THE DRAGON

7

CHAPTER I PRINCE EDWARD

It is the eye that begets and conceives: suddenly by the hap and fecundity of glances which meet a child is summoned from the place of dumbness, and hears, and quickens, and arises to come among men.

Never a conception of Prince “Teddy,” who contended with Li Ku Yu, had entered a human head to the moment when Prince John, his father-to-be (whom the French have called Jean l’Entêté, or “the Stubborn”) landed from the Dominion at Scarboro’ to attend a dance one February night.

He, having just got his “executive curl” as a sub., was sitting among his new wardroom messmates, looking at the dancing, when he made the remark: “Set of frights!—not a pretty girl among the lot.”

But just then three passed before his eyes—sisters—all tall, dark, but the middle one, who was the youngest, the tallest of all; and she came upon his eyes surprisingly, like some being superior to men.

Before long he was waltzing with her, his eyes tied to her eyes whose dark-blue anon looked black.

She was Minna Simmons, a doctor’s daughter, already at nineteen a Bachelor of Science, now “swotting” to get a degree in medicine.

His Royal Highness was amazed at her “cleverness”; and queens suddenly appeared to him mean in the presence of this imperial creature and more reigning thing than queens, a lady.

But with that sea-dog bluntness on which he prided himself, he said to her within a den of Union Jacks and smilax: “You are the very nicest girl I ever dreamt of!”

10

On which she shook her head slowly at him, murmuring with an indulgent smile: “I am not to be commandeered.”

His answer was: “I don’t believe you are: what I should rather choose would be to offer you my hand in marriage.”

“Ah! the vast paw,” she breathed, her eyes turned white to heaven.

He said: “Suppose I did so, what would you say to it?”

“I am sorry, Sir,” she answered: “I should say no.”

“We will see about that,” muttered John l’Entêté.

And before midnight he had got from her a promise of correspondence in six months’ time—on general topics.

Within two he began to write frequently; within three he appeared suddenly at The Priory (her house), vowing that he would go mad; he kept telephoning across Britain; and after six months she began to answer his letters, as promised.

He had got his second stripe when he received from her at Shotley this:

“My sisters, whose judgment is considered good, urge it upon me that that may well turn to the public advantage, if I am given the honour to unite my mother’s blood with your Royal Highness’; and though I pity you, Sir, for the quite hot water which this business must bring you into, I will now profess myself ready to act as your Royal Highness directs.... Your Royal Highness divines that I could not long be kept a back-stairs consort.... If centuries of custom attempt to suppress me, I think it is the custom that will see itself suppressed.... God only grant that I may be some good, if it is to be so....”

Count three months thence, England is under snow—it is seven days before Christmas—when from him at Balmoral comes to her: “I am now taking car to come....”

She locked herself into her room then, to stare....

Afterwards she opened a steel casket by knobs that revolved to cypher-numbers, to get from it the photograph of a young man in flannels, with which she sat again; and, 11gazing at it, presently said to it: “Dear, it is no good, it can’t be helped—unless I turn tail, and don’t play the game. I was to be one of the mother-women, you see, not one of the wife-women—God’s will be done.”

Now tears filled her lids, her lip quivered: she held the photograph tenderly pressed to her face, her eyes closed; but then with a gasp of anger and anguish dashed it off her into the fire.

Six months later she was the Queen of the Britains and Empress of India; and her “bowing-manner” was considered good.

But from the first her reign was a troubled reign.

Here at home she was not universally adored. That wit of her tongue was too swift and withering. Her talk, if always distinguished, was always vigorously vernacular, dashed anon with a sort of slang, and anon, for all her moral severity, with the risqué—that which came to her tongue’s tip out it flew, like new knives flying. Then, too, no daughter of a hundred kings was ever so jealous a stickler for the intricacies of ritual. She pestered the Cabinet. The anger of her glance became a social apprehension, and her censorship of morals extended to males. Lords, grooms, equerries, had to be Bayards! and, like Victoria, she looked coldly upon widows who remarried.

As to the foreign Royalties, the home aristocracy, who, for a fortnight, had a thought of patronising her, they were taught in torrents of lava-torments that she was twice the sovereign of subjects, and once the sovereign of sovereigns. If a dowager was proud of monkey-ancestry, be sure her sin would find her out, and a tongue like the Avenging Angel’s edge would singe her. Some day Her Majesty would manage to put to her some simple question in biology or physics, and then was lost in horror at the Hottentot ignorance of European women with coronets on their foreheads. But if all this caused her domineering forehead, her tongue, and the play of her eyes to become a terror in the land, it did not tend to make her idolised.

