Not having a fiddle I couldn't do that. I wish I could have, for I'm instantly natural and happy when I get playing; but the Grafin said she hoped I would play to some of her friends one evening as soon as she could arrange it,—friends interested in youthful geniuses, as she put it.

I said I would love to, and that it was so kind of her, but privately I thought I would inquire of Kloster first; for if her friends are all as deeply interested in music as the Graf and Helena, then I would be doing better and more profitably by going to bed at ten o'clock as usual, rather than emerge bedizened from my lair to go and flaunt in these haunts of splendid virtue.

After Herr von Inster came I began faintly to enjoy myself, for he talked all round, and greatly and obviously relieved his aunt by doing so. Helena let go of my ear and looked at him. Once she very nearly smiled. The other girl left off murmuring, and talked about things I could talk about too, such as England and Germany—they're never tired of that—and Strauss and Debussy. Only the Graf sat mute, his eyes fixed on the tablecloth.

"My husband is dying to hear you play," said the Grafin, when he got up presently to go back to his work. "Absolutely dying," she said, recklessly padding out the leanness of his very bald good-bye to me.

He said nothing even to that. He just went. He didn't seem to be dying.

Herr von luster walked back with me. He is very agreeable-looking, with kind eyes that are both shrewd and sad. He talks English very well, and so did everybody at the Koseritzes who talked at all. He is pathetically keen on music. Kloster says he would have been a really great player, but being a Junker settles him for ever. It is tragic to be forced out of one's natural bent, and he says he hates soldiering. People in the street were very polite, and made way for me because I was with an officer. I wasn't pushed off the pavement once.

Good night my own mother. I've had a happy week. I put my arms round you and kiss you with all that I have of love.

Your Chris.



Wanda came in in great excitement to fetch my tray just now, and said a prince has been assassinated. She heard the Herrschaften saying so at supper. She thought they said it was an Austrian, but whatever prince it was it was Majestatsbeleidigung to get killing him, and she marvelled how any one had dared. Then Frau Berg herself came to tell me. By this time I was in bed,—pig-tailed, and ready to go to sleep. She was tremendously excited, and I felt a cold shiver down my back watching her. She was so much excited that I caught it from her and was excited too. Well, it is very dreadful the way these king-people get bombed out of life. She said it was the Austrian heir to the throne and his wife, both of them. But of course you'll know all about it by the time you get this. She didn't know any details, but there had been extra editions of the Sunday papers, and she said it would mean war.

"War?" I echoed.

"War," she repeated; and began to tread heavily about the room saying, "War. War."

"But who with?" I asked, watching her fascinated, sitting up in bed holding on to my knees.

"It will come," said Frau Berg, treading about like some huge Judaic prophetess who sniffs blood. "It must come. There will be no quiet in the world till blood has been let."

"But what blood?" I asked, rather tremulously, for her voice and behaviour curdled me.

"The blood of all those evil-doers who are responsible," she said; and she paused a moment at the foot of my bed and folded her arms across her chest—they could hardly reach, and the word chest sounds much too flat—and added, "Of whom there are many."

Then she began to walk about again, and each time a foot went down the room shook. "All, all need punishing," she said as she walked. "There will be, there must be, punishment for this. Great and terrible. Blood will, blood must flow in streams before such a crime can be regarded as washed out. Such evil-doers must be emptied of all their blood."

And then luckily she went away, for I was beginning to freeze to the sheets with horror.

I got out of bed to write this. You'll be shocked too, I know. The way royalties are snuffed out one after the other! How glad I am I'm not one and you're not one, and we can live safely and fruitfully outside the range of bombs. Poor things. It is very horrible. Yet they never seem to abdicate or want not to be royalties, so that I suppose they think it worth it on the whole. But Frau Berg was terrible. What a bloodthirsty woman. I wonder if the other boarders will talk like that. I do pray not, for I hate the very word blood. And why does she say there'll be war? They will catch the murderers and punish them as they've done before, and there'll be an end of it. There wasn't war when the Empress of Austria was killed, or the King and Queen of Servia. I think Frau Berg wanted to make me creep. She has a fixed idea that English people are every one of them much too comfortable, and should at all costs be made to know what being uncomfortable is like. For their good, I suppose.



Berlin, Tuesday, June 30th, 1914.

Darling mother,

How splendid that you're going to Switzerland next month with the Cunliffes. I do think it is glorious, and it will make you so strong for the winter. And think how much nearer you'll be to me! I always suspected Mrs. Cunliffe of being secretly an angel, and now I know it. Your letter has just come and I simply had to tell you how glad I am.

Chris.

This isn't a letter, it's a cry of joy.



Berlin, Sunday, July 5th, 1914.

My blessed little mother,

It has been so hot this week. We've been sweltering up here under the roof. If you are having it anything like this at Chertsey the sooner you persuade the Cunliffes to leave for Switzerland the better. Just the sight of snow on the mountains out of your window would keep you cool. You know I told you my bedroom looks onto the Lutzowstrasse and the sun beats on it nearly all day, and flies in great numbers have taken to coming up here and listening to me play, and it is difficult to practise satisfactorily while they walk about enraptured on my neck. I can't swish them away, because both my hands are busy. I wish I had a tail.

Frau Berg says there never used to be flies in this room, and suggests with some sternness that I brought them with me,—the eggs, I suppose, in my luggage. She is inclined to deny that they're here at all, on the ground chiefly that nothing so irregular as a fly out of its proper place, which is, she says, a manure heap, is possible in Germany. It is too well managed, is Germany, she says. I said I supposed she knew that because she had seen it in the newspapers. I was snappy, you see. The hot weather makes me disposed, I'm afraid, to impatience with Frau Berg. She is so large, and she seems to soak up what air there is, and whenever she has sat on a chair it keeps warm afterwards for hours. If only some clever American with inventions rioting in his brain would come here and adapt her to being an electric fan! I want one so badly, and she would be beautiful whirling round, and would make an immense volume of air, I'm sure.

Well, darling one, you see I'm peevish. It's because I'm so hot, and it doesn't get cool at night. And the food is so hot too and so greasy, and the pallid young man with the red mouth who sits opposite me at dinner melts visibly and continuously all the time, and Wanda coming round with the dishes is like the coming of a blast of hot air. Kloster says I'm working too much, and wants me to practise less. I said I didn't see that practising less would make Wanda and the young man cooler. I did try it one day when my head ached, and you've no idea what a long day it seemed. So empty. Nothing to do. Only Berlin. And one feels more alone in Berlin than anywhere in the world, I think. Kloster says it's because I'm working too much, but I don't see how working less would make Berlin more companionable. Of course I'm not a bit alone really, for there is Kloster, who takes a very real and lively interest in me and is the most delightful of men, and there is Herr von Inster, who has been twice to see me since that day I lunched at his aunt's, and everybody in this house talks to me now,—more to me, I think, than to any other of the boarders, because I'm English and they seem to want to educate me out of it. And Hilda Seeberg has actually got as far in friendship as a cautious invitation to have chocolate with her one afternoon some day in the future at Wertheim's; and the pallid young man has suggested showing me the Hohenzollern museum some Sunday, where he can explain to me, by means of relics, the glorious history of that high family, as he put it; and Frau Berg, though she looks like some massive Satan, isn't really satanic I expect; and Dr. Krummlaut says every day as he comes into the diningroom rubbing his hands and passes my chair, "Na, was macht England?" which is a sign he is being gracious. It is only a feeling, this of being completely alone. But I've got it, and the longer I'm here and the better I know people the greater it becomes. It's an uneasiness. I feel as if my spirit were alone,—the real, ultimate and only bit of me that is me and that matters.

