distinguished of the Grants. He had escaped the excessive angularity of
his elder brothers, and although he was much better looking than Sholto,
Jasmine's father, there was between them a family likeness, by which
Jasmine was less moved than she felt she ought to be. In fact, the
amount she had lately had to endure of family duties, family influence,
family sensibilities, had made her chary of seeming to ascribe any
importance at all even to her own father so far as he was a relation.
The Colonel, in addition to being an outwardly distinguished officer in
a Highland regiment of repute, had married one of the daughters of old
Sir Frederick Willoughby, who was Minister at the Court of the Grand
Duke of Pomerania at the time when Captain Grant, as he then was, found
himself in Pomerania on matters connected with his profession. He had
not been married long when the Boer War broke out, his success in which
as an intelligence officer put into his head the idea of becoming a
military attache, an ambition that with the help of his father-in-law,
then Ambassador at Rome, he was able to achieve.
His wife may not have brought him as much money as the wives of Hector
and Eneas, but she brought him quite enough to sustain without
financial worries the semi-political, semi-military positions that he
found so congenial, and through his success in which, coupled with his
double relationship to Sir Frederick Willoughby and Sir Hector Grant, he
was given the guardianship of the lunatic Prince Adalbert of Pomerania.
Enough pretence of state was kept up at 23, The Crescent, Curtain Wells,
to make the Colonel and his wife feel their own importance. He had the
Distinguished Service Order, could still reasonably turn the pages of
the _London Gazette_ two or three times a year with a good chance of
finding himself with the C.M.G., and had not yet quite given up hope of
the Bath. He had picked up in Rome the Crown of Italy, in Madrid the
Order of Isabella the Catholic, while from Pomerania he had received the
cordon of St. Wenceslaus, and the third class of the Order of the Black
Griffin (with Claws). His responsibility for the younger son of a royal
house gave him in Curtain Wells, after the Mayor, the Member, and the
Master of Ceremonies at the Pump Room, the most conspicuous position
among his fellow-townsmen, and when the barouche which by the terms of
the guardianship had to be maintained for His Serene Highness made a
splendid progress past the arcades and along the dignified streets of
the old watering-place, Colonel Grant, observing the respectful glances
of the citizens, felt that his career had been a success.
Aunt Mildred, even as a girl, had been considered eccentric for a
Willoughby; her marriage with a soldier of fortune had done nothing to
cure this reputation; association with Prince Adalbert had done a great
deal to develop it. To this eccentricity was added a strong squint.
Military attaches are notorious for the cynical way in which they
sacrifice everybody to their careers, and it might be argued in favour
of Colonel Grant that he had sacrificed himself as cynically as any of
his friends.
Jasmine's visit opened inauspiciously, because by mistake she travelled
down to Curtain Wells by an earlier train than the one to which she had
been recommended by her aunt; she therefore arrived at The Crescent
about two o'clock without having been met at the station. When her aunt
came to greet her in the drawing-room, Jasmine had an impression that
she was still eating, and apologized for interrupting her lunch.
"Lunch?" repeated Aunt Mildred, still making these curious sounds of
eating. "We finished lunch at twelve, and we dine at four." The sound of
eating continued, and made Jasmine so shy that she was speechless until
she suddenly realized that what she had mistaken for incomplete
mastication was merely the automatic play of Aunt Mildred's muscles on a
loosely fitting set of false teeth. Mrs. Alexander Grant, unaware that
she was making this noise, did not pay any attention to her niece's want
of tact; but Jasmine was so much embarrassed that she evidently did not
make a favourable first impression.
The spacious Georgian proportions of the drawing-room at 23, The
Crescent, were destroyed by a mass of marquetry furniture,
antimacassars, and photographs in plush and silver frames of royal
personages, the last of which gave the room an unreal and uninhabited
appearance like the private parlour of a public-house where respectable
groups of excursionists take tea on Sunday afternoon; for these people
with ridiculous coiffures and costumes, signing themselves Albertina or
Frederica or Adolphus, were as little credible as a publican's
relatives.
