I laughed and kissed her.

"It is no laughing matter," she said, with solemn eyes.

"No," I said, suddenly solemn too, remembering how Agatha Trent died.

And I took her face in both my hands and kissed her again, but with the

seriousness of a parting blessing. For all her dignity, she has to

reach up to me when I kiss her.

She put my hair tidy with a gentle hand, and said, "You are not at all

what a _junges Madchen_ generally is, but you are very nice. Please

wish that my child may be a boy, so that I shall become the mother of a

soldier."

I kissed her again, and got out of it that way, for I don't wish

anything of the sort, and with that we parted.

Meanwhile the Grafin had been sitting very firmly in her carriage,

having refused all Frau Bornsted's entreaties to come in. It was

wonderful to see how affable she was and yet how firm, and wonderful to

see the gulf her affability put between the Bornsteds--he was at the

gate too, bowing--and herself.

And now here I am, and it's past eleven, and my window opens right on

to the Haff, and far away across the water I can see the lights of

Swinemunde twinkling where the Haff joins the open sea. It is a most

beautiful old house, centuries old, and we had a romantic

evening,--first at supper in a long narrow pannelled room lit by

candles, and then on the terrace beneath my window, where larkspurs

grow against the low wall along the water's edge. There is nobody here

except the Koseritzes, and Herr von Inster, and two girl-friends of

Helena's, very pretty and smart-looking, and an old lady who was once

the Grafin's governess and comes here every summer to enjoy what she

called, speaking English to me, the Summer Fresh.

It was like a dream. The water made lovely little soft noises along

the wall of the terrace. It was so still that we could hear the throb

of a steamer far away on the Haff, crossing from Stettin to Swinemunde.

The Graf, as usual, said nothing,--"He has much to think of," the

Grafin whispered to me. The girls talked together in undertones, which

would have made me feel shy and out of it if I hadn't somehow not

minded a bit, and they did look exactly what the Colonel had said they

were, in their pale evening frocks,--a nosegay of very delicate and

well cared-for hothouse flowers. I had on my evening frock for the

first time since I left England, and after the weeks of high blouses

felt conspicuously and terribly overdressed up in my bedroom and till I

saw the frocks the others had on, and then I felt the exact opposite.

Herr von Inster hardly spoke, and not to me at all, but I didn't mind,

I had so much in my head that he had talked about this morning. I feel

so completely natural with him, so content; and I think it is because

he is here at Koseritz that I'm so comfortable, and not in the least

shy, as I was that day at luncheon. I simply take things as they come,

and don't think about myself at all. When I came down to supper

to-night he was waiting in the hall, to show me the way, he said; and

he watched me coming down the stairs with that look in his eyes that is

such a contrast to the smart, alert efficiency of his figure and

manner,--it is so gentle, so kind. I went into the room where they all

were with a funny feeling of being safe. I don't even know whether

Helena stared.

To-morrow the Klosters come over, and are going to stay the night, and

to-morrow I may play my fiddle again. I've faithfully kept my promise

and not touched it. Really, as it's a quarter to twelve now and at

midnight my week's fasting will be over, I might begin and play it

quite soon. I wonder what would happen if I sat on my window-sill and

played Ravel to the larkspurs and the stars! I believe it would make

even the Graf say something. But I won't do anything so unlike, as

Frau Bornsted would say, what a _junges Madchen_ generally does, but go

to bed instead, into the prettiest bed I've slept in since I had a

frilly cot in the nursery,--all pink silk coverlet and lace-edged

sheets. The room is just like an English country-house bedroom; in

fact the Grafin told me she got all her chintzes in London! It's so

funny after my room at Frau Berg's, and my little unpainted wooden

attic at the Oberforsterei.

Good night, my blessed mother. There are two owls somewhere calling to

each other in the forest. Not another sound. Such utter peace.

Your Chris.

_Koseritz, Sunday evening, July 19, 1914_.

My own darling mother,

I don't know what you'll say, but I'm engaged to Bernd. That's Herr

von Inster. You know his name is Bernd? I don't know what to say to

it myself. I can't quite believe it. This time last night I was

writing to you in this very room, with no thought of anything in the

world but just ordinary happiness with kind friends and one specially

kind and understanding friend, and here I am twenty-four hours later

done with ordinary happiness, taken into my lover's heart for ever.

It was so strange. I don't believe any girl ever got engaged in quite

that way before. I'm sure everybody thinks we're insane, except

Kloster. Kloster doesn't. He understands.

It was after supper. Only three hours ago. I wonder if it wasn't a

dream. We were all on the terrace, as we were last night. The

Klosters had come early in the afternoon. There wasn't a leaf

stirring, and not a sound except that lapping water against the bottom

of the wall where the larkspurs are. You know how sometimes when

everybody has been talking together without stopping there's a sudden

hush. That happened to-night, and after what seemed a long while of

silence the Grafin said to Kloster, "I suppose, Master, it would be too

much to ask you to play to us?"

"Here?" he said. "Out here?"

"Why not?" she said.

I hung breathless on what he would say. Suppose he played, out there

in the dusk, with the stars and the water and the forest all round us,

what would it be like?

He got up without a word and went indoors.

The Grafin looked uneasy. "I hope," she said to Frau Kloster, "my

asking has not offended him?"

But Bernd knew--Bernd, still at that moment only Herr von Inster for

me. "He is going to play," he said.

And presently he came out again with his Strad, and standing on the

step outside the drawingroom window he played.

I thought, This is the most wonderful moment of my life. But it

wasn't; there was a more wonderful one coming.

We sat there in the great brooding night, and the music told us the

things about love and God that we know but can never say. When he had

done nobody spoke. He stood on the step for a minute in silence, then

he came down to where I was sitting on the low wall by the water and

put the Strad into my hands. "Now you," he said.

Nobody spoke. I felt as though I were asleep.

He took my hand and made me stand up. "Play what you like," he said;

and left me there, and went and sat down again on the steps by the

window.

I don't know what I played. It was the violin that played while I held

it and listened. I forgot everybody,--forgot Kloster critically noting

what I did wrong, and forgot, so completely that I might have been

unconscious, myself. I was _listening_; and what I heard were secrets,

secrets strange and exquisite; noble, and so courageous that suffering

didn't matter, didn't touch,--all the secrets of life. I can't

explain. It wasn't like anything one knows really. It was like

something very important, very beautiful that one _used_ to know, but

has forgotten.

Presently the sounds left off. I didn't feel as though I had had

anything to do with their leaving off. There was dead silence. I

stood wondering rather confusedly, as one wonders when first one wakes

from a dream and sees familiar things again and doesn't quite

understand.

Kloster got up and came and took the Strad from me. I could see his

face in the dusk, and thought it looked queer. He lifted up my hands

one after the other, and kissed them.

But Bernd got up from where he was sitting away from the others, and

took me in his arms and kissed my eyes.

And that's how we were engaged. I think they said something. I don't

know what it was, but there was a murmur, but I seemed very far away

and very safe; and he turned round when they murmured, and took my

hand, and said, "This is my wife." And he looked at me and said, "Is

it not so?" And I said "Yes." And I don't remember what happened next,

and perhaps it was all a dream. I'm so tired,--so tired and heavy with

happiness that I could drop in a heap on the floor and go to sleep like

that. Beloved mother--bless your Chris.

_Koseritz, Monday, July 20_.

My own darling mother,

I'm too happy,--too happy to write, or think, or remember, or do

anything except be happy. You'll forgive me, my own ever-understanding

mother, because the minutes I have to take for other things seem so

snatched away and lost, snatched from the real thing, the one real

thing, which is my lover. Oh, I expect I'm shameless, and I don't

care. Ought I to simper, and pretend I don't feel particularly much?

Be ladylike, and hide how I adore him? Telegraph to me--telegraph your

blessing. I must be blessed by you. Till I have been, it's like not

having had my crown put on, and standing waiting, all ready in my

beautiful clothes of happiness except for that. I don't care if I'm

silly. I don't care about anything. I don't know what they think of

our engagement here. I imagine they deplore it on Bernd's

account,--he's an officer and a Junker and an only son and a person of

promise, and altogether heaps of important things besides the important

thing, which is that he's Bernd. And you see, little mother, I'm only

a woman who is going to have a profession, and that's an impossible

thing from the Junker point of view. It's queer how nothing matters,

no criticism or disapproval, how one can't be touched directly one

loves somebody and is loved back. It is like being inside a magic ring

of safety. Why, I don't think that there's anything that could hurt me

so long as we love each other. We've had a wonderful morning walking

in the forest. It's all quite true what happened last night. It

wasn't a dream. We are engaged. I've hardly seen the others. They

congratulated us quite politely. Kloster was very kind, but anxious

lest I should let love, as he says, spoil art. We laughed at that.

Bernd, who would have been a musician but for his family and his

obligations, is going to be it vicariously through me. I shall work

all the harder with him to help me. How right you were about a lover

being the best of all things in the world! I don't know how anybody

gets on without one. I can't think how I did. It amazes me to

remember that I used to think I was happy. Bless me, little

mother--bless us. Send a telegram. I can't wait.

