Part 22

A man went down under the hoofs of a wretched Rosinante. There were cries for "Police!" and spiked helmets appeared in the crowd. It surged and swayed.... The guardians of the law had drawn their cutlasses and were beating their fellow-children of the Fatherland upon their heads with the flat of these weapons, in the attempt to effect a junction between the cabs and those who wished to hire them. Thus the pressure on the flanks, ribs and breast-bone of P. C. Breagh became suffocating. Lifted from his feet, he was carried backward and forward by rushes, growing less certain of his own identity as the roaring in his ears became louder. Just as his eyelids dropped and he passed out of his own knowledge, a powerful hand caught him by the coat-collar, and a solid rampart of human flesh interposed between his lately-drifting body and the waves of the human sea that raged beyond.

Gulping, P. C. Breagh became aware that he was spread-eagled against the railings of the Palace courtyard facing the Unter den Linden, and that a big man in a loose black waterproof rain-cloak and broad-leaved black felt hat was holding to a railing on each side of him and warding off the rushes.

"Th-thanks! I'm tremendously obliged!..." he was beginning, when the swish of the cutlasses and the shrieking of the cutlassed drowned his voice. Yet another voice, masculine, resonant, and imperious, dominated all others; it cried:

"The King commands the police to sheath their swords!"

And upon the instant lull in the tumult that followed came another order:

"His Majesty has work to do for the Fatherland. Let the people disperse quietly to their homes!"

And the crowd, pacified and quieted, answered, "We will so!" in a crashing volley of Teutonic gutturals, and began to split up and move away in sections, singing "_Heil dir im Siegerkranz_" in sonorous unison. When through the Palace gates came a small and shabby brougham drawn by a venerable bay, and driven by an elderly coachman in gray-and-black livery, the sight of whose military cockade evoked another whirlwind of enthusiasm....

"Moltke! It is our Moltke!" men shouted to one another, and the old General, who sat alone in the carriage, the lean, stooping, septuagenarian in the spiked helmet, whose thin, ascetic face was rosy with suppressed excitement and whose pale blue eyes twinkled good-humoredly between their narrow lids at the seething ocean of humanity in which the shabby brougham labored, saluted in acknowledgment of the cheers.

"Moltke! Long live our Moltke! But where has Otto got to!" hiccuped an alcoholic seaman, clutching the ledge of the brougham window. He continued in the midst of a silence born of consternation: "What has become of the Big Pomeranian? We would have--hic!--carried him home shoulder-high for this week's--hic!--work he has done!"

Zealous hands dragged the presumptuous speaker back, as the venerable expert in war doffed his spiked helmet, and said, popping his auburn-wigged head out of the brougham window:

"Where Count Bismarck is needed there he will be, depend on it! Now, children, let me get back to my maps!"

"Tell us first how things are going in France yonder?" bellowed another Berliner, and the great Field-Marshal answered, pointing the jest with his keenest twinkle:

"You want to know how things are going there? Well, the wheat has suffered from the drought, but acorns and potatoes promise to be plentiful, and pumpkins will be big this year!"

And the crowd, splitting with laughter, made way for the brougham of the Chief of the General Staff, and the joke was sown broadcast over Germany before the end of half an hour. For were not Moltke's acorns the oblong, round-ended bullets of the Prussian needle-gun, as his potatoes were the shrapnel shell cast by the six-pounder steel breech-loaders designed by Krupp for the Prussian field-artillery, and the big pumpkins the seventeen-pound projectiles fired by the siege-guns of nine centimeters' bore? ...

The massive ribs that had acted as buffers between P. C. Breagh and the battering onslaughts of the crowd shook with laughter as the brougham moved on through a lane that continuously opened in the mass of bodies and closed when it had passed.... Then their owner settled the wide-leaved felt hat more firmly on his head, and said in well-bred, fluent English, turning his heavily-jowled face and powerful, fiery-blue eyes on P. C. Breagh, who was thanking him in his best German for his timely assistance:

"Do not thank me so effusively. I have a habit of sometimes saving a man's life! Yours happened to be in peril; there is no need to say more!"

