Part 13
You see, when he began life, Theodore IV. was simply Prince Theodore Pavelovitch, the younger son of a nephew of the reigning Krol, Paul III,; and nobody dimly dreamed that he would ever ascend the throne. So he went to Paris, and “made his studies” in the Latin Quarter, like any commoner.
In those days—as, I dare say, it still is in these—the Latin Quarter was crowded with students from the far South-east. Servians, Roumanians, Monte-rossans, grew, as it were, on every bush; we even had a sprinkling of Bulgarians and Montenegrins; and those of them who were not (more or less vaguely) princes, you could have numbered on your fingers. And, anyhow, in that democratic and self-sufficient seat of learning, titles count for little, and foreign countries are a matter of consummate ignorance and jaunty unconcern. The Duke of Plaza-Toro, should he venture in the classical Boul’ Miche, would have to cede the pas to the latest hero of the Beaux-Arts, or bully from the School of Medicine, even though the hero were the son of a village apothecary, and the bully reeked to heaven of absinthe and tobacco; while the Prime Minister of England would find his name, it is more than to be feared, unknown, and himself regarded as a person of quite extraordinary unimportance.
So we accepted Prince Theodore Pavelovitch, and tried him by his individual merits, for all the world as if he were made of the same flesh and blood as Tom, Dick, and Harry; and thee-and-thou’d him, and hailed him as mon vieux, as merrily as we did everybody else. Indeed, I shouldn’t wonder if the majority of those who knew him were serenely unaware that his origin was royal (he would have been the last to apprise them of it), and roughly classed him with our other princes valaques. For convenience sake, we lumped them all—the divers natives of the lands between the Black Sea and the Adriatic—under the generic name, Valaques; we couldn’t be bothered with nicer ethnological distinctions.
We tried Prince Theodore by his individual merits; but, as his individual merits happened to be signal, we liked him very much. He hadn’t a trace of “side;” his pockets were full of money; he was exceedingly free-handed. No man was readier for a lark, none more inventive or untiring in the prosecution of one. He was a brilliant scholar, besides, and almost the best fencer in the Quarter. And he was pleasantly good-looking—fair-haired, blue-eyed, with a friendly humorous face, a pointed beard, and a slight, agile, graceful figure. Everybody liked him, and everybody was sorry when he had to leave us, and return to his ultra-mundane birthplace. “It can’t be helped,” he said. “I must go home and do three years of military service. But then I shall come back. I mean always to live in Paris.”
That was in ’82. But he never came back. For, before his three years of military service were completed, the half-dozen cousins and the brother who stood between him and the throne, had one by one died off, and Theodore himself had succeeded to the dignity of Krolevitch,—as they call their Heir-Presumptive. In 1886 he married. And, finally, in ’88, his great-uncle Paul also died—at the age of ninety-seven, if you please—and Theodore was duly proclaimed Krol.
He didn’t forget his ancient cronies, though; and I was only one of those whom he invited to come and stay with him in his Palace. I came, and stayed.... eleven months! That seems egregious; but what will you say of another of us, Arthur Fleet (or Florimond, as their Majesties have nicknamed him), who came at the same time, and has stayed ever since? The fact is, the King is a tenacious as well as a delightful host; if he once gets you within his portals, he won’t let you go without a struggle. “We do bore ourselves so improbably out here, you know,” he explains. “The society of a Christian is a thing we’d commit a crime for.”
Theodore’s consort, Anéli Isabella, Kroleva Tcherrnnogory—vide the Almanach de Gotha—is the third daughter of the late Prince Maximilian of Wittenburg; sister, therefore, to that young Prince Waldemar who comes almost every year to England, and with whose name and exploits as a yachtsman all conscientious students of the daily press will be familiar; and cousin to the reigning Grand Duke Ernest.
Theoretically German, she is, however, to all intents and purposes, French; for her mother, the Princess Célestine (of Bourbon-Morbihan), was a Frenchwoman, and, until her marriage, I fancy that more than half of Anéli’s life was passed between Nice and Paris. She openly avows, moreover, that she “detests Germany, the German language, the German people, and all things German, and adores France and the French.” And her political sympathies are entirely with the Franco-Russ alliance.
