Royal Highness Part 7

The reporter of the _Courier_, notebook in one hand and pencil in the other, peered with neck thrust forward over the hall out of his corner, so as to make sure whom the Prince was going to engage. It was the fair, tall girl, with the collar-bones and the big white hands, Fraulein Unschlitt, the soap-boiler's daughter. She was still standing where Klaus Heinrich had left her.

"Are you still there?" he said breathlessly.... "May I have the pleasure? Come along!"

The sets were complete. They wandered about for a while without finding a place. A man with a ribbon rosette hurried up, seized a pair of young people by the shoulders and induced them to leave their stand under the chandelier, that his Grand Ducal Highness might occupy it with Fraulein Unschlitt. The band had been hesitating, it now struck up, the prescribed compliments were exchanged, and Klaus Heinrich danced like the rest of the world.

The doors into the next room stood open. In one of them was a buffet with flower vases, punch bowls, and dishes of many-coloured cakes. The dance extended right into this room, two sets were dancing in it. In the other room some white-covered tables were arrayed, which were still standing empty.

Klaus Heinrich stepped forwards and backwards, laughed to the others, stretched out his hand and grasped theirs, and then again seized his partner's big white hand, put his right arm round the maiden's muslin-clad waist and revolved with her on their particular patch, while he kept his left hand, which also wore a little white glove, on his hip.

They laughed and talked as they danced. The Prince made mistakes, forgot himself, upset figures, and lost his place. "You must keep me straight!"

he said in the confusion. "I'm upsetting everything! Nudge me in the ribs!" and the others gradually plucked up courage and set him right, ordered him laughingly hither and thither, even laid their hands on him and pushed him a little when necessary. The fair damsel with the collar-bones was particularly zealous in pus.h.i.+ng him about.

The spirits of the dancers rose with every figure. Their movements became freer, their calls bolder, they began to stamp their feet and to prance as they advanced and retired, while they held each other's hands and balanced themselves with their arms. Klaus Heinrich too stamped, at first only by way of signal, but soon more loudly; and as far as the balancing with the arms was concerned, the fair maiden looked after that when they advanced together. Also every time she danced facing him she made an exaggerated sc.r.a.pe before him which much increased the merriment.

The refreshment room was full of chatter and babble, which attracted everybody's envious glances. Some one had left his set in the middle of the dance, purloined a sandwich from the buffet, and was now chewing away proudly as he swerved and stamped, to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the rest.

"What cheek!" said the fair maiden. "They don't stand on ceremony!" and the idea gave her no peace. Before you could look round, she was off, had dashed lightly and nimbly between the lines of dancers, had seized a sandwich from the buffet and was back in her place.

Klaus Heinrich was the one who applauded her most heartily. His left hand was a difficulty, and so he managed without it, while with his right he beat on the top of his head and doubled up with laughter. Then he became quieter and rather pale. He was struggling with himself....

The quadrille was nearing its end. What he meant to do he must do quickly. They had already got to the grand chain.

And as he was already almost too late, he did what he had been struggling with himself about. He broke away, ran swiftly through the dancers, with muttered apologies when he collided with anybody, reached the buffet, seized a sandwich, rushed back, and came sliding into his set; that was not all, he put the sandwich--it was an egg and sardine one--to the lips of his partner, the damsel with the big white hands; she curtseyed a little, bit into it, bit almost half off without using her hands, and throwing back his head he stuffed the rest into his mouth!

The high spirits of the set found a vent in the grand chain, which was just beginning. Right round the hall went the dancers, winding zig-zag in and out and stretching out their hands. Then it stopped, the tide turned, and once more the stream went round, laughing and chattering, with mistakes and entanglements and hurriedly rectified complications.

Klaus Heinrich pressed the hands he grasped without knowing to whom they belonged. He laughed and his chest heaved. His smoothly parted hair was ruffled, and a bit fell over his forehead, his s.h.i.+rt-front bulged a little out of his waistcoat, and in his face and sparkling eyes was that look of tender emotion which is sometimes the expression of happiness.

He said several times during the chain, "What awful fun! What glorious fun!" He met his cousins, and to them too he said, "We have had such fun--in our set over there!"

Then came the clapping and au revoirs; the dance was over. Klaus Heinrich again stood facing the fair maiden with the collar-bones, and when the music changed time he once more put his arm round her tender waist, and away they danced.

Klaus Heinrich did not steer well and often knocked into other couples, because he kept his left hand planted on his hip, but he brought his partner somehow or other to the entrance to the refreshment room, where they called a halt and refreshed themselves with pineappleade which was handed to them by the waiters. They sat just at the entrance on two velvet stools, drank and chatted about the quadrille, the Citizens'

Ball, and other social functions in which the fair maiden had already taken part that winter....

