Imet Elsa and Franz von Kreuzenach at the house of Elizabeth von Detmold in the Hohenzollernring, which became a meeting-place for Brand and the girl to whom he was now betrothed. Dr. Small and I went round there to tea at Brand’s invitation, and I spent several evenings there owing to the friendship of Elizabeth von Detmold, who seemed to like my company. That lady was in many ways remarkable, and I am bound to say that in spite of my repugnance to many qualities of the German character I found her charming. The tragedy of the war had hit her with an almost particular malignancy. Married in 1914 to a young officer of the Prussian Guard, she was widowed at the first battle of Ypres. Her three brothers had been killed in 1915, ‘16 and ‘17. Both her parents had died during the war, owing to its accumulating horror. At twenty-six years of age she was left alone in her big house with hardly enough money for its upkeep, and not enough to supplement the rigid war rations which were barely sufficient for life. I suppose there were thousands of young women in Germany—hundreds of thousands—who had the same cause for sorrow (we do not realise how German families were massacred in that blood-bath of war, so that even French and British losses pale in tragedy before their piled dead), but there were few, I am sure, who faced their grief with such high courage and such unembittered charity. Like Elsa von Kreuzenach, she devoted her days to suffering childhood in thecrèchesand feeding-centres which she had helped to organise, and she spent many of her evenings in working-women’s clubs, and sometimes in working-men’s clubs, where she read and lectured to them on social problems. The war had made her an ardent pacifist, and, to some extent, a revolutionary of the Liebknecht school. She saw no hope for civilisation so long as the junker caste remained in Europe, and the philosophy of militarism, which she believed stood fast not only in Germany but in France and England, and other nations. She had a passionate belief, like many other German people at that time, in President Wilson and his League of Nations, and put all her hopes in the United States as the one power in the world who could make a peace of reconciliation and establish a new brotherhood of peoples. After that she looked to a social revolution throughout the world by which the working classes should obtain full control of their own destiny and labour.
I found it strange to hear that patrician girl, for she was one of the aristocratic caste, with an elegance that came from long breeding, adopting the extreme views of revolutionary socialism, not as a pretty intellectual theory, but with a pasisonate courage that might lead her to prison or to death in the conflict between the old powers and the new.
To Elsa von Kreuzenach she behaved in a protective and mothering way, and it seemed to me that “Brand’s girl,” as Dr. Small called her, was the spiritual child of this stronger and more vital character. Elsa, was, I fancy, timid of those political and pacifist ideas which Elizabeth von Detmold stated with such frank audacity. She cherished the spirit of the human charity which gave them their motive power, but shrank from the thought of the social strife and change which must precede them. Yet there was nothing doll-like in her character. There were moments when I saw her face illumined by a kind of mediaeval mysticism which was the light of a spirit revealed perhaps by the physical casket which held it, insecurely. Truly she was as pretty and delicate as a piece of Dresden china, but for Brand’s sake I did not like the fragile look which hinted at a quick fading of her flower-like beauty. Her adoration for Brand was, in my opinion, rather pitiful. It was very German, too, in its meek reverence, as of a mediaeval maid to knighthood. I prefer the way of French womanhood, convinced of intellectual equality with men, and with their abiding sense of humour; or the arrogance of the English girl, who makes her lover prove his mettle by quiet obedience. Elsa followed Brand with her eyes wherever he moved, touched his hard, tanned hand with little secret caresses, and whenever he spoke her eyes shone with gladness at the sound of his voice. I liked her better when she was talking to our little doctor or to myself, and, therefore, not absorbed in sentiment. At these times she was frank and vivacious, and, indeed, had an English way with her which no doubt she had learnt in her Brighton school.
Brand interested me intensely at these times. Sometimes I found myself doubting whether he was really so much in love with his German girl as he imagined himself to be. I noticed that he was embarrassed by Elsa’s public demonstrations of love—that way she had of touching his hand, and another trick of leaning her head against his shoulder. As a typical Englishman, in some parts of his brain at least, he shrank from exposing his affection. It seemed to me also that he was more interested in political and psychological problems than in the by-play of love’s glances and revealings. He argued long and deeply with Elizabeth von Detmold on the philosophy of Karl Marx, the anarchist movement in Berlin, and on the possibility of a Rhineland republic, which was then being advocated by a party in Cologne and Mainz whose watchword was “Los von Berlin!” and freedom from Prussian domination for the Rhine provinces. Even with Elsa he led the conversation to discussions about German mentality, the system of German education, and the possible terms of peace. Twice at least, when I was present, he differed with her rather bluntly—a little brutally, I thought—about the German administration of Belgium.