She is a deliciously pretty little lady, with curling soft-brown hair, a round, very young-looking face, a delicate rose-and-ivory complexion, and big, bright, innocent brown eyes—innocent, yet with plenty of potential archness, even potential mischief, lurking in them. She has beautiful full red lips, besides, and exquisite little white teeth. Florimond wrote a triolet about her once, in which he described her as “une fleur en porcelaine.” Her Majesty repudiated the phrase indignantly. “Why not say a wax-doll, and be done with it?” she demanded. All the same, “fleur en porcelaine” does, in a manner, suggest the general effect of her appearance, its daintiness, its finish, its crisp chiselling, its clear, pure colour. Whereas, nothing could be more misleading than “wax-doll,” for there is character, character, in every molecule of her person.
The Queen’s character, indeed, is what I wish I could give some idea of It is peculiar, it is distinctive; to me, at any rate, it is infinitely interesting and diverting; but, by the same token—if I may hazard so to qualify it—it is a trifle.... a trifle.... difficult.
“You’re such an arbitrary gent!” I heard Florimond complain to her, one day. (I heard and trembled, but the Queen only laughed.) And that will give you an inkling of what I mean.
If she likes you, if you amuse her, and if you never remotely oppose or question her desire of the moment, she can be all that is most gracious, most reasonable, most captivating: an inspiring listener, an entertaining talker: mingling the naïveté, the inexperience of evil, the half comical, half appealing unsophistication, of a girl, of a child almost—of one who has always lived far aloof from the struggle and uncleanness of the workaday world—with the wit, the humour, the swift appreciation and responsiveness of an exceedingly impressionable, clear-sighted, and accomplished woman.
But... but....
Well, I suppose, the right way of putting it would be to say, in the consecrated formula, that she has the defects of her qualities. Having preserved something of a child’s simplicity, she has not entirely lost a child’s wilfulness, a child’s instability of mood, a child’s trick of wearing its heart upon its sleeve. She has never perfectly acquired a grown person’s power of controlling or concealing her emotions.
If you don’t happen to amuse her—if, by any chance, it is your misfortune to bore her, no matter how slightly; and, oh, she is so easily bored!—the atmosphere changes in a twinkling: the sun disappears, clouds gather, the temperature falls, and (unless you speedily “brisken up,” or fly her presence) you may prepare for most uncomfortable weather. If you manifest the faintest hesitation in complying with her momentary wishes, if you raise the mildest objection to them—gare à vous! Her face darkens, ominous lightning flashes in her eyes, her under-lip swells dangerously; she very likely stamps her foot imperiously; and you are to be accounted lucky if you don’t get a smart dab from the barbed end of her royal tongue. And if she doesn’t like you, though she may think she is trying with might and main to disguise the fact and to treat you courteously, you know it directly, and you go away with the persuasion that she has been, not merely cold and abstracted, but downright uncivil.
In a word, Queen Anéli is hasty, she is impatient.
And, in addition to that, she is uncertain. You can never tell beforehand, by any theory of probabilities based on past experience, what will or will not, on any given occasion, cause her to smile or frown. The thing she expressed a desire for yesterday, may offend her to-day, The suggestion that offended her yesterday, to-day she may welcome with joyous enthusiasm. You must approach her gingerly, tentatively; you must feel your ground.
“Oh, most dread Sovereign,” said Florimond, “if you won’t fly out at me, I would submit, humbly, that you’d better not drive this afternoon in your victoria, in your sweet new frock, for, unless all signs fail, it’s going to rain like everything.”
She didn’t fly out at him exactly; but she retorted succinctly, with a peremptory gesture, “No, it’s not going to rain,” as who should say, “It daren’t.” And she drove in her victoria, and spoiled her sweet new frock. “Not to speak of my sweet new top-hat,” sighs Florimond, who attended her; “the only Lincoln and Bennett topper in the whole length and breadth of Monterosso.”
