CHAPTER XXIX. THE STRANGE GUEST

The Eil Wagen, into whose bowels I had committed myself on leaving Frankfort, rolled along for twenty-four hours before I could come to any determination as to whither I should go; for so is it that perfect liberty is sometimes rather an inconvenience, and a little despotism is now and then no bad thing; and at this moment I could have given a ten- gulden piece to any one who should have named my road, and settled my destination.

‘Where are we?’ said I, at length, as we straggled, nine horses and all, into a great vaulted _porte cochère_.

‘At the “Koenig von Preussen,” mein Herr,’ said a yellow-haired waiter, who flourished a napkin about him in truly professional style.

‘Ah, very true; but in what town, city, or village, and in whose kingdom?’

‘Ach, du lieber Gott!’ exclaimed he, with his eyes opened to their fullest extent. ‘Where would you be but in the city of Hesse-Cassel, in the Grand-Duchy of Seiner Königlichen Hoheit-----’

‘Enough, more than enough! Let me have supper.’

The Speisesaal was crowded with travellers and townspeople as I entered; but the room was of great size, and a goodly table, amply provided, occupied the middle of it. Taking my place at this, I went ahead through the sliced shoe-leather, yclept beef, the Kalbs-braten and the Gurken- salat, and all the other indigestible abominations of that light meal a German takes before he lies down at night. The company were, with the exception of a few military men, of that nondescript class every German town abounds with--a large-headed, long-haired, plodding-looking generation, with huge side-pockets in their trousers, from one of which a cherry-wood pipe-stick is sure to project; civil, obliging, good sort of people they are, but by no means remarkable for intelligence or agreeability. But then, what mind could emerge from beneath twelve solid inches of beetroot and bouilli, and what brain could bear immersion in Bavarian beer?

One never can understand fully how atrocious the tyranny of Napoleon must have been in Germany, until he has visited that country and seen something of its inhabitants; then only can one compute what must the hurricane have been that convulsed the waters of such a landlocked bay. Never was there a people so little disposed to compete with their rulers, never was obedience more thoroughly an instinct. The whole philosophy of the German’s mind teaches him to look within rather than without; his own resources are more his object in life than the enjoyment of state privileges, and to his peaceful temper endurance is a pleasanter remedy than resistance. Almost a Turk in his love of tranquillity, he has no sympathy with revolutions or public disturbances of any kind, and the provocation must indeed be great when he arouses himself to resist it. That when he is thus called on he can act with energy and vigour, the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 abundantly testify. Twice the French armies had to experience the heavy retribution on unjust invasion. Both Spain and Germany repaid the injuries they had endured, but with a characteristic difference of spirit. In the one case it was the desultory attacks of savage guerillas, animated by the love of plunder as much as by patriotism; in the other, the rising of a great people to defend their homes and altars, presented the glorious spectacle of a nation going forth to the fight. The wild notes of the Basque bugle rang not out with such soul-stirring effects as the beautiful songs of Körner, heard beside the watch-fire or at the peasant’s hearth. The conduct of their own princes might have debased the national spirit of any other people; but the German’s attachment to Fatherland is not a thing of courtly rule nor conventional agreement. He loves the land and the literature of his fathers; he is proud of the good faith and honesty which are the acknowledged traits of Saxon character; he holds to the ‘sittliche Leben,’ the orderly domestic habits of his country; and as he wages not a war of aggression on others, he resists the spoliation of an enemy on the fields of his native country.

When the French revolution fire broke out, the students were amongst its most ardent admirers; the destruction of the Bastile was celebrated among the secret festivals of the Burschenschaft; and although the fever was a brief one, and never extended among the more thinking portion of the nation, to that same enthusiasm for liberty was owing the great burst of national energy which in 1813 convulsed the land from the Baltic to the Tyrol, and made Leipsic the compensation for Jena.

With all his grandeur of intellect, Napoleon never understood the national character--perhaps he may have despised it. One of his most fatal errors, undoubtedly, was the little importance he attached to the traits which distinguish one country from another, and the seeming indifference with which he propounded notions of government diametrically opposed to all the traditions and prejudices of those for whom they were intended. The great desire for centralisation; the ambition to make France the heart of Europe, through whose impulse the life-blood should circulate over the entire Continent; to merge all distinctions of race and origin, and make Frenchmen of one quarter of the globe--was a stupendous idea, and if nations were enrolled in armies, might not be impossible. The effort to effect it, however, cost him the greatest throne of Christendom.

