seemed even more dear out there where it was beautiful. You sound so
content, darling mother, about me, and so full of belief in me. You
may be very sure that if a human being, by trying and working, can
justify your dear belief it's your Chris. The snapshot of the border
full of Canterbury bells makes me able to picture you. Do you wear the
old garden hat I loved you so in when you garden? Tell me, because I
want to think of you _exactly_. It makes my mouth water, those
Canterbury bells. I can see their lovely colours, their pink and blue
and purple, with the white Sweet Williams and the pale lilac violas you
write about. Well, there's nothing of that in the Lutzowstrasse. No
wonder I went away from it this morning to go out and look for June in
the woods. The woods were a little thin and austere, for there has
been no rain lately, but how enchanting after the barren dustiness of
my Berlin street! I did love it so. And I felt so free and glorious,
coming off on my own for my hard-earned Sunday outing, just like any
other young man.
The train going down was full of officers, and they all looked very
smart and efficient and satisfied with themselves and life. In my
compartment they were talking together eagerly all the way, talking
shop with unaffected appetite, as though shop were so interesting that
even on Sundays they couldn't let it be, and poring together over maps.
No trace of stolidity. But where is this stolidity one has heard
about? Compared to the Germans I've seen, it is we who are stolid;
stolid, and slow, and bored. The last thing these people are is bored.
On the contrary, the officers had that same excitement about them, that
same strung-upness, that the men boarders at Frau Berg's have.
Potsdam is charming, and swarms with palaces and parks. If it hadn't
been woods I was after I would have explored it with great interest.
Do you remember when you read Carlyle's Frederick to me that winter you
were trying to persuade me to learn to sew? And, bribing me to sew,
you read aloud? I didn't learn to sew, but I did learn a great deal
about Potsdam and Hohenzollerns, and some Sunday when it isn't quite so
fine I shall go down and visit Sans Souci, and creep back into the past
again. But today I didn't want walls and roofs, I wanted just to walk
and walk. It was very crowded in the train coming back, full of people
who had been out for the day, and weary little children were crying,
and we all sat heaped up anyhow. I know I clutched two babies on my
lap, and that they showed every sign of having no self-control. They
were very sweet, though, and I wouldn't have minded it a bit if I had
had lots of skirts; but when you only have two!
Wanda was very kind, and brought me some secret coffee and bread and
butter to my room when I told her I had walked at least ten miles and
was too tired to go into supper. She cried out "_Herr Je_!"--which I'm
afraid is short for Lord Jesus, and is an exclamation dear to her--and
seized the coffee pot at once and started heating it up. I remembered
afterwards that German miles are three times the size of English ones,
so no wonder she said _Herr Je_. But just think: I haven't seen a
single boarder for a whole day. I do feel so much refreshed.
You know I told you in my last letter I was going to lunch with the
Koseritzes on Monday, and so I did, and the chief thing that happened
there, was that I was shy. Imagine it. So shy that I blushed and
dropped things. For years I haven't thought of what I looked like when
I've been with other people, because for years other people have been
so absorbingly interesting that I forgot I was there too; but at the
Koseritzes I suddenly found myself remembering, greatly to my horror,
that I have a face, and that it goes about with me wherever I go, and
that parts of it are--well, I don't like them. And I remembered that
my hair had been done in a hurry, and that the fingers of my left hand
have four hard lumps on their tips where they press the strings of my
fiddle, and that they're very ugly, but then one can't have things both
ways, can one. Also I became aware of my clothes, and we know how
fatal that is when they are weak clothes like mine, don't we, little
mother? You used to exhort me to put them on with care and
concentration, and then leave them to God. Such sound advice! And
I've followed it so long that I do completely forget them; but last
Monday I didn't. They were urged on my notice by Grafin Koseritz's
daughter, whose eyes ran over me from head to foot and then back again
when I came in. She was the neatest thing--_aus dem Ei gegossen_, as
they express perfect correctness of appearance. I suddenly knew, what
I have always suspected, that I was blowsy,--blowsy and loose-jointed,
with legs that are too long and not the right sort of feet. I hated my
_Beethovenkopf_ and all its hair. I wanted to have less hair, and for
it to be drawn neatly high off my face and brushed and waved in
beautiful regular lines. And I wanted a spotless lacy blouse, and a
string of pearls round my throat, and a perfectly made blue serge skirt
without mud on it,--it was raining, and I had walked. Do you know what
I felt like? A _goodnatured_ thing. The sort of creature people say
generously about afterwards, "Oh, but she's so goodnatured."
Grafin Koseritz was terribly kind to me, and that made me shyer than
ever, for I knew she was trying to put me at my ease, and you can
imagine how shy _that_ made me. I blushed and dropped things, and the
more I blushed and dropped things the kinder she was. And all the time
my contemporary, Helena, looked at me with the same calm eyes. She has
a completely emotionless face. I saw no trace of a passion for music
or for anything else in it. She made no approaches of any sort to me,
she just calmly looked at me. Her mother talked with the extreme
vivacity of the hostess who has a difficult party on hand. There was a
silent governess between two children. Junkerlets still in the
school-room, who stared uninterruptedly at me and seemed unsuccessfully
endeavouring to place me; there was a young lady cousin who talked
during the whole meal in an undertone to Helena; and there was Graf
Koseritz, an abstracted man who came in late, muttered something vague
on being introduced to me and told I was a new genius Kloster had
unearthed, sat down to his meal from which he did not look up again,
and was monosyllabic when his wife tried to draw him in and make the
conversation appear general. And all the time, while lending an ear to
her cousin's murmur of talk, Helena's calm eyes lingered on one portion
after the other of your poor vulnerable Chris.
Actually I found myself hoping hotly that I hadn't forgotten to wash my
ears that morning in the melee of getting up. I have to wash myself in
bits, one at a time, because at Frau Berg's I'm only given a very small
tin tub, the bath being used for keeping extra bedding in. It is
difficult and distracting, and sometimes one forgets little things like
ears, little extra things like that; and when Helena's calm eyes, which
appeared to have no sort of flicker in them, or hesitation, or blink,
settled on one of my ears and hung there motionless, I became so much
unnerved that I upset the spoon out of the whipped-cream dish that was
just being served to me, on to the floor. It was a parquet floor, and
the spoon made such a noise, and the cream made such a mess. I was so
wretched, because I had already upset a pepper thing earlier in the
meal, and spilt some water. The white-gloved butler advanced in a sort
of stately goose-step with another spoon, which he placed on the dish
being handed to me, and a third menial of lesser splendour but also
white-gloved brought a cloth and wiped up the mess, and the Grafin
became more terribly and volubly kind than ever. Helena's eyes never
wavered. They were still on my ear. A little more and I would have
reached that state the goaded shy get to when they suddenly in their
agony say more striking things than the boldest would dream of saying,
but Herr von Inster came in.
He is the young man I told you about who played my accompaniment the
other night. We had got to the coffee, and the servants were gone, and
the Graf had lit a cigar and was gazing in deep abstraction at the
tablecloth while the Grafin assured me of his keen interest in music
and its interpretation by the young and promising, and Helena's eyes
were resting on a spot there is on my only really nice blouse,--I can't
think how it got there, mother darling, and I'm fearfully sorry, and
I've tried to get it out with benzin and stuff, but it is better to
wear a blouse with spots on it than not to wear a blouse at all, isn't
it. I had pinned some flowers on it too, to hide it, and so they did
at first, but they were fading and hanging down, and there was the
spot, and Helena found it. Well, Herr von Inster came in, and put us
all right. He looks like nothing but a smart young officer, very
beautiful and slim in his Garde-Uhlan uniform, but he is really a lot
of other things besides. He is the Koseritz's cousin, and Helena says
_Du_ to him. He was very polite, said the right things to everybody,
explained he had had his luncheon, but thought, as he was passing, he
would look in. He would not deny, be said, that he had heard I was
coming--he made me a little bow across the table and smiled--and that
he had hopes I might perhaps be persuaded to play.
