The Menace of the Word

It will be best, both for the reader and the writer, not to bother about what particular country was the scene of this extraordinary incident. It may well be left vague, so long as it is firmly stipulated that it was not in the Balkans, where so many romancers have rushed to stake out claims ever since Mr. Anthony Hope effected his coup d'état in Ruritania. The Balkan kingdom is convenient because kings are killed and despotic governments overthrown with pleasing swiftness and frequency, and the crown may fall to any adventurer, good or bad. But meanwhile, in the same Balkan State, the farms remain in the same families, the plot of land, the orchard or the vineyard, descends from father to son; the rude equality of peasant proprietorship has never been greatly disturbed by large financial operations. In short, in the Balkan kingdom there is some safety and continuity for the Family, so long as it is not the Royal Family.

But with the kingdom in question here, how different! Whatever name we may give it, it was at least a highly-civilized and well-ordered society, in which the Royal Family continued serene and safe under police protection and constitutional limitations; in which all the public services were conducted with a regularity verging on tedium, and in which nobody was ever ruined or overthrown except the butcher, the baker, the candle-stick-maker and the various types of tradesmen and common citizens who might happen to cross the path of large commercial operations. The country might well be one of the smaller German States that have been industrialized by dependence on mines and factories, or one of the former dependencies of the Austrian Empire. It does not matter; it is enough to secure the reader's respect and interest to know that it was a thoroughly modern and enlightened community, which had advanced in every science and perfected every social convenience until it was within reasonable distance of revolution; not a potty little palace revolution, in which a few princes are murdered, but a real, international, universal social revolution; probably beginning with a General Strike and probably ending with bankruptcy and famine.

It was all the more possible, because breezy events of this sort had already broken out in a neighbouring industrial state, and after some months of very bewildering civil war, had ended in the victory of one out of the six revolutionary generals fighting each other in the field; the victor being a certain General Casc, an able soldier who had originally come with the Colonial troops garrisoned in the neighbourhood, and who was credited in local gossip with being partly a negro, a fact which considerably consoled those who had been defeated by him. For our own territory, which we will call Pavonia, he was only of importance—as an unluckily lucky example.

The public crisis became acute in Pavonia with the appearance of the rather mysterious agitation about "The Word". To this day there are disputes about the nature of the movement. Some of the government agents and inquirers swore the ignorant populace did really believe that, with the discovery of a new Word, everything in the world would be explained. A wild pamphlet did actually appear, in which the writer argued with insane ingenuity that, as all modern publicity and popularization consist of concentrating a book into a paragraph, or a chapter into a sentence, so at last the whole truth about the present problem would be concentrated into a word. Crowds of impatient malcontents were adjured to Wait for the Word; and apocalyptic visions were provided, of the scenes of world-change that would follow, when once The Word was spoken. The Word would contain in itself, it was gravely asserted, a complete plan of operations and an explanation of the whole organized strategy of the revolt. Some said the whole fancy had originated with one Bohemian poet, who signed his poems, "Sebastian", and had certainly composed a lyric invocation full of allusions to The Word. Many repeated the lines which ran:

As Aaron's serpent swallowed snakes and rods,
As God alone is greater than the gods,
As all stars shrivel in the single sun,
The words are many, but The Word is one.

But nobody in office ever saw the revolutionary poet who tossed these little trifles at the Government and the public; until he was identified one day in the street by the very last person who was likely to meet him.

The Princess Aurelia Augusta Augustina, etc. etc. (who had embedded somewhere in her stratified Christian names the name of Mary, by which she was called for convenience by her family), was the niece of the reigning monarch, and, having only just left school, did not as yet fully appreciate the difference between reigning and ruling. She was a vigorous young woman with red hair and a Roman nose, and having as yet learned more about Royalties in history than in politics, took their position with a certain simplicity and could even imagine (just as if she had really been in the Balkans) that they might be worth murdering or worth obeying. She had come back into the life of the Court and the capital, which she had left as a mere child, full of that irrepressible desire to be useful, which is so normal in women and so dangerous in great ladies, and she was at present making herself a nuisance by asking questions of everybody about everything. She naturally asked questions about the popular political riddle of The Word, and generally, as Mr. Edmund Burke would say, about the cause of the present discontents. She was all the more intrigued when nobody could tell her what The Word was and very few, in her world, what the row was all about. It was therefore with a considerable glow of superiority that she returned to her family one afternoon and announced that she had actually seen the seditious minstrel, who was apparently responsible for the somewhat obscure revolutionary rhyme and the somewhat mysterious revolutionary movement.

Her car was moving slowly down a quiet street, because she was on the look-out for a curio shop she had known in childhood and could not immediately locate. Just beyond the curio shop was a café, with a few tables outside it in the continental manner, and at one of these tables was seated in front of a green liqueur an odd-looking person with very long hair and a very high stock or cravat. I have said that historical and geographical identification matter little in this case; and the reader may, if he likes, clothe this queer episode in any outlandish or antiquated fashion of fantasies of costume, for indeed the most recent fashion is full of quaint revivals and modes that might be either very old or very new. The man with the stock might have been some eccentric contemporary or creation of Balzac; he might equally well have been an art student of today, with the most Futurist views but the most Early Victorian whiskers. His mane of long hair was of an incredible dark auburn that looked like dim crimson rather than ordinary red; his forked or cloven beard was of the same unnatural colour and was shown up by the high cravat which was of a vivid sort of peacock-green. The colour of the cravat varied, however, from day to day; sometimes it was of a brighter green when the spirit of spring inspired his songs; sometimes of purple when he was lamenting the rich tragedy of his loves; sometimes completely black when he had decided that the time had really come to destroy the universe. He would explain to his friends that he followed without faltering the clue of the mood and the sky of morning, but they never recommended a necktie that did not contrast effectively with his beard. For this was no other than the poet Sebastian, whose verses counted for so much in the revolutionary movement of the moment.

The Princess, of course, was quite unaware of his identity, and would have passed him with no particular comment beyond a disapproval of his necktie. But he returned to her attention and remained in it because of the curiously different conditions in which she saw him only an hour or two later, when the shops and factories had shut their doors and poured forth their populations. When she came back again through the quiet street, it was no longer quiet. It was especially the reverse of quiet in the neighbourhood of the café where the stranger had been drinking the green liqueur, and if the car moved slowly now, it was because of the difficulty of making its way through an ever-thickening crowd. For the long-haired person in the cravat was now standing on the café table and declaiming what appeared to be alternate fragments of prose and verse, with some modern intermediate types difficult to define. She came just in time, however, to hear the end of the now familiar jingle or rhymed motto:

"As God alone is greater than the gods,
As all stars shrivel in the single sun,
The words are many, but The Word is one.

"But The Word will not pass my lips, nor those of the Four Wardens of The Word who already know it, until the first part of the work has been accomplished. When the powerless have risen against the powerful, when the poor have risen above the rich, when the weak have risen and proved stronger than the strong, when—"

At this moment he and his hearers suddenly became conscious of the sober but elegant vehicle which was pushing its prow like a boat above the popular waves, and the somewhat haughty countenance that appeared above it, just behind the wooden countenance of the chauffeur. Most people present recognized the lady and there was a sudden stir and stoppage, as of embarrassment, but the poet standing on the table struck a new attitude of sublime impudence and cried aloud:

"But how hard it is for ugliness to rise against beauty. And we are an ugly lot!"

And the Princess drove on in a condition of towering rage.