When Albrecht had finished, Klaus Heinrich stepped one pace sideways, closed his heels with a fresh salute, and said: “I beg, dear Albrecht, to offer my heart-felt and respectful thanks, in my own name and that of the whole country. For it is you in the long run who make all these blessings possible, and the redoubled love of the people will be your reward for your magnanimous resolutions.”
He pressed his brother’s thin, sensitive hand, which he kept close to his chest, and extended to him only to the extent of moving his forearm. The Grand Duke had thrust forward his short, round underlip, and his eyelids were half-closed. He answered softly with a lisp:
“I am the less inclined to entertain illusions about the people’s love, as I can, as you know, dispense with such questionable love without a pang. So question whether I deserve it is scarcely worth notice. When it’s time to start, I go to the station and give the signal to the engine-driver, which is silly rather than dutiful, but it’s my duty. But you’re in a different position. You’re a Sunday child. Everything turns out trumps for you.… I wish you luck,” he said, raising the lids from his lonely-looking, blue eyes. And it was clear at this moment that he loved Klaus Heinrich. “I wish you happiness, Klaus Heinrich—but not too much, and that you may not repose too comfortably in the love of the people. I have already said that everything turns out trumps for you. The girl of your choice is very strange, very un-domesticated, and, most important of all, very original. She has a mixture of blood, I’ve been told that Indian blood flows in her veins. That’s perhaps a good thing. With a wife like that, there’s less danger, perhaps, of your having too easy a time.”
“Neither happiness,” said Klaus Heinrich, “nor the people’s love will have the effect of making me cease to be your brother.”
He left to face a difficult interview, a tête-à-tête with Mr. Spoelmann, his personal proposal for Imma’s hand. He found he had to swallow what his negotiators had swallowed, for Samuel Spoelmann showed not the smallest pleasure and snarled several refreshing truths at him. But it was over at last, and the morning came when the betrothal appeared in the Gazette. The long tensions resolved into endless jubilation. Dignified men waved pocket-handkerchiefs at one another, and embraced in the open square: bunting flew from every flag-staff.
But the same day the news reached Schloss “Hermitage,” that Raoul Ueberbein had committed suicide.
The story was a vile as well as stupid one, and would not be worth relating had not its end been so horrible. No attempt will be made here to apportion the blame. The Doctor’s death gave rise to two opposing factions. One affirmed that he had been driven to take his life owing to the misgivings which his desperate act had evoked: the others declared with a shrug that his conduct was impossible and crazy, and that he had shown all his life a total lack of self-control. The point need not be decided. At any rate nothing justified so tragic an end; indeed, a man with the gifts of Raoul Ueberbein deserved something better than ruin.… Here is the story.
At Easter the year before the professor in charge of the top class but one at our Grammar School, who suffered from heart-weakness, had been temporarily retired on the ground of his illness, and Doctor Ueberbein, notwithstanding his comparative youth, had been given the first vacant chair simply in view of his professional zeal and his undeniably remarkable success in a lower class. It was a happy experiment, as events proved; the class had never done so well as this year. The professor on leave, a popular man with his colleagues, had become a peevish as well as careless and indolent man as the result of his infirmity, with which was combined a sociable but immoderate inclination for beer. He had shut his eyes to details and had sent up every year an extremely badly prepared batch of pupils into the Select. A new spirit had come into the class with the temporary professor, and nobody was surprised at it. People knew his uncomfortable professional zeal, his single-minded and never-resting energy. They foresaw that he would not miss such an opportunity for self-advancement, round which he had doubtless built ambitious hopes.
So an end had soon been put to laziness and boredom in the second class. Dr. Ueberbein had pitched his expectations high, and his skill in inspiring even the most recalcitrant had proved irresistible. The boys worshipped him. His superior, fatherly, and jolly, swaggering way kept them on the alert, shook them up, and made them feel it a point of honour to follow their teacher through thick and thin. He won their hearts by going for Sunday excursions with them, when they were allowed to smoke, while he bewitched their imaginations by boyishly conceived rodomontades about the greatness and severity of public life. And on Monday the members of yesterday’s expedition would meet for work in a cheerful and eager frame of mind.
