VI

We met Elsa at the Gare de l’Est in Paris the evening after our arrival. Brand’s nervous anxiety had increased as the hour drew near, and he smoked cigarette after cigarette while he paced up and down theSalle d’Attenteas far as he could for the crowds which surged there.

Once he spoke to me about his apprehensions.

“I hope to God this will work out all right.... I’m only thinking of her happiness.”

Another time he said: “This French crowd would tear her to pieces if they knew she was German.”

While we were waiting we met a friend of old times. I was first to recognise Pierre Nesle, who had been attached to us as interpreter andliaisonofficer. He was in civil clothes and was wearing a bowler hat and a light overcoat, so that his transformation was astonishing. I touched him on the arm as he made his way quickly through the crowd, and he turned sharply and stared at me as though he could not place me at all. Then a look of recognition leapt into his eyes and he grasped both my hands delightedly. He was still thin and pale, but some of his old melancholy had gone out of his eyes and in its place there was an eager, purposeful look.

“Here’s Brand,” I said. “He’ll be glad to see you again.”

“Quelle chance!” exclaimed Pierre, and he made a dash for his friend and before Brand could remonstrate kissed him on both cheeks. They had been good comrades and after the rescue of Marthe from the mob in Lille it was to Brand that Pierre Nesle had opened his heart and revealed his agony. He could not stay long with us in the station as he was going to some political meeting, and perhaps it was well, because Brand was naturally anxious to escape from him before Elsa came.

“I am working hard—speaking, writing, organising—on behalf of theLigue des Tranchées,” said Pierre. “You must come and see me at my office. It’s the headquarters of the new movement in France. Anti-militarist, to fulfil the ideals of the men who fought to end war.”

“You’re going to fight against heavy odds,” said Brand. “Clemenceau won’t love you, nor those who like his peace.”

Pierre laughed and used an old watchword of the war.

“Nous les aurons!Those old dead-heads belong to the past. Peace has still to be made by the men who fought for a new world.”

He gave us his address, pledged us to call on him, and slipped into the vortex of the crowd.

Brand and I waited another twenty minutes, and then in a tide of new arrivals we saw Elsa. She was in the company of Major Quin, Brand’s friend who had brought her from Cologne, a tall Irishman who stooped a little as he gave his arm to the girl. She was dressed in a blue coat and skirt, very neatly, and it was the glitter of her spun-gold hair that made me catch sight of her quickly in the crowd. Her eyes had a frightened look as she came forward, and she was white to the lips. Thinner, too, than when I had seen her last, so that she looked older and not, perhaps, quite so wonderfully pretty. But her face lighted up with intense gladness when Brand stood in front of her, and then, under an electric lamp, with a crowd surging around him, took her in his arms.

Major Quin and I stood aloof, chatting together.

“Good journey?” I asked.

“Excellent, but I’m glad it’s over. That little lady is too unmistakably German. Everybody spotted her and looked unutterable things. She was frightened, and I don’t wonder. Most of them thought the worst of me. I had to threaten one fellow with a damned good hiding for an impertinent remark I overheard.”

Brand thanked him for looking after his wife, and Elsa gave him her hand and said, “Danke schön.”

Major Quin raised his finger and said, “Hush. Don’t forget you’re in Paris now.”

Then he saluted with a click of spurs and took his leave. I put Brand and his wife in a taxi and drove outside by the driver to a quiet old hotel in the Rue St. Honoré, where we had booked rooms.

When we registered, the manager at the desk stared at Elsa curiously. She spoke English, but with an unmistakable accent. The man’s courtesy to Brand, which had been perfect, fell from him abruptly and he spoke with icy insolence when he summoned one of the boys to take up the baggage. In the dining-room that night all eyes turned to Elsa and Brand, with inquisitive, hostile looks. I suppose her frock, simple and ordinary as it seemed to me, proclaimed its German fashion. Or perhaps her face and hair were not so English as I had imagined. It was a little while before the girl herself was aware of those unpleasant glances about her. She was very happy sitting next to Brand, whose hand she caressed once or twice, and into whose face she looked with adoration. She was still very pale, and I could see that she was immensely tired after her journey, but her eyes shone wonderfully. Sometimes she looked about her and encountered the stares of people—elderly Frenchbourgeoisand some English nurses and a few French officers—dining at other tables in the great room with gilt mirrors and painted ceiling. She spoke to Brand presently in a low voice.