Your Chris.

_Koseritz, Thursday, July 23_.

My own mother,

Thank you so much for your telegram of blessing, darling one, which I

have just had. It seems to set the seal of happiness on me. I know

you will love Bernd, and understand directly you see him why I do. We

are so placid here these beautiful summer days. Everybody accepts us

now resignedly as a _fait accompli_, and though they remain

unenthusiastic they are polite and tolerant. And whenever I play to

them they all grow kind. It's rather like being Orpheus with his lute,

and they the mountain tops that freeze. I've discovered I can melt

them by just making music. Helena really does love music. It was

quite true what her mother said. Since I played that first wonderful

night of my engagement she has been quite different to me. She still

is silent, because that's her nature, and she still stares; but now she

stares in a sort of surprise, with a question in her eyes. And

wherever she may be in the house or garden, if she hears me beginning

to play she creeps near on tiptoe and listens.

Kloster has gone. He and his wife were both very kind to us, but

Kloster is worried because I've fallen in love. I'm not to go back to

Berlin till Monday, as Bernd can stay on here till then, and there's no

point in spending a Sunday in Berlin unless one has to. Kloster is

going to give me three lessons a week instead of two, and I shall work

now with such renewed delight! He says I won't, but I know better.

Everything I do seems to be touched now with delight. How funny that

room at Frau Berg's will look and feel after being here. But I don't

mind going back to it one little half a scrap. Bernd will be in

Berlin; he'll be writing to me, seeing me, walking with me. With him

there it will be, every bit of it, perfect.

"When I come back to town in October," the Grafin said to me, "you must

stay with us. It is not fitting that Bernd's betrothed should live in

that boarding-house of Frau Berg's. Will not your mother soon join

you?"

It is very kind of her, I think. It appears that a girl who is engaged

has to be chaperoned even more than a girl who isn't. What funny

ancient stuff these conventions are. I wonder how long more we shall

have of them. Of course Frau Berg and her boarders are to the Junker

dreadful beyond words.

But her question about you set me thinking. Won't you come, little

mother? As it is such an unusual and never-to-be-repeated occurrence

in our family that its one and only child should be going to marry?

And yet I can't quite see you in August in lodgings in Berlin, come

down from your beautiful mountain, away from your beautiful lake.

After all, I've only got four more months of it, and then I'm finished

and can go back to you. What is going to happen then, exactly, I don't

know. Bernd says, Marry, and that you'll come and live with us in

Germany. That's all very well, but what about, if I marry so soon,

starting my public career, which was to have begun this next winter?

Kloster says impatiently. Oh marry, and get done with it, and that

then | I'll be sensible again and able to arrange my debut as a

violinist with the calm, I gather he thinks, of the disillusioned.

"I'm perfectly sensible," I said.

"You are not. You are in love. A woman should never be an artist.

Again I say, Mees Chrees, what I have said to you before, that it is

sheer malice on the part of Providence to have taken you, a woman, as

the vessel which is to carry this great gift about the world. A man,

gifted to the extent you so unluckily are, falls in love and is

inspired by it. Indeed, it is in that condition that he does his best

work; which is why the man artist is so seldom a faithful husband, for

the faithful husband is precluded from being in love."

"Why can't he be in love?" I asked, husbands now having become very

interesting to me.

"Because he is a faithful husband."

"But he can be in love with his wife."

"No," said Kloster, "he cannot. And he cannot for the same reason that

no man can go on wanting his dinner who has had it. Whereas," he went

on louder, because I had opened my mouth and was going to say

something, "a woman artist who falls in love neglects everything and

merely loves. Merely loves," he repeated, looking me up and down with

great severity and disfavour.

"You'll see how I'll work," I said.

"Nonsense," he said, waving that aside impatiently. "Which is why," he

continued, "I urge you to marry quickly. Then the woman, so

unfortunately singled out by Providence to be something she is not

fitted for, having married and secured her husband, prey, victim. Or

whatever you prefer to call him--"

"I prefer to call him husband," I said.

"--if she succeeds in steering clear of detaining and delaying objects

like cradles, is cured and can go back with proper serenity to that

which alone matters. Art and the work necessary to produce it. But

she will have wasted time," he said, shaking his head. "She will most

sadly have wasted time."

In my turn I said Nonsense, and laughed with that heavenly, glorious

security one has when one has a lover.

I expect there are some people who may be as Kloster says, but we're

not like them, Bernd and I. We're not going to waste a minute. He

adores my music, and his pride in it inspires me and makes me glow with

longing to do better and better for his sake, so as to see him moved,

to see him with that dear look of happy triumph in his eyes. Why, I

feel lifted high up above any sort of difficulty or obstacle life can

try to put in my way. I'm going to work when I get to Berlin as I

never did before.

I said something like this to Kloster, who replied with great tartness

that I oughtn't to want to do anything for the sake of producing a

certain look in somebody's eyes. "That is not Art, Mees Chrees. That

is nothing that will ever be any good. You are, you see, just the

veriest woman; and here--" he almost cried--"is this gift, this

precious immortal gift, placed in such shaky small hands as yours."

"I'm very sorry," I said, feeling quite ashamed that I had it, he was

so much annoyed.

"No, no," he said, relenting a little, "do not be sorry--marry. Marry

quickly. Then there may be recovery."

And when he was saying good-bye--I tell you this because it will amuse

you--he said with a kind of angry grief that if Providence were

determined in its unaccountable freakishness to place a gift which

should be so exclusively man's in the shell or husk (I forget which he

called it, but anyhow it sounded contemptuous), of a woman, it might at

least have selected an ugly woman. "It need not," he said angrily,

"have taken one who was likely in any case to be selected for purposes

of love-making, and given her, besides the ordinary collection of

allurements provided by nature to attract the male, a _Beethovenkopf_.

Never should that wide sweep of brow and those deep set eyes, the whole

noble thoughtfulness of such a head,"--you mustn't think me vain,

little mother, he positively said all these things and was so

angry--"have been combined with the rubbish, in this case irrelevant

and actually harmful, that goes to make up the usual pretty young face.

Mees Chrees, I could have wished you some minor deformity, such as many

spots, for then you would not now be in this lamentable condition of

being loved and responding to it. And if," he said as a parting shot,

"Providence was determined to commit this folly, it need not have

crowned it by choosing an Englishwoman."

"What?" I said, astonished, following him out on to the steps, for he

has always seemed to like and admire us.

"The English are not musical," he said, climbing into the car that was

to take him to the station, and in which Frau Kloster had been

patiently waiting. "They are not, they never were, and they never will

be. Purcell? A fig for your Purcell. You cannot make a great gallery

of art out of one miniature, however perfect. And as for your moderns,

your Parrys and Stanfords and Elgars and the rest, why, what stuff are

they? Very nice, very good, very conscientious: the translation into

musical notation of respectable English gentlemen in black coats and

silk hats. They are the British Stock Exchange got into music. No,

no," he said, tucking the dust-cover round himself and his wife, "the

English are not musicians. And you," he called back as the car was

moving, "You, Mees Chrees, are a freak,--nothing whatever but a freak

and an accident."

We turned away to go indoors. The Grafin said she considered he might

have wished her good-bye. "After all," she remarked, "I was his

hostess."

She looked thoughtfully at me and Bernd as we stood arm-in-arm aside at

the door to let her pass. "These geniuses," she said, laying her hand

a moment on Bernd's shoulder, "are interesting but difficult."

I think, little mother, she meant me, and was feeling a little sorry

for Bernd!

Isn't it queer how people don't understand. Anyhow, when she had gone

in we looked at each other and laughed, and Bernd took my hands and

kissed them one after the other, and said something so sweet, so

dear,--but I can't tell you what it was. That's the worst of this

having a lover,--all the most wonderful, beautiful things that are

being said to me by him are things I can't tell you, my mother, my

beloved mother whom I've always told everything to all my life. Just

the things you'd love most to hear, the things that crown me with glory

and pride, I can't tell you. It is because they're sacred. Sacred and

holy to him and to me. You must imagine them, my precious one; imagine

the very loveliest things you'd like said to your Chris, and they won't

be half as lovely as what is being said to her. I must go now, because

Bernd and I are going sailing on the Haff in a fishing boat there is.

We're taking tea, and are going to be away till the evening. The

fishing boat has orange-coloured sails, and is quite big,--I mean you

can walk about on her and she doesn't tip up. We're going to run her

nose into the rushes along the shore when we're tired of sailing, and

Bernd is going to hear me say my German psalms and read Heine to me.

