The Short Reign of Pippin IV

  “Be silent.’ Pippin said softly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You have it, my dear, but be silent.”

  “I don’t understand you,” cried Marie. “Where in the world do you find the right to tell me to be silent? Who do you think you are?”

  “I am the King” said Pippin, and this had not occurred to Marie. “That’s funny,” he said. “I am, you know.” And it was so obviously true that Marie looked at him with startled eyes.

  “Yes, Sire,” she said, and was silent.

  “Starting to be a king is difficult, my dear,” he said apologetically.

  The king paced back and forth in Charles Martel’s room. “You don’t answer the telephone,” he complained. “You pay no attention to the pneumatique. I see there on that bust of Napoleon three letters delivered by hand, unopened. What is your explanation, sir?”

  “Don’t be so damn royal with me,” said Uncle Charlie irritably. “I don’t even dare go out on the street. I haven’t taken my shutters down since the coronation.”

  “Which you did not attend,” said the king.

  “Which I did not dare attend. I am driven to despair. Descendants of the old nobility think I have your private ear. I am glad to be able to tell the truth—that I have not seen you. There is a line in front of my shop every day. Were you followed here?”

  “Followed? I was escorted!” said the king. “I haven’t been alone for a week. They watch me awaken. They help me dress. They are in my bedroom. They practically come into my bathroom. When I crack my eggs their lips tighten. When I raise my spoon their eyes follow it to my mouth. And you think you are driven—”

  “But you are their property,” said Uncle Charlie. “You, my dear nephew, are an extension of your people, and they have inalienable rights over your person.”

  “I can’t imagine how I let myself in for this.” said Pippin. “I didn’t want to move to Versailles. I wasn’t asked. I was moved. It’s drafty there, Uncle Charlie. The beds are horrible. The floors creak. What are you mixing there?”

  “A martini,” said Uncle Charlie. “I’ve learned it from a young friend of Clotilde’s, an American. The first taste is dreadful, but it becomes progressively more delicious. It has some of the hypnotic qualities of morphine. Try it! Don’t let the ice frighten you.”

  “That’s horrible,” said the king and he drained the little glass. “Pour me another one, will you?” He licked his lips. “I had forgotten that the king has guests, built-in guests. Two hundred aristocrats are living with me at Versailles.”

  “Well, you have room for them.”

  “Room, yes, but nothing else. They sleep on the floor, in the halls. They’ve broken up the furniture to bum in the fireplaces to keep warm.”

  “In August?”

  “Versailles would be cold in hell,” said the king. “Say, what is in this? Gin I can taste, but what else?”

  “Vermouth. Just a breath of vermouth. When they become delicious you’ve had too many. Try sipping this one, Sire. You are nervous, my child.”

  “Nervous? Why wouldn’t I be nervous? Uncle Charlie, I am sure that somewhere in France there must be aristocrats who are solvent, but not among my guests. The word has gone out, under the bridges and under the barrows and to the subway gratings. I am surrounded by what, if they were not so high-born, would be called bums, but stately bums. They stroll majestically in the gardens. They touch their lips with bits of lace. They speak in words directly out of Corneille. And they aren’t honest, Uncle Charlie. They steal.”

  “What do you mean, ‘they steal’?”

  “My uncle, there isn’t a hen coop nor a rabbit hutch within ten miles that is safe from them. When the farmers complain, my guests smile and lash out the lace handkerchiefs they have shoplifted from Printemps. I have had complaints about that too. Every department store in Paris has set up a Nobility Detail to protect its counters. I’m afraid, Uncle Charlie; I am told the peasants are beginning to sharpen their scythes.”

  “Maybe you’ll have to modernize the throne, my dear nephew; you may have to take a stand. You understand, of course, that what to ordinary people is simple theft, to the nobility is their ancient right. Do you think you ought to have another? Your color is a little high.”

  “What do you call them?”

  “Martinis.”

  "Italian?"

