Part 6

“‘He wants to see the Czar,’ they shouted, and then laughed in a way that made my blood run cold. ‘There are no more kings. They’ve been abolished.’ And one huge fellow, drawing a long knife out of his belt, shook it menacingly under my nose and began to cross-examine me. It took me about one-fifth of a second to make up my mind to be about the most enthusiastic revolutionist and all-around king hater that ever was born. ‘What did you want to see the Czar for, eh?” he asked. ‘I want to kill him,’ I replied. And a chorus of cheers rent the air. But it was an exceedingly narrow escape. I learned later that the Czar was no more, that the country was being ruled by a little band of lunatics calling themselves Bolsheviki, and that it was a crime even to utter the word king unless a strong adjective was put before it.

“I couldn’t understand it at the time, but I didn’t wait to investigate. I decided to get back to civilization by the shortest route, and so I projected my astral body over to Poland. To save time, I’ll just say that Poland was as benighted as Russia. No king. Then I hopped over to Jugo-Slovakia, I believe you call it. Same thing there. On I sped over the kingless countries of the Balkans and up to Budapest. A big sign on the front door of the palace: ‘Beggars, Peddlers and Kings Not Admitted to This Building.’ I moved on. I went hopefully to Vienna. Picking up a newspaper, I read these headlines: ‘Open Season for Aristocrats Begins. In First Day’s Shooting Twenty-nine Counts and Forty-three Barons Bagged. Slaying Parties Now Favorite Winter Sport. Special Prize Offered by Government to First Person to Kill King.’ Two minutes later I was on my aerial way to Berlin. Here, at least, I was sure I should find royal autocracy firmly entrenched. But as I went up the palace walk one glance told me that Germany, too, had cast off her royal rulers. Sitting on the front steps in his shirtsleeves, smoking a corncob pipe, was a slouchy, unshaven citizen whom I mistook for the janitor. In the old days you know no such uncouth specimen of humanity would have been permitted within half a mile of the palace. And who do you think he turned out to be? The President of the German Republic. A harness-maker, or cobbler, or something of the sort. I learned that, as in Russia, the very name of king was tabooed. Just a day or two before a prominent author had been executed for absent-mindedly remarking that he was fond of collecting his royalties. In a German deck of cards instead of having a king they have two knaves. So I lit out for France. Here I found they hadn’t had a king for many years. I inquired anxiously about my old kingdom, England. ‘Oh, they have something over there they call a king,’ I was told. ‘You might cross the Channel and have a chat with him. It would cheer him up.’

“I decided to act on the hint. I didn’t see many changes in London. I thought I recognized some familiar faces among the cab horses. I got an audience with King George by pretending to be the business agent of the Pavers’ and Rammers’ Union. Labor is all-powerful in England today (where is it not?) and George sent word to walk right in the minute he got my card. He was wearing that morning the fool dress uniform of an Honorary Vice-President in the Royal Hibernian Highlanders, Ltd. As soon as we were alone in his private office and I disclosed my identity, he fell on my neck and wept, and called me Uncle Alf. It was very affecting. ‘You’re the only king left that I can talk confidentially to,’ he said, ‘and you’re not really alive. It used to be that almost every country in Europe had its king and royal family. Everybody with a drop of royal blood in his veins was on the public payroll. It kept me busy exchanging birthday greetings with my fellow monarchs. I got a stack of letters from them every day. Today the annual convention of the European Kings’ Mutual Benefit Association could hold its meetings in a telephone booth. Where have they all gone? Some are dead and others wish they were.

“‘There’s not much to choose between the mighty dead and the mighty near dead,’ King George continued. ‘Cousin Mohammed, the last I heard of him, was running an elevator in a Swiss hotel. Cousin Ferdinand was an old clothes man in Naples. Cousin Ludwig had got a job as janitor of an apartment house—determined to be an autocrat to the end. Cousin Wilhelm was engaged in writing his auto-obituary and reading a book on ‘St. Helena As a Health Resort.’ Cousin Charles got upset and left for good. All the retired kings I know are retiring indeed. About the quickest way to unpopularity these days is to proclaim the divine right of kings. Even my oldest boy feels it, poor Wails. ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’ The man who wrote that knew what he was talking about. It makes the poorest nightcap on record. I’ll s’y.

“‘I feel comparatively safe myself,’ he went on, ‘because I’m not and never have been a real king. I draw the salary and hold the title and wear tailor-made uniforms without doing the work. I have no real authority. Why, I can’t dictate to anybody except the court stenographer—when she’s not too busy scrutinizing her nose. Shall I tell you who’s the real boss of Buckingham Palace? (Whisper) The wife. I can’t even spend my own money as I choose. Freedom of the ‘shes’ and all that sort of thing. Also, there’s an Hereditary Keeper of the Royal Purse, and whenever I want any coin I have to apply to him. You’ve heard of the ‘king’s touch’? Well, that’s it. George is the ruler of England, all right, but his first name is Lloyd, not King.’

