Christine Part 6

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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 n.o.body 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" att.i.tude, 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 appet.i.tes."

"_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 pa.s.s unnoticed. To smite down a G.o.d's Anointed!"

He held up his hands. "Not yet, it is true, an actually Anointed, but set aside by G.o.d 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 G.o.d has arranged for them, and rear their heads in shameless compet.i.tion with men. Our rulers, whom G.o.d 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 a.s.sa.s.sination. 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-l.u.s.t and loot-l.u.s.t.

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.