Fortune and I met also in a crowd, but indoors. Brand and Eileen O’Connor were both to be at one of the evening parties which assembled every now and then in a flat at Chelsea belonging to Susy Whincop, designer of stained glass, driver of ambulances for the Scottish Women’s Convoy, and sympathetic friend before the war of any ardent soul who grew long hair if a man, short hair if a woman, and had some special scheme, philosophy, or inspiration for the welfare of humanity.
I had known Susy and her set in the old days. They were the minor intellectuals of London, and I had portrayed some of them in a novel called “Intellectual Mansions,” which they did not like, though I loved them all. They wrote little poems, painted little pictures, produced little plays, and talked about all subjects under heaven with light-hearted humour, an arrogance towards popular ideas, and a quick acceptance of the new, the unusual and the revolutionary in art and thought. Into their way of life war crashed suddenly with its thunder notes of terror. All that they had lived for seemed to be destroyed, and all their ideals overthrown. They had believed in beauty, and it was flung into the mud, and bespattered with blood, and buried beneath the ugly monsters of war’s idolatry.
They had been devotees of liberty, and were made slaves of the drill sergeant and other instruments of martial law. They had been enemies of brutality, cruelty, violence, but all human effort now was for the slaughter of men, and the hero was he who killed most with bayonet or bomb. Their pretty verses were made of no account. Their impressionistic paintings were not so useful as the camouflage of tin huts. Their little plays were but feeble drama to that which now was played out on the world’s stage to the roar of guns and the march of armies. They went into the tumult and fury of it all, and were lost. I met some of them, like Fortune and Brand, in odd places. Many of them died in the dirty ditches. Some of them wrote poems before they died, stronger than their work before the war, with a noble despair or the exaltation of sacrifice. Others gave no sign of their previous life, and were just absorbed into the ranks—ants in these legions of soldier-ants. Now those who had escaped with life were coming back to their old haunts, trying to pick up old threads, getting back, if they could, to the old ways of work, hoping for a new inspiration out of immense experience, but not yet finding it.
In Susy Whincop’s flat some of them had gathered when I went there, and when I looked round upon them, seeing here and there vaguely-remembered faces, I was conscious of a change that had overtaken them, and, with a shock, wondered whether I too had altered so much in those five years. I recognised Peter Hallam, whom I had known as a boy just down from Oxford, with a genius (in a small way) for satirical verse and a talent for passionate lyrics of a morbid and erotic type. Yes, it was certainly Peter, though his face had hardened and he had cropped his hair short and walked with one leg stiff.
He was talking to a girl with bobbed hair. It was Jennie Southcombe, who had been one of the heroines of the Serbian retreat, according to accounts of newspaper correspondents.
“My battery,” said Peter, “plugged into old Fritz with open sights for four horns. We just mowed ‘em down.”
Another face rang a little bell in my memory. Surely that was Alfred Lyon, the Futurist painter? No, it could not be, for Lyon had dressed like an Apache, and this man was in conventional evening clothes and looked like a Brigadier in mufti. Alfred Lyon?... Yes, there he was, though he had lost his pose—cribbed from Murger’sVie de Bohème—and his half-starved look, and the wildness in his eyes. As he passed Susy Whincop he spoke a few words, which I overheard.
“I’ve abandoned Futurism. The present knocked that silly. Our little violence, which shocked Suburbia, was made ridiculous by the enormous thing that smashed every convention into a cocked hat.’ I’m just going to put down some war scenes—I made notes in the trenches—with that simplicity of the primitive soul to which we went back in that way of life. The soldier’s point of view, his vision, is what I shall try for.”
“Splendid!” said Susy. “Only, don’t shrink from the abomination. We’ve got to make the world understand—and remember.”
I felt a touch on my sleeve, and a voice said, “Hulloa!... Back again?”
I turned and saw an oldish-young man, with white hair above a lean, clean-shaven face and sombre eyes. I stared, but could not fix him.
“Don’t you remember?” he said. “Wetherall, of the Stage Society!”
“Oh, Lord, yes!”
I grasped his hand, and tried to keep the startled look out of my eyes. But he saw it, and smiled.
“Four years as a prisoner of the Turk have altered me a bit. This white hair, eh? And I feel like Rip van Winkle.”
He put into words something which I had been thinking since my arrival in Susy’s rooms.
“We are therevenants, the ghosts who have come back to their old haunts. We are pretending that everything is the same as before, and that we are the same. But it’s all different, and we have changed most of all. Five years of war have dug their hoofs into the faces of most people in this crowd. Some of them look fifteen, twenty, years older, and I expect they’ve been through a century of experience and emotion.”
“What’s coming out of it?” I asked. “Anything big?”
“Not from us,” said Wetherall. “Most of us are finished. Our nerves have gone to pieces, and our vitality has been sapped. We shall put down a few notes of things seen and understood. But it’s the next generation that will get the big vision, or the one after next.”
Then I was able to shake hands with Susy Whincop, and, as I have said, she left me in no doubt about the change that four years of war had made to me.
