XLV
He left Paris without calling on Kenneth Murless for the purpose of indulging in violence. What was the good? To blow Kenneth’s brains out, or to punch his head, would not bring back Joyce. She had dismissed him for ever out of her heart and life. He walked alone upon the road and all that he had felt in loneliness before was nothing to this certainty of eternal separation. She was dead to him, and he to her.
He made one last foolish, futile effort to pretend otherwise by writing her a letter in which he implored her to wait a while at least before she took the step from which she could never return.
“Wait six months,” [he said]. “My loyalty is yours for that time, or longer, and perhaps before the end of it you will realise your horrible mistake—this midsummer madness that possesses you. . . .”
“Wait six months,” [he said]. “My loyalty is yours for that time, or longer, and perhaps before the end of it you will realise your horrible mistake—this midsummer madness that possesses you. . . .”
Stuff like that he wrote, but knew the hopelessness of it, and did not wait in Paris for an answer. She wouldn’t answer. She had told him all there was to know. As she had said once before, when as yet the “something” that had happened had not happened, it was “past argument.” Perhaps—almost certainly—throughout her married life her subconsciousness had known what she knew now consciously. She had been more at ease with Kenneth than ever with him. She had preferred his conversation, his sense of humour, his point of view. There was a secret code between them which he had never learnt. He had been “out of it,” after the first few weeks of sentiment and passion.
He reasoned all this out with astounding calmness of mind, between bouts of astounding rage and anguish, in the train from Paris to Berlin. He was quietly and deliberately rude to a young British officer in his carriage who tried to enter into conversation on the way to Cologne, where he belonged to the Army of Occupation. The boy was surprised by his gruffness, and shrank back into sulky silence, staring at him now and then with furtive eyes, until Bertram apologised, and said, “Sorry for being uncivil. I’ve got the devil of a toothache. You know—a jumping nerve!” One doesn’t tell a travelling companion that one has the devil of a broken heart, aching horribly.
“Oh, Lord,” said the boy, “what infernal bad luck! No wonder you don’t want me to jaw to you! There’s nothing worse.”
He offered Bertram a brandy flask and said “it helped sometimes.” And Bertram, to satisfy him, took a good swig which at least had the effect of sending him to sleep after a wakeful night. It was an uneasy sleep, and he wakened once crying out the name of Joyce. Fortunately the young officer was dozing, or pretending to doze. He left the carriage at Cologne, and hoped Bertram’s toothache would be cured by the time he reached Berlin.
A nice boy, like thousands who had been as young as he at the beginning of the war, and now had been four years, six years, even seven years, dead. How extraordinary was that! Bertram had been barely nineteen when he first joined up, in 1914. Now he was getting on for twenty-six, and felt as old as fifty. Well, he’d crammed in all the experience of life—war, marriage, failure, complete and absolute tragedy.
What was life? Nothing but some kind of service, where he could be of use somewhere. Service to boys younger than himself, like that kid on the way to Cologne. He might help, by a hairsbreadth in the balance of fate, to save their lives from another massacre. That would be worth doing. He was dedicated still to his work for peace. But first he must get peace within himself. Not easy, with this conflict tearing inside him. He must get some kind of wisdom, serenity, quietude of resignation before he could work for peace in the world. He would “chuck” thinking about his own wound, and plunge into the study of the world after war. That was the only line of sanity.
Berlin ought to be interesting. He would meet his sister Dorothy there, with her German husband. He would get to hear things and see things. It would be strange to walk about among the Enemy, without being killed.
Not long ago the Germans were “They.” During the war that was always the word used. “They” are putting up a strafe along the Menin Road. “They” are very quiet to-day. “They” are rather active on the Divisional Front. It would be damn funny to meet them in shops and restaurants, perhaps in private drawing-rooms—men, very likely, who had potted at him when he’d shown his cap a second above the parapet, or fired the five-point-nines which had rattled his nerves in a rat-haunted dug-out. . . .
Bertram could not get a room in any hotel in Berlin. There was a waiters’ strike, and all the hotels were closed and picketed except the Adlon, which paid what the strikers demanded, clapped the difference on to the bills, and did a roaring business with every room booked weeks in advance, and crowds of Germans, Austrians, English, and Jews of all nationalities, clamouring for admittance at any price, and bribing the head clerk with thousands of marks, to get their names on the waiting list.
It was the outside porter of the Adlon who saved Bertram from a night in the streets, by giving him a card to a private lodging-house somewhere near the Grossspielhaus, where he was able to obtain a bed-sitting-room in which all his meals would be served.
His landlord came in repeatedly to study his comfort, to explain the working of the electric light, to ask whether he desiredhellesordunklesbeer, and to carry in his tray with theAbend-essen. He was a tall Prussian of middle-age who had been aFeldwebel, or sergeant-major, with the Second Prussian Guards, after keeping a small hotel in Manchester. He spoke very good English, and lingered to talk while Bertram ate a well-cooked steak.
“You were an officer in the English army?”
Bertram nodded. “In France, all the time.”
“I also. We were opposite the English at Ypres, Cambrai, the Somme, in ’16. I used to hear your men talking in the trenches. Sometimes I called out to them, and sometimes they answered back. ‘How deep are you in mud, Tommy?’ That was in the winter of ’16. ‘Up to our bloody knees,’ said an English Tommy. ‘That’s nothing,’ I answered, ‘We’re up to our waists.’ ‘Serve you bloody well right!’ said the English boy.”
