Christine Part 4

_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 Lutzowstra.s.se 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 ma.s.sive Satan, isn't really satanic I expect; and Dr. Krummlaut says every day as he comes into the diningroom rubbing his hands and pa.s.ses 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 endors.e.m.e.nt 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-cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.s 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d'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 gra.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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--G.o.d 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 gra.s.s 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 Lutzowstra.s.se. 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 l.u.s.ty G.o.ddesses 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sing through, and Strauss is its latest flowering,--even noisier, even more b.l.o.o.d.y, 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 a.s.sa.s.sinations, 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 G.o.d, 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.