She is hasty, she is uncertain; and then... she is intense. She talks in italics, she feels in superlatives; she admits no comparative degree, no emotional half-tones. When she is not ecstatically happy, she is desperately miserable; wonders why she was ever born into this worst of all possible worlds; wishes she were dead; and even sometimes drops dark hints of meditated suicide. When she is not in the brightest of affable humours, she is in the blackest of cross ones. She either loves a thing, or she simply can’t endure it;—the thing may be a town, a musical composition, a perfume, or a person. She either loves you, or simply can’t endure you; and she’s very apt to love you and to cease to love you alternately—or, at least, to give you to understand as much—three or four times a day. It is winter midnight or summer noon, a climate of extremes.
“Do you like the smell of tangerine-skin?”
Every evening for a week, when, at the end of dinner, the fruit was handed round, the King asked her that question; and she, never suspecting his malice, answered invariably, as she crushed a bit between her fingers, and fervidly inhaled its odour, “Oh, do I like it? I adore it. It’s perfect rapture.”
She is hasty, she is uncertain, she is intense. Will you be surprised when I go on to insist that, down deep, she is altogether well-meaning and excessively tender-hearted, and when I own that among all the women I know I can think of none other who seems to me so attractive, so fascinating, so sweetly feminine and loveable? (Oh, no, I am not in love with her, not in the least—though I don’t say that I mightn’t be, if I were a king, or she were not a queen.) If she realises that she has been unreasonable, she is the first to confess it; she repents honestly, and makes the devoutest resolutions to amend. If she discovers that she has hurt anybody’s feelings, her conscience will not give her a single second of peace, until she has sought her victim out and heaped him with benefits. If she believes that this or that distasteful task forms in very truth a part of her duty, she will go to any length of persevering self-sacrifice to accomplish it.
She has a hundred generous and kindly impulses, where she has one that is perverse or inconsiderate. Bring any case of distress or sorrow to her notice, and see how instantly her eyes soften, how eager she is to be of help. And in her affections, however mercurial she may appear on the surface, she is really constant, passionate, and, in great things, forbearing. She and her husband, for example, though they have been married perilously near ten years, are little better than a pair of sweethearts (and jealous sweethearts, at that: you should have been present on a certain evening when we had been having a long talk and laugh over old days in the Latin Quarter, and an evil spirit prompted one of us to regale her Majesty with a highly-coloured account of Theodore’s youthful infatuation for Nina Childe!... Oh, their faces! Oh, the silence! ); and then, witness her devotion to her brother, to her sisters; her fondness for Florimond, for Madame Donarowska, who was her governess when she was a girl, and now lives with her in the Palace.
“I am writing a fairy-tale,” Florimond said to her “about Princess Gugglegoo and Princess Raggle-snag.”
“Oh?” questioned the Queen. “And who were they?”
“Princess Gugglegoo was all sweetness and pinkness, softness and guilelessness, a rose full of honey, and without a thorn; a perfect little cherub; oh, such a duck! Princess Ragglesnag was all corners and sharp edges, fire and fret, dark moods and quick angers; oh, such an intolerant, dictatorial, explosive, tempestuous princess! You could no more touch her than you could touch a nettle, or a porcupine, or a live coal, or a Leyden jar, or any other prickly, snaggy, knaggy, incandescent, electric thing. You were obliged to mind your p’s and q’s with her! But no matter how carefully you minded them, she was sure to let you have it, sooner or later; you were sure to rile her, one way or another: she was that cantankerous and tetchy, and changeable and unexpected.—And then.... Well, what do you suppose?”
“I’m waiting to hear,” the Queen replied, a little drily.
“Oh, there! If you’re going to be grumpy, ma’am, I won’t play,” cried Florimond.
“I’m not grumpy. Only, your characters are rather conventionally drawn. However, go on, go on.”
“There was a distinct suggestion of menace in your tone. But never mind. If you didn’t really mean it, we’ll pretend there wasn’t.—Well, my dears,” he went on, turning, so as to include the King in his audience, “you never will believe me, but it’s a solemn, sober fact that these two princesses were twin sisters, and that they looked so much alike that nobody, not even their own born mother, could tell them apart. Now, wasn’t that surprising? Only Ragglesnag looked like Gugglegoo suddenly curdled and gone sour, you know; and Gugglegoo looked like Ragglesnag suddenly wreathed out in smiles and graces. So that the courtiers used to say ’Hello! What can have happened? Here comes dear Princess Gugglegoo looking as black as thunder.’ Or else—’Bless us and save us! What’s this miracle? Here comes old Ragglesnag looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth,’ Well, and then....”
