“We don’t want to be done good to. We want to enjoy ourselves.”
“I did not know,” said the King, gently. “But now you have spoken I
will at once appoint a Minister of Public Enjoyment, and——”
The Magician was watching the crowd, and he saw how the sight of the
King’s good face and the sound of his good voice were working on their
hearts that had once loved him. Now Negretti sprang forward. “One word,
brother!” he cried, and led the King into the shadow of a close-clipped
yew-tree walk. The moment they were hidden he caught his brother’s
arm and whispered a wicked spell: and the first words of it were in
Persian, and the next in Greek, and after that came words in Arabic and
Spanish, and the speech of the county of Essex, and the last words of
all were “be changed to a stone.”
And so strong was the spell that the King was turned to a stone that
very minute—a great white stone—and fell under the yew hedge, and lay
there.
Then the Magician said “Ha, ha!” and, after waiting so long as he
deemed prudent, he went back to the people, and said—
“I regret to inform you that your King has proved quite unreliable as
a man of business. When I urged him to sign a written agreement to
keep you always in a good humour he refused, and then he remembered an
urgent appointment in Nova Scotia; and he has gone, and taken most of
the crown treasure with him. But, do not despair, I will be your King,
and I have an income quite sufficient to keep up a small establishment
of my own. And my golden argosies are now on the way from the Indies,
bearing all manner of precious things, and bales of plush are on their
way from Yorkshire. So now I am King.”
The people believed him, for they had never known a King who spoke
anything but the truth. So they shouted, “Long live the King!” and
the matter was settled. That very day Negretti had the Palace painted
magenta, and covered all the window-sashes and mantelpieces with gold
paint, and stuck embossed coloured scraps on them.
Then he went out into the garden to get a good look at his magenta
Palace from the outside, and as he went along the clipped-yew walk
there was the Princess Perihelia weeping over the white stone.
“What are you crying for?” he asked.
“I’m crying for the White King,” said she.
“And why do you cry _here_?” said the Magician.
“I don’t know,” said the poor Princess, and she looked so beautiful
that the Magician went straight into the Palace and told the Prime
Tailor to sew new rubies all over his new purple plush suit because he
was going a-courting.
The very next day Negretti put on the purple plush suit as well as the
Royal Crown, and went to the wing of the Palace which the White King
had set apart for the Princess Perihelia to live in. Alban’s crown was
made of silver and pearls and moonstones, and the new King had ordered
a new crown, all gold, and stuck as full of rubies and emeralds and
sapphires as a really good Christmas cake is of plums. (I do not mean
the cake they call “good, wholesome school cake,” but the kind they
have at home when there is a party.) He took all his many-coloured
retinue with him, and they waited on the terrace while the Magician
knocked at the door.
“Come in,” said the Princess.
“I’ve come to marry you,” said the Magician, coming to the point at
once; for he had arranged to have a procession that afternoon, and he
was a little pressed for time.
But Perihelia said, “No, thank you.”
The Magician could hardly believe his ears. “But you’ll be Queen of the
land,” said he, “and that’s what you’d have been if you’d married my
brother, and, I suppose, what you wanted to be.”
“O no, it isn’t,” said she.
“Well, what did you want?” said he.
“I wanted to be the White King’s wife,” said she.
“It’s the same thing,” he said.
But she said: “No, it isn’t, not a bit.” And it was in vain that he
showed her his best plush suit and the plush suits of his retainers;
she simply wouldn’t look at them, nor at the precious stones either;
so at last he went off to his Palace to make more rubies and precious
stones and things like that, and she went off to cry over the white
stone.
Now a lot of tell-tale-tits had built their nests above the Palace,
and some of them flew off and told the Magician how Perihelia was
always crying in the yew avenue over the white stone. So he said to
his slaves: “Get a hand-cart, and carry the thing on to the middle of
the bridge and drop it into the river.” So they did, and the stone
stuck, end-up, in the mud; and when the golden argosies of the Magician
came up the river, bearing peacocks and apes and turquoises, every
single galley split on that stone, and the whole treasure went to the
bottom; all but the peacocks, and they flew away into the country of
a neighbouring King, who thought every one should be useful and not
ornamental; so he cut off the peacocks tails, and clipped their wings,
and tried to teach them to lay turkey’s eggs. But it is very difficult
to get a peacock to do anything useful.
So then the Magician set a lot of people dredging for the lost
treasure; and, among other things, they fished up some poor dead apes
and the big white stone, and as the stone seemed to have been rather
in the way in the bed of the river, they carted it away to the fields
behind the town, where the white jonquils grew, and dumped it down
there, and left it among the long grass.
And the Princess could not come and cry over it there because she did
not know where it was, and besides she was very busy; for, after she
had refused to marry him, the Magician said, “Very well, then, you can
just do the free washing;” for the royal housekeeper had given five
minutes’ notice, and left at the end of it, as soon as the new King
had the Palace painted magenta, and no one else knew how to do washing
by white magic, and though the people had sneered at it in the White
King’s time they stood out for it now, and said free washing was what
they had always been accustomed to. Poor Perihelia did not know the
white magic; but she washed by the Sunlight Magic, and everything she
sent home from the wash was pinky or pearly or greeny, like the little
clouds in a May dawn. The people were pleased, but not the Magician.
“I like a colour to _be_ a colour,” he said. “I hate your half
measures.”
He was beginning to remodel the kingdom to his own fancy. Instead of
a Lord Chief Good-doer he had a Lord Chief Magician, and instead of
the Education Department he had a Permanent Committee of Black and
Coloured Magic, and he shut up the free washhouses. “Who wants to
wash?” said he, and he ordered a free distribution of nasty medicine
instead; and altogether he was really beginning to enjoy himself
when another tell-tale-tit came fluttering in at the window of his
laboratory, and, perching on the top of a crucible, told him of a
Rumour. The Rumour had been running about the town like a mad thing,
and wherever it ran it left its tail behind it. Rumour, as you know, is
a beast with many tales; and now everybody knew that the white stone
had moved in the night and had come rolling up to the gate of the town.
