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ROYAL HIGHNESS

Translated from the German of
THOMAS MANN
by A. Cecil Curtis

GROSSET & DUNLAP
Publishers
by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf

COPYRIGHT, 1909, S. FISCHER, VERLAG

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

PRELUDE

The scene is the Albrechtstrasse, the main artery of the capital, which runs from Albrechtsplatz and the Old Schloss to the barracks of the Fusiliers of the Guard. The time is noon on an ordinary week-day; the season of the year does not matter. The weather is fair to moderate. It is not raining, but the sky is not clear; it is a uniform light grey, uninteresting and sombre, and the street lies in a dull and sober light which robs it of all mystery, all individuality. There is a moderate amount of traffic, without much noise and crowd, corresponding to the not over-busy character of the town. Tram-cars glide past, a cab or two rolls by, along the pavement stroll a few residents, colourless folk, passers-by, the public—“people.”

Two officers, their hands in the slanting pockets of their grey great-coats, approach each other; a general and a lieutenant. The general is coming from the Schloss, the lieutenant from the direction of the barracks. The lieutenant is quite young, a mere stripling, little more than a child. He has narrow shoulders, dark hair, and the wide cheek-bones so common in this part of the world, blue rather tired-looking eyes, and a boyish face with a kind but reserved expression. The general has snow-white hair, is tall and broad-shouldered, altogether a commanding figure. His eyebrows look like cotton-wool, and his moustache hangs right down over his mouth and chin. He walks with slow deliberation, his sword rattles on the asphalt, his plume flutters in the wind, and at every step he takes the big red lapel of his coat flaps slowly up and down.

And so these two draw near each other. Can this rencontre lead to any complication? Impossible. Every observer can foresee the course this meeting will naturally take. We have on one side and the other age and youth, authority and obedience, years of services and docile apprenticeship—a mighty hierarchical gulf, rules and prescriptions, separate the two. Natural organization, take thy course! And, instead, what happens? Instead, the following surprising, painful, delightful, and topsy-turvy scene occurs.

The general, noticing the young lieutenant's approach, alters his bearing in a surprising manner. He draws himself up, yet at the same time seems to get smaller. He tones down with a jerk, so to speak, the splendour of his appearance, stops the clatter of his sword, and, while his face assumes a cross and embarrassed expression, he obviously cannot make up his mind where to turn his eyes, and tries to conceal the fact by staring from under his cotton-wool eyebrows at the asphalt straight in front of him.

The young lieutenant too betrays to the careful observer some slight embarrassment, which however, strange to say, he seems to succeed, better than the grey-haired general, in cloaking with a certain grace and self-command. The tension of his mouth is relaxed into a smile at once modest and genial, and his eyes are directed with a quiet and self-possessed calm, seemingly without an effort, over the general's shoulder and beyond.

By now they have come within three paces of each other. And, instead of the prescribed salute, the young lieutenant throws his head slightly back, at the same time draws his right hand—only his right, mark you—out of his coat-pocket and makes with this same white-gloved right hand a little encouraging and condescending movement, just opening the fingers with palm upwards, nothing more. But the general, who has awaited this sign with his arms to his sides, raises his hand to his helmet, steps aside, bows, making a half-circle as if to leave the pavement free, and deferentially greets the lieutenant with reddening cheeks and honest modest eyes. Thereupon the lieutenant, his hand to his cap, answers the respectful greeting of his superior officer—answers it with a look of child-like friendliness; answers it—and goes on his way.

A miracle! A freak of fancy! He goes on his way. People look at him, but he looks at nobody, looks straight ahead through the crowd, with something of the air of a woman who knows that she is being looked at. People greet him; he returns the greeting, heartily and yet distantly. He seems not to walk very easily; it looks as if he were not much accustomed to the use of his legs, or as if the general attention he excites bothers him, so irregular and hesitating is his gait; indeed, at times he seems to limp. A policeman springs to attention, a smart woman, coming out of a shop, smiles and curtseys. People turn round to look at him, nudge each other, stare at him, and softly whisper his name….

It is Klaus Heinrich, the younger brother of Albrecht II, and heir presumptive to the throne. There he goes, he is still in view. Known and yet a stranger, he moves among the crowd—people all around him, and yet as if alone. He goes on his lonely way and carries on his narrow shoulders the burden of his Highness!

I
THE CONSTRICTION

Artillery salvos were fired when the various new-fangled means of communication in the capital spread the news that the Grand Duchess Dorothea had given birth to a prince for the second time at Grimmburg. Seventy-two rounds resounded through the town and surrounding country, fired by the military in the walls of the “Citadel.” Directly afterwards the fire brigade also, not to be outdone, fired with the town salute-guns; but in their firing there were long pauses between each round, which caused much merriment among the populace.

The Grimmburg looked down from the top of a woody hill on the picturesque little town of the same name, which mirrored its grey sloping roofs in the river which flowed past it. It could be reached from the capital in half an hour by a local railway which paid no dividends. There the castle stood, the proud creation of the Margrave Klaus Grimmbart, the founder of the reigning house in the dim mists of history, since then several times rejuvenated and repaired, fitted with the comforts of the changing times, always kept in a habitable state and held in peculiar honour as the ancestral seat of the ruling house, the cradle of the dynasty. For it was a rule and tradition of the house that all direct descendants of the Margrave, every child of the reigning couple, must be born there.

This tradition could not be ignored. The country had had sophisticated and unbelieving sovereigns, who had laughed at it, and yet had complied with it with a shrug of the shoulders. It was now much too late to break away from it whether it was reasonable and enlightened or not: why, without any particular necessity, break with an honoured custom, which had managed somehow to perpetuate itself? The people were convinced that there was something in it. Twice in the course of fifteen generations had children of reigning sovereigns, owing to some chance or other, first seen the light in other schlosses: each had come to an unnatural and disgraceful end. But all the sovereigns of the land and their brothers and sisters, from Henry the Confessor and John the Headstrong, with their lovely and proud sisters, down to Albrecht, the father of the Grand Duke, and the Grand Duke himself, Johann Albrecht III, had been brought into the world in the castle; and there, six years before, Dorothea had given birth to her firstborn, the Heir Apparent.

The castle was also a retreat as dignified as it was peaceful. The coolness of its rooms, the shady charms of its surroundings, made it preferable as a summer residence to the stiff Hollerbrunn. The ascent from the town, up a rather badly paved street between shabby cottages and a scrubby wall, through massive gates to the ancient ruin at the entrance to the castle-yard, in the middle of which stood the statue of Klaus Grimmbart, the founder, was picturesque but tiring. But a noble park spread at the back of the castle hill, through which easy paths led up into the wooded and gently-swelling uplands, offering ideal opportunities for carriage drives and quiet strolls.

As for the inside of the castle, it had been last subjected at the beginning of the reign of Johann Albrecht III to a thorough clean-up and redecoration—at a cost which had evoked much comment. The furniture of the living-rooms had been completed and renewed in a style at once baronial and comfortable; the escutcheons in the “Hall of Justice” had been carefully restored to their original pattern. The gilding of the intricate patterns on the vaulted ceilings looked fresh and cheerful, all the rooms had been fitted with parquet, and both the larger and the smaller banqueting-halls had been adorned with huge wall-paintings from the brush of Professor von Lindemann, a distinguished Academician, representing scenes from the history of the reigning House executed in a clear and smooth style which was far removed from and quite unaffected by the restless tendencies of modern schools. Nothing was wanting. As the old chimneys of the castle and its many-coloured stoves, reaching tier upon tier right up to the ceiling, were no longer fit to use, anthracite stoves had been installed in view of the possibility of the place being used as a residence during the winter.

But the day of the seventy-two salvos fell in the best time of the year, late spring, early summer, the beginning of June, soon after Whitsuntide. Johann Albrecht, who had been early informed by telegram that the labour had begun just before dawn, reached Grimmburg Station by the bankrupt local railway at eight o'clock, where he was greeted with congratulations by three or four dignitaries, the mayor, the judge, the rector, and the town physician. He at once drove to the castle. The Grand Duke was accompanied by Minister of State, Dr. Baron Knobelsdorff, and Adjutant-General of Infantry, Count Schmettern. Shortly afterwards two or three more ministers arrived at the royal residence, the Court Chaplin Dom Wislezenus, President of the High Consistory, one or two Court officials, and a still younger Adjutant, Captain von Lichterloh. Although the Grand Duke's Physician-in-Ordinary, Surgeon-General Dr. Eschrich, was attending the mother, Johann Albrecht had been seized with the whim of requiring the young local doctor, a Doctor Sammet, who was of Jewish extraction into the bargain, to accompany him to the castle. The unassuming, hard-working, and earnest man, who had as much as he could do and was not in the least expecting any such distinction, stammered “Quite delighted … quite delighted” several times over, thus provoking some amusement.

The Grand Duchess's bedroom was the “Bride-chamber,” a five-cornered, brightly painted room on the first floor, through whose window a fine view could be obtained of woods, hills, and the windings of the river. It was decorated with a frieze of medallion-shaped portraits, likenesses of royal brides who had slept there in the olden days of the family history.

There lay Dorothea; a broad piece of webbing was tied round the foot of her bed, to which she clung like a child playing at horses, while convulsions shook her lovely frame. Doctor Gnadebusch, the midwife, a gentle and learned woman with small fine hands and brown eyes, which wore a look of mystery behind her round, thick spectacles, was supporting the Duchess, while she said:

“Steady, steady, your Royal Highness…. It will soon be over. It's quite easy…. Just once more … that's nothing…. Rest a bit: knees apart…. Keep your chin down….”

A nurse, dressed like her in white linen, helped too, and moved lightly about with phials and bandages during the pauses. The Physician-in-Ordinary, a gloomy man with a greyish beard, whose left eyelid seemed to droop, superintended the birth. He wore his operating-coat over his surgeon-general's uniform. From time to time there peeped into the room, to ascertain the progress of the confinement, Dorothea's trusty Mistress of the Robes, Baroness von Schulenburg-Tressen, a corpulent and asthmatic woman of distinctly dragoon-like appearance, who nevertheless liked to display a generous expanse of neck and shoulders at the court balls. She kissed her mistress's hand and went back to an adjoining room, in which a couple of thin ladies-in-waiting were chatting with the Grand Duchess's Chamberlain-in-Waiting, a Count Windisch. Dr. Sammet, who had thrown his linen coat like a domino over his dress-coat, was waiting modestly and attentively by the washstand.

Johann Albrecht sat in a neighbouring room used as a study, which was separated from the “Bride-chamber” only by a so-called powder closet and a passage-room. It was called the library, in view of several manuscript folios, which lay slanting in the massive book-shelves and contained the history of the castle. The room was furnished as a writing-room. Globes adorned the walls. The strong wind from the hills blew through the open bow-window. The Grand Duke had ordered tea, and the groom of the chamber, Prahl, had himself brought the tray; but it was standing forgotten on the leaf of the desk, and Johann Albrecht was pacing the room from one corner to the other in a restless, uncomfortable frame of mind. His top-boots kept creaking as he walked. His aide-de-camp, von Lichterloh, listened to the noise, as he waited patiently in the almost bare passage-room.

The Minister, the Adjutant-General, the Court Chaplain, and the Court officials, nine or ten in all, were waiting in the state-room on the ground floor. They wandered through the larger and the smaller banqueting-halls, where trophies of banners and weapons hung between Lindemann's pictures. They leaned against the slender pillars, which spread into brightly coloured vaulting above their heads. They stood before the narrow, ceiling-high windows, and looked out through the leaded panes over river and town; they sat on the stone benches which ran round the walls, or on seats before the stoves, whose Gothic tops were supported by ridiculous little stooping imps of stone. The bright sunlight made the gold lace on the uniforms, the orders on the padded chests, the broad gold stripes on the trousers of the dignitaries glisten.

The conversation flagged. Three-cornered hats and white-gloved hands were constantly being raised to mouths which opened convulsively. Nearly everybody had tears in his eyes. Several had not had time to get any breakfast. Some sought entertainment in a timid examination of the operating-instruments and the round leather-cased chloroform jar, which Surgeon-General Eschrich had left there in case of emergency. After von Bühl zu Bühl, the Lord Marshal, a powerful man with mincing manners, brown toupée, gold-rimmed pince-nez, and long, yellow fingernails, had told several anecdotes in his quick, jerky way, he dropped into an armchair, in which he made use of his gift of being able to sleep with his eyes open—of losing consciousness of time and place while retaining a steady gaze and alert attitude, and in no way imperilling the dignity of the situation.

Dr. von Schröder, Minister of Finance and Agriculture, had had a conversation earlier in the day with the Minister of State, Dr. Baron Knobelsdorff, Minister of Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, and the Grand Ducal Household. It was a spasmodic chat, which began with a discussion on art, went on to financial and economic questions, alluded, somewhat disapprovingly, to a High Court official, and did not leave even the most exalted personages out of account. It began with the two men standing, with their hats in their hands behind their backs, in front of one of the pictures in the larger banqueting-hall, each of them thinking more than he said. The Finance Minister said: “And this? What's this? What's happening? Your Excellency is so well informed.”

“Merely superficially. It is the investiture of two Grand princes of the blood by their uncle, the Emperor. As your Excellency can see, the two young men are kneeling and taking the oath with great solemnity on the Emperor's sword.”

“Fine, extraordinarily fine! What colouring! Dazzling. What lovely golden hair the princes have! And the Emperor … exactly as he is described in the books! Yes, that Lindemann well deserves all the distinctions which have been given him.”

“Absolutely. Those which have been given him; those he quite deserves.”

Dr. von Schröder, a tall man with a white beard, a pair of thin gold spectacles on his white nose, a belly protruding slightly underneath his stomach, and a bull-neck, which lapped over the stiff collar of his coat, looked, without taking his eyes off the picture, somewhat doubtfully at it, under the influence of a diffidence which seized him from time to time during conversations with the baron. This Knobelsdorff, this favourite and exalted functionary, was so enigmatical. At times his remarks, his retorts, had an indefinable tinge of irony about them. He was a widely travelled man, he had been all over the world, he had so much general knowledge, and interests of such a strange and exotic kind. And yet he was a model of correctness. Herr von Schröder could not quite understand him. However much one agreed with him, it was impossible to feel that one really understood him. His opinions were full of a mysterious reserve, his judgments of a tolerance which left one wondering whether they implied approval or contempt.

But the most suspicious thing about him was his laugh, a laugh of the eyes in which the mouth took no part, a laugh which seemed to be produced by the wrinkles radiating from the corners of his eyes, or vice versa to have produced those same wrinkles in the course of years. Baron Knobelsdorff was younger than the Finance Minister; he was then in the prime of life, although his close-trimmed moustache and hair smoothly parted in the middle were already beginning to turn grey—for the rest a squat, short-necked man, obviously pinched by the collar of his heavily-laced court dress. He left Herr von Schröder to his perplexity for a minute, and then went on: “Only perhaps it might be to the interests of a prudent administration of the Privy Purse if the distinguished professor had rested content with stars and titles … to speak bluntly, what may all these delightful works of art have cost?”

Herr von Schröder recovered his animation. The desire, the hope of understanding the Baron, of getting on to intimate and confidential terms with him, excited him. “Just what I was thinking!” said he, turning round to resume his walk through the galleries. “Your Excellency has taken the question out of my mouth. I wonder what this ‘Investiture’ cost, and all the rest of these wall-pictures. For the restoration of the castle six years ago cost a million altogether.”

“At least that.”

“A solid million! And that amount was audited and approved by Lord Marshal von Bühl zu Bühl, who is sitting yonder in a state of comfortable catalepsy—audited, approved, and disbursed by the Keeper of the Privy Purse, Count Trümmerhauff.”

“Disbursed, or owing!”

“One of the two!… This total, I say, debited to a fund, a fund …”

“In a word, the fund of the Grand Ducal settled estates.”

“Your Excellency knows as well as I what that means. No, it makes me run cold…. I swear I am neither a skin-flint nor a hypochondriac, but it makes me run cold when I think of a man, with present conditions staring him in the face, coolly throwing a million away—on what? On a nothing, a pretty whim, on the beautification of the family schloss in which his babies have to be born….”

