Brand shook his head and said he must breathe fresh air. Fortune was playing a Brahms concerto in the style of a German master on the table-cloth.
I followed Brand, and we strolled through the dark streets of Lille and did not talk. In each of our minds was the stupendous thought that it was the last night of the war—the end of the adventure, as young Clatworthy had said. God! It had been a frightful adventure from first to last—a fiery furnace in which youth had been burnt up like grass. How much heroism we had seen, how much human agony, ruin, hate, cruelty, love! There had been comradeship and laughter in queer places and perilous hours. Comradeship, perhaps that was the best of all: the unselfish comradeship of men. But what a waste of life! What a lowering of civilisation! Our heritage—what was it, after victory? Who would heal the wounds of the world?
Brand suddenly spoke, after our long tramp in the darkness, past windows from which came music, and singing, and shouts of laughter. He uttered only one word, but all his soul was in it.
“Peace!”
That night we went to see Eileen O’Connor and to enquire after the girl Marthe. Next day Pierre Nesle was coming to find his sister.
XIX
Eileen O’Connor had gone back from the convent to the rooms she had before her trial and imprisonment. I was glad to see her in a setting less austere than the whitewashed parlour in which she had first received us. There was something of her character in the sitting-room where she had lived so long during the war, and where with her girl friends she had done more dangerous work than studying the elements of drawing and painting. In that setting, too, she looked at home—“The Portrait of a Lady,” by Lavery, as I saw her in my mind’s eye, when she sat in a low armchair by the side of a charcoal stove, with the lamplight on her face and hair and her dress shadowy. She wore a black dress of some kind, with a tiny edge of lace about the neck and a string of coloured beads so long that she twisted it about her fingers in her lap. The room was small, but cosy in the light of a tall lamp on an iron stand shaded with red silk. Like all the rooms I had seen in Lille—not many—this was panelled, with a polished floor, bare except for one rug. On the walls were a few etchings framed in black—London views mostly—and some water-colour drawings of girls’ heads, charmingly done, I thought. They were her own studies of some of her pupils and friends, and one face especially attracted me because of its delicate and spiritual beauty.
“That was my fellow prisoner,” said Eileen O’Connor. “Alice de Villers-Auxicourt. She died before the trial—happily, because she had no fear.”