While Reinhold thus spoke, it had not escaped the Count that the President and the General had repeatedly exchanged looks of understanding and approval, that Herr von Strummin’s broad face had grown long with amazement and terror, and—what above all angered him—that the ladies listened as attentively as if a ball were in question. At any rate he would not let him have the last word.
“But this wonderful storm is at best—I mean in the most favourable case for you—a mere hypothesis!” cried he.
“Only for those who are not convinced of its inevitableness as I am,” answered Reinhold.
“Well, well,” said the Count, “I will suppose that you do not stand alone in your opinion, even more, that you are right in it, that the storm will come today or tomorrow, or sometime; still it cannot happen every day—perhaps can only happen once in a century. Well, gentlemen, I have the deepest respect for the farsighted previsions of our authorities; but such distant perspectives must seem inappreciable to the most farseeing, and ought not to decide them to leave undone what is required at once.”
As the Count’s last words were evidently addressed to the General and the President, and not to him, Reinhold did not think himself called upon to answer. But neither did they answer; the rest kept silence too, and an awkward pause ensued. At last the President coughed behind his slender white hand, and said:
“It is strange that while Captain Schmidt, here, in that decided tone which only conviction gives, is prophesying to us a storm, which our kind host, to whom certainly it would come nearest, would prefer to remove into the land of fancy—it is strange that I have been reminded at every word of another storm—”
“Another!” cried Meta.
“Another storm, my dear young lady, and of quite another sort; I need not tell these gentlemen of what sort. In this case also the usual course of affairs has been in the most unexpected manner interrupted, and there has been an accumulation of waters, flowing in immense streams of gold, ladies, from west to east. In this case also the wise men prophesy that such an unnatural state of affairs cannot be of long continuance; that it has already lasted its time, that an ebb must soon come, a reaction, a storm, which—to preserve the image which so strikingly applies to the matter—will, like the other, come upon us, destroying, overwhelming everything, and with its troubled and barren waters cover the ground, on which men believed their riches and power to be forever established.”
In his eagerness to give another turn to the conversation, and in the pleasure of his happy comparison, the President had not considered that the topic was still the same, and that it must be more unpleasant to the Count in this new phase than in the former one. He became aware of his thoughtlessness when the Count, in a tone that trembled with agitation, exclaimed:
“I hope, President, that you do not confound our plan, dictated, I may say, by the purest patriotism, with the enterprises so much in favour nowaday, which mostly have no other source than the vulgarest greed of gain.”
“My dear Count! how can you suppose that I could even dream of such a thing!” exclaimed the President.
The Count bowed. “Thank you,” said he, “for I confess that nothing would hurt my feelings more. I have always considered it as a political necessity, and a proof of his eminently statesmanlike capacity, that Prince Bismarck has made use of certain means for carrying out his great ideas, which he certainly would have preferred not using, if only to avoid too close contact with persons, all intercourse with whom must have been formerly thoroughly distasteful to him. I consider it also as a necessary consequence of this misfortune, that in order to reward these persons he has inaugurated, has been obliged to inaugurate, the new era of speculators, and of immoderate greed of gain, with those fatal milliards. Meanwhile—”
“Excuse my interrupting you,” said the General; “I consider these compacts of the Prince’s with those persons, parties, strata of population, classes of society—call them what you will—as you do, Count Golm, most certainly a misfortune, but by no means a necessary one. On the contrary; the rocher de bronze, upon which the Prussian kingdom is established, formed as it was of a loyal aristocracy, a zealous body of officials, a faithful army—all these were strong enough to support the German Empire, if it must needs be German rather than Prussian, or indeed an empire at all.”
“Yes, General, it had need to be, and to be German,” said Reinhold.
The General shot a dark look at the young man from under his bushy eyebrows; but he had listened before with satisfaction to his explanations, and felt that he must let him speak now, when he disagreed with him.
“Why do you think so?” asked he.
“I judge by my own feelings,” answered Reinhold; “but I am certain that they are the feelings of everyone who has lived, as I have, often and long together far from home in a foreign land; who has experienced, as I have, what it means to belong to a people that is no nation, and because it is not one is little regarded, or even despised by the other nations with which we deal; what it means, in the difficult position in which a sailor so easily may find himself, to have only himself to look to, or, what is still worse, to have to request the assistance and protection needed from others, who give it grudgingly and would prefer not helping at all. I have experienced and gone