“‘And is there any genuine autocrat left on earth?’ I asked King George. ‘Anybody to carry on the traditions of the old absolute monarchs?’

“‘Just one,’ he replied, ‘and he’s not called a king. His title is President. His name is—’

“‘George! George!’ a shrill voice interrupted his Majesty. ‘Did you get that pound of sugar I sent you for?’

“‘I told you I wasn’t an absolute monarch,’ George said, as he motioned me to depart while the departing was good. But I wonder whom he meant when he said there was only one world autocrat left?”

As I took my leave I could not even hazard a guess.

XIV

OLD KING COLE GIVES VIEWS ON PROHIBITION

The city editor’s assignment read: “Interview Old King Cole if sober (I mean the king, not you) and get his photo and pictures of the pipe, the bowl and the three fiddlers, if possible, for a nice layout. Stir him up on prohibition.”

I found His Majesty at his home at the corner of Rye and Bourbon Avenues, planet of Jupiter, next door to Bacchus and across the street from Gambrinus. I entered his presence not without trepidation, for I had never interviewed a real king before, although I am personally acquainted with several apartment house janitors and the policeman on our beat. But I needn’t have feared, for he received me with the utmost urbanity. Dressed in a purple robe, he was sitting in a chair of state and looked every foot a king. I just had time to note his typical poker face, suffused with a royal flush, when he gave me greeting.

“Sit down and have something,” he exclaimed. “What’ll it be? Tea, lemonade, beerine or just a drink from the old town pump? Here’s a new soft bottled beverage that’s having quite a run with the boys. It’s made of ginger, red pepper, turpentine, cocaine, yeast and chewing tobacco. Here’s another drink the boys call the ‘lame mule,’ because it hasn’t any kick. Ha, ha! Would you like to have some more of my jokes?”

“In just a few minutes, Your Majesty, but business before pleasure. I have been asked to interview you on the subject of prohibition, but I had no idea that booze was under the ban up here.”

“Oh, yes, we had to follow the fashion. Queen Cole, as you may not know, has been president of the West Jupiter W. C. T. U. for years, and when America did the Sahara act, why there was nothing to it but we must give prohibition a whirl too. But I dunno. I kind of think we’ll be back on the old basis again some day.

“Sometimes, however, I can’t help wondering what’ll be the next great reform. Abolishing tobacco, prob’ly. The fellows who never succeeded in learning to smoke are getting busy already, I see. If I called for my bowl today I wouldn’t get it, and I suppose along about week after next, if I call for my pipe, somebody will tell me that all tobacco is prohibited except Wheeling tobies containing less than half of one per cent of the real thing. I can still call for my fiddlers three, but the next thing I know they’ll be locking me up for running a cabaret without a license and a cover charge.

“You never can tell where those measly reformers will break out next. One of these mornings you’ll pick up the paper and read: ‘Association for the Prohibition of Lemon Pie Introduces Bill in Congress. Alarming Increase in Indigestion Attributed to Seductive Delicacy. New Law Provides for Right of Search of Pantries.’ There’d be a lot of kicks, but what’s the use? Folk would go around wearing buttons inscribed: ‘No Pie, No Work.’ Orators would point out that the workingman must have his pie. Schoolboys would go on strike. New England farmers would protest that their breakfasts had been spoiled. But the pie amendment would be slipped in some appropriation bill as a joker, and then good-bye pie.

“That would be only a starter. The scheme to have the government prescribe what you shall eat and drink and smoke is only beginning to get up speed. Every domestic menu will have to be O. K’d by the Secretary of the Interior. There will be laws to make everybody go to bed at ten and get up at six, to prohibit the wearing of blue neckties with red whiskers, to compel the printing of all baseball reports in English, and to force pedestrians to wear license numbers, front and rear, and give three loud honks on approaching congested cross-walks.

“You’ll have to get up in the morning by the official whistle, eat breakfast according to the food controller, ride to work in a government street car, work so many hours, play a round of golf on the public links, don a Bureau of Health mask to kiss your wife when you get home, eat another government meal, sit on the front porch and smoke a tobaccoless cigar, fight the mosquitos awhile—remembering the anti-profanity amendment to the old Federal Constitution—and then go to bed when the curfew sounds, being careful not to transgress the state anti-snoring law. That’s what you’re coming to.

“‘Old King Cole was a merry old soul.’ Ah, my boy, I’m afraid the emphasis is going to be on the ‘was.’ I try to keep up the bluff that I’m enjoying myself; it’s a tough task. Take away my pipe, and my bowl, and my fiddlers three, and you can have my job as king. A king will have no more fun than a commoner. But here comes the Queen. Sh! Sh! Not a word of this to Her Majesty.

