II
Nobody in Jingalo knows to this day what finally induced the Prime Minister to concede so unexpectedly that preliminary point of vantage—a mere foothold among the interstices of the ministerial program—which the Women Chartists had so long and vainly striven for. What use they made of the opportunity thus accorded has now become a matter of history: we need not go into it here.
No royal message to ministers in Council assembled worked that miracle; for, as we shall see in another chapter, the King's mind was destined at this point to be suddenly distracted in quite other ways; and when he was again able to turn his attention anywhere but to himself he found that and other matters which had disturbed his conscience tending with comparative smoothness toward a solution in which he personally had had little share.
But though Jingalo knows nothing of these inner workings of history, we peering behind the scenes may note how, when bureaucracy is bent on keeping up appearances, fear of scandal can become more potent to constitutional ends than love of justice.
Never in his long career had the Prime Minister known so flagrant an instance of blackmail unpunishable by law as that which the Princess Charlotte sprung on him when, in brief interview, she dictated the terms on which alone the Ann Juggins episode was to be allowed to sink into oblivion. And perhaps one can hardly wonder, under the circumstances, that even then he did not feel secure, and was anxious to see so incalculable a "sport" or variant of the royal breed removed to a safe distance. For even though he might rely on her word as to the past, where was his guarantee that she might not do the same thing again?
"That Prime Minister is very anxious to get rid of you," said Prince Fritz when at a later date he and the Princess began once more to compare notes as to future plans, when in fact the joyful news of their engagement was about to be publicly announced in a general uproar of thanksgiving.
"Oh, yes," went on Fritz, enjoying the retrospect, "one could see that quite well. He was putting on my boots for me all the time, and was willing to pay a good deal more for the accommodation than he had expected me to ask."
"Pay?"
"Yes, dearest; but it all goes into your pocket, not mine. It is the price he pays for your character; that is all."
"But what has my character to do with him?"
"Your character, beloved," said the Prince, turning upon her an adoring gaze, "leaves him with no moment in which he can feel safe. He thinks that you have 'a great vitality,' but here not enough scope. And he seems that he cannot govern this country so long as you stay in it. I think him very wise. Shall I tell you what I did?"
"Well?"
"I made a bargain."
"About me?"
"Of course about you, beloved—for you; who else except would I bargain for? Besides was it about anything but your business that he and I were having to seek each other? Well, because you so frighten him now he pays rather more to get rid of you; and you, oh my dear heart's beloved, you will get more. That is all that your Fritz had to do yesterday—and he has done it. So now!"
And then, well pleased with himself, the practical Fritz let his romantic side appear again, and for two minutes or so he lived up to the sky-like blueness of his eyes and the childlike gentleness of his face, and because his heart was very full of love he talked his own native German, and not Jingalese any more.
And these two sides of him are here given so that the reader, if kindly anxious about Charlotte's future, may trouble about her no more; for when your idealist is also a very practical man of business he can, up to the capacity of his brain-power, go anywhere and do anything, and even in a land that is outside Baedeker will assuredly find his feet. Not for nothing had Prince Hans Fritz Otto of Schnapps-Wasser turned his bottled industry of home-waters into a company.
In tentative motherings of her gigantic babe, Charlotte had forgotten all about money and business affairs when once more the practical man in him came out of childish disguise to make an inquiry.
"Beloved," said he, "tell me—was he that man?"
"Which man?" inquired Charlotte innocently.
"The one that you wrestled with?"
Charlotte nodded; a smile flickered over her face.
"And you got him down?"
"Yes."
"Quite down?"
"As flat as he could go."
"And that is why you marry me?"
The two lovers exchanged sweet looks of candor and honesty.
"Yes," said Charlotte, smiling, "that is why."
"O Beloved," murmured the infatuated Fritz, "how beautifully you do tell lies."
CHAPTER XXIII
"CALL ME JACK!"
It was noticed when the King came down to the first Council of the new session that his face was flushed and his manner strangely discomposed. He barely returned the respectful greetings of his ministers, and by postponement of the customary invitation to be seated, kept them out of their chairs for quite an appreciable time. Standing awkwardly about the board they looked like a group of carrion crows awaiting the symptoms of death before descending to their meal. To none did he accord any word of personal recognition.