However, Jasmine was too anxious about her presentation to His Serene
Highness to notice anything very much, and if she had offended her aunt
by arriving too soon or by not knowing the time for dinner, she made up
for it by asking how she was to address the Prince. This was a topic on
which her aunt obviously liked to expatiate, and she was delighted to be
asked to instruct Jasmine how to curtsey, and to inform her that he was
always addressed as 'Sir' in the English manner, because his mother, the
Grand Duchess, had expressed a wish that the more formal German mode of
salutation should be dispensed with in order to provide a suitable
atmosphere of simplicity for the simple soul of her youngest son.
"Is he very mad?" asked Jasmine.
"Good heavens, child," her aunt gasped, "I beg you will not use that
word here. Mad? He's not mad at all."
At that moment the door opened to admit a diminutive figure in livery.
Jasmine was just going to curtsey under the impression that it was the
Prince, when she heard her aunt say, "What is it now, Snelson?" in time
to realize that it was the butler.
"His Serene Highness is being rather troublesome, madam," said Snelson.
"Oh? What is the matter?"
"Well, madam, when he got up this morning he would put on his evening
dress, and now he wants to go for a drive in evening dress."
"Why, Snelson?"
"I think he wants to go to the theatre again. He enjoyed himself very
much last night. Quite a pleasure to hear him chuckling when he got
home. I told him if he was a good boy he should go again next week, but
he went and lost his temper, and now he's gone and thrown all his
lounge suits into the area. The maids are picking them up as fast as
they can. Perhaps you could come up and speak to him, madam? He's got it
into his head I'm trying to keep him from the theatre."
"Such a boy!" sighed Aunt Mildred, and her intense squint gave Jasmine a
momentary illusion that she was referring to Snelson. "Such a boy! You
see what a boy he is. He's as interested in life as a sparrow. _You're_
going to be devoted to him, of course. You'll rave about him."
Jasmine was wondering why this was so certain, when one of the maids
came in to say that it was not a bit of good her collecting His Serene
Highness's clothes, because as fast as they were collected, he was
throwing them out of the window again.
"And he's started screaming," added the maid.
"Snelson, you ought never to have left him," Aunt Mildred said severely.
"You ought to have known he would start screaming. You should have sent
for me to come up."
"I've locked him in his room, madam."
"Yes, and you know that always makes him scream. He hates being locked
in his room."
Aunt Mildred went away with Snelson, and Jasmine was left to herself,
until Uncle Alexander came in and got over the awkwardness of avuncular
greetings by asking her what all the fuss was about. She told him about
the Prince's throwing his clothes out of the window, which her uncle
attributed to excitement over her visit.
"No, I don't think it's that," said Jasmine. "I think he wants to go to
the theatre again."
"Oh no, he's excited about your visit. You must humour him. Very nice
fellow really. Very nice chap. And as sane as you or me if you take him
the right way. I think Snelson irritates him. If he wants to put on
evening dress, why shouldn't he put on evening dress? So silly to thwart
him about a little thing like that. I can always manage him perfectly
well. I spoke to my brother Hector about it, and he agreed with me that
there are only two ways to deal with lunatics ... with patients, I mean
... either to give way to them in everything or to give way to them in
nothing."
Jasmine thought this sounded excellent if ambiguous advice.
"Now I humour him," said the Colonel. "The other day he heard some
tactless people talking about electric shocks, and he got it into his
head that he couldn't touch anything without getting an electric shock.
Well, you can imagine what a nuisance that was to everybody. What did I
do? I humoured him. I put a saucer on his head and told him he was
insulated, and he went about carrying that saucer on his head for a week
as happy as he could be. He's forgotten all about electricity now. Take
my advice: humour him." At this point Snelson came down again.
"If you please, sir, Mrs. Grant says His Highness insists on wearing his
evening dress."
"Well, let him wear his evening dress, damme, let him wear it," the
Colonel shouted. "Let him wear it. Let him wear his pyjamas if he wants
to wear his pyjamas."
"Very good, sir," said Snelson in an injured voice as he retired.
A few minutes later the subject of all this discussion appeared in the
drawing-room.
