“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. “And when did you meet her?”
“Sonny,” said the doctor, “what do you think I’ve been doing all these weeks in Cologne? Drinking coffee at the Domhof Hotel with the A.P.M. and his soldier-policemen? Watching the dancing-girls every evening in wine-rooms like this?”
We sat in a Wein-stube as we talked, for the sake of light and a little music. It was typical of a score of others in Cologne, with settees of oak divided from each other in “cosy corners” hung with draperies of green and red silk; and little tables to which waiters brought relays of Rhine wines in tall thin bottles for the thirstiness of German civilians and British officers. At one end of the room was a small stage, and an orchestra composed of a pianist who seemed to be suffering from a mild form of shell-shock (judging from a convulsive twitch), a young German-Jew who played the fiddle squeakily, and a thin, sad-faced girl behind a ’cello. Every now and then a bald-headed man in evening clothes mounted the stage and begged the attention of the company for a dance by the well-known artist Fräulein So-and-So. From behind a curtain near the wine-bar came a dancing-girl, in the usual ballet dress and the usual fixed and senseless smile, who proceeded to perform Pavlova effects on a stage two yards square, while the young Jew fiddler flattened himself against the side curtain, with a restricted use of his bow, and the pianist with the shell-shock lurched sideways as he played, to avoid her floppy skirts, and the girl behind the ’cello drew deep chords with a look of misery.
“These are pretty dull spots,” I said to the little doctor, “but where have you been spending your time? And when did you meet Elsa von Kreuzenach?”
Dr. Small told me that he had been seeking knowledge in the only place where he could study social health and social disease—hospitals, work-shops, babies’ crèches, slum tenements. He was scornful of English officers and correspondents who summed up the social state of Germany after a stroll down the Hohestrasse, a gorge of ersatz pastry (“filth!” he said) in the tea-shops, and a dinner of four courses in a big hotel on smuggled food at fantastic prices.
“You might as well judge Germany by the guzzling swine in this place as England by a party of profiteers at Brighton. The poor middle-classes and the labourers stay indoors after their day’s job, and do not exhibit their misery in the public ways.”
“Real misery?” I asked. “Hunger?”
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 bulbous-headed, 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.”