King John of Jingalo Part 6

"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 l.u.s.ter----" 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 t.i.tle-page of my book."

"Good gracious!" cried the King.

Max was pleased to see what an impression he had made: he did not usually get so good a listener. "And to think," said he, "that all this talk came of your having asked me a question on a matter that is already five years old. I am sorry to have taken up so much time explaining myself."

"On the contrary," said the King, "I am glad. Five years? Yes, I am very glad to know that." He got up and moving to the table made a call on his private telephone. "Would you mind waiting a few minutes," he went on, "perhaps I shall need your countenance."

A secretary answered the call; and presently the Comptroller-General himself appeared to learn the royal pleasure.

"I am sorry, my dear General," said the King, "to trouble you at so late an hour. But about that matter of the widow--who is not a widow. I wish fifty pounds to be sent to her--anonymously. Yes, fifty pounds. Will you see that it is done to-night?"

Turning to Max he said, as though referring to conversation already pa.s.sed, "You have effectually interested me in her case."

Max saw that he was being used as a p.a.w.n in a game he did not understand, and held his tongue; and the Comptroller-General, finding himself dismissed, retired to do for once as he was told.

And so, by the inglorious device of anonymity and lavishness combined the King maintained his point, and sent his gift to the relief of one who was, as a matter of fact, just as legally a widow as any other you or I may like to name.

John of Jingalo had not yet broken the official leading-strings, but on this occasion he had circ.u.mvented them. Flushed with his triumph, he bade his son an affectionate good-night. "Come and talk to me again," he said. "I don't agree with anything you say, but you help me to think."

It was a sign of progress. Hitherto he had relied, with a far greater sense of security and comfort, on those who had enabled him not to think. Consultation with Max, insidious as the drug-habit, and as secretively employed, was henceforth to count for much in the development of the Const.i.tutional Crisis. Hereditary monarchy had conceived the idea of turning its hereditary material to account. No doubt the Cabinet would have objected, preferring to keep its victim in complete mental isolation; but at present, the Cabinet did not know.

CHAPTER IV

POPULAR MONARCHY

I

That talk with Max formed the preliminary to a month of the most strenuous verbal and intellectual conflict that the King had ever known.

Outside all was calm: the Const.i.tutional Crisis was in suspension; by agreement on both sides hostilities had been deferred till trade should have reaped its full profit out of the Silver Jubilee celebrations. The papers spoke admiringly of this truce to party warfare as "instinctive loyalty" on the part of the people, "expressive of their desire to do honor to a beloved sovereign in a spirit undisturbed by the contending voices of faction."

There was no "instinctive loyalty," however, within the Cabinet! While streets were decorating and illuminations preparing, ministers were giving his Majesty a thoroughly bad time.

In a way, of course, he brought it upon himself, for at the very next Council meeting after his conversation with Max he did a thing which, so far as his own reign was concerned, was absolutely without precedent: he opened his mouth and spoke;--objected, contended, argued. And at the sound of his voice uttering something more than mere formalities, ministers sat up amazed, most of them very angry and scandalized at so unexpected a reversion to the const.i.tutional usages of a previous generation.

Not a word of all this leaked out. The whole thing was an admirable example of that keeping-up of appearances on which bureaucratic government so largely depends. And it was, if you come to think of it, a very deftly arranged affair. There was the whole country bobbing with loyalty, enthusiasm, and commercial opportunism; the Cabinet unenc.u.mbered for a while by any parliamentary situation that could cause anxiety, and correspondingly free to direct its energies elsewhere; and there within the Council, and without a soul to advise him, was the King, scuffling confusedly against the predatory devices of his ministers. The poor man's knowledge of the Const.i.tution was but scanty, and his powers of argument were feeble, for from the day of his accession the word "precedent" had governed him. Yet he had an idea, a feeling, that he was now being forced into a wrong position; the const.i.tutional breath was being beaten out of his body, and he would pa.s.s from his levees, from his receptions of foreign emba.s.sies and addresses of loyalty and congratulation, to a conflict in Council which reminded him of nothing so much as a "scrum" upon the football field.

