humorous way.
“Where is it now?” asked the little doctor.
“Besides,” said Brand, “I had that letter to Franz von Kreuzenach in my
pocket. I don’t mind telling you I detested the fellow for his infernal
impudence in making love to you.”
“Sure now, it was a one-sided affair, entirely,” said Eileen,
exaggerating her Irish accent, “but one has to be polite to a gentleman
that saves one’s life on account of a romantic passion. Oh, Wickham,
it’s very English you are!”
Brand could find nothing to say for himself, and it was I who came to
the rescue of his embarrassment by dragging a red herring across the
thread of Eileen’s discourse. She had a wonderful way of saying things
that on most girls’ lips would have seemed audacious, or improper, or
‘high-falutin’, but on hers were natural with a simplicity which shone
through her.
Her sense of humour played like a light about her words, yet beneath her
wit was a tenderness and a knowledge of tragic things. I remember some
of her sayings that night at dinner, and they seemed to me very good
then, though when put down they lose the deep melody of her voice and
the smile or sadness of her dark eyes.
“England,” she said, “fought the war for liberty and the rights of small
nations, but said to Ireland, ‘Hush, keep quiet there, damn you, or
you’ll make us look ridiculous.’”
“Irish soldiers,” she said, “helped England to win all her wars, but
mostly in Scottish regiments. When the poor boys wanted to carry an
Irish flag, Kitchener said, ‘Go to hell,’ and some of them went to
Flanders... and recruiting stopped with a snap.”
“Now, how do you know these things?” asked “Daddy” Small. “Did Kitchener
go to Lille to tell you?”
“No,” said Eileen, “but I found some of the Dublin boys in the prison at
Lille, and they told the truth before they died, and perhaps it was that
which killed them. That and starvation and German brutality.”
“I believe you’re a Sinn Feiner,” said Dr. Small. “Why don’t you go to
Ireland and show your true colours, ma’am?”
“I’m Sinn Fein all right,” said Eileen, “but I hated the look of a white
wall in Lille, and there are so many white walls in the little green
isle. So I’m stopping in Kensington and trying to hate the English, but
can’t because I love them.”
She turned to Wickham and said: “Will you take me for a row in
Kensington Gardens the very next day the sun shines?”
“Rather!” said Wickham, “on one condition!’
“And that?”
“That you’ll be kind to my little Elsa when she comes.”
“I’ll be a mother to her,” said Eileen, “but she must come quick or I’ll
be gone.”
“Gone?”
Wickham spoke with dismay in his voice. I think he had counted on Eileen
as his stand-by when Elsa would need a friend in England.
“Hush now!” said “Daddy” Small. “It’s my secret, you wicked lady with
black eyes and a mystical manner.”
“Doctor,” said Eileen, “your own President rebukes you. ‘Open covenants
openly arrived at--weren’t those his words for the new diplomacy?”
“Would to God he had kept to them,” said the little doctor, bitterly,
launching into a denunciation of the Peace Conference until I cut him
short with a question.
“What’s this secret, Doctor?”
He pulled out his pocket-book with an air of mystery.
“We’re getting on with the International League of Goodwill,” he said.
“It’s making more progress than the League of Nations. There are names
here that are worth their weight in gold. There are golden promises
which by the grace of God----”
“Daddy” Small spoke solemnly--“will be fulfilled by golden deeds.
Anyhow, we’re going to get a move on--away from hatred towards charity,
not for the making of wounds but for the healing, not punishing the
innocent for the sins of the guilty, but saving the innocent--the Holy
Innocents--for the glory of life. Miss Eileen and others are going to
be the instruments of the machinery of mercy, rather, I should say, the
spirit of humanity.”
“With you as our gallant leader,” said Eileen, patting his hand.
“It sounds good,” said Brand. “Let’s hear some more.”
Dr. Small told us more in glowing language, and in Biblical utterance
mixed with American slang like Billy Sunday’s Bible. He was profoundly
moved. He was filled with hope and gladness, and with a humble pride
because his efforts had borne fruit.
The scheme was simple. From his friends in the United States he had
promises, as good as gold, of many millions of American dollars. From
English friends he had also considerable sums. With this treasure he
was going to Central Europe to organise relief on a big scale for the
children who were starving to death. Eileen O’Connor was to be his
private secretary and assistant-organiser. She would have heaps of work
to do, and she had graduated in the prisons and slums of Lille. They
were starting in a week’s time for Warsaw, Prague, Buda-Pesth and
Vienna.
“Then,” said Brand, “Elsa will lose a friend.”
“Bring her, too,” said Eileen. “There’s work for all.”
Brand was startled by this, and a sudden light leapt into his eyes.
“By Jove!... But I’m afraid not. That’s impossible.”
So it was only a week we had with Eileen, but in that time we had some
good meetings and merry adventures. Brand and I rowed her on the lake in
Kensington Gardens, and she told us Irish fairy-tales as she sat in the
stem with her hat in her lap, and the wind playing in her brown hair.
We took her to the Russian Ballet and she wept a little at the beauty of
it.
“After four years of war,” she said, “beauty is like water to a parched
soul. It’s so exquisite it hurts.”
She took us one day into the Carmelite Church at
Kensington, and Brand and I knelt each side of her, feeling sinners with
a saint between us. And then, less like a saint, she sang ribald little
songs on the way to her mother’s house in Holland Street, and said “Drat
the thing!” when she couldn’t find her key to unlock the door.
“Sorry, Biddy my dear,” she said to the little maidservant who opened
the door. “I shall forget my head one day.”
“Sure, Miss Eileen,” said the girl, “but never the dear heart of you, at
all, at all.”
Eileen’s mother was a buxom, cheery, smiling Irishwoman who did not
worry, I fancy, about anything in the world, and was sure of heaven.
Her drawing-room was littered with papers and novels, some of which she
swept off the sofa with a careless hand.
“Won’t you take a seat then?”
I asked her whether she had not been anxious about her daughter when
Eileen was all those years under German rule.
“Not at all,” said the lady. “I knew our dear Lord was as near to Lille
as to London.”
Two of her boys had been killed in the war, “fighting,” she said, “for
an ungrateful country which keeps its heel on the neck of Ireland,”
and two were in the United States, working for the honour of Ireland on
American newspapers. Eileen’s two sisters had married during the war and
between them had given birth to four Sinn Feiners. Eileen’s father had
died a year ago, and almost his last word had been her name.
“The dear man thought all the world of Eileen,” said Mrs. O’Connor. “I
was out of it entirely when he had, her by his side.”
“You’ll be lonely,” said Brand, “when your daughter goes abroad again.”
Eileen answered him.