He chuckled over the reminiscence, but presently sighed deeply and said:
“The war was one long horror.”
“What made you begin it?” asked Bertram.
The man shrugged his shoulders.
“It was a war of Capital. We were all silly sheep.”
Bertram went on eating, and wished the man would go. He wanted to be alone. But the man stood by his chair and was anxious to talk.
“I suppose they still hate us in England?”
“They’re not fond of you,” said Bertram.
The man sighed again, noisily.
“I was very happy in Manchester. . . . You will find no hate against the English in Germany. Not much. We know you believe in ‘fair play.’ Not like the French!”
“You don’t like the French?”
The man’s face suddenly deepened in colour, and there came into his eyes a look of rage.
“The French? They’ve put every insult on us. Make us eat dirt. One day we’ll go back, and wring their necks—like this!”
He put his big hands together, and gave them a convulsive twist while he made a noise in his throat like a man choking.
“I thought you’d had enough of war,” said Bertram.
“Not against the French. I’d march again to-morrow to make them feel the German boot in their backsides.”
“Then it would happen all over again,” said Bertram. “The lousy trenches, the gun-fire, the massacre of men.”
“With a difference,” said the man, in a low voice, as though hiding, or half-revealing a secret thought.
“What kind of difference?”
“The French won’t have the English on their side next time.Nicht wahr?”
Bertram swung round in his chair.
“If the Germans think that, they’re making the hell of a mistake. For the second time.”
“So?”
The man had a scared look, as though he had said too much.
“Your dinner was good. It was good meat,nicht wahr? Better than in the trenches!”
He laughed in a guttural way, desiring to wipe out a bad impression.
That night Bertram set out to find his sister Dorothy, the Frau von Arenburg. By a queer coincidence in names, she lived in the Dorotheenstrasse, somewhere across the Wilhelmstrasse, at the corner of which was the British Embassy. Unfamiliar with the geography of Berlin, he lost his way, and found himself in the Leipzigerstrasse, so that, in halting German, he had to ask for the direction from a passer-by. It was a tall young man who listened very patiently to his bad German and then spoke in excellent English.
“If you will follow me, sir, I shall be very happy to guide you to the address.”
“Very good of you,” said Bertram.
“A pleasure, believe me.”
By the way he fell into step it was easy to see the man had been a soldier, and by all his bearing, an officer.
“You are a stranger in Berlin, sir?”
“My first visit,” said Bertram. “I arrived to-day.”
“So?You will find people friendly to you as an Englishman. We admire your sporting instincts, if I may say so without offence. You have chivalry to your enemy.”
“I hope so,” said Bertram, coldly, thinking of the propaganda of hate in some part of the English press, yet resenting a little this praise of England from a German officer.
“In the war your men bore no grudge after the fight. I was a prisoner after Cambrai, in ’17. Your ‘Tommies’ gave me cigarettes when I was captured, and I was generously treated. I am pleased to acknowledge that.”
“Our prisoners were not well-treated in Germany,” said Bertram.
“Perhaps that was so, here and there,” said the officer. “We hadn’t much food to spare. We were all on half-rations towards the end.”
“There was great brutality in some of the camps,” said Bertram.
“Doubtless some of our prison commandants were brutal. We have not yet reached the stage of the English in good humour. I admit that, in spite of ourKultur!”
He laughed frankly, and then halted.
“You are now in Dorotheenstrasse, at Number 20. Good-night and good luck.”
He saluted ceremoniously, but Bertram held out his hand and thanked him. The action seemed to touch the young man.
“It’s kind of you—to shake hands! We don’t like the English to think of us as Huns. We are not so bad as that.”
“A war name!” said Bertram. “Now it’s peace between us.”
“Peace and good will,” said the young man. “We cannot say that of all our late enemies.”
He hesitated for a moment, as though wishing the excuse of talking further. But as Bertram was silent, he saluted again, swung on his heel, and strode down the street.
After all it was a vain walk to Dorotheenstrasse, because when Bertram rang the bell of his sister’s house, theMädchenwho answered the door gave him to understand that the Herr Baron von Arenburg and thegnädige Frauwere away in the country, and would not return until the following afternoon.
It was a disappointment. Bertram felt like all men alone in a strange city, very lonely in its crowds. And his loneliness was deepened by a sense of spiritual desolation, and personal abandonment, because of Joyce.
He was surely, he thought, one of the loneliest men in the whole world that night, and then fought against the self-pity which threatened again to overwhelm him. “Keep a stiff upper lip, my lad!” he said to himself as he wandered about the well-lighted streets with these Germans on every side of him, seeking amusement in the “Wein-stube” and dancing halls.
They seemed happy. There was no visible sign of penury here, or of unhealed wounds of war, as in London where unemployed men went begging of the theatre crowds and there was a general air of depression and anxiety of many faces. These people were alert, cheerful, apparently prosperous. The only reminder of the agony they must have suffered was a blind man in soldier’s uniform who sat selling matches with a drooping head and pale, sad face. Now and then the passers-by dropped a coin in his tray and he said “Danke schön!”
Bertram pushed through a swing door into a place where music was being played. He couldn’t wander about all the time. It was partly a drinking-place, and partly a dancing-hall. The open space for dancing was surrounded by little tables all crowded with men and women drinking wine out of long-necked bottles. In the gallery an orchestra was playing jazz tunes, with a terrible blare of instruments. Every now and then men and women rose from the tables and joined the dancers until they were all densely wedged in one moving mass, jazzing up and down gracelessly.