Through one goal or another he was to be kicked--the exercise of the Crown's prerogative to nominate Free Church Bishops, or the refusal to exercise it. And whichever expedient he was driven to in the end, he knew that on one side grandiloquent words would be written about his fine instinct for the const.i.tutional limitations or powers of monarchy, and on the other, pained, but deeply respectful words of regret that he had been so ill-advised by his ministers--or by others. Whichever side loses, it is the football which wins the game. That, however, is merely the spectator's point of view. The football only knows that it has been kicked. Yet the King was well aware that in Parliament at any rate appearances would be kept up; and that whatever corner of the field he got kicked to, the blame for it would be laid, ostensibly, on others; though, as a result, the monarchy to which it was his bounden duty to "add l.u.s.ter" would be either strengthened or weakened: and what course to take he really did not know.

His mind, in consequence, was greatly troubled. Being of conservative instincts he believed that, in the main, the Bishops were right and the Prime Minister wrong. The Prime Minister had been hara.s.sing the country with general elections; and the country had had about as many as it could stand: yet without a fresh election no other ministry was possible. And now, at a moment when the country was bent on profiting by the revival in trade which the approaching celebrations had stimulated, nothing would be so unpopular as a fresh ministerial crisis; and he could have no doubt that, whatever the papers might pretend to say, the odium of that crisis, if due to his own action, would fall eventually upon himself.

And the Prime Minister knew it! Yes, just at that juncture, resignation, or the threat of it, had become an absolutely compelling card; and he was playing it for all it was worth. Free Church Bishops were to be promised for the ensuing year, or the Ministry would be bound to feel, here and now, that his Majesty's confidence in it had been withdrawn.

Resignation, aimed not against any opposing majority in Parliament, but against the demur and opposition of the Crown itself--that fact in all its political significance, with all its possible developments of danger for the State and of humiliation for the monarchy, was daily pressing its relentless weight against the King's scruples. The more unanswerable it seemed the more angry he became, the more keenly did he feel that he was being unfairly used. And then, one day, as he sat thinking at his desk, all at once a new thought occurred to him, throwing a queer radiance into his face, of joy mixed with cunning. And then, gradually, it faded out and left a blank; the old expression of anxiety and distrustfulness returned. He shook his head at himself, scared that such a thought should ever have come into it. "No, no, it wouldn't do!" he muttered. "Impossible."

All the same he got up from his desk, and in deep cogitation began walking about the room. The carpet with its rich variegated pattern, like Max's conversation, helped him to think; until certain deliveries of a royal courier from abroad came to divert his attention to more particular and family affairs.

Nevertheless his mind had again reverted to its vetoed notion when, an hour later, on his way to the Queen's apartments he met the Princess Charlotte tripping gaily along the corridor. She stopped to give him her "return home" embrace. "How well you are looking, papa!" cried she, admiring his flushed countenance. But the King, though he smiled, remained preoccupied with the embryos of statecraft.

"My dear," he said abruptly, "do you think that I am popular?"

"Why, yes, papa, of course!" she said, opening sweet eyes at him.

"Doesn't everybody cheer you when you go anywhere?"

"I think," said her father dubiously, lending his ears in fancy to the sound, "I think that crowds get into the habit of cheering,--not because they care for me, but just because there are a lot of them, and they like to hear the sound of their own voices."

"But sometimes you have quite small crowds," said his daughter, "and still they cheer."

"Yes, yes," he allowed, "so they do. Yes, even the nursemaids, I notice, wave their handkerchiefs when I ride by them in the park. And I daresay some of them do it because they are sorry for me."

"Sorry for you, papa?"

"My dear, wouldn't you be sorry to have to be King now-a-days? It's no fun, I can a.s.sure you."

"I wouldn't like to be King always," said Charlotte, with honesty; "but you know, papa, with all the Silver Jubilee celebrations coming on you are quite immensely popular."