King John of Jingalo Part 43

"But I can't say that sort of thing, my dear."

"Yes, you can, papa! It's an old right; the right of unrepresented people to come direct to their sovereign and tell him that his ministers are refusing to do things for them. And your ministers are trying to keep you from knowing about it, to keep you from knowing even that you have such a power; and by not knowing it they are making you break your Coronation oath. Oh, papa, isn't that dreadful to think of?"

"My dear, if that were true----"

"But it is true, papa! These women are trying to bring you their pet.i.tion, and they are prevented. The ministers say that you have nothing to do with it; so they go to the ministers--they take their pet.i.tion to the ministers, and ask them to bring it to you, so that you may give them an answer. Have any of them brought you the pet.i.tion, papa?"

The King shook his head.

"You see, they do nothing! And so the women go again, and again, and again, taking their pet.i.tion with them; and because they are trying to get to you--to say that their grievances shall be looked into, and something done about them--because of that they are being beaten and bruised in the streets; and when they won't turn back then they are arrested and sent to prison."

By this time Charlotte was weeping.

"They may be quite wrong," she cried, "foolish and impossible in their demands; they may have no grievances worth troubling about--though if so, why are they troubling as they do?--but they have the right, under the old law, for those grievances to be inquired into and considered and decided about. And Parliament won't do it; it is too busy about other things, grievances that aren't a bit more real, and about which people haven't been pet.i.tioning at all. But you, papa (if that pet.i.tion came to you), would have the right to make them attend to it. And they know it; and that's why they won't let you hear anything about it."

The King's conscience was beginning to be troubled. He had no confidence either in the good sense or the uprightness of his ministers to fall back upon; and he saw that his daughter, though she knew so little about the merits of the case, was very much in earnest. She had caught his hand and was holding it; she kissed it, and he could feel the dropping of warm tears.

"Very well, my dear," he said, "very well; I promise that this shall be looked into."

"Oh, papa!" she cried joyfully. "It was partly for that--just a little, not all, of course--that I went to prison."

"Then you ought not to have been so foolish. Why could you not have come to me?"

"I don't think you would have attended; not so much as you do now."

And the King had to admit how, perhaps, that was true.

"Well, my dear," he said again, "I promise that it shall be seen to. No, I shan't forget."

And then she kissed him and thanked him, and went away comforted. And when he was alone he got down the index volume of Professor Teller's _Const.i.tutional History_, and after some search under the heading of "Pet.i.tions" found indeed that Charlotte was right, and that the power to send messages to Parliament for the remedying of abuses was still his own.

CHAPTER XVII

THE INCREDIBLE THING HAPPENS

I

Since the break-up of his plans the King had been finding consolation in his son's book, an advance copy of which had reached him while Max was still abroad. Consolation is, perhaps, hardly the right word; it had distracted him in more ways than one; partly, and in a good sense, from his own personal depression over things gone wrong, but more with a scared apprehension of the terrible hubbub that would arise when its contents became known. The t.i.tle, _Government and the Governed_, was sober enough, and the post-diluvian motto once threatened by Max had been omitted; but the contents were of a highly revolutionary character, and the bland "take-or-leave me" att.i.tude of the author toward the public he would some day be called upon to rule was on a par with that statement of her prison doings which Charlotte was preparing for the delectation of Hans Fritz Otto, Prince of Schnapps-Wa.s.ser. In neither case did it seem likely that such a confession would draw parties together.

And so before the King had even finished reading he felt it his duty to write imploring his son not to publish.

Before an answer could reach him important events supervened. The reverberations of the bomb brought Max flying back to the bosom of his family; and then the Charlotte episode had followed, over which Max had not been at all sympathetic, for in spite of his emanc.i.p.ated views about things in general, he had still the particular notion that revolution belonged only to men, and that women, incapable of conducting it efficiently, had far better leave it alone.

And so it was that only when things had begun to resettle themselves was any fresh reference made to the book's forthcoming publication.

As soon as the subject was broached Max presented a face of polite astonishment.

"I thought you knew, sir," he said.

"Knew what?"

"The most important event in recent history; I even thought you might have instigated it."

"I don't know what you are talking about."

"Then I must break the news. My book has been burned to the ground." He spoke as though it had been an edifice. "I am told, for my consolation, that it burned extremely well--'fiercely,' the papers said--and gave the firemen a lot of trouble. Your letter and the news reached me almost simultaneously; I knew, therefore, that you would be glad."

"No, no, don't say 'glad,'" protested the King; "in a way I am sorry, even. I only wanted it to be anonymous. One can do things anonymously.

How did it come about?"

"It was the work of an incendiary."

