He threw on his cap and his great white cavalry cloak lined with
Russian sables and passed out by the front door into the still white
night. The snowstorm was over, the fall had lessened to the merest
sprinkle. The bitter northerly wind no longer drove the blizzards
screaming before it, each tree stood immovable under its burden, the
overloaded evergreen bushes lay flat upon the ground. And the moon
sailed high, drifting away eastward. Through the tatters of the
frost-fog shone the great blazing jewels of the stars.
Twelve o'clock struck near and far, and from the great Cathedral of
the Place St. Louis, as from every bell-graced tower and steeple in
Versailles, rang the Christmas carillon. Many voices broke upon the
piercing, windless quiet. Many footsteps were passing through the
snowy streets. Catholics were going to their Midnight Mass and
Communion to be celebrated by permission of the Prussian Minister.
He pictured the crowds that would flock to the great churches of
Paris--how Notre Dame would be packed to the doors, and Ste.
Marguerite, also the great Church of the Carmelites, and the ancient
church of the Augustine Fathers in the Place des Victoires....
He imagined the flower-decked High Altars in the churches and chapels
of Versailles thronged about with war-weary, famine-bitten refugees
and residents. German Catholics would mingle with them--the
conqueror and the conquered kneeling side by side. Wounded soldiers
of both nations would help each other to limp to the Communion rail;
the atmosphere of the hushed, crowded sanctuaries would throb and
vibrate with prayer....
For what boon would all these suppliants entreat High Heaven most
fervently? Pacing in and out of the snowy garden alleys, his giant
shadow passing over the moveless tree shadows, he asked himself the
question. There was but one reply:
For Peace.... They would pray to GOD for Peace ... that Bismarck was
not going to give them yet a while. Under the icicles that had
formed on his great mustache he laughed. And a Satanic pride swelled
within him as he told himself that this was his crowning hour of life.
The wild sweet frenzy of the bells was dying down. Distant refrains
of sturdy German carols came from the military quarters and the
barracks. The bells stopped, wavered, broke out again, grew faint,
and were still. And it seemed to the man standing in the chill
silence of the snowy garden as though he heard the Spirit of France
and the Spirit of Germany communing in the depths of this Christmas
Night.
It was the voice of France that wept:
"_Alas! miserable that I am, what hast thou done to me? Why have thy
fierce hordes rolled down upon me from the strange Pagan lands in the
inclement East? Was it my fame, or my wealth, or my beauty that
tempted thy Hunnish warriors, the yellow-haired footmen, with hard,
blue-eyed faces and huge hairy limbs, and the uncouth, fierce tanned
horsemen, who ride as though they were one with their beasts? Woe is
met for my white breasts that were kissed by the conquering Roman!
must I yield them again to be bruised by the ravishing Frank? A
curse on thee! thou treacherous, deep-flowing, swift river, that hast
again proved no barrier to the Prussian invader! I am fallen a prey
to the Confederation set up by the Corsican upon the Rhine. Oh! hard
as the nether millstone! Wilt thou unpitying, behold Famine devour
my beauty? See, the white limbs that show through my tattered
garment are fleshless! No man who looks upon me would desire me
more! For what hast thou dug a pit about me and set up thy terrible
war engines? Was I not willing to make terms with thee, as the
conqueror?_"
It was the Voice of Germany that answered:
"_O Gaulish Queen! thou wert willing, but not for the conquered is it
to appoint the sum of the ransom, or hold parley with the victors
regarding the price of blood! Hearest thou, O fallen one? I
withdraw my triumphant legions when it pleases me. This is a land
where the wine and the women are luscious. When we have drunken deep
enough, we shall load ourselves with spoil and treasure and go. Yet
ere I withdraw, I shall have known thee as a lover, whose desire is
kindled the fiercer because of thy hate. Death shall be the priest
who celebrates our espousals. He shall unite us with a ring of steel
and fire. Then I depart, leaving thee to the enemies of thine own
household, who shall wreak thee greater ruin than thy foes. But a
child shall be born of thy long resistance and my fierce triumph and
our brief mingling, who shall be called Peace! Hearest thou, O
France?_"
He listened, standing on the hard-frozen, white-powdered garden path
between the swept-up snow mounds. There was no answer. He returned,
stamping the snow from his clogged spurs, to the house.