But nothing much troubled her but her son, she truly a “mother-woman,” every day finding time to be with him; 12and to him the privilege of her presence was ever more fascinating than his toy-submarine.

Seldom a day but she spoke to him of Germany growing, of China changing. “The Chinese are pretty shrewd, Teddy,” she said in showing him a lump of white jade, sent her by the Dowager Empress, one day at Windsor: “the only man who can outwit a Jew in business is a Chinaman—don’t forget. And, then, there are so many of them! How many?”

“Four hundred and ten millions, mother,” the Prince promptly responded.

“Just think—more than all Europe. God wanted them to be so many: and there they are. But nobody quite knows why!”

“Teddy” meditated the matter; and he said: “Mother, why don’t all the countries make themselves into one under one King? Save such a mass of energy! How absurd for Berks to set up as a separate kingdom, and Bucks as another——”

“But of what nation would that one King be?”

“English, I suppose.”

“His name ‘Teddy’?”

“Teddy” blushed under her roguish ogle, and she, seeing him in distress, came to his rescue, saying, “Dear, you will deserve to be such a King: your mind is large enough. And don’t think that I disagree, for I quite see that all sorrow is due to that folly of nations and men in calling bits of an earth their ‘own.’ When nations do it, the result is wars, and all this cost of armaments; when individuals do it, the result is all the failure and perplexity and bread of tears that we see men eat. But if one King owned it all for everybody, and hired out bits, then we might see some fun, and soon would be flying to the moon! That what you meant?” The boy was gazing into her great flamboyant eyes with such adoration, that it made her laugh, and dip a kiss inside his sailor collar.

But her plans for him were beset by obstacles. There was King John l’Entêté, for one, to be reckoned with; as one 13morning when she exclaimed: “I am his mother!” pacing a room of the Winter Palace at Petersburg; to which His Majesty answered: “Your Majesty speaks as if a father was of no account!”

“Oh, of course, a father, too,” she said—“though fathers are only a modern development, mind! Formerly there were no fathers, only mothers.”

The King fingered his beard, saying with his touch of pompousness: “Indeed! But Your Majesty fails to mention at what precise period of the world’s history this innocent condition of things prevailed.”

“It prevails still!—among bees, for instance.”

“This is strange,” said the King.

“Ah!” said the Queen.

“But what have bees to do with the matter?” asked His Majesty: “the point is, that Your Majesty wishes to deprive the Prince of learning what all gentlemen learn——”

“Oh, I do! since a decent boy hasn’t the time to: and if the point of that boy’s intellect be soppyfied and softened by learning six hundred words of Greek—if he becomes the least bit like any of them—I shall go mad, I think, I couldn’t stand it. What I want him to learn is that about bees—God’s facts—infinitely Divine, awful, lovely, romantic, religious, significant, educating. But, if a boy learns that it pleases some people to call a boy a ‘pais,’ or a ‘garçon,’ does that give him to think and adore? Oh, Your Majesty knows very little Greek, and I know lots—through no fault of my own, God knows—and some other things, too—can’t you listen to me?”

“But everyone differs from Your Majesty!”

“Except thinkers,” she said, almost crying, “and, oh, isn’t that hard that the brightness of the wise should be for ever overborne by the dullness of the stupid?”

That break of tears in her voice, her throbbing throat, touched His Majesty. Her figure, moreover, as she roamed the room, with that glory of her gallant grand eyes aglow, was very magnetic, so that the King lowered his lids a little, 14let slip a look at her hips, lowered them, stole a look, then said: “Well, I only hope Your Majesty’s plans won’t compromise the Throne’s popularity.”

“No”—in a gentler tone, touching his shoulder—“people will understand.”

“But will they?” he asked: “I pride myself upon my knowledge of the people—or does Your Majesty imagine yourself so popular a monarch as I am?”

She smiled down now upon him. “No, I don’t dispute that with you. You have the popularity, but, oh, let me have Teddy.”

And in the end she managed: the Prince went to Brockweir.

Now, already at Brockweir was Li Ku, called “Sky-Blue” (since he was a Celestial!) son of a member of the Min Cheng Pu (Home Office); and nine days after the Prince’s arrival, he slapped Li Ku across the face. Whereupon a formal fight.

