those silly flies. I’ve had to promise not to touch a fiddle for the first week I’m away, and during the second week not to work more than two hours a day, and then I may come back if I feel quite well again. He says he’ll be at Heringsdorf, which is a seaside place not very far away from where I shall be, for ten days himself, and will come over and see if I’m being good. He says the Koseritz’s country place isn’t far from where I shall be, so I shan’t feel as if I didn’t know a soul anywhere. The Koseritz party at which I was to play never came off. I was glad of that. I didn’t a bit want to play at it, or bother about it, or anything else. The hot weather drove the Grafin into the country, Herr von Inster told me, He too seems to think I ought to go away. I saw him this afternoon after being with Kloster, and he says he’ll go down to his aunt’s–that is Grafin Koseritz–while I’m in the neighbourhood, and will ride over and see me. I’m sure you’d like him very much. My address will be:
_bei Herrn Oberforster Bornsted
Schuppenfelde
Reg. Bez. Stettin_.
I don’t know what Reg. Bez. means. I’ve copied it from a card Kloster gave me, and I expect you had better put it on the envelope. I’ll write and tell you directly I get there. Don’t worry about me, little mother; Kloster says they are fearfully kind people, and it’s the healthiest place, in the heart of the forest, away on the edge of a thing they call the Haff, which is water. He says that in a week I shall be leaping about like a young roe on the hill side; and he tries to lash me to enthusiasm by talking of all the wild strawberries there are there, and all the cream.
My heart’s love, darling mother.
Your confused and rather hustled Chris.
_Oberforsterei, Schuppenfelde, July 11th, 1914_.
My own little mother,
Here I am, and it is lovely. I must just tell you about it before I go to bed. We’re buried in forest, eight miles from the nearest station, and that’s only a Kleinbahn station, a toy thing into which a small train crawls twice a day, having been getting to it for more than three hours from Stettin. The Oberforster met me in a high yellow carriage, drawn by two long-tailed horses who hadn’t been worried with much drill judging from their individualistic behaviour, and we lurched over forest tracks that were sometimes deep sand and sometimes all roots, and the evening air was so delicious after the train, so full of different scents and freshness, that I did nothing but lift up my nose and sniff with joy.
The Oberforster thought I had a cold, without at the same time having a handkerchief; and presently, after a period of uneasiness on my behalf, offered me his. “It is not quite clean,” he said, “but it is better than none.” And he shouted, because I was a foreigner and therefore would understand better if he shouted.
I explained as well as I could, which was not very, that my sniffs were sniffs of exultation.
“_Ach so_,” he said, indulgent with the indulgence one feels towards a newly arrived guest, before one knows what they are really like.
We drove on in silence after that. Our wheels made hardly any noise on the sandy track, and I suddenly discovered how long it is since I’ve heard any birds. I wish you had come with me here, little mother; I wish you had been on that drive this evening. There were jays, and magpies, and woodpeckers, and little tiny birds like finches that kept on repeating in a monotonous sweet pipe the opening bar of the Beethoven C minor Symphony No. 5. We met nobody the whole way except a man with a cartload of wood, who greeted the Oberforster with immense respect, and some dilapidated little children picking wild strawberries. I wanted to remark on their dilapidation, which seemed very irregular in this well-conducted country, but thought I had best leave reasoned conversation alone till I’ve had time to learn more German, which I’m going to do diligently here, and till the Oberforster has discovered he needn’t shout in order to make me understand. Sitting so close to my ear, when he shouted into it it was exactly as though some one had hit me, and hurt just as much.
He is a huge rawboned man, with the flat-backed head and protruding ears so many Germans have. What is it that is left out of their heads, I wonder? His moustache is like the Kaiser’s, and he looks rather a fine figure of a man in his grey-green forester’s uniform and becoming slouch hat with a feather stuck in it. Without his hat he is less impressive, because of his head. I suppose he has to have a head, but if he didn’t have to he’d be very good-looking.
