Читать книгу King John of Jingalo - Laurence Housman - Страница 11

Table of Contents

The sentence which had attracted the King's attention, coming as it did from the newspaper on whose opinions he most frequently relied, ran thus—

"In this developing crisis the Nation looks with complete and loyal assurance to him who alone stands high and independent above all parties, confident that when the time for a final decision has arrived he will so act, within the recognized limits of the Royal Prerogative, as to add a fresh luster and a renewed significance to that supreme symbol and safeguard of the popular will which, under Divine Providence, still crowns our constitutional edifice."

The King read it three times over. He read it both standing and sitting: and read in whatever attitude it certainly sounded well. As a peroration its rhythm and flow were admirable, as a means of keeping up the courage and confidence of readers who placed their reliance mainly upon literary style nothing could be better; but what, by all that was constitutional, did it mean?—or rather, how did it mean that he, the high and independent one, was to do it? Point by point its sentiments were unexceptionable; but what it actually pointed to he did not know. "Add luster?" Why, yes, certainly. But was not that what he was already doing day by day on the continuous deposit system, even as the oyster within its shell deposits luster upon the pearls which a sort of hereditary disease has placed within its keeping? "Renewed significance?" But in what respect had the significance of the royal office become obscured? Was anything that he did insignificant? "Symbol and safeguard of the popular will?" Yes: if his Coronation oath meant anything. But how was he, symbol and safeguard and all the rest of it, to find out what the popular will really was? No man in all the Kingdom was so much cut off from living contact with the popular will as was he!

The King was in his study, the room in which most of the routine work of his daily life was accomplished—a large square chamber with three windows to one side looking out across a well-timbered park toward a distant group of towers. But for those towers, so civic in their character, it might well have been taken for a country view; scarcely a roof was visible.

Upon a large desk in the center of the chamber lay a pile of official letters and documents awaiting his perusal; and he knew that in the adjoining room one of his private secretaries was even now attending his call. But from none of his secretaries could he learn anything about the popular will.

He walked to a window and stood looking out into the soft sunlit air, slightly misty in quality, which lay over the distances of his capital. Away behind those trees, beneath those towers, sending toward him a ceaseless reverberation of bells, wheels, street cries, and all the countless noises of city life, went a vast and teeming population of men and women, already far advanced on the round of their daily toil. He was in their midst, but not one of them could he see; and not one of them did he really know as man to man. Everything that he learned about their lives came to him at second or at third hand; nor did actual contact bring him any closer, for wherever he moved among them they knew who he was and behaved accordingly. For twenty-five years he had not walked in a single one of those streets the nearest of which lay within a stone's throw of his palace. As a youth, before his father came to the throne, he had sometimes gone about, with or without companions, just like an ordinary person, taking his chance of being recognized: it had not mattered then. But now it could not be done: people did not expect it of him; his ministers would have regarded it as a dangerous and expensive habit, requiring at least a trebling of the detective service, and even then there would always have been apprehension and uncertainty. He was King; and though, whatever might happen to him, his place would be automatically filled, and government go on just as before, yet, as a national symbol, his life was too valuable to be risked; and so on ascending the throne he had been forced, as his father before him, to resign his personal liberty and cease to go out in the happy, unpremeditated fashion of earlier days.

He had long since got over the curious home-sickness which this separation had at first caused him, and as an opening to personal enjoyment the impulse for freedom had long since died within him; but his heart still vaguely hungered for the people who called him their King; and looking out into the pale sunshine that was now thinly buttering the surface of his prosperous capital, and listening to the perpetual tick and hum of its busy life, he knew that for him it was and must remain, except in an official sense, an unknown territory. And yet out there, in that territory which he was unable to explore, the thing that is called "the popular will" lived and moved and had its being! Dimly he dreamed of what it might be—a thing of substance and form; but there was none to interpret to him his dream—except upon official lines.

Before his eyes, a salient object in the heavens surpassing the stony eminences which surrounded it, rose the tall spire of the twin Houses of Parliament. Upon its top swung a gilded weathercock; while about a portion of its base stood a maze of scaffolding, the façade of the building having during the last few months been under repair. There seemed, however, for the moment, to be no workmen upon it. Presently, as he gazed vacantly and without intent, something that moved upon the upper masonry engaged his attention. Slowly along its profile, out of all those hidden millions below, one of his subjects, a single and minute representative of the popular will, emerged cautiously into view.

The King was gifted with good sight; and though the figure appeared but as a tiny speck, it was unmistakably that of a man bearing a burden upon his back and ascending steadily toward the highest point of all. In a word it was a steeplejack. As the name passed through the King's mind it evoked recollection; and he said to himself again, "I wonder whether they call me Jack—I wonder."

With a curious increase of interest and fellow-feeling he watched the distant figure mounting to its airy perch. And as he did so a yet further similitude and parable flashed through his mind. For the man's presence at that dizzy height he knew that the Board of Public Works was responsible: as a single item in the general expenditure the weathercock of the Palace of Legislature had had voted to it a new coat of gilt, and this steeplejack was now engaged in putting it on. He was there in the words of a certain morning journal, "to add fresh luster to that supreme symbol of the popular will which crowned the constitutional edifice."

As the words with their caressing rhythm flowed across the King's brain he discerned the full significance of the scene which was being enacted before him. This weathercock—the highest point of the constitutional edifice—requiring to be touched up afresh for the public eyes—was truly symbolical of the crown in its relation to the popular will; twisting this way and that responsive to and interpretative of outside forces, it had no will of its own at all, and yet to do its work it must blaze resplendently and be lifted high, and to be put in working trim and kept with luster untarnished it required at certain intervals the attentions of a steeplejack—one accustomed to being in high places, accustomed to isolation and loneliness, accustomed to bearing a burden upon his back before the eyes of all: one whose functions were rather like his own.

He saw that the steeplejack had now reached the point where his work was waiting for him, work that required nerve and courage. He wondered whether it were highly paid; he wondered also by what means the man slung himself into position, and by what process the new gold had to be applied so that it would stick. Perhaps he only polished up what was already there, coated and covered from view by the grime of modern industry. If so, how did he scrape off the dirt without also scraping off the gold? Perhaps, on the other hand, all the old gold had to come off before new gold could be put on. He wondered whether the man ever forgot his perilous position, whether habit did not make him sometimes careless, whether he ever felt giddy, and how far the exploit was really attended by danger to one possessed of skill and a cool head; and as he thought, putting himself in the man's place, his hands grew sympathetically moist.

Well, he was wasting time, he must really get to his own work now; that secretary would be wondering what had become of him. He glanced away over the distant roofs that here and there emerged above the trees, and then for a last look back again. And as he did so all at once he started and uttered an acute exclamation of distress. A dark speck had suddenly detached itself from the ball upon which the vane stood, and could now be seen glissading with horrible swiftness down the slope of the spire. It fell into the scaffolding, zigzagged from point to point, and disappeared. There could be no mistake about it, it was the man himself who had fallen: that single and minute expression of the popular will had passed for ever from view; and the smooth and equable hum of the unseen millions below went steadily on.