“Oh, you can’t keep me back by insidious remarks like that! Mother
spends most of her days in church, and the rest of them reading naughty
novels which keep her from ascending straight to heaven without the
necessity of dying first. She is never lonely because her spirit is in
touch with those she loves, in this world or the other. And isn’t that
the truth I’m after talking, mother o’ mine!”
“I never knew more than one O’Connor who told the truth yet,” said the
lady, “and that’s yourself, my dear. And it’s a frightening way you have
with it that would scare the devil out of his skin.”
They were pleasant hours with Eileen, and when she went away from
Charing Cross one morning with Dr. Small, five hospital nurses and two
Americans of the Red Cross, I wished with all my heart that Wickham
Brand had asked her and not Elsa von Kreuzenach to be his wife. That was
an idle wish, for the next morning Brand and I crossed over to France,
and on the way to Paris my friend told me that the thought of meeting
Elsa after those months of separation excited him so that each minute
seemed an hour. And as he told me that he lit a cigarette and I saw that
his hand was trembling, because of this nervous strain.
VI
We met Elsa at the Gare de l’Est in Paris the evening after our
arrival. Brand’s nervous anxiety had increased as the hour drew near,
and he smoked cigarette after cigarette while he paced up and down the
_Salle d’Attente_ as far as he could for the crowds which surged there.
Once he spoke to me about his apprehensions.
“I hope to God this will work out all right.... I’m only thinking of her
happiness.”
Another time he said: “This French crowd would tear her to pieces if
they knew she was German.”
While we were waiting we met a friend of old times. I was first to
recognise Pierre Nesle, who had been attached to us as interpreter and
_liaison_ officer. He was in civil clothes and was wearing a bowler
hat and a light overcoat, so that his transformation was astonishing. I
touched him on the arm as he made his way quickly through the crowd, and
he turned sharply and stared at me as though he could not place me at
all. Then a look of recognition leapt into his eyes and he grasped both
my hands delightedly. He was still thin and pale, but some of his old
melancholy had gone out of his eyes and in its place there was an eager,
purposeful look.
“Here’s Brand,” I said. “He’ll be glad to see you again.”
“_Quelle chance!_” exclaimed Pierre, and he made a dash for his friend
and before Brand could remonstrate kissed him on both cheeks. They had
been good comrades and after the rescue of Marthe from the mob in Lille
it was to Brand that Pierre Nesle had opened his heart and revealed his
agony. He could not stay long with us in the station as he was going
to some political meeting, and perhaps it was well, because Brand was
naturally anxious to escape from him before Elsa came.
“I am working hard--speaking, writing, organising--on behalf of the
_Ligue des Tranchées_,” said Pierre. “You must come and see me at
my office. It’s the headquarters of the new movement in France.
Anti-militarist, to fulfil the ideals of the men who fought to end war.”
“You’re going to fight against heavy odds,” said Brand. “Clemenceau
won’t love you, nor those who like his peace.”
Pierre laughed and used an old watchword of the war.
“_Nous les aurons!_ Those old dead-heads belong to the past. Peace has
still to be made by the men who fought for a new world.”
He gave us his address, pledged us to call on him, and slipped into the
vortex of the crowd.
Brand and I waited another twenty minutes, and then in a tide of new
arrivals we saw Elsa. She was in the company of Major Quin, Brand’s
friend who had brought her from Cologne, a tall Irishman who stooped a
little as he gave his arm to the girl. She was dressed in a blue coat
and skirt, very neatly, and it was the glitter of her spun-gold hair
that made me catch sight of her quickly in the crowd. Her eyes had a
frightened look as she came forward, and she was white to the lips.
Thinner, too, than when I had seen her last, so that she looked older
and not, perhaps, quite so wonderfully pretty. But her face lighted up
with intense gladness when Brand stood in front of her, and then, under
an electric lamp, with a crowd surging around him, took her in his arms.
Major Quin and I stood aloof, chatting together.
“Good journey?” I asked.
“Excellent, but I’m glad it’s over. That little lady is too unmistakably
German. Everybody spotted her and looked unutterable things. She was
frightened, and I don’t wonder. Most of them thought the worst of me. I
had to threaten one fellow with a damned good hiding for an impertinent
remark I overheard.”
Brand thanked him for looking after his wife, and Elsa gave him her hand
and said, “_Danke schön_.”
Major Quin raised his finger and said, “Hush. Don’t forget you’re in
Paris now.”
Then he saluted with a click of spurs and took his leave. I put Brand
and his wife in a taxi and drove outside by the driver to a quiet old
hotel in the Rue St. Honoré, where we had booked rooms.
When we registered, the manager at the desk stared at Elsa curiously.
She spoke English, but with an unmistakable accent. The man’s courtesy
to Brand, which had been perfect, fell from him abruptly and he spoke
with icy insolence when he summoned one of the boys to take up the
baggage. In the dining-room that night all eyes turned to Elsa and
Brand, with inquisitive, hostile looks. I suppose her frock, simple and
ordinary as it seemed to me, proclaimed its German fashion. Or perhaps
her face and hair were not so English as I had imagined. It was a little
while before the girl herself was aware of those unpleasant glances
about her. She was very happy sitting next to Brand, whose hand she
caressed once or twice, and into whose face she looked with adoration.
She was still very pale, and I could see that she was immensely tired
after her journey, but her eyes shone wonderfully. Sometimes she
looked about her and encountered the stares of people--elderly French
_bourgeois_ and some English nurses and a few French officers--dining
at other tables in the great room with gilt mirrors and painted ceiling.
She spoke to Brand presently in a low voice.
“I am afraid. These people stare at me so much. They guess what I am.”
“It’s only your fancy,” said Brand. “Besides, they would be fools not to
stare at a face like yours.”
She smiled and coloured up at that sweet flattery.
“I know when people like one’s looks. It is not for that reason they
stare.”
“Ignore them,” said Brand. “Tell me about Franz and Frau von Detmold.”
It was unwise of him to sprinkle his conversation with German names.
The waiter at our table was listening attentively. Presently I saw him
whispering behind the screen to one of his comrades and looking our way
sullenly.
He kept us waiting an unconscionable time for coffee, and when at last
Brand gave his arm to Elsa and led her from the room, he gave a harsh
laugh as they passed, and I heard the words, “_Sale Boche!_” spoken in
a low tone of voice, yet loud enough for all the room to hear. From all
the little tables there came titters of laughter and those words, “_Sale
Boche!_” were repeated by several voices. I hoped that Elsa and Brand
had not heard, but I saw Elsa sway a little on her husband’s arm as
though struck by an invisible blow, and Brand turned with a look of
passion, as though he would hit the waiter or challenge the whole room
to warfare. But Elsa whispered to him, and he went with her up the
staircase to their rooms.