It was toward the end of lunch-time, and a small boy, flying with tidings toward the Lower School, panted, “Prince and Sky-Blue—fight!” to one Richard Chinnery, sitting on the Fourth Form steps, intent upon winding primary wire round a bobbin; and Chinnery called after: “What’s the row?”

“Caught Sky-Blue trephining cat not properly anæsthetised!”—he was gone.

Whereupon Chinnery dashed off to the shed down in the hollow, and made his way through a throng that already had no little respect for him, to see the champions already stripped—like David and Goliath, Sky-Blue being a tall strip of yellow, six months the elder.

But there was little fun; and after the third lead-off Chinnery, muttering, “It’s a butchery,” dashed back to his induction coil. The Royal combatant, in fact, had all the art, and presently muttering, “Oh, well, doesn’t matter,” put on his jacket.

It was over, then? Li Ku Yu sat on the shed-bench, his legs under him—impossible to guess if he was humbled, if he was ratty inside, he smiling as ever his insolent smile, 15chin up—huge-headed, tough as orange-skin, breezy, brazen, a cool blade, looking ready to wink.

He smiled ever; but seldom laughed, except on Saturdays—when he was younger—when he would stand in the town’s electric shed watching the commutators spinning asleep, six revolutions a second; and a moment would come when that depth of insolence would be riven by a little giggle—a giggle of glee and victory at the trickiness of man and the admission of God; and he laughed one Tuesday when a crusher was crushing up the old school-chapel bricks, when, after gazing many minutes at the engine jigging, the glee digged him, and he giggled.

“But there’s something wrong about that orange lately,” said Chinnery after six months: “he has changed his Saturday-habits.”

The Prince was “doing arsenic”—a Wednesday afternoon when he did the metals; and Chinnery, whose drawer was next to his, was under instructions to show him his way about in analysis—Chinnery two years the elder, and already his young head was a garden of consciousness—tall—hollow-chested ... gentle....

“Know that man they call Spider?” he asked—“retired poacher and gaol-bird—cottage back of the Chasewood. I go up there to get rock-specimens, and twice I’ve spied Sky-Blue and Spider in the dell there. Deighton wouldn’t like it, though Sky-Blue’s a Steer.”

(“Steers” were town-boys, and Dr Deighton the Head-Master—a bearded Sea-King, blushing rich with brandy, his gown dropping down his right shoulder, the howl of a cow in him, heart-harrowing, memorable, a wrangler—“mathematics”—not perhaps “learned,” but the very best of earth’s teachers.)

“What would Sky-Blue be doing at Spider’s?” the Prince asked.

“Not sure, but you look out: for if you two meet in serious battle, you kill each other. My idea is that Sky-Blue is taking lessons in boxing from Spider.”

“Free country—Or the attraction may be Spider’s gal.”

“Ah, don’t underestimate my Sky-Blue,” Chinnery 16said: “that’s no ordinary orange. I’ll swear that he hasn’t wasted five minutes since he was nine—I know him, for I have some attraction for him apparently, and he comes to watch me messing about up in that library alcove. Dumb as a mummy! But one afternoon he began to gas, and, Ted-of-the-Throne, I never knew speech so fascinating. The things that saffron sack of thoughts vomited out of his chasm! you’d hardly believe.”

“Oh, aye, I guess,” muttered the Prince, holding up a precipitate to squint at.

“Said that white people are a freak! ‘like white mice,’ not a permanent type; hence we produce a shudder in the yellow breast. And you know that old sixpenny atlas which is his Bible—he produced that to show me that Europe and Asia are just like twins in structure; and he calls the two islands, England and Japan, the negative and positive terminals of a cell, the continents being the plates, Europe the white zinc, Asia the yellow copper.”

“Scott, that’s gas,” “Teddy” said.

“Anyway, an intellect above Spider’s gal.”

“Oh, aye, I think I know.”

“Yes, and above gals diviner far than Spider’s! Look here—don’t tell anybody——” Chinnery produced from his drawer a curious document, a folio of silk-paper on a stick of ivory round which the folio rolled, sending an aroma of roses into that sulphuretted stench of the room.

“This must have dropped out of Sky-Blue’s pocket when he snatched out Asia to show me, and I confiscated it as contraband. Passion, my boy.... Ever seen one Oyone motoring in the town? Not? Then you never beheld human beauty. Visits at my cousins, the Santleys—oh, Oyone, would that I had never beheld the phiz and evil peeper of thee! A half-caste—her father a P. & O. ship’s-surgeon—Irish—mother a geisha-girl of Nagasaki. How Oyone ever got into a Wesleyan mission-school at Tientsin I can’t say, but she did, then fell in with Sky-Blue’s present guardian, A-lu-te.—Surely you have seen A-lu-te somewhere? Little old woman like a monkey?”