It was then that one of the suite, Major von Platow, the Grand Duke's aide-de-camp, came up to Klaus Heinrich, bowed and begged leave to announce that their Royal Highnesses were now going. He had been charged ... But Klaus Heinrich gave him to understand that he wished to remain, in so emphatic a fas.h.i.+on that the aide-de-camp did not like to insist upon his errand.

The Prince uttered exclamations of an almost rebellious regret and was obviously bitterly grieved at the idea of going home at once. "We are having such fun!" he said, stood up and gripped the Major's arm gently.

"Dear Major von Platow, please do intercede for me! Talk to Excellency von k.n.o.belsdorff, do anything you like--but to go now, when we are all having such fun together! I'm sure my cousins are going to stay...." The Major looked at the fair maiden with the big white hands, who smiled at him; he too smiled and promised to do his best. This little scene was enacted while the Grand Duke and the Grand d.u.c.h.ess were already taking leave of the city dignitaries at the entrance into the town park.

Immediately afterwards the dancing on the first floor began again.

The ball was at its height. Everything official had gone, and the king of revelry came into his own. The white-covered tables in the adjoining rooms were occupied by families drinking punch and eating supper. Youth streamed to and fro, sitting excitedly and impatiently on the edges of the chairs to eat a mouthful, drink a gla.s.s, and again plunge into the merry throng. On the ground-floor there was an old-German beer-cellar, which was crowded with the more sedate men. The big dancing-hall and the buffet-room were by now monopolized by the dancers. The buffet-room was filled with fifteen or sixteen young people, sons and daughters of the city, among them Klaus Heinrich. It was a kind of private ball in there.

They danced to the music which floated in from the main hall.

Doctor Ueberbein, the Prince's tutor, was seen there for a minute or two, having a short talk with his pupil. He was heard to mention, watch in hand, Herr von k.n.o.belsdorff's name, and to say that he was down in the beer-cellar and was coming back to take the Prince away. Then he went. The time was half-past ten. And while he sat below and conversed with his friends over a tankard of beer, only for an hour or perhaps an hour and a half, not more, those dreadful things, that simply incredible scandal, happened in the buffet-room, to which it fell to him to put a stop, though unfortunately too late.

The punch provided was weak, it contained more soda-water than champagne, and if the young people lost their equilibrium it was more the intoxication of the dance than of the wine. But in view of the Prince's character and the solid bourgeois origin of the rest of the company, that was not enough to explain what happened. Another, a peculiar intoxication, was a factor here on both sides. The peculiar thing was that Klaus Heinrich was fully conscious of each separate stage in this intoxication, and yet had not the power or the will to shake it off.

He was happy. He felt on his cheeks the same glow burning as he saw in the faces of the others, and as his eyes, dazed by a soft mist, travelled about the room, and rested admiringly on one fair form after another, his look seemed to say: "We!" His mouth too said it--said, for the pure joy of saying them, sentences in which a "We" occurred. "Shall _we_ sit down? shall _we_ have another turn? shall _we_ have a drink?

shall _we_ make up two sets?" It was especially to the maiden with the collar-bones that Klaus Heinrich made remarks with a "We" in them. He had quite forgotten his left hand, it hung down, he felt so happy that it did not worry him and he never thought of hiding it. Many saw now for the first time what really was the matter with it, and looked curiously on with an unconscious grimace at the thin, short arm in the sleeve, the little, by now rather dirty white kid glove which covered the hand. But as Klaus Heinrich was so careless about it, the others plucked up courage, the result being that everybody took hold of the malformed hand quite unconcernedly in the round or square dances.

He did not keep it back. He felt himself borne along, nay rather whirled around by a feeling, a strong, wild feeling of contentment, that grew, gathered heat from itself, possessed itself of him more and more recklessly, overpowered him even more vehemently and breathlessly, seemed to lift him triumphantly from the floor. What was happening? It was difficult to say, difficult to be quite sure. The air was full of words, detached cries, not spoken but expressed on the dancers' faces, in their att.i.tudes, in all they were doing and saying. "He must just once! Bring him along, bring him along ...! Caught, caught!" A young damsel with a turned-up nose, who asked him for a gallop when the "leap-year" dance came, said quite clearly without any obvious connexion, "Chucker up!" as she got ready to start off with him.

