Part 25

Yet never once in any company did any German, man or woman, acknowledge the guilt of Germany in having started the war. Russia had “moved first.” England had hemmed in Germany. The German people had been ringed round by enemies. And in spite of all those enemies, the German armies had never been defeated. It was the home front that had broken down, by sheer starvation.

Never defeated! Bertram challenged that belief, with some violence, at one of Dorothy’s afternoon “at homes.”

Among the ladies were several ex-officers, two Generals of Rupprecht’s Army, so long opposite the British, in Flanders.

It was General von Althof who made the statement, with simple sincerity.

“_Gott sei dank!_ Our brave Armies were never defeated, from first to last.”

“That surprises me,” said Bertram, with an ironical smile; “I always thought the German Armies were broken to bits. First on the Marne, in July ’18. Afterwards like brown paper on August 8th. They could never hold a line again. When the end came they’d lost hundreds of thousands of prisoners, thousands of guns, and the whole war-machine was destroyed. Otherwise there was no need to sign the Armistice, the greatest surrender of any nation in the history of the world, surely?”

It was not a courteous way of speech; not kind. But Bertram was becoming rather tired of this calm forgetfulness of what had happened in history, and he disliked the type represented by General von Althof, one of those hard, bald-headed Prussians, with a mind as narrow as a Brazil nut.

Von Althof became red about the gills, and then very pale.

“Doubtless, as a young regimental officer, you regard local successes as great victories. That is a common error, not difficult to understand. As a General of the German High Command, I repeat, sir, that our glorious Armies were never defeated in the field of battle. The Armistice was forced upon us by revolution at home, and the broken _morale_ of a hungry people.”

“There can be no argument about it,” said one of the younger officers. “It is an accepted fact.”

Bertram made a considerable argument about it, until checked by Dorothy, who was visibly distressed.

General von Althof departed with suppressed rage, after a stiff bow to Bertram, and the other officers took their leave later, so that only a few ladies remained.

One of them was the Fräulein von Wegener, a pretty blonde, who seemed to be Dorothy’s greatest friend.

She crossed over to Bertram, sitting by his side, and her eyes were alight with amusement.

“Of course I don’t think our Armies were defeated—I’m German!—but I adore the courage with which you attacked Von Althof. It made me tremble all over! I have never seen any officer disagree with a General. It isn’t done in Germany. You reminded me of St. George and the Dragon.”

Bertram’s rage had subsided, and he felt guilty of a social misdemeanour in having raised such an argument in Dorothy’s drawing-room.

“I behaved like the Dragon,” he said. “Breathing out fire. A disgraceful incident!”

“I love sincerity,” said Fräulein von Wegener. “And I hate Generals.”

“How’s that?” asked Bertram. “They seem to be highly respected in Germany, in spite of their—well, let’s call it failure to achieve absolute victory.”

The girl laughed, with a pleasant, musical, mirthful sound.

“Their self-conceit is _kolossal_! But they’ve been found out. The German people have no more use for them.”

“You think that?” asked Bertram, doubtfully.

“The people,” she said, and then lowered her voice. “Not the little crowd in drawing-rooms like this. . . . I go among the working folk, in children’s clinics—for charity, you know. They hate war and all its stupidity. Never again, they say.”

“Not even against France?”

She hesitated, and seemed embarrassed for a moment.

“Not even against France, if she gives us a decent chance.”

She spoke of Dorothy, looking across at her with admiration.

“Your lovely sister has made me a Pacifist. She’s a saint. She has converted me from all my wicked ways.”

“You were very wicked?” asked Bertram.

“In idea,” she said, smiling. “Full of naughty passion, and intolerance, and rebellion against God. Now I’m getting good. I have a new philosophy.”

“What’s that?” asked Bertram.

“Love of humanity,” she said.

“It sounds good,” said Bertram. “But I seem to have heard of it before, and it’s a little vague.”

He came to know more of her philosophy, even more of her love of humanity, because Dorothy invited her often to the house, and to the Opera, where she was placed next to Bertram, and to picnic parties in the Grünewald, where she looked her prettiest in muslin frocks “made by my own little fingers” (she told him), and to evening concerts in public gardens outside Berlin.

