As he queried, a sudden spasm of the windpipe shot him to the perpendicular. He coughed and hawked as he had never done before. With a hand upon his side, he coughed, straining horribly. With streaming, starting eyes he coughed, clutching at his throat.
And then, with a sudden stab of pain beneath the uvula and a strangling access of coughing, he realized that a familiar home prediction had been fulfilled:
"Otto, you will certainly swallow that pin!..."
He could almost hear the voice of his wife speaking. How absurd! he thought, and laughed; and the agony in his lacerated gullet brought on a fit of choking worse than those that had gone before. He seized the candle and held it to his face before the shaving mirror, opening his powerful jaws to their widest and straining his eyes that were too blind with tears to see his own swollen, discolored features. He spat furiously, ejecting showers of saliva streaked with blood, but not the obstacle that was choking him.... He thrust his hand into his mouth, and groped as far down his throat as his fingers could reach—all to no avail....
"Help!..."
He gasped the word, realizing that if no help came, he was a dead man. And he seized the bell rope and rang furiously, until the rope came down in his hand as had that of the reception-room a day or so previously, followed by a long trail of rusty wire that, when tugged, evoked no metal clang below.
"Help! For the love of God!" he croaked, and whirling vertigo seized him. Whooping with a dreadful croupy intake, he tripped over a footstool, and fell upon his hands and knees, and struggled up again in a last strangling effort, and staggered to the door.
The door handle seemed to stick, or could it be that his grasp had lost its power? In the light of the gas and his yet flaring candle, he looked at his knuckles and saw that they were turning blackish blue.... A wave of blackness rose and fell, swamping consciousness. He emerged from drowning waters, and found himself upon the landing, gripping some round object that proved to be the wrenched-off door handle, and moaning in the whisper that he thought a shout:
"Help, help, help!..."
Bismarck, the man whom Kings and Emperors meant when they spoke of Prussia—the great Minister who had made three Wars—was dying. Would no one come? Not one of those who loved the man would ever know the true story of his sordid, solitary ending.... Not one of those who hated him but would hear every ugly detail of it, and recount it for others, smiling at its grim, grotesque absurdity....