The door stood open as he had left it. The even tread of the
sentries came from the Rue de Provence. He had heard the guard being
changed at the entrance gates and beyond the wall at the bottom of
the garden. Those without were vigilant if those within were not.
He remembered, noting the absence of the usual Chancery attendant
from the hall bench, that he had given permission to the servants,
without distinction, to make merry upon this night. He could hear no
clinking of glasses and bottles belowstairs. Perhaps sleep had
overtaken them as it had the revelers in the dining-room. He softly
opened the double doors of that apartment. A stench combined of
stale tobacco, spilled wine, and alcoholic humanity offended his
nose, and he withdrew it. But not before he had ascertained that
with the exception of Abeken, who had left early, and Count
Hatzfeldt, who must have been taken home--the Staff slept there.
He looked into the drawing-room. The fire lay in gray ashes between
the fire dogs. On the table lay the signed Treaty with Bavaria. He
picked it up and rolled it, looking at the mantelshelf, where the
bat-winged bronze demon brooded over the ormolu clock.
The room, whose hearth was cold, whose windows, closely shuttered,
bolted and blinded, had the curtains drawn close over them, was
lighted by a yellow ray shining through the glass door opening into
the conservatory. He crossed to this door and looked through.
Commendably sober, the two officers of the guard of Green Jaegers who
were quartered here sat chatting in whispers and smoking by the
stove. Between them on an upturned tub bottom stood a little,
twinkling, taper-lit Christmas tree.
"Von Uslar! Bleichröder!..."
The Minister opened the glass door and looked in. The officers
sprang to their feet and stood saluting him. He smiled at the little
tree, and asked, nodding at the door at the end of the conservatory,
leading to a room where the library of the late M. Tessier had
peaceably moldered until the clerks and decipherers of the Prussian
Foreign Office had been assigned it for their quarters:
"Have those fellows yet gone to bed?"
And even as he queried he knew by the peculiar smile upon the faces
of Captain von Uslar and his subaltern, that the scene in the
dining-room was repeated here. He said with a shrug:
"Oh, well!... They had my permission to make a night of it. One
would like to be sure, though, that there are no candles to upset!"
The junior officer moved to the library door and opened it, setting
free a puff of hot air laden with wine fumes, and a chorus of snores
ranging from piping alto to deep bass. Nothing could be seen except
the vague outlines of prostrate bodies, revealed by a pale gleam of
moonlight that made its way down the chimney and shone upon the dead
ashes of the hearth.
"Shall I wake anybody?" queried the lieutenant's look. The Minister
made a sign in the negative, bade a pleasant good night to the two
officers, and withdrew, shutting the glass door. He quitted the
drawing-room, went into the hall, tried the fastenings of the hall
door, and crossed to the hatchway under the main staircase that led
to the kitchen quarters. A gas jet was flaring in a draught at the
bottom of the staircase. He went down, regulated the light as he
passed to a safer volume, and tried the handle of the door leading to
what had been a housekeeper's parlor, and was now used by the house
steward and the Chancery attendants as an upper servants' hall. A
gasalier of flaring jets revealed five persons in here, wrapped in
the heavy sleep of drunkenness. One, the house steward, snored,
recumbent on a sofa; Grams and Engelberg, those monuments of rigid
respectability, reposed with their heads and shoulders resting on the
table, appropriately decorated with empty bottles and upset glass
beakers, and in the center of which stood a great china bowl.
The Minister peeped into this vessel curiously. Apples stuck with
cloves, and cinnamon sticks left high and dry at the bowl bottom
testified to the Yuletide correctness of the punch, brewed by the
skilled hand of the Foreign Office cook. He, the artist responsible
for the dinner which had astonished the three Bavarian
plenipotentiaries, leaned back, slumbering profoundly in a
high-backed armchair. A china pipe, gayly tasseled and painted,
drooped from one side of his relaxed mouth. His feet rested upon the
sprawling back of the gigantic Niederstedt, who had gone to sleep
upon a sheepskin rug in front of the wood stove. His huge right hand
still grasped an empty bottle that had contained his favorite Old
Nordhausen. He opened one eye as the Minister stooped to inspect
him--uttered a stertorous snort, and relapsed again into his hoggish
Nirvana, leaving the Minister, as he deliberately turned out the gas
and quitted the steward's room, to realize that, save himself, the
two officers smoking in the winter garden, and the women presumably
sleeping on the second floor, the house whose outer precincts were so
vigilantly guarded, did not contain a sober head.
