“My dear new niece,” she said, looking round the table at everybody, “promises to become a most excellent little German. See how she already recognizes and admires our restraint on the one hand, and on the other, our power.”
The Colonel, who was sitting on one side of me, laughed, raised his glass, and begged me to permit him to drink my health and the health of that luckiest of young men, Lieutenant von Inster. “Old England forever!” he exclaimed, bowing over his glass to me, “The England that raises such fair flowers and allows Germany to pluck them. Long may she continue these altruistic activities. Long may the homes of Germany be decorated with England’s fairest products.”
By this time he was on his feet, and they were toasting England and me. They were all quite enthusiastic, and I felt so proud and pleased, with Bernd sitting beside me looking so proud and pleased. “England!” they called out, lifting their glasses, “England and the new alliance!” And they bowed and smiled to me, and came round one by one and clinked their glasses against mine.
Then Bernd had to make a little speech and thank the Colonel, and you can’t think how beautifully he speaks, and not a bit shy, and saying exactly the right things. Then the Graf actually got up and said something — I expect etiquette forced him to or he never would have — but once he was in for it he did it with the same unfaltering fluency and appropriateness that Bernd had surprised me with. He said they — the Koseritzes and Insters — welcomed the proposed marriage between Bernd and myself, not alone for the many graces, virtues, and, above all gifts — (picture the abstracted Graf reeling off these compliments! You should have seen my open mouth) — that so happily adorned the young lady, great and numerous though they were, but also because such a marriage would still further cement the already close union existing between two great countries of the same faith, the same blood, and the same ideals. “Long may these two countries,” he said, “who carry in their hands the blazing torches of humanity and civilization, march abreast down the pages of history, writing it in glorious letters as they march.” Then he sat down, and instantly relapsed into silence and abstraction. It was as if a candle had been blown out.
They’re all certainly very kind to me, the people I’ve met here, and say the nicest things about England. They’re in love with her, as I used to tell Frau Berg’s boarders, but openly and enthusiastically, not angrily and reluctantly as the boarders were. I’ve not heard so many nice things about England ever as I did yesterday. I loved hearing them, and felt all lit up.
We went out on the balcony overlooking the Thiergarten after dinner. The Graf’s chief had sent for him, and Bernd and some of the men had gone away too, but more people kept dropping in and joining us on the balcony watching the crowds. The Brandenburger Thor is close on our left, and the Reichstag is a stone’s throw across the road on our right. When the crowd saw the officers in our group, they yelled for joy and flung their hats in the air. The Colonel, in his staff officer’s uniform, was the chief attraction. He seemed unaware that there was a crowd, and talked to me in much the same hilarious and flowery strain he had talked at the Oberforsterei, saying a great number of things about hair and eyes and such. I know I’ve got hair and eyes; I’ve had them all my life, so what’s the use of wasting time telling me about them? I tried all I knew to get him to talk about what he really thought of the chances of war, but quite in vain.
Do you know what time it is? Nearly eight, and the Deutschland uber Alles business has already started in the streets. There are little crowds of people, looking so tiny and black, not a bit as if they were real, and had blood in them and could be hurt, already on the steps of the Reichstag eagerly reading the morning papers. I must get dressed and go down and hear if anything fresh has happened. Good-bye my own loved mother, — I’ll write whenever I get a moment. And don’t forget, mother darling, that if you’re worried about my being here I’ll start straight off for Switzerland. But if you’re not worried I wouldn’t like to interrupt my lessons. They really are very important things for our future.
Your Chris.
Berlin, Friday afternoon, July 31st.
My sweetest mother,
Your letters have been following me about, to Koseritz and to Frau Berg’s, where of course you didn’t know I wouldn’t be. I went to Frau Berg’s today and found your last two. I love you, my precious mother, and thank you for all your dearness and sweet unselfish understanding about Bernd and me. You have always been my closest, dearest friend, as well as my own darling mother. I seem now to be living in a sort of bath of love. Can anything more ever be added to it? I feel as if I had reached the very innermost heart of happiness. Wonderful how one carries about such a precious consciousness. It’s like something magic and hidden that takes care of one, keeping one untouched and unharmed; while outside, day and night, there’s this terrible noise of a people gone mad.