Herr von Knobelsdorff laughed. “Yes, Heaven knows romance is a luxury, and a mighty expensive one too! Excellency, I agree with you—of course. But consider, after all the whole trouble in the Grand Ducal finances is due to this same romantic luxury. The root of the evil lies in the fact that the ruling dynasty are farmers; their capital consists in land and soil, their income in agricultural profits. At the present day…. They have not been able up to the present to make up their minds to turn into industrialists and financiers. They allow themselves with regrettable obstinacy to be swayed by certain obsolete and idealistic conceptions, such as, for instance, the conceptions of trust and dignity. The royal property is hampered by a trust entailed in fact. Advantageous alienations are barred. Mortgages, the raising of capital on credit for commercial improvements, seem to them improper. The administration is seriously hindered in the free exploitation of business opportunities—by ideas of dignity. You'll forgive me, won't you? I'm telling you the absolute truth. People who pay so much attention to propriety as these of course cannot and will not keep pace with the freer and less hampered initiative of less obstinate and unpractical business people. Now then, what, in comparison with this negative luxury, does the positive million signify, which has been sacrificed to a pretty whim, to borrow your Excellency's expression? If it only stopped there! But we have the regular expenses of a fairly dignified Court to meet. There are the schlosses and their parks to keep up, Hollerbrunn, Monbrillant, Jägerpreis, aren't there? The Hermitage, Delphinenort, the Pheasantry, and the others…. I had forgotten Schloss Zegenhaus and the Haderstein ruins … not to mention the Old Schloss…. They are not well kept up, but they all cost money…. There are the Court Theatre, the Picture Gallery, the Library, to maintain. There are a hundred pensions to pay,—no legal compulsion to pay them, but motives of trust and dignity. And look at the princely way in which the Grand Duke behaved at the time of the last floods…. But I'm preaching you a regular sermon!”

“A sermon,” said the Minister of Finance, “which your Excellency thought would shock me, while you really only confirmed my own view. Dear Baron”—here Herr von Schröder laid his hand on his heart,—“I am convinced that there is no longer room for any misunderstanding as to my opinion, my loyal opinion, between you and me. The King can do no wrong…. The sovereign is beyond the reach of reproaches. But here we have to do with a default … in both senses of the word!… a default which I have no hesitation in laying at the door of Count Trümmerhauff. His predecessors may be pardoned for having concealed from their sovereigns the true state of the Court finances; in those days nothing else was expected of them. But Count Trümmerhauff's attitude now is not pardonable. In his position as Keeper of the Privy Purse he ought to have felt it incumbent on him to put a brake on his Highness's thoughtlessness, to feel it incumbent on him now to open his Royal Highness's eyes relentlessly to the facts …”

Herr Knobelsdorff knitted his brows and laughed.

“Really?” said he. “So your Excellency is of the opinion that that is what the Count was appointed for! I can picture to myself the justifiable astonishment of his lordship, if you lay before him your view of the position. No, no … your Excellency need be under no delusion; that appointment was a quite deliberate expression of his wishes on the part of his Royal Highness, which the Count must be the first to respect. It expressed not only an ‘I don't know,’ but also an ‘I won't know.’ A man may be an exclusively decorative personality and yet be acute enough to grasp this…. Besides … honestly … we've all of us grasped it. And the only grain of comfort for all of us is this: that there isn't a prince alive to whom it would be more fatal to mention his debts than to his Royal Highness. Our Prince has a something about him which would stop any tactless remarks of that sort before they were spoken …”

“Quite true, quite true,” said Herr von Schröder. He sighed and stroked thoughtfully the swansdown trimming of his hat. The two men were sitting, half turned towards each other, on a raised window seat in a roomy niche, past which a narrow stone corridor ran outside, a kind of gallery, through the pointed arches of which peeps of the town could be seen. Herr von Schröder went on:

“You answer me, Baron; one would think you were contradicting me, and yet your words show more incredulity and bitterness than my own.”

Herr von Knobelsdorff said nothing, but made a vague gesture of assent.

“It may be so,” said the Finance Minister, and nodded gloomily at his hat. “Your Excellency may be quite right. Perhaps we are all blameworthy, we and our forefathers too. But it ought to have been stopped. For consider, Baron; ten years ago an opportunity offered itself of putting the finances of the Court on a sound footing, on a better footing anyhow, if you like. It was lost. We understand each other. The Grand Duke, attractive man that he is, had it then in his power to clear things up by a marriage which from a sound point of view might have been called dazzling. Instead of that … speaking not for myself, of course, but I shall never forget the disgust on everybody's faces when they mentioned the amount of the dowry…”

“The Grand Duchess,” said Herr von Knobelsdorff, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes disappeared almost entirely, “is one of the handsomest women I have ever seen.”

“That is an answer one would expect of your Excellency. It's an æsthetic answer, an answer which would have held quite as good if his Royal Highness's choice, like his brother Lambert's, had fallen on a member of the royal ballet.”

“Oh, there was no danger of that. The Prince's taste is a fastidious one, as he has shown. He has always shown in his wants the antithesis to that want of taste which Prince Lambert has shown all his life. It was a long time before he made up his mind to marry. Everybody had given up all hope of a direct heir to the throne. They were resigned for better or worse to Prince Lambert, whose … unsuitability to be heir to the throne we need not discuss. Then, a few weeks after he had succeeded, Johann Albrecht met Princess Dorothea, cried, “This one or none!” and the Grand Duchy had its sovereign lady. Your Excellency mentioned the thoughtful looks which were exchanged when the figures of the dowry were published,—you did not mention the jubilation which at the same time prevailed. A poor princess, to be sure. But is beauty, such beauty, a power of happiness or not? Never shall I forget her entry! Her first smile, as it lighted on the gazing crowds, won their love. Your Excellency must allow me to profess once more my belief in the idealism of the people. The people want to see their best, their highest, their dream, what stands for their soul, represented in their princes—not their money bags. There are others to represent those….”

“That's just what there are not; just what we have not got.”

“The more's the pity, then. The main point is, Dorothea has presented us with an Heir Apparent.”

“To whom may Heaven grant some idea of figures!”

“I agree.”

At this point the conversation between the two Ministers ceased. It was broken off by the announcement by aide-de-camp von Lichterloh, of the happy issue of the confinement. The smaller banqueting-hall was soon filled with officials. One of the great carved doors was quickly thrown open, and the aide-de-camp appeared in the hall. He had a red face, blue soldier's eyes, a bristling flaxen moustache, and silver lace on his collar. He looked somewhat excited, like a man who had been released from deadly boredom and was primed with good news. Conscious of the unusualness of the occasion, he boldly ignored the rules of decorum and etiquette. He saluted the company gaily, and, spreading his elbows, raised the hilt of his sword almost to his breast crying: “Beg leave to announce: a prince!”

“Good!” said Adjutant-General Count Schmettern.

“Delightful, quite delightful, I call that perfectly delightful!” said Lord Marshal von Bühl zu Bühl in his jerky way; he had recovered consciousness at once.

The President of the High Consistory, Dom Wislezenus—a clean-shaven, well-built man, who, as a son of a general, and thanks to his personal distinction, had attained to his high dignity at a comparatively early age, and on whose black silk gown hung the star of an Order—folded his white hands on his breast, and said in a melodious voice, “God bless his Grand Ducal Highness!”

“You forget, Captain,” said Herr von Knobelsdorff, laughing, “that in making your announcement you are encroaching on my privileges and province. Until I have made the most searching investigations into the state of affairs, the question whether it is a prince or a princess remains undecided.”

The others laughed, and Herr von Lichterloh replied: “As you wish, your Excellency! Then I have the honour to beg your Excellency to assume this most important charge….”

This dialogue referred to the attributes of the Minister of State, as registrar of the Grand Ducal house, in which capacity he was required to satisfy himself with his own eyes of the sex of the princely offspring and to make an official declaration on the subject. Herr von Knobelsdorff complied with this formality in the so-called powder-closet in which the new-born babe was bathed. He stayed longer there, however, than he had intended to, as he was puzzled and arrested by a painful sight, which at first he mentioned to nobody except the midwife.

Doctor Gnadebusch showed him the child, and her eyes, gleaming mysteriously behind her thick spectacles, travelled between the Minister of State and the little copper-coloured creature, as it groped about with one—only one—little hand, as if she was saying: “Is it all right?”

It was all right. Herr von Knobelsdorff was satisfied, and the wise woman wrapped the child up again. But even then she continued to look down at the Prince and then up at the Baron, until she had drawn his eyes to the point to which she wished to attract them. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes disappeared, he knit his brows, tried, compared, felt, examined for two or three minutes, and at last asked: “Has the Grand Duke yet seen it?”

“No, Excellency.”

“When the Grand Duke sees it,” said Herr von Knobelsdorff, “tell him that he will grow out of it.”

And to the others on the ground-floor he reported—“A splendid prince!”

But ten or fifteen minutes after him the Grand Duke also made the disagreeable discovery,—that was unavoidable, and resulted for Surgeon-General Eschrich in a short, extremely unpleasant scene, but for the Grimmburg Doctor Sammet in an interview with the Grand Duke which raised him considerably in the latter's estimation and was useful to him in his subsequent career. What happened was briefly as follows:

After the birth Johann Albrecht had again retired to the library, and then returned to sit for some time at the bedside with his wife's hand in his. Thereupon he went into the “powder-closet,” where the infant now lay in his high, richly gilded cradle, half covered with a blue silk curtain, and sat down in an armchair by the side of his little son. But while he sat and watched the sleeping infant it happened that he noticed what it was hoped that he would not notice yet. He drew the counterpane back, his face clouded over, and then he did exactly what Herr von Knobelsdorff had done before him, looked from Doctor Gnadebusch to the nurse and back again, both of whom said nothing, cast one glance at the half-open door into the bride-chamber, and stalked excitedly back into the library.

Here he at once rang the silver eagle-topped bell which stood on the writing-table, and said to Herr von Lichterloh, who came in, very curtly and coldly: “I require Herr Eschrich.”

When the Grand Duke was angry with any member of his suite, he was wont to strip the culprit for the moment of all his titles and dignities, and to leave him nothing but his bare name.

The aide-de-camp again clapped his spurs and heels together and withdrew. Johann Albrecht strode once or twice in a rage up and down the room, and then, hearing Herr von Lichterloh bring the person he had summoned into the ante-room, adopted an audience attitude at his writing-table.

As he stood there, his head turned imperiously in half-profile, his left hand planted on his hip, drawing back his satin-fronted frock coat from his white waistcoat, he exactly resembled his portrait by Professor von Lindemann, which hung beside the big looking-glass over the mantelpiece in the “Hall of the Twelve Months” in the Town Schloss, opposite the portrait of Dorothea, and of which countless engravings, photographs, and picture postcards had been published. The only difference was that Johann Albrecht in the portrait seemed to be of heroic stature, while he really was scarcely of medium height. His forehead was high where his hair had receded, and from under his grey eyebrows, his blue eyes looked out, with dark rings round them, giving them an expression of tired haughtiness. He had the broad, rather too high cheek-bones which were a characteristic of his people. His whiskers and the soft tuft on his chin were grey, his moustache almost white. From the distended nostrils of his small but well-arched nose, two unusually deep furrows ran down to his chin. The lemon-coloured ribbon of the Family Order always showed in the opening of his waistcoat. In his buttonhole the Grand Duke wore a carnation.

Surgeon-General Eschrich entered with a low bow. He had taken off his operating-coat. His eyelid drooped more heavily than usual over his eye. He looked apprehensive and uncomfortable.

The Grand Duke, his left hand on his hip, threw his head back, stretched out his right hand and waved it, palm upwards, several times up and down impatiently.

“I am awaiting an explanation, a justification, Surgeon-General,” said he, with a voice trembling with irritation. “You will have the goodness to answer my questions. What is the matter with the child's arm?”

The Physician-in-Ordinary raised his hand a little—a feeble gesture of impotence and blamelessness. He said:

“An it please Your Royal Highness…. An unfortunate occurrence. Unfavourable circumstances during the pregnancy of her Royal Highness….”

“That's all nonsense!” The Grand Duke was so much excited that he did not wish for any justification, in fact he would not allow one. “I would remind you, sir, that I am beside myself. Unfortunate occurrence! It was your business to take precautions against unfortunate occurrences….”

The Surgeon-General stood with half-bowed head and, sinking his voice to a submissive tone, addressed the ground at his feet.

“I humbly beg to be allowed to remind you that I, at least, am not alone responsible. Privy Councillor Grasanger—an authority on gynæcology—examined her Royal Highness. But nobody can be held responsible in this case….”

“Nobody … Really! I permit myself to make you responsible…. You are answerable to me…. You were in charge during the pregnancy, you superintended the confinement. I have relied on the knowledge to be expected from your rank, Surgeon-General, I have trusted to your experience. I am bitterly disappointed, bitterly disappointed. All that your skill can boast of is … that a crippled child has been born….”

“Would your Royal Highness graciously weigh …”

“I have weighed. I have weighed and found wanting. Thank you!”

Surgeon-General Eschrich retired backwards, bowing. In the ante-room he shrugged his shoulders, while his cheeks glowed.

The Grand Duke again fell to pacing the library in his princely wrath, unreasonable, misinformed, and foolish in his loneliness. However, whether it was that he wished to humiliate the Physician-in-Ordinary still further, or that he regretted having robbed himself of any explanations—ten minutes later the unexpected happened, and the Grand Duke sent Herr von Lichterloh to summon young Doctor Sammet to the library.

The doctor, when he received the message, again said: “Quite delighted … quite delighted, …” and at first changed colour a little, then composed himself admirably. It is true that he was not a complete master of the prescribed etiquette, and bowed too soon, while he was still in the door, so that the aide-de-camp could not close it behind him, and had to ask him in a whisper to move forward; but afterwards he stood in an easy and unconstrained attitude, and gave reassuring answers, although he showed that he was naturally rather slow of speech, beginning his sentences with hesitating noises and frequently interspersing them with a “Yes,” as if to confirm what he was saying. He wore his dark yellow hair cut en brosse and his moustache untrimmed. His chin and cheeks were clean-shaved, and rather sore from it. He carried his head a little on one side, and the gaze of his grey eyes told of shrewdness and practical goodness. His nose, which was too broad at the bottom, pointed to his origin. He wore a black tie, and his shiny boots were of a country cut. He kept his elbows close to his side, with one hand on his silver watch-chain. His whole appearance suggested candour and professional skill; it inspired confidence.

The Grand Duke addressed him unusually graciously, rather in the manner of a teacher who has been scolding a naughty boy, and turns to another with a sudden assumption of mildness.

“I have sent for you, doctor…. I want information from you about this peculiarity in the body of the new-born prince…. I assume that it has not escaped your notice…. I am confronted with a riddle … an extremely painful riddle…. In a word, I desire your opinion.” And the Grand Duke, changing his position, ended with a gracious motion of the hand, which encouraged the doctor to speak.

Dr. Sammet looked at him silently and attentively, as if waiting till the Grand Duke had completely regained his princely composure. Then he said: “Yes; we have here to do with a case which is not of very common occurrence, but which is well known and familiar to us. Yes. It is actually a case of atrophy …”

“Excuse me … atrophy …?”

“Forgive me, Royal Highness. I mean stunted growth. Yes.”

“I see, stunted growth. Stunting. That's it. The left hand is stunted. But it's unheard of! I cannot understand it! Such a thing has never happened in my family! People talk nowadays about heredity.”

Again the doctor looked silently and attentively at the lonely and domineering man, to whom the news had only just penetrated that people were talking lately about heredity. He answered simply: “Pardon me, Royal Highness, but in this case there can be no question of heredity.”

“Really! You're quite sure!” said the Grand Duke rather mockingly. “That is one satisfaction. But will you be so kind as to tell me what there can be a question of, then.”

“With pleasure, Royal Highness. The cause of the malformation is entirely a mechanical one. It has been caused through a mechanical constriction during the development of the embryo. We call such malformations constriction-formations, yes.”

The Grand Duke listened with anxious disgust; he obviously feared the effect of each succeeding word on his sensitiveness. He kept his brows knit and his mouth open: the two furrows running down to his beard seemed deeper than ever. He said: “Constriction-formations, … but how in the world … I am quite sure every precaution must have been taken …”

“Constriction-formations,” answered Dr. Sammet, “can occur in various ways. But we can say with comparative certainty that in our case … in this case it is the amnion which is to blame.”

“I beg your pardon…. The amnion?”

“That is one of the fœtal membranes, Royal Highness. Yes. And in certain circumstances the removal of this membrane from the embryo may be retarded and proceed so slowly that threads and cords are left stretching from one to the other … amniotic threads as we call them, yes. These threads may be dangerous, for they can bind and knot themselves round the whole of a child's limb; they can entirely intercept, for instance, the life-ducts of a hand and even amputate it. Yes.”

“Great heavens … amputate it. So we must be thankful that it has not come to an amputation of the hand?”

“That might have happened. Yes. But all that has happened is an unfastening, resulting in an atrophy.”

“And that could not be discovered, foreseen, prevented?”

“No, Royal Highness. Absolutely not. It is quite certain that no blame whatever attaches to anybody. Such constrictions do their work in secret. We are powerless against them. Yes.”

“And the malformation is incurable? The hand will remain stunted?”

Dr. Sammet hesitated; he looked kindly at the Grand Duke.

“It will never be quite normal, certainly not,” he said cautiously. “But the stunted hand will grow a little larger than it is at present, oh yes, it assuredly will …”

“Will he be able to use it? For instance … to hold his reins or to make gestures, like any one else?…”

“Use it … a little…. Perhaps not much. And he's got his right hand, that's all right.”