The next morning when I met them at breakfast Elsa still looked
desperately tired, though very happy, and Brand had lost a little of
his haggard look and his nerve was steadier. But it was an uncomfortable
moment for all of us when the manager came to the table and regretted
with icy courtesy that their rooms would not be available another night
owing to a previous arrangement which he had unfortunately overlooked.
“Nonsense!” said Brand, shortly. “I have taken these rooms for three
nights, and I intend to stay in them.”
“It is impossible,” said the manager. “I must ask you to have your
baggage packed by twelve o’clock.”
Brand dealt with him firmly.
“I am an English officer. If I hear another word from you I will call on
the Provost Marshal and get him to deal with you.”
The manager bowed. This threat cowed him, and he said no more about
a change of rooms. But Brand and his wife, and I, as their friend,
suffered from a policy of passive resistance to our presence. The
chambermaid did not answer their bell, having become strangely deaf.
The waiter was generally engaged at other tables whenever we wanted him.
The hall porter turned his back upon us. The page-boys made grimaces
behind our backs, as I saw very well in the gilt mirror, and as Elsa
saw.
They took to having their meals out, Brand insisting always that I
should join them, and we drove out to the Bois and had tea there in the
_Chalet des Iles_. It was a beautiful afternoon in September, and the
leaves were just turning to crinkled gold and the lake was as blue
as the cloudless sky above. Across the ferry came boatloads of young
Frenchmen with their girls, singing, laughing, on this day of peace.
Some of the men limped as they came up the steps from the landing-stage.
One walked on crutches. Another had an empty sleeve. Under the trees
they made love to their girls and fed them with rose-tinted ices.
“These people are happy,” said Elsa. “They have forgotten already the
agony of war. Victory is healing. In Germany there is only misery.”
A little later she talked about the peace.
“If only the _Entente_ had been more generous in victory our despair
would not be so great. Many of us, great multitudes, believed that the
price of defeat would be worth paying because Germany would take a place
among free nations and share in the creation of a nobler world. Now we
are crushed by the militarism of nations who have used our downfall to
increase their own power. The light of a new ideal which rose above the
darkness has gone out.”
Brand took his wife’s hand and stroked it in his big paw.
“All this is temporary and the work of the old men steeped in the old
traditions which led to war. We must wait for them to die. Then out of
the agony of the world’s boyhood will come the new revelation.”
Elsa clasped her hands and leaned forward, looking across the lake in
the Bois de Boulogne.
“I would like to live long enough to be sure of that,” she said,
eagerly. “If we have children, my husband, perhaps they will listen to
our tales of the war as Franz and I read about wolves and goblins in our
fairy-tales. The fearfulness of them was not frightening, for we knew we
were safe.”
“God grant that,” said Brand, gravely.
“But I am afraid!” said Elsa. She looked again across the lake, so blue
under the sky, so golden in sunlight; and shivered a little.
“You are cold!” said Brand.
He put his arms about her as they sat side by side, and her head drooped
upon his shoulder and she closed her eyes like a tired child.
They went to the opera that night and I refused their invitation to join
them, protesting that they would never learn to know each other if a
third person were always present. I slipped away to see Pierre Nesle,
and found him at an office in a street somewhere off the Rue du Louvre,
which was filled with young men whose faces I seemed to have seen before
under blue shrapnel helmets above blue tunics. They were typewriting as
though serving machine-guns, and folding up papers while they whistled
the tune of “_Madelon_.” Pierre was in his shirtsleeves, dictating
letters to a _poilu_ in civil clothes.
“Considerable activity on the western front, eh?” he said when he saw
me.
“Tell me all about it, Pierre.”
He told me something about it in a restaurant where we dined in the
Rue du Marché St. Honoré. He was one of the organising secretaries of
a society made up exclusively of young soldiers who had fought in the
trenches. There was a sprinkling of intellectuals among them--painters,
poets, novelists, journalists--but the main body were simple soldiers
animated by one idea--to prevent another war by substituting the
common-sense and brotherhood of peoples for the old diplomacy of secret
alliances and the old tradition of powerful armies.
“How about the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations?” I asked.
Pierre Nesle shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
“The Peace Treaty belongs to the Napoleonic tradition. We’ve got beyond
that now. It is the programme that has carefully arranged another and
inevitable war. Look at the world now! Look at France, Italy, Germany,
Austria! We are all ruined together, and those most ruined will, by
their disease and death, drag down Europe into general misery. _Mon
vieux_, what has victory given to France! A great belt of devastated
country, cemeteries crowded with dead youth, bankruptcy, and everything
five times the cost of pre-war rates. Another such victory will wipe us
off the map. We have smashed Germany, it is true, for a time. We have
punished her women and children for the crimes of their war lords, but
can we keep her crushed? Are our frontiers impregnable against the time
when her people come back for revenge, smashing the fetters we have
placed on them, and rising again in strength? For ten years, for twenty
years, for thirty years perhaps, we shall be safe. And after that, if
the heart of Europe does not change, if we do not learn wisdom from the
horror that has passed, France will be ravaged again, and all that we
have seen our children will see, and their suffering will be greater
than ours, and they will not have the hope we had.”
He stared back into the past, not a very distant past, and I fancy that
among the figures he saw was Marthe, his sister.
“What’s the remedy?” I asked.
“A union of democracy across the frontiers of hate,” he answered, and I
think it was a phrase that he had written and learnt by heart.
“A fine phrase!” I said, laughing a little.
He flared up at me.
“It’s more than a phrase. It’s the heart-beat of millions in Europe.”
“In France?” I asked pointedly. “In the France of Clemenceau?”
“More than you imagine,” he answered, boldly. “Beneath our present
Chauvinism, our natural exultation in victory, our inevitable hatred of
the enemy, common-sense is at work, and an idealism higher than that.
At present its voice is not heard. The old men are having their day.
Presently the new men will arrive with the new ideas. They are here, but
do not speak yet.”
“The old men again!” I said. “It is strange. In Germany, in France, in
England, even in America, people are talking strangely about the old men
as though they were guilty of all this agony. That is remarkable.”
“They were guilty,” said Pierre Nesle. “It is against the old men in all
countries of Europe that youth will declare war. For it was their ideas
which brought us to our ruin.”
He spoke so loudly that people in the restaurant turned to look at him.
He paid his bill and spoke in a lower voice.
“It is dangerous to talk like this in public. Let us walk up the Champs
Elysées, where I am visiting some friends.”
Suddenly a remembrance came back to him.
“Your friends, too,” he said.
“My friends?”
“But yes; Madame Chéri and Hélène. After Edouard’s death they could not
bear to live in Lille.”
