Part 2 (2/2)
But the Council was one of those functions in which it was held necessary that the part played by the King (albeit no more than a silent presidency at a Board where others spoke) should wear an appearance of importance. And so the announcement made by the Comptroller was merely preliminary to another and more flouris.h.i.+ng announcement by an usher of the Court. Two lackeys threw open a door--other than that through which the General had just entered, and a bowing official, beautifully dressed and waving a fairy-like wand, announced from the threshold, ”Your Majesty's Council, now in attendance, humbly begs audience of your Majesty.”
III
Then followed a pause. The Comptroller-General with head deferentially bent waited to catch the royal eye. The King graciously allowed his royal eye to be caught; and the Comptroller-General, interpreting the silent consent of that glance, uttered with due solemnity the traditional form of words indicative of the royal pleasure. ”His Majesty hears,” he lowed in the correct ”palace accent”: and the usher bowed and retired.
All this helped, of course, to make the act of presiding in Council seem highly important and consequential to any monarch susceptible to ceremonial flattery. Whether it had originally been so devised may be questioned, for monarchs of old had needed no such ceremonial backing to their very practical incursions into ministerial debate. What we have to notice is that the ceremony had survived, while the other thing--the practice of substantial interference--had become obsolete.
The King pa.s.sed from his private apartments to broad corridors and portals where resplendent footmen stood in waiting, where everything worked with silent and automatic precision to prepare the way for his feet, signaling him on from point to point as though he were a sort of special train for which the line had been expressly cleared and all other traffic shunted. And yet when he came to the small anteroom which opened directly into the Council Chamber he felt for all the world like a timid bather about to unb.u.t.ton the door of his bathing-machine and step forth into a strange and hostile element. That moment of trepidation was one he never could get over,--to face his Council of Ministers was always a plunge; for here truly he felt out of his depth, aware that politically he was no swimmer. And now for a couple of hours he would have to endure while, thoroughly at home in their own element, twenty stout aquatic athletes tumbled around him.
The door was thrown open; and with an air of calm self-possession he walked to the head of the table about which his ministers stood waiting.
”Be seated, gentlemen,” he said, embracing in a single bow the obeisances of all; and like slow waves they closed in on him, subsiding in large curves and soft fawning ripples of hand-rubbing around the empurpled board at which nominally he was to preside.
When all were seated in order, he signed for the Prime Minister to open the proceedings, and thereafter had scarcely to speak; for at a King's Council only general reports were presented, no discussions took place, no fresh proposals were mooted; and so he sat and heard how this department or that was extending its beneficent operations, how statistics were completing to their last decimal places the prognostications of experts, and how along with these things imports and exports were balancing, trade declining, education advancing, and strikes growing every day more formidable and more popular.
It was only this last point that really interested him; for here he seemed to get a dim rumor of something that was part at least of that popular will which it was his duty to symbolize and to safeguard. But these official advisers of his were all for putting strikes down, and yet while putting them down they seemed to wish to curry favor with the strikers themselves. For on the one hand there was trade declining, if the strikes were not put down, to support fresh taxation, on the other the Labor Party, eighty strong, declining, if the strikes were put down, to support the Government. And with the Finance Act coming on the question was whether to accept an increasing deficit in the revenue or a declining majority in the Legislature. This could be read vaguely between the lines of the report presented by the Minister of the Interior. But all this time not one word was said about the coming const.i.tutional crisis which was in everybody's mind. That had been thoroughly discussed by ministers sitting in real Council elsewhere, a Council at which the Head of the Const.i.tution had not been present, and about which he would hear no more than the Prime Minister chose to tell him.
And so, smoothly, equably, and uneventfully the Council reached its conclusion; ministers one after another closed up their portfolios, and sitting mute in their places respectfully waited the royal word of dismissal.
Then the King rose: and all around the board the fawning ripples of hand-rubbing ceased, and the slow curving wave of the ministerial body receded to a respectful distance; while his Majesty pa.s.sed forth to the adjoining chamber, there to give, as was customary, separate audience to those ministers who had any special memoranda to submit requiring the royal endors.e.m.e.nt.
On this occasion he found his Comptroller already awaiting him, apologetic for what might seem intrusion on territory belonging more properly to the Prime Minister. Under the correctness of his deportment it was clear that urgency impelled.
”I have come, sir,” he said, ”to submit to your Majesty, before the matter goes further, a certain difficulty which has arisen in connection with your Majesty's gracious donation to the widow of the unfortunate workman who----” He paused.
”You mean the steeplejack?” queried the King.
The Comptroller-General bowed a.s.sent. ”Your Majesty ordered inquiry to be made.”
”I did. Has it been found whether he had a family?”
”A large family, sir: a wife and seven children.”
”Ah,” said the King, ”then you would suggest that ten pounds is not quite----? Well, make it twenty.”
”That, sir, is not the difficulty. The fact is we have discovered that the man was what in the industrial world is known as a 'blackleg.' As your Majesty may be aware there is at this moment a strike in the building trade: and this man was working against the orders of his Union. Under those circ.u.mstances a donation from your Majesty becomes pointed.”
”Pointed at what?”
”At the Trades Unions, sir.”
”But what,” cried the King, astonished, ”have a widow and children to do with the Trades Unions?”
”The man was working against orders, your Majesty.”
”But at somebody's orders, I suppose? Anyway, it was for the Government.”
”Oh no, sir!” Correct.i.tude protested against so dangerous an implication.
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