“Will it be very obvious?” asked the Grand Duke, and scanned Dr. Sammet's face earnestly. “Very noticeable? Will it detract much from his general appearance, think you?”

“Many people,” answered Dr. Sammet evasively, “live and work under greater disadvantages. Yes.”

The Grand Duke turned away, and walked once up and down the room. Dr. Sammet deferentially made way for him, and withdrew towards the door. At last the Grand Duke resumed his position at the writing-table and said: “I have now heard what I wanted to know, doctor; I thank you for your report. You understand your business, no doubt about that. Why do you live in Grimmburg? Why do you not practise in the capital?”

“I am still young, Royal Highness, and before I devote myself to practising as a specialist in the capital I should like a few years of really varied practice, of general experience and research. A country town like Grimmburg affords the best opportunity of that. Yes.”

“Very sound, very admirable of you. In what do you propose to specialise later on?”

“In the diseases of children, Royal Highness. I intend to be a children's doctor, yes.”

“You are a Jew?” asked the Grand Duke, throwing back his head and screwing up his eyes.

“Yes, Royal Highness.”

“Ah—will you answer me one more question? Have you ever found your origin to stand in your way, a drawback in your professional career? I ask as a ruler, who is especially concerned that the principle of ‘equal chances for all’ shall hold good unconditionally and privately, not only officially.”

“Everybody in the Grand Duchy,” answered Dr. Sammet, “has the right to work.” But he did not stop there: moving his elbows like a pair of short wings, in an awkward, impassioned way, he made a few hesitating noises, and then added in a restrained but eager voice: “No principle of equalization, if I may be allowed to remark, will ever prevent the incidence in the life of the community of exceptional and abnormal men who are distinguished from the bourgeois by their nobleness or infamy. It is the duty of the individual not to concern himself as to the precise nature of the distinction between him and the common herd, but to see what is the essential in that distinction and to recognize that it imposes on him an exceptional obligation towards society. A man is at an advantage, not at a disadvantage, compared with the regular and therefore complacent majority, if he has one motive more than they to extraordinary exertions. Yes, yes,” repeated Dr. Sammet. The double affirmative was meant to confirm his answer.

“Good … not bad; very remarkable, anyhow,” said the Grand Duke judicially. He found Dr. Sammet's words suggestive, though somewhat off the point. He dismissed the young man with the words: “Well, doctor, my time is limited. I thank you. This interview—apart from its painful occasion—has much reassured me. I have the pleasure of bestowing on you the Albrecht Cross of the Third Class with Crown. I shall remember you. Thank you.”

This was what passed between the Grimmburg doctor and the Grand Duke. Shortly after Johann Albrecht left the castle and returned by special train to the capital, chiefly to show himself to the rejoicing populace, but also in order to give several audiences in the palace. It was arranged that he should return in the evening to the castle, and take up his residence there for the next few weeks.

All those present at the confinement at Grimmburg who did not belong to the Grand Duchess's suite were also accommodated in the special train of the bankrupt local railway, some of them travelling in the Sovereign's own saloon. But the Grand Duke drove from the castle to the station alone with von Knobelsdorff, the Minister of State, in an open landau, one of the brown Court carriages with the little golden crown on the door. The white feathers in the hats of the chasseurs in front fluttered in the summer breeze. Johann Albrecht was grave and silent on the journey; he seemed to be worried and morose. And although Herr von Knobelsdorff knew that the Grand Duke, even in private, disliked anybody addressing him unasked and uninvited, yet at last he made up his mind to break the silence.

“Your Royal Highness,” he said deprecatingly, “seems to take so much to heart the little anomaly which has been discovered in the Prince's body, … and yet one would think that on a day like this the reasons for joy and proud thankfulness so far outweigh …”

“My dear Knobelsdorff,” replied Johann Albrecht, with some irritation and almost in tears, “you must forgive my ill-humour; you surely do not wish me to be in good spirits. I can see no reason for being so. The Grand Duchess is going on well—true enough, and the child is a boy—that's a blessing too. But he has come into the world with an atrophy, a constriction, caused by amniotic threads. Nobody is to blame, it is a misfortune; but misfortunes for which nobody is to blame are the most terrible of all misfortunes, and the sight of their Sovereign ought to awaken in his people other feelings than those of sympathy. The Heir Apparent is delicate, needs constant care. It was a miracle that he survived that attack of pleurisy two years ago, and it will be nothing less than a miracle if he lives to attain his majority. Now Heaven grants me a second son—he seems strong, but he comes into the world with only one hand. The other is stunted, useless, a deformity, he will have to hide it. What a drawback! What an impediment! He will have to brave it out before the world all his life. We must let it gradually leak out, so that it may not cause too much of a shock on his first appearance in public. No, I cannot yet get over it. A prince with one hand …”

“‘With one hand,’” said Herr von Knobelsdorff. “Did your Royal Highness use that expression twice deliberately?”

“Deliberately?”

“You did not, then?… For the Prince has two hands, yet as one is stunted, one might if one liked also describe him as a prince with one hand.”

“What then?”

“And one must almost wish, not that your Royal Highness's second son, but that the heir to the throne were the victim of this small malformation.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Why, your Royal Highness will laugh at me; but I am thinking of the gipsy woman.”

“The gipsy woman? Please go on, my dear Baron!”

“Of the gipsy woman—forgive me!—who a hundred years ago prophesied the birth of a Prince to your Royal Highness's house—a prince ‘with one hand’—that is how tradition puts it—and attached to the birth of that prince a certain promise, couched in peculiar terms.”

The Grand Duke turned on his seat and stared, without saying a word, at Herr von Knobelsdorff, at the outer corner of whose eyes the radiating wrinkles were playing. Then, “Mighty entertaining!” he said, and resumed his former attitude.

“Prophecies,” continued Herr von Knobelsdorff, “generally come true to this extent, that circumstances arise which one can interpret, if one has a mind to, in their sense. And the broadness of the terms in which every proper prophecy is couched makes this all the more easy. ‘With one hand’—that is regular oracle-style. What has actually happened is a moderate case of atrophy. But that much counts for a good deal, for what is there to prevent me, what is there to prevent the people, from assuming the whole by this partial fulfilment, and declaring that the conditional part of the prophecy has been fulfilled? The people will do so; if not at once, at any rate if the rest of the prophecy, the actual promise, is in any way realised, it will put two and two together, as it always has done, in its wish to see what is written turn out true. I don't see how it is going to come about—the Prince is a younger son, he will not come to the throne, the intentions of fate are obscure. But the one-handed prince is there—and so may he bestow on us as much as he can.”

The Grand Duke did not answer, secretly thrilled by dreams of the future of his dynasty.

“Well, Knobelsdorff, I will not be angry with you. You want to comfort me, and you have not done it badly. But I must do what is expected of me….”

The air resounded with the distant cheers of many voices. The people of Grimmburg were crowded in black masses behind the cordon at the station. Officials were standing apart in front, waiting for the carriages. There was the mayor, raising his top-hat, wiping his forehead with a crumpled handkerchief, and poring over a paper whose contents he was committing to memory. Johann Albrecht assumed the expression appropriate to listening to the smoothly worded address and to answering concisely and graciously:

“Most excellent Mr. Mayor….” The town was dressed with flags, and the bells were ringing.

In the capital all the bells were ringing. And in the evening there were illuminations; not by formal request of the authorities, but spontaneous—the whole city was a blaze of light.

II
THE COUNTRY

The country measured eight thousand square kilometres, and numbered one million inhabitants.

A pretty, quiet, leisurely country. The tops of the trees in its forests rustled dreamily; its broad acres showed signs of honest care; its industries were undeveloped to the point of indigence.

It possessed some brick-kilns, a few salt and silver-mines—that was almost all. A certain amount of tourist-traffic must also be mentioned, but he would be a bold man who described it as a flourishing industry. The alkali springs, which rose from the ground in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital and formed the centre of an attractive bathing-establishment, constituted the claims of the city to be considered a health resort. But while the baths at the end of the Middle Ages had been frequented by visitors from afar, they had later lost their repute, and been put in the shade by other baths and forgotten. The most valuable of the springs, that called the Ditlinde spring, which was exceptionally rich in lithium salts, had been opened up quite recently, in the reign of Johann Albrecht III, and as energetic business and advertising methods were not employed, its water had not yet succeeded in winning world-recognition. A hundred thousand bottles of it were sent away in the year—rather less than more. And but few strangers came to drink it on the spot….

The Diet was the scene all the year round of speeches about the “barely” satisfactory results of the trade returns, by which was really meant the entirely unsatisfactory results, which nobody could dispute, that the local railways did not cover their expenses and the main lines did not pay any dividends—distressing but unalterable and inveterate facts, which the Minister for Trade in luminous but monotonous declarations explained by the peaceful commercial and industrial circumstances of the country, as well as by the inaccessibility of the home coal-deposits. Critics added something about defective organization of the State industrial administration. But the spirit of contradiction and negation was not strong in the Diet; the prevailing frame of mind among the representatives of the people was one of dull and true-hearted loyalty.

So the railway revenues did not by any means rank first among the public revenues of a private-investment nature; the forest revenues had ranked first for years in this land of woods and plough. The fall in them, their startling depreciation, however sufficient reasons there were for it, was a much more difficult matter to mend.

The people loved their woods. They were a fair and compact type, with searching blue eyes and broad, rather high cheek-bones, a sensible and honest, solid and backward stamp of men. They clung to their country's forest with all the strength of their nature; it lived in their bones, it was to the artists which it bred the source and home of their inspirations, and it was quite properly the object of popular gratitude, not only in regard to the gifts of soul and intellect of which it was the donor. The poor gathered their firewood in the forest; it gave to them freely, they had it for nothing. They went stooping and gathering all kinds of berries and mushrooms among its trunks, and earned a little something by doing so. That was not all. The people recognized that their forest had a very distinctly favourable influence on the weather and the healthy condition of the country; they were well aware that without the lovely woods in the neighbourhood of the capital the spa-garden outside would not attract foreigners with money to spend; in short, this not over-industrious and up-to-date people could not help knowing that the forest stood for the most important asset, the most profitable heritage of the country.

And yet the forest had been sinned against, outraged for ages and ages. The Grand Ducal Department of Woods and Forests deserved all the reproaches that were laid against it. That Department had not political insight enough to see that the wood must be maintained and kept as inalienable common property, if it was to be useful not only to the present generation, but also to those to come; and that it would surely avenge itself if it were exploited recklessly and short-sightedly, without regard to the future, for the benefit of the present.

That was what happened, and was still happening. In the first place great stretches of the floor of the forest had been impoverished by reckless and excessive spoliation of its litter. Matters had repeatedly gone so far that not only the most recent carpet of needles and leaves, but the greatest part of the fall of years past had been removed and used in the fields partly as litter, partly as mould. There were many forests which had been completely stripped of mould; some had been crippled by the raking away of the litter: instances of this were to be found in the public woodlands as well as in the State woodlands.

If the woods had been put to these uses in order to tide over a sudden agricultural crisis, there would have been no reason to complain. But although there were not wanting those who declared that an agricultural system founded on the appropriation of wood-litter was inexpedient, indeed dangerous, the trade in litter went on without any particular reason, on purely fiscal grounds, so it was put—that is to say, on grounds which, examined closely, proved to be only one ground and object, namely, the making of money. For it was money which was wanted. But to get this money, ceaseless inroads were made on the capital, until one fine day it was realised with dismay that an unsuspected depreciation in that capital had ensued.

The people were a peasant race, and thought that the way to be up-to-date was to display a perverted, artificial, and improper zeal and to employ reckless business methods. A characteristic instance was the dairy-farming … one word about that. Loud complaints were heard, principally in the official medical annual, that a deterioration was noticeable in the nourishment, and consequently in the development, of the country people. What was the reason? The owners of cows were bent on turning all the full-milk at their disposal into money. The spread of the dairy industry, the development and productiveness of the milk trade, tempted them to disregard the claims of their own establishments. A strength-giving milk diet became a rarity in the country, and in its stead recourse was had to unsubstantial skimmed milk, inferior substitutes, vegetable oils, and, unfortunately, alcoholic drinks as well. The critics talked about under-feeding, they even called it physical and moral debilitation of the population; they brought the facts to the notice of the Diet, and the Government promised to give the matter their earnest attention.

But it was only too clear that the Government was at bottom infected with the same perversity as the mistaken dairy-farmers. Timber continued to be cut to excess in the State forests; once cut it was gone, and meant a continual shrinkage of public property. The clearings might have been necessary occasionally, when the forests had been damaged in one way or another, but often enough they had been due simply to the fiscal reasons referred to: and instead of the proceeds of the clearings being used for the purchase of new tracts, instead of the cleared tracts being replanted as quickly as possible—instead, in a word, of the damage to the capital value of the State forests being balanced by an addition to their capital value, the quickly earned profits had been devoted to the payment of current expenses and the redemption of bonds. Of course there could be no doubt that a reduction of the National Debt was only too desirable; but the critics expressed the opinion that that was not the time to devote extraordinary revenues to the building up of the sinking-fund.

Anybody who had no interest in mincing matters must have described the State finances as in a hopeless muddle. The country carried a debt of thirty million pounds—it struggled along under it with patience and devotion, but with secret groans. For the burden, much too heavy in itself, was made trebly heavy through a rise in the rate of interest and through conditions of repayment such as are usually imposed on a country whose credit is shaken, whose exchange is low, and which has already almost come to be reckoned as “interesting” in the world of financiers.

The succession of financial crises appeared to be never-ending. The list of failures seemed without beginning or end. And a maladministration, which was made no better by frequent changes in its personnel, regarded borrowing as the only cure for the creeping sickness in the State finances. Even the Chancellor of the Exchequer, von Schröder, whose probity and singleness of purpose were beyond all doubt, had been given a peerage by the Grand Duke, because he had succeeded in placing a loan at a high rate of interest in the most difficult circumstances. His heart was set on an improvement in the credit of the State: but as his resource was to contract new debts while he paid off the old, his policy proved to be no better than a well-meant but costly blind. For a simultaneous sale and purchase of bonds meant a higher purchase than selling price, involving the loss of thousands of pounds.

It seemed as if the country were incapable of producing a man of any adequate financial gifts. Improper practices and a policy of “hushing-up” were the fashion. The budget was so drawn up that it was impossible to distinguish between ordinary and extraordinary State requirements. Ordinary and extraordinary items were jumbled up together, and those responsible for the budgets deceived themselves, and everybody else, as to the real state of affairs, by appropriating loans, which were supposed to be raised for extraordinary purposes, to cover a deficit in the ordinary exchequer…. The holder of the finance portfolio at one time was actually an ex-court marshal.

Dr. Krippenreuther, who took the helm towards the end of Johann Albrecht III's reign, was the Minister who, convinced like Herr von Schröder of the necessity for a strenuous reduction in the debt, induced the Diet to consent to a final and extreme addition to the burden of taxation. But the country, naturally poor as it was, was on the verge of insolvency, and all Krippenreuther got was unpopularity. His policy really meant merely a transfer from one hand to the other, a transfer which itself involved a loss; for the increase in taxation laid a burden on the national economy which pressed more heavily and more directly than that which was removed by the sinking of the National Debt.

Where, then, were help and a remedy to be found? A miracle, so it seemed, was needed—and meanwhile the sternest economy. The people were pious and loyal, they loved their princes as themselves, they were permeated with the sublimity of the monarchical idea, they saw in it a reflexion of the Deity. But the economical pressure was too painful, too generally felt. The most ignorant could read in the thinned and crippled forests a tale of woe. The consequence was that repeated appeals had been made in the Diet for a curtailment of the Civil List, a cutting down of the appanages and Crown endowments.

The Civil List amounted to twenty-five thousand pounds, the revenues of the Crown demesnes to thirty-seven thousand pounds. That was all. And the Crown was in debt—to what extent was perhaps known to Count Trümmerhauff, the Keeper of the Grand Ducal Purse, a regular stickler, but a man of absolutely no business instincts. It was not known to Johann Albrecht; at any rate he seemed not to know it, and therein followed the example of his forefathers, who had rarely deigned to give more than a passing thought to their debts.

The people's attitude of veneration was reflected in their princes' extraordinary sense of their own dignity, which had sometimes assumed fanciful and even extravagant forms, and had found its most obvious and most serious expression in every period in a tendency to extravagance and to a reckless ostentation as exaggerated as the dignity it represented. One Grimmburger had been christened “the luxurious” in so many words,—they had almost all deserved the nickname. So that the state of indebtedness of the House was an historical and hereditary state, reaching back to the times when all loans were a private concern of the Sovereign, and when John the Headstrong, wishing to raise a loan, pledged the liberty of the most prominent of his subjects to do so.

Those times were past; and Johann Albrecht III, a true-born Grimmburger in his instincts, was unfortunately no longer in a position to give free rein to his instincts. His fathers had played ducks and drakes with the family funds, which were reduced to nothing or little better than nothing. They had been spent on the building of country-seats with French names and marble colonnades, on parks with fountains, on splendid operas and all kinds of glittering shows. Figures were figures, and, much against the inclination of the Grand Duke, in fact without his consent, the Court was gradually cut down.

