"Talk! Talk! Ach! Those are your orders, Johann. See to them, and communicate with me here. I must write."
He moved over to a desk while Stryj deliberately adjusted his hat and lit another cigarette. Then he moved towards the door.
"Is there anything else?" he enquired, with his hand upon the handle.
Von Salzinger glanced round.
"Yes, use every means at your command to get the information we need. Remember, Stryj, if the secrets of Borga have been discovered, if our country has been betrayed, then a harvest of vengeance is going to be reaped."
He turned back to his desk and began a long communication addressed to Prince von Berger, while Johann Stryj passed silently out of the room.
CHAPTER XV
THE INERADICABLE STRAIN
Von Salzinger was gross. He looked it. But he had not yet arrived at those years when the outward form loses its atmosphere of virile strength submerged beneath overwhelming adipose and a general bodily inertia. That would come as inevitably as reaction invariably follows upon the heels of excess when vitality passes its maximum. Von Salzinger was of original type, and beneath the shallow veneer of the civilizing process, in him was to be found of a certainty the hairy hands of the savage. It is the brand which can never be eradicated from the original Teuton, and particularly from those who are native of Prussia. The anxious insistence of the claims to Kultur, emanating more particularly from Prussian sources, can be taken as something in the nature of an unconscious admission of the depths from which they have only been partially lifted.