“I’m sure of it.... It is useless telling her that the innocent are
being punished for the guilty, and that all Europe was involved in the
same guilt. She says, ‘You have altered your ideas. The strain of war
has been too much for you.’ She means I’m mad or bad!... Sometimes
I think I may be, but when I think of those scenes in Cologne, the
friendly way of our fighting-men with their former enemy, the charity
of our Tommies, their lack of hatred now the job is done, I look at
these people in England, the stay-at-homes, and believe it is they who
are warped.”
The news of Brand’s marriage with a German girl had leaked out, though
his people tried to hush it up. It came to me now and then as a tit-bit
of scandal from men who had been up at Oxford with him in the old days.
“You know that fellow Wickham Brand?”
“Yes.”
“Heard the rumour about him?”
“No.”
“They say he’s got a German wife. Married her after the Armistice.”
“Why not?”
That question of mine made them stare as though I had uttered
some blasphemy. Generally they did not attempt to answer it, but
shrugged their shoulders with a look of unutterable disgust, or said,
“Disgraceful!” They were men, invariably, who had done _embusqué_ work
in the war, in Government offices and soft jobs. Soldiers who had
fought their way to Cologne were more lenient. One of them said, “Some
of the German girls are devilish pretty. Not my style, perhaps, but
kissable.”
I saw something of Brand’s trouble when I walked down Knightsbridge
with him one day on the way to his home in Chelsea. Horace Chipchase,
the novelist, came face to face with us and gave a whoop of pleasure
when he saw us. Then suddenly, after shaking hands with me and
greeting Brand warmly, he remembered the rumour that had reached him.
Embarrassment overcame him, and ignoring Brand he confined his remarks
to me, awkwardly, and made an excuse for getting on. He did not look at
Brand again.
“Bit strained in his manner,” I remarked, glancing sideways at Wickham.
He strode on, with tightened lips.
“Shared rooms with me once, and I helped him when he was badly in need
of it.... He’s heard about Elsa. Silly blighter!”
But it hurt the man, who was very sensitive under his hard crust.
It was on the way to his house that he told me he had made arrangements
at last for Elsa to join him in England. One of his friends at
headquarters in Cologne was providing her with a passport and had
agreed to let her travel with him to Paris, where he was to give
evidence before a committee of the Peace Conference. Brand could fetch
her from there in a week’s time.
“I am going to Paris next week,” I told him, and he gave a grunt of
pleasure, and said, “Splendid! We can both meet Elsa.”
I thought it curious then, and afterwards, that he was anxious for my
company when he met his wife and when she was with him. I think the
presence of a third person helped him to throw off a little of the
melancholy into which he relapsed when alone.
I asked him if Elsa’s family knew of her marriage and were reconciled
to it, and he told me that they knew, but were less reconciled now than
when she had first broken the news to her father and mother on the
day of her wedding. Then there had been a family “scene.” The General
had raged and stormed, and his wife had wept, but after that outburst
had decided to forgive her, in order to avoid a family scandal. There
had been a formidable assembly of uncles, aunts and cousins of the
von Kreuzenach family to sit in judgment upon this affair which, as
they said, “touched their honour,” and Elsa’s description of it,
and of her terror and sense of guilt (it is not easy to break with
racial traditions) was very humourous, though at the same time rather
pathetic. They had graciously decided, after prolonged discussions
in which they treated Elsa exactly as though she were the prisoner
at a court-martial, to acknowledge and accept her marriage with
Captain Brand. They had been led to this decision mainly owing to
the information given by Franz von Kreuzenach that Captain Brand
belonged to the English aristocracy, his father being Sir Amyas Brand,
and a member of the English House of Parliament. They were willing
to admit that, inferior as Captain Brand’s family might be to that
of von Kreuzenach--so old and honoured in German history--it was yet
respectable and not unworthy of alliance with them. Possibly--it was an
idea suggested with enormous solemnity by Onkel von Kreuzenach--Elsa’s
marriage with the son of an English Member of Parliament might be of
service to the Fatherland in obtaining some amelioration of the Peace
Terms (the Treaty was not yet signed), and in counteracting the harsh
malignity of France. They must endeavour to use this opportunity
provided by Elsa in every possible way as a patriotic duty.... So at
the end of the family conclave Elsa was not only forgiven but was to
some extent exalted as an instrument of God for the rescue of their
beloved Germany.
