-daily-waiter: and now he made bright the knife of the
assassin, tending its edge as a gardener the tender sprout, the knife
being his _métier_ and forte, he despising the noisy, mediate, uncertain
pistol, nor could use it, his instincts belonging to the Stone Age. But
the days passed, and he could by no means get near to Hogarth.
One night he boldly penetrated to the royal antechamber with the knife
under his waist-band, having passed the stairs-guard by a specious
official envelope. As it was late, he thought it must be about the
Regent's bedtime, having the vaguest ideas as to royal ways and
bedtimes, Hogarth being then in a consultation with three of the Cabinet
destined to last till morning. And Harris: “Can I see the Lord Regent?”
with that lifted brow of perpetual surprise and alertness.
“You? Who are you?” asked a gentleman-in-waiting.
“That's neither 'ere nor there, if it comes to that. I'm Captain
Macnaghten's man, then”.
“But what is it you want?”
“He told me to give the Regent this 'ere”--showing the envelope.
“Weally! then, give it to me”.
“He said I was to give it to the Regent's self”.
“Then, go to blazes quickly, will you? and let Captain Macnaghten know
fwom me that he has been dwinking”.
Harris could not penetrate the ten-fold barrier; but he lay in wait;
watched from some coign every Royal exit and entrance, careful that
Hogarth never saw his face; and he cherished the knife-edge.
One night, four days before the debate, he stood by the Green Park
railings, listless, smoking, when--he started: saw a hurried figure come
out--face muffled--Hogarth!--alone.
Hogarth walked a little, entered a cab; Harris, in another, shadowed
him.
Down Piccadilly, the Hammersmith Road, into the Addison: Hogarth
alighted; Harris followed.
Now, at this time Hogarth had a spy, who presented him reports of the
doings of Rebekah Frankl--a species of literature which the Regent found
agreeable; and, as for two days Rebekah had, for some reason, been at a
villa of Addison Road, this escapade of the Lord Regent was motived by
his hope of catching there some glimpse of her, the house being small,
he having seized his first chance of secret escape from state-affairs
near midnight: and behind him, like the shadow of death, stole the
assassin.
Hogarth, going soft up to the house, leaned aside from the frontage
steps to peer; but Venetian blinds barred him from the least sight
of the interior, though he could hear sounds, strange sounds, as of
wailing; and, as the villa was in the midst of quite a spacious ground,
well grown with trees and shrubberies, he stole round to the back,
peered into an open door level with the garden, and within saw a doorway
of twilight in the midst of darkness; had hoped to see a servant, who
might talk gossip, or even contrive him sight of the Sacred Body; had
ready bribe in hand: but nobody there. So, after some hesitation, he
entered; and Harris, just then come to the house-corner on tiptoe,
discerned him go in, ran on hot bricks to the door, and now distinctly
saw Hogarth, who had passed through a kitchen, standing on three wooden
steps before a doorway which framed a faint light in the room beyond.
On which a shivering of eagerness, quick as winking sheet-lightning,
shook Harris' right knee.
Hogarth, meantime, having seen the chamber before him empty, in his
headlong way had entered, and the guess now in Harris' mind was this:
“It's a girl: a night out”....
He hesitated, Hogarth being once within the house and lost to him, but
after some minutes dared to follow.
Hogarth, meantime, had seen that the light came from a death-taper, with
which was a vessel of water for ceremonial purification, and a napkin,
here being all the preparations for _tahara_ (washing); and suddenly,
in a near room, arose the clamorous dole of _shivah_ (the seven
mourning-days), Rachel weeping for her children, because they are not:
a Jew was dead: “shema, Yisrael...”: and this explained Rebekah's stay
there, for the bereaved may not leave the house. A peer at the bed--a
covered face--pierced him with a compunction like shame: here was
_kodesh_, and he a desecrator with his earthy passion: so he turned to
beat a retreat by the way he had come--when a faint sound that way, made
by Harris; and, instead, he leapt lightly through a window five feet
above the garden.
Some moments later Harris, entering on prowling all-fours, and seeing
the bed-clothes hang immediately near, stole under; waited: no sound
save the singsong lament; and “O Gawd”, thought he, cynic even in his
palest agitation, “there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing
of teeth”....But that Hogarth had not come to wail and gnash he felt
convinced: if he heard no sound above him, that might be because of the
sounds around; so he crawled barely out, and, kneeling, put up a most
cautious groping hand, the bed being in the darkest part of the room;
someone there: and swiftly as a dolphin twists to dart and snap,
his knife was in a breast and instantly ready to strike its expected
bedfellow.