“Oh, you needn’t continue,” the Queen interrupted, bridling. “You’re tedious and obvious, and utterly unfair and unjust. I hope I’m not an insipid little fool, like Gugglegoo; but I don’t think I’m quite a termagant, either, like your horrid exaggerated Ragglesnag.”
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” wailed Florimond. “Why will people go and make a personal application or everything a fellow says? If I had been even remotely thinking of your Majesty, I should never have dreamed of calling her by either of those ridiculous outlandish names. Gugglegoo and Ragglesnag, indeed!”
“What would you have called her?” the King asked, who was chuckling inscrutably in his armchair.
“Well, I might have called her Ragglegoo, and I might have called her Gugglesnag. But I hope I’m much too discerning ever to have applied such a sweeping generalisation to her as Ragglesnag, or such a silly, sugary sort of barbarism as Gugglegoo.”
“It’s perfectly useless,” the Queen broke out, bitterly, “to expect a man—even a comparatively intelligent and highly-developed man, like Florimond—to understand the subtleties of a woman’s nature, or to sympathise with the difficulties of her life. When she isn’t as crude, and as blunt, and as phlegmatic, and as insensitive, and as transparent and commonplace and all-of-one-piece as themselves, men always think a woman’s unreasonable and capricious and infantile. It’s a little too discouraging. Here I wear myself to a shadow, and bore and worry myself to extermination, with all the petty contemptible cares and bothers and pomps and ceremonies of this tiresome little Court; and that’s all the thanks I get—to be laughed at by my husband, and lectured and ridiculed in stupid allegories by Florimond! It’s a little too hard. Oh, if you’d only let me go away, and leave it all behind me! I’d go to Paris and change my name, and become a concert-singer. It’s the only thing I really care for—to sing and sing and sing. Oh, if I could only go and make a career as a concert-singer in Paris! Will you let me? Will you? Will you?” she demanded, vehemently, of her husband.
“That’s rather a radical measure to bring up for discussion at this hour of the night, isn’t it?” the King suggested, laughing.
“But it’s quite serious enough for you to afford to consider it. And I don’t see why one hour isn’t as good as another. Will you let me go to Paris and become a concert-singer?”
“What! And leave poor me alone and forlorn here in Vescova? Oh, my dear, you wouldn’t desert your own lawful spouse in that regardless manner!”
“I don’t see what ’lawful’ has to do with it. You don’t half appreciate me. You think I’m childish, and capricious, and bad-tempered, and everything that’s absurd and idiotic. I don’t see why I should waste my life and my youth, stagnating in this out-of-the-way corner of Nowhere, with a man who doesn’t appreciate me, and who thinks I’m childish and idiotic, when I could go to Paris and have a life of my own, and a career, and do the only thing in the world I really care for. Will you let me go? Answer. Will you?”
But the King only laughed.
“And besides,” the Queen went on, in a minute, “if you really missed me, you could come too. You could abdicate. Why shouldn’t you? Instead of staying here, and boring and worrying ourselves to death as King and Queen of this ungrateful, insufferable, little unimportant ninth-rate make-believe of a country, why shouldn’t we abdicate and go to Paris, and be a Man and a Woman, and have a little Life, instead of this dreary, artificial, cardboard sort of puppet-show existence? You could devote yourself to literature, and I’d go on the concert-stage, and we’d have a delightful little house in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and be perfectly happy. Of course, Flori-mond would come with us. Why shouldn’t we? Oh, if you only would Î Will you? Will you, Theo?” she pleaded earnestly.
The King looked at his watch. “It’s nearly midnight, my dear,” he said. “High time, I should think, to adjourn the debate. But if, when you wake up to-morrow morning, you wish to resume it, Flori-mond and I will be at your disposal. Meanwhile, we’re losing our beauty-sleep; and I, for one, am going to bed.”
“Oh, it’s always like that!” the Queen complained. “You never do me the honour of taking seriously anything I say. It’s intolerable. I don’t think any woman was ever so badly treated.”
