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.