But the breast was alone, the breast of Estrella, the Prophetess, four
days dead.
Harris snatched off the face-cloth, peered upon a noble old visage,
fixed now in trance, and said: “Well, I'm--”
Now he ran, but in the kitchen stopped wild-eyed. It I might be
murder-he was not certain; at least it was out-rage, and he might be
traced: there was the cabman who had brought him--his absence from
the Palace---“Bah! it can't be proved....” But still, if he were even
arrested, and Hogarth got to hear of his presence about the Court--that
would spoil all. He listened: all that part of the house a settled
solitude, the servants themselves sitting _shivah_; and back he ran,
seized upon the little old body, not now stiff, _rigor mortis_ having
passed, saw that the sheet was unstained, and snatched her away out
to the bottom of the garden where shrubbery and holly-hedge formed a
jungle.
Now he set to dig with hissing haste; and, even as he hissed and digged,
he talked without pause, envenomed, heaping her sanctity with insult:
“Old cat you...dust to dust and ashes to ashes, it is....What you want
to do that for? under you go in the cold, cold sod....Who arst you to
put your little finger in the pie? There's another one for you, fair in
the gullet! Now take her up tenderly, lift her with care-and down she
goes”....
Such were Estrella's _kaddish_ and “House of Life”....As he had only the
knife, and the work was slow, and in the midst of it an outcry from the
house, the body missed, he stopped, listening, but without acute fear,
knowing it improbable that they could dream of seeking in the grounds,
and as a matter of fact their minds were a mere paralysis of holy
wonder; so presently he had the little body in a two-foot grave,
arranged surface and dead leaves to naturalness, leapt a wall, and got
away.
Never did act of assassin have result so momentous: for though the
predictions of Estrella had lately spread far among upper-class Jews, it
was only on the day after her burial by Harris that her fame reached to
each Jew under the sun.
It was given out that divine confirmation had been vouchsafed to her
prophecies by the snatching of her body, like Enoch's, into Heaven, or
by its burial, like Moses', by Jahvah: for when no explanation but one
is extant, the brain fastens upon that, and embraces it.
And as Estrella, who, in life, had guarded her hard sayings for the few,
had left papers revealing for her whole race what she had dreamed, like
wildfire now ran her message among the Chosen.
Now Temple and Synagogue were crowded: rabbi and pawnbroker and
_maggid,_ clothes-man and _takif,_ were infected; and there spread the
cry (for the most part meaningless): “To Zion!”
It may be that the Jewish electorate were now too agitated with the near
probability of Shiloh to interest themselves in any mundane question: at
all events, it was during that rage that the Government-whips announced
the certainty that the Jewish members would vote against the Land Bill.
Hogarth first heard it pretty late at night from the Prime Minister; and
“Ha!-the Jews”, he went: “so they have dared, these men? I never thought
that they would! May God deliver me from His ill-chosen people--!”
“And ill-choosing, it seems, my Lord King”.
“Quite so! But, Sir Robert Wortley, is it supportable this thing?”--a
brand now on his brow--“an alien race in Britain opposing thus daringly
not _my_ will only, but the plain will of the people? And have I the air
of one who will support it? Rather, I assure you, would I govern without
a Parliament! But stop--perhaps I shall be found capable of dealing with
these mischievous children of Israel. Give me a night: and to-morrow
at noon come, and hear. Of course, this second-reading business must be
postponed “.
And deep and wide, in lonely vigil, wrought the Regent's thought that
night, till morning: of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of tendencies,
histories, soils, ports, railways, possibilities, race-genius,
analogies, destinies; of Rothschild and I Solomon; of Hirsch and Y'hudah
Hanassi; of the Jewish Board of Guardians, Rab Asa, and the Targum on
the Babylonish Talmud; of the Barbary Jews, the Samaritans, and Y'hudah
Halevi; of the Colonial Bank, and the Karaite Jews....
When at dawn he threw himself dressed into bed, he had resolved upon
a very great thing: their expulsion from England, Pole and Hungarian,
Baron and coster, and the little child at the breast, ten millions.
His eyes had closed toward sleep when, with a start, he remembered a
prophecy uttered one evening in the _Boodah_ Throne-room, and these
words: “Richard, deal gently with my people....”
Two nights later, with a retinue, he hurriedly left England-for
Constantinople.