She held me at arm’s length, studying my face.
“Soul alive!” she said. “You’ve been through it all right! Hell’s branding-irons have been busy with a fair-faced man.”
“As bad as that?” I asked, and she answered very gravely, “As bad as that.”
She had hardly changed, except for a few streaks of grey in her brown hair. Her low, broad forehead was as smooth as before; her brown eyes shone with their old steady light. She had not lost her sense of humour, though she had seen a good deal of blood and agony and death.
“How’s humanity?” I asked, and she laughed and Shrugged her shoulders.
“What can one do with it? I thought we were going to catch the old devil by the tail and hold him fast, but he’s broken loose again. This peace! Dear God!... And all the cruelty and hatred that have survived the massacre! But I don’t despair even now. In this room there is enough good-will and human kindness to create a new world. We’re going to have a good try to make things better by-and-by.”
“Who’s your star to-night?” I asked. “Who is the particular Hot-Gospeller with a mission to convert mankind?”
“I’ve several,” said Susy.
She glanced round the room, and her eyes rested on a little man with goggles and a goatee beard, none other than my good friend Dr. Small, with whom I had travelled down many roads. I had no notion that he knew Susy or was to be here to-night.
“There’s one great soul—a little American doctor whose heart is as big as humanity itself, and whose head is filled with the wisdom of the wise.”
“I know him,” I said, “and I agree with you.”
He caught our eyes fixed on him, and blinked through his goggles, and then waved his hand, and made his way to us.
“Hulloa, doc.!” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Susy Whincop?”
“No need,” he answered. “Miss Whincop is the golden link between all men of good-will.”
Susy was pleased with that. She patted the little doctor’s hand and said, “Bully for you, doctor! and may the Stars and Stripes wave over the League of Nations!”
Then she was assailed by other guests, and the doctor and I took refuge in a corner.
“How’s everything?” I asked.
The doctor was profoundly dejected, and did not hide the gloom that possessed his soul.
“Sonny,” he answered, “we shall have to fight with our backs to the wall, because the enemy—the old devil—is prevailing against us. I have just come over from Paris, and I don’t mind telling you that what I saw during the Peace Conference has made me doubt the power of goodness over evil.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“Daddy” Small’s story was not pleasant to hear. It was the story of the betrayal, one by one, of every ideal for which simple men had fought and died, a story of broken pledges, of hero-worship dethroned, and of great peoples condemned to lingering death. The Peace Treaty, he said, would break the heart of the world and prepare the way for new, more dreadful, warfare.
“How about Wilson?” I asked.
The little doctor raised his hands like a German crying, “Kamerad!”
“Wilson was not big enough. He had the future of civilisation in his hands, but his power was filched from him, and he never knew until the end that he had lost it. He was like a simple Gulliver among the Liliputians. They tied him down with innumerable threads of cotton while he slept in self-complacency with a sense of righteousness. He was slow-thinking among quick-witted people. He stated a general principle, and they drafted out clauses which seemed to fulfil the principle while violating it in every detail. They juggled with facts and figures so that black seemed white through his moral spectacles, and he said Amen to their villainy, believing that God had been served by righteousness. Bit by bit they broke his pledges and made a jigsaw puzzle of them so artfully that he believed they were uncracked. Little by little they robbed him of his honour, and he was unaware of the theft. In preambles and clause headings and interpretations they gave lip-service to the fourteen points upon which the armistice was granted, and to which the allied nations were utterly pledged, not only to the Germans and all enemies, but to their own people. Not one of those fourteen points is in the reality of the Treaty. There has been no self-determination of peoples. Millions have been transferred into unnatural boundaries. There have been no open covenants openly arrived at. The Conference was within closed doors. The clauses of the Peace Treaty were kept secret from the world until an American journalist got hold of a copy and sent it to his paper. What has become of the equality of trade conditions and the removal of economic barriers among all nations consenting to peace? Sonny, Europe has been carved up by the spirit of vengeance, and multitudes of men, women and children have been sentenced to death by starvation. Another militarism is enthroned above the ruin of German militarism. Wilson was hoodwinked into putting his signature to a peace of injustice which will lead by desperation to world anarchy and strife. When he understands what thing he has done he will be stricken by a mortal blow to his conscience and his pride.”
“Doctor,” I said, “there is still hope in the League of Nations. We must all back that.”
He shook his head.
“The spirit has gone out of it. It was born without a soul. I believe now that the future welfare of the world depends upon a change of heart among the peoples, inspired by individuals in all nations who will work for good and give a call to humanity, indifferent to statesmen, treaties and Governments.”
“The International League of Good-will?”
He nodded and smiled.
“Something like that.”
