‘What do you mean?’ asked de Kock.
‘Why,’ I said, ‘it would be no trouble at all for me to devise a clockwork mechanism to make him blink his eyes, sway his poor old head, tremble all over, and move those stiff, shaky hands of his. To me, that would be as easy as making a cuckoo-clock.’
De Kock was delighted with the idea. We arranged it between us secretly, so as to give His Majesty a pleasant little surprise. If he wanted his harmless fun, he could have it. No one knew what we were doing. Dicker was very ill with a disease of the heart – of which, by the way, he died shortly after. So de Kock and I spent all our spare time playing with his dummy and, as a matter of fact, we really began to take quite a fancy to it – as a job, I mean. It had taken hold of us.
The machinery that made the eyes and the head move and the hands tremble was nothing: a mere toymaker’s job. I always liked difficult, intricate pieces of work. So it occurred to me that it might be really amusing to fix the jointed figure so that it could stand up and even take a few stiff rheumaticky paces backwards and forwards. That also was easy – hawkers in the street sell tin toys which can do that very thing; and even turn somersaults. No, it was not complicated enough for me.
Having made the dummy tremble and blink and sit and stand and walk, I now wanted to make it talk.
Well, you know that the phonograph had been invented then, although it was a very crude affair and did not sound real. But then again, neither did the King’s voice sound real – in fact it sounded rather like a scratchy old phonograph record. Also, the King’s voice was the easiest thing in the world for any man to imitate. You can imitate it yourself if you like. Let a lot of saliva run to the back of your throat and groan – there is the King’s voice. I say once again, it was easy. The entire mechanism fitted into the back of the figure between the shoulder-blades and the hips, and was operated by several levers. If you pressed one, the figure stood up. If you pressed another, it walked twelve paces forward and turned on its heel. So if you wanted the figure to pace up and down all you had to do was repeat the pressure on that lever.
Another lever made it sit down. As the thighs and legs made an angle of ninety degrees, the phonograph automatically started. Choking imprecations, together with groans of pain came out of the mouth. All the time the dummy shook and quivered, while a perfectly simple, concertina-shaped bellows inside the head sucked in the air and blew it out, so that the moustache that concealed the mouth was constantly in motion, and you could hear a kind of wheezy breathing.
It was all quite life-like, especially when we dressed it in clothes which we borrowed from the King’s wardrobe. As the King’s Clockmaker, I was a person of great consequence in the Palace. Everybody knew what had happened to Tancredy; they all went out of their way to be polite to me. I could even have had intrigues with Duchesses if I had been so disposed. I had no difficulty in getting from the Master of the King’s Wardrobe a complete outfit of the royal clothes, including fur slippers, a sable dressing-gown and a round velvet cap such as His Majesty invariably wore. When the dummy was dressed we sat it in a deep red velvet chair in the workshop, covered it with a sheet, and waited. At last the moment came. De Kock and I were excited, like children who have prepared a wonderful surprise for a beloved parent and are impatient to reveal it.
The King came in, with his doctor and his attendant holding him up, and was lowered, groaning and cursing, into his usual chair.
‘What have you got there?’ he asked.
I said: ‘A little surprise for Your Majesty.’ Then I pressed two of the levers and whisked away the sheet all in one movement, and the dummy got up, walked twelve paces, which brought it face to face with His Majesty, and turned scornfully on its heel. I had measured my distance. Following it, I pressed another lever and it walked straight back to the chair and turned on its heel again. Another touch and it sat down, and the gramophone started and the great groaning voice bellowed dirty language right into the King’s face.
I looked towards him laughing in anticipation of his delight, but what I saw horrified me. His face had become blue. His eyes seemed to be trying to push themselves out of their sockets. His mouth opened, and he uttered a terrible rattling scream. I still hear that scream in my dreams.
‘Your Majesty,’ I cried, ‘forgive me!’
But he did not hear me. He fell back, and seemed to shrink like a sack of flour ripped open with a knife; and the old doctor, with a face as blue and terrified as the old King’s, felt his heart and stammered: ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He’s dead – the King is dead!’ And I remember that the sturdy attendant, bursting into tears, threw himself on his knees and cried: ‘Oh, Your Majesty, Your Majesty! Don’t go without me! Take me with you! Oh, Your Majesty!’ He shouted this a heartbroken voice, something like the howl of a dog in the night. Then I heard footsteps; the door opened. I saw Kobalt with a dozen others behind him. Kobalt naturally looked first towards the King’s chair, and when he saw what was there, the blood ran out of his face. Yet he was a quick-thinking man, even at a moment like this. He swung round and shouted: ‘Back to your posts! God help the man I find in this corridor! Colonel of the Guard, a double guard on the outer gates – no one leaves the Palace!’
After that he slid into the workshop, shut the door, approached the royal chair and said: ‘Doctor Zerbin – is His Majesty——?’
‘His Majesty is dead,’ said the doctor, with tears on his face. I felt that it was I who had killed the King and I said: ‘Your Highness, it was all well meant. His Majesty asked us, de Kock and me, to make a figure, for a joke. The King wanted to——’
Kobalt turned, quick as a snake, with murder in his eyes. But then he saw the figure in the chair and his mouth hung open. He looked from it to the dead King. You know how death changes people. His Majesty, poor man, was all shrunk and shrivelled and blue, and looked somehow less than half as big as he had been five minutes before. The dummy, in every hair and every baggy pouch and wrinkle, was the image of the King as he had been when he was alive. Kobalt came slowly towards me. I never was a brave man, and loathe violence. I thought Kobalt was going to kill me, and all in a rush I said: ‘Don’t be hasty! De Kock and I are perfectly innocent, I swear it. His Majesty wanted a waxwork figure just to play a trick. A figure … like this….’
And I pressed levers. I made the wax image of Nicolas III stand up. It walked twelve rheumaticky paces, looked at the corpse of the King, turned on its heel, strode back, sat down groaning and trembling, and puffed at Kobalt all the vile words you have ever heard, in a voice like the voice of His Majesty. Then it was still, except for a swaying of the head and a continuous tremor. In a quiet place, of course, anyone could have heard the noise of the powerful clockwork that made it move. But in the Palace of poor King Nicolas III, where there were more than seven hundred clocks, the noise of cogs, ratchets and pendulums was perpetually in everybody’s ears; even the members of the kitchen staff when they were out imagined that they were still hearing the ticking of clocks.
Kobalt actually bowed to the image and started to say: ‘Your Majesty,’ but he stopped himself after the first syllable, and said: ‘How very remarkable!’
‘It is only a doll,’ said de Kock, and there was a certain gratification mixed with the terror in his voice, ‘a wax doll, a mere nothing.’
‘It looks real enough,’ I said, pressing the levers again; whereupon the figure got up, stood, walked twelve paces, turned, walked back, sat, groaned with agony and damned our eyes. Kobalt touched its wax forehead and shuddered. He went over to the King and felt his hand. Then his keen eyes veiled themselves. I could see that he was thinking hard and fast. It was not difficult to guess what was in his mind; the end of the King was the end of Kobalt. He, too, was as good as dead.