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 broken morale of 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 is kolossal! 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 the gnädiges 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 a hübsches 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 of The 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 of The 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 Times interested 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.
Murless, on the 19th of this month, at the British Embassy in Paris, the Honourable Kenneth Murless, of pneumonia. Aged twenty-seven.
Bertram read the lines three or four times before the meaning of them fully reached his consciousness. He uttered a sharp exclamation, startling the German folk in his carriage. In his mind was a strange mingling of pity for Joyce and gladness for himself.
Kenneth had died not much more than a month after the dinner at the Griffon. Perhaps Joyce had not gone to him so soon. . . .
That was a rotten way of looking at things. What a tragedy for Joyce! And for Kenneth, that very perfect gentleman, who had tried to play the game “according to the rules!”