I remembered a dinner-party in New York after the armistice. I had been lecturing on the League of Nations at a time when the Peace Treaty was still unsigned, but when already there was a growing hostility against President Wilson, startling in its intensity. The people of the United States were still moved by the emotion and idealism with which they had roused great armies and sent them to the fields of France. Some of the men were returning home again. I stood outside a club in New York when a darkie regiment returned its colours, and I heard the roars of cheering that followed the march of the negro troops. I saw Fifth Avenue filled with triumphal arches, strung across with jewelled chains, festooned with flags and trophies of the home-coming of the New York Division. The heart of the American people was stirred by the pride of its achievement on the way to victory and by a new sense of power over the destiny of mankind. But already there was a sense of anxiety about the responsibilities to which Wilson in Europe was pledging them without their full and free consent. They were conscious that their old isolation was being broken down, and that by ignorance or rash promise they might be drawn into other European adventures which were no concern of theirs. They knew how little was their knowledge of European peoples, with their rivalries, and racial hatreds, and secret intrigues. Their own destiny as a free people might be thwarted by being dragged into the jungle of that unknown world. In any case Wilson was playing a lone hand, pledging them without their advice or agreement, subordinating them, it seemed, to the British Empire, with six votes on the Council of the League to their poor one. What did he mean? By what right did he do so?
At every dinner-table these questions were asked before the soup was drunk; at the coffee end of the meal every dinner-party was a debating club, and the women joined with the men in hot discussion; until some tactful soul laughed loudly, and some hostess led the way to music or a dance.
The ladies had just gone after one of these debates, leaving us to our cigars and coffee, when “Daddy” Small made a proposition which startled me at the time.
“See here,” he said to his host and the other men. “Out of this discussion one thing stands clear and straight. It is that in this room, now, at this table, are men of intellect—American and English—men of goodwill towards mankind, men of power in one way or another, who agree that whatever happens there must be eternal friendship between England and the United States.”
“Sure!” said a chorus of voices.
“In other countries there are men with the same ideals as, ourselves—peace, justice between men and nations, a hatred of cruelty, pity for women and children, charity and truth. Is that agreed?”
“Sure!” said the other guests.
They were mostly business men, well-to-do, but not of the “millionaire” class, with here and there a writing-man, an artist and, as I remember, a clergyman.
“I am going to be a commercial traveller in charity,” said the little doctor. “I am going across the frontiers to collect clients for an international society of goodwill. I propose to establish a branch at this table.”
The suggestion was received with laughter by some of the men, but, as I saw, with gravity by others.
“What would be the responsibilities, doctor. Do you want money?”
This was from the manager of an American railroad.
“We shall want a bit,” said the doctor. “Not much. Enough for stamps and occasional booklets and typewriting. The chief responsibility would be to spot lies leading to national antagonism, and to kill them by exposure to cold truth; also, to put in friendly words, privately and publicly, on behalf of human kindness across the barriers of hate and malignity. Any names for the New York branch?”
The doctor took down twelve names, pledged solemnly to his programmes....
I remembered that scene in New York when I stood with the little man in Susy Whincop’s drawing-room.
“What about this crowd?” I asked.
“Sonny,” he said, “this place is reeking with humanity. The real stuff. Idealists who have seen hell pretty close, most of them. Why, in this room there’s enough goodwill to move mountains of cruelty, if we could get a move on all together.”
It was then that I saw Charles Fortune, though I was looking for Brand.
Fortune was wearing one of his special “faces.” I interpreted it as his soulful and mystical face. It broke a little as he winked at me.
“Remarkable gathering,” he said. “The Intellectuals come back to their lair. Some of them like little Bo-Peep who lost her sheep and left their tails behind them.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he answered. “We used to talk like that. I’m trying to grope back.”
He put his hand over his forehead wearily.
“God!” he said. “How terrible was war in a Nissen hut! I cannot even now forget that I was every yard a soldier!”
He began to hum his well-remembered anthem, “Blear-eyed Bill the Butcher of the Boche,” and then checked himself.
“Nay, let us forget that melody of blood. Let us rather sing of fragrant things of peace.” He hummed the nursery ballad of “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are!”
Susy Whincop seized him by the wrist.
“So the Fat Boy has escaped the massacre? Come and make us laugh. We are getting too serious at the piano end of the room.”
“Lady,” said Fortune, “tempt me not to mirth-making. My irony is terrible when roused.”
As he went to the piano I caught sight of Brand just making his way through a group by the door.
I had never seen him in civil clothes, but he looked as I had imagined him, in an old pre-war dinner-jacket and baggy trousers, and a shirt that bulged abominably. A tuft of hair stuck up behind—the tuft that Eileen O’Connor, had pulled for Auld Lang Syne. But he looked fine and distinguished, with his hard, lean face and strong jaw and melancholy eyes.
He caught sight of me and gripped my hand, painfully.
“Hullo, old man! Welcome back. I have heaps to tell you.”
“Good things?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Not good.... Damned bad, alas!”
He did not continue the conversation. He stared across my shoulder at the door as though he saw an apparition. I turned to see the object of his gaze. It was Eileen O’Connor, whom I had first met in Lille.
She was in an evening frock cut low at the neck, and her arms were bare. There was a smile in her dark Irish eyes, and about her long humorous mouth. The girl I had seen in Lille was not so elegant as this, not so pretty. The lifting of care, perhaps, had made the change.
Susy Whincop gave a cry of “Is that Eileen?” and darted to her.