This is such a sweet place, little mother. I’ve got the dearest little clean bare bedroom, so attractive after the grim splendours of my drawingroom-bedroom at Frau Berg’s. You can’t think how lovely it is being here after the long hot journey. It’s no fun travelling alone in Germany if you’re a woman. I was elbowed about and pushed out of the way at stations by any men and boys there were as if I had been an ownerless trunk. Either that, or they stared incredibly, and said things. One little boy–he couldn’t have been more than ten–winked at me and whispered something about kissing. The station at Stettin was horrible, much worse than the Berlin one. I don’t know where they all came from, the crowds of hooligan boys, just below military age, and extraordinarily disreputable and insolent. To add to the confusion on the platform there were hundreds of Russians and Poles with their families and bundles–I asked my porter who they were, and he told me–being taken from one place where they had been working in the fields to another place, shepherded by a German overseer with a fierce dog and a revolver; very poor and ragged, all of them, but gentle, and, compared to the Germans, of beautiful manners; and there were a good many officers–it was altogether the most excited station I’ve seen, I think–and they stared too, but I’m certain that if I had been in a difficulty and wanted help they would have walked away. Kloster told me Germans divide women into two classes: those they want to kiss, and those they want to kick, who are all those they don’t want to kiss. One can be kissed and kicked in lots of ways besides actually, I think, and I felt as if I had been both on that dreadful platform at Stettin. So you can imagine how heavenly it was to get into this beautiful forest, away from all that, into the quiet, the _holiness_. Frau Bornsted, who learned English at school, told me all the farms, including hers, are worked by Russians and Poles who are fetched over every spring in thousands by German overseers. “It is a good arrangement,” she said. “In case of war we would not permit their departure, and so would our fields continue to be tilled.” In case of war! Always that word on their tongues. Even in this distant corner of peace.
The Oberforsterei is a low white house with a clearing round it in which potatoes have been planted, and a meadow at the back going down to a stream, and a garden in front behind a low paling, full of pinks and larkspurs and pansies. A pair of antlers is nailed over the door, proud relic of an enormous stag the Oberforster shot on an unusually lucky day, and Frau Bornsted was sewing in the porch beneath honeysuckle when we arrived. It was just like the Germany one had in one’s story books in the schoolroom days. It seemed too good to be true after the Lutzowstrasse. Frau Bornsted is quite a pretty young woman, flat rather than slender, tall, with lovely deep blue eyes and long black eyelashes. She would be very pretty if it occurred to her that she is pretty, but evidently it doesn’t, or else it isn’t proper to be pretty here; I think this is the real explanation of the way her hair is scraped hack into a little hard knob, and her face shows signs of being scrubbed every day with the same soap and the same energy she uses for the kitchen table. She has no children, and isn’t, I suppose, more than twenty five, but she looks as thirty five, or even forty, looks in England.
I love it all. It is really just like a story book. We had supper out in the porch, prepared, spread, and fetched by Frau Bornsted, and it was a milk soup–very nice and funny, and I lapped it up like a thirsty kitten–and cold meat, and fried potatoes, and curds and whey, and wild strawberries and cream. They have an active cow who does all the curds and whey and cream and butter and milk-soup, besides keeping on having calves without a murmur,–“She is an example,” said Frau Bornsted, who wants to talk English all the time, which will play havoc, I’m afraid, with my wanting to talk German.
She took me to a window and showed me the cow, pasturing, like David, beside still waters. “And without rebellious thoughts unsuited to her sex,” said Frau Bornsted, turning and looking at me. She showed what she was thinking of by adding, “I hope you are not a suffragette?”
The Oberforster put on a thin green linen coat for supper, which he left unbuttoned to mark that he was off duty, and we sat round the table till it was starlight. Owls hooted in the forest across the road, and bats darted about our heads. Also there were mosquitoes. A great _many_ mosquitoes. Herr Bornsted told me I wouldn’t mind them after a while. “_Herrlich_,” I said, with real enthusiasm.
And now I’m going to bed. Kloster was right to send me here. I’ve been leaning out of my window. The night tonight is the most beautiful thing, a great dark cave of softness. I’m at the back of the house where the meadow is and the good cow, and beyond the meadow there’s another belt of forest, and then just over the tops of the pines, which are a little more softly dark than the rest of the soft darkness, there’s a pale line of light that is the star-lit water of the Haff. Frogs are croaking down by the stream, every now and then an owl hoots somewhere in the distance, and the air comes up to my face off the long grass cool and damp. I can’t tell you the effect the blessed silence, the blessed peace has on me after the fret of Berlin. It feels like getting back to God. It feels like being home again in heaven after having been obliged to spend six weeks in hell. And yet here, even here in the very lap of peace, as we sat in the porch after supper the Oberforster talked ceaselessly of Weltpolitik. The very sound of that word now makes me wince; for translated into plain English, what it means when you’ve pulled all the trimmings off and look at it squarely, is just taking other people’s belongings, beginning with their blood. I must learn enough German to suggest that to the Oberforster: Murder, as a preliminary to Theft. I’m afraid he would send me straight back in disgrace to Frau Berg.
Good night darling mother. I’ll write oftener now. My rules don’t count this fortnight. Bless you, beloved little mother.
Your Chris.
_Schuppenfelde, Monday, July 13th_.
