Fortune and I met also in a crowd, but indoors. Brand and Eileen O’Connor were both to be at one of the evening parties which assembled every now and then in a flat at Chelsea belonging to Susy Whincop, designer of stained glass, driver of ambulances for the Scottish Women’s Convoy, and sympathetic friend before the war of any ardent soul who grew long hair if a man, short hair if a woman, and had some special scheme, philosophy, or inspiration for the welfare of humanity.

I had known Susy and her set in the old days. They were the minor intellectuals of London, and I had portrayed some of them in a novel called “Intellectual Mansions,” which they did not like, though I loved them all. They wrote little poems, painted little pictures, produced little plays, and talked about all subjects under heaven with light-hearted humour, an arrogance towards popular ideas, and a quick acceptance of the new, the unusual and the revolutionary in art and thought. Into their way of life war crashed suddenly with its thunder notes of terror. All that they had lived for seemed to be destroyed, and all their ideals overthrown. They had believed in beauty, and it was flung into the mud, and bespattered with blood, and buried beneath the ugly monsters of war’s idolatry.

They had been devotees of liberty, and were made slaves of the drill sergeant and other instruments of martial law. They had been enemies of brutality, cruelty, violence, but all human effort now was for the slaughter of men, and the hero was he who killed most with bayonet or bomb. Their pretty verses were made of no account. Their impressionistic paintings were not so useful as the camouflage of tin huts. Their little plays were but feeble drama to that which now was played out on the world’s stage to the roar of guns and the march of armies. They went into the tumult and fury of it all, and were lost. I met some of them, like Fortune and Brand, in odd places. Many of them died in the dirty ditches. Some of them wrote poems before they died, stronger than their work before the war, with a noble despair or the exaltation of sacrifice. Others gave no sign of their previous life, and were just absorbed into the ranks—ants in these legions of soldier-ants. Now those who had escaped with life were coming back to their old haunts, trying to pick up old threads, getting back, if they could, to the old ways of work, hoping for a new inspiration out of immense experience, but not yet finding it.

In Susy Whincop’s flat some of them had gathered when I went there, and when I looked round upon them, seeing here and there vaguely-remembered faces, I was conscious of a change that had overtaken them, and, with a shock, wondered whether I too had altered so much in those five years. I recognised Peter Hallam, whom I had known as a boy just down from Oxford, with a genius (in a small way) for satirical verse and a talent for passionate lyrics of a morbid and erotic type. Yes, it was certainly Peter, though his face had hardened and he had cropped his hair short and walked with one leg stiff.

He was talking to a girl with bobbed hair. It was Jennie Southcombe, who had been one of the heroines of the Serbian retreat, according to accounts of newspaper correspondents.

“My battery,” said Peter, “plugged into old Fritz with open sights for four horns. We just mowed ‘em down.”

Another face rang a little bell in my memory. Surely that was Alfred Lyon, the Futurist painter? No, it could not be, for Lyon had dressed like an Apache, and this man was in conventional evening clothes and looked like a Brigadier in mufti. Alfred Lyon?... Yes, there he was, though he had lost his pose—cribbed from Murger’s Vie de BohÈme—and his half-starved look, and the wildness in his eyes. As he passed Susy Whincop he spoke a few words, which I overheard.

“I’ve abandoned Futurism. The present knocked that silly. Our little violence, which shocked Suburbia, was made ridiculous by the enormous thing that smashed every convention into a cocked hat.’ I’m just going to put down some war scenes—I made notes in the trenches—with that simplicity of the primitive soul to which we went back in that way of life. The soldier’s point of view, his vision, is what I shall try for.”

“Splendid!” said Susy. “Only, don’t shrink from the abomination. We’ve got to make the world understand—and remember.”

I felt a touch on my sleeve, and a voice said, “Hulloa!... Back again?”

I turned and saw an oldish-young man, with white hair above a lean, clean-shaven face and sombre eyes. I stared, but could not fix him.

“Don’t you remember?” he said. “Wetherall, of the Stage Society!”

“Oh, Lord, yes!”

I grasped his hand, and tried to keep the startled look out of my eyes. But he saw it, and smiled.

“Four years as a prisoner of the Turk have altered me a bit. This white hair, eh? And I feel like Rip van Winkle.”

He put into words something which I had been thinking since my arrival in Susy’s rooms.

