KING JOHN OF JINGALO

CHAPTER I

A DOMESTIC INTERIOR

I

The King of Jingalo had just finished breakfast in the seclusion of the royal private apartments. Turning away from the pleasantly deranged board he took up one of the morning newspapers which lay neatly folded upon a small gilt-legged table beside him. Then he looked at his watch.

This action was characteristic of his Majesty: doing one thing always reminded him that presently he would have to be doing another. Conscientious to a fault, he led a harassed and over-occupied life, which was not the less wearisome in its routine because no clear results ever presented themselves within his own range of vision. By an unkind stroke of fortune he had been called to the rule of a kingdom that had grown restive under the weight of too much tradition; and constitutionally he was unable to let it alone. So must he now remind himself in the hour of his privacy how all too fleeting were its moments, and how soon he would have to project himself elsewhere.

Glancing across the table towards his consort he saw that she was still engrossed in the opening of her letters—large stiff envelopes, conspicuously crested, containing squarish sheets of unfolded note-paper; for it was a rule of the Court that no creased correspondence should ever solicit the attention of the royal eye, and that all letters should be written upon one side only. The Queen was very fond of receiving these spacious missives; though they contained little of importance they came to her from half the crowned heads of Europe, as well as from the most select circle of Jingalese aristocracy. They gave occupation to two secretaries, and were a daily reminder to her Majesty that, in her own country at any rate, she was the acknowledged leader of society.

Having looked at his watch the King said: "My dear, what are you going to do to-day?"

"Really," replied the Queen, "I don't quite know; I have not yet looked at my diary."

Her Majesty seldom did know anything of the day's program until she had consulted her secretaries, who, with dovetailing ingenuity, arranged her hours and booked to each day—often many months in advance—the engagements which lay ahead. Therein she showed a calmer and more philosophic temperament than her consort. The King always knew; every day of his life with anxious forecast he consulted his diary while shaving, and breakfasted with its troubling details fresh upon his recollection.

Having answered his inquiry the Queen relapsed into her correspondence, while the King resumed his newspaper; and the moment may be regarded as propitious for presenting the reader with a portrait of these two august personages, since so good an opportunity may not occur again. The kind of portrait we offer is, of course, of an up-to-date and biographical character, and does not limit itself to those circumstances of time and space in which the commencement of this history has landed us.

So, first, we take the King,—not as we have just found him, seated at a table with chair turned sideways and features sharply illuminated by the reflected lights of the journal he holds in his hands—for thus we do not see him to advantage, and it is to advantage that we would exhibit in its externals a character of which, before we have done with it, we intend to grow fond. Time and space must provide us with a broader view of him than that.

This King had been upon the throne for twenty-five years; and during that period, like a rich wine in the wood, monarchy had mellowed within him, permeating his system with its mild and slightly dry flavor; it had become as it were a habit, and he carried it quite naturally, almost unconsciously, though with just a suspicion of weight, much as a scholar carries his learning or a workman his bag of tools.

A pleasantly florid face, quaintly expressive of an importance about which its owner was undecided, imposed above a fullish waistcoat a chin which was now tending toward the slopes of middle age. The eyes were mild and vaguely speculative, the lips full and loosely formed, and when they smiled they began tentatively in a tremulous lift showing only the two upper front teeth—the smile of a woman rather than of a man. This smile—when it made, as it so often had to make, its appearance in public—was curiously suggestive of interrogation. "Am I now meant to smile?" it seemed to say. "Very good, then I will." This tentatively advanced smile of a countenance so highly exalted for others to gaze on, was peculiarly winning to those who were its recipients; it suggested a gentle character, indicating through its shyness both the giving and the receiving of a favor; and among those in personal attendance on him the King was—perhaps on account of that smile—more liked than he knew. Servants whom the vastness of his establishments did not convert into total strangers found him a considerate master, full of a personal interest in their snug lives, and with a carefully practised memory for the numbers and names of their children; and the only complaint that even his valets had against him was that he remained his own barber and evinced a certain reluctance in casting his suits until they had begun to show a suspicion of wear. In outward relations he was a kind, touchy, companionable soul; inwardly he was one who suffered acutely from lack of companionship and conversation, not because he had not plenty of people to talk to, but because so many things came into his head that he must not say, while the correct substitutes for them only occurred to him later. And thus it came about that a good deal of his intercourse with humanity was limited to a pleasant expression of face, wearing generally, especially when it smiled, a wistful note of interrogation.

To present this face to the public in the regulation doses which were considered inducive to loyalty, he had sat thirty-nine times for his portrait to popular rather than famous painters, and to commercially successful photographers more times than any one could count. And painters and photographers alike had agreed that he was a steady and a patient sitter. They all liked him. He himself preferred the photographers; they came more often but they took less time and did not require the give-and-take of artificially made conversation. They were also more amenable to criticism, and kept behind the scenes for "touching-up" purposes wonderful anonymous artists who gave no trouble whatever, requiring no sittings and yet producing results that for tact and skill combined with accuracy could not be beaten. Occasionally, after having sat for his portrait to one of the painters, the King was advised to bestow on him a knighthood or an order. In his heart of hearts he would have much preferred knighting a photographer; but for some reason which was beyond him to discover this was not considered the correct thing, and the knighthoods went accordingly to the people who gave him the most trouble and the least satisfactory results.

It had never been the King's lot to be handsome; but now the approaches of age were giving to his countenance a dignity which in youth it had lacked. This was part and parcel of a certain mental obtuseness or obstinacy: when his Majesty did not understand, majesty became sedentary in his face. Often when it was the duty, or the device, of his ministerial advisers to confuse his mind with explanatory details about things which lay far beyond it, they would presently become aware that he did not in the least understand what they were saying, or that such understanding as he possessed at the beginning had become darkened by judicious counsel. This stage of the reasoning process was marked by a gentle access of majesty to the royal countenance; and when it appeared ministers were informed that, for the time being, their object was attained. When, however, the King did understand, or thought that he did, he was less majestic and more troublesome, and had to be circumvented in other ways; and a good deal of this history will be taken up with the circumventions practised by an astute Cabinet upon a monarch who was brought by accident to imagine that he really did understand the position of ignominy combined with responsibility in which the Constitution had placed him.

II

John of Jingalo had been in harness all his life: he had never known freedom, never been left to find his own feet, never been taught to think for himself except upon conventional lines; and these had kept him from ever putting into practice the rudimental self-promptings which sometimes troubled him. He had been elaborately instructed, but not educated; his own individual character, that is to say, had not been allowed to open out; but a sort of traditional character had been slowly squeezed into him in order to fit him for that conventional acceptance of a variety of ancient institutions (some moldering, some still vigorous) which, by a certain official and ruling class of monetarily interested persons, was considered to be the correct constitutional attitude. Monarchy, that is to say, had been interpreted to him by those who sucked the greatest amount of social prestige and material benefit from its present conditions as a "going concern"; and in that imposed interpretation deportment came first, initiative last, and originality nowhere at all.

In many respects, indeed, his training had been like that of a young girl whose parents have determined, without leaving her any choice in the matter, that matrimony is to be her single aim and the sphere of the home her outward circumference. Like a young girl whose future is thus controlled he had acquired a pleasant smattering of several social accomplishments; he had learned to speak three languages with fluency, to draw, to dance, to ride, to behave under all likely circumstances with perfect correctness, and to walk down the center of a large room with apparent ease. He had been trained, for review purposes and for the final privilege of carrying a cocked hat as well as a crown upon his coffin, in a profession which he would never be allowed to practise; and, having been "brought out" with much show and parade at an early age, had been introduced to a vast number of very important people, and dragged through a long series of social functions, which, however crowded, gave always a free floor for his feet to walk on and never presented a single back to his view. But as a result of all these crowds, with their bewildering blend of glittering toilet, deferential movement, and flattering speech, he knew no more of the inner realities of life than the young girl knows of it from a series of dances, flirtations, and afternoon teas. This polite and decorous, yet dazzling mask had been drawn between him and the actualities of existence, presenting itself to view again and again, and concealing its essential sameness in the pomp and circumstance with which it was attended. At these functions thousands of brilliant and distinguished people had bowed their well-stored brains within a few inches of his face, had exchanged with their monarch a few words of studied politeness and compliment, now and then had even laid themselves out to amuse him, but never once had they imparted to his mind an arresting or a commanding thought, never once endeavored to change any single judgment that had ever been formed for him. Not once in all the years since he came to man's estate—except occasionally with his wife and on one isolated occasion with his father—had he ever found himself involved so deeply in argument, or in any difference of opinion, as to be forced to feel himself beaten. That single discussion with his father had been closed peremptorily—parental and regal authority combining had cut it short; and as for his wife—well, she was dear, amiable, and, within her limits, sensible; but intellectually she was not his superior. Thus there had come to him a good deal of social discipline, experience of a kind, but of education in the higher intellectual sense scarcely any. He had merely been taught carefully and elaborately to take up a certain position, and in a vast number of minutely differing circumstances (mainly of social formality) to fill it or seem to fill it "as one to the manner born."

In addition he had been trained, on strictly impartial and noncommittal lines, to take an interest in politics; to have within certain narrow and prescribed limits an open mind—one, that is to say, with its orifice comfortably adapted to the stuffing process practised on kings by the great ones of the official world; and when his mind would not open in certain required directions, well, after all, it did not much matter, since in the end it made no practical difference.

Under these circumstances he would have been a mere social and official automaton had not certain defects of his character saved him. Though timid he was impulsive; he was also a little irritable, rather suspicious, and indomitably fussy in response to the call of duty. Temper, fuss, and curiosity saved him from boredom; he was conscientiously industrious, and though there was much that he did not understand he managed to be interested in nearly everything.

In the fiftieth year of his age, this monarch, amiable, affable, and of a thoroughly deserving domestic character, was destined to be thrust into a seething whirlpool of political intrigue in which, for the first time, his conscience was to be seriously troubled over the part he was asked to play. And while that wakening of his conscience was to cause him a vast amount of trouble, it was to have as enlarging and educative an effect upon his character as her first love affair has upon a young girl. From this moment, in fact, you are to see a shell-bound tortoise blossom into a species of fretful porcupine, his shell splintering itself into points and erecting them with blundering effectiveness against his enemies. And you shall see by what unconscious and subterranean ways history gets made and written.

III

And now let us turn to the Queen. In her case less analysis is needed: one had only to look at her, at the genial and comfortable expression of her face, at the ample, but not too ample, lines of her person, to see that in her present high situation she both gave and found satisfaction. She did, with ease and even with appetite, that which the King, with so much anxious expenditure of nervous energy, was always trying to do—her duty. She had a position and she filled it. She was not clever, but her imperturbable common-sense made up for what she lacked intellectually. No one, except the newspapers, would call her beautiful; but she was comely and enjoyed good health, and she had what one may describe as a good surface—nothing that she wore was thrown away on her, and any chair that she occupied, however large, she never failed to adorn. There you have her picture: you may imagine her as plump, as blonde, as good-tempered, and as well-preserved for her age as suits your individual taste—no qualifying word of the chronicler of this history shall obstruct the view; and you may be as fond of her as you like.

The Queen was the head of Jingalese society, and of its charities as well. Her influence was enormous: at a mere word from her organizations sprang into being. Without any Acts of Parliament to control or guide them—merely at the delicately expressed wish of her Majesty—thousands of charming, wealthy, and influential women would waste spare hour upon hour and expend small fortunes of pocket-money in keeping uncomfortable things comfortably going in their accustomed grooves. It was calculated that the Queen's patronage had the immediate effect of trebling the subscription list of any charity, while the mere withdrawal of her name spelt bankruptcy. Her Majesty was patron to forty-nine charities and subscribed to all of them. For the five largest she appeared annually on a crimson-covered platform, insuring thereby a large supply of silk purses containing contributions, and a full report in the press of all the speeches. It was her rule to open two bazaars regularly each summer, to lay the foundation-stones of three churches, orphanages, or hospitals (whichever happened to require the greatest amount of money for their completion), to attend the prize-giving at the most ancient of the national charity schools, and every winter, when distress and unemployment were at their worst, to go down to the Humanitarian Army's soup-kitchen, and there taste, from a tin mug with a common pewter spoon, the soup which was made for the poor and destitute. This last performance, which took so much less time and trouble than all the rest, proved each year the most popular incident of her Majesty's useful and variegated public life, for every one felt that it provided in the nicest possible way an antidote to the advance of socialistic theories. The papers dealt with it in leading articles; and the lucky casuals who happened to drop in on the day when her Majesty paid the surprise visit arranged for her by her secretaries would report that they had never tasted such good soup in all their born days.

It may truthfully be said that the Queen never spent an idle day, and never came to the end of one without the consciousness of having done good. All the more, therefore, is it remarkable that, as the outcome of so much benevolence and charity, the Queen knew absolutely nothing of the real needs and conditions of the people, and that she knew still less how any alterations in the laws, manners, or customs of the country could better or worsen the conditions of unemployment, sweated labor, or public morality. Her whole idea of political economy was summed up in the proposition that anything must be good for the country which was good for trade; and it may certainly be said that for the majority of trade interests she was as good as gold. Without caring too much for dress (being herself wholly devoid of personal vanity) she ordered dresses in abundance, and constantly varied the fashion, the color, and the material, because she was given to understand that change and variety stimulated trade. Her most revolutionary act had been to readopt, one fine spring morning, the ample skirt of the crinoline period in order to counteract the distress and shortage of work caused in the textile trade by the introduction and persistence of the "hobble skirt." As a consequence of this sudden disturbance of the evolutionary law governing creation in the modiste's sense of the word, there was a sharp reaction a year later, which—after the artificial stimulus of the previous season—threw more women out of employment than ever; new fancy-trades had to be learned in apprenticeships at starvation wages—with the result that wages had to be eked out in other ways. But of all this her Majesty heard nothing. It never occurred to anybody that these ultimate consequences of her amiable incentive to industry could possibly concern her; and the Queen, finding that people no longer knew how to adapt themselves to the long, full skirts of their grandmothers, accepted without demur the next wave of fashion that swept over Europe from London via Paris.

The Queen never herself opened a paper. Extracts were read out to her each day by one of her ladies; these being selected by another lady appointed for the purpose as those most likely to interest the royal mind. It was made known in the press that her Majesty never read the divorce cases; neither did she read politics or the police news. No controversial side of the national life ever entered her brain—until somehow or another it was reached by the dim uproar of the Women Chartists' movement. She expressed her disapproval, and the page was turned.

Her instinctive tastes stood always as a guide for what she should be told; and experience limited her inquiry. In all her life her influence had never been used for the release of an unjustly convicted prisoner, the abatement of an inhuman sentence, or the abolition of any abuse established by law. Queens who had done these things in the past were medieval figures, and such interference was quite unsuitable for a royal consort under modern conditions. Had Philippa of Hainault lived in these more enlightened times she would have been forced to let the Burghers of Calais go hang and restrict herself to making provision for their widows and orphans; for to arrest any act of government had long since ceased to be within the functions of a queen.

Like her husband, this royal lady was surrounded by officialdom, or, rather, by its complementary and feminine appendices—the wives and daughters of the aristocracy, of politicians, of ecclesiastical and military dignitaries: these to her represented the sphere, activity, and capacity of her own sex. Other women—pioneers of education and of reform, rescue-workers, organizers, writers, orators, had—the majority of them—lived and died without once coming in contact with the official leader of Jingalese womanhood; for they and their like were outside the official ranks, and stood for things combative and controversial and dangerously alive, and only a few of them had been brought to Court in their venerable old age, to be looked at as curiosities when their fighting days were over and their work done.

On the governing boards of the hospitals to which the Queen gave her patronage there was not a single woman—or a married one either; but when her Majesty visited the wards she was very nice to the nurses. She was, in fact, very nice to everybody, and everybody was very nice to her.

IV

A king and a queen take so long to describe that the reader will have almost forgotten how we left them at the breakfast table. But the Queen had her letters and the King his newspapers, and there, when we return to them in the historic present, they still are.

Yes, there they sit, an institutional expression of the nation's general complacence with the state of civilization at which it has arrived, interpreting in decorous form the voice of the articulate majority—the inarticulate not being interpreted at all. There they sit, he with his newspapers, she with her letters: the King a little anxious and perturbed, the Queen not anxious or perturbed about anything.

She was still enjoying her superfluous correspondence, he studying in a vague distrustfulness the various organs of public opinion which lay around him, doubtful of them all, yet wishing to find one he could rely on. For now they were all very full of the approaching constitutional crisis, and were adumbrating in respectful, yet slightly menacing terms, what the King himself would do in the matter. Whereas what he actually would do he had not himself the ghost of a notion,—did not yet know, in fact, what legs he had to stand on, having no information upon that point beyond what the Prime Minister had chosen to tell him.

And being puzzled he wanted to talk, yet not directly of the matter which perturbed his mind; but somehow by hearing his own voice he hoped to arrive at the popular sentiment. It was a way he had; and the Queen, who was often his audience, knew the preliminary symptoms by heart. So when presently he began crackling his newspaper and drawing a series of audible half breaths as though about to begin reading, his wife recognized the sign that here was something she must listen to. She put down her letters and attended.

"I see," said his Majesty, culling his information from the opening paragraph of a leading article, "I see that the Government is losing popularity every day. That Act they passed last year for the reinstitution of turnpikes to regulate the speed of motor-traffic is proving unpopular."

"Is it a failure, then?" inquired the Queen.

"On the contrary, it is a success. But the system was expected to pay for its upkeep by the amount of fines it brought in, whereas the result has been to make the conduct of motorists so exemplary that the measure has ceased to pay. Unable to escape detection, 'joy-riding' has become practically non-existent, motor-cars are ceasing to be used for breaches of the peace, and the trade is going down in consequence by leaps and bounds. The fact is you cannot now-a-days put a stop to any grave abuse without seriously damaging some trade-interest. If 'trade' is to decide matters it would be much better not to legislate at all."

"My dear! wouldn't that be revolutionary?" inquired the Queen.

"Keeping things as they are is not revolutionary," replied his Majesty, "though it's a hard enough thing to do now-a-days."

"But," objected his wife, "they must pass something, or else how would they earn their salaries?"

"That's it!" said the King,—"payment of members; another of those unnecessary reforms thrust on us by the example of England."

"Ah, yes!" answered his wife, feeling about for an intelligent ground of agreement, "England is so rich; she can afford it."

"It isn't that at all," retorted his Majesty; "plenty of other countries have had to afford it before now. But it was only when England did it that we took up with the notion. We are always imitating England: the attraction of contraries, I suppose, because we are surrounded by land as they are by water. Why else did they start turning me into a commercial traveler, sending me all over Europe and round the world to visit colonies that no longer really belong to us? Only because they are doing the same thing over in England."

"They saw that you wanted change of air," said the Queen.

"Change of fiddlesticks!" answered the King; "I consider it a most dangerous precedent to let a sovereign be too long out of his own country. It makes people imagine they can do just as well without him!"

The Queen looked at her husband with shrewd and kindly furtiveness. She had a funny little suspicion that the ministry did at times greatly prefer his absence to his presence: and that "change of fiddlesticks" was really their underlying motive. About this monarch she herself had no illusions: he was a dear, but he fussed; and when once he began fussing he required an enormous amount of explanation and persuasion. Even she, therefore, was not at all averse to letting him go on these State outings in which she need not always accompany him. They gave him something fresh to think about, and to her a time of leisure when she need not pretend to think about anything she did not understand.

"Of course," went on the King, "it makes good copy for the newspapers. The press is powerful, and governments are obliged now-a-days to throw in a certain amount of spectacle to keep it in a good temper. We are sent off to perform somewhere, and after us come the penny-a-liner and the cinematograph."

"Oh! my dear, much more than a penny-a-liner," corrected the Queen; "I heard of one correspondent who makes £5,000 a year. And think how good for trade! Besides, do not we get the benefit of it?"

"Benefit!" exclaimed the King irritably, "where is the benefit to us of journalists who describe State functions as though they were jewelers' touts and dressmakers rolled into one? The vulgarity of people's present notion of what makes monarchy impressive is appalling. Listen to this, my dear! This is you and me at the Opening of Parliament yesterday." He unfolded his paper and read—

"'The regal purple flowed proudly from the King's shoulders; above their three ribbons of red, green, and gold, the Orders of his ancestors burned confidingly on the royal breast. The Queen's diamonds were supreme; upon the silken fabric of her corsage they flashed incredibly; one watched them, fire-color infinitely varied, infinitely intensified, like nothing else seen on earth. As she advanced, deeply bowing to right and left, parabolas of light exhaled from her coronet like falling stars. When King and Queen were seated, their State robes flowing in purple waves and ripples of ermine to the very steps of the dais, the picture was complete. Single gems of the first water glistened like dewdrops in the Queen's ears, while upon her bosom as she breathed the three great Turgeneff diamonds caught and defiantly threw back the light. They became the center of all eyes.'

"I call that disgusting!" said the King. "Why diamonds should burn confidingly on my breast, and flash incredibly on yours, I'm sure I don't know. But there we are: a couple of clothes'-pegs for journalists to hang words on."

The Queen had rather enjoyed the description, it enabled her to see herself as she appeared to others.

"I don't see the harm," she said; "we have to wear these things, so they may as well be described."

"I wish some day you wouldn't wear them!" said the King. "Then, instead of talking of your trinkets and your clothes, they would begin to pay attention to what royalty really stands for."

The Queen was gathering up her letters from the table: she smiled indulgently upon her spouse.

"Jack," said she, "you are jealous!"

"I wish, Alicia," said the King testily, "that you would not call me 'Jack'; at least, not after—not where any of the servants may come in and overhear us. It would not sound seemly."

"My dear John," said the Queen, "don't be so absurd. You know perfectly well that it's just that which makes us most popular. People are always telling little anecdotes of that kind about us; and then, think of all the photographs! If people were to talk of you as 'King Jack,' it would mean you were the most popular person in the country."

"I wonder if they do?" murmured the King. "I wonder!" He felt remote from his people, for he did not know.

The Queen noticed his depression; something was troubling him, and being a lady of infinite tact, she abruptly turned the conversation. "What are you doing to-day, dear?" she inquired brightly.

"I have a Council at eleven," moaned the King, "and I really must get through a few of these papers first. It gives me a great advantage when Brasshay begins talking—a great advantage if I know what the papers have been saying about him. To-day it's the Finance Act. By the way, Charlotte was asking me yesterday to raise her allowance. Is there any reason for it?"

"A little more for dress would now be advisable," said the Queen. "She has lately begun to open Church bazaars: I thought they would do for her to begin upon. And the other day she laid the foundation-stone of a dogs' orphanage—very nicely, I'm told."

"Of course," said the King, "she's old enough, and it is quite time I asked for a definite grant from Parliament. But if one did that now they would probably not raise it afterwards. Very much better to wait, I think, till we have made a really brilliant match for her; then, for the sake of its financial prestige, the nation will do the thing handsomely."

"She has got an idea she doesn't like foreigners," said the Queen reflectively.

"She will have to like some foreigner!" said the King. "As the only daughter of a reigning monarch she must marry royalty, and we haven't any one left among ourselves who is eligible. Charlotte must get to like foreigners. Max has no objection to foreigners, I hope?"

The Queen gave her husband a curious look.

"From what I hear," she murmured, "I should say none: but it is not for me to make any inquiries."

"Dear me! is that so?" said the King. "Well, well! When did you hear about it?"

"Only yesterday; but it has been going on a long time."

"I suppose," sighed his Majesty, "I suppose one couldn't expect it to be otherwise. Well, I must speak to him, then; and we shall really have to get him married to somebody. The religious difficulty, of course, narrows our choice most unfortunately; and when we happen to be on bad terms both with Germany and England, through trying to be friendly to both, why, really there is hardly anybody left."

"I hear," remarked the Queen, "that the Hereditary Prince of Schnapps-Wasser is returning from his three years' exploration of central South America this autumn. Wouldn't he be worth thinking about?"

"You mean for Charlotte? But I expect he will be wanted at the Prussian Court."

The Queen shook her head. "Oh, no! He is out of favor there. They have never forgiven him his description of the Kaiser's oratorio as 'Moses Among the Crocodiles.' That is why I thought he might not be averse to looking in our direction. He used to be a nice boy; he is handsome according to his portraits, and Charlotte is not without her taste for adventure."

"That doesn't solve the problem about Max," said his Majesty discontentedly. "And, by the way, where is Charlotte?"

"She has gone to stay with Lady—oh, I have forgotten her name—the one who had a fancy for history and took a diploma in it. They are opening that new college for women, with a Greek play all about the Trojans, and Charlotte particularly wanted to go."

"H'm?" queried the King; "rather an advanced set for Charlotte to consort with—just now, I mean,—don't you think? There might be some of those Women Chartists among them."

"Oh, no!" replied her Majesty; "they are all quite respectable,—ladies every one of them. I took care to make inquiries about that."

And then, quite contentedly, she made a final gathering of her correspondence, and sailed off for a preliminary interview with her two indispensable secretaries; while the King, selecting three out of the pile of newspapers, carried them away with him to his study. There was a sentence in one of them which he particularly wanted to read again. And with this vacating of the breakfast-chamber we may as well close the chapter.

CHAPTER II

ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN

I

The sentence which had attracted the King's attention, coming as it did from the newspaper on whose opinions he most frequently relied, ran thus—

"In this developing crisis the Nation looks with complete and loyal assurance to him who alone stands high and independent above all parties, confident that when the time for a final decision has arrived he will so act, within the recognized limits of the Royal Prerogative, as to add a fresh luster and a renewed significance to that supreme symbol and safeguard of the popular will which, under Divine Providence, still crowns our constitutional edifice."

The King read it three times over. He read it both standing and sitting: and read in whatever attitude it certainly sounded well. As a peroration its rhythm and flow were admirable, as a means of keeping up the courage and confidence of readers who placed their reliance mainly upon literary style nothing could be better; but what, by all that was constitutional, did it mean?—or rather, how did it mean that he, the high and independent one, was to do it? Point by point its sentiments were unexceptionable; but what it actually pointed to he did not know. "Add luster?" Why, yes, certainly. But was not that what he was already doing day by day on the continuous deposit system, even as the oyster within its shell deposits luster upon the pearls which a sort of hereditary disease has placed within its keeping? "Renewed significance?" But in what respect had the significance of the royal office become obscured? Was anything that he did insignificant? "Symbol and safeguard of the popular will?" Yes: if his Coronation oath meant anything. But how was he, symbol and safeguard and all the rest of it, to find out what the popular will really was? No man in all the Kingdom was so much cut off from living contact with the popular will as was he!

The King was in his study, the room in which most of the routine work of his daily life was accomplished—a large square chamber with three windows to one side looking out across a well-timbered park toward a distant group of towers. But for those towers, so civic in their character, it might well have been taken for a country view; scarcely a roof was visible.

Upon a large desk in the center of the chamber lay a pile of official letters and documents awaiting his perusal; and he knew that in the adjoining room one of his private secretaries was even now attending his call. But from none of his secretaries could he learn anything about the popular will.

He walked to a window and stood looking out into the soft sunlit air, slightly misty in quality, which lay over the distances of his capital. Away behind those trees, beneath those towers, sending toward him a ceaseless reverberation of bells, wheels, street cries, and all the countless noises of city life, went a vast and teeming population of men and women, already far advanced on the round of their daily toil. He was in their midst, but not one of them could he see; and not one of them did he really know as man to man. Everything that he learned about their lives came to him at second or at third hand; nor did actual contact bring him any closer, for wherever he moved among them they knew who he was and behaved accordingly. For twenty-five years he had not walked in a single one of those streets the nearest of which lay within a stone's throw of his palace. As a youth, before his father came to the throne, he had sometimes gone about, with or without companions, just like an ordinary person, taking his chance of being recognized: it had not mattered then. But now it could not be done: people did not expect it of him; his ministers would have regarded it as a dangerous and expensive habit, requiring at least a trebling of the detective service, and even then there would always have been apprehension and uncertainty. He was King; and though, whatever might happen to him, his place would be automatically filled, and government go on just as before, yet, as a national symbol, his life was too valuable to be risked; and so on ascending the throne he had been forced, as his father before him, to resign his personal liberty and cease to go out in the happy, unpremeditated fashion of earlier days.

