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KING JOHN OF JINGALO
THE STORY OF A MONARCH IN DIFFICULTIES
BY LAURENCE HOUSMAN
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1912
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. A Domestic Interior
II. Accidents Will Happen
III. Wild Oats and Widows' Weeds
IV. Popular Monarchy
V. Church and State
VI. Of Things not Expected
VII. The Old Order
VIII. Pace-making in Politics
IX. The New Endymion
X. King and Council
XI. A Royal Commission
XII. An Arrival and a Departure
XIII. A Promissory Note
XIV. Heads or Tails
XV. A Deed Without a Name
XVI. Concealment and Discovery
XVII. The Incredible Thing Happens
XVIII. The King's Night Out
XIX. The Spiritual Power
XX. The Thorn and the Flesh
XXI. Night-light
XXII. A Man of Business
XXIII. "Call Me Jack"
XXIV. The Voice of Thanksgiving
KING JOHN OF JINGALO
CHAPTER I
A DOMESTIC INTERIOR
I
The King of Jingalo had just finished breakfast in the seclusion of the
royal private apartments. Turning away from the pleasantly deranged
board he took up one of the morning newspapers which lay neatly folded
upon a small gilt-legged table beside him. Then he looked at his watch.
This action was characteristic of his Majesty: doing one thing always
reminded him that presently he would have to be doing another.
Conscientious to a fault, he led a harassed and over-occupied life,
which was not the less wearisome in its routine because no clear results
ever presented themselves within his own range of vision. By an unkind
stroke of fortune he had been called to the rule of a kingdom that had
grown restive under the weight of too much tradition; and
constitutionally he was unable to let it alone. So must he now remind
himself in the hour of his privacy how all too fleeting were its
moments, and how soon he would have to project himself elsewhere.
Glancing across the table towards his consort he saw that she was still
engrossed in the opening of her letters--large stiff envelopes,
conspicuously crested, containing squarish sheets of unfolded
note-paper; for it was a rule of the Court that no creased
correspondence should ever solicit the attention of the royal eye, and
that all letters should be written upon one side only. The Queen was
very fond of receiving these spacious missives; though they contained
little of importance they came to her from half the crowned heads of
Europe, as well as from the most select circle of Jingalese aristocracy.
They gave occupation to two secretaries, and were a daily reminder to
her Majesty that, in her own country at any rate, she was the
acknowledged leader of society.
Having looked at his watch the King said: "My dear, what are you going
to do to-day?"
"Really," replied the Queen, "I don't quite know; I have not yet looked
at my diary."
Her Majesty seldom did know anything of the day's program until she had
consulted her secretaries, who, with dovetailing ingenuity, arranged her
hours and booked to each day--often many months in advance--the
engagements which lay ahead. Therein she showed a calmer and more
philosophic temperament than her consort. The King always knew; every
day of his life with anxious forecast he consulted his diary while
shaving, and breakfasted with its troubling details fresh upon his
recollection.
Having answered his inquiry the Queen relapsed into her correspondence,
while the King resumed his newspaper; and the moment may be regarded as
propitious for presenting the reader with a portrait of these two august
personages, since so good an opportunity may not occur again. The kind
of portrait we offer is, of course, of an up-to-date and biographical
character, and does not limit itself to those circumstances of time and
space in which the commencement of this history has landed us.
So, first, we take the King,--not as we have just found him, seated at a
table with chair turned sideways and features sharply illuminated by the
reflected lights of the journal he holds in his hands--for thus we do
not see him to advantage, and it is to advantage that we would exhibit
in its externals a character of which, before we have done with it, we
intend to grow fond. Time and space must provide us with a broader view
of him than that.
This King had been upon the throne for twenty-five years; and during
that period, like a rich wine in the wood, monarchy had mellowed within
him, permeating his system with its mild and slightly dry flavor; it had
become as it were a habit, and he carried it quite naturally, almost
unconsciously, though with just a suspicion of weight, much as a scholar
carries his learning or a workman his bag of tools.
A pleasantly florid face, quaintly expressive of an importance about
which its owner was undecided, imposed above a fullish waistcoat a chin
which was now tending toward the slopes of middle age. The eyes were
mild and vaguely speculative, the lips full and loosely formed, and when
they smiled they began tentatively in a tremulous lift showing only the
two upper front teeth--the smile of a woman rather than of a man. This
smile--when it made, as it so often had to make, its appearance in
public--was curiously suggestive of interrogation. "Am I now meant to
smile?" it seemed to say. "Very good, then I will." This tentatively
advanced smile of a countenance so highly exalted for others to gaze on,
was peculiarly winning to those who were its recipients; it suggested a
gentle character, indicating through its shyness both the giving and the
receiving of a favor; and among those in personal attendance on him the
King was--perhaps on account of that smile--more liked than he knew.
Servants whom the vastness of his establishments did not convert into
total strangers found him a considerate master, full of a personal
interest in their snug lives, and with a carefully practised memory for
the numbers and names of their children; and the only complaint that
even his valets had against him was that he remained his own barber and
evinced a certain reluctance in casting his suits until they had begun
to show a suspicion of wear. In outward relations he was a kind, touchy,
companionable soul; inwardly he was one who suffered acutely from lack
of companionship and conversation, not because he had not plenty of
people to talk to, but because so many things came into his head that he
must not say, while the correct substitutes for them only occurred to
him later. And thus it came about that a good deal of his intercourse
with humanity was limited to a pleasant expression of face, wearing
generally, especially when it smiled, a wistful note of interrogation.
To present this face to the public in the regulation doses which were
considered inducive to loyalty, he had sat thirty-nine times for his
portrait to popular rather than famous painters, and to commercially
successful photographers more times than any one could count. And
painters and photographers alike had agreed that he was a steady and a
patient sitter. They all liked him. He himself preferred the
photographers; they came more often but they took less time and did not
require the give-and-take of artificially made conversation. They were
also more amenable to criticism, and kept behind the scenes for
"touching-up" purposes wonderful anonymous artists who gave no trouble
whatever, requiring no sittings and yet producing results that for tact
and skill combined with accuracy could not be beaten. Occasionally,
after having sat for his portrait to one of the painters, the King was
advised to bestow on him a knighthood or an order. In his heart of
hearts he would have much preferred knighting a photographer; but for
some reason which was beyond him to discover this was not considered the
correct thing, and the knighthoods went accordingly to the people who
gave him the most trouble and the least satisfactory results.
It had never been the King's lot to be handsome; but now the approaches
of age were giving to his countenance a dignity which in youth it had
lacked. This was part and parcel of a certain mental obtuseness or
obstinacy: when his Majesty did not understand, majesty became sedentary
in his face. Often when it was the duty, or the device, of his
ministerial advisers to confuse his mind with explanatory details about
things which lay far beyond it, they would presently become aware that
he did not in the least understand what they were saying, or that such
understanding as he possessed at the beginning had become darkened by
judicious counsel. This stage of the reasoning process was marked by a
gentle access of majesty to the royal countenance; and when it appeared
ministers were informed that, for the time being, their object was
attained. When, however, the King did understand, or thought that he
did, he was less majestic and more troublesome, and had to be
circumvented in other ways; and a good deal of this history will be
taken up with the circumventions practised by an astute Cabinet upon a
monarch who was brought by accident to imagine that he really did
understand the position of ignominy combined with responsibility in
which the Constitution had placed him.
II
John of Jingalo had been in harness all his life: he had never known
freedom, never been left to find his own feet, never been taught to
think for himself except upon conventional lines; and these had kept him
from ever putting into practice the rudimental self-promptings which
sometimes troubled him. He had been elaborately instructed, but not
educated; his own individual character, that is to say, had not been
allowed to open out; but a sort of traditional character had been slowly
squeezed into him in order to fit him for that conventional acceptance
of a variety of ancient institutions (some moldering, some still
vigorous) which, by a certain official and ruling class of monetarily
interested persons, was considered to be the correct constitutional
attitude. Monarchy, that is to say, had been interpreted to him by those
who sucked the greatest amount of social prestige and material benefit
from its present conditions as a "going concern"; and in that imposed
interpretation deportment came first, initiative last, and originality
nowhere at all.
In many respects, indeed, his training had been like that of a young
girl whose parents have determined, without leaving her any choice in
the matter, that matrimony is to be her single aim and the sphere of the
home her outward circumference. Like a young girl whose future is thus
controlled he had acquired a pleasant smattering of several social
accomplishments; he had learned to speak three languages with fluency,
to draw, to dance, to ride, to behave under all likely circumstances
with perfect correctness, and to walk down the center of a large room
with apparent ease. He had been trained, for review purposes and for the
final privilege of carrying a cocked hat as well as a crown upon his
coffin, in a profession which he would never be allowed to practise;
and, having been "brought out" with much show and parade at an early
age, had been introduced to a vast number of very important people, and
dragged through a long series of social functions, which, however
crowded, gave always a free floor for his feet to walk on and never
presented a single back to his view. But as a result of all these
crowds, with their bewildering blend of glittering toilet, deferential
movement, and flattering speech, he knew no more of the inner realities
of life than the young girl knows of it from a series of dances,
flirtations, and afternoon teas. This polite and decorous, yet dazzling
mask had been drawn between him and the actualities of existence,
presenting itself to view again and again, and concealing its essential
sameness in the pomp and circumstance with which it was attended. At
these functions thousands of brilliant and distinguished people had
bowed their well-stored brains within a few inches of his face, had
exchanged with their monarch a few words of studied politeness and
compliment, now and then had even laid themselves out to amuse him, but
never once had they imparted to his mind an arresting or a commanding
thought, never once endeavored to change any single judgment that had
ever been formed for him. Not once in all the years since he came to
man's estate--except occasionally with his wife and on one isolated
occasion with his father--had he ever found himself involved so deeply
in argument, or in any difference of opinion, as to be forced to feel
himself beaten. That single discussion with his father had been closed
peremptorily--parental and regal authority combining had cut it short;
and as for his wife--well, she was dear, amiable, and, within her
limits, sensible; but intellectually she was not his superior. Thus
there had come to him a good deal of social discipline, experience of a
kind, but of education in the higher intellectual sense scarcely any. He
had merely been taught carefully and elaborately to take up a certain
position, and in a vast number of minutely differing circumstances
(mainly of social formality) to fill it or seem to fill it "as one to
the manner born."
In addition he had been trained, on strictly impartial and noncommittal
lines, to take an interest in politics; to have within certain narrow
and prescribed limits an open mind--one, that is to say, with its
orifice comfortably adapted to the stuffing process practised on kings
by the great ones of the official world; and when his mind would not
open in certain required directions, well, after all, it did not much
matter, since in the end it made no practical difference.
Under these circumstances he would have been a mere social and official
automaton had not certain defects of his character saved him. Though
timid he was impulsive; he was also a little irritable, rather
suspicious, and indomitably fussy in response to the call of duty.
Temper, fuss, and curiosity saved him from boredom; he was
conscientiously industrious, and though there was much that he did not
understand he managed to be interested in nearly everything.
In the fiftieth year of his age, this monarch, amiable, affable, and of
a thoroughly deserving domestic character, was destined to be thrust
into a seething whirlpool of political intrigue in which, for the first
time, his conscience was to be seriously troubled over the part he was
asked to play. And while that wakening of his conscience was to cause
him a vast amount of trouble, it was to have as enlarging and educative
an effect upon his character as her first love affair has upon a young
girl. From this moment, in fact, you are to see a shell-bound tortoise
blossom into a species of fretful porcupine, his shell splintering
itself into points and erecting them with blundering effectiveness
against his enemies. And you shall see by what unconscious and
subterranean ways history gets made and written.
III
And now let us turn to the Queen. In her case less analysis is needed:
one had only to look at her, at the genial and comfortable expression of
her face, at the ample, but not too ample, lines of her person, to see
that in her present high situation she both gave and found satisfaction.
She did, with ease and even with appetite, that which the King, with so
much anxious expenditure of nervous energy, was always trying to do--her
duty. She had a position and she filled it. She was not clever, but her
imperturbable common-sense made up for what she lacked intellectually.
No one, except the newspapers, would call her beautiful; but she was
comely and enjoyed good health, and she had what one may describe as a
good surface--nothing that she wore was thrown away on her, and any
chair that she occupied, however large, she never failed to adorn. There
you have her picture: you may imagine her as plump, as blonde, as
good-tempered, and as well-preserved for her age as suits your
individual taste--no qualifying word of the chronicler of this history
shall obstruct the view; and you may be as fond of her as you like.
The Queen was the head of Jingalese society, and of its charities as
well. Her influence was enormous: at a mere word from her organizations
sprang into being. Without any Acts of Parliament to control or guide
them--merely at the delicately expressed wish of her Majesty--thousands
of charming, wealthy, and influential women would waste spare hour upon
hour and expend small fortunes of pocket-money in keeping uncomfortable
things comfortably going in their accustomed grooves. It was calculated
that the Queen's patronage had the immediate effect of trebling the
subscription list of any charity, while the mere withdrawal of her name
spelt bankruptcy. Her Majesty was patron to forty-nine charities and
subscribed to all of them. For the five largest she appeared annually on
a crimson-covered platform, insuring thereby a large supply of silk
purses containing contributions, and a full report in the press of all
the speeches. It was her rule to open two bazaars regularly each summer,
to lay the foundation-stones of three churches, orphanages, or hospitals
(whichever happened to require the greatest amount of money for their
completion), to attend the prize-giving at the most ancient of the
national charity schools, and every winter, when distress and
unemployment were at their worst, to go down to the Humanitarian Army's
soup-kitchen, and there taste, from a tin mug with a common pewter
spoon, the soup which was made for the poor and destitute. This last
performance, which took so much less time and trouble than all the rest,
proved each year the most popular incident of her Majesty's useful and
variegated public life, for every one felt that it provided in the
nicest possible way an antidote to the advance of socialistic theories.
The papers dealt with it in leading articles; and the lucky casuals who
happened to drop in on the day when her Majesty paid the surprise visit
arranged for her by her secretaries would report that they had never
tasted such good soup in all their born days.
It may truthfully be said that the Queen never spent an idle day, and
never came to the end of one without the consciousness of having done
good. All the more, therefore, is it remarkable that, as the outcome of
so much benevolence and charity, the Queen knew absolutely nothing of
the real needs and conditions of the people, and that she knew still
less how any alterations in the laws, manners, or customs of the country
could better or worsen the conditions of unemployment, sweated labor, or
public morality. Her whole idea of political economy was summed up in
the proposition that anything must be good for the country which was
good for trade; and it may certainly be said that for the majority of
trade interests she was as good as gold. Without caring too much for
dress (being herself wholly devoid of personal vanity) she ordered
dresses in abundance, and constantly varied the fashion, the color, and
the material, because she was given to understand that change and
variety stimulated trade. Her most revolutionary act had been to
readopt, one fine spring morning, the ample skirt of the crinoline
period in order to counteract the distress and shortage of work caused
in the textile trade by the introduction and persistence of the "hobble
skirt." As a consequence of this sudden disturbance of the evolutionary
law governing creation in the modiste's sense of the word, there was a
sharp reaction a year later, which--after the artificial stimulus of the
previous season--threw more women out of employment than ever; new
fancy-trades had to be learned in apprenticeships at starvation
wages--with the result that wages had to be eked out in other ways. But
of all this her Majesty heard nothing. It never occurred to anybody that
these ultimate consequences of her amiable incentive to industry could
possibly concern her; and the Queen, finding that people no longer knew
how to adapt themselves to the long, full skirts of their grandmothers,
accepted without demur the next wave of fashion that swept over Europe
from London _via_ Paris.
The Queen never herself opened a paper. Extracts were read out to her
each day by one of her ladies; these being selected by another lady
appointed for the purpose as those most likely to interest the royal
mind. It was made known in the press that her Majesty never read the
divorce cases; neither did she read politics or the police news. No
controversial side of the national life ever entered her brain--until
somehow or another it was reached by the dim uproar of the Women
Chartists' movement. She expressed her disapproval, and the page was
turned.
Her instinctive tastes stood always as a guide for what she should be
told; and experience limited her inquiry. In all her life her influence
had never been used for the release of an unjustly convicted prisoner,
the abatement of an inhuman sentence, or the abolition of any abuse
established by law. Queens who had done these things in the past were
medieval figures, and such interference was quite unsuitable for a royal
consort under modern conditions. Had Philippa of Hainault lived in these
more enlightened times she would have been forced to let the Burghers of
Calais go hang and restrict herself to making provision for their widows
and orphans; for to arrest any act of government had long since ceased
to be within the functions of a queen.
Like her husband, this royal lady was surrounded by officialdom, or,
rather, by its complementary and feminine appendices--the wives and
daughters of the aristocracy, of politicians, of ecclesiastical and
military dignitaries: these to her represented the sphere, activity, and
capacity of her own sex. Other women--pioneers of education and of
reform, rescue-workers, organizers, writers, orators, had--the majority
of them--lived and died without once coming in contact with the official
leader of Jingalese womanhood; for they and their like were outside the
official ranks, and stood for things combative and controversial and
dangerously alive, and only a few of them had been brought to Court in
their venerable old age, to be looked at as curiosities when their
fighting days were over and their work done.
