King John of Jingalo | Page 4

directions, well, after all, it did not much matter, since
in the end it made no practical difference.
Under these circumstances he would have been a mere social and
official automaton had not certain defects of his character saved him.
Though timid he was impulsive; he was also a little irritable, rather
suspicious, and indomitably fussy in response to the call of duty.
Temper, fuss, and curiosity saved him from boredom; he was
conscientiously industrious, and though there was much that he did not
understand he managed to be interested in nearly everything.
In the fiftieth year of his age, this monarch, amiable, affable, and of a
thoroughly deserving domestic character, was destined to be thrust into
a seething whirlpool of political intrigue in which, for the first time, his
conscience was to be seriously troubled over the part he was asked to
play. And while that wakening of his conscience was to cause him a
vast amount of trouble, it was to have as enlarging and educative an
effect upon his character as her first love affair has upon a young girl.
From this moment, in fact, you are to see a shell-bound tortoise
blossom into a species of fretful porcupine, his shell splintering itself
into points and erecting them with blundering effectiveness against his
enemies. And you shall see by what unconscious and subterranean
ways history gets made and written.
III
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