If I go on like this you too, my little mother, will begin echoing Kloster and tell me that I'm working too much. Dear England. Dear, dear England. To find out how much one loves England all one has to do is to come to Germany.

Of course they talk of nothing else at every meal here now but the Archduke's murder. It's the impudence of the Servians that chiefly makes them gasp. That they should dare! Dr. Krummlaut says they never would have dared if they hadn't been instigated to this deed of atrocious blasphemy by Russia,—Russia bursting with envy of the Germanic powers and encouraging every affront to them. The whole table, except the Swede who eats steadily on, sees red at the word affront. Frau Berg reiterates that the world needs blood-letting before there can be any real calm again, but it isn't German blood she wants to let. Germany is surrounded by enormously wicked people, I gather, all swollen with envy, hatred and malice, and all of gigantic size. In the middle of these monsters browses Germany, very white and woolly-haired and loveable, a little lamb among the nations, artlessly only wanting to love and be loved, weak physically compared to its towering neighbours, but strong in simplicity and the knowledge of its gute Recht. And when they say these things they all turn to me for endorsement and approval—they've given up seeking response from the Swede, because she only eats—and I hastily run over my best words and pick out the most suitable one, which is generally herrlich, or else ich gratuliere. The gigantic, the really cosmic cynicism I fling into it glances off their comfortable thick skins unnoticed.

I think Kloster is right, and they haven't grown up yet. People like the Koseritzes, people of the world, don't show how young they are in the way these middle-class Germans do, but I daresay they are just the same really. They have the greediness of children too,—I don't mean in things to eat, though they have that too, and take the violent interest of ten years old in what there'll be for dinner—I mean greed for other people's possessions. In all their talk, all their expoundings of deutsche Idealen, I have found no trace of consideration for others, or even of any sort of recognition that other nations too may have rights and virtues. I asked Kloster whether I hadn't chanced on a little group of people who were exceptions in their way of looking at life, and he said No, they were perfectly typical of the Prussians, and that the other classes, upper and lower, thought in the same way, the difference lying only in their manner of expressing it.

"All these people, Mees Chrees," he said, "have been drilled. Do not forget that great fact. Every man of every class has spent some of the most impressionable years of his life being drilled. He never gets over it. Before that, he has had the nursery and the schoolroom: drill, and very thorough drill, in another form. He is drilled into what the authorities find it most convenient that he should think from the moment he can understand words. By the time he comes to his military service his mind is already squeezed into the desired shape. Then comes the finishing off,—the body drilled to match the mind, and you have the perfect slave. And it is because he is a slave that when he has power—and every man has power over some one—he is so great a bully."

"But you must have been drilled too," I said, "and you're none of these things."

He looked at me in silence for a moment, with his funny protruding eyes. Then he said, "I am told, and I believe it, that no man ever really gets over having been imprisoned."



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.



Berlin, Wednesday, July 8th, 1914.

Beloved mother,

Kloster says I'm to go into the country this very week and not come back for a whole fortnight. This is just a line to tell you this, and that he has written to a forester's family he knows living in the depths of the forests up beyond Stettin. They take in summer-boarders, and have had pupils of his before, and he is arranging with them for me to go there this very next Saturday.

Do you mind, darling mother? I mean, my doing something so suddenly without asking you first? But I'm like the tail being wagged by the dog, obliged to wag whether it wants to or not. I'm very unhappy at being shovelled off like this, away from my lessons for two solid weeks, but it's no use my protesting. One can't protest with Kloster. He says he won't teach me any more if I don't go. He was quite angry at last when I begged, and said it wouldn't be worth his while to go on teaching any one so stale with over-practising when they weren't fit to practise, and that if I didn't stop, all I'd ever be able to do would be to play in the second row of violins—(not even the first!)—at a pantomime. That shrivelled me up into silence. Horror-stricken silence. Then he got kind again, and said I had this precious gift—God, he said, alone knew why I had got it, I a woman; what, he asked, staring prawnishly, is the good of a woman's having such a stroke of luck?—and that it was a great responsibility, and I wasn't to suppose it was my gift only, to spoil and mess up as I chose, but that it belonged to the world. When he said that, cold shivers trickled down my spine. He looked so solemn, and he made me feel so solemn, as though I were being turned, like Wordsworth in The Prelude, into a dedicated spirit.

But I expect he is right, and it is time I went where it is cooler for a little while. I've been getting steadily angrier at nothing all the week, and more and more fretted by the flies, and one day—would you believe it—I actually sat down and cried with irritation because of those silly flies. I've had to promise not to touch a fiddle for the first week I'm away, and during the second week not to work more than two hours a day, and then I may come back if I feel quite well again. He says he'll be at Heringsdorf, which is a seaside place not very far away from where I shall be, for ten days himself, and will come over and see if I'm being good. He says the Koseritz's country place isn't far from where I shall be, so I shan't feel as if I didn't know a soul anywhere. The Koseritz party at which I was to play never came off. I was glad of that. I didn't a bit want to play at it, or bother about it, or anything else. The hot weather drove the Grafin into the country, Herr von Inster told me, He too seems to think I ought to go away. I saw him this afternoon after being with Kloster, and he says he'll go down to his aunt's—that is Grafin Koseritz—while I'm in the neighbourhood, and will ride over and see me. I'm sure you'd like him very much. My address will be:

bei Herrn Oberforster Bornsted Schuppenfelde Reg. Bez. Stettin.

I don't know what Reg. Bez. means. I've copied it from a card Kloster gave me, and I expect you had better put it on the envelope. I'll write and tell you directly I get there. Don't worry about me, little mother; Kloster says they are fearfully kind people, and it's the healthiest place, in the heart of the forest, away on the edge of a thing they call the Haff, which is water. He says that in a week I shall be leaping about like a young roe on the hill side; and he tries to lash me to enthusiasm by talking of all the wild strawberries there are there, and all the cream.

My heart's love, darling mother. Your confused and rather hustled Chris.

Oberforsterei, Schuppenfelde, July 11th, 1914.

My own little mother,

Here I am, and it is lovely. I must just tell you about it before I go to bed. We're buried in forest, eight miles from the nearest station, and that's only a Kleinbahn station, a toy thing into which a small train crawls twice a day, having been getting to it for more than three hours from Stettin. The Oberforster met me in a high yellow carriage, drawn by two long-tailed horses who hadn't been worried with much drill judging from their individualistic behaviour, and we lurched over forest tracks that were sometimes deep sand and sometimes all roots, and the evening air was so delicious after the train, so full of different scents and freshness, that I did nothing but lift up my nose and sniff with joy.

The Oberforster thought I had a cold, without at the same time having a handkerchief; and presently, after a period of uneasiness on my behalf, offered me his. "It is not quite clean," he said, "but it is better than none." And he shouted, because I was a foreigner and therefore would understand better if he shouted.

I explained as well as I could, which was not very, that my sniffs were sniffs of exultation.

"Ach so," he said, indulgent with the indulgence one feels towards a newly arrived guest, before one knows what they are really like.

We drove on in silence after that. Our wheels made hardly any noise on the sandy track, and I suddenly discovered how long it is since I've heard any birds. I wish you had come with me here, little mother; I wish you had been on that drive this evening. There were jays, and magpies, and woodpeckers, and little tiny birds like finches that kept on repeating in a monotonous sweet pipe the opening bar of the Beethoven C minor Symphony No. 5. We met nobody the whole way except a man with a cartload of wood, who greeted the Oberforster with immense respect, and some dilapidated little children picking wild strawberries. I wanted to remark on their dilapidation, which seemed very irregular in this well-conducted country, but thought I had best leave reasoned conversation alone till I've had time to learn more German, which I'm going to do diligently here, and till the Oberforster has discovered he needn't shout in order to make me understand. Sitting so close to my ear, when he shouted into it it was exactly as though some one had hit me, and hurt just as much.

