The Man on Horseback/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
THE STRETCHING OF THE WEB
It was about five minutes after seven when the Bursche, the Colonel's military servant, an immense, chubby-faced, curly haired Pomeranian peasant lad whose legs in their tight trousers looked like plump sausages, whose chest beneath the crimson cloth plastron was exaggeratedly round and extended, like a pouter pigeon's, and whose hands in white cotton gloves looked like those of a German edition of Fred Stone in the rôle of the "Scarecrow," opened the double doors of the Wedekind salon and announced in a stentorian voice:
"Herr Graves!" which he pronounced as if it were spelled "Graafase."
Tom, a sunny smile on his face, stepped into the room, shook hands first with the Colonel, who greeted him effusively, with the Colonel's wife, a tall, raw-boned woman in cut purple velvet and diamonds, with a hooked nose, very intelligent black eyes, a fringe of false reddish hair falling over her forehead, and the voice of a grenadier, and was then introduced the rounds of the company. There was one civilian, a Professor Conrad Heifer, a small, spectacled man in illy fitting evening dress and a crumpled white necktie that had worked its way past the collar and was threatening the professor's tiny, red ears. The other guests were all officers and their wives, in full regimentals, some in the uniform of the Uhlans, others in the cream and silver of the Cuirassiers of the Guard, and one dapper, bowlegged man in the crimson and gold of the Potsdam Hussars. All wore decorations, and Tom, who held his left hand over his lapel, chuckled to himself as he noticed it.
"Charmed! Delighted!" some of the officers said in English, clicking their heels and bowing from their waist lines in rectangular fashion.
Others gave German words of greeting … And even Tom knew that it was different from the German he had heard on shipboard, on the customs pier, and in the railway stations: it was snarling, cutting, pronounced with a jarring twang:
"Grosse Ehre!"
"Ah! Kolossales Vergnügen!"
"Servus! Servus!" from a South German.
Finally the Colonel introduced him to a short, broad-shouldered gentleman sitting on a green plush sofa at the other end of the room, very pompous and very erect—"like some darned idol in a Chink joss house," thought Tom—who wore the uniform of a general and whose breast outshone all the others in its splendor of stars and medals.
Colonel Wedekind clicked his heels and bowed very deeply.
"Königliche Hoheit—Royal Highness!" he said, in an awestruck whisper, "permit me graciously to introduce Mr. Graves, the American gentleman of whom I spoke to you!" and, in Tom's ear: "His Royal Highness, Prince Ludwig Karl, the Emperor's cousin!"
His Royal Highness rasped something about "Vergnügt!" while Tom, chuckling to himself for the first time since he had entered the salon, took his left hand from the lapel of his coat, exposing an enormous gold medal, set with diamonds, and barbarously ornamented with various designs—the figure of a cowboy riding a refractory mare and waving his stetson, that of an Indian, of a buffalo charging head down, and the whole surmounted by an enameled American flag.
Prince Ludwig Karl opened his eyes wide.
"I—I …" He said, in halting English, "may I inquire what decoration you are wearing? I—ah—I thought I was familiar with all foreign orders eh?" turning to the Colonel, who bowed and seemed flustered.
Tom laughed out loud in the innocence of his heart, sure that the Prince and all the others would fall in readily with his Western sense of humor.
"Say, Prince," he exclaimed in a hearty voice that carried the length of the room, "I knew all you fellows would be decked out like cattle at a country fair, with medals and ribbons and all that—seen it in the movies—" touching, to the terrible consternation of the assembled company, the Red Eagle of the First Class, Prussia's highest decoration, that blazed on the Prince's chest, "and so I said to myself I was going to do the right thing by Spokane and the whole Northwest. Swell little medal this, don't you think? Won it at the Pendleton round-up for breaking the broncho-busting record. Take a look at it, Prince Believe me—the boys had to chip in considerably to pay for it!"
It was a familiar voice which broke the pall of utter, horrified silence that had followed Tom's little speech.
"Well, Graves, I see you kept your promise!" and Tom knew who the old friend was of whom Colonel Wedekind had spoken over the telephone, Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede, the German officer who had wanted to buy the Yankee Doodle Glory; and "Yankee Doodle Glory" was the only word which Tom caught from the flood of German which the young officer was whispering to the Prince, causing the latter to come out of his indignant trance and to wave a condescending hand in the direction of the young Westerner.
The Baron took Tom by the arm.
"I am so glad you kept your promise," he repeated. "It was awfully decent of you to break your engagement with Lord Vyvyan."
Tom was about to give an astonished reply, for he remembered that Krauss had told him he had not had a chance to tell the Colonel about the invitation to Vyvyan. But his first surprise was quickly swallowed in a second when the Baron, still blithely rambling on, advised him jocularly to be careful how he applied his "charming American sense of humor with us stodgy Germans. We want you to like us, Graves, and we'll take corking good care of you. We'll see that you get into no more such Homeric scrapes as you did with that fellow Neumann aboard the Augsburg."
"Say!" This time Tom was amazed. He had nearly forgotten about the little contretemps with the bank clerk, and here it was being quoted at him on his first day in Berlin. He was familiar with the quickness and shrewdness of American reporters, but it seemed that their German colleagues—for it could not be anything else—had them beaten by many miles.
He was going to say something of the sort when the German Baron, seeing the expression of surprise in Tom's honest eyes and feeling instinctively that he had been guilty of some error of judgment, quickly and successfully changed the conversation. He pointed at Bertha, who was just then coming into the salon, a charming figure in her dress of white Chinese crepe with a tunic of rose-pink chiffon, the whole covered with a very spider's web of silver beads and silver thread.
She was walking by the side of an old lady, dressed in black, with snow-white hair and snapping brown eyes.
"I am not a jealous man," lightly laughed the Baron, walking away and leaving Tom a clear field.
The latter stepped up to Bertha as straight as an arrow.
"Hello, Bertha!" he said. "You're a mighty comforting sight for sore eyes."
The girl smiled.
"Grandmother," she said, turning to the old lady, "this is Tom Graves, a good friend of mine from Spokane."
"Grandmother?" exclaimed Tom. "I thought—why—" he stammered, hesitated, then went on in an undertone. "I thought your grandmother was dangerously ill … Not expected to live—and that's why you came over here in such a hurry!"
"It was a mistake, Tom," she said. "Just a mistake in the transmission of the cable. Some words were misspelled."
And the next moment the Bursche opened the doors to the dining-room, announcing dinner:
"Abendessen is servirt, Fran Oberst!"
"Sounds good to me," laughed Tom, tucking Bertha's hand under his arm. "I'm as hungry as a bear!"—and, unceremoniously, used to the free ease of the West, utterly ignorant of the finely shaded rules of etiquette, he walked into the dining-room just one step ahead of His Royal Highness.