Part 6

His Majesty, whom I had not met before, is a man tall in stature, but stooping somewhat at the shoulders. His age is not apparent in his features, his hair and beard (which is scanty) are still black, and his eyes, though they betray an expression of weariness, are lively. He was good enough to bid certain officials near him to go out into the anteroom, where I trust my words could not be heard, though there is no door separating the King's closet from that passage, but only a German tapestry, presented, I think, at the time of the King's marriage by the Elector, his father-in-law.

The King would first have me set before him what I had to say, which I did as briefly as possible, and following exactly the instructions given me by Your Excellency. I made no attempt to diminish, still less to deny the crime of which My Lord had been guilty; nay, I even exaggerated it, if that were possible, in order to prepare his Sovereign for my plea, which was that My Lord's youth and the manner in which the adventure was presented to him excused him in some part for the action of which he had been guilty. I briefly spoke of the campaigns in which he had fought since his sixteenth year, and I showed how easily to a soldier the expedition which has had so disastrous an ending might have appeared as a just and loyal war. I was careful to omit any whisper of what the Emperor had threatened in case of a refusal (for such were your instructions), and finally I laid at the feet of His Majesty the plea of common mercy, dwelling upon My Lord's household, the future of his young and innocent children, and all else that would follow upon the sacrifice of such a life.

His Majesty listened to me gravely, and replied that he had fully revolved My Lord's action, and its nature and consequence, in his mind, as also the effect of the determination he himself had taken, which determination could not be shaken by any argument that I or another might put before him. It was (he said) a necessary example to others, and the more highly placed the culprit the stronger the necessity of the sentence appeared to him. He said further, that in the matter of rebellion and treason (which, as Holy Writ discovered, was among the most detestable of crimes, and compared even to witchcraft, against which enormity His Majesty is especially watchful) it was a thing which must be ended once and for all, and could not be dealt with in any manner save by the extirpation of its authors and the total suppression and extinction of the originators and begettors thereof. To be brief, His Majesty would not be moved in any manner, but told me, speaking as a man will who has no more to say, the date and hour were already fixed, and had been communicated to me. With this His Majesty dismissed me, and I left him.

Upon the Thursday, therefore, the morrow, which they reckon in this country as the 15th of the month, I bade Charles, my attendant, go warn My Lord that I would see him at his convenience, and My Lord answered very graciously that my convenience was his own, whereupon I said I would come at once, and did so, it being about an hour after noon, and My Lord sitting at wine after his meal, which he had eaten alone in the room assigned to him.

My Lord was well furnished in all particulars, and the clemency of the season further lessened his discomforts of prison, but he was closely guarded, and he complained to me, though without bitterness, that when his wife had visited him but a week before, bringing with her the little Count, my master, and his little sister also by the hand, a man-at-arms had been present throughout their interview. He also told me that for writing he might have what liberty he would, but that he might fold over and seal no letter. I asked him what his regimen had been in the matter of religion, at which he sighed and said that he had been permitted to see the Carthusian whom Your Excellency had sent to this part under a safeguard, but that no Mass might be said in his room, nor within the precincts of the whole castle: which, as he was told, was forbidden by a law of this realm; but this I would hardly believe, and indeed we had permission of His Majesty (who is indifferent to such things) that Mass should be privily said upon the following morning, which was that on which My Lord was to suffer. And for this purpose a table was set, he whom Your Excellency has sent bringing with him a little altar stone and all that was necessary for the Office.

My Lord dismissed me when I had spoken to him for perhaps half-an-hour, asking him what I should do, but he bade me return a little before sunrise on the morrow, which (Your Excellency) I very punctually did, more sorrowful at heart than I could say, having not slept that night for the multitude of letters that I must read and dispatch, and for the weight of the business that was before me.

When therefore it was fully light, but the sun not yet risen, I went over from my lodgings (which are not far from the Royal Mint) to the Castle, and was admitted to My Lord's presence, where he sat with a heavy look, and yet gallantly as it were, having with him My Lady and the two little children, the Priest having said Mass and the table being now in order, but he remaining for the last Offices.