Not having a fiddle I couldn't do that. I wish I could have, for I'm
instantly natural and happy when I get playing; but the Grafin said she
hoped I would play to some of her friends one evening as soon as she
could arrange it,--friends interested in youthful geniuses, as she put
it.
I said I would love to, and that it was so kind of her, but privately I
thought I would inquire of Kloster first; for if her friends are all as
deeply interested in music as the Graf and Helena, then I would be
doing better and more profitably by going to bed at ten o'clock as
usual, rather than emerge bedizened from my lair to go and flaunt in
these haunts of splendid virtue.
After Herr von Inster came I began faintly to enjoy myself, for he
talked all round, and greatly and obviously relieved his aunt by doing
so. Helena let go of my ear and looked at him. Once she very nearly
smiled. The other girl left off murmuring, and talked about things I
could talk about too, such as England and Germany--they're never tired
of that--and Strauss and Debussy. Only the Graf sat mute, his eyes
fixed on the tablecloth.
"My husband is dying to hear you play," said the Grafin, when he got up
presently to go back to his work. "Absolutely _dying_," she said,
recklessly padding out the leanness of his very bald good-bye to me.
He said nothing even to that. He just went. He didn't seem to be
dying.
Herr von luster walked back with me. He is very agreeable-looking,
with kind eyes that are both shrewd and sad. He talks English very
well, and so did everybody at the Koseritzes who talked at all. He is
pathetically keen on music. Kloster says he would have been a really
great player, but being a Junker settles him for ever. It is tragic to
be forced out of one's natural bent, and he says he hates soldiering.
People in the street were very polite, and made way for me because I
was with an officer. I wasn't pushed off the pavement once.
Good night my own mother. I've had a happy week. I put my arms round
you and kiss you with all that I have of love.
Your Chris.
Wanda came in in great excitement to fetch my tray just now, and said a
prince has been assassinated. She heard the _Herrschaften_ saying so
at supper. She thought they said it was an Austrian, but whatever
prince it was it was _Majestatsbeleidigung_ to get killing him, and she
marvelled how any one had dared. Then Frau Berg herself came to tell
me. By this time I was in bed,--pig-tailed, and ready to go to sleep.
She was tremendously excited, and I felt a cold shiver down my back
watching her. She was so much excited that I caught it from her and
was excited too. Well, it is very dreadful the way these king-people
get bombed out of life. She said it was the Austrian heir to the
throne and his wife, both of them. But of course you'll know all about
it by the time you get this. She didn't know any details, but there
had been extra editions of the Sunday papers, and she said it would
mean war.
"War?" I echoed.
"War," she repeated; and began to tread heavily about the room saying,
"War. War."
"But who with?" I asked, watching her fascinated, sitting up in bed
holding on to my knees.
"It will come," said Frau Berg, treading about like some huge Judaic
prophetess who sniffs blood. "It must come. There will be no quiet in
the world till blood has been let."
"But what blood?" I asked, rather tremulously, for her voice and
behaviour curdled me.
"The blood of all those evil-doers who are responsible," she said; and
she paused a moment at the foot of my bed and folded her arms across
her chest--they could hardly reach, and the word chest sounds much too
flat--and added, "Of whom there are many."
Then she began to walk about again, and each time a foot went down the
room shook. "All, all need punishing," she said as she walked. "There
will be, there must be, punishment for this. Great and terrible.
Blood will, blood must flow in streams before such a crime can be
regarded as washed out. Such evil-doers must be emptied of all their
blood."
And then luckily she went away, for I was beginning to freeze to the
sheets with horror.
I got out of bed to write this. You'll be shocked too, I know. The
way royalties are snuffed out one after the other! How glad I am I'm
not one and you're not one, and we can live safely and fruitfully
outside the range of bombs. Poor things. It is very horrible. Yet
they never seem to abdicate or want not to be royalties, so that I
suppose they think it worth it on the whole. But Frau Berg was
terrible. What a bloodthirsty woman. I wonder if the other boarders
will talk like that. I do pray not, for I hate the very word blood.
And why does she say there'll be war? They will catch the murderers
and punish them as they've done before, and there'll be an end of it.
There wasn't war when the Empress of Austria was killed, or the King
and Queen of Servia. I think Frau Berg wanted to make me creep. She
has a fixed idea that English people are every one of them much too
comfortable, and should at all costs be made to know what being
uncomfortable is like. For their good, I suppose.
_Berlin, Tuesday, June 30th, 1914_.
Darling mother,
How splendid that you're going to Switzerland next month with the
Cunliffes. I do think it is glorious, and it will make you so strong
for the winter. And think how much nearer you'll be to me! I always
suspected Mrs. Cunliffe of being secretly an angel, and now I know it.
Your letter has just come and I simply had to tell you how glad I am.
Chris.
This isn't a letter, it's a cry of joy.
_Berlin, Sunday, July 5th, 1914_.
My blessed little mother,
It has been so hot this week. We've been sweltering up here under the
roof. If you are having it anything like this at Chertsey the sooner
you persuade the Cunliffes to leave for Switzerland the better. Just
the sight of snow on the mountains out of your window would keep you
cool. You know I told you my bedroom looks onto the Lutzowstrasse and
the sun beats on it nearly all day, and flies in great numbers have
taken to coming up here and listening to me play, and it is difficult
to practise satisfactorily while they walk about enraptured on my neck.
I can't swish them away, because both my hands are busy. I wish I had
a tail.
Frau Berg says there never used to be flies in this room, and suggests
with some sternness that I brought them with me,--the eggs, I suppose,
in my luggage. She is inclined to deny that they're here at all, on
the ground chiefly that nothing so irregular as a fly out of its proper
place, which is, she says, a manure heap, is possible in Germany. It
is too well managed, is Germany, she says. I said I supposed she knew
that because she had seen it in the newspapers. I was snappy, you see.
The hot weather makes me disposed, I'm afraid, to impatience with Frau
Berg. She is so large, and she seems to soak up what air there is, and
whenever she has sat on a chair it keeps warm afterwards for hours. If
only some clever American with inventions rioting in his brain would
come here and adapt her to being an electric fan! I want one so badly,
and she would be beautiful whirling round, and would make an immense
volume of air, I'm sure.
Well, darling one, you see I'm peevish. It's because I'm so hot, and
it doesn't get cool at night. And the food is so hot too and so
greasy, and the pallid young man with the red mouth who sits opposite
me at dinner melts visibly and continuously all the time, and Wanda
coming round with the dishes is like the coming of a blast of hot air.
