Part 18

Do you hear the echo of the thunderous acclamations that attended the Foreign Minister to his seat, the clapping of hands, stamping of feet, roaring of lungs that have been dust for more than forty years, or are now on the point of dissolving into their native element? Naturally because the Right were defiant, the Left called their utterances bellicose. Had the Right manifested a disposition to turn the other cheek in Scriptural fashion, the Left would have passionately taunted this band of politicians with cowardice, lack of patriotism, indifference to the sacred cause of national freedom,--would have accused them of being traitors to their country, and Heaven knows what else.

The Press threw oil upon the roaring conflagration. Were this affront submitted to, cried the _Gaulois_, "there would not exist a woman in the world who would accept a Frenchman's arm!" The _Correspondant_ was "relieved to find that Frenchmen once more have become Frenchmen." The _Moniteur Universel_ was charmed to discover that the blame for this momentous conflict could never be attributed to the French Government. The _Figaro_ left off making a cockshy of the Imperial dignity, to admit that for once the Emperor's official mouthpiece had spoken the right word. And the _Débats_ praised the attitude taken by the Government. "Silence at this juncture would," it cried, "have been pusillanimous. Shall the nation be accused of bowing its head for the second time, before the cannon of Sadowa?"

Lord Granville, replacing the recently deceased Clarendon at Great Britain's Foreign Ministry, mentioned to the Spanish Ambassador to England that the choice of Prince Leopold would create a sore. He wrote to Layard at Berlin that he considered France had been given good cause of resentment. Lyons, in the shoes of Lord Cowley, at the English Embassy in Paris, wrote to his chief that the unhappy affair had revived all the old animosity, though it seemed to him that "neither the Emperor nor his Ministers really wish or expect war!" The _Times_ of July 8th was severe on the policy of Prussia; the _Standard_ for once expressed the same opinion as the _Times_. The _Daily Telegraph_ prophesied that the succession of the Prussian Prince would mean France's present humiliation and future peril. The _Pall Mall Gazette_ poked mordant fun at the attitude of unconsciousness assumed by King William, who, between sips of Ems water, declared his ignorance of the whole affair. The _Early Wire_, backing and filling, kept an even keel for a day or two. Then said Mr. Knewbit confidentially to P. C. Breagh, one midsummer evening, after the early supper:

"My opinion is we are a-going to give a leg-up to this 'ere 'O'enzollern business, our Chief being--when England, Home, and Duty permit him to indulge the weakness--a red-'ot admirer of a Certain Person at Berlin. Who"--Mr. Knewbit's wink was infinitely sagacious--"is said on the strict Q.T. to have put up Field-Marshal Prim and the Government at Madrid to making the proposal to the young gentleman. For the sake of giving a jolt-up to the elderly swell at the Tuileries. We all have our ideal 'eroes," Mr. Knewbit added, "and our Chief's partiality dates from his acting in an emergency as Special War Correspondent for his own paper, durin' the Prusso-Austrian War of 1866. It was at the Battle of----that name always beats me----"

"Königgratz, perhaps?" suggested Carolan.

"Königgratz--when this 'ere Bismarck spurs his big brown mare up to Colonel von Somebody to ask him why, seeing the 'eavy losses occurring in his neighborhood from Austrian Artillery--he didn't ride forward with his Cuirassiers to find out where the shells came from? Took our Chief's fancy uncommon, that did, as the iron sugar-plums was dropping freely in the neighborhood, and when he had rode on, swearing at the Colonel like anything you can imagine--the old man picked up a cigar-stump he'd pitched away, and keeps it to this hour in the pen-tray of the silver inkstand the Proprietors presented him with when he came home."

Said P. C. Breagh reflectively:

"It's the rule, invariably. Men love Bismarck or lampoon him--swear by him--or swear at him. He's the devil or a demigod--there's no alternative!"

"Good!" said Mr. Knewbit, leaning back in his Windsor chair, and rubbing the ear of the ginger Tom with the toe of one of his carpet slippers. "Tell us a bit more. Anything you can lay hold of. I want to see him stand out a bit clearer in my mind."