The Princess Catherine, the sister of the Grand Duke, was never spoken of in the capital without a touch of sympathy. She had been married to a member of a neighbouring ruling House, had been left a widow, and had come back to her brother's capital, where she lived with her red-headed children in what used to be the Heir Apparent's palace on the Albrechtstrasse, before whose gates a gigantic doorkeeper stood all day long in a pompous attitude with staff and shoulder-belt complete, while life went on with peculiar moderation inside.

Prince Lambert, the Grand Duke's brother, did not come in for much attention. There was a coolness between him and his relations, who could not forgive him his mésalliance, and he hardly ever came to Court. He lived in his villa overlooking the public gardens with his wife, an ex-dancer from the Court Theatre who bore the title of Baroness von Rohrdorf, after one of the Prince's properties; and there he divided his time between sport and theatre-going, and struggling with his debts. He had dropped his dignities and lived just like a private citizen; and if he was generally supposed to have a struggle to make two ends meet, nobody gave him much sympathy for it.

But alterations had been made in the old castle itself—reductions of expenses, which were discussed in the city and the country, and discussed usually in an apprehensive and regretful sense, because the people at bottom wished to see themselves represented with due pride and magnificence. Several high posts at the Court had been amalgamated for economy's sake, and for years past Herr von Bühl zu Bühl had been Lord Marshal, Chief Master of the Ceremonies, and Marshal of the Household at once. There had been many discharges in the Board of Green Cloth and the servants' hall, among the pike-staffs, yeomen of the guard, and grooms, the master cooks and chief confectioners, the court and chamber lackeys. The establishment of the royal stable had been reduced to the barest minimum…. And what was the good of it all? The Grand Duke's contempt for money showed itself in sudden outbursts against the squeeze; and while the catering at the Court functions reached the extreme limits of permissible simplicity, while at the supper at the close of the Thursday concerts in the Marble Hall nothing but continual roast beef with sauce remoulade and ice-pudding were served on the red velvet coverings of the gilt-legged tables, while the daily fare at the Grand Duke's own candle-decked table was no better than that of an ordinary middle-class family, he defiantly threw away a whole year's income on the repair of the Grimmburg.

But meanwhile the rest of his seats were falling to pieces. Herr von Bühl simply had not the means at his disposal for their upkeep. And yet it was a pity in the case of many of them. Those which lay at some little distance from the capital, or right out in the country, those luxurious asylums cradled in natural beauties whose dainty names spoke of rest, solitude, content, pastime, and freedom from care, or recalled a flower or a jewel, served as holiday resorts for the citizens and strangers, and brought in a certain amount in entrance-money which sometimes—not always—was devoted to their upkeep. This was not the case, however, with those in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital. There was the little schloss in the Empire style, the Hermitage, standing silent and graceful on the edge of the northern suburbs, but long uninhabited and deserted in the middle of its over-grown park, which joined on to the public gardens, and looked out on its little, mud-stiff pond. There was Schloss Delphinenort which, only a quarter of an hour's walk from the other, in the northern part of the public gardens themselves, all of which had once belonged to the Crown, mirrored its untidiness in a huge square fountain-basin; both were in a sad state. That Delphinenort in particular—that noble structure in the early baroque style, with its stately entrance-colonnade, its high windows divided into little white-framed panes, its carved festoons, its Roman busts in the niches, its splendid approach-stairs, its general magnificence—should be abandoned to decay for ever, as it seemed, was the sorrow of all lovers of architectural beauty; and when one day, as the result of unforeseen, really strange circumstances, it was restored to honour and youth, among them at any rate the satisfaction was general…. For the rest, Delphinenort could be reached in fifteen or twenty minutes from the spa-garden, which lay a little to the north-west of the city, and was connected with its centre by a direct line of trams.

The only residences used by the Grand Ducal family were Schloss Hollerbrunn, the summer residence, an expanse of white buildings with Chinese roofs, on the farther side of the chain of hills which surrounded the capital, coolly and pleasantly situated on the river and famed for the elder-hedges in its park; farther, Schloss Jägerpreis, the ivy-covered hunting-box in the middle of the woods to westward; and lastly, the Town Castle itself, called the “Old” Castle, although no new one existed.

It was called thus, with no idea of comparison, simply because of its age, and the critics declared that its redecoration was more a matter of urgency than that of the Grimmburg. Even the inner rooms, which were in daily use by the family, were faded and cracked, not to mention the many uninhabited and unused rooms in the oldest parts of the many-styled building, which were all choked and flyblown. For some time past the public had been refused admission to them,—a measure which was obviously due to the shocking state of the castle. But people who could get a peep, the tradesmen and the staff, declared that there was stuffing peeping out of more than one stiff, imposing piece of furniture.

The castle and the Court Church together made up a grey, irregular, and commanding mass of turrets, galleries, and gateways, half fortress, half palace. Various epochs had contributed to its erection, and large parts of it were decaying, weather-beaten, spoilt, and ready to fall into pieces. To the west it dropped steeply down to the lower-lying city, and was connected with it by battered steps clamped together with rusty iron bars. But the huge main gate, guarded by lions couchant, and surmounted by the pious, haughty motto: “Turris fortissima nomen Domini,” in almost illegible carving, faced the Albrechtsplatz. It had its sentries and sentry boxes; it was the scene of the changing of the guard, with drums and martial display; it was the playground of all the urchins of the town.

The Old Castle had three courtyards, in the corners of which rose graceful stair-turrets and between whose paving stones an unnecessary amount of weeds was generally growing. But in the middle of one of the courtyards stood the rose-bush,—it had stood there for ages in a bed, although there was no other attempt at a garden to be seen. It was just like any other rose-bush; it had a porter to tend it, it stood there in snow, rain, and sunshine, and in due season it bore roses. These were exceptionally fine roses, nobly formed, with dark-red velvet petals, a pleasure to look at, and real masterpieces of nature. But those roses had one strange and dreadful peculiarity: they had no scent! Or rather, they had a scent, but for some unknown reason it was not the scent of roses, but of decay—a slight, but plainly perceptible scent of decay. Everybody knew it; it was in the guide-books, and strangers visited the courtyard to convince themselves of it with their own noses. There was also a popular idea that it was written somewhere that at some time or other, on a day of rejoicings and public felicity, the blossoms of the rose-bush would begin to give forth a natural and lovely odour.

After all, it was only to be expected that the popular imagination would be exercised by the wonderful rose-bush. It was exercised in precisely the same way by the “owl-chamber” in the Old Castle, which was used as a lumber room. Its position was such that it could not be ignored, not far from the “Gala Rooms,” and the “Hall of the Knights,” where the Court officers used to assemble on Court days, and thus in a comparatively modern part of the building. But there was certainly something uncanny about it, especially as from time to time noises and cries occurred there, which could not be heard outside the room and whose origin was unascertainable. People swore that it came from ghosts, and many asserted that it was especially noticeable when important and decisive events in the Grand Ducal family were impending,—a more or less gratuitous rumour, which deserved no more serious attention than other national products of an historical and dynastic frame of mind, as for instance a certain dark prophecy which had been handed down for hundreds of years and may be mentioned in this connexion. It came from an old gipsy-woman, and was to the effect that a prince “with one hand” would bring the greatest good fortune to the country. The old hag had said: “He will give to the country with one hand more than all the rest could give it with two.” That is how the prophecy was recorded, and how it was quoted from time to time.

Round the Old Castle lay the capital, consisting of the Old Town and the New Town, with their public buildings, monuments, fountains, and parks, their streets and squares, named after princes, artists, deserving statesmen, and distinguished citizens, divided into two very unequal halves by the many-bridged river, which flowed in a great loop round the southern end of the public garden, and was lost in the surrounding hills. The city was a university town, it possessed an academy which was not in much request and whose curricula were unpractical and rather old-fashioned; the Professor of Mathematics, Privy Councillor Klinghammer, was the only one of any particular repute in the scientific world. The Court Theatre, though poorly endowed, maintained a decent level of performances. There was a little musical, literary, and artistic life; a certain number of foreigners came to the capital, wishing to share in its well-regulated life and such intellectual attractions as it offered, among them wealthy invalids who settled down in the villas round the spa-gardens and were held in honour by the State and the community as doughty payers of taxes.

And now you know what the town was like, what the country was like, and how matters stood.

III
HINNERKE THE SHOEMAKER

The Grand Duke's second son made his first public appearance on the occasion of his christening. This festivity aroused the same interest in the country as always attached to happenings within the Royal Family circle. It took place after weeks of discussion and research as to the manner of its arrangement, was held in the Court Church by the President of the High Consistory, Dom Wislezenus, with all the due ceremonial, and in public, to the extent that the Lord Marshal's office, by the Prince's orders, had issued invitations to it to every class of society.

Herr von Bühl zu Bühl, a courtly ritualist of the greatest circumspection and accuracy, in his full-dress uniform superintended, with the help of two masters of the ceremonies, the whole of the intricate proceedings: the gathering of the princely guests in the Gala Rooms, the solemn procession in which they, attended by pages and squires, walked up the staircase of Heinrich the Luxurious and through a covered passage into the church, the entry of the spectators from the highest to the lowest, the distribution of the seats, the observance of due decorum during the religious service itself, the order of precedence at the congratulations which took place directly after the service was ended…. He panted and puffed, smiled ingratiatingly, brandished his staff, laughed in nervous bursts, and kept executing retreating bows.

The Court Church was decorated with plants and draperies. In addition to the representatives of the nobility, of the Court and country, and of the higher and lower Civil Service, tradesmen, country folk, and common artisans, in high good humour, filled the seats. But in a half-circle of red-velvet arm-chairs in front of the altar sat the relations of the infant, foreign princes as sponsors and the trusty representatives of such as had not come in person. The assemblage at the christening of the Heir Apparent six years before had not been more distinguished. For in view of Albrecht's delicacy, the advanced age of the Grand Duke, and the dearth of Grimmburg relations, the person of the second-born prince was at once recognized as an important guarantee for the future of the dynasty. Little Albrecht took no part in the ceremony; he was kept to his bed with an indisposition which Surgeon-General Eschrich declared to be of a nervous character.

Dom Wislezenus preached from a text of the Grand Duke's own choosing. The Courier, a gossiping city newspaper, had given a full account of how the Grand Duke had one day fetched with his very own hands the large metal-clasped family Bible out of the rarely visited library, had shut himself up with it in his study, searched in it for a whole hour, at last copied the text he had chosen on to a piece of paper with his pocket-pencil, signed it “Johann Albrecht,” and sent it to the Court preacher. Dom Wislezenus treated it in a musical style, so as to speak, like a leit motif. He turned it inside and out, dressed it in different shapes and squeezed it dry; he announced it in a whisper, then with the whole power of his lungs; and whereas, delivered lightly and reflectively at the beginning of his discourse, it seemed a thin, almost unsubstantial subject; at the close, when he for the last time thundered it at the congregation, it appeared richly orchestrated, heavily scored, and pregnant with emotion. Then he passed on to the actual baptism, and carried it out at full length so that all could see it, with due stress on every detail.

This, then, was the day of the prince's first public appearance, and that he was the chief actor in the drama was clearly shown by the fact that he was the last to come on the stage, and that his entry was distinct from that of the rest of the company. Preceded by Herr von Bühl, he entered slowly, in the arms of the Mistress of the Robes, Baroness von Schulenburg-Tressen, and all eyes were fixed on him. He was asleep in his laces, his veils, and his white silk robe. One of his little hands happened to be hidden. His appearance evoked unusual delight and emotion. The cynosure and centre of attraction, he lay quietly there, bearing it all, as may be supposed, patiently and unassumingly. It was to his credit that he did not make any disturbance, did not clutch or struggle; but, doubtless from innate trustfulness, quietly resigned himself to the state which surrounded him, bore it patiently, and even at that early date sank his own emotions in it….

The arms in which he reposed were frequently changed at fixed points in the ceremony. Baroness Schulenburg handed him with a curtsey to his aunt, Catherine, who, with a stern look on her face, was dressed in a newly remade lilac silk dress, and wore Crown jewels in her hair. She laid him, when the moment came, solemnly in his mother Dorothea's arms, who, in all her stately beauty, with a smile on her proud and lovely mouth, held him out a while to be blessed, and then passed him on. A cousin held him for a minute or two, a child of eleven or twelve years with fair hair, thin sticks of legs, cold bare arms, and a broad red silk sash which stuck out in a huge knot behind her white dress. Her peaked face was anxiously fixed on the Master of the Ceremonies….

Once the Prince woke up, but the flickering flames of the altar-candles and a many-coloured shaft of sunlight dust blinded him, and made him close his eyes again. And as there were no thoughts, but only soft unsubstantial dreams in his head, as moreover he was feeling no pain at the moment, he at once fell asleep again.

He received a number of names while he slept; but the chief names were Klaus Heinrich.

And he slept on in his cot with its gilded cornice and blue silk curtains, while the royal family feasted in the Marble Hall, and the rest of the guests in the Hall of the Knights, in his honour.

The newspapers reported his first appearance; they described his looks and his dress, and emphasized his truly princely behaviour, couching the moving and inspiring account in words which had often done duty on similar occasions. After that, the public for a long time heard little of him, and he nothing of them.

He knew nothing as yet, understood nothing as yet, guessed nothing as to the difficulty, danger, and sternness of the life prescribed for him; nothing in his conduct suggested that he felt any contrast between himself and the great public. His little existence was an irresponsible, carefully supervised dream, played on a stage remote from the public stage; and this stage was peopled with countless tinted phantoms, both stationary and active, some emerging but transiently, some permanently at hand.

Of the permanent ones, the parents were far in the back-ground, and not altogether distinguishable. They were his parents, that was certain, and they were exalted, and friendly too. When they approached there was a feeling as if everything else slipped away to each side, and left a respectable passage along which they advanced towards him to show him a moment's tenderness. The nearest and clearest things to him were two women with white caps and aprons, two beings who were obviously all goodness, purity, and loving-kindness, who tended his little body in every way, and were much distressed when he cried…. A close partner in his life, too, was Albrecht, his brother; but he was grave, distant, and much more advanced.

When Klaus Heinrich was two years old, another birth took place in the Grimmburg, and a princess came into the world. Thirty-six guns were allotted to her, because she was of the female sex, and she was given the name of Ditlinde at the font. She was Klaus Heinrich's sister, and it was a good thing for him that she appeared. She was at first surprisingly small and weak, but she soon grew like him, caught him up, and the two became inseparable. They shared each other's lives, each other's views, feelings, and ideas: they communicated to each other their impressions of the world outside them.

It was a world, they were impressions, calculated to produce a reflective frame of mind. In winter they lived in the old castle. In summer they lived in Hollerbrunn, the summer schloss, on the river, in the cool, in the scent of the violet hedges with white statues between them. On the way thither, or if at any other time father or mother took them with them in one of the brown carriages with the little golden crown on the door, all the passers-by stopped, cheered, and took their hats off; for father was Prince and Ruler of the country, consequently they themselves were Prince and Princess—undoubtedly in precisely the same sense as were the princes and princesses in the French stories which their Swiss governess told them. That was worth consideration, it was at any rate a peculiar occurrence. When other children heard the stories, they necessarily regarded the princes which figured in them from a great distance, and as solemn beings whose rank was a glorification of reality and with whom to concern themselves was undoubtedly a chastening of their thoughts, and an escape from the ordinary existence. But Klaus Heinrich and Ditlinde regarded the heroes of the stories as their own equals and fellows, they breathed the same air as them, they lived in a schloss like them, they stood on a fraternal footing with them, and were justified in identifying themselves with them. Was it their lot, then, to live always and continually on the height to which others only climbed when stories were being told to them? The Swiss governess, true to her general principles, would have found it impossible to deny it, if the children had asked the question in so many words.

The Swiss governess was the widow of a Calvinistic minister and was in charge of both children, each of whom had two lady's maids as well. She was black and white throughout: her cap was white and her dress black, her face was white, with white warts on one cheek, and her smooth hair had a mixed black-and-white metallic sheen. She was very precise and easily put out. When things happened which, though quite without danger, could not be allowed, she clasped her white hands and turned her eyes up to heaven. But her quietest and severest mode of punishment for serious occasions was to “look sadly” at the children—implying that they had lost their self-respect. On a fixed day she began, on a hint from higher quarters, to address Klaus Heinrich and Ditlinde as “Grand Ducal Highness,” and from that day she was more easily put out than before….