The clear incisive tones had an inflection that was almost contemptuous, yet a smile, curving the heavy mustache, showed the small and well-preserved teeth it shadowed, as he added in his admirable English, fastening a button of the thin black waterproof cloak which had been disarranged in the recent struggle sufficiently to show that it covered some sort of military uniform:

"Save this,--that I happen to possess a son about your age, and should not care to lose him!"

And with this he was gone, leaving P. C. Breagh breathless with the greatness of the adventure that had befallen him. For the owner of the bulldog face with the fierce blue eyes blazing over their heavy orbital pouches, was the unpopular Minister who had been booed by the Ultramontane and Socialist students three years before, as the Berlin express-train passed through the station of Schwärz-Brettingen--the all-powerful Chancellor, who was meant when diplomats and Press leader-writers referred to "Prussia."

What did he on foot in those packed, roaring thoroughfares, where the assassin's dagger or revolver might play its part so safely? Perhaps, like the Third Napoleon, whose peacock bubble of Empire might now have reached the point of bursting, Count Bismarck believed in his fortunate star....

Ah! what was that round bright object lying on the pavement? P. C. Breagh, still dazed with the magnitude of the thing that had befallen him, stooped and picked, it up.

It was a medal of silver, with the Prussian Eagle enameled in red upon the obverse, and a name which left no doubt as to the identity of P. C. Breagh's rescuer. Upon, the reverse was the inscription: "_Fur Rettung aus Gefahr_"--"For Saving From Danger." With the date of the 24th June, 1842....

No doubt the Chancellor prized this, the decoration earned at twenty-four for saving his orderly-groom and another private from drowning, when serving as _Landwehr_ cavalry officer with the Stargaard Regiment of Hussars. Well, he should have it back,--but into no hands but his would P. C. Breagh surrender it,--P. C. Breagh, who had been cast out with mockery from the editorial offices of one daily and two evening newspapers, when he had offered--at a rate of astounding cheapness,--to supply their columns with material drawn from the experiences of one who had never previously enjoyed an opportunity of seeing the thing called War.

One Editor had dealt with him drastically, pitching his card into the waste-paper basket, and saying, "No! Get out with you!" A second had whistled up a tube and called down a sub-editor, and said to him, "Look at this!" The third had preached a brief but pithy sermon on presumption and cocksureness, winding up with the intimation that if P. C. Breagh ever found himself at the seat of war and in possession of any experiences worth recording, he might submit them for consideration if he chose.

These men would never know it, but they were profoundly humiliated. At least one of them had lost a half-column, striking the note of personal adventure to the clink of shekels of fine gold. As for Mr. Knewbit ... P. C. Breagh could almost hear him chuckling--had only to shut his eyes to see the poker, sketching out headings on the Coram Street kitchen wall:

"ADVENTURE OF YOUNG ENGLISHMAN.

WAR CORRESPONDENT IN BERLIN.

CRUSHED BY THE CROWD.

RESCUED BY BISMARCK.

THE IRON HAND SAVES A LIFE!"

Meanwhile, the medal had to be returned to the hands of its owner, who must, P. C. Breagh was firm on that!--consent to receive it from the hands of the finder, if he wanted it back again. P. C. Breagh knew the Foreign Office, in the Wilhelm Strasse--the shabbiest residence in all that street of official palaces--with its high-pitched, red-tiled Mansard roof, its shabby gray stuccoed front (a main building with two short wings, pierced by twelve windows, and decorated with a sham-Hellenic frieze and shallow pilasters),--and its big, park-like garden stretching away behind.

So, clutching the precious token, P. C. Breagh plunged back into the crowd. It was dense, but no longer solid, and, still lustily singing, with intervals of cheering, it bore him down the Linden as far as the Brandenburg Gate.

There it split into three vociferating rivers of humanity. One of which streamed north-westward toward the offices of the Great General Staff, where Moltke, the ancient war-wizard, was busy over his maps! Another, desirous of refreshment, surged onward in the direction of the Thiergarten. The third flowed down the street of palaces, and with it went P. C. Breagh.

XVIII

The Foreign Office knocker was a colossal funereal wreath, of sooty bronze laurel, that wakened hollow startling echoes in the tomb-like void of a grim stone vestibule.