He is a huge rawboned man, with the flat-backed head and protruding ears so many Germans have. What is it that is left out of their heads, I wonder? His moustache is like the Kaiser's, and he looks rather a fine figure of a man in his grey-green forester's uniform and becoming slouch hat with a feather stuck in it. Without his hat he is less impressive, because of his head. I suppose he has to have a head, but if he didn't have to he'd be very good-looking.

This is such a sweet place, little mother. I've got the dearest little clean bare bedroom, so attractive after the grim splendours of my drawingroom-bedroom at Frau Berg's. You can't think how lovely it is being here after the long hot journey. It's no fun travelling alone in Germany if you're a woman. I was elbowed about and pushed out of the way at stations by any men and boys there were as if I had been an ownerless trunk. Either that, or they stared incredibly, and said things. One little boy—he couldn't have been more than ten—winked at me and whispered something about kissing. The station at Stettin was horrible, much worse than the Berlin one. I don't know where they all came from, the crowds of hooligan boys, just below military age, and extraordinarily disreputable and insolent. To add to the confusion on the platform there were hundreds of Russians and Poles with their families and bundles—I asked my porter who they were, and he told me—being taken from one place where they had been working in the fields to another place, shepherded by a German overseer with a fierce dog and a revolver; very poor and ragged, all of them, but gentle, and, compared to the Germans, of beautiful manners; and there were a good many officers—it was altogether the most excited station I've seen, I think—and they stared too, but I'm certain that if I had been in a difficulty and wanted help they would have walked away. Kloster told me Germans divide women into two classes: those they want to kiss, and those they want to kick, who are all those they don't want to kiss. One can be kissed and kicked in lots of ways besides actually, I think, and I felt as if I had been both on that dreadful platform at Stettin. So you can imagine how heavenly it was to get into this beautiful forest, away from all that, into the quiet, the holiness. Frau Bornsted, who learned English at school, told me all the farms, including hers, are worked by Russians and Poles who are fetched over every spring in thousands by German overseers. "It is a good arrangement," she said. "In case of war we would not permit their departure, and so would our fields continue to be tilled." In case of war! Always that word on their tongues. Even in this distant corner of peace.

The Oberforsterei is a low white house with a clearing round it in which potatoes have been planted, and a meadow at the back going down to a stream, and a garden in front behind a low paling, full of pinks and larkspurs and pansies. A pair of antlers is nailed over the door, proud relic of an enormous stag the Oberforster shot on an unusually lucky day, and Frau Bornsted was sewing in the porch beneath honeysuckle when we arrived. It was just like the Germany one had in one's story books in the schoolroom days. It seemed too good to be true after the Lutzowstrasse. Frau Bornsted is quite a pretty young woman, flat rather than slender, tall, with lovely deep blue eyes and long black eyelashes. She would be very pretty if it occurred to her that she is pretty, but evidently it doesn't, or else it isn't proper to be pretty here; I think this is the real explanation of the way her hair is scraped hack into a little hard knob, and her face shows signs of being scrubbed every day with the same soap and the same energy she uses for the kitchen table. She has no children, and isn't, I suppose, more than twenty five, but she looks as thirty five, or even forty, looks in England.

I love it all. It is really just like a story book. We had supper out in the porch, prepared, spread, and fetched by Frau Bornsted, and it was a milk soup—very nice and funny, and I lapped it up like a thirsty kitten—and cold meat, and fried potatoes, and curds and whey, and wild strawberries and cream. They have an active cow who does all the curds and whey and cream and butter and milk-soup, besides keeping on having calves without a murmur,—"She is an example," said Frau Bornsted, who wants to talk English all the time, which will play havoc, I'm afraid, with my wanting to talk German.

She took me to a window and showed me the cow, pasturing, like David, beside still waters. "And without rebellious thoughts unsuited to her sex," said Frau Bornsted, turning and looking at me. She showed what she was thinking of by adding, "I hope you are not a suffragette?"

The Oberforster put on a thin green linen coat for supper, which he left unbuttoned to mark that he was off duty, and we sat round the table till it was starlight. Owls hooted in the forest across the road, and bats darted about our heads. Also there were mosquitoes. A great many mosquitoes. Herr Bornsted told me I wouldn't mind them after a while. "Herrlich," I said, with real enthusiasm.

And now I'm going to bed. Kloster was right to send me here. I've been leaning out of my window. The night tonight is the most beautiful thing, a great dark cave of softness. I'm at the back of the house where the meadow is and the good cow, and beyond the meadow there's another belt of forest, and then just over the tops of the pines, which are a little more softly dark than the rest of the soft darkness, there's a pale line of light that is the star-lit water of the Haff. Frogs are croaking down by the stream, every now and then an owl hoots somewhere in the distance, and the air comes up to my face off the long grass cool and damp. I can't tell you the effect the blessed silence, the blessed peace has on me after the fret of Berlin. It feels like getting back to God. It feels like being home again in heaven after having been obliged to spend six weeks in hell. And yet here, even here in the very lap of peace, as we sat in the porch after supper the Oberforster talked ceaselessly of Weltpolitik. The very sound of that word now makes me wince; for translated into plain English, what it means when you've pulled all the trimmings off and look at it squarely, is just taking other people's belongings, beginning with their blood. I must learn enough German to suggest that to the Oberforster: Murder, as a preliminary to Theft. I'm afraid he would send me straight back in disgrace to Frau Berg.

Good night darling mother. I'll write oftener now. My rules don't count this fortnight. Bless you, beloved little mother.

Your Chris.



Schuppenfelde, Monday, July 13th.

Sweet mother,

I got your letter from Switzerland forwarded on this morning, and like to feel you're by so much nearer me than you were a week ago. At least, I try to persuade myself that it's a thing to like, but I know in my heart it makes no earthly difference. If you're only a mile away and I mayn't see you, what's the good? You might as well be a thousand. The one thing that will get me to you again is accomplished work. I want to work, to be quick; and here I am idle, precious days passing, each of which not used for working means one day longer away from you. And I'm so well. There's no earthly reason why I shouldn't start practising again this very minute. A day yesterday in the forest has cured me completely. By the time I've lived through my week of promised idleness I shall be kicking my loose box to pieces! And then for another whole week there'll only be two hours of my violin allowed. Why, I shall fall on those miserable two hours like a famished beggar on a crust.

Well, I'm not going to grumble. It's only that I love you so, and miss you so very much. You know how I always missed you on Sunday in Berlin, because then I had time to feel, to remember; and here it is all Sundays. I've had two of them already, yesterday and today, and I don't know what it will be like by the time I've had the rest. I walked miles yesterday, and the more beautiful it was the more I missed you. What's the good of having all this loveliness by oneself? I want somebody with me to see it and feel it too. If you were here how happy we should be!

I wish you knew Herr von Inster, for I know you'd like him. I do think he's unusual, and you like unusual people. I had a letter from him today, sent with a book he thought I'd like, but I've read it,—it is Selma Lagerlof's Jerusalem; do you remember our reading it together that Easter in Cornwall? But wasn't it very charming of him to send it? He says he is coming this way the end of the week and will call on me and renew his acquaintance with the Oberforster, with whom he says he has gone shooting sometimes when he has been staying at Koseritz. His Christian name is Bernd. Doesn't it sound nice and honest.

I suppose by the end of the week he means Saturday, which is a very long way off. Saturdays used to seem to come rushing on to the very heels of Mondays in Berlin when I was busy working. Little mother, you can take it from me, from your wise, smug daughter, that work is the key to every happiness. Without it happiness won't come unlocked. What do people do who don't do anything, I wonder?

