“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.”
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.