King John of Jingalo: The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties

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.

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—