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.