Christine Part 2

"It is my Papa's birthday today," she said, pointing to the photograph.

"Is it?" I said, surprised, for I thought I remembered she had told me he was dead. "But didn't you say--"

"Yes. Certainly I told you Papa was dead since five years."

"Then why--?"

"But _liebes Fraulein_, he still continues to have birthdays," she said, staring at me in real surprise, while I stared back at her in at least equally real surprise.

"Every year," she said, "the day comes round on which Papa was born.

Shall he, then, merely because he is with G.o.d, not have it celebrated?

And what would people think if I did not? They would think I had no heart."

After that I began to hope there would be a cake, for they have lovely birthday cakes here, and it is the custom to give a slice of them to every one who comes near you. So I looked round the room out of the corners of my eyes, discreetly, lest I should seem to be as greedy as I was, and I lifted my nose a little and waved it cautiously about, but I neither saw nor smelt a cake. Frau Berg had a birthday three days ago, and there was a heavenly cake at it, a great flat thing with cream in it, that one loved so that first one wanted to eat it and then to sit on it and see all the cream squash out at the sides; but evidently the cake is the one thing you don't have for your birthday after you are dead. I don't want to laugh, darling mother, and I know well enough what it is to lose one's beloved Dad, but you see Hilda had shown me her family photographs only the other day, for we are making friends in a sort of flabby, hesitating way, and when she got to the one of her father she said with perfect frankness that she hadn't liked him, and that it had been an immense relief when he died. "He prevented my doing anything," she said, frowning at the photograph, "except that which increased his comforts."

I asked Kloster about anniversaries when I went for my lesson on Friday. He is a very human little man, full of sympathy,---the sort of comprehending sympathy that laughs and understands together, yet his genius seems to detach him from other Germans, for he criticizes them with a dispa.s.sionate thoroughness that is surprising. The remarks he makes about the Kaiser, for instance, whom he irreverently alludes to as S. M.--(short and rude for _Seine Majestat_)--simply make me shiver in this country of _lese majeste_. In England, where we can say what we like, I have never heard anybody say anything disrespectful about the King. Here, where you go to prison if you laugh even at officials, even at a policeman, at anything whatever in b.u.t.tons, for that is the punishable offence of Beamtenbeleidigung--haven't they got heavenly words--Kloster and people I have come across in his rooms say what they like; and what they like is very rude indeed about that sacred man the Kaiser, who doesn't appear to be at all popular. But then Kloster belongs to the intelligents, and his friends are all people of intelligence, and that sort of person doesn't care very much, I think, for absolute monarchs. Kloster says they're anachronisms, that the world is too old for them, too grown-up for pretences and decorations.

And when I went for my lesson on Friday I found his front door wreathed with evergreens and paper flowers,--pretences and decorations crawling even round Kloster--and I went in very reluctantly, not knowing what sort of a memorial celebration I was going to tumble into. But it was only that his wife--I didn't know he had a wife, he seemed altogether so happily unmarried--was coming home. She had been away for three weeks; not nearly long enough, you and I and others of our self-depreciatory and self-critical country would think, to deserve an evergreen garland round our door on coming back. He laughed when I told him I had been afraid to come in lest I should disturb retrospective obsequies.

"We are still so near, my dear Mees Chrees," he said, shrugging a fat shoulder--he asked me what I was called at home, and I said you called me Chris, and he said he would, with my permission, also call me Chrees, but with Mees in front of it to show that though he desired to be friendly he also wished to remain respectful--"we are still so near as a nation to the child and to the savage. To the clever child, and the powerful savage. We like simple and gross emotions and plenty of them; obvious tastes in our food and our pleasures, and a great deal of it; fat in our food, and fat in our women. And, like the child, when we mourn we mourn to excess, and enjoy ourselves in that excess; and, like the savage, we are afraid, and therefore hedge ourselves about with observances, celebrations, cannon, kings. In no other country is there more than one king. In ours we find three and an emperor necessary. The savage who fears all things does not fear more than we Germans. We fear other nations, we fear other people, we fear public opinion to an extent incredible, and tremble before the opinion of our servants and tradespeople; we fear our own manners and therefore are obliged to preserve the idiotic practice of duelling, in which as often as not the man whose honour is being satisfied is the one who is killed; we fear all those above us, of whom there are invariably a great many; we fear all officials, and our country drips with officials. The only person we do not fear is G.o.d."

