XIX
Eileen O’Connor had gone back from the convent to the rooms she had before her trial and imprisonment. I was glad to see her in a setting less austere than the white-washed parlour in which she had first received us. There was something of her character in the sitting-room where she had lived so long during the war, and where with her girl-friends she had done more dangerous work than studying the elements of drawing and painting. In that setting, too, she looked at home—“The Portrait of a Lady,” by Lavery, as I saw her in my mind’s eye, when she sat in a low arm-chair by the side of a charcoal stove, with the lamplight on her face and hair and her dress shadowy. She wore a black dress of some kind, with a tiny edge of lace about the neck and a string of coloured beads so long that she twisted it about her fingers in her lap. The room was small, but cosy in the light of a tall lamp, on an iron stand, shaded with red silk. Like all the rooms I had seen in Lille—not many—this was panelled, with a polished floor, bare except for one rug. On the walls were a few etchings framed in black—London views mostly—and some water-colour drawings of girls’ heads, charmingly done, I thought. They were her own studies of some of her pupils and friends, and one face especially attracted me, because of its delicate and spiritual beauty.
“That was my fellow-prisoner,” said Eileen O’Connor. “Alice de Villers-Auxicourt. She died before the trial. Happily, because she had no fear.”
I noticed one other thing in the room which was pleasant to see—an upright piano, and upon a stool by its side a pile of old songs which I turned over one by one as we sat talking. They were English and Irish, mostly from the 17th century onwards, but among them I found some German songs, and on each cover was written the name of Franz von Kreuzenach. At the sight of that name I had a foolish sense of embarrassment and dismay, as though I had discovered a skeleton in a cupboard, and I slipped them hurriedly between other sheets.
Eileen was talking to Wickham Brand. She did not notice my confusion. She was telling him that Marthe, Pierre’s sister, was seriously ill with something like brain-fever. The girl had regained consciousness at times, but was delirious, and kept crying out for her mother and Pierre to save her from some horror that frightened her. The nuns had made enquiries about her through civilians in Lille. Some of them had heard of the girl under her stage name—“Marthe de Méricourt.” She had sung in the cabarets before the war. After the German occupation she had disappeared for a time. Somebody said she had been half-starved and was in a desperate state. What could a singing-girl do in an “occupied” town? She reappeared in a restaurant frequented by German officers and kept up by a woman of bad character. She sang and danced there for a miserable wage, and part of her duty was to induce German officers to drink champagne—the worst brand for the highest price. A horrible degradation for a decent girl! But starvation, so Eileen said, has fierce claws. Imagine what agony, what terror, what despair must have gone before that surrender! To sing and dance before the enemies of your country!
“Frightful!” said Brand. “A girl should prefer death.”
Eileen O’Connor was twisting the coloured beads between her fingers. She looked up at Wickham Brand with a deep thoughtfulness in her dark eyes.
“Most men would say that. And all women beyond the war-zone, safe, and shielded. But death does not come quickly from half-starvation, in a garret without fire, in clothes that are worn threadbare. It is not the quick death of the battlefield. It is just a long-drawn misery.... Then there is loneliness. The loneliness of a woman’s soul. Do you understand that?”
Brand nodded gravely.
“I understand the loneliness of a man’s soul. I’ve lived with it.”