Kloster says I'm working too much, and wants me to practise less. I
said I didn't see that practising less would make Wanda and the young
man cooler. I did try it one day when my head ached, and you've no
idea what a long day it seemed. So empty. Nothing to do. Only
Berlin. And one feels more alone in Berlin than anywhere in the world,
I think. Kloster says it's because I'm working too much, but I don't
see how working less would make Berlin more companionable. Of course
I'm not a bit alone really, for there is Kloster, who takes a very real
and lively interest in me and is the most delightful of men, and there
is Herr von Inster, who has been twice to see me since that day I
lunched at his aunt's, and everybody in this house talks to me
now,--more to me, I think, than to any other of the boarders, because
I'm English and they seem to want to educate me out of it. And Hilda
Seeberg has actually got as far in friendship as a cautious invitation
to have chocolate with her one afternoon some day in the future at
Wertheim's; and the pallid young man has suggested showing me the
Hohenzollern museum some Sunday, where he can explain to me, by means
of relics, the glorious history of that high family, as he put it; and
Frau Berg, though she looks like some massive Satan, isn't really
satanic I expect; and Dr. Krummlaut says every day as he comes into the
diningroom rubbing his hands and passes my chair, "_Na, was macht
England_?" which is a sign he is being gracious. It is only a feeling,
this of being completely alone. But I've got it, and the longer I'm
here and the better I know people the greater it becomes. It's an
_uneasiness_. I feel as if my _spirit_ were alone,--the real, ultimate
and only bit of me that is me and that matters.
If I go on like this you too, my little mother, will begin echoing
Kloster and tell me that I'm working too much. Dear England. Dear,
dear England. To find out how much one loves England all one has to do
is to come to Germany.
Of course they talk of nothing else at every meal here now but the
Archduke's murder. It's the impudence of the Servians that chiefly
makes them gasp. That they should dare! Dr. Krummlaut says they never
would have dared if they hadn't been instigated to this deed of
atrocious blasphemy by Russia,--Russia bursting with envy of the
Germanic powers and encouraging every affront to them. The whole
table, except the Swede who eats steadily on, sees red at the word
affront. Frau Berg reiterates that the world needs blood-letting
before there can be any real calm again, but it isn't German blood she
wants to let. Germany is surrounded by enormously wicked people, I
gather, all swollen with envy, hatred and malice, and all of gigantic
size. In the middle of these monsters browses Germany, very white and
woolly-haired and loveable, a little lamb among the nations, artlessly
only wanting to love and be loved, weak physically compared to its
towering neighbours, but strong in simplicity and the knowledge of its
_gute Recht_. And when they say these things they all turn to me for
endorsement and approval--they've given up seeking response from the
Swede, because she only eats--and I hastily run over my best words and
pick out the most suitable one, which is generally _herrlich_, or else
_ich gratuliere_. The gigantic, the really cosmic cynicism I fling
into it glances off their comfortable thick skins unnoticed.
I think Kloster is right, and they haven't grown up yet. People like
the Koseritzes, people of the world, don't show how young they are in
the way these middle-class Germans do, but I daresay they are just the
same really. They have the greediness of children too,--I don't mean
in things to eat, though they have that too, and take the violent
interest of ten years old in what there'll be for dinner--I mean greed
for other people's possessions. In all their talk, all their
expoundings of _deutsche Idealen_, I have found no trace of
consideration for others, or even of any sort of recognition that other
nations too may have rights and virtues. I asked Kloster whether I
hadn't chanced on a little group of people who were exceptions in their
way of looking at life, and he said No, they were perfectly typical of
the Prussians, and that the other classes, upper and lower, thought in
the same way, the difference lying only in their manner of expressing
it.
"All these people, Mees Chrees," he said, "have been drilled. Do not
forget that great fact. Every man of every class has spent some of the
most impressionable years of his life being drilled. He never gets
over it. Before that, he has had the nursery and the schoolroom:
drill, and very thorough drill, in another form. He is drilled into
what the authorities find it most convenient that he should think from
the moment he can understand words. By the time he comes to his
military service his mind is already squeezed into the desired shape.
Then comes the finishing off,--the body drilled to match the mind, and
you have the perfect slave. And it is because he is a slave that when
he has power--and every man has power over some one--he is so great a
bully."
"But you must have been drilled too," I said, "and you're none of these
things."
He looked at me in silence for a moment, with his funny protruding
eyes. Then he said, "I am told, and I believe it, that no man ever
really gets over having been imprisoned."
_Evening_.
I feel greatly refreshed, for what do you think I've been doing since I
left off writing this morning? Motoring out into the country,--the
sweet and blessed country, the home of God's elect, as the hymn says,
only the hymn meant Jerusalem, and the golden kind of Jerusalem, which
can't be half as beautiful as just plain grass and daisies. Herr von
Inster appeared up here about twelve. Wanda came to my door and banged
on it with what sounded like a saucepan, and I daresay was, for she
wouldn't waste time leaving off stirring the pudding while she went to
open the front door, and she called out very loud, "_Der Herr Offizier
ist schon wieder da_."
All the flat must have heard her, and so did Herr von Inster.
"Here I am, _schon meeder da_" he said, clicking his heels together
when I came into the diningroom where he was waiting among the _debris_
of the first spasms of Wanda's table-laying; and we both laughed.
He said the Master--so he always speaks of Kloster, and with such
affection and admiration in his voice--and his wife were downstairs in
his car, and wanted him to ask me to join them so that he might drive
us all into the country on such a fine day.
You can imagine how quickly I put on my hat.
"It is doing you good already," he said, looking at me as we went down
the four nights of stairs,--so Kloster had been telling him, too, that
story about too much work.
Herr von Inster drove, and we three sat on the back seat, because he
had his soldier chauffeur with him, so I didn't get as much talk with
him as I had hoped, for I like him _very_ much, and so would you,
little mother. There is nothing of the aggressive swashbuckler about
him. I'm sure he doesn't push a woman off the pavement when there
isn't room for him.
I don't think I've told you about Frau Kloster, but that is because one
keeps on forgetting she is there. Perhaps that quality of beneficent
invisibleness is what an artist most needs in a wife. She never says
anything, except things that require no answering. It's a great
virtue, I should think, in a wife. From time to time, when Kloster has
_lese majestated_ a little too much, she murmurs _Aber_ Adolf; or she
announces placidly that she has just killed a mosquito; or that the sky
is blue; and Kloster's talk goes on on the top of this little
undercurrent without taking the least notice of it. They seem very
happy. She tends him as carefully as one would tend a baby,--one of
those quite new pink ones that can't stand anything hardly without
crumpling up,--and competently clears life round him all empty and
free, so that he has room to work. I wish I had a wife.
We drove out through Potsdam in the direction of Brandenburg, and
lunched in the woods at Potsdam by the lake the Marmor Palais is on.
Kloster stared at this across the water while he ate, and the sight of
it tinged his speech regrettably. Herr von Inster, as an officer of
the King, ought really to have smitten him with the flat side of his
sword, but he didn't; he listened and smiled. Perhaps he felt as the
really religious do about God, that the Hohenzollerns are so high up
that criticism can't harm them, but I doubt it; or perhaps he regards
Kloster indulgently, as a gifted and wayward child, but I doubt that
too. He happens to be intelligent, and is not to be persuaded that a
spade is anything but a spade, however much it may be got up to look
like the Ark of the Covenant or anything else archaic and
bedizened--God forbid, little mother, that you should suppose I meant
that dreadful pun.
Frau Kloster had brought food with her, part of which was cherries, and
they slid down one's hot dry throat like so many cool little blessings.
I could hardly believe that I had really escaped the Sunday dinner at
the pension. We were very content, all of us I think, sitting on the
grass by the water's edge, a tiny wind stirring our hair--except
Kloster's, because he so happily hasn't got any, which must be
delicious in hot weather,--and rippling along the rushes.
"She grows less pale every hour," Kloster said to Herr von Inster,
fixing his round eyes on me.
Herr von Inster looked at me with his grave shrewd ones, and said
nothing.
"We brought out a windflower," said Kloster, "and behold we will return
with a rose. At present, Mees Chrees, you are a cross between the two.
