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Peck's Bad Boy Abroad, a fiction by George W. Peck |
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Chapter 9. The Bad Boy And His Dad Call On King Edward... |
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_ CHAPTER IX. The Bad Boy and His Dad Call on King Edward and Almost Settle the Irish Question.
The American minister arranged it for us. He told somebody that Peck's Bad Boy and his dad were in town, and just wanted to size up a king and see how he averaged up with United States politicians, and the king set an hour for us to call. Well, you'd a dide to see dad fix up. Everybody said, when we showed our card at the hotel, notifying us that we were expected at Marlboro House at such a time, that we would be expected to put on plenty of dog. That is what an American from Kalamazoo, who sells breakfast food, said, and the hotel people said we would be obliged to wear knee breeches and dancing pumps and silk socks, and all that kind of rot, and men's furnishers began to call upon us to take our measure for clothes, but when they told us how much it would cost, dad kicked. He said he had a golf suit he had made in Oshkosh at the time of the tournament, that every one in Oshkosh said was out of sight, and was good enough for any king, and so he rigged up in it, and I hired a suit at a masquerade place, and dad hired a coat, kind of red, to go with his golf pants and socks, and he wore canvas tennis shoes. I looked like a picture out of a fourteenth century book, but dad looked like a clown in a circus. One of dad's calves made him look as though he had a milk leg, cause the padding would not stay around where the calf ought to be, but worked around towards his shin. We went to Marlboro House in a hansom cab, and all the way there the driver kept looking down from the hurricane deck, through the scuttle hole, to see if we were there yet, and he must have talked with other cab drivers in sign language about us, for every driver kept along with us, looked at us and laughed, as though we were a wild west show. On the way to the king's residence it was all I could do to keep dad braced up to go through the ordeal. He was brave enough before we got the invitation, and told what he was going to say to the king, and you would think he wasn't afraid of anybody, but when we got nearer to the house and dad thought of going up to the throne and seeing a king in all his glory, surrounded by his hundreds of lords and dukes and things, a crown on his head, and an ermine cloak trimmed with red velvet, and a six-quart milk pan full of diamonds, some of them as big as a chunk of alum, dad weakened, and wanted to give the whole thing up and go to a matinee, but I wouldn't have it, and told him if he didn't get into the king row now that I would shake him right there in London and start in business as a Claude Duval highwayman and hold up stage coaches, and be hung on Tyburn Tree, as I used to read about in my history of Sixteen-String Jack and other English highwaymen. Dad didn't want to see the family disgraced, so he let the cabman drive on, but he said if we got out of this visit to royalty alive, it was the last tommyrot he would indulge in. Well, old man, it is like having an operation for appendicitis, you feel better when you come out from under the influence of the chloroform and the doctor shows you what they took out of you, and you feel that you are going to live, unless you grow another vermiform appendix. We were driven into a sort of Central park, and up to a building that was big as a lot of exposition buildings, and the servants took us in charge and walked us through long rooms covered with pictures as big as side show pictures at a circus, but instead of snake charmers and snakes and wild men of Borneo and sword swallowers, the king's pictures were about war, and women without much clothes on from the belt up. Gosh, but some of those pictures made you think you could hear the roar of battle and smell gun powder, and dad acted as though he wanted to git right down on the marble floor and dig a rifle pit big enough to git into. They walked us around like they do when you are being initiated into a secret society, only they didn't sing, "Here comes the Lobster," and hit you with a dried bladder. The servants that were conducting us laffed. I had never seen an Englishman laff before, and it was the most interesting thing I saw in London. Most Englishmen look sorry about something, as though some dear friend died every day, and their faces seem to have grown that way. So when they laff it seems as though the wrinkles would stay there, unless they treated their faces with massage. They were laughing at dad's dislocated calf, and his scared appearance, as though he was going to receive the thirty-second degree, and didn't know whether they were going to throw him over a precipice or pull him up to the roof by the hind legs. We passed a big hall clock, and it struck just when we were near it, and of all the "Hark, from the tombs" sounds I ever heard, that clock took the cake. Dad thought it sounded like a death knell, and he would have welcomed the turning in of a fire alarm as a sound that meant life everlasting, beside that doleful sound. After we had marched about three mile heats, and passed the chairs of the noble grand and the senior warden, and the exalted ruler, we came to a bronze door as big as the gate to a cemetery, and the grand conductor gave us a few instructions about how to back out fifteen feet from the presence of the king, when we were dismissed, and then he turned