Sweet mother,
I got your letter from Switzerland forwarded on this morning, and like to feel you’re by so much nearer me than you were a week ago. At least, I try to persuade myself that it’s a thing to like, but I know in my heart it makes no earthly difference. If you’re only a mile away and I mayn’t see you, what’s the good? You might as well be a thousand. The one thing that will get me to you again is accomplished work. I want to work, to be quick; and here I am idle, precious days passing, each of which not used for working means one day longer away from you. And I’m so well. There’s no earthly reason why I shouldn’t start practising again this very minute. A day yesterday in the forest has cured me completely. By the time I’ve lived through my week of promised idleness I shall be kicking my loose box to pieces! And then for another whole week there’ll only be two hours of my violin allowed. Why, I shall fall on those miserable two hours like a famished beggar on a crust.
Well, I’m not going to grumble. It’s only that I love you so, and miss you so very much. You know how I always missed you on Sunday in Berlin, because then I had time to feel, to remember; and here it is all Sundays. I’ve had two of them already, yesterday and today, and I don’t know what it will be like by the time I’ve had the rest. I walked miles yesterday, and the more beautiful it was the more I missed you. What’s the good of having all this loveliness by oneself? I want somebody with me to see it and feel it too. If you were here how happy we should be!
I wish you knew Herr von Inster, for I know you’d like him. I do think he’s unusual, and you like unusual people. I had a letter from him today, sent with a book he thought I’d like, but I’ve read it,–it is Selma Lagerlof’s Jerusalem; do you remember our reading it together that Easter in Cornwall? But wasn’t it very charming of him to send it? He says he is coming this way the end of the week and will call on me and renew his acquaintance with the Oberforster, with whom he says he has gone shooting sometimes when he has been staying at Koseritz. His Christian name is Bernd. Doesn’t it sound nice and _honest_.
I suppose by the end of the week he means Saturday, which is a very long way off. Saturdays used to seem to come rushing on to the very heels of Mondays in Berlin when I was busy working. Little mother, you can take it from me, from your wise, smug daughter, that work is the key to every happiness. Without it happiness won’t come unlocked. What do people do who don’t do anything, I wonder?
Koseritz is only five miles away, and as he’ll stay there, I suppose, with his relations, he won’t have very far to come. He’ll ride over, I expect. He looks so nice on a horse. I saw him once in the Thiergarten, riding. I’d love to ride on these forest roads,–the sandy ones are perfect for riding; but when I asked the Oberforster today, after I got Herr von Inster’s letter, whether he could lend me a horse while I was here, what do you think I found out? That Kloster, suspecting I might want to ride, had written him instructions on no account to allow me to. Because I might tumble off, if you please, and sprain either of my precious wrists. Did you ever. I believe Kloster regards me only as a vessel for carrying about music to other people, not as a human being at all. It is like the way jockeys are kept, strict and watched, before a race.
Frau Bornsted gazed at me with her large serious eyes, and said, “Do you play the violin, then, so well?”
“No,” I snapped. “I don’t.” And I drummed with my fingers on the windowpane and felt as rebellious as six years old.
But of course I’m going to be good. I won’t do anything that may delay my getting home to you.
The Bornsteds say Koseritz is a very beautiful place, on the very edge of the Haff. They talk with deep respectfulness of the Herr Graf, and the Frau Grafin, and the _junge_ Komtesse. It’s wonderful how respectful Germans are towards those definitely above them. And so uncritical. Kloster says that it is drill does it. You never get over the awe, he says, for the sergeant, for the lieutenant, for whoever, as you rise a step, is one step higher. I told the Bornsteds I had met the Koseritzes in Berlin, and they looked at me with a new interest, and Frau Bornsted, who has been very prettily taking me in hand and endeavouring to root out the opinions she takes for granted that I hold, being an _Englanderin_, came down for a while more nearly to my level, and after having by questioning learned that I had lunched with the Koseritzes, and having endeavoured to extract, also by questioning, what we had had to eat, which I couldn’t remember except the whipped cream I spilt on the floor, she remarked, slowly nodding her head, “It must have been very agreeable for you to be with the _grafliche Familie_.”
“And for them to be with me,” I said, moved to forwardness by being full of forest air, which goes to my head.
I suppose this was what they call disrespectful without being funny, for Frau Bornsted looked at me in silence, and Herr Bornsted, who doesn’t understand English, asked in German, seeing his wife solemn, “What does she say?” And when she told him he said, “_Ach_,” and showed his disapproval by absorbing himself in the _Deutsche Tageszeitzing_.
It’s wonderful how easy it is to be disrespectful in Germany. You’ve only got to be the least bit cheerful and let some of it out, and you’ve done it.
“Why are the English always so like that?” Frau Bornsted asked presently, after having marked her regret at my behaviour by not saying anything for five minutes.
“Like what?”
“So–so without reverence. And yet you are a religious people. You send out missionaries.”
“Yes, and support bishops,” I said. “You haven’t got any bishops.”