"Well, well! A bout of drunkenness may well be condoned in the
servants when the master himself gave the signal for revelry!"
He told himself so, smiling as he made the round of the basement
house doors. Nothing had disturbed his equanimity saving the
discovery that Niederstedt was incapable of speech or movement. For
with his strange characteristic mingling of audacity and caution, the
Minister, while leaving Mademoiselle de Bayard practically free
within the house limits, had insured by private orders that the giant
East Prussian should sleep henceforth outside his master's bedroom
door.
Again, as the master's long strides carried him upstairs to the hall
again, and he took his bedroom candle from the row on the Empire
console, he knew a moment of inward f rat. There was nobody to help
him undress, and put away his clothes. Wherever Fate and the
Intendant General had assigned the Minister's sleeping quarters, the
deft Grans, or the attentive Engelberg had always appeared--or,
failing these, the stolid Niederstedt--to render these and other
personal services, the lack of which after long use is keenly felt.
Is was a hellish nuisance to a middle-aged man to have to get himself
out of his full-dress uniform. One grew hot at the mere thought of
unfastening the shoulder belt and sword belt, collar hooks, buckles,
swivels, and so on. Last, but not least, the final wrestle with the
polished, spurred jack boots....
"God be thanked, I am not wearing the cuirass!" he said to himself
devoutly, as he laid hand upon his bedroom door.
It swung back, and then his vexation passed from him. On a little
table near the hearthside, where yet some embers of a fire glowed
redly, stood a little gayly-caparisoned Christmas tree. Under its
branches, adorned with red-and-white tapers as yet unlighted, lay the
gifts that came from home.
He crossed the room in two long steps and stood smiling before the
little fir tree. The purplish redness died out of his great cheeks
and jowl, the congested veins no longer stood out like ropes upon his
throat and temples. The great eyes that had blazed with Satanic
pride softened into tenderness, as he picked up the gifts one by one
and looked at them.
"From His Daughter to Papachen," said an embroidered tobacco pouch.
"From Bill" and "From Herbert" a gold fusee box and a smoker's knife
were respectively labeled. "From thy wife Johanna" was written on a
slip of paper attached to the case that contained a handsome cup of
Tula ware. He turned the cup in his hands many times before he
returned it to its outer husk. He said fondly, familiarly, as though
the giver were standing beside him:
"Little thou carest, thou good heart!--whether thou art wife to a
Chancellor of the North German Confederation, or the Chancellor of
the German Empire. One object in life thou hast--and that is to get
the old man home again!" After a moment he added, pitching the
Bavarian Treaty on the center table, unhooking and removing his sword
belt, and throwing it on the couch: "Babel must be bombarded, or thou
wilt not be pleased with me ... am I not a good pupil, to have
learned my lesson so well?"
The shoulder belt came off with a slight degree of twisting and
fumbling. He laid it aside, and moved to the slaving glass, and by
its aid unfastened from his collar swivel the Iron Cross. "Good!" he
commented, and laid it on top of a dispatch box on the center table.
Then he began slowly and methodically to unfasten the other Orders
from his breast. As he pricked a finger with the pin of one in
wrenching at it angrily, it occurred to him that it would have been
perfectly feasible to have removed his dress tunic with all its
decorations, and this discovery stung him to wrath.
"_Kreuzdonnerwetter!_--am I, then, such a sheep's head?" he said
angrily to himself. Something dropped upon the floor with a tinkle
and rolled away merrily under a chair, leaving its owner with the
thick silver pin that had secured it gripped between his finger and
thumb. It was the medallion bestowed upon him in '42 for an act of
gallantry, the obverse a shield of silver on a circle, bearing a
red-enameled Prussian eagle, and on the reverse the inscription:
"_Für Rettung aus Gefahr_."
