He accompanied the jeweler's foreman down to the vestibule, chatting agreeably. He carried no valise, so was allowed to pass out with the man. Keeping one thick, hairy-backed hand thrust down into a pocket of his Astrakhan-furbished shooting-jacket, close-clutched upon the solid roll of Prussian banknotes, reft from that smooth and perfumed hiding-place.
XXXI
"The Crown Prince," wrote P. C. Breagh, "and the Red Prince—as people nickname Friedrich Karl of Prussia, in virtue of his partiality for the crimson uniform of his regiment, the Ziethen Hussars,—have departed amidst scenes of overwhelming enthusiasm, to take over the respective commands of the Third and Second Army Corps. On July 31st, at half-past-five noon, the very day on which I pen these lines, the aged Sovereign drove in an open landau drawn by two superb black Hungarian horses to join his Ministers and his Chief of the Great Staff at the station, where waited the special train destined to convey the venerable Commander-in-Chief of the Field Armies of Germany to the immediate Seat of War."
There was a jolt, the pencil bucked furiously, and the writer's skull came smartly into contact with the uncushioned seat-back of the gray-painted, semi-partitioned railway transport-car, in which, with some forty blue-uniformed infantrymen of the Prussian Guard, P. C. Breagh was being hurried toward the Rhine frontier, in a din so comprehensive that you could only make your neighbor hear by putting your mouth to his ear and bawling, and in an atmosphere so thick with dust and smells, of varied degrees of intensity and picturesqueness, that you drew it into your lungs in gulps and exhaled it with sensible effort.
The partly-glazed windows did not let down, bars began where the glass left off, and therefore the N.C.O.'s of the eighth of a company appropriated to themselves the corner-seats. Sandwiched between two large and heated warriors, with his unstrapped knapsack on his knee, and his elbows jammed immovably against his lower ribs, P. C. Breagh abandoned the impulse to rub his bump, and continued to write, using the old straw hat which crowned the knapsack as a support for a notebook.
"The Queen," he went on, "who was evidently laboring under the influence of emotion, accompanied His Majesty. A thunderstorm coruscated and detonated overhead as the Royal salute of guns crashed out, and King Wilhelm's subjects greeted him with round upon round of enthusiastic 'Hoch's.' The object of their acclamations kept continually smoothing his heavy white mustache with the right, ungloved hand, between the salutes with which he acknowledged the plaudits of his people—a characteristic gesture of the veteran monarch when..."
The pencil faltered. "Under the influence of emotion" could not be used again, because it had already done duty for the Queen, whose eyes, poor lady! had been red with crying. P. C. Breagh knocked off to sharpen his pencil and read over what he had set down. "Coruscated and detonated" pleased him, though to have said that the thunderstorm had growled and blazed would have been a good deal nearer the mark. And "characteristic gesture" was loftier language than "familiar trick" or "habit." Mr. Knewbit would have snorted at it, it was true, but this was not one of Mr. Knewbit's stipulated-for letters, "describing in a style readable by plain, ordinary, everyday people, what you've seen and heard, and felt, and smelled."
Still, one could not hope to please everybody—and this was a descriptive article—not a chatty news-letter. When complete, it would be forwarded to the Editor of a Leading Daily, with the brief intimation that more like it might be had—at a price. That it would draw commissions, P. C. Breagh believed implicitly. There was a stately stodginess about the style that could not fail to impress. So he continued as "Die Wacht am Rhein" broke out once more; and the deep bass notes emitted by his burly right-hand neighbor tickled his ribs and made him goosefleshy.
"The aged monarch seemed weary, it appeared to me."