XXV
Perched on the wall,—hung with an old-world Chinese paper, figured with sprays of bamboo, pagodas, bridges, mandarins promenading under yellow umbrellas, and fair Celestials reclining on the banks of a meandering, bright blue stream—the German fly of Mr. Knewbit's envy would have reaped scant information from the conversation of the three men sitting at the dinner-table, for the reason that they conversed in English—perhaps for privacy's sake.
The apartment, not ordinarily used as a dining-room, possessed three sets of folding-doors, and beyond a sofa and twelve heavy chairs, upholstered with a Chinese brocade matching the paper, was scantily furnished. The table plate was solid and handsome. A pair of huge silver-gilt wine-coolers displayed a goodly array of champagne bottles, a cellar-basket with rows of horizontal wicker-nests contained claret, Burgundy, and Rhine wine. The second course was under discussion, but the servants, after placing the dishes on the table, had withdrawn. By a bell kept on a dumb-waiter at the host's elbow, bearing sauces, clean plates, spare glasses, bread of white and black, and other requisites, the attendants could be summoned at need.
The hostess's chair at the table-head was vacant. The two guests' places were laid on the right and left hand of the host. All three men were in uniform, two were well stricken in years; and Time had not left sufficient locks among them to furnish a wig-maker with material for covering a bald patch.
Also, they were men of whom the world had heard much already, and was, before the ending of the year, to hear a great deal more.
The tall, heavily-built man of sixty-seven, in the uniform of a General of Division, who sat upon the host's right hand, boasting a hair-tuft above either ear, a pair of shaggy eyebrows, and a bristling mustache dyed to savage blackness, any intelligent Berliner would have recognized as Von Roon, the Prussian Minister of War; while the mild-looking veteran of seventy who opposed him, displaying the crimson badge of the Great General Staff upon a plain dark close-buttoned military frock, with the ribbons of a dozen decorations showing in a narrow line on his left breast and the coveted Cross of the Red Eagle of the First Class hanging at the black regulation stock that clipped his unstarched linen collar, would have been claimed by the veriest street urchin as "Our Moltke!"
You saw in this hale, lean, stooping Staff Officer, who covered a scalp as bare as a new-born babe's with an obvious auburn wig, the first soldier of the day, the past-master in war-craft. His fine, transparent beaky profile, tight mouth, clear light eyes, set in a net of innumerable knowing little wrinkles, and the cross-hatching of tiny scarlet veins that made his hollow cheeks ruddy as Cornish apples, might have belonged to some aged, ascetic Cardinal, or venerable Professor of Science, rather than to Baron Helmuth Carl Bernhard von Moltke, General, Field-Marshal, and Chief of the Great General Staff of the Prussian Army; whose heraldic motto, Erst wagen dann wagen summarizes his strategical policy; whose conduct of the Danish War of '64 and the Austrian War of '66 had placed Prussia in the forefront as a military nation, under whose banner were soon to gather the Confederated German States.
Questioned as to the identity of the man at the head of the table, the long-limbed, heavily molded, powerfully built personage of five-and-fifty, attired in the undress-uniform of a Colonel of White Cuirassiers, and wearing the Order of Commander of the Red Eagle, the citizen would most likely have scowled, the street-boy spat forth some unsavory epithet, tacked on to a name that was destined to be inscribed upon the era in divers mediums, inclusive of marble and iron, brass and gold and silver; lead and fire; bright steel and red blood.
For this was the Minister to whom diplomats, Parliamentary orators, and political leader-writers referred when they mentioned Prussia; the accursed of Ultramontane, the abhorred of Socialists. Walking alone through the streets, as, indeed, he loved to do, his keen eye and huge physical strength had saved him, ere now, from the assassin's bullet or knife. And you could not look upon him without recognizing a Force, all-potent for good or all-dominant in evil, an enemy to be execrated or a leader to be adored.
The massive, high-domed head was scantily covered, save for a grayish lock or so above either temple, and a thin thatching behind the finely shaped, sagacious ears. The eyebrows were thick—of gray mixed with darkish brown; the luxuriant brown-gray mustache covering the large, mobile, sarcastic mouth, grew heavily as any trooper's. The short, straight nose was rounded at the end like the point of a broadsword. And in the indomitable, vital regard of the blue eyes, partly hidden under thick and level lids, you felt the master-mind, as they coldly considered some question of finance or diplomacy, or blazed challenge and defiance, scorn and irony. And in the sagging orbital pouches, as in the puffy jowl, you read the unmistakable signs of bygone orgies, deep potations, marvelous vital powers taxed to the utmost in the past pursuit of pleasure, as by present indefatigable, unsleeping labors with brain, voice, and pen in the service of Throne and State.