“I am afraid. These people stare at me so much. They guess what I am.”

“It’s only your fancy,” said Brand. “Besides, they would be fools not to stare at a face like yours.”

She smiled and coloured up at that sweet flattery.

“I know when people like one’s looks. It is not for that reason they stare.”

“Ignore them,” said Brand. “Tell me about Franz and Frau von Detmold.”

It was unwise of him to sprinkle his conversation with German names. The waiter at our table was listening attentively. Presently I saw him whispering behind the screen to one of his comrades and looking our way sullenly.

He kept us waiting an unconscionable time for coffee, and when at last Brand gave his arm to Elsa and led her from the room, he gave a harsh laugh as they passed, and I heard the words, “Sale Boche!” spoken in a low tone of voice, yet loud enough for all the room to hear. From all the little tables there came titters of laughter and those words, “Sale Boche!” were repeated by several voices. I hoped that Elsa and Brand had not heard, but I saw Elsa sway a little on her husband’s arm as though struck by an invisible blow, and Brand turned with a look of passion, as though he would hit the waiter or challenge the whole room to warfare. But Elsa whispered to him, and he went with her up the staircase to their rooms.

The next morning when I met them at breakfast Elsa still looked desperately tired, though very happy, and Brand had lost a little of his haggard look and his nerve was steadier. But it was an uncomfortable moment for all of us when the manager came to the table and regretted with icy courtesy that their rooms would not be available another night owing to a previous arrangement which he had unfortunately overlooked.

“Nonsense!” said Brand, shortly. “I have taken these rooms for three nights, and I intend to stay in them.”

“It is impossible,” said the manager. “I must ask you to have your baggage packed by twelve o’clock.”

Brand dealt with him firmly.

“I am an English officer. If I hear another word from you I will call on the Provost Marshal and get him to deal with you.”

The manager bowed. This threat cowed him, and he said no more about a change of rooms. But Brand and his wife, and I, as their friend, suffered from a policy of passive resistance to our presence. The chambermaid did not answer their bell, having become strangely deaf.

The waiter was generally engaged at other tables whenever we wanted him. The hall porter turned his back upon us. The page-boys made grimaces behind our backs, as I saw very well in the gilt mirror, and as Elsa saw.

They took to having their meals out, Brand insisting always that I should join them, and we drove out to the Bois and had tea there in theChalet des Iles. It was a beautiful afternoon in September, and the leaves were just turning to crinkled gold and the lake was as blue as the cloudless sky above. Across the ferry came boatloads of young Frenchmen with their girls, singing, laughing, on this day of peace. Some of the men limped as they came up the steps from the landing-stage. One walked on crutches. Another had an empty sleeve. Under the trees they made love to their girls and fed them with rose-tinted ices.

“These people are happy,” said Elsa. “They have forgotten already the agony of war. Victory is healing. In Germany there is only misery.”

A little later she talked about the peace.

“If only theEntentehad been more generous in victory our despair would not be so great. Many of us, great multitudes, believed that the price of defeat would be worth paying because Germany would take a place among free nations and share in the creation of a nobler world. Now we are crushed by the militarism of nations who have used our downfall to increase their own power. The light of a new ideal which rose above the darkness has gone out.”

Brand took his wife’s hand and stroked it in his big paw.

“All this is temporary and the work of the old men steeped in the old traditions which led to war. We must wait for them to die. Then out of the agony of the world’s boyhood will come the new revelation.”

Elsa clasped her hands and leaned forward, looking across the lake in the Bois de Boulogne.

“I would like to live long enough to be sure of that,” she said, eagerly. “If we have children, my husband, perhaps they will listen to our tales of the war as Franz and I read about wolves and goblins in our fairy-tales. The fearfulness of them was not frightening, for we knew we were safe.”