“Yes, my dear, this young man and I have just been having a chat about the delights and benefits of prohibition. As I was saying, what a glorious thing it is to think that husbands who used to hang around bar-rooms after office hours will now spend their evenings at home, sitting by the fireside reading Woodrow Wilson’s ‘History of the American People’ in nine volumes, net, and drinking hot lemonade. Must you go so soon? Well, good-bye. And listen: if you must print what I said, perhaps you’d better not use my name. Just say ‘one of our most prominent citizens,’ or something. Farewell.”

And as I stepped into the cockpit of my ethereal airplane I reflected that some kings, after all, are no different from other men.

XV

KING HENRY VIII ADMITS SOME MATRIMONIAL MISTAKES

“King Henry the Eighth wants to see you,” said the city editor as I reported for duty. “Says he doesn’t think we’re giving him a square deal. We’ve printed interviews with Solomon and Bluebeard and Brigham Young, all much-married men, and let them make their explanations to put them in a better light with posterity, but for some reason he can’t understand we’ve passed him up. Better see what the old boy has to say.”

“Yes,” said His Majesty, as he motioned me graciously to a seat in his reception room, “I thought it only due to myself to make a statement for publication, particularly since you have been interviewing some of my noted—er—er—competitors, or perhaps I should say fellow-sufferers, and setting them right with the public. Not that I consider them exactly in my class, of course. Unlike Solomon and Bro. Young, I did not believe in what I might call numerically-simultaneous matrimony, nor like Mr. Bluebeard did I think a man justified, whatever the provocation, in resorting to the most extreme measures himself and taking the law into his own hands. Let everything be done strictly according to law, was my motto. I defy anyone, in the case of my wives, to find the coroner’s verdict defective. I am not saying there is not such a thing as justifiable uxoricide. But I can’t understand how a man could get up his nerve to do it. Certainly, speaking for myself, after being bossed by the first five, I’m sure I didn’t feel like raising my finger, or even my voice, against Mrs. Henry Tudor VI. If they lost their heads I do not think the whole blame should rightly rest on me. It takes two to make a quarrel. There were faults on both sides—especially theirs. History records the—that is—rather sudden shufflings-off of my several spouses, but it doesn’t tell the real reasons therefor. Sometimes it seems to me that the history of my case must have been written either by old bachelors or by members of the women’s rights association. Certainly if experienced married men had done the job they wouldn’t have left out all the extenuating circumstances.”

“As what, Your Majesty?”

“Well, did you ever see any reference in history to the annual earthquake at St. James’ Palace known as the Fall house-cleaning cataclasm? Of course you haven’t. And yet we husbands were afflicted with the same epidemics in those days, that seem so far away, as you are now.”

“I never thought of it before, Your Majesty. With the canning and house-cleaning seasons over, a modern married man begins to realize just how the soldiers felt the day the armistice was signed.”

“Precisely. Even though he knows the trouble is bound to recur when the germs get in the air again next Fall. But the man who has been married to only a limited extent can’t begin to sympathize with a case like mine. The first few wives are the hardest.

“Take this matter of house-cleaning. Every wife has her own system, her exclusive, copyrighted plan of offensive campaign which differs from everybody else’s. My first wife, for example, believed in moving all the furniture out of the dining room into the hall on the very first day of the attack and then served all meals for two days in the form of a stand-up free lunch in the butler’s pantry. The regular hall furniture was moved into the parlor to make room for the dining room furniture. Consequently the place was so cluttered up there was nowhere to sit down. But of course all husbands, even when house-cleaning is not prevalent, have to stand a good deal. My second wife, as soon as she was inaugurated in office as secretary of the interior and speaker of my house, reversed all the precedents of her predecessor. When the house-cleaning epidemic arrived she collected all the furniture in the palace and piled it up in the dining room. On fine days during the upheaval I got a hand-out on the back porch and on wet days I ate in the cellar. I had just become fairly accustomed to this domestic arrangement when Wife III, Series A, appeared on the scene with some entirely different and equally ingenious scheme for turning the house downside up. So it went, each new domestic administration having its own peculiar policies, not only with reference to house-cleaning but to all forms of domestic discipline. I was willing enough to obey—I realized that is the first duty of soldiers and husbands—but I had work keeping track of the orders. I perceived then why so many married men were volunteering for my new army to fight in France: they wanted to get where there would not be quite so much discipline.

