After breakfast he thanked his host kindly, and went away.
After stopping to wish the cottager, whom he found working in his garden, good morning, he made his way back to the palace.
The Vizier and the other courtiers welcomed him joyfully. They thought he had been lost.
“Well” said the Vizier, when he had heard the story of the King’s adventures, “if your Majesty had thought of mentioning that your Majesty intended to take a walk, the Lord Chief Tramp might have taken it instead, and saved your Majesty the trouble.”
“Then I’m very glad I didn’t mention the fact,” said the King. “In future I intend to do everything I possibly can for myself. You do your work, and I’ll do mine.”
“Your Majesty is surely joking,” said the startled Vizier. “No King of Aldebaran has ever worked.”
“This King of Aldebaran is going to. And he is going to begin at once. Bring me the Law Book.”
“Cannot I —” began the Vizier.
“Bring me the Law Book,” repeated the King. “In future I mean to make all the laws myself, And this is the first of them.”
And in a beautifully clear voice he sang the following verse:
“You may do whatever sort of work you please. You may do whatever task you’re most inclined to. You may do it on the earth or on the seas. You may do it in the air, if you’ve a mind to. You may choose to work at sums or plough your lands. You may choose an ordinary or a rum thing. You may do it with your head or with your hands. But every one in future must do something!”
And they did. And they all in consequence lived very happily ever afterwards.
THE DASTARDLY BEHAVIOUR OF BASHMEAD
The cynical and unblushing baseness of Rupert Alexander Bashmead had formed a subject of conversation among his friends and acquaintances from his eighth birthday onwards. At school his masters, drawing gloomy conclusions from the ingenious system of cribs for which the name of Bashmead is still a household word at St Asterisk’s, were wont to observe that he would come to a bad end. They gave him to understand that if — by some miscarriage of justice — his sentence were to be commuted to penal servitude for life, they would be wounded and disappointed. At College it was an accepted axiom in his set that if there was only one comfortable chair in a room, Bashmead got it. In fact, he was Bashmead. There is no other word.
Among the friends he made at College — for even a man of his hideous moral blackness makes friends — was one James Prendergast. To sum up James’s salient points, he was six-foot-two in height, frivolous in disposition, and boasted a skill amounting to genius in the art of tossing for drinks. He had a theory that a man who wishes to leave the world a better place for his presence in it should choose a walk in life, and not rest until he has made himself pre-eminent in it. James’s walk in life was tossing for drinks.
It did not escape the notice of his acquaintances that Rupert Alexander Bashmead was at considerable pains to cultivate James Prendergast. To account for this phenomenon, they were divided into two schools of thought. His enemies said, in their malicious way, that they supposed he must like James. His friends generously ridiculed the idea. It was absurd, they argued, to suppose that he would make a friend of a man unless he hoped to get something out of him. He was trying to borrow money from James — that was it.
But they were wrong, and for this reason — James had no money. If he had any, we have every reason to suppose that Rupert would have endeavoured to borrow it but as he had none another explanation becomes necessary. Nor is it far to seek. James had a sister, Muriel. There was not much of her, but what there was was charming. Brown hair and grey eyes. Some people said she was clever. Her friends said it was a pity, but she was not nearly so clever as she imagined herself to be.