I recall, too, that there was another tendency already developed in me. I see it in my dealings with other boys of that day. It was the impulse to make other people my instruments, not by direct command or appeal, but by leading them to do, apparently for themselves, what I needed of them.
Such was I, when my aunt, who had cared for me since the death of my parents some years before, fell ill and later died. I was disconsolate for a time and wandered about through the halls and chambers of the house, seeking amusement. And it was thus that one day I came upon an old chest in the room that had been hers. I remembered that chest. There were letters in it letters that had been written to her by friends made in the old days when she was at Court. Often she had read me passages from them bits of gossip about this or that personage whom she had once known occasionally, even, mention of the Kaiser.
Doubtless, too, I thought, there were passages which she had not seen fit to read to me: some more intimate bits of gossip about those brilliant men and women in Berlin whom I then knew only as names. With the eager curiosity of a boy I sought the key, and in a moment had unlocked the chest.
There they lay, those neat, faded bundles, slightly yellow, addressed in a variety of hands. Idly I selected a packet and glanced over the envelopes it contained, lingering, in anticipation of the revelations that might be in them. I must have read a dozen letters before my eye fell upon the envelope that so completely changed my life.
It lay in a corner of the chest, as if hidden from too curious eyes a yellow square of paper, distinguished from its fellows by the quality of the stationery alone, and by its appearance of greater age. But I knew, before I had read fifty words of it, that I was holding in my hands a document that was more explosive than dynamite!
For this letter, written to my aunt years before, by one of the most exalted personages in all Germany, contained statements which, had they been made by anyone else, would have been treason to utter.
Those of you whose memories go back tc the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, will readily recall the notorious ill-feeling that existed between Wilhelm II. and his mother, Victoria, the Dowager Empress Friedrich. Stories have so often been told of this enmity, culminating in the virtual banishment from Berlin of the Queen Mother, that I need not do more than mention them. But what is not so generally known is the small esteem in which Victoria was held by the entire German people. During the twenty years of her married life as the wife of the then Crown Prince Friedrich, she was treated by Berlin Society with the most thinly veiled hostility. Even Bismarck made no attempt to conceal his dislike for her, and accused her to quote his own words of having "poisoned the fountain of Hohenzollern blood at its source."
Victoria, for her part, although she seems to have had no animosity towards the German people, certainly possessed little love for her eldest son, and did her best to delay his accession to the Imperial throne as long as she could. When in 1888 Wilhelm I. was dying, she tried her utmost to secure the succession to her husband, who was then lying dangerously ill at San Remo. "Cancer," the physicians pronounced the trouble, and even the great German specialist, Bergmann, agreed with their diagnosis. There is a law that prevents anyone with an incurable disease, such as cancer, from ascending the Prussian throne; but Victoria knew too well the attitude of her son, Wilhelm, towards herself, not to wish to do everything in her power to prevent him from becoming Emperor so long as she could. In her extremity she appealed to her mother, Queen Victoria of England, who sent Sir Morell Mackenzie, the great English surgeon, to San Remo to report on Friedrich's condition.
Mackenzie opposed Bergmann and said the disease was not cancer; and the physicians inserted a silver tube in the patient's throat, and in due course he became Emperor Friedrich III.
But in spite of Mackenzie and the silver tube, Friedrich III. died after a reign of ninety-eight days and he died of cancer.
Now what was the reason for this hostility between mother and son and between Empress and subjects? There have been many answers given Victoria's love for England, her colossal lack of tact, her impatient unconventionality. Berlin whispered of a dinner in Holland years before, when Victoria had entertained some English people she met there people she had never seen before and had finished her repast by smoking a cigar. That in the days when the sight of a woman smoking horrified the German soul! And Berlin hinted at worse unconventionalities than this.
As for the animosity of the Kaiser, this was attributed to the fact that he held her responsible for his withered left arm.
Plausible reasons, all of these, and possibly true. But consider, if you will, the rumours that followed Victoria all her life the story of an early attachment to the Count Seckendorf, her husband's associate during the Seven Weeks' War of 1866 the reports, sometimes denied but generally believed, of her marriage to the Count not long before her death. True or not, these stories what does it matter?