us over to a little man who was a grand chambermaid, I understood the fellow to say. The door opened, and we went in, and dad's misplaced calf was wobbling as though he had locomotor attacks-ye. Well, there were a dozen or so fellows standing around, and they all had on some kind of uniforms, with gold badges on their breasts, and in the midst of them was a little, sawed-off fat fellow, not taller than five feet six, but a perfect picture of the cigar advertisements of America for a cigar named after the king. I expected to see a king as big as Long John Wentworth of Chicago, a great big fellow that could take a small man by the collar and throw him over a house, and I felt hurt at the small size of the king of Great Britain, but, gosh, he is just like a Yankee, when you get the formality shook off. We bowed and dad made a courtesy like an old woman, and the king came forward with a smile that ought to be imitated by every Englishman. They all imitate his clothes and his hats and his shoes, but he seems to be the only Englishman that smiles. Maybe it is patented, and nobody has a right to smile without paying a royalty, but the good-natured smile of King Edward is worth more than stomach bitters, and the English ought to be allowed to copy it. There is no more solemn thing than a party of Englishmen together in America, unless it is a party of speculators that are short on wheat, or a gathering of defeated politicians when the election returns come in. But the king is as jolly as though he had not a note coming due at the bank, and you would think he was a good, common citizen, after working hours, at a round beer table, with two schooner loads in the hold and another schooner on the way, frothing over the top of the stein. That is the feeling I had for the king when he came up to us and greeted dad as the father of the bad boy and patted me on the shoulder and said: "And so you are the boy that has made more trouble than any boy in the world, and had more fun than anybody, and made them all stand around and wonder what was coming next. You're a wonder. Strange the American people never thought of killing you." I said yessir, and tried to look innocent, and then the king told dad to sit down, and for me to come and stand by his knee, and by ginger, when he patted me on the cheek, and his soft hand squeezed my hand, and he looked into my eyes with the most winning expression, I did not wonder that all the women were in love with him, and that all Englishmen would die for him. He asked dad all about America, its institutions, the president, and everything, and dad was just so flustered that he couldn't say much, until the king said something about the war between the States, in which the southern states achieved a victory. I don't know whether the king said that just to wake dad up, 'cause dad had a grand army button on his coat, but dad choked up a little, and then began to explode, a little at a time, like a bunch of firecrackers, and finally he went off all in a bunch. Dad said: "Look a here, Mr. King, some one has got you all balled up about that war. I know, because I was in it, and now the north and the south are United, and can whip any country that wants to fight a champion, and will go out and get a reputation, by gosh!" The king laughed at touching dad off, and asked dad what was the matter of America and Great Britain getting together and making all nations know when they had better keep their places, and quit talking about fighting. Dad said he never would consent to America and Great Britain getting together to fight any country until Ireland got justice and was ready to come into camp on an equality, and the king said he would answer for the Irishmen of Ireland if dad would pledge the Irishmen of America, 'cause we had about as many Irishmen in America as he had in Ireland, and dad said if the king would give Ireland what she asked for, he would see that the Irishmen in America would sing God Save the King. I guess dad and the king would have settled the Irish question in about fifteen minutes, and signed a treaty, only a servant brought in a two-quart bottle of champagne, and dad and the king hadn't drank a quart apiece before dad started to sing "My Country Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Libertee," and the king sang "God Save the King," and, by thunder, it was the same tune, and tears came into dad's eyes, and the king took out his handkerchief and wiped his nose, and I bellered right out, and the king rose and offered a toast to America and everybody in it, and they swallered it, and dad said there was enough juice left in the bottle for one more round, and he proposed a toast to all the people of Great Britain, including the Irish and the king who loved them, and down she went, and they were standing up. And I told dad it was time to go. Say, it was great, Uncle Ezra, and I wish you could have been there, and there had been another bottle. The only thing that happened to mar the reunion of dad and the king was when we were going out backwards, bowing. There was a little hassock back of me, and I kicked it back of dad, and when dad's heels struck it he went over backwards and struck on his golf pants, and dad said: "El, 'Ennery, I'ave broken my bloomink back, but who cares," and when the servants picked dad up and took him out in the hall and marched us to the entrance, dad got in the cab, gave the grand hailing sign of distress, started to sing God save something or other, and went to sleep in the cab, and I took him to the hotel. Yours, Hennery. _ |
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