Chapter III: The Coup D’état

The carriages that rolled to the Buckingham Palace ball about a year later rolled through snow, and snow was falling when, some minutes after Her Majesty had danced the square-dance, a lady came to breathe near her ear: “I understand, Ma’am, that His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales has arrived, and craves to know if Your Majesty will graciously grant him a ten-minutes’ interview where he waits alone in the Picture Gallery.”

The Queen’s heart went a beat quicker. “I will do so,” she gave answer with that gracious smile which distinguished her; and her steps set out slow but grew hurried.

The Prince in a splashed mackintosh, pilot cap in hand, half knelt, and then felt her heart on his.

“So here you are!”

“Here I am, Mother: straight from Paddington with Manning and Sir Martin Raine.”

“I had my eyes on my watch!”

“Oh, aye, I thought I’d see if you’d see me straight away.”

“Have you succeeded?”

“That’s all right.”

“So this is the end of Brockweir?”

“So it seems.”

“Did I do well to send you to Brockweir?”

He lowered his lids to say: “You are always my lucky star, Mother.”

“Sit here: I give you ten minutes, and two more for love—Oh! and I have won about Dartmouth!”—she clapped her finger-tips—“you’re to travel first!”

“You always win, Mother, when I’m the stake.”

“Haven’t I made you a credit to your country? Haven’t I? Tell me.”

“Well, I think so, though I’m something of a duffer in some things.”

“But you never say ‘heavy as lead,’ lead being rather light? you know where your pancreas is, and some little something of the Divinity of the universe you live in?”

“Oh, aye, that’s all to the good.”

“And you have been good, too.... _Have_ you been?”

The Prince rushed red as a rose. “Well, I hope so.”

A little pause now—a rising of alarm in Her Majesty’s eyes. She said: “Edward the Red Prince.”

“Ha, ha. Really, Mother——”

“_A girl?_”

Now he looked her straight, saying: “I may have met a girl, mother.”

Her eyes shut, she moving her face intolerantly, making a little lip-sound of vexation. The thing that she feared had come upon her. And there was silence.

Then: “Oh, well, Teddy, it won’t do.”

“Mother, I hope you are not cross. Possibly, if you knew the lady——”

“_I?_ Milk-maid? Frizzy hair?”

“Oh, Mother, we have only a few minutes, and here we are out of step——”

“But stay—is it to be supposed that you are what is called ‘in love’?”

“I do seem to think of one——”

“Now, how annoying. And the lady knows this? and who you are?”

“She doesn’t happen to know who I am. I did tell her once that there were immense obstacles to our uni——”

“Union forsooth, Your Royal Highness!”—Her Majesty’s eyes flashing like that Star of South Africa which bathed her brow in its blaze—“pray select your words to me with greater circumspection! _There_ is the Union that concerns you”—she pointed to that huge picture of the first sitting of the Union Convention at Cape Town—“for your so ‘democratic’ colonies want their ‘Royalty’ royal, let me tell you, and Kings are not masters of themselves, but servants of the world. I am astonished that you venture to say such things to me!”

“Mother, I attend to what you say.”

“But stay,” said the Queen; “when you mentioned to the lady that there were immense obstacles—what did the lady say?”

“She said that as I conquered Li Ku, so I should conquer the obstacles.”

The Queen smiled a little now, saying: “I see! Poor little thing, I’ll think of it, and see what can be done to let her down gently. But you should have told her plainly, Teddy. Li Ku was yellow, the obstacles blue.—When, by the way, did all this rapture happen?”

“Year ago. We met just after I had fought Li Ku; then—twice; then—thrice.”

The Queen thought that an odd way of putting it—twice, then thrice: why not ‘five times’? But she only said: “And, Teddy, you never told me.”

“Mother, I longed to. But I knew there would be a frown, and I thought that if I could first manage somehow to get you to see her—then you might—I can’t quite explain—there are natural aristocrats, as you know—cellularly select—essentially precious somehow—strangely rare—gentle——”

This praise afresh alarmed Her Majesty. Her next words were: “And the lady lives—where?”

Now the Prince’s eyes sprang into wide-awakedness. “Had I better tell, Mother?”

“Well!—I think so.”

“Scott, Mother, I don’t want to have the poor girl appalled and thundered upon.”

“Well!—But if I command?”

“Your Majesty is seventy times seven my Queen——”

“And you my little king of kings. Tell.”

“Teddy” moaned. “She lives at Nottingham.”

“And her name?”

“Eulalia.”

“Eulalia what?”

“She told me Bayley.”

