He would say and do that which was given to Him to say or do. As an Englishman, He had His intuitions. And He required no confidences. England, the shy, the proud, should be served by Her shy proud son, the Servant of the servants of God. The divine afflatus of patriotism inspired Him, brightening His eyes, erecting His head. He sat down again: took His writing-board on His knees; and wrote. Anon, He rang the bell and gave some orders. Also, He sent some written slips of cyphers to the operators in the Vatican marconigraph office.
On the twenty-second of January, the Supreme Pontiff descended to the basilica of St. Peter-by-the-Vatican; and sang mass for the repose of the soul of Queen Victoria, the Great, the Good. The same day, the English newspapers announced that His Holiness had sent a cardinal-ablegate to place the Golden Rose, the pontifical tribute to virtuose queens, on Her Majesty's tomb in the mausoleum at Frogmore.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Italian Socialists having been won for Italy, and the German Socialists by the German Emperor, the British Socialists began to wonder where they themselves came in. The predilection for forming societies which is to be met-with among all the degenerate and hysterical, may assume different forms. Criminals unite in bands, as Lombroso expressly establishes. Hence the British Socialists (in their quandary) held fatuous meetings hoping to generate a policy in an atmosphere of hot envious man. They really did want to know their exact position: for, in some indefinable way, they were beginning to feel that they were by no means as necessary to the universe as they had imagined themselves to be. It seemed as though this planet (for one) were moving quite easily without them, and (what was more annoying) on a path which was quite strange to them, a comfortable path and a desirable. They felt that they were being left out in the cold; and, as their nature was, they looked about for some safe person on whom to void their spleen. They began with the Roman Pontiff. That an archaic potentate of His calibre, should prove to be fresh and actual and vigorous, struck them as something of a nuisance. They had deemed Him hardly worth consideration, a decayed relic of antiquity, useful perhaps as a monument of the bad old days when the world was drowned in damnable idolatry: but nothing more. That any man whose reputation so publicly had been besmirched as His had been, should dare to hold up his head, to live and move and have his being, to dispose of millions of money and of the minds of nations, struck them as simply atrocious. He had refused the honour of their alliance, had scorned their overtures with contemptuous silence. They would return Him scorn for scorn: they would shew Him what He had lost. If He flattered Himself that His so called Epistles to this that and the other would have any influence, the sooner He was undeceived the better. The Liblab Fellowship soon would let 'an unhappy old drawler of platitudinous flapdoodle like Hadrian' know His place, quoth the blameless Comrade Bob Matchwood. All the same, amid all the rhapsodic rhodomontade of sound and fury signifying nothing, there remained among the fellow-shippers just enough intellect to perceive one thing. Comrade Frank Conollan put on his pince-nez; and, with a spasm of jerks and twitches, was delivered of the opinion that the Liblab Fellowship could not hope to recover anything like a respectable position in the popular estimation as long as it remained where it was. He said that to blink the fact, that Liblabbery had taken a false step in approaching the Pope of Rome, was not a bit of good. Liblabbery had courted a snub; and had been smitten with the snubbiest of snubs. If he might use a metaphorical expression, he would say that Liblabbery had been enticed into a bog and made to look unspeakably silly. If he might use a poetical expression from Shakespeare, he would say 'like unback'd colts they pricked their ears, advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses, and calf-like follow'd through tooth'd briers, pricking goss, and thorns, which enter'd their frail skins, into the filthy mantled pool, where, dancing up to the chins, the foul lake o'er-stunk their feet.'
(It began to dawn upon the Liblabs that the Comrade was doing the very thing desired. He was leading up to the customary denunciation of some traitor. He was about to provide them with the name of the usual scape-goat. They prolonged pleased ears in his direction.)
He would go further. He would say, still using the expressions of the immortal bard of Avon, "Your fairy, which you say is a harmless fairy, has done little better than played the Jack with us."