But the blinds of the monarch's study were pulled down, unmistakably signifying that all was over for the present.... The central valves of the great gilded Palace gates were now shut, leaving open only the smaller carriage-way, through which mounted aides and orderly officers conveying dispatches presently began to stream. The carriages of Ministers and other State officials followed these, while lesser personages, emerging from the exit left for pedestrians, began to hail cab-drivers from the stand of hackneys on the Linden side of the Opera House. Swearing, the frustrated Jehus of these vehicles laid about them with their whips in the endeavor to force their animals through the solid crowd....
A man went down under the hoofs of a wretched Rosinante. There were cries for "Police!" and spiked helmets appeared in the crowd. It surged and swayed.... The guardians of the law had drawn their cutlasses and were beating their fellow-children of the Fatherland upon their heads with the flat of these weapons, in the attempt to effect a junction between the cabs and those who wished to hire them. Thus the pressure on the flanks, ribs and breast-bone of P. C. Breagh became suffocating. Lifted from his feet, he was carried backward and forward by rushes, growing less certain of his own identity as the roaring in his ears became louder. Just as his eyelids dropped and he passed out of his own knowledge, a powerful hand caught him by the coat-collar, and a solid rampart of human flesh interposed between his lately-drifting body and the waves of the human sea that raged beyond.
Gulping, P. C. Breagh became aware that he was spread-eagled against the railings of the Palace courtyard facing the Unter den Linden, and that a big man in a loose black waterproof rain-cloak and broad-leaved black felt hat was holding to a railing on each side of him and warding off the rushes.
"Th-thanks! I'm tremendously obliged!..." he was beginning, when the swish of the cutlasses and the shrieking of the cutlassed drowned his voice. Yet another voice, masculine, resonant, and imperious, dominated all others; it cried:
"The King commands the police to sheath their swords!"
And upon the instant lull in the tumult that followed came another order:
"His Majesty has work to do for the Fatherland. Let the people disperse quietly to their homes!"
And the crowd, pacified and quieted, answered, "We will so!" in a crashing volley of Teutonic gutturals, and began to split up and move away in sections, singing "Heil dir im Siegerkranz" in sonorous unison. When through the Palace gates came a small and shabby brougham drawn by a venerable bay, and driven by an elderly coachman in gray-and-black livery, the sight of whose military cockade evoked another whirlwind of enthusiasm....
"Moltke! It is our Moltke!" men shouted to one another, and the old General, who sat alone in the carriage, the lean, stooping, septuagenarian in the spiked helmet, whose thin, ascetic face was rosy with suppressed excitement and whose pale blue eyes twinkled good-humoredly between their narrow lids at the seething ocean of humanity in which the shabby brougham labored, saluted in acknowledgment of the cheers.
"Moltke! Long live our Moltke! But where has Otto got to!" hiccuped an alcoholic seaman, clutching the ledge of the brougham window. He continued in the midst of a silence born of consternation: "What has become of the Big Pomeranian? We would have—hic!—carried him home shoulder-high for this week's—hic!—work he has done!"