Christine

Ch. 3: July

Berlin, Sunday, July 5th, 1914.

My blessed little mother,

It has been so hot this week. We've been sweltering up here under the

roof. If you are having it anything like this at Chertsey the sooner

you persuade the Cunliffes to leave for Switzerland the better. Just

the sight of snow on the mountains out of your window would keep you

cool. You know I told you my bedroom looks onto the Lutzowstrasse and

the sun beats on it nearly all day, and flies in great numbers have

taken to coming up here and listening to me play, and it is difficult

to practise satisfactorily while they walk about enraptured on my neck.

I can't swish them away, because both my hands are busy. I wish I had

a tail.

Frau Berg says there never used to be flies in this room, and suggests

with some sternness that I brought them with me,--the eggs, I suppose,

in my luggage. She is inclined to deny that they're here at all, on

the ground chiefly that nothing so irregular as a fly out of its proper

place, which is, she says, a manure heap, is possible in Germany. It

is too well managed, is Germany, she says. I said I supposed she knew

that because she had seen it in the newspapers. I was snappy, you see.

The hot weather makes me disposed, I'm afraid, to impatience with Frau

Berg. She is so large, and she seems to soak up what air there is, and

whenever she has sat on a chair it keeps warm afterwards for hours. If

only some clever American with inventions rioting in his brain would

come here and adapt her to being an electric fan! I want one so badly,

and she would be beautiful whirling round, and would make an immense

volume of air, I'm sure.

Well, darling one, you see I'm peevish. It's because I'm so hot, and

it doesn't get cool at night. And the food is so hot too and so

greasy, and the pallid young man with the red mouth who sits opposite

me at dinner melts visibly and continuously all the time, and Wanda

coming round with the dishes is like the coming of a blast of hot air.

Kloster says I'm working too much, and wants me to practise less. I

said I didn't see that practising less would make Wanda and the young

man cooler. I did try it one day when my head ached, and you've no

idea what a long day it seemed. So empty. Nothing to do. Only

Berlin. And one feels more alone in Berlin than anywhere in the world,

I think. Kloster says it's because I'm working too much, but I don't

see how working less would make Berlin more companionable. Of course

I'm not a bit alone really, for there is Kloster, who takes a very real

and lively interest in me and is the most delightful of men, and there

is Herr von Inster, who has been twice to see me since that day I

lunched at his aunt's, and everybody in this house talks to me

now,--more to me, I think, than to any other of the boarders, because

I'm English and they seem to want to educate me out of it. And Hilda

Seeberg has actually got as far in friendship as a cautious invitation

to have chocolate with her one afternoon some day in the future at

Wertheim's; and the pallid young man has suggested showing me the

Hohenzollern museum some Sunday, where he can explain to me, by means

of relics, the glorious history of that high family, as he put it; and

Frau Berg, though she looks like some massive Satan, isn't really

satanic I expect; and Dr. Krummlaut says every day as he comes into the

diningroom rubbing his hands and passes my chair, "_Na, was macht

England_?" which is a sign he is being gracious. It is only a feeling,

this of being completely alone. But I've got it, and the longer I'm

here and the better I know people the greater it becomes. It's an

_uneasiness_. I feel as if my _spirit_ were alone,--the real, ultimate

and only bit of me that is me and that matters.

If I go on like this you too, my little mother, will begin echoing

Kloster and tell me that I'm working too much. Dear England. Dear,

dear England. To find out how much one loves England all one has to do

is to come to Germany.

Of course they talk of nothing else at every meal here now but the

Archduke's murder. It's the impudence of the Servians that chiefly

makes them gasp. That they should dare! Dr. Krummlaut says they never

would have dared if they hadn't been instigated to this deed of

atrocious blasphemy by Russia,--Russia bursting with envy of the

Germanic powers and encouraging every affront to them. The whole

table, except the Swede who eats steadily on, sees red at the word

affront. Frau Berg reiterates that the world needs blood-letting

before there can be any real calm again, but it isn't German blood she

wants to let. Germany is surrounded by enormously wicked people, I

gather, all swollen with envy, hatred and malice, and all of gigantic

size. In the middle of these monsters browses Germany, very white and

woolly-haired and loveable, a little lamb among the nations, artlessly

only wanting to love and be loved, weak physically compared to its

towering neighbours, but strong in simplicity and the knowledge of its

_gute Recht_. And when they say these things they all turn to me for

endorsement and approval--they've given up seeking response from the

Swede, because she only eats--and I hastily run over my best words and

pick out the most suitable one, which is generally _herrlich_, or else

_ich gratuliere_. The gigantic, the really cosmic cynicism I fling

into it glances off their comfortable thick skins unnoticed.