You have ceased to be a windflower, and are not yet a rose. I wager
that by five o'clock the rose period will have set in."
They were both so kind to me all day, you can't think little mother,
and so was Frau Kloster, only one keeps on forgetting her. Herr von
Inster didn't talk much, but he looked quite as content as the rest of
us. It is strange to remember that only this morning I was writing
about feeling so lonely and by myself in spirit. And so I was; and so
I have been all this week. But I don't feel like that now. You see
how the company of one righteous man, far more than his prayers,
availeth much. And the company of two of them availeth exactly double.
Kloster is certainly a righteous man, which I take it means a man who
is both intelligent and good, and so I am sure is Herr von Inster. If
he were not, he, a Junker and an officer, would think being with people
so outside his world as the Klosters intolerable. But of course then
he wouldn't be with them. It wouldn't interest him. It is so funny to
watch his set, regular, wooden profile, and then when he turns and
looks at one to see his eyes. The difference just eyes can make! His
face is the face of the drilled, of the perfect unthinking machine, the
correct and well-born Oberleutnant; and out of it look the eyes of a
human being who knows, or will know I'm certain before life has done
with him, what exultations are, and agonies, and love, and man's
unconquerable mind. He really is very nice. I'm sure you'd like him.
After lunch, and after Kloster had said some more regrettable things,
being much moved, it appeared, by the palace facing him and by some
personal recollections he had of the particular Hohenzollern it
contained, while I lay looking up along the smooth beech-trunks to
their bright leaves glancing against the wonderful blue of the sky--oh
it was so lovely, little mother!--and Frau Kloster sometimes said
_Aber_ Adolf, and occasionally announced that she had slain another
mosquito, we motored on towards Brandenburg, along the chain of lakes
formed by the Havel. It was like heaven after the Lutzowstrasse. And
at four o'clock we stopped at a Gasthaus in the pinewoods and had
coffee and wild strawberries, and Herr von Inster paddled me out on the
Havel in an old punt we found moored among the rushes.
It looked so queer to see an officer in full Sunday splendour punting,
but there are a few things which seem to us ridiculous that Germans do
with great simplicity. It was rather like being punted on the Thames
by somebody in a top hat and a black coat. He looked like a bright
dragon-fly in his lean elegance, balancing on the rotten little board
across the end of the punt; or like Siegfried, made up to date, on his
journey down the Rhine,--made very much up to date, his gorgeous
barbaric boat and fine swaggering body that ate half a sheep at a
sitting and made large love to lusty goddesses wittled away by the
centuries to this old punt being paddled about slowly by a lean man
with thoughtful eyes.
I told him he was like Siegfried in the second act of the
Gotterdammerung, but worn a little thin by the passage of the ages, and
he laughed and said that he at least had got Brunnhilde safe in the
boat with him, and wasn't going to have to climb through fire to fetch
her. He says he thinks Wagner's music and Strauss's intimately
characteristic of modern Germany: the noise, the sugary sentimentality
making the public weep tears of melted sugar, he said, the brutal
glorification of force, the all-conquering swagger, the exaggeration of
emotions, the big gloom. They were the natural expression, he said, of
the phase Germany was passing through, and Strauss is its latest
flowering,--even noisier, even more bloody, of a bigger gloom. In that
immense noise, he said, was all Germany as it is now, as it will go on
being till it wakes up from the nightmare dream of conquest that has
possessed it ever since the present emperor came to the throne.
"I'm sure you're saying things you oughtn't to," I said.
"Of course," he said. "One always is in Germany. Everything being
forbidden, there is nothing left but to sin. I have yet to learn that
a multiplicity of laws makes people behave. Behave, I mean, in the way
Authority wishes."
"But Kloster says you're a nation of slaves, and that the drilling you
get _does_ make you behave in the way Authority wishes."
He said it was true they were slaves, but that slaves were of two
kinds,--the completely cowed, who gave no further trouble, and the
furtive evaders, who consoled themselves for their outward conformity
to regulations by every sort of forbidden indulgence in thought and
speech. "This is the kind that only waits for an opportunity to flare
out and free itself," he said. "Mind, thinking, can't be chained up.
Authority knows this, and of all things in the world fears thought."
He talked about the Sarajevo assassinations, and said, he was afraid
they would not be settled very easily. He said Germany is
seething,--seething, he said emphatically, with desire to fight; that
it is almost impossible to have a great army at such a pitch of
perfection as the German army is now and not use it; that if a thing
like that isn't used it will fester inwardly and set up endless
internal mischief and become a danger to the very Crown that created
it. To have it hanging about idle in this ripe state, he said, is like
keeping an unexercised young horse tied up in the stable on full feed;
it would soon kick the stable to pieces, wouldn't it, he said.
"I hate armies," I said. "I hate soldiering, and all it stands for of
aggression, and cruelty, and crime on so big a scale that it's
unpunishable."
"Great God, and don't I!" He exclaimed, with infinite fervour.
He told me something that greatly horrified me. He says that children
kill themselves in Germany. They commit suicide, schoolchildren and
even younger ones, in great numbers every year. He says they're driven
to it by the sheer cruelty of the way they are overworked and made to
feel that if they are not moved up in the school at the set time they
and their parents are for ever disgraced and their whole career
blasted. Imagine the misery a wretched child must suffer before it
reaches the stage of _preferring_ to kill itself! No other nation has
this blot on it.
"Yes," he said, nodding in agreement with the expression on my face,
"yes, we are mad. It is in this reign that we've gone mad, mad with
the obsession to get at all costs and by any means to the top of the
world. We must outstrip; outstrip at whatever cost of happiness and
life. We must be better trained, more efficient, quicker at grabbing
than other nations, and it is the children who must do it for us. Our
future rests on their brains. And if they fail, if they can't stand
the strain, we break them. They're of no future use. Let them go.
Who cares if they kill themselves? So many fewer inefficients, that's
all. The State considers that they are better dead."
And all the while, while he was telling me these things, on the shore
lay Kloster and his wife, neatly spread out side by side beneath a tree
asleep with their handkerchiefs over their faces. That's the idea
we've got in England of Germany,--multitudes of comfortable couples,
kindly and sleepy, snoozing away the afternoon hours in gardens or pine
forests. That's the idea the Government wants to keep before Europe,
Herr von Inster says, this idea of benevolent, beery harmlessness. It
doesn't want other nations to know about the children, the dead, flung
aside children, the ruthless breaking up of any material that will not
help in the driving of their great machine of destruction, because then
the other nations would know, he says, before Germany is ready for it
to be known, that she will stick at nothing.
Wanda has just taken away my lamp, Good night my own sweet mother.
Your Chris.
_Berlin, Wednesday, July 8th, 1914_.
Beloved mother,
Kloster says I'm to go into the country this very week and not come
back for a whole fortnight. This is just a line to tell you this, and
that he has written to a forester's family he knows living in the
depths of the forests up beyond Stettin. They take in summer-boarders,
and have had pupils of his before, and he is arranging with them for me
to go there this very next Saturday.
Do you mind, darling mother? I mean, my doing something so suddenly
without asking you first? But I'm like the tail being wagged by the
dog, obliged to wag whether it wants to or not. I'm very unhappy at
being shovelled off like this, away from my lessons for two solid
weeks, but it's no use my protesting. One can't protest with Kloster.