“You are the first nation in the world as regards missionaries,” she said, gazing at me thoughtfully and taking no notice of the bishops. “My father”–her father is a pastor–“has a great admiration for your missionaries. How is it you have so many missionaries and at the same time so little reverence ?”
“Perhaps that _is_ why,” I said; and started off explaining, while she looked at me with beautiful uncomprehending eyes, that the reaction from the missionaries and from the kind of spirit that prompts their raising and export might conceivably produce a desire to be irreverent and laugh, and that life more and more seemed to me like a pendulum, and that it needs must swing both ways.
Frau Bornsted sat twisting her wedding ring on her finger till I was quiet again. She does this whenever I emit anything that can be called an idea. It reminds her that she is married, and that I, as she says, am _nur ein junges Madchen_, and therefore not to be taken seriously.
When I had finished about the pendulum, she said, “All this will be cured when you have a husband.”
There was a tea party here yesterday afternoon. At least, it was coffee. I thought there were no neighbours, and when I came back late from having been all day in the forest, missing with an indifference that amazed Frau Bornsted the lure of her Sunday dinner, and taking some plum-cake and two Bibles with me, English and German, because I’m going to learn German that way among other ways while I’m here, and I think it’s a very good way, and it immensely impressed Frau Bornsted to see me take two Bibles out for a walk,–when I got back about five, untidy and hot and able to say off a whole psalm in perfect Lutheran German, I found several high yellow carriages, like the one I was fetched in on Saturday, in front of the paling, with nosebags and rugs on the horses, and indoors in the parlour a number of other foresters and their wives, besides Frau Bornsted’s father and mother and younger sister, and the local doctor and his wife, and the Herr Lehrer, a tall young man in spectacles who teaches in the village school two miles away.
I was astonished, for I imagined complete isolation here. Frau Bornsted says, though, that this only happens on Sundays. They were sitting round the remnants of coffee and cake, the men smoking and talking together apart from the women, the women with their bonnet-strings untied and hanging over their bosoms, of which there seemed to be many and much, telling each other, while they fanned themselves with immense handkerchiefs, what they had had for their Sunday dinner.
I would have slunk away when I heard the noise of voices, and gone round to the peaceful company of the cow, but Frau Bornsted saw me coming up the path and called me in.
I went in reluctantly, and on my appearing there was a dead silence, which would have unnerved me if I hadn’t still had my eyes so full of sunlight that I hardly saw anything in the dark room, and stood there blinking.
“_Unsere junge Englanderin,” said Frau Bornsted, presenting me. “Schuhlerin von_ Kloster–_grosses Talent_,–” I heard her adding, handing round the bits of information as though it was cake.
They all said _Ach so_, and _Wirklich_, and somebody asked if I liked Germany, and I said, still not seeing much, “_Es ist wundervoll_,” which provoked a murmur of applause, as the newspapers say.
I found I was expected to sit in a corner with Frau Bornsted’s sister, who with the Lehrer and myself, being all of us unmarried, represented what the others spoke of as _die Jugend_, and that I was to answer sweetly and modestly any question I was asked by the others, but not to ask any myself, or indeed not to speak at all unless in the form of answering. I gathered this from the behaviour of Frau Bornsted’s sister; but I do find it very hard not to be natural, and it’s natural to me, as you know to your cost, don’t you, little mother, to ask what things mean and why.
There was a great silence while I was given a cup of coffee and some cake by Frau Bornsted, helped by her sister. The young man, the third in our trio of youth, sat motionless in the chair next to me while this was done. I wanted to fetch my cup myself, rather than let Frau Bornsted wait on me, but she pressed me down into my chair again with firmness and the pained look of one who is witnessing the committing of a solecism. “_Bitte_–take place again,” she said, her English giving way in the stress of getting me to behave as I should.
The women looked on with open interest and curiosity, examining my clothes and hair and hands and the Bibles I was clutching and the flowers I had stuck in where the Psalms are, because I never can find the Psalms right off. The men looked too, but with caution. I was fearfully untidy. You would have been shocked. But I don’t know how one is to lie about on moss all day and stay neat, and nobody told me I was going to tumble into the middle of a party.
The first to disentangle himself from the rest and come and speak to me was Frau Bornsted’s father, Pastor Wienicke. He came and stood in front of me, his legs apart and a cigar in his mouth, and he took the cigar out to tell me, what I already knew, that I was English. “_Sie sind englisch_,” said Herr Pastor Wienicke.
“Ja,” said I, as modestly as I could, which wasn’t very.
There was something about the party that made me sit up on the edge of my chair with my feet neatly side by side, and hold my cup as carefully as if I had been at a school treat and expecting the rector every minute. “England,” said the pastor, while everybody else listened,–he spoke in German–“is, I think I may say, still a great country.”