Anna was her name, and because of her close friendship with Dorothy—they were almost like sisters, it seemed—she insisted upon Bertram calling her that and forgetting the _gnädiges Fräulein_. She called him Bertram, after demurely asking his permission. He found her amusing. She had a playful sense of humour and teased him because of his English shyness. For England, in spite of being German, she had a romantic admiration, and she confessed to him that the manners of Englishmen seemed to be adorable, because of their courtesy to women.

“My manners are atrocious,” said Bertram, “as you may have observed.”

She did not agree. She thought he had the look of a Lancelot in Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” which she read with exquisite delight.

It was impossible for Bertram to ignore the fact that she flirted with him ardently, and that her eyes worshipped him. He was not annoyed. He liked it. He liked the little curl that played about each cheek, and her milky skin, and her laughing voice, and pretty, plump figure. She was what Christy used to call, in his dry way, “a cuddlesome thing—and highly dangerous.”

Bertram did not find her extremely dangerous, though he acknowledged to himself that a little care might be necessary at times, if he wished to avoid temptation. There was no need why he should avoid temptation, being a free man, now that Joyce had flung him over, but always there was that trick of conscience in him, or self-imposed repression, which had held him back from easy amour, which meant no more to other men he knew than a passing adventure, without consequence. In any case, this girl was of high caste. A love affair would mean marriage, and he was not as free as that, nor so inclined.

There was a moment of danger one evening in the Grünewald, that wonderful woodland within a tram journey of Berlin. Dorothy and her husband had wandered away, hand in hand, like two lovers of the humbler class who came here also for their picnics and pleasure parties. Anna and Bertram sat together in a little bower, hidden from the passers-by, where they had all had tea together an hour or more ago. Birds were singing in the boughs above their heads, and Bertram sat with his back to a tree, listening to the pleasant twitter and watching the light play through the leaves. Anna sat on the grass, a yard away from him, with her muslin frock spread out and her straw hat by her side. The breeze played softly with the little curl on each cheek, and she was like the princess in a German fairy-tale.

“Bertram,” she said presently, “you are very silent. Talk to me, and tell me pretty things.”

“Silence is good,” he said. “I like looking at your prettiness.”

“_So?_ Now that is what I like to hear you say!”

“I’ve said it.”

“Say it again. Do you think me pretty?”

“Wonderfully beautiful!”

“No, not that. That’s insincere. Dorothy is beautiful. I’m only a _hübsches mädel_—a pretty maid. Do you like me, Bertram?”

“Very much.”

“You don’t hate me because I’m German?”

“I’ve finished with hate.”

“Do you love me a little?”

He laughed at her audacity.

“What do you mean by love?”

“I can only tell by what I feel.”

“How’s that?”

“I feel that I want to be with you always, and to go where you go.”

She was on her knees now, and moved a little way towards him, and dropped down on the grass with her elbows up, and her dimpled chin in the cup of her hands.

Bertram was startled. This was going a little too far, perhaps. It had reached the danger point.

“I’m afraid if you went where I am going it would be to unpleasant places. I’m off to Moscow next week.”

“To Moscow! And next week! Let me come with you, then. With you I should feel safe, even in Moscow.”

The idea amused him. It would be pleasant enough to have Anna as his travelling companion. It would be a cure for loneliness. But it was out of the bounds of possibility, and not within his code of honour, or mental liberty.

“My passport is only for one,” he said. “And it has taken me a month to get.”

“Wait another month and get two!”

“_Nicht möglich!_ Let’s join Dorothy and her husband.”

“Cold Englishman!” she said, and sprang up with a vexed laugh.

“Not cold,” he said, taking her hand. “Only prudent. Or cowardly.”

They walked away, through the wood, hand in hand, as Dorothy and Von Arenburg had gone before them. Anna held his hand tight, and presently looked up at him with coaxing eyes and a childish pout.

“If you’re going so soon, we may as well begin to say good-bye.”

The meaning of her words was plain. She wanted him to kiss her, and under a tree there the place was good and discreet. He rather liked the idea of kissing her, but for a little warning that it could not end there, if he began. She called him “cold Englishman.” He was not that. He was too easily fired, and knew that if he once let a spark touch his passion, it might blaze into something like a bonfire. He didn’t want to make a blaze with this little German girl. So he compromised—the middle of the road again!—and raised her hand to his lips, very gallantly, but without ardour.