"But--" I began, remembering their motto, bestowed on them by Bismarck,

"Yes, yes, I know," he interrupted. "It is not, however, true. The contrary is the truth. We Germans fear not G.o.d, but everything else in the world. It is only fear that makes us polite, fear of the duel; for, like the child and the savage, we have not had time to acquire the habit of good manners, the habit which makes manners inevitable and invariable, and it is not natural to us to be polite. We are polite only by the force of fear. Consequently--for all men must have their relaxations--whenever we meet the weak, the beneath us, the momentarily helpless, we are brutal. It is an immense relief to be for a moment natural. Every German welcomes even the smallest opportunity."

You would be greatly interested in Kloster, I'm certain. He sits there, his fiddle on his fat little knees, his bow punctuating his sentences with quivers and raps, his shiny bald head reflecting the light from the window behind him, and his eyes coming very much out of his face, which is excessively red. He looks like an amiable prawn; not in the least like a person with an active and destructive mind, not in the least like a great musician. He has the very opposite of the bushy eyebrows and overhanging forehead and deep set eyes and lots of hair you're supposed to have if you've got much music in you. He came over to me the other day after I had finished playing, and stretched up--he's a good bit smaller than I am--and carefully drew his finger along my eyebrows, each in turn. I couldn't think what he was doing.

"My finger is clean, Mees Chrees," he said, seeing me draw back. "I have just wiped it, Be not, therefore, afraid. But you have the real Beethoven brow--the very shape--and I must touch it. I regret if it incommodes you, but I must touch it. I have seen no such resemblance to the brow of the Master. You might be his child."

I needn't tell you, darling mother, that I went back to the boarders and the midday guests not minding them much. If I only could talk German properly I would have loved to have leant across the table to Herr Mannfried, an unwholesome looking young man who comes in to dinner every day from a bank in the Potsdamerstra.s.se, and is very full of that hatred which is really pa.s.sion for England, and has pale hair and a mouth exactly like two scarlet slugs--I'm sorry to be so horrid, but it _is_ like two scarlet slugs--and said,--"Have you noticed that I have a _Beethovenkopf_? What do you think of me, an _Englanderin_, having such a thing? One of your own great men says so, so it must be true."

We are studying the Bach Chaconne now. He is showing me a different reading of it, his idea. He is going to play it at the Philarmonie here next week. I wish you could hear him. He was intending to go to London this season and play with a special orchestra of picked players, but has changed his mind. I asked him why, and he shrugged his shoulder and said his agent, who arranges these things, seemed to think he had better not. I asked him why again--you know my persistency--for I can't conceive why it should be better not for London to have such a joy and for him to give it, but he only shrugged his shoulder again, and said he always did what his agent told him to do. "My agent knows his business, my dear Mees Chrees," he said. "I put my affairs in his hands, and having done so I obey him. It saves trouble. Obedience is a comfortable thing."

"Then why--" I began, remembering the things he says about kings and masters and persons in authority; but he picked up his violin and began to play a bit. "See," he said, "this is how--"

And when he plays I can only stand and listen. It is like a spell.

One stands there, and forgets... .

_Evening_.