But what to do with this letter to which I attached so much importance? Something impelled me not to speak of it to my family. But who else was there?
In my perplexity I did an utterly foolish thing. I put my whole confidence in a man's word. There was, serving at a nearby fortress, a Major-General von Dassel, who was in the habit of coming to our house quite regularly. To him I went, and under pledge of silence I told him my story. Of course, he broke the pledge and left immediately for Berlin. All doubts, if I had any, as to the importance of the document, vanished with him. And if I had any misgivings concerning my own importance they quickly vanished, too. Back from Berlin, with Major- General von Dassel came an agent of the Chancellor. He did not come to our house; instead von Dassel sent for me to go to his headquarters in the fortress. I met there a solemn frockcoated personage who, so he said, had come down from Berlin especially to see me. Imagine my elation! I was in my element; what I had hoped for had at last happened. The pages of Richelieu and of my secret histories were coming true. Another man and I were to lock our wits in a fight to the finish that pleasure I promised myself. He was a worthy opponent, an official, a professional intriguer. As I looked into his serious, bearded face, I built romances about him.
The agent of the Chancellor wanted my document and my pledge to keep silent about its contents. Through sheer love of combat, I refused him on both points. He tried persuasion and reason. I was adamant. He tried cajolery.
"It is plain," he said, in a voice that was caressingly agreeable, "that you are an extremely clever young man. I have never before met your like--that is, at your age. A great career will be possible to such a young man if only he shows himself eager to serve his Government, eager to meet the wishes of his Chancellor."
Of course, I was delighted with this flattery, which I felt was entirely deserved. I began to believe that I was a person of importance. I became stubborn which always has been one of my best and worst traits. I saw that the gentleman in the frock-coat was becoming angry; his serious eyes flashed. Apparently much against his will, he tried threats; he suavely pointed out that if I persisted in my resolve not to surrender the document, destruction yawned at my feet. The threats touched off the fuse of my romanticism. I felt I was leading the life of intrigue of which I had read.
"If you will wait here," I told him, "I shall go home and get the document for you."
The Chancellor's representative stroked his beard, deliberated a moment and seemed uncertain.
"Oh, the Junge will come back all right," put in Major-General von Dassel. But the boy did not come back. My family had always been excessively liberal with money, and I had enough in my own little "war chest" to buy a railway ticket, and a considerable amount besides. So I promptly ran off to Paris; and to this day I don't know how long the gentleman in the frock-coat waited for me in von Dassel's office.
The terrors and thrills and delight of that panic-stricken flight still make me smile. No peril I have since been through was half as exciting. . . . Berlin! . . . Koln! . . . Brussels! It was a keen race against arrest. I was happily frightened, much as a colt is when it shies at its own shadow. Although I was in long trousers and looked years older than I was, I had not sense enough to see the affair in its true light --a foolish escapade which was quite certain to have disagreeable consequences. And so I fled from Berlin to Paris.
From Paris I fled too. There, any circumstance struck my fevered imagination as being suspicious. After a day in the French capital, I scurried south to Nice and from Nice to Monte Carlo. Precocious youngster, indeed, for there I had my first experience with that favoured figure of the novelist, the woman secret agent! No novelist, I venture to say, would ever have picked her out of the Riviera crowd as being what she was. She wore no air of mystery; and though attractive enough in a quiet way, she was very far from the siren type in looks or manners. The friendliness that she, a woman of the mid-thirties, showed a lonely boy was perfectly natural. I should never have guessed her to be an agent of the Wilhelmstrasse had she not chosen to let me know it. Of course, the moment she spoke to me of "my document," I knew she had made my acquaintance with a purpose. If the dear old frock-coated agent of the Chancellor had been asleep, the telegraph wires from Berlin to Paris and Nice and Monte Carlo had been quite awake.
The proof that I was actually watched and waited for thrilled me anew. It also alarmed me when my friend explained how deeply my Government was affronted. Soon the alarm outgrew the thrill and in the end I quite broke down. Then the woman in her, touched with pity, apparently displaced the adventuress. We took counsel together and she showed me a way out.