Good-bye then for the moment, my little darling one. How very heavenly

it is being engaged, and having the right to go off openly for hours

with the one person you want to be with, and nobody can say, "No, you

mustn't." Do you know Bernd has to have the Kaiser's permission to

marry? All officers have to, and he quite often says no. The girl has

to prove she has an income of her own of at least 5000 marks--that's

250 pounds a year--and be of demonstrably decent birth. Well, the

birth part is all right--I wonder if the Kaiser knows how to pronounce

Cholmondeley--and of course once I get playing at concerts I shall earn

heaps more than the 250 pounds; so I expect we shall be able to arrange

that. Kloster will give me a certificate of future earning powers, I'm

sure. But marrying seems so far off, such a dreamy thing, that I've

not begun really to think of it. Being engaged is quite lovely enough

to go on with. There's Bernd calling.

_Evening_.

I've just come in. It's ten o'clock. I've had the most perfect day.

Little mother, what an amazingly beautiful world it is. Everything is

combining to make this summer the most wonderful of summers for me.

How I shall think of it when I am old, and laugh for joy. The weather

is so perfect, people are so kind, my playing prospects are so

encouraging; and there's Bernd. Did you ever know such a lot of lovely

things for one girl? All my days are filled with sunshine and love.

Everywhere I look there's nothing but kindness. Do you think the world

is getting really kinder, or is it only that I'm so happy? I can't

help thinking that all that talk I heard in Berlin, all that

restlessness and desire to hit out at somebody, anybody,--the

knock-him-down-and-rob him idea they seemed obsessed with, was simply

because it was drawing near the holiday time of year, and every one was

overworked and nervy after a year's being cooped up in offices; and

then the great heat came and finished them. They were cross, like

overtired children, cross and quarrelsome. How cross I was too,

tormented by those flies! After this month, when everybody has been

away at the sea and in the forests, they'll be different, and as full

of kindliness and gentleness as these gentle kind skies are, and the

morning and the evening, and the placid noons. I don't believe anybody

who has watched cows pasturing in golden meadows, as Bernd and I have

for hours this afternoon, or heard water lapping among reeds, or seen

eagles shining far up in the blue above the pine trees, and drawn in

with every breath the sweetness, the extraordinary warm sweetness, of

this summer in places in the forests and by the sea,--I don't believe

people who had done that could for at least another year want to

quarrel and fight. And by the time they did want to, having got jumpy

in the course of months of uninterrupted herding together, it will be

time for them to go for holidays again, back to the blessed country to

be soothed and healed. And each year we shall grow wiser, each year

more grown-up, less like naughty children, nearer to God. All we want

is time,--time to think and understand. I feel religious now.

Happiness has made me so religious that I would satisfy even Aunt

Edith. I'm sure happiness brings one to God much quicker than ways of

grief. Indeed it's the only right way of being brought, I think. You

know, little mother, I've always hated the idea of being kicked to God,

of getting on to our knees because we've been beaten till we can't

stand. I think if I were to lose what I love,--you, Bernd, or be hurt

in my hands so that I couldn't play,--it wouldn't make me good, it

would make me bad. I'd go all hard, and defy and rebel. And really

God ought to like that best. It's at least a square and manly

attitude. Think how we would despise any creature who fawned on us,

and praised and thanked us because we had been cruel. And why should

God be less fine than we are? Oh well, I must go to bed. One can't

settle God in the tail-end of a letter. But I'm going to say prayers

tonight, real prayers of gratitude, real uplifting of the heart in

thanks and praise. I think I was always happy, little mother. I don't

remember anything else; but it wasn't this secure happiness. I used to

be anxious sometimes. I knew we were poor, and that you were so very

precious. Now I feel safe, safe about you as well as myself. I can

look life in the eyes, quite confident, almost careless. I have such

faith in Bernd! Two together are so strong, if one of the two is Bernd.

Good night my blessed mother of my heart. I'm going to say

thank-prayers now, for you, for him, for the whole beautifulness of the

world. My windows are wide open on to the Haff. There's no sound at

all, except that little plop, plop, of the water against the terrace

wall. Sometimes a bird flutters for a moment in the trees of the

forest on either side of the garden, turning over in its sleep, I

suppose, and then everything is still again, so still; just as if some

great cool hand were laid gently on the hot forehead of the world and

was hushing it to sleep.

Your Chris who loves you.

_Koseritz, Friday, July 25th, 1914_.

Beloved mother,

Bernd was telegraphed for this afternoon from headquarters to go back

at once to Berlin, and he's gone. I'm rubbing my eyes to see if I'm

awake, it has been so sudden. The whole house seemed changed in an

instant. The Graf went too. The newspaper doesn't get here till we

are at lunch, and is always brought in and laid by the Graf, and today

there was the Austrian ultimatum to Servia in it, and when the Graf saw

that in the headlines of the _Tageszeitung_ he laid it down without a

word and got up and left the room. Bernd reached over for the paper to

see what had happened, and it was that. He read it out to us. "This

means war," he said, and the Grafin said, "Hush," very quickly; I

suppose because she couldn't bear to hear the word. Then she got up

too, and went after the Graf, and we were left, Helena and the

governess, and the children, and Bernd, and I at a confused and untidy

table, everybody with a question in their eyes, and the servants' hands

not very steady as they held the dishes. The menservants would all

have to go and fight if there were war. No wonder the dishes shook a

little, for they can't but feel excited.

As soon as we could get away from the diningroom Bernd and I went out

into the garden--the Graf and Grafin hadn't reappeared--and he said

that though for a moment he had thought Austria's ultimatum would mean

war, it was only just the first moment, but that he believed Servia

would agree to everything, and the crisis would blow over in the way so

many of them had blown over before.

I asked him what would happen if it didn't; I wanted things explained

to me clearly, for positively I'm not quite clear about which nations

would be fighting; and he said why talk about hateful things like war

as long as there wasn't a war. He said that as long as his chief left

him peacefully at Koseritz and didn't send for him to Berlin I might be

sure it was going to be just a local quarrel, for his being sent for

would mean that all officers on leave were being sent for, and that the

Government was at least uneasy. Then at four o'clock came the

telegram. The Government is, accordingly, at least uneasy.

I saw hardly any more of him. He got his things together with a

quickness that astonished me, and he and the Graf, who was going to

Berlin by the same train, motored to Stettin to catch the last express.

Just before they left he caught hold of my hand and pulled me into the

library where no one was, and told me how he thanked God I was English.

"Chris, if you had been French or Russian,"--he said, looking as though

the very thought filled him with horror. He laid his face against

mine. "I'd have loved you just the same," he said, "I could have done

nothing else but love you, and think, think what it would have meant--"

"Then it will be Germany as well, if there's war?" I said, "Germany as

well as Austria, and France and Russia--what, almost all Europe?" I

exclaimed, incredulous of such a terror.

"Except England," he said; and whispered, "Oh, thank God, except

England." Somebody opened the door an inch and told him he must come

at once. I whispered in his ear that I would go back to Berlin

tomorrow and be near him. He went out so quickly that by the time I

got into the hall after him the car was tearing down the avenue, and I

only caught a flash of the sun on his helmet as he disappeared round

the corner.

It has all been so quick. I can't believe it quite. I don't know what

to think, and nobody says anything here. The Grafin, when I ask her

what she thinks, says soothingly that I needn't worry my little

head--my little head! As though I were six, and made of sugar--and

that everything will settle down again. "Europe is in an excited

state," she says placidly, "and suspects danger round every corner, and

when it has reached the corner and looked round it, it finds nothing

there after all. It has happened often before, and will no doubt

happen again. Go to bed, my child, and forget politics. Leave them to

older and more experienced heads. Always our Kaiser has been on the

side of peace, and we can trust him to smooth down Austria's ruffled

feathers."

Greatly doubting her Kaiser, after all I've heard of him at Kloster's,

I was too polite to be anything but silent, and came up to my room

obediently. If there is war, then Bernd--oh well, I'm tired. I don't

think I'll write any more tonight. But I do love you so very much,

darling mother.

Your Chris.

What a mercy that mothers are women, and needn't go away and fight.

Wouldn't it have been too awful if they had been men!

_Koseritz, Saturday, July 25th, 1914.

You know, my beloved one, I'd much rather be at Frau Berg's in Berlin

and independent, and able to see Bernd whenever he can come, without

saying dozens of thank you's and may I's to anybody each time, and I

had arranged to go today, and now the Grafin won't let me. She says

she'll take me up on Monday when she and Helena go. They're going for

a short time because they want to be nearer any news there is than they

are here, and she says it wouldn't be right for her, so nearly my aunt,

to allow me, so nearly her niece, to stay by myself in a pension while

she is in her house in the next street. What would people say? she

asked--_was wurden die Leute sagen_, as every German before doing or

refraining from doing a thing invariably inquires. They all from top

to bottom seem to walk in terror of _die Leute_ and what they would

_sagen_. So I'm to go to her house in the Sommerstrasse, and live in

chaperoned splendour for as long as she is there. She says she is

certain my mother would wish it. I'm not a hit certain, I who know my

mother and know how beautifully empty she is of conventions and how

divinely indifferent to _die Leute_; but as I'm going to marry a German

of the Junker class I suppose I must appease his relations,--at any

rate till I've got them, by gentle and devious methods, a little more

used to me. So I gave in sullenly. Don't be afraid,--only sullenly

inside, not outside. Outside I was so well-bred and pleased, you can't

think. It really is very kind of the Grafin, and her want of

enthusiasm, which was marked, only makes it all the kinder. On that

principle, too, my gratefulness, owing to an equal want of enthusiasm,

is all the more grateful.