He says he won't teach me any more if I don't go. He was quite angry
at last when I begged, and said it wouldn't be worth his while to go on
teaching any one so stale with over-practising when they weren't fit to
practise, and that if I didn't stop, all I'd ever be able to do would
be to play in the second row of violins--(not even the first!)--at a
pantomime. That shrivelled me up into silence. Horror-stricken
silence. Then he got kind again, and said I had this precious
gift--God, he said, alone knew why I had got it, I a woman; what, he
asked, staring prawnishly, is the good of a woman's having such a
stroke of luck?--and that it was a great responsibility, and I wasn't
to suppose it was my gift only, to spoil and mess up as I chose, but
that it belonged to the world. When he said that, cold shivers
trickled down my spine. He looked so solemn, and he made me feel so
solemn, as though I were being turned, like Wordsworth in The Prelude,
into a dedicated spirit.
But I expect he is right, and it is time I went where it is cooler for
a little while. I've been getting steadily angrier at nothing all the
week, and more and more fretted by the flies, and one day--would you
believe it--I actually sat down and cried with irritation because of
those silly flies. I've had to promise not to touch a fiddle for the
first week I'm away, and during the second week not to work more than
two hours a day, and then I may come back if I feel quite well again.
He says he'll be at Heringsdorf, which is a seaside place not very far
away from where I shall be, for ten days himself, and will come over
and see if I'm being good. He says the Koseritz's country place isn't
far from where I shall be, so I shan't feel as if I didn't know a soul
anywhere. The Koseritz party at which I was to play never came off. I
was glad of that. I didn't a bit want to play at it, or bother about
it, or anything else. The hot weather drove the Grafin into the
country, Herr von Inster told me, He too seems to think I ought to go
away. I saw him this afternoon after being with Kloster, and he says
he'll go down to his aunt's--that is Grafin Koseritz--while I'm in the
neighbourhood, and will ride over and see me. I'm sure you'd like him
very much. My address will be:
_bei Herrn Oberforster Bornsted
Schuppenfelde
Reg. Bez. Stettin_.
I don't know what Reg. Bez. means. I've copied it from a card Kloster
gave me, and I expect you had better put it on the envelope. I'll
write and tell you directly I get there. Don't worry about me, little
mother; Kloster says they are fearfully kind people, and it's the
healthiest place, in the heart of the forest, away on the edge of a
thing they call the Haff, which is water. He says that in a week I
shall be leaping about like a young roe on the hill side; and he tries
to lash me to enthusiasm by talking of all the wild strawberries there
are there, and all the cream.
My heart's love, darling mother.
Your confused and rather hustled Chris.
_Oberforsterei, Schuppenfelde, July 11th, 1914_.
My own little mother,
Here I am, and it is lovely. I must just tell you about it before I go
to bed. We're buried in forest, eight miles from the nearest station,
and that's only a Kleinbahn station, a toy thing into which a small
train crawls twice a day, having been getting to it for more than three
hours from Stettin. The Oberforster met me in a high yellow carriage,
drawn by two long-tailed horses who hadn't been worried with much drill
judging from their individualistic behaviour, and we lurched over
forest tracks that were sometimes deep sand and sometimes all roots,
and the evening air was so delicious after the train, so full of
different scents and freshness, that I did nothing but lift up my nose
and sniff with joy.
The Oberforster thought I had a cold, without at the same time having a
handkerchief; and presently, after a period of uneasiness on my behalf,
offered me his. "It is not quite clean," he said, "but it is better
than none." And he shouted, because I was a foreigner and therefore
would understand better if he shouted.
I explained as well as I could, which was not very, that my sniffs were
sniffs of exultation.
"_Ach so_," he said, indulgent with the indulgence one feels towards a
newly arrived guest, before one knows what they are really like.
We drove on in silence after that. Our wheels made hardly any noise on
the sandy track, and I suddenly discovered how long it is since I've
heard any birds. I wish you had come with me here, little mother; I
wish you had been on that drive this evening. There were jays, and
magpies, and woodpeckers, and little tiny birds like finches that kept
on repeating in a monotonous sweet pipe the opening bar of the
Beethoven C minor Symphony No. 5. We met nobody the whole way except a
man with a cartload of wood, who greeted the Oberforster with immense
respect, and some dilapidated little children picking wild
strawberries. I wanted to remark on their dilapidation, which seemed
very irregular in this well-conducted country, but thought I had best
leave reasoned conversation alone till I've had time to learn more
German, which I'm going to do diligently here, and till the Oberforster
has discovered he needn't shout in order to make me understand.
Sitting so close to my ear, when he shouted into it it was exactly as
though some one had hit me, and hurt just as much.
He is a huge rawboned man, with the flat-backed head and protruding
ears so many Germans have. What is it that is left out of their heads,
I wonder? His moustache is like the Kaiser's, and he looks rather a
fine figure of a man in his grey-green forester's uniform and becoming
slouch hat with a feather stuck in it. Without his hat he is less
impressive, because of his head. I suppose he has to have a head, but
if he didn't have to he'd be very good-looking.
This is such a sweet place, little mother. I've got the dearest little
clean bare bedroom, so attractive after the grim splendours of my
drawingroom-bedroom at Frau Berg's. You can't think how lovely it is
being here after the long hot journey. It's no fun travelling alone in
Germany if you're a woman. I was elbowed about and pushed out of the
way at stations by any men and boys there were as if I had been an
ownerless trunk. Either that, or they stared incredibly, and said
things. One little boy--he couldn't have been more than ten--winked at
me and whispered something about kissing. The station at Stettin was
horrible, much worse than the Berlin one. I don't know where they all
came from, the crowds of hooligan boys, just below military age, and
extraordinarily disreputable and insolent. To add to the confusion on
the platform there were hundreds of Russians and Poles with their
families and bundles--I asked my porter who they were, and he told
me--being taken from one place where they had been working in the
fields to another place, shepherded by a German overseer with a fierce
dog and a revolver; very poor and ragged, all of them, but gentle, and,
compared to the Germans, of beautiful manners; and there were a good
many officers--it was altogether the most excited station I've seen, I
think--and they stared too, but I'm certain that if I had been in a
difficulty and wanted help they would have walked away. Kloster told
me Germans divide women into two classes: those they want to kiss, and
those they want to kick, who are all those they don't want to kiss.
One can be kissed and kicked in lots of ways besides actually, I think,
and I felt as if I had been both on that dreadful platform at Stettin.
So you can imagine how heavenly it was to get into this beautiful
forest, away from all that, into the quiet, the _holiness_. Frau
Bornsted, who learned English at school, told me all the farms,
including hers, are worked by Russians and Poles who are fetched over
every spring in thousands by German overseers. "It is a good
arrangement," she said. "In case of war we would not permit their
departure, and so would our fields continue to be tilled." In case of
war! Always that word on their tongues. Even in this distant corner
of peace.
The Oberforsterei is a low white house with a clearing round it in
which potatoes have been planted, and a meadow at the back going down
to a stream, and a garden in front behind a low paling, full of pinks
and larkspurs and pansies. A pair of antlers is nailed over the door,
proud relic of an enormous stag the Oberforster shot on an unusually
lucky day, and Frau Bornsted was sewing in the porch beneath
honeysuckle when we arrived. It was just like the Germany one had in
one's story books in the schoolroom days. It seemed too good to be
true after the Lutzowstrasse. Frau Bornsted is quite a pretty young
woman, flat rather than slender, tall, with lovely deep blue eyes and
long black eyelashes. She would be very pretty if it occurred to her
that she is pretty, but evidently it doesn't, or else it isn't proper
to be pretty here; I think this is the real explanation of the way her
hair is scraped hack into a little hard knob, and her face shows signs
of being scrubbed every day with the same soap and the same energy she
uses for the kitchen table. She has no children, and isn't, I suppose,
more than twenty five, but she looks as thirty five, or even forty,
looks in England.