“Our people did no more than was allowed by the necessities of war,” said Elsa. “It was stern and tragic, but not more barbarous than what other nations would have done.”
“It was horrible, bloody, and unjustified,” said Brand.
“All war,” said Elizabeth von Detmold, “is bloody and unjustified. Directly war is declared the moral law is abrogated. It is simply the reign of devildom. Why pretend otherwise—or weaken the devilish logic by a few inconsistencies of sentiment?”
Brand’s answer to Elsa was not exactly lover-like. I saw the colour fade from her face at the harshness of his answer, but she leaned her head against his body (she was sitting by his side on a low stool), and was silent until her friend Elizabeth had spoken. Then she laughed, bravely, I thought.
“We differ in expression, but we all agree. What Wickham thinks is my thought. I hate to remember how Belgium suffered.”
Brand was utterly unconscious of his harsh way of speech and of his unconcealed acknowledgment of Elizabeth von Detmold’s intellectual superiority in her own drawing-room, so that when she spoke his interest was directed from Elsa to this lady.
“Daddy” Small was also immensely impressed by Frau von Detmold’s character, and he confessed to me that he made notes of her conversation every time he left her house.
“That woman,” he said, “will probably be a martyr for civilisation. I find myself so cussedly in agreement with her that when I go back to New York I shall probably hang a red flag out of my window and lose all my respectable patients. She has the vision of the future.”
“What about Brand and Elsa?” I asked, dragging him down to personalities.
He put his arm through mine as we walked down the Hohestrasse.
“Brand,” he said, in his shrewd way, “is combining martyrdom with romance—an unsafe combination. The pretty Elsa has lighted up his romantic heart because of her adoration and her feminine sentiment. I don’t blame him. At his age—after four years of war and exile—her gold-spun hair would have woven a web round my heart. Youth is youth, and don’t you forget it, my lad!”
“Where does the martyrdom come in?” I asked.
The little doctor blinked through his horn spectacles.
“Don’t you see it? Brand has been working out new ideals of life. After killing a good many German boys, as sniper and chief assassin of the XI. Corps, he wants to marry a German girl as a proclamation to the world that he—Wickham Brand—has done with hatred and is out for the brotherhood of man and the breaking down of the old frontiers. For that ideal he is going to sacrifice his reputation and make a martyr of himself—not forgetting that romance is pleasant and Elsa von Kreuzenach as pretty as a peach! Bless his heart, I admire his courage and his boyishness.”
Any doubt I had about the reality of Brand’s passion for Elsa was at least partly dispelled when he told me, a few nights later, of a tragic thing that had happened to both of them.
He came into my room at the “Domhof” as though he had just seen a ghost. And, indeed, it was a ghost that had frightened him and put a cold hand between him and Elsa.
“My dear old man!” I cried at the sight of him.
“What on earth has happened?”
“A damnable and inconceivable thing!”
I poured him out some brandy, and he drank it in gulps. Then he did a strange and startling thing. Fumbling in his breast-pocket, he pulled out a silver cigarette-case, and going over to the fireplace, dropped it into the blaze of the wood logs which I had had lighted because of the dampness of the room.
“Why do you do that?” I asked.
He watched the metal box blacken and then begin to melt. Several times he poked it so as to get it deeper into the red embers.
“My poor little Elsa!” he said in a pitiful way. “Mein hussches Madel!”
The story he told me later was astounding. Even now to people who were not in the war, who do not know how many strange, fantastic things happened in that wild nightmare, it will seem improbable and untrue. Indeed, I think the central fact was untrue, except as a subjective reality in the minds of Brand and Elsa.
It happened when they were sitting alone in Elizabeth von Detmold’s drawing-room. I fancy they must have been embracing each other, though Brand did not tell me that. Anyhow, Elsa put her hand into his breast-pocket and in a playful way pulled out his cigarette-case.
“May I open it?” she asked.