"He gets his name from the Wendish--I've read in the _Kleine Anekdotenbuch_," said P. C. Breagh, "that 'Bismarck' really means 'beware of the thorns.' And there's a golden sprig of blackberry-bramble among the family quarterings, so perhaps there's something in it, after all. An ancestor of his who lived in the sixteenth century was a tailor--and a natural son of Duke Philip of Hesse, by the way! Duke Philip was a lineal descendant of St. Elizabeth of Hungary--who in her turn was descended from the Emperor Charlemagne----"

"Lor' bless my soul!" said Mr. Knewbit, rubbing his knees.

"And he--this man you want to know about!--was born the younger son of a Pomeranian country squire, and entered the University of Göttingen in 1831. They say that he permitted study to interfere so little with the more serious business of amusement that the name of Mad Bismarck was given him then, and had stuck to him even when he passed his examination as Referendar, and began to practice law in the Municipal Court of Aix-la-Chapelle."

Mr. Knewbit, drinking in the information at every pore, nodded "_More_"--and P. C. Breagh obliged him:

"He served his year as Volunteer at Potsdam in the _Jägers_ of the Guard, and then went home to the paternal estate of Kneiphof, and began sowing wild oats--acres and acres of them. The officers of the garrison were a hard-drinking set of fellows, and the county Junkers scorned to be outdone by them--so they hunted and shot and danced and made love to the local beauties--they dined and supped and gambled and fought duels. In fact, they did all the things men usually do when they mean to have a high old time and don't care a damn for the consequences," said P. C. Breagh, "and when you regularly hail smiling morn with cold punch, beer, and corn-brandy, and wind up the night with quart-beakers of champagne and porter, the consequences must be----"

"A taut skin and a fiery eye next morning," interpolated Mr. Knewbit, "and a tongue like a foul oven-plate or a burned kettle-bottom. But--my stars!--what a constitution that man must have to be as hale and as hearty, and as upright as they say he is, at fifty-five, and with a family of grown-up sons! One wonders how his sweetheart ever had the courage to marry such a--such a Ring-tailed Roarer.... But Love's a thing you can't account for nohow."

"I have heard that the Fräulein Puttkammer's family objected to the engagement," said P. C. Breagh, "but he seems to have got over their prejudices in a way peculiarly his own. By betrothing himself privately to the Fräulein first, and then calling openly to inquire how the family felt about it," he added, in response to the interrogative hoist of Mr. Knewbit's eyebrows, "and taking the precaution, upon entering the room--to hug the young lady before all her friends."

"The hugging would settle the thing--in Germany?" asked Mr. Knewbit.

"To a dead certainty."

"Without any male cousin or anything of that kind getting up and calling the hugger out?" asked Mr. Knewbit dubiously.

"When a man is six feet two inches in height, is as strong as a bull, and possesses a well-earned reputation as a fencer and pistol-shot, even male cousins," returned P. C. Breagh, "are content to sit still and let him hug."

"And then he married her and went into politics--and to-day, when the Press says 'Prussia,' it means him!" cried Mr. Knewbit. "What our Chief likes, and what fetches me!--is his cool owdaciousness. If ever I chance to find myself in Berlin," he added, "before visiting any State Collection of Art Objects ever brought together--I'd choose to 'ave a look at that man!"

Said P. C. Breagh:

"I've seen the Iron Chancellor just once--in '67--passing through Schwärz-Brettingen on his way to Berlin. It was in my first semester at the University, and just after the Constitution of the North German Bund was put into force by Royal Patent. The Social Democrats had protested against the withdrawal of the Prussian garrison from the independent State of Luxembourg--wanted to rush Germany into war over the business, and they, as well as the _Ultramontaine_, having plenty of followers among the students--both parties formed up on the platform of the railway-station, and gave the Count three groans."

"How did he take 'em--the groans, I mean?'

"Rather as if he liked them, now I come to think of it. I can see him now, in civil dress, black frock-coat, vest and trousers, with a white choker something like a Lutheran clergyman's. And he jammed his great black felt hat down on his head and thrust his huge body half out of the carriage window. His eyes--fierce blue eyes heavily pouched underneath, and blazing from under shaggy eyebrows--swept over us as though we were a lot of squeaking mice--though he was laughing in a good-tempered sort of way. And he shouted something in dialect--they said it was a common Pomeranian proverb, '_Let not live men fight over a dead dog!_'"

"Meaning----?"

