BOOK III--BUILDERS OF PEACE

I

Those of us who had been in exile during the years of war and now returned to peace found that England had changed in our absence. We did not know this new England. We did not understand its spirit or its people. Nor did they understand the men who came back from the many fronts of war, by hundreds of thousands, now that demobilisation had become a spate after murmurings that were loud with the menace of revolt from men who had been long patient.

These “_revenants,_” the men who came back out of the terror, were so many Rip van Winkles (of a youthful kind), looking round for the companions of their boyhood, going to old places, touching old stones, sitting by the same fireside, but with a sense of ghostliness. A new generation had arrived since 1914. The children had become boys and girls; the girls had grown into womanhood precociously. There were legions of “flappers” in London and other big cities, earning good wages in Government offices and factories, spending most of their money on the adornment of their prettiness, self-reliant, audacious, out for the fun of life, and finding it. The tragedy of the war had not touched them. It had been a great “lark” to them. They accepted the slaughter of their brothers or their fathers light-heartedly, after a few bursts of tears and a period of sentiment in which pride was strongest. They had grown up to the belief that a soldier is generally killed or wounded, and that he is glad to take the risk, or, if not, ought to be, as part of the most exciting and enjoyable game of war. Women had filled many of the jobs which formerly were the exclusive possession of men, and the men coming back looked at these legions of women clerks, tram conductors, ticket collectors, munition workers, plough-girls, and motor drivers with the brooding thought that they, the men, had been ousted from their places. A new class had arisen out of the whirlpool of social upheaval. The profiteers, in a large way of business, had prospered exceedingly out of the supply and demand of massacre. The profiteer’s wife clothed herself in furs and jewels. The profiteer’s daughters were dancing by night and sleeping by day. The farmers and the shopkeepers had made a good thing out of war. They liked war so long as they were untouched by air-raids or not afflicted by boys who came back blind or crippled. They had always been optimists. They were optimists now, and claimed a share in the merit of the victory that had been won by the glorious watchword of “business as usual.” They hoped the terms of peace would be merciless upon the enemy, and they demanded the Kaiser’s head as a pleasant sacrifice adding spice to the great banquet of victory celebrations.

Outwardly, England was gay and prosperous and light-spirited. It was only by getting away from the seething crowds in the streets, from the dancing crowds, and the theatre crowds, and the shopping crowds, that men came face to face with private and hidden tragedy. In small houses or big, there were women who had lost their men and were listless and joyless, the mothers of only sons who did not come back with the demobilised tide, and the sweethearts of boys who would never fulfil the promise that had given hope in life to lonely girlhood. There was a new rich, but there was also a new poor, and people on small fixed incomes or with little nest-eggs of capital on which they scraped out life found themselves reduced to desperate straits by the soaring of prices and the burden of taxation. Underneath the surface joy of a victorious people there was bitterness to which victory was a mockery and a haggard grief at the cost of war in precious blood. But the bitterness smouldered without any flame of passion, and grief nagged at people’s hearts silently.

Many of the men who came back were in a strange mood--restless, morbid, neurotic. Their own people did not understand them. They could not understand themselves. They had hated war, most of them, but this peace seemed flat and unprofitable to their souls. All purpose and meaning seemed suddenly to have gone out of life. Perhaps it was the narrowness of English home-life. Men who had travelled to far places of the world, who had seen the ways of foreign people, and had been part of a great drama, found themselves back again in a little house, closed in and isolated by the traditions of English individualism, so that often the next-door neighbour is a stranger. They had a sense of being suffocated. They could not stay indoors with the old pleasure in a pipe or a book by the fireside or a chat with mother or wife. Often they would wander out on the chance of meeting some of the “old pals,” or, after a heavy sigh, say, “Oh, God!... let’s go to a theatre or a ‘movie’ show!” The theatres were crammed with men seeking distraction, yet bored with their pleasures and relapsing into a deeper moodiness afterwards. Wives complained that their husbands had “changed.” Their characters had hardened and their tempers were frayed, so that they were strangely irritable and given to storms of rage about nothing at all. It was frightening.... There was an epidemic of violence and of horrible sensual crimes with women victims, ending often in suicide. There were mob riots by demobilised soldiers or soldiers still waiting in camps for demobilisation. Police stations were stormed and wrecked and policemen killed by bodies of men who had been heroes in the war and now fought like savages against their fellow-citizens. Some of them pleaded guilty in court and made queer statements about an utter ignorance of their own actions after the disorder had begun. It seemed as though they had returned to the psychology of that war when men, doped with rum, or drunk with excitement, had leapt over the parapet and remembered nothing more of a battle until they found themselves panting in an enemy trench or lying wounded on a stretcher. It was a dangerous kind of psychology in civil life.

Labourers back at work in factories or mines or railway stations or dockyards, after months or years of the soldier-life, did not return to their old conditions or their old pay with diligence and thankfulness. They demanded higher wages to meet the higher cost of life and after that a margin for pleasure, and after that shorter hours for higher pay and less work in shorter hours. If their demands were not granted they downed tools and said: “What about it?” Strikes became frequent and general, and at a time when the cost of war was being added up to frightful totals of debt which could only be reduced by immense production the worker slacked off, or suspended his labours, and said: “Who gets the profits of my sweat?... I want a larger share.” He was not frightened of a spectre that was scaring all people of property and morality in the Western world. The spectre of Bolshevism, red-eyed, dripping with blood, proclaiming anarchy as the new gospel, did not cause a shiver to the English working man. He said, “What has Russia to do with me? I’m English. I have fought this war to save England, I have done the job; now then, where’s my reward?”

Men who looked round for a living while they lived on an unemployment dole that was not good enough for their new desires became sullen when they returned home night after night with the same old story of “Nothing doing.” The women were still clinging to their jobs. They had earned their independence by good work in war-time. They hated the thought of going back to little homes to be household drudges, dependent for pocket-money on father and brothers. They had not only tasted liberty; they had made themselves free of the large world. They had proved their quality and strength. They were as good as men, and mostly better. Why should they slink back to the little narrow rut of life? But the men said, “Get out. Give us back our jobs.”

It was hard on the officer boys--hardest of all on them. They had gone straight from school to the war, and had commanded men twice as old as themselves and drawn good pay for pocket-money as first lieutenants, captains, even majors of air squadrons and tank battalions. They had gained immense experience in the arts and crafts of war, and that experience was utterly useless in peace.

“My dear young man,” said the heads of prosperous businesses who had been out to “beat the Boche,” even though they sacrificed their only sons or all their sons (with heroic courage!), “you have been wasting your time. You have no qualifications whatever for a junior clerkship in this office. On the contrary, you have probably contracted habits of idleness and inaccuracy which would cause a lot of trouble. This vacancy is being filled by a lad who has not been vitiated by military life, and has nothing to unlearn. Good-morning!”

And the young officers, after a statement like that, went home with swear-words learnt in Flanders, and said: “That’s the reward of patriotism, eh? Well, we seem to have been fooled pretty badly. Next time we shan’t be so keen to strew the fields of death with our fresh little corpses.”

These words, all this murmur from below, did not reach those who sat in high places. They were wonderfully complacent, except when outbreaks of violence or the cessation of labour shocked them with a sense of danger. They arranged peace celebrations before the peace, victory marches when the fruits of victory were as bitter as Dead Sea fruit in the mouths of those who saw the ruin of the world; and round a council table in Paris statesmen of Europe abandoned all the ideals for which the war had been fought by humble men and killed the hopes of all those who had looked to them as the founders of a new era of humanity and common sense.

