Part 24

The girl like Joyce—horribly like her—came round to Bertram’s table and sat deliberately in front of him.

“English boy?” she asked.

“English,” he said.

“You do not drink your wine. Shall I help you?”

“As you like.”

She poured herself out a glass of Niersteiner, and touched Bertram’s glass and said “Prosit!” before taking a sip.

“Why are you sad?” she asked.

“Is it a gay world?”

She shrugged her bare shoulders.

“For the English it should be good. They won the war.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Bertram. “Berlin seems full of rich people, all drinking and dancing like this.”

The girl looked round on the company, and made a grimace of disgust.

“Foreigners mostly in these places. Jews. Profiteers,”—she said the word _Schieber_ for the last class. “This isn’t Germany. It’s the same hell as in other great cities of the world, London, Paris, New York.”

“You know London?”

“Very well. I was there as a dancer before the war. At the Empire. How’s dear old Piccadilly?”

“Still there,” said Bertram.

He wished to God this girl would go away. The line of her neck as she turned her head reminded him of Joyce again.

“I’d like to get back to London,” she said. “Here one must be wicked or starve to death. I have a sister who’s good. She’s a dressmaker. She earns sixty marks a day, sewing on buttons and hooks. It costs her more than that to buy a chemise. She goes to bed when she gets her underclothes washed, once a month. Now she had tuberculosis from _unternährung_.”

“What’s that?” asked Bertram.

“What you call under-feeding. Starvation is another name for it. All the good people suffer from _unternährung_. My mother died from it in the war, when none of us had enough to eat, whatever our virtue. You English made us suffer like that. Your blockade.”

“Yes,” said Bertram.

“It was rather cruel, don’t you think? After the war you kept the blockade up until Peace was signed. You made war against our babies and killed thousands, so that we should be starved into surrender. That wasn’t what you call playing the game.”

“The war game,” said Bertram. “You would have been harder with us if you had won.”

“That’s true. War is perhaps as cruel as peace. Most men are devils, and women she-devils.”

“Some of them are pretty decent,” said Bertram. “If they get a chance. The ordinary crowd.”

“You are not cruel,” she answered. “You are kind. You have kind eyes, and you talk to me as though I were a good woman. I would love you very much if you would let me. What do you say, English boy?”

“I must be going,” said Bertram.

She made a protest, holding his arm, but he called “_Ober!_” and paid for the wine, and rose from his chair. She held out her hand, and he gave her his.

“I expect you’re too good to live,” she said, with a queer little laugh.

“I ought to have died before,” he said, “but I missed the luck. In the war.”

“Learn to laugh,” she said. “Laugh at the cruelty of life, like I do.”

“I expect you know its cruelty,” he said, with a little pity in his voice.

“Down to the bottom of hell,” she answered, and laughed again.

“Well, good-night.”

“_Gute Nacht, hübschen!_”

She bent down suddenly and kissed his hand.

He went out of the dancing hall strangely perturbed. As the girl had bent her head to kiss his hand, the glint of her hair was a terrible reminder of Joyce. Yet this girl who was “bad” had been kinder to him than Joyce! That was a frightful thought. And Joyce was bad too, in a different way. She’d transferred herself to Kenneth with less temptation than this German girl who sold her love to escape _unternährung_, which was starvation.

His passing out of the hall was blocked by a group of people at the entrance. Something was going to happen, and Bertram was forced to stay and see it. Nothing worth seeing, except as a study of human anatomy in acrobatic eccentricity.

A girl made her way through the little crowd to where a man dressed as a sailor waited for her. She wore a red cloak, but dropped it on the edge of the dirty floor, and took the sailor’s hand. For five minutes he whirled her about like a rag doll, flung her over his head, held her wrist and swung her from him, round and round, with frightful rapidity, hurled her backwards, and caught her before her head was smashed against the polished boards—a kind of Apache dance intensified in brutality. Several times the girl came down on her toes from a flying spin and smiled and kissed her hands to the groups of wine-drinkers who applauded and clinked their glasses together as a sign of approval. At the end the girl came to the edge of the dancing floor, picked up her red cloak, thrust her way through the group at the entrance, who said “_Schön! Schön!_” and then collapsed on to a wooden chair half concealed by a curtain in the passage. Bertram saw her face, which was dead white. She was sitting back with her neck over the rail of the chair, gasping like a dying creature.

Bertram spoke to a man in a kind of uniform like a commissionaire.

“Is she all right?”

“She will recover. She goes to another hall presently. She does that five times a night, and is well known in Berlin.”

“How much does she get for that?”

The man laughed in his throat.

