Gerald Kersh - The Best of Gerald Kersh

And after that, I can assure you, Dicker and I were established, under King Nicolas III. We could do no wrong. I really believe that even if Dicker and I had committed murder it would somehow have been hushed up and we could have got away with it. Poor Dicker – this went to his head. Once, for example, when the Chamberlain at the Palace, a terribly proud man with a very hasty temper, told Dicker to remember his place, Dicker threatened to go home. The Chamberlain was dismissed with ignominy.

This man, whose name was Tancredy, then conceived a frightful hate for the King, and secretly gave his support to the Liberal-Democrat Party. I dare say you will have read something about the political situation in that country in King Nicolas’s time, especially towards the end of his reign when there was a great deal of discontent. King Nicolas, like his fathers before him, was an absolute monarch. In effect he was the Law.

After his father, King Vindex II, had been assassinated by a woman who threw a seven-pound bomb into his carriage, Nicolas, influenced by a wise old Minister, had brought about certain reforms in the country. He had started a system of free education, free medical services, sanitation, the encouragement of the fine arts and of heavy industry, the development of an export trade – all this and much more was associated with Nicolas III. Nevertheless, the ordinary man of the people was subject to restrictions which horrified me. I am Swiss, you see.

There was no real freedom of speech or of the Press. The average man had to glance over his shoulder before he felt that it was safe to say what he wanted to say. There was frightful corruption in the highest places – especially when the King had grown too old and feeble and sick to care about anything but his seven hundred fantastic clocks. Consequently discontent was driven out of sight as an acorn is driven into the ground by your foot when you tread on it. This acorn, if I may put it that way, sent out all sorts of underground roots and pushed up unforeseen shoots. There were the Anarcho-Liberals, the Terrorists of the Brutus Party; the Democratic-Socialists, the Independent-Anarchists; the Republicans; the Labour-Royalists; and a dozen others. But the most subtle and formidable force working against the King was that of the Liberal-Democrat Party, led by an ex-lawyer named Martin. This was a Party to be reckoned with. Its methods were unquestionably constitutional and its policy was not to dethrone the King but to take away his power – which meant that the King would become a mere puppet; a King in name only. The Monarchists, who kept a great deal of personal power mainly because the King was a proper King, hated these Liberal-Democrats; and had indeed, my dear sir, very good reason to hate them. They were afraid of the Liberal-Democrats and of Martin, whose Party was growing stronger and stronger. He was suspected of encouraging, and even of financing and inspiring, all kinds of anti-Nicolas propaganda – mysterious little newspapers, scurrilous and filthy books and pamphlets and cartoons printed abroad; riots, acts of terror, and sometimes strikes. But nothing could be proved. Martin was too clever.

It was believed that only the personality of King Nicolas III kept the System in one piece. And poor King Nicolas was senile, paralytic, crippled with arthritis, and not far from death. After he died – and he was expected to die fairly soon – all the quiet, pale things underground would rush out and overwhelm the country.

As long as the old King lived, the Monarchists had something to stand on. You see, nobody was allowed to forget that old King Nicolas had been a much better man than his ancestors; that he was a humane, kind-hearted Father of his People, and meant to make everyone happy as soon as he could afford to do so. Also, he was the King; as such, he inspired the People with an almost superstitious veneration.

But he had no issue. There had been only one son, a pitiful, sickly boy, who was dead of anæmia.

It took me many months to learn all this, and, having learned it, I began to feel that, after all, Dicker and I were not as well provided for as we had thought.

By then I was working on the Great Clock of Nicolas. The old King came every day to watch while we worked. It is a strange thing: although I like a clock to be a clock and not a silly mechanical toy, I developed a kind of weakness for these ingenious little bits of machinery. It was very pleasant working in the Palace: everything was to hand. His Majesty had a passion for exclusiveness: he insisted that the inner workings of the clock we were making should be seen by himself, Dicker, and (of course) me. Honoré de Kock worked with us later, because he, as the sculptor and caster of the figures, had to know what made them work. There was not a great deal for de Kock to do in the beginning. He was a bored, melancholy man, as I have said; and he could not keep his hands still; he was always playing with something.

One day, when it was necessary for him to stand by until we had worked out the details of the knee-joint of the central figure of the Great Clock of Nicolas, he began to knead and fidget with a large lump of putty on the bench. An hour passed. ‘What’s that?’ asked His Majesty.

‘Nothing, Your Majesty,’ said de Kock.

‘Show me,’ said the King.

Then we saw that Honoré de Kock with his fidgety, photographic hands had squeezed, gouged, and patted out of that lump of putty an exact likeness of Dicker. The King was childishly delighted and said: ‘Do one of me.’

Poor de Kock bowed and said: ‘With pleasure, Your Majesty, but not in putty. Putty will not hold its shape. If it would please you I could make your likeness in, say, wax – simply, Sire, as a little game to divert you.’

Although it was early in the day, de Kock had already drunk a whole bottle of Apricot Brandy, and scarcely knew, or cared, what he was saying.

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘it might amuse Your Majesty. One of the first commissions I ever had was from a lady who had her likeness made in wax – full-length.’

‘What for?’ asked the King.

‘Why, her husband was suspicious of her, you see, because she was very much younger than he. She used to leave her room stealthily in the dead of night to visit someone else. Her husband was in the habit of peeping in at odd hours to see if she was still there. I made her a perfect likeness, movable at the joints like a dressmaker’s dummy, so that she could put herself into all kinds of attitudes; and deceived her husband perfectly for three years.’

‘And what happened then?’

‘Your Majesty, one night the husband crept in to spy upon his wife as usual, and was so overcome by the beauty of my waxwork that he ventured to creep up and kiss it. And then he rushed out yelling that his wife was dead – just as she came creeping back along the passage.’

‘And then? Did he kill her?’

‘No, he broke up the wax model.’

That was the only occasion on which I ever saw the King laugh. It hurt him, and the laugh turned into a groan, and the groan into a curse. But de Kock’s story had put him into a very good humour. King Nicolas had been a very gay fellow in his time, fond of practical jokes – you know, making fools of people; pouring water over them, setting booby-traps so that when they opened the door a pailful of something nasty emptied itself over them … and so forth.

‘Yes,’ he said to de Kock, ‘you shall make me in wax, life-size. But you mustn’t tell anyone about it, do you hear? You go on and model me – every hair, every line, everything. Then we’ll have fun. Yes, we’ll play tricks. I shall be in two places at the same time. I’ll frighten them out of their wits, the rogues….’

Later, the King sent de Kock a beautiful gold cigar-case, studded with diamonds, but de Kock was gloomy and furious. ‘Why did I tell him?’ he cried. ‘Why in God’s name? After all these years – have I come down to making wax dolls for old men in their second childhood?’