II

It was when the Peace Treaty had been signed, but not ratified by the representatives of Germany and Austria, that I met some of the friends with whom I had travelled along many roads of war or had met in scenes which already seemed far back in history. In London, after a journey to America, I came again in touch with young Harding, whom I had seen last on his way home to his pretty wife, who had fretted at his long absence, and Charles Fortune, whose sense of humour had made me laugh so often in the time of tragedy. Those were chance meetings in the eddies of the great whirlpool of London life, as I saw other faces, strange for a moment or two, until the difference between a field-cap and a bowler hat, a uniform and civil clothes, was wiped out by a look of recognition and the sound of a remembered voice.

Not by chance but by a friendship which had followed me across the world with written words, I found myself once more in the company of Wickham Brand, and with him went again to spend some evenings with Eileen O’Connor, who was now home in Kensington, after that grim drama which she had played so long in Lille.

With “Daddy” Small I had been linked up by a lucky chain of coincidences which had taken us both to New York at the same time and brought us back to Europe on the same boat, which was the White Star liner _Lapland_.

My chance meeting with Harding led to a renewal of friendship which was more of his seeking than mine, though I liked him a good deal. But he seemed to need me, craving sympathy, which I gave with sincerity, and companionship, which I could not give so easily, being a busy man.

It was on the night when London went mad because of peace, though not so mad, I was told, as on the night of armistice. It all seemed mad to me when I was carried like a straw in a raging torrent of life which poured down the Strand, swirled round Trafalgar Square, and choked all channels westwards and eastwards of Piccadilly Circus. The spirit of London had broken bounds. It came wildly from mean streets in the slum quarters to the heart of the West End. The worst elements had surged up and mingled with the middle-class folk and those who claim exclusiveness by the power of wealth. In ignorance that all barriers of caste were to be broken that night, “society” women, as they are called, rather insolent in their public display of white shoulders and diamonds and furs, set out in motor cars for hotels and restaurants which had arranged peace dinners and peace dances. Some of them, I saw, were unaccompanied by their own men, whom they were to meet later, but the vacant seats in their open cars were quickly filled by soldiers, seamen, or merry devils in civil clothes who climbed over the backs of the cars when they were brought to a standstill in the crush of vast crowds. Those uninvited guests, some of them wearing women’s bonnets, most of them fluttering with flags pinned to their coats, all of them provided with noisemaking instruments, behaved with ironical humour to the pretty ladies, touched their coiled hair with “ticklers,” blew loud blasts on their toy trumpets, delivered cockney orations to them for the enjoyment of the crowds below. Some of the pretty ladies accepted the situation with courage and good humour, laughing with shrill mirth at their grotesque companions. Others were frightened and angry. I saw one girl try to beat off the hands of men clambering about her car. They swarmed into it and paid no heed to her cries of protest....

All the flappers were out in the Strand and in Trafalgar Square and many streets. They were factory girls, shop girls, office girls, and their eyes were alight with adventure and a pagan ecstasy. Men teased them as they passed with the long “ticklers,” and they, armed with the same weapon, fought duels with these aggressors, and then fled, and were pursued into the darkness of side-streets, where they were caught and kissed. Soldiers in uniform, English, Scots, Canadians, Australians, came lurching along in gangs, arm in arm, then mingled with the girls, changed headgear with them, struggled and danced and stampeded with them. Seamen, three sheets in the wind, steered an uneven course through this turbulent sea of life, roaring out choruses, until each man had found a maid for the dance of joy.

London was a dark forest with nymphs and satyrs at play in the glades and Pan stamping his hoofs like a giddy goat. All the passions let loose by war, the breaking down of old restraints, the gladness of youth at escape from death, provided the motive-power, unconscious and primitive, behind this carnival of the London crowds. From some church a procession came into Trafalgar Square, trying to make a pathway through the multitude. A golden cross was raised high, and clergymen in surplices, with acolytes and faithful women, came chanting solemn words. The crowd closed about them. A mirthful sailor teased the singing women with his “tickler.” Loud guffaws, shrill laughter, were in the wake of the procession, though some men stood to attention as the cross passed, and others bared their heads, and something hushed the pagan riot a moment.

At the windows in Pall Mall men in evening clothes who had been officers in the world-war sat by the pretty women who had driven through the crowds, looking out on the noisy pageant of the street. A piano-organ was playing, and two young soldiers danced with ridiculous grace, imitating the elegance and languorous ecstasy of society dancers. One of them wore a woman’s hat and skirt, and was wonderfully comic.

I stood watching them, a little stupefied by all the noise and tumult of this “Peace” night, and with a sense of tragic irony, remembering millions of boys who lay dead in quiet fields and the agony of many peoples in Europe. It was then that I saw young Harding. He was sitting in his club window just above the dancing soldiers and looking out with a grave and rather woe-begone face, remarkable in contrast with the laughing faces of fellow-clubmen and their women. I recognised him after a moment’s query in my mind, and said: “Hulloa, Harding!”

He stared at me, and I saw the sudden dawning of remembrance.

“Come in,” he answered. “I had no idea you were back again!”

So I went into his club and sat by his side at the open window, glad of this retreat from the pressure and tumult of the mob below.

He talked conventionally for a little while, and asked me whether I had had “a good time” in the States, and whether I was busy, and why the Americans seemed so hostile to President Wilson. I understood from him that he approved of the Peace Treaty and was glad that Germany and Austria had been “wiped off the map” as far as it was humanly possible.

We chatted like that for what I suppose was something more than half an hour, while we looked out upon the seething multitude in the street below, when suddenly the boy’s mask fell from him, so abruptly and with such a naked revelation of a soul in anguish that concealment was impossible.

I saw him lean forward with his elbows on the windowsill and his hands clenching an iron bar. His face had become like his shirt front, almost as white as that. A kind of groan came from him, like that of a man badly wounded. The people on either side of him turned to look at him, but he was unconscious of them, as he stared at something in the street. I followed the direction of his eyes and guessed that he was looking at a motor-car which had been stopped by the crowd, who were surging about it. It was an open car, and inside were a young man and woman in fancy dress as Pierrot and Columbine. They were standing up and pelting the crowd with long coloured streamers, which the mob caught and tossed back again with shouts of laughter. The girl was very pretty, with an audacious little face beneath the white sugar-loaf cap, and her eyes were on fire. Her companion was a merry-eyed fellow, dean-shaven and ruddy-faced (for he had not chalked it to Pierrot’s whiteness), and looked to me typical of a naval officer or one of our young airmen. I could see nothing to groan about in such a sight.

“What’s wrong, Harding?”

I touched him on the elbow, for I did not like him to give himself away before the other company in the window-seat.

He rose at once, and walked in a stumbling way across the room, while I followed. The room was empty where we stood.

“Aren’t you well?” I asked.

He laughed in a most tragic way.

“Did you see those two in the car, Pierrot and Columbine?”

I nodded.

“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 whisky 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 were 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 woeful 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 often 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 devilishly 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 humorist 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 handled in 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 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.

III

Fortune and I met also in a crowd, but indoors. Brand and Eileen O’Connor were both to be at one of the evening parties which assembled every now and then in a flat at Chelsea belonging to Susy Whincop, designer of stained glass, driver of ambulances for the Scottish Women’s Convoy, and sympathetic friend before the war of any ardent soul who grew long hair if a man, short hair if a woman, and had some special scheme, philosophy, or inspiration for the welfare of humanity.

I had known Susy and her set in the old days. They were the minor intellectuals of London, and I had portrayed some of them in a novel called “Intellectual Mansions,” which they did not like, though I loved them all. They wrote little poems, painted little pictures, produced little plays, and talked about all subjects under heaven with light-hearted humour, an arrogance towards popular ideas, and a quick acceptance of the new, the unusual and the revolutionary in art and thought. Into their way of life war crashed suddenly with its thunder notes of terror. All that they had lived for seemed to be destroyed, and all their ideals overthrown. They had believed in beauty, and it was flung into the mud, and bespattered with blood, and buried beneath the ugly monsters of war’s idolatry.

