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 State 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 has 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
shown 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 know 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
Lilliputians. 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 darky 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 those 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 good-will 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 writingman, 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 Good-will. 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 programme....
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 good-will 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,
humourous 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.