I think Kloster is right, and they haven't grown up yet. People like the Koseritzes, people of the world, don't show how young they are in the way these middle-class Germans do, but I daresay they are just the same really. They have the greediness of children too,I don't mean in things to eat, though they have that too, and take the violent interest of ten years old in what there'll be for dinnerI mean greed for other people's possessions. In all their talk, all their expoundings of deutsche Idealen , I have found no trace of consideration for others, or even of any sort of recognition that other nations too may have rights and virtues. I asked Kloster whether I hadn't chanced on a little group of people who were exceptions in their way of looking at life, and he said No, they were perfectly typical of the Prussians, and that the other classes, upper and lower, thought in the same way, the difference lying only in their manner of expressing it.
"All these people, Mees Chrees," he said, "have been drilled. Do not forget that great fact. Every man of every class has spent some of the most impressionable years of his life being drilled. He never gets over it. Before that, he has had the nursery and the schoolroom: drill, and very thorough drill, in another form. He is drilled into what the authorities find it most convenient that he should think
from the moment he can understand words. By the time he comes to his military service his mind is already squeezed into the desired shape. Then comes the finishing off,the body drilled to match the mind, and you have the perfect slave. And it is because he is a slave that when he has powerand every man has power over some onehe is so great a bully."
"But you must have been drilled too," I said, "and you're none of these things."
He looked at me in silence for a moment, with his funny protruding eyes. Then he said, "I am told, and I believe it, that no man ever really gets over having been imprisoned."
Evening .
I feel greatly refreshed, for what do you think I've been doing since I left off writing this morning? Motoring out into the country,the sweet and blessed country, the home of God's elect, as the hymn says, only the hymn meant Jerusalem, and the golden kind of Jerusalem, which can't be half as beautiful as just plain grass and daisies. Herr von Inster appeared up here about twelve. Wanda came to my door and banged on it with what sounded like a saucepan, and I daresay was, for she wouldn't waste time leaving off stirring the pudding while she went to open the front door, and she called out very loud, "Der Herr Offizier ist schon wieder da ."
All the flat must have heard her, and so did Herr von Inster.
"Here I am, schon meeder da " he said, clicking his heels together when I came into the diningroom where he was waiting among the debris of the first spasms of Wanda's table-laying; and we both laughed.
He said the Masterso he always speaks of Kloster, and with such affection and admiration in his voiceand his wife were downstairs in his car, and wanted him to ask me to join them so that he might drive us all into the country on such a fine day.
You can imagine how quickly I put on my hat.
"It is doing you good already," he said, looking at me as we went down the four nights of stairs,so Kloster had been telling him, too, that story about too much work.
Herr von Inster drove, and we three sat on the back seat, because he had his soldier chauffeur with him, so I didn't get as much talk with him as I had hoped, for I like him very much, and so would you, little mother. There is nothing of the aggressive swashbuckler about him. I'm sure he doesn't push a woman off the pavement when there isn't room for him.
I don't think I've told you about Frau Kloster, but that is because one keeps on forgetting she is there. Perhaps that quality of beneficent invisibleness is what an artist most needs in a wife. She never says anything, except things that require no answering. It's a great virtue, I should think, in a wife. From time to time, when Kloster has lese majestated a little too much, she murmurs Aber Adolf; or she announces placidly that she has just killed a mosquito; or that the sky is blue; and Kloster's talk goes on on the top of this little undercurrent without taking the least notice of it. They seem very happy. She tends him as carefully as one would tend a baby,one of those quite new pink ones that can't stand anything hardly without crumpling up,and competently clears life round him all empty and free, so that he has room to work. I wish I had a wife.
We drove out through Potsdam in the direction of Brandenburg, and lunched in the woods at Potsdam by the lake the Marmor Palais is on. Kloster stared at this across the water while he ate, and the sight of it tinged his speech regrettably. Herr von Inster, as an officer of the King, ought really to have smitten him with the flat side of his sword, but he didn't; he listened and smiled. Perhaps he felt as the really religious do about God, that the Hohenzollerns are so high up that criticism can't harm them, but I doubt it; or perhaps he regards Kloster indulgently, as a gifted and wayward child, but I doubt that too. He happens to be intelligent, and is not to be persuaded that a spade is anything but a spade, however much it may be got up to look like the Ark of the Covenant or anything else archaic and bedizenedGod forbid, little mother, that you should suppose I meant that dreadful pun.