That position of hers lasted in her family until the terms of the
Peace Treaty leaked out, and then were published in full. A storm of
indignation rose in Germany, and Elsa was a private victim of its
violence in her own house. The combined clauses of the Treaty were
read as a sentence of death by the German people. Clause by clause,
they believed it fastened a doom upon them, and insured their ruin. It
condemned them to the payment of indemnities which would demand all
the produce of their industry for many and uncertain years. It reduced
them to the position of a Slave state, without an army, without a
fleet, without colonies, without the right to develop industries in
foreign countries, without ships to carry their merchandise, without
coal to supply their factories, or raw material for their manufactures.
To enforce the payment of these indemnities foreign commissions
would seize all German capital invested in former enemy or neutral
states, and would keep armed forces on the Rhine ready to march at
any time, years after the conclusion of peace, into the heart of
Germany. The German people might work, but not for themselves. They had
freed themselves of their own tyrants, but were to be subject to an
international tyranny depriving them of all hope of gradual recovery
from the ruin of defeat. On the West and on the East, Austria was to
be hemmed in by new States formed out of her own flesh-and-blood under
the domination of hostile races. She was to be maimed and strangled.
The Fourteen Points to which the Allies had pledged themselves before
the Armistice had been abandoned utterly, and Wilson’s promise of a
peace which would heal the wounds of the world had been replaced by a
peace of vengeance which would plunge Central Europe into deep gulfs of
misery, despair, and disease. That, at least, was the German point of
view.
“They’re stunned,” said Brand. “They knew they were to be punished, and
they were willing to pay a vast price of defeat. But they believed that
under a Republican Government they would be left with a future hope of
progress, a decent hope of life, based upon their industry. Now they
have no hope, for we have given them a thin chance of reconstruction.
They are falling back upon the hope of vengeance and revolt. We have
prepared another inevitable war when the Germans, with the help of
Russia, will strive to break the fetters we have fastened on them. So
goes the only purpose for which most of us fought this war, and all our
pals have died in vain.”
He stopped in the street and beat the pavement with his stick.
“The damned stupidity of it all!” he said. “The infernal wickedness of
those Old Men who have arranged this thing!”
Three small boys came galloping up Cheyne Walk with toy reins and
tinkling bells.
“Those children,” said Brand, “will see the things that we have
seen and go into the ditches of death before their manhood has been
fulfilled. We fought to save them, and have failed.”
He told me that even Elsa had been aghast at the Peace Terms.
“I hoped more from the generous soul of England,” she had written to
him.
Franz von Kreuzenach had written more bitterly than that.
“We have been betrayed. There were millions of young men in Germany who
would have worked loyally to fulfil Wilson’s conditions of peace as
they were pledged in his Fourteen Points. They would have taken their
punishment, with patience and courage, knowing the penalty of defeat.
They would have worked for the new ideals of a new age, which were to
be greater liberty and the brotherhood of man in a League of Nations.
But what is that League? It is a combination of enemies, associated
for the purpose of crushing the German people and keeping her crushed.
I, who loved England and had no enmity against her even in war, cannot
forgive her now for her share in this Peace. As a German I find it
unforgivable, because it perpetuates the spirit of hatred, and thrusts
us back into the darkness where evil is bred.”
“Do you agree with that?” I asked Brand.
“On the whole, yes,” he said, gravely. “Mind you, I’m not against
punishing Germany. She had to be punished. But we are substituting
slow torture for just retribution, and like Franz I’m thinking of the
effect on the future. By generosity we should have made the world safe.
By vengeance we have prepared new strife. Europe will be given up to
anarchy and deluged in the blood of the boys who are now babes.”
I had dinner with Brand’s people and found them “difficult.” Sir Amyas
Brand had Wickham’s outward hardness and none of his inner sensibility.
He was a stiff, pompous man who had done extremely well out of the war,
I guessed, by the manufacture of wooden huts, to which he attached a
patriotic significance, apart from his profits. He alluded to the death
of his younger son as his “sacrifice for the Empire,” though it seemed
to me that the boy Jack had been the real victim of sacrifice. To
Wickham he behaved with an exasperating air of forgiveness, as to one
who had sinned and was physically and morally sick.
“How do you think Wickham is looking?” he asked me at table, and when I
said, “Very well,” he sighed and shook his head.
“The war was a severe nervous strain upon him. It has changed him
sadly. We try to be patient with him, poor lad.”
Brand overhead his speech and flushed angrily.
“I’m sorry I try your patience so severely, sir,” he said in a bitter,
ironical way.
