I found him, as Medhurst had reported, considerably agitated. He is a good-hearted chap, and a brilliant writer, though he’s too apt to allow his feelings to carry him away; for he’s even more sentimental than the average German, and entirely lacking in the characteristic German phlegm. He is as vivacious and excitable as a Frenchman, and I fancy there’s a good big dash of French blood in his pedigree, though he’d be angry if any one suggested such a thing!
He did not know me for a moment, but when I told him who I was he welcomed me effusively.
“Ah, now I remember; we met in London, when I was there with my poor friend. ‘We heard at midnight the clock,’ as our Shakespeare says. And you are going to take his place? I have not yet the shock recovered of his death; from it I never shall recover. O judgment, to brutish beasts hast thou fled, and their reason men have lost. My heart, with my friend Carson, in its coffin lies, and me, until it returns, you must excuse!”
I surmised that he was quoting Shakespeare again, as he had to Medhurst. I wanted to smile, though I was so downright wretched. He would air what he conceived to be his English, and he was funny!
“Would you mind speaking German?” I asked, for there was a good deal I wanted to learn from him, and I guessed I should get at it all the sooner if I could head him off from his quotations. His face fell, and I hastened to add—
“Your English is splendid, of course, and you’ve no possible need to practise it; but my German’s rusty, and I’d be glad to speak a bit. Just you pull me up, if you can’t understand me, and tell me what’s wrong.”
My German is as good as most folks’, any day, but he just grabbed at my explanation, and accepted it with a kindly condescension that was even funnier than his sentimental vein. Therefore the remainder of our conversation was in his own language.
“I hear you’ve left the Zeitung,” I remarked. “Going on another paper?”
“The editor of the Zeitung dismissed me,” he answered explosively. “Pig that he is, he would not understand the reason that led to my ejection from Russia!”