He had long since got over the curious home-sickness which this separation had at first caused him, and as an opening to personal enjoyment the impulse for freedom had long since died within him; but his heart still vaguely hungered for the people who called him their King; and looking out into the pale sunshine that was now thinly buttering the surface of his prosperous capital, and listening to the perpetual tick and hum of its busy life, he knew that for him it was and must remain, except in an official sense, an unknown territory. And yet out there, in that territory which he was unable to explore, the thing that is called "the popular will" lived and moved and had its being! Dimly he dreamed of what it might be—a thing of substance and form; but there was none to interpret to him his dream—except upon official lines.

Before his eyes, a salient object in the heavens surpassing the stony eminences which surrounded it, rose the tall spire of the twin Houses of Parliament. Upon its top swung a gilded weathercock; while about a portion of its base stood a maze of scaffolding, the façade of the building having during the last few months been under repair. There seemed, however, for the moment, to be no workmen upon it. Presently, as he gazed vacantly and without intent, something that moved upon the upper masonry engaged his attention. Slowly along its profile, out of all those hidden millions below, one of his subjects, a single and minute representative of the popular will, emerged cautiously into view.

The King was gifted with good sight; and though the figure appeared but as a tiny speck, it was unmistakably that of a man bearing a burden upon his back and ascending steadily toward the highest point of all. In a word it was a steeplejack. As the name passed through the King's mind it evoked recollection; and he said to himself again, "I wonder whether they call me Jack,—I wonder."

With a curious increase of interest and fellow-feeling he watched the distant figure mounting to its airy perch. And as he did so a yet further similitude and parable flashed through his mind. For the man's presence at that dizzy height he knew that the Board of Public Works was responsible: as a single item in the general expenditure the weathercock of the Palace of Legislature had had voted to it a new coat of gilt, and this steeplejack was now engaged in putting it on. He was there in the words of a certain morning journal, "to add fresh luster to that supreme symbol of the popular will which crowned the constitutional edifice."

As the words with their caressing rhythm flowed across the King's brain he discerned the full significance of the scene which was being enacted before him. This weathercock—the highest point of the constitutional edifice—requiring to be touched up afresh for the public eyes—was truly symbolical of the crown in its relation to the popular will; twisting this way and that responsive to and interpretative of outside forces, it had no will of its own at all, and yet to do its work it must blaze resplendently and be lifted high, and to be put in working trim and kept with luster untarnished it required at certain intervals the attentions of a steeplejack—one accustomed to being in high places, accustomed to isolation and loneliness, accustomed to bearing a burden upon his back before the eyes of all: one whose functions were rather like his own.

He saw that the steeplejack had now reached the point where his work was waiting for him, work that required nerve and courage. He wondered whether it were highly paid; he wondered also by what means the man slung himself into position, and by what process the new gold had to be applied so that it would stick. Perhaps he only polished up what was already there, coated and covered from view by the grime of modern industry. If so, how did he scrape off the dirt without also scraping off the gold? Perhaps, on the other hand, all the old gold had to come off before new gold could be put on. He wondered whether the man ever forgot his perilous position, whether habit did not make him sometimes careless, whether he ever felt giddy, and how far the exploit was really attended by danger to one possessed of skill and a cool head; and as he thought, putting himself in the man's place, his hands grew sympathetically moist.

Well, he was wasting time, he must really get to his own work now; that secretary would be wondering what had become of him. He glanced away over the distant roofs that here and there emerged above the trees, and then for a last look back again. And as he did so all at once he started and uttered an acute exclamation of distress. A dark speck had suddenly detached itself from the ball upon which the vane stood, and could now be seen glissading with horrible swiftness down the slope of the spire. It fell into the scaffolding, zigzagged from point to point, and disappeared. There could be no mistake about it, it was the man himself who had fallen: that single and minute expression of the popular will had passed for ever from view; and the smooth and equable hum of the unseen millions below went steadily on.

II

Fleeing from the sight still registered upon his brain the King rang for his secretary. A figure of correctitude entered.

"There has been an accident," said his Majesty. "Over there!" He pointed. "A steeplejack has fallen."

The secretary slid respectfully to the window and looked out. To that polite official gaze of inquiry the scene of the tragedy returned a blank and uncommunicative stare.

"Poor wretch!" murmured the King. "I actually saw him go! Ring up, and inquire at the Police Center; though, of course, the poor fellow must be dead!"

The secretary sped away on his errand, and the King, moving back to the window, gazed fixedly at the spire, as though it could still in some way inform him of the tragedy consummated below. Then he returned to his desk and looked distractedly at his papers, but it was no use—back he went to the window again.

Presently the secretary returned and stood drooping for permission to speak. Permission came. "The man is dead, your Majesty. He was killed instantly."

The King gave a sigh of relief. "Of course," he murmured, "from such a height as that!" He stood for a while still cogitating on the sad event: then he said, with that considerate thoughtfulness which habit had made a second nature, "Be good enough to find out whether the poor fellow was married. If so let a donation be sent to his widow,—whatever the case seems to warrant—more if there should happen to be children."

Over his tablets the secretary bowed the beauty of his person like a recording angel. Then he paused that the heavenly measure might be taken with accuracy.

"Shall it be five pounds, sir?" he inquired.

"Better make it ten," said the King; "I believe that pays for a funeral. In sending it, you might explain that I had the misfortune to be an eye-witness."

The secretary cooed like a brooding dove. Of course everybody would understand and appreciate. He made a memorandum of the ten pounds and closed up his tablets.

Meanwhile the King went on thinking aloud. "I wonder," he said, "whether they take proper precautions in a trade like that? I would like to look it up. Find me the 'ST' volume of the Encyclopedia Appendica."

And when the volume was brought to him the King sat down and read all about steeplejacks and climbing irons, and cranks, and pulleys, and all the other various appliances requisite for the driving of that dreadful trade; read also how the men were inclined to prime themselves for the task in ever-increasing measure, and so one day having over-primed to be found at the bottom instead of at the top, knowing nothing themselves of how they got there. It was all very interesting and very apposite, and rather pathetic; and when he had done he turned over the pages backward till he came from steeplejacks to "Statesmen" and "Statecraft" and "Statutes" and the affairs of State in general (it was from the Encyclopedia Appendica—a presentation copy—that he got most of his information upon practical things); and in these articles he became so absorbed that he quite forgot how time flew, until his chief secretary came formally to announce to him that the hour for appearing in Council had arrived.

This announcement, be it observed, was made by no ordinary working secretary, but by the chief of them all, the Comptroller of his Majesty's household, a retired general who had passed from the military to the civil service with a record brilliantly made for him by other men—adjutants and attachés and all those indefatigable right-hand assistants of whom your true diplomatist forms his stepping-stones to power. General Poast and the Prime Minister shared between them the ordering and disposal of the King's public services to the Nation, while over other departments impenetrable to the Premier the hand of the Comptroller was still extended. Though personally the King rather disliked him, he had become an absolutely indispensable adjunct to the daily life—so smooth in its workings, yet so easily dislocated—of the Royal Household; also, as a go-between for ministers whose intercourse with the Crown was purely formal, he had proved himself a very efficient implement when on occasion it became necessary to circumvent or reduce to reason the King's characteristic obstinacy in small matters of detail. He might, in fact, be regarded as the keeper not so much of the King's conscience, as of his savoir faire, and of that tact for which Royalty in all countries is conspicuous. Everything that related to the remembering of names and faces, of dates, anniversaries and historical associations, all those small considerate actions of royal charity which robbed of their due privacy have now become the perquisite of the press; all these things stood ranged under minutely tabulated heads within the Comptroller-General's department. He was, literally, the King's Remembrancer; and so, on this occasion also, he had come as intermediary to remind his Majesty that the hour for the Council was at hand.

But the Council was one of those functions in which it was held necessary that the part played by the King (albeit no more than a silent presidency at a Board where others spoke) should wear an appearance of importance. And so the announcement made by the Comptroller was merely preliminary to another and more flourishing announcement by an usher of the Court. Two lackeys threw open a door—other than that through which the General had just entered, and a bowing official, beautifully dressed and waving a fairy-like wand, announced from the threshold, "Your Majesty's Council, now in attendance, humbly begs audience of your Majesty."

III

Then followed a pause. The Comptroller-General with head deferentially bent waited to catch the royal eye. The King graciously allowed his royal eye to be caught; and the Comptroller-General, interpreting the silent consent of that glance, uttered with due solemnity the traditional form of words indicative of the royal pleasure. "His Majesty hears," he lowed in the correct "palace accent": and the usher bowed and retired.

All this helped, of course, to make the act of presiding in Council seem highly important and consequential to any monarch susceptible to ceremonial flattery. Whether it had originally been so devised may be questioned, for monarchs of old had needed no such ceremonial backing to their very practical incursions into ministerial debate. What we have to notice is that the ceremony had survived, while the other thing—the practice of substantial interference—had become obsolete.

The King passed from his private apartments to broad corridors and portals where resplendent footmen stood in waiting, where everything worked with silent and automatic precision to prepare the way for his feet, signaling him on from point to point as though he were a sort of special train for which the line had been expressly cleared and all other traffic shunted. And yet when he came to the small anteroom which opened directly into the Council Chamber he felt for all the world like a timid bather about to unbutton the door of his bathing-machine and step forth into a strange and hostile element. That moment of trepidation was one he never could get over,—to face his Council of Ministers was always a plunge; for here truly he felt out of his depth, aware that politically he was no swimmer. And now for a couple of hours he would have to endure while, thoroughly at home in their own element, twenty stout aquatic athletes tumbled around him.

The door was thrown open; and with an air of calm self-possession he walked to the head of the table about which his ministers stood waiting. "Be seated, gentlemen," he said, embracing in a single bow the obeisances of all; and like slow waves they closed in on him, subsiding in large curves and soft fawning ripples of hand-rubbing around the empurpled board at which nominally he was to preside.

When all were seated in order, he signed for the Prime Minister to open the proceedings, and thereafter had scarcely to speak; for at a King's Council only general reports were presented, no discussions took place, no fresh proposals were mooted; and so he sat and heard how this department or that was extending its beneficent operations, how statistics were completing to their last decimal places the prognostications of experts, and how along with these things imports and exports were balancing, trade declining, education advancing, and strikes growing every day more formidable and more popular.

It was only this last point that really interested him; for here he seemed to get a dim rumor of something that was part at least of that popular will which it was his duty to symbolize and to safeguard. But these official advisers of his were all for putting strikes down, and yet while putting them down they seemed to wish to curry favor with the strikers themselves. For on the one hand there was trade declining, if the strikes were not put down, to support fresh taxation, on the other the Labor Party, eighty strong, declining, if the strikes were put down, to support the Government. And with the Finance Act coming on the question was whether to accept an increasing deficit in the revenue or a declining majority in the Legislature. This could be read vaguely between the lines of the report presented by the Minister of the Interior. But all this time not one word was said about the coming constitutional crisis which was in everybody's mind. That had been thoroughly discussed by ministers sitting in real Council elsewhere, a Council at which the Head of the Constitution had not been present, and about which he would hear no more than the Prime Minister chose to tell him.

And so, smoothly, equably, and uneventfully the Council reached its conclusion; ministers one after another closed up their portfolios, and sitting mute in their places respectfully waited the royal word of dismissal.

Then the King rose: and all around the board the fawning ripples of hand-rubbing ceased, and the slow curving wave of the ministerial body receded to a respectful distance; while his Majesty passed forth to the adjoining chamber, there to give, as was customary, separate audience to those ministers who had any special memoranda to submit requiring the royal endorsement.

On this occasion he found his Comptroller already awaiting him, apologetic for what might seem intrusion on territory belonging more properly to the Prime Minister. Under the correctness of his deportment it was clear that urgency impelled.

"I have come, sir," he said, "to submit to your Majesty, before the matter goes further, a certain difficulty which has arisen in connection with your Majesty's gracious donation to the widow of the unfortunate workman who——" He paused.

"You mean the steeplejack?" queried the King.

The Comptroller-General bowed assent. "Your Majesty ordered inquiry to be made."

"I did. Has it been found whether he had a family?"

"A large family, sir: a wife and seven children."

"Ah," said the King, "then you would suggest that ten pounds is not quite——? Well, make it twenty."

"That, sir, is not the difficulty. The fact is we have discovered that the man was what in the industrial world is known as a 'blackleg.' As your Majesty may be aware there is at this moment a strike in the building trade: and this man was working against the orders of his Union. Under those circumstances a donation from your Majesty becomes pointed."

"Pointed at what?"

"At the Trades Unions, sir."

"But what," cried the King, astonished, "have a widow and children to do with the Trades Unions?"

"The man was working against orders, your Majesty."

"But at somebody's orders, I suppose? Anyway, it was for the Government."

"Oh no, sir!" Correctitude protested against so dangerous an implication.

"But surely! Wasn't he there at the orders of the Board of Works?"

"At the orders of the contractor, your Majesty."

"Who was under contract with the Board to complete by a certain date."

"That, sir, cannot be denied."

"Well, really then," said the King, "from what department does this objection to the donation emanate?"

"From no department, your Majesty. The objection is on general grounds of policy."

The King's pride and modesty were becoming a little hurt; he was annoyed that so small a matter of private charity should be thus canvassed and brought within the range of politics. Subconsciously he had also another and a more symbolic reason which helped him to show fight.

"Really, my dear General," he said, "I think we are discussing this matter very unnecessarily. The widow is still a widow, and the children, who you tell me number seven, are orphans; and surely at his death a man ceases to be either a blackleg or a trades unionist. He is not working against orders now, at any rate. Make it twenty! make it twenty." (His utterance grew hurried; a way he had when crossed and anxious not to have to give way.) "I can't hear anything more about it now: I have Brasshay waiting to see me." And as at that moment the Prime Minister was announced, the Comptroller-General, for the present at any rate, "made it twenty" and retired. But he did so with a wry and a determined face.

As for the King he was thoroughly put out; the steeplejack was by association beginning to assume in his mind a very particular importance; he had become a symbol not merely of the sovereign himself, but of that act of statesmanship which he had been adjured to undertake by his favorite newspaper. This man, his prototype, had failed to add in completeness that luster which he had set out to add; had even died in the attempt; and here, in seeking with all his sympathies aroused to provide for the widow and children, the King was finding himself thwarted, and thwarted, too, on purely political grounds. Well, it should be a test: he would not be thwarted. The Cabinet couldn't resign on this; so he would do as he liked! And under the table, on a soft deep carpet of velvet-pile he stuck his heels into the ground and felt very determined.

And then he found that he must attend to something else, for the Prime Minister was speaking, and now at last was speaking on a very important matter.

IV

"Your Majesty," said the Prime Minister, "the Bishops are blocking all our bills; the business of the country is at a standstill."

"Blocking?" queried the King; for he did know a little of contemporary history at all events.

"Amending," corrected the Minister. "Amending on lines which we cannot possibly accept."

"Some of them seemed to me quite excellent amendments," said the King. "But, of course, I don't know."

"They express, sir, no doubt, a point of view—quite an estimable point of view, if it were not a question of politics: they reflect, that is to say, the mind of the ecclesiastical side of the Spiritual and Judicial Chamber. Your Majesty's House of Laity sees things differently: I am bound, therefore, to submit to your Majesty certain important proposals for the relief of the impasse at which we have now arrived. As no doubt, sir, you are aware, we have the Judges, the Juridical half of the Chamber, for the most part with us, since for the last few years their appointment has been entirely in our hands. But the Bishops, with the exception of one or two, are obdurate and immovable. We select the most liberal Churchmen we can find: but it is no use; each new Bishop, adopted by Dean and Chapter, becomes when once seated in the Upper Chamber, merely a reflection of those who have gone before him: the Juridical minority is swamped, the Spiritual element remains supreme, and we have no chance of obtaining a majority."

"It is only because you will try to do things too fast!" said the King; but the Prime Minister continued—

"And now, sir, our one opportunity has come. The Bill for dividing the dioceses and doubling the number of the Bishoprics has just passed into law. I flatter myself that when the Prelates assented to that Bill they did not realize how its powers might be directed. It is the proposal of your Majesty's advisers to nominate to those Bishoprics only Free Churchmen, men whose political views coincide with our own."

"Free Churchmen!" cried the King, startled; "but they are outside the Establishment altogether."

"Merely on a point of Church discipline," answered the Prime Minister. "They are ministers properly ordained. When they seceded over the 'Church Government Act' they carried their full Canonical Orders with them: only as they had no Bishops they have become a diminishing body. Their beliefs, or their disbeliefs (for on many points the churches are merely maintaining an observance of definitions which their intellects no longer really accept)—their professed beliefs, then, shall I say?—in all matters of doctrine are not more heterogeneous than those which distract the councils and the congregations of the Establishment. It is only on matters of administration and Church discipline that they fundamentally differ. We count upon the Free Church Bishops to give us a majority both on the secularization of charities and the opening of the theological chairs and divinity degrees of our Universities to all sects and communities alike. After that we shall be in a position to deal with State Endowment and with Education generally."

"But will the Chapters, under such circumstances, accept the Crown's nominees?" inquired the King. "And even if they do, may not the Bishops refuse to consecrate them?"

"The right in law of a Dean and Chapter to reject the Crown's nominee and to substitute one of their own has already been decided against them," said the Prime Minister. "As for the consecration, if the Bishops refuse their services we have an understanding with the exiled Archimandrite of Cappadocia to see the whole thing through for us."

"Good Heavens!" cried the King, "a black man with two wives."

"His orders," said the Prime Minister, "are perfectly valid, and are recognized not only by us but by Rome. Only last year the Bishops were making quite a stir about him; there was even a proposal that he should assist at the next consecration so as to clear away all doubts in the eyes of Romanists as to the validity of our own orders. It would, therefore, be a measure of poetic justice if now——"

"I don't think we ought to do it," interrupted the King.

"If the Bishops give way in time, sir, it will be unnecessary."

"Will you consent to my seeing the Archbishop about it?" inquired the King, much perturbed.

"Sir, I have already seen him."

"Well, what did he say?"

"He said a good many things, and said them very well. His general impression seemed to be that we should not dare to do it. That is where he is mistaken."

"You have to consult me also," remarked the King.

"Sir, that is what I am now doing." The Prime Minister bowed with the utmost deference.

"You put me in a great difficulty!"

"I am sorry that your Majesty should make difficulty," retorted the Premier dryly.

"You seem to forget," pursued the King, "that I am sworn to maintain both Church and Constitution as established by law."

"Sir, we propose nothing unconstitutional."

"Free Churchmen are not constitutional, they have no standing."

"They have a right to their opinions like all the rest of your Majesty's subjects."

"Not to be made Bishops."

"That merely legalizes their position."

The King shook his head. "I don't like it," he said; "I don't like it! And if you won't let me consult the Archbishop how am I to know what I ought to do?"

"If as advisers to the Crown we have had the misfortune to lose your Majesty's confidence," said the Prime Minister suavely, "I hope your Majesty will not hesitate to say so. But I am bound to inform you, sir, that should your Majesty be unable to accept the advice now offered, it will be the most painful duty of your Majesty's ministers to tender their resignation."

"I observe," retorted the King tartly, "that whenever you begin reminding me of my 'Majesty' you have always something unpleasant to spring on me! You are treating me now just as you have been treating the Bishops; you will not listen to advice; no, you will not accept amendments, you behave as though you were already a single Chamber Government. You ought to accept amendments! I don't like Free Church Bishops. If they want to become Bishops they can go to the Archimandrite for themselves. I suppose you are making it worth his while?" he added suspiciously.

"Doubtless there will be an arrangement," answered the Premier smoothly. "There again the Archbishop has already helped us. Less than a year ago he made representations to us on the subject, recommending the Archimandrite for a State pension."

"And pray, will that appear in the estimates?"

"There is no reason why it should not appear."

"I have noticed," commented the King, "that if people do an unscrupulous thing in the full light of day, it takes a certain appearance of honesty."

"A very statesmanlike observation, your Majesty," smiled the Prime Minister. "In this matter I may say we are without scruple because our case is unanswerable."

"You shall have my answer," said the King, "when I have had more time to think about it."

With which oblique retort to the Prime Minister's assertion he rose, and the interview terminated.

V

By this time he was thoroughly tired: he had done a hard morning's work; not only had he been harassed and annoyed, but he had been thinking a great deal more than he usually thought, and his brain ached. But even now his troubles were not ended; just as he turned to go the Minister of the Interior craved audience; and at his first word the King's irritation grew afresh, for here was dismissed controversy cropping up again.

While the King was receiving the Prime Minister his Comptroller-General had not been idle: indeed he never was idle. He had gone straight to the Minister of the Interior and had reported to him the failure of his efforts, for it was this minister who had in the first place come to him. The steeplejack had fallen, so to speak, right into the middle of his department; and with the King's donation coming on the top the catastrophe bulked large. For, be it known, on the order of the day for the morrow's sitting of Parliament was a motion of the Labor Party, directing censure on the Government for having brought pressure to bear on contractors and caused work to be continued upon Government buildings when Labor and Capital were at war. It was nothing to Labor that the hire of the scaffolding used in the repairs was costing the country a considerable sum of money while it stood uselessly waiting about the walls of the Legislature; blacklegs had gone up on it and blacklegs had been pulled down from it; and one particular blackleg had gone up on it and had come down without any pulling whatever—an accident over which Labor was savagely ready to exult and say, "Serve him right!" And how would it be if they saw in their morning papers, on the very day when the motion was down for debate, that the King had gone out of his way to make a handsome donation to the widow? The Minister of the Interior simply could not allow it; yet now word had come to him that his Majesty persisted in his intention. So when the Prime Minister came out the Minister of the Interior went in and put his case to the King, as I have put it here to the reader—only far more persuasively, and ornately, and at very much greater length. He also added to what has already been set forth, as a point making the man a less worthy object of compassion, that according to latest accounts he had gone to his work under the influence of drink.

"So do all steeplejacks," said the King, and quoted the Encyclopedia: "It is only when they are drunk that they can do it. I know." He spoke as though he had tried it.

Before the minister had done the King was really angry. "Mr. Secretary," said he, "I don't care how many strikes there are, or how many Trades Unions, or how many motions of censure from the gentlemen of the Labor Party: they may motion to censure me if they like! The man is dead, and I was unfortunate enough to be a witness of his death. He died in an attempt to do a laudable action." (Here the King was tempted to quote the peroration from his favorite newspaper, but he checked himself: the minister would not have understood.) "His wife," he went on, "is now a widow, and his children are orphans; and if that twenty pounds may not go to them, then I am not master of my own purse-strings, or"—he added by way of finish—"of my own natural feelings and emotions as an ordinary human being."

And before that burst of eloquence the Minister of the Interior was abashed into silence, and retired from the royal presence discomfited.

The King's argument had heated him, like the royal furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, seven times more than he was wont to be heated. He so seldom argued with anybody, still less with his ministers: and here he had been arguing with one or another of them for half the morning. He almost felt as if something had happened to him; a touch of giddiness seized him as he turned to retire to his private apartments; and the thought struck him—if he was as much upset as this over a small side-issue, what would he be like when he had done adding that luster to the constitutional edifice which the nation in its crisis would presently be demanding of him? The wear and tear were going to be considerable.

Circumstance had departed as he retraced his steps to the domestic wing. The lackeys, having done their ceremonial duty, had disappeared: he was free to go unobserved. As he ascended the marble staircase which led from the great hall toward the private apartments he was still thinking of the steeplejack, the man who somehow seemed now to be an emblem of himself. This man, set to the superfluous task of regilding the weathercock of the Legislature, doing it in defiance of master craftsmen and fellow-workmen, lured to do it because the cost of the hiring of the scaffolding had become an expensive charge on the Board of Works, and then, after the custom of the Trade, primed, emboldened, and made drunk to do it, drunk to a point which had brought him to destruction—yes, he was like that man; his temptations, his perils, his essential superfluity were all the same. As he went up the stair he tried to imagine he was the man himself, going up and up, a solitary and uplifted figure, fixing his thoughts on things above in order that he might forget the gulf which yawned below. He took his hand from the balustrade, and gazing upward at the gilt and crystal chandelier suspended from the dome above, so entirely forgot his surroundings for one moment that, missing a step, he lost balance backwards and fell with amazing thoroughness down the full flight of steps till he reached the bottom.

CHAPTER III

WILD OATS AND WIDOWS' WEEDS

I

Bump! bump! bump! went his head. Through a confused vision of stars, veined marble, stained glass, and flying stair-rails he saw his legs trail helplessly after, close in above, fling violently across him feet foremost, and dash out of view. In other words, having reached the bottom of the grand staircase he had turned a complete and homely somersault.

For awhile he lay half stunned, unable to move. Something had undoubtedly happened to his head, but he was still conscious. Cautiously he turned himself over and looked round. No one was about; no one had seen this ignominious downfall of Jingalo's topmost symbol on the too highly polished floors of its own abode; and nobody must know. It was not the right and dignified way for a royal accident to happen: falling down-stairs suggested the same failing as that to which steeplejacks were prone.

He picked himself up, and aware now of a sharp pain in the middle of his spine as well as at the back of his head, crawled slowly and in a rather doubled-up attitude toward the royal apartments.

As he moved cautiously along the private corridor, he met the Queen coming from her room, dressed for going out. She detected at once his painful and decrepit attitude. "What is the matter, dear?" she inquired.

"Nothing, nothing," mumbled the King, "only a touch of sciatica." And as he did not encourage her impulse to pause and make further inquiries, she let him go past.

He went into his room, and sat very carefully down, for he was still uncertain whether some vertebral bit of him was not broken. Then he put his hand to the back of his head and felt it. Yes, undoubtedly something had happened; at contact with his finger it made a sound curiously like the ticking of a clock, and under the scalp a portion of bone seemed to move. And yet he was not threatened with unconsciousness; on the contrary he felt very wide awake: shaken though he was, ideas positively bubbled in his brain, his whole being effervesced. For a moment a fear flickered across his mind that he was going mad. But if so it was a wholly pleasurable sensation, for though his fancy went at a gallop, it was orderly, logical, and consecutive, not like madness at all. He dismissed the notion; but further reflection confirmed him in his determination not to tell anybody; he did not want to explain how he had walked upstairs fancying himself a steeplejack. It would have sounded stupid.

Then all at once he felt very sick and giddy, and going to the couch he lay down on it, and there, finding relief in the horizontal position, he fell fast asleep.

When he awoke an hour later his head, except for an extreme local tenderness, felt all right again; but when he tested it the faint ticking sound was still there. His mind was now calm; his thoughts no longer went at a gallop, but they seemed—what was the word?—freer, more articulate, more at his beck and call; and in spirit he was far less harassed and anxious. Altogether he felt that he possessed himself more than he had ever done before: his mental views had become more open.

Then he remembered that he wanted to see his son Max, and talk to him about certain matters; and so, after a few more tentative touches to the back of his head to find if it was still ticking—which it was—he went into his study, and sending for one of his secretaries, got a message despatched. And only when he was well on in the routine of his afternoon's labors did he recollect that he had not lunched.

That break in the regularity of his habits seemed almost an adventure; but as he did not now feel hungry he plodded on, for this was his day of the week for signing accumulated arrears of documents, and several hundreds awaited him. So for a couple of hours he worked as regularly and monotonously as a bank-clerk, and while he was signing the less important papers, and passing them to one of his secretaries to be blotted and sorted, another read out to him those of which he wished to learn the contents.