“Edouard, that poor boy who came back? He is dead?”
“He was broken by the prison life,” said Pierre. “He died within a month
of armistice, and Hélène wept her heart out. He confided a secret to me.
Hélène and he had come to love each other, and would marry when they
could get her mother’s consent--or, one day, if not.”
“What’s her objection?” I asked. “Why, it’s splendid to think that
Hélène and you will be man and wife. The thought of it makes me feel
good.”
He pressed my arm and said, “_Merci, mille fois, mon cher_.”
Madame Chéri objected to his political opinions. She regarded them as
poisonous treachery.
“And Hélène?”
I remembered that outburst, months back, when Hélène had desired the
death of many German babies.
“Hélène loves me,” said Pierre simply. “We do not talk politics.”
On our way to the Avenue Victor Hugo I ventured to ask him a question
which had been a long time in my mind “Your sister, Marthe? She is
well?”
Even in the pearly twilight of the Champs Elysées I was aware of
Pierre’s sudden change of colour. I had touched a nerve that still
jumped.
“She is well and happy,” he answered gravely. “She is now a
_religieuse_, a nun, in the convent at Lille. They tell me she is a
saint. Her name in religion is _Sour Angélique._”
I called on Madame Chéri and her daughter with Pierre Nesle. They seemed
delighted to see me, and Hélène greeted me like an old and trusted
friend, giving me the privilege of kissing her cheek. She had grown
taller and beautiful, and there was a softness in her eyes when she
looked at Pierre which made me sure of his splendid luck.
Madame Chéri had aged, and some of her fire had burnt out. I guessed
that it was due to Edouard’s death. She spoke of that, and wept a
little, and deplored the mildness of the Peace Treaty which had not
punished the evil race who had killed her husband and her boy and the
flower of France.
“There are many German dead,” said Pierre. “They have been punished.”
“Not enough!” cried Madame Chéri. “They should all be dead.”
Hélène kissed her hand and snuggled down to her as once I had seen in
Lille.
“_Petite maman_,” she said, “let us talk of happy things to-night. Pierre
has brought us a good friend.”
Later in the evening, when Pierre and Hélène had gone into another room
to find some biscuits for our wine, Madame Chéri spoke to me about their
betrothal.
“Pierre is full of strange and terrible ideas,” she said. “They are
shared by other young men who fought bravely for France. To me they
seem wicked, and the talk of cowards, except that their medals tell of
courage. But the light in Hélène’s eyes weakens me. I’m too much of a
Frenchwoman to be stern with love.”
By those words of hers I was able to give Pierre a message of good-cheer
when he walked back with me that night, and he went away with gladness.
With gladness also did Elsa Brand set out next day for England where, as
a girl, she had known happy days, and where now her dream lived with the
man who stood beside her. Together we watched for the white cliffs, and
when suddenly the sun glinted on them she gave a little cry, and putting
her hand through Brand’s arm, said, “Our home!”
VII
I saw very little of Brand in London after Elsa’s arrival in his
parent’s house at Chelsea. I was busy, as usual, watching the way of the
world and putting my nose down to bits of blank paper which I proceeded
to spoil with futile words. Brand was doing the same thing in his study
on the top floor of the house in Cheyne Walk, while Elsa, in true German
style, was working embroidery or reading English literature to improve
her mind and her knowledge of the language.
Brand was endeavouring strenuously to earn money enough to make him free
of his father’s house. He failed, on the whole, rather miserably. He
began a novel on the war, became excited with it for the first six
chapters, then stuck hopelessly and abandoned it.
“I find it impossible,” he wrote to me, “to get the real thing into my
narrative. It is all wooden, unnatural, and wrong. I can’t get the right
perspective on paper, although I think I see it clear enough when I’m
not writing. The thing is too enormous, the psychology too complicated
for my power of expression. A thousand characters, four years of
experience, come crowding into my mind, and I can’t eliminate the
unessential and stick the point of my pen into the heart of truth.
Besides, the present state of the world, to say nothing of domestic
trouble, prevents anything like concentration... And my nerves have gone
to hell.”
After the abandonment of his novel he took to writing articles for
magazines and newspapers, some of which appeared, thereby producing
some useful guineas. I read them and liked their strength of style and
intensity of emotion. But they were profoundly pessimistic, and “the
gloomy Dean,” who was prophesying woe, had an able seconder in Wickham
Brand, who foresaw the ruin of civilisation and the downfall of the
British Empire because of the stupidity of the world’s leaders and the
careless ignorance of the multitudes. He harped too much on the same
string, and I fancied that editors would soon begin to tire of his
melancholy tune. I was right.
“I have had six articles rejected in three weeks,” wrote Brand. “People
don’t want the truth. They want cheery insincerity. Well, they won’t get
it from me, though I starve to death.... But it’s hard on Elsa. She’s
having a horrible time, and her nerve is breaking. I wish to God I could
afford to take her down to the country somewhere, away from spiteful
females and their cunning cruelty. Have you seen any Christian charity
about in this most Christian country? If so, send me word, and I’ll walk
to it on my knees, from Chelsea.”
It was in a postscript to a letter about a short story he was writing
that he wrote an alarming sentence.
“I think Elsa is dying. She gets weaker every day.” Those words sent
me to Chelsea in a hurry. I had been too careless of Brand’s troubles,
owing to my own pressure of work and my own fight with a nervous
depression which was a general malady, I found, with most men back from
the war.
When I rapped the brass knocker on the house in Cheyne Walk the door
was opened by a different maid from the one I had seen on my first visit
there. The other one, as Brand told me afterwards, had given notice
because “she couldn’t abide them Huns” (meaning Elsa), and with her had
gone the cook, who had been with Wickham’s mother for twenty years.
Brand was writing in his study upstairs when the new maid showed me in.
Or, rather, he was leaning over a writing-block, with his elbows dug
into the table and his face in his hands, while an unlighted pipe--his
old trench pipe--lay across the inkpot.
“Thinking out a new plot, old man?” I asked cheerily.
“It doesn’t come,” he said. “My own plot cuts across my line of
thought.”
“How’s Elsa?”
He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the door leading from his room.
“Sleeping, I hope.... Sit down and let’s have a yarn.”
We talked about things in general for a time. They were not very
cheerful, anyhow. Brand and I were both gloomy souls just then, and knew
each other too well to camouflage our views about the state of Europe
and the “unrest” (as it was called) in England.
Then he told me about Elsa, and it was a tragic tale From the very first
his people had treated her with a studied unkindness which had broken
her nerve and spirit. She had come to England with a joyous hope of
finding happiness and friendship with her husband’s family, and glad to
escape from the sadness of Germany and the solemn disapproval of her own
people, apart from Franz, who was devoted to her.