“God grant that,” said Brand, gravely.

“But I am afraid!” said Elsa. She looked again across the lake, so blue under the sky, so golden in sunlight; and shivered a little.

“You are cold!” said Brand.

He put his arms about her as they sat side by side, and her head drooped upon his shoulder and she closed her eyes like a tired child.

They went to the opera that night and I refused their invitation to join them, protesting that they would never learn to know each other if a third person were always present. I slipped away to see Pierre Nesle, and found him at an office in a street somewhere off the Rue du Louvre, which was filled with young men whose faces I seemed to have seen before under blue shrapnel helmets above blue tunics. They were typewriting as though serving machine-guns, and folding up papers while they whistled the tune of “Madelon.” Pierre was in his shirtsleeves, dictating letters to apoiluin civil clothes.

“Considerable activity on the western front, eh?” he said when he saw me.

“Tell me all about it, Pierre.”

He told me something about it in a restaurant where we dined in the Rue du Marché St. Honoré. He was one of the organising secretaries of a society made up exclusively of young soldiers who had fought in the trenches. There was a sprinkling of intellectuals among them—painters, poets, novelists, journalists—but the main body were simple soldiers animated by one idea—to prevent another war by substituting the common-sense and brotherhood of peoples for the old diplomacy of secret alliances and the old tradition of powerful armies.

“How about the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations?” I asked.

Pierre Nesle shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.

“The Peace Treaty belongs to the Napoleonic tradition. We’ve got beyond that now. It is the programme that has carefully arranged another and inevitable war. Look at the world now! Look at France, Italy, Germany, Austria! We are all ruined together, and those most ruined will, by their disease and death, drag down Europe into general misery.Mon vieux, what has victory given to France! A great belt of devastated country, cemeteries crowded with dead youth, bankruptcy, and everything five times the cost of pre-war rates. Another such victory will wipe us off the map. We have smashed Germany, it is true, for a time. We have punished her women and children for the crimes of their war lords, but can we keep her crushed? Are our frontiers impregnable against the time when her people come back for revenge, smashing the fetters we have placed on them, and rising again in strength? For ten years, for twenty years, for thirty years perhaps, we shall be safe. And after that, if the heart of Europe does not change, if we do not learn wisdom from the horror that has passed, France will be ravaged again, and all that we have seen our children will see, and their suffering will be greater than ours, and they will not have the hope we had.”

He stared back into the past, not a very distant past, and I fancy that among the figures he saw was Marthe, his sister.

“What’s the remedy?” I asked.

“A union of democracy across the frontiers of hate,” he answered, and I think it was a phrase that he had written and learnt by heart.

“A fine phrase!” I said, laughing a little.

He flared up at me.

“It’s more than a phrase. It’s the heart-beat of millions in Europe.”

“In France?” I asked pointedly. “In the France of Clemenceau?”

“More than you imagine,” he answered, boldly. “Beneath our present Chauvinism, our natural exultation in victory, our inevitable hatred of the enemy, common-sense is at work, and an idealism higher than that. At present its voice is not heard. The old men are having their day. Presently the new men will arrive with the new ideas. They are here, but do not speak yet.”

“The old men again!” I said. “It is strange. In Germany, in France, in England, even in America, people are talking strangely about the old men as though they were guilty of all this agony. That is remarkable.”

“They were guilty,” said Pierre Nesle. “It is against the old men in all countries of Europe that youth will declare war. For it was their ideas which brought us to our ruin.”

He spoke so loudly that people in the restaurant turned to look at him. He paid his bill and spoke in a lower voice.

“It is dangerous to talk like this in public. Let us walk up the Champs Elysées, where I am visiting some friends.”

Suddenly a remembrance came back to him.

“Your friends, too,” he said.

“My friends?”

“But yes; Madame Chéri and Hélène. After Edouard’s death they could not bear to live in Lille.”

“Edouard, that poor boy who came back? He is dead?”