"Meaning, one would suppose, that the Luxembourg garrison was a right which had been given up as unimportant, and therefore was of no more value than a dead dog, set against the cost of a new war."

"I'm obliged for your information," said Mr. Knewbit, pushing back his chair and getting up to reach his brass tobacco-box from the high kitchen mantelshelf. "In return I'll give you a bit o' news--which may be of walley to you. You have been talking A.1 journalism, young man, as different from the stuff you commonly put on paper as gold is from this metal"--he tapped the brass tobacco-box--"and--my advice is--For the future, write only of what you know; have felt, and heard and seen!"

He sucked despairingly at the wooden pipe he was filling and, finding it foul, stuck the stem in the spout of the boiling kettle--a practice abhorred of Miss Ling--and left it to be cleaned as he continued:

"Big things are going on in the world at this moment--things worth watching and waiting for. Damme!--though I'm not a swearer as a rule," said the little man, "if I don't wish I could change places with something that has wings. The great man we have been a-talking of is at this minute at his country-seat in Pomerania--that's the estate he bought with the grant--sixty thousand pounds English, it came to--the German Parliament voted him after the Prussian-Austrian War. And the King of Prussia is at Ems, a-drinking the waters, and the French Ambassador has been sent there by the Emperor Napoleon III. to obtain a special audience, I'm told. And if you or me could swop jobs with a fly on the wall at one place or the other--being a German insect it would be likely to understand their crack jaw language--me or you would be able to supply a leaded half-column for Special Issue that would fairly set the world afire. See this!"

He took the short poker from the top of Miss Ling's kitchen-range, and, pushing back his chair, rose and approached the wall, which was destitute of pictures, and distempered in an economical brown color.

"Look here, I say!..." began P. C. Breagh.

"The breath of genius inflates me," said Mr. Knewbit, who had had more than his allowance of beer at supper. "The impulse to prophesy stimulates me. Look at this!"

He wielded the poker deftly as he spoke. And on the brown distemper appeared in huge white letters:

WILL THERE BE WAR? YES! HOHENZOLLERN QUESTION NO DEAD DOG TO FRANCE! GAUL, AND TEUTON RIPE FOR CONFLICT. BISMARCK'S VIEWS!

"But, there, my inspiration gives out," said Mr. Knewbit, replacing the poker on the range and shaking his head mournfully, "unless it was possible to change with that fly on the wall--and take him at one of his expansive, confidential moments--if he ever has any--neither me nor any other man living will ever be able to give Bismarck's real views upon this or any other subject dealing with Politics. Who's this?"

The hall-door had slammed a moment previously. There had been a step upon the oilcloth-covered basement staircase, and now it bore Miss Ling's first-floor lodger, Herr von Rosius, the "quiet gentleman," who taught German to English students and English to Germans at the Institute of Languages in Berners Street, W.--across the threshold of her tidy kitchen, pipe in mouth and hat in hand.

"Meine Herren, I haf to beg your pardons! I seek the Fräulein Ling----" he was beginning, when suddenly the tall, broad-shouldered figure in the ill-fitting checked tweed clothes was petrified into rigidity. The felt hat he had civilly removed dropped from his hand, his jaws clenched on his inseparable meerschaum. Bolt upright, crimson to the hair, and staring through his steel-rimmed spectacles, he stood confronting the huge white letters that disfigured Miss Ling's brown distemper.

"_Kreuzdonnerwetter! was ist dies?_" Carolan heard him mutter in his own tongue. "_Es ist in jedermanns Mund!_" Then he recovered himself almost instantly, picked up his hat, and gave good-evening in his stiff, yet civil, way.

XXIV

"Good evening! Miss Ling is out, and won't be back for an hour," explained Mr. Knewbit, "but if there was anything you were wanting in a hurry, I'll see that you get it, somehow."

"Thanks, thanks!" said Herr von Rosius pleasantly. "So that I shall have my bill within an hour I shall need nothing. Pray inform the Fräulein I haf just received a cable from my family in Germany. They tell me I am wanted at home."

"Sorry, sorry!" said Mr. Knewbit in his pouncing manner. "Sudden, sudden! Hope no bad news?"

