XLVI
He found his sister Dorothy at home next evening, waiting for him excitedly, having had the message he had left with the Mädchen. 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. Are you sure?”
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.”