At about half-past ten a footman comes with a summons to go downstairs, so I put on my outdoor things and follow him out into the sunny courtyard, through a big archway, and along winding sandy paths, till I reach a point where I can see the Empress sitting at a table under some big trees near what is called the “English garden"—a garden made, and still maintained much as she left it, by that daughter of George III who married a Landgraf of Hesse-Homburg.
Here it is that the Kaiser’s little daughter first comes dancing lightly into my life, to remain in it, a permanent and very delightful memory. A steep grassy bank in front descends so deeply to a tiny lake lying below that the intervening shore is hidden. Suddenly above this bank appears the sleek golden head of a small girl of nine or so, dressed in a stiff, starched, plain white sailor dress with a blue collar and a straw sailor hat.
Her mother calls to her in English, “Come here, Sissy”; and with a hop skip and jump over the intervening space she springs forward and holds out her hand to me with frank friendliness.
A few steps behind her comes another flying figure in white—her brother, Prince Joachim, the youngest of the six sons of the Kaiser; and then above the bank emerges the young officer I met at supper the night before, who is Governor to the Prince. Both children begin talking volubly in German to the Empress, the little girl, as far as my limited knowledge permits me to judge, emphatically contradicting every word her brother says. They are obviously—well, perhaps, it would be over-emphasis to call it quarrelling, but they are certainly not quite in accord. The young officer, lingering in the background—lingering in backgrounds becomes a fine art at court—gives me a meaning glance, raises his eyebrows, smiles and shakes his head with a slight shrug of his shoulders.
“They are always zanking,” he says to me in his fluent but imperfect English, when, after a few minutes, the Empress departs, leaving me to the full and undisturbed enjoyment of my duties. I subsequently consult a dictionary and discover that zanken is a German verb meaning “to wrangle,” “to dispute acrimoniously.” It is a conspicuous characteristic of the children’s intercourse in those early days. Although they cannot bear to be parted from each other, they are as frankly and reciprocally rude as politicians, discovering an amazing fertility in the application of opprobrious and insulting epithets, flowers of rhetoric of which I gather a few for personal use if necessary. These storms beat with bewildering and baffling violence on my head, lacking, as I do, the knowledge of the German language necessary to make my censure more discriminating; but I note that Prince Joachim’s Governor is just as helpless as myself, though his command of the vernacular might be supposed to give him some advantage.
The next few days are busied with initiation into that mysterious inner side of court life of which the general public necessarily knows little but imagines many vain things. Chief among those early impressions is that of the Kaiser himself, whom I have not yet seen, as he is absent on one of his numerous journeys. Distilled through the alembic of his little daughter’s mind I soon perceive that the Emperor, hitherto known to me only by the medium of newspapers, which, although perhaps accurately informed as to facts, often throw a misleading light on the character and temperament of this much-discussed monarch, is not always playing the part of the frowning Imperial Personage of fierce moustaches, corrugated brow and continually-clenched mailed fist—that he frequently recedes from this warlike attitude and becomes an ordinary humorous domestic “Papa,” who makes sportive jokes with his family at the breakfast table and is even occasionally guilty of the more atrocious form of pun.