The table-talk dealt chiefly, at first, with culinary and gastronomical matters. Asparagus soup iced and a clear soup with vermicelli had preceded the course of fish, placed on the table by the servants, who had then been dismissed. A huge dish of Waldbach trout with green sauce and another, as capacious, of crayfish stewed in cream with mushrooms, vanished before a double onslaught on the part of the War Minister and the Chancellor, the Chief of the General Staff partaking sparingly, as was his wont.
Said his host, smiling and setting down an empty wine goblet:
"You eat nothing, Herr Baron Field-Marshal, whereas I, who come of a family of great eaters, and His Excellency, who boasts a similarly inherited capacity, have taken twice of each dish."
"Thanks, thanks, dear Count," said Moltke mildly, glancing downward at the well-marked hollow behind his middle buttons; "but I do not like to overload my stomach, particularly at my time of life."
"Being aware of Your Excellency's objection to dishes that are heavy," the Chancellor continued gravely, but still smiling, "I took pains to select a menu of light, easily digested things. What are three or four dozens of oysters at the commencement of a dinner?"
Von Roon agreed, in a hoarse bass, that set the chandelier-glasses vibrating:
"Or a few half-pound trout, or a helping or so of stewed crayfish? Mere nothings—to a strong digestion."
"Mine cannot be strong," the great strategist remarked modestly, "for I find that an over-plentiful meal oppresses the brain, and hinders steady thought."
Said the Chancellor, filling from a long-necked bottle one of the three large crystal goblets that served him as wine-glasses, emptying it at a draught and setting it down:
"Hah! Were that known in a certain high quarter at Paris, what a cargo of delicacies you would presently receive from the Maison Chevet!"
Von Roon's big voice came in:
"Was not Chevet the Parisian purveyor who supplied the banker-minister Lafitte with fish for a Dieppe dinner in the time of the French Monarchy?"
"So!" The Chancellor, holding his napkin delicately in both hands, dried the wine from his mustache, and added, turning his great, slightly bloodshot eyes upon the interrogator. "And who is now chief caterer for the Emperor Napoleon the Third." He added, glancing back at Moltke, and observing that his glass stood unemptied: "Since Your Excellency will not eat, let me recommend you the wine, which is of special quality. Not only Rüdesheim, but good Rüdesheim. Ha, ha, ha!"
The veteran's clear eyes became mere slits in the mass of puckered wrinkles. He pushed back his auburn peruke, showing his high-arched temples, and laughed, revealing gums as healthy as a child's, and still accommodating three or four staunch old grinders inclined at various angles, like ancient apple-tree stumps.
"Nu, nu! You are twitting me with my candor to Sultan Mahmoud in 1835; but what else could I say when Chosref Pasha intimated that His Sublimity required my opinion? Directly I tasted his wretched wine, I knew some rogue had sold him an inferior brand, and thus I told him honestly: 'It is Rüdesheim, Your Majesty, but it is not good Rüdesheim!' And with the first of the boxes of tobacco and cigarettes that came from Constantinople after my return to Germany, I received the message that the tutun was not only Turkish tutun, but good Turkish tutun." He drank off his wine, ending: "And so my nephews say it is, for I smoke neither cigarettes nor pipes."
"I smoke pipes," said the Chancellor, stretching a white, muscular hand toward the bell on the dumb-waiter, "when my doctor prohibits cigars." He added: "Pipes of all materials and descriptions—one sort excepted. I have no doubt Your Excellency could give it a name."
The War Minister, pondering, knotted his heavy tufted eyebrows, and presently blew out his cheeks as a man may when the jest baffles his wit. The Field-Marshal began to laugh, a gentle chuckle that began by agitating his lean abdomen, and shaking his bowed but vigorous shoulders before it widened his mouth into a slit curved gaily at the corners, and squeezed tears of merriment out of his puckered eyes.
"I'll wager half a pfennig I will name it at the first guess! You mean the Calumet of Peace!"
Von Roon barked out a laugh. The Chancellor nodded, smiling. Then two middle-aged, grave-looking male servants in plain black entered with the third course, and the faces of the diners underwent a curious change. They were more suave, and all expression seemed as though it had been wiped from them. Until, following on the heels of the servants (who brought the entrées), there appeared a colossal boarhound, dark tawny in color, with black pointings, short, rounded ears, massive chest, square muzzle, and red-rimmed eyes. Fixing these fierce orbs upon his master with an affection proved not altogether disinterested by the copious dribbling of his jaws, the great brute sat upright at his left hand, flogged the carpet with his heavy tail, and saluted the placing of the dishes on the table with three gruff barks.