“Enough to keep her alive. About as much as the price of a bottle of wine. Women are cheap.”

Bertram thought of some words spoken by the German girl who had kissed his hand.

“War is almost as cruel as peace.”

Terrible words, spoken with tragic sincerity and a painted smile.

It wasn’t true. He had seen the cruelty of war, not only in the fighting line and in the fields of the dead, and the wounded, the blinded and gassed, but in villages where women saw their little homes go up in flames, fled from the approach of the Enemy, wept for those who had been caught before escape was possible, led the life of refugees through years of misery and squalor and hopelessness. War was not an alternative cruelly to that of peace. It was an additional cruelty. It didn’t stop the private vices and cruelties of men and women. It created more vice, more disease, more starvation, more of that hell into which the girl like Joyce had fallen. . . . But peace, after all, was cruel! And life, anyhow, at its worst and at its best. All one could do, it seemed, was to acquire a little courage, a sense of humour, a touch of charity, and make the best of a bad business, or with luck, which wasn’t his, a little private paradise.

XLVI

He found his sister Dorothy at home next evening, waiting for him excitedly, having had the message he had left with the _Mädchen_. He was surprised by her emotion at seeing him, not having realised what this would mean to a girl who had been exiled in the enemy’s country through the war, and had seen no one of her kith and kin till now, three years after the ending of war. She took hold of him, laughing and crying at the same time, held him at arm’s length to see the change in him, drew him close again, and kissed him with rather overwhelming joy.

She had changed more than he had imagined. Two years older than himself—she was twenty-eight now—her coiled brown hair was already touched with grey, and her beautiful face—she had always been the beauty of the family—bore visible traces of some past anguish. In an indefinable way also, she had become German. There was something of the “_Haus-Frau_” about her, not only in her style of dress but in her look and her way of moving.

She told him she had a million questions she wanted to ask, and first of all of her father, and of her dear mother and of poor Digby and Susan, and then of himself and Joyce, whom she had never seen—“funny that, Bertram!”—and then of England, and Ireland. Poor, tragic, rebellious Ireland!

“A big order!” said Bertram. “It would take a month to tell you all that, and most of it is tragedy.”

“You shall tell me for a month. I want to hear everything, through the war and afterwards. Once I was starved for food—we lived on next to nothing in the two last years of war!—but now I am more starved for news. I ache for every detail of it!”

But intimate talk was checked awhile on Bertram’s side by the appearance of Dorothy’s husband, the Baron von Arenburg. He was a soldierly-looking fellow of about thirty, with easy manners, and a fair, good-natured face, with grey eyes and a little yellow moustache. He shook hands with a firm grip, and said he was delighted to meet Dorothy’s brother, “whom she adores!”

Bertram knew something of his record during the war, through Dorothy’s letters to her mother. He had been with the cavalry in East Prussia, in the great sweep back under Mackensen. Most of the time he had been on the Russian Front, and was only in the West in the last phase of the war, when the dismounted cavalry were thrown in to stiffen the retreat in September of ’18, to the end. “War prolongers!” as the German infantry called them, derisively and with hate.

Bertram noticed that he kissed his wife’s hand on entering, with a kind of gallant reverence, surprising, he thought, in a German, though afterwards he saw it was the usual custom.

At dinner the conversation was desultory. Bertram hedged on most of the subjects which might lead him into deep water. To enquiries about Joyce he answered vaguely that she was staying with some friends in France. To Dorothy’s questions about the purpose of his visit to Germany he answered that he was “writing a bit”—in a journalistic way. He wanted to study the conditions in Germany, the spirit of the people, and so on.

Dorothy and her husband exchanged glances. This seemed to them exciting news. They were glad, they said, that at last some one had come from England to tell the truth about Germany. The English newspapers told nothing but lies. The falsity of the picture they drew was positively frightful—“utterly grotesque,” said Von Arenburg.

“In what way?” asked Bertram.

Dorothy told him “in every way.” They pretended that Germany was getting enormously rich, that the people were not taxed, that the German mark was being forced down deliberately, in exchange value, in order to capture the world’s trade, that Germany was making munitions of war and training secret armies, that the Revolution was a sham, and the plea of poverty a colossal fraud.

“Is none of that true?” asked Bertram.

Dorothy laughed, the old, full-throated laugh which he remembered in the old days of home life.

“Lies, lies, lies!” she cried.

Emotionally, vehemently, she protested that the middle classes in Germany were so impoverished by the downfall of the mark that even now they were on “short commons” and unable to buy clothes, especially underclothes or boots. So far from escaping taxation, they were ground down with taxes—even small incomes equal to sixty pounds a year in England. The mark fell because every time Germany had to pay her monstrous indemnities she had to purchase foreign money at gold rates, and then print enormous new issues of paper money.