Bertram took a seat at a vacant table, and ordered some wine to pay for his place. He sat there, staring at the dancers and the people at the tables. Some of the girls were astonishingly pretty in the German type, with blonde hair and blue eyes. There was one who reminded him of Joyce, and he felt a sharp touch of pain at the thought. She had the same kind of gold-spun hair and slim figure, but her face was painted, which was not a habit of Joyce’s, and it was plain to see that she was a girl of “easy virtue” by the way her eyes roved around the group of men, with inviting smiles. She sat alone, smoking a cigarette, with her elbows on the table. The men were mostly of a repulsive type. There were several of them with shaven heads, or so closely cropped that they were nearly bald, as he had seen Prussian officers when, as prisoners, they had thrown away their shrapnel helmets.
Other men here were foreigners, a few English, a group of Americans, a number of Jews of unguessable nationalities. The women mingled with them, drank with them, ogled them, and they did not resent these Germanhouris.
Bertram had never seen such dancing. It was perfectly respectable, but grotesque because of the stiff way in which the Germans interpreted the modern steps with a kind of mechanical jig.
The girl like Joyce—horribly like her—came round to Bertram’s table and sat deliberately in front of him.
“English boy?” she asked.
“English,” he said.
“You do not drink your wine. Shall I help you?”
“As you like.”
She poured herself out a glass of Niersteiner, and touched Bertram’s glass and said “Prosit!” before taking a sip.
“Why are you sad?” she asked.
“Is it a gay world?”
She shrugged her bare shoulders.
“For the English it should be good. They won the war.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Bertram. “Berlin seems full of rich people, all drinking and dancing like this.”
The girl looked round on the company, and made a grimace of disgust.
“Foreigners mostly in these places. Jews. Profiteers,”—she said the wordSchieberfor the last class. “This isn’t Germany. It’s the same hell as in other great cities of the world, London, Paris, New York.”
“You know London?”
“Very well. I was there as a dancer before the war. At the Empire. How’s dear old Piccadilly?”
“Still there,” said Bertram.
He wished to God this girl would go away. The line of her neck as she turned her head reminded him of Joyce again.
“I’d like to get back to London,” she said. “Here one must be wicked or starve to death. I have a sister who’s good. She’s a dressmaker. She earns sixty marks a day, sewing on buttons and hooks. It costs her more than that to buy a chemise. She goes to bed when she gets her underclothes washed, once a month. Now she had tuberculosis fromunternährung.”
“What’s that?” asked Bertram.
“What you call under-feeding. Starvation is another name for it. All the good people suffer fromunternährung. My mother died from it in the war, when none of us had enough to eat, whatever our virtue. You English made us suffer like that. Your blockade.”
“Yes,” said Bertram.
“It was rather cruel, don’t you think? After the war you kept the blockade up until Peace was signed. You made war against our babies and killed thousands, so that we should be starved into surrender. That wasn’t what you call playing the game.”
“The war game,” said Bertram. “You would have been harder with us if you had won.”
“That’s true. War is perhaps as cruel as peace. Most men are devils, and women she-devils.”
“Some of them are pretty decent,” said Bertram. “If they get a chance. The ordinary crowd.”
“You are not cruel,” she answered. “You are kind. You have kind eyes, and you talk to me as though I were a good woman. I would love you very much if you would let me. What do you say, English boy?”
“I must be going,” said Bertram.
She made a protest, holding his arm, but he called “Ober!” and paid for the wine, and rose from his chair. She held out her hand, and he gave her his.
“I expect you’re too good to live,” she said, with a queer little laugh.
“I ought to have died before,” he said, “but I missed the luck. In the war.”
“Learn to laugh,” she said. “Laugh at the cruelty of life, like I do.”
“I expect you know its cruelty,” he said, with a little pity in his voice.
“Down to the bottom of hell,” she answered, and laughed again.
“Well, good-night.”
“Gute Nacht, hübschen!”
She bent down suddenly and kissed his hand.
He went out of the dancing hall strangely perturbed. As the girl had bent her head to kiss his hand, the glint of her hair was a terrible reminder of Joyce. Yet this girl who was “bad” had been kinder to him than Joyce! That was a frightful thought. And Joyce was bad too, in a different way. She’d transferred herself to Kenneth with less temptation than this German girl who sold her love to escapeunternährung, which was starvation.
His passing out of the hall was blocked by a group of people at the entrance. Something was going to happen, and Bertram was forced to stay and see it. Nothing worth seeing, except as a study of human anatomy in acrobatic eccentricity.
A girl made her way through the little crowd to where a man dressed as a sailor waited for her. She wore a red cloak, but dropped it on the edge of the dirty floor, and took the sailor’s hand. For five minutes he whirled her about like a rag doll, flung her over his head, held her wrist and swung her from him, round and round, with frightful rapidity, hurled her backwards, and caught her before her head was smashed against the polished boards—a kind of Apache dance intensified in brutality. Several times the girl came down on her toes from a flying spin and smiled and kissed her hands to the groups of wine-drinkers who applauded and clinked their glasses together as a sign of approval. At the end the girl came to the edge of the dancing floor, picked up her red cloak, thrust her way through the group at the entrance, who said “Schön! Schön!” and then collapsed on to a wooden chair half concealed by a curtain in the passage. Bertram saw her face, which was dead white. She was sitting back with her neck over the rail of the chair, gasping like a dying creature.