“Good old Teddy—hero of all my novels,” the Queen fondly said, hardly noticing the queerness of that “she told me.” “And don’t think,” she added, “that I am going to thunder upon her. We’ll see how things go: and it is just as well that I should have her name and place. But how could she possibly like you the day you fought Li Ku? You must have been so Chineaten, Manchewed, and Sky-Blued! And, by the way, talking of Li Ku Yu, do you know what he now is? I have a letter from Sir John Pilkinton at Peking.”

“What is Li Ku, Mother?”

“A Sub-Chancellor of the Grand Secretariat. Now, think what that means—that in about a year he has romped through Pundit ‘learning,’ such as it is—has, in fact, got an Optimus in the Peking Chin Shih exam. (Doctor’s Degree)—a stiff physical ordeal, apart from the cram. So you see.”

“Oh, aye, he will do something or other,” said the Prince—“says I must get up early, and I mean to. Perhaps we haven’t seen the last of each other, Mr Chin-chin and I.”

This was to come true only four months later when the Prince got a sight of Li Ku Yu going robed in a green (official) chair through the East Gate Glorious of the Forbidden City—for before his Investiture, or his actual cadetship, “Teddy” had eaten with chop-sticks, had learned buck-jumping and stock-whip cracking in the Australian Bush, had collected uniform-buttons of Cossacks and Redifs, had bagged big game in Somaliland, and been half drowned in a flood of the Great Fish River.

By the time he was leaving Dartmouth, Li Ku Yu was carrying out a bloody reform in the administration of the Yu Chuan Pu (Post-Office); and when the Prince had been six months on the _St Vincent_, Li Ku was a Chargé d’Affaires, making frequent trips between Peking and Tokio.

This man never lost an hour. Steadily, like a rat darkly gnawing a hole through the night-watches, he was gnawing at the old condition of the world, with the plan of a new world ready in his head: and as at an electric shock Asia thrilled at the presence of his vigour.

His first high attempt was a secret treaty, frankly framed against the white races, between the Dragon-flag and the Rising Sun.

But in this he failed. The Anglo-Japanese alliance, though very thin-worn, still existed; and in the eyes of the Japanese Chancellery that very young diplomat, Li Ku Yu, had rather the character of a dreamer. Now, though every great man may be a dreamer, not every dreamer is a great man; and to distinguish between the two sorts of dream is not always easy. But he smiled at all contradiction with his ordinary patience, for no being ever had so unshakeable a faith in his innate kingship, trickiness, and luck.

He was always sure, too, of his Dowager. Tea-room gossip in the Capital persistently said that she was his _bonne amie_; but, then, Li Ku Yu was little of a lover, though he certainly provoked women by his very aloofness, as the sparrow attracts the cat.

Anyway, Lung Lü from the first saw in him her master; and it is probable that from the first she and he had doomed her son, the young Emperor, to death.

Lung Lü was then about thirty-five, a woman of strong mind, though much under the influence of eunuchs, and not less notorious for her orgies in the dark seclusion of her palaces than the Empresses Wu and Tzu Hsi.

Her powers were again now fairly absolute, for though the Throne had been utterly overthrown by the Constitution of a few years before, the pendulum as usual had swung anew, and the Heavenly Empire was again governed by the “Decrees” and “Edicts” of a woman’s moods.

Now, the Emperor, who was sixteen, and nearly ready to take the reins, detested his mother and Li Ku Yu.

He knew well that they had sentenced him to death, if not by drug or dirk, then by the life of riot to which they pushed him, a hated life from which his frail nature was helpless to escape: for they two took care that each of the eunuchs, and even his tutors, should be his teachers in evil.

Besides, the young Emperor, who had some spirit, felt himself a fly in the presence of Li’s smile, of Li’s bulk of skull, whose lines bulged largely as at the horse-power of some engine pumping within: and in his head on his bed at night he meant no good to Li Ku Yu.

And there were many on his side to plot with him—Censors, Grand Councillors, the Manchu Clansmen, who all abhorred the scholar from Brockweir, the pigtail with opinions more hairy-devil than the hairy devils’.

Accordingly, upon the failure of Li Ku Yu’s mission to the Court of Japan, his assassination was determined upon as soon as he should return; and, meantime, Memorial after Memorial was presented to the Throne, urging his cashiering and impeachment before the Board of Punishments.

But he did not return—to Peking. Before he left Tokio, a rebellion had broken out, once more, among “the Turbans” (Turkestan Mohammedans); and an Edict from the Throne—which Li Ku Yu wrote—gave him the Governorship of Shensi, with the command to suppress the rebellion—for he danced from office to office like dancers dashing through “the daisy-chain,” changing hands in an entanglement of arms, with laughter; and, having some instinct of the intrigue against him in the Imperial City, he passed straight on to his Yamên at Sianfu.

There he raised some militia; and with 17,000 raw levies, and one brigade from the Northern Army, started out westward—without the least experience in the handling of masses of troops.