They had been devotees of liberty, and were made slaves of the drill sergeant and other instruments of martial law. They had been enemies of brutality, cruelty, violence, but all human effort now was for the slaughter of men, and the hero was he who killed most with bayonet or bomb. Their pretty verses were made of no account. Their impressionistic paintings were not so useful as the camouflage of tin huts. Their little plays were but feeble drama to that which now was played out on the world’s stage to the roar of guns and the march of armies. They went into the tumult and fury of it all, and were lost. I met some of them, like Fortune and Brand, in odd places. Many of them died in the dirty ditches. Some of them wrote poems before they died, stronger than their work before the war, with a noble despair or the exaltation of sacrifice. Others gave no sign of their previous life, and were just absorbed into the ranks--ants in these legions of soldier-ants. Now those who had escaped with life were coming back to their old haunts, trying to pick up old threads, getting back, if they could, to the old ways of work, hoping for a new inspiration out of immense experience, but not yet finding it.

In Susy Whincop’s flat some of them had gathered when I went there, and when I looked round upon them, seeing here and there vaguely-remembered faces, I was conscious of a change that had overtaken them, and, with a shock, wondered whether I too had altered so much in those five years. I recognised Peter Hallam, whom I had known as a boy just down from Oxford, with a genius (in a small way) for satirical verse and a talent for passionate lyrics of a morbid and erotic type. Yes, it was certainly Peter, though his face had hardened and he had cropped his hair short and walked with one leg stiff.

He was talking to a girl with bobbed hair. It was Jennie Southcombe, who had been one of the heroines of the Serbian retreat, according to accounts of newspaper correspondents.

“My battery,” said Peter, “plugged into old Fritz with open sights for four horns. We just mowed ‘em down.”

Another face rang a little bell in my memory. Surely that was Alfred Lyon, the Futurist painter? No, it could not be, for Lyon had dressed like an Apache, and this man was in conventional evening clothes and looked like a Brigadier in mufti. Alfred Lyon?... Yes, there he was, though he had lost his pose--cribbed from Murger’s _Vie de Bohème_--and his half-starved look, and the wildness in his eyes. As he passed Susy Whincop he spoke a few words, which I overheard.

“I’ve abandoned Futurism. The present knocked that silly. Our little violence, which shocked Suburbia, was made ridiculous by the enormous thing that smashed every convention into a cocked hat.’ I’m just going to put down some war scenes--I made notes in the trenches--with that simplicity of the primitive soul to which we went back in that way of life. The soldier’s point of view, his vision, is what I shall try for.”

“Splendid!” said Susy. “Only, don’t shrink from the abomination. We’ve got to make the world understand--and remember.”

I felt a touch on my sleeve, and a voice said, “Hulloa!... Back again?”

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 Stage 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 have 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 shone 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 knew 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 Liliputians. 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 darkie 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 these 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 goodwill 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 writing-man, 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 goodwill. 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 programmes....

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 goodwill 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 humorous 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.

IV

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 borderline 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, add 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----”

I shook my head at that, but Brand was insistent.

“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 hand? 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 humorous, 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 Father-land 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 emnity 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 Mm. It has changed him sadly. We try to be patient with him, poor lad.”

Brand overheard 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 ah 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 Tower. 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 humorous 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 Goodwill,” 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 stem 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’s 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.

VI

We met Elsa at the Gare de l’Est in Paris the evening after our arrival. Brand’s nervous anxiety had increased as the hour drew near, and he smoked cigarette after cigarette while he paced up and down the _Salle d’Attente_ as far as he could for the crowds which surged there.

Once he spoke to me about his apprehensions.

“I hope to God this will work out all right.... I’m only thinking of her happiness.”

Another time he said: “This French crowd would tear her to pieces if they knew she was German.”

While we were waiting we met a friend of old times. I was first to recognise Pierre Nesle, who had been attached to us as interpreter and _liaison_ officer. He was in civil clothes and was wearing a bowler hat and a light overcoat, so that his transformation was astonishing. I touched him on the arm as he made his way quickly through the crowd, and he turned sharply and stared at me as though he could not place me at all. Then a look of recognition leapt into his eyes and he grasped both my hands delightedly. He was still thin and pale, but some of his old melancholy had gone out of his eyes and in its place there was an eager, purposeful look.

“Here’s Brand,” I said. “He’ll be glad to see you again.”

“_Quelle chance!_” exclaimed Pierre, and he made a dash for his friend and before Brand could remonstrate kissed him on both cheeks. They had been good comrades and after the rescue of Marthe from the mob in Lille it was to Brand that Pierre Nesle had opened his heart and revealed his agony. He could not stay long with us in the station as he was going to some political meeting, and perhaps it was well, because Brand was naturally anxious to escape from him before Elsa came.

“I am working hard--speaking, writing, organising--on behalf of the _Ligue des Tranchées_,” said Pierre. “You must come and see me at my office. It’s the headquarters of the new movement in France. Anti-militarist, to fulfil the ideals of the men who fought to end war.”

“You’re going to fight against heavy odds,” said Brand. “Clemenceau won’t love you, nor those who like his peace.”

Pierre laughed and used an old watchword of the war.

“_Nous les aurons!_ Those old dead-heads belong to the past. Peace has still to be made by the men who fought for a new world.”

He gave us his address, pledged us to call on him, and slipped into the vortex of the crowd.

Brand and I waited another twenty minutes, and then in a tide of new arrivals we saw Elsa. She was in the company of Major Quin, Brand’s friend who had brought her from Cologne, a tall Irishman who stooped a little as he gave his arm to the girl. She was dressed in a blue coat and skirt, very neatly, and it was the glitter of her spun-gold hair that made me catch sight of her quickly in the crowd. Her eyes had a frightened look as she came forward, and she was white to the lips. Thinner, too, than when I had seen her last, so that she looked older and not, perhaps, quite so wonderfully pretty. But her face lighted up with intense gladness when Brand stood in front of her, and then, under an electric lamp, with a crowd surging around him, took her in his arms.

Major Quin and I stood aloof, chatting together.

“Good journey?” I asked.

“Excellent, but I’m glad it’s over. That little lady is too unmistakably German. Everybody spotted her and looked unutterable things. She was frightened, and I don’t wonder. Most of them thought the worst of me. I had to threaten one fellow with a damned good hiding for an impertinent remark I overheard.”

Brand thanked him for looking after his wife, and Elsa gave him her hand and said, “_Danke schön_.”

Major Quin raised his finger and said, “Hush. Don’t forget you’re in Paris now.”

Then he saluted with a click of spurs and took his leave. I put Brand and his wife in a taxi and drove outside by the driver to a quiet old hotel in the Rue St. Honoré, where we had booked rooms.

When we registered, the manager at the desk stared at Elsa curiously. She spoke English, but with an unmistakable accent. The man’s courtesy to Brand, which had been perfect, fell from him abruptly and he spoke with icy insolence when he summoned one of the boys to take up the baggage. In the dining-room that night all eyes turned to Elsa and Brand, with inquisitive, hostile looks. I suppose her frock, simple and ordinary as it seemed to me, proclaimed its German fashion. Or perhaps her face and hair were not so English as I had imagined. It was a little while before the girl herself was aware of those unpleasant glances about her. She was very happy sitting next to Brand, whose hand she caressed once or twice, and into whose face she looked with adoration. She was still very pale, and I could see that she was immensely tired after her journey, but her eyes shone wonderfully. Sometimes she looked about her and encountered the stares of people--elderly French _bourgeois_ and some English nurses and a few French officers--dining at other tables in the great room with gilt mirrors and painted ceiling. She spoke to Brand presently in a low voice.

“I am afraid. These people stare at me so much. They guess what I am.”

“It’s only your fancy,” said Brand. “Besides, they would be fools not to stare at a face like yours.”

She smiled and coloured up at that sweet flattery.

“I know when people like one’s looks. It is not for that reason they stare.”

“Ignore them,” said Brand. “Tell me about Franz and Frau von Detmold.”