Bertram spoke to a man in a kind of uniform like a commissionaire.
“Is she all right?”
“She will recover. She goes to another hall presently. She does that five times a night, and is well known in Berlin.”
“How much does she get for that?”
The man laughed in his throat.
“Enough to keep her alive. About as much as the price of a bottle of wine. Women are cheap.”
Bertram thought of some words spoken by the German girl who had kissed his hand.
“War is almost as cruel as peace.”
Terrible words, spoken with tragic sincerity and a painted smile.
It wasn’t true. He had seen the cruelty of war, not only in the fighting line and in the fields of the dead, and the wounded, the blinded and gassed, but in villages where women saw their little homes go up in flames, fled from the approach of the Enemy, wept for those who had been caught before escape was possible, led the life of refugees through years of misery and squalor and hopelessness. War was not an alternative cruelly to that of peace. It was an additional cruelty. It didn’t stop the private vices and cruelties of men and women. It created more vice, more disease, more starvation, more of that hell into which the girl like Joyce had fallen. . . . But peace, after all, was cruel! And life, anyhow, at its worst and at its best. All one could do, it seemed, was to acquire a little courage, a sense of humour, a touch of charity, and make the best of a bad business, or with luck, which wasn’t his, a little private paradise.
XLVI
He found his sister Dorothy at home next evening, waiting for him excitedly, having had the message he had left with theMädchen. He was surprised by her emotion at seeing him, not having realised what this would mean to a girl who had been exiled in the enemy’s country through the war, and had seen no one of her kith and kin till now, three years after the ending of war. She took hold of him, laughing and crying at the same time, held him at arm’s length to see the change in him, drew him close again, and kissed him with rather overwhelming joy.
She had changed more than he had imagined. Two years older than himself—she was twenty-eight now—her coiled brown hair was already touched with grey, and her beautiful face—she had always been the beauty of the family—bore visible traces of some past anguish. In an indefinable way also, she had become German. There was something of the “Haus-Frau” about her, not only in her style of dress but in her look and her way of moving.
She told him she had a million questions she wanted to ask, and first of all of her father, and of her dear mother and of poor Digby and Susan, and then of himself and Joyce, whom she had never seen—“funny that, Bertram!”—and then of England, and Ireland. Poor, tragic, rebellious Ireland!
“A big order!” said Bertram. “It would take a month to tell you all that, and most of it is tragedy.”
“You shall tell me for a month. I want to hear everything, through the war and afterwards. Once I was starved for food—we lived on next to nothing in the two last years of war!—but now I am more starved for news. I ache for every detail of it!”
But intimate talk was checked awhile on Bertram’s side by the appearance of Dorothy’s husband, the Baron von Arenburg. He was a soldierly-looking fellow of about thirty, with easy manners, and a fair, good-natured face, with grey eyes and a little yellow moustache. He shook hands with a firm grip, and said he was delighted to meet Dorothy’s brother, “whom she adores!”
Bertram knew something of his record during the war, through Dorothy’s letters to her mother. He had been with the cavalry in East Prussia, in the great sweep back under Mackensen. Most of the time he had been on the Russian Front, and was only in the West in the last phase of the war, when the dismounted cavalry were thrown in to stiffen the retreat in September of ’18, to the end. “War prolongers!” as the German infantry called them, derisively and with hate.
Bertram noticed that he kissed his wife’s hand on entering, with a kind of gallant reverence, surprising, he thought, in a German, though afterwards he saw it was the usual custom.
At dinner the conversation was desultory. Bertram hedged on most of the subjects which might lead him into deep water. To enquiries about Joyce he answered vaguely that she was staying with some friends in France. To Dorothy’s questions about the purpose of his visit to Germany he answered that he was “writing a bit”—in a journalistic way. He wanted to study the conditions in Germany, the spirit of the people, and so on.
Dorothy and her husband exchanged glances. This seemed to them exciting news. They were glad, they said, that at last some one had come from England to tell the truth about Germany. The English newspapers told nothing but lies. The falsity of the picture they drew was positively frightful—“utterly grotesque,” said Von Arenburg.
“In what way?” asked Bertram.
Dorothy told him “in every way.” They pretended that Germany was getting enormously rich, that the people were not taxed, that the German mark was being forced down deliberately, in exchange value, in order to capture the world’s trade, that Germany was making munitions of war and training secret armies, that the Revolution was a sham, and the plea of poverty a colossal fraud.
“Is none of that true?” asked Bertram.
Dorothy laughed, the old, full-throated laugh which he remembered in the old days of home life.
“Lies, lies, lies!” she cried.
Emotionally, vehemently, she protested that the middle classes in Germany were so impoverished by the downfall of the mark that even now they were on “short commons” and unable to buy clothes, especially underclothes or boots. So far from escaping taxation, they were ground down with taxes—even small incomes equal to sixty pounds a year in England. The mark fell because every time Germany had to pay her monstrous indemnities she had to purchase foreign money at gold rates, and then print enormous new issues of paper money.
The whole thing was mad. Germany, after four and a half years of war which had ruined her utterly, was expected to pay back the losses of all her enemies, and all their war-pensions, and all the cost of the Army of Occupation. Not even the United States, which had all the gold in the world, could pay such fabulous sums.
“It’s only fair that Germany should pay for the ruin she made,” said Bertram stolidly. “I was in France during the war. I saw the destruction of her cities and villages and farms and harvest fields. Wiped off the map.”