Three-quarters of the school year had thus passed, when the news went round, before Christmas, that the professor on leave, now fairly strong again, would resume his duties after the holidays, and would again act as professor of the second class. And now it came out what sort of man Doctor Ueberbein was, with his green complexion and superior manner. He objected and remonstrated; he lodged a vigorous and, in form, not incontestable protest against the class with which he had spent three-quarters of the year, and whose work and recreation he had shared up to the very mouth of the goal, being taken from its professor for the last quarter and restored to the official who had spent three-quarters of the year on leave. His action was intelligible and comprehensible, and one must sympathize with it. He had undoubtedly hoped to send up a model class to the head master, who taught the Select, a class whose forwardness would put his skill in the best light and would hasten his promotion; and it must grieve him to look forward to another’s reaping the fruits of his devotion. But though his disgust might be excusable, his frenzy was not: and it is an unfortunate fact that, when the head master proved deaf to his representations, he became simply frenzied. He lost his head, he lost all balance, he set heaven and hell to work to prevent this loafer, this alcohol-heart, this blankety-blank, as he did not hesitate to describe the professor on leave, from taking his class from him. And when he found no support among his colleagues, as was natural in the case of so unsociable a man, the poor wretch had so far forgotten himself as to incite the pupils entrusted to him to rebel.
He had put the question to them from his desk—Whom do you want for your master for the last quarter, me or that other fellow? And, wound up by his stirring appeal, they had shouted that they wanted him. Then, he said, they must take matters into their own hands, show their colours, and act as one boy—though goodness knows what in his excitement he meant by that. But when after the holidays the returned professor entered the class-room, they screamed Doctor Ueberbein’s name at him for minutes on end—and there was a fine scandal.
It was kept as quiet as possible. The revolutionaries got off almost unpunished, as Doctor Ueberbein himself put on record, at the inquiry which was at once initiated, his appeal to them. As to the Doctor himself, too, the authorities seemed generally inclined to close their eyes to what had happened. His zeal and skill were highly valued, certain learned works, the fruits of his mighty industry, had made his name known, he was popular in high quarters—quarters, be it noticed, with which he personally did not come into contact, and which therefore he could not incense by his patronizing bearing. Further, his record as tutor of Prince Klaus Heinrich weighed in the scales. In short, he was not simply dismissed, as one might have expected him to be. The President of the Grand Ducal Council of Education, before whom the matter came, administered a grave reprimand to him, and Doctor Ueberbein, who had stopped teaching directly after the scandal, was provisionally retired. But people who knew declared later that nothing was intended beyond the professor’s transfer to another grammar school; that in high quarters the only wish was to hush up the whole business, and that the promise of a brilliant future had been actually extended to the Doctor. Everything would have turned out all right.
But the milder the authorities showed themselves towards the Doctor, the more hostile was the attitude of his colle
agues towards him. The “Teachers’ Union” at once established a court of honour, whose object was to secure satisfaction for their beloved member, the alcohol-hearted professor rejected of his pupils. The written statement laid before Ueberbein in his retirement in his lodgings ran as follows: Whereas Ueberbein had resisted the return of the colleague for whom he acted to the professorship of the second class; whereas further he had agitated against him and in the end had actually incited the pupils to insubordination against him, he had been guilty of disloyal conduct to his colleague of such a kind as must be considered dishonourable not only in a professional, but also in a general sense. That was the verdict. The expected result was that Doctor Ueberbein, who had only been a nominal member of the “Teachers’ Union,” withdrew his membership—and there, so many thought, he might well have let the matter rest.
But whether it was that in his seclusion he did not know the goodwill he inspired in higher quarters; that he thought his prospects more hopeless than they were; that he could not stand idleness, unreconciled as he was to the premature loss of his beloved class; that the expression “dishonourable” poisoned his blood, or that his mind was not strong enough to stand all the shocks it received at this time: five weeks after the New Year his landlady found him on the threadbare carpet of his room, no greener than usual, but with a bullet through his heart.
