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.”