Dr. Small glowered at me through his goggles.
“Come and see. Come and see the mothers who have no milk for their babes, and the babes who are bulbousheaded, with rickets. Come and see the tenement lodgings where working families sit round cabbage soup as their chief meal, with bread that ties their entrails into knots but gives ‘em a sense of fulness not enjoyed by those who have no bread. Man, it’s awful. It tears at one’s heart. But you needn’t go into the slums to find hunger—four years of under-nourishment which has weakened growing girls so that they swoon at their work or fall asleep through weakness in the tram cars. In many of the big houses where life looks so comfortable, from which women come out in furs, looking so rich, these German people have not enough to eat, and what they eat is manufactured in the chemist’s shop and the ersatz factories. I found that out from that girl, Elsa von Kreuzenach.”
“How?” I asked.
“She is a nurse in a babies’ crèche, poor child. Showed me round with a mother-look in her eyes, while all the scrofulous kiddies cried, ‘Guten Tag! Guten Tag!’ like the quacking of ducks. ‘After to-morrow,’ she said, ‘there will be no more milk for them. What can we do for them then, doctor? They will wither and die.’ Those were her words, and I saw her sadness. I saw something else presently. I saw her sway a little, and she fell like that girl Marthe on the doorstep at Lille. ‘For the love of Mike!’ I said, and when she pulled round bullied her.
“‘What did you have for breakfast?’ I asked.
“‘Ersatz coffee,’ she said, laughing, ‘and a bit of bread. A good fruhstuck, doctor.’
“‘Good be hanged!’ I said. ‘What did you have for lunch?’
“‘Cabbage soup and ein kleines brodchen,’ she says. ‘After four years one gets used to it.’
“‘What will you have for dinner?’ said I, not liking the look of things.
“She laughed, as though she saw a funny joke.