“_Ja_?” said I politely, tilting up the _ja_ a little at its end, which was meant to suggest not only a deferential, “If you say so it must be so” attitude, but also a courteous doubt as to whether any country could properly be called great in a world in which the standard of greatness was set by so splendid an example of it as his own country.
And it did suggest this, for he said, “_Oh doch_,” balancing himself on his heels and toes alternately, as though balancing himself into exact justice. “_Oh doch._ I think one may honestly say she still is a great country, But–” and he raised his voice and his forefinger at me,–“let her beware of her money bags. That is my word to England: Beware of thy money bags.”
There was a sound of approval in the room, and they all nodded their heads.
He looked at me, and as I supposed he might be expecting an answer I thought I had better say _ja_ again, so I did.
“England,” he then continued, “is our cousin, our blood-relation. Therefore is it that we can and must tell her the truth, even if it is unpalatable.”
“_Ja_,” I said, as he paused again; only there were several little things I would have liked to have said about that, if I had been able to talk German properly. But I had nothing but my list of exclamations and the psalms I had learnt ready. So I said _Ja_, and tried to look modest and intelligent.
“Her love of money, her materialism–these are her great dangers,” he said. “I do not like to contemplate, and I ask my friends here–” he turned slowly round on his heels and back again–“whether they would like to contemplate a day when the sun of the British Empire, that Empire which, after all, has upheld the cause of religion with faithfulness and persistence for so long, shall be seen at last descending, to rise no more, in an engulfing ocean of over-indulged appetites.”
“_Ja_,” I said; and then perceiving it was the wrong word, hastily amended in English, “I mean _nein_.”
He looked at me for a moment more carefully. Then deciding that all was well he went on.
“England,” he said, “is our natural ally. She is of the same blood, the same faith, and the same colour. Behold the other races of the world, and they are either partly, chiefly, or altogether black. The blonde races are, like the dawn, destined to drive away the darkness. They must stand together shoulder to shoulder in any discord that may, in the future, gash the harmony of the world.”
“_Ja_,” I said, as one who should, at the conclusion of a Psalm, be saying Selah.
“We live in serious times,” he said. “They may easily become more serious. Round us stand the Latins and the Slavs, armed to the teeth, bursting with envy of our goods, of our proud calm, and watching for the moment when they can fall upon us with criminal and murderous intent. Is it not so, my Fraulein?”
“_Ja_” said I, forced to agree because of my unfortunate emptiness of German.
The only thing I could have reeled off at him was the Psalm I had learnt, and I did long to, because it was the one asking why the heathen so furiously rage together; but you see, little mother, though I longed to I couldn’t have followed it up, and having fired it off I’d have sat there defenceless while he annihilated me.
But I don’t know what they all mean by this constant talk of envious nations crouching ready to spring at them. They talk and talk about it, and their papers write and write about it, till they inflame each other into a fever of pugnaciousness. I’ve never been anywhere in the least like it in my life. In England people talked of a thousand things, and hardly ever of war. When we were in Italy, and that time in Paris, we hardly heard it mentioned. Directly my train got into Germany at Goch coming from Flushing, and Germans began to get in, there in the very train this everlasting talk of war and the enviousness of other nations began, and it has never left off since. The Archduke’s murder didn’t start it; it was going on weeks before that, when first I came. It has been going on, Kloster says, growing in clamour, for years, ever since the present Kaiser succeeded to the throne. Kloster says the nation thinks it feels all this, but it is merely being stage-managed by the group of men at the top, headed by S. M. So well stage-managed is it, so carefully taught by such slow degrees, that it is absolutely convinced it has arrived at its opinions and judgments by itself. I wonder if these people are mad. Is it possible for a whole nation to go mad at once? It is they who seem to have the enviousness, to be torn with desire to get what isn’t theirs.
“The disastrous crime of Sarajevo,” continued Pastor Wienicke, “cannot in this connection pass unnoticed. To smite down a God’s Anointed!” He held up his hands. “Not yet, it is true, an actually Anointed, but set aside by God for future use. It is typical of the world outside our Fatherland. Lawlessness and its companion Sacrilege stalk at large. Women emerge from the seclusion God has arranged for them, and rear their heads in shameless competition with men. Our rulers, whom God has given us so that they shall guide and lead us and in return be reverently taken care of, are blasphemously bombed.” He flung both his arms heavenwards. “Arise, Germany!” he cried. “Arise and show thyself! Arise in thy might, I say, and let our enemies be scattered!”
Then he wiped his forehead, looked round in recognition of the _sehr guts_ and _ausserordentlich schon gesagts_ that were being flung about, re-lit his cigar with the aid of the Herr Lehrer, who sprang obsequiously forward with a match, and sat down.