“Don’t let’s argue about it, dear lad,” said Sir Amyas Brand suavely.
“No,” said Lady Brand plaintively, “you know argument is bad for you,
Wickham. You become so violent, dear.”
“Besides,” said Ethel Brand, the daughter, in a low and resigned voice,
“what’s done can’t be undone.”
“Meaning Elsa?” asked Wickham savagely. I could see that but for my
restraining presence as a stranger there was all the inflammable stuff
here for a first-class domestic ‘flare-up.’
“What else?” asked Ethel coldly, and meeting her brother’s challenging
eyes with a perfectly steady gaze. She was a handsome girl with
regular, classical features, and tight lips, as narrow-minded, I
imagined, as a mid-Victorian spinster in a cathedral town, and as hard
as granite in principle and prejudice.
Wickham weakened, after signs of an explosion of rage. He spoke gently,
and revealed a hope to which I think he clung desperately.
“When Elsa comes you will all fall in love with her.”
It was the worst thing he could have said, though he was unconscious of
his “gaffe.”
His sister Ethel reddened, and I could see her mouth harden.
“So far, I have remarkably little love for Germans, male or female.”
“I hope we shall behave with Christian charity,” said Lady Brand.
Sir Amyas Brand coughed uneasily, and then tried to laugh off his
embarrassment for my benefit.
“There will be considerable scandal in my constituency!”
“To hell with that!” said Brand irritably. “It’s about time the British
public returned to sanity.”
“Ah!” said Sir Amyas, “there’s a narrow border-line between sanity and
shell-shock. Really, it is distressing what a number of men seem to
come back with disordered nerves. All these crimes, all these cases of
violence----”
It gave him a chance of repeating a leading article which he had
read that morning in _The Times_. It provided a conversation without
controversy until the end of dinner.
In the hall, before I left, Wickham Brand laughed, rather miserably.
“It’s not going to be easy! Elsa will find the climate rather cold
here, eh?”
“She will win them over,” I said hopefully, and these words cheered him.
“Why, yes, they’re bound to like her.”
We arranged for the Paris trip two weeks later, but before then we
were sure to meet at Eileen O’Connor’s. As a matter of fact, we dined
together with Daddy Small next day, and Eileen was with him.
V
I found Eileen O’Connor refreshing and invigorating, so that it was
good to be in her company. Most people in England at that time, at
least those I met, were “nervy,” depressed, and apprehensive of evil
to come. There was hardly a family I knew who had not one vacant chair
wherein a boy had sat when he had come home from school or office, and
afterwards on leave. Their ghosts haunted these homes and were present
in any company where people gathered for conversation or distraction.
The wound to England’s soul was unhealed, and the men who came back had
received grave hurt, many of them, to their nervous and moral health.
This Irish girl was beautifully gay, not with that deliberate and
artificial gaiety which filled London theatres and dancing-halls, but
with an inner flame of happiness. It was difficult to account for that.
She had seen much tragedy in Lille. Death and the agony of men had been
familiar to her. She had faced death herself, very closely, escaping,
as she said, by a narrow “squeak.” She had seen the brutality of war
and its welter of misery for men and women, and now in time of Peace
she was conscious of the sufferings of many people, and did not hide
these things from her mental vision, or cry, “All’s right with the
world!” when all was wrong. But something in her character, something,
perhaps, in her faith, enabled her to resist the pressure of all this
morbid emotion and to face it squarely, with smiling eyes. Another
thing that attracted one was her fearlessness of truth. At a time when
most people shrank from truth her candour was marvellous, with the
simplicity of childhood joined to the wisdom of womanhood.
I saw this at the dinner-party for four, arranged in her honour,
by Daddy Small. That was given, for cheapness’ sake, at a little
old restaurant in Whitehall which provided a good dinner for a few
shillings, and in an “atmosphere” of old-fashioned respectability which
appealed to the little American.
Eileen knocked Brand edgewise at the beginning of his dinner by
remarking about his German marriage.
“The news came to me as a shock,” she said, and when Wickham raised his
eyebrows and looked both surprised and dismayed (he had counted on her
sympathy and help), she patted his hand as it played a devil’s tattoo
on the table-cloth, and launched into a series of indiscretions that
fairly made my hair curl.
“Theoretically,” she said, “I hadn’t the least objection to your
marrying a German girl. I have always believed that love is an instinct
which is beyond the control of diplomats who arrange frontiers and
Generals who direct wars. I saw a lot of it in Lille--and there was
Franz von Kreuzenach, who fell in love with me, poor child. What really
hurt me for a while was green-eyed jealousy.”