“We’re ready to help France to reconstruct all that,” said Dorothy, and Bertram winced a little at that “we.” He shrank from this sister of his identifying herself with her husband’s people. “What we cannot do is to pay for pensions and all the other ridiculous charges.”
“Germany is bound to go bankrupt,” said Von Arenburg. “Nothing can prevent that, and when it happens, Europe will be dragged down with us.”
“France wants to push Germany into the mud,” said Dorothy. “Nothing will satisfy her but a march into the Ruhr to seize the industrial cities and strangle Germany’s chance of life.”
“We shall try to escape—by way of Russia,” said Von Arenburg. “It will cause another war within a generation.”
“And then the breakdown of civilisation in Europe,” said Dorothy. “Dear God! I can’t believe that England will allow it. England’s generous, in spite of her cruelty at times.”
“Cruelty?” asked Bertram.
“The blockade,” she said. “It was cruel to starve German babies—after the Armistice—to force the Treaty of Versailles.”
Some one else had said that. It was the girl like Joyce in the dancing hall—the little prostitute— It seemed to be a general belief. Was there any truth in it?
“For her own interests, England must prevent it!” said Von Arenburg. “She needs world-markets for her goods. She must work for the recovery of Europe.”
“Even if France insists on her right to Shylock’s pound of flesh,” said Dorothy. “France is the enemy of the world’s peace.”
Bertram’s face flushed.
“I don’t want to argue,” he said, “but I know the sacrifice of France. I saw her agony with my own eyes. I’ve just been in the old battlefields again, among the peasants there. There’s only one thing that’s in all their minds—a dread of another war. They’re still not sure that one day Germany won’t come back again, and re-light the red fires. They want nothing but security, and they don’t see it, except in keeping Germany weak.”
“They’re going the wrong way to work to prevent another war,” said Dorothy. “There’s not an insult, a petty provocation, a threat of ignominy, that they haven’t heaped on Germany since the signing of Peace.”
“One must understand their point of view,” said Bertram. “Germany wasn’t very tender of French feelings in time of war, when she thought she was winning.”
He changed the topic of conversation. His advocacy of France seemed to distress Dorothy.
After dinner, when with a tactful word or two Von Arenburg left his wife alone with her brother, Dorothy revealed her thoughts more deeply, with an emotion which touched him, because he shared her hope.
“It’s not that I hate France,” she said. “I used to weep for France when German armies were trampling through her fields—during the years of death. But I hate war. Oh, Bertram, you’ve seen it, and can hardly tell what you’ve seen, because no words can tell it all, but I’ve suffered perhaps more than you. Imagine an English wife of a German husband through all these years! You can’t imagine. The torture of a dual allegiance—duty to my husband, pity for the German wounded—for their frightful slaughter—for the spiritual despair of the German people knowing, in spite of early victories, that they were doomed—for they knew it always! Then, on the other side, my love for England, my pride in English courage, my dreams at night because of English armies under German gunfire, with you, my dear, among them, somewhere in those dreadful fields. I’m angry with France now because she seems to prevent the spirit of peace.”
“She’s not sure that Germany won’t seek revenge again. Areyousure?”
Dorothy sighed, and seemed to think deeply of all that she knew about the German people. Then she told her brother that before the Armistice, and afterwards, the German people had revolted against the war, and militarism. They were all “Wilsonites.” If in defeat they’d been treated generously, they would have risen with immense, overwhelming emotion to new ideals of world peace. But the Treaty of Versailles seemed to put them in chains and doom them to an eternal servitude of debt to the victor nations. Then the attitude of France had been so harsh and so provocative that gradually the German people had hardened again in spirit, and the old venom had come back. The ideals of world peace were abandoned by French policy which sought only the ringing round of Germany with hostile states to keep her down under the menace of armed force. Now hatred for France smouldered in every German heart, and the future was black.
“I’m afraid!” she said, “I’m afraid!”
They were the words which Christy had once spoken in his rooms in London, on a journey back from Central Europe.
Her eyes filled with tears, and then she brushed them away and smiled.
“Let’s forget all that to-night. Tell me about my dear ones, living and dead.”
For hours they talked of their mother and father, Susan and Digby, their old home life, and old friends; and it seemed as though the War had stricken every one, and utterly changed the world they had known when they had lived together under the same roof. It seemed as though they were survivors from a great earthquake. Then Bertram told Dorothy of his own tragedy with Joyce, and she cried out with grief that English womanhood should so forget its old code of virtue.
“Something seems to have changed in the soul of England!” she said. “What is it, Bertram? Have they all broken under the strain of war?”
“It smashed the old traditions,” he said. “Some of them wanted smashing, but the process is painful—and some of the best things got broken with the worst.”
XLVII
In the company of his sister and her husband, Bertram saw a good deal of the inner life of Germany, and polished up his knowledge of the language sufficiently to carry on conversation with the people he met.
There was much that he came to admire in German character, and there were times when he reproached himself for having forgotten “the Enemy” so completely that he could shake hands with a German (so violating an ancient vow) without any sense of physical repugnance, and even discuss the war in a friendly way with men, like Von Arenburg, who had been responsible for the death of British soldiers, and among them his own best comrades.