I don't want to wait here till Monday. I'd like to have gone

today,--got through all the miles of slow forest that lie between us

and the nearest railway station, the miles of forest news has to crawl

through by slow steps, dragged towards us in a cart at a walking pace

once a day. Nearly all today and quite all tomorrow we shall sit here

in this sunny emptiness. It is a wonderful day again, but to me it's

like a body with the soul gone, like the meaningless smile of a

handsome idiot. Evidently, little mother, your unfortunate Chris is

very seriously in love. I don't believe it is news I want to be nearer

to: it's Bernd.

As for news, the papers today seem to think things will arrange

themselves. They're rather unctuous about it, but then they're always

unctuous,--as though, if they had eyes, they would be turned up to

heaven with lots of the pious whites showing. They point out the awful

results there would be to the whole world if Servia, that miserable

small criminal, should dare not satisfy the just demands of Germany's

outraged and noble ally Austria. But of course Servia will. They take

that for granted. Impossible that she shouldn't. The Kaiser is

cruising in his yacht somewhere up round Norway, and His Majesty has

shown no signs, they say, of interrupting his holiday. As long as he

stays away, they remark, nothing serious can happen. What an

indictment of S. M.! As long as he stays away, playing about, there

will be peace. How excellent it would be, then, if he stayed away and

played indefinitely.

I wanted to say this to the Grafin when she read the papers aloud to us

at lunch, and I wonder what would have happened to me if I had. Well,

though I've got to stay with her and be polite in the Sommerstrasse, I

shall escape every other day to that happy, rude place, Kloster's flat,

and can say what I like. I think I told you he is going to give me

three lessons a week now.

_After tea_,

I practised most of the morning. I wrote to Bernd, and told him about

Monday, and told him--oh, lots of little things I just happened to

think of. I went out after lunch and lay in the meadow by the water's

edge with a book I didn't read, the same meadow Bernd and I anchored

our fishing boat at only the day before yesterday, but really ten years

ago, and I lay so quiet that the cows forgot me, and came and scrunched

away at the grass quite close to my head. We had tea as usual on the

terrace in the shady angle of the south-west walls, and the Grafin

discoursed placidly on the political situation. She was most

instructive; calmly imparting knowledge to Helena and me; calmly

embroidering a little calm-looking shirt for her married daughter's

baby, with calm, cool white fingers. She seemed very content with the

world, and the way it is behaving. She looked as unruffled as one of

the swans on the Haff. All the sedition and heretical opinions she

must have heard Kloster fling about have slid off her without leaving a

mark. Evidently she pays no attention to anything he thinks, on the

ground that he is a genius. Geniuses are privileged lunatics. I

gather that is rather how she feels. She was quite interesting about

Germany,--her talk was all of Germany. She knows a great deal of its

history and I think she must have told us all she knew. By the time

the servants came to take away the tea-things I had a distinct vision

of Germany as the most lovable of little lambs with a blue ribbon round

its neck, standing knee-deep in daisies and looking about the world

with kind little eyes.

Good-bye darling mother. Saturday is nearly over now. By this time

the time limit for Servia has expired. I wonder what has happened. I

wonder what you in Switzerland are feeling about it. You know, my

dearest one, I'll interrupt my lessons and come to Switzerland if you

have the least shred of a wish that I should; and perhaps if Bernd

really had to go away--supposing the unlikely were to happen after all

and there were war--I'd want to come creeping back close to you till he

is safe again. And yet I don't know. Surely the right thing would be

to go on, whatever happens, quietly working with Kloster till October

as we had planned. But you've only got to lift your little finger, and

I'll come. I mean, if you get thinking things and feeling worried.

Your Chris.

_Koseritz, Sunday evening, July 26th_.

Beloved mother,

I've packed, and I'm ready. We start early tomorrow. The newspapers,

for some reason, perhaps excitement and disorganization, didn't come

today, but the Graf telephoned from Berlin about the Austro-Hungarian

minister having asked the Servian government for his passports and left

Belgrade. You'll know about this today too. The Grafin, still placid,

says Austria will now very properly punish Servia, both for the murder

and for the insolence of refusing her, Austria's, just demands. The

Graf merely telephoned that Servia had refused. It did seem

incredible. I did think Servia would deserve her punishing.

Yesterday's papers said the demands were most reasonable considering

what had been done. I hadn't read the Austrian note, because of the

confusion of Bernd's sudden going away, and I was full of indignation

at Servia's behaviour, piling insult on injury in this way and risking

setting Europe by the ears, but was pulled up short and set thinking by

the Grafin's looking pleased at my expressions of indignation, and her

coming over to me to pat my cheek and say, "This child will make an

excellent little German."

Then I thought I'd better wait and know more before sweeping Servia out

of my disgusted sight. There are probably lots of other things to

know. Kloster will tell me. I find I have a profound distrust really

of these people. I don't mean of particular people, like the

Koseritzes and the Klosters and their friends, but of Germans in the

mass. It is a sort of deep-down discomfort of spirit, the discomfort

of disagreement in fundamentals.

"Then there'll be war?" I said to the Grafin, staring at her placid

face, and not a bit pleased about being going to be an excellent little

German.

"Oh, a punitive expedition only," she said.

"Bernd thought it would mean Russia and France and you as well," I said.

"Oh, Bernd--he is in love," said the Grafin, smiling.

"I don't quite see--" I began.

"Lovers always exaggerate," she said. "Russia and France will not

interfere in so just a punishment."

"But is it just?" I asked.

She gazed at me critically at this. It was not, she evidently

considered, a suitable remark for one whose business it was to turn

into an excellent little German. "Dear child," she said, "you cannot

suppose that our ally, the Kaiser's ally, would make demands that are

not just?"

"Do you think Friday's papers are still anywhere about?" was my answer.

"I'd like to read the Austrian note, and think it over for myself. I

haven't yet."

The Grafin smiled at this, and rang the bell. "I expect

Dorner"--Dorner is the butler--"has them," she said. "But do not worry

your little head this hot weather too much."

"It won't melt," I said, resenting that my head should be regarded as

so very small and also made of sugar,--she said something like this the

other day, and I resented that too.

"There are people whose business it is to think these high matters out

for us," she said, "and in their hands we can safely leave them."

"As if they were God," I remarked.

She looked at me critically again. "Precisely," she said. "Loyal

subjects, true Christians, are alike in their unquestioning trust and

obedience to authority."

I came upstairs then, in case I shouldn't be able to keep from saying

something truthful and rude.

What a misfortune it is that truth always is so rude. So that a person

who, like myself, for reasons that I can't help thinking are on the

whole base, is anxious to hang on to being what servants call a real

lady, is accordingly constantly forced into a regrettable want of

candour. I wish Bernd weren't a Junker. It is a great blot on his

perfection. I'd much rather he were a navvy, a stark, swearing navvy,

and we could go in for stark, swearing candour, and I needn't be a lady

any more. It's so middle-class being a lady. These German aristocrats

are hopelessly middle-class.

I know when I get to Berlin, and only want to keep abreast of the real

things that may be going to happen, which will take me all my time, for

I haven't been used to big events, it will be very annoying to be

caught and delayed at every turn by small nets of politenesses and

phrases and considerations, by having to remember every blessed one of

the manners they go in for so terribly here. I've never met so _much_

manners as in Germany. The protestations you have to make! The

elaborateness and length of every acceptance or refusal! And it's all

so much fluff and wind, signifying nothing, nothing at all unless it's

fear; fear, again, their everlasting haunting spectre; fear of the

other person's being offended if he is stronger than you, higher

up,--because then he'll hurt you, punish you somehow; ten to one, if

you're a man, he'll fight you.

I've read the Austrian Note. I don't wonder very much at Servia's

refusing to accept it, and yet surely it would have been wiser if she

had accepted it, anyhow as much of it as she _possibly_ could.

"Much wiser," said the Grafin, smiling gently when I said this at

dinner tonight. "At least, wiser for Servia. But it is well so." And

she smiled again.

I've come to the conclusion that the Grafin too wants war,---a big

European war, so that Germany, who is so longing to get that tiresome

rattling sword of hers out of the scabbard, can seize the excuse and

rush in. One only has to have stayed here, lived among them and heard

them talk, to _know_ that they're all on tiptoe for an excuse to start

their attacking. They've been working for years for the moment when

they can safely attack. It has been the Kaiser's one idea, Kloster

says, during the whole of his reign. Of course it's true it has been a

peaceful reign,--they're always pointing that out here when

endeavouring to convince a foreigner that the last thing their immense

preparations mean is war; of course a reign is peaceful up to the

moment when it isn't. They've edged away carefully up to now from any

possible quarrel, because they weren't ready for the almighty smash

they mean to have when they are ready. They've prepared to the

smallest detail. Bernd told me that the men who can't fight, the old

and unfit, each have received instructions for years and years past

every autumn, secret exact instructions, as to what they are to do,

when war is declared, to help in the successful killing of their

brothers,--their brothers, little mother, for whom, too, Christ died.

