Chapter FIVE

The Love Romance of King Peter of Serbia--His Majesty the
Most Misjudged Monarch in Europe--He is my Friend through
Fifteen Years--A King Incognito and his Troubles--His Many
Kindnesses to me--Prince George and the Ladies of the
Ballet.

King Peter of Serbia I first knew in Paris as Prince Peter Karageorgevitch, before he was compelled to succeed to the throne of Serbia on the assassination of King Alexander and his adventuress-consort, Queen Draga.

From that fatal moment poor Peter was a misjudged man. The world believed that he had had a hand in the royal tragedy, but I happen to know that he had no desire to become King of Serbia. The skeleton in His Majesty’s cupboard was a great and absorbing love romance, of which I, among very few, knew the truth, and which is here related for the first time. The lady lived in Paris, and I had often been her guest at luncheon and dinner. At the moment of the royal tragedy she was actually engaged to be married to the man she loved.

Suddenly, without warning, the Prince found himself called to Belgrade to ascend a tottering throne. There was an affectionate leave-taking, and the lady--whose name it would not be fair to mention, for she has lately married--was inconsolable, and came to London, where I called on her at Brown’s Hotel.

Meanwhile the monarch she loved was bearing all the vile abuse that the Press of the world could vent upon his head. The British Press openly declared him to be an assassin, and the British Government withdrew its Minister from the Serbian capital. With his lips sealed, poor King Peter was unable to utter a word in self-defence, while time after time the lady in question, when I called and consoled her, showed me the bitter articles that sensational journalists, ignorant of the facts, wrote against her lover.

Those wicked articles broke the monarch’s heart, and in such distressing circumstances he ascended the throne of Serbia, and was later, with hollow mockery, crowned King, well knowing that the woman he so dearly loved could never become his wife. The Serbians would not tolerate a foreigner as queen, and in any case the marriage could only be a morganatic one.

Such were his constant regrets, and so melancholy his frame of mind, that he shut himself up in his Palace and saw hardly anybody except his Ministers of State. Even this seclusion attracted the suspicions of his traducers, who declared that the new King was a criminal, who dared not show his face to honest folk, and some of our own most influential but ill-informed newspapers were most bitter in their recriminations. I tried to put them right, but they would not have it.

King Peter had been at Belgrade nearly two years before I had my first private audience of him as King. Curiously enough, Europe had never recognized in him the grandson of the great hero of the Serbian people, the rough peasant Karageorge, who, in 1804, raised the Serbians against their oppressors the Turks and defeated them. Peter Karageorgevitch was a born soldier. His facial expression, his stature, his grit, and his mannerisms, all reminded me of Earl Roberts. In 1875 he fought at the head of his troop--which, by the way, he raised himself and crippled his finances thereby--for the emancipation of Bosnia. Surely he was a born soldier!

Serbia is a nation of poets and artists, and in its national poetry there is a hero called Peter Mrcognitch, the Protector of the Poor. And under that assumed name Prince Peter fought. In 1870 he fought on the French side against the Germans, being awarded the Legion of Honour for valour on the battlefield. And again, in 1914, he fought against the Germans. Such was the man whom the world, in its ignorance, denounced as a murderer!

The true history of the last weeks of Alexander’s reign, of those black days of spies and suspicion in Belgrade, has never been told. But I have myself been in those terrible secret oubliettes of the old Turkish fortress, overlooking the junction of the Save with the Danube, where those, many of them leading men of the political, social, and literary world in Belgrade, who dared to utter a word against Draga and her methods, were confined with but little air or light till they died. The Royal House of Obrenovitch was exterminated, it is true, but I affirm here and most solemnly that King Peter had no hand in it whatsoever, and his forced parting with Madame X was the greatest blow in all his splendid but unhappy life.

* * * * *

One dark autumn evening I left the Grand Hotel at Belgrade and drove through the wide ornamental iron gates of the New Konak, or Palace. Blue-coated sentries saluted; idling detectives lifted their hats; and the lines of blue-and-gold liveried servants, drawn up in the big entrance-hall, bent low as I alighted. It was all delightfully impressive and amusing.

In the large inner hall was a wide horse-shoe staircase of regal splendour and in excellent taste. All was very new, for the Palace in which the tragedy had occurred had been pulled down, and its site converted into a lawn.

At the head of the stairs Colonel Tcholak-Antich, the Royal Marshal, in a bright blue uniform, and wearing many decorations, met me, and with the usual etiquette we exchanged our names with our greetings.

“His Majesty wants you to sign his birthday-book, which he keeps for his friends. Will you do so?” was almost his first question.

He took me into a little ante-room, and there I scribbled my name in the space of July 2nd. And I may say that after I had done so, no anniversary of my birthday passed till the King died without my receiving a telegram on that day, bearing a red label, with the words “Government Telegram; With Priority,” wishing me many happy returns.

In addition, as my intimate friends know well--for they have smoked them--His Majesty used to send me a very welcome present of two thousand of his own Serbian cigarettes each year, bearing his royal cipher in gold on them.

But that apart.