“It’s myself,” said Eileen, releasing herself from an ardent embrace, “and all the better for seeing you. Who’s who in this distinguished crowd?”
“Old friends,” I said, being nearest to her. “Four men who walked one day of history up a street in Lille, and met an Irish girl who had the worship of the crowd.”
She took my hand and I was glad of her look of friendship.
“Four?” she said. “That’s too good to be true. All safe and home again?”
It was astonishing that four of us should be there in a room in London with the girl who had been the heroine of Lille. But there was Fortune and “Daddy” Small and Brand and myself.
The crowd gave us elbow-room while we stood round Eileen. To each she gave her hands—both hands—and merry words of greeting. It was only I, and she, perhaps, who saw the gloom on Brand’s face when she greeted him last and said: “Is it well with you, Wickham?”
Her colour rose a little at the sight of him, and he was paler than when I saw him first that night.
“Pretty well,” he said. “One still needs courage—even in peace.”
He laughed a little as he spoke, but I knew that his laughter was the camouflage of hidden trouble, at which he had hinted in his letters to me.
We could not have much talk that evening. The groups shifted and re-shifted. The best thing was when Eileen sang “The Gentle Maiden” as on a night in Lille. Brand, standing near the door, listened, strangely unconscious of the people about him.
“It’s good to hear that song again,” I said.
He started, as though suddenly awakened.
“It stirs queer old memories.”
It was in Eileen’s own house that Brand and I renewed a friendship which had been made in a rescued city where we had heard the adventure of this girl’s life.
As Brand admitted to me, and as he had outlined the trouble in his letters, he was having “a bad time.” Since his marriage with Elsa von Kreuzenach he had not had much peace of mind nor any kind of luck. After leaving Cologne the War Office, prompted by some unknown influence—he suspected his father, who knew the Secretary for War—had sent him off on a special mission to Italy and had delayed his demobilisation until a month before this meeting of ours. That had prevented his plan of bringing Elsa to England, and now, when he was free and her journey possible, he was seriously embarrassed with regard to a home for her. There was plenty of room in his father’s house at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea—too big a house for his father and mother and younger sister, now that the eldest girl had married and his younger brother lay dead on the Somme. It had been his idea that he and Elsa would live in the upper rooms—it made a kind of flat—while he got back to novel-writing until he earned enough to provide a home of his own. It was still his idea, as the only possible place for the immediate future, but the family was dead against it and expressed the utmost aversion, amounting almost to horror, at the idea of receiving his German wife. By violent argument, by appeals to reason and charity, most of all by the firm conviction of his father that he was suffering from shell-shock and would go over the borderline of sanity if thwarted too much, a grudging consent had been obtained from them to give Elsa house-room. Yet he dreaded the coldness of her welcome, and the hostility not only of his own people but of any English society in which she might find herself.
“I shouldn’t have believed,” said Brand, “that such vindictive hatred could have outlasted the war, in England. The people here at home, who have never seen war closer than an air-raid, are poisoned, twisted and envenomed with hate. And the women are worst. My own mother—so sweet and gentle in the old days—would see every German baby starve rather than subscribe to a single drop of milk. My own sister—twenty years of age, add as holy as an angel—would scratch out the eyes of every German girl. She reads the papers every day with a feverish desire for the Kaiser’s trial. She licks her lips at the stories of starvation in Austria. ‘They are getting punished,’ she says. ‘Who?’ I ask her. ‘Austrian babies?’ And she says, ‘The people who killed my brother and yours.’ What’s the good of telling her that I have killedtheirbrothers—many of them—even the brother of my wife——”
I shook my head at that, but Brand was insistent.
“I’m sure of it.... It is useless telling her that the innocent are being punished for the guilty, and that all Europe was involved in the same guilt. She says, ‘You have altered your ideas. The strain of war has been too much for you.’ She means I’m mad or bad.... Sometimes I think I may be, but when I think of those scenes in Cologne, the friendly way of our fighting men with their former enemy, the charity of our Tommies, their lack of hatred now the job is done, I look at these people in England, the stay-at-homes, and believe it is they who are warped.”
The news of Brand’s marriage with a German girl had leaked out, though his people tried to hush it up. It came to me now and then as a tit-bit of scandal from men who had been up at Oxford with him in the old days.
“You know that fellow Wickham Brand?”
“Yes.”
“Heard the rumour about him?”
“No.”
“They say he’s got a German wife. Married her after the armistice.”
“Why not?”
That question of mine made them stare as though I had uttered some blasphemy. Generally they did not attempt to answer it, but shrugged their shoulders with a look of unutterable disgust, or said, “Disgraceful!” They were men, invariably, who had doneembusquéwork in the war, in Government offices and soft jobs. Soldiers who had fought their way to Cologne were more lenient. One of them said, “Some of the German girls are devilish pretty. Not my style, perhaps, but kissable.”