But she did not open it. She stared at a little monogram on its cover, and then began to tremble so that Brand was scared.
“What is the matter?” he said.
Elsa let the cigarette-case drop on to the carpet.
“That box!” she said, in an agonised voice. “Where did you find it?”
Brand remembered where he had found it, though he had not given a thought to it for more than two years. He had found it on a night in No Man’s Land out by the Bois Français, near Fricourt. He had been lying out there on the lip of a mine crater below a hummock of white chalk. Just before dawn a German patrol had crept out, and he had shot at them. One man dropped quite close to where Brand lay. After an hour, when dawn came with a thick white mist rising from the moist earth, Brand crawled over to the body and cut off its shoulder-straps for identification. It was the body of a young man, almost a boy, and Brand saw, with a thrill of satisfaction (it was his “tiger” time), that he had shot him clean through the heart. A good shot in the twilight of the dawn! He thrust his hands into the man’s pockets for papers, and found his pay-book and some letters, and a cigarette-case. With these he crawled back into his own trench. He remembered reading the letters. One was from the boy’s sister, lamenting the length of the war, describing the growing hunger of civilians in Germany, and saying how she prayed every night for her brother’s safety, and for peace. He had read thousands of German letters as an intelligence officer afterwards, but he remembered those because of the night’s adventure. He had handed them over to the adjutant, for headquarters, and had kept the cigarette-case, having lost his own. It had the monogram of “H. v. K.” He had never thought about it from that time to this. Now he thought about it with an intensity of remembrance.
Brand told Elsa von Kreuzenach that he had found the box in No Man’s Land.
“It is my brother Heinrich’s,” she cried. “I gave it to him.”
She drew back, shivering, from the cigarette-case—or was it from Brand? When she spoke next it was in a whisper: “Did you kill him?”
Brand lied to her, and she knew he was lying. She wept bitterly, and when Brand kissed her she was cold, and fainted in his arms.
That was Brand’s story, and it was incredible. Even now I cannot help thinking that such a coincidence could not have happened. There is plenty of room for doubt about that cigarette-case. It was of a usual pattern, plain, with a wreath engraved round a monogram. That monogram “H. v. K.” was astonishing in relation to Elsa von Kreuzenach, but there are thousands of Germans, I imagine, with the same initials. I know two, Hermann von Kranitz and Hans von Kurtheim. In a German directory I have found many other names with those initials. I refuse to believe that Brand should have gone straight to the house of that boy whom he had killed in No Man’s Land.
He believed it, and Elsa was sure of it. That was the tragedy, and the ghost of the girl’s dead brother stood between them now.
For an hour or more he paced up and down my room in an agony of mind, and none of my arguments would convince him or comfort him.
Several times he spoke one sentence which puzzled me.
“It makes no difference,” he said. “It makes no difference.”
I think he meant that it made no difference to his love or purpose. When one thinks over this incident one is inclined to agree with that view. He was no more guilty in killing Elsa’s brother, if he did, than in killing any other German. If their love were strong enough to cross over fields of dead, the fact that Elsa’s brother lay there, shot by Brand’s bullet, made, as he said, “no difference.” It only brought home more closely to two poor individuals the meaning of that world-tragedy.
Elsa, after her first shock of horror, argued that too, and at the beginning of March Brand and she stood at the altar together in a church at the end of the Hohenzollem Ring, and were made man and wife.
At the ceremony there were present Elizabeth von Detmold, Franz von Kreuzenach, Dr. Small, and myself, as Brand’s best man. There was, I think, another presence there, visible only to the minds of Brand and Elsa, and, strangely enough, to mine. As the bride and bridegroom stood together before the priest I had a most uncomfortable vision of the dead body of a German boy lying on the altar beyond them, huddled up as I had seen many grey figures in the mud of Flanders and Picardy. This idea was, of course, due to that war-neurosis which, as Dr. Small said, was the malady of the world. I think at one moment of the service Elsa and Brand felt some cold touch upon them, for they both looked round in a startled way. It may have been a draught stealing through the aisle.
We had tea at Elizabeth von Detmold’s house, and Brand and his wife were wonderfully self-controlled. They could not be happy beyond the sense of a spiritual union because Brand had been ordered by telegram to report at the War Office in London, and was leaving Cologne at four o’clock that afternoon, while Elsa was going home to her parents, who were ignorant of her marriage. Brand’s recall, I am convinced, had been engineered by his father, who was determined to take any step to prevent his son’s marriage with a German girl.