“He was broken by the prison life,” said Pierre. “He died within a month of armistice, and Hélène wept her heart out. He confided a secret to me. Hélène and he had come to love each other, and would marry when they could get her mother’s consent—or, one day, if not.”

“What’s her objection?” I asked. “Why, it’s splendid to think that Hélène and you will be man and wife. The thought of it makes me feel good.”

He pressed my arm and said, “Merci, mille fois, mon cher.”

Madame Chéri objected to his political opinions. She regarded them as poisonous treachery.

“And Hélène?”

I remembered that outburst, months back, when Hélène had desired the death of many German babies.

“Hélène loves me,” said Pierre simply. “We do not talk politics.”

On our way to the Avenue Victor Hugo I ventured to ask him a question which had been a long time in my mind “Your sister, Marthe? She is well?”

Even in the pearly twilight of the Champs Elysées I was aware of Pierre’s sudden change of colour. I had touched a nerve that still jumped.

“She is well and happy,” he answered gravely. “She is now areligieuse, a nun, in the convent at Lille. They tell me she is a saint. Her name in religion isSour Angélique.”

I called on Madame Chéri and her daughter with Pierre Nesle. They seemed delighted to see me, and Hélène greeted me like an old and trusted friend, giving me the privilege of kissing her cheek. She had grown taller and beautiful, and there was a softness in her eyes when she looked at Pierre which made me sure of his splendid luck.

Madame Chéri had aged, and some of her fire had burnt out. I guessed that it was due to Edouard’s death. She spoke of that, and wept a little, and deplored the mildness of the Peace Treaty which had not punished the evil race who had killed her husband and her boy and the flower of France.

“There are many German dead,” said Pierre. “They have been punished.”

“Not enough!” cried Madame Chéri. “They should all be dead.”

Hélène kissed her hand and snuggled down to her as once I had seen in Lille.

“Petite maman,” she said, “let us talk of happy things to-night. Pierre has brought us a good friend.”

Later in the evening, when Pierre and Hélène had gone into another room to find some biscuits for our wine, Madame Chéri spoke to me about their betrothal.

“Pierre is full of strange and terrible ideas,” she said. “They are shared by other young men who fought bravely for France. To me they seem wicked, and the talk of cowards, except that their medals tell of courage. But the light in Hélène’s eyes weakens me. I’m too much of a Frenchwoman to be stern with love.”

By those words of hers I was able to give Pierre a message of good-cheer when he walked back with me that night, and he went away with gladness.

With gladness also did Elsa Brand set out next day for England where, as a girl, she had known happy days, and where now her dream lived with the man who stood beside her. Together we watched for the white cliffs, and when suddenly the sun glinted on them she gave a little cry, and putting her hand through Brand’s arm, said, “Our home!”

Isaw very little of Brand in London after Elsa’s arrival in his parent’s house at Chelsea. I was busy, as usual, watching the way of the world and putting my nose down to bits of blank paper which I proceeded to spoil with futile words. Brand was doing the same thing in his study on the top floor of the house in Cheyne Walk, while Elsa, in true German style, was working embroidery or reading English literature to improve her mind and her knowledge of the language.

Brand was endeavouring strenuously to earn money enough to make him free of his father’s house. He failed, on the whole, rather miserably. He began a novel on the war, became excited with it for the first six chapters, then stuck hopelessly and abandoned it.

“I find it impossible,” he wrote to me, “to get the real thing into my narrative. It is all wooden, unnatural, and wrong. I can’t get the right perspective on paper, although I think I see it clear enough when I’m not writing. The thing is too enormous, the psychology too complicated for my power of expression. A thousand characters, four years of experience, come crowding into my mind, and I can’t eliminate the unessential and stick the point of my pen into the heart of truth. Besides, the present state of the world, to say nothing of domestic trouble, prevents anything like concentration... And my nerves have gone to hell.”

