This was too much for Michael.
“My dear Hermann,” he said, “we alluded very cautiously to the ‘Song to Aegir’ this morning, and delicately remarked that you had heard it once and I twice. How can you care what his opinion of this opera is?”
Falbe shook his handsome head, and gesticulated with his fine hands.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You have just been talking to him himself. I long to hear his every word and intonation. There is the personality, which to us means so much, in which is summed up all Germany. It is as if I had spoken to Rule Britannia herself. Would you not be interested? There is no one in the world who is to his country what the Kaiser is to us. When you told me he had stayed at Ashbridge I was thrilled, but I was ashamed lest you should think me snobbish, which indeed I am not. But now I am past being ashamed.”
He poured out a glass of wine and drank it with a “Hoch!”
“In his hand lies peace and war,” he said. “It is as he pleases. The Emperor and his Chancellor can make Germany do exactly what they choose, and if the Chancellor does not agree with the Emperor, the Emperor can appoint one who does. That is what it comes to; that is why he is as vast as Germany itself. The Reichstag but advises where he is concerned. Have you no imagination, Michael? Europe lies in the hand that shook yours.”
Michael laughed.
“I suppose I must have no imagination,” he said. “I don’t picture it even now when you point it out.”
Falbe pointed an impressive forefinger.
“But for him,” he said, “England and Germany would have been at each other’s throats over the business at Agadir. He held the warhounds in leash—he, their master, who made them.”