"Aha, Tyras!"
"Hey, then, Tyras! So they have cut short your furlough, boy!"
"He would tell you, like that sergeant of infantry who was made postman of a country district after the war of '66, and at whom the illiterate population—who never got anything but bad news or dunning letters—used to shoot as a mild hint to keep away altogether, that all the days are field-days to him. Speaking as a dog with a master who walks when he does not ride, and must be waited for when he is neither riding nor walking."
The Chancellor, smiling, looked at the huge brute, which rose and laid its massive jowl entreatingly upon his chair-arm, and receiving no immediate return in caress, lobbed a heavy forepaw pettishly upon the tablecloth. A chased silver-gilt salt-cellar, in the shape of a Bavarian peasant-girl carrying two milk-pails, toppled, and might have fallen to the floor, but that the Field-Marshal caught it dexterously, though without being able to prevent the salt being spilt.
"No harm done. See!" He triumphantly set the milk-maid in her place again: "Only the salt is spilled upon the cloth!"
"Now, if Tyras were superstitious!" commented the host, as a servant hastened to repair the damage with the aid of a napkin and a porcelain dessert-plate, "he would be convinced that Madame Tyras and her sons were not doing as well as might be hoped."
"The bitch has pupped, then?" said Von Roon as a trio of corks exploded; and the servants, having carried round the dishes, placed them on the table, set an open bottle of champagne, dewy from the ice, and enveloped in a damask napkin, at the right of each diner, and noiselessly quitted the Chinese room.
As the door shut, the Chancellor continued, responding to Roon's question with a nod, and looking at the Chief of the Great General Staff:
"However, Tyras is not one of those nervous sires who rend heaven and earth with outcries if danger threatens one of their offspring. The Pomeranian breed are possibly less nervous than the strain at Sigmaringen. I think Prince Antony——"
Blurted out the Field-Marshal, bolting a mouthful of cutlet and crimsoning to the edges of his wig with sudden anger: "May the great devil fly away with that pompous old sheep's-head!"
"It was not without reason," said the Chancellor, without slackening in his onslaught upon an entrée of duckling stewed with olives, "that I arranged for us three to dine without the servants. Did I not foresee that the hot blood of the warlike youth would effervesce in some such expression as that I have just heard!"
Said the old man, still flushed, but laughing, and sipping at a bumper of dry Sillery:
"He is a sheep's-head, and a pompous one! He negotiates with Prim, as head of the Hohenzollern family, quite forgetting the King, it would appear! He is very well pleased—he thinks the place will suit his son capitally! He sends him on second thoughts to ask the King if he does not think so. Then when France hurries her Ambassador to Ems to inform the King, who has not said 'Ay' or 'Nay' in the matter, that she will not tolerate a Prince of Prussia on the Throne of Spain, he writes to the King saying that he is much impressed by the turn things are taking at Paris, and though he thinks he cannot in decency break off the affair, perhaps the King will do it for him! Meanwhile Prince Leopold, who is the chief person concerned—where withdrawal or acceptance is in question—has quitted Ems and gone where you please.... Not to his parents' country castle of Sigmaringen, but to the Tyrol.... Now why to the Tyrol? This marching and countermarching—with no definite purpose in it, makes my blood boil. Phew!"
And really the perspiration fairly bubbled from the pores of the old warrior, as he took off his auburn peruke and mopped his dripping head and face with a large white handkerchief.
The Chancellor, who had been discussing a second helping of the dish before him, laid down his knife and fork upon their silver-gilt supporters, unfastened a hook of his undress frock, and said, withdrawing a small roll of tissue papers and separating one thin penciled sheet from the rest:
"There is some reason for the Prince's agitation. This morning a telegram in cipher—of which this is a fair transcript—was dispatched from Sigmaringen to Olozaga, the Spanish Ambassador at Paris. It conveys the intimation that Prince Antony withdraws from the candidacy in the name of Prince Leopold. It was sent by the French Emperor's secret agent, a Roumanian named Straz."