On the governing boards of the hospitals to which the Queen gave her
patronage there was not a single woman--or a married one either; but
when her Majesty visited the wards she was very nice to the nurses. She
was, in fact, very nice to everybody, and everybody was very nice to
her.
IV
A king and a queen take so long to describe that the reader will have
almost forgotten how we left them at the breakfast table. But the Queen
had her letters and the King his newspapers, and there, when we return
to them in the historic present, they still are.
Yes, there they sit, an institutional expression of the nation's general
complacence with the state of civilization at which it has arrived,
interpreting in decorous form the voice of the articulate majority--the
inarticulate not being interpreted at all. There they sit, he with his
newspapers, she with her letters: the King a little anxious and
perturbed, the Queen not anxious or perturbed about anything.
She was still enjoying her superfluous correspondence, he studying in a
vague distrustfulness the various organs of public opinion which lay
around him, doubtful of them all, yet wishing to find one he could rely
on. For now they were all very full of the approaching constitutional
crisis, and were adumbrating in respectful, yet slightly menacing terms,
what the King himself would do in the matter. Whereas what he actually
would do he had not himself the ghost of a notion,--did not yet know, in
fact, what legs he had to stand on, having no information upon that
point beyond what the Prime Minister had chosen to tell him.
And being puzzled he wanted to talk, yet not directly of the matter
which perturbed his mind; but somehow by hearing his own voice he hoped
to arrive at the popular sentiment. It was a way he had; and the Queen,
who was often his audience, knew the preliminary symptoms by heart. So
when presently he began crackling his newspaper and drawing a series of
audible half breaths as though about to begin reading, his wife
recognized the sign that here was something she must listen to. She put
down her letters and attended.
"I see," said his Majesty, culling his information from the opening
paragraph of a leading article, "I see that the Government is losing
popularity every day. That Act they passed last year for the
reinstitution of turnpikes to regulate the speed of motor-traffic is
proving unpopular."
"Is it a failure, then?" inquired the Queen.
"On the contrary, it is a success. But the system was expected to pay
for its upkeep by the amount of fines it brought in, whereas the result
has been to make the conduct of motorists so exemplary that the measure
has ceased to pay. Unable to escape detection, 'joy-riding' has become
practically non-existent, motor-cars are ceasing to be used for breaches
of the peace, and the trade is going down in consequence by leaps and
bounds. The fact is you cannot now-a-days put a stop to any grave abuse
without seriously damaging some trade-interest. If 'trade' is to decide
matters it would be much better not to legislate at all."
"My dear! wouldn't that be revolutionary?" inquired the Queen.
"Keeping things as they are is not revolutionary," replied his Majesty,
"though it's a hard enough thing to do now-a-days."
"But," objected his wife, "they must pass something, or else how would
they earn their salaries?"
"That's it!" said the King,--"payment of members; another of those
unnecessary reforms thrust on us by the example of England."
"Ah, yes!" answered his wife, feeling about for an intelligent ground of
agreement, "England is so rich; she can afford it."
"It isn't that at all," retorted his Majesty; "plenty of other countries
have had to afford it before now. But it was only when England did it
that we took up with the notion. We are always imitating England: the
attraction of contraries, I suppose, because we are surrounded by land
as they are by water. Why else did they start turning me into a
commercial traveler, sending me all over Europe and round the world to
visit colonies that no longer really belong to us? Only because they are
doing the same thing over in England."
"They saw that you wanted change of air," said the Queen.
"Change of fiddlesticks!" answered the King; "I consider it a most
dangerous precedent to let a sovereign be too long out of his own
country. It makes people imagine they can do just as well without him!"
The Queen looked at her husband with shrewd and kindly furtiveness. She
had a funny little suspicion that the ministry did at times greatly
prefer his absence to his presence: and that "change of fiddlesticks"
was really their underlying motive. About this monarch she herself had
no illusions: he was a dear, but he fussed; and when once he began
fussing he required an enormous amount of explanation and persuasion.
Even she, therefore, was not at all averse to letting him go on these
State outings in which she need not always accompany him. They gave him
something fresh to think about, and to her a time of leisure when she
need not pretend to think about anything she did not understand.
"Of course," went on the King, "it makes good copy for the newspapers.
The press is powerful, and governments are obliged now-a-days to throw
in a certain amount of spectacle to keep it in a good temper. We are
sent off to perform somewhere, and after us come the penny-a-liner and
the cinematograph."
"Oh! my dear, much more than a penny-a-liner," corrected the Queen; "I
heard of one correspondent who makes £5,000 a year. And think how good
for trade! Besides, do not we get the benefit of it?"
"Benefit!" exclaimed the King irritably, "where is the benefit to us of
journalists who describe State functions as though they were jewelers'
touts and dressmakers rolled into one? The vulgarity of people's present
notion of what makes monarchy impressive is appalling. Listen to this,
my dear! This is you and me at the Opening of Parliament yesterday." He
unfolded his paper and read--
"'The regal purple flowed proudly from the King's shoulders; above their
three ribbons of red, green, and gold, the Orders of his ancestors
burned confidingly on the royal breast. The Queen's diamonds were
supreme; upon the silken fabric of her corsage they flashed incredibly;
one watched them, fire-color infinitely varied, infinitely intensified,
like nothing else seen on earth. As she advanced, deeply bowing to right
and left, parabolas of light exhaled from her coronet like falling
stars. When King and Queen were seated, their State robes flowing in
purple waves and ripples of ermine to the very steps of the dais, the
picture was complete. Single gems of the first water glistened like
dewdrops in the Queen's ears, while upon her bosom as she breathed the
three great Turgeneff diamonds caught and defiantly threw back the
light. They became the center of all eyes.'
"I call that disgusting!" said the King. "Why diamonds should burn
confidingly on my breast, and flash incredibly on yours, I'm sure I
don't know. But there we are: a couple of clothes'-pegs for journalists
to hang words on."
The Queen had rather enjoyed the description, it enabled her to see
herself as she appeared to others.
"I don't see the harm," she said; "we have to wear these things, so they
may as well be described."
"I wish some day you wouldn't wear them!" said the King. "Then, instead
of talking of your trinkets and your clothes, they would begin to pay
attention to what royalty really stands for."
The Queen was gathering up her letters from the table: she smiled
indulgently upon her spouse.
"Jack," said she, "you are jealous!"
"I wish, Alicia," said the King testily, "that you would not call me
'Jack'; at least, not after--not where any of the servants may come in
and overhear us. It would not sound seemly."
"My dear John," said the Queen, "don't be so absurd. You know perfectly
well that it's just that which makes us most popular. People are always
telling little anecdotes of that kind about us; and then, think of all
the photographs! If people were to talk of you as 'King Jack,' it would
mean you were the most popular person in the country."
"I wonder if they do?" murmured the King. "I wonder!" He felt remote
from his people, for he did not know.
The Queen noticed his depression; something was troubling him, and being
a lady of infinite tact, she abruptly turned the conversation. "What are
you doing to-day, dear?" she inquired brightly.
"I have a Council at eleven," moaned the King, "and I really must get
through a few of these papers first. It gives me a great advantage when
Brasshay begins talking--a great advantage if I know what the papers
have been saying about him. To-day it's the Finance Act. By the way,
Charlotte was asking me yesterday to raise her allowance. Is there any
reason for it?"
"A little more for dress would now be advisable," said the Queen. "She
has lately begun to open Church bazaars: I thought they would do for her
to begin upon. And the other day she laid the foundation-stone of a
dogs' orphanage--very nicely, I'm told."
"Of course," said the King, "she's old enough, and it is quite time I
asked for a definite grant from Parliament. But if one did that now they
would probably not raise it afterwards. Very much better to wait, I
think, till we have made a really brilliant match for her; then, for the
sake of its financial prestige, the nation will do the thing
handsomely."
"She has got an idea she doesn't like foreigners," said the Queen
reflectively.
"She will have to like some foreigner!" said the King. "As the only
daughter of a reigning monarch she must marry royalty, and we haven't
any one left among ourselves who is eligible. Charlotte must get to like
foreigners. Max has no objection to foreigners, I hope?"
The Queen gave her husband a curious look.
"From what I hear," she murmured, "I should say none: but it is not for
me to make any inquiries."
"Dear me! is that so?" said the King. "Well, well! When did you hear
about it?"
"Only yesterday; but it has been going on a long time."
"I suppose," sighed his Majesty, "I suppose one couldn't expect it to be
otherwise. Well, I must speak to him, then; and we shall really have to
get him married to somebody. The religious difficulty, of course,
narrows our choice most unfortunately; and when we happen to be on bad
terms both with Germany and England, through trying to be friendly to
both, why, really there is hardly anybody left."
"I hear," remarked the Queen, "that the Hereditary Prince of
Schnapps-Wasser is returning from his three years' exploration of
central South America this autumn. Wouldn't he be worth thinking about?"
"You mean for Charlotte? But I expect he will be wanted at the Prussian
Court."
The Queen shook her head. "Oh, no! He is out of favor there. They have
never forgiven him his description of the Kaiser's oratorio as 'Moses
Among the Crocodiles.' That is why I thought he might not be averse to
looking in our direction. He used to be a nice boy; he is handsome
according to his portraits, and Charlotte is not without her taste for
adventure."
"That doesn't solve the problem about Max," said his Majesty
discontentedly. "And, by the way, where is Charlotte?"
"She has gone to stay with Lady--oh, I have forgotten her name--the one
who had a fancy for history and took a diploma in it. They are opening
that new college for women, with a Greek play all about the Trojans, and
Charlotte particularly wanted to go."
"H'm?" queried the King; "rather an advanced set for Charlotte to
consort with--just now, I mean,--don't you think? There might be some of
those Women Chartists among them."
"Oh, no!" replied her Majesty; "they are all quite respectable,--ladies
every one of them. I took care to make inquiries about that."
And then, quite contentedly, she made a final gathering of her
correspondence, and sailed off for a preliminary interview with her two
indispensable secretaries; while the King, selecting three out of the
pile of newspapers, carried them away with him to his study. There was a
sentence in one of them which he particularly wanted to read again. And
with this vacating of the breakfast-chamber we may as well close the
chapter.
CHAPTER II
ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
I
The sentence which had attracted the King's attention, coming as it did
from the newspaper on whose opinions he most frequently relied, ran
thus--
"In this developing crisis the Nation looks with complete and loyal
assurance to him who alone stands high and independent above all
parties, confident that when the time for a final decision has arrived
he will so act, within the recognized limits of the Royal Prerogative,
as to add a fresh luster and a renewed significance to that supreme
symbol and safeguard of the popular will which, under Divine Providence,
still crowns our constitutional edifice."
The King read it three times over. He read it both standing and sitting:
and read in whatever attitude it certainly sounded well. As a peroration
its rhythm and flow were admirable, as a means of keeping up the courage
and confidence of readers who placed their reliance mainly upon literary
style nothing could be better; but what, by all that was constitutional,
did it mean?--or rather, how did it mean that he, the high and
independent one, was to do it? Point by point its sentiments were
unexceptionable; but what it actually pointed to he did not know. "Add
luster?" Why, yes, certainly. But was not that what he was already doing
day by day on the continuous deposit system, even as the oyster within
its shell deposits luster upon the pearls which a sort of hereditary
disease has placed within its keeping? "Renewed significance?" But in
what respect had the significance of the royal office become obscured?
Was anything that he did insignificant? "Symbol and safeguard of the
popular will?" Yes: if his Coronation oath meant anything. But how was
he, symbol and safeguard and all the rest of it, to find out what the
popular will really was? No man in all the Kingdom was so much cut off
from living contact with the popular will as was he!
The King was in his study, the room in which most of the routine work
of his daily life was accomplished--a large square chamber with three
windows to one side looking out across a well-timbered park toward a
distant group of towers. But for those towers, so civic in their
character, it might well have been taken for a country view; scarcely a
roof was visible.
Upon a large desk in the center of the chamber lay a pile of official
letters and documents awaiting his perusal; and he knew that in the
adjoining room one of his private secretaries was even now attending his
call. But from none of his secretaries could he learn anything about the
popular will.
He walked to a window and stood looking out into the soft sunlit air,
slightly misty in quality, which lay over the distances of his capital.
Away behind those trees, beneath those towers, sending toward him a
ceaseless reverberation of bells, wheels, street cries, and all the
countless noises of city life, went a vast and teeming population of men
and women, already far advanced on the round of their daily toil. He was
in their midst, but not one of them could he see; and not one of them
did he really know as man to man. Everything that he learned about their
lives came to him at second or at third hand; nor did actual contact
bring him any closer, for wherever he moved among them they knew who he
was and behaved accordingly. For twenty-five years he had not walked in
a single one of those streets the nearest of which lay within a stone's
throw of his palace. As a youth, before his father came to the throne,
he had sometimes gone about, with or without companions, just like an
ordinary person, taking his chance of being recognized: it had not
mattered then. But now it could not be done: people did not expect it of
him; his ministers would have regarded it as a dangerous and expensive
habit, requiring at least a trebling of the detective service, and even
then there would always have been apprehension and uncertainty. He was
King; and though, whatever might happen to him, his place would be
automatically filled, and government go on just as before, yet, as a
national symbol, his life was too valuable to be risked; and so on
ascending the throne he had been forced, as his father before him, to
resign his personal liberty and cease to go out in the happy,
unpremeditated fashion of earlier days.
He had long since got over the curious home-sickness which this
separation had at first caused him, and as an opening to personal
enjoyment the impulse for freedom had long since died within him; but
his heart still vaguely hungered for the people who called him their
King; and looking out into the pale sunshine that was now thinly
buttering the surface of his prosperous capital, and listening to the
perpetual tick and hum of its busy life, he knew that for him it was and
must remain, except in an official sense, an unknown territory. And yet
out there, in that territory which he was unable to explore, the thing
that is called "the popular will" lived and moved and had its being!
Dimly he dreamed of what it might be--a thing of substance and form; but
there was none to interpret to him his dream--except upon official
lines.
Before his eyes, a salient object in the heavens surpassing the stony
eminences which surrounded it, rose the tall spire of the twin Houses of
Parliament. Upon its top swung a gilded weathercock; while about a
portion of its base stood a maze of scaffolding, the façade of the
building having during the last few months been under repair. There
seemed, however, for the moment, to be no workmen upon it. Presently, as
he gazed vacantly and without intent, something that moved upon the
upper masonry engaged his attention. Slowly along its profile, out of
all those hidden millions below, one of his subjects, a single and
minute representative of the popular will, emerged cautiously into view.
The King was gifted with good sight; and though the figure appeared but
as a tiny speck, it was unmistakably that of a man bearing a burden upon
his back and ascending steadily toward the highest point of all. In a
word it was a steeplejack. As the name passed through the King's mind it
evoked recollection; and he said to himself again, "I wonder whether
they call _me_ Jack,--I wonder."
With a curious increase of interest and fellow-feeling he watched the
distant figure mounting to its airy perch. And as he did so a yet
further similitude and parable flashed through his mind. For the man's
presence at that dizzy height he knew that the Board of Public Works was
responsible: as a single item in the general expenditure the weathercock
of the Palace of Legislature had had voted to it a new coat of gilt, and
this steeplejack was now engaged in putting it on. He was there in the
words of a certain morning journal, "to add fresh luster to that supreme
symbol of the popular will which crowned the constitutional edifice."
As the words with their caressing rhythm flowed across the King's brain
he discerned the full significance of the scene which was being enacted
before him. This weathercock--the highest point of the constitutional
edifice--requiring to be touched up afresh for the public eyes--was
truly symbolical of the crown in its relation to the popular will;
twisting this way and that responsive to and interpretative of outside
forces, it had no will of its own at all, and yet to do its work it must
blaze resplendently and be lifted high, and to be put in working trim
and kept with luster untarnished it required at certain intervals the
attentions of a steeplejack--one accustomed to being in high places,
accustomed to isolation and loneliness, accustomed to bearing a burden
upon his back before the eyes of all: one whose functions were rather
like his own.
He saw that the steeplejack had now reached the point where his work was
waiting for him, work that required nerve and courage. He wondered
whether it were highly paid; he wondered also by what means the man
slung himself into position, and by what process the new gold had to be
applied so that it would stick. Perhaps he only polished up what was
already there, coated and covered from view by the grime of modern
industry. If so, how did he scrape off the dirt without also scraping
off the gold? Perhaps, on the other hand, all the old gold had to come
off before new gold could be put on. He wondered whether the man ever
forgot his perilous position, whether habit did not make him sometimes
careless, whether he ever felt giddy, and how far the exploit was really
attended by danger to one possessed of skill and a cool head; and as he
thought, putting himself in the man's place, his hands grew
sympathetically moist.
