HENRY VIII. AND HIS HAREM IN
HADES.
CHAPTER IV.
Henry VIII. and His
Harem in Hades.
“QUAKER worship may be as appropriate as any other kind on Sunday,” observed William Penn, “but this silence is getting on my nerves. Why don’t you say something funny, you humorists? What’s the use of having famous funny men in this society if they cannot enliven Hades on a dull Sabbath?”
“I’m not in the humor to be humorous to-night,” said Bret Harte, who was busily engaged in making “Condensed Novels” by tearing to shreds without reading, their contents from the title page to the finis; book reviewing they designate it up on earth.
“Do you call that wit?” sneered Eugene Field.
“If you can define the difference between wit and humor, I’ll promise to laugh the next time you see things at night,” retorted Harte.
“Eternity is too short for definitions, except to a philologist,” evaded Field. “Ask Dick Whately; the archbishop of Dublin is the only man who discriminates English synonyms.”
“I know when you don’t ask me,” replied the doctor. “Consult Webster.”
“Mortal cannot live by wit alone,” commented that philologist.
“Being immortal, I can,” said Johnson.
“Mark that down, Boswell, even if Shakespeare does object to the doctor’s company on the Mount of Parnassus. A man of perpetual inspiration ought to use a fountain pen, but in the absence of a point to Johnson’s wit, Demosthenes will lend you a pebble.”
“As I live in a glass hot-house, I never throw stones,” gurgled the orator, after a vain effort to clear his throat of a pill from the laboratory of Nature.
“On earth I always kept a box of bon mots on my chimney piece,” put in Sydney Smith.
“If they had been chocolate bon bons, you would have been a sustaining favorite among the ladies,” chuckled King Henry the Eighth.
“Where knowledge of women is concerned, I bow to your marital Majesty,” acquiesced Smith. “Mere man never becomes a post-graduate on femininology, but he can manage to get up a bowing acquaintance with women after he is married to six of them. It seems to me that Utah would be a good place to study her ‘of infinite variety.’ I have often thought that much of Solomon’s wisdom came from his three hundred wives.”
“With such a match-making father,” I put in, my newspaper instinct scenting “copy,” “I have often wondered why good Queen Bess never married.”
“I’m sorry Elizabeth didn’t keep up the family reputation,” answered the king, “but I guess she thought I did marrying enough for the whole family. Besides, Bess had her hands full ruling the kingdom and her temper without attempting to rule a husband. However, I never could understand why she turned a deaf ear to Sir Walter’s pleading. He wooed her so long with his eyes that she asked him one day why he was such a mute, inglorious Raleigh. He replied that a beggar who is dumb should challenge double pity. As many another man has done since then, the silent lover lost his head over a woman.”
“That’s the King James version,” retorted Sir Walter. “It seems to me that your Majesty should confine yourself to rattling the skeletons in your own Bluebeard’s closet.”
“I see you have a sharp tongue to match the edge of the axe which brought you to your knees. You had a reason for what you did on earth, but you lost your reason along with your head when you left the upper world. By the shade of Anne Boleyn,” went on the king, becoming more and more enraged as he proceeded, “were we on earth, your insolence should cause you to swing from Tyburn’s tree.”
“You can’t string me up,” sneered Raleigh. “No man ever made a monkey of me.”
“No, but a woman did. You can’t cloak what you did for Elizabeth. Now Anne—”
“You forget yourself,” angrily interrupted Anne Boleyn, who had just come upon the scene.
“But you won’t allow me to forget you!” ruefully retorted the king.
“It’s time you came home, Henry. You’ve been keeping altogether too late hours at the club recently and I’ve come to take you home.”
“But I had promised to take tea with Catharine Parr,” rebelled Henry. “You know she is rightfully my wife.”
“Really? You forget that decrees of divorce are not binding in Hades, whether they have been executed by the hangsman or by the justice.”
“I appeal to Judge Blackstone.”
“This is altogether without precedent, but I must support the lady,” responded the jurist, gallantly.
“Then take her. Bless you, my children. I’ve no hard feelings, Anne. May no decrees of court or fate terminate your second union. I’ve sampled the wine of her womanhood, Judge, and as wine improves with age, it ought to be even better now than it was some hundreds of years ago.”
“It isn’t every man who would give his wife a recommendation,” diplomatically remarked Blackstone, alarmed at the construction Henry had placed on his gallantry, and noting that Anne Boleyn seemed pleased thereby. “I fear, however, that Satan would object to any but Lucifer matches in Hades, so until you strike brimstone, Anne here is still your wife.”
“How about the others?” groaned Henry.
“You must settle that with them,” evaded the jurist. “I think one wife would be enough for me, but as you have made your harem, you can’t lie out of it.”
“Henry!” The tone was threatening. The king meekly arose and cast an appealing glance at me.