Young Harding was going with him, having been given his demobilisation papers, and being desperately anxious, as I have told, to get home. It was curious that Brand should be his fellow-traveller that night, and I thought of the contrast of their journey, one man going to his wife with eager gladness, the other man leaving his wife after a few hours of marriage.
At the end poor Elsa clung to her husband with most passionate grief and, without any self-consciousness now, because of the depth of his emotion, Brand, with tears in his eyes, tenderly embraced her. She walked back bravely with her brother to her mother’s house, while Brand and I raced to the station where his orderly was waiting with his kit.
“See you again soon,” said Brand, gripping my hand.
“Where?” I asked, and he answered gloomily: “God knows.”
It was not on the Rhine. There was a general exodus of all officers who could get “demobbed” on any claim or pretext, the small Army of Occupation settled down to a routine life without adventure, and the world’s interest shifted to Paris, where the fate of Europe was being settled by a company of men with the greatest chance in history. I became a wanderer in a sick world.
Those of us who had been in exile during the years of war and now returned to peace found that England had changed in our absence. We did not know this new England. We did not understand its spirit or its people. Nor did they understand the men who came back from the many fronts of war, by hundreds of thousands, now that demobilisation had become a spate after murmurings that were loud with the menace of revolt from men who had been long patient.
These “revenants,” the men who came back out of the terror, were so many Rip van Winkles (of a youthful kind), looking round for the companions of their boyhood, going to old places, touching old stones, sitting by the same fireside, but with a sense of ghostliness. A new generation had arrived since 1914. The children had become boys and girls; the girls had grown into womanhood precociously. There were legions of “flappers” in London and other big cities, earning good wages in Government offices and factories, spending most of their money on the adornment of their prettiness, self-reliant, audacious, out for the fun of life, and finding it. The tragedy of the war had not touched them. It had been a great “lark” to them. They accepted the slaughter of their brothers or their fathers light-heartedly, after a few bursts of tears and a period of sentiment in which pride was strongest. They had grown up to the belief that a soldier is generally killed or wounded, and that he is glad to take the risk, or, if not, ought to be, as part of the most exciting and enjoyable game of war. Women had filled many of the jobs which formerly were the exclusive possession of men, and the men coming back looked at these legions of women clerks, tram conductors, ticket collectors, munition workers, plough-girls, and motor drivers with the brooding thought that they, the men, had been ousted from their places. A new class had arisen out of the whirlpool of social upheaval. The profiteers, in a large way of business, had prospered exceedingly out of the supply and demand of massacre. The profiteer’s wife clothed herself in furs and jewels. The profiteer’s daughters were dancing by night and sleeping by day. The farmers and the shopkeepers had made a good thing out of war. They liked war so long as they were untouched by air-raids or not afflicted by boys who came back blind or crippled. They had always been optimists. They were optimists now, and claimed a share in the merit of the victory that had been won by the glorious watchword of “business as usual.” They hoped the terms of peace would be merciless upon the enemy, and they demanded the Kaiser’s head as a pleasant sacrifice adding spice to the great banquet of victory celebrations.
Outwardly, England was gay and prosperous and light-spirited. It was only by getting away from the seething crowds in the streets, from the dancing crowds, and the theatre crowds, and the shopping crowds, that men came face to face with private and hidden tragedy. In small houses or big, there were women who had lost their men and were listless and joyless, the mothers of only sons who did not come back with the demobilised tide, and the sweethearts of boys who would never fulfil the promise that had given hope in life to lonely girlhood. There was a new rich, but there was also a new poor, and people on small fixed incomes or with little nest-eggs of capital on which they scraped out life found themselves reduced to desperate straits by the soaring of prices and the burden of taxation. Underneath the surface joy of a victorious people there was bitterness to which victory was a mockery and a haggard grief at the cost of war in precious blood. But the bitterness smouldered without any flame of passion, and grief nagged at people’s hearts silently.
