CHAPTER TEN
Andreas to Nikolai.
"On board the 'White Star.'
"Quiet days in the archipelago, but I cannot linger in this pleasant warmth. My whole being has to adapt itself to equatorial conditions, if you can grasp the meaning of such a daft kind of expression.
"For be it known to you, my friend, I am off to Zanzibar, not the isle of dreams peopled with cloves and palm trees, but to our consulate as attaché, where I shall have to apply myself to practical work. Is it really that the post 'happened to fall vacant' so that I, doctor of laws, could so conveniently slip into it? Or was it not, rather, that they wanted to get rid as quickly as possible of the man who had murdered the ambassador of a foreign power? I gather that I, whose poems no one in the home country has ever taken the slightest notice of, have suddenly become celebrated, and that people are interested enough in me to put themselves about in order to save me from detention in a fortress. The truth is that I am impatient to take up my job, that I am in love with my work, although the cause of my going and the place I am going to smack a little too much of the romantic.
"Meanwhile I am doing my best to keep a new work that has gripped me lately from intruding itself upon my conscious life. But it won't stay in the background all the time. It is taking shape in the form of a kind of rhapsodic trilogy, vaguely resembling certain things of Hector Berlioz's. I could give you an idea of it if you were here....
"It is horrible that my poems should have appeared just before the catastrophe; they have made a sensation and already run into several editions. Olivia has gone to the ancestral castle in Dalmatia; there was a picture of it in all the papers. Diana has disappeared without leaving a trace, spirited away from us all, and the cloak of mystery has once more fallen upon her strong young shoulders.
"The world which had always seemed to me a complicated but logical phenomenon, has become simpler, more understandable--because it is unlogical. Anyway, so far as I am concerned I cannot grasp how it happened that I should have slain that fine, able, and talented man, made Olivia a widow and Clemens an orphan, I who had no conception of bringing about all these disasters at the time I wooed and won....
"Othello has become very quiet these days. It is as if he knew all. I am a little anxious as to how he will stand the tropics. He will have to be my only muse now; no more women; no more poetry writing; only work.
"ANDREAS."
Linnartz to the Foreign Secretary.
"Sir,
"I beg to enclose a formal report on recent events. You will gather from its perusal that the catastrophe came as the logical consequence of the advent of that adventuress whose shameless flight has made it impossible for us, by delivering her over unconditionally to the local authorities, to counteract Sir Henry's and Le Chat's calumnious insinuations at the ministry here.
"Indeed, the Minister for Foreign Affairs is more incensed than ever against us because he firmly believes that we were instrumental in effecting her escape. You will see, Sir, from the report, that I did everything in my power to prevent her departure. Who is responsible for assisting this female spy to escape, neither I nor the local authorities have as yet been able to discover. The day it fell to my happy lot temporarily to take over control of affairs at the embassy, the most exemplary good order reigned in the house in spite of the very natural excitement caused by recent events. The gentlemen of the embassy were all at their posts, energetically dealing with the more pressing business, and making preparations, etc. I have treated as idle gossip the rumour that His Highness Prince Eduard ... went to see the spy at her villa early that morning; but at the same time I held it to be my duty to mention the rumour in my enclosed report.
"Putting things together, I would like to repeat, what you, Sir, will gather for yourself from my report, that Count von Münsterberg was the victim of a spy who used the so-called poet as her stalking-horse to get into the confidence of the countess (the strange behaviour of the Great Dane betrayed her machinations); that this same spy used her seductions to keep the count away from home, thereby isolating the countess and precipitating the catastrophe; and all this with a view to getting rid of the count and replacing him by a protégé of the newspaper magnate and financier Herr Scherer, whose interests make him wish to see Baron von Winterthur take over the ambassadorial post.
"Believe me, Sir, to be
"Your obedient servant, "LINNARTZ."