It was believed that only the personality of King Nicolas III kept the System in one piece. And poor King Nicolas was senile, paralytic, crippled with arthritis, and not far from death. After he died – and he was expected to die fairly soon – all the quiet, pale things underground would rush out and overwhelm the country.
As long as the old King lived, the Monarchists had something to stand on. You see, nobody was allowed to forget that old King Nicolas had been a much better man than his ancestors; that he was a humane, kind-hearted Father of his People, and meant to make everyone happy as soon as he could afford to do so. Also, he was the King; as such, he inspired the People with an almost superstitious veneration.
But he had no issue. There had been only one son, a pitiful, sickly boy, who was dead of anæmia.
It took me many months to learn all this, and, having learned it, I began to feel that, after all, Dicker and I were not as well provided for as we had thought.
By then I was working on the Great Clock of Nicolas. The old King came every day to watch while we worked. It is a strange thing: although I like a clock to be a clock and not a silly mechanical toy, I developed a kind of weakness for these ingenious little bits of machinery. It was very pleasant working in the Palace: everything was to hand. His Majesty had a passion for exclusiveness: he insisted that the inner workings of the clock we were making should be seen by himself, Dicker, and (of course) me. Honoré de Kock worked with us later, because he, as the sculptor and caster of the figures, had to know what made them work. There was not a great deal for de Kock to do in the beginning. He was a bored, melancholy man, as I have said; and he could not keep his hands still; he was always playing with something.
One day, when it was necessary for him to stand by until we had worked out the details of the knee-joint of the central figure of the Great Clock of Nicolas, he began to knead and fidget with a large lump of putty on the bench. An hour passed. ‘What’s that?’ asked His Majesty.
‘Nothing, Your Majesty,’ said de Kock.
‘Show me,’ said the King.
Then we saw that Honoré de Kock with his fidgety, photographic hands had squeezed, gouged, and patted out of that lump of putty an exact likeness of Dicker. The King was childishly delighted and said: ‘Do one of me.’
Poor de Kock bowed and said: ‘With pleasure, Your Majesty, but not in putty. Putty will not hold its shape. If it would please you I could make your likeness in, say, wax – simply, Sire, as a little game to divert you.’
Although it was early in the day, de Kock had already drunk a whole bottle of Apricot Brandy, and scarcely knew, or cared, what he was saying.
‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘it might amuse Your Majesty. One of the first commissions I ever had was from a lady who had her likeness made in wax – full-length.’
‘What for?’ asked the King.
‘Why, her husband was suspicious of her, you see, because she was very much younger than he. She used to leave her room stealthily in the dead of night to visit someone else. Her husband was in the habit of peeping in at odd hours to see if she was still there. I made her a perfect likeness, movable at the joints like a dressmaker’s dummy, so that she could put herself into all kinds of attitudes; and deceived her husband perfectly for three years.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘Your Majesty, one night the husband crept in to spy upon his wife as usual, and was so overcome by the beauty of my waxwork that he ventured to creep up and kiss it. And then he rushed out yelling that his wife was dead – just as she came creeping back along the passage.’
‘And then? Did he kill her?’
‘No, he broke up the wax model.’
That was the only occasion on which I ever saw the King laugh. It hurt him, and the laugh turned into a groan, and the groan into a curse. But de Kock’s story had put him into a very good humour. King Nicolas had been a very gay fellow in his time, fond of practical jokes – you know, making fools of people; pouring water over them, setting booby-traps so that when they opened the door a pailful of something nasty emptied itself over them … and so forth.
‘Yes,’ he said to de Kock, ‘you shall make me in wax, life-size. But you mustn’t tell anyone about it, do you hear? You go on and model me – every hair, every line, everything. Then we’ll have fun. Yes, we’ll play tricks. I shall be in two places at the same time. I’ll frighten them out of their wits, the rogues….’
Later, the King sent de Kock a beautiful gold cigar-case, studded with diamonds, but de Kock was gloomy and furious. ‘Why did I tell him?’ he cried. ‘Why in God’s name? After all these years – have I come down to making wax dolls for old men in their second childhood?’
But I said: ‘Wax doll or bronze doll, what is the difference? If it pleases the old gentleman, let him have it. You know how generous he is when he is pleased. You’ll have to hang about in the workshop for several months, perhaps. You will be bored. Instead of playing with a bit of putty, play with a bit of wax, and do yourself some good at the same time.’
De Kock was mollified; and set up a great lump of clay on a stand and went to work on the King’s head. His technique was, if I remember rightly, as follows: first he modelled the head with microscopic accuracy in sculptor’s clay. When this was dry, he made with infinite care a plaster mould, into which a special sort of wax was poured. So, the mould being taken away, section by section, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, out came the head, looking so horrible that it gave me a nightmare. It did not look a bit like the King at that stage, because de Kock had made him without the hair and the beard.
The putting in of the King’s hair was the most tedious part of the business, because in a real life-like waxwork image every hair must be put in separately. I should not have cared for the job of putting in King Nicolas’s beard a hair at a time; but when de Kock was at work he was a fanatic in his thoroughness. That is why he was what he was, poor fellow. Also, in spite of his first angry reluctance, he became engrossed in the King’s head. He went to a shop where such things were sold, and bought an enormous quantity of beautiful silky white hair. (The starving peasant women of the Balkans, some of whom have beautiful heads of hair, sell their crowning glory for a few copper coins in order to buy something to eat.) The old King watched, blinking, fascinated. Then, looking at him, an idea occurred to me. I said to de Kock: ‘Since the old gentleman has taken such an interest in this doll, as you call it, why not let us combine our two arts? If you can fix your model constructionally, I can undertake to do the rest.’