He used to wonder sometimes whether that were not treachery to his old standards of loyalty and honour, and was conscience-stricken because he accepted hospitality, kindness, even friendship, from these people. But he found it impossible to keep up the old “hate” against them. Even in war-time that spirit of hate had been behind the lines rather than in the trenches. The “Tommies” had given cigarettes to their prisoners after the heat of battle. German officers had been treated civilly by British officers, if they were at all well-behaved, and within a few days after the occupation of Cologne, British soldiers had clinked beer mugs with the fellows who had once lain behind machine guns, mowing them down. That was the real spirit of chivalry, a lesson taught by the common man, obeying some instinctive decent law of nature, to neurotic and morbid-minded people who watered the roots of hate and cultivated its poisonous fruit with unceasing care.
Only by some friendly pact with these people could Europe have peace. Bertram could see no chance of peace if they were to be treated for ever as moral lepers. It was ridiculous to regard them as moral lepers.
How could he take that view when he moved among their crowds in the Opera House, in pleasant beer gardens outside Berlin to which they flocked in the evenings, by the lakeside and in the woods of the Grünewald? These young Germans with their girls, drinking light beer, eating ices, chattering to the music of the band, playing with little flaxen-haired children, did not behave like moral lepers. They were good-natured, decent, smiling folk, the girls wonderfully neat and pretty and plump, in cheap frocks, the men shabbily dressed, many in their old war tunics dyed and re-cut to civilian styles, but scrupulously brushed.
Von Arenburg, who had a certain sense of humour, limited by a Prussian outlook, used to ask Bertram what he thought of the “Huns” in assemblies like that. “Do they behave like barbarians? Do you see them eating their babies?”
“No,” said Bertram; “but I find them enjoying themselves, obviously well-fed, not badly dressed, and spending quite a lot of marks on their evening’s amusement. What about this German poverty, that you keep telling me about?”
It was Dorothy who tried to explain. These people in their home lives stinted and scraped to enjoy an evening’s pleasure like this. They lived in overcrowded rooms, stiflingly hot in summer. To go to a beer garden in the evening was essential for very life and health. It cost but a few marks for light beer or a pink ice. Look at the girls’ frocks, so clean, but so cheap. Look at their boots, made of paper and sham leather.
Bertram was not satisfied with these explanations. It seemed to him in Berlin and the other towns to which he went, that the German people were marvellously prosperous after the war. It was true that in exchange value German paper money was slumping away at an alarming rate, and that every time it dropped prices were higher in the shops. But wages seemed to rise also, and people seemed to get more paper money every month, which, in Germany, had still a fair purchasing power.
He wandered round the great stores, like Wertheim’s, and was startled by the amazingly low price of everything manufactured in Germany, and there seemed nothing they didn’t make. Translated into English figures, at the current rate of exchange, they were a mockery of English competition. At such prices they could beat us in every market of the world, and, so it seemed, were doing.
Von Arenburg pooh-poohed his argument.
“It’s all illusion,” he said. “I admit the feverish activity of German trade and industry. It’s the genius of our people, inspired by a desperate desire to avert their ruin. But nothing can do that so long as the Allied nations do not release their stranglehold. We sell below cost price. To buy raw material from abroad we have to pay the difference on the mark. We’re bleeding to death. Presently the crash will come, and Europe will shudder in all its members.”
Bertram was not good at arithmetic. International finance was a mystery to him. He could not find any clue to this economic mystery of the German people, bankrupt (they said) yet prosperous, capturing world trade (as they admitted), yet “bleeding to death.”
More within his power of observation was the mentality of these people, and in patient listening at luncheon tables and dinner tables, where he met the Junker crowd and the “Intellectuals,” in conversations with shop-keepers and peasants, he tried to discover the drift of thought in Germany after defeat.
Largely the peace of the world depended upon their outlook on the future. Had they liberated themselves from their old militarism? Were they preparing to march forward as a free democracy in a commonwealth of nations, away from the darkness of the old War-Gods in this Jungle? Or were they again worshipping those ancient gods with secret rites and propitiations?
It was hard to tell among Dorothy’s friends. They revealed how deep the agony of war had been in their souls, how sharply the wound still hurt. These German ladies, very charming, some of them, had lost fathers, husbands, brothers, lovers, sons, even in more appalling numbers than the death-rate of England. Whole families of the German aristocracy had been wiped out, and in the humbler classes it was the same.
They cursed the war, and the Army commanders, and the politicians. They said they had been “betrayed” by the conceit of Ludendorff, by the folly of the Supreme War Council, by the spirit of Bolshevism among the troops on the Russian Front who had been bitten by that frightful microbe. They protested against the “cruelty” of the Versailles Treaty, and asserted their faith in Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” which had never been fulfilled. That was another betrayal, not only of Germany, but of all the hopes of the world.
Yet never once in any company did any German, man or woman, acknowledge the guilt of Germany in having started the war. Russia had “moved first.” England had hemmed in Germany. The German people had been ringed round by enemies. And in spite of all those enemies, the German armies had never been defeated. It was the home front that had broken down, by sheer starvation.
Never defeated! Bertram challenged that belief, with some violence, at one of Dorothy’s afternoon “at homes.”
Among the ladies were several ex-officers, two Generals of Rupprecht’s Army, so long opposite the British, in Flanders.
It was General von Althof who made the statement, with simple sincerity.
“Gott sei dank!Our brave Armies were never defeated, from first to last.”
