The Mouse That Roared (3 page)

Gloriana was so taken aback and indeed hurt at being anticipated in this manner that for a minute she couldn’t say anything. She felt cheated. She had wanted to surprise Tully with the plan to form a third party and he had taken the whole éclat of the thing away by telling her of it himself. She decided there and then that she was sure she didn’t like him.

“Well,” she said at last, “that’s perfectly true. I do want you to form a third party. But I don’t want it to be a successful party. At least, I don’t want it to be really successful, but only to appear successful. You see, we’re short of money.”

“Who isn’t?” said Tully. “As you see, I was mending my own shoes when you called, though it’s so interesting a job, now I know how, that I don’t know why anybody should pay someone else to do the work. If Your Grace is in need of the services of a cobbler, I will be completely happy to place myself at your disposal as perhaps cobbler extraordinary to the duchy of Grand Fenwick.”

“This is nothing to joke about,” said Gloriana, sharply. “It’s serious. Grand Fenwick needs money. There are too many people here now to be supported by our own products. So we have to import food and clothing. And we have to have money to do that. Mr. Benter believes we can make enough by adding water to the Pinot to increase our exports of wine. But Count Mountjoy says that would spoil the market for the wine and be disastrous in the long run.

“That’s why we want you to form a third party. We want you to form a Communist party. Hold a meeting next Sunday --we can get permission from Bishop Alvin--and tell people that the government must be overthrown, and so on. Then we will tell the Americans that the government is threatened by Communist infiltration and they will lend us all the money we need.”

Tully had been lighting his pipe during this explanation, for outside of official meetings in the castle formality was dropped in Grand Fenwick in the presence of the Duchess. This was not through lack of respect, but because if formalities were insisted upon, half a day’s work might be lost if she decided to take a tour of the country. And she couldn’t be expected to remain locked up in the castle all day in the interests of maintaining production.

Tully’s match went out in his hand, he was so interested in what Gloriana was saying.

“Communist party!” he exclaimed. “But Communism wouldn’t work here. It’s a philosophy completely unsuited to agricultural areas. You can force poor beggars in factories to produce more products, but a farmer can’t force the land to produce. He can’t preach Marx to the weather so that it rains at the right time. And in the whole of Russia the sun has never been known for as much as one day to listen to the economics of the late Joseph Stalin. Communism could never make any headway in Grand Fenwick.”

“I’m very glad to hear it,” retorted Gloriana, smugly, “because as I said, I don’t want it to be successful. We just want it to appear successful so that the Americans will lend us the money we need.”

“Besides,” continued Tully, as if he had not heard her last remark, “I don’t like Communism. I don’t like to think that anyone’s my equal. Nobody is. I’m superior to a great number of people and inferior to others, and for that reason I’m not at all sure that I’m in favour of democracy either. It’s nonsense to have the vote of someone who only after enormous struggle achieves the ability to read, be the equal of the vote of another who can read in twenty-four languages, though reading is no criterion. I merely cite it as an example.”

By this time the Duchess had completely lost sight of the main topic. “Just what kind of a government do you favour?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Tully. “I toyed with anarchy once, but on reading into the subject found that there were as many kinds of anarchy as there are of democracy. There are plain anarchists and syndicalist anarchists, and deviationist anarchists and, for all I know, syndicalist deviationist anarchists. There’s as much anarchy in anarchy as there is in any political philosophy. But I’m still looking around.”

“Well, while you’re looking around, wouldn’t you like trying to be a Communist for a while? Even if you don’t like it, remember that it’s for your country. It’s an act of patriotism to help us survive. We have as much right to survive as bigger nations have. We have been a free nation for about six hundred years and hundreds of thousands of people have been born and grown up and died happily in Grand Fenwick. Just because we are a little nation doesn’t mean that we should surrender our own liberty and our own pride and all our traditions and heritages and unite with some other country in order to live. It’s not our fault that we haven’t got any money. We’ve lived courageously and honourably for six centuries, but times have changed against us.” She was not too far from tears when she finished.

