And when the volume was brought to him the King sat down and read all about steeplejacks and climbing irons, and cranks, and pulleys, and all the other various appliances requisite for the driving of that dreadful trade; read also how the men were inclined to prime themselves for the task in ever-increasing measure, and so one day having over-primed to be found at the bottom instead of at the top, knowing nothing themselves of how they got there. It was all very interesting and very apposite, and rather pathetic; and when he had done he turned over the pages backward till he came from steeplejacks to "Statesmen" and "Statecraft" and "Statutes" and the affairs of State in general (it was from the Encyclopedia Appendica—a presentation copy—that he got most of his information upon practical things); and in these articles he became so absorbed that he quite forgot how time flew, until his chief secretary came formally to announce to him that the hour for appearing in Council had arrived.
This announcement, be it observed, was made by no ordinary working secretary, but by the chief of them all, the Comptroller of his Majesty's household, a retired general who had passed from the military to the civil service with a record brilliantly made for him by other men—adjutants and attachés and all those indefatigable right-hand assistants of whom your true diplomatist forms his stepping-stones to power. General Poast and the Prime Minister shared between them the ordering and disposal of the King's public services to the Nation, while over other departments impenetrable to the Premier the hand of the Comptroller was still extended. Though personally the King rather disliked him, he had become an absolutely indispensable adjunct to the daily life—so smooth in its workings, yet so easily dislocated—of the Royal Household; also, as a go-between for ministers whose intercourse with the Crown was purely formal, he had proved himself a very efficient implement when on occasion it became necessary to circumvent or reduce to reason the King's characteristic obstinacy in small matters of detail. He might, in fact, be regarded as the keeper not so much of the King's conscience, as of his savoir faire, and of that tact for which Royalty in all countries is conspicuous. Everything that related to the remembering of names and faces, of dates, anniversaries and historical associations, all those small considerate actions of royal charity which robbed of their due privacy have now become the perquisite of the press; all these things stood ranged under minutely tabulated heads within the Comptroller-General's department. He was, literally, the King's Remembrancer; and so, on this occasion also, he had come as intermediary to remind his Majesty that the hour for the Council was at hand.
But the Council was one of those functions in which it was held necessary that the part played by the King (albeit no more than a silent presidency at a Board where others spoke) should wear an appearance of importance. And so the announcement made by the Comptroller was merely preliminary to another and more flourishing announcement by an usher of the Court. Two lackeys threw open a door—other than that through which the General had just entered, and a bowing official, beautifully dressed and waving a fairy-like wand, announced from the threshold, "Your Majesty's Council, now in attendance, humbly begs audience of your Majesty."
III
Then followed a pause. The Comptroller-General with head deferentially bent waited to catch the royal eye. The King graciously allowed his royal eye to be caught; and the Comptroller-General, interpreting the silent consent of that glance, uttered with due solemnity the traditional form of words indicative of the royal pleasure. "His Majesty hears," he lowed in the correct "palace accent": and the usher bowed and retired.
All this helped, of course, to make the act of presiding in Council seem highly important and consequential to any monarch susceptible to ceremonial flattery. Whether it had originally been so devised may be questioned, for monarchs of old had needed no such ceremonial backing to their very practical incursions into ministerial debate. What we have to notice is that the ceremony had survived, while the other thing—the practice of substantial interference—had become obsolete.
The King passed from his private apartments to broad corridors and portals where resplendent footmen stood in waiting, where everything worked with silent and automatic precision to prepare the way for his feet, signaling him on from point to point as though he were a sort of special train for which the line had been expressly cleared and all other traffic shunted. And yet when he came to the small anteroom which opened directly into the Council Chamber he felt for all the world like a timid bather about to unbutton the door of his bathing-machine and step forth into a strange and hostile element. That moment of trepidation was one he never could get over,—to face his Council of Ministers was always a plunge; for here truly he felt out of his depth, aware that politically he was no swimmer. And now for a couple of hours he would have to endure while, thoroughly at home in their own element, twenty stout aquatic athletes tumbled around him.
The door was thrown open; and with an air of calm self-possession he walked to the head of the table about which his ministers stood waiting. "Be seated, gentlemen," he said, embracing in a single bow the obeisances of all; and like slow waves they closed in on him, subsiding in large curves and soft fawning ripples of hand-rubbing around the empurpled board at which nominally he was to preside.
When all were seated in order, he signed for the Prime Minister to open the proceedings, and thereafter had scarcely to speak; for at a King's Council only general reports were presented, no discussions took place, no fresh proposals were mooted; and so he sat and heard how this department or that was extending its beneficent operations, how statistics were completing to their last decimal places the prognostications of experts, and how along with these things imports and exports were balancing, trade declining, education advancing, and strikes growing every day more formidable and more popular.
It was only this last point that really interested him; for here he seemed to get a dim rumor of something that was part at least of that popular will which it was his duty to symbolize and to safeguard. But these official advisers of his were all for putting strikes down, and yet while putting them down they seemed to wish to curry favor with the strikers themselves. For on the one hand there was trade declining, if the strikes were not put down, to support fresh taxation, on the other the Labor Party, eighty strong, declining, if the strikes were put down, to support the Government. And with the Finance Act coming on the question was whether to accept an increasing deficit in the revenue or a declining majority in the Legislature. This could be read vaguely between the lines of the report presented by the Minister of the Interior. But all this time not one word was said about the coming constitutional crisis which was in everybody's mind. That had been thoroughly discussed by ministers sitting in real Council elsewhere, a Council at which the Head of the Constitution had not been present, and about which he would hear no more than the Prime Minister chose to tell him.