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. . . .”
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 desired helles or dunkles beer, and to carry in his tray with the Abend-essen. He was a tall Prussian of middle-age who had been a Feldwebel, 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 our Kultur!”
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, the Mädchen who answered the door gave him to understand that the Herr Baron von Arenburg and the gnädige Frau were 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 German houris.
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 word Schieber for 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 from unternährung.”
“What’s that?” asked Bertram.
“What you call under-feeding. Starvation is another name for it. All the good people suffer from unternährung. 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 escape unternährung, 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.