Brand decided to take the risk, and though he asked my advice
beforehand, as a matter of friendship, I knew my warnings were useless.
It was about a month after that tram journey to Bonn that he came into
my room at the Domhof, looking rather pale but with a kind of glitter
in his eyes.
“I may as well tell you,” he said abruptly, “that I am going to marry a
German girl.”
“Elsa von Kreuzenach?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Just a guess.”
“It’s against her parents’ wish,” he said, “to say nothing of my
parents, who think I have gone mad. Elsa and I will have to play a lone
hand.”
“‘Lone’ is not the word,” I suggested. “You are breaking that taboo
we talked of. You will be shunned by every friend you have in the
world--except one or two queer people like myself”--(Here he said,
“Thanks,” and grinned rather gratefully) “and both you and she will be
pariahs in England, Germany, and anywhere on the wide earth where there
are English, Germans, French, Americans and others who fought the war.
I suppose you know that?”
“Perfectly,” he answered, gravely.
I told him that I was amazed that he of all men should fall in love
with a German girl--he who had seen all the abomination of the war,
and had come out to it with a flaming idealism. To that he answered
savagely:
“Flaming idealism be blowed! I came out with blood-lust in my heart,
and having killed until I was sick of killing--German boys who popped
their heads over the parapet--I saw that the whole scheme of things was
wrong, and that the grey men had no more power of escape than the brown
men. We had to go on killing each other because we were both under the
same law, thrust upon us by those directing the infernal machinery
of world-politics. But that’s not the point, and it’s old and stale,
anyhow.”
“The point is,” I said, “that you will be looked upon as a traitor by
many of your best pals, that you will smash your father and mother, and
that this girl Elsa and you will be profoundly miserable.”
“We shall be enormously and immensely happy,” he answered, “and that
outweighs everything.”
He told me that he needed happiness. For more than four years he had
suffered agony of mind in the filth and mud of war. He craved for
beauty, and Elsa fulfilled his ideal. He had been a lonely devil, and
Elsa had offered him the only cure for the worst disease in life,
intimate and eternal love.
Something prompted me to say words which I deeply regretted as soon as
they were spoken. It was the utterance of a subconscious thought.
“There is a girl, not German, who might have cured your loneliness. You
and Eileen O’Connor would have made good mates.”
For some reason he was hit rather hard by that remark. He became
exceedingly pale, and for a moment or two did not answer me. I thought
he would blurt out some angry reply, damning my impudence, but when he
spoke it was in a grave, gentle way which seemed to me more puzzling.
“Eileen would make a fine wife for any man she liked. But she’s above
most of us.”
We stayed up, talking, nearly all that night, and Wickham Brand
described one scene within his recent experiences which must have been
sensational. It was when he announced to the family von Kreuzenach that
he loved Elsa and desired her hand in marriage.
Brand’s sense of humour came back to him when he told me of this
episode, and he laughed now at the frightfulness of his ordeal. It was
he who had insisted upon announcing the news to Elsa’s parents, to
avoid any charge of dishonesty. Elsa herself was in favour of hiding
their love until Peace was declared, when perhaps the passionate
hostility of her parents to England might be abated. For Brand’s sake
also she thought it would be better. But she yielded to his argument
that secrecy might spoil the beauty of their friendship, and give it an
ugly taint.
“We’ll go through with it straight from the start,” he had cried.
Elsa’s answer was quick and glad.
“I have no fear now of anything in the world except the loss of you!”
Franz von Kreuzenach was the first to know, and Elsa told him. He
seemed stunned with surprise, and then immensely glad, as he took his
sister in his arms and kissed her.
“Your marriage with an English officer,” he said, “will be the symbol
of reconciliation between England and Germany.”
After that he remembered his father and mother, and was a coward at the
thought of their hostility. The idea of telling his father, as Elsa
asked him to do, put him into what Brand called “the bluest of blue
funk.” He had the German reverence for parental authority and though
he went as far as the door-handle of his father’s study, he retreated,
and said in a boyish way, speaking in English, as usual, with Brand and
his sister:
“I haven’t the pluck! I would rather face shell-fire than my father’s
wrath.”
It was Brand who “went over the top.”
He made his announcement formally, in the drawing-room after dinner, in
the curiously casual way which proved him a true Englishman. He cleared
his throat (he told me, grinning at his own mannerism), and during a
gap in the conversation said to the General:
“By the way, sir, I have something rather special to mention to-night.”
“_Bitte?_” said the old General, with his hard, deliberate courtesy.
“Your daughter and I,” said Brand, “wish to be married as soon as
possible. I have the honour to ask your consent.”
Brand told me of the awful silence which followed his statement. It
seemed interminable. Franz von Kreuzenach, who was present, was as
white as though he had been condemned to death by court-martial. Elsa
was speechless, but came over to Brand’s side and held his hand. Her
mother had the appearance of a lady startled by the sudden appearance
of a poisonous snake. The General sat back in his chair, grasping its
arms and gasping for breath as though Brand had hit him in the stomach.