"How do you know that?"

"There was absolute proof,--something which refused to burn,--a box of matches made in Jingalo, or some other fire-resistant of a similar kind.

The perpetrator got off. Yes--the House of Ganz-Wurst certainly seems at the present moment particularly to attract the attentions of these obscurantists in politics. Who knows whether the hand which threw the bomb at you had not already been dipped in the petrol which had given so flaming an account of my claims to authorship?"

"What are you going to do about it?"

"Reprint, I suppose, as soon as I can afford it, or do you still wish me not to? You hold almost the only copy that is left."

The King shook his head. "As I told you, Max, I think publication would be very unwise; you would be sure to regret it afterwards. Remember that some day you will come to the throne; and what you think you can do now you can't do then. All at once it becomes impossible."

And then the King gave a queer consternated gasp, for he himself remembered something--something he had conditionally promised, believing that the conditions would never be fulfilled; and now fate had brought them about; and if Max so willed it a thing would presently be taking place much more disturbing to the inst.i.tution of royalty than the publication of a mere book.

To the King's last remark Max merely replied: "At present, sir, it is you who are upon the throne and not I--a circ.u.mstance over which I have very particular reasons for being glad. And now, sir, something has just occurred to me: do not think that I am going to antic.i.p.ate the date you fixed, that is not till next week, but when all is settled, as it so soon will be if I remain of sane mind, then I will present all the preserved copies of my book to the lady whom you so disapprove of, and she shall do with them exactly as she wishes--order a new edition, or put them on the fire to help her make soup for the poor. That is a little device of mine, sir, for bringing her into your good graces; for if I know anything of her mind she will maintain that to publish such a book without a full intention of putting its principles into practice is a mere parade of insincerity and foolishness. And so--from your point of view--she will be saving the monarchy from a danger which no one else can avert; for I am not prepared to surrender my power to do mischief into any hands but hers. A copy of the book, you may be interested to hear, has already gone to her; and her silence about it warns me that the epoch it so strenuously makes for is not the one that she desires."

"You are still talking like a book, Max," said the King sarcastically, wishing to divert discussion for the time being from that which he was referring to.

"Ah, yes," said Max; "as a bird who mourns his mate. Why, for a while, should I not indulge my grief? I shall never write another; all I had it in me to say was said there. In future--though you may hear in my voice an echo of that lost romance--I am going to be a man not of words but of deeds."

The King smiled.

"You look incredulous, sir; but I have already startled that Commission you put me on, and compelled it to include in the scope of its inquiry things which it did not want to inquire into at all. Believe me, sir; if we get before us all the evidence that I intend we shall find ourselves forced into making a very unpopular report--far more unpopular than my book would have been, and far more subversive of the established order of things than at present you can have any idea. Even your coats, sir--exorbitant though their price now is--are going to cost you more as a result of this Commission, unless we can so arrange that in future a little less shall be paid for the 'cut' and a little more for the needle and thread that join the cuttings together. I am going to have it said in this report of ours--for I have discovered it to be a fact--that the very clothes which are your daily wear (and mine) are put together by men and women paid at something less than twopence-half-penny an hour.

And I am going to get it put in that scandalously personal way (your clothes and mine--the clothes we go to open Parliament in, and set the fashions in, and when we have worn them some half-dozen times hand on to charity), I am going to have it thus put that all may be conscious and ashamed when they see us so exhibiting ourselves, and no longer think a well-cut coat under modern commercial conditions a fit adjunct for royalty. That, sir, will do a great deal more harm to 'trade' than my book would have done. The public conscience does not like to have these things brought home to royalty itself; we and the 'social evil' are in no way to be connected with each other, lest it should be seen that we help to make its ways easy. Only the other day I was credibly informed that a man who headed with twenty thousand pounds the list of a charity bearing my mother's name, has been allowed by the police to get out of this country scot free--though guilty of infamous conduct,--merely because the contribution of that tainted donation to a royal fund would not have 'looked well.'"

"Oh, stop talking to me, Max!" cried the King, made irritable by his increased sense of helplessness. "Go and do what you like, say what you like, report what you like; you've got the Commission to play with; run it for all it is worth; but for Heaven's sake let me have peace for a while! Why should you trouble me? You know that I can do nothing."

"You have done a great deal," said Max, whose admiration for his father had grown very considerably during the past year.

"I have missed doing a great deal; but of that you know nothing, and I'm not going to tell you." And then he could stand it no more. "Do you imagine I should have made you that idiotic promise," he cried, "if I had supposed for a moment that I should still be here when you came to claim it?" And so saying he got up and, diplomatic in retreat, hurried out of the room.