Part 24 (2/2)
because of a greater proportion of outside blood lines, were quite as proud of the fact that, while possessed of sufficient royal blood to be in ”the divinity,” they inherited supposedly greater intelligence from their mundane ancestors. This latter group, to make good their claims, made a great show of intellectuality, and cultivated most persistently a dilletante dabbling into all sorts of scientific and artistic matters.
Because of Marguerite's high credit in Royal blood she was courted by ”purists” by whom I was only tolerated on her account. On the other hand, the ”intellectuals” considered me as a great a.s.set for their cause and glorified particularly in the prospects of marriage of an outside scientist to an eighty-degree Hohenzollern princess. This rivalry of the clans of Royal Society made us much sought after and I was flooded with invitations.
It did not take me long to discover, however, that the reason for my popularity was not altogether a matter of respect for my intellectual genius. I had at first been inclined to accept all invitations, innocently supposing that I was being feted as an honorary guest. But my social secretary advised against this; and, when he began bringing me checks to sign, I realized that the social privileges of Royal Society included the honour of paying the bills for one's own entertainment.
I had already arranged with my banker that a fourth of my income be turned over to Marguerite until her marriage, for she was without income of her own, and it was upon my pet.i.tion that she had been restored to the Royal Level. At my banker's suggestion I had also made over ten thousand marks a month to the Countess, under whose motherly wing Marguerite was being sheltered. I therefore soon discovered that my income of a million marks a year would be absorbed quite easily by Royal Society. The entire system appeared to me rather sordid, but such matters were arranged by bankers and secretaries and the princ.i.p.als were supposed to be quite innocent of any knowledge of, or concern for, the details.
The Countess Luise, who was permitted to entertain so lavishly at my expense, was playing for the favour of both of the opposing social clans. Possessing a high degree of Hohenzollern blood she stood well with the purists. But her income was not all that could be desired, so she had adroitly discovered in her only son a touch of intellectual genius, and the young man quite dutifully had become a maker of picture plots, hoping by this distinction to win as a wife one of the daughters of some wealthy intellectual interloper. At first I had feared the Countess had designs upon Marguerite as a wife for her son, but as Marguerite had no income of her own I saw that in this I was mistaken, and I developed a feeling of genuine friendliness for the plump and cordial Countess.
”Do you know what I was reading last night?” I remarked one evening, as I chatted with Marguerite and her chaperone.
”Some work on obesity, I hope,” sparkled the Countess. Like many of the House of Hohenzollern, among whom there was no weight control, she carried a surplus of adipose tissue not altogether consistent with beauty.
”No, indeed,” I said gravely. ”Nothing about your material being, but a treatise upon your spiritual nature. I was reading an old school book that I found among my forgotten relics--a book about the Divinity of the House of Hohenzollern.”
”Oh, how jolly!” chuckled the Countess. ”How very funny that I never thought before that you, Herr von Armstadt, were once taught all those delightful fables.”
”And once believed them too,” I lied.
”Oh, dear me,” replied the Countess, with a ponderous sigh, ”so I suppose you did. And what a shock I must have been to you with an eighty centimetre waist.”
”You are not quite Junoesque,” I admitted.
”The more reason you should use your science, Herr Chemist, to aid me to recover my G.o.ddess form.”
”What are you folks talking about?” interrupted Marguerite.
”About our divinity, my dear,” replied Luise archly.
”But do you feel that it is really necessary,” I asked, ”that such fables should be put into the helpless minds of children?”
”It surely must be. Suppose your own heredity had proven tricky--it does sometimes, you know--and you had been found incapable of scientific thought. You would have been deranked and perhaps made a record clerk--no personal reflections, but such things do happen--and if you now were filing cards all day you would surely be much happier if you could believe in our divinity. Why else would you submit to a loveless life and the dull routine of toil? Did not all the ancients, and do not all the inferior races now, have objects of religious wors.h.i.+p?”
”But the other races,” I said, ”do not wors.h.i.+p living people but spiritual divinities and the sainted dead.
”Quite so,” replied the over-plump G.o.ddess, ”but that is why their _kulturs_ are so inefficient. Surely the wors.h.i.+p was useless to the spirits and the dead, whereas we find it quite profitable to be wors.h.i.+pped. But for this wonderful doctrine of the divinity of the blood of William the Great we should be put to all sorts of inconveniences.”
”You might even have to work,” I ventured.
The Countess bestowed on me one of her most bewitching smiles. ”My dear Herr Chemist,” she said in sugary tones, ”you with your intellectual genius can twit us on our psychic lacks and we must fall back on the divine blood of our Great Ancestor--but would you really wish the slaves of dull toil to think it as human as their own?”
”But to me it seems a little gross,” I said.
”Not at all; on the contrary, it is a master stroke of science and efficiency--inferior creatures must wors.h.i.+p; they always have and always will--then why waste the wors.h.i.+p?”
~3~
My position as director of the protium works soon brought me into conference with Admiral von Kufner who was Chief of the Submarine Staff.
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