This duty was generally performed by the Comptroller-General himself; but to-day he was missing, and the King, left to make his own selection, was rather startled to find what a number of really important documents had been left over for this day, devoted to what may be described as routine signatures. As a rule it was the Comptroller who, out of his long experience, selected those documents which must be read and, only after due consideration, signed. Now, by some accident, he had been prevented from attending, and here was a crowd of important documents, the terms of which the King had never heard. He began to wonder. At least ten or a dozen were strange to him: he ordered them to be set aside. And now very dimly, very gradually, he began to suspect his position, and to perceive that without watchfulness he might very easily become less a conscious instrument of Government than a mere mechanism. What if he had become that already?

II

And then it grew dusk. The King dismissed his secretaries, and without turning on the light sat and thought alone. The effervescence had all gone from his brain, melancholy ruled him; and as he sat ruminating upon the past and his own present position his mind became obsessed by all the historical characters who had preceded him in the exercise of those royal functions now grown so exiguous in his hands, who had sat and labored at Statecraft in that very room, some of them, perhaps, in the very chair in which he was now seated.

They became almost present to his consciousness. How would they have behaved in the present situation? How would they have set to work to add luster to that supreme symbol which still crowned the constitutional edifice?

He could imagine his own father opposing over a considerable period the weight of his personal prestige to the importunacy of ministers, saying with stately ease: "We will speak of that, gentlemen, some other day," and so calmly turning from the subject in dispute—not solving it, but at least imposing delay as the penalty which ministers must pay for a difference of opinion. That policy of quiet procrastination no minister of his time would have dared to withstand without first making for it a certain time-allowance. So much at least would have been secured, not of right, but through the weight of a stronger personality.

And what about others before him? Slowly there dawned upon the King's vision—clear as though he had seen her but yesterday, the regal presence of a certain ancestress who more than any other had made the monarchy what it now was—an almost miraculous survival from the past. It was the old Queen Regent, the lady who for the last twenty years of her consort's reign, when his wavering mind had failed him, had ruled her ministers with a rod which was not of iron, but which, none the less, they had feared, and sought by many devious ways to evade. Out of some book of memoirs a vision of something that had taken place in that very room rose up before him. Around her a ring of Bishops, crowding the royal hearth-rug, each standing defenseless with deferential stoop, tea-cup in hand; and she, seated before them with plump hands folded in her lap upon a lace kerchief, or tapping now and again upon the arms of her chair to give emphasis, was laying down her word of law, and putting an end to revolt in the Church.

"I won't have it!" she cried. "I won't have it! This nonsense has got to be put down!"

And what could a Bishop do with a tea-cup in his hand? There she had got them, six or eight chosen Prelates, every one of them in a defenseless position; how could they argue an affair of State so? What could they do but assent to the incontrovertible statement that "nonsense" must and certainly should be put down—though knowing all the time that the particular "nonsense" in question, being a thing inbred in the minds of men, could not be put down by any act of Parliament and would persist even to the breaking-up of Church unity? And so a perfectly ineffective Church Government Act had passed into law, causing its honest opponents to secede, while its far more numerous dishonest opponents had remained; and the Queen Regent, having for the time being asserted her authority in the Church, had passed on the actual solution of the problem to later times.

Later times: the King's brain ceased to visualize, he came back to himself and to the accumulated problems now pressing for solution. Yes; for the monarchy, not only as she had made it, but as it had now become, that great little lady was almost equally responsible. Her genius had only arrested its decay by bottling it up in the clear preservative of her own virtues. It now stood out more conspicuously than ever, a survival from the past: it had not really moved on. Had it, under that preserving process, become more brittle? With a more open mind he was beginning to suspect that the ancient institution was crumbling in his hands; that a creeping paralysis had seized hold of it. Why? What had he done? Was simple honesty the last and fatal touch that had called these symptoms of death to light? Had he been too human for an office with which humanity was no longer compatible? It seemed a confounding charge to one whose soul was filled with a social hunger which ever went unsatisfied, whose official isolation from his people was a daily obsession. His doubt was whether he had been human enough? As he cogitated on the matter the suspicion grew in him that he had only been human domestically; outside his domesticity he had resigned his humanity and become an automaton, a thing in leading-strings. He had allowed constitutional usage, aye, and constitutional encroachments also, to crush him down. In constitutional usage he was as harnessed and bedizened as the piebald ponies who drew his state-coach when he went each year to open or shut the flood-gates of legislative eloquence. Constitutional usage, determined for him by others, was the bearing-rein that had bowed his neck to that decorative arch of mingled condescension and pride with which he received deputations, addresses, ambassadors. Constitutional usage had put a bit in his mouth and blinkers upon his eyes, so that now, even in his own Council Chamber, he was not expected to speak, was not expected to see unless his attention were specially invited. More and more the critical and suspensory powers of the Crown were coming to be regarded as out of place, a straining of the Royal Prerogative. The growth of the ministerial system had gone on; and he, shut off from growth in its midst, was being robbed of strength day by day. And all this was being done, not in the eyes of his people, but secretly, under smooth and respectful formalities, by a Cabinet insidiously bent on acquiring as its own that of which it robbed him. In this unwritten and unnoticed readjustment of the Constitution nothing was being passed on to the people's representatives. They knew nothing about it; keeping all that to itself, the Cabinet, like the grim wolf with privy paw, "daily devoured apace, and nothing said."

So far (barring the quotation from Milton, a purely literary adornment on the author's part), so far he had got with drifting and despondent thought, when again that small regal presence, of low statute but ample form, became clearly defined, and he heard the soft staccato voice saying sharply: "I won't have it! I won't have it!"

The blood of his ancestors thrilled in his veins. There and then he formed a resolution—neither would he! He moved to his desk and sat down to write; and even as he did so material for the breaking of that resolve presented itself,—the Comptroller-General, calm and self-possessed, glided into the room.

He had a communication to make: the story did not take long to tell. He had been extending his inquiries—further and more particular inquiries into the life and domestic relations of the unfortunate steeplejack; and he had discovered, oh, horror! but just in time, that the woman who had lived with him was not his wife.

"But you told me they had seven children," said the King.

"That is so, Sir," replied the Comptroller-General; "it has been a relationship of long standing. Morally, of course, that only makes the matter worse."

The King did not know why morally the permanence of that arrangement should make it worse. It was a statement which he accepted without question; it came to him with authority from one whose guidance in such matters he had ever been accustomed to follow and find correct. Before the weight of the moral law, he bowed his head and gave up the ghost of the dead steeplejack. The widow and the seven orphans passed out of existence; they ceased any longer to be mouths and hearts of flesh, and became instead abstractions to be set in a class apart—one not eligible for rewards. To such as these no public declaration of the royal bounty could be made.

"Very well," said the King despondently, "strike off the memorandum! The twenty pounds need not go."

An hour later the Queen came in and found him sitting alone and miserable in his chair. She spoke to him, but he did not answer. Then as she drew nearer, to find out if anything were really the matter, his misery found voice.

"I can't move! I am unable to move!" he moaned.

"What is it, dear?" she inquired, "sciatica?"

His answer came from a source she could not fathom.

"No one," he murmured in a tone of deep discouragement, "no one will ever call me 'Jack.'"

III

Three hours later, after dinner, the King and his son, Prince Max, were sitting together in the same room. The King, feeling considerably better for a good meal, had given Max one of his best cigars, and having gone so far to establish confidential relations, was now trying to summon up courage to speak to the young man as a father should.

But here, as elsewhere, he was met by the old difficulty—he and his son were not intimates. They had drifted apart, not for any lack of filial or paternal affection, but simply because in the round of their official lives they so seldom met privately; and since the Prince had acquired an establishment of his own the King knew little of what he did with his daily life beyond the records of the Court Circular.

Max was now twenty-five; he was taller and darker than his father, more handsome and more self-possessed. In his appearance he combined the polish of a military training with the quiet air of an amateur scholar; his forehead was prematurely, but quite becomingly, bald, his mustache well groomed, his figure slight but athletic. He had inherited his father's full lips, but the glance of his eye was of a keener and shrewder quality, and it might be suspected that the eye-glasses which he occasionally put on were assumed more for effect than for necessity. Above all, he possessed what the King conspicuously lacked—self-assurance, and with it a sort of moral ease as though any error he might fall into would be taken rather as an experience to profit by than as an occasion for self-reproach. His face showed as he talked that quality of humor which enables a man to laugh at his own enthusiasms, and one could not always be sure whether he were serious or merely indulging in dialectics. To any one out of touch with his intellectual origins, he was a man difficult to know; and the King, being in that matter altogether at sea, knew really very little about him, and was in consequence a little afraid of him.

That fact made a frontal attack difficult; nevertheless, having screwed himself up to speak, he began abruptly.

"Max," said his father, "have you ever thought about marrying?"

Max smiled a little bitterly. "I started thinking about it," he said, "when I was seventeen; and off and on I have thought about it ever since." Then he added rather coldly, as though to warn off mere curiosity, "Why do you ask, sir? Has any proposal been made?"

"Well," said his father, "we might certainly arrange something. I feel, indeed, that we ought to—at your age. I only wanted first to know how you felt upon the matter. You see," he added, hesitating, "people are beginning to talk; and it won't do."

This oblique and cautious reference to his son's private life marked a new stage in their relations: it was actually the first occasion, in all their intercourse as father and son, upon which the sex-question had ever been broached between them. It was no wonder, therefore, that so far they had been rather strangers to each other. Now, however, having decided to speak, the King also decided that he must go on and interfere. It required some moral courage; for he had never failed to recognize his son as the stronger character, and, especially in intellectual matters, his superior.

"I have been told that you have been keeping a mistress," he said, avoiding the young man's eye.

"That," answered Max, "would, I suppose, be the generally received phrase for it."

"Who is she?" queried the King, pushing hazardously on, now that the danger-point had been reached.

"Do you wish to meet her?"

Parental dignity was offended.

"That is a suggestion you ought not to make."

"Then, my dear father, why inquire after her? She and I suit each other: to you she is nothing."

"How long has this been going on?"

"We have lived together for five years."

The King recalled a phrase that he had recently heard authoritatively spoken—"a relationship of long standing. Morally, of course, that only makes the matter worse."

"H'm!" he said aloud. "You started early, I must say!"

"You, sir, at that age were already a father," said Max correctively.

The King made an interjectory movement, but the Prince went on. "I was twenty, and I was still virginal. To speak frankly, I was amazed at myself, perhaps even amused. Yes, even now I am inclined to think that, among princes, my record must have been exceptional. This lady, to whom I owe nearly the whole of my domestic experience, saved me from an adventuress——"

The King lifted his eyebrows.

"One," went on the Prince, "who would have wrung from me in a single year far more, from a merely monetary point of view, than the whole experience has yet cost me."

The King was slightly bewildered. "This person," he said tentatively, "is not, then, of the adventuress class?"

"Nor was that other: by class she was one of the highest of our aristocracy. I believe that when she is received at Court it is correct etiquette for you to kiss her upon the cheek. The lady who did actually befriend me was her companion and secretary, an Austrian by birth. She had divorced her husband and possessed only a small annuity on which she was unable to live independently in the style to which she had become accustomed. Yet for the first year of our liaison she would accept from me no provision, and we saw each other but seldom. Strange as it may seem she taught me the value and the charm of conjugal moderation and fidelity. Just now she is receiving a visit from her son, on leave from his military services abroad; and respecting the ordinary moral conventions, which happen also to be hers, I do not go to see her while the son's visit is being paid. Yet I apprehend that he cannot be in ignorance of the facts."

"She has a grown-up son?" queried the King, still a little puzzled; and Max smiled.

"A polite way," said he, "of inquiring as to her age. Yes: she is on the verge of forty, and assures me that she will soon be showing it. You may be interested also to hear that she is a Roman Catholic, has attacks of devoutness which occasionally prescribe separation, and has twice threatened, not in anger but with a most sincere reluctance, to break up our peaceful establishment. I recognize that in the end her love for her Church will probably prove stronger than her love for me—at all events in practice. I have, indeed, some apprehension that her son's visit may result in a turning of the balance, since he has now inherited his father's property and can give his mother the position she has a right to expect. If that should be so, you will find me very attentive to any offer of marriage that any Court of western civilization (which now includes Japan) may have to make. Have I said, sir, all that you wish to know about my feelings in the matter?"

"What I don't understand," said the King, "is your idea about the morality of all this."

"Really," replied the Prince, "I hardly know that I have any. It has gone on so long; and anything that is regular and of long standing tends to produce a moral feeling."

This arrested the King's attention. "You think so?" he interrogated; but Max waived any decisive pronouncement.

"Perhaps," said he, "I do not quite know what morality means. I fancy sometimes that its full meaning may be sprung upon me when I find myself in love; or, if I am not destined to undergo that experience, on the day when I learn that I am to become a father without having intended it. Morality arises out of the proper or improper performance of social obligations; and I have sometimes wondered whether society's most insane treatment of illegitimacy would not have compelled me into a misalliance with my 'mistress,' as you call her, had she ever——"

"Max!" cried the King, "you are outrageous!"

"Is that really how it strikes you?" inquired his son. "I feared, rather, that it was an inexpugnable remnant of my religious training. If the notion is anarchic I can feel more at home with it. But do not forget that I am a doctor of divinity."

"You!" exclaimed the King.

"Had it escaped your recollection, sir? I confess that sometimes it escapes mine. Yes: I became a D.D. before I was sent down from College."

"You were not 'sent down'!"

"Not ostensibly, sir; I should have been. I left to take up my military—accomplishments, for I may not call them 'duties.' But you can hardly forget that I am the only man who ever dared to screw up the Master of Pentecost in his own rooms. While my associates were screwing up the Dean, I was screwing up the Master; it was one of my earliest attempts to be companionable with my fellow-men."

The King sympathized, but was puzzled. "Do you mean—with the Master?"

"No, sir, with my fellow-students, those of my own years, amongst whom I had been placed. But I found that it was impossible. They, for the lesser offense, were actually 'sent down'; I, having finished my thesis and obtained my doctor's degree, was merely passed on at a slightly accelerated pace to receive fresh honors. That gave me a lesson which I have never forgotten; no honor that has come to me have I ever fully earned; and no disgrace that I have earned has ever been visited upon me for the public to know. There in a nutshell you have the moral training of the heir to a modern throne. What chance, then, have I to know anything about morality?"

"My dear son," said the King, "don't say these dreadful things. Even if they are true, don't say them. They do no good."

But though he deprecated having to meet such thoughts clothed in the flesh of speech, he was really very much interested to find that Max had them; he was seeing his son in a new light. And meanwhile the Prince went on—

IV

"I often think, sir, of those two medieval institutions which we have now lost—I suppose irrevocably—the whipping boy and the court jester. What a pity that they cannot be revived! The whipping boy, a device to put princes on their honor to be neither negligent nor wanton in the fulfilment of their duties; and the jester to break us of our too self-conscious airs and exhibit to us our follies. See what we have done instead! When our growing sense of priggish decorum and our dishonest ceremoniousness of speech made the jester a figure no longer possible, we substituted for him the poet-laureate!—not to persuade us of our follies, but to chant our undeserved praises. And alas, how much more ridiculous, at certain times, he has made us appear—nay, be! With what lecherous sweetness or ponderous grief he has put us to bed with our wives or our ancestors, with what maudlin sentiment he has crooned over us in our cradles! And how poor a show we present when poetry thus tries to make our ordinary human doings appear so different from those of other men! England set us that bad example; and, as usual, we followed her. Only think how far more resplendent might have been her history had the Court of St. James's continued and developed the institution of the jester and let the laureateship go. If Pope could only have had the teasing of Queen Anne, and Swift the goading of the earlier Georges; if Johnson could have bumbled gruff wisdom into the ears of number three; and, following upon these, could Sheridan, and Hook, and Carlyle, and Sidney Smith (I pick up names almost at random) have had a really assured position and full plenary indulgence as commentators on the Court and aristocracy of the Regency, and of the early Victorian period which culminated in that middleman's millennium, the Great Exhibition, with its Crystal Palace so shoddily furnished to celebrate the expurgation of art from industry. If only that could have been allowed, think how England might have been standing now—honest in her faults as in her virtues, a beacon light to the whole world. But there! it is no use wishing such saving grace to a rival nation, when we are so out of grace ourselves."

Prince Max paused for breath. "And then the whipping boy," he went on, "think of him!"

"Yes, Max. I am thinking of him a good deal!" said the King, in a tone wherein sarcasm and indulgence were pleasantly blended.

"You mean that I myself need the discipline?" smiled Max, "that my political ideas are even worse than my morals? Well, here is what you should do. Choose for me an exemplary young priest of the Established Church, let him be gentle and comely to attract the hearts of women, athletic and erudite to command the respect of men; and when I become a cause of scandal or forget what is due to my position, let him be set to stand in the old stocks at the doors of the Cathedral on a given day, for a given number of hours; let it be announced in the Court Circular that he is there to do penance for my sins, and let it be my privilege, if penitent, to come in person after the first hour and release him before the eyes of all. What more effective form of control could you devise for me than this? How could I remain impenitent and unsubmissive when for my faults an innocent man stood exposed in contumely to the public gaze? Sir, you would have me exemplary in a week, or a fugitive from that country which set so high a standard of honor for its princes. As it is, our whipping boys go unlabeled with our names; and our offenses are expiated by countless thousands who know not for whose sins they suffer."

"Max," said his father, "you sound as if you were quoting from some book."

"I am," answered the Prince; "it is one that I am writing myself, that being the only form of free action that is left to me. At the threshold of manhood I recognized what my fate was to be, and that I was not really intended to do anything. That is why I talk. Activity is necessary to me. To keep myself in physical vigor I run about and play; to keep myself in mental vigor I read, I examine life, and I propound theories. This book which I am now writing would probably excite no comment if published anonymously, but will be regarded as revolutionary when it is known to have been written by the heir to a crown."

"Do you mean to publish it, then?" cried the King in awestruck tone.

"Certainly," answered the Prince. "Has not the nation every right to know the opinions of its possible future King? Never shall it be said that Jingalo accepted me blindly under the dark cover of heredity."

At this news the King looked really aghast. "And you propose, while I am spending myself in trying to add luster——" he began, then checked himself; "you propose to publish a work which may destroy the confidence at present subsisting between the sovereign and the people?"

"Would not false confidence be a worse alternative, sir?" inquired Max.

"But you are doing it in my time," said the King plaintively; "it is my reign you are disturbing, not your own. I don't think you have any right."

"My dear father," answered the Prince, "the more impossible I prove myself to be, the more popular you will become."

But the King was not to be consoled by that prospect; he was working not for himself alone—not for himself, indeed, at all.

"Max," he said earnestly, "believe me, monarchy, even at the present day, is of the greatest social and political value. Unsettle it in the public mind, and you unsettle the basis of government and the sacredness of property; everything else goes with it. The hereditary principle has in its keeping all that makes for stability, continuity, and tradition; nothing can adequately take its place."

"Do not forget, sir," said his son, "that if we follow our heredity back far enough, ours is an elected monarchy. And if once you admit election you must admit also the right of the to-be-elected one to offer or refuse his candidature. The nation cannot play fast and loose, as it has done, with the principle of male primogeniture, and at the same time impose upon us, its candidates for election, an unavoidable obligation to accept the burden of heredity. No; let us have the matter quite clear. If the people—as they have done by others in the past—claim the right to reject me, should I prove myself an outrageous and impossible character, I equally claim the right to reject them; and I must see them capable of making a reasonable use of my services before I will consent to be made use of."

"Well," said the King, breathing in resignation, "I suppose I ought not to mind too much. 'After me the Deluge,' is a wise enough saying when one has no power to prevent it."

"'After me the Deluge,'" said Max, "has come down to us with a muddled application. If monarchy would only adopt it as its motto, monarchy would be good for another thousand years. Louis XV said it; and Louis XVI failed to give it effect. Had he but placed himself at the head of the Deluge, in the very forefront of its rush and roar, waved his hat to it and cried: 'After me!' like a captain to his company, and started off at a gallop, it would have obeyed and followed him. 'After me the Deluge!' should be the rallying cry of the monarchy for the renewal of its youth, not the quavering note of its dotage. That is the motto I am going to put on the title-page of my book."

"Good gracious!" cried the King.

Max was pleased to see what an impression he had made: he did not usually get so good a listener. "And to think," said he, "that all this talk came of your having asked me a question on a matter that is already five years old. I am sorry to have taken up so much time explaining myself."

"On the contrary," said the King, "I am glad. Five years? Yes, I am very glad to know that." He got up and moving to the table made a call on his private telephone. "Would you mind waiting a few minutes," he went on, "perhaps I shall need your countenance."

A secretary answered the call; and presently the Comptroller-General himself appeared to learn the royal pleasure.

"I am sorry, my dear General," said the King, "to trouble you at so late an hour. But about that matter of the widow—who is not a widow. I wish fifty pounds to be sent to her—anonymously. Yes, fifty pounds. Will you see that it is done to-night?"

Turning to Max he said, as though referring to conversation already passed, "You have effectually interested me in her case."

Max saw that he was being used as a pawn in a game he did not understand, and held his tongue; and the Comptroller-General, finding himself dismissed, retired to do for once as he was told.

And so, by the inglorious device of anonymity and lavishness combined the King maintained his point, and sent his gift to the relief of one who was, as a matter of fact, just as legally a widow as any other you or I may like to name.

John of Jingalo had not yet broken the official leading-strings, but on this occasion he had circumvented them. Flushed with his triumph, he bade his son an affectionate good-night. "Come and talk to me again," he said. "I don't agree with anything you say, but you help me to think."

It was a sign of progress. Hitherto he had relied, with a far greater sense of security and comfort, on those who had enabled him not to think. Consultation with Max, insidious as the drug-habit, and as secretively employed, was henceforth to count for much in the development of the Constitutional Crisis. Hereditary monarchy had conceived the idea of turning its hereditary material to account. No doubt the Cabinet would have objected, preferring to keep its victim in complete mental isolation; but at present, the Cabinet did not know.

CHAPTER IV

POPULAR MONARCHY

I

That talk with Max formed the preliminary to a month of the most strenuous verbal and intellectual conflict that the King had ever known. Outside all was calm: the Constitutional Crisis was in suspension; by agreement on both sides hostilities had been deferred till trade should have reaped its full profit out of the Silver Jubilee celebrations. The papers spoke admiringly of this truce to party warfare as "instinctive loyalty" on the part of the people, "expressive of their desire to do honor to a beloved sovereign in a spirit undisturbed by the contending voices of faction."

There was no "instinctive loyalty," however, within the Cabinet! While streets were decorating and illuminations preparing, ministers were giving his Majesty a thoroughly bad time.

In a way, of course, he brought it upon himself, for at the very next Council meeting after his conversation with Max he did a thing which, so far as his own reign was concerned, was absolutely without precedent: he opened his mouth and spoke;—objected, contended, argued. And at the sound of his voice uttering something more than mere formalities, ministers sat up amazed, most of them very angry and scandalized at so unexpected a reversion to the constitutional usages of a previous generation.

Not a word of all this leaked out. The whole thing was an admirable example of that keeping-up of appearances on which bureaucratic government so largely depends. And it was, if you come to think of it, a very deftly arranged affair. There was the whole country bobbing with loyalty, enthusiasm, and commercial opportunism; the Cabinet unencumbered for a while by any parliamentary situation that could cause anxiety, and correspondingly free to direct its energies elsewhere; and there within the Council, and without a soul to advise him, was the King, scuffling confusedly against the predatory devices of his ministers. The poor man's knowledge of the Constitution was but scanty, and his powers of argument were feeble, for from the day of his accession the word "precedent" had governed him. Yet he had an idea, a feeling, that he was now being forced into a wrong position; the constitutional breath was being beaten out of his body, and he would pass from his levees, from his receptions of foreign embassies and addresses of loyalty and congratulation, to a conflict in Council which reminded him of nothing so much as a "scrum" upon the football field. Through one goal or another he was to be kicked—the exercise of the Crown's prerogative to nominate Free Church Bishops, or the refusal to exercise it. And whichever expedient he was driven to in the end, he knew that on one side grandiloquent words would be written about his fine instinct for the constitutional limitations or powers of monarchy, and on the other, pained, but deeply respectful words of regret that he had been so ill-advised by his ministers—or by others. Whichever side loses, it is the football which wins the game. That, however, is merely the spectator's point of view. The football only knows that it has been kicked. Yet the King was well aware that in Parliament at any rate appearances would be kept up; and that whatever corner of the field he got kicked to, the blame for it would be laid, ostensibly, on others; though, as a result, the monarchy to which it was his bounden duty to "add luster" would be either strengthened or weakened: and what course to take he really did not know.

His mind, in consequence, was greatly troubled. Being of conservative instincts he believed that, in the main, the Bishops were right and the Prime Minister wrong. The Prime Minister had been harassing the country with general elections; and the country had had about as many as it could stand: yet without a fresh election no other ministry was possible. And now, at a moment when the country was bent on profiting by the revival in trade which the approaching celebrations had stimulated, nothing would be so unpopular as a fresh ministerial crisis; and he could have no doubt that, whatever the papers might pretend to say, the odium of that crisis, if due to his own action, would fall eventually upon himself.

And the Prime Minister knew it! Yes, just at that juncture, resignation, or the threat of it, had become an absolutely compelling card; and he was playing it for all it was worth. Free Church Bishops were to be promised for the ensuing year, or the Ministry would be bound to feel, here and now, that his Majesty's confidence in it had been withdrawn.

Resignation, aimed not against any opposing majority in Parliament, but against the demur and opposition of the Crown itself—that fact in all its political significance, with all its possible developments of danger for the State and of humiliation for the monarchy, was daily pressing its relentless weight against the King's scruples. The more unanswerable it seemed the more angry he became, the more keenly did he feel that he was being unfairly used. And then, one day, as he sat thinking at his desk, all at once a new thought occurred to him, throwing a queer radiance into his face, of joy mixed with cunning. And then, gradually, it faded out and left a blank; the old expression of anxiety and distrustfulness returned. He shook his head at himself, scared that such a thought should ever have come into it. "No, no, it wouldn't do!" he muttered. "Impossible."

All the same he got up from his desk, and in deep cogitation began walking about the room. The carpet with its rich variegated pattern, like Max's conversation, helped him to think; until certain deliveries of a royal courier from abroad came to divert his attention to more particular and family affairs.

Nevertheless his mind had again reverted to its vetoed notion when, an hour later, on his way to the Queen's apartments he met the Princess Charlotte tripping gaily along the corridor. She stopped to give him her "return home" embrace. "How well you are looking, papa!" cried she, admiring his flushed countenance. But the King, though he smiled, remained preoccupied with the embryos of statecraft.

"My dear," he said abruptly, "do you think that I am popular?"

"Why, yes, papa, of course!" she said, opening sweet eyes at him. "Doesn't everybody cheer you when you go anywhere?"

"I think," said her father dubiously, lending his ears in fancy to the sound, "I think that crowds get into the habit of cheering,—not because they care for me, but just because there are a lot of them, and they like to hear the sound of their own voices."

"But sometimes you have quite small crowds," said his daughter, "and still they cheer."

"Yes, yes," he allowed, "so they do. Yes, even the nursemaids, I notice, wave their handkerchiefs when I ride by them in the park. And I daresay some of them do it because they are sorry for me."

"Sorry for you, papa?"

"My dear, wouldn't you be sorry to have to be King now-a-days? It's no fun, I can assure you."

"I wouldn't like to be King always," said Charlotte, with honesty; "but you know, papa, with all the Silver Jubilee celebrations coming on you are quite immensely popular."

"Ah!" said the King. "Thank you, my dear, that is what I wanted to know."

He went on to the Queen's apartments, and Princess Charlotte stood looking after him. "Poor dear!" she said to herself. She was sorry for him too—very sorry just now; for she had a secret growing within her somewhere between heart and head which, if he knew of it—and some day he would have to know of it—would cause him a great deal of worry.

This young woman with her growing secret was at that time twenty-three.