Prince Adalbert Victor Augustus of Pomerania was a tall and very thin
young man, though on account of his habit of walking with a furtive
crouch he did not give an impression of height. He had a sparse beard,
the hairs of which seemed to wave about upon his chin like weeds in the
stream of a river. This beard did not add the least dignity to his
countenance, but he was allowed to keep it because it was considered
unsafe to trust him with a razor, and he would never allow Snelson to
shave him. He walked round an ordinary room as if he were crossing a
narrow and dangerous Alpine pass, and he would never let go his hold of
any piece of furniture until he was able to grasp the next piece along
the route of his progress. Owing to this way of moving about, Jasmine,
when he first came into the room, thought he was going to attack her.
She supposed that it would be discourteous to watch him all the way
round the room, and she could not help feeling nervous when she heard
him behind her. Mrs. Grant, perhaps because she was nearly as idiotic as
the Prince himself, assumed the airs of a mother with him, and always
addressed him as Bertie.
"Now, Bertie, be a good boy," she said, "and come and shake hands with
my niece. You've heard all about her. This is little Miss Jasmine."
The Prince suddenly released the piece of furniture he was holding, and
just as some child makes up its mind to venture upon a crucial dash in a
game like Puss-in-the-corner, he rushed up to Jasmine, and after
muttering "I like you very much, thank you, little Miss Jasmine," he at
once rushed back to his piece of furniture so rapidly that Jasmine had
no time to curtsey. She was not yet used to the direction of her aunt's
eyes, and now observing that they were apparently fixed upon herself in
disapproval, she began her obeisance. The Prince evidently liked her
curtsey, for he began curtseying too, until the Colonel said in a sharp
whisper: "For goodness' sake don't excite him. The one thing we try to
avoid is exciting him with unnecessary ceremony." So evidently her aunt
had not been looking at her, and this was presently obvious, because
while she was telling Snelson to order the barouche, her eyes were still
fixed on Jasmine.
"Are you coming for a drive, dear?" she asked her husband. "It was quite
sunny this morning when I woke up."
The Colonel shook his head.
"And now, Bertie," she went on, "be a good boy and put on your other
suit."
"I want to go to the theatre," the Prince argued.
"Well, you shall go to the theatre to-night."
"I want to go now," the Prince persisted.
"Now come along, your Serene Highness," said Snelson. "Try and not give
so much trouble, there's a good chap. You can go to the theatre
to-night."
However, the Prince did not go to the theatre that night, for after a
stately drive through Curtain Wells, from which Jasmine on the grounds
of untidiness after a journey excused herself, they sat down to play
bridge after dinner. Jasmine did not know how to play bridge. Her uncle
told her that her ignorance of the game did not matter, because she
could always be dummy, the Prince also being perpetual dummy. Even as a
dummy, the Prince wasted a good deal of time, because he had to be
allowed to play the cards that were called for, and it took him a long
time to distinguish between suits, let alone between court cards and
common cards. He had a habit, too, of suddenly throwing all his cards up
into the air, so that Snelson was kept in the room to spend much of his
time in routing about on the floor for the cards that his royal master
had flung down. The Prince had other obstructive habits, like suddenly
getting up in order to shake hands with everybody in turn, which, as
Mrs. Grant said, expressed his delightful nature, although it rather
interfered with the progress of the game.
When the Colonel, with Jasmine as his dummy partner, had beaten his wife
and the Prince, he became jovial, and there being still half an hour
before the Prince had to compose his excitement prior to going to bed, a
game of ludo was suggested. This would have been a better game if Prince
Adalbert had not wanted to change the colour of his counters all the
time, which made it difficult to know who was winning, and impossible to
say who had really won. The Colonel, after humouring him in the first
game, grew interested in a big lead he had established with Red in the
second game and objected to the Prince's desire to change him into
Green. It was in vain that Jasmine and her aunt offered him Yellow or
Blue: he was determined to have Red, and when the Colonel declined to
surrender his lead, the Prince decided that the game was tiddly-winks,
which caused it to break up in confusion.