Von Rosius's pale blue eyes might have been stones, they were so hard, and had so little expression. He removed and wiped his glasses with his silk handkerchief, and said, carefully replacing them:

"_Nein, ganz und gar nicht_, but my mother is in need of me. So I have resigned my post at the Berners Street Institute of Languages, and got my passport from our North German Consul in your city. Be so good to give my message to the Fräulein. I go upstairs to pack my trunks and bags!"

Von Rosius's long legs had carried him to the first-floor before Mr. Knewbit had done rubbing his ear and thinking. When his sitting-room door had banged, and the kitchen gaselier ceased to vibrate at the concussion, the little man said, looking at Carolan:

"You have an eye in your head, young chap, and have lived in that gentleman's country, and speak his language. And yet the setting of his upper lip and the blank expression he throwed into his spectacles when I put a plain question to him, have told me more about him than you've learned. I'll bet you a ginger-ale that Germany is his mother, and he has been recalled to serve in the Reserve Force, I forget what they call it just now."

"They call the Reserve the Reserve, but I expect you mean the _Landwehr_," returned Carolan, wondering at the little man's sharpness.

"That's it. Listen to him singing," said Mr. Knewbit, as the first-floor sitting-room door banged open again, heavy steps crossed the landing, and the robust baritone of Herr von Rosius trolled forth a fragment of song: "Now, if that might be anything in the 'Rule Britannia' line, my ginger-ale's as good as won."

"It's the _Wacht am Rhein_," said P. C. Breagh, returning enlightened from an excursion to the bottom of the kitchen staircase, "and I believe you've hit the nail on the head."

"He served in '66 he told me," said Mr. Knewbit, indicating the unseen Von Rosius with an upward jerk of his chin, "and now he's got to go back and be a cog or a screw-nut somewhere in the big war-machine you've told me of. What did he call Service of the Active kind? 'Camping under the helmet-spike.' We shall miss him, for a quieter and civiler lodger never wore out oilcloth. Hark!--that was the hall-door. Monsieur Meguet's back uncommon early. As a rule, after the Museum Print Room closes he goes to his club in Leicester Square."

The French gentleman who lived on the second floor had ascended the doorsteps simultaneously with Mr. Ticking. Mounting to the hall on his way upstairs, attended by the ginger Tom--no longer a kitten--P. C. Breagh found them, surrounded by a blue haze of Sweet Caporal and Navy Cut, finishing a political discussion on the mat, while Mr. Mounteney, languidly leaning against the door-post of the ground-floor front-parlor, listened with a detached and weary air.

"_C'est de bouc émissaire_--I tell you he is the scapegoat of a diplomat's malice!" declared the French gentleman. "Of himself he is without designs--unambitious! a good child, nothing more! Brave as he is--has he not been trained from infancy to hardihood and acts of daring?--has he not slept with but a blanket for covering, and eaten the soldier's sausage of pea? ... Brave as he is, he dare not draw upon his unhappy country the terrible--the devastating--the exterminating wrath of France!"

The French gentleman whose profession was Prints had spoken loudly,--possibly without the design of being heard upon the first floor.

Now, as he paused to wipe his streaming brow with a brilliant green silk handkerchief, a door upon the landing immediately above was suddenly thrown open, and as a trunk was dragged across the landing, a stave of the German equivalent to "Rule, Britannia," boomed forth in Herr von Rosius's powerful baritone:

"_While there's a drop of blood to run, While there's an arm to hold a gun-- While there's a hand to wield a sword-- Brum--brum brum brum----_"

The German words were lost in the racket accompanying the violent ejection of heavy articles from the bedroom. Comparative calm ensued as M. Meguet continued:

"Disciplined, well drilled, energetic, and brave, the Army of France is unmatched and invincible. Our Emperor assures us upon the honor of a Napoleon, that, equipped and ready to the last buckle--to the final gaiter-button, it waits but the signal to roll on. Its musket is infinitely superior to the Prussian needle-gun, that feeble invention of an ill-balanced mind!--its artillery is commanded by a picked corps of officers--is enforced by that terrific weapon, the _mitrailleuse_. The Army of Prussia is a bundle of dry bones, fastened together--not with living sinews--but with rusty wire. The Prussian Monarch is a tottering pantaloon of seventy-three, crowned with dusty laurels; who submits to be the puppet of a demon in human form! The Genius of France is a divine and glorious being, whose soul burns with the noble thirst for warlike achievements, whose blood courses with the fire and heat of unimpaired youth...."

