In the smoking-room I retired to a corner to read the latest telegrams and drink my coffee in solitude. One was as impossible as the other, and lest I be thought to exaggerate I will not say how many men pursued me to find out what I had been discussing with Jellaby. I should be sorry even to guess at the number of unknown men who entered into conversation, but I cannot forget the omnipresence of Sir Adolf Erckmann. In less worthy moments I suspect him of deliberately displaying what he conceived to be sufficiently flamboyant patriotism to obscure the unhappy circumstance of his name. Certainly he edged from one end of the room to the other, unsparingly subjecting man after man to an unvarying monologue.
"These Chermans wand a lezzon," he grunted into his beard. "And we'll give id 'em, hein? They thought Bridain wouldn't gom in. We gan dell a differend story, hein?"
His scarlet face and head, bronzed with the wind and sun of his recent tour on the Continent, was moist with exertion by the time he penned me in my corner.
"How long is it going to last, Erckmann?" I asked—with some idea of testing the resources of his English.
"How long?" he repeated, pulling truculently at his tangled beard. "A month, hein? Doo months ad the oudside. I'm a bangker, my boy. I know, hein? If they doan'd ged to Baris in a vordnide, they're done, zmashed, pancrupd. You ead your Grizmas dinner in Berlin, hein?"
I resisted the obvious retort and made an excuse to get home to my uncle.
IV
The first news I received on reaching Princes Gardens was that my uncle was unwell and wished to see me at once.
"No, sir, I can't tell you no more than that," said Filson tearfully, and I judged that to serve Bertrand had been a task of difficulty during the past five days.
I found my uncle seated in his bedroom with a rug over his knees, conspicuously doing nothing. Little threads of blood discoloured the whites of his eyes, and he seemed curiously shrunken and old. He looked at me in silence for a few moments after I had shut the door, then remarked carelessly: