"Well, k.n.o.belsdorff, I will not be angry with you. You want to comfort me, and you have not done it badly. But I must do what is expected of me...."

The air resounded with the distant cheers of many voices. The people of Grimmburg were crowded in black ma.s.ses behind the cordon at the station.

Officials were standing apart in front, waiting for the carriages. There was the mayor, raising his top-hat, wiping his forehead with a crumpled handkerchief, and poring over a paper whose contents he was committing to memory. Johann Albrecht a.s.sumed the expression appropriate to listening to the smoothly worded address and to answering concisely and graciously:

"Most excellent Mr. Mayor...." The town was dressed with flags, and the bells were ringing.

In the capital all the bells were ringing. And in the evening there were illuminations; not by formal request of the authorities, but spontaneous--the whole city was a blaze of light.

II

THE COUNTRY

The country measured eight thousand square kilometres, and numbered one million inhabitants.

A pretty, quiet, leisurely country. The tops of the trees in its forests rustled dreamily; its broad acres showed signs of honest care; its industries were undeveloped to the point of indigence.

It possessed some brick-kilns, a few salt and silver-mines--that was almost all. A certain amount of tourist-traffic must also be mentioned, but he would be a bold man who described it as a flourishing industry.

The alkali springs, which rose from the ground in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital and formed the centre of an attractive bathing-establishment, const.i.tuted the claims of the city to be considered a health resort. But while the baths at the end of the Middle Ages had been frequented by visitors from afar, they had later lost their repute, and been put in the shade by other baths and forgotten.

The most valuable of the springs, that called the Ditlinde spring, which was exceptionally rich in lithium salts, had been opened up quite recently, in the reign of Johann Albrecht III, and as energetic business and advertising methods were not employed, its water had not yet succeeded in winning world-recognition. A hundred thousand bottles of it were sent away in the year--rather less than more. And but few strangers came to drink it on the spot....

The Diet was the scene all the year round of speeches about the "barely"

satisfactory results of the trade returns, by which was really meant the entirely unsatisfactory results, which n.o.body could dispute, that the local railways did not cover their expenses and the main lines did not pay any dividends--distressing but unalterable and inveterate facts, which the Minister for Trade in luminous but monotonous declarations explained by the peaceful commercial and industrial circ.u.mstances of the country, as well as by the inaccessibility of the home coal-deposits.

Critics added something about defective organization of the State industrial administration. But the spirit of contradiction and negation was not strong in the Diet; the prevailing frame of mind among the representatives of the people was one of dull and true-hearted loyalty.

So the railway revenues did not by any means rank first among the public revenues of a private-investment nature; the forest revenues had ranked first for years in this land of woods and plough. The fall in them, their startling depreciation, however sufficient reasons there were for it, was a much more difficult matter to mend.

The people loved their woods. They were a fair and compact type, with searching blue eyes and broad, rather high cheek-bones, a sensible and honest, solid and backward stamp of men. They clung to their country's forest with all the strength of their nature; it lived in their bones, it was to the artists which it bred the source and home of their inspirations, and it was quite properly the object of popular grat.i.tude, not only in regard to the gifts of soul and intellect of which it was the donor. The poor gathered their firewood in the forest; it gave to them freely, they had it for nothing. They went stooping and gathering all kinds of berries and mushrooms among its trunks, and earned a little something by doing so. That was not all. The people recognized that their forest had a very distinctly favourable influence on the weather and the healthy condition of the country; they were well aware that without the lovely woods in the neighbourhood of the capital the spa-garden outside would not attract foreigners with money to spend; in short, this not over-industrious and up-to-date people could not help knowing that the forest stood for the most important a.s.set, the most profitable heritage of the country.

And yet the forest had been sinned against, outraged for ages and ages.

The Grand Ducal Department of Woods and Forests deserved all the reproaches that were laid against it. That Department had not political insight enough to see that the wood must be maintained and kept as inalienable common property, if it was to be useful not only to the present generation, but also to those to come; and that it would surely avenge itself if it were exploited recklessly and short-sightedly, without regard to the future, for the benefit of the present.

That was what happened, and was still happening. In the first place great stretches of the floor of the forest had been impoverished by reckless and excessive spoliation of its litter. Matters had repeatedly gone so far that not only the most recent carpet of needles and leaves, but the greatest part of the fall of years past had been removed and used in the fields partly as litter, partly as mould. There were many forests which had been completely stripped of mould; some had been crippled by the raking away of the litter: instances of this were to be found in the public woodlands as well as in the State woodlands.

If the woods had been put to these uses in order to tide over a sudden agricultural crisis, there would have been no reason to complain. But although there were not wanting those who declared that an agricultural system founded on the appropriation of wood-litter was inexpedient, indeed dangerous, the trade in litter went on without any particular reason, on purely fiscal grounds, so it was put--that is to say, on grounds which, examined closely, proved to be only one ground and object, namely, the making of money. For it was money which was wanted.

But to get this money, ceaseless inroads were made on the capital, until one fine day it was realised with dismay that an unsuspected depreciation in that capital had ensued.

The people were a peasant race, and thought that the way to be up-to-date was to display a perverted, artificial, and improper zeal and to employ reckless business methods. A characteristic instance was the dairy-farming ... one word about that. Loud complaints were heard, princ.i.p.ally in the official medical annual, that a deterioration was noticeable in the nourishment, and consequently in the development, of the country people. What was the reason? The owners of cows were bent on turning all the full-milk at their disposal into money. The spread of the dairy industry, the development and productiveness of the milk trade, tempted them to disregard the claims of their own establishments.

A strength-giving milk diet became a rarity in the country, and in its stead recourse was had to unsubstantial skimmed milk, inferior subst.i.tutes, vegetable oils, and, unfortunately, alcoholic drinks as well. The critics talked about under-feeding, they even called it physical and moral debilitation of the population; they brought the facts to the notice of the Diet, and the Government promised to give the matter their earnest attention.

But it was only too clear that the Government was at bottom infected with the same perversity as the mistaken dairy-farmers. Timber continued to be cut to excess in the State forests; once cut it was gone, and meant a continual shrinkage of public property. The clearings might have been necessary occasionally, when the forests had been damaged in one way or another, but often enough they had been due simply to the fiscal reasons referred to: and instead of the proceeds of the clearings being used for the purchase of new tracts, instead of the cleared tracts being replanted as quickly as possible--instead, in a word, of the damage to the capital value of the State forests being balanced by an addition to their capital value, the quickly earned profits had been devoted to the payment of current expenses and the redemption of bonds. Of course there could be no doubt that a reduction of the National Debt was only too desirable; but the critics expressed the opinion that that was not the time to devote extraordinary revenues to the building up of the sinking-fund.

Anybody who had no interest in mincing matters must have described the State finances as in a hopeless muddle. The country carried a debt of thirty million pounds--it struggled along under it with patience and devotion, but with secret groans. For the burden, much too heavy in itself, was made trebly heavy through a rise in the rate of interest and through conditions of repayment such as are usually imposed on a country whose credit is shaken, whose exchange is low, and which has already almost come to be reckoned as "interesting" in the world of financiers.

The succession of financial crises appeared to be never-ending. The list of failures seemed without beginning or end. And a maladministration, which was made no better by frequent changes in its personnel, regarded borrowing as the only cure for the creeping sickness in the State finances. Even the Chancellor of the Exchequer, von Schroder, whose probity and singleness of purpose were beyond all doubt, had been given a peerage by the Grand Duke, because he had succeeded in placing a loan at a high rate of interest in the most difficult circ.u.mstances. His heart was set on an improvement in the credit of the State: but as his resource was to contract new debts while he paid off the old, his policy proved to be no better than a well-meant but costly blind. For a simultaneous sale and purchase of bonds meant a higher purchase than selling price, involving the loss of thousands of pounds.

It seemed as if the country were incapable of producing a man of any adequate financial gifts. Improper practices and a policy of "hushing-up" were the fashion. The budget was so drawn up that it was impossible to distinguish between ordinary and extraordinary State requirements. Ordinary and extraordinary items were jumbled up together, and those responsible for the budgets deceived themselves, and everybody else, as to the real state of affairs, by appropriating loans, which were supposed to be raised for extraordinary purposes, to cover a deficit in the ordinary exchequer.... The holder of the finance portfolio at one time was actually an ex-court marshal.