  “It isn’t.” said Uncle Charlie. “Pippin, I don’t want you to leave me, but I think it only fair to warn you that Clotilde is bringing her new friend. I’ve opened the little rear door for my own convenience. If you would care to leave without being seen—”

  “What friend is this?”

  “An American friend. I thought he might be interested in some sketches.”

  “Uncle Charlie!”

  “A man must live, my nephew. No royal revenues have been assigned to me. Are there any royal revenues, by the way?”

  “Not that I know of,” said the king. “There’s the new American loan, but the Privy Council won’t release any of it. You know the Privy Council is not unlike the recent republican government.”

  “Why shouldn’t it be?” said Uncle Charlie. “It’s the same people. As I said, the little rear door opens into the alley.” “Are you going to use your position to cheat this American? Uncle Charlie, is that the noble thing to do?”

  “As a matter of fact, it is,” said Charles Martel. “We invented it. I make no representations. If he likes a picture, he buys it. I simply say Boucher might have painted it. So he might. Anything is possible.”

  “But you are the king’s uncle! To cheat a commoner, and an American commoner, at that, is—is like shooting sitting birds. The British would take a dim view of it.”

  “The British have developed their own methods of combining aristocracy with profit. They have more recent experience than we. But we will learn—and meanwhile, what is wrong with practicing on a rich American?”

  “He is rich?”

  “He is what the Americans call ‘loaded’ His father is the Egg King of a province called Petaluma.”

  “Well, at least you’re not stealing from the—the lower orders.”

  “Indeed I am not, my child. In America one only becomes a member of the lower orders when one is insolvent.”

  “Uncle Charlie, if you’re making another one of those what-do-you-call-thems, I think I will stay and meet this Egg Prince. Is Clotilde serious in this—friendship?”

  “I should hope so,” said Uncle Charlie. “His father, H. W. Johnson, the king, has two hundred and thirty million chickens.”

  “Gracious!” said Pippin. “Well, thank Heaven Clotilde is not falling into the error of a certain English princess, giving her heart to a commoner. Thank you, Uncle Charlie. You know, you’re getting the knack. This is far superior to the first one.”

  Tod Johnson was no more born to the purple than was the original Charles Martel. In 1932 The Johnson Grocery in Petaluma, California, nudged on by what was called “The Great Depression,” slipped quietly out of existence.

  In 1933 H.W. Johnson, Tod’s father, was enrolled on federal relief and assigned to road work.

  H. W. Johnson never blamed President Hoover for the loss of his grocery store, but he could never forgive President Roosevelt for having fed him.

  When, lacking refrigeration, the relief organization distributed live chickens, Mr. Johnson kept them a while before he ate them. He was fascinated by birds so unintelligent, which nevertheless could find subsistence in the weed patch behind his house.

  During his two years on the road gang, Hank Johnson thought about chickens. When his grandmother died, leaving him three thousand dollars, he promptly bought ten thousand baby chicks. Most of this first venture died of a disease which darkened their combs and withered their feathers, but Johnson was not one to cry failure. It was hard enough to engage his interest in the first place, but once engaged, it was even more difficult to budge it. He wrote to the Department of Agriculture for its chicke
n booklet and from it he learned chicken economy. Apart from diseases, he read, chickens are a luxury until you have fifty thousand of them. With that number, you may break even. With one hundred thousand you can show a small profit. Over half a million, you begin to get some place.

  One need not go into Mr. Johnson’s organizational plans. They involved small investments by some of his neighbors and all of his relatives, who were persuaded to put up the capital for the initial two hundred thousand baby chicks.

  When half a million birds guaranteed a profit, this money was returned with thanks and a small bonus. From then on, H. W. Johnson was on his own.

  Tod was three when the first million chicks marched in their little wire-floored cells. H. W. by that time was getting government surplus for feed and was selling eggs and fryers to the Army and Navy.

  Tod went to the Petaluma public schools. In high school he joined the 4-H Club, where he learned a good deal about chickens: their habits, their diseases, and their propensities. He learned also to detest them for their stupidity, their odor, and their mess.

