We fumbled our way to a street on the edge of the canal, according to
Brand’s uncanny sense of direction and his remembrance of what the
Irish girl had told him. There we found the convent, a square box-like
building behind big gates. We pulled a bell which jangled loudly, and
presently the gate opened an inch, letting through the light of a
lantern which revealed the black-and-white coif of a nun.
“_Qui va là?_”
Brand told her that we had come to see Miss O’Connor, and the gate was
opened wider and we went into the courtyard, where a young nun stood
smiling. She spoke in English.
“We were always frightened when the bell rang during the German
occupation. One never knew what might happen. And we were afraid for
Miss O’Connor’s sake.”
“Why?” asked Brand.
The little nun laughed.
“She did dangerous work. They suspected her. She came here after her
arrest. Before then she had rooms of her own. Oh, messieurs, her
courage, her devotion! Truly she was heroic!”
She led us into a long corridor with doors on each side, and out of one
door came a little group of nuns with Eileen O’Connor.
The Irish girl came towards us with outstretched hands which she gave
first to Brand. She seemed excited at our coming and explained that the
Reverend Mother and all the nuns wanted to see us, to thank England by
means of us, to hear something about the war and the chance of victory
from the first English officers they had seen.
Brand was presented to the Reverend Mother, a massive old lady with a
slight moustache on the upper lip and dark luminous eyes, reminding me
of the portrait of Savonarola at Florence. The other nuns crowded round
us, eager to ask questions, still more eager to talk. Some of them were
quite young and pretty, though all rather white and fragile, and they
had a vivacious gaiety, so that the building resounded with laughter.
It was Eileen O’Connor who made them laugh by her reminiscences of
girlhood when she and Brand were “_enfants terribles_,” when she used
to pull Brand’s hair and hide the pipe he smoked too soon. She asked
him to take off his field-cap so that she might see whether the same
old unruly tuft still stuck up at the back of his head, and she and all
the nuns clapped hands when she found it was so, in spite of war-worry
and steel hats. All this had to be translated into French for the
benefit of those who could not understand such rapid English.
“I believe you would like to give it a tug now,” said Brand, bending
his head down, and Eileen O’Connor agreed.
“And indeed I would, but for scandalising a whole community of nuns, to
say nothing of Reverend Mother.”
The Reverend Mother laughed in a curiously deep voice, and a crowd of
little wrinkles puckered at her eyes. She told Miss O’Connor that even
her Irish audacity would not go as far as that, which was a challenge
accepted on the instant.
“One little tug, for old times’ sake,” said the girl, and Brand yelped
with pretended pain at the vigour of her pull, while all the nuns
screamed with delight.
Then a clock struck and the Reverend Mother touched Eileen (as
afterwards I called her) on the arm and said she would leave her with
her friends. One by one the nuns bowed to us, all smiling under their
white _bandeaux_, and then went down the corridor through an open door
which led into a chapel, as we could see by twinkling candlelight.
Presently the music of an organ and of women’s voices came through the
closed doors.
Eileen O’Connor took us into a little parlour where there were just
four rush-chairs and a table, and on the clean whitewashed walls a
crucifix.
Brand took a chair by the table, rather awkwardly, I thought.
“How gay they are!” he said. “They do not seem to have been touched by
the horrors of war.”
“It is the gaiety of faith,” said Eileen. “How else could they have
survived the work they have done, the things they have seen? This
convent was a shambles for more than three years. These rooms were
filled with wounded, German wounded, and often English wounded, who
were prisoners. They were the worst cases for amputation, and butcher’s
work, and the nuns did all the nursing. They know all there is to know
of suffering and death.”
“Yet they have not forgotten how to laugh!” said Brand. “That is
wonderful. It is a mystery to me.”
“You must have seen bad things,” said Eileen. “Have you lost the gift
of laughter?”
“Almost,” said Brand, “and once for a long time.”
Eileen put her hands to her breast.
“Oh, learn it again,” she said. “If we cannot laugh we cannot work.
Why, I owe my life to a sense of humour.”
She spoke the last words with more than a trivial meaning. They seemed
to tell of some singular episode, and Brand asked her to explain.
She did not explain then. She only said some vague things about
laughing herself out of prison and stopping a German bullet with a
smile.
“Why did the devils put you in prison?” asked Brand.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“In Lille it was bad form if one had not been arrested once at least. I
was three weeks in a cell half the size of this, and twenty women were
with me there. There was very little elbow-room!”