Well, he was wasting time, he must really get to his own work now; that
secretary would be wondering what had become of him. He glanced away
over the distant roofs that here and there emerged above the trees, and
then for a last look back again. And as he did so all at once he started
and uttered an acute exclamation of distress. A dark speck had suddenly
detached itself from the ball upon which the vane stood, and could now
be seen glissading with horrible swiftness down the slope of the spire.
It fell into the scaffolding, zigzagged from point to point, and
disappeared. There could be no mistake about it, it was the man himself
who had fallen: that single and minute expression of the popular will
had passed for ever from view; and the smooth and equable hum of the
unseen millions below went steadily on.
II
Fleeing from the sight still registered upon his brain the King rang for
his secretary. A figure of correctitude entered.
"There has been an accident," said his Majesty. "Over there!" He
pointed. "A steeplejack has fallen."
The secretary slid respectfully to the window and looked out. To that
polite official gaze of inquiry the scene of the tragedy returned a
blank and uncommunicative stare.
"Poor wretch!" murmured the King. "I actually saw him go! Ring up, and
inquire at the Police Center; though, of course, the poor fellow must be
dead!"
The secretary sped away on his errand, and the King, moving back to the
window, gazed fixedly at the spire, as though it could still in some way
inform him of the tragedy consummated below. Then he returned to his
desk and looked distractedly at his papers, but it was no use--back he
went to the window again.
Presently the secretary returned and stood drooping for permission to
speak. Permission came. "The man is dead, your Majesty. He was killed
instantly."
The King gave a sigh of relief. "Of course," he murmured, "from such a
height as that!" He stood for a while still cogitating on the sad event:
then he said, with that considerate thoughtfulness which habit had made
a second nature, "Be good enough to find out whether the poor fellow was
married. If so let a donation be sent to his widow,--whatever the case
seems to warrant--more if there should happen to be children."
Over his tablets the secretary bowed the beauty of his person like a
recording angel. Then he paused that the heavenly measure might be taken
with accuracy.
"Shall it be five pounds, sir?" he inquired.
"Better make it ten," said the King; "I believe that pays for a funeral.
In sending it, you might explain that I had the misfortune to be an
eye-witness."
The secretary cooed like a brooding dove. Of course everybody would
understand and appreciate. He made a memorandum of the ten pounds and
closed up his tablets.
Meanwhile the King went on thinking aloud. "I wonder," he said, "whether
they take proper precautions in a trade like that? I would like to look
it up. Find me the 'ST' volume of the _Encyclopedia Appendica_."
And when the volume was brought to him the King sat down and read all
about steeplejacks and climbing irons, and cranks, and pulleys, and all
the other various appliances requisite for the driving of that dreadful
trade; read also how the men were inclined to prime themselves for the
task in ever-increasing measure, and so one day having over-primed to be
found at the bottom instead of at the top, knowing nothing themselves of
how they got there. It was all very interesting and very apposite, and
rather pathetic; and when he had done he turned over the pages backward
till he came from steeplejacks to "Statesmen" and "Statecraft" and
"Statutes" and the affairs of State in general (it was from the
_Encyclopedia Appendica_--a presentation copy--that he got most of his
information upon practical things); and in these articles he became so
absorbed that he quite forgot how time flew, until his chief secretary
came formally to announce to him that the hour for appearing in Council
had arrived.
This announcement, be it observed, was made by no ordinary working
secretary, but by the chief of them all, the Comptroller of his
Majesty's household, a retired general who had passed from the military
to the civil service with a record brilliantly made for him by other
men--adjutants and attachés and all those indefatigable right-hand
assistants of whom your true diplomatist forms his stepping-stones to
power. General Poast and the Prime Minister shared between them the
ordering and disposal of the King's public services to the Nation, while
over other departments impenetrable to the Premier the hand of the
Comptroller was still extended. Though personally the King rather
disliked him, he had become an absolutely indispensable adjunct to the
daily life--so smooth in its workings, yet so easily dislocated--of the
Royal Household; also, as a go-between for ministers whose intercourse
with the Crown was purely formal, he had proved himself a very efficient
implement when on occasion it became necessary to circumvent or reduce
to reason the King's characteristic obstinacy in small matters of
detail. He might, in fact, be regarded as the keeper not so much of the
King's conscience, as of his savoir faire, and of that tact for which
Royalty in all countries is conspicuous. Everything that related to the
remembering of names and faces, of dates, anniversaries and historical
associations, all those small considerate actions of royal charity which
robbed of their due privacy have now become the perquisite of the press;
all these things stood ranged under minutely tabulated heads within the
Comptroller-General's department. He was, literally, the King's
Remembrancer; and so, on this occasion also, he had come as intermediary
to remind his Majesty that the hour for the Council was at hand.
But the Council was one of those functions in which it was held
necessary that the part played by the King (albeit no more than a silent
presidency at a Board where others spoke) should wear an appearance of
importance. And so the announcement made by the Comptroller was merely
preliminary to another and more flourishing announcement by an usher of
the Court. Two lackeys threw open a door--other than that through which
the General had just entered, and a bowing official, beautifully dressed
and waving a fairy-like wand, announced from the threshold, "Your
Majesty's Council, now in attendance, humbly begs audience of your
Majesty."
III
Then followed a pause. The Comptroller-General with head deferentially
bent waited to catch the royal eye. The King graciously allowed his
royal eye to be caught; and the Comptroller-General, interpreting the
silent consent of that glance, uttered with due solemnity the
traditional form of words indicative of the royal pleasure. "His Majesty
hears," he lowed in the correct "palace accent": and the usher bowed and
retired.
All this helped, of course, to make the act of presiding in Council seem
highly important and consequential to any monarch susceptible to
ceremonial flattery. Whether it had originally been so devised may be
questioned, for monarchs of old had needed no such ceremonial backing to
their very practical incursions into ministerial debate. What we have to
notice is that the ceremony had survived, while the other thing--the
practice of substantial interference--had become obsolete.
The King passed from his private apartments to broad corridors and
portals where resplendent footmen stood in waiting, where everything
worked with silent and automatic precision to prepare the way for his
feet, signaling him on from point to point as though he were a sort of
special train for which the line had been expressly cleared and all
other traffic shunted. And yet when he came to the small anteroom which
opened directly into the Council Chamber he felt for all the world like
a timid bather about to unbutton the door of his bathing-machine and
step forth into a strange and hostile element. That moment of
trepidation was one he never could get over,--to face his Council of
Ministers was always a plunge; for here truly he felt out of his depth,
aware that politically he was no swimmer. And now for a couple of hours
he would have to endure while, thoroughly at home in their own element,
twenty stout aquatic athletes tumbled around him.
The door was thrown open; and with an air of calm self-possession he
walked to the head of the table about which his ministers stood waiting.
"Be seated, gentlemen," he said, embracing in a single bow the
obeisances of all; and like slow waves they closed in on him, subsiding
in large curves and soft fawning ripples of hand-rubbing around the
empurpled board at which nominally he was to preside.
When all were seated in order, he signed for the Prime Minister to open
the proceedings, and thereafter had scarcely to speak; for at a King's
Council only general reports were presented, no discussions took place,
no fresh proposals were mooted; and so he sat and heard how this
department or that was extending its beneficent operations, how
statistics were completing to their last decimal places the
prognostications of experts, and how along with these things imports and
exports were balancing, trade declining, education advancing, and
strikes growing every day more formidable and more popular.
It was only this last point that really interested him; for here he
seemed to get a dim rumor of something that was part at least of that
popular will which it was his duty to symbolize and to safeguard. But
these official advisers of his were all for putting strikes down, and
yet while putting them down they seemed to wish to curry favor with the
strikers themselves. For on the one hand there was trade declining, if
the strikes were not put down, to support fresh taxation, on the other
the Labor Party, eighty strong, declining, if the strikes were put down,
to support the Government. And with the Finance Act coming on the
question was whether to accept an increasing deficit in the revenue or a
declining majority in the Legislature. This could be read vaguely
between the lines of the report presented by the Minister of the
Interior. But all this time not one word was said about the coming
constitutional crisis which was in everybody's mind. That had been
thoroughly discussed by ministers sitting in real Council elsewhere, a
Council at which the Head of the Constitution had not been present, and
about which he would hear no more than the Prime Minister chose to tell
him.
And so, smoothly, equably, and uneventfully the Council reached its
conclusion; ministers one after another closed up their portfolios, and
sitting mute in their places respectfully waited the royal word of
dismissal.
Then the King rose: and all around the board the fawning ripples of
hand-rubbing ceased, and the slow curving wave of the ministerial body
receded to a respectful distance; while his Majesty passed forth to the
adjoining chamber, there to give, as was customary, separate audience to
those ministers who had any special memoranda to submit requiring the
royal endorsement.
On this occasion he found his Comptroller already awaiting him,
apologetic for what might seem intrusion on territory belonging more
properly to the Prime Minister. Under the correctness of his deportment
it was clear that urgency impelled.
"I have come, sir," he said, "to submit to your Majesty, before the
matter goes further, a certain difficulty which has arisen in connection
with your Majesty's gracious donation to the widow of the unfortunate
workman who----" He paused.
"You mean the steeplejack?" queried the King.
The Comptroller-General bowed assent. "Your Majesty ordered inquiry to
be made."
"I did. Has it been found whether he had a family?"
"A large family, sir: a wife and seven children."
"Ah," said the King, "then you would suggest that ten pounds is not
quite----? Well, make it twenty."
"That, sir, is not the difficulty. The fact is we have discovered that
the man was what in the industrial world is known as a 'blackleg.' As
your Majesty may be aware there is at this moment a strike in the
building trade: and this man was working against the orders of his
Union. Under those circumstances a donation from your Majesty becomes
pointed."
"Pointed at what?"
"At the Trades Unions, sir."
"But what," cried the King, astonished, "have a widow and children to do
with the Trades Unions?"
"The man was working against orders, your Majesty."
"But at somebody's orders, I suppose? Anyway, it was for the
Government."
"Oh no, sir!" Correctitude protested against so dangerous an
implication.
"But surely! Wasn't he there at the orders of the Board of Works?"
"At the orders of the contractor, your Majesty."
"Who was under contract with the Board to complete by a certain date."
"That, sir, cannot be denied."
"Well, really then," said the King, "from what department does this
objection to the donation emanate?"
"From no department, your Majesty. The objection is on general grounds
of policy."
The King's pride and modesty were becoming a little hurt; he was annoyed
that so small a matter of private charity should be thus canvassed and
brought within the range of politics. Subconsciously he had also another
and a more symbolic reason which helped him to show fight.
"Really, my dear General," he said, "I think we are discussing this
matter very unnecessarily. The widow is still a widow, and the children,
who you tell me number seven, are orphans; and surely at his death a man
ceases to be either a blackleg or a trades unionist. He is not working
against orders now, at any rate. Make it twenty! make it twenty." (His
utterance grew hurried; a way he had when crossed and anxious not to
have to give way.) "I can't hear anything more about it now: I have
Brasshay waiting to see me." And as at that moment the Prime Minister
was announced, the Comptroller-General, for the present at any rate,
"made it twenty" and retired. But he did so with a wry and a determined
face.
As for the King he was thoroughly put out; the steeplejack was by
association beginning to assume in his mind a very particular
importance; he had become a symbol not merely of the sovereign himself,
but of that act of statesmanship which he had been adjured to undertake
by his favorite newspaper. This man, his prototype, had failed to add in
completeness that luster which he had set out to add; had even died in
the attempt; and here, in seeking with all his sympathies aroused to
provide for the widow and children, the King was finding himself
thwarted, and thwarted, too, on purely political grounds. Well, it
should be a test: he would not be thwarted. The Cabinet couldn't resign
on this; so he would do as he liked! And under the table, on a soft deep
carpet of velvet-pile he stuck his heels into the ground and felt very
determined.
And then he found that he must attend to something else, for the Prime
Minister was speaking, and now at last was speaking on a very important
matter.
IV
"Your Majesty," said the Prime Minister, "the Bishops are blocking all
our bills; the business of the country is at a standstill."
"Blocking?" queried the King; for he did know a little of contemporary
history at all events.
"Amending," corrected the Minister. "Amending on lines which we cannot
possibly accept."
"Some of them seemed to me quite excellent amendments," said the King.
"But, of course, I don't know."
"They express, sir, no doubt, a point of view--quite an estimable point
of view, if it were not a question of politics: they reflect, that is to
say, the mind of the ecclesiastical side of the Spiritual and Judicial
Chamber. Your Majesty's House of Laity sees things differently: I am
bound, therefore, to submit to your Majesty certain important proposals
for the relief of the impasse at which we have now arrived. As no doubt,
sir, you are aware, we have the Judges, the Juridical half of the
Chamber, for the most part with us, since for the last few years their
appointment has been entirely in our hands. But the Bishops, with the
exception of one or two, are obdurate and immovable. We select the most
liberal Churchmen we can find: but it is no use; each new Bishop,
adopted by Dean and Chapter, becomes when once seated in the Upper
Chamber, merely a reflection of those who have gone before him: the
Juridical minority is swamped, the Spiritual element remains supreme,
and we have no chance of obtaining a majority."
"It is only because you will try to do things too fast!" said the King;
but the Prime Minister continued--
"And now, sir, our one opportunity has come. The Bill for dividing the
dioceses and doubling the number of the Bishoprics has just passed into
law. I flatter myself that when the Prelates assented to that Bill they
did not realize how its powers might be directed. It is the proposal of
your Majesty's advisers to nominate to those Bishoprics only Free
Churchmen, men whose political views coincide with our own."
"Free Churchmen!" cried the King, startled; "but they are outside the
Establishment altogether."
"Merely on a point of Church discipline," answered the Prime Minister.
"They are ministers properly ordained. When they seceded over the
'Church Government Act' they carried their full Canonical Orders with
them: only as they had no Bishops they have become a diminishing body.
Their beliefs, or their disbeliefs (for on many points the churches are
merely maintaining an observance of definitions which their intellects
no longer really accept)--their professed beliefs, then, shall I
say?--in all matters of doctrine are not more heterogeneous than those
which distract the councils and the congregations of the Establishment.
It is only on matters of administration and Church discipline that they
fundamentally differ. We count upon the Free Church Bishops to give us a
majority both on the secularization of charities and the opening of the
theological chairs and divinity degrees of our Universities to all sects
and communities alike. After that we shall be in a position to deal
with State Endowment and with Education generally."
"But will the Chapters, under such circumstances, accept the Crown's
nominees?" inquired the King. "And even if they do, may not the Bishops
refuse to consecrate them?"
"The right in law of a Dean and Chapter to reject the Crown's nominee
and to substitute one of their own has already been decided against
them," said the Prime Minister. "As for the consecration, if the Bishops
refuse their services we have an understanding with the exiled
Archimandrite of Cappadocia to see the whole thing through for us."
"Good Heavens!" cried the King, "a black man with two wives."
"His orders," said the Prime Minister, "are perfectly valid, and are
recognized not only by us but by Rome. Only last year the Bishops were
making quite a stir about him; there was even a proposal that he should
assist at the next consecration so as to clear away all doubts in the
eyes of Romanists as to the validity of our own orders. It would,
therefore, be a measure of poetic justice if now----"
"I don't think we ought to do it," interrupted the King.
"If the Bishops give way in time, sir, it will be unnecessary."
"Will you consent to my seeing the Archbishop about it?" inquired the
King, much perturbed.
"Sir, I have already seen him."
"Well, what did he say?"
"He said a good many things, and said them very well. His general
impression seemed to be that we should not dare to do it. That is where
he is mistaken."
"You have to consult me also," remarked the King.
"Sir, that is what I am now doing." The Prime Minister bowed with the
utmost deference.
"You put me in a great difficulty!"
"I am sorry that your Majesty should make difficulty," retorted the
Premier dryly.
"You seem to forget," pursued the King, "that I am sworn to maintain
both Church and Constitution as established by law."
"Sir, we propose nothing unconstitutional."
"Free Churchmen are not constitutional, they have no standing."
"They have a right to their opinions like all the rest of your Majesty's
subjects."
"Not to be made Bishops."
"That merely legalizes their position."
The King shook his head. "I don't like it," he said; "I don't like it!
And if you won't let me consult the Archbishop how am I to know what I
ought to do?"
"If as advisers to the Crown we have had the misfortune to lose your
Majesty's confidence," said the Prime Minister suavely, "I hope your
Majesty will not hesitate to say so. But I am bound to inform you, sir,
that should your Majesty be unable to accept the advice now offered, it
will be the most painful duty of your Majesty's ministers to tender
their resignation."
"I observe," retorted the King tartly, "that whenever you begin
reminding me of my 'Majesty' you have always something unpleasant to
spring on me! You are treating me now just as you have been treating the
Bishops; you will not listen to advice; no, you will not accept
amendments, you behave as though you were already a single Chamber
Government. You ought to accept amendments! I don't like Free Church
Bishops. If they want to become Bishops they can go to the Archimandrite
for themselves. I suppose you are making it worth his while?" he added
suspiciously.