I think Kloster is right, and they haven't grown up yet. People like

the Koseritzes, people of the world, don't show how young they are in

the way these middle-class Germans do, but I daresay they are just the

same really. They have the greediness of children too,--I don't mean

in things to eat, though they have that too, and take the violent

interest of ten years old in what there'll be for dinner--I mean greed

for other people's possessions. In all their talk, all their

expoundings of _deutsche Idealen_, I have found no trace of

consideration for others, or even of any sort of recognition that other

nations too may have rights and virtues. I asked Kloster whether I

hadn't chanced on a little group of people who were exceptions in their

way of looking at life, and he said No, they were perfectly typical of

the Prussians, and that the other classes, upper and lower, thought in

the same way, the difference lying only in their manner of expressing

it.

"All these people, Mees Chrees," he said, "have been drilled. Do not

forget that great fact. Every man of every class has spent some of the

most impressionable years of his life being drilled. He never gets

over it. Before that, he has had the nursery and the schoolroom:

drill, and very thorough drill, in another form. He is drilled into

what the authorities find it most convenient that he should think from

the moment he can understand words. By the time he comes to his

military service his mind is already squeezed into the desired shape.

Then comes the finishing off,--the body drilled to match the mind, and

you have the perfect slave. And it is because he is a slave that when

he has power--and every man has power over some one--he is so great a

bully."

"But you must have been drilled too," I said, "and you're none of these

things."

He looked at me in silence for a moment, with his funny protruding

eyes. Then he said, "I am told, and I believe it, that no man ever

really gets over having been imprisoned."

Evening.

I feel greatly refreshed, for what do you think I've been doing since I

left off writing this morning? Motoring out into the country,--the

sweet and blessed country, the home of God's elect, as the hymn says,

only the hymn meant Jerusalem, and the golden kind of Jerusalem, which

can't be half as beautiful as just plain grass and daisies. Herr von

Inster appeared up here about twelve. Wanda came to my door and banged

on it with what sounded like a saucepan, and I daresay was, for she

wouldn't waste time leaving off stirring the pudding while she went to

open the front door, and she called out very loud, "_Der Herr Offizier

ist schon wieder da_."

All the flat must have heard her, and so did Herr von Inster.

"Here I am, _schon meeder da_" he said, clicking his heels together

when I came into the diningroom where he was waiting among the _debris_

of the first spasms of Wanda's table-laying; and we both laughed.

He said the Master--so he always speaks of Kloster, and with such

affection and admiration in his voice--and his wife were downstairs in

his car, and wanted him to ask me to join them so that he might drive

us all into the country on such a fine day.

You can imagine how quickly I put on my hat.

"It is doing you good already," he said, looking at me as we went down

the four nights of stairs,--so Kloster had been telling him, too, that

story about too much work.

Herr von Inster drove, and we three sat on the back seat, because he

had his soldier chauffeur with him, so I didn't get as much talk with

him as I had hoped, for I like him _very_ much, and so would you,

little mother. There is nothing of the aggressive swashbuckler about

him. I'm sure he doesn't push a woman off the pavement when there

isn't room for him.

I don't think I've told you about Frau Kloster, but that is because one

keeps on forgetting she is there. Perhaps that quality of beneficent

invisibleness is what an artist most needs in a wife. She never says

anything, except things that require no answering. It's a great

virtue, I should think, in a wife. From time to time, when Kloster has

_lese majestated_ a little too much, she murmurs _Aber_ Adolf; or she

announces placidly that she has just killed a mosquito; or that the sky

is blue; and Kloster's talk goes on on the top of this little

undercurrent without taking the least notice of it. They seem very

happy. She tends him as carefully as one would tend a baby,--one of

those quite new pink ones that can't stand anything hardly without

crumpling up,--and competently clears life round him all empty and

free, so that he has room to work. I wish I had a wife.

