CHAPTER Two
It was February 1913.
In a corner of Baroness Mühlwerth's reception room, Scherer and Prince Eduard were exchanging sly digs at the crowd of sycophants assembled there. They were interrupted by a high-pitched voice belonging to a man who wore a galaxy of decorations.
"Always drawing away into corners, you big bugs in the world of finance, eh?"
Sensing that their conversation was critical of the gathering, the foreign secretary, their host, had steered his way through the throng, hoping to break the tête-à-tête, and was shaking hands effusively.
"You financiers! Incorruptible, accepting no political honours or decorations or titles, independent of this world's goods, free to have your own thoughts, a king without the incumbrance of a crown--that's what I call true twentieth-century freedom! What? Or am I to gather from the prince's ironical expression that he is challenging me to say the twenty-first century? Yes, yes," said the minister, raising his voice, for a glance in a wall mirror showed him that a group of left-wing members were standing just behind him, "a new day is dawning over Prussia, and I should indeed count myself a lucky man if I could enlist such brains as associates."
"Your Excellency is well aware," Scherer replied coldly, "that I have never placed too high a value on my business affairs, but, for the present, I am indispensable as a factor in their running smoothly."
"Unpatriotic, my friend; and in the best sense of the word, unsocial!----What do you think?" he asked, turning to the prince.
"If I may be allowed to contradict, I should say, the more unsocial the more independent in his judgment when new ideas are put to the test, those new ideas which one greets with an ironical expression!"
"You talk that way because you are the youngest of several brothers and will never have to worry about governing."
"If I'd had the misfortune to be the first-born I should not have deprived my little country of the benefit of Herr Scherer's advice by insisting that he accept a ministerial post or what not. Financiers and other imaginative spirits must not have their flights impeded by being made prisoners of office."
"Always paradoxical, and, therefore, always productive! But as far as imaginative spirits are concerned, there is one close at hand, I hear the rustling of his wings. Have you met Franklin yet, the seaman, consul, physiognomist, the Austrian poet and philosopher, that man who is talking to my wife?"
"He is laughing," said Scherer under his breath, as he fixed his eyes on the stranger.
"He's grey-haired and tanned," added the prince.
Franklin, at that moment catching sight of Scherer, stared quite openly, and a friendly expression spread down from the black eyes over the haggard cheeks and seemed to penetrate into the little pointed beard as well. He was lean and brown, like all men who spend much of their lives in the open, and looked cleverer than God could possibly have meant any mortal to be. A life of rich experience had set its marks upon his face; but the warm glow of the eyes gave the lie to any suggestion of renunciation, even where battles may have been lost.
"Ah, you are looking at Prince Eduard," said the baroness, who invariably made such false guesses. "Do you know him?"
"Is that the man next his Excellency?" came in a rich baritone from her side.
"Yes, quite near Herr Scherer."
"And who is he, if I may ask?"
"Scherer? Don't you know Scherer? Then a gem is lacking to your collection."
"A humanist?" Franklin asked himself. "Looks like a Holbein--in spite of the horn-rimmed spectacles; they seem to be an actual part of the man--and yet he's certainly a man of action. One can see that in the way he has turned to the tall young man whose mouth has such an ironical twist, and is taking leave of him with a seriousness hardly befitting the place and time...." Thus musing and observing, he quite forgot the baroness who was entertaining him, as she fondly imagined, with her clever prattle; he forgot the company he was in, all these political bigwigs, his own interests and intentions; the only thing he was aware of was this man, this stranger, whose enigmatical and reserved demeanour fascinated him, and absorbed his every faculty, so that he hardly heard his hostess taking leave of him.
Now the host himself stepped up and led him to where Scherer and the prince stood apart, introducing his three guests to one another.
"Ecco," he exclaimed after saying the three names. "An African example to confute the prince's thesis that an original mind is necessarily an unsocial mind. Or would you prefer not to hear anything about those noble things here in the sanctuary of this temple?"
"Here," said Franklin with composure, "is, rather, the manger of the priests. Anyway I shall repudiate none of my sonnets, even those I wrote years ago, which are not nearly as original as they should be."
"Proud and humble, as were ever the masters of the temple," observed the minister with false urbanity. He drifted away to another group and the three pairs of eyes followed his retreating figure with expressions varying from mockery to pity. But the trio kept their thoughts of their host to themselves.
"Did we not meet in Zanzibar?" asked Franklin, in his downright way, turning to the prince.
"Unfortunately, no! I am virgin soil so far as the equator is concerned. It must have been my brother Stefan."
"Of course; but I thought..."
Scherer was eyeing him shrewdly, and thought he detected that the questioner had deliberately confused the personality of the two brothers. But Franklin's nature was far simpler than Scherer surmised, and, even when he was making use of a ruse, he was always honest in intention. The prince's answer, however, raised a doubt in his mind, and this doubt had found speedy expression in his face. He was unhappy at his own blunder, he was unhappy at the prince's manner and tone when replying. In his embarrassment he glanced over at Scherer who immediately came to his aid:
"Then we may hope, after what you've said, for more poems from your pen in the future? Unless you trade only in coco-nuts or in royal and imperial decrees?"
His genial laughter was much to Franklin's taste, and it was merely to keep the ball rolling that he answered provocatively: "Verses only, unfortunately!"
"Why so?" retorted Scherer, still smiling.
"As a poet I am prone to overestimate the importance of commerce, just as you, a business man, obviously attach too much importance to poetry--or at least to my stuff."
"Neither yours nor any one else's," said Scherer in a more serious tone. "Everything in this world depends upon the perfection with which a sonnet is written."
"Say rather upon the perfection of a coco-nut!"
They all laughed, though not quite as heartily as their manner implied. It was as if they were nonplussed and trying to fill in an embarrassing pause. Then Scherer turned upon the prince:
"Suppose you tell us who's right? Reveal unto us the truth, O Oracle! I am all humility and attention...."
"But I am not," interpolated Franklin decisively, though in no unfriendly spirit.
"Do you hear?" laughed the prince, rising slightly on his toes. "That man is obviously in the right who defies the oracle, for he is sure of himself."
"I live among oracles," answered Franklin; "every day I put half a dozen questions or more--or maybe it's the gods I question."
"You can't escape that way," laughed Scherer, "for the prince probably traces his ancestry back to the gods, to Thor or to Wotan...."
"Not so bad," said Eduard, touched both as scion of an ancient line and as anarchist. "But such whimsies only attack the younger nobility, people who have no prospect of ascending a throne--like Lord Byron, for instance. We older stocks only count by centuries."
The prince said this with so puckish a humour that none could accuse him of arrogance. But Scherer took him up:
"Then the line passed from the gods over the nobleman's head to the poet?"
"And back from the poet to the gods," growled the prince. "Curve downwards, with a tendency to soar upwards again. Looping the loop in mythology. Herr Franklin has undoubtedly won this round!"