Berlin, Sunday, August 2nd, 1914
My precious mother,
Just think,—when I had my lesson yesterday Kloster wouldn’t talk either about the war or the Kaiser. For a long time I thought he was ill; but he wasn’t, he just wouldn’t talk. I told him about Friday, and the Kaiser’s “Geht nach Hause und betet,” and how I had felt about it and the whole thing, and I expected a flood of illuminating and instructive and fearless comment from him; and instead he was dumb. And not only dumb, but he fidgeted while I talked, and at last stopped me altogether and bade me go on playing.
Then I asked him if he were ill, and he said, “No, why should I be ill?”
“Because you’re different,—you don’t talk,” I said.
And he said, “It is only women who always talk.”
So then I got on with my playing, and just wondered in silence.
I ran against Frau Kloster in the passage as I was coming out, and asked her if there was anything wrong, and she too said, “No, what should there be wrong?”
“Because the Master’s different,” I said. “He won’t talk.”
And she said, “My dear Mees Chrees, these are great days we live in, and one cannot be as usual.”
“But the Master—” I said. “Just these great days—you’d think he’d be pouring out streams of all the things that most need saying—”
And she shrugged her shoulders and merely repeated, “One is not as usual.”
So I came away, greatly puzzled. I had expected bread, and here I was going off with nothing but an unaccountable stone. Kloster and Bernd are the two solitary sane and wise people I know here in this place of fever, the two I trust, to whom I say what I really think and feel, and I went to Kloster yesterday athirst for wisdom, for that detached, critical picking out one by one of the feathers of the imperial bird, the Prussian eagle, that I find so wholesome, so balance-restoring, so comforting, in what is now a very great isolation of spirit. And he was dumb. I can’t get over it.
I’ve not seen Bernd since, as he is frightfully busy and wasn’t able to come yesterday at all, but he’s coming to lunch today, and perhaps he’ll be able to explain Kloster. I’ve been practising all the morning,—it will seem to you an odd thing to have done while Rome is burning, but I did it savagely, with a feeling of flinging defiance at this topsy-turvy world, of slitting its ugliness in spite of itself with bright spears of music, insisting on intruding loveliness on its preoccupation, the loveliness created by its own brains in the days before Prussia got the upper hand. All the morning I practised the Beethoven violin concerto, and the naked, slender radiance of it without the orchestra to muffle it up in a background, enchanted me into forgetting.
The crowds down there are soberer since Friday, and I didn’t have to go into the bathroom to play. Now that war is upon them the women seem to have started thinking a little what it may really mean, and the men aren’t quite so ready incoherently to roar. They keep on going to church,—the churches have been having services at unaccustomed moments throughout yesterday, of course by order, and are going on like that today too, for the churches are very valuable to Authority in nourishing the necessary emotions in the people at a time like this. The people were told by the Kaiser to pray, and so they do pray. It is useful to have them praying, it quiets them and gets them out of the streets and helps the authorities. Berlin is really the most godless place. Religion is the last thing anybody thinks of. Nobody dreams of going to church unless there is going to be special music there or a prince, and as for the country, my two Sundays there might have been week-days except for the extra food. It is true on each of them I saw a pastor, but each time he came to the family I was with, they didn’t go to him, to his church. Now there’s suddenly this immense recollection of God, turned on by Authority just as one turns on an electric light switch and says “Let there be light,” and there is light. So I picture the Kaiser, running his finger down his list of available assets and coming to God. Then he rings for an official, and says, “Let there be God”; and there is God.
I’m not really being profane. It isn’t really God at all I’m talking about. It’s what German Authority finds convenient to turn on and off, according as it suits what it wishes to obtain. It isn’t God. It’s just a tap.