"With pleasure. It is a slang expression used by the blackguards of the lowest quarters of Paris. 'Cane' is to 'back out' or to 'climb down,' as the Americans would say. Excuse me! I go to pay my bill."
He nodded slightly as he passed Ticking and Mounteney, and bestowed the same civility on P. C. Breagh. Then his heavy footsteps thundered down the kitchen staircase, from whose hatchway he emerged a few minutes later, accompanied by Mr. Knewbit, who had volunteered to help with the luggage, and this being stacked on the cab, their owner got into it, and Herr von Rosius, rigidly shaking hands with his English fellow-lodgers, and exchanging a distant salute with M. Meguet, got into the fusty vehicle and was driven away to the triumphant strains of the Marseillaise, performed by his racial antagonist on the piano appertaining to the first-floor sitting-room he had a moment previously vacated.
"'Prussia climbs down,'" murmured Mr. Knewbit, standing before the inscription on the kitchen distemper. "With the 'and on her 'elm that she 'as——" he went on shedding "h's," as was his way when deeply meditative, "I should doubt the correctness of that report. Still, I shall advise Maria to keep them first-floor apartments vacant a day or two—in case Mr. von Rosius's mother doesn't want him after all.... What does Solomon say? 'Designs are strengthened by counsels, and wars are to be managed by Governments.'"
The kettle was boiling madly, and a volume of steam was issuing from the pipe-bowl. Mr. Knewbit rescued the blackened briar-root, mechanically filled it, and looked for a light.
There was a crumpled pale green paper lying near his boot upon the worn linoleum. He picked it up, and saw that it was a cablegram issued by the North German Submarine Telegraph Company, addressed to Von Rosius, and containing a message of four words:
"Lanze inden Schuh, Uhlan! Hauptquartier, Berlin."
"Now, which shall I do?" asked Mr. Knewbit, scanning the baffling foreign words written in the familiar English characters. Torn between conscientious scruples and a characteristic thirst for information, the little man was pitiable to see. "Which shall I do?" he repeated. "Use this here for a pipe-light—or show it to my young shaver upstairs?"
Deciding on the latter course, he climbed to the attic rented by the young shaver, and knocked at the door.
"Come in! ... I'm not working to-night," said P. C. Breagh out of the darkness. Upon Mr. Knewbit's striking a match, the young man, who was leaning back in his chair before the venerable davenport, contemplating the dusk oblong of starry sky visible above the chimney-pots of Bernard Street, shook himself free of thought as a setter shakes off water, and got up.
"Feel out of sorts?" asked Mr. Knewbit, burning his fingers, and striking another match as he bustled to the single bracket over the narrow wooden mantelshelf and lighted the gas. "Anything wrong?"