I could only sit silent, staring at my plate.  Kloster gone.  Kloster allowing himself to be gagged by a decoration.  I wanted to push the intolerable thought away from me and cry out, “No, it can’t be.”

Why, who can one believe in now?  Who is left?  There’s Bernd, my beloved, my heart’s own mate; and as I sat there dumb, and they all triumphed on with their self-congratulations and satisfactions, and Majestat this, and Deutschland that, for an awful moment my faith in Bernd himself began to shake.  Suppose he too, he with his Prussian blood and upbringing, fell away and went over in spirit to the side of life that decorates a man in return for the absolute control of his thoughts, rewards him for the disposal of his soul?  Kloster, that freest of critics, had gone over, his German blood after all unable to resist the call to slavery.  I never could have believed it.  I never would have believed it without actual proof.  And Bernd?  What about Bernd?  For I haven’t more believed in Kloster than I do in Bernd.  Oh, little mother, I was cold with fear.

Then he came.  My dear one came for a blessed half hour.  And because we, thank God, are betrothed, and so have the right to be alone together, we got rid of those smug triumphant others; and if he had happened not to be able to come, and I had had to wait till tomorrow, all night long thinking of Kloster, I believe I’d have gone mad.  For you see one believes so utterly in a person one does believe in.  At least, I do.  I can’t manage caution in belief, I can’t give prudently, carefully, holding back part, as I’m told a woman does if she is really clever, in either faith or love.  And how is one to get on without faith and love?  Bernd comforted me.  And he comforted me most by my finding how greatly he needed to be comforted himself.  He was every bit as profoundly shaken and shocked as I was.  Oh, the relief of discovering that!

We clung to each other, and comforted each other like two hurt children.  Kloster has been so much to us both.  More, perhaps, here in this place of hypocrisy and self-deceptions, than he would have been anywhere else.  He stood for fearlessness, for freedom, for beauty, for all the great things.  And now he has gone; silent, choked by the Rote Adler Orden Erste Klasse.  It is an order with three classes.  We wondered bitterly whether he couldn’t have been had cheaper,—­whether second, or even third class, wouldn’t have done it.  He is now a Wirkliche Geheimrath mit dem Pradikat Excellenz.  God rest his soul.

  Chris.

  Berlin, Monday, August 3rd, 1914.

Darling own mother,

It’s only a matter of hours now before Bernd will have to go, and when he goes I’m coming back to you.

Your Chris.

  Berlin, Monday August 3rd, evening.

Precious mother,

I want to come back to you—­directly Bernd has gone I’m coming back to you, and if he doesn’t go soon but is used in Berlin at the Staff Head Quarters, as he says now perhaps he may be for a while, I won’t stay with the Koseritzes, but go back to Frau Berg’s for as long as Bernd is in Berlin, and the day he leaves I start for Switzerland.