Part 18
"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.
"'Prussia climbs down,'" murmured Mr. Knewbit, standing before the inscription on the kitchen distemper. "With the 'and on her 'elm that she 'as----" he went on shedding "h's," as was his way when deeply meditative, "I should doubt the correctness of that report. Still, I shall advise Maria to keep them first-floor apartments vacant a day or two--in case Mr. von Rosius's mother doesn't want him after all.... What does Solomon say? '_Designs are strengthened by counsels, and wars are to be managed by Governments._'"
The kettle was boiling madly, and a volume of steam was issuing from the pipe-bowl. Mr. Knewbit rescued the blackened briar-root, mechanically filled it, and looked for a light.
There was a crumpled pale green paper lying near his boot upon the worn linoleum. He picked it up, and saw that it was a cablegram issued by the North German Submarine Telegraph Company, addressed to Von Rosius, and containing a message of four words:
"_Lanze inden Schuh, Uhlan! Hauptquartier, Berlin._"
"Now, which shall I do?" asked Mr. Knewbit, scanning the baffling foreign words written in the familiar English characters. Torn between conscientious scruples and a characteristic thirst for information, the little man was pitiable to see. "Which shall I do?" he repeated. "Use this here for a pipe-light--or show it to my young shaver upstairs?"
Deciding on the latter course, he climbed to the attic rented by the young shaver, and knocked at the door.
"Come in! ... I'm not working to-night," said P. C. Breagh out of the darkness. Upon Mr. Knewbit's striking a match, the young man, who was leaning back in his chair before the venerable davenport, contemplating the dusk oblong of starry sky visible above the chimney-pots of Bernard Street, shook himself free of thought as a setter shakes off water, and got up.
"Feel out of sorts?" asked Mr. Knewbit, burning his fingers, and striking another match as he bustled to the single bracket over the narrow wooden mantelshelf and lighted the gas. "Anything wrong?"
"I feel out of the swim," said P. C. Breagh, sitting down again astride his chair, and cupping his square chin in a fist that had ink-smears on it, as he stared at the wobbling blue flame that presently spread itself into a yellow fan of radiance, "and hipped and beastly. I've no right to quarrel with my bread-and-butter, but I'm doing it to-night. The fact that I'm a Nobody doesn't prevent me from wanting to wind up as Somebody. Putting the case roughly, that's what's wrong."
"This here house," said Mr. Knewbit in his pouncing manner, "belonged to a man who was a Nobody, if you like. A Master Seaman, who used to tramp it to his ship at Wapping, and pick up the outcast babies lying in the kennels, and roll 'em in his big boat-cloak and carry 'em home. Them foundlings was nobodies--yet two of 'em lived to be Lord Mayors of London. Old Captain Coram, who founded the Hospital, died neglected and forgotten, but nobody looking at his tomb in the Chapel yonder will deny he wound up as Somebody at last!"
P. C. Breagh yawned hugely and rumpled his hair discontentedly.
"The chap you're talking of was a philanthropist, and I want--I'm not ashamed to want--to build a career for myself instead of founding a charity-school. I want--your own talk has made me want!--to get out of this little squirrel-cage--even though there are nuts and sugar and bread in it all the year round. And"--his scowl was portentous--"if this Hohenzollern hadn't backed out of the Spanish Crown affair, when France cockadoodled, and there had been a racket on the Rhine frontier--I'd just have rummaged round to find an editor who'd be ass enough to pay a raw hand for letters sent from the seat of hostilities--and if I couldn't have found one--and of course I couldn't--when seasoned men are as plentiful as nutshells in the Adelphi gallery--I'd have gone to the war as a camp-follower--and got experience that way!"
Said Mr. Knewbit, turning and scanning the resolute, dogged young face, with black eyes that twinkled like jet beads:
"I don't agree with you that seasoned Correspondents are plentiful. There are thousands who're ready to sit in an office behind the Compositors' Room, and write eyewitnesses' accounts of thrilling charges. But them that are ready to go out with a Permit and get attached to a Staff; them that are ready and willing to march with an Army on the War path--starve when there are no rations, lie in the fields in the sopping rain when no roof's to be had to cover 'em--write accounts of the day's fighting under shell-fire, and cheerfully get killed if a bullet comes their way in the course o' things!--you can't call the journalistic profession overstocked with them. If you do, just name me one such man for each finger of these two big hands of mine. I defy you to, so there!"
They were very big hands, and as Mr. Knewbit held them up side by side, with the palms toward his young shaver, they not undistantly resembled a pair of decent-sized flatfish.
"To become a man like one of these--and they're the Pick of the British Nation," said Mr. Knewbit, "you must be pitched into the midst of things neck and crop, and left to sink or swim. I compliment you when I say that I believe you one of the swimming kind. Now, supposing War broke out after all--how much Hard Cash would you want to carry you through a Campaign?"
"I've got five pounds put away in the Post-Office Savings Bank," returned P. C. Breagh, after a moment's mental calculation, "and I believe I could manage if I had another fifteen."
"Making Twenty Pound," said Mr. Knewbit, biting a finger thoughtfully. He threw the finger out at P. C. Breagh, and his black eyes twinkled more than ever. "For Fifteen Pound down would you undertake to write and send home to the person advancing you the money, for--say four weeks (that'd give two nations comfortable time to have it out and settle their differences in a Christian-like manner, with a little burning of powder, and bloodshed)--three letters per week, describing in a style readable by plain, ordinary, everyday people--what you've seen, and heard--and felt--and smelt--don't forget that!" said Mr. Knewbit, shaking his finger warningly at P. C. Breagh, "on the march, or in the bivouac, or while the fighting was going on?"
P. C. Breagh would have broken in here, but the held-up finger stopped him on the verge of utterance:
"Avoid sham Technicality," said Mr. Knewbit sternly. "Don't let me have stuff like: '_Sir--On the morning of the --th the Field-Marshal von Blitherem--or General Parlezvous--shifted the left wing of his Division nearer to his center, and shortly after nine o 'clock the forces under command of What'shisname and Thingummy began to move in column of so and so. A light 'aze lay upon the fields--the droppin' fire of the enemy's Artillery made itself felt at the Advance Posts nor' and nor'-west._' Nor don't you ladle me out sentimental slumgullion, after the fashion of--'_All is Peace, while I pen these 'asty lines and sip my morning coffee. Yet ere the radiant beams of Sol will have dried the pearly dew from these smiling fields, the 'ideous roar of cannon and the withering burst of shrapnel will have devastated and blighted Nature's choicest 'andiwork, and Man, that noblest work of the Creative Power--will be engaged in the 'orrible task of destroying fellow-men wrought in the image of hisself._' For the Lord is a Man of War--according to the Scriptures," said Mr. Knewbit, ignoring P. C. Breagh's amusement. "And it is written that He shall overthrow Kingdoms and break the scepters of Kings, and cause that nations shall be swallowed up in nations." He added, with a sharp change to his business tone, "And bad or good, these letters of yours are mine, to burn or print as I think fit and necessary? All right! I'll draw up a little agreement--and whenever you choose to sign it--there's your Fifteen Pounds.--Lord! to think I should live to send out a Special Correspondent, all to my own cheek! It's--a--a luxury I should never have anticipated."
"The Correspondent won't be much use without a war to correspond about," said Carolan, growing weary of Mr. Knewbit's humor. "And I suppose there won't be one now."