I was at once conducted to the audience-chamber, the double doors of which, to prevent eavesdroppers, were closed behind me, and by etiquette I was left alone to await His Majesty.

The room, of fine dimensions with a gilded ceiling, seemed, under the many electric lamps, ablaze with gold. The beautiful gilt furniture showed well against the old rose carpet, the damask of the upholstery matching the carpet and being brocaded with gold. Several fine modern paintings of seascapes were on the walls, one big historical painting by the great Botzaritch, whose talented son is a coming artist in London to-day and quite recently drew a remarkable caricature of myself. In the centre was a large settee and several fine gilt chairs, set against a big gilt Renaissance table.

I had scarcely time to look across the luxurious room when the long white double doors at the end opened and His Majesty, in the dark-blue uniform of a Serbian general, entered.

“Well, my dear friend Le Queux, so at last you have come to see me!” he exclaimed, taking my hand. “I have long been expecting you. Many things have happened since we met in Paris, eh?”

He motioned me to a seat on the settee, and then, after handing me a cigarette from the big gold box on the table, he took one, lit it, and cast himself in a soft arm-chair opposite.

Then we began to chat.

“You are very welcome here in Serbia. But I need not tell you, my dear friend,” he said, in his sharp military way. “I have read some of the kind things you have written about us. Would that everyone understood us as you do. I only wish writers would tell the truth as you and Mr. Alfred Stead and a few others have done. But”--and he paused, looking me straight in the face, with his dark, deep-set eyes--“_you know the real truth_! The others, alas! don’t,” and he sighed.

“Your Majesty has been entirely misunderstood,” I said, and then our conversation drifted into matters of a purely private character, for, as a matter of fact, I had seen Madame X at Cannes only three weeks before, and she had given me a message to convey to him.

Presently I spoke of various matters regarding diplomacy--for the truth was that the Foreign Office was anxious to know certain things, and because I knew His Majesty, I had been asked to put certain questions.

“Ah! you want me to talk politics,” he laughed, raising his hand with the fine diamond on it. “No. I make a rule never to do so--even to you, my dear friend! One of our chief faults here in Serbia is that we talk far too much about politics. You have noticed that, I daresay, in the cafés, in the Legations, and elsewhere, eh? All we Serbians are the same--in Montenegro, in Bosnia, and elsewhere. It is always so with a young nation. Our future will, I fervently hope, be one of peace and prosperity. It will ever be my most earnest endeavour to secure this for my people, so that Serbia may prove to Europe that she does not merit the hard things said of her in the past.”

His Majesty, after we had chatted about Florence, a city which he knew quite well, told me a very interesting fact. “We have here, in Serbia,” he said, “a most wonderful cure for rheumatism--the Ribarska Banya. I only tell you what happened personally to me. As you know perhaps, long ago, during the Russo-Turkish War, I contracted acute rheumatism, and have been a martyr to it ever since. I visited every watering-place in Europe, but none of their so-called ‘cures’ did me any good. A year ago, with much reluctance, I went to Ribarska and took the cure, and from that moment I have never since been troubled. It was miraculous! With my own eyes I saw a poor woman wheeled there entirely crippled, and twenty days later I saw her beginning to walk. I would not have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes. You should tell people in England,” he added.

For an hour and a half we chatted about many things--of London, of Paris, of Rome, of Vienna--for His Majesty was essentially an up-to-date man of the world, as well as a monarch. “We want no external troubles,” he declared to me. “We only want to be allowed to progress.”

But, alas! what a débâcle was to come in the days of the war.

“I have had some amusing experiences here since I have been King,” he went on. “One that happened soon after my arrival was rather humorous. It is my habit, as you know, to ride out into the country early each morning for exercise, and I always prefer to be alone. At first the police insisted that I should have an escort, but I do not like to feel as if I were under arrest, so I refused. One beautiful summer’s morning, about a fortnight after I came here, I rode out along the road to Ripanje, and when passing a small village I heard an old peasant-woman loudly lamenting the fate of her relatives and of the whole Serbian nation in general. I drew up, and as I remained unnoticed it suddenly occurred to me that I was unknown, for my features had not yet appeared on the postage-stamps or on the coinage.

“‘Well,’ I asked the old woman, ‘what has happened? Tell me.’

“‘Ah! general. If you only knew how the police treat us here! It is most scandalous! Every police-agent expects a bribe, and if you don’t give him one, he will trump-up charges against you. Woe! that we Serbians should ever live under such a Government. Alexander is dead, and now there is a new King. Oh! if he only knew, I feel sure he would inquire into it all, for they say he is, after all, a good Serbian, even though he shuts himself up in the Konak and never sees anybody.’

“I inquired her name, and then told her that, being a general, I sometimes saw the new King, and when next time I did I would mention her complaint to His Majesty.

“‘Ah! Thanks, general,’ replied the old peasant woman. ‘If you do, then you will earn the thanks of all of us here.’

“Well, on my return here I called Monsieur Paschitch, the Prime Minister, and ordered a full inquiry. Its result was that an appalling state of affairs was revealed. The peasantry were being oppressed on every hand, and I ordered that the officials responsible should not only be degraded, but prosecuted.”