II

The Princess Charlotte had a way of drawing in a breath as if to speak, and then bottling it. This little performance was at times very telling in its effect—it spoke volumes: it told of a long training in self-repression which still did not come quite naturally: it told of inward combustion, of a tightly cornered but still independent mind. Ladies-in-waiting had seen the Princess run out of her mother's presence to tabber her feet on the inlaid floor of the corridor, thence to return smooth, sweet-tempered, and amiable; for between Charlotte and the Queen there were temperamental differences which had to declare themselves or find safety through emergency exits.

The Princess had no such difficulties with her father, for imperturbability was not one of his characteristics, and imperturbability was the one quality in a parent which the Princess simply could not stand; it made her feel powerless; and to feel powerless toward one's intellectual inferiors is, to certain temperaments, maddening. Charlotte had long since been brought to recognize that her mother, in her own dear way, was quite hopeless: but she was able with astonishing ease to get upon her father's nerves and to trouble his conscience; for while the Queen remained impervious to all influences outside the conventions of her training and her habits, the King was as open to new scruples of conscience as a sieve is to the wind—fresh ideas rattled in his head like green peas in a cullender—when he shook his head it seemed to shake them about, and all the larger ones came uppermost; and the Princess Charlotte had in recent years acquired a habit of entangling her father, with the most engaging simplicity, in moral problems for which constitutional monarchy could find no answer.

She was evidently interested in politics, and when of late the King, wishing to check so dangerous a tendency, had sought to know the reason why, she had answered with perfect frankness: "Max says" (for to her, also, Max, the man born to inaction, had been talking), "Max says he is not sure if he means to come to the throne. If he doesn't, it is just as well I should know something of the business."

The young lady had a most disrespectful way of talking about the monarchy as "the business," and did not say it as if in joke.

"Are you going to business to-day, papa?" was actually the phrase uttered in all seriousness, which had met him one of the days when he went down to open Parliament. But though she spoke thus gracelessly of an important State function she attended it herself with grace, and behaved well.

The Princess Charlotte had learned many things alien to her nature; but she had never learned that correctitude of deportment which is supposed to accompany all those born in the regal purple from the cradle to the grave. She substituted for it, however, something much more individual and charming. Tall and abundantly alive, she moved in soft rushes rather quicker than a walk; and her manner of swimming down a room, with swift invisible run of feet, and just three long undulating bows on the top of all—those three doing duty for so many—was a sight on the decorum of which Court opinion was sharply divided. Yet every one admitted that though she might lack convention or anything in the least resembling "the grand manner"—she had a style of her own; many also—even those who disapproved—admitted her charm. As she talked to her chosen intimates, her two hands would go out in quick bird-like gestures of momentary contact, while her brightly moving face gave a constant invitation to the free entry of her thoughts. Barriers she had none. A dangerous young person for getting her own way; for in the process she often got not only her own but other people's as well.

At the moment when she makes her introductory bow from the pages of this history her main and consuming desire was to secure the ordering of her own dresses; and to obtain that preliminary measure of independence for the expression of her own character she was prepared, in the face of maternal opposition, to go to considerable lengths.

The King when he met her in the corridor was, as we have said, preoccupied with affairs of State. But his preoccupation was partly put on with intent for the concealment of other thoughts. The sight of his daughter at that moment, embarrassed him—gave him, indeed, almost a sense of guilt, for he held in his hand a letter from the Hereditary Prince of Schnapps-Wasser accepting the circuitously worded proposal, with all its delicate adumbrations of yet other proposals to follow, that he should visit the Jingalese Court early in the ensuing year—immediately, that is to say, upon his return from South America; and though in his reply the veiled object of that visit was not mentioned there was a touch here and there of compliment, of warmth, of a wish that the date were not so far off, which indicated "a coming on disposition."

And so, under the bright eyes of his daughter, the King was conscious of a sense of guilt, in that he was concealing from her something in which her future was very greatly concerned. It seemed hardly fair thus to be pushing matters on without letting her know: and yet—what else could he do? So, covering his affectionate embarrassment in inquiries about himself, he shuffled past; and when he had gone a little further, turned to take another look at her, and found, startled, that she too was looking at him. There, at opposite ends of the long corridor, father and daughter stood interrogatively at gaze, each feeling a little guilty, each wondering what, at the dénouement, the other would say. Then the charming Charlotte blew him a kiss from her hand, and his Majesty did likewise; and, off to the fulfilment of her destiny went the Princess; and off to his fulfilment of her destiny went he; each quite sure in their two different ways that they knew what was best for her.

III

The King found the Queen at her knitting, very placid and contented and well pleased with herself, for she had just been giving Charlotte a mild talking to. Charlotte had come home with adjectives in her mouth of which the Queen did not approve, and with enthusiasms that went riotously beyond bounds. She had talked of some Professor's translation of a Greek play as "glorious"; and of the play itself—a play all about expatriated women who, their proper husbands having been killed in a siege, were forced to accept at the hands of their enemies husbands of a less proper kind—she had talked of that play as "the most immense, immortal, and modern thing in all drama."

"I told her," said the Queen, "that she was talking about what she didn't understand; but she answered that she had seen it three times. I said, that to go and see the same play three times—especially a play with murders in it—showed a morbid taste. She didn't seem to mind: 'Then I am morbid,' was her reply. And when I said, 'That comes of making friends with these intellectual women,' she only laughed at me. I shan't let her go again, it is doing her harm; she has far too many ideas, far too many: and where she picks them all up I'm sure I don't know; she doesn't get them from me!"

And then the conversation—though Charlotte remained its subject—took another turn, for the King put into his wife's hand the letter he had received from the Prince of Schnapps-Wasser, and immediately her comments began.

"He writes a nice hand," she said, "and expresses himself very well. Speaks of writing a book on his travels; he must be clever. Well, at all events, it's very evident that he means to come, and wants to. We must ask him to send his photograph. I think, my dear, we have made a very good choice, and Charlotte may consider herself very fortunate. But what a pity he's not coming sooner. Well, Charlotte must wait, that's all!"

And so in her own mind the matter was settled, and only the usual details waited to be arranged. She handed the letter back to him.

"Of course," she said, "before he comes Charlotte must have a bigger allowance." She became meditative. "By the way, you had better leave it in my hands; don't give it to Charlotte herself. She wheedles you, I know; but she has ideas about dress which I am not going to encourage; she makes herself far too noticeable as it is. Somebody has been talking to her about 'national costume' and the folly of fashions; and she actually said just now that she wanted to have some kind of dress that she could wear three years running! I told her that fashions were made to be followed, and that it was her duty to follow them. Oh, she was quite sweet about it, and said she supposed I knew best, which of course is true. But she had a sort of 'I'll ask papa' look in her eyes that made me suspicious. She went out just before you came."

"I met her," observed the King.

"And she said nothing?"

"Not a word about her dress allowance."

"Ah, that's all right, then: she takes what I tell her sometimes." Then with a quick glance the Queen asked abruptly: "Have you seen Max?"

"I fancy I may be seeing him this evening," returned the King casually, for he wished to conceal even from his wife the importance he had begun to attach to his son's visits.

"Something is happening," said the Queen pointedly; "at least, so I am informed. That—that person I told you about—she isn't there now."

"However do you come to know that?" inquired the King, surprised; but his question was ignored.

"She has gone abroad," went on his informant. "Had you said anything to Max?"

"I did speak to him."

"Then it seems to have had its effect."

The King very much doubted whether the effect was any of his doing; but he held his peace.

"Now we must find somebody for him," continued the dear lady, covering the past in a tone of charitable allowance.

"I think that Max will find somebody for himself."

But this was not to her taste at all. "How can he," she objected, "unless we send him abroad? I'm sure there's nobody here."

But the King had come recently to know more about Max than his wife did. "Max will find somebody for himself," he repeated; "and if he thinks it worth while, he will go all round the world on a wild goose chase to look for her."

IV

Could the King only have known it, Max had already found his choice nearer home. His domestic arrangements having been temporarily disturbed by a certain lady's departure to visit her son on his estates, he had gone off on a spurt of social curiosity to inspect the slums of his father's capital, and on the third day of his investigation had spied, under a nursing sister's habit, and above a gentle breast bearing an ivory cross, the face of his dreams. Having taken scientific steps to discover whether that particular garb entailed celibate vows, and learning that it did not, he had industriously run its wearer to sainted earth—had, that is to say, pursued her to a top-floor tenement and there found her upon her knees with sanitary zeal scrubbing dirt from the boards of poverty; and poverty upon its bed whimpering with rage and feebly cursing her for thus coming to disturb its peace. Thus they had met, and very promptly and practically had the wearer of the habit made him pay the price for his intrusion by setting him there and then to work of a kind he had never tackled before.

Who she was, and all the sacred dance that she led him on holy feet, before she gave him that reward which was his due, will be told in the later pages of this history. For the present Max had hardly any idea how pure and deep a Jordan he was about to be dipped in, or how thorough a scrubbing he himself was to receive. His voice was still like the rollings of Abana and Pharpar, when he came on this next evening to discourse up-to-date wisdom in his father's ears; not a hair of his well-groomed head showed the ruffling of perturbed thoughts within, nor were his self-confidence and easy satisfaction in the moral and mental liberties wherein he ranged at large in any way diminished or disturbed.

When they had settled down to their talk, the King confidentially broached the proposed visit of the Hereditary Prince of Schnapps-Wasser and its intended significance. Max did not seem particularly impressed. "What does Charlotte say about it?" he inquired casually.

"Charlotte does not say anything. How should she? She does not yet know."

Max smiled. "It will be time, then, to talk about it when she does."

"But there is really nobody else; and Charlotte must marry somebody."

"Has she said so?" inquired Max. "My own impression is that she will have to get through at least one good healthy love affair of her own before she settles down to anything you or the Courts of Europe can provide. After that—if you let her plunge deep enough—you won't have any trouble; she will marry anything you offer. Of course, if you really believed in monarchy as a principle, and not as a mere expedient—a divine institution, and not as the last ditch in which the old class-barriers have to be maintained—you would let her marry any one she chose. It would do the monarchy no harm, and might do it good."

The King shook his head. "It's no use talking like that," said he. "We are not free, any of us. The more other ranks of society have become mixed, commercially mixed—for you know it is money that has done it—the more we must maintain ours. Royalty must not barter itself away."

"But you do barter it," said Max, "for rank if not for gold. And the one is really as base as the other. The great game for royalty to play now-a-days is courageous domesticity."

"There are limits," replied his father. "We must maintain our position."

"That is just where you make the mistake," retorted Max. "You and my dear mother are always ready to play the domestic game where it is not important. You allow photographs of your private life to be on sale in shop-windows; charming private details slip out in newspaper paragraphs; one of you behaves with natural and decent civility to some ordinary poor person, and news of it is immediately flashed to all the press. Two years ago, for instance, when you were triumphantly touring the United States you arrived by some accident at a place called New York; and there, early one morning, having evaded the reporters, you stood looking up at the sky-scrapers when you trod on an errand-boy's toe, or knocked his basket out of his hand; and having done so you touched your hat and apologized—you a King to an errand-boy! And immediately all America, which yawps of equality and of one man being the equal of any other, fell rapturously in love with you! You, I daresay, have forgotten the incident?"

"Quite," said the King.

"But America remembers it. When you left, with all the locusts of the press clinging to the wheels of your chariot, they dubbed you 'conqueror of hearts'; and it was mainly because you had knocked over an errand-boy and apologized to him. Now you do these things naturally; but they are all really part of the business: your secretaries report them to the press."

"What?" exclaimed the King, startled.

"Why, of course! The errand-boy didn't know you from Adam, and no one but your private secretary was with you at the time; at least, so I gathered: it was before breakfast and you had given the detectives the slip. Well, then, merely by letting your human nature and your sense of decency have free play you help to run the monarchic system—you almost make a success of it. But you stop just where you ought to go on. You are natural—you are yourself—where there is no opposition to your being so. If you would go on being natural where there is opposition—where all sorts of high social and political reasons step in and forbid—you would find yourself far more powerful than the Constitution intended you to be, for you would have the people with you. There is a mountain of sentiment ready to rush to your side if you only had the faith to call it to you. Have you not noticed, whenever a royal engagement is announced, how every paper in the land declares it to be a real genuine love-match? And you know—well, you know. I myself can remember Aunt Sophie crying her eyes out for love of the Bishop of Bogaboo whom she fell in love with at a missionary meeting and wasn't allowed to marry; and six weeks later her engagement to Prince Wolf-im-Schafs-Kleider was announced as a sudden and romantic love-match! Why, he had only been sent for to be looked at when the Bogaboo affair became dangerous; and so Aunt Sophie was coerced into that melancholy mold of a jelly which she has retained ever since.

"Now that is where my grandfather showed himself out of touch with the spirit of the age. Had he allowed Aunt Sophie to marry the Bishop and go out during the cool months of the year to teach Bogaboo ladies the use of the crinoline—it was just when crinolines were going out of fashion here, and they could have got them cheap—he would have done a most popular stroke for the monarchy."

"But you forget, my dear boy," said the King, "the Bogaboos were at that time a really dangerous tribe—they still practised cannibalism."

"Yes, they still had their natural instincts unimpaired; the Christian substitute of gin had not yet taken hold on them, and their national institution still provided the one form of useful martyrdom that was left to us. Had Aunt Sophie, or her husband, been eaten by savages there would have been a boom in missions, and both the Church and the monarchy would have benefited enormously. Royalty must take its risks. Kings no longer ride into battle at the head of their armies: even the cadets of royalty, when they get leave to go, are kept as much out of danger as possible. But if royalty cannot lead in something more serious than the trooping of colors and the laying of foundation-stones, then royalty is no longer in the running.

"Now what you ought to do is—find out at what point it would break with all tradition for you to be really natural and think and act as an ordinary gentleman of sense and honor, and then—go and do it! The Government would roll its eyes in horror; the whole Court would be in commotion; but with the people generally you would win hands down!"

"Max, you are tempting me!" said the King.

"Sir," said his son, "I cannot express to you how great is my wish to be proud of your shoes if hereafter I have to step into them. Could you not just once, for my sake, do something that no Government would expect—just to disturb that general smugness of things which is to-day using the monarchy as its decoy?"

The King gazed upon the handsome youth with eyes of hunger and affection. "What is it that you want me to do?" he inquired.

Max held out his cigar at arm's length, looked at it reflectively, and flicked off the ash.

"Don't do that on the carpet!" said his father.

Max smiled. "That is so like you, father," he said; "yes, that is you all over. You don't like to give trouble even to the housemaid. Now when you see things going wrong you ought to give trouble—serious trouble, I mean. You ought, in vulgar phrase, to 'do a bust.'

"When I was a small boy," he went on, "I used to read fairy stories and look at pictures. And there was one that I have always remembered of a swan with a crown round its neck floating along a stream with its beak wide open, singing its last song. To me that picture has ever since represented the institution of monarchy going to its death. The crown, too large and heavy to remain in place, has slipped down from its head and settled like a collar or yoke about its neck. Its head, in consequence, is free, and it begins to sing its 'Nunc dimittis.' The question to me is—what 'Nunc dimittis' are we going to sing? I do not know whether you ever read English poetry; but some lines of Tennyson run in my head; let me, if I can remember, repeat them now—

"'The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul
Of that waste place with joy
Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear
The warble was low, and full, and clear;
And floating about the under-sky,
Prevailing in weakness, the coronach stole
Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear;
But anon her awful jubilant voice,
With a music strange and manifold,
Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold;
As when a mighty people rejoice
With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold!'

"That, my dear father, is the song I wish to hear you singing—that I want to take up, I in my turn after you. I want your voice now to be awful and jubilant, and your carol to be 'free and bold' like the carol of that dying bird; and the sound of it to be like the rejoicing of a mighty people on a day of festival."

The King shook his head. "My dear boy," he said, "I don't understand poetry; I never did."

"Well," said the son, "let me interpret it then into prose. Monarchy as an institution is dying, and it can either die in foolish decrepitude, or it can die mightily, merging itself in democracy for a final blow against bureaucratic government. All that is written in my book. That is why I am now able to express myself so well: these periods are largely a matter of quotation. The right rôle for monarchy to-day is, believe me, to be above all things democratic—not by truckling to the ideas of the people in power—the 'ruling classes' as they still call themselves—but by daring to be human and natural, and to refuse absolutely to be dehumanized on the score of its high dignity and calling.

"If, for instance, I came to you to-day and said I wanted to marry one of my own nation—say even a commoner—in preference to the daughter of some foreign princeling, let me do it! It breaks with a foolish tradition—largely our own importation when, as foreigners, we were seeking to keep up our prestige—it may annoy or even embarrass the Government. Well! have they not annoyed and embarrassed you?"

The King nodded sympathetically, but in words hastened to correct himself. "One has often to make sacrifices in defense of an institution," he said. "That is a duty we both owe."

"Why," inquired the Prince, "should I make sacrifices to an institution I do not really approve? Why should I pretend to love some foreign princess if I have given my heart to one—I cannot say of my own race—for I remember that we are an importation—but of the country of my adoption? Do you really suppose that because it annoys the Prime Minister and disturbs his political calculations, an alliance within those artificially prohibited degrees imposed on royalty will lessen the influence of the Crown by a straw's weight, or quicken its demise by an hour? This country, like all civilized countries, is moving towards some form of republican government. If we are sufficiently human, if we show ourselves determined to call our souls our own—it is not merely possible, it is probable, that when the change comes we shall be called on by popular acclaim to provide the country with its first President. If we did we could secure for that presidency a greater power and prestige than any bureaucratic government would willingly concede. It may be that the real counter-stroke to the present increase of Cabinet control can most effectively be administered by a monarch who is not too careful to preserve the outward forms of monarchy. When that is done, by you, or by me, or by one who comes after us, I am confident that there will be the sound of a people's rejoicing."

"You have strange ideas," said the King, "for one who calls himself a monarchist."

"I am a republican," said the young man.

The King stared at him as though at some strange animal. "You don't say so!" he murmured half aghast. "Supposing the Prime Minister were to find out."

"He will soon," said the Prince. "I shall be sending him a copy of my book on the day of publication."

The King shook his head warningly. Then he smiled, a shy nervous smile. "It would be very awkward," he said slowly, "very awkward indeed, if you happened to come to the throne just now. I really don't know what Brasshay would do. But it's too late for me to begin that sort of thing—far too late now."

CHAPTER V

CHURCH AND STATE

I

All this while other swan-songs were in preparation to be forced down other throats (and thence presently to be rejected); forced with that gentle air of persuasion which rears its lying front over all forms of "peaceful picketing." Starvation and stuffing were the two methods to be employed.

While the Government was picketing the King with threats of withdrawal from office, and the Labor Party the Government with threats of a national strike, the Government was preparing to picket the Bishops by a process of forcible feeding—a plethora of their own kind be thrust upon them—of their own kind but of a very different persuasion. And now at last the Bishops understood that the doubling of their dioceses was but a device of Machiavellian subtlety for the halving of their temporalities.

The Bishops had just opened their holy mouths to protest when the approach of the Jubilee festivities shut them up. The Church of Jingalo was on a tight and established footing, and had to conform to the commercial, conventional, and constitutional requirements of its day; for you cannot, if you are by law established, play fast and loose with those institutions on which a nation bases its prosperity. So even when the Government proposed the creation of demi-mondain bishops, and the setting up of what amounted to a second establishment in the upper chamber of its spiritual spouse, the outward proprieties were still observed, and the sanctities of national interests respected. It is true that the Bishop of Olde, lifting from his bed a burden of ninety years, climbed up into the central pulpit of his diocese to preach a sermon which was ecstatically applauded by all Churchmen, and committed thereafter to the keeping of a carefully selected few. It won for him the affectionate nickname of "Never-say-die" and put his followers into a hole from which they never afterwards emerged. And so the Bishops entered into the loyal silence of the Jubilee truce with a flush of conscious rectitude upon their faces; while behind closed doors the Prime Minister and the Primate Archbishop of Ebury had met to talk business, to drive conditional bargains, and to kill time till such other time as seemed good to them.

They met at the town-residence of the one Bishop of the Establishment who had lent a favorable ear to the Prime Minister's proposals. Boycotted by his brother Bishops this solitary pelican in piety was still on terms of official acquaintance with his titular head. Placing his well-stored nest at the disposal of the two combatants, he retired for a discreet week-end into the wilderness; and the Prime Minister and the Archbishop, after announcing in the press that they also had gone elsewhere, came together by appointment for the indication of ultimatums and the fixing of dates when ju-jitsu was to commence.

When the Prime Minister arrived his Grace the Primate, attended by his chaplain, was already in the house. An ecclesiastical butler carried word to the chaplain, and the chaplain carried it to the oratory.

The Archbishop finished his prayer; it served the double purpose of strengthening him in his resolve to present a firm front that for the time being could do no harm, and of keeping his opponent waiting. The effect did not quite come off. Under that enforced attendance, the Prime Minister had turned his back on the door, and wrapt in contemplation of the book-shelves stood as though unaware that the Primate had made his state entry. It was a pity that he should have missed it.

The Archbishop came into the room bearing in his hands a large Bible, subscribed for and presented to him by a general assembly of Church clergy and laity when the constitutional crisis first began to loom large. It was fitting, therefore, that it should now accompany him to the field of battle. Corners of silver scrollwork, linked together by bands and clasps of the same metal, adorned its surface, and over the glowing red of its Venetian leather binding, lambs, lions, eagles, doves, and pelicans stood lucently embossed, bearing upon their well-drilled shoulders the sacred emblems and mottoes of the ecclesiastical party. More important and more central than these showed the proud heraldic bearings of the metropolitan see of Ebury, crowned with a miter which its occupant never wore, and a Cardinal's hat for which he was no longer qualified.

All these collective sources of inspiration the Archbishop bore in monstrant fashion with hands raised and crossed, and, moving to the strategic position he had previously selected, set down upon the table before him. While thus designing his way he exchanged formal salutation with his antagonist.

"And now, sir," said he, bowing himself to a seat, "now I am entirely at your disposal."

"And I at yours," said the Prime Minister.

But the Archbishop corrected him. "I am here, I take it, rather to be informed of the latest novelties in statecraft than to admit that any fresh standpoint upon our side has become possible." Slowly and solemnly he rested his hands upon the presentation volume as he spoke; across that barrier, representative of the spiritual forces at his back, his small diplomatic eyes twinkled with holy zeal. He was an impressive figure to look at, and also to hear: over six feet in height, with dark hair turned silver, of a ruddy complexion, portly without protuberance, and with a voice of modulated thunder that could fill with ease, twice in one day, even the largest of his cathedrals. As a concession to the world he wore flat side-whiskers, as a concession to the priestly office he shaved his lip. By this compromise he was able to wear a cope without offense to the Evangelicals,—his whiskers saving him from the charge of extreme views. Under his rule, largely perhaps because of those whiskers, peace had settled upon the Church; and in consequence it now presented an almost united front to its political opponents.

All his life he had been accustomed to command. Even in the nursery, as the eldest child and only son of his parents, he had ruled his five sisters with that prescriptive mastery which sex and primogeniture confer. At school he had pursued his career of disciplinarian first as "dowl-master," then as captain of teams, then as prefect with powers of the rod over senior boys his superiors in weight. Continuing at the University to excel in games, he became at twenty-four a class-master in Jingalo's most famous public school. Marrying at thirty a lady of title, he acquired the social touch necessary for his completion, and five years later was appointed Head. Left a disconsolate widower at the age of forty-seven, he drew dignity from his domestic affliction, received a belated call to the ministry, took orders, and became Master of Pentecost, only on the distinct understanding that a bishopric of peculiar importance as a stepping-stone to higher things should be his at the next vacancy. The vacancy occurred without any undue delay; and from that bishopric, after three years of successful practice, he passed at the age of fifty-five to the crowning grace of his present position. Thence he was able to look back over a long vista of things successfully done and heads deferentially bowed to his sway—deans, canons, priests, sisters—a pattern training for a humble servant of that Master whose Cross, as by law established, he was now helping to bear. Even the Prime Minister, facing him with all his parliamentary majority at his back, knew him for a redoubtable opponent. This fight had long ago been foreseen by the Church party, and it was for the fighting policy he now embodied that Dr. Chantry had received nine years previously his "call" from collegiate to sacerdotal office. A large jeweled cross gleamed upon his breast, and a violet waistcoat that buttoned out of sight betokened the impenetrable resolution of his priestly character.

"And now, sir, I am at your disposal," said he; and sat immovable while the Prime Minister spoke.

II

The Prime Minister's argument ran upon material and mathematical lines; he imported no passion into the discussion,—there was no need. He had at his disposal all that was requisite—the parliamentary majority, the popular mandate, and, so he believed, the necessary expedient under the Constitution for bringing the Church to heel. Episcopalianism no longer commanded a majority of the nation; Church endowments had therefore become the preserves of a minority, and scholarship by remaining denominational was getting to be denationalized. Having laid down his premises he proceeded to set forth his demands. Henceforth the Universities were to be released from Church control, all collegiate and other educational appointments to be open and unsectarian, scholarships and fellowships, however exclusive the intentions of their pious founders, were to follow in the same course; degrees of divinity were to be granted irrespective of creed, and chairs of theology open to all comers.

At this point the Archbishop, who had hitherto sat silent, put in a word.

"That will include Buddhists and Mohammedans. Is such your intention?"

The Prime Minister corrected himself. "I should, of course, have said 'all who profess themselves Christians.'"

The Archbishop accepted the concession with an ironical bow.

"Unitarians and Roman Catholics?"

"That would necessarily follow."

"I am ceasing to be amazed," said his Grace coldly. "We, the custodians of theological teaching, are to admit to our endowments the two extremes of heresy and of schism."

"If both are admitted," suggested the Prime Minister, "will they not tend to correct each other? We study history by allowing all sides to be stated, and we admit to its chair both schools, the scientists and the rhetoricians. Why, then, should not theology be studied on the same broad lines?"

"Will the chair of theology become a more stable institution," inquired the Archbishop, "by being turned into a see-saw?"

The Prime Minister smiled on the illustration, but his answer was edged with bitterness.

"That is a way of securing some movement at all events," he remarked caustically.

"The Church," retorted his Grace, "denies the need of such movement. Her firm foundations—we have scriptural warrant for saying—are upon rock. She is neither a traveling menagerie, a swingboat, nor a merry-go-round."

"Yet I have heard," said the Prime Minister, "that she takes a ship to be her symbol, and one, in particular, very specially designed to be a traveling menagerie—containing all kinds both clean and unclean."

"The unclean," said the Archbishop, "were by divine dispensation placed in a decisive minority."

"Yet they shared, I suppose, the provisions of the establishment?"

"They did not, I imagine, sit down at the table with the patriarch and his family."

"Perhaps the dogs ate of the crumbs?"

"It is not 'crumbs' that you are seeking," said the Archbishop with asperity. "From our chairs of theology we dispense to the Church the bread of wisdom from which she draws sustenance; and you ask us to let that source of her intellectual life become infected with microbes,—at a time when latitudinarian doctrines are sapping the unity of the Church and weakening her discipline, to allow their establishment as a principle in our centers of learning and in our seats of divinity! What claim to denounce heresy and schism will be left to the Church if in her very government heretics and schismatic teachers receive posts of influence, emolument, and authority? To what extremes may not the minds of our students be led, to what destruction of ecclesiastical discipline?"

"If you will admit free teaching in the Universities," explained the Prime Minister, "we shall not seek to touch your theological seminaries, or to invade your orders by an infusion of fresh blood."

"Invade our orders?" cried the Primate. "That you cannot do; no Bishop's hands would bestow them!" and he drew back his own with a declamatory gesture. "You yourself are not a Churchman, and you do not perhaps know what to us the Church means. We hold in sacred trust the power of the Keys—if we surrender those we surrender everything."

"They are in a good many hands already," remarked the Prime Minister blandly. "Episcopal power is not limited to the Church of Jingalo." And then for the first time, as a pawn in the political game, the Archimandrite was mentioned. The Archbishop could not believe his ears. "You would not dare," he said.