“That surprises me,” said Bertram, with an ironical smile; “I always thought the German Armies were broken to bits. First on the Marne, in July ’18. Afterwards like brown paper on August 8th. They could never hold a line again. When the end came they’d lost hundreds of thousands of prisoners, thousands of guns, and the whole war-machine was destroyed. Otherwise there was no need to sign the Armistice, the greatest surrender of any nation in the history of the world, surely?”
It was not a courteous way of speech; not kind. But Bertram was becoming rather tired of this calm forgetfulness of what had happened in history, and he disliked the type represented by General von Althof, one of those hard, bald-headed Prussians, with a mind as narrow as a Brazil nut.
Von Althof became red about the gills, and then very pale.
“Doubtless, as a young regimental officer, you regard local successes as great victories. That is a common error, not difficult to understand. As a General of the German High Command, I repeat, sir, that our glorious Armies were never defeated in the field of battle. The Armistice was forced upon us by revolution at home, and the brokenmoraleof a hungry people.”
“There can be no argument about it,” said one of the younger officers. “It is an accepted fact.”
Bertram made a considerable argument about it, until checked by Dorothy, who was visibly distressed.
General von Althof departed with suppressed rage, after a stiff bow to Bertram, and the other officers took their leave later, so that only a few ladies remained.
One of them was the Fräulein von Wegener, a pretty blonde, who seemed to be Dorothy’s greatest friend.
She crossed over to Bertram, sitting by his side, and her eyes were alight with amusement.
“Of course I don’t think our Armies were defeated—I’m German!—but I adore the courage with which you attacked Von Althof. It made me tremble all over! I have never seen any officer disagree with a General. It isn’t done in Germany. You reminded me of St. George and the Dragon.”
Bertram’s rage had subsided, and he felt guilty of a social misdemeanour in having raised such an argument in Dorothy’s drawing-room.
“I behaved like the Dragon,” he said. “Breathing out fire. A disgraceful incident!”
“I love sincerity,” said Fräulein von Wegener. “And I hate Generals.”
“How’s that?” asked Bertram. “They seem to be highly respected in Germany, in spite of their—well, let’s call it failure to achieve absolute victory.”
The girl laughed, with a pleasant, musical, mirthful sound.
“Their self-conceit iskolossal! But they’ve been found out. The German people have no more use for them.”
“You think that?” asked Bertram, doubtfully.
“The people,” she said, and then lowered her voice. “Not the little crowd in drawing-rooms like this. . . . I go among the working folk, in children’s clinics—for charity, you know. They hate war and all its stupidity. Never again, they say.”
“Not even against France?”
She hesitated, and seemed embarrassed for a moment.
“Not even against France, if she gives us a decent chance.”
She spoke of Dorothy, looking across at her with admiration.
“Your lovely sister has made me a Pacifist. She’s a saint. She has converted me from all my wicked ways.”
“You were very wicked?” asked Bertram.
“In idea,” she said, smiling. “Full of naughty passion, and intolerance, and rebellion against God. Now I’m getting good. I have a new philosophy.”
“What’s that?” asked Bertram.
“Love of humanity,” she said.
“It sounds good,” said Bertram. “But I seem to have heard of it before, and it’s a little vague.”
He came to know more of her philosophy, even more of her love of humanity, because Dorothy invited her often to the house, and to the Opera, where she was placed next to Bertram, and to picnic parties in the Grünewald, where she looked her prettiest in muslin frocks “made by my own little fingers” (she told him), and to evening concerts in public gardens outside Berlin.
Anna was her name, and because of her close friendship with Dorothy—they were almost like sisters, it seemed—she insisted upon Bertram calling her that and forgetting thegnädiges Fräulein. She called him Bertram, after demurely asking his permission. He found her amusing. She had a playful sense of humour and teased him because of his English shyness. For England, in spite of being German, she had a romantic admiration, and she confessed to him that the manners of Englishmen seemed to be adorable, because of their courtesy to women.
“My manners are atrocious,” said Bertram, “as you may have observed.”
She did not agree. She thought he had the look of a Lancelot in Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” which she read with exquisite delight.
It was impossible for Bertram to ignore the fact that she flirted with him ardently, and that her eyes worshipped him. He was not annoyed. He liked it. He liked the little curl that played about each cheek, and her milky skin, and her laughing voice, and pretty, plump figure. She was what Christy used to call, in his dry way, “a cuddlesome thing—and highly dangerous.”
Bertram did not find her extremely dangerous, though he acknowledged to himself that a little care might be necessary at times, if he wished to avoid temptation. There was no need why he should avoid temptation, being a free man, now that Joyce had flung him over, but always there was that trick of conscience in him, or self-imposed repression, which had held him back from easy amour, which meant no more to other men he knew than a passing adventure, without consequence. In any case, this girl was of high caste. A love affair would mean marriage, and he was not as free as that, nor so inclined.
There was a moment of danger one evening in the Grünewald, that wonderful woodland within a tram journey of Berlin. Dorothy and her husband had wandered away, hand in hand, like two lovers of the humbler class who came here also for their picnics and pleasure parties. Anna and Bertram sat together in a little bower, hidden from the passers-by, where they had all had tea together an hour or more ago. Birds were singing in the boughs above their heads, and Bertram sat with his back to a tree, listening to the pleasant twitter and watching the light play through the leaves. Anna sat on the grass, a yard away from him, with her muslin frock spread out and her straw hat by her side. The breeze played softly with the little curl on each cheek, and she was like the princess in a German fairy-tale.
