The Secret Memoirs of Bertha Krupp. Fischer Henry William

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СКАЧАТЬ later Frau Krupp and Bertha were going the rounds of Cologne's most exclusive shops. The Hochstrasse is too narrow to permit the use of a carriage; the ladies were followed, then, by a train of commissionaires laden with boxes, for Bertha was buying everything in the line of frocks, costumes and millinery that was pretty and expensive. Consult her mother? Not a bit of it. The Court Marshal's instructions were silk, velvet, laces; nothing else mattered.

      The shopkeepers, of course, knew Frau Krupp; they had known Bertha familiarly ever since she was in short frocks. The girl of seventeen had blossomed into the richest heiress of the world, yet it would have been almost indecent not to consider the elder woman first.

      So the best chair was pushed forward for the Baroness, and man-milliners and mannequins fell over each other trying to win her applause for the goods offered. The widow of the Ironmaster smiled and talked vaguely about their merits, but announced that Bertha was to do her own choosing.

      Bertha went about her task like an inexperienced country lass suddenly fallen into a pot of money. The girl seemed to be working under a sense of assertiveness, tempered by responsibility to a higher power. That higher power regarded her mother of no consequence. Though of a naturally dutiful and kindly nature, Bertha assumed an air of independence unbecoming to so young a woman.

      Indeed her want of respect was of a piece with her "Uncle Majesty's" behaviour in a little Italian town, when his father lay dying there. The War Lord, then a junior Prince, had crossed the Alps as the representative of his grandsire, head of the State, and instantly presumed to lord over his mother, who was the Princess Royal of an Empire, compared with which his own patrimony is a petty Seigneurie.

      He arrived on a Saturday night, and at once ordered divine service for seven o'clock next morning, an hour suiting his restlessness and most unsuited to his parent, worn out with night vigils and anxieties.

      However, to humour him, and also to gain more time to spend with her ailing husband, the Imperial Mother acquiesced in the arrangement; but imagine her surprise when in the morning she learned at the last moment that, at her son's behest, the House Marshal had not provided carriages as usual, and that she was expected to walk three-quarters of a mile to the chapel.

      Meanwhile the official procession of church-goers had started. At the head a platoon of cuirassiers, followed by the Prince's Marshal and staff. Next, his adjutants and a deputation of officers from his regiment; his personal servants in gala livery; finally, himself, walking alone, the observed of all observers.

      The father's own household was commanded to fall behind. So were his mother and sisters; the Prince was not at all interested in them. His Royal Mother might lean on the arm of a footman for all he cared.

      Here we have an exaggeration of the most repulsive traits of egotism, self-indulgence, callousness, coarseness, cruelty and deceitfulness, for, as intimated, Wilhelm had been careful to keep his parent in ignorance of the affront to be put upon her.

      Small wonder that a person so constituted, having vested himself with full charge of a girl's soul and mind as she approached mental and physical puberty, upset her filial equilibrium, while her actions reflected the impress of his own arrogance.

      CHAPTER VI

      FRAULEIN KRUPP INVITED TO COURT

      The Virtue of a Defect – Bertha's Reception – A Disappointment

      There is a streak of malignity in the best of women. Maybe the younger girl has nothing but praise for another a few years her senior, but she will add that naturally "age" inspires respect. Helen has the most beauteous eyes, the daintiest figure, the most transparent complexion, the softest colour, the most exquisite feet, the sweetest smile and the most delightful air of superiority, and when her friend tenders her a box at the Play she will invite some girl conspicuously deficient in most of these excellences – human nature, or just plain, ordinary devilry. So Bertha's mother took a sort of grim satisfaction in the poor taste Bertha displayed in selecting her Court gowns.

      "He taught her to ignore her mother even in matters of dress; serves him right if her appearance jars on his sense of beauty," she said to herself more than once when superintending the packing of Bertha's many trunks.

      The Baroness had never visited the Berlin Court, and her conception of its splendours resided in her own imagination.

      As a matter of fact, the Berlin Court is the home of bad taste; plenty of fine shoulders, but draped with ugly and inappropriate material. Some few petite feet against an overwhelming majority too large and clumsily shod. Some fine arms and hands, since such are subjects of the War-Lord's appreciation, but faces broad, plain and uninteresting.

      The taste of a man who allows his wife to keep a bow-legged attendant is necessarily deplorable; a king permitting that sort of thing, despite prevailing fashions, is inexcusable.

      An anecdote in point.

      When, in the 'nineties, the Medical Congress sat in Berlin, the learned gentlemen were commanded to a reception at the Palace, and in their honour the whole contingent of Court beauties was put on exhibition.

      "Did you ever see an uglier lot of women?" asked a Russian professor afterwards, addressing a table full of colleagues. All shook their heads sadly, depressed by the remembrance of what they had witnessed.

      Into this milieu of hallowed ugliness and organised ennui dropped the Krupp heiress like a pink-cheeked apple among a lot of windfalls.

      As we know, she was not pretty from the stand-point of the English-speaking races. Her complexion was good, but it lacked the Scottish maid's transparency; her hair was fair to look upon, but there are a thousand English girls travelling on the Underground daily whose glossy tresses are to be preferred; her figure was a little too full, like that of Jerome Napoleon's Queen, Catherine of Würtemberg, whose finely chiselled bosoms scandalised the Tuileries when she was scarcely sixteen. She had the heavy gait of the German woman, and the vocabulary of them all: "Oh Himmel," "Ach Gott," "Verdammt," and so forth, a dreadful inheritance, which even the "Semiramis of the North" could not shake off after fifty and more years' residence in Imperial Russia.

      Her Majesty's maid of honour, Countess von Bassewitz, went to the station with Count Keller, a minor gold stick, to receive and welcome Bertha. Bassewitz was young and pretty – "the only happy isle in an ocean of inelegancy," as Duke Gonthier of Schleswig used to say. Her sole perceptible defect was indifferent hands, but, strange to say, this very blemish got her the position at Court.

      The War Lord had declared that he wouldn't have more of the "hideous baggage" (meaning Her Majesty's ladies) that "made his house a nightmare," and that the next Dame du Palais to be appointed was to be good-looking, or must wear a bell, so that he could keep out of her way. His Queen, who regards all women through the jaundiced lorgnette of jealousy, was in despair. In her mind's eye she saw the Schloss peopled with Pompadours, Du Barrys and Dianes de Poitiers.

      The War Lord had instructed the Court Marshal to demand photographs of applicants for the vacant post, and Countess von Bassewitz's he considered the most promising. "Wire her to report to-morrow morning at eight," he ordered. She arrived while the War Lord was busy lecturing his Council of Ministers on international law, and Her Majesty saw the candidate first. She couldn't help admitting to herself that Ina was comely in the extreme, and that it would require a vast deal of intrigue to induce her husband not to appoint the young girl forthwith. Then a happy thought struck her. "You may remove your gloves," she said condescendingly.

      Countess Ina blushed and grew pale in turn; conscious of her weak point, she was afraid it would work her undoing.

      But, СКАЧАТЬ