The vestibule lay at the end of a glass-roofed passage. On the right was a window, behind the window gleamed an eye, belonging to the Chancery janitor who had manipulated the door-levers. The door banged behind P. C. Breagh, and his hope climbed a central flight of stairs, gray-white marble, with bronze balusters badly in need of cleaning. The staircase was covered with worn Turkey carpet, was lighted from above by a green and gold cupola, and guarded by two conventional figures of sphinxes, carved in shiny blackish stone.

All these details the eye of P. C. Breagh gleaned over the arm of the Chancellor's door-porter, a seven-foot East Prussian, who wore plain black official livery and carried no gold-headed staff, yet would have snubbed the Rector of the University of Schwärz-Brettingen had he presented himself in this unceremonious way.

"What does he want? The young man must know that His Excellency the Royal Chancellor of the North German Confederation is engaged upon State business--not to be approached by strangers having no appointments or credentials previously obtained. An introduction to His Excellency is indispensable. Where has the young man lived that he does not know that?"

To which the young man thus addressed could only reiterate that he deeply regretted the absence of a letter of introduction, and that his credentials could only be displayed to His Excellency himself.

"It is likely!" The porter's forehead corrugated with suspicion: "Thus is he approached by lunatics and dangerous persons, armed with crazy petitions or lethal weap----"

"Bosh!"

The English word made the porter leap in his square-toed, steel-buckled half-shoes. Recklessly P. C. Breagh went on:

"I'm neither a lunatic nor an assassin... It's just a case of _Rettung aus Gefahr_. Two lives saved in the year 1842, and another less than an hour ago.... Send that message to His Excellency, and he'll see me, I believe!"

"He believes!" ... snorted the porter indignantly.

A little, stooping, shabbily dressed old man in a chocolate-colored frock-coat with gilt buttons came shuffling across the vestibule carrying a handful of papers, telegrams they appeared to be. He had paused to listen to the latter part of the colloquy, holding his head on one side, as though the better to focus his sharp gray glance on the dusty, obtrusive young Englishman crowned with a sun-burnt Oxford straw hat, attired in a well-worn brown Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers and heather-mixture woolen stockings, and shod with stout, black, leather-laced, hob-nailed boots.

"He believes!" exclaimed the porter as though referring to the chocolate-coated old gentleman. "Will not the highly well-born Herr Legation-Councillor order that I summon Grams and Engelberg, and have this presumptuous person thrown into the street?"

"Softly, softly, my good Niederstedt!" advised the little chocolate-coated old gentleman. He added, shuffling forward in his immense black cloth boots over the slippery marble pavement of the vestibule: "It has occurred to me that an utterance of this young man's referred to an article that has been lost by His Excellency." He added, fixing his sharp, gray, jackdaw's eyes on the face of the young man: "Not valuable, but worth recovering--purely as a memento of the past!..."

Said Carolan bluntly:

"I did refer to such an article. In fact, I have it on me!"

A finger and thumb, stained with snuff, dipped into the Councillor's waistcoat pocket. He said, secretly conveying an order to the watchful porter with a twirl of one jackdaw-eye:

"For a couple of thalers," he displayed the coin, "a box of smokable cigars may be purchased in Berlin." He added, having cast for a bite, and missing the rise: "Four thalers secures a really excellent article!"

"Certainly," agreed P. C. Breagh.

"But for ten thalers," continued the old gentleman with forced enthusiasm, coaxingly beckoning P. C. Breagh to approach nearer, "one may smoke the choicest Havana brands. Give me the medal, fortunate young man, and take the money. Such a sum is not often picked up in the street!"

Said the young man, thus adjured, thrusting out his square chin obstinately:

"If His Excellency consents to receive me, I will personally return the medal to him. Be good enough to let him know as much."

"Unhappy young man! you realize not the greatness of your own presumption!" expostulated the old gentleman, lifting up his warty eyelids and puffing out his whiskered cheeks over his old-fashioned black satin stock. "Is the Chancellor of the Realm to be--and at a national crisis such as this?--at the beck and call of every English traveler?" He added with warmth: "For I know you to be of that nation, young man, though you speak German with some approach to facility. Hence! Trouble here no more, but give me that medal before you take your departure. Otherwise you will be forcibly relieved of it by the hands of those who are accustomed to deal with bumptious and obstinately-authority-defying persons of your description...."

