King John of Jingalo | Page 9

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