Evening
I feel greatly refreshed, for what do you think I’ve been doing since I left off writing this morning? Motoring out into the country,—the sweet and blessed country, the home of God’s elect, as the hymn says, only the hymn meant Jerusalem, and the golden kind of Jerusalem, which can’t be half as beautiful as just plain grass and daisies. Herr von Inster appeared up here about twelve. Wanda came to my door and banged on it with what sounded like a saucepan, and I daresay was, for she wouldn’t waste time leaving off stirring the pudding while she went to open the front door, and she called out very loud, “Der Herr Offizier ist schon wieder da.”
All the flat must have heard her, and so did Herr von Inster.
“Here I am, schon meeder da” he said, clicking his heels together when I came into the diningroom where he was waiting among the debris of the first spasms of Wanda’s table-laying; and we both laughed.
He said the Master—so he always speaks of Kloster, and with such affection and admiration in his voice—and his wife were downstairs in his car, and wanted him to ask me to join them so that he might drive us all into the country on such a fine day.
You can imagine how quickly I put on my hat.
“It is doing you good already,” he said, looking at me as we went down the four nights of stairs,—so Kloster had been telling him, too, that story about too much work.
Herr von Inster drove, and we three sat on the back seat, because he had his soldier chauffeur with him, so I didn’t get as much talk with him as I had hoped, for I like him very much, and so would you, little mother. There is nothing of the aggressive swashbuckler about him. I’m sure he doesn’t push a woman off the pavement when there isn’t room for him.
I don’t think I’ve told you about Frau Kloster, but that is because one keeps on forgetting she is there. Perhaps that quality of beneficent invisibleness is what an artist most needs in a wife. She never says anything, except things that require no answering. It’s a great virtue, I should think, in a wife. From time to time, when Kloster has lese majestated a little too much, she murmurs Aber Adolf; or she announces placidly that she has just killed a mosquito; or that the sky is blue; and Kloster’s talk goes on on the top of this little undercurrent without taking the least notice of it. They seem very happy. She tends him as carefully as one would tend a baby,—one of those quite new pink ones that can’t stand anything hardly without crumpling up,—and competently clears life round him all empty and free, so that he has room to work. I wish I had a wife.
We drove out through Potsdam in the direction of Brandenburg, and lunched in the woods at Potsdam by the lake the Marmor Palais is on. Kloster stared at this across the water while he ate, and the sight of it tinged his speech regrettably. Herr von Inster, as an officer of the King, ought really to have smitten him with the flat side of his sword, but he didn’t; he listened and smiled. Perhaps he felt as the really religious do about God, that the Hohenzollerns are so high up that criticism can’t harm them, but I doubt it; or perhaps he regards Kloster indulgently, as a gifted and wayward child, but I doubt that too. He happens to be intelligent, and is not to be persuaded that a spade is anything but a spade, however much it may be got up to look like the Ark of the Covenant or anything else archaic and bedizened—God forbid, little mother, that you should suppose I meant that dreadful pun.
Frau Kloster had brought food with her, part of which was cherries, and they slid down one’s hot dry throat like so many cool little blessings. I could hardly believe that I had really escaped the Sunday dinner at the pension. We were very content, all of us I think, sitting on the grass by the water’s edge, a tiny wind stirring our hair—except Kloster’s, because he so happily hasn’t got any, which must be delicious in hot weather,—and rippling along the rushes.
“She grows less pale every hour,” Kloster said to Herr von Inster, fixing his round eyes on me.
Herr von Inster looked at me with his grave shrewd ones, and said nothing.
“We brought out a windflower,” said Kloster, “and behold we will return with a rose. At present, Mees Chrees, you are a cross between the two. You have ceased to be a windflower, and are not yet a rose. I wager that by five o’clock the rose period will have set in.”
They were both so kind to me all day, you can’t think little mother, and so was Frau Kloster, only one keeps on forgetting her. Herr von Inster didn’t talk much, but he looked quite as content as the rest of us. It is strange to remember that only this morning I was writing about feeling so lonely and by myself in spirit. And so I was; and so I have been all this week. But I don’t feel like that now. You see how the company of one righteous man, far more than his prayers, availeth much. And the company of two of them availeth exactly double. Kloster is certainly a righteous man, which I take it means a man who is both intelligent and good, and so I am sure is Herr von Inster. If he were not, he, a Junker and an officer, would think being with people so outside his world as the Klosters intolerable. But of course then he wouldn’t be with them. It wouldn’t interest him. It is so funny to watch his set, regular, wooden profile, and then when he turns and looks at one to see his eyes. The difference just eyes can make! His face is the face of the drilled, of the perfect unthinking machine, the correct and well-born Oberleutnant; and out of it look the eyes of a human being who knows, or will know I’m certain before life has done with him, what exultations are, and agonies, and love, and man’s unconquerable mind. He really is very nice. I’m sure you’d like him.