Many of the men who came back were in a strange mood—restless, morbid, neurotic. Their own people did not understand them. They could not understand themselves. They had hated war, most of them, but this peace seemed flat and unprofitable to their souls. All purpose and meaning seemed suddenly to have gone out of life. Perhaps it was the narrowness of English home-life. Men who had travelled to far places of the world, who had seen the ways of foreign people, and had been part of a great drama, found themselves back again in a little house, closed in and isolated by the traditions of English individualism, so that often the next-door neighbour is a stranger. They had a sense of being suffocated. They could not stay indoors with the old pleasure in a pipe or a book by the fireside or a chat with mother or wife. Often they would wander out on the chance of meeting some of the “old pals,” or, after a heavy sigh, say, “Oh, God!... let’s go to a theatre or a ‘movie’ show!” The theatres were crammed with men seeking distraction, yet bored with their pleasures and relapsing into a deeper moodiness afterwards. Wives complained that their husbands had “changed.” Their characters had hardened and their tempers were frayed, so that they were strangely irritable and given to storms of rage about nothing at all. It was frightening.... There was an epidemic of violence and of horrible sensual crimes with women victims, ending often in suicide. There were mob riots by demobilised soldiers or soldiers still waiting in camps for demobilisation. Police stations were stormed and wrecked and policemen killed by bodies of men who had been heroes in the war and now fought like savages against their fellow-citizens. Some of them pleaded guilty in court and made queer statements about an utter ignorance of their own actions after the disorder had begun. It seemed as though they had returned to the psychology of that war when men, doped with rum, or drunk with excitement, had leapt over the parapet and remembered nothing more of a battle until they found themselves panting in an enemy trench or lying wounded on a stretcher. It was a dangerous kind of psychology in civil life.
Labourers back at work in factories or mines or railway stations or dockyards, after months or years of the soldier-life, did not return to their old conditions or their old pay with diligence and thankfulness. They demanded higher wages to meet the higher cost of life and after that a margin for pleasure, and after that shorter hours for higher pay and less work in shorter hours. If their demands were not granted they downed tools and said: “What about it?” Strikes became frequent and general, and at a time when the cost of war was being added up to frightful totals of debt which could only be reduced by immense production the worker slacked off, or suspended his labours, and said: “Who gets the profits of my sweat?... I want a larger share.” He was not frightened of a spectre that was scaring all people of property and morality in the Western world. The spectre of Bolshevism, red-eyed, dripping with blood, proclaiming anarchy as the new gospel, did not cause a shiver to the English working man. He said, “What has Russia to do with me? I’m English. I have fought this war to save England, I have done the job; now then, where’s my reward?”
Men who looked round for a living while they lived on an unemployment dole that was not good enough for their new desires became sullen when they returned home night after night with the same old story of “Nothing doing.” The women were still clinging to their jobs. They had earned their independence by good work in war-time. They hated the thought of going back to little homes to be household drudges, dependent for pocket-money on father and brothers. They had not only tasted liberty; they had made themselves free of the large world. They had proved their quality and strength. They were as good as men, and mostly better. Why should they slink back to the little narrow rut of life? But the men said, “Get out. Give us back our jobs.”
It was hard on the officer boys—hardest of all on them. They had gone straight from school to the war, and had commanded men twice as old as themselves and drawn good pay for pocket-money as first lieutenants, captains, even majors of air squadrons and tank battalions. They had gained immense experience in the arts and crafts of war, and that experience was utterly useless in peace.
“My dear young man,” said the heads of prosperous businesses who had been out to “beat the Boche,” even though they sacrificed their only sons or all their sons (with heroic courage!), “you have been wasting your time. You have no qualifications whatever for a junior clerkship in this office. On the contrary, you have probably contracted habits of idleness and inaccuracy which would cause a lot of trouble. This vacancy is being filled by a lad who has not been vitiated by military life, and has nothing to unlearn. Good-morning!”
And the young officers, after a statement like that, went home with swear-words learnt in Flanders, and said: “That’s the reward of patriotism, eh? Well, we seem to have been fooled pretty badly. Next time we shan’t be so keen to strew the fields of death with our fresh little corpses.”
These words, all this murmur from below, did not reach those who sat in high places. They were wonderfully complacent, except when outbreaks of violence or the cessation of labour shocked them with a sense of danger. They arranged peace celebrations before the peace, victory marches when the fruits of victory were as bitter as Dead Sea fruit in the mouths of those who saw the ruin of the world; and round a council table in Paris statesmen of Europe abandoned all the ideals for which the war had been fought by humble men and killed the hopes of all those who had looked to them as the founders of a new era of humanity and common sense.
