Four days before he had dashed into my room at the Marmor Palace at Potsdam greatly excited. He had been with the Emperor in Berlin all the morning, and had motored back with all speed. Something had occurred, but what it was I failed to discern. He carried some papers in the pocket of his military tunic. From their colour I saw that they were secret reports—those documents prepared solely for the eyes of the Kaiser and those of his precious son.
He took a big linen-lined envelope and, placing the papers in it, carefully sealed it with wax.
"We are going to London, Heltzendorff. Put that in your dispatch-box. I may want it when we are in England."
"To London—when?" I asked, much surprised at the suddenness of our journey, because I knew that we were due at Weimar in two days' time.
"We leave at six o'clock this evening," was the Crown-Prince's reply. "Koehler has ordered the saloon to be attached to the Hook of Holland train. Hardt has already left Berlin to engage rooms for us at the 'Ritz,' in London."
"And the suite?" I asked, for it was one of my duties to arrange who travelled with His Imperial Highness.
"Oh! we'll leave Eckardt at home," he said, for he always hated the surveillance of the Commissioner of Secret Police. "We shall only want Schuler, my valet, and Knof."
We never travelled anywhere without Knof, the chauffeur, who was an impudent, arrogant young man, intensely disliked by everyone.
And so it was that the four of us duly landed at Harwich and travelled to London, our identity unknown to the jostling crowd of Cook's tourists returning from their annual holiday on the Continent.
At the "Ritz," too, though we took our meals in the restaurant, that great square white room overlooking the Park, "Willie" was not recognized, because all photographs of him show him in elegant uniform. In a tweed suit, or in evening clothes, he presents an unhealthy, weedy and somewhat insignificant figure, save for those slant animal eyes of his which are always so striking in his every mood.