After the abandonment of his novel he took to writing articles for magazines and newspapers, some of which appeared, thereby producing some useful guineas. I read them and liked their strength of style and intensity of emotion. But they were profoundly pessimistic, and “the gloomy Dean,” who was prophesying woe, had an able seconder in Wickham Brand, who foresaw the ruin of civilisation and the downfall of the British Empire because of the stupidity of the world’s leaders and the careless ignorance of the multitudes. He harped too much on the same string, and I fancied that editors would soon begin to tire of his melancholy tune. I was right.

“I have had six articles rejected in three weeks,” wrote Brand. “People don’t want the truth. They want cheery insincerity. Well, they won’t get it from me, though I starve to death.... But it’s hard on Elsa. She’s having a horrible time, and her nerve is breaking. I wish to God I could afford to take her down to the country somewhere, away from spiteful females and their cunning cruelty. Have you seen any Christian charity about in this most Christian country? If so, send me word, and I’ll walk to it on my knees, from Chelsea.”

It was in a postscript to a letter about a short story he was writing that he wrote an alarming sentence.

“I think Elsa is dying. She gets weaker every day.” Those words sent me to Chelsea in a hurry. I had been too careless of Brand’s troubles, owing to my own pressure of work and my own fight with a nervous depression which was a general malady, I found, with most men back from the war.

When I rapped the brass knocker on the house in Cheyne Walk the door was opened by a different maid from the one I had seen on my first visit there. The other one, as Brand told me afterwards, had given notice because “she couldn’t abide them Huns” (meaning Elsa), and with her had gone the cook, who had been with Wickham’s mother for twenty years.

Brand was writing in his study upstairs when the new maid showed me in. Or, rather, he was leaning over a writing-block, with his elbows dug into the table and his face in his hands, while an unlighted pipe—his old trench pipe—lay across the inkpot.

“Thinking out a new plot, old man?” I asked cheerily.

“It doesn’t come,” he said. “My own plot cuts across my line of thought.”

“How’s Elsa?”

He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the door leading from his room.

“Sleeping, I hope.... Sit down and let’s have a yarn.”

We talked about things in general for a time. They were not very cheerful, anyhow. Brand and I were both gloomy souls just then, and knew each other too well to camouflage our views about the state of Europe and the “unrest” (as it was called) in England.

Then he told me about Elsa, and it was a tragic tale From the very first his people had treated her with a studied unkindness which had broken her nerve and spirit. She had come to England with a joyous hope of finding happiness and friendship with her husband’s family, and glad to escape from the sadness of Germany and the solemn disapproval of her own people, apart from Franz, who was devoted to her.

Her first dismay came when she kissed the hand of her mother-in-law, who drew it away as though she had been stung by a wasp, and when her movement to kiss her husband’s sister Ethel was repulsed by a girl who drew back icily and said, “How do you do?”

Even then she comforted herself a little with the thought that this coldness was due to English reserve, and that in a little while English kindness would be revealed. But the days passed with only unkindness.

At first Lady Brand and her daughter maintained a chilly silence towards Elsa, at breakfast, luncheon, and other meals, talking to each other brightly, as though she did not exist, and referring constantly to Wickham as “poor Wicky.” Ethel had a habit of reading out morsels from the penny illustrated papers, and often they referred to “another trick of the Huns” or “fresh revelations of Hun treachery.” At these times Sir Amyas Brand said “Ah!” in a portentous voice, but, privately, with some consciousness of decency, begged Ethel to desist from “controversial topics.” She “desisted” in the presence of her brother, whose violence of speech scared her into silence.

A later phase of Ethel’s hostility to Elsa was in the style of amiable enquiry. In a simple, childlike way, as though eager for knowledge, she would ask Elsa such questions as “Why the Germans boiled down their dead?”

“Why they crucified Canadian prisoners?”

“Was it true that German school children sang the Hymn of Hate before morning lessons?”

“Was it by order of the Kaiser that English prisoners were starved to death?”

Elsa answered all these questions by passionate denials. It was a terrible falsehood, she said, that the Germans had boiled down bodies for fats. On the contrary, they paid the greatest reverence to their dead, as her brother had seen in many cemeteries on the Western front. The story of the “crucified Canadians” had been disproved by the English intelligence officers after a special enquiry, as Wickham had told her. She had never heard the Hymn of Hate. Some of the English prisoners had been harshly treated—there were brutal commandants—but not deliberately starved. Not starved more than German soldiers, who had very little food during the last years of the war.