Koseritz is only five miles away, and as he'll stay there, I suppose, with his relations, he won't have very far to come. He'll ride over, I expect. He looks so nice on a horse. I saw him once in the Thiergarten, riding. I'd love to ride on these forest roads,—the sandy ones are perfect for riding; but when I asked the Oberforster today, after I got Herr von Inster's letter, whether he could lend me a horse while I was here, what do you think I found out? That Kloster, suspecting I might want to ride, had written him instructions on no account to allow me to. Because I might tumble off, if you please, and sprain either of my precious wrists. Did you ever. I believe Kloster regards me only as a vessel for carrying about music to other people, not as a human being at all. It is like the way jockeys are kept, strict and watched, before a race.

Frau Bornsted gazed at me with her large serious eyes, and said, "Do you play the violin, then, so well?"

"No," I snapped. "I don't." And I drummed with my fingers on the windowpane and felt as rebellious as six years old.

But of course I'm going to be good. I won't do anything that may delay my getting home to you.

The Bornsteds say Koseritz is a very beautiful place, on the very edge of the Haff. They talk with deep respectfulness of the Herr Graf, and the Frau Grafin, and the junge Komtesse. It's wonderful how respectful Germans are towards those definitely above them. And so uncritical. Kloster says that it is drill does it. You never get over the awe, he says, for the sergeant, for the lieutenant, for whoever, as you rise a step, is one step higher. I told the Bornsteds I had met the Koseritzes in Berlin, and they looked at me with a new interest, and Frau Bornsted, who has been very prettily taking me in hand and endeavouring to root out the opinions she takes for granted that I hold, being an Englanderin, came down for a while more nearly to my level, and after having by questioning learned that I had lunched with the Koseritzes, and having endeavoured to extract, also by questioning, what we had had to eat, which I couldn't remember except the whipped cream I spilt on the floor, she remarked, slowly nodding her head, "It must have been very agreeable for you to be with the grafliche Familie."

"And for them to be with me," I said, moved to forwardness by being full of forest air, which goes to my head.

I suppose this was what they call disrespectful without being funny, for Frau Bornsted looked at me in silence, and Herr Bornsted, who doesn't understand English, asked in German, seeing his wife solemn, "What does she say?" And when she told him he said, "Ach," and showed his disapproval by absorbing himself in the Deutsche Tageszeitzing.

It's wonderful how easy it is to be disrespectful in Germany. You've only got to be the least bit cheerful and let some of it out, and you've done it.

"Why are the English always so like that?" Frau Bornsted asked presently, after having marked her regret at my behaviour by not saying anything for five minutes.

"Like what?"

"So—so without reverence. And yet you are a religious people. You send out missionaries."

"Yes, and support bishops," I said. "You haven't got any bishops."

"You are the first nation in the world as regards missionaries," she said, gazing at me thoughtfully and taking no notice of the bishops. "My father"—her father is a pastor—"has a great admiration for your missionaries. How is it you have so many missionaries and at the same time so little reverence ?"

"Perhaps that is why," I said; and started off explaining, while she looked at me with beautiful uncomprehending eyes, that the reaction from the missionaries and from the kind of spirit that prompts their raising and export might conceivably produce a desire to be irreverent and laugh, and that life more and more seemed to me like a pendulum, and that it needs must swing both ways.

Frau Bornsted sat twisting her wedding ring on her finger till I was quiet again. She does this whenever I emit anything that can be called an idea. It reminds her that she is married, and that I, as she says, am nur ein junges Madchen, and therefore not to be taken seriously.

When I had finished about the pendulum, she said, "All this will be cured when you have a husband."

There was a tea party here yesterday afternoon. At least, it was coffee. I thought there were no neighbours, and when I came back late from having been all day in the forest, missing with an indifference that amazed Frau Bornsted the lure of her Sunday dinner, and taking some plum-cake and two Bibles with me, English and German, because I'm going to learn German that way among other ways while I'm here, and I think it's a very good way, and it immensely impressed Frau Bornsted to see me take two Bibles out for a walk,—when I got back about five, untidy and hot and able to say off a whole psalm in perfect Lutheran German, I found several high yellow carriages, like the one I was fetched in on Saturday, in front of the paling, with nosebags and rugs on the horses, and indoors in the parlour a number of other foresters and their wives, besides Frau Bornsted's father and mother and younger sister, and the local doctor and his wife, and the Herr Lehrer, a tall young man in spectacles who teaches in the village school two miles away.

I was astonished, for I imagined complete isolation here. Frau Bornsted says, though, that this only happens on Sundays. They were sitting round the remnants of coffee and cake, the men smoking and talking together apart from the women, the women with their bonnet-strings untied and hanging over their bosoms, of which there seemed to be many and much, telling each other, while they fanned themselves with immense handkerchiefs, what they had had for their Sunday dinner.

I would have slunk away when I heard the noise of voices, and gone round to the peaceful company of the cow, but Frau Bornsted saw me coming up the path and called me in.

I went in reluctantly, and on my appearing there was a dead silence, which would have unnerved me if I hadn't still had my eyes so full of sunlight that I hardly saw anything in the dark room, and stood there blinking.

"Unsere junge Englanderin," said Frau Bornsted, presenting me. "Schuhlerin von Kloster—grosses Talent,—" I heard her adding, handing round the bits of information as though it was cake.

They all said Ach so, and Wirklich, and somebody asked if I liked Germany, and I said, still not seeing much, "Es ist wundervoll," which provoked a murmur of applause, as the newspapers say.

I found I was expected to sit in a corner with Frau Bornsted's sister, who with the Lehrer and myself, being all of us unmarried, represented what the others spoke of as die Jugend, and that I was to answer sweetly and modestly any question I was asked by the others, but not to ask any myself, or indeed not to speak at all unless in the form of answering. I gathered this from the behaviour of Frau Bornsted's sister; but I do find it very hard not to be natural, and it's natural to me, as you know to your cost, don't you, little mother, to ask what things mean and why.

There was a great silence while I was given a cup of coffee and some cake by Frau Bornsted, helped by her sister. The young man, the third in our trio of youth, sat motionless in the chair next to me while this was done. I wanted to fetch my cup myself, rather than let Frau Bornsted wait on me, but she pressed me down into my chair again with firmness and the pained look of one who is witnessing the committing of a solecism. "Bitte—take place again," she said, her English giving way in the stress of getting me to behave as I should.

The women looked on with open interest and curiosity, examining my clothes and hair and hands and the Bibles I was clutching and the flowers I had stuck in where the Psalms are, because I never can find the Psalms right off. The men looked too, but with caution. I was fearfully untidy. You would have been shocked. But I don't know how one is to lie about on moss all day and stay neat, and nobody told me I was going to tumble into the middle of a party.

The first to disentangle himself from the rest and come and speak to me was Frau Bornsted's father, Pastor Wienicke. He came and stood in front of me, his legs apart and a cigar in his mouth, and he took the cigar out to tell me, what I already knew, that I was English. "Sie sind englisch," said Herr Pastor Wienicke.

"Ja," said I, as modestly as I could, which wasn't very.

There was something about the party that made me sit up on the edge of my chair with my feet neatly side by side, and hold my cup as carefully as if I had been at a school treat and expecting the rector every minute. "England," said the pastor, while everybody else listened,—he spoke in German—"is, I think I may say, still a great country."

"Ja?" said I politely, tilting up the ja a little at its end, which was meant to suggest not only a deferential, "If you say so it must be so" attitude, but also a courteous doubt as to whether any country could properly be called great in a world in which the standard of greatness was set by so splendid an example of it as his own country.