Tully looked at her softly, almost with devotion, which was something he extended to no one but his father. “You really love Grand Fenwick, don’t you?” he asked, gently.

“Yes,” replied the Duchess, “and so does everyone here. It is our earth and our air. You do, too, don’t you?”

Tully walked over to the window. “Sometimes,” he said, slowly, “in places like Seattle or London or the Black Forest in Germany, when I have supposed myself happy, I have thought suddenly of this valley and those mountains, which hold their own blue mist in the evening, and my heart has become so hungry that I had to come back. It is a madness really, for all mountains have their mists and the evening voices in all valleys are the same.”

“Would you love the mountains if they were part of France or Switzerland?”

“I believe I would die rather than that.”

“Then I know you love Grand Fenwick. It is not just the mountains. It is the country, and the country is in danger now. Once we could survive with our longbows and our spirit of independence. But now neither are of any avail. We have to have money. Will you do what I ask and pretend to be a Communist?”

Tully turned to face her and shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “Even if I agreed to do it and the ruse was successful and we got the money, the country would not be saved. We would have sold, indeed, the better part of it, for we would have sold our honour. We, as a nation, would have deliberately defrauded another and generous nation, filching money from it merely because it has plenty.”

He paused for a minute, tamping the tobacco in his pipe with a long forefinger. “You said that little nations have a right to survive as well as big ones,” he continued. “That is true. But big and rich nations should not be victimized just because they are big and rich. Because the United States has money and to spare does not make it any less wrong to trick some of that money out of her. To rob the millionaire is as dishonourable a thing as to rob the widow. We cannot hold our head up as a nation if we have survived by fraud; we can no longer talk of national pride if we have stooped to international thievery. If by such methods we obtained enough money from the United States to make every man, woman, and child in Grand Fenwick a millionaire, they would be blackguard millionaires, all guilty of selling their country’s honour for their own individual survival.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” said the Duchess, slowly. “All I was thinking of was to get the money, so we could go on as we have in the past. Maybe you are right. But we must hit on something. Isn’t there some honourable way of making ends meet?”

“There’s emigration,” Tully replied. “We could encourage people to leave and find work in other countries.”

Gloriana shook her head. “Everybody in Grand Fenwick has a right to stay here if they want,” she said. “It’s their country. They shouldn’t be forced to leave it to earn a living. And besides, emigration used to work, but it doesn’t any longer. I read somewhere that Italy tried to solve its population problem by emigration to the United States. But now there are more people in Italy than there were before the big migrations started and all as poor as ever. And the United States is getting so full that they’ve established quotas. The quota they would fix for Grand Fenwick would probably be only one or two every five years. That wouldn’t help. We’ll have to think of something else.”

They were silent for a while. Gloriana glanced at Tully and, disturbed as she was by the country’s economic problems, found herself thinking that there was something about this man that set him off from and, indeed, above his fellows. He was of the common clay, but the common clay in a different mould. His face was turned halfway from her, the head held up, and with a start she caught, for just a second, a remarkable resemblance between Tully Bascomb and the portrait of her ancestor, Sir Roger Fenwick, in the castle of the duchy. He turned towards her and the likeness was gone.

“There’s only one method of getting money from another nation that is recognized by tradition as honourable,” Tully said, solemnly.

“What is that?” asked the Duchess, with a strange feeling that at this moment she was talking, not to a contemporary man, but to Sir Roger Fenwick himself.

Tully walked over to the chimney and chose from several standing there a six-foot bow stave of yew.

“War,” he said.

“War!” echoed Gloriana, in astonishment.

“War,” repeated Tully. “We could declare war on the United States.”

Duchess Gloriana selected a pomegranate from a dish of fruit before her and could not suppress, even on so solemn an occasion as a meeting of her Privy Council, a smile of anticipation. Pomegranates were her favourite fruit. They were a little hard to come by in Grand Fenwick, and her father, the Duke, had during his lifetime limited her to pomegranates at Christmas and on her birthday. But now, since she was the Duchess, she could have them whenever she wanted.

