"But--after Agadir--I seem to look back upon a slowly rising tide, muttering, sullen, determined--even in Bavaria the old serenity, the settled feeling, was gone--war was discussed as a possibility less casually than of old--"
"I recall a good deal more than that," interrupted Mimi. "Remember that I was the daughter of a manufacturer, and the wife, so-called, of a merchant. They were always grinding their teeth--and from about the time you speak of--over the wrongs of Germany. What the wrongs were I never could make out, and I am bound to say I did not listen very attentively, being absorbed in my own--but it would seem that Germany being the greatest country in the world was somehow not being permitted to let the rest of the world find it out--"
"It is all simple enough, now that I have the key. Germany tried to bully France, and not only was France anxious to avoid war but Britain showed her teeth. Germany was not then prepared to fight the world and was forced to compromise. France gave her a slice of the Kongo in exchange for Germany"s consent to a French Protectorate in Morocco. Of course--after that it must have been evident to all the business brains of Germany that however great and prosperous the Empire might be she was not strong enough to dictate to Europe; nor presume to demand any more of the great prizes than she had already.
"In other words, she was shown her place. It was also more than possible that her aggressive prosperity might one of these days excite the apprehension of Great Britain, who would then show more than her teeth.
Gradually the idea must have permeated, taken possession of the minds of men who had vast fortunes to increase or lose, that sooner or later they must fight for what they had and that it were better perhaps to strike first, at a moment they might choose themselves--however little they might sympathize with the ambitions of the Pan-German Party for supreme power in Europe--"
"Perhaps nothing," said Mimi. "They made up their minds to do it and they did it. It is as plain as daylight. I"d forgive them, too, if they"d won in six months, as they were so sure they would. What I don"t forgive them for is that they have proved themselves the most criminal fools unhung. I"m glad that I am a Bavarian, and that Prussia, whom we have always so hated and despised that we have never turned the lions about on the Siegesthor, should be the prime offenders, humiliating as it may be that we fell for their lies and got into this rotten mess. But go ahead, Mrs. Prentiss. What"s your next? Gee, but you can hand it out.
You must have kept tab since August 1st, 1914."
"I took merely an intelligent American woman"s interest," said Mrs.
Prentiss, momentarily haughty. "And I spent the first two years and a half in Washington, where I often knew more than the newspapers; at all events where I was constantly in the society of thinking men. Also honest men, for war was the last thing we wanted, until our honor became too deeply involved to permit us to hold aloof and fatten on your misery any longer. Also, to be frank, our interests."
The fact which impressed the Germans and reduced all that had gone before to a heated academic discussion, was that Germany was beaten, and that the United States embargo would reduce the Central Empires to actual starvation, not merely devitalizing subnourishment; combined with their own certainty that the Teutonic Powers would go on fighting, under the lash of Prussia, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of loyal German and Austrian boys, plunge countless more families into hopeless grief, doom all the children in the land to sheer hunger and tuberculosis.
Starvation! That was the inevitable fate of Germany if she prolonged the war. And for what? Prostration, physical, financial, economic. To suffer for a generation, at least, the fate of the outlaw, mangy dogs nosing among rotten bones, kicked by the victors whenever they stood on their hind legs and whined for mercy.
And the Americans were prepared to pour into France and Britain billions of dollars and millions of men and incalculable tons of food and ammunition.
4
The two Americans had a deeper purpose in forcing this long argument than hammering the truth into those intelligent but Prussianized brains.
As the hours wore toward the dawn they observed with satisfaction that Gisela"s face grew whiter and grimmer, until finally it set itself in rigid lines. Her mouth was hard, her eyes expanded as if they saw far beyond the crystal mountains glittering before the open windows. Her ma.s.s of dark hair had fallen, and Mrs. Tolby whispered to Mrs. Prentiss that she looked like the Medusa in the Glyptothek in Munich, lovely but relentless.
Gisela was no longer the radiant and voluptuous beauty who had incurred the secret wrath of Ann Howland at Bar Harbor. These years of war, during which she had known hard physical labor and often insufficient nourishment, more rarely still a full night"s sleep, had taken her lovely curves of cheek and form, her brilliant color. She was thin, almost gaunt; but the dissolving of the flesh had given her intellect, her force of character, her aspiring spirit, their first real opportunity to stamp her features. She would always be handsome, with her long dark eyes and ma.s.ses of soft dark hair, her n.o.ble outlines; and her womanly sympathies had preserved their balance between a devitalizing horror on the one hand and callousness on the other; but it was a spiritualized beauty, devoid of that appeal to s.e.x of which she had been, even after she had buried the memory of Franz von Nettelbeck and all desire for love, femininely tenacious, however disdainful.
Mimi was the first to speak after a long interval of silence.
"You"ve got me, all right. I"ve been digging up a few more things. We"re up against it for keeps, and it"s get out or starve out. I"ve a notion to sneak off to my relations in Milwaukee. Mrs. Prentiss, I"ll go as your maid--"
"You"ll do nothing of the sort!" Gisela"s voice cut through the ripples of laughter which always greeted Mimi"s redundant slang. "You"ll go back to Germany with me and do your part in putting an end to this war!" All but Heloise half arose, but she sat staring at that hard drawn face as if in telepathic communication.
