King Gleamlet

To a bright young boy, one of the great advantages of being brought up in the Greek Orthodox Church is that you have two birthdays--your own real birthday and your name day, the day in the Church calendar assigned to your patron saint. Last week cannons booming at dawn woke Bucharest to help celebrate little King Mihai's real birthday, his eighth. In, the ornate National Cathedral, His Majesty, proud of his first long trousers, marched up the aisle with green-&-gold Generals to hear a Te Deum, marched down again to review two squadrons of the royal bodyguard.

"Where are the presents?" he demanded as soon as he was back in the palace. "Where is my tug-boat?" Most successful of last year's real birthday presents was a minutely perfect scale model of a locomotive and train which cost $1,100. the gift of the Rasitza Locomotive Works. This year King Mihai has been asking for an equally elaborate tug boat, complete with miniature barges. But there was no such gift last week. No barge company had felt the urge. Tactfully His Majesty's mother, frugal Princess Helen, explained that he would receive presents from the Royal Family not on his real birthday but on his name day, the custom in Rumania. However there was a nice gentleman waiting in the antechamber with quite a lot of presents.

Baldish, sharp-nosed and Polish was the nice gentleman, Foreign Minister August Zaleski. He was in Bucharest, last week, to keep warm negotiations which have long been simmering toward a Rumanian-Polish treaty of friendship and arbitration. From Dictator-Marshal Pilsudski of Poland he brought to King Mihai some brightly painted wooden toys; a railway train (considerably inferior to last year's); a big book of Polish fairy tales, The Story of the Dwarfs and the Little Orphans, translated into English--the language Mihai most easily reads, usually talks.

According to a Court functionary, His Majesty ignored everything but the fairy tales, pounced on the big book, retreated to an armchair, buried his nose. Soon, perhaps, Boy-King Mihai was reading the story of Dwarf-King Gleamlet, getting ideas about Kingship from the tale of how Royal Gleamlet dealt with Whisk, the field rat, who had stolen his grain:

"What have you to say in your defense?" asks King Gleamlet.

"Nothing . . . nothing but hunger . . . terrible hunger," replies Whisk, with stark Polish realism. "I was hungry . . . and so poor . . . my children were dying of hunger. . . ."

"But hunger does not give us the right to take what does not belong to us. You surely know that?"

"I feared the Winter, gracious King . . . the Winter so terribly long and hard. . . . Gracious King, last Winter, half my children died. Ah, how I suffered! The youngest . . . my youngest child, your Majesty, died before my eyes of hunger. Six days and six nights I looked on ... and still lived . . . lived on ... and could not die for him!"

Tenderhearted, King Mihai, doubtless approved the end of the story, when King Gleamlet breaks down, sobs aloud in Polish pity, and orders: "Release that unhappy creature [rat] and feed his family."

No gentle man is King Mihai's uncle, Prince Nicholas, sporting and 26, one of the three Regents of Rumania. As an example of the sort of things His Royal Highness does, the Bucharest newspaper Cuvantul cautiously printed the following last week:

ACCIDENT TO PRINCE NICHOLAS

"After a collision between the motor car of Prince Nicholas, who was driving himself, and a taxicab, the chauffeur of the latter was taken to a hospital, complaining of injuries to the stomach."