"Doubtless there will be an arrangement," answered the Premier smoothly.
"There again the Archbishop has already helped us. Less than a year ago
he made representations to us on the subject, recommending the
Archimandrite for a State pension."
"And pray, will that appear in the estimates?"
"There is no reason why it should not appear."
"I have noticed," commented the King, "that if people do an unscrupulous
thing in the full light of day, it takes a certain appearance of
honesty."
"A very statesmanlike observation, your Majesty," smiled the Prime
Minister. "In this matter I may say we are without scruple because our
case is unanswerable."
"You shall have my answer," said the King, "when I have had more time to
think about it."
With which oblique retort to the Prime Minister's assertion he rose, and
the interview terminated.
V
By this time he was thoroughly tired: he had done a hard morning's work;
not only had he been harassed and annoyed, but he had been thinking a
great deal more than he usually thought, and his brain ached. But even
now his troubles were not ended; just as he turned to go the Minister of
the Interior craved audience; and at his first word the King's
irritation grew afresh, for here was dismissed controversy cropping up
again.
While the King was receiving the Prime Minister his Comptroller-General
had not been idle: indeed he never was idle. He had gone straight to the
Minister of the Interior and had reported to him the failure of his
efforts, for it was this minister who had in the first place come to
him. The steeplejack had fallen, so to speak, right into the middle of
his department; and with the King's donation coming on the top the
catastrophe bulked large. For, be it known, on the order of the day for
the morrow's sitting of Parliament was a motion of the Labor Party,
directing censure on the Government for having brought pressure to bear
on contractors and caused work to be continued upon Government buildings
when Labor and Capital were at war. It was nothing to Labor that the
hire of the scaffolding used in the repairs was costing the country a
considerable sum of money while it stood uselessly waiting about the
walls of the Legislature; blacklegs had gone up on it and blacklegs had
been pulled down from it; and one particular blackleg had gone up on it
and had come down without any pulling whatever--an accident over which
Labor was savagely ready to exult and say, "Serve him right!" And how
would it be if they saw in their morning papers, on the very day when
the motion was down for debate, that the King had gone out of his way to
make a handsome donation to the widow? The Minister of the Interior
simply could not allow it; yet now word had come to him that his Majesty
persisted in his intention. So when the Prime Minister came out the
Minister of the Interior went in and put his case to the King, as I have
put it here to the reader--only far more persuasively, and ornately, and
at very much greater length. He also added to what has already been set
forth, as a point making the man a less worthy object of compassion,
that according to latest accounts he had gone to his work under the
influence of drink.
"So do all steeplejacks," said the King, and quoted the _Encyclopedia_:
"It is only when they are drunk that they can do it. _I_ know." He spoke
as though he had tried it.
Before the minister had done the King was really angry. "Mr. Secretary,"
said he, "I don't care how many strikes there are, or how many Trades
Unions, or how many motions of censure from the gentlemen of the Labor
Party: they may motion to censure _me_ if they like! The man is dead,
and I was unfortunate enough to be a witness of his death. He died in an
attempt to do a laudable action." (Here the King was tempted to quote
the peroration from his favorite newspaper, but he checked himself: the
minister would not have understood.) "His wife," he went on, "is now a
widow, and his children are orphans; and if that twenty pounds may not
go to them, then I am not master of my own purse-strings, or"--he added
by way of finish--"of my own natural feelings and emotions as an
ordinary human being."
And before that burst of eloquence the Minister of the Interior was
abashed into silence, and retired from the royal presence discomfited.
The King's argument had heated him, like the royal furnace of
Nebuchadnezzar, seven times more than he was wont to be heated. He so
seldom argued with anybody, still less with his ministers: and here he
had been arguing with one or another of them for half the morning. He
almost felt as if something had happened to him; a touch of giddiness
seized him as he turned to retire to his private apartments; and the
thought struck him--if he was as much upset as this over a small
side-issue, what would he be like when he had done adding that luster to
the constitutional edifice which the nation in its crisis would
presently be demanding of him? The wear and tear were going to be
considerable.
Circumstance had departed as he retraced his steps to the domestic wing.
The lackeys, having done their ceremonial duty, had disappeared: he was
free to go unobserved. As he ascended the marble staircase which led
from the great hall toward the private apartments he was still thinking
of the steeplejack, the man who somehow seemed now to be an emblem of
himself. This man, set to the superfluous task of regilding the
weathercock of the Legislature, doing it in defiance of master craftsmen
and fellow-workmen, lured to do it because the cost of the hiring of the
scaffolding had become an expensive charge on the Board of Works, and
then, after the custom of the Trade, primed, emboldened, and made drunk
to do it, drunk to a point which had brought him to destruction--yes, he
was like that man; his temptations, his perils, his essential
superfluity were all the same. As he went up the stair he tried to
imagine he was the man himself, going up and up, a solitary and uplifted
figure, fixing his thoughts on things above in order that he might
forget the gulf which yawned below. He took his hand from the
balustrade, and gazing upward at the gilt and crystal chandelier
suspended from the dome above, so entirely forgot his surroundings for
one moment that, missing a step, he lost balance backwards and fell with
amazing thoroughness down the full flight of steps till he reached the
bottom.
CHAPTER III
WILD OATS AND WIDOWS' WEEDS
I
Bump! bump! bump! went his head. Through a confused vision of stars,
veined marble, stained glass, and flying stair-rails he saw his legs
trail helplessly after, close in above, fling violently across him feet
foremost, and dash out of view. In other words, having reached the
bottom of the grand staircase he had turned a complete and homely
somersault.
For awhile he lay half stunned, unable to move. Something had
undoubtedly happened to his head, but he was still conscious. Cautiously
he turned himself over and looked round. No one was about; no one had
seen this ignominious downfall of Jingalo's topmost symbol on the too
highly polished floors of its own abode; and nobody must know. It was
not the right and dignified way for a royal accident to happen: falling
down-stairs suggested the same failing as that to which steeplejacks
were prone.
He picked himself up, and aware now of a sharp pain in the middle of his
spine as well as at the back of his head, crawled slowly and in a
rather doubled-up attitude toward the royal apartments.
As he moved cautiously along the private corridor, he met the Queen
coming from her room, dressed for going out. She detected at once his
painful and decrepit attitude. "What is the matter, dear?" she inquired.
"Nothing, nothing," mumbled the King, "only a touch of sciatica." And as
he did not encourage her impulse to pause and make further inquiries,
she let him go past.
He went into his room, and sat very carefully down, for he was still
uncertain whether some vertebral bit of him was not broken. Then he put
his hand to the back of his head and felt it. Yes, undoubtedly something
had happened; at contact with his finger it made a sound curiously like
the ticking of a clock, and under the scalp a portion of bone seemed to
move. And yet he was not threatened with unconsciousness; on the
contrary he felt very wide awake: shaken though he was, ideas positively
bubbled in his brain, his whole being effervesced. For a moment a fear
flickered across his mind that he was going mad. But if so it was a
wholly pleasurable sensation, for though his fancy went at a gallop, it
was orderly, logical, and consecutive, not like madness at all. He
dismissed the notion; but further reflection confirmed him in his
determination not to tell anybody; he did not want to explain how he had
walked upstairs fancying himself a steeplejack. It would have sounded
stupid.
Then all at once he felt very sick and giddy, and going to the couch he
lay down on it, and there, finding relief in the horizontal position, he
fell fast asleep.
When he awoke an hour later his head, except for an extreme local
tenderness, felt all right again; but when he tested it the faint
ticking sound was still there. His mind was now calm; his thoughts no
longer went at a gallop, but they seemed--what was the word?--freer,
more articulate, more at his beck and call; and in spirit he was far
less harassed and anxious. Altogether he felt that he possessed himself
more than he had ever done before: his mental views had become more
open.
Then he remembered that he wanted to see his son Max, and talk to him
about certain matters; and so, after a few more tentative touches to the
back of his head to find if it was still ticking--which it was--he went
into his study, and sending for one of his secretaries, got a message
despatched. And only when he was well on in the routine of his
afternoon's labors did he recollect that he had not lunched.
That break in the regularity of his habits seemed almost an adventure;
but as he did not now feel hungry he plodded on, for this was his day of
the week for signing accumulated arrears of documents, and several
hundreds awaited him. So for a couple of hours he worked as regularly
and monotonously as a bank-clerk, and while he was signing the less
important papers, and passing them to one of his secretaries to be
blotted and sorted, another read out to him those of which he wished to
learn the contents.
This duty was generally performed by the Comptroller-General himself;
but to-day he was missing, and the King, left to make his own selection,
was rather startled to find what a number of really important documents
had been left over for this day, devoted to what may be described as
routine signatures. As a rule it was the Comptroller who, out of his
long experience, selected those documents which must be read and, only
after due consideration, signed. Now, by some accident, he had been
prevented from attending, and here was a crowd of important documents,
the terms of which the King had never heard. He began to wonder. At
least ten or a dozen were strange to him: he ordered them to be set
aside. And now very dimly, very gradually, he began to suspect his
position, and to perceive that without watchfulness he might very easily
become less a conscious instrument of Government than a mere mechanism.
What if he had become that already?
II
And then it grew dusk. The King dismissed his secretaries, and without
turning on the light sat and thought alone. The effervescence had all
gone from his brain, melancholy ruled him; and as he sat ruminating upon
the past and his own present position his mind became obsessed by all
the historical characters who had preceded him in the exercise of those
royal functions now grown so exiguous in his hands, who had sat and
labored at Statecraft in that very room, some of them, perhaps, in the
very chair in which he was now seated.
They became almost present to his consciousness. How would they have
behaved in the present situation? How would they have set to work to add
luster to that supreme symbol which still crowned the constitutional
edifice?
He could imagine his own father opposing over a considerable period the
weight of his personal prestige to the importunacy of ministers, saying
with stately ease: "We will speak of that, gentlemen, some other day,"
and so calmly turning from the subject in dispute--not solving it, but
at least imposing delay as the penalty which ministers must pay for a
difference of opinion. That policy of quiet procrastination no minister
of his time would have dared to withstand without first making for it a
certain time-allowance. So much at least would have been secured, not of
right, but through the weight of a stronger personality.
And what about others before him? Slowly there dawned upon the King's
vision--clear as though he had seen her but yesterday, the regal
presence of a certain ancestress who more than any other had made the
monarchy what it now was--an almost miraculous survival from the past.
It was the old Queen Regent, the lady who for the last twenty years of
her consort's reign, when his wavering mind had failed him, had ruled
her ministers with a rod which was not of iron, but which, none the
less, they had feared, and sought by many devious ways to evade. Out of
some book of memoirs a vision of something that had taken place in that
very room rose up before him. Around her a ring of Bishops, crowding the
royal hearth-rug, each standing defenseless with deferential stoop,
tea-cup in hand; and she, seated before them with plump hands folded in
her lap upon a lace kerchief, or tapping now and again upon the arms of
her chair to give emphasis, was laying down her word of law, and putting
an end to revolt in the Church.
"I won't have it!" she cried. "I won't have it! This nonsense has got to
be put down!"
And what could a Bishop do with a tea-cup in his hand? There she had got
them, six or eight chosen Prelates, every one of them in a defenseless
position; how could they argue an affair of State so? What could they do
but assent to the incontrovertible statement that "nonsense" must and
certainly should be put down--though knowing all the time that the
particular "nonsense" in question, being a thing inbred in the minds of
men, could not be put down by any act of Parliament and would persist
even to the breaking-up of Church unity? And so a perfectly ineffective
Church Government Act had passed into law, causing its honest opponents
to secede, while its far more numerous dishonest opponents had remained;
and the Queen Regent, having for the time being asserted her authority
in the Church, had passed on the actual solution of the problem to later
times.
Later times: the King's brain ceased to visualize, he came back to
himself and to the accumulated problems now pressing for solution. Yes;
for the monarchy, not only as she had made it, but as it had now become,
that great little lady was almost equally responsible. Her genius had
only arrested its decay by bottling it up in the clear preservative of
her own virtues. It now stood out more conspicuously than ever, a
survival from the past: it had not really moved on. Had it, under that
preserving process, become more brittle? With a more open mind he was
beginning to suspect that the ancient institution was crumbling in his
hands; that a creeping paralysis had seized hold of it. Why? What had he
done? Was simple honesty the last and fatal touch that had called these
symptoms of death to light? Had he been too human for an office with
which humanity was no longer compatible? It seemed a confounding charge
to one whose soul was filled with a social hunger which ever went
unsatisfied, whose official isolation from his people was a daily
obsession. His doubt was whether he had been human enough? As he
cogitated on the matter the suspicion grew in him that he had only been
human domestically; outside his domesticity he had resigned his humanity
and become an automaton, a thing in leading-strings. He had allowed
constitutional usage, aye, and constitutional encroachments also, to
crush him down. In constitutional usage he was as harnessed and
bedizened as the piebald ponies who drew his state-coach when he went
each year to open or shut the flood-gates of legislative eloquence.
Constitutional usage, determined for him by others, was the bearing-rein
that had bowed his neck to that decorative arch of mingled condescension
and pride with which he received deputations, addresses, ambassadors.
Constitutional usage had put a bit in his mouth and blinkers upon his
eyes, so that now, even in his own Council Chamber, he was not expected
to speak, was not expected to see unless his attention were specially
invited. More and more the critical and suspensory powers of the Crown
were coming to be regarded as out of place, a straining of the Royal
Prerogative. The growth of the ministerial system had gone on; and he,
shut off from growth in its midst, was being robbed of strength day by
day. And all this was being done, not in the eyes of his people, but
secretly, under smooth and respectful formalities, by a Cabinet
insidiously bent on acquiring as its own that of which it robbed him. In
this unwritten and unnoticed readjustment of the Constitution nothing
was being passed on to the people's representatives. They knew nothing
about it; keeping all that to itself, the Cabinet, like the grim wolf
with privy paw, "daily devoured apace, and nothing said."
So far (barring the quotation from Milton, a purely literary adornment
on the author's part), so far he had got with drifting and despondent
thought, when again that small regal presence, of low statute but ample
form, became clearly defined, and he heard the soft staccato voice
saying sharply: "I won't have it! I won't have it!"
The blood of his ancestors thrilled in his veins. There and then he
formed a resolution--neither would he! He moved to his desk and sat down
to write; and even as he did so material for the breaking of that
resolve presented itself,--the Comptroller-General, calm and
self-possessed, glided into the room.
He had a communication to make: the story did not take long to tell. He
had been extending his inquiries--further and more particular inquiries
into the life and domestic relations of the unfortunate steeplejack; and
he had discovered, oh, horror! but just in time, that the woman who had
lived with him was not his wife.
"But you told me they had seven children," said the King.
"That is so, Sir," replied the Comptroller-General; "it has been a
relationship of long standing. Morally, of course, that only makes the
matter worse."
The King did not know why morally the permanence of that arrangement
should make it worse. It was a statement which he accepted without
question; it came to him with authority from one whose guidance in such
matters he had ever been accustomed to follow and find correct. Before
the weight of the moral law, he bowed his head and gave up the ghost of
the dead steeplejack. The widow and the seven orphans passed out of
existence; they ceased any longer to be mouths and hearts of flesh, and
became instead abstractions to be set in a class apart--one not eligible
for rewards. To such as these no public declaration of the royal bounty
could be made.
"Very well," said the King despondently, "strike off the memorandum! The
twenty pounds need not go."
An hour later the Queen came in and found him sitting alone and
miserable in his chair. She spoke to him, but he did not answer. Then as
she drew nearer, to find out if anything were really the matter, his
misery found voice.
"I can't move! I am unable to move!" he moaned.
"What is it, dear?" she inquired, "sciatica?"
His answer came from a source she could not fathom.
"No one," he murmured in a tone of deep discouragement, "no one will
ever call _me_ 'Jack.'"
III
Three hours later, after dinner, the King and his son, Prince Max, were
sitting together in the same room. The King, feeling considerably better
for a good meal, had given Max one of his best cigars, and having gone
so far to establish confidential relations, was now trying to summon up
courage to speak to the young man as a father should.
But here, as elsewhere, he was met by the old difficulty--he and his son
were not intimates. They had drifted apart, not for any lack of filial
or paternal affection, but simply because in the round of their official
lives they so seldom met privately; and since the Prince had acquired an
establishment of his own the King knew little of what he did with his
daily life beyond the records of the Court Circular.
Max was now twenty-five; he was taller and darker than his father, more
handsome and more self-possessed. In his appearance he combined the
polish of a military training with the quiet air of an amateur scholar;
his forehead was prematurely, but quite becomingly, bald, his mustache
well groomed, his figure slight but athletic. He had inherited his
father's full lips, but the glance of his eye was of a keener and
shrewder quality, and it might be suspected that the eye-glasses
which he occasionally put on were assumed more for effect than for
necessity. Above all, he possessed what the King conspicuously
lacked--self-assurance, and with it a sort of moral ease as though any
error he might fall into would be taken rather as an experience to
profit by than as an occasion for self-reproach. His face showed as he
talked that quality of humor which enables a man to laugh at his own
enthusiasms, and one could not always be sure whether he were serious or
merely indulging in dialectics. To any one out of touch with his
intellectual origins, he was a man difficult to know; and the King,
being in that matter altogether at sea, knew really very little about
him, and was in consequence a little afraid of him.
