The Greatest Works of Saki (H. H. Munro) - 145 Titles in One Edition. Saki

      “Ministers of Grace”

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      Although he was scarcely yet out of his teens, the Duke of Scaw was already marked out as a personality widely differing from others of his caste and period. Not in externals; therein he conformed correctly to type. His hair was faintly reminiscent of Houbigant, and at the other end of him his shoes exhaled the right SOUPÇON of harness-room; his socks compelled one’s attention without losing one’s respect; and his attitude in repose had just that suggestion of Whistler’s mother, so becoming in the really young. It was within that the trouble lay, if trouble it could be accounted, which marked him apart from his fellows. The Duke was religious. Not in any of the ordinary senses of the word; he took small heed of High Church or Evangelical standpoints, he stood outside of all the movements and missions and cults and crusades of the day, uncaring and uninterested. Yet in a mystical-practical way of his own, which had served him unscathed and unshaken through the fickle years of boyhood, he was intensely and intensively religious. His family were naturally, though unobtrusively, distressed about it. “I am so afraid it may affect his bridge,” said his mother.

      The Duke sat in a pennyworth of chair in St. James’s Park, listening to the pessimisms of Belturbet, who reviewed the existing political situation from the gloomiest of standpoints.

      “Where I think you political spade-workers are so silly,” said the Duke, “is in the misdirection of your efforts. You spend thousands of pounds of money, and Heaven knows how much dynamic force of brain power and personal energy, in trying to elect or displace this or that man, whereas you could gain your ends so much more simply by making use of the men as you find them. If they don’t suit your purpose as they are, transform them into something more satisfactory.”

      “Do you refer to hypnotic suggestion?” asked Belturbet, with the air of one who is being trifled with.

      “Nothing of the sort. Do you understand what I mean by the verb to koepenick? That is to say, to replace an authority by a spurious imitation that would carry just as much weight for the moment as the displaced original; the advantage, of course, being that the koepenick replica would do what you wanted, whereas the original does what seems best in its own eyes.”

      “I suppose every public man has a double, if not two or three,” said Belturbet; “but it would be a pretty hard task to koepenick a whole bunch of them and keep the originals out of the way.”

      “There have been instances in European history of highly successful koepenickery,” said the Duke dreamily.

      “Oh, of course, there have been False Dimitris and Perkin Warbecks, who imposed on the world for a time,” assented Belturbet, “but they personated people who were dead or safely out of the way. That was a comparatively simple matter. It would be far easier to pass oneself of as dead Hannibal than as living Haldane, for instance.”

      “I was thinking,” said the Duke, “of the most famous case of all, the angel who koepenicked King Robert of Sicily with such brilliant results. Just imagine what an advantage it would be to have angels deputizing, to use a horrible but convenient word, for Quinston and Lord Hugo Sizzle, for example. How much smoother the Parliamentary machine would work than at present!”

      “Now you’re talking nonsense,” said Belturbet; “angels don’t exist nowadays, at least, not in that way, so what is the use of dragging them into a serious discussion? It’s merely silly.”

      “If you talk to me like that I shall just DO it,” said the Duke.

      “Do what?” asked Belturbet. There were times when his young friend’s uncanny remarks rather frightened him.

      “I shall summon angelic forces to take over some of the more troublesome personalities of our public life, and I shall send the ousted originals into temporary retirement in suitable animal organisms. It’s not every one who would have the knowledge or the power necessary to bring such a thing off —”

      “Oh, stop that inane rubbish,” said Belturbet angrily; “it’s getting wearisome. Here’s Quinston coming,” he added, as there approached along the almost deserted path the well-known figure of a young Cabinet Minister, whose personality evoked a curious mixture of public interest and unpopularity.

      “Hurry along, my dear man,” said the young Duke to the Minister, who had given him a condescending nod; “your time is running short,” he continued in a provocative strain; “the whole inept crowd of you will shortly be swept away into the world’s waste-paper basket.”

      “You poor little strawberry-leafed nonentity,” said the Minister, checking himself for a moment in his stride and rolling out his words spasmodically; “who is going to sweep us away, I should like to know? The voting masses are on our side, and all the ability and administrative talent is on our side too. No power of earth or Heaven is going to move us from our place till we choose to quit it. No power of earth or —”

      Belturbet saw, with bulging eyes, a sudden void where a moment earlier had been a Cabinet Minister; a void emphasized rather than relieved by the presence of a puffed-out bewildered-looking sparrow, which hopped about for a moment in a dazed fashion and then fell to a violent cheeping and scolding.

      “If we could understand sparrow-language,” said the Duke serenely, “I fancy we should hear something infinitely worse than ‘strawberry-leafed nonentity.’”

      “But good Heavens, Eugène,” said Belturbet hoarsely, “what has become of — Why, there he is! How on earth did he get there?” And he pointed with a shaking finger towards a semblance of the vanished Minister, which approached once more along the unfrequented path.

      The Duke laughed.

      “It is Quinston to all outward appearance,” he said composedly, “but I fancy you will find, on closer investigation, that it is an angel understudy of the real article.”

      The Angel–Quinston greeted them with a friendly smile.

      “How beastly happy you two look sitting there!” he said wistfully.

      “I don’t suppose you’d care to change places with poor little us,” replied the Duke chaffingly.

      “How about poor little me?” said the Angel modestly. “I’ve got to run about behind the wheels of popularity, like a spotted dog behind a carriage, getting all the dust and trying to look as if I was an important part of the machine. I must seem a perfect fool to you onlookers sometimes.”

      “I think you are a perfect angel,” said the Duke.

      The Angel-that-had-been-Quinston smiled and passed on his way, pursued across the breadth of the Horse Guards Parade by a tiresome little sparrow that cheeped incessantly and furiously at him.

      “That’s only the beginning,” said the Duke complacently; “I’ve made it operative with all of them, irrespective of parties.”

      Belturbet made no coherent reply; he was engaged in feeling his pulse. The Duke fixed his attention with some interest on a black swan that was swimming with haughty, stiff-necked aloofness amid the crowd of lesser water-fowl that dotted the ornamental water. For all its pride of bearing, something was evidently ruffling and enraging it; in its way it seemed as angry and amazed as the sparrow had been.

      At the same moment a human figure came along the pathway. Belturbet looked up apprehensively.

      “Kedzon,” he whispered briefly.

      “An Angel–Kedzon, if I am not mistaken,” said the Duke. “Look, he is talking affably to a human being. That settles it.”

      A shabbily dressed lounger had accosted the man who had been Viceroy in the splendid East, and who still reflected in his mien some of the cold dignity of the Himalayan snow-peaks.

      “Could