My Lady was troubled exceedingly, and a woman of hers who was with her was but little help to her or to us. As for My Lord's children, though they could not understand the case, they saw that something great and terrible was at hand. But all this should not be detailed to Your Excellency, nor can my pen properly express it. My Lady and her servant and the two children were taken, I think, from the room, but I did not look, nor did I hear any sound except a slight sobbing, which very soon ceased: the passing of men-at-arms set at regular places without I remember to hear continuing, and if it be a trivial matter to have this set down for Your Excellency, I do so only in the desire to relate every particular and to omit nothing. I asked My Lord whether there was anything that I could further communicate to the King or to his family, or to any one. He answered in a firm voice that he had attended to all. And he gave me a letter sealed (for this was now permitted him), which letter I am to deliver to Your Excellency and will do so, since I must entrust it to no one. He told me further that he had made his peace and that he had received Communion, but that he would beg the priest whom Your Excellency had sent to remain with him to the end. The Warden of the Castle, a man of strict purpose, but not harsh in his demeanour (though silent, as are the most of these people), said here that the populace, who had gathered in a great crowd, might be angered at the sight of a priest, which sight indeed would recall in them all the circumstances of the war. To this My Lord answered, a little disdainfully I thought, that it was but little to ask, and that for the anger of the people, and indeed for any feeling they might have towards himself, he had no care of it. He did not desire to arouse it, nor did he fear it. Then said the Warden of the Castle, he might be accompanied as he wished, but the priest must put off his gown: which he did and stood dressed like any common man of this country, or rather like some servant. But his hair and the trim of his beard seemed the more foreign in such a habit.

The sun had now risen, and we were apprised that My Lord's hour had come by the beating of drums outside the castle and the noise of the people. My Lord hearing this looked at me sorrowfully for a little time and asked me a question in the matter of religion which I thought both terrible and confusing at such a time, but he pressed me and I replied very humbly that for my part I had lived as most men lived in these times, which are corrupt and evil, and that indeed no man could fully understand the unseen things; no, nor so much as conceive them; but that none the less I hoped I might always bear witness to the Faith as did he at that very moment. To which My Lord answered, sighing, "I bear no witness to that, but only to my constancy, and I could wish that they had left me my sword."

I set down for Your Excellency all that happened, but I would not have Your Excellency think that My Lord was troubled in these matters; only it was his custom to debate learning and philosophy and to express doubts that he might hear them answered: this was all. And it is truly said that a man's custom will be seen expressed in the end of his life.

Meanwhile they were waiting for us, and as I was to be the other that might be present with My Lord when he suffered, the priest and I went before him and behind the men-at-arms, while first went the Warden of the Castle. And we found that the scaffold had been put up upon a level with the window at the side of the main gate, which looks westward towards the City. There was a red cloth upon it, a square, but the rest naked, and round it a sort of railing of rope stretched from posts. The whole was guarded by soldiers of the King's Guard who were a-horse, even the drummers. There was a very great crowd of people who were silent, but when they saw My Lord shouted and made a confusion, till the soldiers pressed them back. The Warden asked My Lord whether he would speak to the people, but he shook his head and pressed his lips together so firmly that one would have thought he smiled. Then the Headsman, kneeling upon one knee, as is the custom, asked My Lord's forgiveness for what he was to do, to whom My Lord answered in a cheerful voice that he very heartily forgave him and all others in this matter. And then saying this word "Come," wherein I did not understand his meaning--but he may have been doing no more than call me as one calls a servant--he took off his cloak, which was dark and heavy and which was that which he had commonly carried in the field, very serviceable and without ornament, and this cloak he handed to me, so that I have it and will bring it with me upon my journey. When he had done this he took off also his undercoat, upon which, as upon his cloak, he had kept no sign of his rank nor any jewel, even of his Order; and this done he kissed me and also him whom Your Excellency sent, the Religious; then he knelt down and, as I think, prayed, but very shortly, after which he laid his head upon the block and asked the Headsman if it were fairly so. To which the Headsman said yes, and that at his signal he would strike: which, when it was given, the Headsman struck, and by the mercy of God was ready at his business: so we threw a cloth that had been given us quickly over the body of My Lord, and while the people groaned we lifted him, two men-at-arms, the priest and I together, to set him in a case of wood which was prepared. Only the Headsman showed My Lord's head to the people, and said, "So perish all traitors," while the people still groaned. Then My Lord's head also was given us and we set it very reverently down, and we covered the case with the cloth given us, which was the end of the business of that morning, from which time till now I have not written, but now write as Your Excellency ordered, and in the first hour in which I find myself able and in command of myself to do so.

My Lord was a great Captain.

THE SHADOWS

It is always in a time when one's attention is at the sharpest strain, when innumerable details are separately and clearly grasped by the mind, and, in a word, when the external circumstance of life is most real to us that the comic contrast between ourselves and the greatness outside us can best be appreciated.

We humans make all that present which is never there, and which is always hurrying past us like the tumble of a stream, an all-important thing.

