Wilhelm left half a dozen of his large, ugly visiting-cards at the door of the hotel for the Jap, Chinese, Turkish and other representatives, bending down the lower right-hand corner of the pasteboards to indicate his regrets that he had failed to find the gentlemen in.
"If any of them attempt to pay me a return visit, I shall put them under 'old Fritz' and pulverise their yellow bones," he said to Bertha.
But before they had finished laughing at the piece of raillery the War Lord uttered a cry of anguish. An infinitesimal cinder or a bit of soot had got into his left ear, causing him the most excruciating pains.
"Home," he gasped piteously. "Let's pick up a physician on the way." (For some reason or other no doctor was included in the small Imperial party.)
Dr. Shrader was dumbfounded when the royal chasseur, in feather hat, broadsword at his side, summoned him. "My consulting hour; dozens of people waiting," he protested. The chasseur bent over the doctor's ear and whispered, whereupon Shrader ran into the street in his dressing-gown, apparently to interview the gutter, for, in his anxiety to pacify the War Lord with stammered excuses, his nose was close to the stream of mucky water running down the hill.
Naturally, the humour of the thing did not appeal to Wilhelm, racked with pain as he was. He rose from the seat, and, pushing the obsequious doctor aside, jumped up the steps, saying: "Attend me, I command." Of course, in the meanwhile the doctor's household had got wind of the royal radiance, and flocked from parlour, bedrooms and scullery, males and females and children, all eager to prostrate themselves in hall or on staircases, wherever they might be.
The War Lord turned to Shrader: "Send them upstairs; lock them in if necessary." And, with a look through the glass door of the waiting-room: "These people must leave instantly; I won't be their Grossebeest."
He let himself drop into the doctor's ample desk-chair.
"The ear-pump and antiseptics!" he commanded with a cry of pain. Then, as the doctor approached with the instruments: "Oh, take off that dirty dressing-gown first. Roll up your sleeves. Wash your hands."
More insulting orders were thundered at the man of science by a supposed gentleman, but their execution gave Shrader time to recover.