The King of Alsander Part 14

"I don't believe you. You dare not touch me. I am an Englishman,"

retorted Norman, refusing to be conciliated.

"I am afraid," replied the President, ringing a little electric bell which was under his hand, "that we shall have to give you immediate proof of the earnestness of our intentions and our power to cause you a disadvantage."

At once four guards entered the room, whom Norman from their uniform and faces recognized to be the very palace guards who had let him and the supposed beggar pa.s.s into the palace the day of their memorable visit.

Unfortunately for Norman, they wore no longer the air of benevolent sleepiness which had characterized them on that former occasion; they were obviously wide awake and attentive to command.

"Do you still refuse to perform the exercises demanded of you?" inquired the President.

"Yes," said Norman, stubbornly.

"Haul him up," said the President quietly, but with anger in his eyes.

Norman found his wrists seized before he could make the slightest resistance, and he was swung up on to the back of the tallest of the guards.

"Do you refuse also to apologize?" said the Doctor.

"Yes."

"Let him go away quietly," said the President.

"Why should we hurt him? We cannot expect him to understand us."

"I insist on an apology. I will not leave the room without it," said Norman. "As for you, you soppy little fool...."

His bewilderment rapidly gave place to alarm. He wished he had not been quite so rude to the President, who, after all, had been polite. Still, he hoped he might be simply undergoing some form of Test by Verification, like the legendary Masonic hot poker. At least, I suppose it is legendary. But when from the tail of his eye he beheld from his undignified perch a horsewhip in the hands of one of the guards, he tried to remember the sufferings of his days in the village school at Blaindon, which, after all, were not of such remote antiquity.

He wondered, like the schoolboy, how many? If, that is, he really was to suffer after all.

His apprehensions were confirmed and relieved by the President, who exclaimed in a wickedly gentle voice, "I'm very sorry, but I suppose you must give him a dozen." The maniac examiners were quite capable, he had felt convinced, of beating him to death, and a dozen? Why, a dozen was about the extent of the good old pedagogic punishments, which he had endured stolidly in his time, and many of them.

A new question surged through his mind. What was the brawny guard about to aim at? Was the supreme indignity to be conferred upon him before all these pompous personages to emphasize his unfitness for dignity? Norman hoped so, for to tell the truth, he didn't care a d.a.m.n about the dignity, but he thought it would hurt less and was more used to it.

Meantime he had never felt so cold, and the rough cloth of the guard who was holding his wrists so tightly grated unpleasantly against his naked chest.

His dignity was not damaged. His shoulders were. He discovered his old pedagogue to have been the mildest and most inefficient flagellator in the world. Let us leave him to his punishment and philosophize a little.

Philosophy and the whip? Is there not always some subtle connexion? Has not a whipping always meant for us something more than a whipping? Is it not a symbol? Think of this, youthful reader, if you are still in the happy days of subjection and possibility, and may it comfort you in the hour of trial. The Spartans formed their character, the Romans ruled the world, with whippings. With little whips the Kings of Egypt made the Jews work with their hands--honest manual toil, to which that race no longer much inclines; he built his pyramid and flogged a great nation into life. But the East, the golden East in the golden days--that was the world for whippings. In other climes and other times, whipping has been a symbol of degradation; in murderous Russia it has been, they say it is, something too foul for the philosopher to look at. But when there were Caliphs in Bagdad, then whipping was the joyous symbol of democracy. Are you rich and powerful, the Caliph's friend? Tread delicately on those rich carpets: the day comes when to put foot to the finest Bokhara may be a torment to make you howl. Are you a poor pedlar selling gla.s.ses from a tray? Repine not at your barefoot treading of the cobbled lanes: it is all practice for the soles; you shall fare better than your proud neighbour on the day of affliction. Quick! Bow your head: put your hands in the sleeves of your tattered abba. The great Vizier is coming, the Window of Heaven, the Tulip of the Garden of Government, the Sun's Moon, the Vizier. And behind him, O Allah! the blazing luminary of the universe itself! Where shall you hide from those dazzling rays? The Caliph comes. Some insolent retainer has kicked over all your gla.s.ses. Your little fortune has gone. No longer will you cry:

"O sunset, O sunrise, O ocean drops my gla.s.ses, O emeralds, O rubies, O sapphires, O my gla.s.ses!"