She proved her sense of humour then by that deep-throated laugh of
hers, but I noticed that just for a second behind the smile in her eyes
there crept a shadow as at the remembrance of some horror, and that she
shivered a little, as though some coldness had touched her.
“It must have been like the Black Hole of Calcutta,” said Brand,
measuring the space with his eyes. “Twenty women herded in a room like
that!”
“With me for twenty-one,” said Eileen. “We had no means of washing.”
She used an awful phrase.
“We were a living stench.”
“Good God!” said Brand.
Eileen O’Connor waved back the remembrance. “Tell me of England and of
Ireland. How’s the little green isle? Has it done well in the war?”
“The Irish troops fought like heroes,” said Brand. “But there were not
enough of them. Recruiting was slow, and there was--some trouble.”
He did not speak about the Irish Rebellion.
“I heard about it vaguely, from prisoners,” said the girl. “It was
England’s fault, I expect. Dear old blundering, muddle-headed England,
who is a tyrant through fear, and twists Irish loyalty into treason by
ropes of red-tape in which the Irish mind gets strangled and awry.
Well, there’s another subject to avoid. I want to hear only good things
to-night. Tell me of London, of Kensington Gardens, of the way from the
Strand to Temple Bar, of the lights that gleam along the Embankment
when lovers go hand-in-hand and see stars in the old black river. Are
they all there?”
“They are all changed,” said Brand. “It is a place of gloom. There are
no lights along the Embankment. They have dowsed their glims for fear
of air-raids. There are few lovers hand-in-hand. Some of the boys lie
dead round Ypres, or somewhere on the Somme, or weep out of blind eyes,
or gibber in shell-shock homes, or try to hop on one leg--while waiting
for artificial limbs,--or trudge on, to-night, towards Maubeuge, where
German machine-guns wait for them behind the ditches. Along the Strand
goes the Painted Flapper, luring men to hell. In Kensington Gardens
there are training camps for more boys ear-marked for the shambles,
and here and there among the trees young mothers who are widows before
they knew their wifehood. There is vice, the gaiety of madness, the
unspeakable callousness of people who get rich on war, or earn fat
wages, and in small stricken homes a world of secret grief. That is
London in time of war. I hate it.”
Brand spoke with bitterness and a melancholy that startled the girl who
sat with folded hands below the crucifix on the whitewashed wall behind
her.
“Dear God! Is it like that?”
She stared at the wall opposite as though it were a window through
which she saw London.
“Yes, of course it is like that. Here in Lille we thought we were
suffering more than anybody in the world. That was our egotism. We
did not realise--not in our souls--that everywhere in the world of
war there was equal suffering, the same cruelty, perhaps the same
temptation to despair.”
Brand repented, I think, of having led the conversation into such
abysmal gloom. He switched off to more cheerful things and gave some
elaborate sketches of soldiers he knew, to which Eileen played up with
anecdotes of rare comedy about the nuns--the fat nun who under the
rigour of war rations became as slim as a willow and was vain of her
new grace; the little French nun who had no fear of German officers and
dared their fury by prophecies of defeat--but was terrified of a mouse
in the refectory; the Reverend Mother, who borrowed a safety-razor from
an English Tommy--he had hidden it in his shirt--to shave her upper
lip, lest the Germans should think her a French _poilu_ in disguise.
More interesting to me than anything that was said were the things
unspoken by Eileen and Brand. In spite of the girl’s easy way of
laughter, her quick wit, her avoidance, if possible, of any reference
to her own suffering, I seemed to see in her eyes and in her face the
strain of a long ordeal, some frightful adventure of life in which
she had taken great hazards--the people had told me she had risked
her life, often--and a woman’s courage which had been tested by that
experience and had not failed, though perhaps at breaking-point in the
worst hours. I supposed her age was twenty-six or so (I guessed it
right this side of a year), but there was already a streak of grey in
her dark hair, and her eyes, so smiling as a rule, looked as if they
had often wept. I think the presence of Brand was a great pleasure to
her--bringing to Lille a link with her childhood--and I saw that she
was studying the personality of this newly-found friend of hers, and
the strong character of his face, not unscathed by the touch of war,
with curious, penetrating interest. I felt in the way, and left them
together with a fair excuse--I had always work to do--and I was pleased
that I did so, they were so obviously glad to have a more intimate talk
about old friends and old times.