It was unwise of him to sprinkle his conversation with German names. The waiter at our table was listening attentively. Presently I saw him whispering behind the screen to one of his comrades and looking our way sullenly.

He kept us waiting an unconscionable time for coffee, and when at last Brand gave his arm to Elsa and led her from the room, he gave a harsh laugh as they passed, and I heard the words, “_Sale Boche!_” spoken in a low tone of voice, yet loud enough for all the room to hear. From all the little tables there came titters of laughter and those words, “_Sale Boche!_” were repeated by several voices. I hoped that Elsa and Brand had not heard, but I saw Elsa sway a little on her husband’s arm as though struck by an invisible blow, and Brand turned with a look of passion, as though he would hit the waiter or challenge the whole room to warfare. But Elsa whispered to him, and he went with her up the staircase to their rooms.

The next morning when I met them at breakfast Elsa still looked desperately tired, though very happy, and Brand had lost a little of his haggard look and his nerve was steadier. But it was an uncomfortable moment for all of us when the manager came to the table and regretted with icy courtesy that their rooms would not be available another night owing to a previous arrangement which he had unfortunately overlooked.

“Nonsense!” said Brand, shortly. “I have taken these rooms for three nights, and I intend to stay in them.”

“It is impossible,” said the manager. “I must ask you to have your baggage packed by twelve o’clock.”

Brand dealt with him firmly.

“I am an English officer. If I hear another word from you I will call on the Provost Marshal and get him to deal with you.”

The manager bowed. This threat cowed him, and he said no more about a change of rooms. But Brand and his wife, and I, as their friend, suffered from a policy of passive resistance to our presence. The chambermaid did not answer their bell, having become strangely deaf.

The waiter was generally engaged at other tables whenever we wanted him. The hall porter turned his back upon us. The page-boys made grimaces behind our backs, as I saw very well in the gilt mirror, and as Elsa saw.

They took to having their meals out, Brand insisting always that I should join them, and we drove out to the Bois and had tea there in the _Chalet des Iles_. It was a beautiful afternoon in September, and the leaves were just turning to crinkled gold and the lake was as blue as the cloudless sky above. Across the ferry came boatloads of young Frenchmen with their girls, singing, laughing, on this day of peace. Some of the men limped as they came up the steps from the landing-stage. One walked on crutches. Another had an empty sleeve. Under the trees they made love to their girls and fed them with rose-tinted ices.

“These people are happy,” said Elsa. “They have forgotten already the agony of war. Victory is healing. In Germany there is only misery.”

A little later she talked about the peace.

“If only the _Entente_ had been more generous in victory our despair would not be so great. Many of us, great multitudes, believed that the price of defeat would be worth paying because Germany would take a place among free nations and share in the creation of a nobler world. Now we are crushed by the militarism of nations who have used our downfall to increase their own power. The light of a new ideal which rose above the darkness has gone out.”

Brand took his wife’s hand and stroked it in his big paw.

“All this is temporary and the work of the old men steeped in the old traditions which led to war. We must wait for them to die. Then out of the agony of the world’s boyhood will come the new revelation.”

Elsa clasped her hands and leaned forward, looking across the lake in the Bois de Boulogne.

“I would like to live long enough to be sure of that,” she said, eagerly. “If we have children, my husband, perhaps they will listen to our tales of the war as Franz and I read about wolves and goblins in our fairy-tales. The fearfulness of them was not frightening, for we knew we were safe.”

“God grant that,” said Brand, gravely.

“But I am afraid!” said Elsa. She looked again across the lake, so blue under the sky, so golden in sunlight; and shivered a little.

“You are cold!” said Brand.

He put his arms about her as they sat side by side, and her head drooped upon his shoulder and she closed her eyes like a tired child.

They went to the opera that night and I refused their invitation to join them, protesting that they would never learn to know each other if a third person were always present. I slipped away to see Pierre Nesle, and found him at an office in a street somewhere off the Rue du Louvre, which was filled with young men whose faces I seemed to have seen before under blue shrapnel helmets above blue tunics. They were typewriting as though serving machine-guns, and folding up papers while they whistled the tune of “_Madelon_.” Pierre was in his shirtsleeves, dictating letters to a _poilu_ in civil clothes.

“Considerable activity on the western front, eh?” he said when he saw me.

“Tell me all about it, Pierre.”

He told me something about it in a restaurant where we dined in the Rue du Marché St. Honoré. He was one of the organising secretaries of a society made up exclusively of young soldiers who had fought in the trenches. There was a sprinkling of intellectuals among them--painters, poets, novelists, journalists--but the main body were simple soldiers animated by one idea--to prevent another war by substituting the common-sense and brotherhood of peoples for the old diplomacy of secret alliances and the old tradition of powerful armies.

“How about the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations?” I asked.

Pierre Nesle shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.

“The Peace Treaty belongs to the Napoleonic tradition. We’ve got beyond that now. It is the programme that has carefully arranged another and inevitable war. Look at the world now! Look at France, Italy, Germany, Austria! We are all ruined together, and those most ruined will, by their disease and death, drag down Europe into general misery. _Mon vieux_, what has victory given to France! A great belt of devastated country, cemeteries crowded with dead youth, bankruptcy, and everything five times the cost of pre-war rates. Another such victory will wipe us off the map. We have smashed Germany, it is true, for a time. We have punished her women and children for the crimes of their war lords, but can we keep her crushed? Are our frontiers impregnable against the time when her people come back for revenge, smashing the fetters we have placed on them, and rising again in strength? For ten years, for twenty years, for thirty years perhaps, we shall be safe. And after that, if the heart of Europe does not change, if we do not learn wisdom from the horror that has passed, France will be ravaged again, and all that we have seen our children will see, and their suffering will be greater than ours, and they will not have the hope we had.”

He stared back into the past, not a very distant past, and I fancy that among the figures he saw was Marthe, his sister.

“What’s the remedy?” I asked.

“A union of democracy across the frontiers of hate,” he answered, and I think it was a phrase that he had written and learnt by heart.

“A fine phrase!” I said, laughing a little.

He flared up at me.

“It’s more than a phrase. It’s the heart-beat of millions in Europe.”

“In France?” I asked pointedly. “In the France of Clemenceau?”

“More than you imagine,” he answered, boldly. “Beneath our present Chauvinism, our natural exultation in victory, our inevitable hatred of the enemy, common-sense is at work, and an idealism higher than that. At present its voice is not heard. The old men are having their day. Presently the new men will arrive with the new ideas. They are here, but do not speak yet.”

“The old men again!” I said. “It is strange. In Germany, in France, in England, even in America, people are talking strangely about the old men as though they were guilty of all this agony. That is remarkable.”

“They were guilty,” said Pierre Nesle. “It is against the old men in all countries of Europe that youth will declare war. For it was their ideas which brought us to our ruin.”

He spoke so loudly that people in the restaurant turned to look at him. He paid his bill and spoke in a lower voice.

“It is dangerous to talk like this in public. Let us walk up the Champs Elysées, where I am visiting some friends.”

Suddenly a remembrance came back to him.

“Your friends, too,” he said.

“My friends?”

“But yes; Madame Chéri and Hélène. After Edouard’s death they could not bear to live in Lille.”

“Edouard, that poor boy who came back? He is dead?”

“He was broken by the prison life,” said Pierre. “He died within a month of armistice, and Hélène wept her heart out. He confided a secret to me. Hélène and he had come to love each other, and would marry when they could get her mother’s consent--or, one day, if not.”

“What’s her objection?” I asked. “Why, it’s splendid to think that Hélène and you will be man and wife. The thought of it makes me feel good.”

He pressed my arm and said, “_Merci, mille fois, mon cher_.”

Madame Chéri objected to his political opinions. She regarded them as poisonous treachery.

“And Hélène?”

I remembered that outburst, months back, when Hélène had desired the death of many German babies.