We drove out through Potsdam in the direction of Brandenburg, and

lunched in the woods at Potsdam by the lake the Marmor Palais is on.

Kloster stared at this across the water while he ate, and the sight of

it tinged his speech regrettably. Herr von Inster, as an officer of

the King, ought really to have smitten him with the flat side of his

sword, but he didn't; he listened and smiled. Perhaps he felt as the

really religious do about God, that the Hohenzollerns are so high up

that criticism can't harm them, but I doubt it; or perhaps he regards

Kloster indulgently, as a gifted and wayward child, but I doubt that

too. He happens to be intelligent, and is not to be persuaded that a

spade is anything but a spade, however much it may be got up to look

like the Ark of the Covenant or anything else archaic and

bedizened--God forbid, little mother, that you should suppose I meant

that dreadful pun.

Frau Kloster had brought food with her, part of which was cherries, and

they slid down one's hot dry throat like so many cool little blessings.

I could hardly believe that I had really escaped the Sunday dinner at

the pension. We were very content, all of us I think, sitting on the

grass by the water's edge, a tiny wind stirring our hair--except

Kloster's, because he so happily hasn't got any, which must be

delicious in hot weather,--and rippling along the rushes.

"She grows less pale every hour," Kloster said to Herr von Inster,

fixing his round eyes on me.

Herr von Inster looked at me with his grave shrewd ones, and said

nothing.

"We brought out a windflower," said Kloster, "and behold we will return

with a rose. At present, Mees Chrees, you are a cross between the two.

You have ceased to be a windflower, and are not yet a rose. I wager

that by five o'clock the rose period will have set in."

They were both so kind to me all day, you can't think little mother,

and so was Frau Kloster, only one keeps on forgetting her. Herr von

Inster didn't talk much, but he looked quite as content as the rest of

us. It is strange to remember that only this morning I was writing

about feeling so lonely and by myself in spirit. And so I was; and so

I have been all this week. But I don't feel like that now. You see

how the company of one righteous man, far more than his prayers,

availeth much. And the company of two of them availeth exactly double.

Kloster is certainly a righteous man, which I take it means a man who

is both intelligent and good, and so I am sure is Herr von Inster. If

he were not, he, a Junker and an officer, would think being with people

so outside his world as the Klosters intolerable. But of course then

he wouldn't be with them. It wouldn't interest him. It is so funny to

watch his set, regular, wooden profile, and then when he turns and

looks at one to see his eyes. The difference just eyes can make! His

face is the face of the drilled, of the perfect unthinking machine, the

correct and well-born Oberleutnant; and out of it look the eyes of a

human being who knows, or will know I'm certain before life has done

with him, what exultations are, and agonies, and love, and man's

unconquerable mind. He really is very nice. I'm sure you'd like him.

After lunch, and after Kloster had said some more regrettable things,

being much moved, it appeared, by the palace facing him and by some

personal recollections he had of the particular Hohenzollern it

contained, while I lay looking up along the smooth beech-trunks to

their bright leaves glancing against the wonderful blue of the sky--oh

it was so lovely, little mother!--and Frau Kloster sometimes said

_Aber_ Adolf, and occasionally announced that she had slain another

mosquito, we motored on towards Brandenburg, along the chain of lakes

formed by the Havel. It was like heaven after the Lutzowstrasse. And

at four o'clock we stopped at a Gasthaus in the pinewoods and had

coffee and wild strawberries, and Herr von Inster paddled me out on the

Havel in an old punt we found moored among the rushes.

It looked so queer to see an officer in full Sunday splendour punting,

but there are a few things which seem to us ridiculous that Germans do

with great simplicity. It was rather like being punted on the Thames

by somebody in a top hat and a black coat. He looked like a bright

dragon-fly in his lean elegance, balancing on the rotten little board

across the end of the punt; or like Siegfried, made up to date, on his

journey down the Rhine,--made very much up to date, his gorgeous

barbaric boat and fine swaggering body that ate half a sheep at a

sitting and made large love to lusty goddesses wittled away by the

centuries to this old punt being paddled about slowly by a lean man

with thoughtful eyes.

