With perhaps more precision than appropriate in a guest, Von Shtrumpf took out his heavy gold watch and clicked it open. “He will? Let us see.” For a while nothing was heard except the grumbling of a well-masticated chop off of last week’s boar as it travelled through someone’s stomach and upper or lower intestine. Then the sound of a set of hooves clattering into the courtyard.
“Here he is now,” said Popoff. “How long was that?”
“Bind-Satan-and-send-him-down-to-Hell! — ExACTly one minute!” he looked at his host with much respect.
There entered now, still sweating and steaming from his ride, a typical rural constable, which is to say, a typical mountain-man, with a leathern band affixed round his right arm; on this was a much-effaced sigil, symbol, or shield, and a much-effaced numeral. The man bore in his hand a folded piece of paper, and this he handed over at once to the outstretched hand of Prince Popoff. Who gave it a quick glance, and swore.
“Bind-Satan-and-send-him-down-to-Hell, indeed! O Thou dear Cross! But this is the message we gave ye to send. Where is the answer?”
The man brushed moisture from his bristly cheek and chin, and from his great drooping moustache. “There ben’t no answer, My Worship,” said he. “The clerk, he jiggles and he dickies his little clicket; and, says he, he says the string be broke.”
“He says — what?”
“The what is broke?”
“That there li’-bit wire string as the message they say it pass along, what they say” continued the constable, evidently no great believer in the miracles of magnetic telegraphy. “It has fell.”
For an instant this curious image was considered; then, almost simultaneously the four others cried, “The line is down!”
The constable nodded his shag-head. Then he passed the back of his shag-wrist across his lips, a gesture evidently noticed and identified by His Worship. “Down to the kitchen, then,” said Prince Yohan, “and tell them to give ye a big drink from the second-best barrel.” The man brightened directly, bowed deeply, and was off immediately. Evidently there were barrels below, and perhaps far below, even the second-best. “Well here’s a fine how-are-ye,” the prince said. “No telegram can get through to the crossstation at the terminus of the Official Remote Northern Route Road.” Outside, a slight and soft Spring rain came mizzling down. Inside, the four men considered this new development. “Outrageous,” said Eszterhazy, “that in a country abounding in goodly trees, telegraph wires should continue to be strung in places from shrub to shrub, and from bush to bush! No wonder the line is down . . . again. The wonder is that it is ever up, at all. Well -”
But Von Shtrumpf, still riding the rails of his one-track mind, said, dolefully, “Not alone chaos. Inevitably, civil war. Unless-unless — it may be treason to suggest, but — if not this heir to the Heir — then who?”
Who, indeed.
A moment’s silence. Then: “Queen Victoria has many sons,” said Shtruwelpeyter, as though commenting on the weather.
The subject was seldom spoken of, but here perhaps the major, after all a principal secretary to the Foreign Office, had found the kernel in the nut. Not much may have been known about Salvador Samuel, self-styled “Sovereign of the Scythians and Pannonians,” but it was known that he had married Magdalena Stewart: call her “Mad Maggie” who would, she nevertheless had been a Stewart (or Stuart) and a Royal Stuart (or Stewart) at that: she had also been an ancestress of the British Queen, however many times removed. And more than once, more than one mind in Scythia- Pannonia-Transbalkania had considered (with more than one emotion) of an almost-endless line of vessels ascending the Ister and bearing as it might be such names as HMS Take, Catch, Rake, Snatch, Seize, and so on and so on; at least one of them conveying, as it might be, Prince Alfred, Prince Arthur, Prince Leopold, or Prince Who, with his umbrella and his cricket-bat and his crown. . . .
“Austria and Russia would never allow it,” said Von Shtrumpf. “Would they? — we should all have to drink tea! ” he cried.
But Eszterhazy had something else on his mind than the possibly enforced consumption of Orange Pekoe, Lapsang-Souchong, or Oolong. “I suggest that you two gentlemen of the Court consider what you both may think best; meanwhile our host and I will withdraw so as not to disturb you.”
Withdrawn into an ante-room the open doors of which debouched upon the vastly wide steps, “Very tactful,” said Prince Yohan. “Verytactful. And now that ye have got us both alone, what is it that ye wish to propose? Eh?”
“Would you very much like to swear allegiance,” asked Eszterhazy, “to some, say, King Algernon or King Archibald?”
The prince surveyed the moist landscape. “Not very much, no,” said he. “I won’t speak of my own ancestral pretentions, every family has those — I suppose that your King Algebra or King Artichoke would be better than some King Vladimir or King Otto — always better King Log than King Stork . . . but . . . what . . . ?”
Eszterhazy shortly gestured to where the light sparse green had begun to grow up along the foothills, ranges, and ridges, of the Red Mountain. “ That is what I would propose,” said he. “Since His Young Highness the Crown Princeling cannot be prevented, via telegraphed orders, from entering Austria along the Northern Remote Route Road, he must be prevented by some other means; he must, in short, not be allowed to leave the country while this imbecile lust is upon him.”
“And therefore?” Yohan looked at Eszterhazy.
Eszterhazy looked at Yohan.
“Need I remind Your Vigor of the ancient parable about Mohammed and the mountain?” he asked.
They were outside. They were by no means out of sight of any part of the castle, but they might by no means be seen from the front parts of it. “Some say that these mountains are worn-down, and not rugged,” said Prince Pop- ofT.
“Some do,” murmured Eszterhazy.
“But parts of them are rugged enough, that it helps to know the mountain passes if you want to move an army through —”
“Indeed
“Now, right here — here — through these declivities and between these peaks, ye see — ”
“I see.”
“This is where he would have to come, Old Ginger I mean, ye see.”
“I see,” murmured Eszterhazy. Old Ginger. What a perfect nickname for the Holy Roman Emperor at the time of the Third Crusade: Old Ginger.
That is (or was), Frederick Barbarossa. Of course his real name was no more Barbarossa than it was Old Ginger. Or for that matter, Hobson or Jobson. Still, it was an interesting survival, one which Eszterhazy had not encountered before.
It was an appropriate place for old survivals, here among the men of the mountains; for they were very much old survivors themselves. In fact, recollecting another old legend, that which had them pursuing the chamois, barefoot, from crag to crag, he considered that these men might themselves be compared to chamois, living where others would not live; and then, by adaptation, living where others could not live. Those snobby, Frenchified bourgeois nobility of Bella and Avar-Ister, who so looked down upon the men of the mountains — if the men of the mountains, ignorant of cities though they were, if they had to live there, they would survive . . . they would manage... if he had to, Prince Popoff could carry carcasses in the Ox Market... but let the reverse be true, if Baron This of Bella, or Count That of Avar-Ister, had to live on the Red Mountain, they could not live there at all. Surely they would die.