by E. F. Benson
It had been the prettiest scene: there were the three little boys, bright-eyed from the flush of their early sleep, thinking it an immense treat to be allowed to come down in the middle of the night and see a real Princess, who had been eating her good dinner with Mummie. Careful instructions had been issued to them: indeed, the whole scene had been rehearsed. They were to cling to their mother’s silver-mail skirt on their first appearance, like a sort of augmented Holy Family, and then shyly advance with infantine bows and kissings of the Princess’s plump hand. It had all gone off excellently: one had said, “Goodnight, Princess,” and bobbed; the next had said, “Gutc Nacht, Prinzessin,” and the smallest had said “Gute night, your Rollighncss.” Upon which Her Rollighness had picked them up and kissed them soundly, and said, “Goodnight, you little darlings. Schlafen Sic wohl.”... And what if soon the Emperor himself did the same sort of thing? He loved domesticity, she was told, and the family life, and set his imperial face against modern ways.... Lady Gurtner wondered if she could ever have the strength of mind to drop Helen Grote, up to whom she had so long and so diligently climbed. Only a few minutes before her ears had tingled with delight at the sound of her own Christian name in the mouth of Lady Grote. Now in her ecstatic flights into the future she foresaw a time when she might pass sentence on the fact of Helen giving Kuhlmann “a lift.” But she was, on reflection, too much in the lift herself to object to the presence of other people there. Up they all went, and got out at their various floors! For a moment some echo of her earlier days, when she used to wait for buses at street corners, came back to her, and she could almost hear somebody call out, “‘Igher up there.” She felt implicitly inclined to obey.
Some rather urgent telephone-call had summoned the little London fog to his business room before her last guest had left, and she could hear his voice talking in German with telephone pauses and reiterated “Hullos!” It was not wise to interrupt him when there was business going on; he was weaned from all other interests if finance claimed him, and it could be nothing but finance of an urgent kind that made him so loquacious at this hour of the night. So she called up her motor and drove off, leaving word that she would be back again in a couple of hours. Only the butler or a footman and her maid would have to sit up, for, kind-hearted woman as she was, she always gave these considerate directions, for which her servants rather despised her. But she knew nothing whatever about that, and a perfectly trained man who saw her into the motor merely murmured, “Thank you, my lady,” in a voice that gave her a thrill of complacency in suggesting how kind and thoughtful she was.
She returned towards three in the morning, having had a very pleasant time at a couple of houses, and her inherent vulgarity had sunned itself and expanded its wings as she represented her party as being quite a small impromptu affair, and allowed the items of it to be almost dragged out of her.... Yes, Kuhlmann had dined, and, like an angel, had sung to them afterwards, and Saalfeld had dined, and had found his baton in his coat pocket, and had conducted his new symphonic poem. And, yes, Nijinski had come and given them “Endymion.”... Helen Grote was there, and had looked quite lovely; it was really unkind of her to make every other woman look ill-dressed and dowdy, but, of course, she couldn’t help it. The Princess seemed to have enjoyed it: she stopped till after twelve, and was delicious to the children....
It was rather a surprise to Aline to be told on her return that Sir Hermann was still up and wished to see her. She bent her tall head to receive the kiss with which he always welcomed her after the shortest absence, and, as usual, spoke German to him.
“What is it?” she asked. “You look serious. Oh, don’t be serious, for I am having such a lovely time.”
“I have had very disquieting news from Berlin,” said he. “A cypher telegram came to the office, which they decoded and sent me. I had it repeated to make sure.”
Her mind instantly went back to the Emperor’s visit, and the glories that might shine on her.
“Not about the Emperor?” she asked. “He’s not ill, is he?”
“Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”
“Because the Ambassador told me he was coming to England in the autumn or the winter. Oh, I forgot. He told me not to mention it, but my telling you is nothing. Oh, Hermann, he was so surprised I didn’t know him, and said he must remedy that.”
He turned quickly to her.
“What?” he said. “The Emperor is coming to England? Tell me at once all His Excellency said. What was his attitude, his outlook? You are not at your party now, dearest. You are in my office, and it is business.”
He heard her delighted account of it all, gnawing his nails as he listened, a habit which was ineradicable when he was interested. He never did such a thing at Aline’s dinner-parties, because he was not really interested. Aline’s parties were a diversion, like lawn-tennis, which he played in his braces.
“Coming to England?” he repeated. “And wanting to know about Ireland? Why should he want to know about Ireland? What did you say?”
“Just what I have told you, liebster. You do not listen. And when the Emperor—”
“Repeat it,” he said, interrupting.
He took a turn up and down the room while this was going on, his feet noiseless on the thick silk Persian carpet, his face reflected at various angles in the four priceless Louis XVI. mirrors, and at each step some fresh aspect of him was silently telegraphed from one to another. Sometimes he looked like a grotesque, malevolent ape, at other angles he looked like a moustached Napoleon.