That fact made a frontal attack difficult; nevertheless, having screwed
himself up to speak, he began abruptly.
"Max," said his father, "have you ever thought about marrying?"
Max smiled a little bitterly. "I started thinking about it," he said,
"when I was seventeen; and off and on I have thought about it ever
since." Then he added rather coldly, as though to warn off mere
curiosity, "Why do you ask, sir? Has any proposal been made?"
"Well," said his father, "we might certainly arrange something. I feel,
indeed, that we ought to--at your age. I only wanted first to know how
you felt upon the matter. You see," he added, hesitating, "people are
beginning to talk; and it won't do."
This oblique and cautious reference to his son's private life marked a
new stage in their relations: it was actually the first occasion, in all
their intercourse as father and son, upon which the sex-question had
ever been broached between them. It was no wonder, therefore, that so
far they had been rather strangers to each other. Now, however, having
decided to speak, the King also decided that he must go on and
interfere. It required some moral courage; for he had never failed to
recognize his son as the stronger character, and, especially in
intellectual matters, his superior.
"I have been told that you have been keeping a mistress," he said,
avoiding the young man's eye.
"That," answered Max, "would, I suppose, be the generally received
phrase for it."
"Who is she?" queried the King, pushing hazardously on, now that the
danger-point had been reached.
"Do you wish to meet her?"
Parental dignity was offended.
"That is a suggestion you ought not to make."
"Then, my dear father, why inquire after her? She and I suit each other:
to you she is nothing."
"How long has this been going on?"
"We have lived together for five years."
The King recalled a phrase that he had recently heard authoritatively
spoken--"a relationship of long standing. Morally, of course, that only
makes the matter worse."
"H'm!" he said aloud. "You started early, I must say!"
"You, sir, at that age were already a father," said Max correctively.
The King made an interjectory movement, but the Prince went on. "I was
twenty, and I was still virginal. To speak frankly, I was amazed at
myself, perhaps even amused. Yes, even now I am inclined to think that,
among princes, my record must have been exceptional. This lady, to whom
I owe nearly the whole of my domestic experience, saved me from an
adventuress----"
The King lifted his eyebrows.
"One," went on the Prince, "who would have wrung from me in a single
year far more, from a merely monetary point of view, than the whole
experience has yet cost me."
The King was slightly bewildered. "This person," he said tentatively,
"is not, then, of the adventuress class?"
"Nor was that other: by class she was one of the highest of our
aristocracy. I believe that when she is received at Court it is correct
etiquette for you to kiss her upon the cheek. The lady who did actually
befriend me was her companion and secretary, an Austrian by birth. She
had divorced her husband and possessed only a small annuity on which she
was unable to live independently in the style to which she had become
accustomed. Yet for the first year of our liaison she would accept from
me no provision, and we saw each other but seldom. Strange as it may
seem she taught me the value and the charm of conjugal moderation and
fidelity. Just now she is receiving a visit from her son, on leave from
his military services abroad; and respecting the ordinary moral
conventions, which happen also to be hers, I do not go to see her while
the son's visit is being paid. Yet I apprehend that he cannot be in
ignorance of the facts."
"She has a grown-up son?" queried the King, still a little puzzled; and
Max smiled.
"A polite way," said he, "of inquiring as to her age. Yes: she is on the
verge of forty, and assures me that she will soon be showing it. You may
be interested also to hear that she is a Roman Catholic, has attacks of
devoutness which occasionally prescribe separation, and has twice
threatened, not in anger but with a most sincere reluctance, to break up
our peaceful establishment. I recognize that in the end her love for her
Church will probably prove stronger than her love for me--at all events
in practice. I have, indeed, some apprehension that her son's visit may
result in a turning of the balance, since he has now inherited his
father's property and can give his mother the position she has a right
to expect. If that should be so, you will find me very attentive to any
offer of marriage that any Court of western civilization (which now
includes Japan) may have to make. Have I said, sir, all that you wish to
know about my feelings in the matter?"
"What I don't understand," said the King, "is your idea about the
morality of all this."
"Really," replied the Prince, "I hardly know that I have any. It has
gone on so long; and anything that is regular and of long standing tends
to produce a moral feeling."
This arrested the King's attention. "You think so?" he interrogated; but
Max waived any decisive pronouncement.
"Perhaps," said he, "I do not quite know what morality means. I fancy
sometimes that its full meaning may be sprung upon me when I find myself
in love; or, if I am not destined to undergo that experience, on the day
when I learn that I am to become a father without having intended it.
Morality arises out of the proper or improper performance of social
obligations; and I have sometimes wondered whether society's most insane
treatment of illegitimacy would not have compelled me into a misalliance
with my 'mistress,' as you call her, had she ever----"
"Max!" cried the King, "you are outrageous!"
"Is that really how it strikes you?" inquired his son. "I feared,
rather, that it was an inexpugnable remnant of my religious training. If
the notion is anarchic I can feel more at home with it. But do not
forget that I am a doctor of divinity."
"You!" exclaimed the King.
"Had it escaped your recollection, sir? I confess that sometimes it
escapes mine. Yes: I became a D.D. before I was sent down from College."
"You were not 'sent down'!"
"Not ostensibly, sir; I should have been. I left to take up my
military--accomplishments, for I may not call them 'duties.' But you can
hardly forget that I am the only man who ever dared to screw up the
Master of Pentecost in his own rooms. While my associates were screwing
up the Dean, I was screwing up the Master; it was one of my earliest
attempts to be companionable with my fellow-men."
The King sympathized, but was puzzled. "Do you mean--with the Master?"
"No, sir, with my fellow-students, those of my own years, amongst whom I
had been placed. But I found that it was impossible. They, for the
lesser offense, were actually 'sent down'; I, having finished my thesis
and obtained my doctor's degree, was merely passed on at a slightly
accelerated pace to receive fresh honors. That gave me a lesson which I
have never forgotten; no honor that has come to me have I ever fully
earned; and no disgrace that I have earned has ever been visited upon me
for the public to know. There in a nutshell you have the moral training
of the heir to a modern throne. What chance, then, have I to know
anything about morality?"
"My dear son," said the King, "don't say these dreadful things. Even if
they are true, don't say them. They do no good."
But though he deprecated having to meet such thoughts clothed in the
flesh of speech, he was really very much interested to find that Max had
them; he was seeing his son in a new light. And meanwhile the Prince
went on--
IV
"I often think, sir, of those two medieval institutions which we have
now lost--I suppose irrevocably--the whipping boy and the court jester.
What a pity that they cannot be revived! The whipping boy, a device to
put princes on their honor to be neither negligent nor wanton in the
fulfilment of their duties; and the jester to break us of our too
self-conscious airs and exhibit to us our follies. See what we have done
instead! When our growing sense of priggish decorum and our dishonest
ceremoniousness of speech made the jester a figure no longer possible,
we substituted for him the poet-laureate!--not to persuade us of our
follies, but to chant our undeserved praises. And alas, how much more
ridiculous, at certain times, he has made us appear--nay, be! With what
lecherous sweetness or ponderous grief he has put us to bed with our
wives or our ancestors, with what maudlin sentiment he has crooned over
us in our cradles! And how poor a show we present when poetry thus tries
to make our ordinary human doings appear so different from those of
other men! England set us that bad example; and, as usual, we followed
her. Only think how far more resplendent might have been her history had
the Court of St. James's continued and developed the institution of the
jester and let the laureateship go. If Pope could only have had the
teasing of Queen Anne, and Swift the goading of the earlier Georges; if
Johnson could have bumbled gruff wisdom into the ears of number three;
and, following upon these, could Sheridan, and Hook, and Carlyle, and
Sidney Smith (I pick up names almost at random) have had a really
assured position and full plenary indulgence as commentators on the
Court and aristocracy of the Regency, and of the early Victorian period
which culminated in that middleman's millennium, the Great Exhibition,
with its Crystal Palace so shoddily furnished to celebrate the
expurgation of art from industry. If only that could have been allowed,
think how England might have been standing now--honest in her faults as
in her virtues, a beacon light to the whole world. But there! it is no
use wishing such saving grace to a rival nation, when we are so out of
grace ourselves."
Prince Max paused for breath. "And then the whipping boy," he went on,
"think of him!"
"Yes, Max. I am thinking of him a good deal!" said the King, in a tone
wherein sarcasm and indulgence were pleasantly blended.
"You mean that I myself need the discipline?" smiled Max, "that my
political ideas are even worse than my morals? Well, here is what you
should do. Choose for me an exemplary young priest of the Established
Church, let him be gentle and comely to attract the hearts of women,
athletic and erudite to command the respect of men; and when I become a
cause of scandal or forget what is due to my position, let him be set to
stand in the old stocks at the doors of the Cathedral on a given day,
for a given number of hours; let it be announced in the Court Circular
that he is there to do penance for my sins, and let it be my privilege,
if penitent, to come in person after the first hour and release him
before the eyes of all. What more effective form of control could you
devise for me than this? How could I remain impenitent and unsubmissive
when for my faults an innocent man stood exposed in contumely to the
public gaze? Sir, you would have me exemplary in a week, or a fugitive
from that country which set so high a standard of honor for its princes.
As it is, our whipping boys go unlabeled with our names; and our
offenses are expiated by countless thousands who know not for whose sins
they suffer."
"Max," said his father, "you sound as if you were quoting from some
book."
"I am," answered the Prince; "it is one that I am writing myself, that
being the only form of free action that is left to me. At the threshold
of manhood I recognized what my fate was to be, and that I was not
really intended to do anything. That is why I talk. Activity is
necessary to me. To keep myself in physical vigor I run about and play;
to keep myself in mental vigor I read, I examine life, and I propound
theories. This book which I am now writing would probably excite no
comment if published anonymously, but will be regarded as revolutionary
when it is known to have been written by the heir to a crown."
"Do you mean to publish it, then?" cried the King in awestruck tone.
"Certainly," answered the Prince. "Has not the nation every right to
know the opinions of its possible future King? Never shall it be said
that Jingalo accepted me blindly under the dark cover of heredity."
At this news the King looked really aghast. "And you propose, while I am
spending myself in trying to add luster----" he began, then checked
himself; "you propose to publish a work which may destroy the confidence
at present subsisting between the sovereign and the people?"
"Would not false confidence be a worse alternative, sir?" inquired Max.
"But you are doing it in my time," said the King plaintively; "it is my
reign you are disturbing, not your own. I don't think you have any
right."
"My dear father," answered the Prince, "the more impossible I prove
myself to be, the more popular you will become."
But the King was not to be consoled by that prospect; he was working not
for himself alone--not for himself, indeed, at all.
"Max," he said earnestly, "believe me, monarchy, even at the present
day, is of the greatest social and political value. Unsettle it in the
public mind, and you unsettle the basis of government and the sacredness
of property; everything else goes with it. The hereditary principle has
in its keeping all that makes for stability, continuity, and tradition;
nothing can adequately take its place."
"Do not forget, sir," said his son, "that if we follow our heredity back
far enough, ours is an elected monarchy. And if once you admit election
you must admit also the right of the to-be-elected one to offer or
refuse his candidature. The nation cannot play fast and loose, as it has
done, with the principle of male primogeniture, and at the same time
impose upon us, its candidates for election, an unavoidable obligation
to accept the burden of heredity. No; let us have the matter quite
clear. If the people--as they have done by others in the past--claim the
right to reject me, should I prove myself an outrageous and impossible
character, I equally claim the right to reject them; and I must see them
capable of making a reasonable use of my services before I will consent
to be made use of."
"Well," said the King, breathing in resignation, "I suppose I ought not
to mind too much. 'After me the Deluge,' is a wise enough saying when
one has no power to prevent it."
"'After me the Deluge,'" said Max, "has come down to us with a muddled
application. If monarchy would only adopt it as its motto, monarchy
would be good for another thousand years. Louis XV said it; and Louis
XVI failed to give it effect. Had he but placed himself at the head of
the Deluge, in the very forefront of its rush and roar, waved his hat to
it and cried: 'After me!' like a captain to his company, and started off
at a gallop, it would have obeyed and followed him. 'After me the
Deluge!' should be the rallying cry of the monarchy for the renewal of
its youth, not the quavering note of its dotage. That is the motto I am
going to put on the title-page of my book."
"Good gracious!" cried the King.
Max was pleased to see what an impression he had made: he did not
usually get so good a listener. "And to think," said he, "that all this
talk came of your having asked me a question on a matter that is already
five years old. I am sorry to have taken up so much time explaining
myself."
"On the contrary," said the King, "I am glad. Five years? Yes, I am very
glad to know that." He got up and moving to the table made a call on his
private telephone. "Would you mind waiting a few minutes," he went on,
"perhaps I shall need your countenance."
A secretary answered the call; and presently the Comptroller-General
himself appeared to learn the royal pleasure.
"I am sorry, my dear General," said the King, "to trouble you at so late
an hour. But about that matter of the widow--who is not a widow. I wish
fifty pounds to be sent to her--anonymously. Yes, fifty pounds. Will you
see that it is done to-night?"
Turning to Max he said, as though referring to conversation already
passed, "You have effectually interested me in her case."
Max saw that he was being used as a pawn in a game he did not
understand, and held his tongue; and the Comptroller-General, finding
himself dismissed, retired to do for once as he was told.
And so, by the inglorious device of anonymity and lavishness combined
the King maintained his point, and sent his gift to the relief of one
who was, as a matter of fact, just as legally a widow as any other you
or I may like to name.
John of Jingalo had not yet broken the official leading-strings, but on
this occasion he had circumvented them. Flushed with his triumph, he
bade his son an affectionate good-night. "Come and talk to me again," he
said. "I don't agree with anything you say, but you help me to think."
It was a sign of progress. Hitherto he had relied, with a far greater
sense of security and comfort, on those who had enabled him not to
think. Consultation with Max, insidious as the drug-habit, and as
secretively employed, was henceforth to count for much in the
development of the Constitutional Crisis. Hereditary monarchy had
conceived the idea of turning its hereditary material to account. No
doubt the Cabinet would have objected, preferring to keep its victim in
complete mental isolation; but at present, the Cabinet did not know.
CHAPTER IV
POPULAR MONARCHY
I
That talk with Max formed the preliminary to a month of the most
strenuous verbal and intellectual conflict that the King had ever known.
Outside all was calm: the Constitutional Crisis was in suspension; by
agreement on both sides hostilities had been deferred till trade should
have reaped its full profit out of the Silver Jubilee celebrations. The
papers spoke admiringly of this truce to party warfare as "instinctive
loyalty" on the part of the people, "expressive of their desire to do
honor to a beloved sovereign in a spirit undisturbed by the contending
voices of faction."
There was no "instinctive loyalty," however, within the Cabinet! While
streets were decorating and illuminations preparing, ministers were
giving his Majesty a thoroughly bad time.
In a way, of course, he brought it upon himself, for at the very next
Council meeting after his conversation with Max he did a thing which, so
far as his own reign was concerned, was absolutely without precedent: he
opened his mouth and spoke;--objected, contended, argued. And at the
sound of his voice uttering something more than mere formalities,
ministers sat up amazed, most of them very angry and scandalized at so
unexpected a reversion to the constitutional usages of a previous
generation.
Not a word of all this leaked out. The whole thing was an admirable
example of that keeping-up of appearances on which bureaucratic
government so largely depends. And it was, if you come to think of it, a
very deftly arranged affair. There was the whole country bobbing with
loyalty, enthusiasm, and commercial opportunism; the Cabinet
unencumbered for a while by any parliamentary situation that could cause
anxiety, and correspondingly free to direct its energies elsewhere; and
there within the Council, and without a soul to advise him, was the
King, scuffling confusedly against the predatory devices of his
ministers. The poor man's knowledge of the Constitution was but scanty,
and his powers of argument were feeble, for from the day of his
accession the word "precedent" had governed him. Yet he had an idea, a
feeling, that he was now being forced into a wrong position; the
constitutional breath was being beaten out of his body, and he would
pass from his levees, from his receptions of foreign embassies and
addresses of loyalty and congratulation, to a conflict in Council which
reminded him of nothing so much as a "scrum" upon the football field.
Through one goal or another he was to be kicked--the exercise of the
Crown's prerogative to nominate Free Church Bishops, or the refusal to
exercise it. And whichever expedient he was driven to in the end, he
knew that on one side grandiloquent words would be written about his
fine instinct for the constitutional limitations or powers of monarchy,
and on the other, pained, but deeply respectful words of regret that he
had been so ill-advised by his ministers--or by others. Whichever side
loses, it is the football which wins the game. That, however, is merely
the spectator's point of view. The football only knows that it has been
kicked. Yet the King was well aware that in Parliament at any rate
appearances would be kept up; and that whatever corner of the field he
got kicked to, the blame for it would be laid, ostensibly, on others;
though, as a result, the monarchy to which it was his bounden duty to
"add luster" would be either strengthened or weakened: and what course
to take he really did not know.