“I would be delighted to have your company,” he said. “In the olden days I should have commanded, but Anne has taken the command from me. You know I want you to denounce those hysterical novelists who have taken liberties with my wives.”
“I’d like to see them take liberties with me,” aggressively brindled madam.
“They couldn’t do that,” soothingly replied his Majesty. “No, they painted you in your true colors: a study in black and white.”
“Where do you live?” I inquired.
“On Eighth Avenue, of course,” returned the king, as if that were a foregone conclusion. “Lucifer named and numbered the streets after a recent visit to New York. Ward McAllister wanted me to live in apartments at Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, but the ‘skidoo set’ was not exclusive enough for me and I said I would live on Eighth Avenue or go back to England. Charon wouldn’t listen to that, as he said I had given him only a single trip ticket. So I am domiciled on Eighth Avenue, which we have now reached. Here I live with my six wives.”
“Six?” I exclaimed, as we entered the royal palace. “I thought it was eight wives. Why did they call you Henry the Eighth if it were not because of the number of your consorts? The only thing we Americans know about you is that you had more wives than the law allows, and instituted a church to enable you to get another.”
“America?” muttered the king. “I don’t remember where that is. Down here, however, we refer all questions of geography to Atlas. My dear, won’t you ask him to come here if he isn’t too weary from carrying on his shoulder the chip of a world which no one will knock off.”
But Her Grace did not move.
“Your church was instituted too late to be binding on me,” she said, her nose becoming an acute retrousse. “The word obey didn’t cut any figure in our matrimonial contract.”
“If I once chopped off your head, as the historians say, you’ve snapped mine off since,” grumbled his hen-pecked Majesty.
“My head was divorced from my shoulders. I should have preferred the courts of law to courting the axe.”
“There! don’t cry or you will cause the carpet to mildew. My dear, never try to salt down a man’s affections with briny tears.”
A queenly woman entered the room. I arose to greet her. The king’s fat interfered with his gallantry; besides, the woman was his wife, which explains while it does not justify.
“My sister and my wife,” said Henry, presenting me to Catharine of Arragon. “It’s the only case on record where a woman, after promising to be a man’s sister, became his wife. Do you wonder that I began to feel quite rich in family relations? Although I murdered my sister-in-law, I left it to the punsters to murder the mothers-in-law who came after me.”
“The historians say that my fall from kingly favor was a matter of conscience,” mused Her Grace. “Didn’t the still small voice make itself heard when you severed the bonds of matrimony with your little hatchet?”
“Not at all, Catharine. I left my conscience on the executioner’s block to flirt with yours!”
“And married again!”
“Of course. Matrimony always had much attraction for me, although I realize that a man had better fall into the sea than fall in love and marry. A corpse devoured by crabs is no less harrowing than the spectacle of a man devoured by love, and it is better to multiply crabs than to multiply sinners and fools. Matrimony is a foretaste of purgatory to which no man should be called upon to submit before death.”
“No wonder you got dyspepsia and gout from indulging your taste.”
“There you are again, Anne, throwing ancient history in my teeth. Did you ever hear how I got rid of the gout?”
I shook my head.
“Ah, thank goodness, one incident of my life has escaped the novelists. Lucifer is compiling a mammoth work ‘Every Man His Own Historian’ to which we are all contributing. It promises to to be one of the ‘six best sellers.’ Permit me to read a chapter from my autobiography:
“I must have fallen asleep upon my throne. I dreamed that a great iron safe had fallen upon my feet and awoke to find a hideous-looking creature seated complacently upon my bandaged foot. I groaned and tried to shake him off, but he still clung there and the weight of his body seemed to be pushing red-hot needles into the swollen flesh.
“He took off his cap with a courtly bow.
“‘Allow me to introduce myself as Mr. Gout, M. D.,’ he said.
“‘What! you are Mr. Gout, who is responsible for my sufferings and you actually have the impudence to come here! Why, oh my foot!’
“‘Do you know why I am so attentive to you?’
“‘From pure cussedness, confound you! Ow-oh, I wish you would keep your attentions to yourself.’
“‘That’s the way of the world. A man is indiscreet, and when he has to pay the penalty, lays the blame on some one else. My duty is to remind you that you cannot abuse this body with impunity.’
“The hideous creature began to jump up and down on my foot. Maddened by the pain, I picked up a heavy dictionary lying near and hurled seventy thousand words bound in calf at him. The aim was too low and Webster fell over my foot. Then I fainted. The Gout had gone!”
“Now that you have disposed of Dr. Gout, let us go back to our original subject—women,” I said, smiling. “A man who has had six wives ought to have some knowledge of the feminine character.”
Just then John Heyward entered. The king turned to him.
“Just in time, fool,” he said. “Answer our American friend: What is a woman?”