  By the time he had graduated from high school there was no need for his further interest in the birds that were building the family fortune. H.W. Johnson was a factory by then. Dressed pullets and millions of eggs rolled off an assembly line. The Johnson offices were far from the smell and sight of chickens. The Johnson estate was on a lovely hill beyond the country club, while the Johnson energy and genius now concerned itself with figures rather than white leghorns. The unit was no longer a hen, but fifty thousand hens. The company had become a corporation with stock held by HW. Johnson, Mrs. H.W. Johnson, Tod Johnson, and young Miss Hazel Johnson, a beautiful girl who on three separate occasions was named Egg Queen at the Petaluma Poultry Pageant.

  It was now time for the family to expand to a dynasty, in the American pattern.

  When Tod went to Princeton there were one hundred million chickens represented by stock certificates. But it must not be thought that only chickens were represented. Johnson, Inc., also sold feed, wire, brooders, incubators, refrigeration plants, and all the equipment which must be purchased by a small operator before he can proceed toward bankruptcy.

  H.W. Johnson wore his title of Egg King gracefully and, true tycoon that he was, bought back his old grocery store and set it up as a museum. His only violence lay in his hatred for the Democratic party, for which he had every reason. Otherwise he was a kindly, generous man, a man of vision. He had peacocks on his lawn at Johnson Vista and an artificial pond for white ducks.

  Tod, meanwhile, dipped into four universities—Princeton for clothes, Harvard for accent, Yale for attitude, and the University of Virginia for manners. He emerged equipped for life with everything except the arts and foreign travel. The first he acquired in New York, where his taste for progressive jazz was developed, and his Grand Tour during the restoration of the French monarchy took care of the second.

  His friendship with Clotilde grew like a mushroom in the caves of Paris; flourished like the pelargoniums in the flower boxes of the sidewalk cafes. Clotilde nurtured the pale plant with care, never letting it stray beyond Fouquet’s on one side and the Hotel George V on the other, in which district Tod’s Brooks-Brothers look did not cause comment. Neither would the princess be embarrassed by meeting any French people.

  The affair reached its crescendo of passion, however, at the Select, when Tod leaned over the table, tore his eyes upward from her bosom, and said hoarsely, “Baby, you’re a dish. A real dish.”

  Clotilde felt it to be a declaration. Afterward, inspecting her well-filled body in a full-length mirror, she growled, “I am a deesh.”

  Clotilde introduced her new friend to Uncle Charlie as a prospective husband, and Charlie accepted him as a prospective customer.

  “You might be interested,” he said to Tod, “in a group of paintings I have heard about. They have just come to light. Buried during the Occupation—”

  “Uncle—please!” said Clotilde.

  “I don’t know much about painting, sir,” said Tod.

  “Perhaps you will learn,” said Charles Martel happily, and later, after he had telephoned the Chase Bank, Paris Branch, he said to Clotilde, “I like that young man. He has an air. You must bring him again to call on me.”

  “Promise me you will not sell him pictures,” the princess pleaded.

  “My dear,” said her great-uncle, “I have made certain discreet inquiries. Should I rob this young man of beauty and art simply because he is rich? Figure to yourself how many are two hundred and thirty million chickens. If one took twenty centimeters as the approximate length of one chicken, they would be—let me see—forty-six million meters, which is forty-six thousand kilometers, which is a procession of chickens extending nearly twice around the world at the equator—imagine!”

  “What would they they going around the world for?” Clotilde asked.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Uncle Charlie. “Oh! Please ask your friend to show me again how to make those—those martinis. There is something I do not accomplish.”

  Clotilde was surprised to find her father in the back room of the Galerie Martel, but she said, “Sire, I wish to present Mr. Tod Johnson. Mr. Tod Johnson, this is my father”—she blushed—“the king.”

  “Glad to know you, Mr. King,” said Tod.

  Uncle Charlie said delicately, “Not Mister—the.”

  “Come again?” said Tod.