His mind, in consequence, was greatly troubled. Being of conservative
instincts he believed that, in the main, the Bishops were right and the
Prime Minister wrong. The Prime Minister had been harassing the country
with general elections; and the country had had about as many as it
could stand: yet without a fresh election no other ministry was
possible. And now, at a moment when the country was bent on profiting by
the revival in trade which the approaching celebrations had stimulated,
nothing would be so unpopular as a fresh ministerial crisis; and he
could have no doubt that, whatever the papers might pretend to say, the
odium of that crisis, if due to his own action, would fall eventually
upon himself.
And the Prime Minister knew it! Yes, just at that juncture, resignation,
or the threat of it, had become an absolutely compelling card; and he
was playing it for all it was worth. Free Church Bishops were to be
promised for the ensuing year, or the Ministry would be bound to feel,
here and now, that his Majesty's confidence in it had been withdrawn.
Resignation, aimed not against any opposing majority in Parliament, but
against the demur and opposition of the Crown itself--that fact in all
its political significance, with all its possible developments of danger
for the State and of humiliation for the monarchy, was daily pressing
its relentless weight against the King's scruples. The more unanswerable
it seemed the more angry he became, the more keenly did he feel that he
was being unfairly used. And then, one day, as he sat thinking at his
desk, all at once a new thought occurred to him, throwing a queer
radiance into his face, of joy mixed with cunning. And then, gradually,
it faded out and left a blank; the old expression of anxiety and
distrustfulness returned. He shook his head at himself, scared that such
a thought should ever have come into it. "No, no, it wouldn't do!" he
muttered. "Impossible."
All the same he got up from his desk, and in deep cogitation began
walking about the room. The carpet with its rich variegated pattern,
like Max's conversation, helped him to think; until certain deliveries
of a royal courier from abroad came to divert his attention to more
particular and family affairs.
Nevertheless his mind had again reverted to its vetoed notion when, an
hour later, on his way to the Queen's apartments he met the Princess
Charlotte tripping gaily along the corridor. She stopped to give him her
"return home" embrace. "How well you are looking, papa!" cried she,
admiring his flushed countenance. But the King, though he smiled,
remained preoccupied with the embryos of statecraft.
"My dear," he said abruptly, "do you think that I am popular?"
"Why, yes, papa, of course!" she said, opening sweet eyes at him.
"Doesn't everybody cheer you when you go anywhere?"
"I think," said her father dubiously, lending his ears in fancy to the
sound, "I think that crowds get into the habit of cheering,--not because
they care for me, but just because there are a lot of them, and they
like to hear the sound of their own voices."
"But sometimes you have quite small crowds," said his daughter, "and
still they cheer."
"Yes, yes," he allowed, "so they do. Yes, even the nursemaids, I notice,
wave their handkerchiefs when I ride by them in the park. And I daresay
some of them do it because they are sorry for me."
"Sorry for you, papa?"
"My dear, wouldn't you be sorry to have to be King now-a-days? It's no
fun, I can assure you."
"I wouldn't like to be King always," said Charlotte, with honesty; "but
you know, papa, with all the Silver Jubilee celebrations coming on you
are quite immensely popular."
"Ah!" said the King. "Thank you, my dear, that is what I wanted to
know."
He went on to the Queen's apartments, and Princess Charlotte stood
looking after him. "Poor dear!" she said to herself. She was sorry for
him too--very sorry just now; for she had a secret growing within her
somewhere between heart and head which, if he knew of it--and some day
he would have to know of it--would cause him a great deal of worry.
This young woman with her growing secret was at that time twenty-three.
II
The Princess Charlotte had a way of drawing in a breath as if to speak,
and then bottling it. This little performance was at times very telling
in its effect--it spoke volumes: it told of a long training in
self-repression which still did not come quite naturally: it told of
inward combustion, of a tightly cornered but still independent mind.
Ladies-in-waiting had seen the Princess run out of her mother's presence
to tabber her feet on the inlaid floor of the corridor, thence to return
smooth, sweet-tempered, and amiable; for between Charlotte and the Queen
there were temperamental differences which had to declare themselves or
find safety through emergency exits.
The Princess had no such difficulties with her father, for
imperturbability was not one of his characteristics, and
imperturbability was the one quality in a parent which the Princess
simply could not stand; it made her feel powerless; and to feel
powerless toward one's intellectual inferiors is, to certain
temperaments, maddening. Charlotte had long since been brought to
recognize that her mother, in her own dear way, was quite hopeless: but
she was able with astonishing ease to get upon her father's nerves and
to trouble his conscience; for while the Queen remained impervious to
all influences outside the conventions of her training and her habits,
the King was as open to new scruples of conscience as a sieve is to the
wind--fresh ideas rattled in his head like green peas in a
cullender--when he shook his head it seemed to shake them about, and all
the larger ones came uppermost; and the Princess Charlotte had in recent
years acquired a habit of entangling her father, with the most engaging
simplicity, in moral problems for which constitutional monarchy could
find no answer.
She was evidently interested in politics, and when of late the King,
wishing to check so dangerous a tendency, had sought to know the reason
why, she had answered with perfect frankness: "Max says" (for to her,
also, Max, the man born to inaction, had been talking), "Max says he is
not sure if he means to come to the throne. If he doesn't, it is just as
well I should know something of the business."
The young lady had a most disrespectful way of talking about the
monarchy as "the business," and did not say it as if in joke.
"Are you going to business to-day, papa?" was actually the phrase
uttered in all seriousness, which had met him one of the days when he
went down to open Parliament. But though she spoke thus gracelessly of
an important State function she attended it herself with grace, and
behaved well.
The Princess Charlotte had learned many things alien to her nature; but
she had never learned that correctitude of deportment which is supposed
to accompany all those born in the regal purple from the cradle to the
grave. She substituted for it, however, something much more individual
and charming. Tall and abundantly alive, she moved in soft rushes
rather quicker than a walk; and her manner of swimming down a room, with
swift invisible run of feet, and just three long undulating bows on the
top of all--those three doing duty for so many--was a sight on the
decorum of which Court opinion was sharply divided. Yet every one
admitted that though she might lack convention or anything in the least
resembling "the grand manner"--she had a style of her own; many
also--even those who disapproved--admitted her charm. As she talked to
her chosen intimates, her two hands would go out in quick bird-like
gestures of momentary contact, while her brightly moving face gave a
constant invitation to the free entry of her thoughts. Barriers she had
none. A dangerous young person for getting her own way; for in the
process she often got not only her own but other people's as well.
At the moment when she makes her introductory bow from the pages of this
history her main and consuming desire was to secure the ordering of her
own dresses; and to obtain that preliminary measure of independence for
the expression of her own character she was prepared, in the face of
maternal opposition, to go to considerable lengths.
The King when he met her in the corridor was, as we have said,
preoccupied with affairs of State. But his preoccupation was partly put
on with intent for the concealment of other thoughts. The sight of his
daughter at that moment, embarrassed him--gave him, indeed, almost a
sense of guilt, for he held in his hand a letter from the Hereditary
Prince of Schnapps-Wasser accepting the circuitously worded proposal,
with all its delicate adumbrations of yet other proposals to follow,
that he should visit the Jingalese Court early in the ensuing
year--immediately, that is to say, upon his return from South America;
and though in his reply the veiled object of that visit was not
mentioned there was a touch here and there of compliment, of warmth, of
a wish that the date were not so far off, which indicated "a coming on
disposition."
And so, under the bright eyes of his daughter, the King was conscious of
a sense of guilt, in that he was concealing from her something in which
her future was very greatly concerned. It seemed hardly fair thus to be
pushing matters on without letting her know: and yet--what else could he
do? So, covering his affectionate embarrassment in inquiries about
himself, he shuffled past; and when he had gone a little further, turned
to take another look at her, and found, startled, that she too was
looking at him. There, at opposite ends of the long corridor, father and
daughter stood interrogatively at gaze, each feeling a little guilty,
each wondering what, at the dénouement, the other would say. Then the
charming Charlotte blew him a kiss from her hand, and his Majesty did
likewise; and, off to the fulfilment of her destiny went the Princess;
and off to his fulfilment of her destiny went he; each quite sure in
their two different ways that they knew what was best for her.
III
The King found the Queen at her knitting, very placid and contented and
well pleased with herself, for she had just been giving Charlotte a mild
talking to. Charlotte had come home with adjectives in her mouth of
which the Queen did not approve, and with enthusiasms that went
riotously beyond bounds. She had talked of some Professor's translation
of a Greek play as "glorious"; and of the play itself--a play all about
expatriated women who, their proper husbands having been killed in a
siege, were forced to accept at the hands of their enemies husbands of a
less proper kind--she had talked of that play as "the most immense,
immortal, and modern thing in all drama."
"I told her," said the Queen, "that she was talking about what she
didn't understand; but she answered that she had seen it three times.
_I_ said, that to go and see the same play three times--especially a
play with murders in it--showed a morbid taste. She didn't seem to mind:
'Then I _am_ morbid,' was her reply. And when I said, 'That comes of
making friends with these intellectual women,' she only laughed at me. I
shan't let her go again, it is doing her harm; she has far too many
ideas, far too many: and where she picks them all up I'm sure I don't
know; she doesn't get them from me!"
And then the conversation--though Charlotte remained its subject--took
another turn, for the King put into his wife's hand the letter he had
received from the Prince of Schnapps-Wasser, and immediately her
comments began.
"He writes a nice hand," she said, "and expresses himself very well.
Speaks of writing a book on his travels; he must be clever. Well, at all
events, it's very evident that he means to come, and wants to. We must
ask him to send his photograph. I think, my dear, we have made a very
good choice, and Charlotte may consider herself very fortunate. But what
a pity he's not coming sooner. Well, Charlotte must wait, that's all!"
And so in her own mind the matter was settled, and only the usual
details waited to be arranged. She handed the letter back to him.
"Of course," she said, "before he comes Charlotte must have a bigger
allowance." She became meditative. "By the way, you had better leave it
in my hands; don't give it to Charlotte herself. She wheedles you, I
know; but she has ideas about dress which I am not going to encourage;
she makes herself far too noticeable as it is. Somebody has been talking
to her about 'national costume' and the folly of fashions; and she
actually said just now that she wanted to have some kind of dress that
she could wear three years running! I told her that fashions were made
to be followed, and that it was her duty to follow them. Oh, she was
quite sweet about it, and said she supposed I knew best, which of course
is true. But she had a sort of 'I'll ask papa' look in her eyes that
made me suspicious. She went out just before you came."
"I met her," observed the King.
"And she said nothing?"
"Not a word about her dress allowance."
"Ah, that's all right, then: she takes what I tell her sometimes." Then
with a quick glance the Queen asked abruptly: "Have you seen Max?"
"I fancy I may be seeing him this evening," returned the King casually,
for he wished to conceal even from his wife the importance he had begun
to attach to his son's visits.
"Something is happening," said the Queen pointedly; "at least, so I am
informed. That--that person I told you about--she isn't there now."
"However do you come to know that?" inquired the King, surprised; but
his question was ignored.
"She has gone abroad," went on his informant. "Had you said anything to
Max?"
"I did speak to him."
"Then it seems to have had its effect."
The King very much doubted whether the effect was any of his doing; but
he held his peace.
"Now we must find somebody for him," continued the dear lady, covering
the past in a tone of charitable allowance.
"I think that Max will find somebody for himself."
But this was not to her taste at all. "How can he," she objected,
"unless we send him abroad? I'm sure there's nobody here."
But the King had come recently to know more about Max than his wife did.
"Max will find somebody for himself," he repeated; "and if he thinks it
worth while, he will go all round the world on a wild goose chase to
look for her."
IV
Could the King only have known it, Max had already found his choice
nearer home. His domestic arrangements having been temporarily disturbed
by a certain lady's departure to visit her son on his estates, he had
gone off on a spurt of social curiosity to inspect the slums of his
father's capital, and on the third day of his investigation had spied,
under a nursing sister's habit, and above a gentle breast bearing an
ivory cross, the face of his dreams. Having taken scientific steps to
discover whether that particular garb entailed celibate vows, and
learning that it did not, he had industriously run its wearer to sainted
earth--had, that is to say, pursued her to a top-floor tenement and
there found her upon her knees with sanitary zeal scrubbing dirt from
the boards of poverty; and poverty upon its bed whimpering with rage and
feebly cursing her for thus coming to disturb its peace. Thus they had
met, and very promptly and practically had the wearer of the habit made
him pay the price for his intrusion by setting him there and then to
work of a kind he had never tackled before.
Who she was, and all the sacred dance that she led him on holy feet,
before she gave him that reward which was his due, will be told in the
later pages of this history. For the present Max had hardly any idea how
pure and deep a Jordan he was about to be dipped in, or how thorough a
scrubbing he himself was to receive. His voice was still like the
rollings of Abana and Pharpar, when he came on this next evening to
discourse up-to-date wisdom in his father's ears; not a hair of his
well-groomed head showed the ruffling of perturbed thoughts within, nor
were his self-confidence and easy satisfaction in the moral and mental
liberties wherein he ranged at large in any way diminished or disturbed.
When they had settled down to their talk, the King confidentially
broached the proposed visit of the Hereditary Prince of Schnapps-Wasser
and its intended significance. Max did not seem particularly impressed.
"What does Charlotte say about it?" he inquired casually.
"Charlotte does not say anything. How should she? She does not yet
know."
Max smiled. "It will be time, then, to talk about it when she does."
"But there is really nobody else; and Charlotte must marry somebody."
"Has she said so?" inquired Max. "My own impression is that she will
have to get through at least one good healthy love affair of her own
before she settles down to anything you or the Courts of Europe can
provide. After that--if you let her plunge deep enough--you won't have
any trouble; she will marry anything you offer. Of course, if you really
believed in monarchy as a principle, and not as a mere expedient--a
divine institution, and not as the last ditch in which the old
class-barriers have to be maintained--you would let her marry any one
she chose. It would do the monarchy no harm, and might do it good."
The King shook his head. "It's no use talking like that," said he. "We
are not free, any of us. The more other ranks of society have become
mixed, commercially mixed--for you know it is money that has done
it--the more we must maintain ours. Royalty must not barter itself
away."
"But you _do_ barter it," said Max, "for rank if not for gold. And the
one is really as base as the other. The great game for royalty to play
now-a-days is courageous domesticity."
"There are limits," replied his father. "We must maintain our position."
"That is just where you make the mistake," retorted Max. "You and my
dear mother are always ready to play the domestic game where it is not
important. You allow photographs of your private life to be on sale in
shop-windows; charming private details slip out in newspaper paragraphs;
one of you behaves with natural and decent civility to some ordinary
poor person, and news of it is immediately flashed to all the press. Two
years ago, for instance, when you were triumphantly touring the United
States you arrived by some accident at a place called New York; and
there, early one morning, having evaded the reporters, you stood looking
up at the sky-scrapers when you trod on an errand-boy's toe, or knocked
his basket out of his hand; and having done so you touched your hat and
apologized--you a King to an errand-boy! And immediately all America,
which yawps of equality and of one man being the equal of any other,
fell rapturously in love with you! You, I daresay, have forgotten the
incident?"
"Quite," said the King.
"But America remembers it. When you left, with all the locusts of the
press clinging to the wheels of your chariot, they dubbed you 'conqueror
of hearts'; and it was mainly because you had knocked over an errand-boy
and apologized to him. Now you do these things naturally; but they are
all really part of the business: your secretaries report them to the
press."
"What?" exclaimed the King, startled.
"Why, of course! The errand-boy didn't know you from Adam, and no one
but your private secretary was with you at the time; at least, so I
gathered: it was before breakfast and you had given the detectives the
slip. Well, then, merely by letting your human nature and your sense of
decency have free play you help to run the monarchic system--you almost
make a success of it. But you stop just where you ought to go on. You
are natural--you are yourself--where there is no opposition to your
being so. If you would go on being natural where there _is_
opposition--where all sorts of high social and political reasons step in
and forbid--you would find yourself far more powerful than the
Constitution intended you to be, for you would have the people with you.
There is a mountain of sentiment ready to rush to your side if you only
had the faith to call it to you. Have you not noticed, whenever a royal
engagement is announced, how every paper in the land declares it to be a
real genuine love-match? And you know--well, you know. I myself can
remember Aunt Sophie crying her eyes out for love of the Bishop of
Bogaboo whom she fell in love with at a missionary meeting and wasn't
allowed to marry; and six weeks later her engagement to Prince
Wolf-im-Schafs-Kleider was announced as a sudden and romantic
love-match! Why, he had only been sent for to be looked at when the
Bogaboo affair became dangerous; and so Aunt Sophie was coerced into
that melancholy mold of a jelly which she has retained ever since.
