Anne Topham - Memories of the Kaisers Court

MEMORIES OF THE
KAISERS COURT

Image not available: THE GERMAN EMPEROR IN ENGLISH ADMIRALS UNIFORM
THE GERMAN EMPEROR IN ENGLISH ADMIRALS UNIFORM

BY
ANNE TOPHAM
WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS
SEVENTH AND CHEAPER EDITION
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

This Edition, at 2s. 6d. net, First Published in 1915

T OWARDS the middle of August 1902, on a very hot, dusty, suffocating day, I was travelling, the prey of various apprehensions, to the town of Homburg-vor-der-Hhe, where the Prussian Court was at that time in temporary residence.

Thither I had been summoned, to join it in the capacity of resident English teacher to the young nine-year-old Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, only daughter of the German Emperor and Empress.

A stormy night-passage of eight hours on the North Sea, followed by a long train-journey through stifling heat lasting till five oclock in the afternoon, naturally affects any ones spiritual buoyancy, and it was with a distinct feeling of depression that I at last descended from the train on to the platform of Homburg station.

I confidently expected that a carriage would be waiting for me, but nothing in the least resembling a royal equipage is to be seen. There is only a row of those shabby, time-worn, open droschkies, harnessed to attenuated, weary-looking horses, which, even since the advent of the taxi into the social conditions of the Fatherland, still maintain a precarious, struggling existence in most German towns.

I am a helpless stranger, with a very limited knowledge of the German language as applied to porters and cabmen, and consequently very much at the mercy of these functionaries.

As my luggage is plainly addressed to the Knigliches Schloss, the group of officials who surround me, all talking together in strident tones, are most anxious that I should get there as soon as possible. I manage to convey to them my idea that a carriage will probably be coming for me soon, and after a few minutes interval of waiting one porter obligingly goes outside the station to look up the long street for the missing vehicle; but he returns sadly shaking his head.

Kein Wagen, he murmurs with an air of finality; and in spite of my misgivings they all fall upon my various possessions and put them into the oldest and most decrepit of the droschkiesthe only one leftwith a horse to correspond, and a driver who strikes the last note in deplorable shabbiness and stupidity. No one who has not travelled in German trains fed with German coal can appreciate the sheer discomfort and misery caused by this wretched fuel, which vomits forth clouds of thick black smoke, laden with solid, sooty particles, having a fatal affinity for the features of the passengers. I have assimilated to myself a certain amount of this invariable accompaniment of Continental travel, and am uncomfortably conscious of the fact. Neither is it thusin a wretched droschky, with my luggage piled drunkenly around me at various untidy, ill-fitting anglesthat I had dreamed of entering the precincts of royalty.

Later on I grew callous in this respect and perceived that I had been unduly sensitive over a small matter; but my feelings on this important occasion were, it must be admitted, acutely miserable. One knows instinctively that a first impression counts for a good deal.

Up the long Louisen-strasse and past the Kurhaus we rattle over the cobble-stones of past ages with which so many German towns are paved, and down a side-street I catch a glimpse of a smart-looking brougham with a footman sitting beside the coachman on the box, driving quickly in the direction from which we have come. I am convinced that it is the carriage meant for me, and would like to go back again to the station; but all attempts to convey my meaning to the egregious person whose back obscures my view are unavailing. He shrugs his shoulders, whips up his horse, utters guttural incomprehensible ejaculations, and points to a large old building in front of us before whose open gates a sentry is pacing. The sentry looks surprised and hesitates, the animal in the shafts crawls through the gateway and comes to a sudden halt in the midst of a big paved courtyard, surrounded by open windows and containing in one angle a pleasant flower-garden of green turf and climbing geraniums. We are in the Royal Homburg Schloss.

A beautiful sun-bathed silence prevails everywhere. Through a gateway opposite, leading into a second courtyard, a fountain can be heard plashing gently with occasional intermittent hesitations and precipitations, while a pigeon croons slumberously at intervals on the roof. Otherwise it seems an absolutely deserted spot. There is nothing to indicate before which of the various doors, which stand half open to the light and air, I ought to be set down.

The driver assumes a round-shouldered, blinking, vacuous attitude of masterly inactivity, while his horse takes a nap after his exertions. I descend from the hateful vehicle and wonder what I ought to do next. Between heat, exasperation, and incertitude, added to the fatigues of travel, I am in a parlous condition, one fume and fret of weariness and desperation.