Your wife will curse you, your children will starve; your dreams of a little ease are shattered with the shining crystals; your fortune lies with them prostrate in the dirt. You crouch in the doorway. But ho! what is that? The Vizier's horse has shied, he is kicking, he has kicked the Sun of the Universe off his saddle. All that splendour is smirching the bashful mud! Forgetting yourself, you rush to help him; your dirty, h.o.r.n.y fingers pick up Perfection, careless of sacrilege. You wait and tremble, for Perfection is himself again. The Vizier is pale. The Monarch gives a sign to the blackest of his black negroes. Down comes the Tulip of the Garden of Government. The Vizierial beard is in the dirt; the Sun's Moon's feet are all in air and looped into a pole: the blows fall, the Tulip howls--and you? The Caliph has embraced you and made you Vizier on the spot. Such is a whipping in the East.

So much, then, for whipping from the point of view of historical geography. It has other aspects--too vast for mention here. The individual aspect, or the whippings inflicted on the famous, on Psyche by Venus, on Aristotle by Phyllis, on St Paul by the Romans, on-Henry Plantagenet by the monks, on Milton by his College, on Voltaire by a lackey, on Sh.e.l.ley by a schoolmaster. We read of the latter that he writhed on the floor not because he was hurt but out of shame. Ethereal Sh.e.l.ley!

Or take the literary aspect. Take the heroes of famous books--what whacks and thwacks they encounter, especially in all books that are an epitome of world life. From _Apuleius_ to _Don Quixote_, from _Gil Blas_ to _Tom Jones,_ from _Candide_ to _Richard Feverel_, there is no great book without its whipping.

And there are those who say children should not be whipped! They are right, dear youthful reader, they are entirely right. It is we who should be whipped, we adults, we pompous people, we who are so ready to torture the young and who have quite forgotten the bitterness of the torture we inflict. It is we who should be whipped, we who dread the dentist, we whose waistcoats bulge and blossom into gold watch chains.

And criminals? O we flog them still, but only the poor, violent, rough fellow who does a bit of straightforward business. It is that fat financier whose juicy back I want to see streaked with red like a rasher of bacon; it is that ape-like vestryman whose yells would be music to my ears; it is, above all, the proprietor of pills that I would strap down to his alliterative and appropriate post, the pillory.

None of the above reflections occurred to Norman. His literary knowledge did not help him. He seemed to have spent whole years being whipped. He felt as if his lungs would burst. But the executioner laid on steadily and evenly, till the victim's back looked like a sheet of music paper.

Then he was abruptly let down and writhed for half a minute with rapidly decreasing pain. And about this let the philosopher say one word more.

Whipping is not strictly torture. It does not deform. It leaves no ill effects. And therefore many a parent who would shudder to use rack or thumb-screw to our children, think nothing of whipping them. But it need not hurt much less.

Norman, in absolute silence, put on his clothes. The examiners meanwhile filed out of the hall; the young shopman-president alone remained. For a mad moment Norman thought he saw tears in the President's eyes and pity in his face; but his own vision was dim, and certainly it seemed improbable that the brute who had ordered the whipping should be affected thereby to tears. When Norman was dressed the President said, "Follow me, I will let you out." Norman obeyed silently. They went alone together into the little shop. The boy had already begun to plot revenge, and now thought he saw his opportunity. Calculating the moment and the distance, he suddenly sprang like a tiger on the President. His effort was attended by no success. He found himself lying on the floor as swiftly as a skater who has tripped on a stone.

