The Crown Jewels of Jerusalem
The Spa at Gross-Kroplets is not one of the fashionable watering places of the Triune Monarchy, else Doctor Eszterhazy would scarcely have been found there. Nor, as he did not practice the curiously fashionable habit of abusing his liver for forty-nine weeks of the year, did he ever feel the need of medicating it with the waters of mineral springs for the remaining three.
It was entirely for the purpose of making a scientific analysis of those waters — or, specifically, those at Gross-Kroplets — which had brought him from his house in Bella, Imperial Capital of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania, to the comparatively small resort high in the Rhiphaean Alps. Two moderately large and three moderately small (five, if one counts the House of the Double-Eagle) hotels served to provide room and board for visitors to the Spa; and although all were privately owned, the Spring itself had been the property of the Royal and Imperial House of Hohenschtupfen since the Capitulations of 1593 and was under the management of the Ministry of the Privy Purse.
Anyone, therefore, not in a condition of gross drunkenness or equally gross nakedness, is free to drink the waters (the waters may actually be drunk free in the original, or Old, Pump Room in what is now the First Floor or Basement, but few except the truly indigent care to avail themselves of the privilege; most visitors preferring to employ the drinking facilities in the First, Second, or Third Class Sections of the New or Grand Pump Room reached from the Terrace where a schedule of fees is in operation); and anyone is, accordingly, free to walk about the pleasantly, if not splendidly, landscaped grounds.
Eszterhazy, therefore, neither said nor did anything when he became aware that someone was not only closely observing him but in effect closely following him. When, of a morning, he walked with his equipment from the small, old-fashioned Inn called The House of the Double-Eagle, someone presently appeared behind his back and and plodded after him. When he set up his equipment next to the basin of rough-worked stone where the Spring welled and bubbled on its way upstairs and down, someone stood outside the doorless chamber and looked in. When he returned with his samples to the Inn, someone followed after him and had vanished before he reached the sprawling old building.
In the afternoons, the whole thing was repeated.
In the evenings, when what passed at Gross-Kroplets for A High Fashionable Occasion was at its most, Eszterhazy stayed in his sitting-room, making entries in his Day-Book, after which he read, first, from some technical work and, next, from some nontechnical one. He was particularly fond of the light novels of an English writer named G. A. Henty, although he more than once complimented the stories of G. de Maupaissant, Dr. A. Techechoff, and H. George Wells.
It was on the morning of the fourth day of his visit, when he was on his knees commencing a check of comparative sedimentation with the aid of a pipette, when someone came to the doorway of the springroom and, after coughing, said, “Are you not Engelbert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Medicine?” Since Eszterhazy felt several simultaneous emotions, none of them amiable, he was for a moment incapable of elegance. — Why, for example, was the cough considered a sound worthy of announcing a supposedly polite address? Why not a gasp, an eructation, a hiccough, or a flatulency? But all he first said was, “You have caused me to contaminate the pippette.”
The questioner paid as much attention to this as he might have to, say, "Brekekeke koax koax.” And, with his eyebrows raised, he merely made an inquiring sound of “Mmm?" which moved his previous question. He was an inordinately ordinary-looking man, with, in a short jacket, baggy trousers, string tie, a mustache which straggled too long on the right side, and pinch-nose spectacles, the look of a drummer for a firm of jobbers in odd lots of oilcloth. A writing-master in a fifth-rate provincial gymnasium. Or, even, the owner by inheritance of two “courts” in one of the proliferating jerry-built suburbs of Bella, whose rents relieved him of the need to be anything much in particular. And, with only another wiggle of the raised eyebrows, this person again repeated his “Mmm?" and this time on a note of higher urgency or pressure.
“Yes, sir, I am Engelbert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Medicine,” the scientist said, irritably. “I am also Engelbert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Jurisprudence; Engelbert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Philosophy; Engelbert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Science; and Engelbert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Literature. And I do not know why any of this should entitle you to burst in upon my quietness and research.”
The other man, as he heard all this, looked all around him, as though inviting spectators (of whom there were none) to witness it; then he said, “I must depart from my invariable incognito to inform you, sir, that I am King of Jerusalem and that you have unfortunately just prevented yourself from the reception of a very important appointment at my court!”
Eszterhazy looked down into the bubbling waters and heaved a silent sigh of self-reproach at himself for allowing himself to be irritated by a noddy. When he looked up, a moment later, prepared to offer a soft and noncommittal
rejoinder, the man had gone.
During the rest of his stay in Gross-Kroplets, he did not see any more of the man; and his single enquiry met with no information at all.
He recollected the incident next, some months later, at the Linguistic Congress, during the middle of an interesting discussion on the Eastern and the Western Aramic, with the Most Reverend Salomon Isaac Tsedek, Grand Rabbi of Bella — who, with his perceptive mind and eye, and observing that a different idea had occurred to Eszterhazy, paused inquiringly. “— Your pardon, Worthy Grand Rabbi. Who is King of Jerusalem?”
“Almighty God, King of Heaven and Earth ... in a theological sense. In a secular sense, I suppose, the Sultan of Turkey.” He did not offend against good manners by adding, “Why do you ask,” as he — as all sensible men and women should — recognized that if a person wished to say why he asked, he would say why he asked. And they returned to their discussion of the construct case, and the genitive.
Some weeks after the Linguistic Congress, Eszterhazy, passing peacefully through the Pearl Market, where he had been pricing some Russko chalcedonies, observed his friend Karrol-Francos Lobats, Commissioner of the Detective Police, deeply engaged in conversation with De Hooft, then President of the Jewelers Association. De Hooft, usually reserved to the point of being phlegmatic, was shaking his head excitedly and even took the Commissioner by the coat lapels. Lobats did notice Eszterhazy, who was going on by, and made as if to disengage himself; after a moment he fell back, as though it had not happened. And Eszterhazy continued on his way.
The visit to the Pearl Market, where gems of all sorts, plus ivory and amber, had been bought, sold, appraised, and bartered for centuries, was a mere brief amusement. Eszterhazy had an overflowing schedule. For one thing, he wished to prepare the final draft of his report on the therapeutic qualities (or otherwise) of medicinal spring water for the Journal of the Iberian Academy of Medicine. For another, he had already begun another study, an enquiry into the practice of clay-eating among the so-called Ten Mountain Tribes of Tsiganes (in which Herrek, his manservant, was of course of invaluable assistance). — Eszterhazy liked to have one enquiry overlapping another, in order to avoid the letdown, the lethargy, which otherwise often accompanied the conclusion of an enquiry.
And, in addition, the end of the Quarterly Court of Criminal Processes was approaching. Eszterhazy wished few men ill; he was by no means a Mallet of Malefactors; but the chance — which the conclusion of every quarter furnished him — of examining from the viewpoint of phrenology the freshly shaven heads of anywhere from fifty-odd to two-hundred or so newly convicted criminals was one which could not be passed up. Indeed, a few of the regular recidivists looked forward to the examination with an enthusiasm which the fact that Eszterhazy always gave each one a chitty payable in chocolate or tobacco at the canteen in the Western Royal and Imperial Penitentiary Fortress could not alone explain.