“Columbine was my wife. Pierrot is now her husband. Funny, isn’t it?”
My memory went back to that night in Cologne less than six months
before, when Harding had asked me to use my influence to get him
demobilised, and as an explanation of his motive opened his pocket-book
and showed me the photograph of a pretty girl, and said, “That’s my
wife ... she is hipped because I have been away so long.” I felt
enormously sorry for him.
“Come and have a whiskey in the smoke-room,” said Harding. “I’d like a
yarn, and we shall be alone.”
I did not want him to tell me his tale. I was tired of tragic history.
But I could not refuse. The boy wanted to unburden himself. I could see
that, though for quite a time after we had sat on each side of the wood
fire, he hesitated in getting to the point and indulged in small-talk
about his favourite brand of cigars, and my evil habit of smoking the
worst kind of cigarettes.
Suddenly we plunged into what was the icy waters of his real thoughts.
“About my wife.... I’d like you to know. Others will tell you, and
you’d have heard already if you hadn’t been away so long. But I think
you would get a wrong notion from others. The fact is, I don’t blame
Evelyn. I would like you to understand that. I blame the Germans for
everything.”
“The Germans?”
That was a strange statement, and I could not see the drift of it until
he explained his meaning.
“The Germans made the war, and the war took 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 woful way, which was not good to hear.
Then he became angry and passionate, and told me it was all the fault
of “those damned women.”
I asked him what “damned women,” and he launched into a wild
denunciation of a certain set of women--most of the names he mentioned
were familiar to me from full-length portraits in 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 always one’s best
pal. Damn him!”
Harding seemed to repent of that curse, at least his next words were
strangely inconsistent.
“Mind you, I don’t blame him, either. It was I who sent him to Evelyn.
He was in the Dragoons with me, and when he went home on leave I said,
‘Go and cheer up my little wife, old man. Take her to a theatre or
two, and all that. She’s devilish lonely.’ Needless to say, he fell in
love with her. I might have known it. As for Evelyn, she was immensely
taken with young Dick. He was a bit of a humourist and made her laugh.
Laughter was a devilish good thing in war-time. That was where Dick had
his pull. I might have 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
bundled into the hall.
“The mistress is out, sir,” said the maid, and he remembered afterwards
that she looked queerly at him, with a kind of pity.
There was the usual note waiting for him. Evelyn was “very sorry.” She
hated causing her husband the grief she knew he would feel, but she and
Dick could not do without each other. The war had altered everything,
and many wives to many husbands. She hoped Harding would be happy after
a bit....
Harding was not happy. When he read that note he went a little mad, and
roamed round London with an automatic pistol, determined to kill his
former friend if he could set eyes on him. Fortunately, he did not find
him. Evelyn and Dick had gone off to a village in Devonshire, and after
three days with murder in his heart Harding had been very ill, and had
gone into a nursing-home. There in his weakness he had, he told me,
“thought things out.” The result of his meditations amounted to no more
than the watchword of many people in years of misery:
“_C’est la guerre!_”
It was the war which had caused his tragedy. It had put too great a
strain on human nature, or at least on human nerves and morals. It
had broken down the conventions and traditions of civilised life. The
Germans had not only destroyed many towns and villages, but many homes
and hearts far from the firing-line. They had let the devil loose.
“Quite a number of my pals,” said Harding, “are in the same boat with
me. They either couldn’t stick to their wives, or their wives couldn’t
stick them. It gives one a sense of companionship!”
He smiled in a melancholy way, but then confessed to loneliness--so
many of his real pals had gone West--and asked whether he could call on
me now and then. It was for that reason that he came to my house fairly
often, and sometimes Fortune, who came too at times, made him laugh, as
in the old days.