He saw pleasure in every eye, and saw that their pleasure lay in drawing him out, in having him amongst them. In his happiness, his dream, to be with them, amongst them, one of them, there obtruded itself from time to time a cold, uncomfortable feeling that he was deluding himself, that the warm, glorious "We" was deceiving him, that he did not really blend in with them, that he was all the time the centre and object of the show, but in a different and more unsatisfactory way than before. They were his enemies to a certain extent, he saw it in the malice of their eyes. He heard as if at a distance, with a peculiar dismay, how the fair damsel with the big white hands called him simply by his names--and he felt that she did so in quite a different spirit to that of Doctor Ueberbein when he did the same. She had the right and the permission to do so, in a certain manner, but was n.o.body here then jealous for his dignity, if he himself was not? It seemed to him that they plucked at his coat, and sometimes in their excitement made wild, sneering remarks about him. A tall, fair young man with pince-nez, with whom he collided while dancing, said quite loud so that everybody could hear it: "Now then, clumsy!" And there was malice in the way in which the fair young maiden, her arm in his and a grin on her lips, whirled round with him till he was ready to drop with giddiness. While they whirled he gazed with swimming eyes at the collar-bones showing under the white, rather rough skin on her neck.

They fell; they had gone too hard at it and tumbled when they tried to stop revolving, and over them stumbled a second pair, not entirely by themselves, but rather at a push from the tall young man with pince-nez.

There was a scrimmage on the floor, and Klaus Heinrich heard above him in the room the chorus which came back to him from the school-playground when he had ventured on a rather daring joke by way of amusing his fellows--a "Ho, ho, ho!" only it sounded more wicked and bolder here....

When shortly after midnight, unfortunately a little behind time, Doctor Ueberbein appeared on the threshold of the buffet-room, this is what he saw: His young pupil was sitting alone on the green plush sofa by the left-hand wall, his clothes all disarranged and himself decorated in an extraordinary way. A quant.i.ty of flowers, which had previously adorned the buffet in two Chinese vases, were stuck in the opening of his waistcoat, between the studs of his s.h.i.+rtfront, even in his collar; round his neck lay the gold chain which belonged to the maiden with the collar-bones, and on his head the flat metal cover of a punch-bowl was balanced like a hat. He kept saying, "What are you doing? What are you doing ...?" while the dancers, hand-in-hand in a semicircle, danced a round dance backwards and forwards in front of him with half-suppressed giggles, whispers, smirks, and ho, ho, ho's.

An unusual and unnatural flush mantled in Doctor Ueberbein's face. "Stop it! Stop it!" he cried in his resonant voice, and, in the silence, consternation, and dismay which at once ensued, he walked with long strides up to the Prince, tore away the flowers in two or three grasps, threw the chain and the cover away, then bowed and said with a stern look, "May I beg your Grand Ducal Highness ...

"I've been an a.s.s, an a.s.s!" he repeated when he got outside.

Klaus Heinrich left the Citizens' Ball in his company.

That was the painful event which happened during Klaus Heinrich's year at school. As I have said, none of the partic.i.p.ators talked about it; even to the Prince, Doctor Ueberbein did not mention the subject for years afterwards, and, as n.o.body crystallized the event in words, it remained incorporeal and promptly faded away, at least apparently, into oblivion.

The Citizens' Ball had taken place in January. Shrove Tuesday, with the Court Ball and the big Court in the Old Schloss, which wound up the social year--regulation festivities, to which Klaus Heinrich was not yet admitted--were past and over. Then came Easter, and with it the close of the school year. Klaus Heinrich's diploma examination, that edifying formality, in the course of which the question, "You agree, do you not, Grand Ducal Highness?" was constantly recurring on the lips of the Professor, and at which the Prince acquitted himself admirably in his very conspicuous position. This was not a very important phase in his life. Klaus Heinrich continued to live in the capital, but after Whitsuntide his eighteenth birthday drew near, and with it a complex of festivities which marked a serious turning-point in his life, and which taxed him severely for days together.

He had attained his majority, had been p.r.o.nounced to be of age. For the first time again since his baptism, he was the centre of attention and chief actor in a great ceremony, but while he had then quietly, irresponsibly, and patiently resigned himself to the formalities which surrounded and protected him, it was inc.u.mbent on him on this day, in the midst of binding prescriptions and stern regulations, hemmed in by the drapery of weighty precedent, to inspire the spectators and to please them by maintaining an att.i.tude of dignity and good-breeding, and at the same time to appear light-hearted.