He added, as the arms of P. C. Breagh were pinioned in an iron grip that clamped the elbows together behind the shoulder-blades, drew his arms down, and pinioned his wrists: "He, he, he! That was a capital stratagem of yours, my excellent Niederstedt! Really very smartly done!"

The grim, sable-clad porter, in whose huge hands P. C. Breagh vainly struggled, relaxed into a smile at the compliment. He said, as from different points two stalwart liveried attendants appeared, hastening to lend assistance:

"One has not served in the Prussian Guards for nothing. Once a soldier, always a soldier! Will the highly well-born Herr Legation-Councillor order Grams and Engelberg to hold this English pig-dog while I take His Excellency's medal out of the fellow's clothes?"

Snarled P. C. Breagh, livid with rage and glaring at the hostile faces like a young male tiger-cat:

"Add robbery to violence if you think well!--you are four to one--and in your own country. But as an English journalist I protest against the outrage.... And the British Ambassador shall take the matter up!"

There was an instant's pause of indecision, during which P. C. Breagh heard the opening of a door on the landing above. Then, with the rustle of silk, and the soft fall of footsteps traversing heavy carpets, a resonant voice called down the stair that led up between the basalt Sphinxes:

"Meanwhile, you will allow me to apologize for the too-excessive zeal of my servants. Do me the favor to come up here!"

The grip of the giant porter became flaccid as an infant's. The voice spoke again from the summit of the stair:

"Herr Legation-Councillor, will you kindly see Madame to her carriage? Au revoir, Madame, et bon voyage!"

A liquid voice responded:

"_Au revoir, Monseigneur_! At Paris--who knows!--before the Noël!"

She pulled down her veil, curtsied with demure elegance, and came softly rustling down in pale-hued, trailing silks and laces, one snow-white hand blazing with splendid emeralds lightly passing over the bronze baluster-rail, the other holding the ivory and jeweled stick of a dainty parasol.

"Madame!"

As by an afterthought he had called her. Midway in her descent the lady turned to look up at him. He said, bending his powerful eyes upon the face of sensuous loveliness:

"Pardon! but I believe--you are a native of France?"

The hint stung. She returned, with the stain of an angry blush darkening the roses purchased from Rimmel; and a hard line showing from the angle of each delicate nostril to the corner of the deep-cut, scarlet lips:

"Monseigneur is correct ... I am a Frenchwoman.... But the heart is free to choose its own country.... And--mine has learned to beat for the Fatherland!..."

So exquisite was the cadence with which the words were uttered, that P. C. Breagh heaved an involuntary sigh. The Legation-Councillor took snuff--it may have been his way of showing emotion. The huge porter sighed like a locomotive blowing off steam. His colleagues, who, like himself, stood waiting in rigid military attitudes, suffered no sympathy to appear in their wooden faces, yet may have felt the more. But the heavy mask of their master was divested of all expression.

"Even," said he, in his clear, resonant voice, "to the point of outdoing Agamemnon, King of Argos. For he--but doubtless you are familiar with the classic story!--merely sacrificed Iphigeneia on the altar of the virginal Artemis...." He added with a tone of intolerable irony: "It would have required fewer scruples and more toughness than Agamemnon possessed to have offered up an only daughter to Venus Libertina.... Only a woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy.... Pardon! but you have dropped your parasol!"

She had shuddered and winced as though his words had been vitriol,--dropped from above--corroding her delicate flesh.... The costly toy had fallen from her hand as the shudder had passed over her, and rolled down the stair, as she continued her descent. P. C. Breagh picked it up and handed it to her, as she set foot upon the lowest step of the staircase. She looked at him, and bent her head. And the beauty that had been hers a moment back was so strangely, bleakly altered, he could scarcely repress an exclamation of dismay.

Thus Circe might have stared, thought P. C. Breagh, when her feeding hogs leaped up as men frantic for vengeance. Thus Duessa, when the spotted image of her own vileness was reflected in the glassy shield of Truth.