After lunch, and after Kloster had said some more regrettable things, being much moved, it appeared, by the palace facing him and by some personal recollections he had of the particular Hohenzollern it contained, while I lay looking up along the smooth beech-trunks to their bright leaves glancing against the wonderful blue of the sky—oh it was so lovely, little mother!—and Frau Kloster sometimes said Aber Adolf, and occasionally announced that she had slain another mosquito, we motored on towards Brandenburg, along the chain of lakes formed by the Havel. It was like heaven after the Lutzowstrasse. And at four o’clock we stopped at a Gasthaus in the pinewoods and had coffee and wild strawberries, and Herr von Inster paddled me out on the Havel in an old punt we found moored among the rushes.
It looked so queer to see an officer in full Sunday splendour punting, but there are a few things which seem to us ridiculous that Germans do with great simplicity. It was rather like being punted on the Thames by somebody in a top hat and a black coat. He looked like a bright dragon-fly in his lean elegance, balancing on the rotten little board across the end of the punt; or like Siegfried, made up to date, on his journey down the Rhine,—made very much up to date, his gorgeous barbaric boat and fine swaggering body that ate half a sheep at a sitting and made large love to lusty goddesses wittled away by the centuries to this old punt being paddled about slowly by a lean man with thoughtful eyes.
I told him he was like Siegfried in the second act of the Gotterdammerung, but worn a little thin by the passage of the ages, and he laughed and said that he at least had got Brunnhilde safe in the boat with him, and wasn’t going to have to climb through fire to fetch her. He says he thinks Wagner’s music and Strauss’s intimately characteristic of modern Germany: the noise, the sugary sentimentality making the public weep tears of melted sugar, he said, the brutal glorification of force, the all-conquering swagger, the exaggeration of emotions, the big gloom. They were the natural expression, he said, of the phase Germany was passing through, and Strauss is its latest flowering,—even noisier, even more bloody, of a bigger gloom. In that immense noise, he said, was all Germany as it is now, as it will go on being till it wakes up from the nightmare dream of conquest that has possessed it ever since the present emperor came to the throne.
“I’m sure you’re saying things you oughtn’t to,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. “One always is in Germany. Everything being forbidden, there is nothing left but to sin. I have yet to learn that a multiplicity of laws makes people behave. Behave, I mean, in the way Authority wishes.”
“But Kloster says you’re a nation of slaves, and that the drilling you get does make you behave in the way Authority wishes.”
He said it was true they were slaves, but that slaves were of two kinds,—the completely cowed, who gave no further trouble, and the furtive evaders, who consoled themselves for their outward conformity to regulations by every sort of forbidden indulgence in thought and speech. “This is the kind that only waits for an opportunity to flare out and free itself,” he said. “Mind, thinking, can’t be chained up. Authority knows this, and of all things in the world fears thought.”
He talked about the Sarajevo assassinations, and said, he was afraid they would not be settled very easily. He said Germany is seething,—seething, he said emphatically, with desire to fight; that it is almost impossible to have a great army at such a pitch of perfection as the German army is now and not use it; that if a thing like that isn’t used it will fester inwardly and set up endless internal mischief and become a danger to the very Crown that created it. To have it hanging about idle in this ripe state, he said, is like keeping an unexercised young horse tied up in the stable on full feed; it would soon kick the stable to pieces, wouldn’t it, he said.
“I hate armies,” I said. “I hate soldiering, and all it stands for of aggression, and cruelty, and crime on so big a scale that it’s unpunishable.”
“Great God, and don’t I!” He exclaimed, with infinite fervour.
He told me something that greatly horrified me. He says that children kill themselves in Germany. They commit suicide, schoolchildren and even younger ones, in great numbers every year. He says they’re driven to it by the sheer cruelty of the way they are overworked and made to feel that if they are not moved up in the school at the set time they and their parents are for ever disgraced and their whole career blasted. Imagine the misery a wretched child must suffer before it reaches the stage of preferring to kill itself! No other nation has this blot on it.
“Yes,” he said, nodding in agreement with the expression on my face, “yes, we are mad. It is in this reign that we’ve gone mad, mad with the obsession to get at all costs and by any means to the top of the world. We must outstrip; outstrip at whatever cost of happiness and life. We must be better trained, more efficient, quicker at grabbing than other nations, and it is the children who must do it for us. Our future rests on their brains. And if they fail, if they can’t stand the strain, we break them. They’re of no future use. Let them go. Who cares if they kill themselves? So many fewer inefficients, that’s all. The State considers that they are better dead.”
And all the while, while he was telling me these things, on the shore lay Kloster and his wife, neatly spread out side by side beneath a tree asleep with their handkerchiefs over their faces. That’s the idea we’ve got in England of Germany,—multitudes of comfortable couples, kindly and sleepy, snoozing away the afternoon hours in gardens or pine forests. That’s the idea the Government wants to keep before Europe, Herr von Inster says, this idea of benevolent, beery harmlessness. It doesn’t want other nations to know about the children, the dead, flung aside children, the ruthless breaking up of any material that will not help in the driving of their great machine of destruction, because then the other nations would know, he says, before Germany is ready for it to be known, that she will stick at nothing.
Wanda has just taken away my lamp, Good night my own sweet mother.
Your Chris.