"And war with France a reckoning with these pig-dogs!" snarled Lil's temporary owner. "If the Serbians and Russes are to be smacked—good! If the French—good also! If the English, a thousand times the better!"
"Let us hope," said the more placable Teuton, emptying his second liqueur-glass of Kümmel—"that it will not be this time as at the affair of Agadir!"
"We are ready!" said Lil's patron with an oath. "We have seven millions of men ready, and two thousand millions of cartridges, and for shell—one would not have dreamed the world held so much steel packed with super-explosive. No, no! Diesmal wird es nicht sein wie in der Agadir!"
He inquired as they left the bar and moved to where Lil, steeped in the Pictures, was standing at the front of the Promenade:
"What are these Gottverflucht jackasses braying about?"
The jackasses were lustily cheering the portrait of Admiral Sir John Rushworth Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet—now flung upon the screen. And the jackasses got upon their feet with a sound as though the packed house were tumbling to pieces, and the Orchestra changed on the final bar of "Rule Britannia!" and the more belligerent of the two Teutons leaned over the barricade and hissed malignantly, as wind and strings crashed tumultuously into "God save the King!"
The row broke out in the Promenade as the Royal portrait flashed out and faded. A German voice swore shrilly, another expostulated, and a woman screamed and screamed....
"'Ere! What's up, what's up now along o' you, young woman?" demanded a burly gold-braided Commissionaire, thrusting through the staring crowd that had gathered. He dragged Lil, still screeching and clawing, from the windpipe of her dishevelled patron, adding, "Do you call this pretty be'aviour? I'm ashamed o' you—I am!"
"He hissed.... The —— hissed the King!" Lil gasped, scarlet and vituperative and still clawing. "Let me git at 'im! Let me——"
"No, hold her tight! It is a lie! She is drunk!" snarled the German who had hissed. His necktie, a choice thing in Berlin haberdashery, much sported on the Unter den Linden, was plucked up by the roots, and a broad bleeding scratch adorned his flushed and angry features. But at the suggestion that he should give the offender in charge of the Police, he melted with his companion into the thinnest of thin air, and Lil did not spend the night in the cells at Wine Street Police-Station. There ought to have been a paragraph in the Daily Teller or the Morning Wire, but it was crowded out by the report—in leaded type—of von Herrnung's death and that of the boy, his volunteer passenger, the only son of Dr. Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., M.V.O., whose distinguished share in the Defence of Gueldersdorp would always be remembered, etc., etc., even now that the frank, manly, and courageous policy of General Botha had established permanent and solid ties of friendship between the Briton and the Boer.