Chapter X
THE Princess has a hill almost entirely to herself. She lives there in a castle almost entirely made of stone, with turrets and battlements. Her affectionate subjects cluster about her feet in domiciles walled with mud and principally roofed with kerosene tins, but they cheerfully acknowledge this to be right and proper, and all they can pay for. One of the many advantages of being a princess is that you never have to put down anything for house-rent; there is always a castle waiting for you and a tax-payer happy to paper it. The world will not allow that it is responsible to a beggar for a crust; but it is delighted to admit that it owes every princess a castle. It is a curious world; but it is quite right, for princesses are to be encouraged and beggars aren’t.
The Princess is married to the Roy-Regent, who puts his initial upon Resolutions and writes every week to the Secretary of State; but it is the Princess who is generally “at home,” and certainly the Princess who matters. The Roy-Regent may induce his Government to make Resolutions; the Princess could persuade it, I am sure, to break them—if she wanted to. Unfortunately we are not permitted to see that comedy, which would be adorable. She does not want to. She is not what you would call a political princess; I have no doubt she has too much else to do. To begin with, only to begin with, she has to go on being beautiful and kind and unruffled; she has to keep the laughter in her eyes and the gentleness in her heart; she has to be witty without being cynical, and initiated without being hard. She has to see through all our little dodges to win her favour and not entirely despise us, and to accept our rather dull and very daily homage without getting sick and tired of us. To say nothing of the Roy-Regent and the babies who have some claims,I suppose, though we are apt to talk about the Princess as if she were here solely to hold her Majesty’s vice-Drawing-rooms and live up to a public ideal. All the virtues, in short, which the rest of us put on of a Sunday, the Princess must wear every day; and that is why it is so difficult and often so tiresome to be a real princess.
Fortunately the Simla Princess is not expected to hold her commission for life. Her Majesty knew, I suppose, from her own royal experience, how it got on the nerves, and realized that if she required anything like that it would be impossible to get the right kind of people. So at the end of every four or five years the Roy-Regent goes home to his ordinary place in the Red Book burdened for life with a frontier policy, but never again compelled to drive out in the evenings attended by four cantering Sikhs, each Sikh much larger than himself and shaking a lance. He may go on to greater things, or he may simply return to the family estates; but in any case the Princess can put her crown away in a drawer anddo things, if she likes, in the kitchen, which must be a great relief. Of course she can never quite forget that she has been a princess, in commission, once. The thought must have an ennobling effect ever after, and often interpose, as it were, between the word and the blow in domestic differences. For this reason alone, many of us would gladly undertake to find the necessary fortitude for the task; but it is not a thing you can get by merely applying for it.
To the state of the Princess belongs that quaint old-fashioned demonstration, the curtsey. The Princess curtseys to the Queen-Empress—how I should like to see her do it!—and we all curtsey to the Princess. This alone would make Simla a school for manners, now that you have to travel so far, unless you are by way of running in and out of Windsor Castle, to find the charming form in ordinary use. How admirable a point of personal contact lies in the curtsey—what deference rendered, what dignity due! “You are a Princess,” it says, “therefore I bend myknee. I am a Person, therefore I straighten it again,” and many things more graceful, more agreeable, more impertinent than that. Indeed, there is a very little that cannot be said in the lines and the sweep of a curtsey. To think there was a time when conversation was an art, and curtseying an accomplishment, is to hate our day of monosyllables and short cuts, of sentiments condensed, and opinions taken for granted. One wonders how we came to lose the curtsey, and how much more went with it, how we could ever let it go, to stand instead squarely on our two feet and nod our uncompromising heads, and say what we have to say. I suppose it is one of the things that are quite gone; we can never reaffect it, indeed our behaviour, consideredasbehaviour, is growing steadily worse. Already you may be asked, by a person whom you have never seen before, whether you prefer Ecclesiastics or Omar Khayyám, or how you would define the ego, or what you think of Mr. Le Gallienne—matters which require confidence, almost a curtain. We have lost the art of the gradualapproach; presently we shall hustle each other like kinetic atoms. A kinetic atom, I understand, goes straight to the point.
We all love curtseying to the Princess therefore, partly because it is a lost art, and partly because it is a way in which we can say, without being fulsome or troublesome, how happy we are to see her. There is only one circumstance under which it is not entirely a privilege. That is when, dismounted, one meets her in one’s habit. Whether it is the long boots or the short skirt, or the uncompromising cut, I cannot say, but I always feel, performing a curtsey to the Princess in my habit, that I am in a false position. Every true woman loves to stalk about in her habit, and tap her heels with her riding crop; there is a shadow of the privileges of the other sex about it which is alluring, and which, as the costume is sanctioned, one can enjoy comfortably; but it is not arranged for curtseying, and there ought to be a dispensation permitting ladies wearing it to bow from the waist.
Then the Princess passes on, leaving yousmiling. I have seen people continue to smile in a lower key for twenty minutes after the Princess has gone by, as water will go on reflecting a glow long after the sunlight has left it. The effect is quite involuntary, and of course it looks a little foolish, but it is agreeable to feel, and nobody, positively nobody, can produce it but the Princess. Indeed the power to produce it would be a capital test for princesses.
