V
Wickham Brand paid his promised visit to the Chéri family, according to his pledge to Hélène, whom he had met in the street the previous day, and he had to drink some of the hidden wine, as I had done, and heard the story of its concealment and of Madame’s oath about the secret hoard of copper. I think he was more disconcerted than I had been by that avowal and told me afterwards that he believed no Englishwoman would have sworn to so deliberate a lie.
“That’s because the English are not so logical,” I said and he puzzled over that.
He was greatly taken with Hélène, as she with him, but he risked their friendship in an awkward moment when he expressed the hope that the German offer of peace (the one before the final surrender) would be accepted.
It was Madame Chéri who took him up on that, sharply, and with a kind of surprised anguish in her voice. She hoped, she said, that no peace would be made with Germany until French and British and American troops had smashed the German armies, crossed the German frontier, and destroyed many German towns and villages. She would not be satisfied with any peace that came before a full vengeance, so that German women would taste the bitterness of war as Frenchwomen had drunk deep of it, and until Germany was heaped with ruins as France had been.
Wickham Brand was sitting with the small boy on his knees, and stroked his hair before answering.
“Dites, donc!” said Hélène, who was sitting on the hearthrug looking up at his powerful profile, which reminded me always of a Norman knight, or, sometimes, of a young monk worried about his soul and the Devil.
He had that monkish look now when he answered.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have felt like that often. But I have come to think that the sooner we get blood out of our eyes the better for all the world. I have seen enough dead Germans—and dead English and dead French—to last a lifetime. Many of the German soldiers hate the war, as I know, and curse the men who drove them on to it. They are trapped. They cannot escape from the thing they curse, because of their discipline, their patriotism——”