He went on informing himself, with a quiet side-glance to right and left, of the effect his communication was producing:
"Perhaps you do not know Straz—a man with the profile and curls of one of M. Layard's man-god bulls of Nineveh, a living tool that might have been tempered in the workshop of an Alexander Borgia, or a Catherine de Medici——"
He stopped to fill one of his great crystal goblets from the champagne-bottle that stood beside him. Moltke, indifferent to the dishes that stood temptingly within reach, had been wiping the inside of his wig dry with his handkerchief. Now, oblivious of the wig, and crumpling it with the handkerchief into a ball, he was squeezing the ball between his narrow palms as he listened to the speaker. Von Roon, who had been busy upon some sweetbreads cooked in sour cream, paused in the act of helping himself again largely.
"So—so—this fellow—Straz——" The Chancellor stuttered now and then, and he did it here effectively—"This uns-scrupulous f-fellow of whom I am t-talking——" He drained the big glass to the dregs, wiped his mustache carefully, and began delicately unfolding more thin sheets of paper from the small but pregnant wad.
"Ah, yes, where was I? Th-this morning, the twelfth of July, the originals of these three telegrams, which are not in cipher, were sent from Sigmaringen by Prince Antony. The first, to Marshal Prim, at Madrid, withdraws his son from the candidacy. The second, to Olozaga, recapitulates the wording of this. The third, ostensibly addressed to the principal journals of Berlin and Germany, and to the German Submarine Telegraphic Agencies by order of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, abandons all pretensions to the Spanish scepter, and restores to Spain her freedom of initiative."
Von Roon bellowed like a nine-inch siege gun:
"What May-madness has the confounded old billy-goat?"
The Chief of the Great General Staff put on his wig, and said, folding his lean arms upon his sunken chest:
"How has he at Paris managed to frighten the old man?"
The Chancellor said, fixing his full, powerful eyes upon the light ones twinkling through their wise old puckers:
"The mission of M. Straz, privately sent, upon the advice of the Duke de Gramont, by the Emperor of France to Sigmaringen (while Count Benedetti repairs to the King of Prussia at Ems, and a third emissary, Bartholdi, is sent to menace President Zorilla at Madrid)—the mission of M. Straz is to terrify the Prince and Princess with threats of the assassination of one, if not both their sons."
Commented Moltke, shrugging a shoulder:
"To work on the woman, always—if there is one! ... Badinguet's tactics are not new—but they are effective beyond doubt."
"Knave!" came from Roon, in a blurt of indignation
"Says Straz to Prince Antony of Hohenzollern—I give you the exact words;—'Highness, His Imperial Majesty the Emperor authorizes me to inform you that a group of Roumanian conspirators are plotting against the life of your elder son, Prince Charles von Hohenzollern—now Charles of Roumania. The threads of this plot being centered in Paris, it is in the Emperor's power to sever them—he will do so if Prince Leopold withdraws from the candidature,—he will not seek to deter the conspirators, should the Prince prove obstinate. Reflect in addition that Prince Leopold, as King of Spain, will have to contend against the plots of Alfonsists and Carlists—as against the intrigues of Montpensier and other aspirants to Isabella's vacated throne. He will not be summoned to reign—he will be called to a disaster. Death will sit beside him, under the Royal canopy.'"
The reader's muscular white hands drew another crackling sheet from the little roll of papers. He went on:
"The mother of the two young men was present—as was intended—when Straz delivered this message from the Emperor. Naturally the Princess brought her batteries to work upon the Prince and her younger son, who, though it is not admitted, was actually present. She has wept, implored, prayed, fainted, argued for forty-eight hours——"
The Field-Marshal muttered:
"Poor soul!"
And with his wrinkled hand he rubbed a glistening drop from his cheek, that was not perspiration. Von Roon snorted like a dyed old war-horse:
"Meanwhile, the Imperial Ambassador, Count Benedetti, will be setting forth the object of his mission to the King!"
Said the Chancellor, letting the words come out softly and distinctly,—and one would have expected so huge a man to roar after the fashion of giants, rather than to speak in such mellifluous tones:
"His instructions run thus: 'Say to the King that we have no secret motive, that we do not seek a pretext for war—and that we only ask to reach an honorable solution of a difficulty that was not created by us.'"
"It is honorable, then," said Von Moltke in a tone of childlike wonder, "to threaten to murder that old woman's two sons?"
"Meanwhile," said the mellifluous, pleasant voice of the Chancellor, "the Emperor and Marshal le Bœuf have sent Staff-Colonel Gresley to Algiers with secret orders to MacMahon to embark those troops from Africa which are most available for service on the Continent, and to warn the most distant regiments to be at Algiers on the 18th. The Generals of his Artillery and Engineers have been dispatched upon a plain-clothes confidential visit of inspection to the fortresses of the North-East, all leave has been stopped, and the commanders of brigades have apprised the staffs of the mobilization offices to dispatch the orders of recall of the reserves. This was put into effect on the 8th. Upon the same day the order was given to bring the Infantry regiments up to War strength by the creation of their Fourth Battalions, and General Blondeau, of the Administrative Branch of the War Department, has been authorized to exceed his credit by the sum of a million francs." He ended, showing his small, regular teeth, as he smiled agreeably upon his hearers: "The Tuileries system of Secret Intelligence is certainly excellent, but I do not think we are so badly served!"