I told him he was like Siegfried in the second act of the

Gotterdammerung, but worn a little thin by the passage of the ages, and

he laughed and said that he at least had got Brunnhilde safe in the

boat with him, and wasn't going to have to climb through fire to fetch

her. He says he thinks Wagner's music and Strauss's intimately

characteristic of modern Germany: the noise, the sugary sentimentality

making the public weep tears of melted sugar, he said, the brutal

glorification of force, the all-conquering swagger, the exaggeration of

emotions, the big gloom. They were the natural expression, he said, of

the phase Germany was passing through, and Strauss is its latest

flowering,--even noisier, even more bloody, of a bigger gloom. In that

immense noise, he said, was all Germany as it is now, as it will go on

being till it wakes up from the nightmare dream of conquest that has

possessed it ever since the present emperor came to the throne.

"I'm sure you're saying things you oughtn't to," I said.

"Of course," he said. "One always is in Germany. Everything being

forbidden, there is nothing left but to sin. I have yet to learn that

a multiplicity of laws makes people behave. Behave, I mean, in the way

Authority wishes."

"But Kloster says you're a nation of slaves, and that the drilling you

get _does_ make you behave in the way Authority wishes."

He said it was true they were slaves, but that slaves were of two

kinds,--the completely cowed, who gave no further trouble, and the

furtive evaders, who consoled themselves for their outward conformity

to regulations by every sort of forbidden indulgence in thought and

speech. "This is the kind that only waits for an opportunity to flare

out and free itself," he said. "Mind, thinking, can't be chained up.

Authority knows this, and of all things in the world fears thought."

He talked about the Sarajevo assassinations, and said, he was afraid

they would not be settled very easily. He said Germany is

seething,--seething, he said emphatically, with desire to fight; that

it is almost impossible to have a great army at such a pitch of

perfection as the German army is now and not use it; that if a thing

like that isn't used it will fester inwardly and set up endless

internal mischief and become a danger to the very Crown that created

it. To have it hanging about idle in this ripe state, he said, is like

keeping an unexercised young horse tied up in the stable on full feed;

it would soon kick the stable to pieces, wouldn't it, he said.

"I hate armies," I said. "I hate soldiering, and all it stands for of

aggression, and cruelty, and crime on so big a scale that it's

unpunishable."

"Great God, and don't I!" He exclaimed, with infinite fervour.

He told me something that greatly horrified me. He says that children

kill themselves in Germany. They commit suicide, schoolchildren and

even younger ones, in great numbers every year. He says they're driven

to it by the sheer cruelty of the way they are overworked and made to

feel that if they are not moved up in the school at the set time they

and their parents are for ever disgraced and their whole career

blasted. Imagine the misery a wretched child must suffer before it

reaches the stage of _preferring_ to kill itself! No other nation has

this blot on it.

"Yes," he said, nodding in agreement with the expression on my face,

"yes, we are mad. It is in this reign that we've gone mad, mad with

the obsession to get at all costs and by any means to the top of the

world. We must outstrip; outstrip at whatever cost of happiness and

life. We must be better trained, more efficient, quicker at grabbing

than other nations, and it is the children who must do it for us. Our

future rests on their brains. And if they fail, if they can't stand

the strain, we break them. They're of no future use. Let them go.

Who cares if they kill themselves? So many fewer inefficients, that's

all. The State considers that they are better dead."

And all the while, while he was telling me these things, on the shore

lay Kloster and his wife, neatly spread out side by side beneath a tree

asleep with their handkerchiefs over their faces. That's the idea

we've got in England of Germany,--multitudes of comfortable couples,

kindly and sleepy, snoozing away the afternoon hours in gardens or pine

forests. That's the idea the Government wants to keep before Europe,

Herr von Inster says, this idea of benevolent, beery harmlessness. It

doesn't want other nations to know about the children, the dead, flung

aside children, the ruthless breaking up of any material that will not

help in the driving of their great machine of destruction, because then

the other nations would know, he says, before Germany is ready for it

to be known, that she will stick at nothing.