"Can you do anything--really?" gasped Kate. "We have been hoping for a revolution, but had given up the idea--until after the war. Your Socialists either eat out of the Kaiser"s hand or sputter and fizzle out. And all your able-bodied men are at the front--"
"But not the women."
"The what?"
"You have both lived in Germany. You know that German women are big strong creatures--what you call husky. They are stronger than many of the men because they have led more decent lives. The men at the front are hopeless as revolutionary material--at present. They are hypnotized.
They have been taught not to think. They are sick of the war, they suffer when they come home and see their women reduced to shadows, or go to the cemeteries to visit the graves of their little brothers and sisters; but the teaching of a lifetime: the omnipotence of their sovereigns, whom they innocently believe to rule by divine right, sends them back submissive, patient, sad. I know what you had in mind when you brought us here to convince us that our country was not only responsible for the war, but beaten. You hoped we would somehow bring about the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria--all the great generals. Is it not so? That would, a.s.suredly, break down the morale of the army, give it a more smashing blow than any it has received even on the Western front. Well, it cannot be done. Even I could not obtain a pa.s.s into Great Headquarters. You might as well expect a British soldier to be permitted to saunter over from his lines and make sketches of the German trenches. Those men guard themselves--day and night, at every point--as if haunted with the fear of a.s.sa.s.sination. Perhaps they are. And remember that the downfall of Caesarism means the downfall not only of junkerism but of all the other kings and Grand Dukes--who are powerful and wealthy in their own domains. They have no doubt cursed Prussia daily since September, 1914, but now they all sink or swim together. They will force Germany to die a thousand deaths in the hope of a miracle that will save a cla.s.s to which the rest of poor Germany is a breeding-ground for their mighty armies. I belong to that cla.s.s. One of my brothers is on the staff of the Crown Prince of Prussia. Take my word for it: the solution of Germany"s deliverance is not to be found in the simple antidote of political a.s.sa.s.sination, for only men bound up in the success of the German arms, or their terrorized creatures of our own s.e.x, are near enough to throw the bomb."
"It was rather a commonplace idea," said Kate, gracefully, "but what can you do?"
"Quite aside from the women of the industrial and lower cla.s.ses generally, who have given the munic.i.p.alities serious trouble with their food riots--far more than you know about--the German women altogether are restless and dissatisfied. They were promised a short and triumphant war. They are daily more skeptical of promises. They have suffered death in life. All that early exaltation--exhilaration--has gone long since.
They shut their teeth and endure because they still believe the cunning official lies--that Britain must be starved by the submersibles, that France"s man power is nearly exhausted, that the United States cannot prepare an army in less than two years and needs all her trained men at home to quell the riots of the ma.s.ses who disapprove of the war. They are taught to believe that ultimate victory for Germany is inevitable--that it is merely a question of months.
"But--convince them that Germany cannot win, that their own conquest is inevitable after three or four more years of horror and torment and personal despair, turn their blind hatred of England and America upon their own conscienceless rulers--"
"Jimminy!" cried Mimi. "That"s the dope. Pound it into them that the Enemy Allies will give them a square deal as a Republic and put them under the steam-roller with the Hohenzollerns if they stand pat, and you"ll get them. No more hungry and tubercular babies, no more babies born with a cuticle short in theirs. They"d rise as one man--I mean--d.a.m.n the men!--as one woman."
Heloise left her seat like a whirlwind and flung herself at Gisela"s feet. Her face was flaming white. She looked like a sibyl. "I knew it would be you!" she cried in her sweet bell-like tones. "I have had visions of you leading us out of this awful war. You have only to talk to the women--your word was gospel to them before the war--they too will have the vision and they will make it fact."
"Yes--but--" interrupted the practical Ann. "How shall you go to work?
It is a stupendous idea. But you never could keep such a propaganda movement a secret. Some one would be sure to betray you. German women are perfect fools about men."
"No longer. Nor were they for several years before the war as subservient (inwardly) to men as they had been in the past. Far from it.
And now! They have suffered too much at the hands of men. They have no illusions left. Love and marriage are ghastly caricatures to women who have lived in a time when men are slaughtered like pigs in ma.s.sed formation; when their little boys are driven to war; when young girls--and widows!--are forced to bring more males into the world with the sanction of neither love nor marriage; when those too young for the trench or the casual bed wail incessantly for bread. Oh, no! The German man"s day of any but legal dominion is over. Of course there is always the danger of spies and traitors, but--"
"The wall for you at sunrise if you get caught," cried Mimi, with another subsidence of enthusiasm.
"If that happen to be my destiny. Can any one experience what we have done during these three years and not be as fatalistic as the men in the trenches? I"d rather die before a firing squad after an attempt to save my wretched country than live to see it set back a hundred years. But I refuse to believe that I shall be betrayed or that I shall fail. _That_ I believe to be my destiny. For a long time the idea has been fumbling in the back of my mind, but it lacked the current which would switch it into my consciousness. You two have supplied the current."