“But surely,” said Lady Brand, “you must admit, my dear, that Germany conducted this war with the greatest possible barbarity? Otherwise, why should the world call them Huns?”

Elsa said it was only the English who called the Germans

Huns, and that was for a propaganda of hatred which was very wicked.

“DoIlook like a Hun?” she asked, and then burst into tears.

Lady Brand was disconcerted by that sign of weakness.

“You mustn’t think us unkind, Elsa, but, of course, we have to uphold the truth.”

Ethel was utterly unmoved by Elsa’s tears, and, indeed, found a holy satisfaction in them.

“When the German people confess their guilt with weeping and lamentation the English will be first to forgive. Never till then.”

The presence of a German girl in the house seemed to act as a blight upon all domestic happiness. It was the cook who first “gave notice.” Elsa had never so much as set eyes upon that cross-eyed woman below-stairs who had prepared the family food since Wickham had sat in a high chair with a bib round his neck. But Mary, in a private interview with Lady Brand, stormy in its character, as Elsa could hear through the folding doors, vowed that she would not live in the same house with “one of those damned Germings.”

Lady Brand’s tearful protestations that Elsa was no longer German, being “Mr. Wickham’s wife,” and that she had repented sincerely of all the wrong done by the country in which she had unfortunately been born, did not weaken the resolution of Mary Grubb, whose patriotism had always been “above suspicion,” “which,” as she said, “I hope to remain so.” She went next morning, after a great noise of breathing and the descent of tin boxes, while Lady Brand and Ethel looked with reproachful eyes at Elsa as the cause of this irreparable blow.

The parlour-maid followed in a week’s time, on the advice of her young man, who had worked in a canteen of the Y.M.C.A. at Boulogne and knew all about German spies.

It was very awkward for Lady Brand, who assumed an expression of Christian martyrdom, and told Wickham that his rash act was bearing sad fruit, a mixed metaphor which increased his anger, as he told me, to a ridiculous degree.

He could see that Elsa was very miserable. Many times she wept when alone with him, and begged him to take her away to a little home of their own, even if it were only one room in the poorest neighbourhood. But Wickham was almost penniless, and begged her to be patient a little longer, until he had saved enough to fulfil their hope. There I think he was unwise. It would have been better for him to borrow money—he had good friends—rather than keep his wife in such a hostile atmosphere. She was weak and ill. He was alarmed at her increasing weakness. Once she fainted in his arms, and even to go upstairs to their rooms at the top of the house tired her so much that afterwards she would lie back in a chair, with her eyes closed, looking very white and worn. She tried to hide her ill-health from her husband, and when they were alone together she seemed gay and happy, and would have deceived him but for those fits of weeping at the unkindness of his mother and sister, and those sudden attacks of “tiredness” when all physical strength departed from her.

Her love for him seemed to grow with the weakness of her body. She could not bear him to leave her alone for any length of time, and while he was writing, sat near him, so that she might have her head against his shoulder or touch his hand, or kiss it. It was not conducive to easy writing or the invention of plots.

Something like a crisis happened after a painful scene in the drawing-room downstairs on a day when Brand had gone out to walk off a sense of deadly depression which prevented all literary effort.

Several ladies had come to tea with Lady Brand and Ethel, and they gazed at Elsa as though she were a strange and dangerous animal.

One of them, a thin and elderly schoolmistress, cross-questioned Elsa as to her nationality.

“I suppose you are Swedish, my dear?” she said sweetly.

“No,” said Elsa.

“Danish, then, no doubt?” continued Miss Clutter.

“I am German,” said Elsa.

That announcement had caused consternation among Lady Brand’s guests. Two of the ladies departed almost immediately. The others stayed to see how Miss Clutter would deal with this amazing situation.

She dealt with it firmly, and with the cold intelligence of a high schoolmistress.

