I met Elsa and Franz von Kreuzenach at the house of Elizabeth von Detmold in the Hohenzollern ring, 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 helpedto 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 passionate 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. Therewere moments when I saw her face illumined by a kind of mediæval 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 mediæval 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 inBerlin, 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 Frauvon 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 golden-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 11th 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 passionfor 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 hübsches Mädel!”
The story he told me later was astounding. Even now to people who were not in the war, who do not know 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 littlemonogram 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 fromthat 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 Hohenzollern 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 hermarriage. 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.
BOOK THREE: BUILDERS OF PEACE
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 whichpride 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 shop-keepers 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 thepromise 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 tostorms 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 dock-yards, 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 isbeing 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 commonsense.
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 noise-making 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 head-gear 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 theCross 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 woebegone 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 window-sill 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, clean-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 air men. 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 whiskey 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 was 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 meaway 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 woful 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 hehad 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 always 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 devilish 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 humourist 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 cabfrom 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 bundled into 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 to 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.
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 herowas 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 withopen sights for four hours. 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 Mürger’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 State 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 has 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 shown 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, buthe’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 know 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 withour 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 Lilliputians. 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 towhich 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 ofNations 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 darky 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 womenjoined 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 those 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 good-will 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 writingman, 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 Good-will. 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 liesleading 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 programme....
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 good-will 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 hummedthe 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, humourous 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.