I love it all. It is really just like a story book. We had supper out
in the porch, prepared, spread, and fetched by Frau Bornsted, and it
was a milk soup--very nice and funny, and I lapped it up like a thirsty
kitten--and cold meat, and fried potatoes, and curds and whey, and wild
strawberries and cream. They have an active cow who does all the curds
and whey and cream and butter and milk-soup, besides keeping on having
calves without a murmur,--"She is an example," said Frau Bornsted, who
wants to talk English all the time, which will play havoc, I'm afraid,
with my wanting to talk German.
She took me to a window and showed me the cow, pasturing, like David,
beside still waters. "And without rebellious thoughts unsuited to her
sex," said Frau Bornsted, turning and looking at me. She showed what
she was thinking of by adding, "I hope you are not a suffragette?"
The Oberforster put on a thin green linen coat for supper, which he
left unbuttoned to mark that he was off duty, and we sat round the
table till it was starlight. Owls hooted in the forest across the
road, and bats darted about our heads. Also there were mosquitoes. A
great _many_ mosquitoes. Herr Bornsted told me I wouldn't mind them
after a while. "_Herrlich_," I said, with real enthusiasm.
And now I'm going to bed. Kloster was right to send me here. I've
been leaning out of my window. The night tonight is the most beautiful
thing, a great dark cave of softness. I'm at the back of the house
where the meadow is and the good cow, and beyond the meadow there's
another belt of forest, and then just over the tops of the pines, which
are a little more softly dark than the rest of the soft darkness,
there's a pale line of light that is the star-lit water of the Haff.
Frogs are croaking down by the stream, every now and then an owl hoots
somewhere in the distance, and the air comes up to my face off the long
grass cool and damp. I can't tell you the effect the blessed silence,
the blessed peace has on me after the fret of Berlin. It feels like
getting back to God. It feels like being home again in heaven after
having been obliged to spend six weeks in hell. And yet here, even
here in the very lap of peace, as we sat in the porch after supper the
Oberforster talked ceaselessly of Weltpolitik. The very sound of that
word now makes me wince; for translated into plain English, what it
means when you've pulled all the trimmings off and look at it squarely,
is just taking other people's belongings, beginning with their blood.
I must learn enough German to suggest that to the Oberforster: Murder,
as a preliminary to Theft. I'm afraid he would send me straight back
in disgrace to Frau Berg.
Good night darling mother. I'll write oftener now. My rules don't
count this fortnight. Bless you, beloved little mother.
Your Chris.
_Schuppenfelde, Monday, July 13th_.
Sweet mother,
I got your letter from Switzerland forwarded on this morning, and like
to feel you're by so much nearer me than you were a week ago. At
least, I try to persuade myself that it's a thing to like, but I know
in my heart it makes no earthly difference. If you're only a mile away
and I mayn't see you, what's the good? You might as well be a
thousand. The one thing that will get me to you again is accomplished
work. I want to work, to be quick; and here I am idle, precious days
passing, each of which not used for working means one day longer away
from you. And I'm so well. There's no earthly reason why I shouldn't
start practising again this very minute. A day yesterday in the forest
has cured me completely. By the time I've lived through my week of
promised idleness I shall be kicking my loose box to pieces! And then
for another whole week there'll only be two hours of my violin allowed.
Why, I shall fall on those miserable two hours like a famished beggar
on a crust.
Well, I'm not going to grumble. It's only that I love you so, and miss
you so very much. You know how I always missed you on Sunday in
Berlin, because then I had time to feel, to remember; and here it is
all Sundays. I've had two of them already, yesterday and today, and I
don't know what it will be like by the time I've had the rest. I
walked miles yesterday, and the more beautiful it was the more I missed
you. What's the good of having all this loveliness by oneself? I want
somebody with me to see it and feel it too. If you were here how happy
we should be!
I wish you knew Herr von Inster, for I know you'd like him. I do think
he's unusual, and you like unusual people. I had a letter from him
today, sent with a book he thought I'd like, but I've read it,--it is
Selma Lagerlof's Jerusalem; do you remember our reading it together
that Easter in Cornwall? But wasn't it very charming of him to send
it? He says he is coming this way the end of the week and will call on
me and renew his acquaintance with the Oberforster, with whom he says
he has gone shooting sometimes when he has been staying at Koseritz.
His Christian name is Bernd. Doesn't it sound nice and _honest_.
I suppose by the end of the week he means Saturday, which is a very
long way off. Saturdays used to seem to come rushing on to the very
heels of Mondays in Berlin when I was busy working. Little mother, you
can take it from me, from your wise, smug daughter, that work is the
key to every happiness. Without it happiness won't come unlocked.
What do people do who don't do anything, I wonder?
Koseritz is only five miles away, and as he'll stay there, I suppose,
with his relations, he won't have very far to come. He'll ride over, I
expect. He looks so nice on a horse. I saw him once in the
Thiergarten, riding. I'd love to ride on these forest roads,--the
sandy ones are perfect for riding; but when I asked the Oberforster
today, after I got Herr von Inster's letter, whether he could lend me a
horse while I was here, what do you think I found out? That Kloster,
suspecting I might want to ride, had written him instructions on no
account to allow me to. Because I might tumble off, if you please, and
sprain either of my precious wrists. Did you ever. I believe Kloster
regards me only as a vessel for carrying about music to other people,
not as a human being at all. It is like the way jockeys are kept,
strict and watched, before a race.
Frau Bornsted gazed at me with her large serious eyes, and said, "Do
you play the violin, then, so well?"
"No," I snapped. "I don't." And I drummed with my fingers on the
windowpane and felt as rebellious as six years old.
But of course I'm going to be good. I won't do anything that may delay
my getting home to you.
The Bornsteds say Koseritz is a very beautiful place, on the very edge
of the Haff. They talk with deep respectfulness of the Herr Graf, and
the Frau Grafin, and the _junge_ Komtesse. It's wonderful how
respectful Germans are towards those definitely above them. And so
uncritical. Kloster says that it is drill does it. You never get over
the awe, he says, for the sergeant, for the lieutenant, for whoever, as
you rise a step, is one step higher. I told the Bornsteds I had met
the Koseritzes in Berlin, and they looked at me with a new interest,
and Frau Bornsted, who has been very prettily taking me in hand and
endeavouring to root out the opinions she takes for granted that I
hold, being an _Englanderin_, came down for a while more nearly to my
level, and after having by questioning learned that I had lunched with
the Koseritzes, and having endeavoured to extract, also by questioning,
what we had had to eat, which I couldn't remember except the whipped
cream I spilt on the floor, she remarked, slowly nodding her head, "It
must have been very agreeable for you to be with the _grafliche
Familie_."
"And for them to be with me," I said, moved to forwardness by being
full of forest air, which goes to my head.
I suppose this was what they call disrespectful without being funny,
for Frau Bornsted looked at me in silence, and Herr Bornsted, who
doesn't understand English, asked in German, seeing his wife solemn,
"What does she say?" And when she told him he said, "_Ach_," and
showed his disapproval by absorbing himself in the _Deutsche
Tageszeitzing_.
It's wonderful how easy it is to be disrespectful in Germany. You've
only got to be the least bit cheerful and let some of it out, and
you've done it.
"Why are the English always so like that?" Frau Bornsted asked
presently, after having marked her regret at my behaviour by not saying
anything for five minutes.
"Like what?"
"So--so without reverence. And yet you are a religious people. You
send out missionaries."
"Yes, and support bishops," I said. "You haven't got any bishops."