“Bertram,” she said presently, “you are very silent. Talk to me, and tell me pretty things.”
“Silence is good,” he said. “I like looking at your prettiness.”
“So?Now that is what I like to hear you say!”
“I’ve said it.”
“Say it again. Do you think me pretty?”
“Wonderfully beautiful!”
“No, not that. That’s insincere. Dorothy is beautiful. I’m only ahübsches mädel—a pretty maid. Do you like me, Bertram?”
“Very much.”
“You don’t hate me because I’m German?”
“I’ve finished with hate.”
“Do you love me a little?”
He laughed at her audacity.
“What do you mean by love?”
“I can only tell by what I feel.”
“How’s that?”
“I feel that I want to be with you always, and to go where you go.”
She was on her knees now, and moved a little way towards him, and dropped down on the grass with her elbows up, and her dimpled chin in the cup of her hands.
Bertram was startled. This was going a little too far, perhaps. It had reached the danger point.
“I’m afraid if you went where I am going it would be to unpleasant places. I’m off to Moscow next week.”
“To Moscow! And next week! Let me come with you, then. With you I should feel safe, even in Moscow.”
The idea amused him. It would be pleasant enough to have Anna as his travelling companion. It would be a cure for loneliness. But it was out of the bounds of possibility, and not within his code of honour, or mental liberty.
“My passport is only for one,” he said. “And it has taken me a month to get.”
“Wait another month and get two!”
“Nicht möglich!Let’s join Dorothy and her husband.”
“Cold Englishman!” she said, and sprang up with a vexed laugh.
“Not cold,” he said, taking her hand. “Only prudent. Or cowardly.”
They walked away, through the wood, hand in hand, as Dorothy and Von Arenburg had gone before them. Anna held his hand tight, and presently looked up at him with coaxing eyes and a childish pout.
“If you’re going so soon, we may as well begin to say good-bye.”
The meaning of her words was plain. She wanted him to kiss her, and under a tree there the place was good and discreet. He rather liked the idea of kissing her, but for a little warning that it could not end there, if he began. She called him “cold Englishman.” He was not that. He was too easily fired, and knew that if he once let a spark touch his passion, it might blaze into something like a bonfire. He didn’t want to make a blaze with this little German girl. So he compromised—the middle of the road again!—and raised her hand to his lips, very gallantly, but without ardour.
“Pooh!” she said, and taking her hand away, put it round his neck and pulled his head down and kissed him, and then with a laugh ran from him towards Dorothy and her husband, who appeared down one of the glades.
It was on the way home that evening that he told Dorothy of a telegram he had received that morning from Bernard Hall ofThe New World. His passport had been arranged with the Soviet authorities. Christy was waiting for him to go down the Volga in the famine region. Bernard Hall wanted the truth about the famine.
Dorothy received the news as a tragic blow.
“I can’t bear you to go away!” she cried. “Stay here, Bertram. Give up the visit to Russia. It’s more dangerous than ever. Stay with us in Germany, and make your home here.”
“My home?” he said, with a sudden pang of self-pity, “I have no home, now Joyce has left me.”
Dorothy answered him in a low, emotional voice.
“There are good women in Germany. One of them loves you already.”
“Meaning Anna von Wegener?”
“You have guessed?”
She was astonished at the rapidity of his intuition, and surprised, and rather hurt, when he laughed.
“It wasn’t a difficult guess. She doesn’t let concealment ‘like a worm i’ the bud, feed on her damask cheek.’ ”
Then he spoke seriously to this sister who had always been his comrade.
“I’m still haunted by the thought of Joyce. I pretend I’ve done with her, cut her image out of my heart and soul. But that’s bunkum. She comes into my dreams at night, and stands between me and the sunlight. I can’t play about with other women—or do more than play—until I’ve cut out Joyce, and the wound is healed.”
She pressed his hand with a sympathy that was good to him.
“Explain to Anna,” he said, “or she’ll think I’m heartless.”
Perhaps she explained well enough. Anna von Wegener was very demure next time she met Bertram, and only showed by her blush that she remembered the scene in the wood. She was with Dorothy and Von Arenburg at the Schlesische Bahnhof when Bertram took the train to Riga.
“I shall pray for you all the time,” said Dorothy. “Don’t stay too long in that frightful country.”
“Take care of your health, my dear fellow,” said Von Arenburg, grasping his hand.
“Remember your friends,” said Anna.
They waved hands to him until the train disappeared.
For a long time he sat motionless in his carriage, thinking of that chapter of life in Germany, and of the new page he was about to turn. He might never come back from Russia. Disease, starvation, crime, all kinds of danger lurked in that unknown country. It was cut off from the outer world. No letters passed, unless smuggled through or sent under official seal. He doubted whether he would get any news while he was there. Perhaps he would never hear the end of the story of Joyce, his wife. It would be strange never to know, until he passed to that place where, perhaps, everything was known, even the secret workings of the heart.
By his side was a bundle of letters from England, and some copies ofThe Times, forwarded to Dorothy’s address. He opened them, but left most of them unread. They were just trivial letters from acquaintances and tradesmen.The Timesinterested him more. The King had gone to Belfast to open the Northern Parliament. He had made a speech, pleading for forgetfulness and forgiveness. There was talk of a Truce—a Treaty of Peace. At last! Thank God for that! . . . British trade returns were still going down. Unemployment was going up. There were the usual lists of births, marriages, and deaths. . . . Deaths! His eyes fell on four lines of small print.