But Albrecht was called “Royal Highness.” Aunt Catherine's children were members of the family only on the distaff side, and so were of less importance. But Albrecht was Crown Prince and Heir Apparent, so that it was not at all unfitting that he should look so pale and distant and keep so much to his bed. He wore Austrian coats with flap pockets and cut long behind. His head had a big bump at the back and narrow temples, and he had a long face. While still quite young he had come through a serious illness, which, in the opinion of Surgeon-General Eschrich, was the reason for his heart having “shifted over to the right.” However that might be, he had seen Death face to face, a fact which had probably intensified the shy dignity which was natural to him. He seemed to be extremely standoffish, cold from embarrassment, and proud from lack of graciousness. He lisped a little and then blushed at doing so, because he was always criticizing himself. His shoulder-blades were a little uneven. One of his eyes had some weakness or other, so that he used glasses for writing his exercises, which helped to make him look old and wise…. Albrecht's tutor, Doctor Veit, a man with hanging mud-coloured moustaches, hollow cheeks, and wan eyes unnaturally far apart, was always at his left hand. Doctor Veit was always dressed in black, and carried a book dangling down his thigh, with his index-finger thrust between its leaves.

Klaus Heinrich felt that Albrecht did not care much for him, and he saw that it was not only because of his inferiority in years. He himself was tender-hearted and prone to tears, that was his nature. He cried, when anybody “looked sadly” at him, and when he knocked his forehead against a corner of the nursery table, so that it bled, he howled from sympathy with his forehead. But Albrecht had faced Death, yet never cried on any condition. He stuck his short, rounded underlip a little forward, and sucked it lightly against the upper one—that was all. He was most superior. The Swiss governess referred in so many words to him in matters of comme il faut as a model. He had never allowed himself to converse with the gorgeous creatures who belonged to the court, not exactly men and human beings, but lackeys—as Klaus Heinrich had sometimes done in unguarded moments. For Albrecht was not curious. The look in his eyes was that of a lonely boy, who had no wish to let the world intrude upon him. Klaus Heinrich, on the contrary, chatted with the lackeys from that same wish, and from an urgent though perhaps dangerous and improper desire to feel some contact with what lay outside the charmed circle. But the lackeys, young and old, at the doors, in the corridors and the passage-rooms, with their sand-coloured gaiters and brown coats, on the red-gold lace of which the same little crown as on the carriage doors was repeated again and again—they straightened their knees when Klaus Heinrich chatted to them, laid their great hands on the seams of the thick velvet breeches, bent a little forward towards him, so that the aiguillettes dangled from their shoulders, and returned various, highly proper answers, the most important part of which was the address “Grand Ducal Highness,” and smiled as they did so with an expression of cautious sympathy, which recalled the words of the old song, “The lad that is born to be king.” Sometimes when he got the chance, Klaus Heinrich went on voyages of discovery in uninhabited parts of the schloss, with Ditlinde, his sister, when she was old enough.

At that time he was having lessons from Schulrat Dröge, Rector of the city schools, who was chosen to be his first tutor. Schulrat Dröge was a born pedagogue. His index-finger, with its folds of dry skin and gold stoneless signet-ring, followed the line of print when Klaus Heinrich read, waiting before going on to the next word until the preceding one had been read. He came in a frock-coat and white waistcoat, with the ribbon of some inferior order in his button-hole, and in broad shiny boots with brown upper-leathers. He wore a pointed grey beard, and bushy grey hair grew out of his big, broad ears. His brown hair was brushed up into points on his temples, and so precisely parted as to show clearly his yellow dry scalp, which was full of holes like canvas. But thin grey hair was visible under the strong brown hair behind and at the sides. He bowed slightly to the lackeys who opened the door for him to the big schoolroom at whose table Klaus Heinrich sat waiting for him. But to Klaus Heinrich he did not confine himself to a superficial bow as he entered the room, but made a pronounced and deliberate bow before he came up to him, and waited for his exalted pupil to offer him his hand. This Klaus Heinrich did; and the fact that he did so twice, not only when he greeted him, but also when he took his departure, just in the graceful and winning way in which he had seen his father give his hand to those who expected it, seemed to him far more important and essential than all the instruction which came between the two ceremonies.

After Schulrat Dröge had come and gone any number of times, Klaus Heinrich had imperceptibly gained a knowledge of all sorts of practical things: to everybody's surprise he was quite at home in every kind of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and could reel off to order the names of the towns in the Grand Duchy pretty well without an omission. But, as has been said, this was not what was in his opinion really necessary and essential for him. From time to time, when he was inattentive at his lessons, the Schulrat rebuked him with a reference to his exalted calling. “Your exalted calling requires you …” he would say or: “You owe it to your exalted calling….” What was his calling, and how was it exalted? Why did the lackeys smile as if to say, “The lad that is born to be king,” and why was his governess so much put out when he let himself go a little in speech or action? He looked round him, and at times, when he looked steadily and long and forced himself to probe the essence of the phenomena around him, a dim apprehension arose in him of the “aloofness” of his position.

He was standing in one of the “gala rooms,” the Silver Hall, in which, as he knew, his father the Grand Duke received solemn deputations—he happened to have wandered into it by himself and he took stock of his surroundings.

It was winter-time and cold, his little shoes were reflected in the glass-clear yellow squares of the parquet which spread like a sheet of ice before him. The ceiling, covered with silvered arabesque-work, was so high that a long metal shaft was necessary to allow the many-armed silver chandelier with its forest of tall white candles to swing in the middle of the great space. Below the ceiling came silver-framed coats-of-arms in faded colours. The walls were edged with silver, and hung with white silk with yellow spots, not to mention a split here and there. A sort of monumental baldachin, resting on two strong silver columns and decorated in front with a silver garland, broken in two places, from the top of which looked down a portrait of a deceased, powdered ancestress draped in imitation ermine, formed the chimney-piece. On each side of the fireplace were broad silvered arm-chairs upholstered in torn white silk. On the side walls opposite each other towered enormous silver-framed mirrors, whose glass was covered with blind spots, and on each side of whose broad white marble ledges stood two candelabra which carried big white candles like the sconces on the walls all round, and like the four silver candlesticks which stood in the corners. Before the high windows to the right, looking over the Albrechtsplatz, whose outer ledges were covered with snow, white silk curtains, yellow spotted, with silver cords and trimmed with lace, fell in rich, and heavy folds to the floor. In the middle of the room, under the chandelier, a moderate-sized table, with a pedestal made like a knobby silver tree-stump and a top made of eight triangles of opaque mother-of-pearl, stood useless, as there were no chairs round it, and it could only serve, and be meant to serve, at the very best, as a support for your Highness, when the lackeys opened the doors and ushered in the solemn figures in Court dress who came to present their respects to you….

Klaus Heinrich looked round the hall, and clearly saw that there was nothing here which reminded him of the realities which Schulrat Dröge, for all his bows, was always impressing upon him. Here all was Sunday and solemnity, just as in church, where also he would have felt the calls made on him by his tutor out of place. Everything here was severe and empty show and a formal symmetry, self-sufficient, pointless, and uncomfortable—whose functions were obviously to create an atmosphere of awe and tension, not of freedom and ease, to inculcate an attitude of decorum and discreet self-obliteration towards an unnamed object. And it was cold in the silver hall—cold as in the halls of the snow-king, where the children's hearts froze stiff.

Klaus Heinrich walked over the glassy floor and stood at the table in the middle. He laid his right hand lightly on the mother-of-pearl table, and placed the left hand on his hip, so far behind that it rested almost in the small of his back, and was not visible from in front, for it was an ugly sight, brown and wrinkled, and had not kept pace with the right in its growth. He stood resting on one leg, with the other a little advanced, and kept his eyes fixed on the silver ornaments of the door. It was not the place nor the attitude for dreaming, and yet he dreamed.

He saw his father, and looked at him as he looked at the hall, to try to grasp his meaning. He saw the dull haughtiness of his blue eyes, the furrows which, proudly and morosely, ran from nostril down to his beard, and were often deepened or accentuated by weariness and boredom…. Nobody dared to address him or to go freely up to him and speak to him unasked—not even the children: it was forbidden, it was dangerous. He answered, it is true: but he answered distantly and coldly, a look of helplessness, of gêne, passed over his face, which Klaus Heinrich was quite able to understand.

Papa made a speech and sent his petitioners away; that is what always happened. He gave an audience at the beginning of the Court ball, and at the end of the dinner with which the winter began. He went with mamma through the rooms and halls, in which the members of the Court were gathered, went through the Marble Hall and the Gala Rooms, through the Picture Gallery, the Hall of the Knights, the Hall of the Twelve Months, the Audience Chamber, and the Ball-room—went not only in a fixed direction, but along a fixed path which bustling Herr von Bühl kept free for him, and addressed a few words to the assembled throng. Whoever was addressed by him bowed low, left a space of parquet between himself and papa, and answered soberly and with signs of gratification. Thereupon papa greeted them over the intervening space, from the stronghold of precise regulations which prescribed the others' movements and warranted his own attitude, greeted them smilingly and lightly and passed on. Smilingly and lightly…. Of course, of course, Klaus Heinrich quite understood it, the look of helplessness which passed for one moment over papa's face when anybody was impetuous enough to address him unasked—understood it, and shared his feeling of gêne! It wounded something, some soft, virgin envelope of our existence which was so essential to it that we stood helpless when anybody roughly broke through it. And yet it was this same something which made our eyes so dull, and gave us those deep furrows of boredom….

Klaus Heinrich stood and saw—he saw his mother and her beauty, which was famed and extolled far and wide. He saw her standing en robe de ceremonie, in front of her great candle-lighted glass, for sometimes, on solemn occasions, he was allowed to be present when the Court hairdresser and the bed-chamber women put the last touches to her toilette. Herr von Knobelsdorff also was present when mamma put on jewels from the Crown regalia, watched and noted down the stones which she decided to use. With all the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes showing, he would make mamma laugh with his droll remarks, so that her soft cheeks filled with lovely little dimples. But her laugh was full of art and grace, and she looked in the glass as she laughed, as if she were practising it.

People said that Slav blood flowed in her veins, and that it was that which gave the sweet radiance to her deep-blue eyes and the night of her raven hair. Klaus Heinrich was like her, so he heard people say, in that he too had steel-blue eyes with dark hair, while Albrecht and Ditlinde were fair, just as papa had been before his hair turned grey. But he was far from handsome, owing to the breadth of his cheek-bones, and especially to his left hand, which mamma was always reminding him to hide adroitly, in the side-pocket of his coat, behind his back, or under the breast of his jacket—especially when his affectionate impulses prompted him to throw both his arms round her. Her look was cold when she bade him mind his hand.

He saw her as she was in the picture in the Marble Hall: in a short silk dress with lace flounces and long gloves, which showed only a glimpse of her ivory arm under her puffed sleeves, a diadem in the night of her hair, her stately form erect, a smile of cool perfection on her strangely hard lips—and behind her the metallic-blue wheel of a peacock's tail. Her face was soft, but its beauty made it stern, and it was easy to see that her heart too was stern and absorbed in her beauty. She slept far into the day when a ball or party was in prospect, and ate only yolks of eggs, so as not to overload herself. Then in the evening she was radiant as she walked on papa's arm along the prescribed path through the halls—grey-haired dignitaries blushed when they were addressed by her, and the Courier reported that it was not only because of her exalted rank that her Royal Highness had been the queen of the ball. Yes, people felt happier for the sight of her, whether it was at the Court or outside in the streets, or in the afternoon driving or riding in the park—and their cheeks kindled. Flowers and cheers met her, all hearts went out to her, and it was clear that the people in cheering her were cheering themselves, and that their glad cries meant that they were cheered and elevated by the sight of her. But Klaus Heinrich knew well that mamma had spent long, anxious hours on her beauty, that there was practice and method in her smiles and greetings, and that her own pulse beat never the quicker for anything or anyone.

Did she love anyone—himself, Klaus Heinrich, for instance, for all his likeness to her? Why, of course she did, when she had time to, even when she coldly reminded him of his hand. But it seemed as if she reserved any expression or sign of her tender feelings for occasions when lookers-on were present who were likely to be edified by them. Klaus Heinrich and Ditlinde did not often come into contact with their mother, chiefly because they, unlike Albrecht, the Heir Apparent, for some time past, did not have their meals at their parents' table, but apart with the Swiss governess; and when they were summoned to mamma's boudoir, which happened once a week, the interview consisted in a few casual questions and polite answers—giving no scope for displays of feeling, while its whole drift seemed to be the proper way to sit in an arm-chair with a teacup full of milk.

But at the concerts which took place in the Marble Hall every other Thursday under the name of “The Grand Duchess's Thursdays,” and were so arranged that the Court sat at little gilt-legged velvet-covered tables, while the leading tenor Schramm from the Court Theatre, accompanied by an orchestra, sang so lustily that the veins swelled on his bald temples—at the concerts Klaus Heinrich and Ditlinde, in their best clothes, were sometimes allowed in the Hall for one song and the succeeding pause, when mamma showed how fond she was of them, showed it to them and to everybody else in so heartfelt and expressive a way that nobody could have any doubt about it. She summoned them to the table at which she sat, and told them with a happy smile to sit beside her, laid their cheeks on her shoulders or bosom, looked at them with a soft, soulful look in her eyes and kissed them both on forehead and mouth. Then the ladies bent their heads and their eyelids quivered, while the men slowly nodded and bit their lips in order, in manly wise, to restrain their emotions…. Yes, it was beautiful, and the children felt they had their share in the effect, which was greater than anything Schramm the singer could procure with his most inspired notes, and nestled close to mamma. For Klaus Heinrich at last realized that it was in the nature of things, no business of ours, to have a simple feeling and to be made happy by it, but that it was our duty to make our tenderness visible to the Hall and to exhibit it, that the hearts of our guests might swell.

Occasionally the people outside in the town and park also were allowed to see that mamma loved us. For while Albrecht drove or rode—bad rider though he was—with the Grand Duke early in the morning, Klaus Heinrich and Ditlinde had from time to time to take turns at accompanying mamma on her drives, which took place in the spring and autumn at the time of the afternoon promenade, with Baroness von Schulenburg-Tressen in attendance. Klaus Heinrich was a little excited and feverish before these drives, to which unfortunately no enjoyment, but on the contrary a great deal of trouble and effort attached. For, directly the open carriage came out through the Lions Gate on to the Albrechtsplatz, past the grenadiers at the “present,” there were a lot of people collected, waiting for it—men, women, and children, who shouted and stared full of curiosity; and that meant pulling oneself together, sitting up erect, smiling, hiding the left hand, and saluting in such a way as to make the people happy. And so it went on right through the city and the fields. Other vehicles were obliged to keep away from ours; the police looked to that. But the foot-passengers stood on the kerb, the women curtseyed, the men took off their hats and looked with eyes full of devotion and importunate curiosity,—and this was the impression Klaus Heinrich got: that they all were there just to be there and to stare, while he was there to show himself and to be stared at; and his was far the harder part. He kept his left hand in his coat-pocket and smiled as mamma wished him to, while he felt that his cheeks were aglow. But the Courier reported that the rosy redness of our little duke's cheeks showed what a healthy boy he was.

Klaus Heinrich was thirteen years old when he stood at the solitary mother-of-pearl table in the middle of the cold silver hall, and tried to probe the reality of things around him. And as he scrutinized the various phenomena: the empty, torn pride of the room, aimless and uncomfortable, the symmetry of the white candles, which seemed to express awe and tension and discreet self-obliteration, the passing shadow on his father's face when anybody addressed him unasked, the cool and calculated beauty of his mother, whose one object was admiration, the devoted and importunately curious gaze of the people outside—then a suspicion seized him, a vague and approximate conception of his situation. But simultaneously horror seized him, terror at such a destiny, a dread of his “exalted calling,” so strong that he turned round and covered his eyes with both his hands—both, the little wrinkled left one too—and sank down at the lonely table and cried, cried from sympathy with himself and his heart—till they came, and wrung their hands and turned their eyes up to heaven and questioned him, and led him away…. He gave out that he had been frightened, and that was quite true.

He had known nothing, understood nothing, suspected nothing of the difficulty and sternness of the life prescribed for him; he had been merry and careless, and had given his guardians many a scare. But there was no resisting the impressions which soon came thronging upon him and forcing him to open his eyes to the real state of things. In the northern suburbs, not far from the spa-gardens, a new road had been opened: people told him that the City Council had decided to call it “Klaus Heinrich Strasse.” Once when driving out with his mother and he called at a picture-dealer's, they wanted to buy something. The footman waited at the carriage door, the public gathered round, the picture-dealer bustled about—there was nothing new in all that. But Klaus Heinrich for the first time noticed his photograph in the shop window. It was hanging next those of artists and great men, men with lofty brows, with a look of the loneliness of fame in their eyes.

