Читать книгу King John of Jingalo - Laurence Housman - Страница 7

Table of Contents

And now let us turn to the Queen. In her case less analysis is needed: one had only to look at her, at the genial and comfortable expression of her face, at the ample, but not too ample, lines of her person, to see that in her present high situation she both gave and found satisfaction. She did, with ease and even with appetite, that which the King, with so much anxious expenditure of nervous energy, was always trying to do—her duty. She had a position and she filled it. She was not clever, but her imperturbable common-sense made up for what she lacked intellectually. No one, except the newspapers, would call her beautiful; but she was comely and enjoyed good health, and she had what one may describe as a good surface—nothing that she wore was thrown away on her, and any chair that she occupied, however large, she never failed to adorn. There you have her picture: you may imagine her as plump, as blonde, as good-tempered, and as well-preserved for her age as suits your individual taste—no qualifying word of the chronicler of this history shall obstruct the view; and you may be as fond of her as you like.

The Queen was the head of Jingalese society, and of its charities as well. Her influence was enormous: at a mere word from her organizations sprang into being. Without any Acts of Parliament to control or guide them—merely at the delicately expressed wish of her Majesty—thousands of charming, wealthy, and influential women would waste spare hour upon hour and expend small fortunes of pocket-money in keeping uncomfortable things comfortably going in their accustomed grooves. It was calculated that the Queen's patronage had the immediate effect of trebling the subscription list of any charity, while the mere withdrawal of her name spelt bankruptcy. Her Majesty was patron to forty-nine charities and subscribed to all of them. For the five largest she appeared annually on a crimson-covered platform, insuring thereby a large supply of silk purses containing contributions, and a full report in the press of all the speeches. It was her rule to open two bazaars regularly each summer, to lay the foundation-stones of three churches, orphanages, or hospitals (whichever happened to require the greatest amount of money for their completion), to attend the prize-giving at the most ancient of the national charity schools, and every winter, when distress and unemployment were at their worst, to go down to the Humanitarian Army's soup-kitchen, and there taste, from a tin mug with a common pewter spoon, the soup which was made for the poor and destitute. This last performance, which took so much less time and trouble than all the rest, proved each year the most popular incident of her Majesty's useful and variegated public life, for every one felt that it provided in the nicest possible way an antidote to the advance of socialistic theories. The papers dealt with it in leading articles; and the lucky casuals who happened to drop in on the day when her Majesty paid the surprise visit arranged for her by her secretaries would report that they had never tasted such good soup in all their born days.

It may truthfully be said that the Queen never spent an idle day, and never came to the end of one without the consciousness of having done good. All the more, therefore, is it remarkable that, as the outcome of so much benevolence and charity, the Queen knew absolutely nothing of the real needs and conditions of the people, and that she knew still less how any alterations in the laws, manners, or customs of the country could better or worsen the conditions of unemployment, sweated labor, or public morality. Her whole idea of political economy was summed up in the proposition that anything must be good for the country which was good for trade; and it may certainly be said that for the majority of trade interests she was as good as gold. Without caring too much for dress (being herself wholly devoid of personal vanity) she ordered dresses in abundance, and constantly varied the fashion, the color, and the material, because she was given to understand that change and variety stimulated trade. Her most revolutionary act had been to readopt, one fine spring morning, the ample skirt of the crinoline period in order to counteract the distress and shortage of work caused in the textile trade by the introduction and persistence of the "hobble skirt." As a consequence of this sudden disturbance of the evolutionary law governing creation in the modiste's sense of the word, there was a sharp reaction a year later, which—after the artificial stimulus of the previous season—threw more women out of employment than ever; new fancy-trades had to be learned in apprenticeships at starvation wages—with the result that wages had to be eked out in other ways. But of all this her Majesty heard nothing. It never occurred to anybody that these ultimate consequences of her amiable incentive to industry could possibly concern her; and the Queen, finding that people no longer knew how to adapt themselves to the long, full skirts of their grandmothers, accepted without demur the next wave of fashion that swept over Europe from London via Paris.

The Queen never herself opened a paper. Extracts were read out to her each day by one of her ladies; these being selected by another lady appointed for the purpose as those most likely to interest the royal mind. It was made known in the press that her Majesty never read the divorce cases; neither did she read politics or the police news. No controversial side of the national life ever entered her brain—until somehow or another it was reached by the dim uproar of the Women Chartists' movement. She expressed her disapproval, and the page was turned.

Her instinctive tastes stood always as a guide for what she should be told; and experience limited her inquiry. In all her life her influence had never been used for the release of an unjustly convicted prisoner, the abatement of an inhuman sentence, or the abolition of any abuse established by law. Queens who had done these things in the past were medieval figures, and such interference was quite unsuitable for a royal consort under modern conditions. Had Philippa of Hainault lived in these more enlightened times she would have been forced to let the Burghers of Calais go hang and restrict herself to making provision for their widows and orphans; for to arrest any act of government had long since ceased to be within the functions of a queen.

Like her husband, this royal lady was surrounded by officialdom, or, rather, by its complementary and feminine appendices—the wives and daughters of the aristocracy, of politicians, of ecclesiastical and military dignitaries: these to her represented the sphere, activity, and capacity of her own sex. Other women—pioneers of education and of reform, rescue-workers, organizers, writers, orators, had—the majority of them—lived and died without once coming in contact with the official leader of Jingalese womanhood; for they and their like were outside the official ranks, and stood for things combative and controversial and dangerously alive, and only a few of them had been brought to Court in their venerable old age, to be looked at as curiosities when their fighting days were over and their work done.

On the governing boards of the hospitals to which the Queen gave her patronage there was not a single woman—or a married one either; but when her Majesty visited the wards she was very nice to the nurses. She was, in fact, very nice to everybody, and everybody was very nice to her.