All the Days and Nights (60 page)

“I don’t wonder,” he said. Their eyes met, full of inquiry. “When I look at you, I feel like sighing,” he said. “My mouth is dry and there is a strange weakness in my legs. I don’t ever remember feeling like this before.”

“I know that when Papa and Mama and Aunt Royal and the others come out on the balcony and bow to the cheering multitudes, I ought to
be there with them, and that I embarrass Papa by my absence, but I do not feel that appearing in public from time to time is enough. There are other things that a ruling family could do. For example, one could learn to play some musical instrument — the cello, or the contrabassoon. Or get to know every single person in the kingdom, and if they are in trouble help them.”

“Your every move and gesture is sudden and free, like the orioles,” the gardener’s boy said.

“Also, I am very tired of wearing the same emeralds to the same operas year after year,” the Princess said. “Isn’t it nice about the birds. One says ‘as the crow flies,’ meaning in a straight line, but when you stand and watch them, it turns out that they often fly in big circles.”

“If I had known I would find you here,” the gardener’s boy said, “I would have come straight here in the first place.”

“Or they fly every which way,” the Princess said. “And nothing can be done about it.”

“I cannot tell you,” the gardener’s boy said, “how I regret the year I spent wandering through China, and the six months I spent in the Caucasus, and those two years in Persia, and that four months and seventeen days in Baluchistan.”

By this time they were sitting on an antique marble bench some distance away. They could hear the music of violins, and the slightest stirring of the air brought with it the perfume of white lilacs.

“What made you take up gardening?” the Princess asked. “One can see at a glance that you are of royal blood. Was it to get away from people?”

“No, it was not that, really. At my father’s court it is impossible to get away from people. There is no court calendar and no time of the day or night that anybody is supposed to be anywhere in particular, and so they are everywhere. I long ago gave up trying to get away from them.”

“How sad!”

“Until I set off on my travels, I didn’t know the meaning of solitude. In my country it is the fashion to admire any form of deviation. The streets of the capital start out impressively in one direction and then suddenly swerve off in quite another, or come to an end when you least expect it. To go straight from one engagement to another is considered impolite. It is also not possible. In school, children aren’t taught how to add and subtract, but, instead, the basic principles of numerology. As you can imagine, the fiscal arrangements are extraordinary. People do not
attempt to balance their checkbooks, and neither does the bank. No tree or bush is ever pruned, and the public gardens are a jungle where it is out of the question for a human being to walk, though I believe wild animals like it. About a decade ago, the musicians decided that the interval between, say, C and C sharp didn’t always have to be a half tone — that sometimes it could be a whole tone and sometimes a whole octave. So there is no longer any music, though there are many interesting experiments with sound. The police do not bother men who like to dress up in women’s clothing and vice versa, and the birth rate is declining. In a country where no thought is ever carried to its logical conclusion and everybody maunders, my father is noted for the discursiveness of his public statements. Even in private he cannot make a simple remark. It always turns out to be a remark within a remark that has already interrupted an observation that was itself of a parenthetical nature. As it happens, I am a throwback to a previous generation and a thorn in the flesh of everybody.”

“How nice that there is someone you take after,” the Princess murmured. “I am said to resemble no one.”

“As a baby I cried when I was hungry,” the Prince said, caught up in the pleasure of talking about himself, “and sucked my thumb in preference to a jeweled pacifier. Applying myself to my studies, I got through my schooling in one-third the time it took my carefully selected classmates to finish their education, and this did not make me popular on the playing field. Also I was neat in my appearance, and naturally quick, and taciturn — and this was felt as being in some oblique way directed against my father. From his reading of history he decided that the only way to make a troublesome crown prince happy was to abdicate in his favor, and he actually started to do this. But the offer was set in a larger framework of noble thoughts and fatherly admonitions, some of which did perhaps have an indirect bearing on the situation, if one could only have sorted them out from the rest, which had no bearing whatever and took him farther and farther afield, so that he lost sight of his original intention, and when we all sat down to dinner the crown was still on his head … I have never talked to anyone the way I am talking to you now. Are you cold sitting here in the moonlight? You look like a marble statue, but I don’t want you to become chilled.”