"Now that is where my grandfather showed himself out of touch with the
spirit of the age. Had he allowed Aunt Sophie to marry the Bishop and go
out during the cool months of the year to teach Bogaboo ladies the use
of the crinoline--it was just when crinolines were going out of fashion
here, and they could have got them cheap--he would have done a most
popular stroke for the monarchy."
"But you forget, my dear boy," said the King, "the Bogaboos were at that
time a really dangerous tribe--they still practised cannibalism."
"Yes, they still had their natural instincts unimpaired; the Christian
substitute of gin had not yet taken hold on them, and their national
institution still provided the one form of useful martyrdom that was
left to us. Had Aunt Sophie, or her husband, been eaten by savages there
would have been a boom in missions, and both the Church and the monarchy
would have benefited enormously. Royalty must take its risks. Kings no
longer ride into battle at the head of their armies: even the cadets of
royalty, when they get leave to go, are kept as much out of danger as
possible. But if royalty cannot lead in something more serious than the
trooping of colors and the laying of foundation-stones, then royalty is
no longer in the running.
"Now what you ought to do is--find out at what point it would break with
all tradition for you to be really natural and think and act as an
ordinary gentleman of sense and honor, and then--go and do it! The
Government would roll its eyes in horror; the whole Court would be in
commotion; but with the people generally you would win hands down!"
"Max, you are tempting me!" said the King.
"Sir," said his son, "I cannot express to you how great is my wish to be
proud of your shoes if hereafter I have to step into them. Could you not
just once, for my sake, do something that no Government would
expect--just to disturb that general smugness of things which is to-day
using the monarchy as its decoy?"
The King gazed upon the handsome youth with eyes of hunger and
affection. "What is it that you want me to do?" he inquired.
Max held out his cigar at arm's length, looked at it reflectively, and
flicked off the ash.
"Don't do that on the carpet!" said his father.
Max smiled. "That is so like you, father," he said; "yes, that is you
all over. You don't like to give trouble even to the housemaid. Now when
you see things going wrong you ought to give trouble--serious trouble, I
mean. You ought, in vulgar phrase, to 'do a bust.'
"When I was a small boy," he went on, "I used to read fairy stories and
look at pictures. And there was one that I have always remembered of a
swan with a crown round its neck floating along a stream with its beak
wide open, singing its last song. To me that picture has ever since
represented the institution of monarchy going to its death. The crown,
too large and heavy to remain in place, has slipped down from its head
and settled like a collar or yoke about its neck. Its head, in
consequence, is free, and it begins to sing its 'Nunc dimittis.' The
question to me is--what 'Nunc dimittis' are we going to sing? I do not
know whether you ever read English poetry; but some lines of Tennyson
run in my head; let me, if I can remember, repeat them now--
"'The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul
Of that waste place with joy
Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear
The warble was low, and full, and clear;
And floating about the under-sky,
Prevailing in weakness, the coronach stole
Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear;
But anon her awful jubilant voice,
With a music strange and manifold,
Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold;
As when a mighty people rejoice
With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold!'
"That, my dear father, is the song I wish to hear you singing--that I
want to take up, I in my turn after you. I want your voice now to be
awful and jubilant, and your carol to be 'free and bold' like the carol
of that dying bird; and the sound of it to be like the rejoicing of a
mighty people on a day of festival."
The King shook his head. "My dear boy," he said, "I don't understand
poetry; I never did."
"Well," said the son, "let me interpret it then into prose. Monarchy as
an institution is dying, and it can either die in foolish decrepitude,
or it can die mightily, merging itself in democracy for a final blow
against bureaucratic government. All that is written in my book. That is
why I am now able to express myself so well: these periods are largely a
matter of quotation. The right rôle for monarchy to-day is, believe me,
to be above all things democratic--not by truckling to the ideas of the
people in power--the 'ruling classes' as they still call themselves--but
by daring to be human and natural, and to refuse absolutely to be
dehumanized on the score of its high dignity and calling.
"If, for instance, I came to you to-day and said I wanted to marry one
of my own nation--say even a commoner--in preference to the daughter of
some foreign princeling, let me do it! It breaks with a foolish
tradition--largely our own importation when, as foreigners, we were
seeking to keep up our prestige--it may annoy or even embarrass the
Government. Well! have they not annoyed and embarrassed you?"
The King nodded sympathetically, but in words hastened to correct
himself. "One has often to make sacrifices in defense of an
institution," he said. "That is a duty we both owe."
"Why," inquired the Prince, "should I make sacrifices to an institution
I do not really approve? Why should I pretend to love some foreign
princess if I have given my heart to one--I cannot say of my own
race--for I remember that we are an importation--but of the country of
my adoption? Do you really suppose that because it annoys the Prime
Minister and disturbs his political calculations, an alliance within
those artificially prohibited degrees imposed on royalty will lessen the
influence of the Crown by a straw's weight, or quicken its demise by an
hour? This country, like all civilized countries, is moving towards some
form of republican government. If we are sufficiently human, if we show
ourselves determined to call our souls our own--it is not merely
possible, it is probable, that when the change comes we shall be called
on by popular acclaim to provide the country with its first President.
If we did we could secure for that presidency a greater power and
prestige than any bureaucratic government would willingly concede. It
may be that the real counter-stroke to the present increase of Cabinet
control can most effectively be administered by a monarch who is not too
careful to preserve the outward forms of monarchy. When that is done, by
you, or by me, or by one who comes after us, I am confident that there
will be the sound of a people's rejoicing."
"You have strange ideas," said the King, "for one who calls himself a
monarchist."
"I am a republican," said the young man.
The King stared at him as though at some strange animal. "You don't say
so!" he murmured half aghast. "Supposing the Prime Minister were to find
out."
"He will soon," said the Prince. "I shall be sending him a copy of my
book on the day of publication."
The King shook his head warningly. Then he smiled, a shy nervous smile.
"It would be very awkward," he said slowly, "very awkward indeed, if you
happened to come to the throne just now. I really don't know what
Brasshay would do. But it's too late for me to begin that sort of
thing--far too late now."
CHAPTER V
CHURCH AND STATE
I
All this while other swan-songs were in preparation to be forced down
other throats (and thence presently to be rejected); forced with that
gentle air of persuasion which rears its lying front over all forms of
"peaceful picketing." Starvation and stuffing were the two methods to be
employed.
While the Government was picketing the King with threats of withdrawal
from office, and the Labor Party the Government with threats of a
national strike, the Government was preparing to picket the Bishops by a
process of forcible feeding--a plethora of their own kind be thrust upon
them--of their own kind but of a very different persuasion. And now at
last the Bishops understood that the doubling of their dioceses was but
a device of Machiavellian subtlety for the halving of their
temporalities.
The Bishops had just opened their holy mouths to protest when the
approach of the Jubilee festivities shut them up. The Church of Jingalo
was on a tight and established footing, and had to conform to the
commercial, conventional, and constitutional requirements of its day;
for you cannot, if you are by law established, play fast and loose with
those institutions on which a nation bases its prosperity. So even when
the Government proposed the creation of demi-mondain bishops, and the
setting up of what amounted to a second establishment in the upper
chamber of its spiritual spouse, the outward proprieties were still
observed, and the sanctities of national interests respected. It is true
that the Bishop of Olde, lifting from his bed a burden of ninety years,
climbed up into the central pulpit of his diocese to preach a sermon
which was ecstatically applauded by all Churchmen, and committed
thereafter to the keeping of a carefully selected few. It won for him
the affectionate nickname of "Never-say-die" and put his followers into
a hole from which they never afterwards emerged. And so the Bishops
entered into the loyal silence of the Jubilee truce with a flush of
conscious rectitude upon their faces; while behind closed doors the
Prime Minister and the Primate Archbishop of Ebury had met to talk
business, to drive conditional bargains, and to kill time till such
other time as seemed good to them.
They met at the town-residence of the one Bishop of the Establishment
who had lent a favorable ear to the Prime Minister's proposals.
Boycotted by his brother Bishops this solitary pelican in piety was
still on terms of official acquaintance with his titular head. Placing
his well-stored nest at the disposal of the two combatants, he retired
for a discreet week-end into the wilderness; and the Prime Minister and
the Archbishop, after announcing in the press that they also had gone
elsewhere, came together by appointment for the indication of ultimatums
and the fixing of dates when ju-jitsu was to commence.
When the Prime Minister arrived his Grace the Primate, attended by his
chaplain, was already in the house. An ecclesiastical butler carried
word to the chaplain, and the chaplain carried it to the oratory.
The Archbishop finished his prayer; it served the double purpose of
strengthening him in his resolve to present a firm front that for the
time being could do no harm, and of keeping his opponent waiting. The
effect did not quite come off. Under that enforced attendance, the Prime
Minister had turned his back on the door, and wrapt in contemplation of
the book-shelves stood as though unaware that the Primate had made his
state entry. It was a pity that he should have missed it.
The Archbishop came into the room bearing in his hands a large Bible,
subscribed for and presented to him by a general assembly of Church
clergy and laity when the constitutional crisis first began to loom
large. It was fitting, therefore, that it should now accompany him to
the field of battle. Corners of silver scrollwork, linked together by
bands and clasps of the same metal, adorned its surface, and over the
glowing red of its Venetian leather binding, lambs, lions, eagles,
doves, and pelicans stood lucently embossed, bearing upon their
well-drilled shoulders the sacred emblems and mottoes of the
ecclesiastical party. More important and more central than these showed
the proud heraldic bearings of the metropolitan see of Ebury, crowned
with a miter which its occupant never wore, and a Cardinal's hat for
which he was no longer qualified.
All these collective sources of inspiration the Archbishop bore in
monstrant fashion with hands raised and crossed, and, moving to the
strategic position he had previously selected, set down upon the table
before him. While thus designing his way he exchanged formal salutation
with his antagonist.
"And now, sir," said he, bowing himself to a seat, "now I am entirely at
your disposal."
"And I at yours," said the Prime Minister.
But the Archbishop corrected him. "I am here, I take it, rather to be
informed of the latest novelties in statecraft than to admit that any
fresh standpoint upon our side has become possible." Slowly and solemnly
he rested his hands upon the presentation volume as he spoke; across
that barrier, representative of the spiritual forces at his back, his
small diplomatic eyes twinkled with holy zeal. He was an impressive
figure to look at, and also to hear: over six feet in height, with dark
hair turned silver, of a ruddy complexion, portly without protuberance,
and with a voice of modulated thunder that could fill with ease, twice
in one day, even the largest of his cathedrals. As a concession to the
world he wore flat side-whiskers, as a concession to the priestly office
he shaved his lip. By this compromise he was able to wear a cope without
offense to the Evangelicals,--his whiskers saving him from the charge of
extreme views. Under his rule, largely perhaps because of those
whiskers, peace had settled upon the Church; and in consequence it now
presented an almost united front to its political opponents.
All his life he had been accustomed to command. Even in the nursery, as
the eldest child and only son of his parents, he had ruled his five
sisters with that prescriptive mastery which sex and primogeniture
confer. At school he had pursued his career of disciplinarian first as
"dowl-master," then as captain of teams, then as prefect with powers of
the rod over senior boys his superiors in weight. Continuing at the
University to excel in games, he became at twenty-four a class-master in
Jingalo's most famous public school. Marrying at thirty a lady of title,
he acquired the social touch necessary for his completion, and five
years later was appointed Head. Left a disconsolate widower at the age
of forty-seven, he drew dignity from his domestic affliction, received a
belated call to the ministry, took orders, and became Master of
Pentecost, only on the distinct understanding that a bishopric of
peculiar importance as a stepping-stone to higher things should be his
at the next vacancy. The vacancy occurred without any undue delay; and
from that bishopric, after three years of successful practice, he passed
at the age of fifty-five to the crowning grace of his present position.
Thence he was able to look back over a long vista of things successfully
done and heads deferentially bowed to his sway--deans, canons, priests,
sisters--a pattern training for a humble servant of that Master whose
Cross, as by law established, he was now helping to bear. Even the Prime
Minister, facing him with all his parliamentary majority at his back,
knew him for a redoubtable opponent. This fight had long ago been
foreseen by the Church party, and it was for the fighting policy he now
embodied that Dr. Chantry had received nine years previously his "call"
from collegiate to sacerdotal office. A large jeweled cross gleamed upon
his breast, and a violet waistcoat that buttoned out of sight betokened
the impenetrable resolution of his priestly character.
"And now, sir, I am at your disposal," said he; and sat immovable while
the Prime Minister spoke.
II
The Prime Minister's argument ran upon material and mathematical lines;
he imported no passion into the discussion,--there was no need. He had
at his disposal all that was requisite--the parliamentary majority, the
popular mandate, and, so he believed, the necessary expedient under the
Constitution for bringing the Church to heel. Episcopalianism no longer
commanded a majority of the nation; Church endowments had therefore
become the preserves of a minority, and scholarship by remaining
denominational was getting to be denationalized. Having laid down his
premises he proceeded to set forth his demands. Henceforth the
Universities were to be released from Church control, all collegiate and
other educational appointments to be open and unsectarian, scholarships
and fellowships, however exclusive the intentions of their pious
founders, were to follow in the same course; degrees of divinity were to
be granted irrespective of creed, and chairs of theology open to all
comers.
At this point the Archbishop, who had hitherto sat silent, put in a
word.
"That will include Buddhists and Mohammedans. Is such your intention?"
The Prime Minister corrected himself. "I should, of course, have said
'all who profess themselves Christians.'"
The Archbishop accepted the concession with an ironical bow.
"Unitarians and Roman Catholics?"
"That would necessarily follow."
"I am ceasing to be amazed," said his Grace coldly. "We, the custodians
of theological teaching, are to admit to our endowments the two extremes
of heresy and of schism."
"If both are admitted," suggested the Prime Minister, "will they not
tend to correct each other? We study history by allowing all sides to be
stated, and we admit to its chair both schools, the scientists and the
rhetoricians. Why, then, should not theology be studied on the same
broad lines?"
"Will the chair of theology become a more stable institution," inquired
the Archbishop, "by being turned into a see-saw?"
The Prime Minister smiled on the illustration, but his answer was edged
with bitterness.
"That is a way of securing some movement at all events," he remarked
caustically.
"The Church," retorted his Grace, "denies the need of such movement. Her
firm foundations--we have scriptural warrant for saying--are upon rock.
She is neither a traveling menagerie, a swingboat, nor a
merry-go-round."
"Yet I have heard," said the Prime Minister, "that she takes a ship to
be her symbol, and one, in particular, very specially designed to be a
traveling menagerie--containing all kinds both clean and unclean."
"The unclean," said the Archbishop, "were by divine dispensation placed
in a decisive minority."
"Yet they shared, I suppose, the provisions of the establishment?"
"They did not, I imagine, sit down at the table with the patriarch and
his family."
"Perhaps the dogs ate of the crumbs?"
"It is not 'crumbs' that you are seeking," said the Archbishop with
asperity. "From our chairs of theology we dispense to the Church the
bread of wisdom from which she draws sustenance; and you ask us to let
that source of her intellectual life become infected with microbes,--at
a time when latitudinarian doctrines are sapping the unity of the Church
and weakening her discipline, to allow their establishment as a
principle in our centers of learning and in our seats of divinity! What
claim to denounce heresy and schism will be left to the Church if in her
very government heretics and schismatic teachers receive posts of
influence, emolument, and authority? To what extremes may not the minds
of our students be led, to what destruction of ecclesiastical
discipline?"
"If you will admit free teaching in the Universities," explained the
Prime Minister, "we shall not seek to touch your theological seminaries,
or to invade your orders by an infusion of fresh blood."
"Invade our orders?" cried the Primate. "That you cannot do; no Bishop's
hands would bestow them!" and he drew back his own with a declamatory
gesture. "You yourself are not a Churchman, and you do not perhaps know
what to us the Church means. We hold in sacred trust the power of the
Keys--if we surrender those we surrender everything."
"They are in a good many hands already," remarked the Prime Minister
blandly. "Episcopal power is not limited to the Church of Jingalo." And
then for the first time, as a pawn in the political game, the
Archimandrite was mentioned. The Archbishop could not believe his ears.
"You would not dare," he said.
"I am sorry," replied the other, "that you should be under any such
misapprehension. Let me remind you that only a year ago you yourself
recommended him for an honorary benefice--a church that had not a
parish."
"Yes, honorary; not with administrative powers."
"Yet I fancy it was devised in order that at a later date you might
employ him--merely by accident as it were--for confirming the validity
of your orders."
"While your device," said the Archbishop, "is to use him as a means for
placing schismatics in a position of control and authority. Sir, I say
to you that you would not dare. The nation will not allow it."
"Time will show," replied the other smoothly.
"Ah!" cried the Archbishop passionately; "you trust to time; I to the
power of the Eternal. If such an attempt is made to violate the body of
our Mother Church then I pronounce sentence of excommunication upon all
who take part in it."