A form of dress unusual at one particularly insignificant moment, a form of words equally unusual, and so forth, seem like immovable eternities to us; they seem so particularly in those moments when we are most thoroughly mixed with our time. Then what fun it is to remember that the whole thing, all the trappings of life, are nothing but a suit of clothes: old-fashioned almost before we have used them, and worthless anyhow.

It is a general election that has made me think these things.

In the moment of an election men mix together very closely; the life of one's time is set before one under a very brilliant and concentrated light, which shows a thousand things one had forgotten in the habits of the nation.

One sees so many kinds of men, one finds about one the relics of so many philosophies, one is astonished to meet, still surviving, so many illusions--that these contemporary details take up a very exaggerated place in our mind. Then it is good for one to remember that the whole of it is but a little smoke.

There are commonplace tags in history which boys can never understand. One of the most commonplace and the most worn is Burke's exclamation in the Bristol election. He heard of the death of a man, and said: "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" and the phrase has gone threadbare, and no school-boy can understand why his elders dwell upon that phrase.

The reason is that it expresses a thing which is not only obvious, but which also happens to be of the utmost moment; and it is peculiarly valuable coming from Burke, who of all men was keenest upon the shams of his time, who of all men was most immersed in the game of politics, who of all men, perhaps, in Parliamentary history was capable of self-deception and of the salaried advocacy which is the basis of self-deception. Burke is, as it were, a little god or idol of your true politician. He was a politician of the politicians. Burke is to the politician what Keats is to the poet, the exemplar, the mirror of the profession; yet Burke it was who said: "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" He was quite right.

A little time ago in Paris an experiment was tried, which later was repeated in London. It was a curious success in each capital. The experiment was this: to put upon the stage a play, the time of which was the sixties of the last century, and to dress the actors up in the clothes of the sixties. In Paris they went further: they reproduced the slang, the jests, the very tone and affectations of fashion which marked the period of Napoleon III. The younger generation, which could not remember the time, looked on curiously at the experiment. To the older people it was comic, with an uncanny comedy, and the irony of it was sometimes more bitter than they liked. So this was man! This was the immortal being! This was the ambitious fellow who would now write a deathless poem, now discover the ultimate truths of Hell and Heaven; now dominate the earth with his machines, now enter the adventure of Mexico--and the rest! There he was, in peg-top trousers, long whiskers, and an absurd top-hat with a narrow brim. And there was woman, the woman, for whom such and such a man had killed himself, such and such another had volunteered for the Crimea; or the woman of whom a third had made a distant idol in the Atlas when he was out in Africa. And there was the woman upon whom the Court depended, or the Ministry; there was the woman who had inspired the best work of Hugo, or who had changed the life of Renan. She wore a crinoline. At the back of her head was a mass of ugly false hair, and how odd these gestures seemed, and what queer turns of phrases there were in her language! What waxwork, and how dead the whole thing seemed!

That experiment in either capital was a dreadful one, which will not easily be tried again. Like all things that grip the mind, the power of its action lay in its truth, and the truth which vivified that experiment and gave it its power was the truth that our affairs are mortal things, and the ephemeral conditions which clothe our lives seem to us at a moment to be the universe itself, and yet are not even as important as the dust. They are small, they are ridiculously small--and also they are evanescent as the snow.

It is an amusement in which I have sometimes indulged, and no doubt many of those who are reading this have tried it for themselves, to turn to the files of old newspapers, choosing some period of great excitement which one can oneself remember, but which is separated from the present time by a sufficient space of years. It is well in practising this sport to choose the columns of a journal which expressed one's own enthusiasm and one's own conviction at the moment. The smile provoked by such a resurrection of the past must be bitter, but it will be the more salutary for its bitterness. _There_ is that great question which (we supposed!) would change the world; _there_ is all the shouting and the exaggeration and violence; and there, beyond it, unseen, is the reality which we have come to know. _Their_ future has become _our_ past, and note how utterly the vision disagrees with the real stuff, and see how vain the vision was. Look how terrors were never fulfilled, read how these hopes were still less destined to fulfilment, and, above all, attached to worthless ends.

In nothing is this lesson better learned or more valuable than in the matter of loves and hatreds. Look up the heroes. They were your heroes too. Read mournfully the enormous nonsense which was written of the villains. "Sir!" said a famous politician and writer of the Victorian time--"Sir! the world in which Palmerston is allowed to live makes me doubt the kindness of my Creator!" That is the kind of thing. Smith is your Hector and Jones is your Thersites! And then the mills of the years take up that flimsy stuff and begin grinding out reality, and what a different thing that finished article is from the raw material of guesswork and imagination with which the mills were fed! You can look back now and see the real Smith and the real Jones. You can see that the real Smith was chiefly remarkable for having one leg shorter than the other, and that the principal talent of the real Jones was the imitating of a steam engine, or a very neat way of playing cards; and that both Jones and Smith were of that common stature which men have in the middle distance of a very ordinary landscape.

