FullReads

Uncle ‘Ennery looked at Max and Terry with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Little West Poultry Street, S. E. He pointed a terrified finger at Terry. “You, there! Speak, will yer?”

“What’s the trouble with you?” snapped Terry.

“My eye! It’s true!” wailed Uncle ‘Ennery. “You’re an American— or some sort of sanguinary foreigner! You three get out of ’ere! I’ll have nothing to do with it! Bringing down the police on me! Get out of ’ere, all of you, kings or no kings!”

Uncle ‘Ennery was in a panic, his eyes insane, his hands waving. He drove them down the stairs, through the courtyard—when Terry stopped to call Josephus he almost hit them—and through the laundry into the street. He could be heard slamming the door, bolting it.

“Uncle ‘Ennery never did like the police,” reflected Ginger. “Well, I’ll find you a nice bit of ‘ay in a ware-’ouse. ”

In a pile of wet and soggy hay, among vile-smelling boxes and carboys, between a warehouse and tracks along which freight trains shrieked all night long, the three boys crept together and shivered and wept—and went fast asleep.

All day they had searched, Bessie Tait and Queen Sidonie, wherever two adventurous boys seemed likely to be. They had so far forgotten any social differences between them that not only did they exchange anecdotes about their boys’ incomparable naughtiness in the matter of sugar on porridge, but also, as they sat exhausted at tea in Sidonie’s boudoir, Bessie gave and Sidonie gratefully noted down a splendid recipe for baked Virginia ham with peaches.

“And if you come to America, you simply must come and stay with Mr. Tait and me, and don’t let any of these millionaire producers pinch you off!”

“I willcome and stay with you, my friend! And Terry and my boy shall play together!” promised H. R. M. “And you will come to us in Slovaria?”

“Well, if I can find time, I’ll certainly try to, Sidonie,” consented Bessie Tait, and the two women—so alike, save that Bessie had the better dressmaker—leaned wearily back and smoked their cigarettes, and glared when the terrified Count Elopatak came in to announce that Prince Sebenco, Prime Minister of Slovaria, had left for London by airplane.

“The old fool!” murmured Sidonie.

Then she tried to look haughty, but it ended in the two tired female warriors, grinning at each other as Elopatak elegantly slunk out.

“Elopatak’s misfortune,” confided Sidonie, “is that he has no calm. He permits the gross material to rule him. He would be calm like myself, if he would only take up Higher Thought. ”

Bessie leaned forward excitedly. “Oh! Have you taken up Higher Thought, too? So have I! Isn’t it just lovely! There’s the livest Higher Thought teacher in Los Angeles that I go to every week—such a fine, noble-looking man, with the loveliest wavy black hair!

“Before I went to him, I used to lose my temper—people are suchfools!—and I used to try to exercise my selfish will on them, but now whenever I get sore at some poor idiot, I just say, ‘All is mystery and ’tis a smile that unlocks the eternal kinship of man to man,’ and then I get just as placid and nice as can be. Such a help!”

“Isn’tit! We have just the same sentence in Higher Thought at home—only it doesn’t sound quite the same, being in Slovarian. And isn’t that curious: my healer is also a handsome man, with such won-derful hair! Of course, in my position I have to belong to the State Church, but it’s out of Higher Thought I’ve learned that any man is as good as I am, even when he obviously isn’t.

“And now I never lose my temper any more. I just say, ‘I am Calmness, therefore I am calm. ’ If I could only get Elopatak and Prince Sebenco—the filthy swine! Oh, Bessie, you don’t know what meeting you means to me! Somehow, in Slovaria and here in England, they don’t seem to understand how sensitive I am!”

All evening the two mothers raged and roamed, but by one of the morning, Bessie was asleep, exhausted. A few hours later it was she who (saluted by bobbies and guards and aides as she stalked down the royal corridor) awoke Sidonie early—and with her she was dragging a scared Ginger Bundock.