The French rule in Spain, in Italy, and in Holland, so far from conciliating the good-will and affection of the people, has sown the seeds of that hatred to France in each of these countries that a century will not eradicate; while no greater evidence of Napoleon’s ignorance of national character need be adduced than in the expectations he indulged in the event of his landing an army in England. His calculation on support from any part of the British people--no matter how opposed to the ministry of the day, or how extreme in their wishes for extended liberties--was the most chimerical thought that ever entered the brain of man. Very little knowledge of our country might have taught him that the differences of party spirit never survive the mere threat of foreign invasion; that however Englishmen may oppose one another, they reserve a very different spirit of resistance for the stranger who should attack their common country; and that party, however it may array men in opposite ranks, is itself but the evidence of patriotism, seeking different paths for its development.

It was at the close of a little reverie to this purpose that I found myself sitting with one other guest at the long table of the Speisesaal; the rest had dropped off one by one, leaving him in the calm enjoyment of his meerschaum and his cup of black coffee. There was something striking in the air and appearance of this man, and I could not help regarding him closely; he was about fifty years of age, but with a carriage as erect and a step as firm as any man of twenty. A large white moustache met his whiskers of the same colour, and hung in heavy curl over his upper lip; his forehead was high and narrow, and his eyes, deeply set, were of a greenish hue, and shaded by large eyebrows that met when he frowned. His dress was a black frock, braided in Prussian taste and decorated by a single cordon, which hung not over the breast, but on an empty sleeve of his coat, for I now perceived that he had lost his right arm near the shoulder. That he was a soldier and had seen service, the most careless observer could have detected; his very look and bearing bespoke the _militaire_. He never spoke to any one during supper, and from that circumstance, as well as his dissimilarity to the others, I judged him to be a traveller. There are times when one is more than usually disposed to let Fancy take the bit in her mouth and run off with them; and so I suffered myself to weave a story, or rather a dozen stories, for my companion, and did not perceive that while I was inventing a history for him he had most ungratefully decamped, leaving me in a cloud of tobacco-smoke and difficult conjectures.

When I descended to the Saal the next morning I found him there before me; he was seated at breakfast before one of the windows, which commanded a view over the platz and the distant mountains. And here let me ask, Have you ever been in Hesse-Cassel? The chances are, not. It is the highroad--nowhere. You neither pass it going to Berlin or Dresden. There is no wonder of scenery or art to attract strangers to it; and yet if accident should bring you thither, and plant you in the ‘König von Preussen,’ with no pressing necessity urging you onward, there are many less pleasant things you could do than spend a week there. The hotel stands on one side of a great platz, or square, at either side of which the theatre and a museum form the other two wings; the fourth being left free of building, is occupied by a massive railing of most laboured tracery, which opens to a wide gate in a broad flight of steps, descending about seventy feet into a spacious park. The tall elms and beech-trees can be seen waving their tops over the grille above, and seeming, from the platz, like young timber; beyond, and many miles away, can be seen the bold chain of the Taunus Mountains stretching to the clouds, forming altogether a view which for extent and splendour I know no city that can present the equal. I could scarce restrain my admiration; and as I stood actually riveted to the spot, I was totally inattentive to the second summons of the waiter, informing me that my breakfast awaited me in another part of the room.

‘What, yonder?’ said I, in some disappointment at being so far removed from all chance of the prospect.

‘Perhaps you would join me here, sir,’ said the officer, rising, and with a most affable air saluting me.

‘If not an intrusion----’

‘By no means,’ said he. ‘I am a passionate admirer of that view myself. I have known it many years, and I always feel happy when a stranger participates in my enjoyment of it.’

I confess I was no less gratified by the opportunity thus presented of forming an acquaintance with the officer himself than with the scenery, and I took my seat with much pleasure. As we chatted away about the town and the surrounding country, he half expressed a curiosity at my taking a route so little travelled by my countrymen, and seemed much amused by my confession that the matter was purely accidental, and that frequently I left the destination of my ramble to the halting-place of the diligence. As English eccentricity can, in a foreigner’s estimation, carry any amount of absurdity, he did not set me down for a madman-- which, had I been French or Italian, he most certainly would have done-- and only smiled slightly at my efforts to defend a procedure in his eyes so ludicrous.

