As Brand admitted to me, and as he had outlined the trouble in his
letters, he was having “a bad time.” Since his marriage with Elsa
von Kreuzenach he had not had much peace of mind nor any kind of
luck. After leaving Cologne the War Office, prompted by some unknown
influence,--he suspected his father, who knew the Secretary for
War--had sent him off on a special mission to Italy and had delayed
his demobilisation until a month before this meeting of ours. That had
prevented his plan of bringing Elsa to England, and now, when he was
free and her journey possible, he was seriously embarrassed with regard
to a home for her. There was plenty of room in his father’s house at
Cheyne Walk, Chelsea--too big a house for his father and mother and
younger sister, now that the eldest girl had married and his younger
brother lay dead on the Somme. It had been his idea that he and Elsa
would live in the upper rooms--it made a kind of flat--while he got
back to novel-writing until he earned enough to provide a home of
his own. It was still his idea, as the only possible place for the
immediate future, but the family was dead against it and expressed the
utmost aversion, amounting almost to horror, at the idea of receiving
his German wife. By violent argument, by appeals to reason and charity,
most of all by the firm conviction of his father that he was suffering
from shell-shock and would go over the border-line of sanity if
thwarted too much, a grudging consent had been obtained from them to
give Elsa house-room. Yet he dreaded the coldness of her welcome, and
the hostility not only of his own people but of any English society in
which she might find herself.
“I shouldn’t have believed,” said Brand, “that such vindictive hatred
could have outlasted the war, in England. The people here at home, who
have never seen war closer than an air-raid, are poisoned, twisted and
envenomed with hate. And the women are worst. My own mother--so sweet
and gentle in the old days--would see every German baby starve rather
than subscribe to a single drop of milk. My own sister--twenty years
of age, and as holy as an angel--would scratch out the eyes of every
German girl. She reads the papers every day with a feverish desire for
the Kaiser’s trial. She licks her lips at the stories of starvation
in Austria. ‘They are getting punished,’ she says. ‘Who?’ I ask her.
‘Austrian babies?’ and she says, ‘The people who killed my brother
and yours.’ What’s the good of telling her that I have killed _their_
brothers--many of them--even the brother of my wife----”