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All places, all Aires, make unto me one country; I have been ship wrackt, yet am not an enemy with the sea or winds.

--Religio Medici.

I

The first unbelievable thing about Grandfather Boissy is that he was born over a century and a quarter ago, in one of those little island colonies which the French and English were accustomed to snap up in passing during the eighteenth century. Great-grandfather, a ne'er-do-weel of family--Boissy de Mortemar was the full name--was sent there for his country's good in 1789, just before the French troubles began, and there remained and was forgotten, very conveniently for him, by his country's successive masters. It must not be thought that this exile, though imposed with a view to relieving a certain irritation which his presence set up in Parisian society, was attended with any humiliation such as the average deportee was obliged to endure. No; my great-grandfather, Auguste-Anne, went off to Santisimo Corazon in style, with a brevet of Lieutenant-Governor in his pocket, to be the representative of his king; my uncle has this brevet yet, with its seals, and its scrolly lawyer's writing, and the brave beginning "Il est ordonné," and at the bottom a fine flourishing signature, "Louis," the L of it three inches tall.

In Paris, Auguste-Anne had, I gather, been a nuisance. In Corazon, freed of relations, with no means ready-made of frittering money, and a climate which after a year or two either calmed or killed the individual submitted to it, he became a very respectable governor. He enjoyed being God, and had a fair conception of how the part should be played. He had a taste for splendour, as had the blacks he ruled. He encouraged their religion, which had withdrawn into the shadows as persecuted faiths will, so that witch doctors throve; even, they got up a procession or two after the fashion of those held at Church festivals, to the great scandal of the official priesthood. In ordinary times these latter would have protested to France, and there would have been a reprimand, and eventually a new Governor with a narrower mind; but by now the year was 1794, priests were disapproved in Paris, and it was felt, after the news of the massacre of Thermidor, that it would be tactless to invite the attention of Robespierre and his colleagues to a religious dispute in a distant island. The clergy did indeed send off some form of protest to the Pope, who replied absent-mindedly with an illuminated blessing, and an indulgence of thirty days for whosoever should recite, fasting, a prayer for the conversion of the heathen. After this their reverences gave it up, and retired with dignity from all competition in processions, wherein, as they had the wit to realize, they were hopelessly outclassed.

Meanwhile Auguste-Anne and his blacks went their scandalous and vivid way, working, but no more than was necessary, and breaking off into refreshing orgies of religion from time to time. The governor's religion, true, was that of Dr. Pangloss rather than of his baptism, but it included dancing and a certain show of physical prowess, and was perfectly understood by the governed. These, indeed, so far sympathised as to lend him occasionally their own mysterious drummers, though not the drums--sacred these, and strung with human hide; had they been borrowed and trifled with odd things might have happened. But the drummers had no objection to showing their skill, and condescended to rub knuckles on the garrison kettles, which thereupon spelt out the strangest aphrodisiac rhythms, unmilitary though commanding. Great-grandfather Boissy was probably the first European to tangle his feet in these rhythms, the germ of jazz, which fell upon barren ground, and bore no fruit for another century. It delights me to think of his two fiddlers and his solitary piper drawling out the artless melodies of old France--Bouton de Rose, Tendre Musette, Dans ce Bocage--with this primal wickedness thudding away underneath.

II

Such was his life on the island, while his impeccable relatives in Paris were scurrying this way and that like rats when a haystack burns. With two frontiers to defend, and a new philosophy to impose upon a sceptical hostile Europe, the Republic One and Indivisible had no thought to spare for Corazon. News came, blown in with stray ships, and was discussed, but without much interest. France was too far away. Then, somewhere about December 1794, came a warship flying the tricolour, from which landed two officers in full regalia with scarves of the three colours, to enquire of the governor why the devil the sacred three did not wave above the little mud fortress which guarded the port. They required an immediate lowering of the detested white flag, together with proofs of citizenship and loyalty from Auguste-Anne. The latter, who happily lacked the kind of principle which obliges a man to strike attitudes, had the flag down at once, and put up a makeshift affair of red, white and blue, made by the garrison's wives out of old petticoats. As for the proofs of citizenship and loyalty, these he provided until the officers were totally exhausted, and unable to deal with a girl or a glass more. He then had them conveyed aboard their vessel by polite negroes, with a note to say that he believed there were English ships in the offing; which hint, when they had recovered sufficiently to read it, they took, and made off under all sail.

When they had gone Auguste-Anne had the tricolour flag hauled down and stowed in a locker for future use. The island dreamed on under the white and gold as before.

A few months later an English sloop appeared, and remained in the harbour a week. At the end of this time another flag, red and white crosses on a blue ground, was stowed in the same locker, and another ship's company went off with aching heads to sea. It was the captain's hope to obtain at least a step in rank by reporting this new acquisition to the territory of George III, and he drew up an impressive report, dwelling on the dangerous nature of the exploit, and the stubborn resistance of the islanders. (More than one of the Governor's ladies had taken fright at his ginger whiskers, which were looked on by the unsophisticated creatures as lusus naturae.) But the Admiralty of those days was ancestor to the Admiralty of these. The king was having a fit when the tidings arrived, and so the report was initialled and docketed, and taken down into the bowels of the earth to be filed; that is to say, it was forgotten with all possible completeness, and the unlucky author remained a post-captain till death.

