“Come and have a whiskey in the smoke-room,” said Harding. “I’d like a yarn, and we shall be alone.”
I did not want him to tell me his tale. I was tired of tragic history. But I could not refuse. The boy wanted to unburden himself. I could see that, though for quite a time after we had sat on each side of the wood fire, he hesitated in getting to the point and indulged in small-talk about his favourite brand of cigars, and my evil habit of smoking the worst kind of cigarettes.
Suddenly we plunged into what was the icy waters of his real thoughts.
“About my wife.... I’d like you to know. Others will tell you, and you’d have heard already if you hadn’t been away so long. But I think you would get a wrong notion from others. The fact is, I don’t blame Evelyn. I would like you to understand that. I blame the Germans for everything.”
“The Germans?”
That was a strange statement, and I could not see the drift of it until he explained his meaning.
“The Germans made the war, and the war took me away from Evelyn, just after our marriage.... Imagine the situation. A kid of a girl, wanting to be merry and bright, eager for the fun of life and all that, left alone in a big old house in the country, or when she got fed up with that, in a big gloomy house in town. She got fed up with both pretty quick. I used to get letters from her—every day for a while—and she used to say in every one of them, ‘I’m fed up like Billy-O.’ That was her way of putting it, don’t you know, and I got scared. But what could I do—out there—except write and tell her to try and get busy with something? Well, she got busy all right!”
Harding laughed again in his woful way, which was not good to hear. Then he became angry and passionate, and told me it was all the fault of “those damned women.”
I asked him what “damned women,” and he launched into a wild denunciation of a certain set of women—most of the names he mentioned were familiar to me from full-length portraits in the Sketch and Tatler—who had spent the years of war in organising fancy bazaars, charity matinées, private theatricals for Red Cross funds—“and all that,” as Harding remarked in his familiar phrase. He said they were rotten all through, utterly immoral, perfectly callous of all the death and tragedy about them, except in a false, hysterical way at times.
“They were ghouls,” he said.