King John of Jingalo Part 17

"The pace?"

"Yes; government to-day, sir, is largely a matter of pace, the actual measures do not so much matter. Modern democracy is making for something of which we are all really--the governing cla.s.ses I mean--profoundly apprehensive: and the problem now is to let it come about without actual catastrophe. When I used the word 'pace,' I had a certain graphic ill.u.s.tration in my mind--an incident I once heard from the manager of a railway--the recountal of which will show your Majesty what I mean.

"A pa.s.senger train, before arriving at the head of a long, evenly graded declivity, had taken on three or four good trucks heavily laden.

Owing to some carelessness in the coupling these wagons became detached on the very crest of the descent, and falling to the rear came almost to a halt. Not quite: sluggishly at first they began to move, and gathering impetus from sheer weight followed in the track of the proceeding train.

Halfway down the declivity, the engine-driver discovered his loss and the danger that threatened him. Looking back, he saw in the distance the wagons weighted by the labor of men's hands drawing nearer with a speed that grew ever more formidable. His one chance, therefore, of avoiding a catastrophe was to put on pace in the hope of arriving at more level conditions before the impact took place. Yet he must still limit himself to a speed which enabled the train to keep to the rails on a certain sharp curve which lay ahead. That was the problem which the engine-driver set himself to solve: up to a certain point the more pace he could allow the greater his chance of safety, beyond that point a new danger arising out of pace lay ahead of him."

The minister paused.

"What happened?" inquired the King.

"He negotiated the curve with success, and had got so far ahead that when the wagons finally overtook him their impetus had been diminished by the more level conditions of the road, and the impact was but slight.

Only the guard's van was smashed, and the guard himself rather badly disabled."

"And what happened afterwards to the guard and the engine-driver?"

inquired his Majesty, much interested.

"The guard was pensioned for life: the engine-driver was promoted."

"And whose fault was it--the guard's?"

"Well, not exactly," replied the Professor; "the careless coupling was done by others, but the guard had the right, which he had not chosen to exercise, to refuse to accompany any train in which his van was not put last--so as to embrace the whole combination. At least, he had the technical right."

"I suppose he did not wish to give trouble," said the King meditatively.

"Very likely; for, of course, had he exercised his right the whole train would have been delayed by the extra shunting."

"And he in consequence a less acceptable servant to his employers."

"No one could have blamed him."

"Not for excess of caution?" queried the King. "Did you not yourself say that on those lines government would become impossible? You have to run your railway system, it seems, with a certain risk of accidents--otherwise you would never be up to time."

"That is so," said the Professor. "In every political crisis it is pace more than principle that I find one has to consider. If it is solved in such and such a way, our pace will be so and so, and the question--will it take us safely over the curve? If it is solved in another way so that the pace slackens, those wagons in the rear may be down upon us."

"And the guard, whose control, while the train makes its running, is but nominal, is then the first to suffer!" He saw himself in the man's place. "Poor glow-worm!" he cried, "he may change the green light in his tail to red--or was it red to begin with? but it is no use! Those proletarian forces descending upon him from the rear are quite blind in their purpose: it is merely dead weight and impetus that send them along." And then he pulled up abruptly, astonished to find that he was talking in Max's manner. Was it so catching?

"Not wholly blind, sir," said the Professor; "believe me, they mean well--mainly to themselves, no doubt: that is only human nature. Every body in the community, whether energized or sluggish, has some weight attached to it; and the more that bodies can agree to combine the greater is their weight politically. One has to recognize that consensus of opinion carries with it a certain moral as well as physical force.

Out of that springs the evolution of our governing system."

"Only I," said the King, "in the nature of things have always to stand alone."

"Sir, you have all history!" said the Professor.

"Which, as you have reminded me, I do not know."

"May I inquire, sir, whether you have a real wish to know?"

"Why, naturally!" exclaimed the King. Whereupon the Professor, as though laying aside something of his officialdom, took up an easier att.i.tude and addressed himself to the point.

"It would, I think, sir, be quite compatible with my duty to my colleagues were I to send your Majesty a few volumes of const.i.tutional history with certain appropriate pa.s.sages marked. It would interest me very greatly to hear the argument developed on the lines you have already laid down. The history I would venture to send is a thoroughly reliable and standard authority, written by an eminent jurist to whose words we later historians still bow. As I said, sir, _pace_ is to-day the thing which really matters; beyond a given pace we, certainly, are not able to go. Luckily for our present plans there is no source from which any forcing of the pace seems probable. I do not think this or any other ministry dare attempt it. Speaking for ourselves any increase of the present pace would, I conceive, become a grave embarra.s.sment. If, therefore, your Majesty has been apprehensive of our adopting any increase of speed, I think you may be rea.s.sured. After the const.i.tutional readjustment our pace is scarcely likely to grow dangerous."