“Daddy Small laughed hilariously, and filled up Eileen’s glass with
Moselle wine.”
Brand looked blank.
“Jealousy?”
“Why, yes,” said Eileen. “Imagine me, an Irish girl, all soppy with
emotion at the first sight of English khaki (that’s a fantastic
situation anyhow!), after four years with the grey men, and then
finding that the first khaki tunic she meets holds the body of a man
she knew as a boy, when she used to pull his hair! And such a grave
heroic-looking man, Wicky! Why, I felt like one of Tennyson’s ladies
released from her dark tower by a Knight of the Round Table. Then you
went away and married a German Gretchen! And all my doing, because if I
hadn’t given you a letter to Franz you wouldn’t have met Elsa. So when
I heard the news, I thought, ‘There goes my romance!’”
Daddy Small laughed again, joyously.
“Say, my dear,” he said, “you’re making poor old Wickham blush like an
Englishman asked to tell the story of his V.C. in public.”
Brand laughed, too, in his harsh, deep voice.
“Why, Eileen, you ought to have told me before I moved out of Lille.”
“And where would maiden modesty have been?” asked Eileen, in her
humourous way.
“Where is it now?” asked the little doctor.
“Besides,” said Brand, “I had that letter to Franz von Kreuzenach in my
pocket. I don’t mind telling you I detested the fellow for his infernal
impudence in making love to you.”
“Sure now, it was a one-sided affair, entirely,” said Eileen,
exaggerating her Irish accent, “but one has to be polite to a gentleman
that saves one’s life on account of a romantic passion. Oh, Wickham,
it’s very English you are!”
Brand could find nothing to say for himself, and it was I who came to
the rescue of his embarrassment by dragging a red herring across the
thread of Eileen’s discourse. She had a wonderful way of saying things
that on most girls’ lips would have seemed audacious, or improper, or
high-falutin, but on hers were natural with a simplicity which shone
through her.
Her sense of humour played like a light about her words, yet beneath
her wit was a tenderness and a knowledge of tragic things. I remember
some of her sayings that night at dinner, and they seemed to me very
good then, though when put down they lose the deep melody of her voice
and the smile or sadness of her dark eyes.
“England,” she said, “fought the war for Liberty and the rights of
small nations, but said to Ireland, ‘Hush, keep quiet there, damn you,
or you’ll make us look ridiculous.’”
“Irish soldiers,” she said, “helped England to win all her wars but
mostly in Scottish regiments. When the poor boys wanted to carry an
Irish flag, Kitchener said, ‘Go to Hell,’ and some of them went to
Flanders ... and recruiting stopped with a snap.”
“Now, how do you know these things?” asked Daddy Small. “Did Kitchener
go to Lille to tell you?”
“No,” said Eileen, “but I found some of the Dublin boys in the prison
at Lille, and they told the truth before they died, and perhaps it was
that which killed them. That, and starvation, and German brutality.”
“I believe you’re a Sinn Feiner,” said Dr. Small. “Why don’t you go to
Ireland and show your true colours, ma’am?”
“I’m Sinn Fein all right,” said Eileen, “but I hated the look of a
white wall in Lille, and there are so many white walls in the little
green isle. So I’m stopping in Kensington and trying to hate the
English, but can’t because I love them.”
She turned to Wickham and said:
“Will you take me for a row in Kensington Gardens the very next day the
sun shines?”
“Rather!” said Wickham, “on one condition!”
“And that?”
“That you’ll be kind to my little Elsa when she comes.”
“I’ll be a mother to her,” said Eileen, “but she must come quick or
I’ll be gone.”
“Gone?”
Wickham spoke with dismay in his voice. I think he had counted on
Eileen as his stand-by when Elsa would need a friend in England.
“Hush now!” said Daddy Small. “It’s my secret, you wicked lady with
black eyes and a mystical manner.”
“Doctor,” said Eileen, “your own President rebukes you. ‘Open covenants
openly arrived at’--weren’t those his words for the new diplomacy?”
“Would to God he had kept to them,” said the little doctor, bitterly,
launching into a denunciation of the Peace Conference until I cut him
short with a question.
“What’s this secret, Doctor?”
He pulled out his pocket-book with an air of mystery.
“We’re getting on with the International League of Good-will,” he said.
