The Count said, somewhat gloomily. “Neither has anyone else now alive, hardly. — One more glass of that American wine—St. Martin’s, you call it? —then I must go”
The old King-Emperor’s mind had, under stress and woe, evidently (at least in this one matter) gone back clear sixty-five years, when the Provo (as it was commonly called) had last been used: and that was to harry the horse-thieves of the Lower Ister. (Quite successfully, as a matter of fact.) Usually worn out in the course of their commissions, only a few survived to be seen even in museums. But everyone had seen pictures of them, in newspapers, magazines, even almanacs. Theater bills and posters. They were a staple feature of the popular melodrama.
“Baron Blugrotz, will nothing stay you from your mad determination to throw me and my aged wife out of our cottage into the snow because we will not allow you to take our promised-in-marriage- daughter into your castle?”
“Nothing [with a sneer]! Nothing, nothing, will stay me!”
A commotion, the door is flung open.
“This will stay you!” The This being, of course, the Provo which the hero holds up in his hand. —At which the evil baron and all his henchfellow’s fall upon their knees and bare their heads and cross themselves they will be merely hanged and not flayed or impaled, and the audience jumps to its feet and shouts and stamps and claps.
Perhaps the aged mind of Ignats Louis had buckled under the strain. Thinking that this relic of the Middle Ages and the Early turkish Wars was appropriate in the era of the telephone, telegraph, and police force. However. Ignats Louis [I L] had, indeed, issued it. He was, indeed, Imperator and Rex [I R]. And it took not much to see clearly the association in his ancient and pious mind between the supposed Crown Jewels of Jerusalem and the Eszterhazy letters, traditionally placed around the corners of the parchment, initials of the words Iesus Nazarenus, RexIudaeorum....
“Well,” said Doctor Eszterhazy, crisply, “it is not for me to bandy words with my Sovereign. He issues, I accept. — Make His Imperial Majesty an appropriate reply.”
“And what,” asked Count Kristy, putting his uniform cap back on and, with a rather wary shrug, preparing to depart, “what is ‘an appropriate reply’?”
“Tell him,” said Doctor Eszterhazy, “tell him I said, ‘Adsum....’”
“Lemkotch, I am not at home to anyone.”
He had known now for some time that the key word in the Gazette article, and the one which tripped the flare in his mind — he had known now for some time that the word was Jerusalem.
"Are you not Engelbert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Medicine?"
"I must depart from my invariable incognito to inform you, sir, that I am King of Jerusalem...."
Over and over again, head resting in his hands, in the silence and solitude of his study, he went over the odd scene in the old spring-room at the mountain spa. Was there, now that he deliberately tried to think that there might be, was there something else in his memory, besides that single scene, connecting himself with the man behind that totally unmemorable face? Or was this delusion?
After a while he sat up, took a pad and drawing-pencil, and, as best he could, made a sketch of the man as he remembered him. The clothing, he somehow felt, the clothing was nothing. The face — He discarded the first drawing and sketched, and larger, the face alone. With the pinch-nose eye-glasses. And the absurd moustache, trimmed shorter on one side. And the hair .... The hair, now .... Well, the man had worn a hat, a hat like millions. Take off the hat, then, and draw the face without it.
Did he part his hair in the middle? Perhaps. Trim it close, like a Prussian officer? Unlikely. Or was he, perhaps, bald? On the whole, and although he could not say why he thought so, Eszterhazy rather thought that the man was bald. He finished the sketch. And stared. Still nothing. Or, rather .... something....
Take off the eyeglasses.
Take off the moustache, too.
After another while, he got up and, fixing the latest sketch to a drawing-board, set this one up on an easel. Tumed the gas-lights down very low.'Turned the shade of the electric-lamp so that it acted as a spot-light. Sat back in his chair. Allowed all the rest of the world to fall away ... except for The Face....
Had he seen it before?
He had seen it before.
Question and answer.
Where had he seen it before?
Question — but no answer.
The stillness grew. There seemed no one passing in the street. There seemed no carriages in the city. The Cathedral bells did not ring. The last voice in the world spoke, many, many blocks away. Then all fell silent.
But, if the sense of sound vanished, other senses remained. There was a smell, and a rather bad smell it was. He could not exactly say what the smell was. Familiar, though. Damnably familiar. That face. Face. Where had he seen —
Without even being able to recall the steps in between, Eszterhazy was in the kitchen. His housekeeper stared at him, her mouth all agape and askew.
“What did you say?” he was asking her, urgently, urgently.
“Why, High-born—”
“What did you say, what did you say —” He forced himself to speak in a softer voice. “Good- woman, now, do not be afraid. But it is very important. What did you say, a while back, you said something about ...” He strained memory; memory submitted, yielded up. “— something about needing something. You said,” he clenched his fists behind his back in the face of her massive incomprehension, the two moles near her mouth, one with a hair in it, never longer, never shorter —
“You said, ‘We need to get some more —’ Now. Goodwoman. You need to get some more of what?”
But still she stood frozen. A figure bobbed behind her. A figure in a greasy apron. Probably the scullery maid. “If you please, Frow Widow Orgats,” the kitchenwoman murmured, “you had been saying, a minute or so back, how we was needing to get more disinfectant. For the, please pardon for the servants’ privy. In the yard.”
Something was out of the ordinary at the Western Imperial Penitentiary Fortress, where his card was always sufficient to bring Smits, the Sub-Governor, bowing respectfully, and saluting, as well, when he had done bowing. Smits was a career screw, up through the ranks of the Administration of Guards. It was, of course, the Governor, Baron von Grubhorn, who interviewed journalists and discussed with them the theories of Lombroso on The Criminal Type. It was the Govenor of the prison who made the weekly address to the prisoners, as they stood in chains, exhorting them on their duties as Christians and loyal subjects of the Triune Monarchy. But it was the Sub-Governor who checked the bread ration, saw to the cell assignments, and even tasted the prison stew — or, as it was unaffectionately called, ‘the scum’ — and, had the Sub-Governor not done so, the bread ration would have diminished, more murders been committed in the cells, and the stew been even scummier.
Now, however, the Sub-Governor was neither bowing nor saluting. He stood in the mud at the entrance to the Fortress, directing the emplacement of what seemed to be a Gatling gun. All about him were guards with rifles at the ready; they poured in and out of the entrance, moiling like atits. Eszterhazy stopped the steam runabout (whose bronze hand-bell no one here had seemed to have heard) about two hundred feet away, proceded on foot.
“What’s wrong, Smits?”