"I am sorry," replied the other, "that you should be under any such misapprehension. Let me remind you that only a year ago you yourself recommended him for an honorary benefice—a church that had not a parish."

"Yes, honorary; not with administrative powers."

"Yet I fancy it was devised in order that at a later date you might employ him—merely by accident as it were—for confirming the validity of your orders."

"While your device," said the Archbishop, "is to use him as a means for placing schismatics in a position of control and authority. Sir, I say to you that you would not dare. The nation will not allow it."

"Time will show," replied the other smoothly.

"Ah!" cried the Archbishop passionately; "you trust to time; I to the power of the Eternal. If such an attempt is made to violate the body of our Mother Church then I pronounce sentence of excommunication upon all who take part in it."

"It would have no legal effect," said the Prime Minister. "You miss the point in dispute. We have not to discuss matters of faith and doctrine, but only of government. If you prefer—if you will give us your co-operation and consent—we are ready at any time to offer you the alternative of disestablishment. It is a solution which for the moment I do not press; but undoubtedly it would leave the spiritualities of the Church more free. Your real fear, I have gathered, is that it would prepare the way for extremes of doctrine, which you yourself cannot countenance. The Church Triumphant, I am told, would run the risk of a larger recognition than is allowed to it under present forms; and the limitations imposed by a State connection are your most hopeful means of retarding doctrinal development. Is not that so?"

"We have not to discuss matters of doctrine," countered the Archbishop stiffly, "but only of government. Our concern is not with the Church's teachings but with her powers for enforcing them upon her own members."

"Including," commented the Prime Minister, "what you have called 'the power of the Keys.' That power you seek to extend over temporalities to which we claim access; and to retain it you have in the past used political means; we are using them to deprive you of that power. I recognize that had your Grace occupied to-day the position of advantage which is now mine, you would have used it—and with justification—for the strengthening of your order; from the popular verdict you would have had authority to deliver sentence against me. Upon the same ground I now take the only sure means that are open to me to strengthen my own order and to safeguard its future liberty."

"What is your order?" smoothly inquired his Grace.

"My order is the representative system, which voices the popular will."

"Mine," said the Archbishop in richly reverberating tones, "is divine revelation, which voices the will of God."

"You claim a closer acquaintance with that Authority than I," remarked the Prime Minister. "Yet I, too, have faith in the efficacy of its workings."

"We base our faith differently," retorted his Grace. "I have my principles; you, as you have just boasted, have your opportunity. I do not think that opportunities are of the same eternal character as principles. To-morrow your opportunity which now seems to give you power, may disappear. My principles will remain."

"I shall always respect them, in their proper place. As an adornment to the Church I am sure they will continue to shine. In the State they have become an excrescence and an impediment."

"You are pushing your definition of impediments rather far when you plan a new thoroughfare, giving strangers the entrée to church premises."

"It is really your definition of 'premises,'" said the Prime Minister, "over which we are chiefly at issue. What right has the Church to regard as strangers any who are baptized Christians?"

The Archbishop seized his advantage exultingly. "I will only remind you," said he, "of the Church Government Act—a measure of no ancient date—by which Parliament forced the Church to expel from benefice those who would not accept her discipline in matters of outward observance. You yourself voted for that measure."

The Prime Minister had to acknowledge the stroke; but he made light of it. "I think that measure has already become obsolete. It was not put very thoroughly into practice even at the beginning."

"Let Parliament, then, admit its error," said the Archbishop, "and abolish the act and the principle which it enshrines before proceeding with other acts diametrically opposed to it. While the law claims a hold over the Church, the Church claims to hold by existing law."

"I may possibly, then, satisfy your Grace," insinuated the Premier, "if presently I propose the restoration of certain Free Church ministers by episcopal consecration to the fold from which they were expelled."

The Archbishop rose to his feet, and raising the presentation Bible high over his head brought it down upon the table with a bang. Then instantaneously conceiving his mistake, he laid his hands over it in the act of blessing.

"Never!" he said firmly and solemnly, with ever deepening inflection of tone, "never! never!"

"It is a measure that might be avoided," conceded the Prime Minister. "The alternative is before you. We have made you our offer."

"You have offered," said the Archbishop, "an alternative which I am not able to discuss. Roman Catholicism and Unitarianism in alternate doses is the price you ask us to pay. The Church of Jingalo will accept neither the Triple Crown nor an untriune Divinity as its guide." He drew himself to his full height. "That, sir, is her answer."

"So you really think," inquired the Prime Minister, "that yours and the Church's voice are one?"

"The blood of her martyrs," said the Archbishop, "has stained the very steps of that throne from which under divine Providence I am commissioned to speak with authority. I call on them to witness that never in her hour of need shall the Church surrender her divine mission to preach only pure doctrine and to defend the faith committed to the saints."

"I thought," said the Prime Minister, "that, officially at least, you did not invoke the dead."

"Sir, we have no need. Their record is our inheritance. It is they who invoke us from an imperishable past."

"Our discussion, then, seems to be at an end. We have gone back into the middle ages."

The Prime Minister, having got very much the answer he expected, here rose and began buttoning his coat. "Well, Archbishop," said he, as he thus trimmed himself to give a neat finish to the discussion, "before we part I will put the question quite frankly: Is it to be peace or war?"

"I am a servant of the Church Militant," answered his Grace.

And then they compared notes and settled dates as to when war was to be declared. Jingalo was about to exhibit to the world the continuity of her institutions, and with her mind thus carried back to ancient times modern controversy was an anachronism.

It was on those historic grounds that they arranged their armistice; but Recording Angels are more truthful than Archbishops or Prime Ministers; and the Recording Angel, having listened to their conversation, was led to set down upon his tables this notable memorandum—that on no account were popular pageantry or trade interests to be disturbed during so golden an opportunity as the Silver Jubilee. While that was going on defense of Church and State must be relegated to obscurity.

III

All this had taken place before the truce actually began (see, in fact, Chapter II). How much, or rather how little the King had heard of it we already know. How little the truce brought benefit to him we shall learn more fully in later chapters. Still for the moment he was not without comfort, for he had got Max to talk to. Every evening that they spent together much talk went on; and the King sat infected and edified while Maxian oratory flowed.

"How is it," inquired his father, "that you have been able to think of these things? I see them when you tell me; but how did they ever come to enter your head?"

"For some years," answered Max, "I had the advantage of being your youngest son. Until I was twenty, two lives stood between me and the succession, and while Stephen and Rupert were drilling I managed to get educated."

"Poor Rupert!" murmured his father, "he would have made a much better King than either of us."

"I don't think so," said Max. "He would merely have kept the monarchy to its old lines—that means sticking in a rut. If the monarchy is to mean anything it will have to move, not merely with the times but ahead of them."

"How can it move ahead of them?"

"How otherwise can it lead? That is what the heads of the privileged classes never seem to understand. Look at the Bishops! See what a spectacle they have made of themselves, all through not leading."

"Ah, yes," sighed the King; "I thought you'd be against the Bishops."

"Against them?" cried Max, "of course I'm against them! The Bishops are a set of prehistoric remains: and even if they were all up to date, a combined house of Bishops and Judges with full legislative powers is antediluvian (I'm speaking of the Deluge now in the sense in which Louis XV spoke of it)—it's an eighteenth-century arrangement.

"Yes, I'm against the Bishops, but I'm much more against the Cabinet. The Cabinet is seeking to control not only the Upper but the Lower Chamber as well, it is fighting the Bishops merely to delude the people; and there are the Laity so stupid, or so lazy, or so corrupt that they won't see it. Every one knows that the Government sells honors for party purposes, and then covers it up by pretending that contributions to the party funds are 'public services.' Everything now is to be had for a price, a Chancellery at so much, a Knighthood at so much more; an Order of the this, that, or the other, in exact proportion to its prestige or its rarity. Last year they had a debate on it in the House, a debate where, between them, the corruptors and the corrupted were in a majority! And they solemnly took a vote on it, and declared that there was no corruption, though everybody knew it to be a fact. The Opposition lay low because they mean to do exactly the same when their time comes. Oh, and it's not only the House of Laity: I daresay a bishopric has got its price if we only knew!"

The King would have rejected such a suggestion as fantastic only a month ago; but now with the Archimandrite in his mind he began to be suspicious. What price, monetary or political, might not the Free Churchmen be paying for their bishoprics, what secret bargain of which it was no one's duty to inform him? He lashed at his own impotence, for the ignominy of his position increased with his growing consciousness. Here was the Prime Minister respectful but compulsive, able to threaten, to browbeat, to dictate terms; but he himself had no counter means to extract from that minister on what terms he was consenting to do these things or what price he was paying to get them done. How constitutionally was he to obtain knowledge of anything? And still, piling up the accusation, the voice of Max went on.

"I presume," said he, "that quite lately a list of Jubilee honors has been submitted to you for approval. What does your approval mean? Is a single one of them your own selection? Do you know what the majority of them are for?"

The King shook his head. "Mostly they are political," said he. "The Government has the right; I have no call to interfere. Isn't it perhaps better that I should not interfere?"

"It may be arguable, sir, that the uncomfortably high position to which we are born cuts us off from the more strenuously fermenting issues of the political game, and from the malignities and hypocrisies of that party system of which, as a nation, we pretend to be so proud, and are secretly so much ashamed. It may be well that some single authority should stand removed from and above party, if in the hands of that authority there is also left power of sentence and dismissal, power also to withhold unmerited reward. But that power you are no longer expected to exercise,—it lies like a china nest-egg never to be hatched, but only to promote the laying of other eggs.

"Yet while your prerogatives have been thus diminished, the claim that you shall act with judicial impartiality has increased, and has become a fetter. To oppose any course of ministerial action to-day is by implication to ally yourself with the other side. You are in the position of a judge whose directions the jury has authority to ignore, and from whose hands all power of imposing a penalty has practically been withdrawn. And these changes have been thrust upon the monarchy by the will, not of the people, but of that class or section which in the evolution of our political system happened at the time to be the ruling one. At one period it was the Church, at another the army, at another the landlord or the capitalist; it was never that latent force lying in the future, that peace-loving, industrial democracy which to-day we are still striving to hold back from its aim. These ruling powers of the past have now concentrated on the Cabinet as their last line of defense; and so at the present day it is the Cabinet which has the largest control not only of patronage (much of it corruptly applied), but of certain penalizing devices by which monetary pressure can be brought upon those who thwart its will. By its practical usurpation of the Crown's right to decree a general election, and by its control of the party funds, from which parliamentary candidates are subsidized and assisted to the poll, it is able to hold over the heads of its supporters a financial threat to which very few can remain indifferent. And this is how our so-called popular chamber is manipulated and run. The power of the purse (I speak now of the moneys voted for public service) lies almost entirely in the hands of those who themselves have the largest monetary interest for keeping away from their constituencies and maintaining their leaders in power; and as a consequence the Ministry's evasion of all regulations and safeguards, its increasing seizure of parliamentary time, its postponement of finance to a date in each session when the legislature's energies are exhausted, have become more and more corrupt in character. Why, the very minister whose duty it is to see that members are constant in their voting and their attendance is the one with whom lies, if not the distribution of patronage, at least its recommendation. He is the go-between, and they know it. How likely, then, are the rank and file to throw their Government out of office when the immediate result will be not only to transfer these bribes to the hands of their political opponents but to inflict upon themselves the cost of a contested election which privately they cannot afford, and to face which they are accordingly obliged to go, cap in hand, to the very men they have voted from power, but who still have absolute control of the party organization and its funds?"

Here Max stopped to take breath.

IV

"But can you suggest any other way?" questioned the King. "Surely we must have party?"

"I have no reason to suggest it," answered his son, "it stands written in history. Under our more ancient Constitution the House of Laity came pledged from its electorate to criticise, and to control (by the giving or withholding of supply) the acts of a separate and administratively independent body. Now Government is carried on by an administrative body, which, though nominally dependent, has at its back a majority of the elected pledged not to criticise. And the difference between the two systems is as the difference between darkness and light. That body is now forcing the monarchy also into the same non-critical attitude, or at least is securing that the criticism shall be impotent of result. And I have the right, sir, to ask what are you doing to-day to preserve for me the powers which you inherited?"

"To tell you the truth, my son," answered the King, "it is only lately that I have begun trying to find out what those powers are. It seems a strange confession to make after twenty-five years; but it is true. When I came to the throne, at a moment of great political changes, I was entirely uninstructed and quite naturally I made mistakes, letting things go when I was told to. From that false position successive ministries have never allowed me to escape; they have kept me (I have only just found it out) as uninstructed as they possibly could. They burden me with routine work, they busy my hands while starving my brain. One of their little ways—done on the score of relieving me of unnecessary trouble—has been to submit in large batches at intervals important documents requiring my assent, smuggling them in under cover of others. And when I find it out, they plead unavoidable delay and urgency, as though it were quite an exception. But I tell you it has been going on, oh, dear me, yes, for a long time now; and the General has known of it as well as any of them! The other day I made one of my secretaries go through the entries, and I find that in the last year I signed sixty Acts of Parliament and about fifteen hundred other State documents, besides mere commissions, titles, diplomas, and all that sort of thing, and I tell you that I haven't a ghost of a notion of what more than a dozen were about! They don't give me time to digest anything; and you are quite right, it's a system!"

"Well," said his son, "at least they don't treat you much worse than they do the people's representatives. It has become their regular plan now to bring in six bills all rolled into one, in a form far too big and complicated ever to be properly discussed. They insert a lot of unnecessary contentiousness at the beginning, and all the really administrative part—the machinery which provides them with political handles throughout the country, and which they call the non-contentious part—at the end; and then—on the score of it being non-contentious, and because by the time they get to it the mind of the legislature is exhausted—then they shut it down with the closure. One result is that we have laws on the statute-book which don't even make grammar. Only last session the Minister of Education got a bill sent up to the Spiritual Chamber with three split infinitives in it."

"What is a split infinitive?" inquired his Majesty.

"Merely a grammatical error for which in your day school-boys used to be whipped. You were not. It's important, because when lawyers get on to the interpretation of the law, loose syntax gives them their opportunity; they make fortunes out of the grammatical errors of Parliament. And, of course, it was a lawyer who drew up this bill."

"Do you mean that some one paid him to put in the split infinitives?" inquired the King anxiously.

"That was quite unnecessary; the thing paid for itself; good drafting is never to the legal interest. But what I wanted to say was this: here, in a House of educated men dealing with education, nobody troubled to correct the grammar of the thing. That to my mind stands out as a moral portent of the first magnitude. The Bishops quite rightly sent it back again, but for the wrong reason. Their reason was pure blind obscurantism; if they had returned it because of its split infinitives and its slovenly drafting, and requested that it should be put into decent Jingalese so that they might pretend to understand it they would have had all the enlightened educationalists in the country with them. As it was they were against them. It is curious how the Spiritual Chamber always seeks its popularity among the fools instead of the wise. It treats democracy like a dog with a bad name, and yet it is to the dog's tail that it pins its faith: and so it wags with the tail."

The King was not happy at hearing the Bishops so abused; and now a word had fallen from his son's lips which enabled him to change the subject to a point which more immediately concerned him.

"Max," said he, "answer me truly, I don't want flattery. Do you think that I am popular?"

The young man viewed his father leniently, indulgently even; the worn, fussy, over-anxious face appealed to his sense of pity. "Oh, yes, I believe so," he said. "They think you are trying to do your best and all that sort of thing. You don't enthuse them as my grandfather used to do; but, then, he had the grand manner, and the grand way of speaking as if he were an oracle. You have put all that aside—except when you make speeches which have been written for you by your ministers. Well, decent people respect you for it; but it has its drawbacks; the crowd prefers the other thing occasionally;—it likes still to pretend, at moments of ceremony, that it believes in divine right and the hereditary principle, and so forth; and where it likes to pretend, the press and the Government are always ready to play into its hands. Yes; it's a mixture; you must attend sometimes to the unrealities,—then, with your real moments, you get your effect."

"Your grandfather," said the King, "never talked to me about anything. He didn't like the idea of being succeeded, hated to think of a time when affairs would have to go on without him. I fancy that he rather despised my mental capacity, or else thought that by just looking at him I should learn. So he never talked to me—not on these subjects I mean; and I am still not sure whether I ought to talk to you. I don't really know where State secrets begin and where they end, or whether I have the right to say anything of what goes on in Council to a single living soul. I wanted to consult the Archbishop the other day—merely to hear his statement of the case from his own side—but I was not allowed. I am the most solitary man in my kingdom; and am kept so, in order that I may remain powerless."

"As Charlotte would say," observed Max, "we haven't taught each other the business. And yet, isn't it strange? Here are we, a long-established firm ('limited, entire,' I suppose we should describe ourselves), existing upon the hereditary principle, and yet not allowed to extract any of its living values. As detached forces we succeed each other upon the throne, each in turn reduced in power and initiative by our official training and our inexperience. When shall we learn to organize our labor and combine like the rest of the world?"

"I think we are combining now," said the King.

"Yes," said Max, "I really believe we are—'John Jingalo and Son'—how nice and commercial that sounds!"

"I only hope the Prime Minister won't hear of it."

"I hope he will," said Max.

CHAPTER VI

OF THINGS NOT EXPECTED

I

"Charlotte!" cried the King, aghast, "what on earth is the meaning of this?"

"What is it, papa?" inquired the Princess innocently.

His Majesty shook at her the paper he had just been reading. "You have promised a hundred pounds donation to the Anti-vivisection Society! Here it is in large headlines: 'The Princess Royal supports the Anti-vivisectionists!'"

"Well, so I do."

"But you mustn't," said her mother.

Princess Charlotte made a face—rather a pretty one.

"I can't help having my opinions, mamma."

"Then you mustn't express them—not publicly."

"If I am not to express them," argued the Princess, "why do you send me into public at all? Isn't laying foundation-stones and opening bazaars a public expression of opinion? Don't I go because you approve of them?"

"That is a very different matter," said her mother. "Good objects like those no one can possibly object to."

"But I think anti-vivisection a good object."

"I don't care what you think," said her father, "you are perfectly free to think as you like. What I want to know is—who do you suppose is going to pay that hundred pounds?"

"You are, papa." She smiled on him sweetly.

"Indeed, your father will do nothing of the sort!" interposed the Queen, while the King was still opening his mouth in wonder at the suggestion.

"If he will only make me an allowance, he needn't," said Charlotte; and while her parents were giving weight to that pronouncement she went on.

"I am going to promise a hundred pounds to every deserving charity you send me to; and if you leave off sending me, I shall write and offer it. It will be in all the papers—it will become the recognized thing—people will begin to look for it,—me and my hundred pounds. And as soon as it is the recognized thing, you know quite well, papa, that you will have to pay."

"Why do you disapprove of vivisection?" inquired her father, finding this frontal attack unmanageable.

"Just a fellow-feeling, I suppose, through being myself a victim. Oh, I don't say there's any torture involved, but now and again mamma gives me an anesthetic, and when I wake up I find something has been done that I don't like—something vital taken off me."

"Nonsense!" said the Queen, "I never do anything of the kind."

But this statement corresponded so startlingly to his Majesty's own experience that he began to pay closer attention.

"When have I done it?" demanded the Queen.

"The last time was when you sent me to spend three weeks with Aunt Sophie in order to develop a taste for foreign missions. It didn't succeed. And when I came back you had changed my suite of rooms without asking me; and I was done out of my balcony!"

"I found her," the Queen explained, "going down by the balcony in the early morning, while the gardeners were still about, to gather flowers."

"I didn't talk to the gardeners."

"You went out when I told you not to."

"You see!" appealed Charlotte, "she does vivisect me. Last time Aunt Sophie was the anesthetic: sometimes it's even worse. You don't hear of these things, papa, because I don't often complain; but there they are. And mamma is so pleased with herself about it—that's what tries me!"

"Charlotte," said her father, "that's not pretty—that's not respectful."

"No, but it's true."

The Queen attempted a diversion. "Why do you want an allowance? I give you pocket-money, and you get all the dresses you need."

"I get a great many more," admitted Charlotte; "but I don't get one that I really like."

"That shows your want of taste."

"Of course, I haven't your taste, mamma, you can't expect it; and what's too good for me doesn't suit me."

But this obliquity of speech missed its point, for of her own taste the Queen had no doubt whatever.

"But, my dear child," interposed the King, "do try to be reasonable! Whatever allowance we made you, you couldn't go on giving a hundred pounds to every charity. You'd have all the benevolent societies in the kingdom flocking about you; life wouldn't be worth living."

"Oh, I know that, papa," said the Princess, "I'm not charitable in the least. I'm only doing it to bring pressure on you; I haven't any other reason whatever."

At this brazen avowal the Queen gasped; but his Majesty became more sympathetic.

"I wanted," she went on, "to do it as nicely and respectably as possible, and I thought to give you away in charity was better than gambling or anything of that sort. Not that I haven't been tempted; for you know, papa, I could quite easily lose you a hundred pounds at every tea-party I go to. But now, if I'm asked to a bridge-table, all I can say is, 'Papa won't make me an allowance, so I can't play for money.'"

"Surely you don't say that!" cried the Queen in horror.

"No," answered the Princess slyly, "but I can say it. And, of course, I shall have to say it to the charities and the anti-vivisectionists if papa doesn't pay up. There'll be headlines about that, too," she added reflectively. "You see, I am in the business now that I've begun helping at sales."

The King got up from his seat, and began to pace the room. For the first time he had discovered in his daughter's character a resemblance to Max, and much as he was beginning to love certain mental values which his son possessed, it rather frightened him to see them cropping up in his daughter.

"Charlotte," he said, in a tone of affectionate appeal, "when have I ever denied you anything that was right and reasonable?"

"Never, dearest papa, never!" said his daughter. "And I'm sure you are not going to begin now. It's too late," she added mischievously.

Yes. It was too late. The King knew it. He had known it from the moment the discussion started. Even the Queen was beginning to know it. Charlotte, sweet, smiling, and determined, held them in the hollow of her hand. Newspaper headlines, if properly manipulated, will defeat in its own domestic circle any monarchy that is now existing.

So the long and short of it was that the King promised Charlotte her allowance; and the Queen sat by and heard, and did not object. And as the Princess passed out to follow her own avocations, whatever they might be, she gave each of her parents the nicest kiss imaginable, thanking them quite humbly for that which they had been powerless to withhold.

The King looked enviously on that bright presence as it flitted away, calm, wilful, and self-possessed; and much he wished that he could conduct his own affairs with the same gay insouciance, and emerge with as much success. Max might be able to manage it, but not he.

The Queen's voice broke in on his deliberations.

"Jack," said she, "we must get her married."

It was her Majesty's remedy for that new portent, the revolting daughter. And there and then she started to discuss ways, means, and dates for bringing the wished-for affair to a head. The dear lady was already exuberantly hopeful. A carefully selected portrait of the Hereditary Prince of Schnapps-Wasser now stood on the central table of her boudoir, and only two days ago she had spied Charlotte looking at it. A fine, adventurous figure, it stood out prominently from all the uniformed splendors surrounding it. "Who is this person in fancy costume?" Charlotte had asked, and the Queen, alive in certain fundamental instincts, had cleverly informed her that it represented one who had been driven by his musical taste to a three years' wandering in the wilderness, and who, though still sadly under a cloud, was now obliged to return to his princely duties. Charlotte did not know, as she looked with amused pity on that sunburnt visage of adventurous youth, that she was gazing on the remedy for her own ailments, nor did she or any one else guess to what surprising results the attempted application of that remedy would lead.

It was quite sufficient for the Queen's gentle lines of diplomacy that Charlotte now knew who he was, that he was presently returning to Europe, and would, on his way or soon after, present himself at the Court of Jingalo. In another quarter her Majesty was less contented, she had not yet found any one good enough for Max; and as the quest added greatly to her daily correspondence, she felt it as a burden and an anxiety, for she did not want to hear of another case of morals.

II

To the King, on the other hand, Max had become a very real and positive relief. The "Max habit" had grown and flourished exceedingly; and as this history deals largely with the mental developments of King John of Jingalo we must follow him to his hours of training and set down their record wherever we can find room for them.

His Majesty told Max of the Charlotte affair that same evening.

Max chuckled. "So Charlotte is not to disapprove of vivisection?" he commented. "How very characteristic that is of the way we have to avoid giving countenance to any movement or change of opinion till it is backed by a majority."

"Is it not our duty to avoid all matters of controversy?"

"If it is we do not act on it. There is much controversy to-day on the subject of vivisection; but that did not prevent you quite recently from bestowing a high mark of favor on its foremost exponent. What you dare not do is bestow a similar mark on one who is opposed to it. Your favors go only to those who represent a majority; minorities are carefully shut away from your ken. You are taught to believe that they are unimportant. Whereas the exact opposite is the truth; for it is always the minorities who have made history and brought about reform."

"Are you still quoting your book at me?" inquired the King.

"I am always quoting it," said Max, "or, rather, I am composing it. Yes; this is the beginning of a chapter which I am about to put together with your help and assistance."

"Make it a mild one!" entreated his father.

"I assure you, sir, that throughout I am understating the case. We have already discussed the question of a monarch's relation to the political and religious controversies of his day. Is he any more truly in contact with the national life on its intellectual side? The only occasion on which I meet at your Court any representatives of literature, or art, is when popular authors and dramatists have come among a miscellaneous gathering of pork butchers, politicians, stock-brokers, bankers, and other prosperous tradesmen to receive at your hands the now somewhat tarnished honor of knighthood. They come in a strange garb hired for the occasion, and they go again. How much have we ever troubled ourselves about the value and quality of their work, or as to why they were selected? Are they the men, think you, who will be reckoned a hundred years hence the artistic and literary giants of their day? I doubt if anybody thinks so except themselves. Is it not rather because by winning contemporary popularity they represent the trade values of their profession, something that can be made to pay, and which, when it does pay, invites public recognition and encouragement? We give small pensions to the specially deserving, I know, to save them from the extremes of poverty and ourselves from disgrace; but to those pensions do we ever add a title? No; titles are the reward of prosperity."

"But, my dear Max," said the King, "how do you expect me to judge of such things? I should only make mistakes."

"You have for your advisers," answered his son, "some twenty men drawn from all departments of life; ought you not to be able to rely on them? When you came to the throne one of our greatest literary men lay bed-ridden, dying quietly of old age. He had received a State pension, for he was poor; he was a giant whose work was done; and he had never in all his life been to Court. Did it occur to you to go and pay this old man reverence? Did it occur to any of your advisers to suggest that you should? Yet in the past kings have done these things, and history has remembered to praise them for doing it. No, sir, we are out of touch with all the really great things that are going on around us in literature and art; for whenever anything new is really great it inevitably divides opinion; and wherever opinion is sharply or at all evenly divided we are out of place. You are under exactly the same orders as those which Charlotte received from my mother—you must not go down into the garden while the gardeners are actually at work; only when they have finished you may come and gather the results. You are run by the State merely to give prestige to the established order, and you must not support things that are not already popular."

"You are mistaken, Max," said his father, in despondent protest. "Nothing whatever prevents me; only I haven't anything to take hold of."

"Yet I have been credibly informed," replied Max, "that when you go to see a so-called problem play of the more intellectual kind, it is arranged for you to go in Lent, for the simple reason that during that period of fasting it is against etiquette for the papers to make any announcement of the fact."

"You don't say so!" exclaimed the King.

"You were not aware of it, then? Yet it is all arranged for you by the Comptroller-General. Tell him that you wish to go and see The Gaudy Girl presently, on its five hundredth performance, and he will raise no difficulty whatever. Tell him that you intend to be present at a performance of Law and Order, a piece that has managed to hold on through thirty performances in spite of the many interests opposed to it, and difficulties will immediately occur to him. Your going would revive the fortunes of that play; and as it makes a very direct attack upon our present judicial system, you can have nothing to do with it. Yet I hear that as a result of its production modifications in our criminal procedure have already been discussed."

