King John of Jingalo Part 14

"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 grace_--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 advertis.e.m.e.nt, has, of course, rushed to its a.s.sistance, 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 circ.u.mstances--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 un.o.bserved; 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 c.o.c.kney wail. And straight on the antic.i.p.ated 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sured 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 quant.i.ty "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.