Such was the end of Raoul Ueberbein, such his false step, such the cause of his fall. “I told you so,” was the burden of all the discussions of his pitiful break-down. The quarrelsome and uncongenial man, who had never been a man amongst men at his club, who had haughtily resisted familiarity, and had ordered his life cold-bloodedly with a view to results alone, and had supposed that that gave him the right to patronize the. whole world—there he lay now: the first hitch, the first obstacle in the field of accomplishment, had brought him to a miserable end. Few of the bourgeois regretted, none of them mourned him—with one single exception, the chief surgeon at the Dorothea Hospital, Ueberbein’s congenial friend, and perhaps a fair lady with whom he used once to play Casino. But Klaus Heinrich always cherished an honourable and cordial memory of his ill-fated tutor.
IX
THE ROSE-BUSH
AND Spoelmann financed the state. The outlines of the transaction were bold and clear; a child could have understood them—and as a fact beaming fathers explained it to their children, as they dangled them on their knees.
Samuel Spoelmann nodded, Messrs. Phlebs and Slippers got to work, and his mighty orders flashed under the waves of the Atlantic to the Continent of the Western Hemisphere. He withdrew a third of his share from the Sugar trust, a quarter from the Petroleum trust, and half from the Steel trust; he had his floating capital paid in to accounts in his name in several banks over here; and he bought from Herr Krippenreuther at par 350,000,000 new 3½ per cent. consols at one stroke. That is what Spoelmann did.
He who knows by experience the influence of the state of mind on the human organs will believe that Dr. Krippenreuther cheered up and in a short time was unrecognizable. He carried himself upright and free, his walk was springy, the yellow look faded from his face, which became red and white, his eyes flashed, and his stomach regained its powers in a few months to such an extent that his friends were delighted to observe that the Minister could give himself up to the enjoyment of blue cabbage and gherkin salad with impunity. That was one pleasant though purely personal result of Spoelmann’s interference in our finances, which was of but slight account in comparison with the effects which that interference had on our public and economic life.
A part of the loan was devoted to the sinking fund, and troublesome public debts were paid off. But this was scarcely needed to secure us breathing space and credit on every side; for no sooner was it known, for all the secrecy with which the matter was treated officially, that Samuel Spoelmann had become the State banker, in fact if not in name, than the skies cleared up above us and all our need was changed into joy and rapture. There was an end to the scare-selling of active debts, the customary rate of interest dropped, our written promises were eagerly sought after as investments, and each twenty-four hours saw a rise in the quotation of our high-interest loan from a deplorably low figure up to above par. The pressure, the nightmare which for decades had weighed down our national finances, was removed; Doctor Krippenreuther puffed out his chest and spoke in the Landtag in favour of all-round reduction in taxation. This was adopted unanimously, and the antediluvian meat tax was finally buried amid the rejoicings of all those who cared for their fellow-men.
A distinct improvement in the pay of the Civil Service, and in the salaries of teachers, clergymen, and all State functionaries was readily voted. Means were now available for restarting the closed-down silver-mines; several hundred workmen were given work, and productive veins were unexpectedly struck. Money, money was forthcoming, the standard of economic morality rose; the forests were replanted, the litter was left in the woods, the stock-owners no longer were compelled to sell their milk, they drank it themselves, and the critics would have sought in vain for ill-nourished peasants in the fields. The nation showed gratitude towards their rulers, who had brought so boundless a blessing to land and people.
Herr von Knobelsdorff needed but few words to induce Parliament to increase the Crown subsidy. The orders for the putting up for sale of the Schlosses “Pastime” and “Favourite” were cancelled. Skilled workmen invaded the Old Schloss, to instal central heating from top to bottom. Our agents in the negotiations with Spoelmann, von Bühl and Dr. Krippenreuther, received the Grand Cross of the Albrechts Order in brilliants; the Finance Minister was also ennobled, and Herr von Knobelsdorff was made happy with a life-size portrait of the exalted couple—painted by the skilful hand of old Professor von Lindemann and exquisitely framed.