"Max," said the King, "you are quite unfair! Our last State performance was of a play that attacked the very things you are always talking about, money-lending, gambling, commercial greed, and the rest of it; and it was the Comptroller-General himself who selected it."

"There!" exulted Max, "now you have given me an example, and I will tell you what happened. You had as your guest the king of a country possessing a real school of drama which is affecting the whole of the European stage. What did we do in his honor and for the honor of our dramatic literature? We chose a play of sixty years ago—our worst period—a piece of clever bombastic fustian mildewed with age; and we chose it merely because it contained the greatest possible number of small 'effective' parts in which 'star' actors could strut across the stage, make their bow before an extremely distinguished audience, and speak their lines in the ears of royalty as the accepted representatives of modern drama. And how they did speak them! How they clung to their entries and exits, how they gassed, and gagged, and threw in fresh 'business' to extend the all too brief time of their appearing; and what an abysmally boring performance the whole thing was! Over a score of these leading actors and actresses had appeared in a similar gala performance on the occasion of your coronation, twenty-five years ago. Most of them are now living on their past reputations, but they have become established; and so that woeful exhibition of utterly used-up material was royalty's public recognition of drama in this country! There, then, you have our connection with art! What good do you suppose we do by countenancing performances like that? We are merely employed to flatter the popular choice and to fatten out the drama in its most commercial connection. All that was done to suit the managers. It gave a pleasant little fillip to the star-system on which most of our theaters are now run; every theater contributed its quota and secured its proportion of reward."

"I was under the impression that they all gave their services."

"Just as you gave yours. You were all busily engaged in making each other popular, and in maintaining your prestige; and you were all very well paid for your trouble."

"But what else do you expect me to do?" exclaimed the unhappy monarch irritably. "All this destructive criticism of yours is so easy; but what does it lead to? Nothing!"

"Revolution," declared Max, "peaceful, bloodless revolution! Whenever any matter is submitted to you over which you have control and a deciding voice, do the unexpected, and you will nearly always be right! That is the biggest revolution in this unwritten Constitution of ours that I can suggest. Do it, and then watch the results."

"But, for instance, do what?"

"Well, go for a beginning to the very plays your Comptroller refrains from recommending or tries to dissuade you from. Oh, you won't come upon anything shocking; quite the reverse. That play, The Gaudy Girl, which I spoke of just now, is about to be revived in a new form—with additions. No doubt it will draw enormously; and as a fortune has been spent on it you would do a popular thing by attending the first performance. It is a risky and indecent piece, but no one will object, on that score, to its receiving the royal patronage."

"How possibly can it be indecent," protested the King, "when it has already run for five hundred nights at one of our leading theaters?"

Max smiled. "Father," he said, "in all your life have you ever once been in a crowd—formed part of it, I mean? Well, then, how can you tell? I have. There is plenty of indecency in a Jingalese crowd—especially indecent suggestion; and it is crowds the theaters have to cater for."

"Still, they have the Censor to reckon with."

"The Censor!" exclaimed Max. "Have you ever asked the Lord Functionary, who controls him, to show you the text of the plays he passes?—or gone further in order to compare them with those he does not pass? Till you have, you know nothing about the Censor's protective powers. He merely protects the existing order of things, like yourself; whatever is paying and popular it becomes his duty to countenance. Well, all that is strictly within your own department, for the supervision of the morals of the stage is still a royal prerogative outside parliamentary control. And I tell you this—that if you were to begin exercising your prerogative conscientiously you would get into more intimate touch with the popular will than would suit the calculations of your ministers. As for the Lord Functionary, he would probably resign. He might be glad of the excuse. Just now there is a considerable row on, and he finds himself in hot water. When you see him you had better ask him about it; and as he is technically the keeper of your conscience you really have a concern in the matter. What has he been doing? Oh, merely drawing the usual invidious distinction between adultery treated seriously and adultery treated as a joke. Under this latter and more popular form it is now occupying with success half the theaters in Jingalo. And if you want to see the deeps open, and understand what they contain,—well, there you have your cue: follow it! Only do that, and you will light such a candle—Ah! now I am quoting from English history; and as I am only concerned with that of Jingalo—I perceive that my present chapter has come to an end. May I take another cigar?"

III

All this time the King had sat cautiously imbibing the stimulus of his son's words. They sent a curious glow through his system; for they touched on the very point which was now daily engaging his thoughts—how, in connection with his own ministerial problem, to do the thing which Brasshay did not expect without thereby involving the prestige of the monarchy in ruin. He looked at his son, so full of self-confidence, so easy and unconcerned in the opinions of others, and very greatly he envied him.

"Max," he said slowly, "you are a very dangerous character."

And Max was flattered, as your man of words and not of deeds always is flattered when the attributes which belong by rights to his betters are ascribed to him.

Nevertheless, in this instance the epithet was well earned, for these secret potations of Max were having their effect upon the King's brain; they reproduced in facsimile the cerebral excitement which had followed upon his fall, and touching the same spot kindled in him a curious mental ardor, which sent him to his Council a different person altogether, one whom his ministers were finding it difficult to recognize and still more difficult to reconcile to their plans. Only when the effects had died down towards the end of each day did the King become himself again. Obstreperous till noon, he would then quiet down by degrees till, at six o'clock, his spirits had reached a strange nadir of depression. Had Brasshay only caught him then, in that period of reaction, he would have found him unformidable as of old; but Brasshay did not know. And then, night after night, came Max with his tangle of words and whipped him into fresh revolt.

He still carried the memory of that last conversation—that chapter which Max had composed into the echoing cavities of his brain—when he next encountered the Lord Functionary.

Certain questions of court etiquette and procedure having been disposed of: "By the way," said his Majesty, "I was told yesterday that you are being criticised—in the play department, I mean."

The Lord Functionary had been spending sleepless nights in a scrambling attempt to acquire a literary education; but his own royal master was the last person to whom he would give himself away; so he only smiled with that air of deference and self-complacence which all court officials know how to combine. "I have heard rumors of it, sir," he replied, in a tone of easy detachment.

"Who are making the complaints?"

"Certain members of Parliament, I believe. They have constituents to satisfy; and under a democracy, of course, autocrats can never do right."

"Are you the autocrat?" inquired the King.

"At your Majesty's disposal," returned the Lord Functionary with a bow.

"Then you are not responsible to Parliament?"

The Lord Functionary smiled, with a touch of disdain. "I should not be holding office if I were," said he.

"Then you are not under the Prime Minister, either?"

"No more than your Majesty," said the magnificent one blandly. "In the order of precedence I am, indeed, several degrees above him. It is, of course, a Government appointment; but while I hold it my discretionary powers are unlimited."

This seemed a very great person, and the King looked on him with envy.

"To whom, then, are you actually responsible?" he inquired.

"To you, sir."

"To me alone?"

"My official title would make it indecent for me to consult any one but your Majesty."

"Ah, yes, you keep my conscience for me, don't you?" said the King. Max was right, then; here was something still left for him to do. He addressed himself to the previous question.

"What exactly is the trouble?"

"A self-advertising minority, sir, has been persistently submitting plays which it was quite out of the question to pass. Being annoyed, they are now attacking the plays which have passed."

"I should like," said the King, "to see some of these plays; to be in touch, if I may so put it, with my own conscience. Would you be good enough to send me three of those you have not passed, and three of the others which are now being attacked. I would like also," he added, "to see The Gaudy Girl in its new version."

The Lord Functionary raised his pale eyebrows.

"May I be allowed to know why, sir?" he inquired.

"Just curiosity," said the King. "I thought of going to see it, and I wanted first to be sure that there was nothing—nothing, you know——"

The Lord Functionary's face became wreathed in smiles.

"Why, certainly, sir. I will see that a copy is sent to your Majesty at once. It is, of course, work of a very light and frivolous kind—but it is popular and it does no harm." Then, as by an after-thought, the official countenance grew grave. "Was her Majesty also intending to be present?" he inquired.

The King, discerning that a negative was invited, gave the required assurance. "As a matter of fact," said he, "it was the Prince who asked me to go—suggested it, that is to say." And immediately official confidence was restored, for to the Lord Functionary Max as a reformer was still unknown, while his taste for frivolous diversion was more easily assumed. And so in due course a copy of the play reached the King's hands.

Perhaps it was through mere inadvertence that the other six did not accompany it. The King noted the omission; but when once he started to read the single play which had reached him he forgot all about the others, for he found that his hands were full. At one stroke of the scythe he had reaped a plentiful harvest.

Here was a play on the very eve of production, reeking with the sniggering improprieties which the keeper of the King's conscience had permitted to become the popular vogue. Suggestions and innuendoes to which the ordinary theater-going public had now grown accustomed, struck his inexperienced Majesty as bold and glaring novelties. The mere cheapness of the wit he passed uncritically by, but the indecencies were so bare and bald that even he, with all his innocence and inexperience, could not fail to understand them. The explanation, of course, was easy; this new version of an old and accepted play had received the official sanction through oversight. Providence had sent him to the rescue in the nick of time; and delighted to have found something which his hand really could do, he took up the blue pencil and set to work.

Snatches of dialogue, half lines of lyric—especially when it came to the last verse—here, there, and everywhere he scored them through with a ruthless hand; and with a renewed sense of usefulness, and a conscience well at ease, he returned the much deleted copy to the Lord Functionary.

Before long that official visited him, presenting a grave countenance. He was by no means enthusiastic over the royal handiwork; the production was about to take place; the play had already practically been licensed—silence up to so late a moment having virtually given consent; and—most difficult point of all—these things which the King was now ruling out had almost all of them been in the previously accepted version.

"Then I suppose," said his Majesty, "that nobody really reads the plays?"

"Oh, yes, sir, they are always read," corrected the Lord Functionary, "but our readers have necessarily to go upon certain lines. They are guided by precedent and custom, which it would be highly inadvisable to disturb."

So he pleaded that the status quo ante might prevail; and yet, man to man, he could not defend what the King showed him.

"Could you," inquired his Majesty indignantly, "read such things aloud to your own family? Could you comfortably, if I called upon you to do so, read them aloud to me?"

"The drama," explained the Lord Functionary, "is so different from anything else; it has not to observe the same conventions. In light comedy, especially, these things really do not count. People never trouble to think about them—they mean nothing."

"In that case," said the King, "no one will mind your cutting them out."

The Lord Functionary seemed not so sure,—his assurance went, in fact, in quite an opposite direction. He pleaded hard for the trade interests which he stood to represent. The play was in an advanced state of rehearsal; many thousands had been spent upon it; and, seeing that it was but a revival, no doubt about the new version passing had existed anywhere.

But to all his entreaties the King remained adamant.

"In this matter," said he, "you have to consult my conscience."

The point could not be further argued.

"It is very unfortunate," said the Lord Functionary in acid tones.

"I must insist," said his Majesty, "that you see to these omissions being made." And the Lord Functionary bowed his pained body over the hand which the King graciously extended.

"Your Majesty must be obeyed," said he.

It was a phrase that the King very seldom heard; it gave him a taste of power.

"Max," said he to his son, upon their next meeting, "I have been doing as you advised. And I do believe you are right."

"What did I advise?" inquired Max, assuming forgetfulness.

"That I should 'do a bust' was, I think, your expression; something unexpected."

"And how have you done it?"

"I have censored The Gaudy Girl."

Max whistled.

IV

The sibilations of that whistle were prophetic of atmospheric disturbance to come. In a week the storm broke.

The King happened to be away, paying a visit of complimentary inspection to frontier fortresses and heard nothing about it. But on his return Max came to him charged with tidings.

He stood over his father and looked at him with a note of satirical approval in his eye, which did not inspire the King with any confidence.

"Sir, do you know what you have done?"

His Majesty denied the impeachment. "I haven't done anything. Not yet."

"You have revolutionized the drama! Even now, at this very moment, the great heart of Jingalo is throbbing from plushed stalls to gallery stair-rail. Because of you The Gaudy Girl is playing its third night to an accompaniment of hilarious riot and uproar such as have not been known in our dramatic world since the public was forced to give up its right to free sittings."

The King was startled; some alarm crept into his voice. "Do you mean that I have done harm?"

"Not in the least; no, quite the reverse. But you have certainly doubled the play's fortune. The run is going to be tremendous."

His Majesty felt flattered; had he not reason? For this surely must mean that he had rightly interpreted the public taste, and that what the popular will really wanted was a pure and carefully expurgated drama.

But Max speedily undeceived him.

"What happened," said he, "is this. The Lord Functionary obeyed your orders, and less than a week ago word went to the management, happily engaged with its finishing touches to the play. Your share in the business, of course, was not mentioned; your cuttings had become the official act of the department. What that meant, you can perhaps hardly conceive. Here was popular musical comedy censored as it had never been censored before. Time was too short for negotiation; besides the whole thing was too drastic for half measures to be of any avail. Dullness, decorum, and disaster stared the management in the face. Suddenly perceiving that its strength lay in submission, it accepted the situation like a man, and in all Jingalo to-day, no hand is raised for the censorship. You have given it the coup de grâce—it will have to go; for you have enlisted the managers—the trade interest against it."

"I?" exclaimed the King.

"Its moral position, as I told you," went on his son, "had recently been shaken by the attacks of the intellectuals—a camp, however, so much in the minority that hitherto its hostility has not been seriously regarded. But now Jingalese drama, as a great commercial enterprise, an interest wherein hundreds of thousands of pounds are yearly invested, has been touched on the raw, and Jingalese drama has risen and shaken itself in wrath. The press, which depends on it for advertisement, has, of course, rushed to its assistance, and condemnation of the censorship now figures in stupendous headlines on all the posters. Leading articles, interviews, and indignation meetings are the order of the day; I wonder you can have missed them."

"I have been busy with other things," explained the King.

"Well, if you are not too busy to-night, I invite you to come and see your handiwork."

"I can hardly do that," said the King, "under the circumstances—if, as you say, there is disturbance going on."

"It is disturbance of a very unanimous kind," said the Prince; "the public is enjoying itself thoroughly. Did I not the other day advise you to reach out a fearless hand to democracy? Well, you have done so; and the dear, good beast has given you its paw."

"I don't think I can go."

"Then you will never understand. But, indeed, sir, I think that you should. I have taken a box under a private name and we can go unobserved; the play has already begun; and if you will keep to the back no one will know that you are there. Besides it is Lent, a season when the incognito of your visits becomes a recognized rule. Do you think you are justified in missing so vivid an interpretation of the popular will?"

The King's hesitation ended. "I suppose I must go on doing the unexpected," said he, "now that I have once begun."

"You could not make a better rule," said Max.

And so, quite unexpectedly, and to the extreme bewilderment of a detective force taken suddenly by surprise, the King found himself in the theater where performance number three of The Gaudy Girl was going on.

The house was packed, tumultuous, and excited. As he entered the sheltering gloom of the box his Majesty recognized the words of the play, remembered, too, that a censored passage lay close ahead. It came.

A sumptuously bosomed figure stepped into the limelight and sang. In the second verse she threw out a rhyme that seemed to clamor for its pair—threw it out as the angler throws out his fly for the fish that is sure to rise. The King held his breath as the blue-penciled passage drew near. The voice quavered and broke; singer and orchestra stopped dead. The house roared. "Go on!" cried encouraging voices from gallery and pit. "Go on! Go on!" And the singer thus emboldened, and accompanied by one small piping flute, a ridiculous starveling of sound after all the blare that had preceded it, sang with a modest and deprecating air a line which fell very flat indeed—a mere nothing tagged from a nursery rhyme—obviously an importation. Stalls, pit, and gallery rocked and shouted with laughter. "Try again!" roared the crowd; and with small, frightened mimminy-pimminy tones the singer tried again. This time a snippet from the national anthem served her turn—but it was no good, the audience would have none of it; in a crescendo of uproarious demand it invited her to try again. Patient as a cat waiting for its chin to be stroked the conductor sat with extended baton. Down to the footlights she minced, delicately as Agag to the downfall of his hopes, thrust out an impudent face, and waggled it. "I can't! You know I can't!" she remonstrated in a shrill cockney wail. And straight on the anticipated word the house roared its applause. Off pranced the singer to her encore on cavorting toes, down flourished the conductor's baton in a crash of chords, and away to its fortunes sailed the play, more than ever a confirmed triumph in the popular favor.

"You see," whispered Max in the parental ear, "you see now what you have done."

"It's a perfect scandal!" exclaimed the King, much put out, for he could not but feel that he was being mocked.

"Not at all," said Max. "All the scandal has been eliminated."

"It ought to be put a stop to!"

"A law doesn't exist."

"This holding authority up to ridicule!"

"When authority has made itself absurd, could you wish it a better fate? To my mind, you have done a noble work."

"But this," said the King, "this is not what I intended at all."

Max smiled indulgently.

"So much the better," said he. "The unexpected is just as good for you, sir, as for others."

Then the King drew back again into his corner, to prepare himself for fresh shocks as the play went on.

The managerial device was simple, effective, and very easy to understand; and from start to finish it was played with little variation, though with ever-increasing success. Here and there, where for a long period no blue-penciled passage occurred, imaginary censorings had been inserted merely to whip curiosity, with the result that the atmosphere of innuendo and suggestion was greatly increased. Indeed, the whole piece reeked of it, new situations had been evolved which the play had not previously contained; and a stimulated audience sat metaphorically with its eye to an eye-hole from which the key had been accommodatingly withdrawn.

And then came the sensation of the evening.

Whether in the course of the performance the King had become so interested as to forget his caution, or whether between the acts too much light had penetrated the box at the back of which he had been sitting, it is now impossible to say. Just before the fall of the curtain he and the Prince got up and left, and traversing the still empty corridors unrecognized, returned to their carriage and the care of the anxiously waiting detectives. But somehow, as the play ended, a whisper got round from the stage and, like an electric flash, through the whole theater the fact of the royal visit became known.

Instantly, with cheer upon cheer, the audience broke into loyal and excited plaudits. The orchestra struck up the national anthem. Hands down popular opinion had won; for in this matter of "the new censorship" as it was called—in this attack upon the interests and liberties, not of a foolish minority, but of a sacred and freedom-loving public, Jingalo and its monarch had joined forces, and bureaucracy was dethroned.

The next day it was on all the posters; newspapers celebrated the event in flaring headlines—"The King Condemns the Censor!" And before the week was over, the Lord Functionary had resigned his high office on grounds of health.

The King was much puzzled over the whole affair; and his advisers did their best to keep him mystified. Both the Prime Minister and the late Lord Functionary himself earnestly assured him that his conscientious interference had had nothing whatever to do with the latter's retirement; for at this juncture it would never have done for the monarch to suppose that he held so much power over the official lives of his ministers. Quite by accident he had come in contact with that great unknown quantity "the popular will," and, without in the least realizing what he was about, had first touched it on the raw, and then tickled it; and the "dear good beast," as Max phrased it, recognizing only the second part of his performance, had turned rapturously round and given him its paw.

The King had his scruples; he did not like thus to win popularity by accident, and yet, the more he looked into it, the more he saw this for a fact, that by committing a popular faux pas he had secured far more consideration from his ministers than by doing the correct thing.

John of Jingalo did not yet understand that his correctness of conduct was one of the chief factors relied on by a bureaucratic government for reducing him to political insignificance. He had yet to learn that a submissive and well-behaved monarchy was essential to its very existence.

CHAPTER VII

THE OLD ORDER

I

All this, the reader will remember, had taken place in Lent. The King had done something which according to the accepted canons was quite incorrect; he had been to a frivolous but popular play during the penitential season and it had got into the papers. But instead of being blamed for it he had gained enormously in popularity.

Now had his Majesty been merely aiming for this, as politicians aim for it (deserting principles for party, or party when its principles become a hindrance), he might have followed the lead given him by the people of Jingalo, and, recognizing that the Church Calendar had lost its hold upon the popular imagination, might thenceforward have secularized his conduct, and paved the way in Court circles for that separation of Church and State which his ministers were itching to bring about but did not yet dare.

But John of Jingalo had all the defects which belong to a conscientious character. He had not gone to the play for amusement, it had not amused him, he did not at all agree with the public's attitude towards it, and yet he was reaping the benefit; he was standing in a glow of popular approbation under false pretenses; and the more he thought about it the less he liked it—it gave him a bad conscience.

Yet, in spite of that, he could not but recognize that he had touched power; under a misapprehension the people had responded to him as never before; he had done what they regarded as a sporting thing in sending unpopular officialdom to the right-about; it was even possible that among theatrical circles when the exploit was talked of he was now known as "good old King Jack." All the same he did not feel that he had been good, and he wanted to make amends.

The highly colored conversations of Max, the talk about whipping-boys and Court jesters, and all those ancient divinities which had once hedged a King but were now mere barbed wire entanglements, had turned his attention toward certain medieval institutions the practice of which had lapsed, or had become reduced to a mere shadow of their former selves. And with a conscience ill at ease over the damage he had wrought to a season which he still regarded with a certain conventional reverence, his thoughts lighted upon Maundy Thursday, then less than a fortnight off.

He remembered having once watched from a private gallery in the royal chapel the impoverished ceremony which now did shabby duty for the old symbol of kingly humility and service. He had seen the vicarious sacrifice of silver pennies doled out by his almoners to a duplicated dozen of old men and women who had lost their better days in circumstances of the utmost respectability; and shocked at the poverty of the display he had been glad to learn that a more Christian gift of tea, clothes, snuff, and tobacco was added outside the Church door when the ceremony was over. But even so its ritual had not attracted him: it had lost its human values, and seemed to have been kept in life merely for archeological association.

Now on looking into the matter once more (the Encyclopedia Appendica gave him the required information) he was astonished to find that the old foot-washing ceremony of Holy Thursday was originally the chief function at which every year the Knights of the Holy Thorn were bound, if not unavoidably prevented, to appear and do service. Nay, when he turned to it, he found that it still stood so expressed in the Charter of the Order, and that each new Knight, upon admission thereto, swore solemnly to keep and observe the same—so help him God—faithfully unto his life's end.

If he had had any doubt before, the terms of that oath, which he himself had taken—probably without understanding it since it had been read to him in Latin—were sufficient to decide him. Without loss of time he sent word by his Comptroller-General to the Prime Minister that he intended in the following week to revive the full ceremony and to recall the Knights of the Thorn to the duties they had so long neglected. The ceremony, as of old, was to take place in public at noon outside the doors of the metropolitan cathedral.

"The King is going off his head," said the Comptroller-General by way of preface to the announcement with which he was charged; and the Prime Minister was ready to agree with him when he heard it.

"Preposterous!" he exclaimed.

"He has got chapter and verse for it," lamented the Comptroller-General.

"Can't you persuade him that it's a forgery?"

"It's in the oath," replied the other; "you yourself have taken it."

"Oh, yes, the form; but the ceremony—the accompanying service, I mean—was cut out of the Church Prayers at the time of the Reformation. It has become illegal."

"Inside a church, yes; not outside. At least that is his contention. Oh, I have already done my best! He got quite excited when I ventured to discuss the matter,—asked me if I understood the nature of an oath, and whether I had ever taken one."

"Is he much set on it?"

"I have had to write to the Archbishop."

"What do you think he'll say about it?"

"Ordinarily he would oppose it as savoring of Rome; under present circumstances my impression is that he will welcome it as giving the Church an added importance. You don't like it?"

"Of course, I don't."

"Then you had better see the King yourself. You have only a week left; and he has already begun looking at the weather-glass and wondering if it's going to be fine."

"That's just like him!" said the Prime Minister.

"Yes, and he's getting more like himself every day. My part is not a sinecure, I can assure you."

Accordingly the Prime Minister went over to the Palace and saw the King. Informed as to what line of argument had already been tried and failed, he approached the matter from a new standpoint: he spoke in the name of Protestantism. This ceremony had only survived in Catholic countries; in Jingalo the Reformation had killed it, and it had gone with graven images, the invocation of saints, and the worship of relics to the limbo of forgotten foolishnesses.

"The Charter of the Holy Thorn has not gone," said the King.

"Nor has your Majesty's title to the Crown of Jerusalem; but who ever thinks of enforcing it?"

"I am willing to resign it any day," replied his Majesty. "I can also, if you think it advisable, abolish the Charter of the Holy Thorn and the Knighthood with it. But I don't think the Knights would quite like that."

"If it comes to a question of liking," said the Prime Minister, "I do not think they will quite like washing beggars' feet in public."

"Oh, I do the washing and the drying," said the King. "They only carry the basins and put on the boots. I have looked up the whole ceremony; it's very impressive. You have only to read it and you will become converted: it is so symbolical."

The Prime Minister objected that though in its origin the ceremony might have had symbolic meaning and beauty, its performance now-a-days would be looked upon as a mere form and superstition, contrary to the spirit of the age.

This reminded the King of a certain "maxim."

"'The spirit of the age,'" he quoted, "'is the industrious collection of bric-à-brac—good, bad, and indifferent': this one happens to be good, and has been neglected. And talk about forms and ceremonies!—what can be more formal, superstitious, and idiotic than the procession of Court functionaries and King's Musketeers (with the Dean of the Chapels Royal carrying a candle) which, on every ninth of November—the anniversary of the Bed-Chamber Plot—comes to look under my bed to see whether assassins are not lurking there? On one occasion I was laid up with influenza, but I had to submit to that form and superstition because it had become traditional. And all the papers gloated over the fact, and called it 'a link in the chain of monarchy,' though as a matter of fact the conspiracy in question had been got up against that branch of the succession which we afterwards succeeded in dethroning. All the personal inconvenience I had to endure on that occasion was as nothing in comparison to the satisfaction which the public got out of it. No, Mr. Prime Minister, if you are going to do away with things because they are forms and superstitions, then I institute the Order of the New Broom, and I make you the first Knight of it; and the rest of your life will have to be spent in sweeping." ("And oh!" thought the King, feeling himself in form, "I only wish Max could hear me now!")

Failing in his personal appeal the Prime Minister turned on the Departments, and the King fought them one by one: the Board of Works which wanted to have the roads up; the Clerk of the Weather who said that a depression unsuitable for open-air gatherings was crossing Europe; the Chief of the Police who said that so large an open space was bad for a crowd; the Minister of Public Worship who wished everything to be done—if done at all—indoors and unobtrusively, by preference in one of the Royal Chapels: the effect, he said, would be more reverent. And when all these in turn had failed, the Prime Minister asked for a Council on the subject, and was told it was none of the Council's business.

"I am Grand Master in my own Order," said the King, "and you, as one of its Knights, in any matter pertaining to the Order owe me your unquestioning obedience."

That was unanswerable; he did. And so the King got his way.

II

The revival proved a tremendous success, although it did not reproduce the medieval conditions in their entirety.

The twelve old women were left out; it was not considered decent for the King to wash their feet in public and the Queen absolutely refused to do so. Instead they were invited to take tea at the Palace, and afterwards were all presented with foot-warmers.

In other directions also invidious distinctions were attempted, and a certain amount of controversy was raised. The Bishops made a scrambling and desultory fight for it that, as the steps of the Cathedral were to be used, all the washen beggars should be actual communicants of the Established Church; but the demand died down when it was found that such a breed did not exist; and a rush of undesirables to the altar in order to qualify could hardly be welcomed as a tolerable solution.

There was a tussle, too, among the Knights of the Thorn as to how many towel-bearers there should be (the towels remaining perquisites afterwards); but the King and his Master of Ceremonies—the delighted Max helping them—were able to settle matters to the general satisfaction, and, by allowing a towel to each foot and twelve cakes of soap, provided a sufficient number of souvenirs to go round.

And so the day came, the weather was fine, and the attendant crowd rapturous. The King and his Knights, in nodding plumes and robes of thorn-stamped velvet, made the show of their lives; organ music rolled from within, bands played without, and massed choirs sang like angels from the parapets and galleries above the west doors of the Cathedral.

And when their ordeal by water was over, then the twelve beggars—all of guaranteed good character although not actual communicants—received with delight each a new pair of shoes and stockings, which they were able to sell at fabulous prices, immediately the ceremony was over, to collectors of curiosities, chiefly Americans. And that same night twelve very happy beggars, all more or less drunk, made their appearance on the largest music-hall stage in the metropolis, where the whole scene was elaborately re-enacted in facsimile, followed by a cinematograph record of the actual event.

