“Because you’re different,—­you don’t talk,” I said.

And he said, “It is only women who always talk.”

So then I got on with my playing, and just wondered in silence.

I ran against Frau Kloster in the passage as I was coming out, and asked her if there was anything wrong, and she too said, “No, what should there be wrong?”

“Because the Master’s different,” I said.  “He won’t talk.”

And she said, “My dear Mees Chrees, these are great days we live in, and one cannot be as usual.”

“But the Master—­” I said.  “Just these great days—­you’d think he’d be pouring out streams of all the things that most need saying—­”

And she shrugged her shoulders and merely repeated, “One is not as usual.”

So I came away, greatly puzzled.  I had expected bread, and here I was going off with nothing but an unaccountable stone.  Kloster and Bernd are the two solitary sane and wise people I know here in this place of fever, the two I trust, to whom I say what I really think and feel, and I went to Kloster yesterday athirst for wisdom, for that detached, critical picking out one by one of the feathers of the imperial bird, the Prussian eagle, that I find so wholesome, so balance-restoring, so comforting, in what is now a very great isolation of spirit.  And he was dumb.  I can’t get over it.

I’ve not seen Bernd since, as he is frightfully busy and wasn’t able to come yesterday at all, but he’s coming to lunch today, and perhaps he’ll be able to explain Kloster.  I’ve been practising all the morning,—­it will seem to you an odd thing to have done while Rome is burning, but I did it savagely, with a feeling of flinging defiance at this topsy-turvy world, of slitting its ugliness in spite of itself with bright spears of music, insisting on intruding loveliness on its preoccupation, the loveliness created by its own brains in the days before Prussia got the upper hand.  All the morning I practised the Beethoven violin concerto, and the naked, slender radiance of it without the orchestra to muffle it up in a background, enchanted me into forgetting.

The crowds down there are soberer since Friday, and I didn’t have to go into the bathroom to play.  Now that war is upon them the women seem to have started thinking a little what it may really mean, and the men aren’t quite so ready incoherently to roar.  They keep on going to church,—­the churches have been having services at unaccustomed moments throughout yesterday, of course by order, and are going on like that today too, for the churches are very valuable to Authority in nourishing the necessary emotions in the people at a time like this.  The people were told by the Kaiser to pray, and so they do pray.  It is useful to have them praying, it quiets them and gets them out of the streets and helps the authorities.  Berlin is really the most godless place.  Religion is the last thing anybody thinks of.  Nobody dreams of going to church