After the betrothal the people gave rein to their fancy in calculating the dowry which Imma Spoelmann was to receive from her father. It made them giddy; they were possessed by a mad desire to scatter figures of truly astronomical dimensions about. But the dowry did not exceed an earthly figure, comfortably big though it was. It amounted to a hundred million.
“Gracious I” said Ditlinde zu Ried-Hohenried, when she first heard it. “And my dear Philipp with his peat.” Many another had the same thought; but Spoelmann’s daughter allayed the nervous anger which might arise in simple hearts in face of such monstrous wealth, for she did not forget to do good and share her good fortune, and on the very day of the public betrothal she gave a sum of 500,000 marks, the yearly interest on which was to be divided among the four county councils for charitable and generally useful purposes.
Klaus Heinrich and Imma drove in one of Spoelmann’s olive-coloured, red-cushioned motors on a round of visits to the members of the House of Grimmburg. A young chauffeur drove the sumptuous car—the one in which Imma had found a likeness to Klaus Heinrich. But his nervous tension was but small on this trip, for he had to restrain the motor’s giant strength so far as possible and go slowly—so closely were they surrounded by admiring crowds; for as the more remote authors of our happiness, Grand Duke Albrecht and Samuel Spoelmann, each in his own fashion, concealed themselves from the crowd, the latter heaped all its love and gratitude on the heads of the exalted couple. Boys could be seen through the plate glass of the motor throwing their caps in the air, the shouts of men and women came surging in, clear and shrill, and Klaus Heinrich, his hand to his helmet, said admonishingly: “You must respond too, Imma, to your side, otherwise they’ll think you cold.”
They drove to Princess Katharine’s, and were received with dignity. In the time of Grand Duke Johann Albrecht, her brother, said the aunt to her nephew, it would never have been allowed. But the times moved fast, and she prayed Heaven that his betrothed would accustom herself to the Court. They proceeded to Princess zu Ried-Hohenried’s, and there it was love she met with. Ditlinde’s Grimmburg pride found comfort in the assurance that Leviathan’s daughter might become Princess of the Grand Ducal House and Roy
al Highness, but could never be Grand Ducal Princess like herself; for the rest, she was overjoyed that Klaus Heinrich had rummaged out for himself anything so sweet and precious. As the wife of Philipp with his peat, she had the best reasons for knowing how to value the advantages of the match, and cordially welcomed her sister-in-law to her arms.
They drove too to Prince Lambert’s villa, and while the Countess-bride struggled to keep up a conversation with the dazzling but very uneducated Baroness von Rohrdorf, the old petticoat-hunter congratulated his nephew in his sepulchral voice on the unprejudiced choice he had made, and on so boldly snapping his fingers at Court and Highness. “I am not snapping my fingers at my Highness, uncle; not only have I had an eye to my own happiness in no inconsiderable measure, but I have acted throughout with the Mass, the Whole, in view,” said Klaus Heinrich rather rudely; whereupon they broke off, and drove to Schloss “Segenhaus,” where Dorothea, the poor Dowager, held her dreary Court. She cried as she kissed the young bride on the forehead, without knowing why she did so.
Meanwhile Samuel Spoelmann sat at Delphinenort surrounded with plans and sketches of furniture and silk carpet-patterns, and drawings of gold plate. He left his organ untouched, and forgot the stone in his kidney, and got quite red cheeks from merely having so much to do; for however small the opinion he had formed of “the young man,” or the hope he held out of his ever being seen at Court, yet his daughter was going to be married, and he wanted the arrangements to be worthy of his means. The plans had to do with the new Schloss “Hermitage,” for Klaus Heinrich’s bachelor quarters were to be razed to the ground, and a new Schloss built on its site, roomy and bright and decorated, by Klaus Heinrich’s wish, in a mixture of Empire and modern styles, combining cool severity with homely comfort. Mr. Spoelmann appeared one morning in person, after drinking the waters in the spa-garden, in his faded great-coat at the “Hermitage,” in order to find out whether this or that piece of furniture could be used for the new Schloss. “Let’s see, young Prince, what you’ve got,” he snarled, and Klaus Heinrich showed him everything in his sober room—the thin sofas, the stiff-legged tables, the white-enamelled tables in the corners.