Dr. Krippenreuther, who took the helm towards the end of Johann Albrecht III's reign, was the Minister who, convinced like Herr von Schroder of the necessity for a strenuous reduction in the debt, induced the Diet to consent to a final and extreme addition to the burden of taxation. But the country, naturally poor as it was, was on the verge of insolvency, and all Krippenreuther got was unpopularity. His policy really meant merely a transfer from one hand to the other, a transfer which itself involved a loss; for the increase in taxation laid a burden on the national economy which pressed more heavily and more directly than that which was removed by the sinking of the National Debt.

Where, then, were help and a remedy to be found? A miracle, so it seemed, was needed--and meanwhile the sternest economy. The people were pious and loyal, they loved their princes as themselves, they were permeated with the sublimity of the monarchical idea, they saw in it a reflexion of the Deity. But the economical pressure was too painful, too generally felt. The most ignorant could read in the thinned and crippled forests a tale of woe. The consequence was that repeated appeals had been made in the Diet for a curtailment of the Civil List, a cutting down of the appanages and Crown endowments.

The Civil List amounted to twenty-five thousand pounds, the revenues of the Crown demesnes to thirty-seven thousand pounds. That was all. And the Crown was in debt--to what extent was perhaps known to Count Trummerhauff, the Keeper of the Grand Ducal Purse, a regular stickler, but a man of absolutely no business instincts. It was not known to Johann Albrecht; at any rate he seemed not to know it, and therein followed the example of his forefathers, who had rarely deigned to give more than a pa.s.sing thought to their debts.

The people's att.i.tude of veneration was reflected in their princes'

extraordinary sense of their own dignity, which had sometimes a.s.sumed fanciful and even extravagant forms, and had found its most obvious and most serious expression in every period in a tendency to extravagance and to a reckless ostentation as exaggerated as the dignity it represented. One Grimmburger had been christened "the luxurious" in so many words,--they had almost all deserved the nickname. So that the state of indebtedness of the House was an historical and hereditary state, reaching back to the times when all loans were a private concern of the Sovereign, and when John the Headstrong, wishing to raise a loan, pledged the liberty of the most prominent of his subjects to do so.

Those times were past; and Johann Albrecht III, a true-born Grimmburger in his instincts, was unfortunately no longer in a position to give free rein to his instincts. His fathers had played ducks and drakes with the family funds, which were reduced to nothing or little better than nothing. They had been spent on the building of country-seats with French names and marble colonnades, on parks with fountains, on splendid operas and all kinds of glittering shows. Figures were figures, and, much against the inclination of the Grand Duke, in fact without his consent, the Court was gradually cut down.

The Princess Catherine, the sister of the Grand Duke, was never spoken of in the capital without a touch of sympathy. She had been married to a member of a neighbouring ruling House, had been left a widow, and had come back to her brother's capital, where she lived with her red-headed children in what used to be the Heir Apparent's palace on the Albrechtstra.s.se, before whose gates a gigantic doorkeeper stood all day long in a pompous att.i.tude with staff and shoulder-belt complete, while life went on with peculiar moderation inside.

Prince Lambert, the Grand Duke's brother, did not come in for much attention. There was a coolness between him and his relations, who could not forgive him his _mesalliance_, and he hardly ever came to Court. He lived in his villa overlooking the public gardens with his wife, an ex-dancer from the Court Theatre who bore the t.i.tle of Baroness von Rohrdorf, after one of the Prince's properties; and there he divided his time between sport and theatre-going, and struggling with his debts. He had dropped his dignities and lived just like a private citizen; and if he was generally supposed to have a struggle to make two ends meet, n.o.body gave him much sympathy for it.

But alterations had been made in the old castle itself--reductions of expenses, which were discussed in the city and the country, and discussed usually in an apprehensive and regretful sense, because the people at bottom wished to see themselves represented with due pride and magnificence. Several high posts at the Court had been amalgamated for economy's sake, and for years past Herr von Buhl zu Buhl had been Lord Marshal, Chief Master of the Ceremonies, and Marshal of the Household at once. There had been many discharges in the Board of Green Cloth and the servants' hall, among the pike-staffs, yeomen of the guard, and grooms, the master cooks and chief confectioners, the court and chamber lackeys.