You wrote to me last sitting under a cherry tree, you said, in the orchard at the back of your hotel at Glion, and you talked of the colour of the lake far down below through the leaves of walnut trees, and of the utter peace. Here day and night, day and night, since Wednesday, soldiers in new grey uniforms pass through the Brandenburger Thor down the broad road to Charlottenburg. Their tramp never stops. I can see them from my window tramping, tramping away down the great straight road; and crowds that don’t seem to change or dwindle watch them and shout. Where do the soldiers all come from? I never dreamed there could be so many in the world, let alone in Berlin; and Germany isn’t even at war! But it’s no use asking questions, or trying to talk about it. I’ve found the word “Why?” in this house is not only useless but improper. Nobody will talk about anything; I suppose they don’t need to, for they all seem perfectly to know. They’re in the inner circle in this house. They’re not the public. The public is that shouting, perspiring mob out there watching the soldiers, and Frau Berg and her boarders are the public, and so are the soldiers themselves. The public here are all the people who obey, and pay, and don’t know; an immense multitude of slaves, — abject, greedy, pitiful. I don’t think I ever could have imagined a thing so pitiful to see as these respectable middle-aged Berlin citizens, fathers of families, careful livers on small incomes, clerks, pastors, teachers, professors, drunk and mad out there publicly on the pavement, dancing with joy because they think the great moment they’ve been taught to wait for has come, and they’re going to get suddenly rich, scoop in wealth from Russia and France, get up to the top of the world and be able to kick it. That’s what I saw over and over again today as I somehow got through to Frau Berg’s to fetch your letters. An ordinary person from an ordinary country wants to cover these heated elderly gentlemen up, and hide them out of sight, so shocking are they to one’s sense of respect and reverence for human beings. Imagine decent citizens, paunchy and soft with beer and sitting in offices, wearing cheap straw hats and carefully mended and brushed black coats, dancing with excitement on the pavement; and nobody thinking it anything but fine and creditable, at the prospect of their children’s blood going to be shed, and everybody’s children’s blood, except the blood of those safe children, the children of the Hohenzollerns!
The weather is fiercely hot. There’s a brassy sky without a cloud, and all the leaves of the trees in the Thiergarten are shiny and motionless as if they were cut out of metal. A little haze of dust hangs perpetually along the Lindens and the road to Charlottenburg, — not much of it, because the roads are too well kept, but enough to show that the troops never leave off tramping. And all down where they pass, on each side, are the perspiring crowds of people, red and apoplectic with excitement and heat, women and children and babies mixed up in one heaving, frantic mass. The windows of the houses on each side of the Brandenburger Thor are packed with people all day long, and the noise of patriotism doesn’t leave off for an instant.
It’s a very ugly noise. The only place where I can get away from it — and I do hate noise, it really hurts my ears — is the bathroom here, which is a dark cupboard
with no window, in the very middle of the house. I thought it a dreadful bathroom when I first saw it, but now I’m grateful that it can’t be aired. The house was built years and years before Germans began to wash, and it wasn’t till the Koseritzes came that a bath was wanted. Then it had to be put in any hole, and this hole is the one place where there is silence. Everywhere else, in every room in the house, it is as if one were living next door to a dozen public houses in the worst slums of London and it were always Saturday night. I do think the patriotism of an unattacked, aggressive country is a hideous thing.
Bernd got me somehow through the crowd to the calmer streets on the way to Frau Berg. He didn’t want me to go out at all, but I want to see what I can. The Kaiser rushed through the Brandenburger Thor in his car as we went out. You never saw such a scene as then. It was frightening, like a mob of lunatics let loose. Every time he is seen tearing along the streets there’s this wild scene, Bernd says. He has suddenly leaped to the topmost top of popularity, for he’s the dispenser now of the great lottery in which all the draws are going to be prizes. You know there isn’t a German, not the cleverest, not the most sober, who doesn’t regularly and solemnly buy lottery tickets. Aren’t they, apart from all the other things they are, the funniest people. So immature in wisdom, so top-heavy with dangerous knowledge that their youngness in wisdom makes them use wrongly. If they hadn’t got the latest things in guns and equipment they would be quiet, and wouldn’t think of fighting.