She was not cold, but she got up and walked because he suggested it.

“Two days later,” he continued, “I saddled my favorite Arabian horse and rode off alone to see the world. When I first came here, walking in a
straight line through streets that were at right angles to each other, I felt I had found a second home. After a few weeks, as I got to know the country better —”

Seeing his hesitation, she said, “You do not need to be tactful with me. Say it.”

“My impressions are no doubt dulled from too much traveling,” he began tactfully, “but it does seem to me that there are things that cannot be said except in a roundabout way. And things that cannot be done until you have first done something else. A wide avenue that you can see from one end to the other is a splendid sight, but when every street is like this, the effect is of monotony.” Then, with a smile that was quite dazzling with happiness, the Prince went on, “Would you like to know my name? I am called Arqué. Before setting off on the Grand Tour, I should have supplied myself with letters of introduction, but I was in too much of a hurry, and so here, as in the other countries I visited, I knew no one. I could not present myself at the palace on visiting day because I was traveling incognito. I was free to pack my bags and go, but I lingered, unable to make up my mind what country to visit next, and one morning as I was out walking, an idea occurred to me. I hurried back to the inn and persuaded a stableboy to change clothes with me. Fifteen minutes later I was at the back door of the palace asking to speak to the head gardener. Shortly after that I was on my hands and knees, pulling weeds. The rest you know.”

They were now standing beside a fountain. Looking deep into her eyes, he said, “In my father’s kingdom there is a bird called the nightingale that sings most beautifully.”

“A generation ago there were still a few nightingales here,” the Princess said, “but now there aren’t any. It seems they do not like quite so much order. This is the first time I have ever walked in the gardens at night. I didn’t know that this plashing water would be full of moonlight.”

“Your eyes are full of moonlight also,” the Prince said.

“I feel I can tell you anything,” the Princess said.

“Tomorrow,” Prince Arqué said, glancing in the direction of the rosebush that was named after the Queen of Denmark, “I will move them all back.”

“Oh, no!” the Princess cried. “Oh, don’t do that! They are perfect just the way they are.”

“Would you like to be alone now?” the Prince inquired wistfully. “I
cannot bear the thought of leaving you, but I know that you like to have some time to yourself.”

“I cannot bear to leave you either,” the Princess said.

S
INCE
they had both been brought up on fairy tales, they proposed to be married amid great rejoicing and live happily ever after, but the Minister of State had other plans, and did not favor an alliance with a country whose foreign policy was so lacking in straightforwardness. The Princess Horizon was locked in her room, Prince Arqué was informed that his visa had expired, and they never saw each other again. According to the most interesting and least reliable of the historians of the period, Prince Arqué succeeded his father to the throne, and left the royal palace, which was as confusing as a rabbit warren, for a new one that he designed himself and that set the fashion for straight lines and right angles in architecture. From architecture it spread to city planning, and so on. King Arqué had a son who was terribly long-winded, and a thorn in his flesh.

As for the Princess Horizon, it seems she found a new and rather dreadful way of disappearing. From the day she was told she could not marry Prince Arqué, she never smiled again, and no one knew what was on her mind or in her heart. When her sympathetic ladies-in-waiting had finished grouping themselves around her chair, to their dismay she was sitting in it. When the royal family appeared on a balcony that was reserved for moments of history, the Princess was with them and bowed graciously to the cheering multitudes. She opened bazaars, laid cornerstones, distributed medals, and went to the opera. When the exiled King of Poland asked for her hand in marriage, the offer was considered eminently suitable and accepted. The exiled King of Poland turned out to have a flaw in his character also, but of a more ordinary kind; he had a passion for gambling. Ace of hearts, faro, baccarat, hazard, roulette — he played them all feverishly, and feverishly the courtiers imitated him, mortgaging their castles and laying waste their patrimony so they could go on gambling. The trees in their neglected orchards soon took on a more natural shape, and sorrowing elders grew bent with age. The common people aped the nobility as usual. New roads were carelessly built and therefore less straight than the old ones, the law of the land became full of loopholes, and only now and then did someone indulge in straightforward, logical thinking.