Wanda has just taken away my lamp, Good night my own sweet mother.

Your Chris.

--

Berlin, Wednesday, July 8th, 1914.

Beloved mother,

Kloster says I'm to go into the country this very week and not come

back for a whole fortnight. This is just a line to tell you this, and

that he has written to a forester's family he knows living in the

depths of the forests up beyond Stettin. They take in summer-boarders,

and have had pupils of his before, and he is arranging with them for me

to go there this very next Saturday.

Do you mind, darling mother? I mean, my doing something so suddenly

without asking you first? But I'm like the tail being wagged by the

dog, obliged to wag whether it wants to or not. I'm very unhappy at

being shovelled off like this, away from my lessons for two solid

weeks, but it's no use my protesting. One can't protest with Kloster.

He says he won't teach me any more if I don't go. He was quite angry

at last when I begged, and said it wouldn't be worth his while to go on

teaching any one so stale with over-practising when they weren't fit to

practise, and that if I didn't stop, all I'd ever be able to do would

be to play in the second row of violins--(not even the first!)--at a

pantomime. That shrivelled me up into silence. Horror-stricken

silence. Then he got kind again, and said I had this precious

gift--God, he said, alone knew why I had got it, I a woman; what, he

asked, staring prawnishly, is the good of a woman's having such a

stroke of luck?--and that it was a great responsibility, and I wasn't

to suppose it was my gift only, to spoil and mess up as I chose, but

that it belonged to the world. When he said that, cold shivers

trickled down my spine. He looked so solemn, and he made me feel so

solemn, as though I were being turned, like Wordsworth in The Prelude,

into a dedicated spirit.

But I expect he is right, and it is time I went where it is cooler for

a little while. I've been getting steadily angrier at nothing all the

week, and more and more fretted by the flies, and one day--would you

believe it--I actually sat down and cried with irritation because of

those silly flies. I've had to promise not to touch a fiddle for the

first week I'm away, and during the second week not to work more than

two hours a day, and then I may come back if I feel quite well again.

He says he'll be at Heringsdorf, which is a seaside place not very far

away from where I shall be, for ten days himself, and will come over

and see if I'm being good. He says the Koseritz's country place isn't

far from where I shall be, so I shan't feel as if I didn't know a soul

anywhere. The Koseritz party at which I was to play never came off. I

was glad of that. I didn't a bit want to play at it, or bother about

it, or anything else. The hot weather drove the Grafin into the

country, Herr von Inster told me, He too seems to think I ought to go

away. I saw him this afternoon after being with Kloster, and he says

he'll go down to his aunt's--that is Grafin Koseritz--while I'm in the

neighbourhood, and will ride over and see me. I'm sure you'd like him

very much. My address will be:

--

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 i***t. Evidently, little mother, your unfortunate Chris is

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

to: it's Bernd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

played indefinitely.

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

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

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

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

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

three lessons a week now.

After tea,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

discoursed placidly on the political situation. She was most

instructive; calmly imparting knowledge to Helena and me; calmly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

with kind little eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Chris.

--

Koseritz, Sunday evening, July 26th.

Beloved mother,

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

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

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

minister having asked the Servian government for his passports and left

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

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

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

Graf merely telephoned that Servia had refused. It did seem

incredible. I did think Servia would deserve her punishing.

Yesterday's papers said the demands were most reasonable considering

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

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

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

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

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

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

excellent little German."

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

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

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

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

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

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

of disagreement in fundamentals.

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

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

German.

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

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

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

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

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

interfere in so just a punishment."

"But is it just?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

not just?"

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

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

haven't yet."

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

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

your little head this hot weather too much."

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

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

other day, and I resented that too.

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

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

"As if they were God," I remarked.

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

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

obedience to authority."

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

something truthful and rude.

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

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

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

lady, is accordingly constantly forced into a regrettable want of

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

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

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

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

are hopelessly middle-class.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

she smiled again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

endeavouring to convince a foreigner that the last thing their immense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Chris.

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

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

bear.