Bernd made me promise to wait at Frau Berg’s till he could fetch me, and as he didn’t get back till two o’clock, and Frau Berg very amiably said I must be her guest at the well-known mid-day meal, I found myself once more in the bosom of the boarders. Only this time I sat proudly on Frau Berg’s right, in the place of honour next to Doctor Krummlaut, instead of in the obscurity of my old seat at the dark end near the door.
It was so queer, and so different. There was the same Wanda, resting her dishes on my left shoulder, which she always used to do, not only so as to attract my attention but as a convenience to herself, because they were hot and heavy. There were the same boarders, except the red-mouthed bank-clerk and another young man. Hilda Seeberg was there, and the Swede, and Doctor Krummlaut; and of course Frau Berg, massive in her tight black dress buttoned up the front without a collar to it, the big brooch she fastens it with at the neck half hidden by her impressive double chins, which flow down as majestically as a patriarch’s beard. We had the same food, the same heat, and I’m sure the same flies. But the nervous tension there used to be, the tendency to quarrel, the pugnacious political arguing with me, the gibes at England, were gone. I don’t know whether it was because I’m engaged to a Prussian officer that they were so very polite — I was tremendously congratulated, — but they were certainly different about England. It may of course have been their general happiness — happiness makes one so kind all round! — for here too was the content, the satisfaction of those who, after painful waiting, get what they want. It was expressed very noisily, not with the restraint of the Koseritzes, but it was the same thing really. The Berg atmosphere was more like the one in the streets. Where the Grafin in her pleasure became only more calm, the boarders were abandoned, — excited like savages dancing round the fire their victims are to roast at. Frau Berg rumbled and shook with her relief, like some great earthquake, and didn’t mind a bit apparently about the tremendous rise there has been in prices this week. What will she get, I wonder, by war, except struggle and difficulty and departing boarders? Being a guest, I had to be polite and let them say what they liked without protest, — really, the disabilities of guests! I couldn’t argue, as I would have if I’d still been a boarder, which was a pity, for meanwhile I’ve learned a lot of German and could have said a great many things and been as natural as I liked here away from the Grafin’s gentle smile reminding me that I’m not behaving. But I had to sit and listen smilingly, and of course show none of my horror at their attitude, for more muzzling even than being a guest is being the betrothed of a Prussian officer. They don’t know what sort of a Prussian officer he is, how different, how truly educated, how full of dislike for the base things they worship and want; and he, caught by birth in the Prussian chains, shall not be betrayed by me who love him. Here he is, caught anyhow for the present, and he must do his duty; but someday we’re going away, — he, and I, and you, little mother darling, when there’s no war anywhere in sight and therefore no duty to stay for, and we’ll go and live in America, and he’ll take off all those buttons and spurs and things, and we’ll give ourselves up to freedom, and harmlessness, and art, and beauty, and we’ll have friends who neither intrigue, which is what the class at the top here lives by, nor who waste their lives being afraid, which is what all the other classes here spend their lives being.
“At last we are going to wipe off old scores against France,” Doctor Krummlaut spluttered through his soup today at Frau Berg’s with shining eyes, — I should have thought it was France who had the old scores that need wiping— “and Russia, the barbarian Colossus, will topple over and choke in its own blood.”
Then Frau Berg capped that with sentiments even more bloodthirsty.
Then the Swede, who never used to speak, actually raised her voice in terms of blood too, and expressed a wish to see a Cossack strung up by his heels to every electric-light standard along the Lindens.
Then Hilda Seeberg said if her Papa — that Papa she told me once she hadn’t at all liked — were only alive, it would be the proudest moment of his life when, at the head of his regiment, he would go forth to slay President Poincare. “And if,” she said, her eyes flashing, “owing to his high years his regiment was no longer able to accept his heroic leadership, he would, I know, proceed secretly to France as an assassin, and bomb the infamous Poincare, — bomb him in the name of our Kaiser, of our Fatherland, and of our God.”
“Amen,” said Frau Berg, very loud.
