We could not have much talk that evening. The groups shifted and re-shifted. The best thing was when Eileen sang “The Gentle Maiden” as on a night in Lille. Brand, standing near the door, listened, strangely unconscious of the people about him.
“It’s good to hear that song again,” I said.
He started, as though suddenly awakened.
“It stirs queer old memories.”
It was in Eileen’s own house that Brand and I renewed a friendship which had been made in a rescued city where we had heard the adventure of this girl’s life.
IV
As Brand admitted to me, and as he had outlined the trouble in his letters, he was having “a bad time.” Since his marriage with Elsa von Kreuzenach he had not had much peace of mind nor any kind of luck. After leaving Cologne the War Office, prompted by some unknown influence,—he suspected his father, who knew the Secretary for War—had sent him off on a special mission to Italy and had delayed his demobilisation until a month before this meeting of ours. That had prevented his plan of bringing Elsa to England, and now, when he was free and her journey possible, he was seriously embarrassed with regard to a home for her. There was plenty of room in his father’s house at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea—too big a house for his father and mother and younger sister, now that the eldest girl had married and his younger brother lay dead on the Somme. It had been his idea that he and Elsa would live in the upper rooms—it made a kind of flat—while he got back to novel-writing until he earned enough to provide a home of his own. It was still his idea, as the only possible place for the immediate future, but the family was dead against it and expressed the utmost aversion, amounting almost to horror, at the idea of receiving his German wife. By violent argument, by appeals to reason and charity, most of all by the firm conviction of his father that he was suffering from shell-shock and would go over the border-line of sanity if thwarted too much, a grudging consent had been obtained from them to give Elsa house-room. Yet he dreaded the coldness of her welcome, and the hostility not only of his own people but of any English society in which she might find herself.