“Don’t you believe it,” she said. “We’re a hard, logical, relentless people, like all peasant folk of Celtic stock. It’s the English who are romantic and sentimental, like the Germans.”
He was amazed at those words (so Eileen told us) and then laughed heartily in his very boyish way.
“You are pleased to make fun of me. You are pulling my leg, as we said at Oxford.”
So they took to talking for a few minutes in the courtyard when they met, and Eileen noticed that they met more often than before. She suspected him of arranging that, and it amused her. By that time she had a staunch friend in the old Kommandant who believed her to be an enemy of England and an Irish patriot. She was already playing the dangerous game under his very nose, or at least within fifty yards of the blotting-pad over which his nose used to be for many hours of the day in his office. It was utterly necessary to keep him free from any suspicion. His confidence was her greatest safeguard. It was therefore unwise to refuse him (an honest, stupid old gentleman) when he asked whether, now and again, he might bring one of his officers and enjoy an hour’s music in her rooms after dinner. He had heard her singing, and it had gone straight to his heart. There was one of his officers, Lieutenant Baron Franz von Kreuzenach, who had a charming voice. They might have a little musical recreation which would be most pleasant and refreshing.
“Bring your Baron,” said Eileen. “I shall not scandalise my neighbours when the courtyard is closed.”
Her girl-friends were scandalised when they heard of these musical evenings—two or three times a month—until she convinced them that it was a service to France, and a life insurance for herself and them. There were times when she had scruples. She was tricking both those men who sat in her room for an hour or two now and then, so polite, so stiffly courteous, so moved with sentiment when she sang old Irish songs and Franz von Kreuzenach sang his German songs. She was a spy, in plain and terrible language, and they were utterly duped. On more than one night while they were there an escaped prisoner was in the cellar below, with a German uniform, and cypher message, and all directions for escape across the lines. Though they seldom talked about the war, yet now and again by casual remarks they revealed the intentions of the German army and its moral, or lack of moral. With the old Kommandant she did not feel so conscience-stricken. To her he was gentle and charming, but to others a bully, and there was in his character the ruthlessness of the Prussian officer on all matters of “duty,” and he hated England ferociously.
With Franz von Kreuzenach it was different. He was a humanitarian, and sensitive to all cruelty in life. He hated not the English but the war with real anguish, as she could see by many words he let fall from time to time. He was, she said, a poet, and could see across the frontiers of hatred to all suffering humanity, and so revolted against the endless, futile massacre and the spiritual degradation of civilised peoples. It was only in a veiled way he could say these things, in the presence of his superior officer, but she understood. She understood another thing as time went on—nearly eighteen months all told. She saw, quite clearly, as all women must see in such a case that this young German was in love with her.
“He did not speak any word in that way,” said Eileen when she told us this, frankly, in her straight manner of speech, “but in his eyes, in the touch of his hand, in the tones of his voice, I knew that he loved me, and I was very sorry.”
“It was a bit awkward,” said Brand, speaking with a strained attempt at being casual. I could see that he was very much moved by that part of the story, and that there was a conflict in his mind.