It was when the Peace Treaty had been signed, but not ratified by the representatives of Germany and Austria, that I met some of the friends with whom I had travelled along many roads of war or had met in scenes which already seemed far back in history. In London, after a journey to America, I came again in touch with young Harding, whom I had seen last on his way home to his pretty wife, who had fretted at his long absence, and Charles Fortune, whose sense of humour had made me laugh so often in the time of tragedy. Those were chance meetings in the eddies of the great whirlpool of London life, as I saw other faces, strange for a moment or two, until the difference between a field-cap and a bowler hat, a uniform and civil clothes, was wiped out by a look of recognition and the sound of a remembered voice.
Not by chance but by a friendship which had followed me across the world with written words, I found myself once more in the company of Wickham Brand, and with him went again to spend some evenings with Eileen O’Connor, who was now home in Kensington, after that grim drama which she had played so long in Lille.
With “Daddy” Small I had been linked up by a lucky chain of coincidences which had taken us both to New York at the same time and brought us back to Europe on the same boat, which was the White Star linerLapland.
My chance meeting with Harding led to a renewal of friendship which was more of his seeking than mine, though I liked him a good deal. But he seemed to need me, craving sympathy, which I gave with sincerity, and companionship, which I could not give so easily, being a busy man.
It was on the night when London went mad because of peace, though not so mad, I was told, as on the night of armistice. It all seemed mad to me when I was carried like a straw in a raging torrent of life which poured down the Strand, swirled round Trafalgar Square, and choked all channels westwards and eastwards of Piccadilly Circus. The spirit of London had broken bounds. It came wildly from mean streets in the slum quarters to the heart of the West End. The worst elements had surged up and mingled with the middle-class folk and those who claim exclusiveness by the power of wealth. In ignorance that all barriers of caste were to be broken that night, “society” women, as they are called, rather insolent in their public display of white shoulders and diamonds and furs, set out in motor cars for hotels and restaurants which had arranged peace dinners and peace dances. Some of them, I saw, were unaccompanied by their own men, whom they were to meet later, but the vacant seats in their open cars were quickly filled by soldiers, seamen, or merry devils in civil clothes who climbed over the backs of the cars when they were brought to a standstill in the crush of vast crowds. Those uninvited guests, some of them wearing women’s bonnets, most of them fluttering with flags pinned to their coats, all of them provided with noisemaking instruments, behaved with ironical humour to the pretty ladies, touched their coiled hair with “ticklers,” blew loud blasts on their toy trumpets, delivered cockney orations to them for the enjoyment of the crowds below. Some of the pretty ladies accepted the situation with courage and good humour, laughing with shrill mirth at their grotesque companions. Others were frightened and angry. I saw one girl try to beat off the hands of men clambering about her car. They swarmed into it and paid no heed to her cries of protest....
All the flappers were out in the Strand and in Trafalgar Square and many streets. They were factory girls, shop girls, office girls, and their eyes were alight with adventure and a pagan ecstasy. Men teased them as they passed with the long “ticklers,” and they, armed with the same weapon, fought duels with these aggressors, and then fled, and were pursued into the darkness of side-streets, where they were caught and kissed. Soldiers in uniform, English, Scots, Canadians, Australians, came lurching along in gangs, arm in arm, then mingled with the girls, changed headgear with them, struggled and danced and stampeded with them. Seamen, three sheets in the wind, steered an uneven course through this turbulent sea of life, roaring out choruses, until each man had found a maid for the dance of joy.
London was a dark forest with nymphs and satyrs at play in the glades and Pan stamping his hoofs like a giddy goat. All the passions let loose by war, the breaking down of old restraints, the gladness of youth at escape from death, provided the motive-power, unconscious and primitive, behind this carnival of the London crowds. From some church a procession came into Trafalgar Square, trying to make a pathway through the multitude. A golden cross was raised high, and clergymen in surplices, with acolytes and faithful women, came chanting solemn words. The crowd closed about them. A mirthful sailor teased the singing women with his “tickler.” Loud guffaws, shrill laughter, were in the wake of the procession, though some men stood to attention as the cross passed, and others bared their heads, and something hushed the pagan riot a moment.