Each of these aged or more or less diseased Germans, the left-overs who

really can't possibly fight, has his place allotted to him in these

secret orders in the nearest town to where he lives, a place

supervising the stores or doing organizing work. Every other man,

except those who have the luck to be idiots or dying--what a world to

have to live in, when this is luck--will fight. The women, and the

thousands of imported Russians and Poles, will look after the farms for

the short time the men will be away, for it is to be a short war, a few

weeks only, as short as the triumphant war of 1870. Did you ever know

anything so horrifying, so evil, as this minute concentration, year in

year out, for decades, on killing--on successful, triumphant killing,

just so that you can grab something that doesn't belong to you. It is

no use dressing it up in big windy words like _Deutschthum_ and the

rest of the stuff the authorities find it convenient to fool their

slaves with,--it comes to exactly that. I always, you see, think of

Germany as the grabber, the attacker. Anything else, now that I've

lived here, is simply inconceivable. A defensive war in which she

should have to defend her homes from wanton attack is inconceivable.

There is no wantonness now in the civilized nations. We have outgrown

the blood stage. We are sober peoples, sober and civilian,--grown up,

in fact. And the semi-civilized peoples would be afraid to attack a

nation so strong as Germany. She is training and living, and has been

training and living for years and years, simply to attack. What is the

use of their protesting? One has only to listen to their points of

view to brush aside the perfunctory protestations they put in every now

and then, as if by order, whenever they remember not to be natural.

Oh, I know this is very different from what I was writing and feeling

two or three days ago, but I've been let down with a jerk, I'm being

reminded of the impressions I got in Berlin, they've come up sharply

again, and I'm not so confident that what was the matter with the

people there was only heat and overwork. There was an eagerness about

them, a kind of fever to begin their grabbing. I told you, I think,

how Berlin made me think when first I got there of something _seething_.

Darling mother, forgive me if I'm shrill. I wouldn't be shrill, I'm

certain I wouldn't, if I could believe in the necessity, the justice of

such a war, if Germany weren't going to war but war were coming to

Germany. And I'm afraid,--afraid because of Bernd. Suppose he--Well,

perhaps by the time we get to Berlin things will have calmed down, and

the Grafin will be able to come back straight here, which God grant,

and I shall go back to Frau Berg and my flies. I shall regard those

flies now with the utmost friendliness. I shan't mind anything they do.

Good night blessed mother. I'm so thankful these two days are over.

Your Chris.

It is this silence here, this absurd peaceful sunshine, and the placid

Grafin, and the bland unconsciousness of nature that I find hard to

bear.

_Berlin, Wednesday, July 29th_.

My own little mother,

It is six o'clock in the morning, and I'm in my dressing-gown writing

to you, because if I don't do it now I shall be swamped with people and

things, as I was all yesterday and the day before, and not get a

moment's quiet. You see, there is going to be war, almost to a dead

certainty, and the Germans have gone mad. The effect even on this

house is feverish, so that getting up very early will be my only chance

of writing to you.

You never saw anything like the streets yesterday. They seemed full of

drunken people, shouting up and down with red faces all swollen with

excitement. It is of course intensely interesting and new to me, who

have never been closer to such a thing as war than history lessons at

school, but what do they all think they're going to get, what do they

all think it's really _for_, these poor creatures bellowing and

strutting, and waving their hats and handkerchiefs, and even their

babies, high over their heads whenever a _konigliche Hoheit_ dashes

past in a motor, which happens every five minutes because there are

such a lot of them. Our drive from Koseritz to Stettin on Monday,

which now seems so remote that it is as if it was another life, was the

last beautiful ordinary thing that happened. Since then it has been

one great noise and ugliness. I can't forget the look of the country

as we passed through it on Monday, so lovely in its summer

peacefulness, the first rye being cut in the fields, the hedges full of

Traveler's Joy. I didn't notice how beautiful it was at the time, I

only wanted to get on, to get away, to get the news; but now I'm here I

remember it as something curiously _innocent_, and I'm so glad we had a

puncture that made us stop for ten minutes in a bit of the road where

there were great cornfields as far as one could see, and a great

stretch of sky with peaceful little white clouds that hardly moved, and

only the sound of poplars by the roadside rustling their leaves with

that lovely liquid sound they make, and larks singing. It comforts me

to call this up again, to hide in it for a minute away from the

shouting of _Deutschland uber Alles_, and the _hochs_ and yellings.

Then we got to Stettin; and since then I have lived in ugliness.

The Kaiser came back on Monday. He had arrived in Berlin by the time

we got here, and the Grafin's triumphant calm visibly increased when

the footman who met us at the station eagerly told her the news. For

this, as the papers said that evening, hardly able to conceal their joy

beneath their pious hopes that the horrors of war may even yet be

spared the world, reveals the full seriousness of the situation. I

like the "even yet," don't you? Bernd was at the station, and drove

with us to the Sommerstrasse. We went along the Dorotheenstrasse, at

the back of Unter den Linden, as the Lindens were choked with people.

It was impossible to get through them. They were a living wedge of

people, with frantic mounted policemen trying to get them to go

somewhere else.

Bernd was so dear, and oh it was such a blessing to be near him again!

But he was solemn, and didn't smile at all except when he looked at me.

Then that dear smile that is so full of goodness changed his whole

face. "Oh Bernd, I do love you so _much_," I couldn't help whispering,

leaning forward to do it regardless of Helena who sat next to him; and

seeing by Helena's stare that she had heard, and feeling recklessly

cheerful at having got back to him, I turned on her and said, "Well, he

shouldn't smile at me in that darling way."

The Grafin laughed gently, so I knew she thought my manners bad. I've

learned that when she laughs gently she disapproves, just as I've

learned that when she says with a placid sigh that war is terrible and

must be avoided, all her hopes are bound up in its not being avoided.

Her only son is in the Cuirassiers, and is, Kloster says, a naturally

unsuccessful person. War is his chance of promotion, of making a

career. It is also his chance of death or maiming, as I said to Helena

on Sunday at Koseritz when she was talking about her brother and his

chances if there is war to the pastor, who was calling hat in hand and

very full of bows.

She stared at me, and so did the pastor. I'm afraid I plumped into the

conversation impetuously.

"I had sooner," said Helena, "that Werner were dead or maimed for life

than that he should not make a career. One's brother must not, cannot

be a failure."

And the pastor bowed and exclaimed, "That is well and finely said.

That is full of pride, of the true German patrician pride."

Helena, you see, forgot, as Germans sometimes do, not to be natural.

She said straight but it was a career she wanted for her brother. She

forgot the usual talk of patriotism and the glory of being mangled on

behalf of Hohenzollerns.

Yesterday the menservants disappeared, and women waited on us. There

was no jolt in the machinery. It went on as smoothly as though the

change had been weeks ago. Even the butler, who certainly is too old

to fight, vanished.

Bernd comes in whenever he can. Luckily we're quite close to the

General Staff Headquarters here, and he has his meals with us. He

persists that the war will be kept rigidly to Austria and Servia, and

therefore will be over in a week or two. He says Sir Edward Grey has

soothed bellicose governments before now, and will be able to do so

again. He talks of the madness of war, and of how no Government

nowadays would commit such a sheer stupidity as starting it. I listen

to him, and am convinced and comforted; then I go back to the others,

and my comfort slips away again. For the others are so sure. There's

no question for them, no doubt. They don't say so, any of them,

neither the Graf, nor the Grafin, nor the son Werner who was here

yesterday nor Bernd's Colonel who dined here last night, nor any of the

other people. Government officials who come to see the Graf, and women

friends who come to see the Grafin. They don't say war is certain, but

each one of them has the look of satisfaction and relief people have

when they get something they've wanted very much for a very long time

and sigh out "At last!" Some of them let out their satisfaction more

than others,--Bernd's Colonel, for instance, who seems particularly

hilarious. He was very hilarious last night, though not ostensibly

about war. If the possibility of war is mentioned, as of course it

constantly is, they at once all shake their heads as if to order, and

look serious, and say God grant it may even now be avoided, or

something like that; just as the newspapers do. And last night at

dinner somebody added a hope, expressed with a very grave face, that

the people of Germany wouldn't get out of hand and force war upon the

Government against its judgment.