I've been reading your last darling letter again, so full of love, so full of thought for me, out in a corner of the Thiergarten this afternoon, and I see that while I'm eagerly writing and writing to you, page after page of the things I want to tell you, I forget to tell you the things you want to know. I believe I never answer _any_ of your questions! It's because I'm so all right, so comfortable as far as my body goes, that I don't remember to say so. I have heaps to eat, and it is very satisfying food, being German, and will make me grow sideways quite soon, I should think, for Frau Berg fills us up daily with dumplings, and I'm certain they must end by somehow showing; and I haven't had a single cold since I've been here, so I'm outgrowing them at last; and I'm not sitting up late reading,--I couldn't if I tried, for Wanda, the general servant, who is general also in her person rather than particular--aren't I being funny--comes at ten o'clock each night on her way to bed and takes away my lamp.

"Rules," said Frau Berg briefly, when I asked if it wasn't a little early to leave me in the dark. "And you are not left in the dark.

Have I not provided a candle and matches for the chance infirmities of the night?"

But the candle is cheap and dim, so I don't sit up trying to read by that. I preserve it wholly for the infirmities.

I've been in the Thiergarten most of the afternoon, sitting in a green corner I found where there is some gra.s.s and daisies down by a pond and away from a path, and accordingly away from the Sunday crowds. I watched the birds, and read the Winter's Tale, and picked some daisies, and felt very happy. The daisies are in a saucer before me at this moment. Everything smelt so good,--so warm, and sweet, and young, with the leaves on the oaks still little and delicate. Life is an admirable arrangement, isn't it, little mother. It is so clever of it to have a June in every year and a morning in every day, let alone things like birds, and Shakespeare, and one's work. You've sometimes told me, when I was being particularly happy, that there were even greater happiness ahead for me,--when I have a lover, you said; when I have a husband; when I have a child. I suppose you know, my wise, beloved mother; but the delight of work, of doing the work well that one is best fitted for, will be very hard to beat. It is an exultation, a rapture, that manifest progress to better and better results through one's own effort. After all, being obliged on Sundays to do nothing isn't so bad, because then I have time to think, to step back a little and look at life.

See what a quiet afternoon sunning myself among daisies has done for me. A week ago I was measuring the months to be got through before being with you again, in dismay. Now I feel as if I were very happily climbing up a pleasant hill, just steep enough to make me glad I can climb well, and all the way is beautiful and safe, and on the top there is you. To get to the top will be perfect joy, but the getting there is very wonderful too. You'll judge, from all this that I've had a happy week, that work is going well, and that I'm hopeful and confident. I mustn't be too confident, I know, but confidence is a great thing to work on. I've never done anything good on days of dejection.

Goodnight, dear mother. I feel so close to you tonight, just as if you were here in the room with me, and I had only to put out my finger and touch Love. I don't believe there's much in this body business. It is only spirit that matters really; and nothing can stop your spirit and mine being together.

Your Chris.

Still, a body is a great comfort when it comes to wanting to kiss one's darling mother.

_Berlin, Sunday, June 2lst, 1914_.

My precious mother,

The weeks fly by, full of work and _Weltpolitik_. They talk of nothing here at meals but this _Weltpolitik_. I've just been having a dose of it at breakfast. To say that the boarders are interested in it is to speak feebly: they blaze with interest, they explode with it, they scorch and sizzle. And they are so pugnacious! Not to each other, for contrary to the att.i.tude at Kloster's they are knit together by the toughest band of uncritical and obedient admiration for everything German, but they are pugnacious to the Swede girl and myself.

Especially to myself. There is a holy calm about the Swede girl that nothing can disturb. She has an enviable gift for getting on with her meals and saying nothing. I wish I had it. Directly I have learned a new German word I want to say it. I acc.u.mulate German words every day, of course, and there's something in my nature and something in the way I'm talked at and to at Frau Berg's table that makes me want to say all the words I've got as quickly as possible. And as I can't string them into sentences my conversation consists of single words, which produce a very odd effect, quite unintended, of detached explosions. When I've come to the end of them I take to English, and the boarders plunge in after me, and swim or drown in it according to their several ability.