From upstairs came the big baritone, buzzing like a gigantic bumble-bee:

"_The oath is sworn--the hosts roll on, In heart and soul thy sons are one. Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine, We'll keep our watch upon the Rhine!_"

"I tell you!" cried M. Meguet passionately, and pitching his voice so as to be heard, if possible, still more distinctly on the floor above; "France will cross the Rhine! Her hosts will inundate the soil of Germany like a vast tidal wave, and in one moment obliterate----"

Silence had prevailed above during the utterance of the above-recorded sentences. At the word "obliterate," a heavy canvas holdall dropped over the balusters of the upper landing, missing the speaker by a calculated inch; and as the ginger Tom, with an astonished curse, disappeared in the direction of the kitchen:

"_Prut!_" said the voice of Von Rosius from above, "that was an uncommonly near shave. Pray pardon," he added, appearing on the staircase, emitting volumes of smoke from his big meerschaum. "I so much regret the accident!"

He was attired in rough traveling-clothes, and wore an intensely practical woolen cap with ear-flaps, though the July night was oppressively hot. And his spectacles were inscrutable as he gathered up the boots, slippers, and clothes-brush that had escaped from the holdall, leaned the bulky brown canvas mass against the hall-wainscoting, and felt in the drawer of the rickety hatstand that never had hats on it, for the cab-whistle that was wheezy from overwork.

"It is nothing, Monsieur, you have not deranged me for an instant," returned M. Meguet, with ominously smiling bonhomie. Then refixing his late audience with his eye, he went on as though the interruption had never happened:

--"and obliterate from the face of the earth the entire German nation."

Von Rosius opened the hall-door, letting in the sultry smell of the hot street. He stood upon the threshold, and blew for a four-wheeler, one tittering, mocking trill. M. Meguet continued, quavering, and clutching his brow in the character of the terrified Hohenzollern, and imparting a tremor of agitation to his legs:

"Is it, then, to be wondered at," cries this unhappy Leopold, "that the opinion of Queen Victoria and the observations of the Czar of Russia have quickened scruples already existing in my breast? Will my royal relatives wonder that I say: _This shall not be_? The brand designed to set a world on fire has been quenched by my mother's tears, and the entreaties of my wife and infants. Let M. de Bismarck mount the Spanish Throne, and adorn his crafty temples with this crown of piercing bayonets. I withdraw from this fatal candidacy, though the whole world should say----"

M. Meguet shrugged his shoulders and struck the blow for which he had been saving himself:

--"should say what the latest edition of that admirably-informed journal, the _Evening Gazette_, quotes from this morning's edition of _Le Gaulois_:

"'_La Prusse cane!_'"

Von Rosius was standing on the threshold of the open door as the words hissed past him. Distant wheels were rumbling up the dusty cobblestones of Coram Street from, the cabstand at the corner of Russell Square

"Now, what's the English of that?" asked Mr. Ticking, rashly.

"Possibly," remarked M. Meguet, with a sardonic smile at the tall figure and broad shoulders that blocked the hall-doorway, "Herr von Rosius might be able to inform you!"

Von Rosius signaled to the driver of the approaching cab before he turned. In his rough, loosely-fitting clothes, he bulked large and menacing, though his spectacles were as inscrutable as ever, and under his light mustache his excellent teeth showed quite smilingly. He felt for money in his trousers-pocket as he answered composedly:

"With pleasure. It is a slang expression used by the blackguards of the lowest quarters of Paris. '_Cane_' is to 'back out' or to 'climb down,' as the Americans would say. Excuse me! I go to pay my bill."

He nodded slightly as he passed Ticking and Mounteney, and bestowed the same civility on P. C. Breagh. Then his heavy footsteps thundered down the kitchen staircase, from whose hatchway he emerged a few minutes later, accompanied by Mr. Knewbit, who had volunteered to help with the luggage, and this being stacked on the cab, their owner got into it, and Herr von Rosius, rigidly shaking hands with his English fellow-lodgers, and exchanging a distant salute with M. Meguet, got into the fusty vehicle and was driven away to the triumphant strains of the Marseillaise, performed by his racial antagonist on the piano appertaining to the first-floor sitting-room he had a moment previously vacated.