“Hélène loves me,” said Pierre simply. “We do not talk politics.”

On our way to the Avenue Victor Hugo I ventured to ask him a question which had been a long time in my mind “Your sister, Marthe? She is well?”

Even in the pearly twilight of the Champs Elysées I was aware of Pierre’s sudden change of colour. I had touched a nerve that still jumped.

“She is well and happy,” he answered gravely. “She is now a _religieuse_, a nun, in the convent at Lille. They tell me she is a saint. Her name in religion is _Sour Angélique._”

I called on Madame Chéri and her daughter with Pierre Nesle. They seemed delighted to see me, and Hélène greeted me like an old and trusted friend, giving me the privilege of kissing her cheek. She had grown taller and beautiful, and there was a softness in her eyes when she looked at Pierre which made me sure of his splendid luck.

Madame Chéri had aged, and some of her fire had burnt out. I guessed that it was due to Edouard’s death. She spoke of that, and wept a little, and deplored the mildness of the Peace Treaty which had not punished the evil race who had killed her husband and her boy and the flower of France.

“There are many German dead,” said Pierre. “They have been punished.”

“Not enough!” cried Madame Chéri. “They should all be dead.”

Hélène kissed her hand and snuggled down to her as once I had seen in Lille.

“_Petite maman_,” she said, “let us talk of happy things to-night. Pierre has brought us a good friend.”

Later in the evening, when Pierre and Hélène had gone into another room to find some biscuits for our wine, Madame Chéri spoke to me about their betrothal.

“Pierre is full of strange and terrible ideas,” she said. “They are shared by other young men who fought bravely for France. To me they seem wicked, and the talk of cowards, except that their medals tell of courage. But the light in Hélène’s eyes weakens me. I’m too much of a Frenchwoman to be stern with love.”

By those words of hers I was able to give Pierre a message of good-cheer when he walked back with me that night, and he went away with gladness.

With gladness also did Elsa Brand set out next day for England where, as a girl, she had known happy days, and where now her dream lived with the man who stood beside her. Together we watched for the white cliffs, and when suddenly the sun glinted on them she gave a little cry, and putting her hand through Brand’s arm, said, “Our home!”

VII

I saw very little of Brand in London after Elsa’s arrival in his parent’s house at Chelsea. I was busy, as usual, watching the way of the world and putting my nose down to bits of blank paper which I proceeded to spoil with futile words. Brand was doing the same thing in his study on the top floor of the house in Cheyne Walk, while Elsa, in true German style, was working embroidery or reading English literature to improve her mind and her knowledge of the language.

Brand was endeavouring strenuously to earn money enough to make him free of his father’s house. He failed, on the whole, rather miserably. He began a novel on the war, became excited with it for the first six chapters, then stuck hopelessly and abandoned it.

“I find it impossible,” he wrote to me, “to get the real thing into my narrative. It is all wooden, unnatural, and wrong. I can’t get the right perspective on paper, although I think I see it clear enough when I’m not writing. The thing is too enormous, the psychology too complicated for my power of expression. A thousand characters, four years of experience, come crowding into my mind, and I can’t eliminate the unessential and stick the point of my pen into the heart of truth. Besides, the present state of the world, to say nothing of domestic trouble, prevents anything like concentration... And my nerves have gone to hell.”

After the abandonment of his novel he took to writing articles for magazines and newspapers, some of which appeared, thereby producing some useful guineas. I read them and liked their strength of style and intensity of emotion. But they were profoundly pessimistic, and “the gloomy Dean,” who was prophesying woe, had an able seconder in Wickham Brand, who foresaw the ruin of civilisation and the downfall of the British Empire because of the stupidity of the world’s leaders and the careless ignorance of the multitudes. He harped too much on the same string, and I fancied that editors would soon begin to tire of his melancholy tune. I was right.

“I have had six articles rejected in three weeks,” wrote Brand. “People don’t want the truth. They want cheery insincerity. Well, they won’t get it from me, though I starve to death.... But it’s hard on Elsa. She’s having a horrible time, and her nerve is breaking. I wish to God I could afford to take her down to the country somewhere, away from spiteful females and their cunning cruelty. Have you seen any Christian charity about in this most Christian country? If so, send me word, and I’ll walk to it on my knees, from Chelsea.”

It was in a postscript to a letter about a short story he was writing that he wrote an alarming sentence.

“I think Elsa is dying. She gets weaker every day.” Those words sent me to Chelsea in a hurry. I had been too careless of Brand’s troubles, owing to my own pressure of work and my own fight with a nervous depression which was a general malady, I found, with most men back from the war.

When I rapped the brass knocker on the house in Cheyne Walk the door was opened by a different maid from the one I had seen on my first visit there. The other one, as Brand told me afterwards, had given notice because “she couldn’t abide them Huns” (meaning Elsa), and with her had gone the cook, who had been with Wickham’s mother for twenty years.

Brand was writing in his study upstairs when the new maid showed me in. Or, rather, he was leaning over a writing-block, with his elbows dug into the table and his face in his hands, while an unlighted pipe--his old trench pipe--lay across the inkpot.

“Thinking out a new plot, old man?” I asked cheerily.

“It doesn’t come,” he said. “My own plot cuts across my line of thought.”

“How’s Elsa?”

He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the door leading from his room.

“Sleeping, I hope.... Sit down and let’s have a yarn.”

We talked about things in general for a time. They were not very cheerful, anyhow. Brand and I were both gloomy souls just then, and knew each other too well to camouflage our views about the state of Europe and the “unrest” (as it was called) in England.

Then he told me about Elsa, and it was a tragic tale From the very first his people had treated her with a studied unkindness which had broken her nerve and spirit. She had come to England with a joyous hope of finding happiness and friendship with her husband’s family, and glad to escape from the sadness of Germany and the solemn disapproval of her own people, apart from Franz, who was devoted to her.

Her first dismay came when she kissed the hand of her mother-in-law, who drew it away as though she had been stung by a wasp, and when her movement to kiss her husband’s sister Ethel was repulsed by a girl who drew back icily and said, “How do you do?”

Even then she comforted herself a little with the thought that this coldness was due to English reserve, and that in a little while English kindness would be revealed. But the days passed with only unkindness.

At first Lady Brand and her daughter maintained a chilly silence towards Elsa, at breakfast, luncheon, and other meals, talking to each other brightly, as though she did not exist, and referring constantly to Wickham as “poor Wicky.” Ethel had a habit of reading out morsels from the penny illustrated papers, and often they referred to “another trick of the Huns” or “fresh revelations of Hun treachery.” At these times Sir Amyas Brand said “Ah!” in a portentous voice, but, privately, with some consciousness of decency, begged Ethel to desist from “controversial topics.” She “desisted” in the presence of her brother, whose violence of speech scared her into silence.

A later phase of Ethel’s hostility to Elsa was in the style of amiable enquiry. In a simple, childlike way, as though eager for knowledge, she would ask Elsa such questions as “Why the Germans boiled down their dead?”

“Why they crucified Canadian prisoners?”

“Was it true that German school children sang the Hymn of Hate before morning lessons?”

“Was it by order of the Kaiser that English prisoners were starved to death?”

Elsa answered all these questions by passionate denials. It was a terrible falsehood, she said, that the Germans had boiled down bodies for fats. On the contrary, they paid the greatest reverence to their dead, as her brother had seen in many cemeteries on the Western front. The story of the “crucified Canadians” had been disproved by the English intelligence officers after a special enquiry, as Wickham had told her. She had never heard the Hymn of Hate. Some of the English prisoners had been harshly treated--there were brutal commandants--but not deliberately starved. Not starved more than German soldiers, who had very little food during the last years of the war.

“But surely,” said Lady Brand, “you must admit, my dear, that Germany conducted this war with the greatest possible barbarity? Otherwise, why should the world call them Huns?”