This business occupied him fourteen months.

He had to sit down before garrisoned towns with disgraceful guns and ragged brigades; once he had to grow the millet that gave porridge to his troops; and, meantime, his discipline was so grim and rigid, that very many of his men perished on the way.

During all which, in the Throne-Hall of Exalted Peace, the young Emperor had begun to govern; Lung Lü had retired with her eunuchs and ladies to her lake-picnics, stage-plays and other delights to her I-Ho-Yüan or Summer Palace (five miles out); and at once by a Vermilion Rescript the Emperor dismissed Li Ku Yu, “permitting him to commit suicide,” and despatching another General to take his place.

The body-guard of “Old Style” soldiers, carrying great two-handed swords, who surrounded this General, were pounced upon by the rank and file of Li Ku Yu’s soldiers, who adored him, and were killed by the “slicing” process, then dismembered. The heads of the General and of the Commissioner who had come to inspect Li Ku Yu’s suicide, were carried for days on the markers’ standard-staffs of two rear-guard companies.

Thus Li Ku Yu crossed the Rubicon, and broke with the Throne of his country.

By this time his military advance had grown more rapid—it gradually grew rapid to a ravaging avalanche. He scourged Turkestan as far as Kashgar of man, cattle and plant. Never did regiments leave in their rear so complete a desert. In captured cities his troops ran riot like terriers let loose on rats; they cracked the skulls of the young upon rocks; they hacked off the bosoms of mothers before they stabbed them; for intervals of three hundred miles not a thing was left alive where their withering fire had run.

It was on his return march from Kashgar that he despatched couriers to make the vast order of 125,000 cinematographs through the agency of a German firm at Shanghai.

As his victorious host approached the Capital, crackers spattered in every town, and the Dowager despatched him a poem of congratulation, a Dragon-robe, four rolls of “auspicious” silk, twenty pounds of swallow-nests, and a tablet bearing the inscription: “Backbone of the State.”

Now, on the Emperor’s seventeenth birthday, his mother had summoned before her the most beautiful of the daughters of noble Manchu families, from whom to select a score of ladies for her son’s harem; and among those selected had been a certain Niuhulu, a half-sister of Li Ku Yu—Li’s own mother being a Chinese woman, though his father was Manchu. And this Niuhulu contrived to send him out a message when he was still ninety miles from Peking, saying that his death was a settled thing, if he once entered the city.

The next morning at the Hour of the Hare (six) Li Ku Yu entered the city by the Shih Che (N.W.) Gate—apparently alone—in peasant’s dress: he had come flying through the night, as the vulture stoops: and he proceeded southward toward the Imperial City.

At that early hour the Supernal Countenance was granting audience to the Grand Councillors, Princes, and Ministers of the Presence in the Pavilion of Ceremonial Phœnixes in the Lake Palace; and there they were kneeling, looking pigmy in a room most gloomily grand, grouped round the Dragon Throne, on which sat the Glorious One, his face to the south.

Li Ku Yu was still felt to be at a safe distance away, and they were discussing the disposing of the troops at their command in the Capital, when suddenly Li Ku Yu, two pistols in his hands, was among them like the typhoon’s swoop—darted in howling, astounding the heart, a sort of laugh distorting his bawling mouth, as he howled: “I am here to save Your Majesty from your enemies!” in shouting which he half-knelt—without kow-towing, and instantly was up again.

Now, one may not enter unsummoned, nor stand up. So, pallid as death, the boy-Emperor sprang to his feet, frantically pointing, screaming out: “Why, that man has designs upon my life! You see him there, that man? My Guards! My Guards!”

In flocked a mob of guards and eunuchs; but at the same time revolvers were crackling outside; and almost at once a half company of infantry in civilian garb darted into the hall.

A few shots were exchanged, a few corpses dropped, while Li Ku Yu, grasping the Emperor, held him behind his body, as if to protect him; and then Guards, Ministers, eunuchs, fled pell-mell. But only to be everywhere captured outside by the battalion in mufti which now surrounded the Imperial and Forbidden Cities. They were Li Ku Yu’s veterans.

At the same time Lung Lü was reclining on the lofty deck of a large barge-of-state carved with dragons and phœnixes, coming along the canal that leads from Summer Palace to Imperial City: for she was duly in the secret of the _coup d’état_; and she issued an Edict that day in her son’s name:—“ill-health had moved him to implore his Most Holy Mother to resume the onerous duties of a ruler for him.”

Four months later the poor boy robed himself in the Ceremonial Robes of Long-life, turned his face to the south, mounted the Dragon, and was carried rotten to the stars.

He had been put into semi-imprisonment in the South lake Palace, surrounded by a foul crew of eunuchs and scoundrels, and died of many things.