And it did suggest this, for he said, "Oh doch," balancing himself on his heels and toes alternately, as though balancing himself into exact justice. "Oh doch. I think one may honestly say she still is a great country, But—" and he raised his voice and his forefinger at me,—"let her beware of her money bags. That is my word to England: Beware of thy money bags."

There was a sound of approval in the room, and they all nodded their heads.

He looked at me, and as I supposed he might be expecting an answer I thought I had better say ja again, so I did.

"England," he then continued, "is our cousin, our blood-relation. Therefore is it that we can and must tell her the truth, even if it is unpalatable."

"Ja," I said, as he paused again; only there were several little things I would have liked to have said about that, if I had been able to talk German properly. But I had nothing but my list of exclamations and the psalms I had learnt ready. So I said Ja, and tried to look modest and intelligent.

"Her love of money, her materialism—these are her great dangers," he said. "I do not like to contemplate, and I ask my friends here—" he turned slowly round on his heels and back again—"whether they would like to contemplate a day when the sun of the British Empire, that Empire which, after all, has upheld the cause of religion with faithfulness and persistence for so long, shall be seen at last descending, to rise no more, in an engulfing ocean of over-indulged appetites."

"Ja," I said; and then perceiving it was the wrong word, hastily amended in English, "I mean nein."

He looked at me for a moment more carefully. Then deciding that all was well he went on.

"England," he said, "is our natural ally. She is of the same blood, the same faith, and the same colour. Behold the other races of the world, and they are either partly, chiefly, or altogether black. The blonde races are, like the dawn, destined to drive away the darkness. They must stand together shoulder to shoulder in any discord that may, in the future, gash the harmony of the world."

"Ja," I said, as one who should, at the conclusion of a Psalm, be saying Selah.

"We live in serious times," he said. "They may easily become more serious. Round us stand the Latins and the Slavs, armed to the teeth, bursting with envy of our goods, of our proud calm, and watching for the moment when they can fall upon us with criminal and murderous intent. Is it not so, my Fraulein?"

"Ja" said I, forced to agree because of my unfortunate emptiness of German.

The only thing I could have reeled off at him was the Psalm I had learnt, and I did long to, because it was the one asking why the heathen so furiously rage together; but you see, little mother, though I longed to I couldn't have followed it up, and having fired it off I'd have sat there defenceless while he annihilated me.

But I don't know what they all mean by this constant talk of envious nations crouching ready to spring at them. They talk and talk about it, and their papers write and write about it, till they inflame each other into a fever of pugnaciousness. I've never been anywhere in the least like it in my life. In England people talked of a thousand things, and hardly ever of war. When we were in Italy, and that time in Paris, we hardly heard it mentioned. Directly my train got into Germany at Goch coming from Flushing, and Germans began to get in, there in the very train this everlasting talk of war and the enviousness of other nations began, and it has never left off since. The Archduke's murder didn't start it; it was going on weeks before that, when first I came. It has been going on, Kloster says, growing in clamour, for years, ever since the present Kaiser succeeded to the throne. Kloster says the nation thinks it feels all this, but it is merely being stage-managed by the group of men at the top, headed by S. M. So well stage-managed is it, so carefully taught by such slow degrees, that it is absolutely convinced it has arrived at its opinions and judgments by itself. I wonder if these people are mad. Is it possible for a whole nation to go mad at once? It is they who seem to have the enviousness, to be torn with desire to get what isn't theirs.

"The disastrous crime of Sarajevo," continued Pastor Wienicke, "cannot in this connection pass unnoticed. To smite down a God's Anointed!" He held up his hands. "Not yet, it is true, an actually Anointed, but set aside by God for future use. It is typical of the world outside our Fatherland. Lawlessness and its companion Sacrilege stalk at large. Women emerge from the seclusion God has arranged for them, and rear their heads in shameless competition with men. Our rulers, whom God has given us so that they shall guide and lead us and in return be reverently taken care of, are blasphemously bombed." He flung both his arms heavenwards. "Arise, Germany!" he cried. "Arise and show thyself! Arise in thy might, I say, and let our enemies be scattered!"

Then he wiped his forehead, looked round in recognition of the sehr guts and ausserordentlich schon gesagts that were being flung about, re-lit his cigar with the aid of the Herr Lehrer, who sprang obsequiously forward with a match, and sat down.

Wasn't it a good thing he sat down. I felt so much happier. But just as it was at the meals at Frau Berg's so it was at the coffee party here,—I was singled out and talked to, or at, by the entire company. The concentration of curiosity of Germans is terrible. But it's more than curiosity, it's a kind of determination to crush what I'm thinking out of me and force what they're thinking into me. I shall see as they do; I shall think as they do; they'll shout at me till I'm forced to. That's what I feel. I don't a bit know if it isn't quite a wrong idea I've got, but somehow my very bones feel it.

Would you believe it, they stayed to supper, all of them, and never went away till ten o'clock. Frau Bornsted says one always does that in the country here when invited to afternoon coffee. I won't tell you any more of what they said, because it was all on exactly the same lines, the older men singling me out one by one and very loudly telling me variations of Pastor Wienicke's theme, the women going for me in twos and threes, more definitely bloodthirsty than the men, more like Frau Berg on the subject of blood-letting, more openly greedy. They were all disconcerted and uneasy because nothing more has been heard of the Austrian assassination. The silence from Vienna worries them, I gather, very much. They are afraid, actually they are afraid, Austria may be going to do nothing except just punish the murderers, and so miss the glorious opportunity for war. I wonder if you can the least realize, you sane mother in a sane place, the state they're in here, the sort of boiling and straining. I'm sure the whole of Germany is the same,—lashed by the few behind the scenes into a fury of aggressive patriotism. They call it patriotism, but it is just blood-lust and loot-lust.

I helped Frau Bornsted get supper ready, and was glad to escape into the peace of the kitchen and stand safely frying potatoes. She was very sweet in her demure Sunday frock of plain black, and high up round her ears a little white frill. The solemnity and youth and quaintness of her are very attractive, and I could easily love her if it weren't for this madness about Deutschland. She is as mad as any of them, and in her it is much more disconcerting. We will be discoursing together gravely—she is always grave, and never knows how funny we both are being really—about amusing things like husbands and when and if I'm ever going to get one, and she, full of the dignity and wisdom of the married, will be giving me much sage counsel with sobriety and gentleness, when something starts her off about Deutschland. Oh, they are intolerable about their Deutschland!

The Oberforster is calling for this—he's driving to the post, so good-bye little darling mother, little beloved and precious one.

Your Chris.



Schuppenfelde, Thursday, July 16, 1914.

My blessed mother,

Here's Thursday evening in my week of nothing to do, and me meaning to write every day to you, and I haven't done it since Monday. It's because I've had so much time. Really it's because I've been in a sort of sleep of loveliness. I've been doing nothing except be happy. Not a soul has been near us since Sunday, and Frau Bornsted says not a soul will, till next Sunday. Each morning I've come down to a perfect world, with the sun shining through roses on to our breakfast-table in the porch, and after breakfast I've crossed the road and gone into the forest and not come back till late afternoon.

