Ch. 4: August - Page 2

families behaving like
drunken hooligans. Somehow a spectacled professor with a golden chain
across his blackwaistcoated and impressive front, just roaring
incoherently, just opening his mouth and hurling any sort of noise out
of it till the veins on his neck and forehead look as though they would
burst, is the strangest sight in the world to me. I can imagine
nothing stranger, nothing that makes one more uncomfortable and
ashamed. It is what will always jump up before my eyes in the future
at the words German patriotism. And to see a stout elderly lady, who
ought to be presiding with slow dignity in some ordered home, hoarse
with shouting, tear the feathered hat she otherwise only uses tenderly
on Sundays off her respectable grey head and wave it frantically,
screaming _hochs_ every time a prince is seen or a general or one of
the ministers, makes one want to cry with shame at the indignity put
upon poor human beings, at the exploiting of their passions, in the
interests of one family.

The Grafin's smart cousin got us on to some steps and stood with us, so
that we should not be pushed off them instantly again, as we would have
been if he had left us. I think they were the steps of a statue, or
fountain, or something like that, but the whole whatever it was was so
covered with people, encrusted with them just like one of those sticky
fly-sticks is black with flies, that I don't know what it was really.
I only know that it wasn't a house, and that we were quite close to the
palace, and able to look down at the sea beneath us, the heaving,
roaring sea of distorted red faces, all with their mouths wide open,
all blistering and streaming in the sun.

The Grafin, who had recovered her calm in the presence of her inferiors
of the middle classes, put up her eyeglasses and examined them with
interest and indulgence. Helena stared. The cousin twisted his little
moustache, standing beside us protectingly, very elegant and slender
and nonchalant, and remarked at intervals, "_Fabelhafte Enthusiasmus,
was_?"

It came into my mind that Beerbohm Tree must sometimes look on like
that at a successful dress rehearsal of his well-managed stage crowds,
with the same nonchalant satisfaction at the excellent results, so well
up to time, of careful preparation.

Of course I said "_Colossal_" to the cousin, when he expressed his
satisfaction more particularly to me.

"_Dreckiges Yolk, die Russen_" he remarked, twisting his little
moustache's ends up. "_Werden lernen was es heisst, frech sein gegen
uns. Wollen sie blau und schwartz dreschen_."

You know German, so I needn't take its peculiar flavour out by
transplanting the young man's remarks.