So we set out, and it was surprising the way he got us through.  If the crowd didn’t fall apart instantly of itself at his approach, an obsequious policeman—­one of those same Berlin policemen who are so rude to one if one is alone and really in need of help—­sprang up from nowhere and made it.  It’s as far from the Friedrichstrasse to the Schlossplatz as it is from here to the Friedrichstrasse, but we did it very much quicker than we did the first half in the taxi, and when we reached it there they all were, the drunken crowds—­that’s the word that most exactly describes them—­yelling, swaying, cursing the ones in their way or who trod on their feet, shouting hurrahs and bits of patriotic songs, every one of them decently dressed, obviously respectable people in ordinary times.  That’s what is so constantly strange to me,—­these solid burghers and their families behaving like drunken hooligans.  Somehow a spectacled professor with a golden chain across his blackwaistcoated and impressive front, just roaring incoherently, just opening his mouth and hurling any sort of noise out of it till the veins on his neck and forehead look as though they would burst, is the strangest sight in the world to me.  I can imagine nothing stranger, nothing that makes one more uncomfortable and ashamed.  It is what will always jump up before my eyes in the future at the words German patriotism.  And to see a stout elderly lady, who ought to be presiding with slow dignity in some ordered home, hoarse with shouting, tear the feathered hat she otherwise only uses tenderly on Sundays off her respectable grey head and wave it frantically, screaming hochs every time a prince is seen or a general or one of the ministers, makes one want to cry with shame at the indignity put upon poor human beings, at the exploiting of their passions, in the interests of one family.

The Grafin’s smart cousin got us on to some steps and stood with us, so that we should not be pushed off them instantly again, as we would have been if he had left us.  I think they were the steps of a statue, or fountain, or something like that, but the whole whatever it was was so covered with people, encrusted with them just like one of those sticky fly-sticks is black with flies, that I don’t know what it was really.  I only know that it wasn’t a house, and that we were quite close to the palace, and able to look down at the sea beneath us, the heaving, roaring sea of distorted red faces, all with their mouths wide open, all blistering and streaming in the sun.

The Grafin, who had recovered her calm in the presence of her inferiors of the middle classes, put up her eyeglasses and examined them with interest and indulgence.  Helena stared.  The cousin twisted his little moustache, standing beside us protectingly, very elegant and slender and nonchalant, and remarked at intervals, “Fabelhafte Enthusiasmus, was?”

It came into my mind that Beerbohm Tree must sometimes look on like that at a successful dress rehearsal of his well-managed stage crowds, with the same nonchalant satisfaction at the excellent results, so well up to time, of careful preparation.