--

Berlin, Wednesday, July 29th.

My own little mother,

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

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

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

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

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

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

of writing to you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

babies, high over their heads whenever a _konigliche Hoheit_ dashes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

somewhere else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

very full of bows.

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

conversation impetuously.

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

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

be a failure."

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

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

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

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

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

behalf of Hohenzollerns.

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

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

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

to fight, vanished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Government against its judgment.

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

with Kloster, who explained that the Government is arranging everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the other, our power."

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

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

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

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

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

she continue these altruistic activities. Long may the homes of

Germany be decorated with England's fairest products."

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

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

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

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

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

their glasses against mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Koseritzes and Insters--welcomed the proposed marriage between Bernd

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

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

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

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

marriage would still further cement the already close union existing

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

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

their hands the blazing torches of humanity and civilization, march

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

them, and felt all lit up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

for our future.

Your Chris.

--

Berlin, Friday afternoon, July 31st.

My sweetest mother,

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

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

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

and thank you for all your dearness and sweet unselfish understanding

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

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

bath of love. Can anything more ever be added to it? I feel as if I

had reached the very innermost heart of happiness. Wonderful how one

carries about such a precious consciousness. It's like something magic

and hidden that takes care of one, keeping one untouched and unharmed;

while outside, day and night, there's this terrible noise of a people

gone mad.

You wrote to me last sitting under a cherry tree, you said, in the

orchard at the back of your hotel at Glion, and you talked of the

colour of the lake far down below through the leaves of walnut trees,

and of the utter peace. Here day and night, day and night, since

Wednesday, soldiers in new grey uniforms pass through the Brandenburger

Thor down the broad road to Charlottenburg. Their tramp never stops.

I can see them from my window tramping, tramping away down the great

straight road; and crowds that don't seem to change or dwindle watch

them and shout. Where do the soldiers all come from? I never dreamed

there could be so many in the world, let alone in Berlin; and Germany

isn't even at war! But it's no use asking questions, or trying to talk

about it. I've found the word "Why?" in this house is not only useless

but improper. Nobody will talk about anything; I suppose they don't

need to, for they all seem perfectly to _know_. They're in the inner

circle in this house. They're not the public. The public is that

shouting, perspiring mob out there watching the soldiers, and Frau Berg

and her boarders are the public, and so are the soldiers themselves.

The public here are all the people who obey, and pay, and don't know;

an immense multitude of slaves,--abject, greedy, pitiful. I don't

think I ever could have imagined a thing so pitiful to see as these

respectable middle-aged Berlin citizens, fathers of families, careful

livers on small incomes, clerks, pastors, teachers, professors, drunk

and mad out there publicly on the pavement, dancing with joy because

they think the great moment they've been taught to wait for has come,

and they're going to get suddenly rich, scoop in wealth from Russia and

France, get up to the top of the world and be able to kick it. That's

what I saw over and over again today as I somehow got through to Frau

Berg's to fetch your letters. An ordinary person from an ordinary

country wants to cover these heated elderly gentlemen up, and hide them

out of sight, so shocking are they to one's sense of respect and

reverence for human beings. Imagine decent citizens, paunchy and soft

with beer and sitting in offices, wearing cheap straw hats and

carefully mended and brushed black coats, _dancing_ with excitement on

the pavement; and nobody thinking it anything but fine and creditable,

at the prospect of their children's blood going to be shed, and

everybody's children's blood, except the blood of those safe children,

the children of the Hohenzollerns!

The weather is fiercely hot. There's a brassy sky without a cloud, and

all the leaves of the trees in the Thiergarten are shiny and motionless

as if they were cut out of metal. A little haze of dust hangs

perpetually along the Lindens and the road to Charlottenburg,--not much

of it, because the roads are too well kept, but enough to show that the

troops never leave off tramping. And all down where they pass, on each

side, are the perspiring crowds of people, red and apoplectic with

excitement and heat, women and children and babies mixed up in one

heaving, frantic mass. The windows of the houses on each side of the

Brandenburger Thor are packed with people all day long, and the noise

of patriotism doesn't leave off for an instant.