Even when proceedings had commenced it was evident that his attention constantly wandered, only returning by fits and starts at the call of some chance phrase on which now and again he would seize, remarking in a tone of irritation, "And what does this mean, please?" And thereafter he would require to be instructed at some length, as though he had forgotten all current or preceding events.
In consequence of this the formal reports of the various departments became a lengthy business; and the really important matters, to discuss which the Council had been specially called, were proportionally delayed.
Presently the word "strikes" caught his ear.
"Ah, yes, what about those strikes?" he inquired.
"They are still going on, your Majesty."
"Yes, I know that! Why are they going on—that's what I want to know? The strike you are talking about was practically over more than a month ago; why has it begun again?"
"They have secured fresh funds, sir, and other trades have joined in."
"Is it the other trades that are finding the funds?"
"Not entirely, sir; large contributions are now coming in from abroad."
"From abroad?" interjected the King irritably, "where are they getting funds from abroad?"
"From England, sir."
"From the Government, do you mean?"
"Of course not from the Government, sir."
"Well, explain yourself, then! Don't call it England if it isn't England."
"I might almost say that it is England, sir, since a judicial decision is the immediate cause of it. Labor in that country has just won a very important action for damages arising out of a Crown prosecution. It has now been decided that the Crown is responsible for the torts of its civil and military agents. The unions in consequence are flush with funds, and a portion of the Court's award, amounting to £50,000, has been handed over to the strike fund in this country."
"And this subsidy from a foreign and a so-called friendly Power is having the effect of prolonging our industrial conflicts, and is doing damage to our trade?"
"Undoubtedly, sir, it has that effect."
"Well, and has nothing been said about it—to the English Government, I mean?"
"It is not a direct act of the Government, sir."
"I don't need to be told that," said the King. "Neither was it a direct act of the Government when a party of English undergraduates climbed to the top of our embassy and hauled down the national flag because Jingalese had been made a compulsory substitute for Greek at their universities. But for that the English Government apologized, publicly and privately, and all round. Do they apologize for this? Do they offer to compensate us for the loss it is to our trade and the corresponding gain to theirs? Have they been asked to apologize?"
"Certainly not, sir."
"And pray, why not?"
By this time, around the ministerial board, much open-eyed interrogation was going on. Where, they seemed to be asking, was this glut of foolish interrogations going to end? But still the minister under examination endeavored to answer as though the questions were reasonable.
"There would be no chance, sir, of obtaining any redress."
"Yet this is doing us infinitely more harm?"
"It is merely a development, sir, of that new thing called 'syndicalism.' It is cropping up everywhere now."
"It may be new as it likes," protested the King. "All I say is that as it stands it is a casus belli. You say it is cropping up; all the more reason why it should be put down! What else is government for? Take cattle disease; you put that down, you do not allow that to be imported. Why should you allow syndicalism to be imported either?"
The Council sought resignation of spirit in sighs and looked to its Chief in mute appeal.
"How would your Majesty propose to prevent the importation of ideas?" inquired the Prime Minister dryly, in a tone that tried to be patient.
"Don't tell me," said the King, "that a syndicalist subsidy to Labor of £50,000 is only an idea. But you are quite right, Mr. Prime Minister; in the past countries have gone to war largely over the importation of ideas, as you call them, either religious or social; that is why they failed. England went to war with France at the end of the eighteenth century merely because France was importing revolutionary ideas into England. Was she able to prevent it? No; she only got the disease in a much more virulent form herself, and has been running tandem to it ever since. It is no use going to war for sentimental reasons; you must do it for business reasons, and you must do it in a business-like way."
"Merely as a matter of business, sir," said the Prime Minister, his hopefulness now on a descending scale, "war with England would cost us considerably more than the loss of trade occasioned by this subsidy which you complain of."
"Not a bit of it!" retorted the King, "not if you went the right way to work. The Chancellor was saying just now that we should have to devise some fresh taxes. Well, put a tax on Englishmen; quite enough of them come here to make it worth while. Every summer the place is alive with them!"