"Badly served!" echoed Roon. "One would say not!"
"You must be served by the great devil himself and all his devilkins, Otto, my dear fellow!" said the Chief of the Great General Staff, with a merry chuckle, "to have all this dished up to you before it is cold! Well, well! Thanks be to the good God—we are not so far behind these French as we might be! No, no! not at all so far behind! ..."
He said this musingly, his startlingly limpid eyes almost hidden by the wrinkles and puckers, his long, humorous upper lip drawn down and set firmly on the lower one, as he cupped his sharp chin in the palm of one wrinkled hand, nursing the elbow appertaining to it in the palm of-the other hand.
"'So far behind,' do you say?" growled Von Roon. "Sapperlot! I should call it a day's march and a half-day's march ahead!"
"It may be—it may be!" said the Field-Marshal placidly. "God grant that it prove so!"
"You are as pious as the King to-night," said the Chancellor, laughing heartily. "And your God is the God of Battles, we all know!"
"Yes, yes, the Friend Above does not forget this old fellow!" said the Field-Marshal simply. "The thousand-ton Krupp gun—whose acquaintance the Parisians made at the Exposition of 1867,—has been waiting ever since to make upon them an impression of a different kind! Like the gun, I have bided my time, as the Scotch say. Neither the cannon nor myself will last for ever, but to worry is folly! ... Heaven will not let us rust upon the shelf!"
"'Mensch ärgere Dich nicht' is a good proverb," said the Chancellor, "not only for Your Excellency! Chained to my study-table all yesterday and this morning,—horribly handicapped by the absence of my First Secretary Abeken, who is doing duty with the King at Ems.—listening to reports, receiving showers of telegrams, dictating replies in answer to the appeals or expostulations of Foreign Ministers—sending instructions to Ambassadors, and drinking Mühlbrunnen water,—which must not be taken when one is vexed or worried, if one wants it not to play the very devil in one's inside, I chewed the cud of that proverb, 'Man, do not vex thyself!' to keep myself from gnawing my tongue. That official international threat of Gramont, uttered in the session of the Corps Législatif of July 6th,—the filth hurled by the Paris Press—did not cost me a sleepless night. But that, after such insults, the King of Prussia should treat with Benedetti at Ems while the Prussian Foreign Minister remained at Varzin—stuck in my gizzard as though I had swallowed a prickle-burr. It was worse than Olmütz.... I saw nothing but resignation ahead of me!"
Von Roon agreed:
"To me also it seemed a slight not to the Foreign Minister alone—but to His Majesty's Government in your person."
The Field-Marshal added, his wrinkled face lengthening dourly:
"I may tell you—there being no ladies present!—the whole affair acted on me like unripe gooseberries, especially after reading that sentence in the Gaulois, written by a gamin with a finger to his nose...."
Von Boon thundered:
"'La Prusse cane!' Only say black-dose, rather than sour gooseberries, and there you have the effect of the words on me!"
Said the Chancellor, with a twinkle of humor:
"They wrought upon myself as an emetocatharsis. For, repudiating the slight, and simultaneously expelling from my system the last remains of compunction, I decided then and there to hurry off from Varzin to Ems for the purpose of urging upon His Majesty the urgent necessity for summoning the Reichstag. The words I meant to use kept drumming in my skull—We shall be traitors to ourselves if we do not accept this challenge. Without an instant's delay, we must mobilize!"
Said Roon:
"Why not, when we are prepared to take measures for the safety of the Rhenish provinces? We can put Saarbrück in a state of defense in twenty-four hours, and Mainz in less than forty-eight. Is it not so, Herr General Field-Marshal?"
Von Moltke's dry, level voice returned quietly:
"My plan of invasion was drawn up in 1868. All my arrangements are made, as I have said. When His Majesty—when the Chancellor of the Confederation and Your Excellency give the signal—I go home to my quarters on the first floor of the south-east wing of the Great General Staff Department, and dispatch a telegraphic message of three words..." He began to laugh, rubbing his hands together. "Then—you will see whether I am ready! All I ask is Opportunity—like Krupp's thousand-tonner gun!"