The years went on. Somewhere about the time when Napoleon was striking like forked lightning through Italy, a deputation waited on Auguste-Anne. He came from his bed to meet it in a peacock-coloured dressing-gown, and learned that it wished him to be king. Now that King Louis was dead, said the spokesman, nobody knew for certain whom the island belonged to. There were the Republicans, who sounded ferocious, and the English, who had run about after a little ball in full mid-day sun, and were regarded by the islanders as no better than lunatics. Remained Auguste-Anne; and the deputation, which included--privately glaring, but publicly all balm--the Bishop, and the most renowned of the witch-doctors, came to suggest that it was his duty to clear up the situation by accepting the crown. The whites harangued him, and drew examples from antiquity; the blacks wept and addressed him, not without a percentage of truth, as the father of their children. Seeing both parties so much in earnest, Auguste-Anne displayed no false modesty, but agreed then and there, all dressing-gowned as he was, to rule them. They thanked him without surprise and retired backwards to compose public demonstrations of rejoicing after their several manners. The blacks got up their inevitable procession, which was rained on, to the secret joy of the Bishop, whose Te Deum with augmented choir, and the now Royal piper playing the serpent, was a triumph of comfort and good producing.

Auguste-Anne was present, needless to say, while the canons and choirs felicitated God on having acquired him as vicegerent, sitting close to the altar and looking impressive in a blackguardly way. Later, when the Bishop, fired by the success of his performance, worked up to a coronation service, he submitted to the various ceremonies with dignity, and was respectful to such relics as the tibia of St. Athanasius and the ossa innominata of St. Stipendius, taken for the occasion from a magnificent charnel-house of solid silver. When it was over, the King, though tired, walked in procession under a canopy to a sort of natural grassy amphitheatre near the bay, and went through the whole thing again, according to the rather more ancient and much more disreputable rites of the blacks. The Bishop, though piqued, feigned not to notice this deliberate encouragement given to Paganism; remembering the result of his application to the Pope, and the distance of Corazon from any authority, he retired with a judicious migraine, and thus avoided taking any scandal. Happily, he recovered in time for the Palace dinner that evening, and did it full justice, which is more than can be said for the chief Witch-doctor, who lay on the shore all night in a sweat of blood, troubled by the resentful ghosts of sacrificed virgins.

III

When these civil and religious sprees were over, life went on as before; that is to say, the people supplied themselves at Nature's expense with food, and spent the rest of their time with women, or composing liquid symphonies upon a delectable ground-bass of rum. Such was the routine of blacks and whites alike, and Auguste-Anne was the last person to interfere with it. He left matters alone; it was his genius, the one thing he could do really well. Years had taught him that in an island such as Corazon, time and climate do all the ruling needed; glory, by which is usually meant wholesale killing, he left to the tornadoes which whirled through the gulf of Mexico every six or seven years. The anticipation of these disasters, and the rebuilding of life after they had occurred, were the island's artless substitutes for the thrills of civilised warfare, with this important difference, that the heads of the State and the poorest plodding conscript stood in exactly the same danger while the elements raged.

It was after one such tornado, which had blown in the Palace door as by a charge of gunpowder, flattening a couple of domestics, and cutting Auguste-Anne himself about the head with flying splinters, that the second deputation arrived. Auguste-Anne, piratical in bandages, received them and enquired their business; which was, put briefly, to get him married. They said that what with tornadoes and time they might lose him now any day. (Auguste-Anne started at this plain speaking, but the fact remained, he was forty-three and the climate was not tolerant to middle-age.) They knew, they said hastily, that so far there had been no diminishing of his remarkable physical powers, which had become a legend already, handed down in story from mothers to daughters when these attained suitable age; but all the same--

Then, as before, the whites harangued, and the blacks wept. "But where the devil," enquired Auguste-Anne, "am I to look for a wife in this bitch of an island?"

The deputation had an answer to this, having thought the whole situation out with care, amid the mourning and labour of a tornado's aftermath. It would not do, they agreed, to take a wife from the island. Women could not stand splendour; they had no heads for it. Lift up one island woman, and her first idea would be to trample the other island women, and these would rebel, and stir up their husbands, and there would be trouble in no time. (Witness that good-for-nothing daughter of old Tascher de Lapagerie, cocked up on a throne as Empress of the French, making her husband ridiculous with her extravagance and her bad taste in lovers.) Nor would it do, pursued the deputation, to return to France in search of a wife; nothing but parvenues now in France, none of the good old thin blood left, thin noses, thin notions; only a lot of dukes called after battles, and duchesses red-handed from the maternal wash-tub. America was out of the question, as was Canada, and the wilder republics of the south. The only place left where a personage like Auguste-Anne, last of a line of graceful existers, royalist and rich, might best look for a consort, was England. England swarmed with exiled ladies, poor but suitable, bending over embroidery, teaching deportment; even--these too--busied over wash-tubs. (But a wash-tub from which one has risen, and a wash-tub to which, after selling the last jewel, one descends, are two very different things.) The deputation's advice, then, was this: that Auguste-Anne should set sail in the next ship that touched at the little harbour, leaving his people to tidy up the island against his return; that he should take his time in England, look about him, choose, unhurried, some young creature who might enjoy the thought of processions and progeny, and bring her back to reign. Finances, they explained, would hardly run to a second crown; but there was always the Virgin's, which she only wore on feast-days, and could well spare the loan of now and then.

In fact, they had the whole plan neatly cut and dried.

As usual, Auguste-Anne did not keep them waiting, but assented at once, and dismissed them to such rejoicings as the devastation and threatening famine of the land allowed.