Wasn’t it a good thing he sat down. I felt so much happier. But just as it was at the meals at Frau Berg’s so it was at the coffee party here,–I was singled out and talked to, or at, by the entire company. The concentration of curiosity of Germans is terrible. But it’s more than curiosity, it’s a kind of determination to crush what I’m thinking out of me and force what they’re thinking into me. I shall see as they do; I shall think as they do; they’ll shout at me till I’m forced to. That’s what I feel. I don’t a bit know if it isn’t quite a wrong idea I’ve got, but somehow my very bones feel it.
Would you believe it, they stayed to supper, all of them, and never went away till ten o’clock. Frau Bornsted says one always does that in the country here when invited to afternoon coffee. I won’t tell you any more of what they said, because it was all on exactly the same lines, the older men singling me out one by one and very loudly telling me variations of Pastor Wienicke’s theme, the women going for me in twos and threes, more definitely bloodthirsty than the men, more like Frau Berg on the subject of blood-letting, more openly greedy. They were all disconcerted and uneasy because nothing more has been heard of the Austrian assassination. The silence from Vienna worries them, I gather, very much. They are afraid, actually they are afraid, Austria may be going to do nothing except just punish the murderers, and so miss the glorious opportunity for war. I wonder if you can the least realize, you sane mother in a sane place, the state they’re in here, the sort of boiling and straining. I’m sure the whole of Germany is the same,–lashed by the few behind the scenes into a fury of aggressive patriotism. They call it patriotism, but it is just blood-lust and loot-lust.
I helped Frau Bornsted get supper ready, and was glad to escape into the peace of the kitchen and stand safely frying potatoes. She was very sweet in her demure Sunday frock of plain black, and high up round her ears a little white frill. The solemnity and youth and quaintness of her are very attractive, and I could easily love her if it weren’t for this madness about Deutschland. She is as mad as any of them, and in her it is much more disconcerting. We will be discoursing together gravely–she is always grave, and never knows how funny we both are being really–about amusing things like husbands and when and if I’m ever going to get one, and she, full of the dignity and wisdom of the married, will be giving me much sage counsel with sobriety and gentleness, when something starts her off about Deutschland. Oh, they are _intolerable_ about their Deutschland!
The Oberforster is calling for this–he’s driving to the post, so good-bye little darling mother, little beloved and precious one.
Your Chris.
_Schuppenfelde, Thursday, July 16, 1914_.
My blessed mother,
Here’s Thursday evening in my week of nothing to do, and me meaning to write every day to you, and I haven’t done it since Monday. It’s because I’ve had so much time. Really it’s because I’ve been in a sort of sleep of loveliness. I’ve been doing nothing except be happy. Not a soul has been near us since Sunday, and Frau Bornsted says not a soul will, till next Sunday. Each morning I’ve come down to a perfect world, with the sun shining through roses on to our breakfast-table in the porch, and after breakfast I’ve crossed the road and gone into the forest and not come back till late afternoon.
Frau Bornsted has been sweet about it, giving me a little parcel of food and sending me off with many good wishes for a happy day. I wanted to help her do her housework, but except my room she won’t let me, having had orders from Kloster that I was to be completely idle. And it _is_ doing me good. I feel so perfectly content these last three days. There’s nothing fretful about me any more; I feel harmonized, as if I were so much a part of the light and the air and the forest that I don’t know now where they leave off and I begin. I sit and watch the fine-weather clouds drifting slowly across the tree-tops, and wonder if heaven is any better. I go down to the edge of the Haff, and lie on my face in the long grass, and push up my sleeves, and slowly stir the shallow golden water about among the rushes. I pick wild strawberries to eat with my lunch, and after lunch I lie on the moss and learn the Psalm for the day, first in English and then in German. About five I begin to go home, walking slowly through the hot scents of the afternoon forest, feeling as solemn and as exulting as I suppose a Catholic does when he comes away, shriven and blest, from confession. In the evening we sit out, and the little garden grows every minute more enchanted. Frau Bornsted rests after her labours, with her hands in her lap, and agrees with what the Oberforster every now and then takes his pipe out of his mouth to say, and I lie back in my chair and stare at the stars, and I think and think, and wonder and wonder. And what do you suppose I think and wonder about, little mother? You and love. I don’t know why I say you and love, for it’s the same thing. And so is all this beauty of summer in the woods, and so is music, and my violin when it gets playing to me; and the future is full of it, and oh, I do so badly want to say thank you to some one!
Good night my most precious mother.
Your Chris.
Schuppenfelde, Friday, July 17,1914.
This morning when I came down to breakfast, sweet mother, there at the foot of the stairs was Herr von Inster. He didn’t say anything, but watched me coming down with the contented look he has I like so much. I was frightfully pleased to see him, and smiled all over myself. “Oh,” I exclaimed, “so you’ve come.”