I saw something of Brand’s trouble when I walked down Knightsbridge with him one day on the way to his home in Chelsea. Horace Chipchase, the novelist, came face to face with us and gave a whoop of pleasure when he saw us. Then suddenly, after shaking hand? with me and greeting Brand warmly, he remembered the rumour that had reached him. Embarrassment overcame him, and ignoring Brand he confined his remarks to me, awkwardly, and made an excuse for getting on. He did not look at Brand, again.
“Bit strained in his manner,” I remarked, glancing sideways at Wickham.
He strode on with tightened lips.
“Shared rooms with me once, and I helped him when he was badly in need of it.... He’s heard about Elsa. Silly blighter!”
But it hurt the man, who was very sensitive under his hard crust.
It was on the way to his house that he told me he had made arrangements at last for Elsa to join him in England. One of his friends at headquarters in Cologne was providing her with a passport and had agreed to let her travel with him to Paris where he was to give evidence before a committee of the Peace Conference. Brand could fetch her from there, in a week’s time.
“I am going to Paris next week,” I told him, and he gave a grunt of pleasure, and said, “Splendid! We can both meet Elsa.”
I thought it curious then, and afterwards, that he was anxious for my company when he met his wife and when she was with him. I think the presence of a third person helped him to throw off a little of the melancholy into which he relapsed when alone.
I asked him if Elsa’s family knew of her marriage and were reconciled to it, and he told me that they knew, but were less reconciled now than when she had first broken the news to her father and mother on the day of her wedding. Then there had been a family “scene.” The General had raged and stormed, and his wife had wept, but after that outburst had decided to forgive her, in order to avoid a family scandal. There had been a formidable assembly of uncles, aunts and cousins of the von Kreuzenach family to sit in judgment upon this affair which, as they said, “touched their honour,” and Elsa’s description of it, and of her terror and sense of guilt (it is not easy to break with racial traditions), was very humorous, though at the same time rather pathetic. They had graciously decided, after prolonged discussions in which they treated Elsa exactly as though she were the prisoner at a court-martial, to acknowledge and accept her marriage with Captain Brand. They had been led to this decision mainly owing to the information given by Franz von Kreuzenach that Captain Brand belonged to the English aristocracy, his father being Sir Amyas Brand, and a member of the English House of Parliament. They were willing to admit that, inferior as Captain Brand’s family might be to that of von Kreuzenach—so old and honoured in German history—it was yet respectable and not unworthy of alliance with them. Possibly—it was an idea suggested with enormous solemnity by Onkel von Kreuzenach—Elsa’s marriage with the son of an English Member of Parliament might be of service to the Father-land in obtaining some amelioration of the Peace Terms (the Treaty was not yet signed), and in counteracting the harsh malignity of France. They must endeavour to use this opportunity provided by Elsa in every possible way as a patriotic duty.... So at the end of the family conclave Elsa was not only forgiven but was, to some extent, exalted as an instrument of God for the rescue of their beloved Germany.
That position of hers lasted in her family until the terms of the Peace Treaty leaked out, and then were published in full. A storm of indignation rose in Germany, and Elsa was a private victim of its violence in her own house. The combined clauses of the Treaty were read as a sentence of death by the German people. Clause by clause, they believed it fastened a doom upon them, and insured their ruin. It condemned them to the payment of indemnities which would demand all the produce of their industry for many and uncertain years. It reduced them to the position of a slave state, without an army, without a fleet, without colonies, without the right to develop industries in foreign countries, without ships to carry their merchandise, without coal to supply their factories or raw material for their manufactures. To enforce the payment of these indemnities foreign commissions would seize all German capital invested in former enemy or neutral states, and would keep armed forces on the Rhine ready to march at any time, years after the conclusion of peace, into the heart of Germany. The German people might work, but not for themselves. They had freed themselves of their own tyrants, but were to be subject to an international tyranny depriving them of all hope of gradual recovery from the ruin of defeat. On the West and on the East, Austria was to be hemmed in by new states formed out of her own flesh-and-blood under the domination of hostile races. She was to be maimed and strangled. The Fourteen Points to which the allies had pledged themselves before the armistice had been abandoned utterly, and Wilson’s promise of a peace which would heal the wounds of the world had been replaced by a peace of vengeance which would plunge Central Europe into deep gulfs of misery, despair, and disease. That, at least, was the German point of view.
“They’re stunned,” said Brand. “They knew they were to be punished, and they were willing to pay a vast price of defeat. But they believed that under a republican Government they would be left with a future hope of progress, a decent hope of life, based upon their industry. Now they have no hope, for we have given them a thin chance of reconstruction. They are falling back upon the hope of vengeance and revolt. We have prepared another inevitable war when the Germans, with the help of Russia, will strive to break the fetters we have fastened on them. So goes the only purpose for which most of us fought this war, and all our pals have died in vain.”
He stopped in the street and beat the pavement with his stick.
“The damned stupidity of it all!” he said. “The infernal wickedness of those old men who have arranged this thing!”
Three small boys came galloping up Cheyne Walk with toy reins and tinkling bells.
“Those children,” said Brand, “will see the things that we have seen and go into the ditches of death before their manhood has been fulfilled. We fought to save them, and have failed.”