It's a very ugly noise. The only place where I can get away from

it--and I do hate noise, it really _hurts_ my ears--is the bathroom

here, which is a dark cupboard with no window, in the very middle of

the house. I thought it a dreadful bathroom when I first saw it, but

now I'm grateful that it can't be aired. The house was built years and

years before Germans began to wash, and it wasn't till the Koseritzes

came that a bath was wanted. Then it had to be put in any hole, and

this hole is the one place where there is silence. Everywhere else, in

every room in the house, it is as if one were living next door to a

dozen public houses in the worst slums of London and it were always

Saturday night. I do think the patriotism of an unattacked, aggressive

country is a hideous thing.

Bernd got me somehow through the crowd to the calmer streets on the way

to Frau Berg. He didn't want me to go out at all, but I want to see

what I can. The Kaiser rushed through the Brandenburger Thor in his

car as we went out. You never saw such a scene as then. It was

frightening, like a mob of lunatics let loose. Every time he is seen

tearing along the streets there's this wild scene, Bernd says. He has

suddenly leaped to the topmost top of popularity, for he's the

dispenser now of the great lottery in which all the draws are going to

be prizes. You know there isn't a German, not the cleverest, not the

most sober, who doesn't regularly and solemnly buy lottery tickets.

Aren't they, apart from all the other things they are, the _funniest_

people. So immature in wisdom, so top-heavy with dangerous knowledge

that their youngness in wisdom makes them use wrongly. If they hadn't

got the latest things in guns and equipment they would be quiet, and

wouldn't think of fighting.

Bernd made me promise to wait at Frau Berg's till he could fetch me,

and as he didn't get back till two o'clock, and Frau Berg very amiably

said I must be her guest at the well-known mid-day meal, I found myself

once more in the bosom of the boarders. Only this time I sat proudly

on Frau Berg's right, in the place of honour next to Doctor Krummlaut,

instead of in the obscurity of my old seat at the dark end near the

door.

It was so queer, and so different. There was the same Wanda, resting

her dishes on my left shoulder, which she always used to do, not only

so as to attract my attention but as a convenience to herself, because

they were hot and heavy. There were the same boarders, except the

red-mouthed bank-clerk and another young man. Hilda Seeberg was there,

and the Swede, and Doctor Krummlaut; and of course Frau Berg, massive

in her tight black dress buttoned up the front without a collar to it,

the big brooch she fastens it with at the neck half hidden by her

impressive double chins, which flow down as majestically as a

patriarch's beard. We had the same food, the same heat, and I'm sure

the same flies. But the nervous tension there used to be, the tendency

to quarrel, the pugnacious political arguing with me, the gibes at

England, were gone. I don't know whether it was because I'm engaged to

a Prussian officer that they were so very polite--I was tremendously

congratulated,--but they were certainly different about England. It

may of course have been their general happiness--happiness makes one so

kind all round!--for here too was the content, the satisfaction of

those who, after painful waiting, get what they want. It was expressed

very noisily, not with the restraint of the Koseritzes, but it was the

same thing really. The Berg atmosphere was more like the one in the

streets. Where the Grafin in her pleasure became only more calm, the

boarders were abandoned,--excited like savages dancing round the fire

their victims are to roast at. Frau Berg rumbled and shook with her

relief, like some great earthquake, and didn't mind a bit apparently

about the tremendous rise there has been in prices this week. What

will she get, I wonder, by war, except struggle and difficulty and

departing boarders? Being a guest, I had to be polite and let them say

what they liked without protest,--really, the disabilities of guests!

I couldn't argue, as I would have if I'd still been a boarder, which

was a pity, for meanwhile I've learned a lot of German and could have

said a great many things and been as natural as I liked here away from

the Grafin's gentle smile reminding me that I'm not behaving. But I

had to sit and listen smilingly, and of course show none of my horror

at their attitude, for more muzzling even than being a guest is being

the betrothed of a Prussian officer. _They_ don't know what sort of a

Prussian officer he is, how different, how truly educated, how full of

dislike for the base things they worship and want; and he, caught by

birth in the Prussian chains, shall not be betrayed by me who love him.

