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.