“As I was saying, I got mixed on my orders and was constantly making mistakes. Wives so often fail to realize that accidents will happen to the best regulated husbands. For instance, Wife No. 1 had a rule that I must be in by eleven o’clock, but might stay out till twelve if I could tell just where I’d been. Wife No. 2 changed the hour to ten and No. 3, if I recall correctly, fixed it at ten-thirty. It’s not strange if occasionally along late in the evening I got a trifle mixed as to which administration was in office at that precise moment and consequently strayed a bit from the prescribed schedule. I could not always be sure whether I was supposed to be running on eastern or central standard time. As a result the first unvarying greeting that met my ears on my arrival home was apt to assume the sharply interrogatory form. I always answered whenever I could distinctly remember. At least I did my best. Matrimony is paved with good intentions.

“There were other disadvantages, also—connected with what I now perceive to have been my mistaken matrimonial policy—which may not occur to persons of more limited experience. For instance, how many realize that I was virtually at the mercy of a soviet of my wives’ relations? When a wife happened to shuffle off did her relatives immediately conclude that they were no longer my connections by marriage? They did not. They still considered themselves close relations—even closer, when I sought to borrow money from them. After a few matrimonial administrations I had enough ‘in-laws’ to fill a convention hall. Indeed, they did form a sort of mutual benefit association and used to meet and pass resolutions of condemnation on me and condolence with the new incumbent every time I happened to change wives. Sore, of course, because they weren’t invited to the wedding. But I had to draw the line somewhere. In those days, as now, they used to term it ‘solemnizing’ a marriage, although that word ‘obey’ in the ceremony was a joke. And half the time I felt just like a sort of comic supplement. In all my voyaging on the seven seas of matrimony I can recollect very few times when I was allowed to do any of the steering. Looking back, life seems to have been just one wife after another. Why did I do it? Well, I read in the newspapers the other day a supposedly sensational story of a Boston man who got married while under the influence of hypnotism, but I couldn’t see that the case contained any unusual feature.”

“Speaking of matrimony, Your Majesty (as you have just been doing so extensively), have you any advice to offer? What do you consider the lucky month for marriage?”

“Young man,” replied the king in solemn tones as he arose to bid me adieu, “I don’t know anything about that. But I can tell you this: there are at least six unlucky ones. That is as far as I experimented.”

And though I possessed only one-sixth of his matrimonial experience, I shook the aged monarch’s hand in silent sympathy before tiptoeing from his pathetic presence.

XVI

DON QUIXOTE SAYS HE WASN’T SO CRAZY AS SOME MODERN REFORMERS

As the trim figure in a neatly fitted sack suit arose to greet me with an odd mixture in his manner of ancient courtesy and the modern “glad hand,” my face must have betrayed my surprise at his unexpected appearance for he exclaimed: “Astonished, eh? Most earth folk are. Seem to expect to see the shade of Don Quixote de la Mancha togged out in his old cast-iron clothes and helmet with a sword for a walking stick. They fail to make allowance for the fact that we shades progress, just like you people down below. We try to be as up-to-date as possible. I suppose you thought, too, you were going to interview a harmless lunatic and listen amusedly to his rambling conversation and perhaps have the fun of joshing him a bit. Well, I’m happy to say I’ve got over my delusions, or illusions or whatever they were. And shall I tell you what cured me? Why, watching the antics and performances of some of you down on earth. My motto is thoroughness. I want to do every job up in the most complete style. I will either be the champion, the record-holder, the biggest in the bunch or else nothing at all. I may once have been in a fair way to becoming the world’s most inspired idiot and champion all-round, catch-as-catch-can professional ‘regulator,’ but I’m now a has-been, a second-rater. There’s too much competition. I’m ashamed of myself. I throw up my hands and quit. Do you understand me?”

“Well, not entirely, Don Quixote. What modern competitors or successors have you got?”

“Do you have to ask that?” he replied. “Why, I can get materialized and take a run below and in five minutes see more fellows crazier than I ever was than I can count. Or I can just stay up here and read the newspapers. I was reading only this morning of a bill that’s going to be introduced in the Maine Legislature to prohibit women from wearing high-heeled shoes. They used to call me a fool reformer, but I never was quite so idiotic as to try to reform women’s dress in the slightest particular. Trying to dictate feminine fashions would be just about as sensible as attempting to sweep back the ocean. The next thing they know somebody will be trying to tack an amendment on to the Constitution forbidding women to wear furs in summer and low shoes and open-work waists in winter. I see one writer calls the anti-high-heels measure ‘Quixotic.’ That shows all he knows about me. I was accused of being slightly off at one time, but nobody ever charged me with utter imbecility. And I see that some other professional set-’em-all-rights are going to put the ban on tobacco—if they can. They’ll have some hard sledding. But I was glad to observe that a judge had the sense to turn down an application for a charter from an anti-tobacco association. The society’s announced object was to make the growing, manufacture, sale and use of tobacco illegal. I held my breath until I found what the judge did.