I noticed one other thing in the room which was pleasant to see—an upright piano, and upon a stool by its side a pile of old songs which I turned over one by one as we sat talking. They were English and Irish, mostly from the seventeenth century onwards, but among them I found some German songs, and on each cover was written the name of Franz von Kreuzenach. At the sight of that name I had a foolish sense of embarrassment and dismay, as though I had discovered a skeleton in the cupboard, and I slipped them hurriedly between other sheets.
Eileen was talking to Wickham Brand. She did not notice my confusion. She was telling him that Marthe, Pierre’s sister, was seriously ill with something like brain-fever. The girl had regained consciousness at times, but was delirious, and kept crying out for her mother and Pierre to save her from some horror that frightened her. The nuns had made enquiries about her through civilians in Lille. Some of them had heard of the girl under her stage name—“Marthe de Méricourt.” She had sung in the cabarets before the war. After the German occupation she had disappeared for a time. Somebody said she had been half-starved and was in a desperate state. What could a singing-girl do in an “occupied” town? She reappeared in a restaurant frequented by German officers and kept up by a woman of bad character. She sang and danced there for a miserable wage, and part of her duty was to induce German officers to drink champagne—the worst brand for the highest price. A horrible degradation for a decent girl! But starvation, so Eileen said, has fierce claws. Imagine what agony, what terror, what despair must have gone before that surrender! To sing and dance before the enemies of your country!
“Frightful!” said Brand. “A girl should prefer death.”
Eileen O’Connor was twisting the coloured beads between her fingers. She looked up at Wickham Brand with a deep thoughtfulness in her dark eyes.
“Most men would say that. And all women beyond the war zone, safe and shielded. But death does not come quickly from half-starvation in a garret without fire, in clothes that are worn threadbare. It is not the quick death of the battlefield. It is just a long-drawn misery.... Then there is loneliness. The loneliness of a woman’s soul. Do you understand that?”
Brand nodded gravely. “I understand the loneliness of a man’s soul. I’ve lived with it.”
“Worse for a woman,” said Eileen. “That singing-girl was lonely in Lille. Her family—with that boy Pierre—were on the other side of the lines. She had no friends here before the Germans came.”
“You mean that afterwards——”
Brand checked the end of his sentence and the line of his mouth hardened.
“Some of the Germans were kind,” said Eileen. “Oh, let us tell the truth about that! They were not all devils.”