I thought that rather funny. Especially after two hours in the morning

with Kloster, who explained that the Government is arranging everything

that is happening, managing public opinion, creating the exact amount

of enthusiasm and aggressiveness it wishes to have behind it, just as

it did in 1870 when it wanted to bring about the war with France. I

know it isn't proper for a _junges Madchen_ to talk at dinner unless

she is asked a question, and I know she mustn't have an opinion about

anything except bonbons and flowers, and I also know that a _junges

Madchen_ who is betrothed is expected to show on all occasions such

extreme modesty, such a continuous downcast eye, that it almost amounts

to being ashamed of herself; yet I couldn't resist leaning across the

table to the man who said that, a high official in the _Ministerium des

Innern_, and saying "But your public is so disciplined and your

Government so almighty--" and was going on to ask him what grounds he

had for his fears that a public in that condition would force the

Government's hand, for I was interested and wanted dreadfully to hear

what he would say, when the Grafin slipped in, smiling gently.

"My dear new niece," she said, looking round the table at everybody,

"promises to become a most excellent little German. See how she

already recognizes and admires our restraint on the one hand, and on

the other, our power."

The Colonel, who was sitting on one side of me, laughed, raised his

glass, and begged me to permit him to drink my health and the health of

that luckiest of young men, Lieutenant von Inster. "Old England

forever!" he exclaimed, bowing over his glass to me, "The England that

raises such fair flowers and allows Germany to pluck them. Long may

she continue these altruistic activities. Long may the homes of

Germany be decorated with England's fairest products."

By this time he was on his feet, and they were toasting England and me.

They were all quite enthusiastic, and I felt so proud and pleased, with

Bernd sitting beside me looking so proud and pleased. "England!" they

called out, lifting their glasses, "England and the new alliance!" And

they bowed and smiled to me, and came round one by one and clinked

their glasses against mine.

Then Bernd had to make a little speech and thank the Colonel, and you

can't think how beautifully he speaks, and not a bit shy, and saying

exactly the right things. Then the Graf actually got up and said

something--I expect etiquette forced him to or he never would have--but

once he was in for it he did it with the same unfaltering fluency and

appropriateness that Bernd had surprised me with. He said they--the

Koseritzes and Insters--welcomed the proposed marriage between Bernd

and myself, not alone for the many graces, virtues, and, above all

gifts--(picture the abstracted Graf reeling off these compliments! You

should have seen my open mouth)--that so happily adorned the young

lady, great and numerous though they were, but also because such a

marriage would still further cement the already close union existing

between two great countries of the same faith, the same blood, and the

same ideals. "Long may these two countries," he said, "who carry in

their hands the blazing torches of humanity and civilization, march

abreast down the pages of history, writing it in glorious letters as

they march." Then he sat down, and instantly relapsed into silence and

abstraction. It was as if a candle had been blown out.

They're all certainly very kind to me, the people I've met here, and

say the nicest things about England. They're in love with her, as I

used to tell Frau Berg's boarders, but openly and enthusiastically, not

angrily and reluctantly as the boarders were. I've not heard so many

nice things about England ever as I did yesterday. I loved hearing

them, and felt all lit up.

We went out on the balcony overlooking the Thiergarten after dinner.

The Graf's chief had sent for him, and Bernd and some of the men had

gone away too, but more people kept dropping in and joining us on the

balcony watching the crowds. The Brandenburger Thor is close on our

left, and the Reichstag is a stone's throw across the road on our

right. When the crowd saw the officers in our group, they yelled for

joy and flung their hats in the air. The Colonel, in his staff

officer's uniform, was the chief attraction. He seemed unaware that

there was a crowd, and talked to me in much the same hilarious and

flowery strain he had talked at the Oberforsterei, saying a great

number of things about hair and eyes and such. I know I've got hair

and eyes; I've had them all my life, so what's the use of wasting time

telling me about them? I tried all I knew to get him to talk about

what he really thought of the chances of war, but quite in vain.

Do you know what time it is? Nearly eight, and the _Deutschland uber

Alles_ business has already started in the streets. There are little

crowds of people, looking so tiny and black, not a bit as if they were

real, and had blood in them and could be hurt, already on the steps of

the Reichstag eagerly reading the morning papers. I must get dressed

and go down and hear if anything fresh has happened. Good-bye my own

loved mother,--I'll write whenever I get a moment. And don't forget,

mother darling, that if you're worried about my being here I'll start

straight off for Switzerland. But if you're not worried I wouldn't

like to interrupt my lessons. They really are very important things

for our future.

Your Chris.

_Berlin, Friday afternoon, July 31st_.

My sweetest mother,

Your letters have been following me about, to Koseritz and to Frau

Berg's, where of course you didn't know I wouldn't be. I went to Frau

Berg's today and found your last two. I love you, my precious mother,

and thank you for all your dearness and sweet unselfish understanding

about Bernd and me. You have always been my closest, dearest friend,

as well as my own darling mother. I seem now to be living in a sort of

bath of love. Can anything more ever be added to it? I feel as if I

had reached the very innermost heart of happiness. Wonderful how one

carries about such a precious consciousness. It's like something magic

and hidden that takes care of one, keeping one untouched and unharmed;

while outside, day and night, there's this terrible noise of a people

gone mad.

You wrote to me last sitting under a cherry tree, you said, in the

orchard at the back of your hotel at Glion, and you talked of the

colour of the lake far down below through the leaves of walnut trees,

and of the utter peace. Here day and night, day and night, since

Wednesday, soldiers in new grey uniforms pass through the Brandenburger

Thor down the broad road to Charlottenburg. Their tramp never stops.

I can see them from my window tramping, tramping away down the great

straight road; and crowds that don't seem to change or dwindle watch

them and shout. Where do the soldiers all come from? I never dreamed

there could be so many in the world, let alone in Berlin; and Germany

isn't even at war! But it's no use asking questions, or trying to talk

about it. I've found the word "Why?" in this house is not only useless

but improper. Nobody will talk about anything; I suppose they don't

need to, for they all seem perfectly to _know_. They're in the inner

circle in this house. They're not the public. The public is that

shouting, perspiring mob out there watching the soldiers, and Frau Berg

and her boarders are the public, and so are the soldiers themselves.

The public here are all the people who obey, and pay, and don't know;

an immense multitude of slaves,--abject, greedy, pitiful. I don't

think I ever could have imagined a thing so pitiful to see as these

respectable middle-aged Berlin citizens, fathers of families, careful

livers on small incomes, clerks, pastors, teachers, professors, drunk

and mad out there publicly on the pavement, dancing with joy because

they think the great moment they've been taught to wait for has come,

and they're going to get suddenly rich, scoop in wealth from Russia and

France, get up to the top of the world and be able to kick it. That's

what I saw over and over again today as I somehow got through to Frau

Berg's to fetch your letters. An ordinary person from an ordinary

country wants to cover these heated elderly gentlemen up, and hide them

out of sight, so shocking are they to one's sense of respect and

reverence for human beings. Imagine decent citizens, paunchy and soft

with beer and sitting in offices, wearing cheap straw hats and

carefully mended and brushed black coats, _dancing_ with excitement on

the pavement; and nobody thinking it anything but fine and creditable,

at the prospect of their children's blood going to be shed, and

everybody's children's blood, except the blood of those safe children,

the children of the Hohenzollerns!

The weather is fiercely hot. There's a brassy sky without a cloud, and

all the leaves of the trees in the Thiergarten are shiny and motionless

as if they were cut out of metal. A little haze of dust hangs

perpetually along the Lindens and the road to Charlottenburg,--not much

of it, because the roads are too well kept, but enough to show that the

troops never leave off tramping. And all down where they pass, on each

side, are the perspiring crowds of people, red and apoplectic with

excitement and heat, women and children and babies mixed up in one

heaving, frantic mass. The windows of the houses on each side of the

Brandenburger Thor are packed with people all day long, and the noise

of patriotism doesn't leave off for an instant.

It's a very ugly noise. The only place where I can get away from

it--and I do hate noise, it really _hurts_ my ears--is the bathroom

here, which is a dark cupboard with no window, in the very middle of

the house. I thought it a dreadful bathroom when I first saw it, but

now I'm grateful that it can't be aired. The house was built years and

years before Germans began to wash, and it wasn't till the Koseritzes

came that a bath was wanted. Then it had to be put in any hole, and

this hole is the one place where there is silence. Everywhere else, in

every room in the house, it is as if one were living next door to a

dozen public houses in the worst slums of London and it were always

Saturday night. I do think the patriotism of an unattacked, aggressive

country is a hideous thing.

Bernd got me somehow through the crowd to the calmer streets on the way

to Frau Berg. He didn't want me to go out at all, but I want to see

what I can. The Kaiser rushed through the Brandenburger Thor in his

car as we went out. You never saw such a scene as then. It was

frightening, like a mob of lunatics let loose. Every time he is seen

tearing along the streets there's this wild scene, Bernd says. He has

suddenly leaped to the topmost top of popularity, for he's the

dispenser now of the great lottery in which all the draws are going to

be prizes. You know there isn't a German, not the cleverest, not the

most sober, who doesn't regularly and solemnly buy lottery tickets.

Aren't they, apart from all the other things they are, the _funniest_

people. So immature in wisdom, so top-heavy with dangerous knowledge

that their youngness in wisdom makes them use wrongly. If they hadn't

got the latest things in guns and equipment they would be quiet, and

wouldn't think of fighting.