Elsa said it was only the English who called the Germans

Huns, and that was for a propaganda of hatred which was very wicked.

“Do _I_ look like a Hun?” she asked, and then burst into tears.

Lady Brand was disconcerted by that sign of weakness.

“You mustn’t think us unkind, Elsa, but, of course, we have to uphold the truth.”

Ethel was utterly unmoved by Elsa’s tears, and, indeed, found a holy satisfaction in them.

“When the German people confess their guilt with weeping and lamentation the English will be first to forgive. Never till then.”

The presence of a German girl in the house seemed to act as a blight upon all domestic happiness. It was the cook who first “gave notice.” Elsa had never so much as set eyes upon that cross-eyed woman below-stairs who had prepared the family food since Wickham had sat in a high chair with a bib round his neck. But Mary, in a private interview with Lady Brand, stormy in its character, as Elsa could hear through the folding doors, vowed that she would not live in the same house with “one of those damned Germings.”

Lady Brand’s tearful protestations that Elsa was no longer German, being “Mr. Wickham’s wife,” and that she had repented sincerely of all the wrong done by the country in which she had unfortunately been born, did not weaken the resolution of Mary Grubb, whose patriotism had always been “above suspicion,” “which,” as she said, “I hope to remain so.” She went next morning, after a great noise of breathing and the descent of tin boxes, while Lady Brand and Ethel looked with reproachful eyes at Elsa as the cause of this irreparable blow.

The parlour-maid followed in a week’s time, on the advice of her young man, who had worked in a canteen of the Y.M.C.A. at Boulogne and knew all about German spies.

It was very awkward for Lady Brand, who assumed an expression of Christian martyrdom, and told Wickham that his rash act was bearing sad fruit, a mixed metaphor which increased his anger, as he told me, to a ridiculous degree.

He could see that Elsa was very miserable. Many times she wept when alone with him, and begged him to take her away to a little home of their own, even if it were only one room in the poorest neighbourhood. But Wickham was almost penniless, and begged her to be patient a little longer, until he had saved enough to fulfil their hope. There I think he was unwise. It would have been better for him to borrow money--he had good friends--rather than keep his wife in such a hostile atmosphere. She was weak and ill. He was alarmed at her increasing weakness. Once she fainted in his arms, and even to go upstairs to their rooms at the top of the house tired her so much that afterwards she would lie back in a chair, with her eyes closed, looking very white and worn. She tried to hide her ill-health from her husband, and when they were alone together she seemed gay and happy, and would have deceived him but for those fits of weeping at the unkindness of his mother and sister, and those sudden attacks of “tiredness” when all physical strength departed from her.

Her love for him seemed to grow with the weakness of her body. She could not bear him to leave her alone for any length of time, and while he was writing, sat near him, so that she might have her head against his shoulder or touch his hand, or kiss it. It was not conducive to easy writing or the invention of plots.

Something like a crisis happened after a painful scene in the drawing-room downstairs on a day when Brand had gone out to walk off a sense of deadly depression which prevented all literary effort.

Several ladies had come to tea with Lady Brand and Ethel, and they gazed at Elsa as though she were a strange and dangerous animal.

One of them, a thin and elderly schoolmistress, cross-questioned Elsa as to her nationality.

“I suppose you are Swedish, my dear?” she said sweetly.

“No,” said Elsa.

“Danish, then, no doubt?” continued Miss Clutter.

“I am German,” said Elsa.

That announcement had caused consternation among Lady Brand’s guests. Two of the ladies departed almost immediately. The others stayed to see how Miss Clutter would deal with this amazing situation.

She dealt with it firmly, and with the cold intelligence of a high schoolmistress.

“How _very_ interesting!” she said, turning to Lady Brand. “Perhaps your daughter-in-law will enlighten us a little about German psychology which we have found so puzzling. I should be so glad if she could explain to us how the German people reconcile the sinking of merchant ships, the unspeakable crime of the _Lusitania_ with any belief in God, or even with the principles of our common humanity. It is a mystery to me how the drowning of babies could be regarded as legitimate warfare by a people proud of their civilisation.”

“Perhaps it would be better to avoid controversy, dear Miss Clutter,” said Lady Brand, alarmed at the prospect of an “unpleasant” scene which would be described in other drawing-rooms next day.

But Miss Clutter had adopted Ethel’s method of enquiry. She so much wanted to know the German point of view. Certainly they must have a point of view.

“Yes, it would be so interesting to know!” said another lady.

“Especially if we could believe it,” said another.

Elsa had been twisting and re-twisting a little lace handkerchief in her lap. She was very pale, and tried to conceal a painful agitation from all these hostile and enquiring ladies.

Then she spoke to them in a low, strained voice.

“You will never understand,” she said. “You look out from England with eyes of hate, and without pity in your hearts. The submarine warfare was shameful. There were little children drowned on the _Lusitania_, and women. I wept for them and prayed the dear God to stop the war. Did you weep for our little children and our women? They, too, were killed by sea warfare, not only a few, as on the _Lusitania_, but thousands and tens of thousands. Your blockade closed us in with an iron ring. No ship could bring us food. For two years we starved on short rations and chemical foods. We were without fats and milk. Our mothers watched their children weaken and wither and die, because of the English blockade. Their own milk dried up within their breasts. Little coffins were carried down our streets day after day, week after week. Fathers and mothers were mad at the loss of their little ones. ‘We must smash our way through the English blockade!’ they said. The U-boat warfare gladdened them. It seemed a chance of rescue for the children of Germany. It was wicked. But all the war was wickedness. It was wicked of you English to keep up your blockade so long after Armistice, so that more children died and more women were consumptive, and men fainted at their work. Do you reconcile that with God’s good love? Oh, I find more hatred here in England than I knew even in Germany. It is cruel, unforgiving, unfair! You, are proud of your own virtue and hypocritical. God will be kinder to my people than to you, because now we cry out for His mercy, and you are still arrogant, with the name of God on your lips but a devil of pride in your hearts. I came here with my dear husband believing that many English would be like him, forgiving, hating cruelty, eager to heal the world’s broken heart. You are not like him. You are cruel and lovers of cruelty, even to one poor German girl who came to you for shelter with her English man. I am sorry for you. I pity you because of your narrowness. I do not want to know you.”

She stood up, swaying a little, with one hand on the mantelpiece, as afterwards she told her husband. She did not believe that she could cross the floor without falling. There was a strange dizziness in her head, and a mist before her eyes. But she held her head high and walked out of the drawing-room, and then upstairs. When Wickham Brand came back she was lying on her bed very ill. He sent for a doctor who was with her for half-an-hour.

“She is very weak,” he said. “No pulse to speak of. You will have to be careful of her--deuced careful.”

He gave no name to her illness. “Just weakness,” he said. “Run down like a worn-out clock. Nerves all wrong, and no vitality.”

He sent round a tonic which Elsa took like a child, and for a little while it seemed to do her good. But Brand was frightened because her weakness had come back.

I am glad now that I had an idea which helped Brand in this time of trouble and gave Elsa some weeks of happiness and peace. It occurred to me that young Harding was living alone in his big old country house near Weybridge, and would be glad and grateful, because of his loneliness, to give house-room to Brand and his wife. He had a great liking for Brand, as most of us had, and his hatred of Germany had not been so violent since his days in Cologne. His good nature, anyhow, and the fine courtesy which was the essential quality of his character, would make him kind to Elsa, so ill and so desperately in need of kindness. I was not disappointed. When I spoke to him over the telephone he said, “It will be splendid for me. This lonely house is getting on my nerves badly. Bring them down.”

I took them down in a car two days later. It was a fine autumn day with a sparkle in the air and a touch of frost on the hedgerows. Elsa, wrapped up in heavy rugs, lay back next to Brand, and a little colour crept back into her cheeks and brought back her beauty. I think a shadow lifted from her as she drove away from that house in Chelsea where she had dwelt with enmity among her husband’s people.

