At last we came again in view of the station, and a mass of policemen took us in charge, still rather nervous—the policemen I mean—and very irritated with the crowd and perhaps a little with us.
The time for the train to start was overdue. We scrambled in hurriedly, but the Empress wished to show the accompanying officer some recognition of the strenuous activity he had displayed on her behalf. The gentleman-in-waiting hastily produced a case full of those royal-monogrammed-scarfpins, studs, and brooches, which are part of the travelling equipment of every court. The officer received a tie-pin, and one of the police-officers some studs, thrust into his hands almost as the train moved off, and we were left to review and discuss the experiences of the last half-hour.
“Never, no, never in the whole course of my experience,” declared the Empress, “was I in such a fearful crowd. I really began to think that we never should emerge alive. It was too horrible.”
She shuddered and was obviously unstrung. As for the Princess, she was unusually pale and subdued, and it was a long time before she again proposed “a tiny walk” in a strange town.
In the next morning’s Königsberg Times was a paragraph in the news column to the effect that the Empress and Princess, with a small following, had walked “ungezwungen” (freely) through the town for a short time. Obviously the reporter had not been in the thick of the crowd.
CHAPTER XIV
THE KAISER AND KAISERIN
THE key to a man’s actions must always be found in his personal character. Two men saying exactly the same thing do not mean the same thing, but through the medium of speech are expressing their own individualities, prejudices, illusions, their outlook on the world.
The German Emperor, explained, interpreted, misinterpreted, by his own actions perhaps as much as by the many persons who, after a few hours’ conversation with him, imagine that they, and they only, have had a real soul-revelation from this frankly-unreserved, many-sided monarch, might say with Emerson, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” It is not at all unlikely that he does not particularly want to be understood—that he hardly understands himself. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
The Emperor’s conversation at its best has a certain quality of intoxication—is provocative of thought and wit. Men have been seen, grave American professors and others of that type not easily thrown off their mental balance, to retire from talk with His Majesty with the somewhat dazedly ecstatic look of people who have indulged in champagne; then they go home, and under the influence of this interview write eulogistic, apologetic character-sketches of the Emperor.
It may be asked how does he appear in the intimacies of private life, to the inner circle of his Court, to those who see him in unguarded moments? Men often change for the better, or sometimes for the worse, when they retire from the public eye. But the Emperor is much the same everywhere, he has no special reserves of character for domestic consumption only.