The King was a little disappointed at these modern developments, they seemed to take away from the penitential character of the performance, and rather to weaken than restore in the public conscience the due observance of Lent.

Max, however, assured his father that he had made the greatest hit of his life; his personal popularity had been greatly enhanced. What pleased him better was that in feeling for the public pulse, by the light of his own conscience, he had proved that he was right and the Prime Minister wrong.

Yet, though ostensibly in the wrong, the Prime Minister had really been right. He had reckoned that the move might prove a popular one—for the monarchy; and though a dull average of popularity for that ancient institution suited his book for the present, he did not wish, in view of certain eventualities, to see it greatly increased, and still less did he wish the King to discover that by acting in opposition to his ministers he might gain in popular esteem.

As one of the Knights of the Thorn he himself had been obliged to attend the ceremony; and by some it was noticed that, as he stood holding a golden ewer in his two hands, he looked very cross. But all the other Knights of the Thorn—those who had towels and soap as perquisites—enjoyed themselves thoroughly and were already looking forward to a repetition of the performance next year. Even in their case, then, the King had proved to be right,—forms and ceremonies accompanied by fine clothes were still popular things; the Order of the New Broom would not be yet.

III

And then, with blare of trumpet and clash of drum, with troopings and marchings, with garlanded streets and miles upon miles of cheering people, came the great Jubilee festivities. Silver was the note of the decorations—silver in the midst of green spring. The Queen herself wore silver gowns and bonnets of heliotrope, and the King a uniform wherein silver braid formed the becoming substitute for gold. Corporations came carrying silver caskets; army pensioners and school-children, fêted at the public expense, received white metal mementoes which, while new at any rate, looked as real as any coin of the realm. For a whole week the piebald ponies really worked for their living, grumbling loudly between whiles in their stalls; for a whole week "loyalty" was the note on which the press harped its seraphic praises of monarchy and nation; and for a whole week people actually did drop politics, reduce their hours of labor, and run about enjoying themselves.

The poet laureate published an ode for the occasion; he remarked on the passing of time, said that the King had acquired wisdom and understanding, but that the Queen did not look a day older; said that the trees were green on that day twenty-five years ago when the King ascended the throne, and that they were green still; said that cows ate grass then, and were eating it now without any decrease of appetite; said, in fact, that nothing sweet, reasonable, or beautiful had really changed at all, and that the monarchy, taking its constitutional day by day, was the national expression of that unchangeableness.

The day after the appearance of his poem he received that titular recognition for lack of which a poet laureate must feel that he has lived in vain. And then, all this unchangeableness of things having been thus ratified and sealed with the official seal, the King, his ministers, and the whole political world advanced to the edge of changes such as the country had not seen the like of for the last hundred years.

CHAPTER VIII

PACE-MAKING IN POLITICS

I

Inside the Council, meanwhile, curious and uncomfortable things had been happening. The King's talkativeness had steadily increased; no one could reduce him to reason.

"He reminds me," said one of his ministers irritably, "of the school-boy's story of the tea-kettle which discovered locomotion. Off boiled the lid: 'Why!' cries the observant inventor, 'put that upon wheels and it would go!' So he put it upon wheels and it went. He is exactly like that tea-kettle on wheels, miraculously set going without any inside reason to guide him! In my opinion before long there will have to be a regency." He tapped his skull meaningly, but in the wrong place: he should have tapped the back of it.

"What? Prince Max!" ejaculated his auditor; "I should hardly call that a remedy!"

"Nothing can be worse," declared the other, "than things as they are!"

In that he made a mistake; they were going to be much worse. The King's new mental activities were only just getting into their stride; and from a very unexpected quarter he was about to receive aid.

At the Council board, where the King had now found voice, one alone sat humorously interested and amused—the Minister of Fine Arts. He was not an artist himself—had he been he would never have been allowed to occupy that position; he was a Professor of History, Teller by name, and more than any of his fellow-ministers he studied life. Nothing interested him so much as the human machine; and to see this rather humdrum monarch suddenly developing into a tea-kettle on wheels, as his colleague had so happily phrased it, filled him with profound interest and an underlying sympathy.

Dimly the King had become aware that somewhere in that body of adroit shufflers who were supposed to minister to his constitutional needs the confused cry of his conscience had evoked an echo. He saw under a high bald forehead kindly eyes watching him; and it was a kindly voice charged with considerateness which one day, over a matter in which time pressed, begged for a further interview.

International exhibitions had become the vogue; and in putting on its peace paint for the Jubilee, Jingalo had determined to maintain its prestige among the nations by holding a conversazione of the Arts. In matters of that sort his Majesty had no particular taste; but in an art exhibition it was his duty to be interested. If need be he would open it, and would say of art and of its relations to the national life anything that the commissioners required of him. He would also lend any pictures from the royal collection which did not leave too obvious a gap upon the walls. All this was a mere matter of course; but the occasion being important—one of the great events indeed of the Jubilee festivities—it was expected of him that he should give a rather special consideration to the final plans.

Though wearied by the circumlocutions of his Council which had lasted throughout the morning, he named an hour, and at six o'clock received his minister in private audience.

The Professor began to explain matters in the usual official tone, but before long perceived that the attention paid to him was merely formal. The King sat depressed, listless, and cold. This renewal of the official routine found him mentally fagged out; it was evident that his thoughts were elsewhere.

Making the matter as short as he could in decency, the Professor folded his memoranda and returned them to his pocket.

Recalled to himself by the ensuing silence the King spoke—

"I really don't know enough about it to say anything," he murmured. "No doubt you have arranged everything for the best." But still he remained seated as though the interview were not ended, and the minister had perforce to remain seated also.

"I fear that to-day we have wearied your Majesty," he said at last to fill up the pause. "The Council is sometimes very trying."

The King lifted forlorn eyes in a sort of gratitude upon this, the least troublesome of all his ministers. "You, at least," he answered, "have not to reproach yourself, for I noticed that you did not speak."

"I was listening," answered the Professor; "I was much struck by your Majesty's line of argument."

"You agreed?"

"I cannot separate myself from my colleagues," returned the minister cautiously; "but I recognized the strength of your Majesty's case. On its own premises, if well put, it becomes unanswerable."

"I hardly thought that I had put it well." The King's voice showed despondency.

"To be perfectly frank, sir," said the Professor, tempering the amiable twinkle of his gaze with a deferential movement of the head, "you did not. The historical argument requires a knowledge of history."

"You remind me of another of my deficiencies, Professor."

"It is shared, your Majesty, by nearly the whole of the Cabinet. Very few of us, sir, knew anything more of it than you; and those of us who did were intent on concealing our knowledge."

"Very considerate, I am sure."

"Not at all, sir: our knowledge would have given strength to your argument."

The King sat up a little at this confirmation of his suspicions. "Do you mean, then, that my ministers make it a part of their duty to conceal from me the truth?"

"Some truths, sir," submitted the Professor, "may have undue weight given to them, which it then becomes a councilor's duty to correct. After all, history is only history; if at times we cannot break from it we shall never get anywhere."

"Yet all to-day," protested the King, "history, precedent, and the Constitution are the words that have been drummed into my ears, for all the world as though I, and not you, were the preacher of subversive doctrine."

"Your Majesty will remember that in this country we have had three successful revolutions against the Constitution. In one the monarchy was successful, in two the people."

"Is that said as a warning?"

"By no means, sir; merely to show that precedents lie on both sides like dry bones in the wilderness. But it requires the power of a prophet to call those dry bones to life. At present I see no prophet in Israel."

"Yet every member of the Government prophesies."

"I noticed, sir, that you did not. Never once did you pretend to know what the future would bring forth: you only pointed to the past, deducing therefrom your duty, as you conceived it, to the Constitution. Conditionally that commanded my respect."

"Surely," said the King, "I am bound, whatever the conditions, to hold sacred a trust which has been committed to me by inheritance."

The Professor bowed. "With your Majesty," he assented, "the hereditary principle must naturally be strong: it is implanted in your blood. I have no such impulse in mine. My father was born in a workhouse."

"That is very remarkable," said the King. "To have attained to your present position, your life must have been full of interest and adventure."

"Full of interest—yes. Adventure—no. Very plodding, very uneventful, almost monotonous apart from mental happenings. Now and then an unsought stroke of fortune. That is all."

"How did you ever get into the Cabinet?" inquired the King, in a tone that betrayed a sort of puzzled respect.

"Merely to fill a gap in a ministry whose days were numbered. Then an unexpected turn of the wheel kept us in power, and I remained. It was an inglorious arrival, but I found I could be of use: a sort of connecting line between incompatibles. I am not unpopular with my colleagues, and left alone in my department, I go my own way."

"And what is your way?" inquired the King, still searching for guidance.

"I do nearly everything as my permanent officials tell me, recognizing that while ministers come and go permanent officials remain and acquire experience from both sides. On the other hand, I use my own discretion in the hastening or suspension of the superannuation clause; I promote by results and not by seniority. My department, in consequence, is the most efficient in the whole Civil Service, and I have less work to do than any other minister. Thus I am left with more leisure and energy to devote to the consideration of policy, and affairs in general."

"And do you approve," inquired the King, "of the present policy?"

The minister paused. "I think the pace is about right," he said reflectively.

"The pace?"

"Yes; government to-day, sir, is largely a matter of pace, the actual measures do not so much matter. Modern democracy is making for something of which we are all really—the governing classes I mean—profoundly apprehensive: and the problem now is to let it come about without actual catastrophe. When I used the word 'pace,' I had a certain graphic illustration in my mind—an incident I once heard from the manager of a railway—the recountal of which will show your Majesty what I mean.

"A passenger train, before arriving at the head of a long, evenly graded declivity, had taken on three or four good trucks heavily laden. Owing to some carelessness in the coupling these wagons became detached on the very crest of the descent, and falling to the rear came almost to a halt. Not quite: sluggishly at first they began to move, and gathering impetus from sheer weight followed in the track of the proceeding train. Halfway down the declivity, the engine-driver discovered his loss and the danger that threatened him. Looking back, he saw in the distance the wagons weighted by the labor of men's hands drawing nearer with a speed that grew ever more formidable. His one chance, therefore, of avoiding a catastrophe was to put on pace in the hope of arriving at more level conditions before the impact took place. Yet he must still limit himself to a speed which enabled the train to keep to the rails on a certain sharp curve which lay ahead. That was the problem which the engine-driver set himself to solve: up to a certain point the more pace he could allow the greater his chance of safety, beyond that point a new danger arising out of pace lay ahead of him."

The minister paused.

"What happened?" inquired the King.

"He negotiated the curve with success, and had got so far ahead that when the wagons finally overtook him their impetus had been diminished by the more level conditions of the road, and the impact was but slight. Only the guard's van was smashed, and the guard himself rather badly disabled."

"And what happened afterwards to the guard and the engine-driver?" inquired his Majesty, much interested.

"The guard was pensioned for life: the engine-driver was promoted."

"And whose fault was it—the guard's?"

"Well, not exactly," replied the Professor; "the careless coupling was done by others, but the guard had the right, which he had not chosen to exercise, to refuse to accompany any train in which his van was not put last—so as to embrace the whole combination. At least, he had the technical right."

"I suppose he did not wish to give trouble," said the King meditatively.

"Very likely; for, of course, had he exercised his right the whole train would have been delayed by the extra shunting."

"And he in consequence a less acceptable servant to his employers."

"No one could have blamed him."

"Not for excess of caution?" queried the King. "Did you not yourself say that on those lines government would become impossible? You have to run your railway system, it seems, with a certain risk of accidents—otherwise you would never be up to time."

"That is so," said the Professor. "In every political crisis it is pace more than principle that I find one has to consider. If it is solved in such and such a way, our pace will be so and so, and the question—will it take us safely over the curve? If it is solved in another way so that the pace slackens, those wagons in the rear may be down upon us."

"And the guard, whose control, while the train makes its running, is but nominal, is then the first to suffer!" He saw himself in the man's place. "Poor glow-worm!" he cried, "he may change the green light in his tail to red—or was it red to begin with? but it is no use! Those proletarian forces descending upon him from the rear are quite blind in their purpose: it is merely dead weight and impetus that send them along." And then he pulled up abruptly, astonished to find that he was talking in Max's manner. Was it so catching?

"Not wholly blind, sir," said the Professor; "believe me, they mean well—mainly to themselves, no doubt: that is only human nature. Every body in the community, whether energized or sluggish, has some weight attached to it; and the more that bodies can agree to combine the greater is their weight politically. One has to recognize that consensus of opinion carries with it a certain moral as well as physical force. Out of that springs the evolution of our governing system."

"Only I," said the King, "in the nature of things have always to stand alone."

"Sir, you have all history!" said the Professor.

"Which, as you have reminded me, I do not know."

"May I inquire, sir, whether you have a real wish to know?"

"Why, naturally!" exclaimed the King. Whereupon the Professor, as though laying aside something of his officialdom, took up an easier attitude and addressed himself to the point.

"It would, I think, sir, be quite compatible with my duty to my colleagues were I to send your Majesty a few volumes of constitutional history with certain appropriate passages marked. It would interest me very greatly to hear the argument developed on the lines you have already laid down. The history I would venture to send is a thoroughly reliable and standard authority, written by an eminent jurist to whose words we later historians still bow. As I said, sir, pace is to-day the thing which really matters; beyond a given pace we, certainly, are not able to go. Luckily for our present plans there is no source from which any forcing of the pace seems probable. I do not think this or any other ministry dare attempt it. Speaking for ourselves any increase of the present pace would, I conceive, become a grave embarrassment. If, therefore, your Majesty has been apprehensive of our adopting any increase of speed, I think you may be reassured. After the constitutional readjustment our pace is scarcely likely to grow dangerous."

The Professor had managed to indicate that these were—if so it might be allowed—his last words. The King rose.

"I shall be much obliged, Professor," said he, "if you will lend me the books you have mentioned. When may I look for them?"

"Sir," said the Professor, in smooth matter-of-fact tones, "it so happens that I have them with me in my carriage. I will have them conveyed to your Majesty immediately."

And therewith he bowed over the King's hand and departed.

II

Left to himself the King stood considering for a while. He was pleased, but puzzled. What had this man, wise and kindly, been telling him? What advice were his words intended to convey? He was quite sure now that this minister had come and talked to him for a purpose: and what he had mainly talked about was "pace." It was "pace" that mattered. That was all very well, but with pace he himself had nothing to do—except in a negative sort of way. He, occupying the position of guard with brakes to his hand but no steam-power, could only cause delay; he had no means, and no object that he could see, for accelerating matters. Besides, had not the Professor said that in his estimation the pace was about right? All his efforts to secure delay would—he was already aware of it—fail of their effect; ministerial resignation threatening, he would have to give in. The alternative, the mad alternative that had for a moment occurred to him—no, it would not do! The results might be too tremendous, might lead even to revolution and a republic, and so he gave the problem up. And then a pile of six large volumes "with Professor Teller's humble duty" was brought in and set down before him; and John of Jingalo sat down to read the marked passages.

It was a reading that for its completion extended over many days.

What first attracted his attention, however, was a chronological series of plates, showing the map of Europe in all its political changes from the tenth to the twentieth century. This was, in fact, a key to the whole work, for as the author rightly pointed out in his opening paragraph the history of Europe was inextricably bound up in the history of Jingalo, and the one could not be properly studied without some understanding of the other.

These maps of Europe he turned from century to century; and there, as he marked their many variations, there always to be recognized was Jingalo occupying its proud historical position—so often challenged, yet still on the whole unchanged. It had found room to live and breathe, not by its own strength, but by a careful adjustment of the political balance between others, and a neutralization artfully and sometimes treacherously contrived of greater forces than its own. It had for neighbors two great military states and several smaller ones; and had at some time or another been at war with nearly all of them. Often—generally in fact—it had come out of those wars more vanquished than victorious (though Jingalese school-books carefully concealed the fact): it had lost, for proof, more territory than any other power in the world except England, and yet, like England, cherished the curious conviction that it had won all the really important battles and dictated each peace upon its own terms. Having been wholesomely driven out of France in the fifteenth century, it had captured and carried away with it as trophy the order of the White Feather, with its proud motto, "J'y suis, j'y reste." In the eighteenth century it had adopted by compulsion from Germany an alteration in its law of regal inheritance, and had marked its adhesion to the new formula by the institution of the order of the Dachshund, with the obsequious motto, "Das ist mir ganz Wurst," popularly mistranslated by the wags of the day into, "That is the worst for me." Beaten by the infidel in the Crusades it had joined thenceforth to its regalia the holy crown of Jerusalem; and having thrown over the Papacy at the time of the Reformation, had added to its armorial bearings the Keys of St. Peter, and to its royal claims and titles the Kingship of Rome. A frequent and murderous deposition of its kings had but accentuated its devotion to the monarchic system: while its solemn confirmation of each fresh breach of continuity had stood to reaffirm its general belief in the hereditary principle, and in divine providence as controlled by Act of Parliament. The only other country in the world which had acted with such scrupulous inconsistency, unrepentant and unashamed, was England. It was no wonder, therefore, that in their history the two countries had much in common; and it must have been through sheer inadvertence, in view of their rival claims to be the constitutional pace-makers of Europe, that while they had often stood badly in the way of each other's interests they had never yet fallen to blows.

International politics, however, were not for the moment the King's chief concern, and he turned back from the pages of Europe to study in detail the constitutional history of his own country and the powers it still reserved for its kings.

While he pursued these studies, many things new and strange presented themselves to his gaze. There were, he discovered, powers of the Crown still extant, though lapsing through gradual desuetude, of which he had never dreamt, and as to the existence of which no one had made it his duty to inform him. Some of them had been in regular practice less than forty years ago; they were becoming obsolete merely because the advisers of the Crown wished it. Just as the House of the Laity was now falling more and more under the control of a Cabinet whose powers waxed as the other's waned, so the King himself was in the hands of those whose interests were to conceal from him the powers he possessed.

He came on a page where the right of royal initiative in Council had been thoughtfully underlined by the Professor; and he discovered with astonishment that a whole series of constitutional questions lay altogether outside the competence of ministers to deal with until they had been first formally submitted to the King himself. Under this heading he found that no financial proposal touching on Crown lands, or on grants to the royal family, could become a matter of ministerial discussion without his consent first given; no proposal to alter the royal line of succession or the oath taken by the King at his coronation; no change of definition in the articles or creed of the Established Church; no alienation of Church lands; no fresh institution of any rank, title, order, or degree, nor the abolition thereof; no alteration in the laws governing the right of the voteless to petition the King against the acts of his ministers; no subsidy or treaty of war, and no surrender, barter, or exchange to a foreign power of any part whatsoever of the King's dominions; no appointment to a foreign embassy; no elevation of a commoner to rank or title; no issue of royal patents; no free pardons for criminals, and no change in the composition of either of the two Houses of Parliament. All these things must be formally submitted to the will of the Crown before being entered as items of the ministerial policy.

"My word!" cried the King, perceiving for the first time how unconstitutionally that word had been set at naught. He could hardly believe his senses. Here under his nose, all these weeks lèse majesté had been rampantly disporting itself; and he knew nothing of it! Possibly the Prime Minister knew nothing of it either; had not the Professor said that many of his colleagues were as ignorant of constitutional history as the sovereign himself? But some knew—some must know! And the King, who but a few hours before had believed himself the most helpless of emblems, a mere ornamental topknot to the constitutional edifice, now found himself armed with weapons of far-reaching precision that would enable him to carry war into the enemy's country. Metaphorically he clapped his wings and crowed. Yes, it was as though that weathercock, to which hitherto he had likened himself, that toy of chance, swung this way and that upon a pivot with no will of its own, had suddenly taken to itself life and wing and power, and quitting its stake had descended into the arena with beak and claw stiffened for the fray. That board of tormenting ministers was now in his power—for a time at any rate.

In his excitement he got upon his feet and trotted about the room, and pausing now and again he gazed ahead with a gloating eye on a whole series of ministerial councils to come. For this monarch, you must remember, had been departmentalized all his life, and to that extent dehumanized; and it was only in a departmental way that he recognized his opportunity. The power to strike which he now visualized came through no intellectual enlargement, no opening up of moral vistas, but only through the discovery that he had on his side a mass of red tape the existence of which he had not previously suspected. In similar trammels to those which had so long hampered and restricted his own movements it was now possible for him to entangle the goings of his ministers. A hundred and one things had been done which were not merely out of order but—oh, blessed word!—unconstitutional; and in consequence the poor dear man's mind was in a welter of delight. At last he had a weapon to his hand whose reach and mechanism he could manipulate. "Oh, dear me, yes!" he said to himself, and said it several times.

When a character of childlike simplicity has got hold of a loaded gun, it has a natural instinct to let it off. The actual direction, and what the target is to be, are not so important as the delightful sense of hearing the gun go off,—of proving by actual demonstration that it really was a loaded and dangerous thing, capable of causing consternation. John of Jingalo was simple, and when he got up from his first solid reading of the Professor's volumes he felt that he was well primed; and his instinct was to let himself go, to spread himself, to attack his enemy with extended front so that they would not know where to have him. Half-a-dozen small tags of red tape gave him a far greater sense of resource and opportunity for aggression than any one good piece of measurable length capable of being well wound and knotted. His powers, such as they were, were largely imitative; and now for some weeks the wordy Max had been coaching him. The Professor had supplied him with the material, Max with the method for applying it; the Professor had given him his head, Max had given him his tongue. Looking forward to the exercise of his new-found powers he meant, in a word, to be voluble; and when in later chapters he becomes yet more surprising, let the reader remember that fortuitous crack at the back of his skull through which the windows of his head were open and his brain-pan a place of draughts wherein any winds of doctrine might blow. A word of opposition, a mere gust of excitement, were now quite enough to set him going, and once started he was very difficult to stop.

For much the same reason, having once started to prance up and down the carpet—that carpet so variegated and Maxian in its pattern—he found it very difficult to sit down again; and would not have done so had not the measured striking of the clock upon the chimney-piece reminded him that he was expecting a visit from Max. Then a curious change came over his deportment; he stood considering, glancing from the telltale volumes upon the table to the door through which he was presently expecting his son to enter. Then with a secretive look and a shake of the head, "Oh, dear me, no," he murmured very softly; and taking up the books he put them away in a drawer and locked it, and, when presently Max came in, said nothing of his new discovery, but sat docile and listened, while the other drew out the shining length of his vocabulary, making words sound like deeds.

Not for nothing was John of Jingalo the son of his father, not for nothing a descendant of kings who so far as they consciously achieved power had always held it possessively and exclusively, withholding the key from their heirs. Post obits were not popular in that royal House of Ganz-Wurst which for two hundred years had ruled over Jingalo.

CHAPTER IX

THE NEW ENDYMION

I

Readers who have hearts will remember that while these things were taking place in the political world, something of more intimate and personal concern had happened to Prince Max. That young man, whose head was so crowded with ideals for others, had discovered—or glimpsed, it would be more correct to say—an ideal of his own, in the shaping of which he had nothing whatever to do. Goddess-like she had descended upon him from skies in which previously he had held no faith at all; and even yet it was a tussle for his conscience to accept anything coming from that quarter as really divine. He was agnostic; he did not like the Church, and he rather despised that attitude of mind which accepted miracle as a directing power in human affairs, and looked to an unseen world for the inspirations of life. It was as though some modern Endymion gazing up at the round and prosaic surface of the moon, and refusing to admit that there entered into its composition anything even of so low a vitality as green cheese—it was as though such an one had seen the affirmed negation suddenly take to itself life and form, and disclose from afar a whole heaven of thoughts, beauties, and aspirations which he had not believed existent. And then, having seen that gracious form so well defined that it must for ever remain imprinted upon his consciousness, he had watched it steal from him into obscurity, wilfully concealing its whereabouts, though ever since the silver haze of that hidden presence had permeated his world.

Concealment and flight are, we know, the very arrows of love when directed with subtle intent against the hunter's heart in man; and they are scarcely less powerful to kindle his ardor when undirected and without purpose, or, as in this case, of a purpose wholly negative and without lure.

His lady had disappeared, because in very truth parting was her intent; and in haunting for a while the dark and crooked ways which her feet had blessed, he had but the poor satisfaction of knowing that he was depriving of her ministrations lives inconceivably more miserable than his own. That consciousness when it came touched him in a point of honor, and forced him to relinquish the quest; but there remained with him thenceforth a maddening sense that if, accepting his withdrawal, she had resumed her avocations, he now knew daily where she was, and had only to break with his scruples in order to find her.

They had met less than half-a-dozen times; and he, driven by his mental pugnacity to test so unreasonable an apparition, had spared neither himself nor her. The sincerity of her faith had angered him, though anything else, had he detected it, would have destroyed his dream; and when he had scoffed she had not troubled to rebuke him, had only glanced at him amused, not with pity or condescension or kind Christian charity, but with a very friendly understanding and often with what seemed agreement. He was astonished to find that a rippling sense of humor could go hand in hand with a blind gift of faith, and to hear sayings as bold as his own uttered as though they were the merest common-sense. "Why yes, of course," she admitted, in answer to one of his tirades, "if you want envy, hatred, and uncharitableness in a concentrated form you will find them in the Church; that stands to reason." And when he inquired why, she answered, quite simply, "Because a bad Christian is Satan's best material."

Nor had she any illusions about that particular branch of the Church militant for which she labored; she regarded it rather as a half-baked body of territorials than a regular army equipped for the field. Still it served a purpose, gave useful occupation to many, and stood for the time being against unreasoning panic or callous desertion of duty; nor would she surrender its few poor healing virtues for any of the nostrums he sought to set in their place. "It does more than you with all your talking," she said quietly, and, as they passed by, took him into a mission church where he might see—a small corrugated iron hut, set down in the midst of slums. Under the scent of incense the smell of disinfectants was strong; near a stove sat a lay reader, and about her a dozen poor weary women plying needle and thread. Two or three of them held children at the breast; in a pen near by lay half-a-dozen others asleep. Over the stove was a large boiler supplying hot water to poor parishioners; away by a small side altar knelt a single figure in prayer. Brightly colored "stations of the Cross," and something upon the altar that looked like a large tea-cozy, before which burned a light, told how here the law was systematically broken, and that the "nonsense" inveighed against by the old Queen Regent had not yet been put down.

"That is the bit of Christianity I work for," she said as she led him out again, "a sort of mother-hen whose cluckings, scratchings, and incubations are run in a parish of five thousand half-starved people on less than £300 a year. Have you anything better to show?"

"I want revolution," he said.

"Choose your own time," she answered mildly. "Here every day we are facing a far worse thing."

"Making it endurable," he objected. "These people are patient because of you and your like."

"Impatience would only make it harder for them," she returned. "You can't argue with them; they haven't the brains."

"Not in working order, I admit."

"Meanwhile they have to live."

"And when you help them to that end—are they at all grateful?"

"A few; yes, that is one of the hardest things we have to bear,—we who are living stolen lives; for whether we will it or not our vitality comes from them; daily we drain it from their blood, and nothing we can do will stop it."

"Are you in need of money?"

"Always; but five million pounds given us to-morrow would not go to the root of this."

"What would?"

"Nothing but true worship."

"You worship an alibi," said Max.

"What nearer divinity has brought you here?" she inquired. And he, too conscious of the personal motive, forbore to explain.

At their fifth meeting she told him quite frankly that he was interfering with her work, that she could not have him accompanying her, waiting for her, picking her up as if by chance.

"If you want to do work you must find it for yourself; you will if you are sincere," she said in answer to his request that she would commission him.

"But may I not be your follower?" he pleaded, choosing the word for its double sense.

"Lay sisters don't have followers," she replied. "They don't go with the costume."

"Then why wear it? Will you turn away a disciple for a mere matter of dress?"

