King John of Jingalo

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"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-a-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, feted 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.

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