“Pooh!” she said, and taking her hand away, put it round his neck and pulled his head down and kissed him, and then with a laugh ran from him towards Dorothy and her husband, who appeared down one of the glades.

It was on the way home that evening that he told Dorothy of a telegram he had received that morning from Bernard Hall of _The New World_. His passport had been arranged with the Soviet authorities. Christy was waiting for him to go down the Volga in the famine region. Bernard Hall wanted the truth about the famine.

Dorothy received the news as a tragic blow.

“I can’t bear you to go away!” she cried. “Stay here, Bertram. Give up the visit to Russia. It’s more dangerous than ever. Stay with us in Germany, and make your home here.”

“My home?” he said, with a sudden pang of self-pity, “I have no home, now Joyce has left me.”

Dorothy answered him in a low, emotional voice.

“There are good women in Germany. One of them loves you already.”

“Meaning Anna von Wegener?”

“You have guessed?”

She was astonished at the rapidity of his intuition, and surprised, and rather hurt, when he laughed.

“It wasn’t a difficult guess. She doesn’t let concealment ‘like a worm i’ the bud, feed on her damask cheek.’”

Then he spoke seriously to this sister who had always been his comrade.

“I’m still haunted by the thought of Joyce. I pretend I’ve done with her, cut her image out of my heart and soul. But that’s bunkum. She comes into my dreams at night, and stands between me and the sunlight. I can’t play about with other women—or do more than play—until I’ve cut out Joyce, and the wound is healed.”

She pressed his hand with a sympathy that was good to him.

“Explain to Anna,” he said, “or she’ll think I’m heartless.”

Perhaps she explained well enough. Anna von Wegener was very demure next time she met Bertram, and only showed by her blush that she remembered the scene in the wood. She was with Dorothy and Von Arenburg at the Schlesische Bahnhof when Bertram took the train to Riga.

“I shall pray for you all the time,” said Dorothy. “Don’t stay too long in that frightful country.”

“Take care of your health, my dear fellow,” said Von Arenburg, grasping his hand.

“Remember your friends,” said Anna.

They waved hands to him until the train disappeared.

For a long time he sat motionless in his carriage, thinking of that chapter of life in Germany, and of the new page he was about to turn. He might never come back from Russia. Disease, starvation, crime, all kinds of danger lurked in that unknown country. It was cut off from the outer world. No letters passed, unless smuggled through or sent under official seal. He doubted whether he would get any news while he was there. Perhaps he would never hear the end of the story of Joyce, his wife. It would be strange never to know, until he passed to that place where, perhaps, everything was known, even the secret workings of the heart.

By his side was a bundle of letters from England, and some copies of _The Times_, forwarded to Dorothy’s address. He opened them, but left most of them unread. They were just trivial letters from acquaintances and tradesmen. _The Times_ interested him more. The King had gone to Belfast to open the Northern Parliament. He had made a speech, pleading for forgetfulness and forgiveness. There was talk of a Truce—a Treaty of Peace. At last! Thank God for that! . . . British trade returns were still going down. Unemployment was going up. There were the usual lists of births, marriages, and deaths. . . . Deaths! His eyes fell on four lines of small print.

_Murless_, on the 19th of this month, at the British Embassy in Paris, the Honourable Kenneth Murless, of pneumonia. Aged twenty-seven.

Bertram read the lines three or four times before the meaning of them fully reached his consciousness. He uttered a sharp exclamation, startling the German folk in his carriage. In his mind was a strange mingling of pity for Joyce and gladness for himself.

Kenneth had died not much more than a month after the dinner at the Griffon. Perhaps Joyce had not gone to him so soon. . . .

That was a rotten way of looking at things. What a tragedy for Joyce! And for Kenneth, that very perfect gentleman, who had tried to play the game “according to the rules!”

XLVIII

The journey to Riga had not been too bad, except for examination of passports and luggage at odd times of the day and night, at unexpected frontiers. This happened each side of “the Polish corridor,” which had been made by the Treaty of Versailles like a wedge driven through Germany to Danzig. It happened again on the frontiers of Lithuania and Latvia.

