The Man on Horseback/Chapter 19

loved Bertha Wedekind with all his fine, pure, close-fibered strength.

But he was no purblind fool.

Never having had much experience with women, his judgment was fresh and unclouded. He was free from the incubus of lying sensuality. Thus he recognized her faults; and he loved her none the less dearly.

And her greatest fault, rather her misfortune, was that at the most impressionable stage of her girlhood, she had come under the spell and glamour, for spell and glamour it was for all its harsh, mean tawdriness, of the Prussian military clique.

Her experience in life was nil. Her knowledge of history, civilization, and economics was the usual use less average, the usual useless hodge-podge of school text-books and romantic fiction.

Carefully hedged in by her Uncle Heinrich, by her uncle's friends, by the young officers and high officials she met, she was only allowed to see what was best in Berlin, and in a mistaken sweep of loyalty to her father's native land she compared it with what was worst in America. She gloried in the pomp and circumstance, enthusiasm shining in her clear young eyes when she walked down Unter den Linden with Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede or the little Hussar, when she felt the respect and admiration with which the civilians regarded her martial companions.

Her former life in Spokane flashed up at such moments in sad, gray streaks of remembrance. At the time it had been pleasant enough, she thought, with the weekly hops at the Country Club, the horseback rides in the evenings across Hangman's Creek and out to Fort Wright, the quiet, simple, sunny summers spent at Hayden Lake or on the Killicott ranch, the plain-spoken, square-shouldered men, mining engineers, ranchers, merchants, lawyers, and young Canadian bank clerks from the local branch of the Bank of Montreal, who called each other Tom and Dick and Jack and Jim.

No! Back yonder there had been no romance, no glamour, no clanking of sabers, no clicking of heels, no kissing of hands, no whispering of: "Gnädigstes Fräulein, Sie sehen ja ganz fabelhaft entzückend aus!" no gay, challenging music of fife and drum.

Looking through the spectacles of her youthful imagination, she admired and loved this new Berlin which had sprung up, fungus-like, since the Franco-Prussian War, which had been built up with the money stolen from France. She was untrained in artistic judgment, and she admired the broad, sweeping streets framed by houses tumbled together of every style from peaked Gothic to ultra-modern Sezession; the department stores that tried to look like Florentine cathedrals and the churches that tried to look like department stores; the rococo palaces of the nouveaux riches decorated with meaningless stucco ornaments and monstrous caryatides supporting nothing in particular; the great public ballroom of the Behren Strasse, the Palais de Danse that endeavored to go Paris one better by using fifteen colors, clashing, cruel, hideous, where the same French artist had used no more than three, perfectly blended.

Bertha was too young to understand the over-emphatic, unæsthetic, bragging spirit of it all. She was caught in the whirl of gayety.

And there was gayety in the Berlin of the Autumn of the year Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen, nine months before the War. A future historian may some day call it the hysterical gayety that precedes the coming of madness.

Madness of too sudden success!

Madness of a nation, overfed, oversexed, cursed with national paranoia, intoxicated with the poisonous wine of self-glory!

Laughing, screaming, shouting madness that wound up in blood, and misery, and cruelties unspeakable—and punishment!

All that autumn Berlin danced. Berlin flirted. Berlin laughed. Berlin spent money like water. And the clique in the Wilhelm Strasse, the rulers of Germany, helped it along. They realized their own danger. They decided that there should be no national, wholesale awakening to the fact that the huge business colossus of modern Germany had feet of clay, a heart that was hollow, and empty pockets, that over-speculation had drained the imperial exchequer and that the most gigantic national failure and bankruptcy was imminent.

The exchequer must be filled. And there was but one way to do it:

Conquest! Conquest by the sword!

In the meantime, until the blow was struck, swiftly and successfully, the people of Germany must be kept in good humor.

On with the dance!—was the dictum of the Wilhelm Strasse. Sing and drink and shout! Spend money! Buy, buy, buy!

On with the whirl of gayety! … Lest the people see the misery, the terrible threat of failure and bankruptcy that yawned at their feet like an abyss of Fate, lest they see beneath the pomp and circumstance of glittering uniforms and recognize the grinning skeletons … Like symbolic shapes!

Horribly expressive of something!

Suggestive of—what?

And in the midst of it all, with the best in the land, Bertha danced. Of course she saw a lot of Tom for the young Westerner went everywhere, was invited everywhere, and he, too, enjoyed himself. It amused him to meet Princes of the blood and aristocrats, who boasted twenty-four quarterings on their armorial shields. There was not the faintest shade of snobbishness in him. But the surface of his mood was exuberant. He felt an almost boyish delight, tempered with whimsical humor, in his growing power to comport himself correctly towards the élite of Berlin—and his correctness spelled simplicity, manliness, the natural, good-humored dignity of the free man of the plains.

As such he was accepted by the young officers and, if the truth be told, really liked.

Bertha, too, liked him, had always liked him, occasional tiffs apart, with unquestioning fondness. But rather with the sort of fondness one has for a beloved and thoroughly satisfying domestic animal.

But love? Real flesh-and-blood love?

"No, Tom," she said, a little sadly, when, one October evening, he had asked her for the tenth time that month to marry him and to return with him to Spokane. "I do not love you—and I shan't marry you."

"Still the same old reason, I guess?" he smiled.

"What ever do you mean, Tom?"

"Go on! You know well enough," he said rather brutally. "You wouldn't marry me even if you loved me …"

"Which I don't!"

"All right. But even if you did, you wouldn't marry me. Because …"

"Let's change the subject, Tom!"

"I won't! I repeat you won't marry me because I am not wearing one of those cute, pea-green monkey-jackets and because I don't drag three foot of pointed steel behind me."

"Well?" demanded Bertha belligerently, "suppose you are right? What are you going to do about it, Tom?"

"Do about it? Why! I am going to get me that monkey-jacket and that bit of steel. That's all!"

And Bertha would not have laughed had she known what had happened to Tom during the last couple of days.