It may be added that I use the word "drapery" not only as a figure of speech. The Prince wore a crimson mantle on this occasion, a sumptuous and theatrical article of raiment, which his father and grandfather before him had worn at their coming-of-age, and which notwithstanding days of airing, still smelt of camphor. The crimson mantle had originally belonged to the robes of the Knights of the Grimmburg Griffin, but was now nothing more than a ceremonial garb for the use of princes attaining their majority. Albrecht, the Heir Apparent, had never worn the family one. As his birthday fell in the winter, he always spent it in the South, in a place with a warm and dry climate, whither he was thinking of returning this autumn too, and as at the time of his eighteenth birthday his health had not permitted him to travel home, it had been decided to declare him officially of age in his absence, and to dispense with the Court ceremony.

As to Klaus Heinrich, there was only one opinion, especially among the representatives of the public, that the mantle suited him admirably, and he himself, notwithstanding the way in which it hampered his movements, found it a blessing, as it made it easy for him to hide his left hand.

Between the canopied bed and the bellying chest of drawers in his bedroom, that was situated on the second floor looking out on the yard with the rose-bush, he made himself ready for the show, carefully and precisely, with the help of his valet, Neumann, a quiet and precise man who had been recently attached to him as keeper of his wardrobe and personal servant.

Neumann was an ex-barber, and was filled, especially in the direction of his original calling, with that pa.s.sionate conscientiousness, that insatiable knowledge of the ideal, which gives rise to the highest skill. He did not shave like any ordinary shaver, he was not content to leave no stubble behind, he shaved in such a way that every shadow of a beard, every recollection of one, was removed, and without hurting the skin he managed to restore to it all its softness and smoothness. He cut Klaus Heinrich's hair exactly square above the ears, and arranged it with all the a.s.siduity required, in his opinion, by this preparation for the Prince's ceremonial appearance. He managed that the parting should come over the left eye and run slanting back over the crown of the head, so that no tufts or wisps should stick up on it; he brushed the hair on the right side up from the forehead into a prim crest on which no hat or helmet could make an impression. Then Klaus Heinrich, with his help, squeezed himself carefully into his uniform of lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards, whose high-braided collar and tight fit favoured a dignified bearing, put on the lemon-coloured silk band and the flat gold chain of the House Order, and went down to the picture gallery where the members of the family and the foreign relations of the Grand Ducal pair were waiting. The Court was waiting in the adjoining Hall of the Knights, and it was there that Johann Albrecht himself invested his son with the crimson mantle.

Herr von Buhl zu Buhl had marshalled a procession, the ceremonial procession from the Hall of the Knights to the Throne-room. It had cost him no little worry. The composition of the Court made it difficult to contrive an impressive arrangement, and Herr von Buhl especially lamented the lack of upper Court officials, which on such occasions made itself most severely felt. The Royal Mews had recently been put under Herr von Buhl, and he felt himself quite up to his various functions, but he asked everybody how he could be expected to make a good impression, when the most important posts were filled simply by the master of the Buck-hounds, von Stieglitz, and the director of the Grand Ducal Theatre, a gouty general.

While he, in his capacity as Lord Marshal, Chief Master of the Ceremonies, and House Marshal, in his embroidered clothes and brown toupee, covered with orders and with his golden pince-nez on his nose, came waddling and planting his long staff in front of him behind the cadets, who, dressed as pages, and their hair parted over the left eye, opened the procession, he pondered deeply over what came behind him. A few chamberlains--not many, for some were wanted for the end of the procession--their plumed hats under their arms and the Key on their coat-tails, followed close at his heels, in silk stockings. Next came Herr von Stieglitz, and the limping theatre-director in front of Klaus Heinrich, who, in his mantle between the exalted couple, and followed by his brother and sister, Albrecht and Ditlinde, formed the actual nucleus of the procession.

Behind their Highnesses came von k.n.o.belsdorff, the House Minister and President of Council, his eye-wrinkles all at work; a little knot of aides-de-camp and palace ladies came next: General Count Schmettern and Major von Platow, a Count Trummerhauff, cousin of the Keeper of the Privy Purse, as military aide-de-camp of the Heir Apparent, and the Grand d.u.c.h.ess's women led by the short-winded Baroness von Schulenburg-Tressen. Then followed, attended and followed by aides-de-camp, chamberlains, and Court ladies, Princess Catherine, with her red-haired progeny, Prince Lambert with his lovely wife, and the foreign relations or their representatives. Pages brought up the rear.

Thus they went at a measured pace from the Hall of the Knights through the Gala Halls, the Hall of the Twelve Months, and the Marble Hall into the Throne-room. Lackeys, with red-gold aiguillettes on their brown coats, stood theatrically in couples at the open double doors. Through the broad windows the June morning sun streamed gaily and recklessly in.