He told me that even Elsa had been aghast at the Peace Terms.
“I hoped more from the generous soul of England,” she had written to him.
Franz von Kreuzenach had written more bitterly than that.
“We have been betrayed. There were millions of young men in Germany who would have worked loyally to fulfil Wilson’s conditions of peace as they were pledged in his Fourteen Points. They would have taken their punishment with patience and courage, knowing the penalty of defeat. They would have worked for the new ideals of a new age, which were to be greater liberty and the brotherhood of man in a League of Nations. But what is that league? It is a combination of enemies, associated for the purpose of crushing the German people and keeping her crushed. I, who loved England and had no emnity against her even in war, cannot forgive her now for her share in this peace. As a German I find it unforgivable, because it perpetuates the spirit of hatred and thrusts us back into the darkness where evil is bred.”
“Do you agree with that?” I asked Brand.
“On the whole, yes,” he said, gravely. “Mind you, I’m not against punishing Germany. She had to be punished. But we are substituting slow torture for just retribution, and like Franz I’m thinking of the effect on the future. By generosity we should have made the world safe. By vengeance we have prepared new strife. Europe will be given up to anarchy and deluged in the blood of the boys who are now babes.”
I had dinner with Brand’s people and found them “difficult.” Sir Amyas Brand had Wickham’s outward hardness and none of his inner sensibility. He was a stiff, pompous man who had done extremely well out of the war, I guessed, by the manufacture of wooden huts, to which he attached a patriotic significance, apart from his profits. He alluded to the death of his younger son as his “sacrifice for the Empire,” though it seemed to me that the boy Jack had been the real victim of sacrifice.. To Wickham he behaved with an exasperating air of forgiveness, as to one who had sinned and was physically and morally sick.
“How do you think Wickham is looking?” he asked me at table, and when I said, “Very well,” he sighed and shook his head.
“The war was a severe nervous strain upon Mm. It has changed him sadly. We try to be patient with him, poor lad.”
Brand overheard his speech and flushed angrily.
“I’m sorry I try your patience so severely, sir,” he said in a bitter, ironical way.
“Don’t let’s argue about it, dear lad,” said Sir Amyas Brand suavely.
“No,” said Lady Brand plaintively, “you know argument is bad for you, Wickham. You become so violent, dear.”
“Besides,” said Ethel Brand, the daughter, in a low and resigned voice, “what’s done can’t be undone.”
“Meaning Elsa?” asked Wickham savagely. I could see that but for my restraining presence as a stranger there was all the inflammable stuff here for a first-class domestic “flare-up.”
“What else?” asked Ethel coldly, and meeting her brother’s challenging eyes with a perfectly steady gaze. She was a handsome girl with regular, classical features and tight lips, as narrow-minded, I imagined, as a mid-Victorian spinster in a cathedral town, and as hard as granite in principle and prejudice.
Wickham weakened after signs of an explosion of rage. He spoke gently, and revealed a hope to which I think he clung desperately.
“When Elsa comes you will all fall in love with her.”
It was the worst thing he could have said, though he was unconscious of his “gaffe.”
His sister Ethel reddened, and I could see her mouth harden.
“So far I have remarkably little love for Germans, male or female.”
“I hope we shall behave with Christian charity,” said Lady Brand.
Sir Amyas Brand coughed uneasily, and then tried to laugh off his embarrassment for my benefit.
“There will be considerable scandal in my constituency!”
“To hell with that!” said Brand, irritably. “It’s about time the British public returned to sanity.”
“Ah!” said Sir Amyas, “there’s a narrow border-line between sanity, and shell-shock. Really, it is distressing what a number of men seem to come back with disordered nerves. All these crimes, all these cases of violence——”
It gave him a chance of repeating a leading article which he had read that morning inThe Times. It provided a conversation without controversy until the end of dinner.
In the hall, before I left, Wickham Brand laughed, rather miserably.
“It’s not going to be easy! Elsa will find the climate rather cold here, eh?”
“She will win them over,” I said hopefully, and these words cheered him.
“Why, yes, they’re bound to like her.”
We arranged for the Paris trip two weeks later, but before then we were sure to meet at Eileen O’Connor’s. As a matter of fact, we dined together with “Daddy” Small next day, and Eileen was with him.
Ifound Eileen O’Connor refreshing and invigorating, so that it was good to be in her company. Most people in England at that time, at least those I met, were “nervy,” depressed, and apprehensive of evil to come. There was hardly a family I knew who had not one vacant chair wherein a boy had sat when he had come home from school or office, and afterwards on leave. Their ghosts haunted these homes and were present in any company where people gathered for conversation or distraction. The wound to England’s soul was unhealed, and the men who came back had received grave hurt, many of them, to their nervous and moral health.