The pin remained in his hand. Cursing his own clumsiness, he took
the lighted candle he had placed upon the center table upon entering,
and stooped to recover the evasive prize. Both hands were required
for the task, that was quickly apparent. Half unconsciously he
reverted to a habit for which his wife had often playfully scolded
him--nipped the broken silver pin between his teeth and bent down to
resume his search upon the floor.
As he stooped, the detonation of a driving charge and the deafening
roar and shriek of a huge shell were followed by an ear-splitting
explosion. His practiced ear told him. that the shell had been
fired from the Fortress of St. Valérien. Half a dozen others
followed in rapid succession. No alarm trumpet sounded. Dogs
barked, near and far, the echoes of the cannonade rattled among the
woods and high grounds, then died out. He said to himself: "Those
sugar plums have done damage somewhere near St. Germain.... Now,
then, where is this runaway medal?"
As he queried, a sudden spasm of the windpipe shot him to the
perpendicular. He coughed and hawked as he had never done before.
With a hand upon his side, he coughed, straining horribly. With
streaming, starting eyes he coughed, clutching at his throat.
And then, with a sudden stab of pain beneath the uvula and a
strangling access of coughing, he realized that a familiar home
prediction had been fulfilled:
"_Otto, you will certainly swallow that pin!..._"
He could almost hear the voice of his wife speaking. How absurd! he
thought, and laughed; and the agony in his lacerated gullet brought
on a fit of choking worse than those that had gone before. He seized
the candle and held it to his face before the shaving mirror, opening
his powerful jaws to their widest and straining his eyes that were
too blind with tears to see his own swollen, discolored features. He
spat furiously, ejecting showers of saliva streaked with blood, but
not the obstacle that was choking him.... He thrust his hand into
his mouth, and groped as far down his throat as his fingers could
reach--all to no avail....
"_Help!..._"
He gasped the word, realizing that if no help came, he was a dead
man. And he seized the bell rope and rang furiously, until the rope
came down in his hand as had that of the reception-room a day or so
previously, followed by a long trail of rusty wire that, when tugged,
evoked no metal clang below.
"Help! For the love of God!" he croaked, and whirling vertigo seized
him. Whooping with a dreadful croupy intake, he tripped over a
footstool, and fell upon his hands and knees, and struggled up again
in a last strangling effort, and staggered to the door.
The door handle seemed to stick, or could it be that his grasp had
lost its power? In the light of the gas and his yet flaring candle,
he looked at his knuckles and saw that they were turning blackish
blue.... A wave of blackness rose and fell, swamping consciousness.
He emerged from drowning waters, and found himself upon the landing,
gripping some round object that proved to be the wrenched-off door
handle, and moaning in the whisper that he thought a shout:
"Help, help, help!..."
Bismarck, the man whom Kings and Emperors meant when they spoke of
Prussia--the great Minister who had made three Wars--was dying.
Would no one come? Not one of those who loved the man would ever
know the true story of his sordid, solitary ending.... Not one of
those who hated him but would hear every ugly detail of it, and
recount it for others, smiling at its grim, grotesque absurdity....
Choked by a pin!... An end rather less noble for a great Chancellor
than being run over by a donkey cart or smothered in a midden pit
full of liquid manure....
Someone was groaning horribly, close beside him. Deep ruckling,
gasping groans with a rattle and a catch midway. Were they his own
death groans? What was this? The walls were melting and vanishing.
Clear, vivid, definite, there unrolled before his filming eyes a
picture of Varzin, his Pomeranian country home. It was Spring. The
dark pines about the house shone as though newly varnished. The
larches were caparisoned with tassels of pale green. The blue sky
was vivid as Persian turquoise. He saw his daughter in a white dress
step out from the low wide porch and stand smiling upon the terrace.
She had a bunch of primroses in her belt, and his great hound Tyras
had followed her and was rubbing his great head against her sleeve.
"Dying!" he tried to say to her. "Help your father!" ... But it
seemed to him that he uttered nothing but a groan. There was a
thundering in his ears like the noise of a field battery. His great
bulk reeled toward her.... He pitched forward and fell heavily....
He heard a scared voice crying: "Monseigneur!..." and knew no more.