It's queer, the atmosphere here,--in this house, in the streets, wherever one goes. They all seem to be in a condition of tension--of intense, tightly-strung waiting, very like that breathless expectancy in the last act of "Tristan" when Isolde's ship is sighted and all the violins hang high up on to a shrill, intolerably eager note. There's a sort of fever. And the big words! I thought Germans were stolid, quiet people. But how they talk! And always in capital letters. They talk in tremendous capitals about what they call the _deutscke Standpunkt_; and the _deutsche Standpunkt_ is the most wonderful thing you ever came across. b.u.t.ter wouldn't melt in its mouth. It is too great and good, almost, they give one to understand, for a world so far behind in high qualities to appreciate. No other people has anything approaching it. As far as I can make out, stripped of its decorations its main idea is that what Germans do is right and what other people do is wrong. Even when it is exactly the same thing. And also, that wrong becomes right directly it has anything to do with Germans. Not with _a_ German. The individual German can and does commit every sort of wrong, just as other individuals do in other countries, and he gets punished for them with tremendous harshness; Kloster says with unfairness. But directly he is in the plural and becomes _Wir Deutschen_, as they are forever saying, his crimes become virtues. As a body he purifies, he has a purging quality. Today they were saying at breakfast that if a crime is big enough, if it is on a grand scale, it leaves off being a crime, for then it is a success, and success is always virtue,--that is, I gather, if it is a German success; if it is a French one it is an outrage. You mustn't rob a widow, for instance, they said, because that is stupid; the result is small and you may be found out and be cut by your friends. But you may rob a great many widows and it will be a successful business deal. No one will say anything, because you have been clever and successful.

I know this view is not altogether unknown in other countries, but they don't hold it deliberately as a whole nation. Among other things that Hilda Seeberg's father did which roused her unforgiveness was just this,--to rob too few widows, come to grief over it, and go bankrupt for very little. She told me about it in an outburst of dark confidence. Just talking of it made her eyes black with anger. It was so terrible, she said, to smash for a small amount,--such an overwhelming shame for the Seeberg family, whose poverty thus became apparent and unhideable. If one smashes, she said, one does it for millions, otherwise one doesn't smash. There is something so chic about millions, she said, that whether you make them or whether you lose them you are equally well thought-of and renowned.

"But it is better to--well, disappoint few widows than many," I suggested, picking my words.

"For less than a million marks," she said, eyeing me sternly, "it is a disgrace to fail."

They're funny, aren't they. I'm greatly interested. They remind me more and more of what Kloster says they are, clever children. They have the unmoral quality of children. I listen--they treat me as if I were the audience, and they address themselves in a bunch to my corner--and I put in one of my words now and then, generally with an unfortunate effect, for they talk even louder after that, and then presently the men get up and put their heels together and make a stiff inclusive bow and disappear, and Frau Berg folds up her napkin and brushes the crumbs out of her creases and says, "_Ja, ja_," with a sigh, as a sort of final benediction on the departed conversation, and then rises slowly and locks up the sugar, and then treads heavily away down the pa.s.sage and has a brief skirmish in the kitchen with Wanda, who daily tries to pretend there hadn't been any pudding left over, and then treads heavily back again to her bedroom, and shuts herself in till four o'clock for her _Mittagsruhe_; and the other boarders drift away one by one, and I run out for a walk to get unstiffened after having practised all the morning, and as I walk I think over what they've been saying, and try to see things from their angle, and simply can't.

On Tuesdays and Fridays I have my lesson, and tell Kloster about them.

He says they're entirely typical of the great bulk of the nation.

"_Wir Deutschen_," he says, and laughs, "are the easiest people in the world to govern, because we are obedient and inflammable. We have that obedience of mind so convenient to Authority, and we are inflammable because we are greedy. Any prospect held out to us of getting something belonging to some one else sets us instantly alight. Dangle some one else's sausage before our eyes, and we will go anywhere after it. Wonderful material for S. M." And he adds a few irreverences.