“It is very disquieting,” he said at length. “Austria has sent a note to Serbia, on the subject of the murder of the Archduke, which Serbia cannot accept. That, of course, everybody knew yesterday. But now comes what nobody in this country knows, and what I heard from Berlin to-night. Germany is secretly mobilizing. I doubt really if it is known there: they talk of autumn manœuvres. But it is more than autumn manoeuvres, it is mobilization, and I believe it means war. Not one word of this to anybody, Aline. You understand me: not one word, one hint.”
Suddenly he threw his arms out, shaking his fists.
“And you tell me the Emperor will come to England in the autumn or the winter,” he said. “What does that mean? Is it merely a lie to make us doze and sleep again? Or, lieber Goti, is it an irony? How does he mean to come? As a guest of the family of his mother, or as their conqueror? Answer me that! His visit here! Will he come on a warship, or on his yacht? Is he coming to the opera to listen to music, or to Westminster Abbey to be crowned? God damn these kings when they see themselves as God’s anointed. They upset finance; there is no doing anything with them!”
She laughed.
“Hermann, you are having a nightmare,” she said. “You’re talking in your sleep. The Ambassador told me there was no stronger affection in the Emperor’s heart, except his love for Germany, than his affection for England. He said the Emperor would be heartbroken at the thought of trouble in Ireland.”
“Ach, Aline, you are simpler than a Parsifal,” he said impatiently. “Would he not say that in any case?”
“He wouldn’t if it was not true,” she said. “He was here as my guest: he would not tell me lies as he ate his dinner!”
Hermann kicked away a footstool that lay in the path of his prowling walk.
“And because he was here as your guest, he may not lie to you?” he asked. “That would be a queer state of things! Where’s the use of a diplomat if he may not say what will be of service to his Fatherland? What is a dinner, what is hospitality to a good German, when his brain can help his country? Indeed, heart’s dearest, you have forgotten mu eh if you think that: you have become almost as blind as these golfing Englishmen. Is not the call of the All-Highest, the chance to serve him, to sound louder in German ears than little proverbs about eating salt? Have we all got to become members of the race we live among when we go out to dine with them?”
He resumed his walk, taking a cigar from a table as he passed, and then throwing it
uncut and unlit into the fireplace.
“And what is the loudest call for me, Aline?” he asked. “Here am I, German, here am! English also, and so are you. I speak of my interests, you understand, not yet of my sympathies: I speak of my money, my business, my credit. That point will face me — it faces me now — unless I am more mistaken than I have ever been yet. I must act, and act quickly, before the news I have received gets known, for there is no use in rowing, however hard, when you are once in the rapids. I have immense interests in Germany: I have immense interests here. I have to choose, before all power of choice is taken from me. War! War! What gigantic ruin may it not mean!”
She sat down limply, helplessly. All her scintillating vitality, that lived and drew its light from the brilliant surface of life, seemed drained out of her; while he to whom all her ambitions were but toys and trifles, who yawned and blinked at those great parties, except in so far that they delighted her, was transformed into a vivid, glowing personality, when problems of money and business and credit occupied him.
“But war?” she repeated. “War between England and Germany? It is inconceivable! What on earth could a quarrel arise over? What is it all about?”
“I do not say it is necessarily war between England and Germany,” said he. “I say only that Germany is mobilizing: she is striking a match — indeed, she has struck it. Will she blow it out, or will she hold it to light the paper which will light the sticks, which will cause the coal to burn? I used to have to light the fire in the office in the morning thirty years ago, and do you think I did not look how the flame spread? I had to build the fire also, and I knew how to make it catch light most easily. The paper flamed, and the sticks caught the fire if they were dry. And, good God, Europe is like a dry stick to-day. Anything will make it catch fire, and just because Russia and France and this damned little island hate Germany! And why do they hate her? Because they fear her splendid power. There is the sword wrapped round with the olive-branch. Let them beware of making her takeoff the olive-branch, and show the steel. Who knows what the power of Germany is? Not I, not the Kaiser, not anybody—”
“But war between England and Germany?” she wailed again. “How can you believe it, with the Emperor so friendly? What is it about?”
He interrupted impatiently.
“Heart’s beloved,” he said in his accustomed formula, “ do not go on like that. ‘What is it about?’ you asked me. It is about Serbia and Russia, and France and England and Germany. It is about the world, not less than that! You would not even attend if I tried to tell you. As for its being inconceivable, it is just the inconceivable that always happens. At least the man who does not take the inconceivable into his reckonings is a very poor financier. It was inconceivable that your little Japan should win a war against that great sprawling Russia. But had I not foreseen and betted on the inconceivable, we should not, you and I, be in Curzon Street, but in that little flat in West Kensington, with — with a gramophone! Take it from me there is going to be war. Will England come in? I don’t know; I have got to think. But Germany is preparing for war. Whom is she preparing to fight? Not Serbia, but that brown bear that backs Serbia. And if she fights the brown bear, what of France? And if—”
He gnawed his nails in silence a moment, and his mind flew back to the question as to how he personally, his money and his credit would be affected.
“Luckily my interests in Germany are widely distributed,” he said. “I can realize a million or so without attracting much attention. That I must certainly do. God! I wish I could be in Berlin for ten minutes. I would give ten thousand pounds a minute for ten minutes in Berlin. And yet I know all I want to know. I have the data that matter!”
