Jones, abandoning his fork, repeated it. "One thing! In Potsdam, on that
cloudless July night, when the world, on which he proposed to batten,
slept, toiled, feasted, fasted, occupied with its futile loves and
hates, that thing must have occurred to him."
"Yes, but confound it, what was it?"
Jones lit a cigar. "Bernstorff said, or is said to have said--I do not
count him among my acquaintances--that on that night this supercanaille
showed symptoms of what I think I have seen described as vacillation.
That is quite on the cards. It bears out my theory. In any event the
fellow had his ambitions. He wanted to descend into the red halls of
history disguised. He might have succeeded. History is very careless and
to-day barely recalls that at five o'clock on the morning succeeding his
marriage to a dowdy fat girl, he treated his regiment to a drill. The
fact is uninteresting and would be equally unimportant were it not for
the note that it struck. Subsequently, when he leaped on the throne, he
shouted that those who opposed him he would smash. "There is no other
law than mine"; he later announced--a fine phrase and yet but a modern
variant of Domitian's: "Your god and master orders it." Incidentally, in
addition to the Garter, an honorific which the Duke of Cambridge
admirably summarised as "having, sir, none of the damned nonsense of
merit about it," he had other distinctions. He had--and has--uranomania,
that is to say, a flight of fancy in which the patient believes himself
associated with God. He had also defilirium tremens, which manifested
itself in those man[oe]uvres that are war's image and in which the
troops defile. Yet, when it came to the real thing, it may be that this
paradomaniac lacked the stomach. Apart from the Kruger incident, and one
or two other indecencies, his observance of international etiquette was
relatively correct. The lackeys of history might therefore have
deodorised him. With a sow's ear a lot may be done. Have a cigar?"