This Irish girl was beautifully gay, not with that deliberate and artificial gaiety which filled London theatres and dancing halls, but with ah inner flame of happiness. It was difficult to account for that. She had seen much tragedy in Lille. Death and the agony of men had been familiar to her. She had faced death herself, very closely, escaping, as she said, by a narrow “squeak.” She had seen the brutality of war and its welter of misery for men and women, and now in time of peace she was conscious of the sufferings of many people, and did not hide these things from her mental vision or cry, “All’s right with the world!” when all was wrong. But something in her character, something, perhaps, in her faith, enabled her to resist the pressure of all this “morbid emotion” and to face it squarely, with smiling eyes. Another thing that attracted one was her fearlessness of truth. At a time when most people shrank from truth her candour was marvellous, with the simplicity of childhood joined to the wisdom of womanhood.
I saw this at the dinner-party for four arranged in her honour by “Daddy” Small. That was given, for cheapness’ sake, at a little old restaurant in Whitehall which provided a good dinner for a few shillings, and in an “atmosphere” of old-fashioned respectability which appealed to the little American.
Eileen knocked Brand edgewise at the beginning of his dinner by remarking about his German marriage.
“The news came to me as a shock,” she said, and when Wickham raised his eyebrows and looked both surprised and dismayed (he had counted on her sympathy and help), she patted his hand as it played a devil’s tattoo on the table-cloth, and launched into a series of indiscretions that fairly made my hair curl.
“Theoretically,” she said, “I hadn’t the least objection to your marrying a German girl. I have always believed that love is an instinct which is beyond the control of diplomats who arrange frontiers and generals who direct wars. I saw a lot of it in Lille—and there was Franz von Kreuzenach, who fell in love with me, poor child. What really hurt me for a while was green-eyed jealousy.”
“Daddy” Small laughed hilariously, and filled up Eileen’s glass with Moselle wine.
Brand looked blank.
“Jealousy?”
“Why, yes,” said Eileen. “Imagine me, an Irish girl, all soppy with emotion at the first sight of English khaki (that’s a fantastic situation anyhow!), after four years with the grey men, and then finding that the first khaki tunic she meets holds the body of a man she knew as a boy, when she used to pull his hair! And such a grave heroic-looking man, Wicky! Why, I felt like one of Tennyson’s ladies released from her dark tower by a Knight of the Round Tower. Then you went away and married a German Gretchen! And all my doing, because if I hadn’t given you a letter to Franz you wouldn’t have met Elsa. So when I heard the news, I thought, ‘There goes my romance!’”
“Daddy” Small laughed again, joyously.
“Say, my dear,” he said, “you’re making poor old Wickham blush like an Englishman asked to tell the story of his V.C. in public.”
Brand laughed, too, in his harsh, deep voice.
“Why, Eileen, you ought to have told me before I moved out of Lille.”
“And where would maiden modesty have been?” asked Eileen, in her humorous way.
“Where is it now?” asked the little doctor.
“Besides,” said Brand, “I had that letter to Franz von Kreuzenach in my pocket. I don’t mind telling you I detested the fellow for his infernal impudence in making love to you.”
“Sure now, it was a one-sided affair, entirely,” said Eileen, exaggerating her Irish accent, “but one has to be polite to a gentleman that saves one’s life on account of a romantic passion. Oh, Wickham, it’s very English you are!”
Brand could find nothing to say for himself, and it was I who came to the rescue of his embarrassment by dragging a red herring across the thread of Eileen’s discourse. She had a wonderful way of saying things that on most girls’ lips would have seemed audacious, or improper, or ‘high-falutin’, but on hers were natural with a simplicity which shone through her.
Her sense of humour played like a light about her words, yet beneath her wit was a tenderness and a knowledge of tragic things. I remember some of her sayings that night at dinner, and they seemed to me very good then, though when put down they lose the deep melody of her voice and the smile or sadness of her dark eyes.
“England,” she said, “fought the war for liberty and the rights of small nations, but said to Ireland, ‘Hush, keep quiet there, damn you, or you’ll make us look ridiculous.’”
“Irish soldiers,” she said, “helped England to win all her wars, but mostly in Scottish regiments. When the poor boys wanted to carry an Irish flag, Kitchener said, ‘Go to hell,’ and some of them went to Flanders... and recruiting stopped with a snap.”
“Now, how do you know these things?” asked “Daddy” Small. “Did Kitchener go to Lille to tell you?”
“No,” said Eileen, “but I found some of the Dublin boys in the prison at Lille, and they told the truth before they died, and perhaps it was that which killed them. That and starvation and German brutality.”
“I believe you’re a Sinn Feiner,” said Dr. Small. “Why don’t you go to Ireland and show your true colours, ma’am?”
“I’m Sinn Fein all right,” said Eileen, “but I hated the look of a white wall in Lille, and there are so many white walls in the little green isle. So I’m stopping in Kensington and trying to hate the English, but can’t because I love them.”
She turned to Wickham and said: “Will you take me for a row in Kensington Gardens the very next day the sun shines?”
“Rather!” said Wickham, “on one condition!’
“And that?”
“That you’ll be kind to my little Elsa when she comes.”
“I’ll be a mother to her,” said Eileen, “but she must come quick or I’ll be gone.”
“Gone?”
