“Exactly,” I said, for I saw that he was getting excited, “but pray tell me, General, to what do I owe the honour of this visit?”
The General’s manner changed at once.
“Highly learned, and high-well-born-professor,” he said, “I come to you as to a fellow author, known and honoured not merely in England, for that is nothing, but in Germany herself, and in Turkey, the very home of Culture.”
I knew that it was mere flattery. I knew that in this same way Lord Haldane had been so captivated as to come out of the Emperor’s presence unable to say anything but “Sittlichkeit” for weeks; that good old John Burns had been betrayed by a single dinner at Potsdam, and that the Sultan of Turkey had been told that his Answers to Ultimatums were the wittiest things written since Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Yet I was pleased in spite of myself.
“What!” I exclaimed, “they know my works of humour in Germany?”
“Do they know them?” said the General. “Ach! Himmel! How they laugh. That work of yours (I think I see it on the shelf behind you), The Elements of Political Science, how the Kaiser has laughed over it! And the Crown Prince! It nearly killed him!”
“I will send him the new edition,” I said. “But tell me, General, what is it that you want of me?”
“It is about my own book,” he answered. “You have read it?”
I pointed to a copy of Germany and the Next War, in its glaring yellow cover—the very hue of Furchtbarkeit—lying on the table.
“You have read it? You have really read it?” asked the General with great animation.