“It’s making more progress than the League of Nations. There are names
here that are worth their weight in gold. There are golden promises
which by the grace of God”--Daddy Small spoke solemnly--“will be
fulfilled by golden deeds. Anyhow, we’re going to get a move on--away
from hatred towards charity, not for the making of wounds but for the
healing, not punishing the innocent for the sins of the guilty, but
saving the innocent--the Holy Innocents--for the glory of life. Miss
Eileen and others are going to be the instruments of the machinery of
mercy--rather, I should say, the spirit of humanity.”
“With you as our gallant leader,” said Eileen, patting his hand.
“It sounds good,” said Brand. “Let’s hear some more.”
Dr. Small told us more in glowing language, and in Biblical utterance
mixed with American slang like Billy Sunday’s Bible. He was profoundly
moved. He was filled with hope and gladness, and with a humble pride
because his efforts had borne fruit.
The scheme was simple. From his friends in the United States he had
promises, as good as gold, of many millions of American dollars. From
English friends he had also considerable sums. With this treasure he
was going to Central Europe to organise relief on a big scale for the
children who were starving to death. Eileen O’Connor was to be his
private secretary and assistant-organiser. She would have heaps of
work to do, and she had graduated in the prisons and slums of Lille.
They were starting in a week’s time for Warsaw, Prague, Buda-Pesth and
Vienna.
“Then,” said Brand, “Elsa will lose a friend.”
“Bring her too,” said Eileen. “There’s work for all.”
Brand was startled by this, and a sudden light leapt into his eyes.
“By Jove!... But I’m afraid not. That’s impossible.”
So it was only a week we had with Eileen, but in that time we had some
good meetings and merry adventures. Brand and I rowed her on the lake
in Kensington Gardens, and she told us Irish fairy-tales as she sat in
the stern, with her hat in her lap, and the wind playing in her brown
hair. We took her to the Russian Ballet and she wept a little at the
beauty of it.
“After four years of war,” she said, “beauty is like water to a parched
soul. It is so exquisite it hurts.”
She took us one day into the Carmelite church at Kensington, and Brand
and I knelt each side of her, feeling sinners with a saint between us.
And then, less like a saint, she sang ribald little songs on the way to
her mother’s house in Holland Street, and said, “Drat the thing!” when
she couldn’t find her key to unlock the door.
“Sorry, Biddy my dear,” she said to the little maidservant who opened
the door. “I shall forget my head one day.”
“Sure, Miss Eileen,” said the girl, “but never the dear heart of you,
at all, at all.”
Eileen’s mother was a buxom, cheery, smiling Irishwoman who did not
worry, I fancy, about anything in the world, and was sure of Heaven.
Her drawing-room was littered with papers and novels, some of which she
swept off the sofa with a careless hand.
“Won’t you take a seat then?”
I asked her whether she had not been anxious about her daughter when
Eileen was all those years under German rule.
“Not at all,” said the lady. “I knew our dear Lord was as near to Lille
as to London.”
Two of her boys had been killed in the war, “fighting,” she said, “for
an ungrateful country which keeps its heel on the neck of Ireland,” and
two were in the United States, working for the honour of Ireland on
American newspapers. Eileen’s two sisters had married during the war
and between them had given birth to four Sinn Feiners. Eileen’s father
had died a year ago, and almost his last word had been her name.
“The dear man thought all the world of Eileen,” said Mrs. O’Connor. “I
was out of it entirely when he had her by his side.”
“You’ll be lonely,” said Brand, “when your daughter goes abroad again.”
Eileen answered him.
“Oh, you can’t keep me back by insidious remarks like that! Mother
spends most of her days in church, and the rest of them reading naughty
novels which keep her from ascending straight to Heaven without the
necessity of dying first. She is never lonely because her spirit is in
touch with those she loves, in this world or the other. And isn’t that
the truth I’m after talking, Mother o’ mine?”
“I never knew more than one O’Connor who told the truth yet,” said the
lady, “and that’s yourself, my dear. And it’s a frightening way you
have with it that would scare the devil out of his skin.”
They were pleasant hours with Eileen, and when she went away from
Charing Cross one morning with Dr. Small, five hospital nurses and two
Americans of the Red Cross, I wished with all my heart that Wickham
Brand had asked her, and not Elsa von Kreuzenach, to be his wife. That
was an idle wish, for the next morning Brand and I crossed over to
France, and on the way to Paris my friend told me that the thought of
meeting Elsa after those months of separation excited him so that each
minute seemed an hour. And as he told me that he lit a cigarette, and I
saw that his hand was trembling, because of this nervous strain.