CHAPTER XXVII
BERTHA'S WEDDING DAY
Krupp Hospitality—A Nasty Custom—"Old Fritz at Play—The Bride Arrayed—Abdul's Present—The Wedding Service—A Glimpse of Essen
On October the 15th, 1906, Bertha Krupp was married, and, presto! Wilhelm jumped into the saddle: Krupp en croupe was meant for both the heiress and her husband-to-be.
To be sure, Essen was en fête for the War Lady and Gustav. For them flags and garlands and paper flowers. Rivers and oceans of paper flowers! They recalled Unter den Linden when some yellow or brown, or maybe a white, majesty is expected to make his state entry through the Brandenburg Gate. And almost as many girls in white as paper flowers on lantern posts and over doorways, while every boy had his face and his hands washed, and all the professors and directors wore their locks in curls.
To-day all victims of Moloch labour, of burns and crashing irons, of scaffolds that gave way and mountains of steel a-tremble, of engines gone wrong and cars off the track, and a thousand and one other accidents connected with work, were freshly shaved and voluble of their sufferings and Fraulein's kindness. Johann gave a leg to prevent bubbles in the casting of a royal Prussian cannon, and Fraulein bought him an artificial one, offering this advantage over the real article: he might throw it at his wife when nettled. Heinrich had lost the sight of an eye in the service of the works, and Fraulein not only procured him a glass one, but added a steel pince-nez that made him look like a twopenny clerk. And Mariechen and Märtchen had good jobs in the ammunition shops, since their husbands were killed in an earth-slide at the Germania shipyards near Kiel—"Fraulein looks after everything and everybody." In short, city and country-side, town hall and hospital, the well-to-do and the poor, old and young, the joyous and the lame and the halt—all looked their best in Bertha's honour and acted gemuetlich-like (which was mostly noise) in Bertha's honour—when the War Lord came into sight!
Once upon a time the War Lady had been sternly admonished not to bring more than three attendants on her state visit to Berlin; in repaying that visit—for his intervening comings to Essen were more or less impromptu or on business—the War Lord brought twenty times three, sixty: personal friends, courtiers, generals and army officers.
When, years before, he inflicted two-thirds of this number on King Christian, the Continent stood aghast at his inconsiderate impudence, for the Copenhagen Court was notoriously poor then. But Bertha was his ward and was under his thumb, and, besides, had "money to burn."
So he embraced this opportunity for paying off old debts by inviting to Essen a number of nobles whose hospitality he had enjoyed, for there they would be more sumptuously lodged and dined and wined than at his own house.
The call to Villa Huegel was snapped up by all who could crowd into the Imperial train, for Krupp hospitality is proverbial in the Fatherland's mansions and country houses; and the Prussian aristocrat, living at home on superannuated venison, herrings and potatoes, washed down by diluted fusel-oil called Schnapps, likes nothing better than to gorge himself at the expense of persons whose lack of rank precludes dreaded return visits.