On a dozen or more occasions, at different times, I was received by King Peter. He was always most generous to me, and gave me the run of the whole royal domains for fishing and shooting, and he sent to me the beautiful signed portrait of himself, which can be found as the frontispiece of my book, _An Observer in the Near East_--a book which, by the way, was at first published anonymously, because I was engaged in secret-service work.

More than once he was quite frank with me concerning his troubles. We were sitting together one afternoon when he suddenly rose, and with clouded brow paced his long room, overlooking the Danube and the great Hungarian plains. Then, halting before me abruptly, he asked with a sigh:

“Don’t you think I was far happier in Paris than in my present life in this gilded cage?”

And on another day, when he was deploring how wrongly the world had judged him, he said:

“A man’s life is one long warfare against the malice of his fellow-men. The wise man changes his mind, the fool never!”

His Majesty’s love romance, to which I have referred, was surely one of the most tragic that has ever occurred to any man. Because of the recent marriage of Madame X, and because she is still my friend, I refrain from telling the whole story. If I did, the reader would accuse me of putting fiction into this volume, which I have determined not to do. Yet surely the old adage that fact is often stranger than fiction cannot be denied.

One day, perhaps, I shall make the real romance the plot of a novel, and then I shall not be accused of mixing fiction with fact!

Poor King Peter had many family troubles, not the least being the erratic life of his smart and extremely good-looking son, Prince George, whose autographed photograph, together with that of his father, looks up at me from my table as I write.

The private life of any young Crown Prince is popularly supposed to be rather hectic, and in Prince George’s case it certainly has been no exception. Indeed, it is an open secret that he was the original of the character of “Prince Danilo” in the _Merry Widow_--the lazy lover of languorous ladies.

One incident that will perhaps be interesting as revealing the life of a good-looking, good-for-nothing boy, who really had no vices but just enjoyed the joy of living, I may perhaps be permitted to relate.

One day, while in Belgrade, I had been invited to luncheon by Madame Vesnitch, wife of Dr. Milenko Vesnitch, then Minister of Justice, and afterwards Serbian Minister in Paris. At table were the Prime Minister, my old and valiant friend Monsieur Nicholas Paschitch, Costa Stoyanovitch, Minister of Commerce, Mr. Alexander Tucker, Serbian Consul-General in London, and Colonel Tcholak-Antich, the Royal Marshal, with some ladies, the Crown Prince being the guest. After the ladies had left the table, the patriarchal Prime Minister, Paschitch, with his long, sweeping beard and eagle eyes, who is to-day still known as “The Grand Old Man of the Balkans,” looked across at the Crown Prince and asked in French, so that all of us should hear:

“Your Highness, there are rumours of some strange doings of yours last night. Tell us what really happened.”

“Happened?” laughed the young Prince, with a cigarette between his fingers. “Why, nothing really happened! It never does!”

“But there was some fun at the Palace, wasn’t there?” asked Dr. Vesnitch, our host.

“Fun? Well, not much. They laughed--that was all,” was his reply.

“Well, do tell us what actually happened,” urged the Prime Minister.

“If you want to know, I’ll tell you,” laughed Prince George, after sipping his coffee. “Last night I dined at the Military Club, when somebody said that a new ballet was to be produced at the Opera. We were all bored stiff, so half a dozen of us went to the club-box at the theatre and saw a fairly good show. The curtain fell rather early, so I suggested that we might have a little supper. We invited eighteen of the girls, and took them round by the back door of the Palace. Everybody was in bed. I woke up old Rachitch, the chef, and the old buffer soon scraped us up some supper. But things seemed very dull and slow. It was almost like a funeral. So, knowing where the key of the Treasury is kept, I got it and took out the royal crown and crowned myself King of Serbia. Oh! That woke up the whole party! The girls yelled!”

Suffice it to say that Prince George renounced all his rights to the succession two years later, and his younger brother, Alexander, who recently married a daughter of the Queen of Roumania, now reigns as King.

Truly Prince George, a merry, easy-going, humorous friend to me, was hardly fitted to rule the new nation of Jugo-Slavia.

He was fond of practical jokes, and would sit in his window in a wing of the palace that overlooks the principal boulevard--a fine thoroughfare lined with plane trees--and with a catapult pick out his friends, firing at them big pellets of chalk, which, bursting when they hit, left nasty marks on their smart uniforms.

Yet when I was with him and his father for seven months, at the Serbian headquarters, in the war against the Turks, he showed himself to be a most brave and competent officer, whom everyone loved. He very nearly lost his life at the battle of Kumonovo by a deed that was never reported, namely, the saving of the life of a student sergeant-major on the battlefield, at the risk of his own; a deed that, if it had been performed by any British soldier, would certainly have won the Victoria Cross.

Of his many love-affairs, of his boyish pranks, and of the many stormy interviews he had with his father the King, tales are often told in Belgrade. Nicholas Paschitch and his charming Italian wife--whose guest I have been on so many occasions--tell many amusing stories of the Crown Prince’s follies and extravagances, and of his hopeless disregard of all that befitted his station as the coming ruler of Jugo-Slavia, now the most powerful state in the Balkans.