“Bobo,” she said, picking up a silver fruit knife and turning to the Count of Mountjoy, “how long is it since we went to war?”

“A little over five hundred years,” replied the Count. He thought it an idle question, posed by a curious and somewhat wilful girl, who also happened to be his sovereign lady. Just what the Privy Council meeting had been summoned for he was not sure. But he prided himself on knowledge of the history of his country and took this opportunity of airing it. “The occasion,” he continued, “was a war with France, and the battle was fought in the Pass of Pinot. There were four hundred and thirty under the double-headed eagle of Fenwick --four hundred bowmen and thirty men-at-arms. An ancestor of yours, my lady, and one of mine, were among those on the field. The French numbered twelve hundred. They made three charges down the Pass, in bodies of four hundred knights to each charge, and were met with the arrows of Grand Fenwick, loosed with such discipline and courage that at the end of the day seven hundred of the French were dead, and our losses amounted to only five.”

“No other war since then?” asked the Duchess, busy with the little ruby beads of the pomegranate.

“None,” said the Count. His silver head, illumined by the sunlight, looked not unlike that of the eagle which was the national emblem. “None have been necessary. The battle of the Pass of Pinot settled for all time the sovereignty and right to respect and freedom of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.”

“We must be badly out of practice--I mean at fighting wars,” murmured the Duchess.

“Perhaps,” replied the Count. “But should the necessity arise again, I have no doubt that we would give a good account of ourselves. Indeed, the contest would be most interesting. Our national weapon, the longbow, has been out of date for so long that it has become, in many ways, a super weapon. It can kill at a range of five hundred yards. It is completely accurate in skilled hands. It is silent. It requires a low expenditure for ammunition, and lends itself excellently to mass fire.”

“I’m very glad to hear all this,” replied the Duchess, delicately putting aside the remains of her pomegranate, “because we will have to go to war again quite soon.”

“The longbow,” continued the Count, “is an example of a weapon which, like the mace--excuse me. What was that, Your Highness? Did I hear you say that we will have to go to war again quite soon?”

“Just so,” said Gloriana.

The Count allowed his monocle to fall into his lap. “Your Highness is not serious?” he suggested, hopefully.

“We are,” replied the Duchess.

“Why,” said the Count, “this is an utterly ridiculous proposal. It is monstrous. It is not to be thought upon for a moment. Are you sure, Your Grace, that you are feeling well?”

“Quite well,” replied Gloriana. “And if you will see if Mr. Benter is outside so we can complete the membership of the Privy Council, I will tell you all about it.” There was no mistaking that this last was an order, coming from a ruler to a subject, and despite his astonishment, which gave him a sense of having been mentally paralysed for the moment, the Count rose to bring in the leader of the Dilutionist party. He was gone some little while--longer than the courtesies of the court would permit in normal circumstances--and when he returned with Mr. Benter, both were agitated and worried.

“Gentlemen,” said Gloriana, eyeing the pomegranates but deciding against them in view of the serious nature of the business ahead, “I have called this meeting for two purposes. The first is to report to you as the leaders of the two principal parties of Grand Fenwick on the result of the suggestion that we form a Communist party in the duchy to obtain money from the Americans. The second is to ask your further advice--indeed, I would put the matter more strongly and say to request your assent, to an alternative course of action.”

In her official occasions, the Duchess Gloriana XII showed a marked ability to shift from young woman to distant sovereign. This, her newly-elected party leaders were just beginning to discover, and they found the. tactic overwhelming. A few moments before, the Duchess had been a rather ingenuous girl, picking on a pomegranate. Now she was the ruler of a nation, intent on wielding her authority.

“As to the proposal for the formation of a Communist party,” she continued, “you will recall that I undertook myself to put the matter to Tully Bascomb, who it was agreed would be the best and safest person to lead such an organization. However, he was able to persuade me that this was the wrong course of action.”