King John of Jingalo

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KING JOHN OF JINGALO

THE STORY OF A MONARCH IN DIFFICULTIES

BY LAURENCE HOUSMAN

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1912

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. A Domestic Interior

II. Accidents Will Happen

III. Wild Oats and Widows' Weeds

IV. Popular Monarchy

V. Church and State

VI. Of Things not Expected

VII. The Old Order

VIII. Pace-making in Politics

IX. The New Endymion

X. King and Council

XI. A Royal Commission

XII. An Arrival and a Departure

XIII. A Promissory Note

XIV. Heads or Tails

XV. A Deed Without a Name

XVI. Concealment and Discovery

XVII. The Incredible Thing Happens

XVIII. The King's Night Out

XIX. The Spiritual Power

XX. The Thorn and the Flesh

XXI. Night-light

XXII. A Man of Business

XXIII. "Call Me Jack"

XXIV. The Voice of Thanksgiving

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."

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