Frau Bornsted has been sweet about it, giving me a little parcel of food and sending me off with many good wishes for a happy day. I wanted to help her do her housework, but except my room she won't let me, having had orders from Kloster that I was to be completely idle. And it is doing me good. I feel so perfectly content these last three days. There's nothing fretful about me any more; I feel harmonized, as if I were so much a part of the light and the air and the forest that I don't know now where they leave off and I begin. I sit and watch the fine-weather clouds drifting slowly across the tree-tops, and wonder if heaven is any better. I go down to the edge of the Haff, and lie on my face in the long grass, and push up my sleeves, and slowly stir the shallow golden water about among the rushes. I pick wild strawberries to eat with my lunch, and after lunch I lie on the moss and learn the Psalm for the day, first in English and then in German. About five I begin to go home, walking slowly through the hot scents of the afternoon forest, feeling as solemn and as exulting as I suppose a Catholic does when he comes away, shriven and blest, from confession. In the evening we sit out, and the little garden grows every minute more enchanted. Frau Bornsted rests after her labours, with her hands in her lap, and agrees with what the Oberforster every now and then takes his pipe out of his mouth to say, and I lie back in my chair and stare at the stars, and I think and think, and wonder and wonder. And what do you suppose I think and wonder about, little mother? You and love. I don't know why I say you and love, for it's the same thing. And so is all this beauty of summer in the woods, and so is music, and my violin when it gets playing to me; and the future is full of it, and oh, I do so badly want to say thank you to some one!

Good night my most precious mother.

Your Chris.



Schuppenfelde, Friday, July 17,1914.

This morning when I came down to breakfast, sweet mother, there at the foot of the stairs was Herr von Inster. He didn't say anything, but watched me coming down with the contented look he has I like so much. I was frightfully pleased to see him, and smiled all over myself. "Oh," I exclaimed, "so you've come."

He held out his hand and helped me down the last steps. He was in green shooting clothes, like the Oberforster's, but without the official buttons, and looked very nice. You'd like him, I'm sure. You'd like what he looks like, and like what he is.

He had been in the forest since four this morning, shooting with his colonel, who came down with him to Koseritz last night. The colonel and Graf Koseritz, who came down from Berlin with them, were both breakfasting, attended by the Bornsteds, and it shows how soundly I sleep here that I hadn't heard anything.

"And aren't you having any breakfast?" I asked.

"I will now," he said. "I was listening for your door to open,"

I think you'd like him very much, little mother.

The colonel, whose name is Graf Hohenfeld, was being very pleasant to Frau Bornsted, watching her admiringly as she brought him things to eat. He was very pleasant to me too, and got up and put his heels together and said, "Old England for ever" when I appeared, and asked the Graf whether Frau Bornsted and I didn't remind him of a nosegay of flowers. Obviously we didn't. The Graf doesn't look as if anybody ever reminded him of anything. He greeted me briefly, and then sat staring abstractedly at the tablecloth, as he did in Berlin. The Colonel did all the talking. Both he and the Graf had on those pretty green shooting things they wear in Germany, with the becoming soft hats and little feathers. He was very jovial indeed, seemed fond and proud of his lieutenant, Herr von Inster, slapped the Oberforster every now and then on the back, which made him nearly faint with joy each time, and wished it weren't breakfast and only coffee, because he would have liked to drink our healths,—"The healths of these two delightful young roses," he said, bowing to Frau Bornsted and me, "the Rose of England—long live England, which produces such flowers—and the Rose of Germany, our own wild forest rose."

I laughed, and Frau Bornsted looked sedately indulgent,—I suppose because he is a great man, this staff officer, who helps work out all the wonderful plans that are some day to make Germany able to conquer the world; but, as she explained to me the other day when I said something about her eyelashes being so long and pretty, prettiness is out of place in her position, and she prefers it not mentioned. "What has the wife of an Oberforster to do with prettiness?" she asked. "It is good for a junges Madchen, who has still to find a husband, but once she has him why be pretty? To be pretty when you are a married woman is only an undesirability. It exposes one easily to comment, and might cause, if one had not a solid character, an ever-afterwards-to-be-regretted expenditure on clothes."

The men were going to shoot with the Oberforster after breakfast and be all day in the forest, and the Colonel was going back to Berlin by the night train. He said he was leaving his lieutenant at Koseritz for a few days, but that he himself had to get back into harness at once,—"While the young one plays around," he said, slapping Herr von Inster on the back this time instead of the Oberforster, "among the varied and delightful flora of our old German forests. Here this nosegay," he said, sweeping his arm in our direction, "and there at Koseritz—" sweeping his arm in the other direction, "a nosegay no less charming but more hot-house,—the schone Helena and her young lady friends."

I asked Herr von Inster after breakfast, when we were alone for a moment in the garden, what his Colonel was like after dinner, if even breakfast made him so jovial.

"He is very clever," he said. "He is one of our cleverest officers on the Staff, and this is how he hides it."

"Oh," I said; for I thought it a funny explanation. Why hide it?

Perhaps that is what's the matter with the Graf,—he's hiding how clever he is.

But that Colonel certainly does seem clever. He asked where we live in England; a poser, rather, considering we don't at present live at all; but I told him where we did live, when Dad was alive.

"Ah," he said, "that is in Sussex. Very pretty just there. Which house was your home?"

I stared a little, for it seemed waste of time to describe it, but I said it was an old house on an open green.

"Yes," he said, nodding, "on the common. A very nice, roomy old house, with good outbuildings. But why do you not straighten out those corners on the road to Petworth? They are death traps."

"You've been there, then?" I said, astonished at the extreme smallness of the world.

"Never," he said, laughing. "But I study. We study, don't we, Inster my boy, at the old General Staff. And tell your Sussex County Council, beautiful English lady, to straighten out those corners, for they are very awkward indeed, and might easily cause serious accidents some day when the roads have to be used for real traffic."

"It is very good of you," I said politely, "to take such an interest in us."

"I not only take the greatest interest in you, charming young lady, and in your country, but I have an orderly mind and would be really pleased to see those corners straightened out. Use your influence, which I am sure must be great, with that shortsighted body of gentlemen, your County Council."

"I shall not fail," I said, more politely than ever, "to inform them of your wishes."

"Ah, but she is delightful,—delightful, your little Englanderin," he said gaily to Frau Bornsted, who listened to his badinage with grave and respectful indulgence; and he said a lot more things about England and its products and exports, meaning compliments to me—what can he be like after dinner?—and went off, jovial to the last, clicking his heels and kissing first Frau Bornsted's hand and then mine, in spite, as he explained, of its being against the rules to kiss the hand of a junges Madchen, but his way was never to take any notice of rules, he said, if they got between him and a charming young lady. And so he went off, waving his green hat to us and calling out Auf Wiedersehen till the forest engulfed him.

Herr von Inster and the Graf went too, but quietly. The Graf went exceedingly quietly. He hadn't said a word to anybody, as far as I could see, and no rallyings on the part of the Colonel could make him. He didn't even react to being told what I gather is the German equivalent for a sly dog.

Herr von Inster said, when he could get a word in, that he is coming over to-morrow to drive me about the forest. His attitude while his Colonel rattled on was very interesting: his punctilious attention, his apparent obligation to smile when there were sallies demanding that form of appreciation, his carefulness not to miss any indication of a wish.

"Why do you do it?" I asked, when the Colonel was engaged for a moment with the Oberforster indoors. "Isn't your military service enough? Are you drilled even to your smiles?"

"To everything," he said. "Including our enthusiasms. We're like the claque at a theatre."

Then he turned and looked at me with those kind, surprising eyes of his,—they're so reassuring, somehow, after his stern profile—and said, "To-morrow I shall be a human being again, and forget all this,—forget everything except the beautiful things of life."

Now I must leave off, because I want to iron out my white linen skirt and muslin blouse for to-morrow, as it's sure to be hot and I may as well look as clean as I can, so good-bye darling little mother. Oh, I forgot to say how glad I am you like being at Glion. I did mean to answer a great many things in your last letter, my little loved one, but I will tomorrow. It isn't that I don't read and reread your darling letters, it's that one has such heaps to say oneself to you. Each time I write to you I seem to empty the whole contents of the days I've lived since I last wrote into your lap. But to-morrow I'll answer all your questions,—to-morrow evening, after my day with Herr von Inster, then I can tell you all about it.