Kate threw back her head and gave her merry, ringing laugh. "What delicious irony! Germany defeated by its women! When I think of your august papa, dear Gisela! That kulturistically typical, that nave yet Jovian symbol of all the arrogance and conceit, the simple creed of Kaiserism uber alles, and will-to-rule, that hurled this colossus on the back of Europe--"
"Quite so. You of all present know that I received the proper training for the part I am about to play. If all goes well we women will erect a tablet to my father"s memory in the cathedral at Berlin." She leaned down and patted the rapt face of Heloise, then scowled at Mimi. "May I not count on you?" she asked sternly.
"May you? Well, say, what are you taking me for? I"m more afraid of you than I am of a firing squad, and anyhow I seem to know we"ll win out.
I"m going to carry a club in case I mix up with Hans. But what"s your plan?"
"This is neither the time nor place to work out a campaign. The first move will be to train lieutenants in every State in Germany--women whom we know either personally or through correspondence. You, Heloise, will return to Munich at once and make out the lists. We shall have no difficulty obtaining permits to travel all over the Empire, for it will never enter the insanely stupid official head to doubt whatever excuse we may choose to give. Not only are we German women and therefore sheep, but we are Red Cross nurses.... And remember that nearly all the men who are still in the factories are Socialists--and that women swarm in all of those factories--"
"Marie!" cried Heloise. "How she will work! She has the confidence of the Socialist party--both wings--wherever she is known; and she can talk--like a torrent of liquid fire."
"And the next chapter?" asked Mrs. Prentiss curiously. "You led the German women in thought for five years. Shall you have a Woman"s Republic, with you as President?"
"Certainly not. It is not in the German women--not yet--to crave the grinding cares of public life. We shall make the men do the work, and we will live for the first time. Delivered from Caesarism and junkerism and with the advanced men of Germany at the head of a Republic, I should feel too secure of Germany"s future to demand any of the ugly duties of government--although the women will speak through the men. Their day of silence and submission is forever pa.s.sed--"
"Same here," remarked Mimi, stretching and yawning. "Let"s go to bed. I have smoked fifty-three cigarettes and my voice is ruined. Nevertheless I shall be a great prima donna, and you, Gisela, can chuck propaganda, and write romance. The world will devour it after these years of undiluted realism written in red ink on a black page. Look at the sun trying to climb out of that mist and give us his blessing."
"I shall go for a walk," said Gisela, "and I shall go alone."
IV
1
Mrs. Prentiss and Mrs. Tolby placed a large sum of money to Gisela"s account in a Swiss bank, and this she transferred to the Bayerischer Vereinsbank in Munich. As she had collected large sums for war relief, and was on the board of nine war charities, no suspicion was excited.
She had given to these organizations the greater part of the small fortune she had made from her play and other writings, not absorbed by taxation and bond subscriptions, but there were many wealthy women, hungry, sad, apprehensive that peace would find them paupers, upon whom she could depend to give liberally.
There was to be no printed matter nor correspondence, but an army of lieutenants, who, starting from certain centers, would augment their numbers from Gisela"s long list of correspondents, until it would be possible to sound personally all the women of a district whom it was thought wise to trust.
Gisela returned to Germany as soon as she had worked out the details of her campaign and received the enthusiastic donation of her American friends. Mimi Brandt, Marie von Erkel (who looked like an ecstatic fury of the French Revolution when she realized that at last she had a role to play in life that would not only vent her consuming energies and ambition, but enable her to a.s.sist in the downfall of a race of men whom she hated, both for their tyranny and indifference to brains without beauty, with all the diverted pa.s.sion of her nature), Aimee von Erkel, who was persistent, incisive, and so alarmed at the prospect of all the men in the world being killed, that she would have hastened peace on any terms; Princess Starnworth, a Socialist and idealist, a brilliant and persuasive speaker, to whom war was the ultimate horror; Johanna Stuck, whose revolt had been deep and bitter long before the war and who was one of Gisela"s fervent disciples and aides--these and six others were sent on one pretense or another into the various States of Germany--the kingdoms, princ.i.p.alities, grand duchies, duchies, and "free towns"--to bear Gisela"s personal message and select the proper leaders.
Gisela went at once to Berlin and had a long interview with Mariette, who was ripe for revolution: her lover had been killed and her husband had not. Mariette was not of the type that sorrow and loss enn.o.ble. She was still a handsome woman, particularly in her uniform, but the pink and white cheeks that once had covered her harsh bones were sunken and sallow. Her mouth was like a narrow bar of iron. Her eyes were half closed as if to hide the cold and deadly flame that never flickered; even her nostrils were rigid. All her hard and sensual nature, devoid of tenderness, but dissolved with sentimentality while the man who had conquered her had lived, she had centered on her lover, and with his death she was a tool to Gisela"s hand to wreak vengeance upon the powers that had sent him out of the world.