Bernd made me promise to wait at Frau Berg's till he could fetch me,

and as he didn't get back till two o'clock, and Frau Berg very amiably

said I must be her guest at the well-known mid-day meal, I found myself

once more in the bosom of the boarders. Only this time I sat proudly

on Frau Berg's right, in the place of honour next to Doctor Krummlaut,

instead of in the obscurity of my old seat at the dark end near the

door.

It was so queer, and so different. There was the same Wanda, resting

her dishes on my left shoulder, which she always used to do, not only

so as to attract my attention but as a convenience to herself, because

they were hot and heavy. There were the same boarders, except the

red-mouthed bank-clerk and another young man. Hilda Seeberg was there,

and the Swede, and Doctor Krummlaut; and of course Frau Berg, massive

in her tight black dress buttoned up the front without a collar to it,

the big brooch she fastens it with at the neck half hidden by her

impressive double chins, which flow down as majestically as a

patriarch's beard. We had the same food, the same heat, and I'm sure

the same flies. But the nervous tension there used to be, the tendency

to quarrel, the pugnacious political arguing with me, the gibes at

England, were gone. I don't know whether it was because I'm engaged to

a Prussian officer that they were so very polite--I was tremendously

congratulated,--but they were certainly different about England. It

may of course have been their general happiness--happiness makes one so

kind all round!--for here too was the content, the satisfaction of

those who, after painful waiting, get what they want. It was expressed

very noisily, not with the restraint of the Koseritzes, but it was the

same thing really. The Berg atmosphere was more like the one in the

streets. Where the Grafin in her pleasure became only more calm, the

boarders were abandoned,--excited like savages dancing round the fire

their victims are to roast at. Frau Berg rumbled and shook with her

relief, like some great earthquake, and didn't mind a bit apparently

about the tremendous rise there has been in prices this week. What

will she get, I wonder, by war, except struggle and difficulty and

departing boarders? Being a guest, I had to be polite and let them say

what they liked without protest,--really, the disabilities of guests!

I couldn't argue, as I would have if I'd still been a boarder, which

was a pity, for meanwhile I've learned a lot of German and could have

said a great many things and been as natural as I liked here away from

the Grafin's gentle smile reminding me that I'm not behaving. But I

had to sit and listen smilingly, and of course show none of my horror

at their attitude, for more muzzling even than being a guest is being

the betrothed of a Prussian officer. _They_ don't know what sort of a

Prussian officer he is, how different, how truly educated, how full of

dislike for the base things they worship and want; and he, caught by

birth in the Prussian chains, shall not be betrayed by me who love him.

Here he is, caught anyhow for the present, and he must do his duty; but

someday we're going away,--he, and I, and you, little mother darling,

when there's no war anywhere in sight and therefore no duty to stay

for, and we'll go and live in America, and he'll take off all those

buttons and spurs and things, and we'll give ourselves up to freedom,

and harmlessness, and art, and beauty, and we'll have friends who

neither intrigue, which is what the class at the top here lives by, nor

who waste their lives being afraid, which is what all the other classes

here spend their lives being.

"At last we are going to wipe off old scores against France," Doctor

Krummlaut spluttered through his soup today at Frau Berg's with shining

eyes,--I should have thought it was France who had the old scores that

need wiping--"and Russia, the barbarian Colossus, will topple over and

choke in its own blood."

Then Frau Berg capped that with sentiments even more bloodthirsty.

Then the Swede, who never used to speak, actually raised her voice in

terms of blood too, and expressed a wish to see a Cossack strung up by

his heels to every electric-light standard along the Lindens.

Then Hilda Seeberg said if her Papa--that Papa she told me once she

hadn't at all liked--were only alive, it would be the proudest moment

of his life when, at the head of his regiment, he would go forth to

slay President Poincare. "And if," she said, her eyes flashing, "owing

to his high years his regiment was no longer able to accept his heroic

leadership, he would, I know, proceed secretly to France as an

assassin, and bomb the infamous Poincare,--bomb him in the name of our

Kaiser, of our Fatherland, and of our God."

"Amen," said Frau Berg, very loud.

I flew to Bernd when he came. It was as if a door had been flung open,

and the freshness and sanity of early morning came into the room when

he did. I hung on his arm, and looked up into his dear shrewd eyes, so

clear and kind, so full of wisdom. The boarders were with one accord

servile to him; even Doctor Krummlaut, a clever man with far better

brains probably than Bernd. Bernd, from habit, stiffened and became

unapproachable the instant the middle class public in the shape of the

congratulatory boarders appeared. He doesn't even know he's like that,

his training has made it second nature. You should have seen his

lofty, complete indifference. It was dreadfully rude really, and oh

how they loved him for it! They simply adored him, and were ready to

lick his boots. It was so funny to see them sidling about him, all of

them wagging their tails. He was the master, come among the slaves.

But to think that even Doctor Krummlaut should sidle!

There's a most terrific _extra_ noise going on outside. I can hardly

hear myself write. I don't know whether to run and find out what it

is, or retreat to the bathroom. My ears won't stand much more,--I

shall get deaf, and not be able to play.

_Later_.

What has happened is that special editions of the papers have appeared

announcing that the Kaiser has decreed a state of war for the whole of

Germany. Well. They've done it now. For I did extract from a very

cheerful-looking caller I met coming upstairs to the drawingroom that a

state of war is followed as inevitably by the real thing as a German

betrothal is followed by marriage. One is as committal as the other,

he said. It is the rarest thing, and produces an immense scandal, for

an engagement to be broken off; and, explained the caller looking

extremely pleased,--he was a man-caller, and therefore more willing to

stop and talk--to proceed backwards from a state of war to the _status

quo ante_ might produce the unthinkable result of costing the Kaiser

his throne.

"You can imagine, my most gracious Miss," said the caller, "that His

Majesty would never permit a calamity so colossal to overtake his

people, whose welfare he has continually and exclusively in his

all-highest thoughts. Therefore you may take it from me as completely

certain that war is now assured."

"But nobody has done anything to you," I said.

He gazed at me a moment, and then smiled. "High politics, and little

heads," he said. "High politics, and little women's heads,--" and went

on up the stairs smiling and shaking his own.

I do wish they wouldn't keep on talking as though my head were so

dreadfully small. Never in my life have people taken so utterly and

complacently for granted that I'm stupid.

Well, I feel very sick at heart. How long will it be before Bernd too

will be one of that marching column on the Charlottenburger Chaussee.

He won't go away from me that way, I know. He's on the Staff, and will

go more splendidly; but those men in the new grey uniforms tramping day

and night are symbols each one of them of departing happiness, of a

closed chapter, of the end of something that can never be the same

again.

Your tired Chris.

Before Breakfast.

Berlin, Sat., Aug. 1st, 1914.

My blessed little mother,

I've seen a thing I don't suppose I'll forget. It was yesterday, after

the news came that Germany had sent Russia an ultimatum about instantly

demobilizing, demanding an answer by eleven this morning. The

sensation when this was known was tremendous. The Grafin was shaken

out of her calm into exclamations of joy and fear,--joy that the step

had been taken, fear lest Russia should obey, and there be no war after

all.

We had to shut the windows to be able to hear ourselves talk. Some

women friends of the Grafin's who were here--we had no men with

us--instantly left to drive by back streets to the Schlossplatz to see

the sight it must be there, and the Grafin, saying that we too must

witness the greatest history of the world's greatest nation in the

making, sent for a taxi--her chauffeur has gone--and prepared to

follow. We had to wait ages for the taxi, but it was lucky we had to,

else we might have gone and come back and missed seeing the Kaiser come

out and speak to the crowd. We went a long way round, but even so all

Germany seemed to be streaming towards the Lindens and the part at the

end where the palace is. I don't expect we ever would have got there

if it hadn't been that a cousin of the Grafin's, a very smart young

officer in the Guards, saw us in the taxi as it was vainly trying to

cross the Friedrichstrasse, and flicking the obstructing policemen on

one side with a sort of little kick of his spur, came up all amazement

and salutes to inquire of his most gracious cousin what in the world

she was doing in a taxi. He said it was hopeless to try to get to the

Schlossplatz in it, but if we would allow him to escort us on foot he

would be proud--the gracious cousin would permit him to offer her his

arm, and the young ladies would keep very close behind him.

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.

Of course I said "_Colossal_" to the cousin, when he expressed his

satisfaction more particularly to me.

"_Dreckiges Yolk, die Russen_" he remarked, twisting his little

moustache's ends up. "_Werden lernen was es heisst, frech sein gegen

uns. Wollen sie blau und schwartz dreschen_."

You know German, so I needn't take its peculiar flavour out by

transplanting the young man's remarks.