Harding’s house in Surrey was at the end of a fine avenue of beeches, glorious in their autumn foliage of crinkled gold. A rabbit scuttled across the drive as we came, and bobbed beneath the red bracken of the undergrowth.

“Oh,” said Elsa, like a child, “there is Peterkin! What a rogue he looks!”

Her eyes were bright when she caught sight of Harding’s house in the Elizabethan style of post-and-plaster splashed with scarlet where the Virginia creeper straggled on its walls.

“It is wonderfully English,” she said. “How Franz would love this place!”

Harding came down from the steps to greet us, and I thought it noble of him that he should kiss the girl’s hand when Brand said, “This is Elsa.” For Harding had been a Hun-hater--you remember his much-repeated phrase, “No good German but a dead German!”--and that little act was real chivalry to a woman of the enemy.

There was a great fire of logs burning in the open hearth in the hall, flinging a ruddy glare on the panelled walls and glinting on bits of armour and hunting trophies. Upstairs, also, Brand told me, there was a splendid fire in Elsa’s room, which had once been the room of Harding’s wife. It wanned Elsa not only in body but in soul. Here was an English welcome and kindness of thought. On her dressing-table there were flowers from Harding’s hot-houses, and she gave a little cry of pleasure at the sight of them for there had been no flowers in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. That night she was strong enough to come down to dinner, and looked very charming there at the polished board, fit only by candlelight, whose soft rays touched the gold of her hair.

“It is a true English home,” she said, glancing up at the panelled walls and at portraits of Harding’s people in old-fashioned costumes which hung there.

“A lonely one when no friends are here,” said Harding, and that was the only time he referred in any way to the wife who had left him.

That dinner was the last one which Elsa had sitting at table with us. She became very tired again. So tired that Brand had to carry her upstairs and downstairs, which he did as though she weighed no more than a child. During the day she lay on a sofa in the drawing-room, and Brand did no writing now nor any kind of work, but stayed always with his wife. For hours together he sat by her side, and she held his hand and touched his face and hair, and was happy in her love.

A good friend came to stay with them and brought unfailing cheerfulness. It was Charles Fortune who had come down at Harding’s invitation. He was as comical as ever, and made Elsa laugh with ripples of merriment while he satirised the world as he knew it, with shrewd and penetrating wit. He played the jester industriously to get that laughter from her, though sometimes she had to beg of him not to make her laugh so much because it hurt her. Then he played the piano late into the afternoon, until the twilight in the room faded into darkness except for the ruddy glow of the log fire, or after dinner in the evenings until Brand carried his wife to bed. He played Chopin best, with a magic touch, but Elsa liked him to play Bach and Schumann, and sometimes Mozart, because that brought back her girlhood in the days before the war.

So it was one evening when Brand sat on a low stool by the sofa on which Elsa lay, with her fingers playing in his hair or resting on his shoulder, while Fortune filled the room with melody.

Once or twice Elsa spoke to Brand in a low voice. I heard some of her words as I lay on a bearskin by the fire.

“I am wonderfully happy, my dear,” she said once, and Brand pulled her hand down and kissed it.

A little later she spoke again.

“Love is so much better than hate. Then why should people go to war?”

“God knows, my dear,” said Brand.

It was some time after that, when Fortune was playing softly, that I heard Elsa give a big, tired sigh and say the word “Peace!”

Charles Fortune played something of Beethoven’s now, with grand crashing chords which throbbed through the room as the last glow of the sunset flushed through the windows.

Suddenly Brand stirred on his stool, made an abrupt movement, then rose and gave a loud, agonising cry. Fortune stopped playing with a slur of notes. Harding leapt up from his chair in a dark corner and said, “Brand!... what’s the matter?”

Brand had dropped to his knees and was weeping with, his arms about his dead wife.

VIII

I was again a wanderer in the land, and going from country to country in Europe saw the disillusionment that had followed victory, and the despair that had followed defeat, and the ravages that were bequeathed by war to peace, not only in devastated earth and stricken towns, but in the souls of men and women.

The victors had made great promises to their people, but for the most part they were still unredeemed. They had promised them rich fruits of victory to be paid out of the ruin of their enemies. But little fruit of gold or treasure could be gathered from the utter bankruptcy of Germany and Austria, whose factories stayed idle for lack of raw material and whose money was waste paper in value of exchange. “Reconstruction” was the watchword of statesmen, uttered as a kind of magic spell, but when I went over the old battlefields in France I found no sign of reconstruction, but only the vast belt of desolation which in war I had seen swept by fire. No spell-word had built up those towns and villages which had been blown into dust and ashes, nor had given life to riven trees and earth choked and deadened by high explosives. Here and there poor families had crept back to the place where their old homes had stood, grubbing in the ruins for some relic of their former habitations and building wooden shanties in the desert as frail shelters against the wind and the rain. In Ypres--the city of Great Death--there were wooden _estaminets_ for the refreshment of tourists who came from Paris to see the graveyard of youth, and girls sold picture-postcards where boys of ours had gone marching up the Menin Road under storms of shell-fire which took daily toll of them. No French statesman by optimistic words could resurrect in a little while the beauty that had been in Artois and Picardy and the fields of Champagne.

On days of national thanksgiving the spirit of France was exalted by the joy of victory. In Paris it was a feverish joy, wild-eyed, with laughing ecstasy, with troops of dancing girls and a carnival that broke all bounds between Montmartre and Montparnasse. France had saved herself from death. She had revenged herself for 1870 and the years just passed. She had crushed the enemy that had always been a brutal menace across the frontier. She had her sword deep in the heart of Germany which lay bleeding at her feet.

I who love France with a kind of passion, and had seen during the years of war the agony and the heroism of her people, did not begrudge them their ecstasy, and it touched my spirit with its fire so that in France I could see and understand the French point of view, of ruthlessness towards the beaten foe. But I saw also what many people of France saw slowly, but with a sense of fear, that the treaty made by Clemenceau did not make them safe except for a little while. This had not been, after all, “the war to end war.” There was no guarantee of world-peace. Their frontiers were not made impregnable against the time when the Germans might grow strong again and come back for vengeance. They could not stand alone, but must make new alliances, new secret treaties, new armies, new armaments, because hate survived, and the League of Nations was a farce, as it had come from the table at Versailles.

They looked round and counted their cost--a million and a half dead. A multitude of maimed and blind and nerve-shocked men. A birth-rate that had sunk to zero. A staggering debt which they could not pay. A cost of living which mounted higher and ever higher. A sense of revolt among the soldiers who had come back because their reward for four years of misery was no more than miserable.

So it was in Italy, stricken by a more desperate poverty, disappointed by a lack of spoil, angry with a sense of “betrayal,” afraid of revolution, exultant when a mad poet seized the port of Fiume which had been denied to her by President Wilson and his conscience.

Across the glittering waters of the Adriatic I went to Trieste and found it a dead port with Italian officers in possession of its deserted docks and abandoned warehouses and Austrians dying of typhus in the back streets, and starving to death in tenement houses.

And then, across the new State of Jugo-Slavia, cut out of the body of the old Austrian Empire now lying dismembered, I came to Vienna, which once I had known as the gayest capital of Europe, where charming people played the pleasant game of life with music and love and laughter.

In Vienna there was music still, but it played a _danse macabre_, a dance of death, which struck one with a sense of horror. The orchestras still fiddled in the restaurants. At night the opera-house was crowded. In _cafés_ bright with gilt and glass, in restaurants rich in marble walls, crowds of people listened to the waltzes of Strauss, ate smuggled food at monstrous prices, laughed, flirted, and drank. They were the profiteers of war, spending paper money with the knowledge that it had no value outside Vienna, no value here except in stacks to buy warmth for their stomachs, a little warmth for their souk, while their stock of kronen lasted. They were the vultures from Jugo-Slavia and Czecho-Slovakia come to feed on the corpse of Austria while it still had flesh on its bones, and while Austrian kronen still had some kind of purchase power... And outside, two million people were starving slowly but very surely to death.