“‘A rag and a bone and a hank of hair.’ That sounds like a before-treatment advertisement, but is really original with Kipling. As for myself, although a fool, I don’t attempt to designate a woman by a descriptive tag, as if she were a special brand of chocolates. To man, woman is a sphinx endowed with a voice. He never gets more than a telephonic acquaintance with her, and the woman always hangs up the receiver and monopolizes the transmitter.”
“Listen to the words of a wise fool who wears a dunce cap for a crown,” approved Henry. “Right you are, Heyward, and one woman is very much like another.”
“I beg to differ,” said the poet. “Women are different, not only in their baptismal labels, but in that some women have a husband and others have a cat. Women have often been compared to cats, but did you ever contrast cats and men? Thomas never throws his mother in the face of his wife. He keeps his own whiskers trimmed and stays home nights. He does not come back to the partner of his bosom at three A. M. with a diagonal gait and an asinine gayety, chewing the butt of a cigar and talking in a tongue that is as unsteady as his legs. Nor does Tommy slam the door in fourteen languages when Kitty asks how that blonde hair came on his coat. But we’re all human. If you’re hunting for a perfect woman, stop—she’s dead; if for a perfect man, you’re a fool. Elijahs are no longer translated without being prepared for the undertaker. Yet methinks that if one could forget other folks’ mistakes as easily as one’s own, there would be less scandal.”
He turned to Catharine Parr.
“One thing has always puzzled me. Why is it that women prefer to be old men’s darlings, that you enjoy being clouds in the sunset’s glow rather than in the noontide glory?”
“The setting sun always gives a golden lining to the clouds it embraces, but to drop the figurative—we are soaring rather high—and come down to earth, women marry old men so that they may soon become widows.”
Henry nervously tried to adjust an imaginary crown that weighed heavily on his head.
“Seymour plucked the weeds from the garden of your widowed life before the first blade of grass had pushed up from a newly-made grave. O Inconstancy! O Woman! Of two things, one. Orpheus went to Hell to find his wife. He failed to win her from her refuge in the shades because he looked back to discern her features. Had Euridice retraced the path from Hell without bringing with her surcease from domestic woe, Orpheus would have wished her back down that familiar track. I wish he would pay us another visit. I’d loan him five of mine.”
“Which wife would you retain?” asked Catharine Howard.
“Catharine,” answered Henry, diplomatically.
All three who bore that name beamed with gratification.
“Catharine is always at Parr,” continued the king. His fondness for punning nearly proved his undoing.
“I’m not below Parr,” angrily exclaimed Catharine of Arragon. “I come before her.”
“No, you came,” corrected the king. “It’s merely a question of tense. Many a woman promises to be a sister to the devil who has never received a proposal.”
“That’s a good one on you!” laughed the fool. “Her Grace of Arragon promised to be a sister to you! What do you say to that?”
“My answer is written in history. ‘The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away,’ for which ‘blessed be the name of the Lord.’ I replaced my wives, so that the supply would always equal the demand. I believed that as long as the Lord took, it was my duty to take.”
The king paused long enough to drink a cup of pink tea and to eat some breaded calves’ brains for inspiration.
“When trouble comes,” continued Henry, “some people fly to matrimony, thinking drink too vulgar.”
“Your troubles have been many, judging by your marital intemperance.”
“They were, but my troubles always came singly,” chuckled the king. “As fast as I executed one, another came, but I made sure I was off with the old head before I coveted the new.”
“The only bright thing an American can remember to have heard Punch say is ‘don’t’ when matrimony is on the horizon, but then Punch is English and England has no Ali Ben Theodore—peace to his Strenuosity—to turn the throne into a pulpit for dissertations on vital statistics in the hope that he may make census taking an unnecessary burden of government. Modern philologists were seriously considering the advisability of eliminating the word ‘papa’ from the dictionary, when the leading exponent of the life effective raised the question as to why mamma’s lap wasn’t filled. When the president becomes advance agent for the stork hope is born, but if the stork continues to be derelict in its duties, we might give the eagle a trial in an endeavor to have this statistical indictment set aside.”
“What does Mr. Roosevelt know about the rights of unattached bachelors?” asked Catharine the Third. “He isn’t a bachelor and never was one; he was born domestic and to the domestic man nothing ever happens—except the buying of more cradles.”
“A woman’s tongue is as full of sharp points as a porcupine,” observed Henry, who was inordinately fond of epigrammes. “But never mind, Kittens, I am the last man in the world who would deprive you of woman’s inalienable rights—love, license, and the pursuit of man.”
“Their Majesties are looking well and youthful,” I said, with a gesture that included all the wives of the much-married king.
“One never grows any older in Hades,” answered Henry. “That explains its attraction for women, and why the devil has so many votaries among the fair sex!”
“An exclamation point often hides a pointless period. When a man talks epigrammatically about woman, it is a sign that he doesn’t understand her.”
And being a woman, Catharine Parr had the last word.