Prince Adalbert was really too idiotic to be bearable for long. Living
in the same house with him was like living on terms of equality with a
spoilt monkey. There were times, of course, when his intelligence
approximated to human intelligence, one expression of which was a
passion for collecting. It began by his going down to the kitchen when
the servants were occupied elsewhere and collecting the material and
utensils for the preparation of dinner. Not much damage was done on this
occasion, except that the unbaked portion of a Yorkshire pudding was
concealed in the piano. On another occasion he collected all Jasmine's
clothes and hid them under his bed. Aunt Mildred evinced a tendency to
blame Jasmine for this, even going so far as to suggest that she had
encouraged him to collect her clothes, though in what way this
encouragement was deduced except from Jasmine's usual untidiness was
not made clear. Snelson was ordered to keep a sharper look out on his
master, as it was feared that from collecting inside the house, he might
begin to collect outside the house, which, as the Colonel said, would be
an intolerable bore. The passion for collecting was soon after this
exchanged for a desire to cohabit with owls, the Prince having observed
on one of his drives a tame owl in a wicker cage outside a small
fruiterer's shop. The owner of the bird was persuaded to part with it at
a price, and the Prince drove home in a state of perfect bliss with his
pet on the opposite seat.
"It's really lovely to watch him," said Aunt Mildred.
"Never known him so mad about anything as His Serene Highness is now
about owls," said Snelson. "He'll sit and talk to that owl by the hour
together."
The Prince's devotion to the bird occupied his mind so completely that
it was thought prudent to import two more owls in case anything should
happen to the particular one upon which he was lavishing such love. The
first owl remained his favourite, however, and it really did seem to
return his affection, in a negative kind of way, by never actually
biting the Prince, although it bit everybody else in the house. Jasmine
had no hesitation about encouraging him in this passion, because it kept
him so well occupied that bridge, ludo, and tiddly-winks were put on one
side, and the Prince himself no longer screamed when he had to go to
bed. In fact, he was only too anxious after dinner to get back to his
room in order to pass the evening saying, 'Tu-whit, tu-whoo!' to his
owls. Unfortunately there was begotten from this association an ambition
in the Prince's mind to become an owl himself, and when one evening the
Colonel found him with six feathers stuck in his hair, perched on the
rail of the bed and trying to eat a mouse he had caught, the owls were
banished. The Prince's desire to be an owl was not so easily disposed
of. For some time after his pets had disappeared he replied to all
questions with 'Tu-whit, tu-whoo!' and once when the Colonel impatiently
told him to behave himself like a human being, he rushed at him and bit
his finger.
"Who started him off in this ridiculous owl idea?" the Colonel demanded
of his wife irritably. "Nice thing if the Baron comes over to find out
how he's getting on, and finds that he believes himself to be an owl.
You know perfectly well that they don't really approve of his being
looked after in England, and I can't understand why Jasmine doesn't make
herself more pleasant to him. We all thought before she came that she
would be a recreation for him. It seems to me that he's much madder now
than he's ever been yet."
"Oh, hush, dear!" Aunt Mildred begged her husband, having vainly tried
with signs to fend off the threatened admission of the Prince's state of
mind.
But the Colonel's finger was hurting him acutely, and he would not agree
to keep up the pretence of the Prince's sanity.
"You can't expect me to go about pretending he's not mad. Why, the
people come out of the shops now in order to hear him calling out
'Tu-whit, tu-whoo!' as he drives past. Supposing he starts biting people
in the street? I really do think," he added, turning to Jasmine, "that
you might put yourself out a little bit to entertain him. Of course, if
he bites you, we shall have to do something about it, but I don't think
he will bite you."
Luckily the Prince's memory was not a strong one, and a week after the
owls had been banished, he had forgotten that such birds existed.
From envying the life and habits of an owl His Serene Highness passed on
to imitating Mrs. Alexander Grant's squint. This was an embarrassing
business, because evidently neither the Colonel nor Snelson liked to
correct him too obviously for fear of hurting Mrs. Grant's feelings. As
for her, either she did not notice that he was manipulating his eyes in
an unusual manner, or she supposed that he was paying her a compliment.
She was such a conceited and idiotic woman that she would have been
flattered even by such imitation. When he first began to squint across
the table at Jasmine, she supposed that it was an old habit of his
temporarily revived; but in the passage the next day Snelson came up to
her and asked if she had noticed anything wrong about His Serene
Highness's eyes. Jasmine suggested that he was squinting a little bit,
and Snelson replied: "It's those owls."
"I thought he had forgotten all about them."
"He's for ever now trying to make his eyes look like an owl's."
