It was when the Peace Treaty had been signed, but not ratified by the representatives of Germany and Austria, that I met some of the friends with whom I had travelled along many roads of war or had met in scenes which already seemed far back in history. In London, after a journey to America, I came again in touch with young Harding, whom I had seen last on his way home to his pretty wife, who had fretted at his long absence, and Charles Fortune, whose sense of humour had made me laugh so often in the time of tragedy. Those were chance meetings in the eddies of the great whirlpool of London life, as I saw other faces, strange for a moment or two, until the difference between a field-cap and a bowler hat, a uniform and civil clothes, was wiped out by a look of recognition and the sound of a remembered voice.

Not by chance but by a friendship which had followed me across the world with written words, I found myself once more in the company of Wickham Brand, and with him went again to spend some evenings with Eileen O’Connor, who was now home in Kensington, after that grim drama which she had played so long in Lille.

With “Daddy” Small I had been linked up by a lucky chain of coincidences which had taken us both to New York at the same time and brought us back to Europe on the same boat, which was the White Star liner Lapland.

My chance meeting with Harding led to a renewal of friendship which was more of his seeking than mine, though I liked him a good deal. But he seemed to need me, craving sympathy, which I gave with sincerity, and companionship, which I could not give so easily, being a busy man.

It was on the night when London went mad because of peace, though not so mad, I was told, as on the night of armistice. It all seemed mad to me when I was carried like a straw in a raging torrent of life which poured down the Strand, swirled round Trafalgar Square, and choked all channels westwards and eastwards of Piccadilly Circus. The spirit of London had broken bounds. It came wildly from mean streets in the slum quarters to the heart of the West End. The worst elements had surged up and mingled with the middle-class folk and those who claim exclusiveness by the power of wealth. In ignorance that all barriers of caste were to be broken that night, “society” women, as they are called, rather insolent in their public display of white shoulders and diamonds and furs, set out in motor cars for hotels and restaurants which had arranged peace dinners and peace dances. Some of them, I saw, were unaccompanied by their own men, whom they were to meet later, but the vacant seats in their open cars were quickly filled by soldiers, seamen, or merry devils in civil clothes who climbed over the backs of the cars when they were brought to a standstill in the crush of vast crowds. Those uninvited guests, some of them wearing women’s bonnets, most of them fluttering with flags pinned to their coats, all of them provided with noisemaking instruments, behaved with ironical humour to the pretty ladies, touched their coiled hair with “ticklers,” blew loud blasts on their toy trumpets, delivered cockney orations to them for the enjoyment of the crowds below. Some of the pretty ladies accepted the situation with courage and good humour, laughing with shrill mirth at their grotesque companions. Others were frightened and angry. I saw one girl try to beat off the hands of men clambering about her car. They swarmed into it and paid no heed to her cries of protest....

All the flappers were out in the Strand and in Trafalgar Square and many streets. They were factory girls, shop girls, office girls, and their eyes were alight with adventure and a pagan ecstasy. Men teased them as they passed with the long “ticklers,” and they, armed with the same weapon, fought duels with these aggressors, and then fled, and were pursued into the darkness of side-streets, where they were caught and kissed. Soldiers in uniform, English, Scots, Canadians, Australians, came lurching along in gangs, arm in arm, then mingled with the girls, changed headgear with them, struggled and danced and stampeded with them. Seamen, three sheets in the wind, steered an uneven course through this turbulent sea of life, roaring out choruses, until each man had found a maid for the dance of joy.

London was a dark forest with nymphs and satyrs at play in the glades and Pan stamping his hoofs like a giddy goat. All the passions let loose by war, the breaking down of old restraints, the gladness of youth at escape from death, provided the motive-power, unconscious and primitive, behind this carnival of the London crowds. From some church a procession came into Trafalgar Square, trying to make a pathway through the multitude. A golden cross was raised high, and clergymen in surplices, with acolytes and faithful women, came chanting solemn words. The crowd closed about them. A mirthful sailor teased the singing women with his “tickler.” Loud guffaws, shrill laughter, were in the wake of the procession, though some men stood to attention as the cross passed, and others bared their heads, and something hushed the pagan riot a moment.

At the windows in Pall Mall men in evening clothes who had been officers in the world-war sat by the pretty women who had driven through the crowds, looking out on the noisy pageant of the street. A piano-organ was playing, and two young soldiers danced with ridiculous grace, imitating the elegance and languorous ecstasy of society dancers. One of them wore a woman’s hat and skirt, and was wonderfully comic.

I stood watching them, a little stupefied by all the noise and tumult of this “Peace” night, and with a sense of tragic irony, remembering millions of boys who lay dead in quiet fields and the agony of many peoples in Europe. It was then that I saw young Harding. He was sitting in his club window just above the dancing soldiers and looking out with a grave and rather woe-begone face, remarkable in contrast with the laughing faces of fellow-clubmen and their women. I recognised him after a moment’s query in my mind, and said: “Hulloa, Harding!”

He stared at me, and I saw the sudden dawning of remembrance.

“Come in,” he answered. “I had no idea you were back again!”

So I went into his club and sat by his side at the open window, glad of this retreat from the pressure and tumult of the mob below.