"My dress," she said, "is of more use and protection to me than anything you can do or than money can buy. You have politicians who say that society is built upon force. My dress is the work of women; thousands of lives have made it what it is, and it will take me safely into slums where no policeman dare go alone. When your politicians can come here in coats of a similar make, then they will have begun to solve the problems which they are so fond of talking about. Now, will you please to walk on the other side of the road?"

He took her hand, saying earnestly, "When are we to meet again?"

She shook her head at him, smiling. "Truthfully I haven't time for you," she said, "and I can't make promises."

And then, just for once—for it seemed his last chance—Max fell into sentiment.

"One I want you to make," he insisted.

"What is that?"

"That you will pray for me!"

"Now you are asking for luxuries," she smiled; "you don't believe in prayer. But I will." Then, nodding confidently, she added, "And it will do you good."

And then, as he still lingered, with quiet business-like demeanor she crossed the street and disappeared.

It was true that in thus seeking her intercession Max had asked for a luxury. He did not believe in prayer any more than he had ever done; but he did very much like the idea of being prayed for by the woman he loved. Once, for a brief moment, he had seen her kneel before an altar empty to him of meaning; and as he then watched the serene joy and beauty of her face had realized with a jealous envy how in an instant all thought of him had passed from her mind. So in asking her to pray for him he had merely sought to penetrate by subtlety the unbelievable world of her dreams. And then, even as he reveled in the vision, the odd thought occurred in what terms would he obtain introduction? Once, when for the repayment of a borrowed cab fare she had asked his name and address, he had told her who he was, and she had not believed him; had, indeed, herself tantalized him in return with an address as little probable as his own. If, therefore, she prayed for him in words how would they run, or, if in thought, what character would it assume? "That man," "that nice man," "that talkative man," "that person who called himself Prince Max," "the tall stranger," "the man whom I sent away," "the man who emptied my bucket," "the man who brought in the bed," "the man who waited for me at corners," "the man who wanted to be my follower." All these variant products of a brief acquaintance, though he dwelt on them as luxuries, failed to give him satisfaction, they formed a fretful and at times a tormenting accompaniment to his unapportioned days. At his hours of rising and setting the thought would insistently recur to him: "Now, perhaps even now, she is praying for me." And straightway he would return to the task of trying to realize the nature of her prayer and with what label she pigeoned him in the columbarium of her soul.

Whether or no it could be said that this was "doing him good," he had certainly begun to apprehend the power of prayer; that dove-like spirit with overshadowing wing had found means to ruffle very considerably the even current of his existence. Even had he wished to he could not get her out of his thoughts. Fantastic and prosaic statements of his identity kept leaping into his mind. "The man with his trousers turned up" was one of them. Yes, he had done that in order to make their immaculate cut less noticeable; he had dressed as badly as he knew how, and yet—she might possibly be praying for him as "that well-dressed person." It was a ghastly thought, and he had brought all this purgatory upon himself merely by asking for a "luxury," for something in which he did not really believe. And then, at the thought of her deep sincerity, his mind revolted from all these bywords and subterfuges. "Oh!" he cried to himself, "she knows, she knows, she must know!"

And, of course, as a matter of fact she did. She knew that she had a lover, a young man who had nicknamed himself,—clever and handsome, evidently with time and money to spare, probably of some social position, and with an undeniable likeness to a Prince whom she only knew by his photographs. And for this young man, who on five or six separate occasions had so hindered her with his attentions, she had a deep and impulsive liking which, as it ran counter to her plan of life, she did not choose to encourage.

But if Max could only have known he would have been comforted: she prayed for him every day, morning and night, and taking him at his word, though not in the least believing it, it was as "my Prince Max" that she begged heaven to look after him. And when in her orisons that nymph remembered him she smiled a little more than was her usual wont—for truly he had amused her. In spite of dignified air and polished speeches and a belief in himself that never failed, she had discerned the stripling character of his soul; and greatly would Max have been surprised, and perhaps also a little shocked, could he have learned that he ranked in her mental affections as "rather a dear boy"; for it is woman's way to claim the privilege of a motherly regard without any seniority in age, and with a good deal of feeling that mere "mothering" will not satisfy.

II

Another lady, as to whose movements and plans Prince Max could not yet be indifferent, had meanwhile returned home, and he had been to see her.

The Countess Hilda von Schweniger had sent word that she had serious things to say to him; it was only thus that he received notice of her return. She had a tender weakness for talking seriously at intervals, for the periodic workings of her conscience were ever open to view. But whatever special seriousness of purpose was now perturbing her, this matter-of-fact return to the roof they shared seemed to give it contradiction,—did not at least suggest that any immediate breach in their present relations was to be looked for from her.

And so Max went to the interview wondering how he was going to behave over this new fact which had so largely entered his life; whether he was going to "behave well"—whether indeed it were possible at the same time to behave well and be honest and above-board. He was, in fact, up against the usual difficulty of the man who, having run domesticity on a temporary basis, has discovered grounds for wishing to exchange it for a more permanent one. And as he put his latch-key into the garden door of the quiet tree-shadowed house which for five years he had regarded as his second home, he uttered to himself a kind of a prayer that his relations with a good woman would not now have to be less honest than formerly.

It was evident that she had been on the lookout for him; a French-window in a creeper-covered veranda opened as he advanced, and gracious domesticity stood smiling in the green-lighted shade.

She laid her hands on his shoulders as she kissed him. "Well, mon Prince," she said, "are you glad to see me again?"

He took in all the pleasant and familiar appeal of her face before answering. "Yes, I am," he said, "very."

"That's true—really true?"

And at that challenge he gave a funny little duck of the head, known to her of old, and kissed her again.

She turned quietly and walked away into the room.

"I came back just to hear you say that," she murmured in a moved tone, and stood waiting with her face away from him.

The heart of Max was wonderfully relieved: gladdened also, for as he looked at her he realized that she remained dear to him. With her old simple directness she had let him know what was in her mind, and by her clean brevity of speech had already, in this their first moment together, saved him from the trap into which he might have fallen. Not that the ordinary male temptation to let her resolution stand as cover to his own did not for a moment occur to him. Nay, he could even suggest good reasons; for was not this the kindest reward now left within his power—to let her think that the wish was not shared—to show even a little resentment and reproach? Max, the satirical critic of human nature, could see clearly the attractiveness of such a course,—knew himself a sufficiently good actor to play the game at least well enough to satisfy his artistic taste. But he did not yield to the temptation; had he done so he would have formed a more moral emblem for the edification of my readers than I am now able to provide; and they must face instead the uncomfortable fact that out of this long and immoral liaison between a prince and his mistress certain moral values held good, and that being in need of a sincere friend and confidante he found it in the woman from whom he was about to separate.

He crossed to her side, and taking her hand kissed it with more frequency and fervor than he had kissed her face, and heard then her breath struggling against tears. She reached up her other hand and began stroking his head; and it is life's truth that these two still found attraction and comfort the one in the other.

"Then you are going back again?" whispered Max.

She nodded, saying "yes" afterwards on a catch of breath.

"When?"

She looked at him wistfully. "I didn't want to go—yet."

"Why should you?"

"It wouldn't worry you?"

"Not at all. Very much the reverse."

"I should want to see you, though."

Max smiled. "You mean, then, shouldn't I worry you——"

"I suppose I did mean that," she said, viewing him speculatively.

Then Max was tempted to show off. "Who gave me my first lesson in not worrying?" he asked.

"Oh, yes," she admitted, "but then, you see, I was yours. It has to be different now."

"I want it to be different too," he said; and as by that statement he wished to convey important inner meanings, he spoke solemnly.

She looked at him radiant, half incredulous—the pious wish shining in her eyes. "Oh, Max!" she cried amazed, "has it come to you too, then? Has Our Lady——"

But Max shook his head. "Your Lady is not my lady," he gently confessed.

"Oh!" her voice went down into the deeps of despondency. "Oh! is that what you mean?"

A solemn nod from Max informed her that it was.

"You always told me that it would happen some day."

"I hoped I should have gone."

"And I," said Max, "am glad that you have not. Selfish of me, isn't it?" Then he kissed her hand again.

She began a homely mopping of her face.

"Then it doesn't matter how I look now?" she commented, and paused. "How am I looking?"

"Well, and as dear as ever," he replied.

"That isn't what I wanted to know. You know it isn't."

"You are looking," he said, "just two evening moons older than when I saw you last."

"What have evening moons got to do with it?"

"They are your most becoming time."

She took the compliment with a sigh and a smile; then with an air of resignation sat down.

"Who is she?" she asked abruptly.

"I haven't a ghost of a notion. We haven't been properly introduced, she hasn't encouraged me, I haven't said a word, and I'm not to go near her any more."

This for a start. The Countess Hilda became deeply interested, and very much alarmed. "Then it isn't a princess?" she cried in consternation, "she isn't royalty?"

"Oh, no," said Max, "far from it. She is what you call a sister of mercy, and 'sister'—horrible word—is the only thing I am allowed to call her; she is a sealed casket without a handle."

"Oh, Max," cried his Countess, "don't do it, don't do it; it's wickedness! I didn't matter; but this—oh, Max, you don't know what a grief and disappointment you'll be to me if you——"

"Dearly beloved friend," interrupted Max, "do give me credit for a morality not very greatly inferior to your own. After all I am your pupil."

"But you can't marry her?" cried the Countess.

"Saving your presence, I mean to," asseverated Max.

"You! Where will the Crown go?"

"Charlotte will have three inches taken out of its rim and will fit it far better than I should—that is if anybody is so foolish as to object to my marrying where I please."

"Then in Heaven's name," cried the Countess, "why in all these years haven't you married me?"

Max smiled; they were back into easy relations once more. This was the lady with whom he had never spent a dull day.

"I did not wish to give you the pain of refusing me," said he. "Had I asked you you would have said that I was far too young to know my mind, and that you yourself were too old."

"Yes, I should," she admitted, "but you should have left me to say it." Then she returned to her original bewilderment. "But, my dear boy, if she is a sister of mercy she has taken vows."

"Oh, no, we don't do that in Jingalo. No Jingalese Church-woman may throw away her whole life on so problematical a benefit as a religious vow of celibacy. She may lease herself to Heaven for a given number of years, but freeholds are not allowed."

"And you call that a Church!" cried the Countess.

"Well," said the Prince, "I think that in this case she has got hold of a scientific point worth keeping. Seven years ago I was not, science tells me, the man that I am now; and seven years hence I shall be yet another. What right has my past man to bind this present 'me' in which he has no particle of a share?" And Max, having taken wing on a fresh notion, was off into flight when the Countess brought him to earth.

"And how long is your next lease going to be?" she inquired dryly, "if seven years is all you can answer for?"

"My next man will renew," said Max confidently.

"Sisters of mercy don't accept tenants on those terms," she retorted. And then, seeing that he looked at her with a benevolent eye, added, "Oh, yes, I know that I did, but that isn't the sort of mercy you are looking for now. You'll find, Max, that you need a religion in order to become a freeholder. Mark my word! There! I couldn't have put it better than that! And now as I've come to the end of my lease I had better retire and see to dilapidations and repairs."

She left him smiling; but he knew, in spite of her brave face and jesting words, that there was still trouble of spirit to be gone through; and the repairs took some time.

III

In the days that followed, Max, now launched on his new quest, had as good and sympathetic a listener as lover could wish. And while the Countess thus paid penance and endured some purgatory for a five years' breach with her own conscience, she found compensations, as all sensibly good women will when they come on logical results of their own making. In our conventional readiness to reverence the mother and disown the mistress as social institutions, we are apt to ignore, as though the mere suggestion were an impiety, the fact that in their instincts and affections they have often much in common. It is one of Nature's kindest and wisest economies; yet perhaps the woman treasures it secretly, because it is a quality of her sex scarcely to be understood by men. The chaste mistress sleeps in many a mother's breast, ready to welcome in her grown son that touch of the lover which nestles before it takes flight; and in the unchaste mistress, homely of heart, there is often more of the mother than her paramour has wit to discern.

The Countess Hilda, cut off from home ties and kindred in the very prime of her maternal powers, had cast her eye on Max with a possessive but with no predatory aim; and in her own illicit fashion, contrary to some qualms of conscience and the strict dictates of her creed, had mothered him through the dangerous years with as little damage to his moral fiber as seemed reasonably possible. And now, not without some pangs of maternal jealousy, but with none of the baser kind, she listened while he sat at her feet and talked of the woman he loved. But the real price to be paid, as she clearly saw, lay still in the future and in all those possibilities of beautiful domestic possession wherein she could have no part. Left to herself she sometimes wept in woeful abandonment at the thought that she and his children must for ever remain strangers; and then she dried her eyes and sat eager and attentive to learn what manner of woman their mother would be, if Max had his present will.

"I met her," said Max, "or rather found her again, washing the floor of a single-room tenement on a 'four-pair back' to the accompaniment of screams from its enraged occupant. And when, as a means of introduction, I tendered assistance, she sent me down to the basement to refill her bucket,—offered me a child's head to wash, and then as an alternative bade me bring in a mattress from a second-hand dealer who had neglected to send it. I went. Required to give proofs of my honesty by a shopman who rightly regarded all strangers with suspicion, I deposited the value, which I forgot afterwards to reclaim, and set off with my load. Before I reached the first corner I made the humiliating discovery that I did not know how to carry it. I was bearing it embraced like an infant in arms, but owing to its size my arms would not go round. Twice it unrolled itself and lay like a drunken thing in the gutter; small children stood round and laughed at me. From one of them came these words of wisdom: 'Lor', 'e's only a gentleman, he don't know nothing!' On my second attempt, not seeing well where I was going, I stumbled into an apple-stall; and immediately I, heir to a throne and engaged in a charitable action, found myself regarded as a criminal lunatic by people quite obviously my superiors in all honest ways of earning a living. A small boy took pity on me and offered to carry it on his back—any distance for a penny. That taught me; I gave him the penny and put it upon my own, and having disentangled myself from the crowd in which for foolishness I had become conspicuous, found with relief that thenceforth no one took any notice of me. The old scriptural act of a man carrying his bed struck nobody there as absurd; the streets of our sweated quarters are far more genuine and human than those in which we parade the clothes they make for us. Ah, yes; that statement, at which you show some incredulity, is directly pertinent to my story; for it was an endeavor to trace my clothes to their origin—over the many impediments and difficulties placed in my way—that had led me into those slums. I won't go into that just now, though it had an important connection with our future acquaintance.

"By the time I returned with the bed to the four-pair back attic I had received a better lesson in human values than in any previous half-hour of my existence. I was then given other commissions, and these without any word of apology; as I had volunteered so I was to be used without scruple or mercy, just as a millionaire's motor-car is used at election times, till scratched, battered, broken down, it creeps from the fray. 'We are all sweated workers here,' she said to me afterwards, and then I saw her uses of me explained; anything which came to that mill came to be ground, and the chaff to be cast out. I submitted to her test, and in that first day saw her only by glimpses; but in accompanying her back to the Home from which she emanated I told her why I had come—said that I wished to have a clear conscience and wear clothes upon my back in which there was no element of sweating. She told me it was quite impossible, impossible, that is to say, unless I controlled every stage of manufacture from the raw material to the finished article; and even then, I was warned, the paper cover, the cardboard box, and the string with which it was tied, would all be sweated products. And when I asked what I could do to help matters, she bade me go with empty pockets and see as much of the life as possible for myself, and make others like myself see it also. That is what she had been doing to me—rubbing my nose into it before I should get tired and run away. Even while accepting it she showed a fine indifference to my money. 'Don't let that salve your conscience,' said she, 'we can make it useful, but it won't change matters.' And had I given her a million pounds I do not think she would have thanked me any more."

All that Prince Max narrated of his charitable adventure would take too long to tell here. One thing the Countess noted, as a point well scored, he had begun to learn humility; his offers of service had been rejected as of little use, his company as a hindrance, his new lady had left him to feel small, and he had not resented it, had indeed owned that her judgment on him was just. He had also put himself to her test of sincerity and failed. "I tried to go on with it," he confessed, "but it was no good. What my father says is quite true—we can't really get at the lives of these people, we are too cut off. We make use of them, they of us; but we are still hiding from each other round corners, or walking on opposite sides of the street. She, having become one of them, meant me to see that."

"But she doesn't know who you are."

"She knows what kind I am; it's all the same."

"You didn't cross after her?"

"How could I? It wouldn't have been manners."

"She presumed on your having them, then?"

"She has a generous nature."

"And then, for whole weeks, you did much more than cross after her; you hunted for her, lay in wait for her, doing nothing all the time. My dear grown-up man, wasn't that rather childish?"

"What else could I have done?"

"Made her miss you."

"Well, as we haven't seen each other since, it comes to the same thing."

"But she knows you've been there; she would have thought much more of you if you hadn't been."

"Why?"

"It would have made her more repentant. Now she only thinks that you've tired of it."

"Ah, well, she promised to pray for me," said Max.

"Oh, I pray for you, my dear," sighed the Countess; "not that I suppose that does any good!"

And therein may be discerned a difference between the two women who most concerned themselves for the good of Max's soul; for the other had been quite confident that her prayers would do good. And it is curious how often those who have faith prove to be in the right.

IV

Max had given up the quest, but he had not given up hope. Though love had humbled him, he yet believed in his star, and reminded himself that the world was small.

In the late spring the Jubilee celebrations took up some of his time; maneuvers followed. He went and played at soldiering for the public satisfaction; then returned to his more private and serious avocations, put the finishing touches to his book, and began to receive proofs from the foreign printing-house to which through the Countess's hands he had entrusted it. She herself with kind, charitable intent stayed on; more than ever now he needed some one to talk to and—he did not worry her. Others were trying to worry him. The Queen, after voluminous correspondence, had found and offered him choice of two German princesses whose photographs said flattering things of them; and, when he declined both propositions, had looked at him very sadly indeed—had almost broached the unmentionable subject. "Oh, Max, what are we to do with you?" she sighed; for she was still keeping herself badly informed of his goings-on. "That woman is back again," she informed her husband; "I really think we ought to consult the Archbishop."

The King saw no hope in that. "You must leave Max to take his own time," he said. He did not just then want to worry about Max, since he was preparing to plunge on his own account. "Alone I did it," was to be his boast, and he knew that if once he resumed fathering Max, Max would be fathering him, and his small spurt of initiative would be over.

But all that must be kept for another chapter. This one belongs to Max and his love affairs, past, present, and future; and it is still Max and his fortunes that we are following as we step back into the limelight of publicity.

At the first Court following on the Jubilee celebrations the Bishops appeared in force. It was their final demonstration of loyalty to the throne before the political battle joined, for they were now preparing to reject, just as a last fling, the whole of the Government's program, and then to see what the country thought of it.

As a bilious man sticks out his tongue toward the glass in order to know whether he looks as he feels, so the Bishops were sticking out their tongues toward the country in the hopes of looking as brave as they were pretending to be. And they came to Court that they might advertise their attitude.

They came in silken court-cassocks, preceded by their croziers and followed by their women-folk, a nice expression of that ecclesiastical and domestic blend on which the Church of Jingalo prided itself. These Church ladies were moral emblems in another respect as well: they had the privilege of appearing at Court functions more highly dressed—that is to say, less denuded—than others of a more aristocratic connection. The sacred and unfleshly calling of a bishop threw a protecting mantle over the modest shoulders of his wife and daughters; and these did not go unclad. In accordance with Pauline teaching they were covered in the assembly, expressing in their own persons that "moderation in all things" which was the accepted motto and policy of the Church.

The Archbishop of Ebury was there also; his crozier was different in shape from the rest, and as an addition to his silken cassock he wore a train. He was accompanied by his daughter. Daring in her assertion of the vocation which had withdrawn her from the gaieties of life she wore the gray robe of a little lay-sister of Poverty.

"His Grace the Archbishop of Ebury, Prince Palatine of the Southern Sees, Archdeacon of Rome, Vicar of Jerusalem, and Primate of all the Churches," so, upon entry to the Presence, his full and canonical titles were proclaimed by an usher of the Court.

After so high a flourish more impressive in its way was the simple announcement that followed: "Sister Jenifer Chantry."

Dignity led, quiet unassuming modesty came after; indifferent to her surroundings, obedient to the call of duty, she advanced in her father's wake toward the royal circle. They bowed their way round; and there, suddenly before him, Prince Max beheld the face of his dreams.

The eyes of the beloved met his; and he, struggling desperately to conceal his excitement and emotion from those who stood looking on, saw himself recognized without shock or quiver of disturbance. No heightening of color belied that look of quiet assurance and peace; with disciplined ease, perfect in self-possession, she courtesied and passed him by. And suddenly it seemed to him that all the air was filled with a strange humming sound, soft yet penetrating, like the populous murmur of a summer's day. Above the rustle of robes, the patter of feet, the subdued murmur of voices, and the regulated tones wherein Court ushers were announcing fresh names, that high vibratory note went on; elated and thrilled he listened to it and wondered, not knowing its cause—the quickened murmur of his own blood at the touch of Love's index finger upon his heart.

Now at last he knew who she was; now he could find her again on unforbidden ground, follow her where she had no excuse to hide, and press against all obstacles for an earthly fulfilment of that unpractically directed thing called prayer. For now it should not be only her prayer for him, but his for her; her very name—Chantry—expressed the need he had of her. She was the shrine within which his soul kneeled down to pray—not to any God, but to life itself. Here was the matrix from which all his desultory and scattered forces had been waiting to receive form and direction; to his own small fragment of that general outpouring which we call life, purpose and destiny had come. He with his adventurous theories, she with her patient and unflinching practice, how gloriously together they could tumble old monarchy to the dust and build it anew. For the first time in his life he felt almost fiercely desirous to step into his father's shoes. Strange that such sudden ambitions should be sprung on him by contact with a heart which apparently held none.

All this while he was returning the bows of bishops and their wives. They flowed by in solid file forty or fifty strong; for this was a demonstration with political import behind it, this was going to be in all the press to be understanded of the people; the Bishops about to fight for their own order were passing before the steps of the throne to indicate in dumb show that allegiance to Crown and Constitution which animated their hearts.

And then, gorgeous in cloth of gold and high funnel-shaped hat, introduced by the Minister of Public Worship but unaccompanied by his two black wives, came the Archimandrite of Cappadocia—a counter demonstration; and after him, forty Free Churches divines, all in black gowns, silkened for the occasion, but unenlivened by the moral emblems of their domesticity; a queer somber tail they seemed to that great eastern bird of Paradise under whose wing they would presently acquire the right to wear feathers as fine as his own.

Most of them had never been at Court before, and in consequence were not so well drilled as the Bishops. Some of them bowed too often, and too hurriedly, and before they need, beginning with the Lord Functionary whom they mistook for royalty; and they walked out sideways instead of backwards, reactionary methods of progress not being in their blood. Still, taking them for all in all, they were a very learned-looking body, and their presence in such uncongenial surroundings showed that they meant business.

And deficiency in their demeanor was quite covered by the deportment of the Archimandrite. In the new robe presented to him for the occasion by the Prime Minister (for the moth had got into his own) he looked superb, and behaved with a majesty beside which Jingalo's home-bred royalty sank into insignificance. Max frankly recognized his superior, and bowed low. "This is a descent of the spirit, Archimandrite," he said, as they touched palms; and as he did so a queer breath of eastern spices blew over him, for the man of God was chewing them.

And so, in this great overt act of respectful homage to the throne from both sides, the truce came to an end and the signal for fight was given. More important to Prince Max was the fact that it had revealed to him a certain lady's identity.

CHAPTER X

KING AND COUNCIL

I

During the weeks of the Jubilee recess the King had spent his spare moments in taking notes, and priming himself on fresh points of constitutional usage.

The Comptroller-General was greatly puzzled to see writing going on day after day in which neither he nor any of the secretaries were invited to take part. He was more puzzled still when, by means available to him, he obtained access to what the King had actually written.

After a single reading he felt it his duty to report to the Prime Minister.

"He seems to be writing a history of the Constitution," said the General. "Where he gets his facts from I don't know, but they don't seem to have come from you; quite the other side I should say."

On this note-taking, so voluminous that it resembled the writing of a history, the King was getting into his stride, and was discovering how very much better all these years he could have made his own speeches, had he only been allowed to. He had within him the gift of expression, though not the power of condensing it; he had industry, a good case, and now at last behind his back an unimpeachable authority. And so, at its next meeting he came down into Council stuffed full of facts and phrases, and quite determined that before things went any further his Ministry should hear them.

The constitutional crisis had reached a head as soon as Parliament again met. The defiant action of the Bishops had thrown the Government's program so much into arrears that a drastic quickening of the pace had become necessary; and if, in spite of scare and warning, the Bishops meant to go on doing as they had hitherto done it was evident that their constitutional powers must be limited. The Archimandrite and the Free Churchmen between them might supply the Government with a bare working majority; but that alone would not be sufficient to make legislation fruitful between then and the next general election. Unless the Government, after striking the blow, could come before the country bearing its sheaves with it, there was a very serious chance that its patriotic intention of continuing in power would be frustrated; and even a Government busily engaged in marking time to suit its own bureaucratic interests must appear to have covered the ground mapped out for it.

For this reason Cabinet ministers had been meeting and deciding on a good many things behind the King's back; and the "Spiritual Limitations Bill"—all the world has since heard of it—was the device they had adopted as most suitable to their needs. They proposed to bring it forward in a late winter session.

On the day before Council a draft of the proposed bill reached the hands of the King; and his Majesty on reading it and after referring once again to certain passages in Professor Teller's books of history, smiled gleefully and rubbed his hands; for though he had the heart of a vegetarian he was beginning to scent blood and rather to enjoy the smell of it.

II

The Council was already standing about the board when the King entered. Having bowed them to their seats he formally called on the Prime Minister to read the presented draft. This was done, and through the whole of it without a word of interruption his Majesty sat quiet and as good as gold.

Polite exposition was about to follow; but as the Prime Minister essayed an enlargement of his text his flight was stayed.

"Gentlemen," said the King, "I am dissatisfied with my position."

All turned amazed; the Professor with less amazement than the rest, for he observed, as confirmation of his suspicions, that the King's hand rested upon a bulky pile of manuscript.

"In this bill," said his Majesty, "you are proposing to remodel a Constitution that has lasted in an unwritten form for five hundred years. I see in your proposed emendations that the Crown is frequently mentioned, but its powers are nowhere defined—unless that constantly recurring phrase 'on the advice of his ministers' is a definition which you wish to see indefinitely extended. Otherwise there is no open indication that the Crown's powers are affected. But the question of constitutional rights as between the Bishops and the Laity to-day may to-morrow be a question involving the Crown also; and if you now mean to impose limits on one branch of the legislature, you must extend your definitions to cover the whole ground. I require, gentlemen, if this matter is to be carried any further, that my own powers and prerogatives shall be as accurately defined and set as much on a working basis as those of your two Chambers."

"'Working basis' is distinctly good," murmured Professor Teller, and looked admiringly at the King, whom the Prime Minister hastened to reassure.

"Your Majesty's powers," said he, "are in no way touched. At no single point of our proposals is any limitation suggested."

"Oh, I daresay not, I daresay not!" replied the King, "but though it isn't there in the text it is between the lines; yes, written with invisible ink which will be plain enough to read presently. What I am thinking about is the future. You may be perfectly right as to the wisdom of change; but we must have chapter and verse for it. We can't treat these matters any longer as an affair of honor. It used to be: now it isn't. Honor to-day is not a help but an impediment; I've found that out. To me it has lately become a question—a very grave question—whether I can in honor accept the advice of my ministers; and I do not intend to leave so disquieting a problem for my son to solve after me. There, now you have it!"

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

KING JOHN OF JINGALO

THE STORY OF A MONARCH IN DIFFICULTIES

BY LAURENCE HOUSMAN

NEW YORKHENRY HOLT AND COMPANY1912

Copyright, 1912,BYHENRY HOLT AND COMPANYPublished November, 1912

THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESSRAHWAY, N. J.

CONTENTS