People were satisfied with him on the whole. He gained dignity with years, and self-possession under the pressure of his exalted calling. But the strange thing was that his longing increased at the same time: that roving inquisitiveness which Schulrat Dröge was not the man to satisfy, and which had impelled him to chat with the lackeys. He had given up doing that; it did not lead to anything. They smiled at him, confirming him by that very laugh in the suspicion that his world of the symmetrically marshalled candles presented an unconscious antithesis to the world outside, but they were no manner of help to him. He looked round about him on the expeditions, in the walks he took through the town gardens with Ditlinde and the Swiss governess, followed by a lackey. He felt that if they were all of one mind to stare at him, while he was all alone and made conspicuous just to be stared at, he also had no share in their being and doing. He realized that they presumably were not always as he saw them, when they stood and greeted him with deferential looks; that it must be his birth and upbringing which made their looks deferential, and that it was with them as with the children when they heard about fairy princes, and were thereby refined and elevated above their work-a-day selves. But he did not know what they looked like and were when they were not refined and elevated above their work-a-day selves—his “exalted calling” concealed this from him, and it was a dangerous and improper wish to allow his heart to be moved by things which his exaltedness concealed from him. And yet he wished it, he wished it from a jealousy and that roving inquisitiveness which sometimes drove him to undertake voyages of exploration into unknown regions of the old Schloss, with Ditlinde his sister, when the opportunity offered.

They called it “rummaging,” and great was the charm of “rummaging”; for it was difficult to acquire familiarity with the ground-plan and structure of the old Schloss, and every time they penetrated far enough into the remoter parts they found rooms, closets, and empty halls which they had not yet trodden, or strange round-about ways to already-known rooms. But once when thus wandering about they had a rencontre, an adventure befell them, which made a great impression on Klaus Heinrich, though he did not show it, and opened his eyes.

The opportunity came. While the Swiss governess was absent on leave to attend the evening service, they had drunk their milk from tea-cups with the Grand Duchess, accompanied by the two ladies-in-waiting, had been dismissed and directed to go back hand-in-hand to their ordinary occupations in the nursery, which lay not far off. It was thought that they needed nobody to go with them; Klaus Heinrich was old enough to take care of Ditlinde, of course. He was; and in the corridor he said: “Yes, Ditlinde, we will certainly go back to the nursery, but we need not go, you know, the shortest, dullest way. We'll rummage a bit first. If you go up one step and follow the corridor as far as where the arches begin, you'll find a hall with pillars behind them, and if you go out of one of the doors of the hall with pillars—clamber up the corkscrew staircase, you come to a room with a wooden roof; and there are lots of funny things lying about there. But I don't know what comes after the room, and that's what we've got to find out. So let's go.”

“Yes, let's,” said Ditlinde, “but not too far, Klaus Heinrich, and not where it's too dusty, for this dress shows everything.”

She was wearing a dress of dark-red velvet, trimmed with satin of the same colour. She had at that time dimples in her elbows, and light golden hair, that curled round her ears like ram's horns. In after years she was pale and thin. She too had the broad, rather over-prominent cheek-bones of her father and nation, but they were not accentuated, so that they did not spoil the lines of her face. But with Klaus Heinrich they were strong and emphatic, so that they seemed somewhat to encroach upon, to narrow and to lengthen his steel-coloured eyes. His dark hair was smoothly parted, cut in a careful rectangle on the temples, and brushed straight back from the forehead. He wore an open jacket with a waistcoat buttoning at the throat and a white turn-down collar. In his right hand he held Ditlinde's little hand, but his left arm hung down, with its brown, wrinkled, and undeveloped hand, thin and short from the shoulder. He was glad that he could let it hang without bothering to conceal it; for there was nobody there to stare and to require to be elevated and inspired, and he himself might stare and examine to his heart's content.

So they went and rummaged as they liked. Quiet reigned in the corridors, and they saw hardly a lackey in the distance. They climbed up a staircase and followed the passage till they came to the arches, showing that they were in the part of the Schloss which dated from the time of John the Headstrong and Heinrich the Confessor, as Klaus Heinrich knew and explained. They came to the hall of the pillars, and Klaus Heinrich there whistled several notes close after each other, for the first were still sounding when the last came, and so a clear chord rang under the vaulted ceiling. They scrambled groping and often on hands and knees up the stone winding staircase which opened behind one of the heavy doors, and reached the room with the wooden ceiling, in which there were several strange objects. There were some broken muskets of clumsy size with thickly rusted locks, which had been too bad for the museum, and a discarded throne with torn red velvet cushions, short wide-splayed lion-legs, and cupids hovering over the chair-back, bearing a crown. Then there was a wicked-looking, dusty, cage-like, and horribly interesting thing, which intrigued them much and long. If they were not quite mistaken, it was a rat-trap, for they could see the iron spike to put the bacon on, and it was dreadful to think how the trap-door must fall down behind the great beast…. Yes, this took time, and when they stood up after examining the rat-trap their faces were hot, and their clothes stiff with rust and dust. Klaus Heinrich brushed them both down, but that did not do much good, for his hands were as filthy as his clothes. And suddenly they saw that dusk had begun to fall. They must return quickly, Ditlinde insisted anxiously on that; it was too late to go any farther.

“That's an awful pity,” said Klaus Heinrich. “Who knows what else we mightn't have found, and when we shall get another chance of rummaging, Ditlinde!” But he followed his sister and they hurried back down the turret-stairs, crossed the hall of the pillars, and came out into the arcade, intending to hurry home hand-in-hand.

Thus they wandered on for a time; but Klaus Heinrich shook his head, for it seemed to him that this was not the way he had come. They went still farther; but several signs told them that they had mistaken their direction. This stone seat with the griffin-heads was not standing here before. That pointed window looked to the west over the low-lying quarter of the town and not over the inner courtyard with the rose-bush. They were going wrong, it was no use denying it; perhaps they had left the hall of the pillars by a wrong exit—anyhow they had absolutely lost their way.

They went back a little, but their disquietude would not allow them to go very far back, so they turned right about again, and decided to push on the way they had already come, and to trust to luck. Their way lay through a damp, stuffy atmosphere, and great undisturbed cobwebs stretched across the corners; they went with heavy hearts, and Ditlinde especially was full of repentance and on the brink of tears. People would notice her absence, would “look sadly” at her, perhaps even tell the Grand Duke; they would never find the way, would be forgotten and die of hunger. And where there was a rat-trap, Klaus Heinrich, there were also rats…. Klaus Heinrich comforted her. They only had to find the place where the armour and crossed standards hung; from that point he was quite sure of the direction. And suddenly—they had just passed a bend in the winding passage—suddenly something happened. It startled them dreadfully.

What they had heard was more than the echo of their own steps, they were other, strange steps, heavier than theirs; they came towards them now quickly, now hesitatingly, and were accompanied by a snorting and grumbling which made their blood run cold. Ditlinde made as if to run away from fright: but Klaus Heinrich would not let go her hand, and they stood with starting eyes waiting for what was coming.

It was a man who was just visible in the half-darkness, and, calmly considered, his appearance was not horrifying. He was squat in figure, and dressed like a veteran soldier. He wore a frock-coat of old-fashioned cut, a woollen comforter round his neck and a medal on his breast. He held in one hand a curly top-hat and in the other the bone handle of his clumsily rolled-up umbrella, which he tapped on the flags in time with his steps. His thin grey hair was plastered up from one ear in wisps over his skull. He had bow-shaped black eyebrows, and a yellow-white beard, which grew like the Grand Duke's, heavy upper-lids, and watery blue eyes with pouches of withered skin under them; he had the usual high cheek-bones, and the furrows of his sun-burnt face were like crevasses. When he had come quite close he seemed to recognize the children, for he placed himself against the outer wall of the passage, at once fronted round and began to make a number of bows, consisting of several short forward jerks of his whole body from the feet upwards, while he imparted a look of honesty to his mouth and held his top-hat crown-downwards in front of him. Klaus Heinrich meant to pass him by with a nod, but was surprised into halting, for the veteran began to speak.

“I beg pardon!” he suddenly grunted; then went on in a more natural voice: “I earnestly beg your young Highnesses' pardon! But would your young Highnesses take it amiss if I addressed to them the request that they would very kindly acquaint me with the nearest way to the nearest exit? It need not actually be the Albrechtstor—not in the least necessary that it should be the Albrechtstor. But any exit from the Schloss, if I dare be so free as to address this inquiry to your young Highnesses….”

Klaus Heinrich had laid his left hand on his hip, right behind, so that it lay almost in his back, and looked at the ground. The man had simply spoken to him, had engaged him directly and unavoidably in conversation; he thought of his father and knitted his brows. He pondered feverishly over the question how he ought to behave in this topsy-turvy and incorrect situation. Albrecht would have pursed up his mouth, sucked with his short, rounded under-lip lightly against the upper, and passed on in silence—so much was certain. But what was the use of rummaging if at the first serious adventure one intended to pass on in dignity and dudgeon? And the man was honest, and had nothing wicked about him: that Klaus Heinrich could see when he forced himself to raise his eyes. He simply said: “You come with us, that's the best way. I will willingly show you where you must turn off to get to an exit.” And they went on.

“Thanks!” said the man. “Ever so many thanks for your kindness! Heaven knows I should never have thought that I should live to walk about the Old Schloss one day with your young Highnesses. But there it is, and after all my annoyance—for I have been annoyed, terribly annoyed, that's true and certain—after all my annoyance I have at any rate this honour and this satisfaction.”

Klaus Heinrich longed to ask what might have been the reason for so much annoyance; but the veteran went straight on (and tapped his umbrella in regular time on the flags as he went). “… and I recognized your young Highnesses at once, although it is a bit dark here in the passage, for I have seen you many a time in the carriage, and was always delighted, for I myself have just such a couple of brats at home—I mean to say, mine are brats, mine are … and the boy is called Klaus Heinrich too.”

“Just like me?” said Klaus Heinrich, overjoyed…. “What luck!”

“There's no luck about it,” said the man, “considering he was named expressly after you, for he is a couple of months younger than you, and there are lots of children in the town and country who are called that, and all of them after you. No, one can hardly call it luck….”

Klaus Heinrich concealed his hand and remained silent.

“Yes, recognized you at once,” said the man. “And I thought, thank Heaven, thought I, that's what I call fortune in misfortune, and they'll help you out of the trap into which you have stuck your nose, you old blockhead, and you've good reason to laugh, thought I, for there's many a one has trudged about here and been guyed by those popinjays, and hasn't got out of it so well….”

Popinjays? thought Klaus Heinrich … and guyed? He looked straight in front of him, he did not dare to ask. A fear, a hope struck him…. He said quite simply: “They … they guyed you?”

“Not half!” said the man. “I should think they did, the ogres, and no mistake! But I don't mind telling your young Highnesses, young though you are, but it'll do you good to hear it, that these people here are a set of wasters. A man comes and delivers his work as respectfully as possible…. Yes, bless my soul!” he cried suddenly, and tapped his forehead with his hat. “I haven't yet introduced myself to your young Highnesses and told you who I am, have I?—Hinnerke!” he said, “Master-cobbler Hinnerke, Royal warrant-holder, pensioner and medallist.” And he pointed with the index-finger of his great, rough, yellow-spotted hand to the medal on his breast. “The fact is, that his Royal Highness, your father, has been graciously pleased to order a pair of boots from me, top-boots, riding-boots, with spurs, and made of the best quality patent-leather. They're my speciality, and I made them myself and took a lot of trouble about them, and they were ready to-day and ever so smart. ‘You must go yourself,’ says I to myself…. I have a boy who delivers, but I says to myself: ‘You must go yourself, they are for the Grand Duke.’ So I rig myself out and take my boots and go to the Schloss. ‘All right,’ say the lackeys down below, and want to take them from me, ‘No!’ say I, for I don't trust them. It's my reputation gets me my orders and my warrant, let me tell your Highnesses, not because I tip the lackeys. But the fellows are spoilt by tips from the warrant-holders, and want to get something out of me for their trouble. ‘No,’ say I, for I'm not a one for bribing and underhand dealings, ‘I'll deliver them myself, and if I can't give them to the Grand Duke himself, I'll give them to Valet Prahl.’ They looked daggers, but they say: ‘Then you must go up there!’ And I go up there. There are some more of them up there, and they say ‘All right!’ and want to take charge of the boots, but I ask for Prahl and stick to it. They say: ‘He's having his tea,’ but I'm determined and say, ‘Then I'll wait till he's finished.’ And just as I say it, who comes by in his buckled shoes but Valet Prahl. And he sees me, and I give him the boots with a few modest words, and he says ‘All right!’ and actually adds: ‘They're fine!’ and nods and takes them off. Now I'm satisfied, for Prahl, he's safe, so off I go. ‘Hi!’ cries somebody. ‘Mr. Hinnerke! You're going wrong!’ ‘Damn!’ says I, and right about, and go off in the other direction. But that was the stupidest thing I could do, for they had sent me to Jericho, and that's just where I don't want to go. I walk on a bit and meet another one, and ask him the way to the Albrechtstor. But he spots at once what's up, and says: ‘Go up the stairs, and then keep to the left and then down again, and you'll cut off a large corner!’ And I believe he means it kindly and do what he says, and get more and more muddled and altogether lose my bearings. Then I see that it's not my fault, but the rogues', and it strikes me that I have heard that they often play that trick on Court tradesmen who don't tip them, and let them wander about till they sweat. And my fury makes me blind and stupid, and I get to places where there's not a living soul, and don't know where I am and get properly put about. And at last I meet your young Highnesses. Yes, that's how it is with me and my boots!” ended Shoemaker Hinnerke, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

Klaus Heinrich squeezed Ditlinde's hand. His heart beat so loud that he absolutely forgot to hide his left hand. That was it. That was a touch of it, an outline! No doubt about it, that was the sort of thing his “exalted calling” shielded him from, the sort of thing people did when they were in the ordinary, work-a-day frame of mind. The lackeys…. He said nothing, words failed him.

“I see that your young Highnesses don't answer,” said the shoemaker. And his honest voice was filled with emotion. “I oughtn't to have told you, because it isn't your business to get to know all the wickedness that goes on. But yet I don't know,” he said, laid his head on one side and snapped his fingers, “that it can do any harm, that it can do you any harm for the future and later on….”

“The lackeys …” said Klaus Heinrich, and took a plunge … “are they wicked? I can quite well fancy …”

“Wicked?” said the cobbler. “Good-for-nothings they are. That's the name for them. Do you know what they're good for? They keep the goods back when no tip's forthcoming, keep them back when the tradesman delivers them punctually at the time ordered, and only hand them over days late, so that the tradesman gets blamed, and is considered by the Grand Duke to have failed in his duty and he loses his orders. That's what they do without scruple, and the whole town knows it….”

“That's most annoying!” said Klaus Heinrich. He listened, listened. He hardly realized how much shocked he was. “Do they do anything else?” he said. “I'm quite sure they must do other things of the same kind.”

“You bet!” said the man, and laughed. “No, they don't miss a chance, let me tell your Highnesses, they have all sorts of dodges. There's the door-opening joke, for instance…. That's like this. Your father, our gracious Grand Duke, grants an audience to somebody, let's suppose he's a new hand and it's his first time at Court. And he comes in a frock coat all sweat and shivers, for it is of course no trifle to stand before his Royal Highness for the first time. And the lackeys laugh at him, because they're quite at home here, and tow him into the ante-room, and he doesn't know where he is, and absolutely forgets to tip the lackeys. But then comes his moment, and the adjutant says his name, and the lackeys throw open the double-doors and let him into the room in which the Grand Duke is waiting. Then the new hand stands there and bows and says what he has to say, and the Grand Duke graciously gives him his hand, and so he is dismissed and walks backwards, and thinks the folding-doors are going to open behind him, as he has been definitely promised. But they don't open, I tell your Highnesses, for the lackeys have got their knife into him, because they haven't been tipped, and don't stir a finger for him outside there. But he daren't turn round, absolutely daren't, because he daren't show the Grand Duke his back, that would be grossly bad manners and an insult to his Highness. And then he feels behind him for the door-handle and can't find it, and gets the jumps and scrabbles around on the door, and when at last by the mercy of Providence he finds the knob it's an old-fashioned lock, and he doesn't understand it and fiddles and dislocates his arm and tires himself out and keeps bowing all the time in his agitation, until at last his Highness graciously lets him out with his own hand. Yes, that's the door-opening joke! But that's nothing to what I'm going to tell your Highness….”

They had been so deep in conversation that they had scarcely noticed where they were going, had gone down the stairs and reached the ground-floor, close to the Albrechtstor. Eiermann, one of the Grand Duchess's grooms-of-the-chamber, came towards them. He wore a violet coat and side-whiskers. He had been sent out to look for their Grand Ducal Highnesses. He shook his head while still at a distance, in lively concern, and pursed his mouth up like a funnel. But when he noticed Shoemaker Hinnerke walking with the children and tapping with his umbrella, all the muscles of his face relaxed and his jaw dropped.

There was scarcely time for thanks and farewells, Eiermann was in such a hurry to part the children from the shoemaker. And with many a gloomy prophecy he led their Grand Ducal Highnesses up to their room to the Swiss governess.