The establishment of the royal stable had been reduced to the barest minimum.... And what was the good of it all? The Grand Duke's contempt for money showed itself in sudden outbursts against the squeeze; and while the catering at the Court functions reached the extreme limits of permissible simplicity, while at the supper at the close of the Thursday concerts in the Marble Hall nothing but continual roast beef with sauce remoulade and ice-pudding were served on the red velvet coverings of the gilt-legged tables, while the daily fare at the Grand Duke's own candle-decked table was no better than that of an ordinary middle-cla.s.s family, he defiantly threw away a whole year's income on the repair of the Grimmburg.

But meanwhile the rest of his seats were falling to pieces. Herr von Buhl simply had not the means at his disposal for their upkeep. And yet it was a pity in the case of many of them. Those which lay at some little distance from the capital, or right out in the country, those luxurious asylums cradled in natural beauties whose dainty names spoke of rest, solitude, content, pastime, and freedom from care, or recalled a flower or a jewel, served as holiday resorts for the citizens and strangers, and brought in a certain amount in entrance-money which sometimes--not always--was devoted to their upkeep. This was not the case, however, with those in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital.

There was the little schloss in the Empire style, the Hermitage, standing silent and graceful on the edge of the northern suburbs, but long uninhabited and deserted in the middle of its over-grown park, which joined on to the public gardens, and looked out on its little, mud-stiff pond. There was Schloss Delphinenort which, only a quarter of an hour's walk from the other, in the northern part of the public gardens themselves, all of which had once belonged to the Crown, mirrored its untidiness in a huge square fountain-basin; both were in a sad state. That Delphinenort in particular--that n.o.ble structure in the early baroque style, with its stately entrance-colonnade, its high windows divided into little white-framed panes, its carved festoons, its Roman busts in the niches, its splendid approach-stairs, its general magnificence--should be abandoned to decay for ever, as it seemed, was the sorrow of all lovers of architectural beauty; and when one day, as the result of unforeseen, really strange circ.u.mstances, it was restored to honour and youth, among them at any rate the satisfaction was general.... For the rest, Delphinenort could be reached in fifteen or twenty minutes from the spa-garden, which lay a little to the north-west of the city, and was connected with its centre by a direct line of trams.

The only residences used by the Grand Ducal family were Schloss Hollerbrunn, the summer residence, an expanse of white buildings with Chinese roofs, on the farther side of the chain of hills which surrounded the capital, coolly and pleasantly situated on the river and famed for the elder-hedges in its park; farther, Schloss Jagerpreis, the ivy-covered hunting-box in the middle of the woods to westward; and lastly, the Town Castle itself, called the "Old" Castle, although no new one existed.

It was called thus, with no idea of comparison, simply because of its age, and the critics declared that its redecoration was more a matter of urgency than that of the Grimmburg. Even the inner rooms, which were in daily use by the family, were faded and cracked, not to mention the many uninhabited and unused rooms in the oldest parts of the many-styled building, which were all choked and flyblown. For some time past the public had been refused admission to them,--a measure which was obviously due to the shocking state of the castle. But people who could get a peep, the tradesmen and the staff, declared that there was stuffing peeping out of more than one stiff, imposing piece of furniture.

The castle and the Court Church together made up a grey, irregular, and commanding ma.s.s of turrets, galleries, and gateways, half fortress, half palace. Various epochs had contributed to its erection, and large parts of it were decaying, weather-beaten, spoilt, and ready to fall into pieces. To the west it dropped steeply down to the lower-lying city, and was connected with it by battered steps clamped together with rusty iron bars. But the huge main gate, guarded by lions couchant, and surmounted by the pious, haughty motto: "Turris fortissima nomen Domini," in almost illegible carving, faced the Albrechtsplatz. It had its sentries and sentry boxes; it was the scene of the changing of the guard, with drums and martial display; it was the playground of all the urchins of the town.