Good-bye till then, sweet mother.

Your Chris.



_Koseritz, Saturday evening, July 18, 1914.

My darling little mother,

See where I've got to! Who'd have thought it? Life is really very exciting, isn't it. The Grafin drove over to Schuppenfelde this afternoon, and took me away with her here. She said Kloster was coming for Sunday from Heringsdorf to them, and she knew he would want to see me and would go off to the Oberforsterei after me and leave her by herself if I were at the Bornsteds', and anyhow she wanted to see something of me before I went back to Berlin, and I couldn't refuse to give an old lady—she isn't a bit old—pleasure, and heaps of gracious things like that. Herr von Inster had brought a note from her in the morning, preparing my mind, and added his persuasions to hers. Not that I wanted persuading,—I thought it a heavenly idea, and didn't even mind Helena, because I felt that in a big house there'd be more room for her to stare at me in. And Herr von Inster is going to stay another week, taking his summer leave now instead of later, and he says he will see me safe to Berlin when I go next Saturday.

So we had the happiest morning wandering about the forest, he driving and letting the horses go as slowly as they liked while we talked, and after our sandwiches he took me back to the Bornsteds, and I showed Frau Bornsted the Grafin's letter.

If it hadn't been a Koseritz taking me away she would have been dreadfully offended at my wanting to go when only half my fortnight was over, but it was like a royal command to her, and she looked at me with greatly increased interest as the object of these high attentions. She had been inclined to warn me against Herr von Inster as a person removed by birth from my sphere—I suppose that's because I play the violin—and also against drives in forests generally if the parties were both unmarried; and she had been extraordinarily dignified when I laughed, and had told me it was all very well for me to laugh, being only an ignorant junges Madchen, but she doubted whether my mother would laugh; and she watched our departure for our picnic very stiffly and unsmilingly from the porch. But after reading the Grafin's letter I was treated more nearly as an equal, and she became all interest and co-operation. She helped me pack, while Herr von Inster, who has a great gift for quiet patience, waited downstairs; and she told me how fortunate I was to be going to spend some days with Komtesse Helena, from whom I could learn, she said, what the real perfect junges Madchen was like; and by the time the Grafin herself drove up in her little carriage with the pretty white ponies, she was so much melted and stirred by a house-guest of hers being singled out for such an honour that she put her arm round my neck when I said good-bye, and whispered that though it wasn't really fit for a junges Madchen to hear, she must tell me, as she probably wouldn't see me again, that she hoped shortly after Christmas to enrich the world by yet one more German.

I laughed and kissed her.

"It is no laughing matter," she said, with solemn eyes.

"No," I said, suddenly solemn too, remembering how Agatha Trent died.

And I took her face in both my hands and kissed her again, but with the seriousness of a parting blessing. For all her dignity, she has to reach up to me when I kiss her.

She put my hair tidy with a gentle hand, and said, "You are not at all what a junges Madchen generally is, but you are very nice. Please wish that my child may be a boy, so that I shall become the mother of a soldier."

I kissed her again, and got out of it that way, for I don't wish anything of the sort, and with that we parted.

Meanwhile the Grafin had been sitting very firmly in her carriage, having refused all Frau Bornsted's entreaties to come in. It was wonderful to see how affable she was and yet how firm, and wonderful to see the gulf her affability put between the Bornsteds—he was at the gate too, bowing—and herself.

And now here I am, and it's past eleven, and my window opens right on to the Haff, and far away across the water I can see the lights of Swinemunde twinkling where the Haff joins the open sea. It is a most beautiful old house, centuries old, and we had a romantic evening,—first at supper in a long narrow pannelled room lit by candles, and then on the terrace beneath my window, where larkspurs grow against the low wall along the water's edge. There is nobody here except the Koseritzes, and Herr von Inster, and two girl-friends of Helena's, very pretty and smart-looking, and an old lady who was once the Grafin's governess and comes here every summer to enjoy what she called, speaking English to me, the Summer Fresh.

It was like a dream. The water made lovely little soft noises along the wall of the terrace. It was so still that we could hear the throb of a steamer far away on the Haff, crossing from Stettin to Swinemunde. The Graf, as usual, said nothing,—"He has much to think of," the Grafin whispered to me. The girls talked together in undertones, which would have made me feel shy and out of it if I hadn't somehow not minded a bit, and they did look exactly what the Colonel had said they were, in their pale evening frocks,—a nosegay of very delicate and well cared-for hothouse flowers. I had on my evening frock for the first time since I left England, and after the weeks of high blouses felt conspicuously and terribly overdressed up in my bedroom and till I saw the frocks the others had on, and then I felt the exact opposite. Herr von Inster hardly spoke, and not to me at all, but I didn't mind, I had so much in my head that he had talked about this morning. I feel so completely natural with him, so content; and I think it is because he is here at Koseritz that I'm so comfortable, and not in the least shy, as I was that day at luncheon. I simply take things as they come, and don't think about myself at all. When I came down to supper to-night he was waiting in the hall, to show me the way, he said; and he watched me coming down the stairs with that look in his eyes that is such a contrast to the smart, alert efficiency of his figure and manner,—it is so gentle, so kind. I went into the room where they all were with a funny feeling of being safe. I don't even know whether Helena stared.

To-morrow the Klosters come over, and are going to stay the night, and to-morrow I may play my fiddle again. I've faithfully kept my promise and not touched it. Really, as it's a quarter to twelve now and at midnight my week's fasting will be over, I might begin and play it quite soon. I wonder what would happen if I sat on my window-sill and played Ravel to the larkspurs and the stars! I believe it would make even the Graf say something. But I won't do anything so unlike, as Frau Bornsted would say, what a junges Madchen generally does, but go to bed instead, into the prettiest bed I've slept in since I had a frilly cot in the nursery,—all pink silk coverlet and lace-edged sheets. The room is just like an English country-house bedroom; in fact the Grafin told me she got all her chintzes in London! It's so funny after my room at Frau Berg's, and my little unpainted wooden attic at the Oberforsterei.

Good night, my blessed mother. There are two owls somewhere calling to each other in the forest. Not another sound. Such utter peace.

Your Chris.



Koseritz, Sunday evening, July 19, 1914.

My own darling mother,

I don't know what you'll say, but I'm engaged to Bernd. That's Herr von Inster. You know his name is Bernd? I don't know what to say to it myself. I can't quite believe it. This time last night I was writing to you in this very room, with no thought of anything in the world but just ordinary happiness with kind friends and one specially kind and understanding friend, and here I am twenty-four hours later done with ordinary happiness, taken into my lover's heart for ever.

It was so strange. I don't believe any girl ever got engaged in quite that way before. I'm sure everybody thinks we're insane, except Kloster. Kloster doesn't. He understands.

It was after supper. Only three hours ago. I wonder if it wasn't a dream. We were all on the terrace, as we were last night. The Klosters had come early in the afternoon. There wasn't a leaf stirring, and not a sound except that lapping water against the bottom of the wall where the larkspurs are. You know how sometimes when everybody has been talking together without stopping there's a sudden hush. That happened to-night, and after what seemed a long while of silence the Grafin said to Kloster, "I suppose, Master, it would be too much to ask you to play to us?"

"Here?" he said. "Out here?"

"Why not?" she said.

I hung breathless on what he would say. Suppose he played, out there in the dusk, with the stars and the water and the forest all round us, what would it be like?

He got up without a word and went indoors.

The Grafin looked uneasy. "I hope," she said to Frau Kloster, "my asking has not offended him?"

But Bernd knew—Bernd, still at that moment only Herr von Inster for me. "He is going to play," he said.

And presently he came out again with his Strad, and standing on the step outside the drawingroom window he played.