For the benefit of mankind, the illusion which it is impossible to feel with regard to a past actually remembered re-arises when attached to a past longer still. One can make a hero or villain of Fox or of Pitt. One can look at the dress of the Eighteenth Century, or the puffs and slashes of the Sixteenth, not only without a smile, but actually with pleasure and admiration. We find it glorious to read the English of Elizabeth, and pleasant to read the plain letters written when George the Third was King. But, oh heavens! the Idylls of a King! I say, for the benefit of man, one is allowed an illusion with regard to the remote past; of the near past which we have known, alas, we know the truth--and it appals one with its emptiness. There is no doubt at all that Burke was right for once in his life when he said that we were shadows and that we pursued shadows.

Nevertheless, there is one important thing, and there is one eternal subject which survives.

THE CANVASSER

In that part of the Garden of Eden which lies somewhat to the south-west of the centre thereof the weather, during the recent election which was held there, was bad. It blew, it rained, it hailed, it snowed, and all this was on account of the great comet, of which the people of that region said proudly to strangers, "Have you seen our comet?" Imagining, with I know not how much justice, that this celestial phenomenon was local rather than national or imperial.

The Garden of Eden being mainly of a clay soil, large parts of it were flooded, and a Canvasser (a draper by profession and a Gentleman from London by birth), unacquainted as he was with the Garden of Eden, thought it a foul place, and picked his way without pleasure. He went down a lane the like of which he did not even know to exist in England (for it was what we call in the Garden of Eden a "green lane," and only those learned in the place could get along it at all during the floods).

I say he went down this lane, turned back, took a circumbendibus over some high but abominably sticky ploughed fields, and turned up with more of English earth than most citizens can boast at the door of the Important Cottage. He had been given his instructions carefully, and he was sure of the place. He swung off several pounds of clay from his boots to the right and to the left, and then it struck him that he did not know how to accost a cottage door. There was no knocker and there was no bell. But he had had plenty of proof and instruction dinned into him as to the importance of that cottage, so at last he made up his mind to do something bold and unconventional, and he knocked at it with his knuckles.

Hardly had he done so when he heard within a loud series of syllables proceeding from two human mouths and consisting mainly of the broad A in the vowels and of Z by way of the consonants. At last the door was opened a little way and a rather forbidding-looking old woman, short, fat, but energetic, looked out at him through the crack. She continued to look at him curiously, for it is good manners in the Garden of Eden to allow the guest to speak first.

When the Canvasser grasped this from the great length of silence which he had to endure, he said with the utmost politeness, taking off his hat in a graceful manner and speaking with the light accent of the cultured--

"Is your husband in, madam?"

By way of answer she shut the door upon him and disappeared, and the Canvasser, not yet angry, marvelled at the ways of the Garden of Eden. In a few moments she was back again; she opened the door a little wider, just wide enough to let him come in, and said--

"Ye can see un: but he bain't my husband. He wor my sister's husband like." As she said this she kept her eyes fixed upon the stranger, noting every movement of his face and of his body, until she got him into the large old kitchen. There she put a chair for him, and he sat down.

He found himself opposite a very, very old man, much older than the old woman, sitting in a patched easy chair and staring merrily but fixedly at the fire.

The very, very old man said: "Marnin'."

There was a pause. The Canvasser felt nervous. The old, fat, but energetic woman, still scowling somewhat and still fixedly regarding the stranger, said--

"I do be tellin' of un you bain't my husband, you be poor Martha's husband that was. Ar!"

"Ar!" said the old man, by way of corroboration; and the smile--if it were a smile--upon his drawn and wrinkled face became more mysterious than ever.

The Canvasser coughed a little. "I've brought bad weather with me," he said, by way of opening the delicate conversation.

"Ar!" said the old man. "You ain't brought un nayther! Naw.... Bin ere a sennight com Vriday...." Then he added more reflectively, and as though he were already passing into another world, while he stared at the fire: "You ain't brought un nayther; naw!"

"Well," said the stranger gallantly, though a little put out, "I'm sure I should have been sorry to have brought it."

"Ar, so you may zay! Main sorry I lay," said the old man, and went off into a rattle of laughter which ended in a violent fit of coughing. But even as he coughed he wagged his head from side to side, relishing the joke immensely, and repeating it several times to himself in the intervals of his spasms.

"A lot of water lying about," said the Canvasser, hoping to start some vein at least which would lead somewhere.