Brand replied with equal gravity, regretting his intrusion, and expressing his gratitude for the great courtesy that had been shown to him. Curiously, he told me, he had a strong temptation to laugh. The enormous formality of the reception touched some sense of absurdity so that he wanted to laugh loudly and wildly. Probably that was sheer nervousness.
“Permit me to present my son,” said the lady. “Lieutenant Franz von Kreuzenach.”
The young man came forward and clicked heels in the German fashion, but his way of shaking hands, and his easy “How do you do?” were perfectly English. For a moment Brand met his eyes, and found them frank and friendly. He had a vision of this man sitting in Eileen O’Connor’s room, gazing at her with love in his eyes, and, afterwards, embarrassed, shameful, and immensely sad in that trial scene.
Elsa also shook hands with him, and helped to break the hard ice of ceremony.
“My brother is very glad to meet you. He was at Oxford, you know. Come and sit here. You will take tea, I am sure.”
They had prepared tea for him specially, and Elsa served it like an English girl, charmingly.
Brand was not an easy conversationalist His drawing-room manners were gauche always, and that evening in the German drawing-room he felt, he told me, “a perfect fool,” and could think of no small-talk. Franz von Kreuzenach helped him out by talking about Oxford, and Brand felt more at ease when he found that the young German officer knew some of his old college friends, and described a “rag” in his own third year. The old Baron sat stiffly, listening with mask-like gravity to this conversation. Elsa laughed without embarrassment at her brother’s description of a “debagging” incident, when the trousers of a Proctor had been removed in “the High,” and the Frau von Kreuzenach permitted herself a wintry smile.
“Before the war,” she said, “we wished our children to get an English education. Elsa went to a school at Brighton—— We were very fond of England.”
The General joined in the conversation for the first time.