At the windows in Pall Mall men in evening clothes who had been officers in the world-war sat by the pretty women who had driven through the crowds, looking out on the noisy pageant of the street. A piano-organ was playing, and two young soldiers danced with ridiculous grace, imitating the elegance and languorous ecstasy of society dancers. One of them wore a woman’s hat and skirt, and was wonderfully comic.
I stood watching them, a little stupefied by all the noise and tumult of this “Peace” night, and with a sense of tragic irony, remembering millions of boys who lay dead in quiet fields and the agony of many peoples in Europe. It was then that I saw young Harding. He was sitting in his club window just above the dancing soldiers and looking out with a grave and rather woe-begone face, remarkable in contrast with the laughing faces of fellow-clubmen and their women. I recognised him after a moment’s query in my mind, and said: “Hulloa, Harding!”
He stared at me, and I saw the sudden dawning of remembrance.
“Come in,” he answered. “I had no idea you were back again!”
So I went into his club and sat by his side at the open window, glad of this retreat from the pressure and tumult of the mob below.
He talked conventionally for a little while, and asked me whether I had had “a good time” in the States, and whether I was busy, and why the Americans seemed so hostile to President Wilson. I understood from him that he approved of the Peace Treaty and was glad that Germany and Austria had been “wiped off the map” as far as it was humanly possible.
We chatted like that for what I suppose was something more than half an hour, while we looked out upon the seething multitude in the street below, when suddenly the boy’s mask fell from him, so abruptly and with such a naked revelation of a soul in anguish that concealment was impossible.
I saw him lean forward with his elbows on the windowsill and his hands clenching an iron bar. His face had become like his shirt front, almost as white as that. A kind of groan came from him, like that of a man badly wounded. The people on either side of him turned to look at him, but he was unconscious of them, as he stared at something in the street. I followed the direction of his eyes and guessed that he was looking at a motor-car which had been stopped by the crowd, who were surging about it. It was an open car, and inside were a young man and woman in fancy dress as Pierrot and Columbine. They were standing up and pelting the crowd with long coloured streamers, which the mob caught and tossed back again with shouts of laughter. The girl was very pretty, with an audacious little face beneath the white sugar-loaf cap, and her eyes were on fire. Her companion was a merry-eyed fellow, dean-shaven and ruddy-faced (for he had not chalked it to Pierrot’s whiteness), and looked to me typical of a naval officer or one of our young airmen. I could see nothing to groan about in such a sight.
“What’s wrong, Harding?”
I touched him on the elbow, for I did not like him to give himself away before the other company in the window-seat.
He rose at once, and walked in a stumbling way across the room, while I followed. The room was empty where we stood.
“Aren’t you well?” I asked.
He laughed in a most tragic way.
“Did you see those two in the car, Pierrot and Columbine?”
I nodded.
“Columbine was my wife. Pierrot is now her husband. Funny, isn’t it?”
My memory went back to that night in Cologne, less than six months before, when Harding had asked me to use my influence to get him demobilised, and as an explanation of his motive opened his pocket-book and showed me the photograph of a pretty girl, and said, “That’s my wife;... she is hipped because I have been away so long.” I felt enormously sorry for him.
“Come and have a whisky in the smoke-room,” said Harding. “I’d like a yarn, and we shall be alone.”
I did not want him to tell me his tale. I was tired of tragic history. But I could not refuse. The boy wanted to unburden himself. I could see that, though for quite a time after we had sat on each side of the wood fire he hesitated in getting to the point and indulged in small talk about his favourite brand of cigars and my evil habit of smoking the worst kind of cigarettes.
Suddenly we plunged into what were the icy waters of his real thoughts.
“About my wife... I’d like you to know. Others will tell you, and you’d have heard already if you hadn’t been away so long. But I think you would get a wrong notion from others. The fact is, I don’t blame Evelyn. I would like you to understand that. I blame the Germans for everything.”
“The Germans?”
That was a strange statement, and I could not see the drift of it until he explained his meaning.