"It would have no legal effect," said the Prime Minister. "You miss the
point in dispute. We have not to discuss matters of faith and doctrine,
but only of government. If you prefer--if you will give us your
co-operation and consent--we are ready at any time to offer you the
alternative of disestablishment. It is a solution which for the moment I
do not press; but undoubtedly it would leave the spiritualities of the
Church more free. Your real fear, I have gathered, is that it would
prepare the way for extremes of doctrine, which you yourself cannot
countenance. The Church Triumphant, I am told, would run the risk of a
larger recognition than is allowed to it under present forms; and the
limitations imposed by a State connection are your most hopeful means of
retarding doctrinal development. Is not that so?"
"We have not to discuss matters of doctrine," countered the Archbishop
stiffly, "but only of government. Our concern is not with the Church's
teachings but with her powers for enforcing them upon her own members."
"Including," commented the Prime Minister, "what you have called 'the
power of the Keys.' That power you seek to extend over temporalities to
which we claim access; and to retain it you have in the past used
political means; we are using them to deprive you of that power. I
recognize that had your Grace occupied to-day the position of advantage
which is now mine, you would have used it--and with justification--for
the strengthening of your order; from the popular verdict you would have
had authority to deliver sentence against me. Upon the same ground I now
take the only sure means that are open to me to strengthen my own order
and to safeguard its future liberty."
"What is your order?" smoothly inquired his Grace.
"My order is the representative system, which voices the popular will."
"Mine," said the Archbishop in richly reverberating tones, "is divine
revelation, which voices the will of God."
"You claim a closer acquaintance with that Authority than I," remarked
the Prime Minister. "Yet I, too, have faith in the efficacy of its
workings."
"We base our faith differently," retorted his Grace. "I have my
principles; you, as you have just boasted, have your opportunity. I do
not think that opportunities are of the same eternal character as
principles. To-morrow your opportunity which now seems to give you
power, may disappear. My principles will remain."
"I shall always respect them, in their proper place. As an adornment to
the Church I am sure they will continue to shine. In the State they have
become an excrescence and an impediment."
"You are pushing your definition of impediments rather far when you plan
a new thoroughfare, giving strangers the entrée to church premises."
"It is really your definition of 'premises,'" said the Prime Minister,
"over which we are chiefly at issue. What right has the Church to regard
as strangers any who are baptized Christians?"
The Archbishop seized his advantage exultingly. "I will only remind
you," said he, "of the Church Government Act--a measure of no ancient
date--by which Parliament forced the Church to expel from benefice those
who would not accept her discipline in matters of outward observance.
You yourself voted for that measure."
The Prime Minister had to acknowledge the stroke; but he made light of
it. "I think that measure has already become obsolete. It was not put
very thoroughly into practice even at the beginning."
"Let Parliament, then, admit its error," said the Archbishop, "and
abolish the act and the principle which it enshrines before proceeding
with other acts diametrically opposed to it. While the law claims a hold
over the Church, the Church claims to hold by existing law."
"I may possibly, then, satisfy your Grace," insinuated the Premier, "if
presently I propose the restoration of certain Free Church ministers by
episcopal consecration to the fold from which they were expelled."
The Archbishop rose to his feet, and raising the presentation Bible high
over his head brought it down upon the table with a bang. Then
instantaneously conceiving his mistake, he laid his hands over it in the
act of blessing.
"Never!" he said firmly and solemnly, with ever deepening inflection of
tone, "never! never!"
"It is a measure that might be avoided," conceded the Prime Minister.
"The alternative is before you. We have made you our offer."
"You have offered," said the Archbishop, "an alternative which I am not
able to discuss. Roman Catholicism and Unitarianism in alternate doses
is the price you ask us to pay. The Church of Jingalo will accept
neither the Triple Crown nor an untriune Divinity as its guide." He drew
himself to his full height. "That, sir, is her answer."
"So you really think," inquired the Prime Minister, "that yours and the
Church's voice are one?"
"The blood of her martyrs," said the Archbishop, "has stained the very
steps of that throne from which under divine Providence I am
commissioned to speak with authority. I call on them to witness that
never in her hour of need shall the Church surrender her divine mission
to preach only pure doctrine and to defend the faith committed to the
saints."
"I thought," said the Prime Minister, "that, officially at least, you
did not invoke the dead."
"Sir, we have no need. Their record is our inheritance. It is they who
invoke us from an imperishable past."
"Our discussion, then, seems to be at an end. We have gone back into the
middle ages."
The Prime Minister, having got very much the answer he expected, here
rose and began buttoning his coat. "Well, Archbishop," said he, as he
thus trimmed himself to give a neat finish to the discussion, "before we
part I will put the question quite frankly: Is it to be peace or war?"
"I am a servant of the Church Militant," answered his Grace.
And then they compared notes and settled dates as to when war was to be
declared. Jingalo was about to exhibit to the world the continuity of
her institutions, and with her mind thus carried back to ancient times
modern controversy was an anachronism.
It was on those historic grounds that they arranged their armistice; but
Recording Angels are more truthful than Archbishops or Prime Ministers;
and the Recording Angel, having listened to their conversation, was led
to set down upon his tables this notable memorandum--that on no account
were popular pageantry or trade interests to be disturbed during so
golden an opportunity as the Silver Jubilee. While that was going on
defense of Church and State must be relegated to obscurity.
III
All this had taken place before the truce actually began (see, in fact,
Chapter II). How much, or rather how little the King had heard of it we
already know. How little the truce brought benefit to him we shall learn
more fully in later chapters. Still for the moment he was not without
comfort, for he had got Max to talk to. Every evening that they spent
together much talk went on; and the King sat infected and edified while
Maxian oratory flowed.
"How is it," inquired his father, "that you have been able to think of
these things? I see them when you tell me; but how did they ever come to
enter your head?"
"For some years," answered Max, "I had the advantage of being your
youngest son. Until I was twenty, two lives stood between me and the
succession, and while Stephen and Rupert were drilling I managed to get
educated."
"Poor Rupert!" murmured his father, "he would have made a much better
King than either of us."
"I don't think so," said Max. "He would merely have kept the monarchy to
its old lines--that means sticking in a rut. If the monarchy is to mean
anything it will have to move, not merely with the times but ahead of
them."
"How can it move ahead of them?"
"How otherwise can it lead? That is what the heads of the privileged
classes never seem to understand. Look at the Bishops! See what a
spectacle they have made of themselves, all through not leading."
"Ah, yes," sighed the King; "I thought you'd be against the Bishops."
"Against them?" cried Max, "of course I'm against them! The Bishops are
a set of prehistoric remains: and even if they were all up to date, a
combined house of Bishops and Judges with full legislative powers is
antediluvian (I'm speaking of the Deluge now in the sense in which Louis
XV spoke of it)--it's an eighteenth-century arrangement.
"Yes, I'm against the Bishops, but I'm much more against the Cabinet.
The Cabinet is seeking to control not only the Upper but the Lower
Chamber as well, it is fighting the Bishops merely to delude the people;
and there are the Laity so stupid, or so lazy, or so corrupt that they
won't see it. Every one knows that the Government sells honors for party
purposes, and then covers it up by pretending that contributions to the
party funds are 'public services.' Everything now is to be had for a
price, a Chancellery at so much, a Knighthood at so much more; an Order
of the this, that, or the other, in exact proportion to its prestige or
its rarity. Last year they had a debate on it in the House, a debate
where, between them, the corruptors and the corrupted were in a
majority! And they solemnly took a vote on it, and declared that there
was no corruption, though everybody knew it to be a fact. The Opposition
lay low because they mean to do exactly the same when their time comes.
Oh, and it's not only the House of Laity: I daresay a bishopric has got
its price if we only knew!"
The King would have rejected such a suggestion as fantastic only a month
ago; but now with the Archimandrite in his mind he began to be
suspicious. What price, monetary or political, might not the Free
Churchmen be paying for their bishoprics, what secret bargain of which
it was no one's duty to inform him? He lashed at his own impotence, for
the ignominy of his position increased with his growing consciousness.
Here was the Prime Minister respectful but compulsive, able to threaten,
to browbeat, to dictate terms; but he himself had no counter means to
extract from that minister on what terms he was consenting to do these
things or what price he was paying to get them done. How
constitutionally was he to obtain knowledge of anything? And still,
piling up the accusation, the voice of Max went on.
"I presume," said he, "that quite lately a list of Jubilee honors has
been submitted to you for approval. What does your approval mean? Is a
single one of them your own selection? Do you know what the majority of
them are for?"
The King shook his head. "Mostly they are political," said he. "The
Government has the right; I have no call to interfere. Isn't it perhaps
better that I should not interfere?"
"It may be arguable, sir, that the uncomfortably high position to which
we are born cuts us off from the more strenuously fermenting issues of
the political game, and from the malignities and hypocrisies of that
party system of which, as a nation, we pretend to be so proud, and are
secretly so much ashamed. It may be well that some single authority
should stand removed from and above party, if in the hands of that
authority there is also left power of sentence and dismissal, power also
to withhold unmerited reward. But that power you are no longer expected
to exercise,--it lies like a china nest-egg never to be hatched, but
only to promote the laying of other eggs.
"Yet while your prerogatives have been thus diminished, the claim that
you shall act with judicial impartiality has increased, and has become a
fetter. To oppose any course of ministerial action to-day is by
implication to ally yourself with the other side. You are in the
position of a judge whose directions the jury has authority to ignore,
and from whose hands all power of imposing a penalty has practically
been withdrawn. And these changes have been thrust upon the monarchy by
the will, not of the people, but of that class or section which in the
evolution of our political system happened at the time to be the ruling
one. At one period it was the Church, at another the army, at another
the landlord or the capitalist; it was never that latent force lying in
the future, that peace-loving, industrial democracy which to-day we are
still striving to hold back from its aim. These ruling powers of the
past have now concentrated on the Cabinet as their last line of defense;
and so at the present day it is the Cabinet which has the largest
control not only of patronage (much of it corruptly applied), but of
certain penalizing devices by which monetary pressure can be brought
upon those who thwart its will. By its practical usurpation of the
Crown's right to decree a general election, and by its control of the
party funds, from which parliamentary candidates are subsidized and
assisted to the poll, it is able to hold over the heads of its
supporters a financial threat to which very few can remain indifferent.
And this is how our so-called popular chamber is manipulated and run.
The power of the purse (I speak now of the moneys voted for public
service) lies almost entirely in the hands of those who themselves have
the largest monetary interest for keeping away from their constituencies
and maintaining their leaders in power; and as a consequence the
Ministry's evasion of all regulations and safeguards, its increasing
seizure of parliamentary time, its postponement of finance to a date in
each session when the legislature's energies are exhausted, have become
more and more corrupt in character. Why, the very minister whose duty it
is to see that members are constant in their voting and their attendance
is the one with whom lies, if not the distribution of patronage, at
least its recommendation. He is the go-between, and they know it. How
likely, then, are the rank and file to throw their Government out of
office when the immediate result will be not only to transfer these
bribes to the hands of their political opponents but to inflict upon
themselves the cost of a contested election which privately they cannot
afford, and to face which they are accordingly obliged to go, cap in
hand, to the very men they have voted from power, but who still have
absolute control of the party organization and its funds?"
Here Max stopped to take breath.
IV
"But can you suggest any other way?" questioned the King. "Surely we
must have party?"
"I have no reason to suggest it," answered his son, "it stands written
in history. Under our more ancient Constitution the House of Laity came
pledged from its electorate to criticise, and to control (by the giving
or withholding of supply) the acts of a separate and administratively
independent body. Now Government is carried on by an administrative
body, which, though nominally dependent, has at its back a majority of
the elected pledged _not_ to criticise. And the difference between the
two systems is as the difference between darkness and light. That body
is now forcing the monarchy also into the same non-critical attitude, or
at least is securing that the criticism shall be impotent of result. And
I have the right, sir, to ask what are you doing to-day to preserve for
me the powers which you inherited?"
"To tell you the truth, my son," answered the King, "it is only lately
that I have begun trying to find out what those powers are. It seems a
strange confession to make after twenty-five years; but it is true. When
I came to the throne, at a moment of great political changes, I was
entirely uninstructed and quite naturally I made mistakes, letting
things go when I was told to. From that false position successive
ministries have never allowed me to escape; they have kept me (I have
only just found it out) as uninstructed as they possibly could. They
burden me with routine work, they busy my hands while starving my brain.
One of their little ways--done on the score of relieving me of
unnecessary trouble--has been to submit in large batches at intervals
important documents requiring my assent, smuggling them in under cover
of others. And when I find it out, they plead unavoidable delay and
urgency, as though it were quite an exception. But I tell you it has
been going on, oh, dear me, yes, for a long time now; and the General
has known of it as well as any of them! The other day I made one of my
secretaries go through the entries, and I find that in the last year I
signed sixty Acts of Parliament and about fifteen hundred other State
documents, besides mere commissions, titles, diplomas, and all that sort
of thing, and I tell you that I haven't a ghost of a notion of what more
than a dozen were about! They don't give me time to digest anything; and
you are quite right, it's a system!"
"Well," said his son, "at least they don't treat you much worse than
they do the people's representatives. It has become their regular plan
now to bring in six bills all rolled into one, in a form far too big and
complicated ever to be properly discussed. They insert a lot of
unnecessary contentiousness at the beginning, and all the really
administrative part--the machinery which provides them with political
handles throughout the country, and which they call the non-contentious
part--at the end; and then--on the score of it being non-contentious,
and because by the time they get to it the mind of the legislature is
exhausted--then they shut it down with the closure. One result is that
we have laws on the statute-book which don't even make grammar. Only
last session the Minister of Education got a bill sent up to the
Spiritual Chamber with three split infinitives in it."
"What is a split infinitive?" inquired his Majesty.
"Merely a grammatical error for which in your day school-boys used to be
whipped. You were not. It's important, because when lawyers get on to
the interpretation of the law, loose syntax gives them their
opportunity; they make fortunes out of the grammatical errors of
Parliament. And, of course, it was a lawyer who drew up this bill."
"Do you mean that some one paid him to put in the split infinitives?"
inquired the King anxiously.
"That was quite unnecessary; the thing paid for itself; good drafting
is never to the legal interest. But what I wanted to say was this: here,
in a House of educated men dealing with education, nobody troubled to
correct the grammar of the thing. That to my mind stands out as a moral
portent of the first magnitude. The Bishops quite rightly sent it back
again, but for the wrong reason. Their reason was pure blind
obscurantism; if they had returned it because of its split infinitives
and its slovenly drafting, and requested that it should be put into
decent Jingalese so that they might pretend to understand it they would
have had all the enlightened educationalists in the country with them.
As it was they were against them. It is curious how the Spiritual
Chamber always seeks its popularity among the fools instead of the wise.
It treats democracy like a dog with a bad name, and yet it is to the
dog's tail that it pins its faith: and so it wags with the tail."
The King was not happy at hearing the Bishops so abused; and now a word
had fallen from his son's lips which enabled him to change the subject
to a point which more immediately concerned him.
"Max," said he, "answer me truly, I don't want flattery. Do you think
that _I_ am popular?"
The young man viewed his father leniently, indulgently even; the worn,
fussy, over-anxious face appealed to his sense of pity. "Oh, yes, I
believe so," he said. "They think you are trying to do your best and all
that sort of thing. You don't enthuse them as my grandfather used to do;
but, then, he had the grand manner, and the grand way of speaking as if
he were an oracle. You have put all that aside--except when you make
speeches which have been written for you by your ministers. Well, decent
people respect you for it; but it has its drawbacks; the crowd prefers
the other thing occasionally;--it likes still to pretend, at moments of
ceremony, that it believes in divine right and the hereditary principle,
and so forth; and where it likes to pretend, the press and the
Government are always ready to play into its hands. Yes; it's a
mixture; you must attend sometimes to the unrealities,--then, with your
real moments, you get your effect."
"Your grandfather," said the King, "never talked to me about anything.
He didn't like the idea of being succeeded, hated to think of a time
when affairs would have to go on without him. I fancy that he rather
despised my mental capacity, or else thought that by just looking at him
I should learn. So he never talked to me--not on these subjects I mean;
and I am still not sure whether I ought to talk to you. I don't really
know where State secrets begin and where they end, or whether I have the
right to say anything of what goes on in Council to a single living
soul. I wanted to consult the Archbishop the other day--merely to hear
his statement of the case from his own side--but I was not allowed. I am
the most solitary man in my kingdom; and am kept so, in order that I may
remain powerless."
"As Charlotte would say," observed Max, "we haven't taught each other
the business. And yet, isn't it strange? Here are we, a long-established
firm ('limited, entire,' I suppose we should describe ourselves),
existing upon the hereditary principle, and yet not allowed to extract
any of its living values. As detached forces we succeed each other upon
the throne, each in turn reduced in power and initiative by our official
training and our inexperience. When shall we learn to organize our labor
and combine like the rest of the world?"
"I think we are combining now," said the King.
"Yes," said Max, "I really believe we are--'John Jingalo and Son'--how
nice and commercial that sounds!"
"I only hope the Prime Minister won't hear of it."
"I hope he will," said Max.