Last Wednesday was his concert at the Philarmonie. He played like an angel. It was so strange, the fat, red, more than commonplace-looking little bald man, with his quite expressionless face, his wilfully stupid face--for I believe he does it on purpose, that blankness, that bulgy look of one who never thinks and only eats--and then the heavenly music. It was as strange and arresting as that other mixture, that startling one of the men who sell flowers in the London streets and the flowers they sell. What does it look like, those poor ragged men shuffling along the kerb, and in their arms, rubbing against their dirty shoulders, great baskets of beauty, baskets heaped up with charming aristocrats, gracious and delicate purities of shape and colour and scent. The strangest effect of all is when they happen, round about Easter, to be selling only lilies, and the unearthly purity of the lilies shines on the pa.s.sersby from close to the seller's terrible face. Christ must often have looked like that, when he sat close up to Pharisees.

But although Kloster's music was certainly as beautiful as the lilies, he himself wasn't like those tragic sellers. It was only that he was so very ordinary,--a little man compact, apparently, of grossness, and the music he was making was so divine. It was that marvellous French and Russian stuff. I must play it to you, and play it to you, till you love it. It's like nothing there has ever been. It is of an exquisite youth,--untouched, fearless, quite heedless of tradition, going its own way straight through and over difficulties and prohibitions that for centuries have been supposed final. People like Wagner and Strauss and the rest seem so much sticky and insanitary mud next to these exquisite young ones, and so very old; and not old and wonderful like the great men, Beethoven and Bach and Mozart, but uglily old like a noisy old lady in a yellow wig.

The audience applauded, but wasn't quite sure. Such a master as Kloster, and one of their own flesh and blood, is always applauded, but I think the irregularity, the utter carelessness of the music, its apparently accidental beauty, was difficult for them. Germans have to have beauty explained to them and accounted for,--stamped first by an official, authorized, before they can be comfortable with it. I sat in a corner and cried, it was so lovely. I couldn't help it. I hid away and pulled my hat over my face and tried not to, for there was a German in eyegla.s.ses near me, who, perceiving I wanted to hide, instantly spent his time staring at me to find out why. The music held all things in it that I have known or guessed, all the beauty, the wonder, of life and death and love. I _recognised_ it. I almost called out, "Yes--of course--_I_ know that too."

Afterwards I would have liked best to go home and to sleep with the sound of it still in my heart, but Kloster sent round a note saying I was to come to supper and meet some people who would be useful for me to know. One of his pupils, who brought the note, had been ordered to pilot me safely to the house, it being late, and as we walked and Kloster drove in somebody's car he was there already when we arrived, busy opening beer bottles and looking much more appropriate than he had done an hour earlier. I can't tell you how kindly he greeted me, and with what charming little elucidatory comments he presented me to his wife and the other guests. He actually seemed proud of me. Think how I must have glowed.

"This is Mees Chrees," he said, taking my hand and leading me into the middle of the room. "I will not and cannot embark on her family name, for it is one of those English names that a prudent man avoids. Nor does it matter. For in ten years--nay, in five--all Europe will have learned it by heart."

There were about a dozen people, and we had beer and sandwiches and were very happy. Kloster sat eating sandwiches and staring benevolently at us all, more like an amiable and hospitable prawn than ever. You don't know, little mother, how wonderful it is that he should say these praising things of me, for I'm told by other pupils that he is dreadfully severe and disagreeable if he doesn't think one is getting on. It was immensely kind of him to ask me to supper, for there was somebody there, a Grafin Koseritz, whose husband is in the ministry, and who is herself very influential and violently interested in music. She pulls most of the strings at Bayreuth, Kloster says, more of them even than Frau Cosima now that she is old, and gets one into anything she likes if she thinks one is worth while. She was very amiable and gracious, and told me I must marry a German! Because, she said, all good music is by rights, by natural rights, the property of Germany.

I wanted to say what about Debussy, and Ravel, and Stravinski, but I didn't.