  “Il n’est pas Monsieur King. Il est Le Roi.”

  “No kidding!” said Tod.

  “He is very democratic,” said Uncle Charlie.

  “I voted the Democratic ticket,” said Tod. “My old—my father would kill me if he knew. He’s a Taft man.”

  Pippin spoke for the first time. “Correct me if I am wrong. Have I not heard that Monsieur Taft is dead?”

  “That doesn’t mean a thing to my father,” said Tod. “Let’s get this straight in my mind. What kind of a king?” Pippin said, “I do not understand.”

  “I mean like—well, they call my father the Egg King, and Benny Goodman is the King of Swing, and like that.”

  Pippin cried, “You know Benny Goodman?”

  Well, not really, but I’ve sat close enough to his clarinet to get my ear splashed.”

  “What joy,” said the king. “I have the recording from Carnegie Hall.”

  “I’m more on the progressive kick myself.” said Tod.

  “And you are right in a way,” said Pippin. “This is creative and good, but you must allow, Monsieur Egg, that Goodman, he is classic—at least when he inserts himself in the groove.”

  “Say,” said Tod, “you talk good for a—”

  Pippin chuckled. “Were you about to say ‘king or 'Frog'?”

  “How about that?” said Tod. “You aren’t kidding me, sir?”

  “I am King of France,” said the king. “It was not my choice of profession.”

  “The hell you are!”

  “The hell I'm not.”

  “How’d you learn talk like that, sir?”

  “For a number of years I have subscribed to Downbeat,” said Pippin.

  “Well, that explains it.” Tod turned to Clotilde. “Baby, I’m ape about him. He’s a Georgier George.”

  Uncle Charlie cleared his throat. “Perhaps Monsieur Tod would care to see some of the paintings I spoke about. Apparently they were hidden during the Occupation of France. Two of them are attributed to Boucher.”

  “What do you mean, attributed?” Tod asked. “Aren’t they signed?”

  “Well, no. But there are many indications—the colors, the brush technique—”

  “I’ll lay it on the line, sir,” Tod said. “I thought of buying a present for my father. You see, I want to stay away from the business a little longer and I’ll have to put the bite on him. I thought a real nice present might grease the slide—not that it will fool him. He’ll know what I’m up to, but he may go along with it. He doesn’t mind being fooled if he knows about it.”

/>   “These paintings—” Uncle Charlie began.

  “You say Boucher. I halfway remember him from Art Appreciation. Suppose I buy a Boucher with no signature. Know what will happen? Father will get an expert—he’s hell on experts. And suppose this Boucher is a phony. You see the position I’d be in—hustling my own father.”

  “But a signature would save you that difficulty?”

  “It would help. Understand, it wouldn’t be certain. My father is no dope.”

  “Perhaps we had better look at something else,” said Uncle Charlie. “I know where I can put my hand on a very nice Matisse with a signature. There is a ‘Téte de Femme’ of Rouault, very fine—or maybe you would like to see a veritable swarm of Pasquins. These will have a great future value.”

  “I’d like to look at everything,” said Tod. “Bugsy said you were doing something wrong with the martinis.”

  “They do not taste the same.”

  “Are you getting them cold enough? Mac Kriendler once told me that the only good martini is a cold martini. Here, let me mix you one. Will you have one too, sir?”

  “Thank you. I should like to discuss with you your father, the king.”

  “Egg King.”

  “Exactly. Has he been this for a long time?”

  “Since the depression. He hit bottom them. That was before I was born.”

  “Then he invented his kingdom as he went along?”

  “You might say that, sir. And in his line there is nobody who can touch him.”

  “He has a principality, your father?”

  “Well, it’s a corporation—kind of the same thing if you control the stock.”

  “My young friend, I hope you will come to see me very soon. I wish to discuss the king business with you.”

  “Where do you live, sir? Bugsy wouldn’t ever tell me. I thought she was ashamed.”

  “Perhaps she was,” said the king. “I live at the Palace at Versailles.”