Eyes were turned to heaven, hands were wrung about their absence and the state of their clothes. The worst of all happened, they were “looked at sadly.” But Klaus Heinrich confined his contrition to the bare minimum. He thought: “So the lackeys took money and let the tradesmen wander about the corridors if they did not get any, kept the goods back, that the tradesmen might get blamed, and did not open the folding-doors, so that the suitor had to scrabble. That's what happened in the Schloss, and what must it be outside? Outside among the people who stared at him so respectfully and so strangely, when he drove by with his hand to his hat …? But how had the man dared to tell it him? Not one single time had he called him Grand Ducal Highness; he had forced himself on him and offended his birth and upbringing. And yet, why was it so extraordinarily pleasant to hear all that about the lackeys? Why did his heart beat with such rapt pleasure, when moved by some of the wild and bold things in which his Highness bore no part?”

IV
DOCTOR UEBERBEIN

Klaus Heinrich spent three of his boyhood's years in the company of boys of his own age of the Court and country nobility of the monarchy in an institution, a kind of aristocratic seminary, which von Knobelsdorff, the House Minister, had founded and set in order on his behalf in the “Pheasantry” hunting-schloss.

A Crown property for centuries past, Schloss “Pheasantry” gave its name to the first stopping-place of a State railway running north-west from the capital, and itself took it from a “tame” pheasant preserve, situated not far off among the meadows and woods, which had been the hobby of a former ruler. The Schloss, a one-storied box-like country house with a shingle roof topped by lightning conductors, stood with stables and coach-house on the skirts of extensive fir plantations. With a row of aged lime trees in front, it looked out over a broad expanse of meadowland fringed by a distant bluish circle of woods and intersected by paths, with many a bare patch of play-ground and hurdles for obstacle riding. Opposite the corner of the Schloss was a refreshment pavilion, a beer and coffee garden planted with high trees, which a prudent man called Stavenüter had rented and which was thronged on Sundays in summer by excursionists, especially bicyclists, from the capital. The pupils of the “Pheasantry” were only allowed to visit the pavilion in charge of a tutor.

There were five of them, not counting Klaus Heinrich: Trümmerhauff, Gumplach, Platow, Prenzlau, and Wehrzahn. They were called “the Pheasants” in the country round. They had a landau from the Court stables which had seen its best days, a dog-cart, a sledge, and a few hacks, and when in winter some of the meadows were flooded and frozen over, they had an opportunity of skating. There was one cook, two chamber-maids, one coachman, and two lackeys at the “Pheasantry,” one of whom could drive at a pinch.

Professor Kürtchen, a little suspicious and irritable bachelor with the airs of a comic actor and the manners of an old French chevalier, was head of the seminary. He wore a stubby grey moustache, a pair of gold spectacles in front of his restless brown eyes, and always out-of-doors a top hat on the back of his head. He stuck his belly out as he walked and held his little fists on each side of his stomach like a long-distance runner. He treated Klaus Heinrich with self-satisfied tact, but was full of suspicion of the noble arrogance of his other pupils and fired up like a tom-cat when he scented any signs of contempt for him as a commoner. He loved when out for a walk, if there were people close by, to stop and gather his pupils in a knot around him and explain something to them, drawing diagrams in the sand with his stick. He addressed Frau Amelung, the housekeeper, a captain's widow who smelt strongly of drugs, as “my lady” and showed thus that he knew what was what in the best circles.

Professor Kürtchen was helped by a yet younger assistant teacher with a doctor's degree—a good-humoured, energetic man, bumptious but enthusiastic, who influenced Klaus Heinrich's views and conscience perhaps more than was good for him. A gymnastic instructor called Zotte had also been appointed. The assistant teacher, it may be remarked in passing, was called Ueberbein, Raoul Ueberbein. The rest of the staff came every day by railway from the capital.

Klaus Heinrich remarked with appreciation that the demands made on him from the point of view of learning quickly abated. Schulrat Dröge's wrinkled fore-finger no longer paused on the lines, he had done his work; and during the lessons as well as while correcting his written work Professor Kürtchen seized every opportunity of showing his tact.

One day, quite soon after the institution had started—it was after luncheon in the high-windowed dining-room—he summoned Klaus Heinrich into his study, and said in so many words: “It is contrary to the public interest that your Grand Ducal Highness, during our scientific studies together, should be compelled to answer questions which are at the moment unwelcome to you. On the other hand, it is desirable that your Grand Ducal Highness should continually announce your readiness to answer by holding up your hand. I beg your Grand Ducal Highness accordingly, for my own information, in the case of unwelcome questions, to stretch out your arm to its full length, but in the case of those an invitation to answer which would be agreeable to you, to raise it only half way and in a right angle.”

As for Doctor Ueberbein, he filled the schoolroom with a noisy flow of words, whose cheerfulness disguised the teacher's object without losing sight of it altogether. He had come to no sort of understanding with Klaus Heinrich, but questioned him when it occurred to him to do so, in a free and friendly way without causing him any embarrassment. And Klaus Heinrich's by no means apropos answers seemed to enchant Doctor Ueberbein, to inspire him with warm enthusiasm. “Ha, ha,” he would cry and throw his head back laughing. “Oh, Klaus Heinrich! Oh, scion of princes! Oh, your innocency! The crude problems of life have caught you unprepared! Now then, it is for me with my experience to put you straight.” And he gave the answer himself, asked nobody else, when Klaus Heinrich had answered wrong. The mode of instruction of the other teachers bore the character of an unassuming lecture. And gymnastic-instructor Zotte had received orders from high quarters to conduct the physical exercises with every regard to Klaus Heinrich's left hand—so strictly that the attention of the Prince himself or of his companions should never be drawn unnecessarily to his little failing. So the exercises were limited to running games, and during the riding lessons, which Herr Zotte also gave, all feats of daring were rigorously excluded.

Klaus Heinrich's relations with his comrades were not what one might call intimate, they did not extend to actual familiarity. He stood for himself, was never one of them, by no means counted amongst their number. They were five and he was one; the Prince, the five, and the teachers, that was the establishment. Several things stood in the way of a free friendship. The five were there on Klaus Heinrich's account, they were ordered to associate with him; when during the lessons he answered wrong they were not asked to correct him, they had to adjust themselves to his capacity when riding or playing. They were too often reminded of the advantages they gained by being allowed to share his life. Some of them, the young von Gumplach, von Platow, and von Wehrzahn, sons of country squires of moderate means, were oppressed the whole time by the gratified pride their parents had shown when the invitation from the House Minister reached them, by the congratulations which had poured in from every side.

Count Prenzlau on the other hand, that thick-set, red-haired, freckled youth with the breathless way of speaking and the Christian name Bogumil, was a sprig of the richest and noblest family of landowners in the land, spoilt and self-conscious. He was well aware that his parents had not been able to refuse Baron von Knobelsdorff's invitation, but that it had not seemed to them by any means a blessing from the clouds, and that he, Count Bogumil, could have lived much better and more in accordance with his position on his father's property than at the “Pheasantry.” He found the hacks bad, the landau shabby, and the dog-cart old-fashioned; he grumbled privately over the food.

Dagobert Count Trümmerhauff, a spare, greyhound-looking youth, who spoke in a whisper, was inseparable from him. They had a word among themselves which fully expressed their critical and aristocratic bent, and which they constantly uttered in a biting tone of voice: “hog-wash.” It was hog-wash to have loose collars buttoning on to one's shirt. It was hog-wash to play lawn-tennis in one's ordinary clothes.

But Klaus Heinrich felt himself unequal to using the word. He had not hitherto been aware that there were such things as shirts with collars sewed on to them and that people could possess so many changes of clothes at one time as Bogumil Prenzlau. He would have liked to say “hog-wash,” but it occurred to him that he was wearing at that very time darned socks. He felt inelegant by the side of Prenzlau and coarse compared with Trümmerhauff. Trümmerhauff had the nobility of a wild beast. He had a long pointed nose with a sharp bridge and broad, quivering, thin-walled nostrils, blue veins on his delicate temples and small ears without lobes. He wore broad coloured cuffs fastened with gold links, and his hands were like those of a dainty woman, with filbert nails; a gold bracelet adorned one of his wrists. He half closed his eyes as he whispered…. No, it was obvious that Klaus Heinrich could not compete with Trümmerhauff in elegance. His right hand was rather broad, he had cheek-bones like the men in the street, and he looked quite stumpy by Dagobert's side. It was quite possible that Albrecht might have been better qualified to join the “Pheasants” in their use of “hog-wash.” Klaus Heinrich for his part was no aristocrat, absolutely none, unmistakable facts showed that. For consider his name, Klaus Heinrich, that's what the shoemaker's sons were called all over the place. Herr Stavenüter's children over the road too, who blew their noses with their fingers, bore the same names as himself, his parents, and his brother. But the lordlings were called Bogumil and Dagobert—Klaus Heinrich stood solitary and alone among the five.

However, he formed one friendship at the “Pheasantry,” and it was with Doctor Ueberbein. The Usher Raoul Ueberbein was not a handsome man. He had a red beard and a greenish-white complexion with watery blue eyes, thin red hair, and unusually ugly, protruding, sharp-pointed ears. But his hands were small and delicate. He wore white ties exclusively, which gave him rather a distinguished appearance, although his wardrobe was scanty. He wore a long great-coat out-of-doors, and when riding—for Dr. Ueberbein rode, and excellently well too—a worn-out frock-coat whose skirts he fastened up with safety-pins, tight buttoned breeches, and a high hat.

Where lay the attraction he exercised on Klaus Heinrich? That attraction was very composite. The “Pheasants” had not been long together before a report went about that the usher had dragged a child a long time ago, in circumstances of extreme peril, out of a swamp or bog, and was the possessor of a medal for saving life. That was one impression. Later other details of Doctor Ueberbein's life came to be known, and Klaus Heinrich too heard of them. It was said that his origin was obscure, that he had no father, his mother had been an actress who had paid some poor people to adopt him, and that he had once been starved, which accounted for the greenish tint of his complexion. These were things which did not bear being brought into the light or even being thought of, wild, remote things, to which, however, Doctor Ueberbein himself sometimes alluded—when, for instance, the lordlings, who could not forget his obscure origin, behaved impudently or unbecomingly towards him.

“Suck-a-thumbs and mammy's darlings!” he would say then in loud dudgeon. “I've knocked about long enough to deserve some respect from you young gentlemen!” This fact too, that Doctor Ueberbein had “knocked about,” did not fail of effect on Klaus Heinrich. But the especial charm of the doctor's person lay in the directness of his attitude towards Klaus Heinrich, the tone in which he addressed him from the very beginning, and which distinguished him clearly from everybody else. There was nothing about him which reminded one of the stiff reticence of the lackeys, of the governess's pale horror, of Schulrat Dröge's professional bows, or of Professor Kürtchen's self-satisfied deference. There was nothing about him to recall the strange, loyal, and yet impertinent way in which people outside stared at Klaus Heinrich.

During the first few days after the seminary assembled, he kept silence and confined himself to observation, but then he approached the Prince with a jovial and cheery frankness, a fresh fatherly camaraderie such as Klaus Heinrich had never before experienced. It disturbed him at first, he looked in terror at the doctor's green face; but his confusion found no echo in the doctor, and in no way discouraged him, it confirmed him in his hearty bumptious ingenuousness, and it was not long before Klaus Heinrich was warmed and won, for there was nothing vulgar, nothing degrading, not even anything designed and school-masterish in Doctor Ueberbein's methods—all they showed was the superiority of a man who had knocked about the world, and, at the same time, his tender and open respect for Klaus Heinrich's different birth and position; they showed affection and recognition, at the same time as the cheerful offer of a league between their two different kinds of existence. He called him “Highness” once or twice, then simply “Prince,” then quite simply “Klaus Heinrich.” And he stuck to the last.

When the “Pheasants” went out for a ride, these two rode at the head, the doctor on his stout piebald to the left of Klaus Heinrich on his docile chestnut—trotted when snow or leaves were falling, through springtime thaws or summer heat, along the edge of the woodlands across country, or through the villages, while Doctor Ueberbein related anecdotes of his life. Raoul Ueberbein sounds funny, doesn't it? The very reverse of chic. Yes, Ueberbein had been the name of his adoptive parents, a poor, oldish couple of the inferior bank-clerk class, and he had a quite legal right to it. But that he should be called Raoul had been the decision and mandate of his mother, when she handed over the sum agreed on, together with his fateful little person, to the others—a sentimental decision obviously, a decision prompted by piety. At least it was quite possible that his legal and real father had been called Raoul, and it was to be hoped that his surname had been something which harmonized with it.

For the rest, it had been rather a wild undertaking on the part of his adoptive parents to adopt a child, for “Barmecide had been cook” in the Ueberbein establishment, and it was obvious that it had been only the most urgent necessity which had made them jump at the money. The boy had been given only the scantiest of school educations, but he had taken the liberty of showing what he was made of, had distinguished himself to some extent, and as he was keen to become a teacher, he had been granted out of a public fund the means of obtaining a college education. Well, he had finished his college course not without distinction, as indeed it was expected of him that he should, and he had then been appointed a teacher in a public elementary school, with a good salary, out of which he had managed to give occasional doles by way of gratitude to his honest adoptive parents, until they died almost simultaneously. And a happy release it was for them!

And so he had been left alone in the world, his very birth a misfortune, as poor as a sparrow and endowed by Providence with a green face and dog's ears by way of personal recommendations. Attractive qualifications, were they not? But such qualifications were really favourable ones—once for all, so they proved. A miserable boyhood, loneliness and exclusion from good fortune and all that good fortune brings, a never-ceasing, imperious call to be up and doing, no fear of getting fat and lazy, one's moral fibre was braced, one could never rest on one's oars, but must be always overhauling and passing others. Could anything be more stimulating, when the hard facts were brought home to one? What a handicap over others who “were not obliged to” to the same extent! People who could smoke cigars in the morning….

At that time, by the bedside of one of his unwashed little pupils, in a room which did not smell exactly of spring blossoms, Raoul Ueberbein had made friends with a young man—some years older than he, but in a similar position and like him ill-fated by birth in so far as he was a Jew. Klaus Heinrich knew him—indeed, he might be said to have got to know him on a very intimate occasion. Sammet was his name, a doctor of medicine; he happened by chance to have been in the Grimmburg when Klaus Heinrich was born, and had set up a couple of years later in the capital as a children's doctor. Well, he had been a friend of Ueberbein's, still was one, and they had had many a good talk about fate and duty. What is more, they had both knocked about the world.

Ueberbein, for his part, looked back with sincere pleasure to the time when he had been an elementary teacher. His activities had not been entirely confined to the class-room, he had amused himself by showing also some personal and human concern for his charges' welfare, by visiting them at home, by sharing at times their not too idyllic family life, and in doing so he did not fail to bring away impressions of a most varied kind. In truth, if he had not already tasted the bitterness of the cup of life, he would have had plenty of opportunity then to do so. For the rest, he had not ceased to work by himself, had given private lessons to plump tradesmen's sons, and tightened his waist belt so as to save enough to buy books with—had spent the long, still, and free nights in study. And one day he had passed the State examination with exceptional distinction, had soon received his promotion, had been transferred to a grammar school. As a matter of fact, it had been a sore grief to him to leave his little charges, but so the fates willed. And then it had so happened that he had been chosen to be usher at the “Pheasantry,” for all that his very birth had been a misfortune.

That was Doctor Ueberbein's story, and Klaus Heinrich, as he listened to it, was filled with friendly feelings. He shared his contempt for those who “weren't obliged to” and smoked cigars in the morning, he felt a fearful joy when Ueberbein talked in his jolly blustering way about “knocking about,” “impressions,” and the bitterness of the cup of life, and he felt as if he had been personally an actor in the scenes as he followed his luckless and gallant career from his adoption up to his appointment as grammar-schoolmaster. He felt as if he were in some general sort of way qualified to take part in a conversation about fate and duty. His attitude of reserve relaxed, the experiences of his own fifteen years of life came crowding in upon him, he felt a longing himself to retail confidences, and he tried to tell Doctor Ueberbein all about himself.

But the funny thing was that Doctor Ueberbein himself checked him, opposed any such intention most decidedly. “No, no, Klaus Heinrich,” he said; “full stop there! No confidences, if you please! Not but that I know that you have all sorts of things to tell me…. I need only watch you for half a day to see that, but you quite misunderstand me if you think I'm likely to encourage you to weep round my neck. In the first place, sooner or later you'd repent it. But in the second, the pleasures of a confidential intimacy are not for the likes of you. You see, there's no harm in my chattering. What am I? An usher. Not a common or garden one, in my own opinion, but still no better than such. Just a categorical unit. But you? What are you? That's harder to say…. Let's say a conception, a kind of ideal. A frame. An emblematical existence, Klaus Heinrich, and at the same time a formal existence. But formality and intimacy—haven't you yet learnt that the two are mutually exclusive? Absolutely exclusive. You have no right to intimate confidences, and if you attempted them you yourself would discover that they did not suit you, would find them inadequate and insipid. I must remind you of your duty, Klaus Heinrich.”

Klaus Heinrich laughed and saluted with his crop, and on they rode.