“The Germans made the war, and the war took me away from Evelyn just after our marriage.... Imagine the situation, a kid of a girl, wanting to be merry and bright, eager for the fun of life, and all that, left alone in a big old house in the country, or when she got fed up with that in a big gloomy house in town. She got fed up with both pretty quick. I used to get letters from her—every day for a while—and she used to say in every one of them, ‘I’m fed up like Billy-O.’ That was her way of putting it, don’t you know, and I got scared. But what could I do out there except write and tell her to try and get busy with something? Well, she got busy all right!”
Harding laughed again in his woeful way, which was not good to hear. Then he became angry and passionate, and told me it was all the fault of “those damned women.”
I asked him what “damned women,” and he launched into a wild denunciation of a certain set of women—most of the names he mentioned were familiar to me from full-length portraits in theSketchandTatler—who had spent the years of war in organising fancy bazaars, charity matinées, private theatricals for Red Cross funds, “and all that,” as Harding remarked in his familiar phrase. He said they were rotten all through, utterly immoral, perfectly callous of all the death and tragedy about them, except in a false, hysterical way at times.
“They were ghouls,” he said.
Many of them had married twice, three times, even more than that, before the boys who were killed were cold in their graves. Yet those were the best, with a certain respect for convention. Others had just let themselves go. They had played the devil with any fellow who came within their circle of enticement, if he had a bit of money, or could dance well, or oiled his hair in the right way.
“They corrupted English society,” said Harding, “while they smiled and danced, and dressed in fancy clothes, and posed for their photos in the papers. It was they who corrupted Evelyn when the poor kid was fighting up against her loneliness and very hipped, and all that.”
“Who was the man?” I asked, and Harding hesitated before he told me. It was with frightful irony that he answered: “The usual man in most of these cases, the man who is often one’s best pal. Damn him!”
Harding, seemed to repent of that curse; at least, his next words were strangely inconsistent.
“Mind you, I don’t blame him, either. It was I who sent him to Evelyn. He was in the Dragoons with me, and when he went home on leave I said, ‘Go and cheer up my little wife, old man. Take her to a theatre or two, and all that. She’s devilishly lonely.’ Needless to say, he fell in love with her. I might have known it. As for Evelyn, she was immensely taken with young Dick. He was a bit of a humorist and made her laugh. Laughter was a devilish good thing in war-time. That was where Dick had his pull. I might have knownthat!I was a chuckle-headed idiot.”
The end of the story was abrupt, and at the time I found it hard to find extenuating circumstances in the guilt of the girl who had smashed this boy Harding. She lied to him up to the very moment of his demobilisation; at least, she gave him no clue to her purpose until she hit him, as it were, full in the face with a mortal blow to his happiness.
He had sent her a wire with the one word “Demobilised,” and then had taken the next train back and a cab from Charing Cross to that house of his at Rutland Gate.
“Is the mistress well?” he had asked one of the maids when his kit was handled in the hall.
“The mistress is out, sir,” said the maid, and he remembered afterwards that she looked queerly at him, with a kind of pity.
There was the usual note waiting for him. Evelyn was “very sorry.” She hated causing her husband the grief she knew he would feel, but she and Dick could not do without each other. The war had altered everything, and many wives to many husbands. She hoped Harding would be happy after a bit....
Harding was not happy. When he read that note he went a little mad, and roamed round London with an automatic pistol, determined to kill his former friend if he could set eyes on him. Fortunately, he did not find him. Evelyn and Dick had gone off to a village in Devonshire, and after three days with murder in his heart Harding had been very ill and had gone into a nursing-home. There, in his weakness, he had, he told me, “thought things out.” The result of his meditations amounted to no more than the watchword of many people in years of misery: “C’est la guerre!”
It was the war which had caused his tragedy. It had put too great a strain on human nature, or at least on human nerves and morals. It had broken down the conventions and traditions of civilised life. The Germans had not only destroyed many towns and villages, but many homes and hearts far from the firing-line. They had let the devil loose.
“Quite a number of my pals,” said Harding, “are in the same boat with me. They either couldn’t stick their wives, or their wives couldn’t stick them. It gives one a sense of companionship!”
He smiled in a melancholy way, but then confessed to loneliness—so many of his real pals had gone west—and asked whether he could call on me now and then. It was for that reason that he came to my house fairly often, and sometimes Fortune, who came too at times, made him laugh, as in the old days.