An American in the train called it the “Get-in-and-get-out-express.” It stopped for six hours at Eydtkuhnen on the border of East Prussia, and there was time to walk about and see something of the devastation made by the great Russian drive in the early years of the war. Here were still the blackened ruins of farmhouses and barns and peasants’ cottages, but German industry had built up the villages again, very neat and pretty under their new red roofs, wonderful in contrast to the poor attempts at reconstruction in the war zone of France.

Bertram had to wait four days in Riga before he could get a train to Moscow. The Soviet agents there were unhelpful and rather insolent. The stamp of the Moscow Executive Committee on his special passport did not seem to inspire them with any zeal. They informed Bertram that he might have to wait three weeks for a train—or longer. The thought seemed to amuse them.

Three weeks in Riga! The idea was affrighting because of its boredom. In three days Bertram had exhausted the interests and amusements of a city that seemed dead all day and only wakened to life at one in the morning, when the night cafés and dancing-halls were filled with a company of Letts, Poles, Russians, Finns, and Germans, drinking large quantities of _schnapps_ in quick gulps until their eyes watered and their noses reddened, and they became quarrelsome with their women and each other in a medley of languages.

In one of these cafés Bertram sat opposite an American who opened a friendly conversation.

“Staying long in this City of Departed Glory?”

“Not longer than I can help. I want to get to Moscow, but the trains don’t work.”

The American asked his business there, and raised his eyebrows with a smile when Bertram said, “Journalism. I want to find out the truth about the famine.”

“Well, there’s a famine, I’m told,” said the American. “You might call it a famine, without much exaggeration. About twenty-five million people starving to death, more or less. I’m pushing up some food. A relief train is going to-morrow with the first supplies. That’s my job. I’m A. R. A.”

He pronounced the letters as though they spelt a word—“Ara.” They conveyed nothing then to Bertram, though afterwards he came to know them as the greatest hope of life in Russia for the starving children from Petrograd to the Volga Valley, and the Russians spoke of “Ara” as though it were God. It meant the American Relief Administration.

“Any chance of a place on that train?” he asked.

The American smiled again.

“I expected that question. Is your passport all right for Moscow?”

Bertram showed it, and the American nodded.

“Any objection to lice?” he asked.

“I don’t invite them to dinner,” said Bertram, “but we were on speaking terms in the trenches. ‘Chatty,’ the men used to call it.”

“They’ll give you the glad hand in that _train de luxe_.”

“Then I can get a place?”

“I’ll fix you up. Better take supplies with you. Cheese. Biscuits. A kettle. Enamel mugs. Candles. Blankets. There’s not a restaurant car, nor a _wagon lit_.”

He smiled grimly, and Bertram knew why on the next night when he boarded the train to Moscow. It was nearly midnight, and the station was dimly lit, and after stumbling over grass-grown rails, Bertram found a train in darkness, except in one or two carriages where candles had been lighted and put on the window ledges. A number of Lettish porters staggered along under heavy bundles, and there were more of them in the corridor of the train from which a frightful smell met the open air. The carriages were wooden compartments, stripped of all upholstery, with plank beds, and they seemed to be entirely occupied by Americans and Russians who were quarrelling with each other for vacant possession. There was a jabber of both languages rising into violent oaths of the choicest brand from New York, Omaha, Kansas, and Kentucky. One voice rose higher than all the rest, with a bull-like bellow.

“For Christ’s sake! If all you Tavarishes don’t get out of this bug-box, I’ll get the Cheka on to you and have you minced by Chinese torturers!”

The owner of this voice, as Bertram saw in the candlelight of one carriage, was a young man of Herculean build, in a felt hat, Garibaldi shirt, riding-breeches, and top boots. To make clear the mystical meaning of his words, he seized one of the porters, lifted him up as though he were a sack of potatoes, and flung him at six others massed in the dark corridor. It had the effect of clearing a space and creating a moment’s quietude.

“Who the hell are you?” asked the genial giant, peering at Bertram and putting a flash-light close to his nose. “Do you belong to this outfit?”

Bertram mentioned the name of the American who had “fixed him up.” It was an ordinary name, but produced an immediate and softening effect.