The children were starving quickly to death. Their coffins passed me in the streets. Ten--twelve--fifteen--in one half-hour between San Stefan’s Chinch and the Favoritenstrasse. Small living skeletons padded after one with naked feet, thrusting out little claw-like hands, begging for charity. In the great hospital of Vienna children lay in crowded wards, with twisted limbs and bulbous heads, diseased from birth, because of their mother’s hunger and a life without milk and any kind of fat.

Vienna, the capital of a great empire, had been sentenced to death by the Treaty of Peace which had so carved up her former territory that she was cut off from all her natural resources and from all means of industry, commerce and life.

It was Dr. Small, dear “Daddy” Small, who gave me an intimate knowledge of what was happening in Vienna a year after Armistice, and it was Eileen O’Connor who still further enlightened me by taking me into the babies’ _crèches_, the _Kinderspital_ and the working people’s homes, where disease and death found their victims. She took me to these places until I sickened and said, “I can bear no more.”

Dr. Small had a small office in the Kârtnerstrasse, where Eileen worked with him, and it was here that I found them both a day after my arrival in Vienna. Eileen was on her knees making a wood fire and puffing it into a blaze for the purpose of boiling a tin kettle which stood on a trivet, and after that, as I found, for making tea. Outside there was a raw, horrible day, with a white mist in which those coffins were going by and with those barefoot children with pallid faces and gaunt cheeks padding by one’s side, so that I was glad to see the flames in the hearth and to hear the cheerful dink of tea-cups which the doctor was getting out. Better still, was I glad to see these two good friends, so sane, so vital, so purposeful, as I found them, in a world of gloom and neurosis.

The doctor told me of their work. It was life-saving and increasing in range of action. They had organised a number of feeding centres in Vienna, and stores from which mothers could buy condensed milk and cocoa and margarine, at next to nothing, for their starving babes. Austrian ladies were doing most of the actual work apart from organisation at headquarters, and doing it devotedly. From America and from England money was flowing in.

“The tide of thought is turning,” said the doctor. “Every dollar we get, and every shilling, is a proof that the call of humanity is being heard above the old war cries.”

“And every dollar and every shilling,” said Eileen, “is helping to save the life of some poor woman or some little mite who had no guilt in the war, but suffered from its cruelty.”

“This job,” said the doctor, “suits my peculiar philosophy. I am not out so much to save these babies’ lives----”

Here Eileen threatened to throw the teapot at his head.

“Because,” he added, “some of them would be better dead, and anyhow, you can’t save a nation by charity. But what I am out to do is to educate the heart of the world above the baseness of the passions that caused the massacre in Europe. We’re helping to do it by saving the children and by appealing to the chivalry of men and women across the old frontiers. We’re killers of cruelty, Miss Eileen and I. We’re rather puffed up with ourselves, ain’t we, my dear?”

He grinned at Eileen in a whimsical way, and I could see that between this little American and that Irish girl there was an understanding comradeship.

So he told me when she left the room a minute to get another tea-cup or wash one up.

“That girl!” he said. “Say, laddie, you couldn’t find a better head in all Europe, including Hoover himself. She’s a Napoleon Bonaparte without his blood-lust. She’s Horatio Nelson and Lord Northcliffe and Nurse Cavell all rolled into one, to produce the organising genius of Eileen O’Connor. Only you would have to add a few saints like Catherine of Sienna and Joan of Arc to allow for her spirituality. She organises feeding-centres like you would write a column article. She gets the confidence of Austrian women so that they would kiss her feet if she’d allow it. She has a head for figures that fairly puts me to shame, and as for her courage--well, I don’t mind telling you that I’ve sworn to pack her back to England if she doesn’t keep clear of typhus dens and other fever-stricken places. We can’t afford to lose her by some dirty bug-bite.”

Eileen came into the room again with another tea-cup and saucer. I counted those on the table and saw three already.

“Who is the other cup for?” I asked. “If you are expecting visitors I’ll go, because I’m badly in need of a wash.”

“Don’t worry,” said Eileen. “We haven’t time to wash in Vienna, and, anyhow, there’s no soap, for love or money. This is for Wickham, who is no visitor but one of the staff.”

“Wickham?” I said. “Is Brand here?”

“Rather!” said “Daddy” Small. “He has been here a week and is doing good work. Looks after the supplies, and puts his heart into the job.”

As he spoke the door opened and Brand strode into the room, with rain dripping from his waterproof coat which he took off and flung into a corner before he turned to the table.

“Lord! A cup of tea is what I want!”

“And what you shall have, my dear,” said Eileen.

“But don’t you know a friend when you see him?”

“By Jove!”

He held my hand in a hard grip and patted me on the shoulder. Our friendship was beyond the need of words.

So there we three, who had seen many strange and tragic things in those years of history, were together again in the city of Vienna, the city of death, where the innocent were paying for the guilty, but where also, as “Daddy” Small said, there was going out a call to charity which was being heard by the heart of the world above the old war-cries of cruelty.

I stayed with them only a week. I had been long away from England and had other work to do. But in that time I saw how these three friends, and others in their service, were devoting themselves to the rescue of human life, partly, I think, for their own sake, though without conscious selfishness, and with a passionate pity for those who suffered. By this service they were healing their own souls, sorely wounded in the war. That was so, certainly, with Wickham Brand, and a little, I think, with Eileen O’Connor.

Brand was rescued in the nick of time by the doctor’s call to him. Elsa’s death had struck him a heavy blow when his nerves were already in rags and tatters. Now by active service in this work of humanity and healing he was getting back to normality, getting serene and steady. I saw the change in him, revealed by the light in his eyes and by his quietude of speech and the old sense of humour, which for a while he had lost.

“I see now,” he said one night, “that it’s no use fighting against the injustice and brutality of life. I can’t re-make the world or change the things that are written in history or alter in any big way the destiny of peoples. Stupidity, ignorance, barbarity; will continue among the multitude. All that any of us can do is to tackle some good job that lies at hand, and keep his own soul bright and fearless if there is any chance and use his little intellect in his little circle for kindness instead of cruelty. I find that chance here, and I am grateful.”

The doctor had larger and bigger hopes, though his philosophy of life was not much different from that of Brand’s.

“I want to fix up an intellectual company in this funny old universe,” he said. “I want to establish an intellectual aristocracy on international lines--the leaders of the new world. By intellectuals I don’t mean high-brow fellows with letters after their names and encyclopaedias in their brain-pans. I mean men and women who by moral character, kindness of heart, freedom from narrow hatreds, tolerance of different creeds and races, and love of humanity, will unite in a free, unfettered way, without a label or a league, to get a move on towards a better system of human society. No red Bolshevism, mind you, no heaven by way of hell, but a striving for greater justice between classes and nations, and for peace within the frontiers of Christendom, and beyond, if possible. It’s getting back to the influence of the individual, the leadership of multitudes by the power of the higher mind. I’m doing it by penny postcards to all my friends. This work of ours in Vienna is a good proof of their response. Let all the folk with good hearts behind their brains start writing postcards to each other, with a plea for brotherhood, charity, peace, and the new world would come... You laugh! Yes, I talk a little nonsense. It’s not so easy as that. But see the idea? The leaders must keep in touch, and the herds will follow.”

I turned to Eileen who was listening with a smile about her lips while she pasted labels on to packets of cocoa.

“What’s your philosophy?” I asked.

She laughed, in that deep voice of hers.

“I’ve none; only the old faith, and a little hope, and a heart that’s bustin’ with love.”

Brand was adding up figures in a book of accounts, and smiled across at the girl whom he had known since boyhood, when she had pulled his hair.

His wounds were healing.