Here he is, caught anyhow for the present, and he must do his duty; but

someday we're going away,--he, and I, and you, little mother darling,

when there's no war anywhere in sight and therefore no duty to stay

for, and we'll go and live in America, and he'll take off all those

buttons and spurs and things, and we'll give ourselves up to freedom,

and harmlessness, and art, and beauty, and we'll have friends who

neither intrigue, which is what the class at the top here lives by, nor

who waste their lives being afraid, which is what all the other classes

here spend their lives being.

"At last we are going to wipe off old scores against France," Doctor

Krummlaut spluttered through his soup today at Frau Berg's with shining

eyes,--I should have thought it was France who had the old scores that

need wiping--"and Russia, the barbarian Colossus, will topple over and

choke in its own blood."

Then Frau Berg capped that with sentiments even more bloodthirsty.

Then the Swede, who never used to speak, actually raised her voice in

terms of blood too, and expressed a wish to see a Cossack strung up by

his heels to every electric-light standard along the Lindens.

Then Hilda Seeberg said if her Papa--that Papa she told me once she

hadn't at all liked--were only alive, it would be the proudest moment

of his life when, at the head of his regiment, he would go forth to

slay President Poincare. "And if," she said, her eyes flashing, "owing

to his high years his regiment was no longer able to accept his heroic

leadership, he would, I know, proceed secretly to France as an

assassin, and bomb the infamous Poincare,--bomb him in the name of our

Kaiser, of our Fatherland, and of our God."

"Amen," said Frau Berg, very loud.

I flew to Bernd when he came. It was as if a door had been flung open,

and the freshness and sanity of early morning came into the room when

he did. I hung on his arm, and looked up into his dear shrewd eyes, so

clear and kind, so full of wisdom. The boarders were with one accord

servile to him; even Doctor Krummlaut, a clever man with far better

brains probably than Bernd. Bernd, from habit, stiffened and became

unapproachable the instant the middle class public in the shape of the

congratulatory boarders appeared. He doesn't even know he's like that,

his training has made it second nature. You should have seen his

lofty, complete indifference. It was dreadfully rude really, and oh

how they loved him for it! They simply adored him, and were ready to

lick his boots. It was so funny to see them sidling about him, all of

them wagging their tails. He was the master, come among the slaves.

But to think that even Doctor Krummlaut should sidle!

There's a most terrific _extra_ noise going on outside. I can hardly

hear myself write. I don't know whether to run and find out what it

is, or retreat to the bathroom. My ears won't stand much more,--I

shall get deaf, and not be able to play.

Later.

What has happened is that special editions of the papers have appeared

announcing that the Kaiser has decreed a state of war for the whole of

Germany. Well. They've done it now. For I did extract from a very

cheerful-looking caller I met coming upstairs to the drawingroom that a

state of war is followed as inevitably by the real thing as a German

betrothal is followed by marriage. One is as committal as the other,

he said. It is the rarest thing, and produces an immense scandal, for

an engagement to be broken off; and, explained the caller looking

extremely pleased,--he was a man-caller, and therefore more willing to

stop and talk--to proceed backwards from a state of war to the _status

quo ante_ might produce the unthinkable result of costing the Kaiser

his throne.

"You can imagine, my most gracious Miss," said the caller, "that His

Majesty would never permit a calamity so colossal to overtake his

people, whose welfare he has continually and exclusively in his

all-highest thoughts. Therefore you may take it from me as completely

certain that war is now assured."

"But nobody has done anything to you," I said.

He gazed at me a moment, and then smiled. "High politics, and little

heads," he said. "High politics, and little women's heads,--" and went

on up the stairs smiling and shaking his own.

I do wish they wouldn't keep on talking as though my head were so

dreadfully small. Never in my life have people taken so utterly and

complacently for granted that I'm stupid.

Well, I feel very sick at heart. How long will it be before Bernd too

will be one of that marching column on the Charlottenburger Chaussee.

He won't go away from me that way, I know. He's on the Staff, and will

go more splendidly; but those men in the new grey uniforms tramping day

and night are symbols each one of them of departing happiness, of a

closed chapter, of the end of something that can never be the same

again.

Your tired Chris.