King John of Jingalo

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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."

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