“Whatever shall we do?” said the Lord Chief Magician, who was pounding
up nasty things in the mortar ready for the free distribution of
medicine next day.
“Smash it,” said Negretti. “I’ll take a turn at the medicine while you
go and see the thing done.”
So the Lord Chief Magician called together the Permanent Committee of
Black and Coloured Magic and sent them to break the stone. And when
they began to hit it with their hammers and picks seventeen sharp
splinters of white stone flew off, and each splinter hit a member of
the Committee in the eye and killed him. There were exactly seventeen
members, as it happened. So then the Lord Chief Magician shut the town
gates and ran home and hid under the bed.
And the people of the town were very much interested in the stone that
had rolled by itself and had killed seventeen members of the Committee,
and they made little parties and picnics all day long, taking their
children to look at the stone and carrying sandwiches with them and
bottles of beer.
The Magician was very angry.
“Such rubbish I never heard of,” said he when the tell-tale-tit
alighted on the window-sill and told him of it. “If they want to
look at anything, why can’t they come and look at _me_? I’m sure I’m
coloured enough!”
That night the stone rose up in the thickest of the black dark, when no
one at all is out of doors, except the Police—and not always him—and it
smashed through the town gate and came rolling right up into the Square
and lay there.
The tell-tale-tit awoke the Magician in the morning by singing the news
sharply in his ear, and he went out to see. There was a great crowd in
the Square, and they all cried out—
“It is a magic stone. It will bring us luck. Build it into the royal
Palace.”
“I might do worse,” thought Negretti. “If good Roman cement and a
double coat of magenta paint doesn’t keep it quiet nothing will.”
So he gave orders, and the stone was carted to the Palace, and built
into the wall over the great gate; and while they were gone to fetch
the red paint to cover up the stone and the mortar the Lord Chief
Magician came out from under his bed, and went sneaking up to the
Palace and in at the gate, and the stone fell on him and smashed him
quite flat.
Then Perihelia came running out, and she washed the mortar off the
white stone by her Sunlight Magic; and when the Magician come out she
said: “Let it lie here to-night, and to-morrow, if you will let me go,
I will take it away to my own kingdom, so that it shall never trouble
you again.”
Negretti agreed, because he did not know what else to do, and he was
beginning to despair of the Princess ever marrying him, because he had
now asked her to do so every day for a month, and always with more
display of plush and jewels, and she said “No” more decidedly, and even
crossly, every time. So he began to lose heart.
That night, just when the moon was waning, and before morning broke,
Princess Perihelia slipped down the Palace stairs and into the garden
to look once more on the place where the White King had promised to
love her always.
And when she came to that same place there was the white stone lying
under the shadow of the white rose bushes, and pearly rose leaves had
fallen all over it, and were falling still, like tears.
Perihelia knelt down beside the stone and put her arms round it, and
said—
“Poor stone, dear stone, what is it that troubles you so that you
cannot rest? If I only knew, I might help you with my Sunlight Magic.
Why are you so troubled, and why do I pity you so? Oh, if my White King
were here he would understand and help you! But I can do nothing!”
With that she began to weep over the stone, calling on the White King
to come back to her. And all the while she was talking and weeping the
moon was waning and the light in the East grew pearlier and prettier
minute by minute. And as she wept and clasped the stone she presently
saw in the glowing light that the stone was changing in her arms. Like
white sands falling in an hour-glass, the white stone fell away and
fell away until the sun looked through the white rose bushes and saw
Perihelia clasp the living form of the White King in her loving arms.
The sun’s was not the only eye which saw that meeting. The Magician
had had a bad night, and he came out early, curious to see whether the
stone had moved again. His curiosity was gratified.
When the White King saw his treacherous brother his tongue was
loosed—hitherto kisses had been speech enough for him—and he spoke the
words which he found in his mouth. And they were, naturally enough,
the last words that had gone in at his ears, and the words were first
Persian and then Greek, and then Arabic and Spanish, and the language
of foreigners from Essex; and the words he wound up with were, “be
changed into a stone.”
But the wicked spell that had turned King Alban into a stone had grown
weaker by keeping (as even ’20 port did when it was kept too long),
and it had no longer power to do what it ought to have done. It could
not turn the wicked Magician into a stone, as I am sure you would wish
it to have done; it was only strong enough to turn him into a wooden
post.
* * * * *
I do not wish to have to mention such an unpleasant character as
Negretti again, so I will tell you at once the end of him. He remained
a post for ever and ever, and later on, when King Alban had begun to
do things for his people’s good again, he thought it a pity to waste
even a post, for he was ever a careful King. So he had it made into a
pump, and the water from it was bitter and nasty, like the medicine the
Magician used to give the people; and it was very good for children,
and gave them a nice bright colour in their cheeks. Take care you do
not grow pale, or you may have to drink the water out of that pump. It
is now at Harrogate, or Epsom, or Bath, or somewhere, and you might
quite easily be taken there and made to drink that unpleasant water.
The first persons who had to drink it were the Magician’s retinue. The
King thought it would be good for them, and they were very grateful;
but the next night they stole the State barge, and went home by sea to
their own country.
Among his other improvements, the King started municipal omnibuses,
which were white and gold. But the pump being near the place where
the omnibuses changed horses the conductors used to take the bitter
water to wash the omnibuses with, and gradually they became scarlet
and blue and green and violet, just as you see them to-day. So now you
know the reason of the colour of omnibuses. And this is the end of the
Magician’s part of the story.
* * * * *