Her first dismay came when she kissed the hand of her mother-in-law,
who drew it away as though she had been stung by a wasp, and when her
movement to kiss her husband’s sister Ethel was repulsed by a girl who
drew back icily and said, “How do you do?”
Even then she comforted herself a little with the thought that this
coldness was due to English reserve, and that in a little while English
kindness would be revealed. But the days passed with only unkindness.
At first Lady Brand and her daughter maintained a chilly silence towards
Elsa, at breakfast, luncheon, and other meals, talking to each other
brightly, as though she did not exist, and referring constantly to
Wickham as “poor Wicky.” Ethel had a habit of reading out morsels from
the penny illustrated papers, and often they referred to “another trick
of the Huns” or “fresh revelations of Hun treachery.” At these times Sir
Amyas Brand said “Ah!” in a portentous voice, but, privately, with some
consciousness of decency, begged Ethel to desist from “controversial
topics.” She “desisted” in the presence of her brother, whose violence
of speech scared her into silence.
A later phase of Ethel’s hostility to Elsa was in the style of amiable
enquiry. In a simple, childlike way, as though eager for knowledge,
she would ask Elsa such questions as “Why the Germans boiled down their
dead?”
“Why they crucified Canadian prisoners?”
“Was it true that German school children sang the Hymn of Hate before
morning lessons?”
“Was it by order of the Kaiser that English prisoners were starved to
death?”
Elsa answered all these questions by passionate denials. It was a
terrible falsehood, she said, that the Germans had boiled down bodies
for fats. On the contrary, they paid the greatest reverence to their
dead, as her brother had seen in many cemeteries on the Western front.
The story of the “crucified Canadians” had been disproved by the English
intelligence officers after a special enquiry, as Wickham had told her.
She had never heard the Hymn of Hate. Some of the English prisoners
had been harshly treated--there were brutal commandants--but not
deliberately starved. Not starved more than German soldiers, who had
very little food during the last years of the war.
“But surely,” said Lady Brand, “you must admit, my dear, that Germany
conducted this war with the greatest possible barbarity? Otherwise, why
should the world call them Huns?”
Elsa said it was only the English who called the Germans
Huns, and that was for a propaganda of hatred which was very wicked.
“Do _I_ look like a Hun?” she asked, and then burst into tears.
Lady Brand was disconcerted by that sign of weakness.
“You mustn’t think us unkind, Elsa, but, of course, we have to uphold
the truth.”
Ethel was utterly unmoved by Elsa’s tears, and, indeed, found a holy
satisfaction in them.
“When the German people confess their guilt with weeping and lamentation
the English will be first to forgive. Never till then.”
The presence of a German girl in the house seemed to act as a blight
upon all domestic happiness. It was the cook who first “gave notice.”
Elsa had never so much as set eyes upon that cross-eyed woman
below-stairs who had prepared the family food since Wickham had sat in
a high chair with a bib round his neck. But Mary, in a private interview
with Lady Brand, stormy in its character, as Elsa could hear through the
folding doors, vowed that she would not live in the same house with “one
of those damned Germings.”
Lady Brand’s tearful protestations that Elsa was no longer German, being
“Mr. Wickham’s wife,” and that she had repented sincerely of all the
wrong done by the country in which she had unfortunately been born, did
not weaken the resolution of Mary Grubb, whose patriotism had always
been “above suspicion,” “which,” as she said, “I hope to remain so.” She
went next morning, after a great noise of breathing and the descent of
tin boxes, while Lady Brand and Ethel looked with reproachful eyes at
Elsa as the cause of this irreparable blow.
The parlour-maid followed in a week’s time, on the advice of her young
man, who had worked in a canteen of the Y.M.C.A. at Boulogne and knew
all about German spies.
It was very awkward for Lady Brand, who assumed an expression of
Christian martyrdom, and told Wickham that his rash act was bearing sad
fruit, a mixed metaphor which increased his anger, as he told me, to a
ridiculous degree.
He could see that Elsa was very miserable. Many times she wept when
alone with him, and begged him to take her away to a little home of
their own, even if it were only one room in the poorest neighbourhood.
But Wickham was almost penniless, and begged her to be patient a little
longer, until he had saved enough to fulfil their hope. There I think
he was unwise. It would have been better for him to borrow money--he had
good friends--rather than keep his wife in such a hostile atmosphere.
She was weak and ill. He was alarmed at her increasing weakness. Once
she fainted in his arms, and even to go upstairs to their rooms at the
top of the house tired her so much that afterwards she would lie back in
a chair, with her eyes closed, looking very white and worn. She tried to
hide her ill-health from her husband, and when they were alone together
she seemed gay and happy, and would have deceived him but for those fits
of weeping at the unkindness of his mother and sister, and those sudden
attacks of “tiredness” when all physical strength departed from her.
Her love for him seemed to grow with the weakness of her body. She could
not bear him to leave her alone for any length of time, and while he
was writing, sat near him, so that she might have her head against his
shoulder or touch his hand, or kiss it. It was not conducive to easy
writing or the invention of plots.
Something like a crisis happened after a painful scene in the
drawing-room downstairs on a day when Brand had gone out to walk off a
sense of deadly depression which prevented all literary effort.
Several ladies had come to tea with Lady Brand and Ethel, and they gazed
at Elsa as though she were a strange and dangerous animal.
One of them, a thin and elderly schoolmistress, cross-questioned Elsa as
to her nationality.
“I suppose you are Swedish, my dear?” she said sweetly.
“No,” said Elsa.
“Danish, then, no doubt?” continued Miss Clutter.
“I am German,” said Elsa.
That announcement had caused consternation among Lady Brand’s guests.
Two of the ladies departed almost immediately. The others stayed to see
how Miss Clutter would deal with this amazing situation.
She dealt with it firmly, and with the cold intelligence of a high
schoolmistress.
“How _very_ interesting!” she said, turning to Lady Brand. “Perhaps your
daughter-in-law will enlighten us a little about German psychology which
we have found so puzzling. I should be so glad if she could explain to
us how the German people reconcile the sinking of merchant ships, the
unspeakable crime of the _Lusitania_ with any belief in God, or even
with the principles of our common humanity. It is a mystery to me how
the drowning of babies could be regarded as legitimate warfare by a
people proud of their civilisation.”
“Perhaps it would be better to avoid controversy, dear Miss Clutter,”
said Lady Brand, alarmed at the prospect of an “unpleasant” scene which
would be described in other drawing-rooms next day.
But Miss Clutter had adopted Ethel’s method of enquiry. She so much
wanted to know the German point of view. Certainly they must have a
point of view.