XLVI
THE ORDER IN COUNCIL
Three days before that setting-out, O'Hara's appeal for pardon had come
under the Regent's notice: and as he had read, his eyes--once more--had
softened, as he had thought: “It would be a great crime to forgive him
the long list; but never mind--we will see”....
And he had meant to reply, but suddenly the Jews had swept O'Hara quite
out of his mind.
He was away hardly two weeks: and when he returned, Palestine
and western Armenia were his, all his acts of this period bearing
resemblance in largeness and rage to the incredible forced-marches of
Napoleon.
If one spreads apart the first two fingers, he sees exactly the country
ordained by Hogarth for modern Israel: the first finger Palestine,
looking upon the Mediterranean; between the fingers, the Syrian Desert;
the second (longer) finger that Mesopotamia, “the cradle of our race”
between the Euphrates and the Tigris, this opening upon the Persian
Gulf, and the trade of the East.
The then population of this area was only 300,000 (Arabs, Turks, Jews,
Greeks) in the Palestine finger, omitting Russian pilgrims to Jerusalem;
while in the Mesopotamia finger--all that Hinterland of Palestine called
“Turkish Armenia”--not 320,000 Armenians had been left by Khurdish
rapine and Turkish atrocity: we may therefore say that the whole was an
uninhabited land waiting for inhabitants.
The only things needed (according to modern notions) to make it
immediately colonizable were roads and railways, and the Regent had not
returned to Dover when both were making in Palestine, the Sultan, left
thunderstruck with a chronic eye of scare by that visit, “lending his
co-operation”, consoled meanwhile by a Conversion Loan of thirteen
millions out of Sea-revenue; to which add a grant-in-aid of fifteen
millions to the emigrants, and the remark of Hogarth's Chancellor about
this time becomes intelligible: “Your Lordship's Majesty's expenditure
is exceeding revenue by 50 per cent”; so that Beech's was soon realizing
considerably in bonds over Europe, and Hogarth temporarily poor--had
stubbornly refused any Parliament-grant for the Regent's personal
establishment.
And suddenly from the blue fell his bolt: at that same table of
the Regent's oath-of-office assembled eighty-seven Jewish lords and
gentlemen at noon of the 24th March, the first day of the month Nisan in
the Jewish year 5699, ordered, each by himself, to the Royal presence;
and the Regent, with the gravest eyes, both palms pressed on the table,
in an embarrassment of compunction, rose and spoke with them--Rothschild
and merchant-prince, Chief Rabbi, Manchester Chief Minister, Heads of
the Alliance Israélite, Anglo-Jewish Association, Jewish Board, Jewish
philanthropists, writers; and they could not believe themselves awake.
He began by speaking of himself, the fact of his power, with such
graciousness, that all were affected, not by the power, but by the
gentleness which wielded it: Providence had given him the disposal of
the earth, and it was for him to do his poor best--a lonesome, sorrowful
post; so that talking could never alter in anything the main point; but
it could modify details: and he had called them to invoke their great
administrative gift and expert counsel; he told of the exodus which he
designed, the home which he had prepared them; recommended a Sanhedrim
of Chief Jews to form the Provisional Government of the new State, with
the Chief Rabbi as its head under the title of Shophet (Judge); would
offer a contribution of £ 15,000,000 from his Exchequer toward an
emigration and colonizing fund, and doubtless emigration bureaus would
be at once established at principal centres; he would also hand over
a Deed of Gift of this larger Judaea as between the Sea and the Jewish
people to the Central Authority as soon as established; also, duplicates
of the text of the Treaty as between the Sea and the Ottoman Empire.
What he gave he gave, he assured them, with a free heart, without
condition; except, of course, one: that no inch of the new land should
ever “belong” to any particular Jew: for he gave, as Nature gave the
earth, not to a hundred, but to all, living and to be born, occupiers
to pay rent, not to any adventurer calling himself landlord, but to the
Central Authority, representing all. This done, he would invoke with
confidence upon their able race the blessing of Almighty God.
In tones so mellow did he utter himself, that for many minutes stillness
reigned, every face pale.
Until a baron stood up with ashen under-lip, to say that such a scheme,
it seemed to him, must remain for ever abortive, unless enforced by Act
of Parliament--
But Hogarth checked him quick.
“No, my lord, not by Act of Parliament: the how your lordship may leave
to me. I dare say you will see it in this evening's papers”.
It was by an Order in Council!
* * * * * * *