reigning monarch, and lit it with a match from a golden box, the gift
of the millionaire president of the Amalgamated League of Working
Plumbers.
'What this magazine requires,' he said, 'is red-blooded,
one-hundred-per-cent dynamic stuff, palpitating with warm human
interest and containing a strong, poignant love-motive.'
'That,' we replied, 'is us all over, Mabel.'
'What I need at the moment, however, is a golf story.'
'By a singular coincidence, ours is a golf story.'
'Ha! say you so?' said the editor, a flicker of interest passing over
his finely-chiselled features. 'Then you may let me see it.'
He kicked us in the face, and we withdrew.
THE STORY
On the broad terrace outside his palace, overlooking the fair expanse
of the Royal gardens, King Merolchazzar of Oom stood leaning on the low
parapet, his chin in his hand and a frown on his noble face. The day
was fine, and a light breeze bore up to him from the garden below a
fragrant scent of flowers. But, for all the pleasure it seemed to give
him, it might have been bone-fertilizer.
The fact is, King Merolchazzar was in love, and his suit was not
prospering. Enough to upset any man.
Royal love affairs in those days were conducted on the correspondence
system. A monarch, hearing good reports of a neighbouring princess,
would despatch messengers with gifts to her Court, beseeching an
interview. The Princess would name a date, and a formal meeting would
take place; after which everything usually buzzed along pretty
smoothly. But in the case of King Merolchazzar's courtship of the
Princess of the Outer Isles there had been a regrettable hitch. She had
acknowledged the gifts, saying that they were just what she had wanted
and how had he guessed, and had added that, as regarded a meeting, she
would let him know later. Since that day no word had come from her, and
a gloomy spirit prevailed in the capital. At the Courtiers' Club, the
meeting-place of the aristocracy of Oom, five to one in pazazas
was freely offered against Merolchazzar's chances, but found no takers;
while in the taverns of the common people, where less conservative odds
were always to be had, you could get a snappy hundred to eight. 'For in
good sooth,' writes a chronicler of the time on a half-brick and a
couple of paving-stones which have survived to this day, 'it did indeed
begin to appear as though our beloved monarch, the son of the sun and
the nephew of the moon, had been handed the bitter fruit of the
citron.'
The quaint old idiom is almost untranslatable, but one sees what he
means.
* * * * *
As the King stood sombrely surveying the garden, his attention was
attracted by a small, bearded man with bushy eyebrows and a face like a
walnut, who stood not far away on a gravelled path flanked by rose
bushes. For some minutes he eyed this man in silence, then he called to
the Grand Vizier, who was standing in the little group of courtiers and