“Yes, it would be so interesting to know!” said another lady.
“Especially if we could believe it,” said another.
Elsa had been twisting and re-twisting a little lace handkerchief in her
lap. She was very pale, and tried to conceal a painful agitation from
all these hostile and enquiring ladies.
Then she spoke to them in a low, strained voice.
“You will never understand,” she said. “You look out from England with
eyes of hate, and without pity in your hearts. The submarine warfare
was shameful. There were little children drowned on the _Lusitania_, and
women. I wept for them and prayed the dear God to stop the war. Did you
weep for our little children and our women? They, too, were killed by
sea warfare, not only a few, as on the _Lusitania_, but thousands and
tens of thousands. Your blockade closed us in with an iron ring. No
ship could bring us food. For two years we starved on short rations and
chemical foods. We were without fats and milk. Our mothers watched their
children weaken and wither and die, because of the English blockade.
Their own milk dried up within their breasts. Little coffins were
carried down our streets day after day, week after week. Fathers and
mothers were mad at the loss of their little ones. ‘We must smash
our way through the English blockade!’ they said. The U-boat warfare
gladdened them. It seemed a chance of rescue for the children of
Germany. It was wicked. But all the war was wickedness. It was wicked
of you English to keep up your blockade so long after Armistice, so that
more children died and more women were consumptive, and men fainted at
their work. Do you reconcile that with God’s good love? Oh, I find
more hatred here in England than I knew even in Germany. It is
cruel, unforgiving, unfair! You, are proud of your own virtue and
hypocritical. God will be kinder to my people than to you, because now
we cry out for His mercy, and you are still arrogant, with the name of
God on your lips but a devil of pride in your hearts. I came here
with my dear husband believing that many English would be like him,
forgiving, hating cruelty, eager to heal the world’s broken heart. You
are not like him. You are cruel and lovers of cruelty, even to one poor
German girl who came to you for shelter with her English man. I am sorry
for you. I pity you because of your narrowness. I do not want to know
you.”
She stood up, swaying a little, with one hand on the mantelpiece, as
afterwards she told her husband. She did not believe that she could
cross the floor without falling. There was a strange dizziness in her
head, and a mist before her eyes. But she held her head high and walked
out of the drawing-room, and then upstairs. When Wickham Brand came back
she was lying on her bed very ill. He sent for a doctor who was with her
for half-an-hour.
“She is very weak,” he said. “No pulse to speak of. You will have to be
careful of her--deuced careful.”
He gave no name to her illness. “Just weakness,” he said. “Run down like
a worn-out clock. Nerves all wrong, and no vitality.”
He sent round a tonic which Elsa took like a child, and for a little
while it seemed to do her good. But Brand was frightened because her
weakness had come back.
I am glad now that I had an idea which helped Brand in this time of
trouble and gave Elsa some weeks of happiness and peace. It occurred to
me that young Harding was living alone in his big old country house near
Weybridge, and would be glad and grateful, because of his loneliness, to
give house-room to Brand and his wife. He had a great liking for Brand,
as most of us had, and his hatred of Germany had not been so violent
since his days in Cologne. His good nature, anyhow, and the fine
courtesy which was the essential quality of his character, would make
him kind to Elsa, so ill and so desperately in need of kindness. I was
not disappointed. When I spoke to him over the telephone he said, “It
will be splendid for me. This lonely house is getting on my nerves
badly. Bring them down.”
I took them down in a car two days later. It was a fine autumn day
with a sparkle in the air and a touch of frost on the hedgerows. Elsa,
wrapped up in heavy rugs, lay back next to Brand, and a little colour
crept back into her cheeks and brought back her beauty. I think a shadow
lifted from her as she drove away from that house in Chelsea where she
had dwelt with enmity among her husband’s people.
Harding’s house in Surrey was at the end of a fine avenue of beeches,
glorious in their autumn foliage of crinkled gold. A rabbit scuttled
across the drive as we came, and bobbed beneath the red bracken of the
undergrowth.
“Oh,” said Elsa, like a child, “there is Peterkin! What a rogue he
looks!”
Her eyes were bright when she caught sight of Harding’s house in the
Elizabethan style of post-and-plaster splashed with scarlet where the
Virginia creeper straggled on its walls.
“It is wonderfully English,” she said. “How Franz would love this
place!”
Harding came down from the steps to greet us, and I thought it noble of
him that he should kiss the girl’s hand when Brand said, “This is Elsa.”
For Harding had been a Hun-hater--you remember his much-repeated phrase,
“No good German but a dead German!”--and that little act was real
chivalry to a woman of the enemy.
There was a great fire of logs burning in the open hearth in the hall,
flinging a ruddy glare on the panelled walls and glinting on bits of
armour and hunting trophies. Upstairs, also, Brand told me, there was a
splendid fire in Elsa’s room, which had once been the room of Harding’s
wife. It wanned Elsa not only in body but in soul. Here was an English
welcome and kindness of thought. On her dressing-table there were
flowers from Harding’s hot-houses, and she gave a little cry of pleasure
at the sight of them for there had been no flowers in Cheyne Walk,
Chelsea. That night she was strong enough to come down to dinner,
and looked very charming there at the polished board, fit only by
candlelight, whose soft rays touched the gold of her hair.
“It is a true English home,” she said, glancing up at the panelled walls
and at portraits of Harding’s people in old-fashioned costumes which
hung there.
“A lonely one when no friends are here,” said Harding, and that was the
only time he referred in any way to the wife who had left him.
That dinner was the last one which Elsa had sitting at table with
us. She became very tired again. So tired that Brand had to carry her
upstairs and downstairs, which he did as though she weighed no more than
a child. During the day she lay on a sofa in the drawing-room, and Brand
did no writing now nor any kind of work, but stayed always with his
wife. For hours together he sat by her side, and she held his hand and
touched his face and hair, and was happy in her love.
A good friend came to stay with them and brought unfailing cheerfulness.
It was Charles Fortune who had come down at Harding’s invitation. He was
as comical as ever, and made Elsa laugh with ripples of merriment while
he satirised the world as he knew it, with shrewd and penetrating wit.
He played the jester industriously to get that laughter from her, though
sometimes she had to beg of him not to make her laugh so much because
it hurt her. Then he played the piano late into the afternoon, until the
twilight in the room faded into darkness except for the ruddy glow of
the log fire, or after dinner in the evenings until Brand carried his
wife to bed. He played Chopin best, with a magic touch, but Elsa liked
him to play Bach and Schumann, and sometimes Mozart, because that
brought back her girlhood in the days before the war.
So it was one evening when Brand sat on a low stool by the sofa on
which Elsa lay, with her fingers playing in his hair or resting on his
shoulder, while Fortune filled the room with melody.