“Howveryinteresting!” she said, turning to Lady Brand. “Perhaps your daughter-in-law will enlighten us a little about German psychology which we have found so puzzling. I should be so glad if she could explain to us how the German people reconcile the sinking of merchant ships, the unspeakable crime of theLusitaniawith any belief in God, or even with the principles of our common humanity. It is a mystery to me how the drowning of babies could be regarded as legitimate warfare by a people proud of their civilisation.”

“Perhaps it would be better to avoid controversy, dear Miss Clutter,” said Lady Brand, alarmed at the prospect of an “unpleasant” scene which would be described in other drawing-rooms next day.

But Miss Clutter had adopted Ethel’s method of enquiry. She so much wanted to know the German point of view. Certainly they must have a point of view.

“Yes, it would be so interesting to know!” said another lady.

“Especially if we could believe it,” said another.

Elsa had been twisting and re-twisting a little lace handkerchief in her lap. She was very pale, and tried to conceal a painful agitation from all these hostile and enquiring ladies.

Then she spoke to them in a low, strained voice.

“You will never understand,” she said. “You look out from England with eyes of hate, and without pity in your hearts. The submarine warfare was shameful. There were little children drowned on theLusitania, and women. I wept for them and prayed the dear God to stop the war. Did you weep for our little children and our women? They, too, were killed by sea warfare, not only a few, as on theLusitania, but thousands and tens of thousands. Your blockade closed us in with an iron ring. No ship could bring us food. For two years we starved on short rations and chemical foods. We were without fats and milk. Our mothers watched their children weaken and wither and die, because of the English blockade. Their own milk dried up within their breasts. Little coffins were carried down our streets day after day, week after week. Fathers and mothers were mad at the loss of their little ones. ‘We must smash our way through the English blockade!’ they said. The U-boat warfare gladdened them. It seemed a chance of rescue for the children of Germany. It was wicked. But all the war was wickedness. It was wicked of you English to keep up your blockade so long after Armistice, so that more children died and more women were consumptive, and men fainted at their work. Do you reconcile that with God’s good love? Oh, I find more hatred here in England than I knew even in Germany. It is cruel, unforgiving, unfair! You, are proud of your own virtue and hypocritical. God will be kinder to my people than to you, because now we cry out for His mercy, and you are still arrogant, with the name of God on your lips but a devil of pride in your hearts. I came here with my dear husband believing that many English would be like him, forgiving, hating cruelty, eager to heal the world’s broken heart. You are not like him. You are cruel and lovers of cruelty, even to one poor German girl who came to you for shelter with her English man. I am sorry for you. I pity you because of your narrowness. I do not want to know you.”

She stood up, swaying a little, with one hand on the mantelpiece, as afterwards she told her husband. She did not believe that she could cross the floor without falling. There was a strange dizziness in her head, and a mist before her eyes. But she held her head high and walked out of the drawing-room, and then upstairs. When Wickham Brand came back she was lying on her bed very ill. He sent for a doctor who was with her for half-an-hour.

“She is very weak,” he said. “No pulse to speak of. You will have to be careful of her—deuced careful.”

He gave no name to her illness. “Just weakness,” he said. “Run down like a worn-out clock. Nerves all wrong, and no vitality.”

He sent round a tonic which Elsa took like a child, and for a little while it seemed to do her good. But Brand was frightened because her weakness had come back.

I am glad now that I had an idea which helped Brand in this time of trouble and gave Elsa some weeks of happiness and peace. It occurred to me that young Harding was living alone in his big old country house near Weybridge, and would be glad and grateful, because of his loneliness, to give house-room to Brand and his wife. He had a great liking for Brand, as most of us had, and his hatred of Germany had not been so violent since his days in Cologne. His good nature, anyhow, and the fine courtesy which was the essential quality of his character, would make him kind to Elsa, so ill and so desperately in need of kindness. I was not disappointed. When I spoke to him over the telephone he said, “It will be splendid for me. This lonely house is getting on my nerves badly. Bring them down.”

