Since my friend swooped down on me I have been roaming through nothing but places and palaces—especially palaces. Last Sunday, although I was dog tired, he banged at my bedroom-door at the unearthly hour of nine, and bore me off breakfastless to Potsdam and palaced me to such an extent that the sight of an ordinary middle-class dwelling would have been a positive relief.
He conducted me through Babelsburg, the charming summer palace of old Kaiser Wilhelm; he took me all over the Marble Palace, in which the Crown Princes of Prussia reside as soon as they are old enough; and he made me visit every nook and corner of Sans Souci, and gave off the life of Frederick the Great in chapters—a chapter in each room. I have always respected the memory of Frederick the Great because he was so kind to his dogs, and buried them in the palace grounds and put up stones to their memory. For that I long ago forgave him for playing the flute and painting ladies with two right feet and other anatomical eccentricities; but after three hours of Sans Souci I began to resent Frederick the Great as a personal injustice, and I wasn’t in the least sympathetic when my friend explained to me that the great man was a martyr to the gout and suffered terribly with his nerves.
I was trotted over more Potsdam palaces after Sans Souci, and was graciously admitted to the private apartments of the imperial family, not usually shown to strangers. At any other time I should have felt flattered, but so thoroughly worn out was I that even the sight of the imperial nursery and the imperial clothes-horse, on which the imperial baby-linen is dried in front of the imperial fire, failed to put me in a good temper; and at last, as my friend was dragging me up the steps of another palace to show me a room in which everything was solid silver, I turned round and fled, and never halted until I had jumped into a train that was starting for Berlin, where I arrived just in time to put on a pair of carpet-slippers, and in these I had to rush off to Kroll’s Theatre to see ‘Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor’ ('The Merry Wives of Windsor'), as the performance commenced at the unearthly hour of seven. I have gone through a great deal in my time, but I never expected to have to go through six palaces in one day. After that you will easily understand how the words of the poet who preferred his humble home to roaming through palaces came home to me.
CHAPTER XXI.
PRAGUE.
When a man wakes up in the morning and can’t quite make out where he is, and the first thing that catches his eyes as they wander inquiringly round an unfamiliar bedroom is an electric bell, and underneath it these words:
‘Na sklepnika, rate 1 nou;
Na panskou, rate 2 kráte;
Na poshluhu, rate 3 kráte;’
he may fairly be excused if he feels like a stranger in a strange land. It will probably dawn upon him that somewhere amid these printed specimens of an unknown tongue there is lurking a request that if he wants the waiter he will ring once; that if he requires the chambermaid he will ring twice; and that if he needs the services of the boots he will ring thrice. This is what gradually shaped itself in my mind when I woke up the other morning in Prague, and found myself face to face with the Bohemian or Czechish language.
My earliest recollections of Prague are associated with a piece of well-thumbed music which used to lie about on a piano, and was something to do with a battle. Later on it cropped up occasionally in the schoolroom in connection with a gentleman named Huss, who got into trouble early in the Fourteens; but the world-famous old town fairly burnt itself into my memory in the now almost forgotten lines of poor Prowse, ‘Nicholas’ of Fun:
‘The longitude’s rather uncertain,
The latitude’s equally vague;
But that person I pity who knows not the city,
The beautiful city of Prague.’
It was not of the Bohemia over which Francis Josef reigns to-day that the young poet sang, but of that vaster Bohemia which in years gone by was the happy land of the children of art, of letters, and of song. ‘La Vie de Bohème’ exists no more. The old Bohemians have turned their backs upon their tents, and live in stucco villas. They have crushed the clay pipe under the heels of their patent-leather boots, and taken to cigarettes. They have ceased to herd together in the bonds of brotherhood; they go into Society and eye each other superciliously when they get crushed together on the staircases of the nobility.