The Emperor was smiling in my direction, glass in hand; so I stood up at once with my champagne glass filled to the brim (fortunately I habitually replenished it with water every time I drank) and was able to toss it off very creditably, thanks to the adjutant’s kindly hint and the comparative innocuousness of the beverage. His Majesty also “took wine,” of course, with the other ladies of the Geschwader.
The Bauern-Haus remained for several years a centre of joyous-hearted hospitality and reckless and extravagant cookery. Once the two cousins of the Princess came over from Glienicke to help to prepare supper, accompanied by a French governess and an elegantly-attired tutor in a top-hat and frock-coat. There was no place in our cookery scheme into which the tutor fitted. So we sent him and the French lady to walk about the gardens together, while the children, in a glow of enthusiasm, sat down to peel potatoes for an Irish stew. Prince Leopold (the cousin) insisted—in spite of advice to the contrary—in also trying to peel the onions; but after weeping copious tears over the first one, allowed somebody else to finish. Besides the stew, we had chops, poached eggs, pancakes, and lemonade.
The Empress, in a very light, elegant toilette, arrived at an acute stage of activity, when every child was running, shrieking, clattering glasses, or spilling water, while the sputter of chops and pancakes and the reek of their frying filled the small kitchen to repletion.
Fortunately we had long since been supplied with full-sized cooking utensils and the doll-things had been scrapped.
A heavy thunderstorm once threatened at the very moment when the supper had reached the culminating point of perfection. We had fried our pancakes (they were a favourite dish and always appeared on the menu) to the accompaniment of rumbles of thunder and blue flashes of lightning, but the Princess ignored the gathering storm, absorbed in the mixing of her batter and the smoothness of her potato purée. As I emerged in a decidedly heated state from the kitchen, I caught a mental picture, which still remains in my memory, of a protesting footman standing on the veranda pointing to the darkened heavens, and of the Princess with a fork in her hand, which she flourished in one hand towards the sky (like another Ajax defying the lightning), while she emphatically refused to return to the house before supper was eaten.
“Our beautiful supper,” she said: “no, I won’t go in. The storm’s nothing. It’s going over.” Crashes of thunder punctuated the sentence.
A harassed Ober-Gouvernante appeared round the bushes and commanded our instant return to the palace; but after several minutes of heated discussion the storm actually did pass over, and our supper was eaten to the sound of its faint rumbling retreat towards the river.
Another time we ventured to make vanilla-ice, and sent to the kitchen for the ice-machine. As we were mixing the milk and eggs and vanilla flavouring, four white-capped cooks in their spotless kitchen livery were seen dragging along some sort of wheeled vehicle on which reposed the heavy ice-machine, which we found to our astonishment to be an apparatus almost as large as a piano.
It was lifted down—as a matter of fact I think two cooks might have managed it—and the guests took turns at the handle with such goodwill that unfortunately we rather overdid it, and the iced custard became of such a hard rock-like consistency that we had to thaw it a little before it was fit to eat. But it was pronounced “quite delicious,” and we were sorry we had not made a larger quantity.
Pfingsten, as Whitsuntide is called in Germany, is celebrated by many pleasant customs. It is the season when all the village people place big boughs of young larch on each side of the doorway to welcome the returning spring. Every street breaks out into a sudden growth of unaccustomed greenery, and in the churches young larch trees cut from the hill-side are placed on each side of the altar.