He paused opposite her, and his mind was distracted from the problems which she could not follow, to the problem of her, and all that her life meant to her.
“All that is nothing to you, Aline,” he said. “My dearest, I would never let you want anything that money can buy. But now for our sympathies: where do our sympathies lie? Is it ‘Deutschland über Alles’ for us, or is it England über Deutschland? Answer me that! I speak to you now: I do not just ask you to listen while I talk to myself. If the worst comes to the worst what are we? What do we stand for? Are you going to be English, or are you going to be German? If German, let us not pause: let us walk under the limes in Berlin....”
She was totally incapable of appreciating the magnitude of such a choice: it only reached her in the way that a great rain-storm raging without, just leaks in at the interstices of some window sash, and perhaps makes an infinitesimal puddle on the floor. Nothing greater than that, at the moment, had access to her mind: she could only think of all the pleasant social schemes that shone so rosily in her brain half an hour before, and she began to talk rapidly and half hysterically:
“Oh, I can’t believe it!” she said. “There can be no decision of the sort before me. I’ve got such a full week ahead, there arc a hundred engagements I must keep, and then there’s Baireuth. Surely I can go to Baireuth, Hermann, can’t I? Our tickets are taken for the first cycle, and you’ve engaged a saloon carriage and ordered my cabin on the boat and everything? Oh, don’t let everything be spoiled for me; I was enjoying myself so much without doing anybody any harm, and only giving them the most lovely parties.
“Then there are all my English friends, and you can’t imagine how many intimate friends I’ve got now among the real people — the people who matter. How can I weigh my sympathies in that cold way? We must wait to see what happens and go on being good friends with everybody. Think who was here to-night! German and English and French, and all so friendly, and all dining with us! Surely if you are right, and there is a war, it cannot last very long. You always said that Germany could walk across France whenever she chose, just as you walk across the Park. It would be very sad, but if it’s got to happen, I suppose it’s got to happen, and the sooner it’s over the better. And if we don’t go to Baireuth, we must have some parties down in the country. But I can’t believe it yet: we were so friendly with Germany, and no one could have been pleasanter than the Princess and the Ambassador were to each other. Kuhlmann, too, he is singing in opera here all this week and the next. What will Helen do about him? Will she have to decide? And your cure: won’t you be able to go to Marienbad?”
He interrupted her violently, for her twopenny interests had weaned his uxoriousness from him again.
“Ah, do not be such a baby,” he said. “Can you think of nothing but your operas and your dinner parties? The cataclysm is upon us, and the whole world is going into the cannon’s mouth, and yet you say, ‘Let there be a special cool corner for me in the cannon, where I shall not feel the explosion.’ Who cares whether you go to Baireuth or I to Marienbad? Who are we? That is the question—”
She always cried easily when anything affecting her own personal comfort was concerned; if she missed a train her great blue eyes filled with tears, as she thought how unkind it was of the engine-driver to start before she arrived. The prime duty of everybody was to make things nice for her, since she made things nice for so many others.... So now she began to sob, and the great diamond rose and fell in an agitated manner over her heaving bosom.
“You are horrid to me,” she said. “You scold and scream at me when I am absolutely wretched and want to be comforted. All my pleasure is spoiled, and instead of sympathizing with me, you call me a baby. When you squeezed your finger in the door last week, I did not laugh at you: I tore up one of my best handkerchiefs and bound it up for you. I spend my life in slaving for you, and getting people to come here who might be useful to you. And when I am unhappy, this is all you do—”
He looked at her a moment, as she lay back in her chair clad in that wonderful soft silver mail with the gold line running through it, and the paltriness of her desolation faded from his view, leaving only the desolation.
He seated himself on the arm of her chair, and with his thick, capable fingers caressed her arm. They were squat and st
rong, like the toes of an Arab.
“You are tired, my dearest,” he said; “think no more of these troubles. I did not think you were tired, it did not occur to me, you who are never tired, so your Hermann did not make allowances, and you must forgive him. Go to bed now and get a good night’s rest, and we shall see how things are in the morning. But whatever happens, my Aline, I shall be here to look after you.”
“But you’ve been very unkind,” said she. “I hate unkindness. I am never unkind.”
“I know, and I have asked your forgiveness. I cannot do more than that.”
Never before this evening of her supreme success had her character, the thing she really was, so betrayed itself. She was like a spoiled child: everything that she wanted must be given her, and if she did not want a European war, that must be stopped instantly, because she disliked it. Anyone who did not at once provide her with what she desired, who did not glory in her pleasure, thinking it an honour to contribute to it, who did not agonize over her disappointments, again thinking it an honour wholly to sacrifice himself to averting and nullifying them, was a callous monster, who must not at once be forgiven, even if he professed penitence. The growing intoxication of those last weeks, culminating to-night, had gone to her head like some new wine, and it had become everyone’s duty, her husband’s first of all, to pet and pat and admire her, to go “wholly from themselves,” in their adoration of her, and to shield her from everything that could threaten to vex her. Her concentrated self-centredness had suddenly shot up in flower, like the aloe that stores within it, before its flowering, the energy of twenty years.