It was the mother who spoke first, and ignoring Brand completely, she
addressed her daughter harshly.
“You are mad, Elsa!”
“Yes, Mother,” said the girl. “I am mad with joy.”
“This English officer insults us intolerably,” said the mother, still
ignoring Brand by any glance. “We were forced to receive him into our
house. At least he might have behaved with decency and respect.”
“Mother,” said Elsa, “this gentleman has given me the great honour of
his love.”
“To accept it,” said the lady, “would be a dishonour so dreadful for a
good German girl that I refuse to believe it possible.”
“It is true, Mother, and I am wonderfully happy.”
Elsa went over to her mother, sinking down on her knees, and kissing
the lady’s hand. But Frau von Kreuzenach withdrew her hand quickly, and
then rose from her chair and stood behind her husband, with one hand on
his shoulder.
The old man had found his means of speech at last.
He spoke in a low, stern voice to his daughter. Brand was ignored by
him as by the mother. They did not recognise his presence.
“My daughter,” he said (if Brand remembered his words), “the German
people have been brought to ruin and humiliated by one nation in Europe
who was jealous of our power and genius. That nation was England, our
treacherous, hypocritical enemy. Without England, France would have
been smashed. Without England our Emperor would have prevailed over
all his enemies. Without the English blockade we should not have been
weakened by hunger, deprived of the raw material necessary to victory,
starved so that our children died, and our will to win was sapped.
They were English soldiers who killed my dear son Heinrich, and your
brother. The flower of German manhood was slain by the English in
Flanders and on the Somme.”
The General spoke very quietly, with an intensity of effort to be calm.
But suddenly his voice rose, said Brand, to a kind of harsh shout.
“Any German girl who permits herself to love an Englishman is a
traitorous hussy. I would have her stripped and flogged. The curse of
our old German God shall follow her.”
Another silence, in which there was no sound except the noisy breathing
of the old man, was broken by the hard voice of Frau von Kreuzenach.
“Your father has spoken, Elsa. There is no more to say.”
Elsa had become very pale, but she was smiling at Brand, he told me,
and still held his hand in a tight grip.
“There is something more to say, my dear father and mother,” she
answered. “It is that I love Captain Brand, and that I will follow him
anywhere in the world if he will take me. For love is stronger than
hate, and above all nationality.”
It was Franz von Kreuzenach who spoke now. He was standing at the
table, facing his father, and it was to his father that he talked. He
said that Elsa was right about love. In spite of the war, the souls of
men and women were not separated by racial boundaries. When two souls
touched and mingled, no hatred of peoples, no patriotic passion, could
intervene. Elsa’s love for an English gentleman was but a symbol of
the peace that was coming, when all countries would be united in a
Society of Nations with equal rights and equal duties, and a common
brotherhood. They saw in the streets of Cologne that there was no
natural, inevitable hatred between English and Germans. The Army of
Occupation had proved itself to be an instrument of good will between
those who had tried to kill each other for four years of slaughter.
Captain Brand had behaved with the most charming courtesy and chivalry,
according to the traditions of an English gentleman, and he, Franz von
Kreuzenach, was glad and honoured because this officer desired to take
Elsa for his wife. Their marriage would be a consecration of the new
peace.
The father listened to him silently, except for that hard noise of
breathing. When his son uttered those last words, the old man leaned
forward in his chair, and his eyes glittered.
“Get out of my house, _Schweinhund_! Do not come near me again, or I
will denounce you as a traitor, and shoot you like a dog.”
He turned to Elsa with outstretched hand.
“Go up to bed, girl. If you were younger I would flog you with my
hunting-whip.”
For the first time he spoke to Brand, controlling his rage with a
convulsive effort.
“I have not the power to evict you from the house. For the time being
the German people of the Rhineland are under hostile orders. Perhaps
you will find another billet more to your convenience, and more
agreeable to myself.”
“To-night, sir,” said Brand, and he told me that he admired the old
man’s self-control and his studied dignity.
Elsa still clasped his hand, and before her family he kissed her.
“With your leave, or without leave,” he said, “your daughter and I will
be man and wife, for you have no right to stand between our love.”
He bowed and left the room, and in an hour, the house.
Franz von Kreuzenach came into his room before he left, and wrung his
hand.
“I must go, too,” he said. “My father is very much enraged with me. It
is the break between the young and the old--the new conflict, as we
were saying, one day.”
He was near weeping, and Brand apologised for being the cause of so
much trouble.
In the hall Elsa came to Brand, as the orderly carried out his bags.
“To-morrow,” she said, “we will meet at Elizabeth von Detmold’s--my
true friend.”
Her eyes were wet with tears, but she was smiling, and there was, said
Brand, a fine courage shining in her face.
She put her hands on Brand’s shoulders, and kissed him, to the deep
astonishment and embarrassment of the orderly, who stood by. It was
from this man, Brock, that the news of Brand’s “entanglement” spread,
through other orderlies, to officers of his mess, as he knew by the
cold shoulder that some of them turned to him.