The whole thing was mad. Germany, after four and a half years of war which had ruined her utterly, was expected to pay back the losses of all her enemies, and all their war-pensions, and all the cost of the Army of Occupation. Not even the United States, which had all the gold in the world, could pay such fabulous sums.

“It’s only fair that Germany should pay for the ruin she made,” said Bertram stolidly. “I was in France during the war. I saw the destruction of her cities and villages and farms and harvest fields. Wiped off the map.”

“We’re ready to help France to reconstruct all that,” said Dorothy, and Bertram winced a little at that “we.” He shrank from this sister of his identifying herself with her husband’s people. “What we cannot do is to pay for pensions and all the other ridiculous charges.”

“Germany is bound to go bankrupt,” said Von Arenburg. “Nothing can prevent that, and when it happens, Europe will be dragged down with us.”

“France wants to push Germany into the mud,” said Dorothy. “Nothing will satisfy her but a march into the Ruhr to seize the industrial cities and strangle Germany’s chance of life.”

“We shall try to escape—by way of Russia,” said Von Arenburg. “It will cause another war within a generation.”

“And then the breakdown of civilisation in Europe,” said Dorothy. “Dear God! I can’t believe that England will allow it. England’s generous, in spite of her cruelty at times.”

“Cruelty?” asked Bertram.

“The blockade,” she said. “It was cruel to starve German babies—after the Armistice—to force the Treaty of Versailles.”

Some one else had said that. It was the girl like Joyce in the dancing hall—the little prostitute— It seemed to be a general belief. Was there any truth in it?

“For her own interests, England must prevent it!” said Von Arenburg. “She needs world-markets for her goods. She must work for the recovery of Europe.”

“Even if France insists on her right to Shylock’s pound of flesh,” said Dorothy. “France is the enemy of the world’s peace.”

Bertram’s face flushed.

“I don’t want to argue,” he said, “but I know the sacrifice of France. I saw her agony with my own eyes. I’ve just been in the old battlefields again, among the peasants there. There’s only one thing that’s in all their minds—a dread of another war. They’re still not sure that one day Germany won’t come back again, and re-light the red fires. They want nothing but security, and they don’t see it, except in keeping Germany weak.”

“They’re going the wrong way to work to prevent another war,” said Dorothy. “There’s not an insult, a petty provocation, a threat of ignominy, that they haven’t heaped on Germany since the signing of Peace.”

“One must understand their point of view,” said Bertram. “Germany wasn’t very tender of French feelings in time of war, when she thought she was winning.”

He changed the topic of conversation. His advocacy of France seemed to distress Dorothy.

After dinner, when with a tactful word or two Von Arenburg left his wife alone with her brother, Dorothy revealed her thoughts more deeply, with an emotion which touched him, because he shared her hope.

“It’s not that I hate France,” she said. “I used to weep for France when German armies were trampling through her fields—during the years of death. But I hate war. Oh, Bertram, you’ve seen it, and can hardly tell what you’ve seen, because no words can tell it all, but I’ve suffered perhaps more than you. Imagine an English wife of a German husband through all these years! You can’t imagine. The torture of a dual allegiance—duty to my husband, pity for the German wounded—for their frightful slaughter—for the spiritual despair of the German people knowing, in spite of early victories, that they were doomed—for they knew it always! Then, on the other side, my love for England, my pride in English courage, my dreams at night because of English armies under German gunfire, with you, my dear, among them, somewhere in those dreadful fields. I’m angry with France now because she seems to prevent the spirit of peace.”

“She’s not sure that Germany won’t seek revenge again. Are _you_ sure?”

Dorothy sighed, and seemed to think deeply of all that she knew about the German people. Then she told her brother that before the Armistice, and afterwards, the German people had revolted against the war, and militarism. They were all “Wilsonites.” If in defeat they’d been treated generously, they would have risen with immense, overwhelming emotion to new ideals of world peace. But the Treaty of Versailles seemed to put them in chains and doom them to an eternal servitude of debt to the victor nations. Then the attitude of France had been so harsh and so provocative that gradually the German people had hardened again in spirit, and the old venom had come back. The ideals of world peace were abandoned by French policy which sought only the ringing round of Germany with hostile states to keep her down under the menace of armed force. Now hatred for France smouldered in every German heart, and the future was black.

“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.