Klaus Heinrich looked round him as he processed between his parents through the dreary arabesques, the dilapidated decorations of the show-rooms, now not favoured by kindly artificial light. The bright daylight cheerfully and soberly showed up their decay. From the big l.u.s.tres with their stiff-bound stems, stripped of their coverings in honour of the day, rose thick forests of flameless candles, but everywhere there were prisms missing, crystal festoons torn, so that they gave a canker-bit and toothless impression. The silk damask upholstery of the State furniture, which was arranged stiffly and monotonously round the walls, was thread-bare, the gilt of the frames chipped off, big blind patches marred the surfaces of the tall candle-decked mirrors, and daylight shone through the moth-holes in the faded and discoloured curtains. The gold and silver borders of the tapestry hangings had torn away in several places, and were hanging disconsolately from the walls. Even in the Silver Hall of the Gala Rooms, where the Grand Duke was wont to receive solemn deputations, and in the centre of which stood a mother-of-pearl table with stumpy silver feet, a piece of the silver work had fallen from the ceiling leaving a gaping patch of white plaster.

But why was it that it somehow seemed as if these rooms defied the sober, mocking daylight, and proudly answered its challenge? Klaus Heinrich looked sideways at his father.... The condition of the rooms did not seem to worry him. Never of more than medium height, the Grand Duke had become almost small in the course of years, but he strode majestically on with head thrown back, the lemon-coloured ribbon of the Order over his general's uniform, which he had donned to-day, though he had no military leanings. From under his high and bald forehead and grey eyebrows, his blue eyes, with dull rings round them, were fixed with weary dignity on the distance, and from his pointed white moustaches the two deep furrows ran down his yellowish skin to his beard, imparting to his face a look of contempt. No, the bright daylight could not do any harm to the rooms; the dilapidations did not in the least impair their dignity, they rather increased it. They stood in their discomfort, their theatrical symmetry, their strange musty play-house or church atmosphere, cold and indifferent to the merry and sun-bathed world outside--stern background of a pompous cult, at which Klaus Heinrich this day for the first time officiated.

The procession pa.s.sed through the pairs of lackeys, who, with an expression of relentlessness, pressed their lips together and closed their eyes, into the white and gold expanse of the Throne-room. A wave of acts of homage, sc.r.a.pings, bows, curtseys and salutes, swept through the hall as the procession pa.s.sed in front of the a.s.sembled guests.

There were diplomats with their wives, n.o.bility of the Court and the country, the corps of officers of the capital, the Ministers, amongst whom could be descried the affected, confident face of the new Finance Minister, Dr. Krippenreuther, the Knights of the Great Order of the Grimmburg Griffin, the Presidents of the Diet, dignitaries of all kinds.

High up in the little box above the big looking-gla.s.s by the entrance door could be descried the press representatives peering over each other's shoulders and busily writing in their notebooks.... In front of the throne-baldachin, itself a torn velvet arrangement, crowned with ostrich feathers and framed with gold fillets which would have been all the better for a touch-up, the procession divided as in a polonaise, and went through carefully prescribed evolutions.

The pages and chamberlains fell aside to right and left. Herr von Buhl, his face turned to the throne and his staff uplifted, stepped backwards and stood still in the middle of the hall. The Grand Ducal pair and their children walked up the rounded, red-carpeted steps to the capacious gilded chairs which stood at the top. The remaining members of the House, with the foreign princes, ranged themselves on both sides of the throne; behind them stood the suite, the maids of honour and the grooms of the chambers, and the pages stood on the steps. At a gesture from Johann Albrecht, Herr von k.n.o.belsdorff, who had previously taken up his stand over against the throne, advanced straight to the velvet-covered table, which stood by the side of the steps, and began at once to read from various doc.u.ments the official formalities.

Klaus Heinrich was declared to be of age and fit and ent.i.tled to wear the crown, should necessity require it--every eye was turned on him at this place, and at his Royal Highness Albrecht, his elder brother, who stood close to him. The Heir Apparent was wearing the uniform of a captain in the Hussar regiment which was called by his name. From his silver-laced collar stretched an unmilitary width of civil stand-up collar, and on it rested his fine, shrewd, and delicate head, with its long skull and narrow temples, the straw-coloured moustache on the upper lip, and the blue, lonely-looking eyes which had seen death. He looked not in the least like a cavalry officer, yet so slender and unapproachably aristocratic that Klaus Heinrich, with his national cheek-bones, looked almost coa.r.s.e beside him. The Heir Apparent pursed up his lips when everybody looked at him, protruded his short rounded underlip, and sucked it lightly against the upper one.

Several of the country's orders were bestowed on the Prince who had just come of age, including the Albrecht Cross and the Great Order of the Grimmburg Griffin, not to mention that he was confirmed in the House Order whose insignia he had possessed since his tenth birthday.