Stanley Elkin - George Mills

Which is just as well could be. Or so the story goes. Our version of it anyway, the way I heard it, how it came down to me, our baton-passed history apostolically successioned. Tag, and you’re it.

Maybe we should have tried America, put in some time in the New World. Or maybe not. It’s all new world for our kind anyway, ain’t it? See why I began by implying I was the thinking man’s George Mills? Not because I was any smarter than those other guys, God knows, but because I was capable of all this alternative, but-on-the-other-hand understood like some spiffy grammatical usage. My lot calls that thinking. Your lot too probably. (There I go again.) And if I had this Millsian perspective that lends detachment and magnanimous neutrality, perhaps it’s really because…This isn’t what I wanted to talk about.

It wasn’t religious this time, it was political, historical. Perhaps the King himself opened the door.

I don’t say answered. Opened. Perhaps he was on his way out as I was already knocking. Anyway, now I think of it, I must have startled him (despite his size, which was immense, he was big around as a kiosk) a good deal more than he startled me. I had the advantage, you see, of not knowing he was the King. (What advantage did he have? The man about to step out, nothing on his mind, to judge from his whistling, but his mood, calling, as was his destiny, all the shots of his daily round, and submissive at details as a tool, the arrangements already delegated, assigned, giving over his entire person like a horseman a heel for a hoist. And there I was, blocking his way, stuck in the doorway like an insurrectionist, a man, to look at me, to judge from my seedy clothes and peasant’s seamy appurtenances, the countryman’s straw helmet still on my head, the loose smock that could have concealed weapons, the rude boots like someone’s who might have been in his mutiny suit, for rebellion dressed, a far-flung Jacobin say, some Luddite-come-lately uniformed for sedition and putsch.) Advantage to the hick. (Because what really alarmed him, I learned later, too late, was not my crummy clothes or savage bearing — he was King of Great Britain and Ireland, King of Hanover; he knew our homespun, had closets of the stuff made to order for the bumpkin balls and bog-trots, the hayseed hoedowns and rustic masquerades of his youth — but my simple failure to bow and scrape, to make a leg or flat out kneel. What did I know? My fourth day in town. To me he looked like any other fat, well-groomed London gentleman of breeding. Where were his crown and sceptre? His sash and ribbons? His sword? The feather in his cap no higher than any other man’s. [Indeed, he was bareheaded.] And where, for that matter, were all the King’s men? Some of them? Any? One? His appearance less regal finally than a footman’s. Less regal than the livery of the men who drove the carriages in the streets. [Which was what I’d thought I’d do, why I’d come to London, with no weapons but only my letter of introduction greasy and rumpled under my smock that explained my presence at that particular door — it was not even the front door — at the very time when the man I did not yet know was my sovereign was about to emerge from it.] Dressed in long trousers, the plain style that had just come in, vestless, his neck unadorned save for a wide black circle of cloth that served as cravat.)

So we did this mutual side shuffle, feinting and parrying like swordsmen, like men before mirrors. I would have bowed if he’d given me a chance, displayed nape like a white flag, bobbed and bowed, ducked and dithered. Why not? It costs nothing to give way to squires, even when they’re coming out servants’ entrances, and it pleases them so.

“Stand still, damn ye,” the old fellow said.

And I did, recovering my balance like a tumbler. He looked me over, asked my name.

“It’s George,” I said.

“George,” he mocked.

“Aye,” I said. Then, haughtily, as he’d been scornful: “George, son of George. Son of George, son of George, son of George. George, son of George to the forty-second or forty-third power if it comes to that.”

“And does it come to that?”

“It sure does.”

“British?”

“As the day is long.”

“Bow to the King,” hissed the aging dandy.

“What? Where? Here? ” Startled, reflexive, bent as in cramp. Taking, before him, a kind of cover, as if shells had gone off, rockets, explosives, sunbursts of majesty. (A Mills first, an historical highlight, whose eight and a half centuries had been a kind of preparation for just such a moment. The subject is subjects. The subject is subjects! Who’d lived always in monarchical climes the low-liege life. Assured of kings as a Christian of God but who’d yet to see one. Never mind been in one’s presence, had actual audience. Glimpsed his coach I mean, spotted retainers. Living centuries on a small island since practically the invention of kings, ringed by their circumstance and circumscribed by their ordinance, hemmed by decree, paying the rates and loyal at the levy, doing the death duties and making good on the ransoms, prizing the special commemorative coins and celebratory postage like heirloom, and coming up with the surtaxes and VAT’s, the excise and octroi, all tolls all told and the taxes on war and peace and all the royal expeditions. Excused from nothing yet and exacting from ourselves what they’d tax collectors to exact. Among the poorest of their subjects and withal over the years and down through the reigns and dynasties — how we told time — contributing to their collective, cumulative well-being at least one gold spoke on at least one golden wheel that turned the coach we had yet to see.) I grabbed the sleeve of the old guy’s coat and yanked.

“Get down, Guv! Get down for the sovereign!”

And, groveled as spider, did this dance of good citizenship. Palace farce. For the handkerchief that came off in my hand when I’d grabbed his wrist was embroidered with a silken seal of majesty, his royal monogram in king’s tailored cursive, HMGIV like Roman numerals of state. By this time, too, recognizing elements of the declined, devalued handsomeness in the aging face from the mint, intact perfection of his image on my coins. (Thinking: Not merely a man, not merely even an important man, but actual animate money.)

We aren’t stupid. It was so unexpected. Indeed, I got the picture before the King did, and made my adjustments, all my Kentucky windage reassignments of perception, the King himself still preoccupied with a king’s terrors — mutiny, red menace, rout and regicide. It was my duty to calm him.

Practically prostrate, I called soothingly to him. “Sire,” I crooned. Calling him autarch, calling him dynast, calling him King, my mind all over him with all the stored-up honorifics of a captive race.

“Guv?” he said. “ Guv? ”

“A figure of speech, Father.”

“To the forty-third power?”

“Or forty-second. More likely forty-second. Almost assuredly forty-second.”

“Gee,” he said wistfully, “we’re only George the Fourth. Great Great Grandfather wasn’t born till 1660.”

No. It was my duty to comfort him. And still obeisant, my body language spelling Kick Me, I proceeded to betray a couple dozen generations just like that, appropriating his figures, confiscating for my low use his own long, lazy, highborn inherited primogenitive courtship patterns — their kings’ prerogatives of annulment and divorce, eschewing girl children, all the extended foreplay and monkeyshine monarchics that come with reign, their fiat history and command performance arrangements — thereby appending years to, and actually doubling, our own regulation Mills-size generations. But for all my extemporized mathematics I could only squeeze us to the twenty-second or so power, a figure unacceptable to the parvenu Hanoverian. (Do I sound too larky? Wait. Have patience. I get mine.)