I took them down in a car two days later. It was a fine autumn day with a sparkle in the air and a touch of frost on the hedgerows. Elsa, wrapped up in heavy rugs, lay back next to Brand, and a little colour crept back into her cheeks and brought back her beauty. I think a shadow lifted from her as she drove away from that house in Chelsea where she had dwelt with enmity among her husband’s people.

Harding’s house in Surrey was at the end of a fine avenue of beeches, glorious in their autumn foliage of crinkled gold. A rabbit scuttled across the drive as we came, and bobbed beneath the red bracken of the undergrowth.

“Oh,” said Elsa, like a child, “there is Peterkin! What a rogue he looks!”

Her eyes were bright when she caught sight of Harding’s house in the Elizabethan style of post-and-plaster splashed with scarlet where the Virginia creeper straggled on its walls.

“It is wonderfully English,” she said. “How Franz would love this place!”

Harding came down from the steps to greet us, and I thought it noble of him that he should kiss the girl’s hand when Brand said, “This is Elsa.” For Harding had been a Hun-hater—you remember his much-repeated phrase, “No good German but a dead German!”—and that little act was real chivalry to a woman of the enemy.

There was a great fire of logs burning in the open hearth in the hall, flinging a ruddy glare on the panelled walls and glinting on bits of armour and hunting trophies. Upstairs, also, Brand told me, there was a splendid fire in Elsa’s room, which had once been the room of Harding’s wife. It wanned Elsa not only in body but in soul. Here was an English welcome and kindness of thought. On her dressing-table there were flowers from Harding’s hot-houses, and she gave a little cry of pleasure at the sight of them for there had been no flowers in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. That night she was strong enough to come down to dinner, and looked very charming there at the polished board, fit only by candlelight, whose soft rays touched the gold of her hair.

“It is a true English home,” she said, glancing up at the panelled walls and at portraits of Harding’s people in old-fashioned costumes which hung there.

“A lonely one when no friends are here,” said Harding, and that was the only time he referred in any way to the wife who had left him.

That dinner was the last one which Elsa had sitting at table with us. She became very tired again. So tired that Brand had to carry her upstairs and downstairs, which he did as though she weighed no more than a child. During the day she lay on a sofa in the drawing-room, and Brand did no writing now nor any kind of work, but stayed always with his wife. For hours together he sat by her side, and she held his hand and touched his face and hair, and was happy in her love.

A good friend came to stay with them and brought unfailing cheerfulness. It was Charles Fortune who had come down at Harding’s invitation. He was as comical as ever, and made Elsa laugh with ripples of merriment while he satirised the world as he knew it, with shrewd and penetrating wit. He played the jester industriously to get that laughter from her, though sometimes she had to beg of him not to make her laugh so much because it hurt her. Then he played the piano late into the afternoon, until the twilight in the room faded into darkness except for the ruddy glow of the log fire, or after dinner in the evenings until Brand carried his wife to bed. He played Chopin best, with a magic touch, but Elsa liked him to play Bach and Schumann, and sometimes Mozart, because that brought back her girlhood in the days before the war.

So it was one evening when Brand sat on a low stool by the sofa on which Elsa lay, with her fingers playing in his hair or resting on his shoulder, while Fortune filled the room with melody.

Once or twice Elsa spoke to Brand in a low voice. I heard some of her words as I lay on a bearskin by the fire.

“I am wonderfully happy, my dear,” she said once, and Brand pulled her hand down and kissed it.

A little later she spoke again.

“Love is so much better than hate. Then why should people go to war?”

“God knows, my dear,” said Brand.

It was some time after that, when Fortune was playing softly, that I heard Elsa give a big, tired sigh and say the word “Peace!”

Charles Fortune played something of Beethoven’s now, with grand crashing chords which throbbed through the room as the last glow of the sunset flushed through the windows.

Suddenly Brand stirred on his stool, made an abrupt movement, then rose and gave a loud, agonising cry. Fortune stopped playing with a slur of notes. Harding leapt up from his chair in a dark corner and said, “Brand!... what’s the matter?”

Brand had dropped to his knees and was weeping with, his arms about his dead wife.

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