"Oh," said Jasmine doubtfully, "I hadn't realized that. I thought that
perhaps...." and then she stopped, for it could not be her place to
comment to the butler on his mistress's squint.
"You think he's trying to imitate the old lady?" asked Snelson in that
hoarse whisper that clung to his ordinary method of speech from his
manner of asking people at dinner what wine they would take. "Oh no, he
wouldn't ever imitate her. He might imitate you, though!"
"In what way?" asked Jasmine, rather alarmed.
"Oh, you never can tell," said Snelson. "He's that ingenious, he'd
imitate anybody. He started off imitating me once, and, of course,
through me not being very tall, I didn't quite like it. The Colonel
thought he was imitating a frog when he came into the room like me, and
if I hadn't been here so long, I should have left. I wish you'd take him
up a bit--you know, encourage him a bit, and all that. Time hangs very
heavy on his hands, poor chap. I got the cook's little nephew once to
come in and amuse him of an afternoon, but it was stopped. Etiquette you
know, and all that. Of course, etiquette's all very well in its way, and
I'm not going to say etiquette isn't necessary within bounds; but he
wants amusing. If you can bring him in a toy now and again when you go
out for a walk. I don't mean anything as looks as if it could be eaten,
because he'll start in right off on anything as looks as if it could be
eaten. But any little nice toy, not that small as he can get it right
into his mouth, and not that big as he can hurt himself with it."
Jasmine supposed that Snelson knew what he was talking about, and next
day she bought the Prince a small clockwork engine. He enjoyed this for
about two minutes; then he got angry with it and stamped on it; and when
Snelson told him to behave himself, he pulled Snelson's hair, upon which
the Colonel intervened and reproved Jasmine for exciting His Serene
Highness. The atmosphere at 23, The Crescent, began to get on Jasmine's
nerves. It seemed to her pitiable that for the sake of the honour of
being guardians of a royal imbecile her uncle and aunt should abandon
themselves to a mode of life that in her eyes was degrading. The long
dinners dragged themselves out in the November twilights, and though the
Prince ate so fast that if only he had been concerned dinner would have
been over in ten minutes, a pretence of ceremony was maintained, and
the endless courses must have put a strain on the china of the
establishment, for there used to be long waits, during which the Colonel
had a theory that His Serene Highness's moral stability would be
increased by twiddling his thumbs.
"You may have noticed," he used to say to Jasmine, "how much I insist on
his using his thumbs. You no doubt realize that the main difference
between men and monkeys is that we can use our thumbs. The Prince has a
tendency always to carry his thumbs inside his fingers. I'm sure that if
I could only get him to twiddle them long enough every day, it would be
of great benefit to his development."
After dinner the old round of double dummy bridge followed by ludo had
begun again, and though an attempt was made to vary the games by the
introduction of halma, halma had to be given up, because once when the
Colonel had succeeded in establishing an impregnable position, His
Serene Highness without any warning popped into his mouth the four
pieces that were holding that position.
Nor were the drives on fine mornings in the royal barouche much of a
diversion. Jasmine could not help feeling ashamed to be sitting opposite
His Serene Highness when he made one of his glibbering progresses
through Curtain Wells. It seemed to her that by accepting a seat which
marked her social inferiority she was endorsing the detestable servility
of the tradesmen who came out and fawned upon what was after all no
better than a royal ape. She felt that presently she should have to
break out--exactly in what way she did not know, but somehow, she was
sure. Otherwise she felt that the only alternative would be to become as
mad as the Prince himself. Indeed, so much did he get on her nerves that
she found herself imitating him once or twice in front of her glass,
and she began to realize that the proverbial danger of associating with
lunatics was not less great than it was reputed to be.
Then came the news that the mother of Prince Adalbert, the Grand Duchess
herself, proposed to pay a visit to England shortly, and, what was more,
intended to honour The Crescent, Curtain Wells, by staying in it one
whole night. This news carried Aunt Mildred to the zenith of
self-congratulation, at which height the prospect of the world at her
feet was suddenly obscured by a profound pessimism about the behaviour
of her household during the royal visit.
"She is travelling strictly incognito, and is not even to bring a
lady-in-waiting," she lamented.