Once or twice Elsa spoke to Brand in a low voice. I heard some of her
words as I lay on a bearskin by the fire.
“I am wonderfully happy, my dear,” she said once, and Brand pulled her
hand down and kissed it.
A little later she spoke again.
“Love is so much better than hate. Then why should people go to war?”
“God knows, my dear,” said Brand.
It was some time after that, when Fortune was playing softly, that I
heard Elsa give a big, tired sigh and say the word “Peace!”
Charles Fortune played something of Beethoven’s now, with grand crashing
chords which throbbed through the room as the last glow of the sunset
flushed through the windows.
Suddenly Brand stirred on his stool, made an abrupt movement, then rose
and gave a loud, agonising cry. Fortune stopped playing with a slur
of notes. Harding leapt up from his chair in a dark corner and said,
“Brand!... what’s the matter?”
Brand had dropped to his knees and was weeping with, his arms about his
dead wife.
VIII
I was again a wanderer in the land, and going from country to country
in Europe saw the disillusionment that had followed victory, and the
despair that had followed defeat, and the ravages that were bequeathed
by war to peace, not only in devastated earth and stricken towns, but in
the souls of men and women.
The victors had made great promises to their people, but for the most
part they were still unredeemed. They had promised them rich fruits of
victory to be paid out of the ruin of their enemies. But little fruit of
gold or treasure could be gathered from the utter bankruptcy of Germany
and Austria, whose factories stayed idle for lack of raw material and
whose money was waste paper in value of exchange. “Reconstruction” was
the watchword of statesmen, uttered as a kind of magic spell, but when
I went over the old battlefields in France I found no sign of
reconstruction, but only the vast belt of desolation which in war I had
seen swept by fire. No spell-word had built up those towns and villages
which had been blown into dust and ashes, nor had given life to riven
trees and earth choked and deadened by high explosives. Here and there
poor families had crept back to the place where their old homes had
stood, grubbing in the ruins for some relic of their former habitations
and building wooden shanties in the desert as frail shelters against the
wind and the rain. In Ypres--the city of Great Death--there were wooden
_estaminets_ for the refreshment of tourists who came from Paris to see
the graveyard of youth, and girls sold picture-postcards where boys
of ours had gone marching up the Menin Road under storms of shell-fire
which took daily toll of them. No French statesman by optimistic words
could resurrect in a little while the beauty that had been in Artois and
Picardy and the fields of Champagne.
On days of national thanksgiving the spirit of France was exalted by the
joy of victory. In Paris it was a feverish joy, wild-eyed, with laughing
ecstasy, with troops of dancing girls and a carnival that broke all
bounds between Montmartre and Montparnasse. France had saved herself
from death. She had revenged herself for 1870 and the years just passed.
She had crushed the enemy that had always been a brutal menace across
the frontier. She had her sword deep in the heart of Germany which lay
bleeding at her feet.
I who love France with a kind of passion, and had seen during the years
of war the agony and the heroism of her people, did not begrudge them
their ecstasy, and it touched my spirit with its fire so that in France
I could see and understand the French point of view, of ruthlessness
towards the beaten foe. But I saw also what many people of France saw
slowly, but with a sense of fear, that the treaty made by Clemenceau did
not make them safe except for a little while. This had not been, after
all, “the war to end war.” There was no guarantee of world-peace. Their
frontiers were not made impregnable against the time when the Germans
might grow strong again and come back for vengeance. They could not
stand alone, but must make new alliances, new secret treaties, new
armies, new armaments, because hate survived, and the League of Nations
was a farce, as it had come from the table at Versailles.
They looked round and counted their cost--a million and a half dead. A
multitude of maimed and blind and nerve-shocked men. A birth-rate that
had sunk to zero. A staggering debt which they could not pay. A cost of
living which mounted higher and ever higher. A sense of revolt among the
soldiers who had come back because their reward for four years of misery
was no more than miserable.
So it was in Italy, stricken by a more desperate poverty, disappointed
by a lack of spoil, angry with a sense of “betrayal,” afraid of
revolution, exultant when a mad poet seized the port of Fiume which had
been denied to her by President Wilson and his conscience.
Across the glittering waters of the Adriatic I went to Trieste and found
it a dead port with Italian officers in possession of its deserted
docks and abandoned warehouses and Austrians dying of typhus in the back
streets, and starving to death in tenement houses.
And then, across the new State of Jugo-Slavia, cut out of the body of
the old Austrian Empire now lying dismembered, I came to Vienna, which
once I had known as the gayest capital of Europe, where charming people
played the pleasant game of life with music and love and laughter.
In Vienna there was music still, but it played a _danse macabre_, a
dance of death, which struck one with a sense of horror. The orchestras
still fiddled in the restaurants. At night the opera-house was crowded.
In _cafés_ bright with gilt and glass, in restaurants rich in marble
walls, crowds of people listened to the waltzes of Strauss, ate smuggled
food at monstrous prices, laughed, flirted, and drank. They were the
profiteers of war, spending paper money with the knowledge that it had
no value outside Vienna, no value here except in stacks to buy warmth
for their stomachs, a little warmth for their souk, while their stock
of kronen lasted. They were the vultures from Jugo-Slavia and
Czecho-Slovakia come to feed on the corpse of Austria while it still
had flesh on its bones, and while Austrian kronen still had some kind of
purchase power... And outside, two million people were starving slowly
but very surely to death.
The children were starving quickly to death. Their coffins passed me in
the streets. Ten--twelve--fifteen--in one half-hour between San Stefan’s
Chinch and the Favoritenstrasse. Small living skeletons padded after
one with naked feet, thrusting out little claw-like hands, begging for
charity. In the great hospital of Vienna children lay in crowded wards,
with twisted limbs and bulbous heads, diseased from birth, because of
their mother’s hunger and a life without milk and any kind of fat.
Vienna, the capital of a great empire, had been sentenced to death by
the Treaty of Peace which had so carved up her former territory that
she was cut off from all her natural resources and from all means of
industry, commerce and life.
It was Dr. Small, dear “Daddy” Small, who gave me an intimate knowledge
of what was happening in Vienna a year after Armistice, and it was
Eileen O’Connor who still further enlightened me by taking me into the
babies’ _crèches_, the _Kinderspital_ and the working people’s homes,
where disease and death found their victims. She took me to these places
until I sickened and said, “I can bear no more.”