He held out his hand and helped me down the last steps. He was in green shooting clothes, like the Oberforster’s, but without the official buttons, and looked very nice. You’d like him, I’m sure. You’d like what he looks like, and like what he is.
He had been in the forest since four this morning, shooting with his colonel, who came down with him to Koseritz last night. The colonel and Graf Koseritz, who came down from Berlin with them, were both breakfasting, attended by the Bornsteds, and it shows how soundly I sleep here that I hadn’t heard anything.
“And aren’t you having any breakfast?” I asked.
“I will now,” he said. “I was listening for your door to open,”
I think you’d like him _very_ much, little mother.
The colonel, whose name is Graf Hohenfeld, was being very pleasant to Frau Bornsted, watching her admiringly as she brought him things to eat. He was very pleasant to me too, and got up and put his heels together and said, “Old England for ever” when I appeared, and asked the Graf whether Frau Bornsted and I didn’t remind him of a nosegay of flowers. Obviously we didn’t. The Graf doesn’t look as if anybody ever reminded him of anything. He greeted me briefly, and then sat staring abstractedly at the tablecloth, as he did in Berlin. The Colonel did all the talking. Both he and the Graf had on those pretty green shooting things they wear in Germany, with the becoming soft hats and little feathers. He was very jovial indeed, seemed fond and proud of his lieutenant, Herr von Inster, slapped the Oberforster every now and then on the back, which made him nearly faint with joy each time, and wished it weren’t breakfast and only coffee, because he would have liked to drink our healths,–“The healths of these two delightful young roses,” he said, bowing to Frau Bornsted and me, “the Rose of England–long live England, which produces such flowers–and the Rose of Germany, our own wild forest rose.”
I laughed, and Frau Bornsted looked sedately indulgent,–I suppose because he is a great man, this staff officer, who helps work out all the wonderful plans that are some day to make Germany able to conquer the world; but, as she explained to me the other day when I said something about her eyelashes being so long and pretty, prettiness is out of place in her position, and she prefers it not mentioned. “What has the wife of an Oberforster to do with prettiness?” she asked. “It is good for a _junges Madchen_, who has still to find a husband, but once she has him why be pretty? To be pretty when you are a married woman is only an undesirability. It exposes one easily to comment, and might cause, if one had not a solid character, an ever-afterwards-to-be-regretted expenditure on clothes.”
The men were going to shoot with the Oberforster after breakfast and be all day in the forest, and the Colonel was going back to Berlin by the night train. He said he was leaving his lieutenant at Koseritz for a few days, but that he himself had to get back into harness at once,–“While the young one plays around,” he said, slapping Herr von Inster on the back this time instead of the Oberforster, “among the varied and delightful flora of our old German forests. Here this nosegay,” he said, sweeping his arm in our direction, “and there at Koseritz–” sweeping his arm in the other direction, “a nosegay no less charming but more hot-house,–the _schone_ Helena and her young lady friends.”
I asked Herr von Inster after breakfast, when we were alone for a moment in the garden, what his Colonel was like after dinner, if even breakfast made him so jovial.
“He is very clever,” he said. “He is one of our cleverest officers on the Staff, and this is how he hides it.”
“Oh,” I said; for I thought it a funny explanation. Why hide it?
Perhaps that is what’s the matter with the Graf,–he’s hiding how clever _he_ is.
But that Colonel certainly does seem clever. He asked where we live in England; a poser, rather, considering we don’t at present live at all; but I told him where we did live, when Dad was alive.
“Ah,” he said, “that is in Sussex. Very pretty just there. Which house was your home?”
I stared a little, for it seemed waste of time to describe it, but I said it was an old house on an open green.
“Yes,” he said, nodding, “on the common. A very nice, roomy old house, with good outbuildings. But why do you not straighten out those corners on the road to Petworth? They are death traps.”
“You’ve been there, then?” I said, astonished at the extreme smallness of the world.
“Never,” he said, laughing. “But I study. We study, don’t we, Inster my boy, at the old General Staff. And tell your Sussex County Council, beautiful English lady, to straighten out those corners, for they are very awkward indeed, and might easily cause serious accidents some day when the roads have to be used for real traffic.”
“It is very good of you,” I said politely, “to take such an interest in us.”
“I not only take the greatest interest in you, charming young lady, and in your country, but I have an orderly mind and would be really pleased to see those corners straightened out. Use your influence, which I am sure must be great, with that shortsighted body of gentlemen, your County Council.”
“I shall not fail,” I said, more politely than ever, “to inform them of your wishes.”