"_Oh pardon--aber meine Gnadigste--tausendmal pardon--" he protested

the next minute in a voice of tremendous solicitude, having been pushed

rather hard and suddenly against me by a little boy who had scrambled

down off whatever it was he was hanging on to; and he turned on the

little boy, who I believe had tumbled off rather than scrambled, with

his hand flashing to his sword, ready to slash at whoever it was had

dared push against him, an officer; and seeing it was a child and

therefore not _satisfactionsfahig_ as they say, he merely called him an

_infame_ and _verfluchte Bengel_ and smacked his face so hard that he

would have been knocked down if there had been room to fall in.

As it was, he was only hurled violently against the side of a man in a

black coat and straw hat who looked like an elderly confidential clerk,

so respectable and complete with his short grey beard and spectacles,

who was evidently the father, for he instantly on his own account

smacked the boy on his other ear, and sweeping off his hat entreated

the Herr Leutnant to forgive the boy on account of his extreme youth.

The cousin, whom by now I didn't like, was beginning very severely to

advise the parent jolly well to see to it, or German words to that

effect, that his idiotic boy didn't repeat such insolences, or by hell,

etc., etc., when there was such a blast of extra noise and hurrahing

that the rest of his remarks were knocked out of his mouth. It was the

Kaiser, come out on the balcony of the palace.

The cousin became rigid, and stood at the salute. The air seemed full

of hats and handkerchiefs and delirious shrieking. The Kaiser put up

his hand.

"Majestat is going to speak," exclaimed the Grafin, her calm fluttered

into fragments.

There was an immense instantaneous hush, uncanny after all the noise.

Only the little boy with the boxed ears continued to call out, but not

patriotically. His father, efficient and Prussian, put a stop to that

by seizing his head, buttoning it up inside his black coat, and holding

his arm tightly over it, so that no struggles of suffocation could get

it free. There was no more noise, but the little boy's legs,

desperately twitching, kicked their dusty little boots against the

cousin's shins, and he, standing at the salute with his body rigidly

turned towards Majestat, was unable to take the steps his outraged

honour, let alone the pain in his shins, called for.

I was so much interested in this situation, really absorbed by it, for

the little boy unconsciously was getting quite a lot of his own back,

his little boots being sturdy and studded with nails, and the father,

all eyes and ears for Majestat, not aware of what was happening, that

positively I missed the first part of the speech. But what I did hear

was immensely impressive. I had seen the Kaiser before, you remember;

that time he was in London with the Kaiserin, in 1912 or 1913 I think

it was, and we were staying with Aunt Angela in Wilton Crescent and we

saw him driving one afternoon in a barouche down Birdcage Walk. Do you

remember how cross he looked, hardly returning the salutations he got?

We said he and she must have been quarrelling, he looked so sulky. And

do you remember how ordinary he looked in his top hat and black coat,

just like any cross and bored middle-class husband? There was nothing

royal about him that day except the liveries on the servants, and they

were England's. Yesterday things were very different. He really did

look like the royal prince of a picture book, a real War

Lord,--impressive and glittering with orders flashing in the sun. We

were near enough to see him perfectly. There wasn't much crossness or

boredom about him this time. He was, I am certain, thoroughly enjoying

himself,--unconsciously of course, but with that immense thrilled

enjoyment all leading figures at leading moments must have: Sir

Galahad, humbly glorying in his perfect achievement of negations;

Parsifal, engulfed in an ecstasy of humble gloating over his own

worthiness as he holds up the Grail high above bowed, adoring heads;

Beerbohm Tree--I can't get away from theatrical analogies--coming

before the curtain on his most successful first night, meek with

happiness. Hasn't it run through the ages, this great humility at the

moment of supreme success, this moved self-depreciation of the man who

has pulled it off, the "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us"

attitude,--quite genuine at the moment, and because quite genuine so

extraordinarily moving and impressive? Really one couldn't wonder at

the people. The Empress was there, and a lot of officers and princes

and people, but it was the Emperor alone that we looked at. He came

and stood by himself in front of the others. He was very grave, with a

real look of solemn exaltation. Here was royalty in all its most

impressive trappings, a prince of the fairy-tales, splendidly dressed,

dilated of nostril, flashing of eye, the defender of homes, the leader

to glory, the object of the nation's worship and belief and prayers

since each of its members was a baby, become visible and audible to

thousands who had never seen him before, who had worshipped him by

faith only. It was as though the people were suddenly allowed to look

upon God. There was a profound awe in the hush. I believe if they

hadn't been so tightly packed together they would all have knelt down.

Well, it is easy to stir a mob. One knows how easily one is moved

oneself by the cheapest emotions, by something that catches one on the

sentimental side, on that side of one that through all the years has

still stayed clinging to one's mother's knee. We've often talked of

this, you and I, little mother. You know the sort of thing, and have

got that side yourself,--even you, you dear objective one. The three

things up to now that have got me most on that side, got me on the very

raw of it--I'll tell you now, now that I can't see your amused eyes

looking at me with that little quizzical questioning in them--the three

things that have broken my heart each time I've come across them and

made me only want to sob and sob, are when Kurwenal, mortally wounded,

crawls blindly to Tristan's side and says, "_Schilt mich nicht dass der

Treue auch mitkommt_" and Siegfried's dying "_Brunnhild, heilige

Braut_," and Tannhauser's dying "_Heilige Elisabeth, bitte fur mich_."

All three German things, you see. All morbid things. Most of the

sentimentality seems to have come from Germany, an essentially brutal

place. But of course sentimentality is really diluted morbidness, and

therefore first cousin to cruelty. And I have a real and healthy

dislike for that Tannhauser opera.

But seeing how the best of us--which is you--have these little hidden

swamps of emotionalness, you can imagine the effect of the Kaiser

yesterday at such a moment in their lives on a people whose swamps are

carefully cultivated by their politicians. Even I, rebellious and

hostile to the whole attitude, sure that the real motives beneath all

this are base, and constitutionally unable to care about Kaisers, was

thrilled. Thrilled by him, I mean. Oh, there was enough to thrill one

legitimately and tragically about the poor people, so eager to offer

themselves, their souls and bodies, to be an unreasonable sacrifice and

satisfaction for the Hohenzollerns. His speech was wonderfully suited

to the occasion. Of course it would be. If he were not able to

prepare it himself his officials would have seen to it that some

properly eloquent person did it for him; but Kloster says he speaks

really well on cheap, popular lines. All the great reverberating words

were in it, the old big words ambitious and greedy rulers have conjured

with since time began,--God, Duty, Country, Hearth and Home, Wives,

Little Ones, God again--lots of God.

Perhaps you'll see the speech in the papers. What you won't see is

that enormous crowd, struck quiet, struck into religious awe, crying

quietly, men and women like little children gathered to the feet of,

positively, a heavenly Father. "Go to your homes," he said, dismissing

them at the end with uplifted hand,--"go to your homes, and pray."

And we went. In dead silence. That immense crowd. Quietly, like

people going out of church; moved, like people coming away from

communion. I walked beside Helena, who was crying, with my head very

high and my chin in the air, trying not to cry too, for then they would

have been more than ever persuaded that I'm a promising little German,

but I did desperately want to. I could hardly not cry. These cheated

people! Exploited and cheated, led carefully step by step from

babyhood to a certain habit of mind necessary to their exploiters, with

certain passions carefully developed and encouraged, certain ancient

ideas, anachronisms every one of them, kept continually before their

eyes,--why, if they _did_ win in their murderous attack on nations who

have done nothing to them, what are they going to get individually?

Just wind; the empty wind of big words. They'll be told, and they'll

read it in the newspapers, that now they're great, the mightiest people

in the world, the one best able to crush and grind other nations. But

not a single happiness _really_ will be added to the private life of a

single citizen belonging to the vast class that pays the bill. For the

rest of their lives this generation will be poorer and sadder, that's

all. Nobody will give them back the money they have sacrificed, or the

ruined businesses, and nobody can give them back their dead sons.

There'll be troops of old miserable women everywhere, who were young

and content before all the glory set in, and troops of dreary old men

who once had children, and troops of cripples who used to look forward

and hope. Yes, I too obeyed the Kaiser and went home and prayed; but

what I prayed was that Germany should be beaten--so beaten, so punished

for this tremendous crime, that she will be jerked by main force into

line with modern life, dragged up to date, taught that the world is too

grown up now to put up with the smashings and destructions of a greedy

and brutal child. It is queer to think of the fear of God having to be

kicked into anybody, but I believe with Prussians it's the only way.

They understand kicks. They respect brute strength exercised brutally.

I can hear their roar of derision, if Christ were to come among them

today with His gentle, "Little children, love one another."

Your Chris.

_Berlin, Sunday, August 2nd, 1914_.

My precious mother,

Just think,--when I had my lesson yesterday Kloster wouldn't talk

either about the war or the Kaiser. For a long time I thought he was

ill; but he wasn't, he just wouldn't talk. I told him about Friday,

and the Kaiser's "_Geht nach Hause und betet_," and how I had felt

about it and the whole thing, and I expected a flood of illuminating

and instructive and fearless comment from him; and instead he was dumb.

And not only dumb, but he fidgeted while I talked, and at last stopped

me altogether and bade me go on playing.