"Do you think I was not prepared?" said the President, smiling, as Norman picked himself up. And somehow, for all that his back was still aching, the charm and beauty of the young man, his soft voice and his insinuating smile, changed Norman's wrath into a sort of shame.

"So that's all I'm to get for coming with you," said Norman, like a rueful schoolboy. "You've forgotten even the present suitable for a lady."

"You're a wonderful person," muttered the President. "It's a pity we had to reject you." And opening a drawer he drew out a very beautiful jewelled clasp.

Norman muttered, "How much?" and felt in his pocket. He knew the receipts of Price's Bon Marche would not have paid for it in fifty years--if the stones were real.

"You have earned it this time," said the President, "and please not to take me for a shopkeeper again," and, opening the door into the street, he waited for Norman to go out. The boy hesitated.

"Tell me, to whom does all this belong?" he asked, voicing questions that troubled his mind. "And where is the Old Poet? And why did he choose me as a subject for his unpleasant jokes?"

"Good evening," said the President, pointedly. "I have nothing further to say to you but this, that if you say one word, one little word, to a soul of what has happened to-night--there are worse things awaiting for you than whipping." And with these ominous words he closed the door and shut Norman out into the street.

"This comes," said Norman, bitterly, "of following the advice of poets!"

CHAPTER IX

THE CONSUL

Again in the mist and shadow of sleep He saw his native land.

The hero of this and all our adventures, feeling unheroic and disinclined for further traffic with his fellows, did not proceed to the board of the Widow Prasko, or to the no less hospitable embrace of her lovely daughter, but nursed revenge and a sore back by a walk on the walls. The path along the summit of these old fortifications is broad and smooth: it commands sea, mountains, town and all four corners of the heavens; many lovers, dreamers and successful suicides have pa.s.sed that way. Yet surely it would need more than the vivid recollection of a sound thrashing to make a man leave such a prospect as that wall affords, especially westward, to the mountains and the setting sun. So Norman walked along the walls and not off them.

How to attain satisfaction? Whom to seek in this dilemma? How to be revenged and not ridiculed? How, above all, to get level with those lunatics without again being stripped and whipped like a schoolboy or enduring a worse thing, according to the strange young President's threat? What was the meaning of it, the sense of it, the clue to this mysterious and painful practical joke? Where, above all, was that ancient scoundrel of a poet and in what disguise, and why was he not present at the scene? Had the old curiosity shop been invented from the very beginning simply to attract him? How could they have known he would take the Poet's hint and look there for the present? How was it they were all prepared for him when he came? And, finally, what was the real value of the handsome buckle which he was to give Peronella? He pulled it out of his pocket: if the stones were real, and they looked it, he judged it to be worth a fabulous sum. For a moment he thought it might all have been a plot of Cesano's to befool him. But common sense soon rejected that theory: so artistic and elaborate a practical joke was far beyond the conception of that thin-brained cavalier. Norman walked twice round the walls in hopeless bewilderment, and longed to find a trusty soul to whom he could impart the whole affair. Then, as for the third time he faced the East, the sun of inspiration blazed full on the fields of his intellect.

Visions of Britain's might awake to protect her humblest subject rolled across his mind; of Dreadnoughts blackening the horizon, of a ten minutes' bombardment, of being hauled from prison by merry bluejackets pouring brandy down his throat, of shaking hands with a clean-shaven Admiral, of a protectorate over Alsander, and the immediate repaving of the roads and reconstruction of the sewers.

Was there no British Consulate in Alsander?

Comforted by a resolve to appeal to the might of Britain, he returned at once to the board of the Widow Prasko and the no less hospitable arms of her charming daughter. They had been quite anxious about him.

"And where is it?" was the girl's first question.

He pulled out the exquisite toy, and Peronella cooed with delight.

"My dear Peronella, it is far, far too good for you," said her mother, beaming with ostensible gratification, and burning to know whether any of the stones could possibly not be paste.

"Did you really find that in that poky little shop?" said Peronella.