The Professor had managed to indicate that these were--if so it might be allowed--his last words. The King rose.

"I shall be much obliged, Professor," said he, "if you will lend me the books you have mentioned. When may I look for them?"

"Sir," said the Professor, in smooth matter-of-fact tones, "it so happens that I have them with me in my carriage. I will have them conveyed to your Majesty immediately."

And therewith he bowed over the King's hand and departed.

II

Left to himself the King stood considering for a while. He was pleased, but puzzled. What had this man, wise and kindly, been telling him? What advice were his words intended to convey? He was quite sure now that this minister had come and talked to him for a purpose: and what he had mainly talked about was "pace." It was "pace" that mattered. That was all very well, but with pace he himself had nothing to do--except in a negative sort of way. He, occupying the position of guard with brakes to his hand but no steam-power, could only cause delay; he had no means, and no object that he could see, for accelerating matters. Besides, had not the Professor said that in his estimation the pace was about right?

All his efforts to secure delay would--he was already aware of it--fail of their effect; ministerial resignation threatening, he would have to give in. The alternative, the mad alternative that had for a moment occurred to him--no, it would not do! The results might be too tremendous, might lead even to revolution and a republic, and so he gave the problem up. And then a pile of six large volumes "with Professor Teller's humble duty" was brought in and set down before him; and John of Jingalo sat down to read the marked pa.s.sages.

It was a reading that for its completion extended over many days.

What first attracted his attention, however, was a chronological series of plates, showing the map of Europe in all its political changes from the tenth to the twentieth century. This was, in fact, a key to the whole work, for as the author rightly pointed out in his opening paragraph the history of Europe was inextricably bound up in the history of Jingalo, and the one could not be properly studied without some understanding of the other.

These maps of Europe he turned from century to century; and there, as he marked their many variations, there always to be recognized was Jingalo occupying its proud historical position--so often challenged, yet still on the whole unchanged. It had found room to live and breathe, not by its own strength, but by a careful adjustment of the political balance between others, and a neutralization artfully and sometimes treacherously contrived of greater forces than its own. It had for neighbors two great military states and several smaller ones; and had at some time or another been at war with nearly all of them.

Often--generally in fact--it had come out of those wars more vanquished than victorious (though Jingalese school-books carefully concealed the fact): it had lost, for proof, more territory than any other power in the world except England, and yet, like England, cherished the curious conviction that it had won all the really important battles and dictated each peace upon its own terms. Having been wholesomely driven out of France in the fifteenth century, it had captured and carried away with it as trophy the order of the White Feather, with its proud motto, "J'y suis, j'y reste." In the eighteenth century it had adopted by compulsion from Germany an alteration in its law of regal inheritance, and had marked its adhesion to the new formula by the inst.i.tution of the order of the Dachshund, with the obsequious motto, "Das ist mir ganz Wurst,"

popularly mistranslated by the wags of the day into, "That is the worst for me." Beaten by the infidel in the Crusades it had joined thenceforth to its regalia the holy crown of Jerusalem; and having thrown over the Papacy at the time of the Reformation, had added to its armorial bearings the Keys of St. Peter, and to its royal claims and t.i.tles the Kings.h.i.+p of Rome. A frequent and murderous deposition of its kings had but accentuated its devotion to the monarchic system: while its solemn confirmation of each fresh breach of continuity had stood to reaffirm its general belief in the hereditary principle, and in divine providence as controlled by Act of Parliament. The only other country in the world which had acted with such scrupulous inconsistency, unrepentant and unashamed, was England. It was no wonder, therefore, that in their history the two countries had much in common; and it must have been through sheer inadvertence, in view of their rival claims to be the const.i.tutional pace-makers of Europe, that while they had often stood badly in the way of each other's interests they had never yet fallen to blows.

International politics, however, were not for the moment the King's chief concern, and he turned back from the pages of Europe to study in detail the const.i.tutional history of his own country and the powers it still reserved for its kings.

While he pursued these studies, many things new and strange presented themselves to his gaze. There were, he discovered, powers of the Crown still extant, though lapsing through gradual desuetude, of which he had never dreamt, and as to the existence of which no one had made it his duty to inform him. Some of them had been in regular practice less than forty years ago; they were becoming obsolete merely because the advisers of the Crown wished it. Just as the House of the Laity was now falling more and more under the control of a Cabinet whose powers waxed as the other's waned, so the King himself was in the hands of those whose interests were to conceal from him the powers he possessed.