He talked conventionally for a little while, and asked me whether I had had “a good time” in the States, and whether I was busy, and why the Americans seemed so hostile to President Wilson. I understood from him that he approved of the Peace Treaty and was glad that Germany and Austria had been “wiped off the map” as far as it was humanly possible.

We chatted like that for what I suppose was something more than half an hour, while we looked out upon the seething multitude in the street below, when suddenly the boy’s mask fell from him, so abruptly and with such a naked revelation of a soul in anguish that concealment was impossible.

I saw him lean forward with his elbows on the windowsill and his hands clenching an iron bar. His face had become like his shirt front, almost as white as that. A kind of groan came from him, like that of a man badly wounded. The people on either side of him turned to look at him, but he was unconscious of them, as he stared at something in the street. I followed the direction of his eyes and guessed that he was looking at a motor-car which had been stopped by the crowd, who were surging about it. It was an open car, and inside were a young man and woman in fancy dress as Pierrot and Columbine. They were standing up and pelting the crowd with long coloured streamers, which the mob caught and tossed back again with shouts of laughter. The girl was very pretty, with an audacious little face beneath the white sugar-loaf cap, and her eyes were on fire. Her companion was a merry-eyed fellow, dean-shaven and ruddy-faced (for he had not chalked it to Pierrot’s whiteness), and looked to me typical of a naval officer or one of our young airmen. I could see nothing to groan about in such a sight.

“What’s wrong, Harding?”

I touched him on the elbow, for I did not like him to give himself away before the other company in the window-seat.

He rose at once, and walked in a stumbling way across the room, while I followed. The room was empty where we stood.

“Aren’t you well?” I asked.

He laughed in a most tragic way.

“Did you see those two in the car, Pierrot and Columbine?”

I nodded.

“Columbine was my wife. Pierrot is now her husband. Funny, isn’t it?”

My memory went back to that night in Cologne, less than six months before, when Harding had asked me to use my influence to get him demobilised, and as an explanation of his motive opened his pocket-book and showed me the photograph of a pretty girl, and said, “That’s my wife;... she is hipped because I have been away so long.” I felt enormously sorry for him.

“Come and have a whisky 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 were 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 woeful 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.

Many of them had married twice, three times, even more than that, before the boys who were killed were cold in their graves. Yet those were the best, with a certain respect for convention. Others had just let themselves go. They had played the devil with any fellow who came within their circle of enticement, if he had a bit of money, or could dance well, or oiled his hair in the right way.

“They corrupted English society,” said Harding, “while they smiled and danced, and dressed in fancy clothes, and posed for their photos in the papers. It was they who corrupted Evelyn when the poor kid was fighting up against her loneliness and very hipped, and all that.”

“Who was the man?” I asked, and Harding hesitated before he told me. It was with frightful irony that he answered: “The usual man in most of these cases, the man who is often one’s best pal. Damn him!”

Harding, seemed to repent of that curse; at least, his next words were strangely inconsistent.

“Mind you, I don’t blame him, either. It was I who sent him to Evelyn. He was in the Dragoons with me, and when he went home on leave I said, ‘Go and cheer up my little wife, old man. Take her to a theatre or two, and all that. She’s devilishly lonely.’ Needless to say, he fell in love with her. I might have known it. As for Evelyn, she was immensely taken with young Dick. He was a bit of a humorist and made her laugh. Laughter was a devilish good thing in war-time. That was where Dick had his pull. I might have known that! I was a chuckle-headed idiot.”

The end of the story was abrupt, and at the time I found it hard to find extenuating circumstances in the guilt of the girl who had smashed this boy Harding. She lied to him up to the very moment of his demobilisation; at least, she gave him no clue to her purpose until she hit him, as it were, full in the face with a mortal blow to his happiness.

He had sent her a wire with the one word “Demobilised,” and then had taken the next train back and a cab from Charing Cross to that house of his at Rutland Gate.

“Is the mistress well?” he had asked one of the maids when his kit was handled in the hall.

“The mistress is out, sir,” said the maid, and he remembered afterwards that she looked queerly at him, with a kind of pity.

There was the usual note waiting for him. Evelyn was “very sorry.” She hated causing her husband the grief she knew he would feel, but she and Dick could not do without each other. The war had altered everything, and many wives to many husbands. She hoped Harding would be happy after a bit....

Harding was not happy. When he read that note he went a little mad, and roamed round London with an automatic pistol, determined to kill his former friend if he could set eyes on him. Fortunately, he did not find him. Evelyn and Dick had gone off to a village in Devonshire, and after three days with murder in his heart Harding had been very ill and had gone into a nursing-home. There, in his weakness, he had, he told me, “thought things out.” The result of his meditations amounted to no more than the watchword of many people in years of misery: “C’est la guerre!”

It was the war which had caused his tragedy. It had put too great a strain on human nature, or at least on human nerves and morals. It had broken down the conventions and traditions of civilised life. The Germans had not only destroyed many towns and villages, but many homes and hearts far from the firing-line. They had let the devil loose.

“Quite a number of my pals,” said Harding, “are in the same boat with me. They either couldn’t stick their wives, or their wives couldn’t stick them. It gives one a sense of companionship!”

He smiled in a melancholy way, but then confessed to loneliness—so many of his real pals had gone west—and asked whether he could call on me now and then. It was for that reason that he came to my house fairly often, and sometimes Fortune, who came too at times, made him laugh, as in the old days.