"I can't exactly explain it to you in German; but doctrinairism is not the first requisite in a landlord; and if you were the Graf, you would be for coercing the people under you and about you, into being logical, and you would withdraw yourself from people who opposed you, and you would gradually weaken your influence and destroy your chances of doing good. Why are our Tory country gentlemen always better liked by the people than the Radical proprietors? Why are Tories, as a rule, pleasanter companions than Radicals? I am a Radical; but I always prefer dining with a Tory?"
"Is the Count a Tory?" asked the Schulmeister.
"Yes. Men who have been in business and earned, or gained, a lot of money, almost invariably become fierce Tories. It is their first passport to respectability; and there is no step one can take so cheaply as that of changing one's political theories."
"What a singular social life you have in England!" cried Gersbach, blinking with a curious sort of humour behind his big spectacles. "There is the demi-monde, for example. Why, you talk of that, and your writers speak of it, as if there was an acknowledged rivalry openly carried on between the members of it and your married women."
"But our married women," said Will, "are going to form a trades-union among themselves in order to crush that institution."
At which Franz Gersbach looked puzzled: these English were capable of trying any mad expedient; and somehow their devices always worked well, except in such matters as popular education, military efficiency, music, scholarship, and so forth. As for a trades-union of any kind, it was sure to flourish in England.
They had now reached the edge of the forest, and here Hermann called the party around him, and gave his orders in a loud peremptory tone, which had the effect of considerably frightening his master; the Count hoped that he would do nothing inaccurate.
"You, Herr Schulmeister, will accompany the drivers, and Spiegelmann will give you one of the return-posts. Falz, you will go down to the new-cut road—Greef on your right, Beigel further along. Spiegelmann will sound his horn when you are all posted, and the second horn when the drive commences. Forward, then, in God's name, all of us!"
And away trooped the lads under the surveillance of the venerable Spiegelmann, who had a couple of brace of leashed beagles pulling and straining and whining to get free into the brushwood. Hermann, Will, and the Count at once dived into the twilight of the tall pines, that almost shut out the red flames of the morning over their peaks. The soft, succulent yellow moss was heavy with dew, and so were the ferns and the stoneberry bushes. A dense carpet of this low brushwood deadened the sound of their progress; and they advanced, silent as phantoms, into the dim recesses of the wood. Here and there occurred an opening or clearance, with a few felled trees lying about; then they struggled through a wilderness of younger fir and oak, and finally came into a tract of the forest where nothing was to be seen, as far as the eye could reach, but innumerable tall trunks, coated with the yellow and grey lichens of many years, branchless almost to their summit, and rising from a level plain of damp green moss. There was not even the sound of a bird, or of a falling leaf, to break the intense silence of the place; nor was there the shadow of any living thing to be seen down those long narrow avenues between the closely-growing stems of the trees.
"Count Schönstein," said Will, in a whisper, as they drew near the Haupt-platz, "what gun is that you have with you?"