Courts and courtiers -- Fiction; German fiction -- Translations into English; Germany -- Fiction
Outside the garden gates a few promenaders had collected. They greeted
Klaus Heinrich, smiling with knitted brows and hats lifted, and Klaus
Heinrich thanked them by raising his white-gloved right hand to the peak
of his cap and making a succession of lively nods.
They skirted a piece of waste ground along a birch avenue, whose leaves
were already turning, and then drove through the suburb, between
poverty-stricken houses, over unpaved streets, where the ragged children
left their hoops and tops for a moment to gaze at the carriage with
curious eyes. Some cried, Hurrah! and ran for a while by the side of the
carriage, with heads turned towards Klaus Heinrich. The carriage might
have taken the road by the Spa-gardens; but that through the suburb was
shorter, and time pressed. Ditlinde was particular on points of
regularity, and easily put out if anybody disturbed her household
arrangements by unpunctuality.
Yonder was the Dorothea Children's Hospital of which Doctor Sammet,
Ueberbein's friend, was the Director; Klaus Heinrich drove by it. And
then the carriage left the squalid neighbourhood and reached the
Gartenstrasse, a stately tree-planted avenue, in which lay the houses
and villas of wealthy citizens, and along which ran the tram-line from
the Spa Gardens to the centre of the city. The traffic here was fairly
heavy, and Klaus Heinrich was kept busy answering the greetings which
met him. Civilians took off their hats and looked from under their
eyebrows at him, officers on horse and on foot saluted, policemen
front-turned, and Klaus Heinrich in his corner raised his hand to the
peak of his cap and thanked on both sides with the well-trained bow and
smile which were calculated to confirm the people in their feeling of
participation in his splendid personality.... His way of sitting in his
carriage was quite peculiar--he did not lean back indolently and
comfortably in the cushions, but he took just as active a part in the
motions of the carriage when driving as in those of his horse when
riding; with hands crossed on his sword hilt and one foot a little
advanced, he as it were "took" the unevennesses of the ground, and
accommodated himself to the motion of the badly hung carriage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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