If I were in any way in a position to submit princesses to tests, I should offer that of the single pea and the twenty feather beds with confidence to ours. Which is a pride and a pleasure to be able to say in these days, when ladies thus entitled are so apt to disguise themselves in strong minds or blunt noses or irritating clothes. It is delightful to be assured that, in spite of this tendency, the Princess has not yet vanished, the Princess of the fairy tales, the real Princess, from among us, that such a one is sitting at the moment in her castle, not ten minutes’ walk from here, eating marmalade with a golden spoon, or whatever she likes better than marmalade,and bringing to life day after day that delight in living which you must have, or there’s no use in being a princess. It is possible that she may not put on her diadem every morning; there is no necessity for that, since you could not imagine her without it; and if she prefers reading her Browning to watching her gold-fish, it is not in any way my affair. Indeed, although she occupies a public position, there is no one who more readily accedes her right to a private life than I, though, of course, with the rest of her subjects, I would prefer that she had as little of it as possible. It is said that the Roy-Regent, knowing what would be expected of her, was not content until he had found the most beautiful and agreeable Princess there was; and I can well believe that he sailed over seas and seas to find her, though it is probably only a tradition that they met at George Washington’s country seat where the Princess was looking for trailing arbutus,—another lovely thing whose habitat is the banks of the Potomac. And an improbable tradition, as George Washington never encouraged princesses.
Last night there was an entertainment at the castle and among the guests a chief of one of those smaller Indias that cluster about the great one. He wore his own splendid trappings, and he was a handsome fellow, well set up; and above his keen dark face, in front of the turban, set round with big irregular pearls, was fastened a miniature of the Queen-Empress who holds his fealty in her hand. To him the Princess, all in filmy lace with her diadem flashing, spoke kindly. They sat upon gold-backed chairs a little way apart, and as she leaned to confer her smile and he to receive it, I longed to frame the picture and make perpetual the dramatic moment, the exquisite odd chance. “Surely,” thought I, “the world has never been so graciously bridged before.” Talking of George Washington, if the good man could have seen that, I think he might have melted toward princesses; I do not think, from all we know of him, that he would have had the heart to turn coldly away and disclaim responsibility for this one. I wish he could have seen it; yes, and Martha too, thoughif anybody thought necessary to make trouble and talk about sacred principles of democracy, it would have been Martha. Martha, she would have been the one. Her great and susceptible husband would have taken a philosophic pinch of snuff and toasted posterity.
I see that I have already admitted it, I have slipped in the path of virtuous resolution and lofty indifference; I have gone back, just for a minute, into the world. The reason I have neglected every flower in the garden this morning to write about the Princess is that I have been dining with her. It is so difficult to be unmoved and firm when you know the band will play and there will be silver soup-plates, to say nothing of the Roy-Regent smiling and pleased to see you, and the Roman punch in the middle of the menu. At home, one so seldom has Roman punch in the middle of the menu. Besides, now that I think of it, it was a “command” invitation, and I did not go for any of these reasons, or even to see the Princess, but because I had to; a lofty compulsion of Statewas upon me, and nobody would place her loyalty in question on account of a possible draught. If there had been a draught and I had taken cold I should have felt an added nobility to-day; somewhat the virtue, I suppose, of the elderly statesman who contracts a fatal influenza at a distinguished interment, and so creates a vicious circle of funerals; but there was no draught.
The Princess lives in splendid isolation. If it were not for the Roy-Regent and the babies, and the Commander-in-Chief andhisfamily, she would die of loneliness. And of course the Bishop, though I can’t understand in what way one would depend much upon a bishop, except to ask a blessing when he came to dinner. Kind and human as the Princess is she lives in another world, with an A.D.C. always going in front to tell people to get up, “Their Excellencies are coming.” You cannot ask after the Princess’s babies as you would ask after the babies of a person like yourself; you must say, “How are Your Excellency’s babies?” and this at once removes them farbeyond the operation of your affectionate criticism. When it is impossible even to take babies for granted the difficulties of the situation may be imagined. The situation is glorious but troubling, your ideas often will not flow freely in it, and is there anything more dreadful at a supreme moment than to have your ideas stick? You find yourself saying the same thing you said the last time you had the honour, which is the most mortifying thing that can happen in any conversation.
I often wonder whether the Princess does not look at our little mud houses and wish sometimes that she could come in. The thought is a reckless one but I do entertain it. If you take a kind and friendly interest in people as the Princess does in us all, you cannot be entirely satisfied merely to add them up as population and set them a good example. Nor can it be very interesting to look at the little mud houses and observe only that they have chimneys, and not to know how the mantelpieces are done or whether there is a piano, or if anybody else’ssweet-peas are earlier than yours. In my dreams I sometimes invite the Princess to tea. An A.D.C. always comes behind her carrying the diadem on a red silk cushion, but at my earnest prayer he is made to stay outside on the verandah. We have the best china; and in one dream the Princess broke a cup and we wept together. On another occasion she gave me a recipe for pickled blackberries and told me of a way—I always forget the way—of getting rid of frowns. There is generally something to spoil a dream, and the thing that spoils this one is the A.D.C., who will look in at the window. All the same we have a lovely time, the Princess ignoring all her prerogatives, unless I say something about the state of the country, when she instantly, royally, changes the subject....