"You are the first nation in the world as regards missionaries," she
said, gazing at me thoughtfully and taking no notice of the bishops.
"My father"--her father is a pastor--"has a great admiration for your
missionaries. How is it you have so many missionaries and at the same
time so little reverence ?"
"Perhaps that _is_ why," I said; and started off explaining, while she
looked at me with beautiful uncomprehending eyes, that the reaction
from the missionaries and from the kind of spirit that prompts their
raising and export might conceivably produce a desire to be irreverent
and laugh, and that life more and more seemed to me like a pendulum,
and that it needs must swing both ways.
Frau Bornsted sat twisting her wedding ring on her finger till I was
quiet again. She does this whenever I emit anything that can be called
an idea. It reminds her that she is married, and that I, as she says,
am _nur ein junges Madchen_, and therefore not to be taken seriously.
When I had finished about the pendulum, she said, "All this will be
cured when you have a husband."
There was a tea party here yesterday afternoon. At least, it was
coffee. I thought there were no neighbours, and when I came back late
from having been all day in the forest, missing with an indifference
that amazed Frau Bornsted the lure of her Sunday dinner, and taking
some plum-cake and two Bibles with me, English and German, because I'm
going to learn German that way among other ways while I'm here, and I
think it's a very good way, and it immensely impressed Frau Bornsted to
see me take two Bibles out for a walk,--when I got back about five,
untidy and hot and able to say off a whole psalm in perfect Lutheran
German, I found several high yellow carriages, like the one I was
fetched in on Saturday, in front of the paling, with nosebags and rugs
on the horses, and indoors in the parlour a number of other foresters
and their wives, besides Frau Bornsted's father and mother and younger
sister, and the local doctor and his wife, and the Herr Lehrer, a tall
young man in spectacles who teaches in the village school two miles
away.
I was astonished, for I imagined complete isolation here. Frau
Bornsted says, though, that this only happens on Sundays. They were
sitting round the remnants of coffee and cake, the men smoking and
talking together apart from the women, the women with their
bonnet-strings untied and hanging over their bosoms, of which there
seemed to be many and much, telling each other, while they fanned
themselves with immense handkerchiefs, what they had had for their
Sunday dinner.
I would have slunk away when I heard the noise of voices, and gone
round to the peaceful company of the cow, but Frau Bornsted saw me
coming up the path and called me in.
I went in reluctantly, and on my appearing there was a dead silence,
which would have unnerved me if I hadn't still had my eyes so full of
sunlight that I hardly saw anything in the dark room, and stood there
blinking.
"_Unsere junge Englanderin," said Frau Bornsted, presenting me.
"Schuhlerin von_ Kloster--_grosses Talent_,--" I heard her adding,
handing round the bits of information as though it was cake.
They all said _Ach so_, and _Wirklich_, and somebody asked if I liked
Germany, and I said, still not seeing much, "_Es ist wundervoll_,"
which provoked a murmur of applause, as the newspapers say.
I found I was expected to sit in a corner with Frau Bornsted's sister,
who with the Lehrer and myself, being all of us unmarried, represented
what the others spoke of as _die Jugend_, and that I was to answer
sweetly and modestly any question I was asked by the others, but not to
ask any myself, or indeed not to speak at all unless in the form of
answering. I gathered this from the behaviour of Frau Bornsted's
sister; but I do find it very hard not to be natural, and it's natural
to me, as you know to your cost, don't you, little mother, to ask what
things mean and why.
There was a great silence while I was given a cup of coffee and some
cake by Frau Bornsted, helped by her sister. The young man, the third
in our trio of youth, sat motionless in the chair next to me while this
was done. I wanted to fetch my cup myself, rather than let Frau
Bornsted wait on me, but she pressed me down into my chair again with
firmness and the pained look of one who is witnessing the committing of
a solecism. "_Bitte_--take place again," she said, her English giving
way in the stress of getting me to behave as I should.
The women looked on with open interest and curiosity, examining my
clothes and hair and hands and the Bibles I was clutching and the
flowers I had stuck in where the Psalms are, because I never can find
the Psalms right off. The men looked too, but with caution. I was
fearfully untidy. You would have been shocked. But I don't know how
one is to lie about on moss all day and stay neat, and nobody told me I
was going to tumble into the middle of a party.
The first to disentangle himself from the rest and come and speak to me
was Frau Bornsted's father, Pastor Wienicke. He came and stood in
front of me, his legs apart and a cigar in his mouth, and he took the
cigar out to tell me, what I already knew, that I was English. "_Sie
sind englisch_," said Herr Pastor Wienicke.
"Ja," said I, as modestly as I could, which wasn't very.
There was something about the party that made me sit up on the edge of
my chair with my feet neatly side by side, and hold my cup as carefully
as if I had been at a school treat and expecting the rector every
minute. "England," said the pastor, while everybody else listened,--he
spoke in German--"is, I think I may say, still a great country."
"_Ja_?" said I politely, tilting up the _ja_ a little at its end, which
was meant to suggest not only a deferential, "If you say so it must be
so" attitude, but also a courteous doubt as to whether any country
could properly be called great in a world in which the standard of
greatness was set by so splendid an example of it as his own country.
And it did suggest this, for he said, "_Oh doch_," balancing himself on
his heels and toes alternately, as though balancing himself into exact
justice. "_Oh doch._ I think one may honestly say she still is a
great country, But--" and he raised his voice and his forefinger at
me,--"let her beware of her money bags. That is my word to England:
Beware of thy money bags."
There was a sound of approval in the room, and they all nodded their
heads.
He looked at me, and as I supposed he might be expecting an answer I
thought I had better say _ja_ again, so I did.
"England," he then continued, "is our cousin, our blood-relation.
Therefore is it that we can and must tell her the truth, even if it is
unpalatable."
"_Ja_," I said, as he paused again; only there were several little
things I would have liked to have said about that, if I had been able
to talk German properly. But I had nothing but my list of exclamations
and the psalms I had learnt ready. So I said _Ja_, and tried to look
modest and intelligent.
"Her love of money, her materialism--these are her great dangers," he
said. "I do not like to contemplate, and I ask my friends here--" he
turned slowly round on his heels and back again--"whether they would
like to contemplate a day when the sun of the British Empire, that
Empire which, after all, has upheld the cause of religion with
faithfulness and persistence for so long, shall be seen at last
descending, to rise no more, in an engulfing ocean of over-indulged
appetites."
"_Ja_," I said; and then perceiving it was the wrong word, hastily
amended in English, "I mean _nein_."
He looked at me for a moment more carefully. Then deciding that all
was well he went on.
"England," he said, "is our natural ally. She is of the same blood,
the same faith, and the same colour. Behold the other races of the
world, and they are either partly, chiefly, or altogether black. The
blonde races are, like the dawn, destined to drive away the darkness.
They must stand together shoulder to shoulder in any discord that may,
in the future, gash the harmony of the world."
"_Ja_," I said, as one who should, at the conclusion of a Psalm, be
saying Selah.
"We live in serious times," he said. "They may easily become more
serious. Round us stand the Latins and the Slavs, armed to the teeth,
bursting with envy of our goods, of our proud calm, and watching for
the moment when they can fall upon us with criminal and murderous
intent. Is it not so, my Fraulein?"
"_Ja_" said I, forced to agree because of my unfortunate emptiness of
German.
The only thing I could have reeled off at him was the Psalm I had
learnt, and I did long to, because it was the one asking why the
heathen so furiously rage together; but you see, little mother, though
I longed to I couldn't have followed it up, and having fired it off I'd
have sat there defenceless while he annihilated me.