"I am afraid, sir," said the Prime Minister, sighing wearily, "that the most favored nation clause stands in the way of your Majesty's brilliant suggestion."
"Not if we do it openly as an act of war," explained the King; "then it becomes a war tax. That's what I mean when I say conduct your wars on business lines. Don't tax yourself, tax your enemy! England is the one country we can fight on our own terms. She can't get at us. We are an inland power; there isn't a coast within three hundred miles of us; and Dreadnoughts can't walk on land, you know. They really can't!" he added, as though there might be some doubt among those who had not yet given the matter their consideration.
"I assure you, gentlemen, that war on England, if scientifically conducted, would be a profitable thing. I've been reading a book by a man named Norman Angell, who says that war doesn't pay. Well, the reason for that is we don't conduct our wars on the proper lines. Now if we made war on England——"
"Your Majesty," entreated the Prime Minister, "may we proceed to business?"
"If we made war on England," persisted the King, "we should not have to send out a single regiment, or impose any extra taxation on ourselves; in fact we should save. We should simply raise our railway and hotel tariffs fifteen or twenty per cent. to all Englishmen, except children in arms; children up to thirteen half price. There's the whole thing in a nutshell; no difficulty, no difficulty whatever."
At this point, to the Premier's annoyance, Professor Teller took up the question with a humorous appreciation of its possibilities.
"But, sir," he inquired, "how should we know that they were Englishmen? They might disguise themselves as Americans."
"They couldn't!" said the King. "An Englishman trying to talk American makes as poor an exhibition of himself as an American trying to talk English; and besides, you don't know the British character! Penalize them in the way I am suggesting and they would flaunt their nationality in our faces; they would wear Union-jack waistcoats and carry in their pockets gramophones which played 'God save the King' when you touched them. They would make a point of showing us that they didn't care twopence for our fifteen per cent.; in fact, their Tariff Reformers would applaud us—they would put it in large headlines in all their newspapers, and call it an object lesson and would demand a general election on the strength of it."
"But supposing, sir," inquired the Professor, "that they did not come at all? We have to remember that we live largely by our tourists; and if we eliminate the English tourist——"
"Better and better," said the King. "Think how popular we should be with the rest of Europe! No English? The Germans would simply flock to us; our hotels would be crammed; we should be turning away money at the door."
The Prime Minister tapped wearily upon the table; all this was such utter waste of time; and he began to think that the King was so intending it, and was bent upon making a royal Council a constitutional impossibility.
But in some curious magnetic way other members of the Cabinet were now beginning to be infected. The idea tickled their national vanity; and though it was all put in a very amateurish way, many of them saw well enough that for war to be retained as a solution of international problems something on these lines would have to be done for it. Syndicalism was merely a showing of the way.
"But, your Majesty," inquired the President of the Board of Ways and Means, "might not England retaliate by declaring a Tariff war on us?"
"She might," said the King; "but not with the Liberals still in power; they couldn't reduce themselves to absurdity in that way. Still, supposing our declaration of war threw the Liberals out, what could the others do? Our trade in English goods comes to us mainly through France or Germany; and our own return trade is chiefly limited to our native crockery, toys, wood-carving, and needlework, supposed survivals of our peasant industries, which, as a matter of fact, are nearly all of them manufactured for us in Birmingham, the home of Tariff Reform. In that matter, by the taxing of articles which are only nominally made in Jingalo, English trade would suffer more than ours; and there might, in consequence, come about a real revival of our native crafts (an advantage which I had not previously thought of)—lacking our usual supply of the bogus article we should at last become honest in our professions and truthful in our trademarks. Let the Minister for Home Industries make a note of it."
"The prospect your Majesty holds out is certainly alluring," replied the minister thus appealed to; "but if war is to teach us moral lessons, surely we ought to have moral reasons for engaging in it as well as business ones."