He used to wonder sometimes whether that were not treachery to his old standards of loyalty and honour, and was conscience-stricken because he accepted hospitality, kindness, even friendship, from these people. But he found it impossible to keep up the old “hate” against them. Even in war-time that spirit of hate had been behind the lines rather than in the trenches. The “Tommies” had given cigarettes to their prisoners after the heat of battle. German officers had been treated civilly by British officers, if they were at all well-behaved, and within a few days after the occupation of Cologne, British soldiers had clinked beer mugs with the fellows who had once lain behind machine guns, mowing them down. That was the real spirit of chivalry, a lesson taught by the common man, obeying some instinctive decent law of nature, to neurotic and morbid-minded people who watered the roots of hate and cultivated its poisonous fruit with unceasing care.

Only by some friendly pact with these people could Europe have peace. Bertram could see no chance of peace if they were to be treated for ever as moral lepers. It was ridiculous to regard them as moral lepers.

How could he take that view when he moved among their crowds in the Opera House, in pleasant beer gardens outside Berlin to which they flocked in the evenings, by the lakeside and in the woods of the Grünewald? These young Germans with their girls, drinking light beer, eating ices, chattering to the music of the band, playing with little flaxen-haired children, did not behave like moral lepers. They were good-natured, decent, smiling folk, the girls wonderfully neat and pretty and plump, in cheap frocks, the men shabbily dressed, many in their old war tunics dyed and re-cut to civilian styles, but scrupulously brushed.

Von Arenburg, who had a certain sense of humour, limited by a Prussian outlook, used to ask Bertram what he thought of the “Huns” in assemblies like that. “Do they behave like barbarians? Do you see them eating their babies?”

“No,” said Bertram; “but I find them enjoying themselves, obviously well-fed, not badly dressed, and spending quite a lot of marks on their evening’s amusement. What about this German poverty, that you keep telling me about?”

It was Dorothy who tried to explain. These people in their home lives stinted and scraped to enjoy an evening’s pleasure like this. They lived in overcrowded rooms, stiflingly hot in summer. To go to a beer garden in the evening was essential for very life and health. It cost but a few marks for light beer or a pink ice. Look at the girls’ frocks, so clean, but so cheap. Look at their boots, made of paper and sham leather.

Bertram was not satisfied with these explanations. It seemed to him in Berlin and the other towns to which he went, that the German people were marvellously prosperous after the war. It was true that in exchange value German paper money was slumping away at an alarming rate, and that every time it dropped prices were higher in the shops. But wages seemed to rise also, and people seemed to get more paper money every month, which, in Germany, had still a fair purchasing power.

He wandered round the great stores, like Wertheim’s, and was startled by the amazingly low price of everything manufactured in Germany, and there seemed nothing they didn’t make. Translated into English figures, at the current rate of exchange, they were a mockery of English competition. At such prices they could beat us in every market of the world, and, so it seemed, were doing.

Von Arenburg pooh-poohed his argument.

“It’s all illusion,” he said. “I admit the feverish activity of German trade and industry. It’s the genius of our people, inspired by a desperate desire to avert their ruin. But nothing can do that so long as the Allied nations do not release their stranglehold. We sell below cost price. To buy raw material from abroad we have to pay the difference on the mark. We’re bleeding to death. Presently the crash will come, and Europe will shudder in all its members.”

Bertram was not good at arithmetic. International finance was a mystery to him. He could not find any clue to this economic mystery of the German people, bankrupt (they said) yet prosperous, capturing world trade (as they admitted), yet “bleeding to death.”

More within his power of observation was the mentality of these people, and in patient listening at luncheon tables and dinner tables, where he met the Junker crowd and the “Intellectuals,” in conversations with shop-keepers and peasants, he tried to discover the drift of thought in Germany after defeat.

Largely the peace of the world depended upon their outlook on the future. Had they liberated themselves from their old militarism? Were they preparing to march forward as a free democracy in a commonwealth of nations, away from the darkness of the old War-Gods in this Jungle? Or were they again worshipping those ancient gods with secret rites and propitiations?

It was hard to tell among Dorothy’s friends. They revealed how deep the agony of war had been in their souls, how sharply the wound still hurt. These German ladies, very charming, some of them, had lost fathers, husbands, brothers, lovers, sons, even in more appalling numbers than the death-rate of England. Whole families of the German aristocracy had been wiped out, and in the humbler classes it was the same.

They cursed the war, and the Army commanders, and the politicians. They said they had been “betrayed” by the conceit of Ludendorff, by the folly of the Supreme War Council, by the spirit of Bolshevism among the troops on the Russian Front who had been bitten by that frightful microbe. They protested against the “cruelty” of the Versailles Treaty, and asserted their faith in Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” which had never been fulfilled. That was another betrayal, not only of Germany, but of all the hopes of the world.