But I don't know what they all mean by this constant talk of envious
nations crouching ready to spring at them. They talk and talk about
it, and their papers write and write about it, till they inflame each
other into a fever of pugnaciousness. I've never been anywhere in the
least like it in my life. In England people talked of a thousand
things, and hardly ever of war. When we were in Italy, and that time
in Paris, we hardly heard it mentioned. Directly my train got into
Germany at Goch coming from Flushing, and Germans began to get in,
there in the very train this everlasting talk of war and the
enviousness of other nations began, and it has never left off since.
The Archduke's murder didn't start it; it was going on weeks before
that, when first I came. It has been going on, Kloster says, growing
in clamour, for years, ever since the present Kaiser succeeded to the
throne. Kloster says the nation thinks it feels all this, but it is
merely being stage-managed by the group of men at the top, headed by S.
M. So well stage-managed is it, so carefully taught by such slow
degrees, that it is absolutely convinced it has arrived at its opinions
and judgments by itself. I wonder if these people are mad. Is it
possible for a whole nation to go mad at once? It is they who seem to
have the enviousness, to be torn with desire to get what isn't theirs.
"The disastrous crime of Sarajevo," continued Pastor Wienicke, "cannot
in this connection pass unnoticed. To smite down a God's Anointed!"
He held up his hands. "Not yet, it is true, an actually Anointed, but
set aside by God for future use. It is typical of the world outside
our Fatherland. Lawlessness and its companion Sacrilege stalk at
large. Women emerge from the seclusion God has arranged for them, and
rear their heads in shameless competition with men. Our rulers, whom
God has given us so that they shall guide and lead us and in return be
reverently taken care of, are blasphemously bombed." He flung both his
arms heavenwards. "Arise, Germany!" he cried. "Arise and show
thyself! Arise in thy might, I say, and let our enemies be scattered!"
Then he wiped his forehead, looked round in recognition of the _sehr
guts_ and _ausserordentlich schon gesagts_ that were being flung about,
re-lit his cigar with the aid of the Herr Lehrer, who sprang
obsequiously forward with a match, and sat down.
Wasn't it a good thing he sat down. I felt so much happier. But just
as it was at the meals at Frau Berg's so it was at the coffee party
here,--I was singled out and talked to, or at, by the entire company.
The concentration of curiosity of Germans is terrible. But it's more
than curiosity, it's a kind of determination to crush what I'm thinking
out of me and force what they're thinking into me. I shall see as they
do; I shall think as they do; they'll shout at me till I'm forced to.
That's what I feel. I don't a bit know if it isn't quite a wrong idea
I've got, but somehow my very bones feel it.
Would you believe it, they stayed to supper, all of them, and never
went away till ten o'clock. Frau Bornsted says one always does that in
the country here when invited to afternoon coffee. I won't tell you
any more of what they said, because it was all on exactly the same
lines, the older men singling me out one by one and very loudly telling
me variations of Pastor Wienicke's theme, the women going for me in
twos and threes, more definitely bloodthirsty than the men, more like
Frau Berg on the subject of blood-letting, more openly greedy. They
were all disconcerted and uneasy because nothing more has been heard of
the Austrian assassination. The silence from Vienna worries them, I
gather, very much. They are afraid, actually they are afraid, Austria
may be going to do nothing except just punish the murderers, and so
miss the glorious opportunity for war. I wonder if you can the least
realize, you sane mother in a sane place, the state they're in here,
the sort of boiling and straining. I'm sure the whole of Germany is
the same,--lashed by the few behind the scenes into a fury of
aggressive patriotism. They call it patriotism, but it is just
blood-lust and loot-lust.
I helped Frau Bornsted get supper ready, and was glad to escape into
the peace of the kitchen and stand safely frying potatoes. She was
very sweet in her demure Sunday frock of plain black, and high up round
her ears a little white frill. The solemnity and youth and quaintness
of her are very attractive, and I could easily love her if it weren't
for this madness about Deutschland. She is as mad as any of them, and
in her it is much more disconcerting. We will be discoursing together
gravely--she is always grave, and never knows how funny we both are
being really--about amusing things like husbands and when and if I'm
ever going to get one, and she, full of the dignity and wisdom of the
married, will be giving me much sage counsel with sobriety and
gentleness, when something starts her off about Deutschland. Oh, they
are _intolerable_ about their Deutschland!
The Oberforster is calling for this--he's driving to the post, so
good-bye little darling mother, little beloved and precious one.
Your Chris.
_Schuppenfelde, Thursday, July 16, 1914_.
My blessed mother,
Here's Thursday evening in my week of nothing to do, and me meaning to
write every day to you, and I haven't done it since Monday. It's
because I've had so much time. Really it's because I've been in a sort
of sleep of loveliness. I've been doing nothing except be happy. Not
a soul has been near us since Sunday, and Frau Bornsted says not a soul
will, till next Sunday. Each morning I've come down to a perfect
world, with the sun shining through roses on to our breakfast-table in
the porch, and after breakfast I've crossed the road and gone into the
forest and not come back till late afternoon.
Frau Bornsted has been sweet about it, giving me a little parcel of
food and sending me off with many good wishes for a happy day. I
wanted to help her do her housework, but except my room she won't let
me, having had orders from Kloster that I was to be completely idle.
And it _is_ doing me good. I feel so perfectly content these last
three days. There's nothing fretful about me any more; I feel
harmonized, as if I were so much a part of the light and the air and
the forest that I don't know now where they leave off and I begin. I
sit and watch the fine-weather clouds drifting slowly across the
tree-tops, and wonder if heaven is any better. I go down to the edge
of the Haff, and lie on my face in the long grass, and push up my
sleeves, and slowly stir the shallow golden water about among the
rushes. I pick wild strawberries to eat with my lunch, and after lunch
I lie on the moss and learn the Psalm for the day, first in English and
then in German. About five I begin to go home, walking slowly through
the hot scents of the afternoon forest, feeling as solemn and as
exulting as I suppose a Catholic does when he comes away, shriven and
blest, from confession. In the evening we sit out, and the little
garden grows every minute more enchanted. Frau Bornsted rests after
her labours, with her hands in her lap, and agrees with what the
Oberforster every now and then takes his pipe out of his mouth to say,
and I lie back in my chair and stare at the stars, and I think and
think, and wonder and wonder. And what do you suppose I think and
wonder about, little mother? You and love. I don't know why I say you
and love, for it's the same thing. And so is all this beauty of summer
in the woods, and so is music, and my violin when it gets playing to
me; and the future is full of it, and oh, I do so badly want to say
thank you to some one!
Good night my most precious mother.
Your Chris.
Schuppenfelde, Friday, July 17,1914.
This morning when I came down to breakfast, sweet mother, there at the
foot of the stairs was Herr von Inster. He didn't say anything, but
watched me coming down with the contented look he has I like so much.
I was frightfully pleased to see him, and smiled all over myself.
"Oh," I exclaimed, "so you've come."
He held out his hand and helped me down the last steps. He was in
green shooting clothes, like the Oberforster's, but without the
official buttons, and looked very nice. You'd like him, I'm sure.
You'd like what he looks like, and like what he is.
He had been in the forest since four this morning, shooting with his
colonel, who came down with him to Koseritz last night. The colonel
and Graf Koseritz, who came down from Berlin with them, were both
breakfasting, attended by the Bornsteds, and it shows how soundly I
sleep here that I hadn't heard anything.
"And aren't you having any breakfast?" I asked.
"I will now," he said. "I was listening for your door to open,"