‘You confess,’ said I, at last, somewhat nettled by the indifference with which he heard my most sapient arguments--‘you confess on what mere casualties every event of life turns, what straws decide the whole destiny of a man, and what mere trivial circumstances influence the fate of whole nations, and how in our wisest and most matured plans some unexpected contingency is ever arising to disconcert and disarrange us; why, then, not go a step farther--leave more to fate, and reserve all our efforts to behave well and sensibly, wherever we may be placed, in whatever situations thrown? As we shall then have fewer disappointments, we shall also enjoy a more equable frame of mind, to combat with the world’s chances.’

‘True, if a man were to lead a life of idleness, such a wayward course might possibly suffice him as well as any other; but, bethink you, it is not thus men have wrought great deeds, and won high names for themselves. It is not by fickleness and caprice, by indolent yielding to the accident of the hour, that reputations have been acquired----’

‘You speak,’ said I, interrupting him at this place--‘you speak as if humble men like myself were to occupy their place in history, and not lie down in the dust of the churchyard undistinguishable and forgotten.’

‘When they cease to act otherwise than to deserve commemoration, rely upon it their course is a false one. Our conscience may be--indeed often is--a bribed judge; and it is only by representing to ourselves how our modes of acting and thinking would tell upon the minds of others, reading of but not knowing us, that we arrive at that certain rule of right so difficult in many worldly trials.

‘And do you think a man becomes happier by this?’

‘I did not say happier,’ said he, with a sorrowful emphasis on the last word. ‘He may be better.’

With that he rose from his seat, and looking at his watch he apologised for leaving me so suddenly, and departed.

‘Who is the gentleman that has just gone out?’ asked I of the waiter.

‘The Baron von Elgenheim,’ replied he; ‘but they mostly call him the Black Colonel. Not for his moustaches,’ added he, laughing with true German familiarity, ‘they are white enough, but he always wears mourning.’

‘Does he belong to Hesse, then?’

‘Not he; he’s an Auslander of some sort--a Swabian, belike; but he comes here every year, and stays three or four weeks at a time. And, droll enough too, though he has been doing so for fifteen or sixteen years, he has not a single acquaintance in all Cassel; indeed, I never saw him speak to a stranger till this morning.’

These particulars, few as they were, all stimulated my curiosity to see more of the colonel; but he did not present himself at the table d’hôte on that day or the following one, and I only met him by chance in the Park, when a formal salute, given with cold politeness, seemed to say our acquaintance was at an end.

Now, there are certain inns which by a strange magnetism are felt as homes at once; there is a certain air of quietude and repose about them that strikes you when you enter, and which gains on you every hour of your stay. The landlord, too, has a bearing compounded of cordiality and respect; and the waiter, divining your tastes and partialities, falls quickly into your ways, and seems to regard you as an _habitué_ while you are yet a stranger; while the ringleted young lady at the bar, who passed you the first day on the stairs with a well-practised indifference, now accosts you with a smile and a curtsy, and already believes you an old acquaintance.

To an indolent man like myself, these houses are impossible to leave. If it be summer, you are sure to have a fresh bouquet in your bedroom every morning when you awake; in winter, the _garçon_ has discovered how you like your slippers toasted on the fender, and your _robe de chambre_ airing on the chair; the cook learns your taste in cutlets, and knows to a nicety how to season your _omelette aux fines herbes_; the very washerwoman of the establishment has counted the plaits in your shirt, and wouldn’t put one more or less for any bribery. By degrees, too, you become a kind of confidant of the whole household. The host tells you of ma’mselle’s fortune, and the match on the tapis for her, and all the difficulties and advantages, contra and pro; the waiter has revealed to you a secret of passion for the chambermaid, but for which he would be Heaven knows how many thousand miles off, in some wonderful place, where the wages would enable him to retire in less than a twelvemonth; and even Boots, while depositing your Wellingtons before the fire, has unburdened his sorrows and his hopes, and asks your advice, ‘if he shouldn’t become a soldier?’ When this hour arrives, the house is your own. Let what will happen, _your_ fire burns brightly in your bedroom; let who will come, _your_ dinner is cared for to a miracle. The newspaper, coveted by a dozen and eagerly asked for, is laid by for your reading; you are, then, in the poets words--

‘Liber, honoratus, pulcher--Rex denique Regum’;

and let me tell you, there are worse sovereignties.

Apply this to the ‘König von Preussen,’ and wonder not if I found myself its inhabitant for three weeks afterwards.