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Updated: June 24, 2025
I think if I were to lose what I love, you, Bernd, or be hurt in my hands so that I couldn't play, it wouldn't make me good, it would make me bad. I'd go all hard, and defy and rebel. And really God ought to like that best. It's at least a square and manly attitude. Think how we would despise any creature who fawned on us, and praised and thanked us because we had been cruel.
A woman who was at lunch happened to say she had met him coming out of the front door as she came in. "What was Bernd here?" I exclaimed, half getting up on a sort of impulse to run after him and try and catch him in the street. "Helena thought you had gone out," said the Grafin. "But you knew I hadn't," I said, turning on Helena. "Helena knew nothing of the sort," said the Grafin severely.
"This means war," he said, and the Grafin said, "Hush," very quickly; I suppose because she couldn't bear to hear the word. Then she got up too, and went after the Graf, and we were left, Helena and the governess, and the children, and Bernd, and I at a confused and untidy table, everybody with a question in their eyes, and the servants' hands not very steady as they held the dishes.
Bernd went to her and drew her hand through his arm and led her politely to the door, which he shut after her. Then he came back to me. "You know, Chris," he said, "about England?" "Of course just listen," I answered, for in the street newsboys were yelling Kriegserklarung Englands, and there was a great dull roaring as of a multitude of wild beasts who have been wounded.
It is a wonderful day again, but to me it's like a body with the soul gone, like the meaningless smile of a handsome idiot. Evidently, little mother, your unfortunate Chris is very seriously in love. I don't believe it is news I want to be nearer to: it's Bernd. As for news, the papers today seem to think things will arrange themselves.
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.
I forgot Bernd for a moment, my heart was so full of that other love, that proud love for one's country when it takes its stand on the side of righteousness. And presently the Grafin said it all, tumbled it all out, that England was going to declare war, and under circumstances so shameful, so full of the well-known revolting hypocrisy, that it made an honest German sick.
And yet I can't quite see you in August in lodgings in Berlin, come down from your beautiful mountain, away from your beautiful lake. After all, I've only got four more months of it, and then I'm finished and can go back to you. What is going to happen then, exactly, I don't know. Bernd says, Marry, and that you'll come and live with us in Germany.
I told you, I think, how Berlin made me think when first I got there of something seething. Darling mother, forgive me if I'm shrill. I wouldn't be shrill, I'm certain I wouldn't, if I could believe in the necessity, the justice of such a war, if Germany weren't going to war but war were coming to Germany. And I'm afraid, afraid because of Bernd.
"And have you courage enough?" he asked, taking my face in his hands and looking into my eyes. Oh the blessedness, the blessedness of being near him, of hearing and seeing him. What couldn't I and wouldn't I be and do for Bernd? I told him I had courage enough, for I had him, and I wouldn't fail in it, nor in patience.
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