The change in the boy's face stabbed Madame to consciousness. She caught at her mauve tulle veil, forgetful that it was already lowered, and tore it horizontally, so that her full white rounded chin emerged with fantastic effect, like the moon through a bank of storm-wrack. And then, with her head held high, she swept through the vestibule in a frou-frou of silks and a gale of perfume, and down the passage ending in the hall-door with the funereal knocker. The Legation-Councillor trotted after her. One of the servants followed him, and P. C. Breagh, mounting the staircase between the Sphinxes, reached the landing and the summit of his ambitions in a breath.

"Time is scarce!" said the man who was meant when Prime Ministers and political leader-writers referred to Prussia. "I have no more than five minutes to spare, but you shall have them. Come this way! So you are an English journalist! What paper do you represent, here in Berlin? Sit down and tell me in as few words as possible!"

They were in a small but lofty room on the first-floor, hung with green flock paper. It had a fireplace as well as a stove, and it was a study, yet it contained no bookcases, only a couple of shelved stands laden with pamphlets and papers of the official kind. The two high windows--open and unblinded, though the green-shaded reading-lamp upon the big carved mahogany writing-table was alight--looked across the extensive gardens reaching to the Königgratzer-Strasse. Beyond lay the Thiergarten, all black with masses of people under the sultry red-gold sunset of middle July.

Perhaps you can see--like Scaramouch and the Sultan in the Eastern story--P. C. Breagh, hot and dusty, flushed and rumpled, seated opposite the most formidable personage of the day. He who dictated to Kings and carried his Foreign Office trailing after him whenever he chose to go campaigning, stood upon the skin of a white lioness that served as hearthrug, and bit off the end of a huge cigar. He looked bulkier than ever, and the powerful modeling of his scant-haired temples, the splendid dome of the skull that housed the keenest intellect in Europe, the masterful regard of the great eyes, the sarcastic humor of the mouth shaded by the heavy mustache--traits and features reproduced so constantly in the illustrated newspapers of the period,--conveyed to Carolan the impression that a portrait moved and spoke.

He was attired, as usually represented, in a dark blue, braided military undress-frock, and trousers tightly strapped over boots with cavalry spurs. An Order hung at his collar. As he threw back his head in the act of lighting his cigar, P. C. Breagh recognized it--the Cross of a Commander of the Red Eagle. While on the left breast of the blue frock-coat was a small three-cornered rent in the cloth from which the lost medal had been somehow wrenched away....

The sight of that tear in the dark blue-faced cloth sent the blood racing to P. C. Breagh's forehead. He knew himself for a presumptuous young man. He plunged his hand into the pocket of the brown Norfolk jacket, and brought out the red-and-white enameled decoration, and said, awkwardly laying it upon the edge of the big writing-table, in the yellow radius thrown by the lighted lamp:

"I found this after Your Excellency had gone!"

"Hand it here!" said the heavy blue eyes imperiously. P. C. Breagh got up and obeyed. The Chancellor's long arm shot out, and the muscular white fingers whipped the medal from the palm that offered it. Its owner assured himself by a brief scrutiny that the token had sustained no injury, nodded, and re-pinned it on the breast of his frogged military frock-coat. When this was accomplished,--the small solution in the continuity of the cloth being covered by the decoration,--he said, taking the cigar from his mouth, and knocking off the long crisp ash upon the edge of the white earthenware stove:

"I should have been sorry to have lost that. But, while thanking you for having restored it, let me say that had my servants taken it from you by _force majeure_ they would not have been robbing you,--though in law they might have been held guilty of a personal assault. Now as to your business. You have had one of your five minutes! You have just now said you are an English journalist. Does your business concern the War?"

P. C. Breagh stammered--for the heavy eyes that rested on him seemed to oppress him physically:

"To be frank with Your Excellency, I represent no newspaper. I have some slight experience as a journalist, that is all,--War Correspondence seems to me the highest branch of journalism,--and I want, naturally, to fit myself to practice it. Therefore, as no newspaper would employ me, I accepted a private commission given, out of good-nature, by a friend, who has helped me before. And--my first day in Berlin--I fell in with Your Excellency. I won't deny it seemed a hopeful augury!"

"For the future! ... I understand!" said the Chancellor, sending out a long cloud of cigar-smoke. "And in what way do you suggest that I should help you?"