a few moments,” Charles promised, “I will denude your larders and empty your cellars.”
He returned to the entrance. He poured small change into Fritz’s hand for the taxi drive. He tipped the hall porter. He tipped the porters who were guarding his luggage. He turned back to the stupefied Fritz, who was gazing at his handful of silver.
“There is enough there?” Charles asked him.
“Gnãdiger Herr,” Fritz replied, “this money would buy the taxicab and me! I am not sure that it would not buy the hotel!”
“Listen,” Charles went on. “Park the taxicab anywhere, go and sit down at a café—eat, drink moderately, but eat, man! You look half starved. Then come back here to-morrow morning at ten o’clock. Suite number seventeen. Come up to me—suite seventeen.”
There was joy mingled with a pitiful anxiety upon the man’s face.
“Herr Mildenhall,” he stammered. “You remember Suzette, my wife? She is starving, too.”
“Fetch her, you idiot!” Charles cried. “Drive away in your taxi and fetch her wherever she is. Take her to the café. Eat and drink—both of you. Here—take some more money.”
Fritz stepped back and shook his head.
“Mein Herr,” he confided, “I could buy the café we go to with this.”
“Go to a better one, then.”
“Oh, we shall eat, I promise you,” the man declared with tears in his eyes. “We will eat and we will drink and I will be here at ten in the morning—do not fear. One has not prayed for deliverance all this time in vain,” he added as he stumbled into his seat.
For a moment Charles forgot his own discomfort. He watched Fritz drive off.
“There are many like that?” he asked the hall porter.
“The city is full of them, sir,” was the doleful reply. “It is hard enough for those who have kept their posts. Our wages are reduced, the price of food has gone up, there is no coal and little wood. Life is very difficult. Everything that we have the Germans take. I think that they wish to get rid of the Austrians and they have decided that the quickest way is to starve them. Now they tell me we are to go to war again.”
Charles hurried away with a word of sympathy. He slipped into the lift, where a pert young Viennese lady with flashing eyes languished at him in vain. In a moment or two he was in number seventeen. He drew a long sigh of deep content at the comfort and luxury with which he was surrounded. One valet was waiting to strip off his clothes, another was testing the warmth of the bath. The trunk he had left there had been fetched up and opened. Fresh silk underwear and fresh linen were already laid out. He plunged into the bath with a groan of happiness. He sank in it up to his neck, stretched out his hands for the sponge and the soap. A sensation of amazing and voluptuous content crept over him. He closed his eyes…When he awoke only one of the valets was left.
“Have I been asleep?” he asked.
“Only for a few minutes, sir,” the servant answered.
“Is Frederick still in the bar?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“Telephone down for two dry Martinis. See that they are sent up in the shaker—absolutely cold and the proper glass.”
“I’ll telephone down, sir.”
“A debauch of luxury,” Charles murmured to himself a little later as he finished shaving and eyed his second cocktail greedily. “What has become of my dinner?”
“The waiter brought the first course up, sir, but we sent it back in case you slept longer. I stayed here to see that you did not slip down in the bath and Franz here is unpacking the trunk and your small things and preparing your evening clothes.”
“What time is it?”
“Eight o’clock, sir.”
“I’ll dine in the restaurant,” Charles decided. “I can’t go to sleep at the table, anyhow. I shall come straight to bed afterwards.”
The man’s face was a little grave as he bowed.
“What’s the matter—the restaurant is open, I suppose?”
“Most certainly, sir. The restaurant is open. There is dancing—Mademoiselle Celeste from Sweden, she makes very beautiful gymnastic dance.”
“Capital! Tell the head-waiter to keep me a corner table against the wall somewhere.”
“Certainly, mein Herr.”
Charles completed his toilet, sipped his cocktail and lit a cigarette. There was a knock at the door. Mr. Herodin entered. He smiled at the transformation.
“You are feeling a different man, Herr Mildenhall?” he enquired.
“And looking one, too, I hope!”
The manager waved the servants away.
“You are doing us the honour, I believe, of dining in the restaurant, sir?”
“I thought I would,” Charles acquiesced. “It will be a treat to see some civilized people again.”
“I fear, sir, that you will see very few of them,” Herodin confided. “The fact of it is that our clients have momentarily deserted us.”
Charles nodded and waited for more.
“The people who come here,” the man went on, “are chiefly German Nazis. They are not very polite, they give a great deal of trouble and they are not so particular in their dress and uniform as the Viennese—added to which their behaviour is rude.”
“I understand. Anyhow, I’m much too sleepy to talk to anyone, much less quarrel with them.”
The manager sighed.
“It is sad,” he said, “but one by one my regular clients have deserted me. The Archduke Karl Sebastian was often here; Count Pilduski with the Countess; Monsieur and Madame de Kruiten, and always some of the younger gentlemen from the Embassies when they were going. And now—no one. I thought it better just to give you a word of warning.”
“Very kind of you,” Charles acknowledged. “As a matter of curiosity I must have a look at them, though. Is anyone in possession of the British Embassy?”
“It seems to us, sir, to be in a state of chaos,” Herodin answered. “Mr. Porter is there for urgent enquiries. He was Consul General, I think, before the Embassy began to break up. Did you bring any news, sir? Do you think that there will be war?”
“If there is it will be a very foolish war,” Charles replied. “But no one can tell.”
“You will find such English papers as we have received during the past week on your table in the restaurant, sir,” the hôtelier announced. “There is no late news, but one understands that the German mobilization on Poland’s frontier
