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