On another occasion Doctor Ueberbein said casually: “Popularity is a not very profound, but a grand and comprehensive kind of familiarity.” And that was all he said on the subject.

Sometimes in summer, during the long intervals between the morning lessons, they would sit together in the empty pavilion, or stroll about the “Pheasants” playground, discussing various topics, and breaking off to drink lemonade provided by Herr Stavenüter. Herr Stavenüter beamed as he wiped the rough table and brought the lemonade with his own hands. The glass ball in the bottle-neck had to be pushed in. “Sound stuff!” said Herr Stavenüter. “The best that can be got. No muck, Grand Ducal Highness, and you, doctor, but just sweetened fruit-juice. I can honestly recommend it!”

Then he made his children sing in honour of the visit. There were three of them, two girls and a boy, and they could sing trios. They stood some way off with the green leaves of the chestnut trees for roof, and sang folk-songs while they blew their noses with their fingers. Once they sang a song beginning: “We are all but mortal men,” and Doctor Ueberbein took advantage of the pauses to express his disapproval of this number on the programme. “A paltry song,” he said, and leaned over towards Klaus Heinrich. “A really commonplace song, a lazy song, Klaus Heinrich; you must not let it appeal to you.”

Later, when the children had stopped singing, he returned to the song and described it as “sloppy.” “We are all but mortal men,” he repeated. “God bless us, yes, no doubt we are. But on the other hand we ought perhaps to remember that it is those of us who count for most who may be the occasion for especially emphasizing this truth…. Look you,” he said, leaning back and crossing one leg over the other, while he stroked his beard up from underneath his chin, “look you, Klaus Heinrich, a man who has my intellectual aspirations will not be able to help searching for and clinging to whatever is out of the ordinary in this drab world of ours, wherever and however it appears—he cannot help being put out by such a slovenly song, by such a sheepish abjuration of the exceptional, of the lofty and of the miserable, and of that which is both at once. You may well say: ‘That's talking for effect.’ I'm only an usher, but there's something in my blood, Heaven knows what—I can't find any pleasure in emphasizing the fact that we are all ushers at bottom. I love the extraordinary in every form and in every sense. I love those who are conscious of the dignity of their exceptional station, the marked men, those one can see are not as other men, all those whom the people stare at open-mouthed—I hope they'll appreciate their destiny, and I do not wish them to make themselves comfortable with the slip-shod and luke-warm truth which we have just heard set to music for three voices. Why have I become your tutor, Klaus Heinrich? I am a gipsy, a hard-working one, maybe, but still a born gipsy. My predestination to the rôle of squire of princes is not particularly obvious. Why did I gladly obey the call when it came to me, in view of my energy, and although my very birth was a misfortune? Because, Klaus Heinrich, I see in your existence the clearest, most express, and best-preserved form of the extraordinary in the world. I have become your tutor that I might keep your destiny alive in you. Reserve, etiquette, obligation, duty, demeanour, formality—has the man whose life is surrounded by these no right to despise others? Ought he to allow himself to be reminded of humanity and good nature? No, come along, let's go, Klaus Heinrich, if you don't mind. They're tactless brats, these little Stavenüters.” Klaus Heinrich laughed, he gave the children some of his pocket-money, and they went.

“Yes, yes,” said Doctor Ueberbein in the course of an ordinary walk in the woods to Klaus Heinrich—they had drifted a little distance away from the five “Pheasants”—“nowadays the soul's thirst for veneration has to be satisfied with what it can get. Where will you find greatness? I only hope you may! But quite apart from all actual greatness and high-calling, there is always what I call Highness, select and sadly isolated forms of life, towards which an attitude of the tenderest sympathy should be adopted. For the rest, greatness is strong, it wears jack-boots, it has no need of the knight-services of the mind. But Highness is affecting—damme if it isn't the most affecting thing on earth.”

Once or twice a year the “Pheasantry” journeyed to the capital to attend performances of classical operas and dramas in the Grand Ducal Court Theatre; Klaus Heinrich's birthday in particular was the signal for a visit to the theatre. He would then sit quietly in his carved arm-chair, leaning against the red plush ledge of the Court box, whose roof rested on the heads of two female figures with crossed hands and empty stern faces, and watched his colleagues, the princes, whose destinies were played out on the stage, while he stood the fire of the opera-glasses which from time to time, even during the play, were directed at him from the audience. Professor Kürtchen sat on his left hand and Doctor Ueberbein with the “Pheasants” in an adjoining box.

Once they heard the “Magic Flute,” and on the way home to “Pheasantry” station, in the first-class carriage, Doctor Ueberbein made the whole collection of them laugh by imitating the way in which singers talk when their rôles oblige them to talk in prose. “He is a prince!” he said with pathos, and answered himself in a drawly, sing-song parsonical voice. “He is more than that, he is a man!” Even Professor Kürtchen was so much amused that he bleated.

But next day, in the course of a private lesson in Klaus Heinrich's study, with the round mahogany table, whitened ceiling, and Greek bust on the stove, Doctor Ueberbein repeated his parody, and said then: “Great heavens, that was something new in its time, it was a piece of news, a startling truth! There are paradoxes which have stood so long on their heads that one has to put them on their feet to make anything even moderately daring out of them, ‘He is a man. He is more than that’—that is getting gradually bolder, prettier, even truer. The converse is mere humanity, but I have no hearty love for humanity, I'm quite content to leave it out of account. One must, in a certain sense, be one of those of whom the people say: ‘They are, after all, mortal men too’—or one is as deadly dull as an usher. I cannot honestly wish for the general comfortable obliteration of conflicts and gulfs, that's the way I am made, for better or worse, and the idea of the principe uomo is to me, to speak plainly, an abomination. I am not anxious that it should particularly appeal to you…. Look you, there have always been princes and exceptional persons who live their life of exception with a light heart, simply unconscious of their dignity or denying it outright, and capable of playing skittles with the townsfolk in their shirt-sleeves, without the slightest attempt at an inward qualm. But they are not very important, just as nothing is important which lacks mind. For mind, Klaus Heinrich, mind is the tutor which insists inexorably on dignity, indeed actually creates dignity, it is the arch-enemy and chief antagonist of all human good nature. ‘More than that?’ No! to be a representative, to stand for a number when one appears to be the exalted and refined expression of a multitude. Representing is naturally something more and higher than simply Being, Klaus Heinrich—and that's why people call you Highness.”

So argued Doctor Ueberbein, in loud, hearty, and fluent terms, and what he said influenced Klaus Heinrich's mind and susceptibilities more, perhaps, than was desirable. The prince was then about fifteen years old, and therefore quite competent, if not properly to understand, yet to imbibe the essence of ideas of that sort. The main point was that Doctor Ueberbein's doctrines and apophthegms were so exceptionally supported by his personality.

When Schulrat Dröge, the man who used to bow to the lackeys, reminded Klaus Heinrich of his “exalted calling,” that was nothing more than an exaggerated form of speech, devoid of inner meaning and calculated mainly to add emphasis to his professional claims. But when Doctor Ueberbein, whose very birth had been a misfortune, as he said, and who had a green complexion because he had been half starved; when this man who had dragged a child out of a bog, who had received “impressions” and “knocked about” in all sorts of ways; when he who not only did not bow to the lackeys, but who bawled at them in strident tones when the fancy took him, and who had called Klaus Heinrich himself straight out by his Christian names when he had known him only three days, without asking leave to do so,—when he with a paternal laugh declared that Klaus Heinrich's “path lay among the heights of mankind” (a favourite expression of his), the effect was a feeling of freedom and originality which awoke an echo deep down in the prince's soul.

When Klaus Heinrich listened to the doctor's loud and jolly anecdotes of his life, of the “bitterness of the cup of life,” he felt as he used to when he went rummaging with Ditlinde his sister, and that the man who could tell such anecdotes, that this “rolling stone,” as he called himself, did not, like the others, adopt a reserved and deferential attitude towards him, but, without prejudice to a free and cheerful homage, treated him as a comrade in fate and destiny, warmed Klaus Heinrich's heart to inexpressible gratitude and completed the charm which bound him to the usher for ever….

Shortly after his sixteenth birthday (Albrecht, the Heir Apparent, was at the time in the South for his health) the Prince was confirmed, together with the five “Pheasants,” in the Court Church. The Courier reported the fact without making any sensation of it. Dom Wislezenus, the President of the High Consistory, treated a Bible text in counterpoint, this time to the choice of the Grand Duke, and Klaus Heinrich was on this occasion gazetted a Lieutenant, although he had not the foggiest notion of things military…. His existence was becoming more and more barren of expertise. The ceremonial of the confirmation also lacked incisive significance, and the Prince returned immediately afterwards quietly back to the “Pheasantry” to continue his life amongst his tutors and schoolfellows without any alteration.

It was not till one year later that he left his old-fashioned homely schoolroom with the torso on the stove; the seminary was broken up, and while his five noble comrades were transferred to the Corps of Cadets, Klaus Heinrich again took up his abode in the Old Schloss, intending, in accordance with an agreement which Herr von Knobelsdorff had come to with the Grand Duke, to spend a year at the upper gymnasium classes in the capital. This was a well-calculated and popular step, which however did not make much difference from the point of view of expertise. Professor Kürtchen had gone back to his post at the public academy, he instructed Klaus Heinrich as before in several branches of knowledge, and showed even greater zeal than he had at the seminary, being determined to let everybody see how tactful he was. It also appeared that he had told the rest of the staff of the agreement reached with regard to the two ways in which the Prince should announce his feelings with regard to answering a question.

As to Doctor Ueberbein, who had also returned to the academy, he had not yet advanced so far in his unusual career as to teach the highest class. But at Klaus Heinrich's lively, even insistent request, preferred by him to the Grand Duke, not by word of mouth but by official channels, so to speak, through the benevolent Herr von Knobelsdorff, the usher was appointed tutor and superintendent of home studies, came daily to the Schloss, bawled at the lackeys, and had every opportunity of working on the Prince with his intellectual and enthusiastic talk. Perhaps it was partly the fault of this influence that Klaus Heinrich's relations with the young people with whom he shared the much-hacked school-benches continued even looser and more distant than his connexion with the five at the “Pheasantry”; and if thus the popularity which this year was intended to secure was not attained, the intervals, which both in summer and in winter were spent by all the scholars in the roomy paved courtyard, offered opportunities for camaraderie.

But these intervals, intended to refresh the ordinary scholars, brought with them for Klaus Heinrich the first actual effort of the kind of which his life was to be full. He was naturally, at least during the first term, the cynosure of every eye in the play-ground—no easy matter for him, in view of the fact that here the surroundings deprived him of every external support and attribute of dignity, and he was obliged to play on the same pavement as those whose common idea was to stare at him. The little boys, full of childlike irresponsibility, hung about close to him and gaped, while the bigger ones hovered around with wide-open eyes and looked at him out of the corners of them or from under their eyelids…. The excitement dwindled in course of time, but even then—whether the fault was Klaus Heinrich's or the others'—even later the camaraderie somehow did not make much progress. One might see the prince, on the right of the head master or the usher-in-charge, followed and surrounded by the curious, strolling up and down the courtyard. One could see him, too, chatting with his schoolfellows.

What a charming sight it was! There he leaned, half-sitting on the slope of the glazed-brick wall, with his feet crossed, and his left hand thrust far behind on his hips, with the fifteen members of the first class in a half-circle round him. There were only fifteen this year, for the last promotions had been made with the object in view that the select should contain no elements which were unfitted by origin or personality to be for a year on Christian-name terms with Klaus Heinrich. For the use of Christian names was ordered. Klaus Heinrich conversed with one of them, who had advanced a little towards him out of the semicircle, and answered him with little short bows. Both laughed, everybody laughed directly they began to talk to Klaus Heinrich. He asked him for instance: “Have you yet done your German essay for next Tuesday?”

“No, Prince Klaus Heinrich, not quite yet; I haven't yet done the last part.”

“It's a difficult subject. I haven't any idea yet what to write.”

“Oh, your Highness will…. You'll soon think of something!”

“No, it's difficult…. You got an alpha in arithmetic, didn't you?”

“Yes, Prince Klaus Heinrich, I was lucky.”

“No, you deserved it. I shall never be able to make anything of it!”

Murmurs of amusement and gratification in the semicircle. Klaus Heinrich turned to another schoolfellow, and the first stepped quickly back. Everybody felt that the really important point was not the essay nor the arithmetic, but the conversation as an event and an undertaking, one's attitude and tone, the way one advanced or retired, the success with which one assumed a sympathetic, self-collected, and refined demeanour. Perhaps it was the consciousness of this which brought the smile to everybody's lips.

Sometimes, when he had the semicircle in front of him, Klaus Heinrich would say some such words as “Professor Nicolovius looks an owl.”

Great then was the merriment among the others. Such a remark was the signal for general unbending, they kicked over the traces, “Ho, ho, ho!” 'd in chorus in their newly cracked voices, and one would declare Klaus Heinrich to be a “ripping chap.” But Klaus Heinrich did not often say such things, he only said them when he saw the smile on the others' faces grow faint and wan, and signs of boredom or even of impatience showing themselves; he said them by way of cheering them up, and at the extravagant laughter by which they were followed he wore a look half of curiosity, half of dismay.

It was not Anselm Schickedanz who called him a “ripping chap,” and yet it was directly on his account that Klaus Heinrich had compared Professor Nicolovius to an owl. Anselm Schickedanz had laughed like the others at the joke, but not in quite the same approving way, but with an intonation which implied, “Gracious heavens!” He was a dark boy, with narrow hips, who enjoyed the reputation throughout the school of being a devil of a chap. The tone of the top class this year was admirable. The obligations which membership of Klaus Heinrich's class entailed had been impressed on every boy from various quarters, and Klaus Heinrich was not the boy to tempt them to forget these obligations. But that Anselm Schickedanz was a devil of a chap had often come to his ears, and Klaus Heinrich, when he looked at him, felt a kind of satisfaction in believing what he heard, although it was an obscure problem to him how he could have come by his reputation.

He made several inquiries privately, broached the subject apparently by chance, and tried to find out from one or other of his comrades something about Schickedanz's devilry. He discovered nothing definite. But the answers, whether disparaging or complimentary, filled him with the suspicion of a mad amiability, an unlawful glorious humanity, which was there for the eyes of all, save his own, to see—and this suspicion was almost a sorrow. Everybody said at once, with reference to Anselm Schickedanz, and in saying it dropped into the forbidden form of address: “Yes, Highness, you ought to see him when you are not there!”

Klaus Heinrich would never see him when he was not there, would never get near him, never get to know him. He stole peeps at him when he stood with the others in a semicircle before him, laughing and braced up like all the rest. Everybody braced himself up in Klaus Heinrich's presence, his very existence was accountable for that, as he well knew, and he would never see what Schickedanz was like, how he behaved when he let himself go. At the thought he felt a twinge of envy, a tiny spark of regret.

At this juncture something painful, in fact revolting, occurred, of which nothing came to the ears of the Grand Ducal couple, because Doctor Ueberbein kept his mouth closed and about which scarcely any rumour spread in the capital because everybody who had had a share or any responsibility in the matter, obviously from a kind of feeling of shame, preserved strict silence about it. I refer to the improprieties which occurred in connexion with Prince Klaus Heinrich's presence at that year's citizens' ball, and in which a Fräulein Unschlitt, daughter of the wealthy soap-boiler, was especially concerned.

The citizens' ball was a chronic fixture in the social life of the capital, an official and at the same time informal festivity, which was given by the city every winter in the “Townpark Hotel,” a big, recently enlarged and renovated establishment in the southern suburbs, and provided the bourgeois circles with an opportunity of establishing friendly relations with the Court. It was known that Johann Albrecht III had never cultivated a taste for this civil and rather free-and-easy entertainment, at which he appeared in a black frock-coat in order to lead off the polonaise with the Lady Mayoress, and that he was wont to withdraw from it at the earliest possible moment. This only heightened the general satisfaction when his second son, although not yet bound to do so, already made his appearance at the ball that year—indeed, it became known that he did so at his own express request. It was said that the Prince had employed Excellency von Knobelsdorff to transmit his earnest wish to the Grand Duchess, who in her turn had contrived to obtain her husband's consent.

Outwardly the festivity pursued its wonted course. The most distinguished guests, Princess Catherine, in a coloured silk dress and cap, accompanied by her red-haired children, Prince Lambert with his pretty wife, and last of all Johann Albrecht and Dorothea with Prince Klaus Heinrich, made their appearance in the “Townpark Hotel,” greeted by city officials, with long-ribboned rosettes pinned on their coats. Several Ministers, aides-de-camp in mufti, numbers of men and women of the Court, the leaders of society, as well as landowners from the surrounding country, were present. In the big white hall the Grand Ducal pairs first received a string of presentations, and then, to the strains of the band which sat in the curved gallery up above, Johann Albrecht with the Lady Mayoress, Dorothea with the Lord Mayor, opened the ball by a procession round the room.