Wickham spoke with dismay in his voice. I think he had counted on Eileen as his stand-by when Elsa would need a friend in England.
“Hush now!” said “Daddy” Small. “It’s my secret, you wicked lady with black eyes and a mystical manner.”
“Doctor,” said Eileen, “your own President rebukes you. ‘Open covenants openly arrived at—weren’t those his words for the new diplomacy?”
“Would to God he had kept to them,” said the little doctor, bitterly, launching into a denunciation of the Peace Conference until I cut him short with a question.
“What’s this secret, Doctor?”
He pulled out his pocket-book with an air of mystery.
“We’re getting on with the International League of Goodwill,” he said. “It’s making more progress than the League of Nations. There are names here that are worth their weight in gold. There are golden promises which by the grace of God——”
“Daddy” Small spoke solemnly—“will be fulfilled by golden deeds. Anyhow, we’re going to get a move on—away from hatred towards charity, not for the making of wounds but for the healing, not punishing the innocent for the sins of the guilty, but saving the innocent—the Holy Innocents—for the glory of life. Miss Eileen and others are going to be the instruments of the machinery of mercy, rather, I should say, the spirit of humanity.”
“With you as our gallant leader,” said Eileen, patting his hand.
“It sounds good,” said Brand. “Let’s hear some more.”
Dr. Small told us more in glowing language, and in Biblical utterance mixed with American slang like Billy Sunday’s Bible. He was profoundly moved. He was filled with hope and gladness, and with a humble pride because his efforts had borne fruit.
The scheme was simple. From his friends in the United States he had promises, as good as gold, of many millions of American dollars. From English friends he had also considerable sums. With this treasure he was going to Central Europe to organise relief on a big scale for the children who were starving to death. Eileen O’Connor was to be his private secretary and assistant-organiser. She would have heaps of work to do, and she had graduated in the prisons and slums of Lille. They were starting in a week’s time for Warsaw, Prague, Buda-Pesth and Vienna.
“Then,” said Brand, “Elsa will lose a friend.”
“Bring her, too,” said Eileen. “There’s work for all.”
Brand was startled by this, and a sudden light leapt into his eyes.
“By Jove!... But I’m afraid not. That’s impossible.”
So it was only a week we had with Eileen, but in that time we had some good meetings and merry adventures. Brand and I rowed her on the lake in Kensington Gardens, and she told us Irish fairy-tales as she sat in the stem with her hat in her lap, and the wind playing in her brown hair. We took her to the Russian Ballet and she wept a little at the beauty of it.
“After four years of war,” she said, “beauty is like water to a parched soul. It’s so exquisite it hurts.”
She took us one day into the Carmelite Church at
Kensington, and Brand and I knelt each side of her, feeling sinners with a saint between us. And then, less like a saint, she sang ribald little songs on the way to her mother’s house in Holland Street, and said “Drat the thing!” when she couldn’t find her key to unlock the door.
“Sorry, Biddy my dear,” she said to the little maidservant who opened the door. “I shall forget my head one day.”
“Sure, Miss Eileen,” said the girl, “but never the dear heart of you, at all, at all.”
Eileen’s mother was a buxom, cheery, smiling Irishwoman who did not worry, I fancy, about anything in the world, and was sure of heaven. Her drawing-room was littered with papers and novels, some of which she swept off the sofa with a careless hand.
“Won’t you take a seat then?”
I asked her whether she had not been anxious about her daughter when Eileen was all those years under German rule.
“Not at all,” said the lady. “I knew our dear Lord was as near to Lille as to London.”
Two of her boys had been killed in the war, “fighting,” she said, “for an ungrateful country which keeps its heel on the neck of Ireland,” and two were in the United States, working for the honour of Ireland on American newspapers. Eileen’s two sisters had married during the war and between them had given birth to four Sinn Feiners. Eileen’s father had died a year ago, and almost his last word had been her name.
“The dear man thought all the world of Eileen,” said Mrs. O’Connor. “I was out of it entirely when he had, her by his side.”
“You’ll be lonely,” said Brand, “when your daughter goes abroad again.”
Eileen answered him.
“Oh, you can’t keep me back by insidious remarks like that! Mother spends most of her days in church, and the rest of them reading naughty novels which keep her from ascending straight to heaven without the necessity of dying first. She is never lonely because her spirit is in touch with those she loves, in this world or the other. And isn’t that the truth I’m after talking, mother o’ mine!”
“I never knew more than one O’Connor who told the truth yet,” said the lady, “and that’s yourself, my dear. And it’s a frightening way you have with it that would scare the devil out of his skin.”
They were pleasant hours with Eileen, and when she went away from Charing Cross one morning with Dr. Small, five hospital nurses and two Americans of the Red Cross, I wished with all my heart that Wickham Brand had asked her and not Elsa von Kreuzenach to be his wife. That was an idle wish, for the next morning Brand and I crossed over to France, and on the way to Paris my friend told me that the thought of meeting Elsa after those months of separation excited him so that each minute seemed an hour. And as he told me that he lit a cigarette and I saw that his hand was trembling, because of this nervous strain.