She didn’t recur to the subject next day, however, but passed the entire morning with Florimond, planning the details of a garden-party, and editing the list of guests; and she threw her whole soul into it too. So that, when the King looked in upon them a little before luncheon, Florimond smiled at him significantly (indeed, I’m not sure he didn’t wink at him) and called out, “Oh, we are enjoying ourselves. Please don’t interrupt. Go back to your counting-house and count out your money, and leave us in the parlour to eat our bread and honey.”
It is in the nature of things, doubtless, that a temperament such as I have endeavoured to suggest should find the intensity of its own feelings reflected by those that it excites in others. One would expect to hear that the people who like Queen Anéli like her tremendously, and that the people who don’t like her tremendously don’t like her at all. And, in effect, that is precisely the lady’s case. She is tremendously liked by those who are near to her, and who are therefore in a position to understand her and to make allowances. They love the woman in her; they laugh at and love the high-spirited, whimsical, impetuous, ingenuous child. But those who are at a distance from her, or who meet her only rarely and formally, necessarily fail to understand her, and are apt, accordingly, neither to admire her greatly, nor to bear her much good will. And, of course, while the people who are near to her can be named by twos and threes, those who view her from a distance must be reckoned with by thousands. And this brings me to a painful circumstance, which I may as well mention without more ado. At Vescova—as you could scarcely spend a day in the town and not become aware—Queen Anéli is anything you please but popular.
“The inhabitants of Monterosso,” says M. Boridov, in his interesting history of that country, “fall into three rigidly separated castes: the nobility, a bare handful of tall, fair-haired, pure-blooded Slavs; the merchants and manufacturers, almost exclusively Jews and Germans; and the peasantry, the populace—a short, thick-set, swarthy race, of Slavic origin, no doubt, and speaking a Slavic tongue, but with most of the Slavic characteristics obliterated by admixture with the Turk.... Your true Slav peasant, with his mild blue eyes and his trustful spirit, is as meek and as long-suffering as a dumb beast of burden. But your black-browed Monterossan, your Tchermnogorets, is fierce, lawless, resentful, and vindictive, a Turk’s grandson, the Turk’s first cousin: though no one detests the Turk more cordially than he.”
“Well, at Vescova, and, with diminishing force, throughout all Monterosso, Queen Anéli is entirely misunderstood and sullenly misliked. Her husband cannot be called precisely the idol of his people, either; but he is regarded with indulgence, even with hopefulness; he is a Monterossan, a Pavelovitch: he may turn out well yet. Anéli, on the contrary, is an alien, a German, a Niemkashka. The feeling against her begins with the nobility. Save the half-dozen who are about her person, almost every mother’s son or daughter of them fancies that he or she has been rudely treated by her, and quite frankly hates her. I am afraid, indeed, they have some real cause of grievance; for they are most of them rather tedious, and provincial, and narrow-minded; and they bore her terribly when they come to Court; and when she is bored, as we have seen, she is likely to show it pretty plainly. So they say she gives herself airs. They pretend that when she isn’t absent-minded and monosyllabic, she is positively snappish. They denounce her as vain, shallow-pated, and extravagant. They twist and torture every word she speaks, and everything she does, into subject-matter for unfriendly criticism; and they quote as from her lips a good many words that she has never spoken, and they blame her savagely for innumerable things that she has never thought of doing. But that’s the trouble with the fierce light that beats upon a throne—it shows the gaping multitude so much more than is really there. Why, I have been assured by at least a score of Monterossan ladies that the Queen’s lovely brown hair is a wig; that her exquisite little teeth are the creation of Dr. Evans, of Paris; that whenever anything happens to annoy her, she bursts out with torrents of the most awful French oaths; that she quite frequently slaps and pinches her maids-of-honour; and that, as for her poor husband, he gets his hair pulled and his face scratched as often as he and she have the slightest difference of opinion. Monterossan ladies have gravely asseverated these charges to me (these, and others more outrageous, which I won’t repeat), whilst their Monterossan lords nodded confirmation. It matters little that the charges are preposterous. Give a Queen a bad name, and nine people in ten will believe she merits it.