The Old Castle had three courtyards, in the corners of which rose graceful stair-turrets and between whose paving stones an unnecessary amount of weeds was generally growing. But in the middle of one of the courtyards stood the rose-bush,--it had stood there for ages in a bed, although there was no other attempt at a garden to be seen. It was just like any other rose-bush; it had a porter to tend it, it stood there in snow, rain, and sunshine, and in due season it bore roses. These were exceptionally fine roses, n.o.bly formed, with dark-red velvet petals, a pleasure to look at, and real masterpieces of nature. But those roses had one strange and dreadful peculiarity: they had no scent! Or rather, they had a scent, but for some unknown reason it was not the scent of roses, but of decay--a slight, but plainly perceptible scent of decay.

Everybody knew it; it was in the guide-books, and strangers visited the courtyard to convince themselves of it with their own noses. There was also a popular idea that it was written somewhere that at some time or other, on a day of rejoicings and public felicity, the blossoms of the rose-bush would begin to give forth a natural and lovely odour.

After all, it was only to be expected that the popular imagination would be exercised by the wonderful rose-bush. It was exercised in precisely the same way by the "owl-chamber" in the Old Castle, which was used as a lumber room. Its position was such that it could not be ignored, not far from the "Gala Rooms," and the "Hall of the Knights," where the Court officers used to a.s.semble on Court days, and thus in a comparatively modern part of the building. But there was certainly something uncanny about it, especially as from time to time noises and cries occurred there, which could not be heard outside the room and whose origin was unascertainable. People swore that it came from ghosts, and many a.s.serted that it was especially noticeable when important and decisive events in the Grand Ducal family were impending,--a more or less gratuitous rumour, which deserved no more serious attention than other national products of an historical and dynastic frame of mind, as for instance a certain dark prophecy which had been handed down for hundreds of years and may be mentioned in this connexion. It came from an old gipsy-woman, and was to the effect that a prince "with one hand" would bring the greatest good fortune to the country. The old hag had said: "He will give to the country with one hand more than all the rest could give it with two." That is how the prophecy was recorded, and how it was quoted from time to time.

Round the Old Castle lay the capital, consisting of the Old Town and the New Town, with their public buildings, monuments, fountains, and parks, their streets and squares, named after princes, artists, deserving statesmen, and distinguished citizens, divided into two very unequal halves by the many-bridged river, which flowed in a great loop round the southern end of the public garden, and was lost in the surrounding hills. The city was a university town, it possessed an academy which was not in much request and whose curricula were unpractical and rather old-fashioned; the Professor of Mathematics, Privy Councillor Klinghammer, was the only one of any particular repute in the scientific world. The Court Theatre, though poorly endowed, maintained a decent level of performances. There was a little musical, literary, and artistic life; a certain number of foreigners came to the capital, wishing to share in its well-regulated life and such intellectual attractions as it offered, among them wealthy invalids who settled down in the villas round the spa-gardens and were held in honour by the State and the community as doughty payers of taxes.

And now you know what the town was like, what the country was like, and how matters stood.

III

HINNERKE THE SHOEMAKER

The Grand Duke's second son made his first public appearance on the occasion of his christening. This festivity aroused the same interest in the country as always attached to happenings within the Royal Family circle. It took place after weeks of discussion and research as to the manner of its arrangement, was held in the Court Church by the President of the High Consistory, Dom Wislezenus, with all the due ceremonial, and in public, to the extent that the Lord Marshal's office, by the Prince's orders, had issued invitations to it to every cla.s.s of society.

Herr von Buhl zu Buhl, a courtly ritualist of the greatest circ.u.mspection and accuracy, in his full-dress uniform superintended, with the help of two masters of the ceremonies, the whole of the intricate proceedings: the gathering of the princely guests in the Gala Rooms, the solemn procession in which they, attended by pages and squires, walked up the staircase of Heinrich the Luxurious and through a covered pa.s.sage into the church, the entry of the spectators from the highest to the lowest, the distribution of the seats, the observance of due decorum during the religious service itself, the order of precedence at the congratulations which took place directly after the service was ended.... He panted and puffed, smiled ingratiatingly, brandished his staff, laughed in nervous bursts, and kept executing retreating bows.