Chapter XII: Book III: Builders of Peace (3)

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.