“Good enough! You’re the young guy who’s going to the famine districts? Glad to meet you.”

Bertram found his hand in an enormous fist, and recovered it in a limp and boneless state.

“My name’s Cherry,” said the young giant. “I’m from Lynchburg, Virginia. I do the courier stunt for Ara, from Riga to Moscow. I also boss this train, and make it move. When it stops, I make it move again. Sometimes. If I get out and push. I inspire terror among Tavarishes. When they play tricks I treat ’em rough. When they play straight I’m full of loving-kindness. It’s the only way to get anything done by these lousy Tavarishes.”

“What’s a Tavarish?” asked Bertram.

“A Comrade,” said Cherry of Lynch, Virginia. “It’s a nice way of saying Bolshevik. Call them Tavarish all the time. It makes them feel good. Human equality and all that punk. Have you brought any bug-powder?”

“No.”

“I’ll lend you some. Otherwise you’ll be eaten alive.”

But for Cherry, Bertram would have reached Moscow even more of a wreck than he did. In spite of the powder, he was attacked by many different species of insect as he lay on an upper plank, with Cherry beneath. He saw them crawling in legions up the wooden walls. They ambushed him beneath his blanket, sent out scouts and advance guards and then attacked in mass formation. The nights were torture. In the day time the enemy retired to their hiding places.

The train was crowded with Russian and Lettish couriers, all in charge of heavy packing-cases and sacks. Next to them, four to a carriage, was a contingent of young Americans, going out as clerks to the headquarters staff of the A. R. A., in Moscow. Certain mysterious young men who talked to each other in low voices, were pointed out by Cherry as Russian Soviet officials belonging to the secret police of the Extraordinary Commission, known as “the Cheka,” because each letter of that dreaded word formed the initial of the full Russian title for this organisation.

There was no heat in the train, and it was cold after crossing the Russian frontier in the rainy season of early autumn.

Bertram’s cheese and biscuits, which he had bought in Riga, became utterly distasteful to him after two days, and he yielded to Cherry’s insistent invitation to share his bully beef, pork and beans, tinned butter, and fresh bread. It was Cherry, also, who taught him how to get the one source of comfort available on Russian journeys—a plentiful supply of hot water at every wayside station. The pass-word was “kipyitok,” and this was yelled by Cherry to the _provodnik_, or guard, of the train, who filled the passengers’ kettles so that they could make tea in their carriages.

The Russian frontier was at a place called Sebesh, the other side of a long stretch of flat, barren, abandoned country which seemed to be a kind of No-Man’s Land. The train was immediately boarded by a number of hairy men in sheepskin coats and fur caps, accompanied by two soldiers of the Red Army. Bertram felt a thrill at his first sight of Bolsheviks and Red Soldiers. His mind went back to the atrocity tales of Countess Lydia and her sister, and other refugees from the Russian Terror. These men who pushed their way down the corridor were agents of that terrible new social code and faith which had declared war upon all civilisation based upon individualism and private property, and proclaimed Communism as the new gospel which mankind must accept, whether they liked it or not. Those soldiers represented the power by which that code was enforced upon one hundred and fifty million people. It was their Army which had defeated Koltchak, Denikin, Judenitch, Wrangel, and all the counter-revolutionary forces—financed, armed and equipped by the Allied Powers—which had invaded Russia, laid great districts in ruin and flame, hanged many peasants to the branches of trees, and retreated in disorderly masses from the relentless pursuit of “the Reds.”

The two soldiers escorting the hairy Bolsheviks were not formidable in appearance. They were both about eighteen, with puffy, pale faces, and a hang-dog, under-fed look. They wore long grey overcoats, reaching to their heels, and curious cloth caps, shaped like Assyrian helmets, with stiff peaks behind, and in front the Red Star, five-pointed, of the Soviet Republic.

“See how these Tavarishes love me!” said Cherry.

Certainly the small group of Bolshevik officials who came to examine passports and baggage, greeted Cherry with a kind of forced amusement, in which, as it seemed to Bertram, there was a hint of fear. Perhaps it was due to the vice-like grip with which he insisted upon shaking hands with them; and the bear-like way in which he thumped them on the back.