I flew to Bernd when he came. It was as if a door had been flung open, and the freshness and sanity of early morning came into the room when he did. I hung on his arm, and looked up into his dear shrewd eyes, so clear and kind, so full of wisdom. The boarders were with one accord servile to him; even Doctor Krummlaut, a clever man with far better brains probably than Bernd. Bernd, from habit, stiffened and became unapproachable the instant the middle class public in the shape of the congratulatory boarders appeared. He doesn’t even know he’s like that, his training has made it second nature. You should have seen his lofty, complete indifference. It was dreadfully rude really, and oh how they loved him for it! They simply adored him, and were ready to lick his boots. It was so funny to see them sidling about him, all of them wagging their tails. He was the master, come among the slaves. But to think that even Doctor Krummlaut should sidle!
There’s a most terrific extra noise going on outside. I can hardly hear myself write. I don’t know whether to run and find out what it is, or retreat to the bathroom. My ears won’t stand much more, — I shall get deaf, and not be able to play.
Later.
What has happened is that special editions of the papers have appeared announcing that the Kaiser has decreed a state of war for the whole of Germany. Well. They’ve done it now. For I did extract from a very cheerful-looking caller I met coming upstairs to the drawingroom that a state of war is followed as inevitably by the real thing as a German betrothal is followed by marriage. One is as committal as the other, he said. It is the rarest thing, and produces an immense scandal, for an engagement to be broken off; and, explained the caller looking extremely pleased, — he was a man-caller, and therefore more willing to stop and talk — to proceed backwards from a state of war to the status quo ante might produce the unthinkable result of costing the Kaiser his throne.
“You can imagine, my most gracious Miss,” said the caller, “that His Majesty would never permit a calamity so colossal to overtake his people, whose welfare he has continually and exclusively in his all-highest thoughts. Therefore you m
ay take it from me as completely certain that war is now assured.”
“But nobody has done anything to you,” I said.
He gazed at me a moment, and then smiled. “High politics, and little heads,” he said. “High politics, and little women’s heads,—” and went on up the stairs smiling and shaking his own.
I do wish they wouldn’t keep on talking as though my head were so dreadfully small. Never in my life have people taken so utterly and complacently for granted that I’m stupid.
Well, I feel very sick at heart. How long will it be before Bernd too will be one of that marching column on the Charlottenburger Chaussee. He won’t go away from me that way, I know. He’s on the Staff, and will go more splendidly; but those men in the new grey uniforms tramping day and night are symbols each one of them of departing happiness, of a closed chapter, of the end of something that can never be the same again.
Your tired Chris.
Before Breakfast.
Berlin, Sat., Aug. 1st, 1914.
My blessed little mother,
I’ve seen a thing I don’t suppose I’ll forget. It was yesterday, after the news came that Germany had sent Russia an ultimatum about instantly demobilizing, demanding an answer by eleven this morning. The sensation when this was known was tremendous. The Grafin was shaken out of her calm into exclamations of joy and fear, — joy that the step had been taken, fear lest Russia should obey, and there be no war after all.
We had to shut the windows to be able to hear ourselves talk. Some women friends of the Grafin’s who were here — we had no men with us — instantly left to drive by back streets to the Schlossplatz to see the sight it must be there, and the Grafin, saying that we too must witness the greatest history of the world’s greatest nation in the making, sent for a taxi — her chauffeur has gone — and prepared to follow. We had to wait ages for the taxi, but it was lucky we had to, else we might have gone and come back and missed seeing the Kaiser come out and speak to the crowd. We went a long way round, but even so all Germany seemed to be streaming towards the Lindens and the part at the end where the palace is. I don’t expect we ever would have got there if it hadn’t been that a cousin of the Grafin’s, a very smart young officer in the Guards, saw us in the taxi as it was vainly trying to cross the Friedrichstrasse, and flicking the obstructing policemen on one side with a sort of little kick of his spur, came up all amazement and salutes to inquire of his most gracious cousin what in the world she was doing in a taxi. He said it was hopeless to try to get to the Schlossplatz in it, but if we would allow him to escort us on foot he would be proud — the gracious cousin would permit him to offer her his arm, and the young ladies would keep very close behind him.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 186
