Two Queens

Good Morning and Good Night. By H. H. the Ranee Margaret of Sarawak. (Constable. 15s.) THE history of Sarawak has been an English romance ever since James Brooke of the British East India Company came up from Burma to Singapore, helped to put down a' rebellion in Northern Borneo, and by characteristic English methods of courage and diplomacy was appointed Rajah of Sarawak, chiefly at the wish of the natives themselves. That was in 1841, and after years of beneficent rule, he died in 1868, to be succeeded by his nephew, the great Rajah Charles Brooke, who carried on a government upon the same high principles. These he maintained till his death towards the end of the Great War at the age of 85. It is his widow, herself now over 80, who writes the present fascinating account of her life with her husband in Sarawak, and latterly in France and England.

In one country or another she certainly went through every variety of experience. Her maiden name of De Windt was a French variation of the Dutch De Witt (she is a sister of the late Harry De Windt, the famous traveller), and by her mingled descent from the Dutch, the French, and the English, she seems to have inherited the best characteristics of three races. Her courageous persistence may be traced to Dutch or English, but her gaiety of temperament and her love of all the arts must come from her birth and girlhood at Epinay. Certainly she has possessed the incalculable advantage of speaking French as by nature, and enjoying the fun of every situation.

She needed all the gaiety possible, for at 20 she was married to the second Rajah Brooke, who had come to England with the sole purpose of finding someone suitable to produce an heir to the Brooke dynasty. He was a type of the Englishman who remains silent, unimaginative, and destitute of humour, but devoted, body and soul, to one definite line of duty. His line was the service of Sarawak, and he considered nothing else of much importance, except perhaps fox-hunting during his brief visits home. All his energies and sympathies went to his little kingdom, and even on his wedding day he refused the hotel dinner as being too expensive for the Sarawak finances. But he insisted on his wife's rank, and when the doctor in his capital town sent a medicine bottle labelled " Mrs. Brooke," he returned it to have " H.H. the Ranee " inscribed instead. In those days a wife had no property, and when the young bride once spoke of ordering her horse, the Rajah's mother said severely, " Remember, young lady, that nothing is yours but your wedding ring." " If that is the case," replied the bride, "I shall appear at dinner tonight with nothing on but my wedding ring."

One might have expected plenty of disagreement between that merry nature and the stern devotee to a single duty, but disagreement was rare. She really admired his un- flinching courage, his resource in danger, and the absolute justice of his rule. Indeed, he seems to have been really angry with her only once, when she danced too long and freely with Italian officers landed from a warship that put in at the Sarawak port. He thought she scandalized the English officials and residents, who were a dullish lot, marked by a " stuffy propriety " such as we can well imagine in a small tropical settlement. But he silently approved of her resolve to be friendly with the Malayan people, to learn their language, to wear their costume, and to endear herself to them all. That was no hard task, for she loved and admired them from the first. Yet many of the Dyak tribes in the interior were still head-hunters. Of one ceremony we read : " A Dyak in full war costume bounded into the room, waving an object which at first I took to be a coco-nut. He leaped high and capered about, but was so light of foot that he made no noise on the floor. As he came near us in the dance, I saw that what I had taken to be a coco-nut was a human skull 1 I felt quite sick at the sight, and rushed out of the hall to the bedroom next door."

Her solemn husband only remarked :

" What is the matter ? The head-dance is one of the most important dances among the Dyaks. It was a special entertainment got up in our honour 1 '

Her courage—that best kind of courage which overcomes a sensitive nature—was often shown, but especially when in the Rajah's absence in the interior she held the Fort alone with a few native servants against a truculent host of warriors fully armed with spears and shields, while she had but one rifle and a few little guns that were not loaded and .could not be fired. All her power of endurance was called up when her three baby children died of cholera in the Red Sea. Happily, three boys were born to her later on, and the Rajah's dynasty is secure. Besides courage and endurance she ha3 possessed an astonishing gift for friendship, and the list of her personal friends in France would include nearly all the most celebrated writers, such as Maupassant and Pierre Loti, while in England she knew many of the most cele- brated musicians, writers, and painters, such as flume Jones, Henry James, and W. H. Hudson. Towards the end of the book she remarks : I have grown into quite an old woman, and old women are not the salt of the earth." In her case, I deny it.

From Sarawak, the head-hunters, and their austere, self-sacrificing (and wife-sacrificing) Rajah, it is a far cry to the sumptuous and self-seeking Courts of Europe, as they

existed 50 years ago, and exist no longer. One must remember that the Queen of Roumania's book is only a first volume; and it describes only the societies that were soon to be broken

up by the Great War and the subsequent revolutions. The Princess Marie was the daughter of our Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, brother to King Edward, and afterwards Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Her mother was Marie Alexandrovna,- only daughter of the Tsar Alexander II.

As being also the niece of the Empress Frederick of Germany, she was therefore closely connected with the three greatest Imperial Courts, and men and women of the highest rank were her parents, her uncles, her aunts, or her cousins. One may be excused for the difficulty of tracing the relationships of all these high and mighty persons, for the Queen herself admits the difficulty. Writing especially of her early visit to Russia, she says

" There were no end of other uncles, aunts and cousins, so many of them in fact that I never quite made out who they all were, especially as they were of several generations. . . . For all big occasions, for parades and church ceremonies, for feast days, the family would flock together, and there would be huge family meetings, as regular reviews of uncles, aunts and cousins near or far removed, as numerous as trees in a wood."

She admits it was interesting but also very confusing, and the confusion must have been only increased by the magnifi- cence of the dresses and uniforms, the gold and silver embroideries, the blaze of diamonds, and sapphires " as large as eyes." When, during the years of attempted revolu- tion early in this century, I could perceive from the outside something of all this splendour, and knew also the hideous conditions of life among the workers and peasants, I used to wonder how long it would last. It lasted twelve years. How beautiful some of thy women were—the Tsaritza, the Grand Duchess Serge, her sister, among the chief—and how uncon- scious they all seemed of the abyss lying before their feet ! The little Princess Marie, half English, half Russian, was certainly unconscious of it. As she complains herself, she was brought up in entire ignorance of all the realities of life :

" Of politics we knew nothing, nor had we any idea that social questions existed. We were royal little girls whom everybody loved, and who had certain indisputable rights in a world which was peaceful and exceedingly good to live in. . . We were not brought up prudes, but a certain part of life simply did not exist for us. A risque book never reached our hands, we blushed when it was mentioned that someone was to have a baby."

We are given many interesting and admiring glimpses of her grandmother Queen Victoria, and one may sympathize with Queen Marie when she was already the mother of two children and the grandmother asked : " Did they give

you chloroform when your children were born ? " In great terror she confessed that she had been given a very little. Whereupon, to her astonishment, the great Queen replied :

" Quite right, my dear, I was given chloroform with my ninth and last baby, it had, alas ! not been discovered before, and I assure you, my child, I deeply deplore the fact that I had to bring eight children into the world without its precious aid."

There is much else about Victoria and the English Court, and much about " Carmen Sylva," the Roumanian Queen, and many other figures at one time conspicuous in Europe. This volume ends with the marriage of the girl Princess to the Crown Prince Ferdinand of Roumania, and the rest of her fate will be revealed in the next. HENRY W. NEVINSON.