17

Teddy said no.

“But you know where Sky-Blue lives?”

“Isn’t it that mansion with gables up on the hill?”

“That’s it. But A-lu-te and Oyone are mostly at Regent’s Park, where they have to be for the intrigues. Talk of intrigues! A-lu-te, it seems, was a conspirator, and was banished with Oyone to ‘the post-roads’; and now for Oyone and A-lu-te the puzzle is, so to intrigue as to get back again to the whisperings and peepings of Court-life. As to Oyone—pretty. Blessed are your eyes that have not seen her: some day you may, and then over goes the blooming Throne. Her age, though, is rather in advance of the Heir-apparent’s: seventeen!—twenty-seven she will never see—assassinated, beheaded perhaps, long ere then: tragedy sleeps in those ravishing peepers. But see Sky-Blue’s height above Spider’s ‘gal’: he disdains Venus. Here’s her scroll to him; unroll. Observe the neat, crude, school-girl writing.”

“Li Ku Yu, Her Excellency asks about your health, and wishes you well. “It is now five weeks since she or I have seen you; and your writing is like a miser’s kindnesses. “Li Ku Yu, persons are born and flung up into the sun’s light not when or where they choose. From China round to America and back, life in its tossings, like a fish which is caught and tosses, flings this one up in one generation, and that one up in another, and the rubbings together of persons is as was ordained. Each is sent to his own generation, to rub with it, so that everything may be as was ordained with life; and when one generation is buried, the sun shines on brightly on another. You, Li Ku Yu, and I, Oyone Umé, have been flung up in the same generation, and been flung together, to rub. “It is a sin in life that you are ice and iron to me! Others tend to me, but not I to them; I to you, but not you to me? You are ice, but I will make you bubble; and iron, but I will make you flow. “I have the leprosy for you, Li Ku Yu. I think you 18are like Indian

pansupari of areca-nut, and like chunam with spices rolled up in a betel leaf. “Li Ku Yu, when someone speaks of the end of your college-term, this makes me pale, but afterwards in my chamber my little body dances at this. “I have the hope that you are in health, and not troubling your brow always about studies. “My prayer is that you write to me separately and comfortingly, for my tongue suffers thirst in this furnace. “When I think of you, Li Ku Yu, I stretch myself and kiss the wind. Sayonara! “Oyone.”

“Oh, the miserable...!” muttered Teddy, with a little flush.

“Yes,” said Chinnery, “but the point is, that Sky-Blue is ‘ice and iron’ to her—the nymph of nymphs, earth’s thickest thimbleful of intense liqueur—compared with whom Spider’s han’some gal is a gross frog squatted, a goggling gecko of the rocks. Sky-Blue has other business with Spider.”

But Chinnery’s warning came too soon, and was forgotten in a month. In eighteen nothing had happened.

Meantime, the Prince did well with his eyes and fingers. On the football field, moreover, everything scattered before his passionate impetuosity: for which alone, and then for his decent way, he was well loved. If a boy new to that most anxiously élite “schoolboy spot” “Highnessed” him, he’d say, “My name’s Teddy Reeks to you, kid”: and only one boy, who never forgot, saw his chin lift with a chilling hauteur. It was an amusing thing at Brockweir that after a year many were to be found imitating his nimble way of lifting his toes in stepping, his brisk and restless little roll, his trick of saying “Scott!”

He had no resemblance to the men of the House of Hanover—his face open as a summer’s day, quite English in expression, fair like a face of milk-and-pink in a picture, his eyes light like a Norfolk sky: no weak line, from 19whatever angle one glanced. Taller than his father: shorter than his mother; slightly bow-legged.

He had been at Brockweir eighteen months when one day—as if the Star Venus should descend to earth—the Queen descended upon Brockweir. It was well with “Teddy” that day, and well with all: holiday! throats hoarse with hurrahs! a Teddy carried shoulder high.

Using that day as a date, we count six months to the date when Li Ku Yu received an order to return to China. That was on a Thursday in the Autumn term.

The next Saturday afternoon being fine, the Prince was permitted to take part in a paper-chase—Brockweir being great on running; several of its lads could range a country-side like stags; and none surpassed the Prince in this.