Dr. Small had a small office in the Kârtnerstrasse, where Eileen worked
with him, and it was here that I found them both a day after my arrival
in Vienna. Eileen was on her knees making a wood fire and puffing it
into a blaze for the purpose of boiling a tin kettle which stood on a
trivet, and after that, as I found, for making tea. Outside there was a
raw, horrible day, with a white mist in which those coffins were going
by and with those barefoot children with pallid faces and gaunt cheeks
padding by one’s side, so that I was glad to see the flames in the
hearth and to hear the cheerful dink of tea-cups which the doctor was
getting out. Better still, was I glad to see these two good friends, so
sane, so vital, so purposeful, as I found them, in a world of gloom and
neurosis.
The doctor told me of their work. It was life-saving and increasing
in range of action. They had organised a number of feeding centres in
Vienna, and stores from which mothers could buy condensed milk and cocoa
and margarine, at next to nothing, for their starving babes. Austrian
ladies were doing most of the actual work apart from organisation at
headquarters, and doing it devotedly. From America and from England
money was flowing in.
“The tide of thought is turning,” said the doctor. “Every dollar we get,
and every shilling, is a proof that the call of humanity is being heard
above the old war cries.”
“And every dollar and every shilling,” said Eileen, “is helping to save
the life of some poor woman or some little mite who had no guilt in the
war, but suffered from its cruelty.”
“This job,” said the doctor, “suits my peculiar philosophy. I am not out
so much to save these babies’ lives----”
Here Eileen threatened to throw the teapot at his head.
“Because,” he added, “some of them would be better dead, and anyhow, you
can’t save a nation by charity. But what I am out to do is to educate
the heart of the world above the baseness of the passions that caused
the massacre in Europe. We’re helping to do it by saving the children
and by appealing to the chivalry of men and women across the old
frontiers. We’re killers of cruelty, Miss Eileen and I. We’re rather
puffed up with ourselves, ain’t we, my dear?”
He grinned at Eileen in a whimsical way, and I could see that between
this little American and that Irish girl there was an understanding
comradeship.
So he told me when she left the room a minute to get another tea-cup or
wash one up.
“That girl!” he said. “Say, laddie, you couldn’t find a better head in
all Europe, including Hoover himself. She’s a Napoleon Bonaparte without
his blood-lust. She’s Horatio Nelson and Lord Northcliffe and Nurse
Cavell all rolled into one, to produce the organising genius of Eileen
O’Connor. Only you would have to add a few saints like Catherine of
Sienna and Joan of Arc to allow for her spirituality. She organises
feeding-centres like you would write a column article. She gets the
confidence of Austrian women so that they would kiss her feet if she’d
allow it. She has a head for figures that fairly puts me to shame, and
as for her courage--well, I don’t mind telling you that I’ve sworn to
pack her back to England if she doesn’t keep clear of typhus dens and
other fever-stricken places. We can’t afford to lose her by some dirty
bug-bite.”
Eileen came into the room again with another tea-cup and saucer. I
counted those on the table and saw three already.
“Who is the other cup for?” I asked. “If you are expecting visitors I’ll
go, because I’m badly in need of a wash.”
“Don’t worry,” said Eileen. “We haven’t time to wash in Vienna, and,
anyhow, there’s no soap, for love or money. This is for Wickham, who is
no visitor but one of the staff.”
“Wickham?” I said. “Is Brand here?”
“Rather!” said “Daddy” Small. “He has been here a week and is doing good
work. Looks after the supplies, and puts his heart into the job.”
As he spoke the door opened and Brand strode into the room, with rain
dripping from his waterproof coat which he took off and flung into a
corner before he turned to the table.
“Lord! A cup of tea is what I want!”
“And what you shall have, my dear,” said Eileen.
“But don’t you know a friend when you see him?”
“By Jove!”
He held my hand in a hard grip and patted me on the shoulder. Our
friendship was beyond the need of words.
So there we three, who had seen many strange and tragic things in those
years of history, were together again in the city of Vienna, the city of
death, where the innocent were paying for the guilty, but where also,
as “Daddy” Small said, there was going out a call to charity which
was being heard by the heart of the world above the old war-cries of
cruelty.
I stayed with them only a week. I had been long away from England and
had other work to do. But in that time I saw how these three friends,
and others in their service, were devoting themselves to the rescue
of human life, partly, I think, for their own sake, though without
conscious selfishness, and with a passionate pity for those who
suffered. By this service they were healing their own souls, sorely
wounded in the war. That was so, certainly, with Wickham Brand, and a
little, I think, with Eileen O’Connor.
Brand was rescued in the nick of time by the doctor’s call to him.
Elsa’s death had struck him a heavy blow when his nerves were already
in rags and tatters. Now by active service in this work of humanity and
healing he was getting back to normality, getting serene and steady.
I saw the change in him, revealed by the light in his eyes and by his
quietude of speech and the old sense of humour, which for a while he had
lost.
“I see now,” he said one night, “that it’s no use fighting against the
injustice and brutality of life. I can’t re-make the world or change the
things that are written in history or alter in any big way the destiny
of peoples. Stupidity, ignorance, barbarity; will continue among the
multitude. All that any of us can do is to tackle some good job that
lies at hand, and keep his own soul bright and fearless if there is any
chance and use his little intellect in his little circle for kindness
instead of cruelty. I find that chance here, and I am grateful.”
The doctor had larger and bigger hopes, though his philosophy of life
was not much different from that of Brand’s.
“I want to fix up an intellectual company in this funny old universe,”
he said. “I want to establish an intellectual aristocracy on
international lines--the leaders of the new world. By intellectuals
I don’t mean high-brow fellows with letters after their names and
encyclopaedias in their brain-pans. I mean men and women who by moral
character, kindness of heart, freedom from narrow hatreds, tolerance of
different creeds and races, and love of humanity, will unite in a free,
unfettered way, without a label or a league, to get a move on towards a
better system of human society. No red Bolshevism, mind you, no heaven
by way of hell, but a striving for greater justice between classes and
nations, and for peace within the frontiers of Christendom, and beyond,
if possible. It’s getting back to the influence of the individual, the
leadership of multitudes by the power of the higher mind. I’m doing it
by penny postcards to all my friends. This work of ours in Vienna is a
good proof of their response. Let all the folk with good hearts behind
their brains start writing postcards to each other, with a plea for
brotherhood, charity, peace, and the new world would come... You laugh!
Yes, I talk a little nonsense. It’s not so easy as that. But see the
idea? The leaders must keep in touch, and the herds will follow.”
I turned to Eileen who was listening with a smile about her lips while
she pasted labels on to packets of cocoa.
“What’s your philosophy?” I asked.
She laughed, in that deep voice of hers.
“I’ve none; only the old faith, and a little hope, and a heart that’s
bustin’ with love.”
Brand was adding up figures in a book of accounts, and smiled across at
the girl whom he had known since boyhood, when she had pulled his hair.
His wounds were healing.