He came on a page where the right of royal initiative in Council had been thoughtfully underlined by the Professor; and he discovered with astonishment that a whole series of const.i.tutional questions lay altogether outside the competence of ministers to deal with until they had been first formally submitted to the King himself. Under this heading he found that no financial proposal touching on Crown lands, or on grants to the royal family, could become a matter of ministerial discussion without his consent first given; no proposal to alter the royal line of succession or the oath taken by the King at his coronation; no change of definition in the articles or creed of the Established Church; no alienation of Church lands; no fresh inst.i.tution of any rank, t.i.tle, order, or degree, nor the abolition thereof; no alteration in the laws governing the right of the voteless to pet.i.tion the King against the acts of his ministers; no subsidy or treaty of war, and no surrender, barter, or exchange to a foreign power of any part whatsoever of the King's dominions; no appointment to a foreign emba.s.sy; no elevation of a commoner to rank or t.i.tle; no issue of royal patents; no free pardons for criminals, and no change in the composition of either of the two Houses of Parliament. All these things must be formally submitted to the will of the Crown before being entered as items of the ministerial policy.

"My word!" cried the King, perceiving for the first time how unconst.i.tutionally that word had been set at naught. He could hardly believe his senses. Here under his nose, all these weeks lese majeste had been rampantly disporting itself; and he knew nothing of it!

Possibly the Prime Minister knew nothing of it either; had not the Professor said that many of his colleagues were as ignorant of const.i.tutional history as the sovereign himself? But some knew--some must know! And the King, who but a few hours before had believed himself the most helpless of emblems, a mere ornamental topknot to the const.i.tutional edifice, now found himself armed with weapons of far-reaching precision that would enable him to carry war into the enemy's country. Metaphorically he clapped his wings and crowed. Yes, it was as though that weatherc.o.c.k, to which hitherto he had likened himself, that toy of chance, swung this way and that upon a pivot with no will of its own, had suddenly taken to itself life and wing and power, and quitting its stake had descended into the arena with beak and claw stiffened for the fray. That board of tormenting ministers was now in his power--for a time at any rate.

In his excitement he got upon his feet and trotted about the room, and pausing now and again he gazed ahead with a gloating eye on a whole series of ministerial councils to come. For this monarch, you must remember, had been departmentalized all his life, and to that extent dehumanized; and it was only in a departmental way that he recognized his opportunity. The power to strike which he now visualized came through no intellectual enlargement, no opening up of moral vistas, but only through the discovery that he had on his side a ma.s.s of red tape the existence of which he had not previously suspected. In similar trammels to those which had so long hampered and restricted his own movements it was now possible for him to entangle the goings of his ministers. A hundred and one things had been done which were not merely out of order but--oh, blessed word!--unconst.i.tutional; and in consequence the poor dear man's mind was in a welter of delight. At last he had a weapon to his hand whose reach and mechanism he could manipulate. "Oh, dear me, yes!" he said to himself, and said it several times.

When a character of childlike simplicity has got hold of a loaded gun, it has a natural instinct to let it off. The actual direction, and what the target is to be, are not so important as the delightful sense of hearing the gun go off,--of proving by actual demonstration that it really was a loaded and dangerous thing, capable of causing consternation. John of Jingalo was simple, and when he got up from his first solid reading of the Professor's volumes he felt that he was well primed; and his instinct was to let himself go, to spread himself, to attack his enemy with extended front so that they would not know where to have him. Half-a-dozen small tags of red tape gave him a far greater sense of resource and opportunity for aggression than any one good piece of measurable length capable of being well wound and knotted. His powers, such as they were, were largely imitative; and now for some weeks the wordy Max had been coaching him. The Professor had supplied him with the material, Max with the method for applying it; the Professor had given him his head, Max had given him his tongue. Looking forward to the exercise of his new-found powers he meant, in a word, to be voluble; and when in later chapters he becomes yet more surprising, let the reader remember that fortuitous crack at the back of his skull through which the windows of his head were open and his brain-pan a place of draughts wherein any winds of doctrine might blow. A word of opposition, a mere gust of excitement, were now quite enough to set him going, and once started he was very difficult to stop.

For much the same reason, having once started to prance up and down the carpet--that carpet so variegated and Maxian in its pattern--he found it very difficult to sit down again; and would not have done so had not the measured striking of the clock upon the chimney-piece reminded him that he was expecting a visit from Max. Then a curious change came over his deportment; he stood considering, glancing from the telltale volumes upon the table to the door through which he was presently expecting his son to enter. Then with a secretive look and a shake of the head, "Oh, dear me, no," he murmured very softly; and taking up the books he put them away in a drawer and locked it, and, when presently Max came in, said nothing of his new discovery, but sat docile and listened, while the other drew out the s.h.i.+ning length of his vocabulary, making words sound like deeds.

Not for nothing was John of Jingalo the son of his father, not for nothing a descendant of kings who so far as they consciously achieved power had always held it possessively and exclusively, withholding the key from their heirs. Post obits were not popular in that royal House of Ganz-Wurst which for two hundred years had ruled over Jingalo.

CHAPTER IX

THE NEW ENDYMION