“R
EJOICE
,” said the old man at the railroad crossing, to every person who came that way. He was very old, and his life had been full of troubles, but he was still able to lower the gates when a train was expected, and raise them again when it had passed by in a whirl of dust and diminishing noise. It was just a matter of time before he would be not only old but bedridden, and so, meanwhile, people were patient with him and excused his habit of saying “Rejoice,” on the ground that when you are that old not enough oxygen gets to the brain.

But it was curious how differently different people reacted to that one remark. Those who were bent on accumulating money, or entertaining dreams of power, or just busy, didn’t even hear it. The watchman was somebody who was supposed to guard the railroad crossing, not to tell people how they ought to feel, and if there had been such a thing as a wooden or mechanical watchman, they would have been just as satisfied.

Those who cared about good manners were embarrassed for the poor old fellow, and thought it kinder to ignore his affliction.

And those who were really kind, but not old, and not particularly well acquainted with trouble, said “Thank you” politely, and passed on, without in the least having understood what he meant. Or perhaps it was merely that they were convinced he didn’t mean anything, since he said the same thing day in and day out, regardless of the occasion or who he said it to. “Rejoice,” he said solemnly, looking into their faces. “Rejoice.”

The children, of course, were not embarrassed, and did not attempt to be kind. They snickered and said “Why?” and got no answer, and so they asked another question: “Are you crazy?” And — as so often happened when they asked a question they really wanted to know the
answer to — he put his hand on their head and smiled, and they were none the wiser.

But one day a woman came along, a nice-looking woman with grey hair and lines in her face and no interest in power or money or politeness that was merely politeness and didn’t come from the heart, and no desire to be kind for the sake of being kind, either, and when the old man said “Rejoice,” she stopped and looked at him thoughtfully and then she said, “I don’t know what at.” But not crossly. It was just a statement.

When the train had gone by and the old man had raised the gates, instead of walking on like the others, she stood there, as if she had something more to say and didn’t know how to say it. Finally she said, “This has been the worst year and a half of my entire life. I think I’m getting through it, finally. But it’s been very hard.”

“Rejoice,” the old man said.

“Even so?” the woman asked. And then she said, “Well, perhaps you’re right. I’ll try. You’ve given me something to think about. Thank you very much.” And she went on down the road.

O
NE
morning shortly after this, there was a new watchman at the crossing, a smart-looking young man who tipped his hat to those who had accumulated power or money, and bowed politely to those who valued good manners, and thanked the kind for their kindness, and to the children he said, “If you hang around my crossing, you’ll wish you hadn’t.” So they all liked him, and felt that there had been a change for the better. What had happened was that the old man couldn’t get up out of bed. Though he felt just as well as before, there was no strength in his legs. So there he lay, having to be fed and shaved and turned over in bed and cared for like a baby. He lived with his daughter, who was a slatternly housekeeper and had more children than she could care for and a husband who drank and beat her, and the one tiling that had made her life possible was that her old father was out of the house all day, watching the railroad crossing. So when she brought him some gruel for his breakfast that morning and he said “Rejoice,” she set her mouth in a grim line and said nothing. When she brought him some more of the same gruel for his lunch she was ready to deal with the situation. Standing over him, so that she seemed very tall, she said, “Father, I don’t want to hear that word again. If you can’t say anything but ‘Rejoice,’ don’t say anything, do you hear?” And she thought he seemed to understand. But when she brought
him his supper, he said it again, and in her fury she slapped him. Her own father. The tears rolled down his furrowed cheeks into his beard, and they looked at each other as they hadn’t looked at each other since he was a young man and she was a little girl skipping along at his side. For a moment, her heart melted, but then she thought of how hard her life was, and that he was making it even harder by living on like this when it was time for him to die. And so she turned and went out of the room, without saying that she was sorry. And after that the old man avoided her eyes and said nothing whatever.