“Ah, but she is delightful,–delightful, your little _Englanderin_,” he said gaily to Frau Bornsted, who listened to his _badinage_ with grave and respectful indulgence; and he said a lot more things about England and its products and exports, meaning compliments to me–what can he be like after dinner?–and went off, jovial to the last, clicking his heels and kissing first Frau Bornsted’s hand and then mine, in spite, as he explained, of its being against the rules to kiss the hand of a _junges Madchen_, but his way was never to take any notice of rules, he said, if they got between him and a charming young lady. And so he went off, waving his green hat to us and calling out _Auf Wiedersehen_ till the forest engulfed him.
Herr von Inster and the Graf went too, but quietly. The Graf went exceedingly quietly. He hadn’t said a word to anybody, as far as I could see, and no rallyings on the part of the Colonel could make him. He didn’t even react to being told what I gather is the German equivalent for a sly dog.
Herr von Inster said, when he could get a word in, that he is coming over to-morrow to drive me about the forest. His attitude while his Colonel rattled on was very interesting: his punctilious attention, his apparent obligation to smile when there were sallies demanding that form of appreciation, his carefulness not to miss any indication of a wish.
“Why do you do it?” I asked, when the Colonel was engaged for a moment with the Oberforster indoors. “Isn’t your military service enough? Are you drilled even to your smiles?”
“To everything,” he said. “Including our enthusiasms. We’re like the _claque_ at a theatre.”
Then he turned and looked at me with those kind, surprising eyes of his,–they’re so reassuring, somehow, after his stern profile–and said, “To-morrow I shall be a human being again, and forget all this,–forget everything except the beautiful things of life.”
Now I must leave off, because I want to iron out my white linen skirt and muslin blouse for to-morrow, as it’s sure to be hot and I may as well look as clean as I can, so good-bye darling little mother. Oh, I forgot to say how glad I am you like being at Glion. I did mean to answer a great many things in your last letter, my little loved one, but I will tomorrow. It isn’t that I don’t read and reread your darling letters, it’s that one has such heaps to say oneself to you. Each time I write to you I seem to empty the whole contents of the days I’ve lived since I last wrote into your lap. But to-morrow I’ll answer all your questions,–to-morrow evening, after my day with Herr von Inster, then I can tell you all about it.
Good-bye till then, sweet mother.
Your Chris.
_Koseritz, Saturday evening, July 18, 1914.
My darling little mother,
See where I’ve got to! Who’d have thought it? Life is really very exciting, isn’t it. The Grafin drove over to Schuppenfelde this afternoon, and took me away with her here. She said Kloster was coming for Sunday from Heringsdorf to them, and she knew he would want to see me and would go off to the Oberforsterei after me and leave her by herself if I were at the Bornsteds’, and anyhow she wanted to see something of me before I went back to Berlin, and I couldn’t refuse to give an old lady–she isn’t a bit old–pleasure, and heaps of gracious things like that. Herr von Inster had brought a note from her in the morning, preparing my mind, and added his persuasions to hers. Not that I wanted persuading,–I thought it a heavenly idea, and didn’t even mind Helena, because I felt that in a big house there’d be more room for her to stare at me in. And Herr von Inster is going to stay another week, taking his summer leave now instead of later, and he says he will see me safe to Berlin when I go next Saturday.
So we had the happiest morning wandering about the forest, he driving and letting the horses go as slowly as they liked while we talked, and after our sandwiches he took me back to the Bornsteds, and I showed Frau Bornsted the Grafin’s letter.
If it hadn’t been a Koseritz taking me away she would have been dreadfully offended at my wanting to go when only half my fortnight was over, but it was like a royal command to her, and she looked at me with greatly increased interest as the object of these high attentions. She had been inclined to warn me against Herr von Inster as a person removed by birth from my sphere–I suppose that’s because I play the violin–and also against drives in forests generally if the parties were both unmarried; and she had been extraordinarily dignified when I laughed, and had told me it was all very well for me to laugh, being only an ignorant _junges Madchen_, but she doubted whether my mother would laugh; and she watched our departure for our picnic very stiffly and unsmilingly from the porch. But after reading the Grafin’s letter I was treated more nearly as an equal, and she became all interest and co-operation. She helped me pack, while Herr von Inster, who has a great gift for quiet patience, waited downstairs; and she told me how fortunate I was to be going to spend some days with Komtesse Helena, from whom I could learn, she said, what the real perfect _junges Madchen_ was like; and by the time the Grafin herself drove up in her little carriage with the pretty white ponies, she was so much melted and stirred by a house-guest of hers being singled out for such an honour that she put her arm round my neck when I said good-bye, and whispered that though it wasn’t really fit for a _junges Madchen_ to hear, she must tell me, as she probably wouldn’t see me again, that she hoped shortly after Christmas to enrich the world by yet one more German.
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