"Well, if you want them, you've got them!" said the King. "If moral reasons were to count we ought to have been at war with England any day for the last fifty years. England has become—if she has not always been—a center of infection to the whole of Europe. Every disastrous experiment on which we have embarked has come from her. By her gross mismanagement of established institutions—the Church, the Peerage, the Army, Land, Labor, Capital—the whole system of voluntary service and voluntary education—she has driven the rest of Europe into revolutionary changes for which there was no necessity whatever. In avoiding the woeful example she has set us, of always standing still on the wrong leg, we have run ourselves off both our own. And now she is nourishing syndicalism like a bed of weeds, and sowing the seeds of it into her neighbors' territories. If you are looking for moral excuse there is no end to it; I preferred, however, to put it to you as a business proposition."
"I must assure your Majesty," said the Prime Minister, "that your Majesty's present advisers have no intention whatever of making themselves responsible for a war on England, however advantageous the circumstances may seem."
He might as well have spoken to the wind; with an increasing volubility of utterance the King went on—
"If it were decided," said he, "that an actual invasion of England were advisable, I have three separate plans now forming in my head, all equally feasible and promising, and all capable of being put into operation at one and the same time. Each one, in fact, would serve to divert attention from the others."
It may be noted that at this point Professor Teller suddenly ceased to be amused; his look of half-quizzical detachment becoming changed to one of gravity, almost of distress; his Majesty's "pace" had apparently become too much for him.
"We know, for instance," pursued the King, "that if we succeeded in effecting a landing the German waiters would rise as one man and join us as volunteers. Germany would, of course, officially disown them, while for the purposes of the war we should give them letters of Jingalese naturalization on their enlistment; these, which they would carry in their knapsacks, would prevent them from being shot in the event of their being taken prisoners. Our own army of twenty thousand picked Jingalese sharp-shooters would go to England disguised as tourists. Each in his bag would carry a complete military outfit; our new uniforms are so like those of the English territorials that they would arouse no suspicion at the Customs House, and even when worn only experts would know the difference. At a given signal——"
There the Prime Minister, having extracted a look of despairing encouragement from the Council, got upon his feet.
"I have to ask your Majesty," he said very resolutely, "that we may now be allowed to proceed to the business for which we have been called together."
"At a given signal——" went on the King.
"I must protest, your Majesty."
It was quite useless.
"At a given signal—I will give you your signal, Mr. Prime Minister, when you may throw your bomb; yes, for I have seen you preparing it!—at a given signal when the King and his Parliament were assembled together in one place, some of our forces would mingle with the crowd; others emerging from places of concealment would form into ranks and advance from various quarters upon Westminster. Then, before any one was aware, we would cable our declaration of war, rush the House, seize the heads of the Government, carry them off to the topmost story of the clock tower, garrison it from basement to roof, and there, with the King and his whole Cabinet in our hands, stand siege till the rest of the nation sued for peace."
Once more the Prime Minister endeavored to interpose; he was borne down.
"They could not blow us up," went on the King, "without blowing our prisoners up also; they could not starve us out, for the King and his Cabinet would perforce have to share our privations. We should have in our possession not only the whole personnel of the Government, but that supreme symbol and safeguard of the popular will which crowns their constitutional edifice. And, gentlemen, you may think me as mad as you like—you may arrest me, you may take me to the police-station, you may rob me of all the evidence of conspiracy I have against you, and you may call me Jack—jack-of-all-trades, master of none—Jack, plain Jack——"
The Prime Minister and Council sprang to their feet. Consternation was upon the faces of all.
"But nothing! nothing!" he went on, "no power on earth—except it were a whole army of steeplejacks——"
At that word the flow of his eloquence ceased; his mouth remained open but no sound came from it. Suddenly his staring eyes puckered and closed, wincing as from a blow; and his face flushed to a fiery red, then paled.
He gave a short cry, threw out an arm feebly; wavered, toppled, crumpled like a thing without bone, and fell back into his chair.
"My God!" muttered the Prime Minister. "Oh, great Heaven!"
Some one, more nimble of wit than the rest, dashed out of the room to seek aid. All the others, impressed with a true sense of incompetence, stood looking at their fallen King. Not one of them knew how to handle him, whether it were best to lay him down or leave him alone. First aid—even to their sovereign lord—had formed no part in the education of these his counselors.
The Prime Minister did the one thing which he knew to be correct—and which could not possibly do harm; he felt the King's heart. But nobody for a moment supposed him to be dead; unconscious though he lay, his heavy breathings could be seen and heard.