I thought, This is the most wonderful moment of my life. But it wasn't; there was a more wonderful one coming.

We sat there in the great brooding night, and the music told us the things about love and God that we know but can never say. When he had done nobody spoke. He stood on the step for a minute in silence, then he came down to where I was sitting on the low wall by the water and put the Strad into my hands. "Now you," he said.

Nobody spoke. I felt as though I were asleep.

He took my hand and made me stand up. "Play what you like," he said; and left me there, and went and sat down again on the steps by the window.

I don't know what I played. It was the violin that played while I held it and listened. I forgot everybody,—forgot Kloster critically noting what I did wrong, and forgot, so completely that I might have been unconscious, myself. I was listening; and what I heard were secrets, secrets strange and exquisite; noble, and so courageous that suffering didn't matter, didn't touch,—all the secrets of life. I can't explain. It wasn't like anything one knows really. It was like something very important, very beautiful that one used to know, but has forgotten.

Presently the sounds left off. I didn't feel as though I had had anything to do with their leaving off. There was dead silence. I stood wondering rather confusedly, as one wonders when first one wakes from a dream and sees familiar things again and doesn't quite understand.

Kloster got up and came and took the Strad from me. I could see his face in the dusk, and thought it looked queer. He lifted up my hands one after the other, and kissed them.

But Bernd got up from where he was sitting away from the others, and took me in his arms and kissed my eyes.

And that's how we were engaged. I think they said something. I don't know what it was, but there was a murmur, but I seemed very far away and very safe; and he turned round when they murmured, and took my hand, and said, "This is my wife." And he looked at me and said, "Is it not so?" And I said "Yes." And I don't remember what happened next, and perhaps it was all a dream. I'm so tired,—so tired and heavy with happiness that I could drop in a heap on the floor and go to sleep like that. Beloved mother—bless your Chris.



Koseritz, Monday, July 20.

My own darling mother,

I'm too happy,—too happy to write, or think, or remember, or do anything except be happy. You'll forgive me, my own ever-understanding mother, because the minutes I have to take for other things seem so snatched away and lost, snatched from the real thing, the one real thing, which is my lover. Oh, I expect I'm shameless, and I don't care. Ought I to simper, and pretend I don't feel particularly much? Be ladylike, and hide how I adore him? Telegraph to me—telegraph your blessing. I must be blessed by you. Till I have been, it's like not having had my crown put on, and standing waiting, all ready in my beautiful clothes of happiness except for that. I don't care if I'm silly. I don't care about anything. I don't know what they think of our engagement here. I imagine they deplore it on Bernd's account,—he's an officer and a Junker and an only son and a person of promise, and altogether heaps of important things besides the important thing, which is that he's Bernd. And you see, little mother, I'm only a woman who is going to have a profession, and that's an impossible thing from the Junker point of view. It's queer how nothing matters, no criticism or disapproval, how one can't be touched directly one loves somebody and is loved back. It is like being inside a magic ring of safety. Why, I don't think that there's anything that could hurt me so long as we love each other. We've had a wonderful morning walking in the forest. It's all quite true what happened last night. It wasn't a dream. We are engaged. I've hardly seen the others. They congratulated us quite politely. Kloster was very kind, but anxious lest I should let love, as he says, spoil art. We laughed at that. Bernd, who would have been a musician but for his family and his obligations, is going to be it vicariously through me. I shall work all the harder with him to help me. How right you were about a lover being the best of all things in the world! I don't know how anybody gets on without one. I can't think how I did. It amazes me to remember that I used to think I was happy. Bless me, little mother—bless us. Send a telegram. I can't wait.

Your Chris.



Koseritz, Thursday, July 23.

My own mother,

Thank you so much for your telegram of blessing, darling one, which I have just had. It seems to set the seal of happiness on me. I know you will love Bernd, and understand directly you see him why I do. We are so placid here these beautiful summer days. Everybody accepts us now resignedly as a fait accompli, and though they remain unenthusiastic they are polite and tolerant. And whenever I play to them they all grow kind. It's rather like being Orpheus with his lute, and they the mountain tops that freeze. I've discovered I can melt them by just making music. Helena really does love music. It was quite true what her mother said. Since I played that first wonderful night of my engagement she has been quite different to me. She still is silent, because that's her nature, and she still stares; but now she stares in a sort of surprise, with a question in her eyes. And wherever she may be in the house or garden, if she hears me beginning to play she creeps near on tiptoe and listens.

Kloster has gone. He and his wife were both very kind to us, but Kloster is worried because I've fallen in love. I'm not to go back to Berlin till Monday, as Bernd can stay on here till then, and there's no point in spending a Sunday in Berlin unless one has to. Kloster is going to give me three lessons a week instead of two, and I shall work now with such renewed delight! He says I won't, but I know better. Everything I do seems to be touched now with delight. How funny that room at Frau Berg's will look and feel after being here. But I don't mind going back to it one little half a scrap. Bernd will be in Berlin; he'll be writing to me, seeing me, walking with me. With him there it will be, every bit of it, perfect.

"When I come back to town in October," the Grafin said to me, "you must stay with us. It is not fitting that Bernd's betrothed should live in that boarding-house of Frau Berg's. Will not your mother soon join you?"

It is very kind of her, I think. It appears that a girl who is engaged has to be chaperoned even more than a girl who isn't. What funny ancient stuff these conventions are. I wonder how long more we shall have of them. Of course Frau Berg and her boarders are to the Junker dreadful beyond words.

But her question about you set me thinking. Won't you come, little mother? As it is such an unusual and never-to-be-repeated occurrence in our family that its one and only child should be going to marry? And yet I can't quite see you in August in lodgings in Berlin, come down from your beautiful mountain, away from your beautiful lake. After all, I've only got four more months of it, and then I'm finished and can go back to you. What is going to happen then, exactly, I don't know. Bernd says, Marry, and that you'll come and live with us in Germany. That's all very well, but what about, if I marry so soon, starting my public career, which was to have begun this next winter? Kloster says impatiently. Oh marry, and get done with it, and that then I'll be sensible again and able to arrange my debut as a violinist with the calm, I gather he thinks, of the disillusioned.

"I'm perfectly sensible," I said.

"You are not. You are in love. A woman should never be an artist. Again I say, Mees Chrees, what I have said to you before, that it is sheer malice on the part of Providence to have taken you, a woman, as the vessel which is to carry this great gift about the world. A man, gifted to the extent you so unluckily are, falls in love and is inspired by it. Indeed, it is in that condition that he does his best work; which is why the man artist is so seldom a faithful husband, for the faithful husband is precluded from being in love."

"Why can't he be in love?" I asked, husbands now having become very interesting to me.

"Because he is a faithful husband."

"But he can be in love with his wife."

"No," said Kloster, "he cannot. And he cannot for the same reason that no man can go on wanting his dinner who has had it. Whereas," he went on louder, because I had opened my mouth and was going to say something, "a woman artist who falls in love neglects everything and merely loves. Merely loves," he repeated, looking me up and down with great severity and disfavour.

"You'll see how I'll work," I said.

"Nonsense," he said, waving that aside impatiently. "Which is why," he continued, "I urge you to marry quickly. Then the woman, so unfortunately singled out by Providence to be something she is not fitted for, having married and secured her husband, prey, victim. Or whatever you prefer to call him—"

"I prefer to call him husband," I said.

"—if she succeeds in steering clear of detaining and delaying objects like cradles, is cured and can go back with proper serenity to that which alone matters. Art and the work necessary to produce it. But she will have wasted time," he said, shaking his head. "She will most sadly have wasted time."

In my turn I said Nonsense, and laughed with that heavenly, glorious security one has when one has a lover.