“We are the revenants, the ghosts who have come back to their old haunts. We are pretending that everything is the same as before, and that we are the same. But it’s all different, and we have changed most of all. Five years of war have dug their hoofs into the faces of most people in this crowd. Some of them look fifteen, twenty, years older, and I expect they’ve been through a century of experience and emotion.”

“What’s coming out of it?” I asked. “Anything big?”

“Not from us,” said Wetherall. “Most of us are finished. Our nerves have gone to pieces, and our vitality has been sapped. We shall put down a few notes of things seen and understood. But it’s the next generation that will get the big vision, or the one after next.”

Then I was able to shake hands with Susy Whincop, and, as I have said, she left me in no doubt about the change that four years of war had made to me.

She held me at arm’s length, studying my face.

“Soul alive!” she said. “You’ve been through it all right! Hell’s branding-irons have been busy with a fair-faced man.”

“As bad as that?” I asked, and she answered very gravely, “As bad as that.”

She had hardly changed, except for a few streaks of grey in her brown hair. Her low, broad forehead was as smooth as before; her brown eyes shone with their old steady light. She had not lost her sense of humour, though she had seen a good deal of blood and agony and death.

“How’s humanity?” I asked, and she laughed and Shrugged her shoulders.

“What can one do with it? I thought we were going to catch the old devil by the tail and hold him fast, but he’s broken loose again. This peace! Dear God!... And all the cruelty and hatred that have survived the massacre! But I don’t despair even now. In this room there is enough good-will and human kindness to create a new world. We’re going to have a good try to make things better by-and-by.”

“Who’s your star to-night?” I asked. “Who is the particular Hot-Gospeller with a mission to convert mankind?”

“I’ve several,” said Susy.

She glanced round the room, and her eyes rested on a little man with goggles and a goatee beard, none other than my good friend Dr. Small, with whom I had travelled down many roads. I had no notion that he knew Susy or was to be here to-night.

“There’s one great soul—a little American doctor whose heart is as big as humanity itself, and whose head is filled with the wisdom of the wise.”

“I know him,” I said, “and I agree with you.”

He caught our eyes fixed on him, and blinked through his goggles, and then waved his hand, and made his way to us.

“Hulloa, doc.!” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Susy Whincop?”

“No need,” he answered. “Miss Whincop is the golden link between all men of good-will.”

Susy was pleased with that. She patted the little doctor’s hand and said, “Bully for you, doctor! and may the Stars and Stripes wave over the League of Nations!”

Then she was assailed by other guests, and the doctor and I took refuge in a corner.

“How’s everything?” I asked.

The doctor was profoundly dejected, and did not hide the gloom that possessed his soul.

“Sonny,” he answered, “we shall have to fight with our backs to the wall, because the enemy—the old devil—is prevailing against us. I have just come over from Paris, and I don’t mind telling you that what I saw during the Peace Conference has made me doubt the power of goodness over evil.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Daddy” Small’s story was not pleasant to hear. It was the story of the betrayal, one by one, of every ideal for which simple men had fought and died, a story of broken pledges, of hero-worship dethroned, and of great peoples condemned to lingering death. The Peace Treaty, he said, would break the heart of the world and prepare the way for new, more dreadful, warfare.

“How about Wilson?” I asked.

The little doctor raised his hands like a German crying, “Kamerad!”

“Wilson was not big enough. He had the future of civilisation in his hands, but his power was filched from him, and he never knew until the end that he had lost it. He was like a simple Gulliver among the Liliputians. They tied him down with innumerable threads of cotton while he slept in self-complacency with a sense of righteousness. He was slow-thinking among quick-witted people. He stated a general principle, and they drafted out clauses which seemed to fulfil the principle while violating it in every detail. They juggled with facts and figures so that black seemed white through his moral spectacles, and he said Amen to their villainy, believing that God had been served by righteousness. Bit by bit they broke his pledges and made a jigsaw puzzle of them so artfully that he believed they were uncracked. Little by little they robbed him of his honour, and he was unaware of the theft. In preambles and clause headings and interpretations they gave lip-service to the fourteen points upon which the armistice was granted, and to which the allied nations were utterly pledged, not only to the Germans and all enemies, but to their own people. Not one of those fourteen points is in the reality of the Treaty. There has been no self-determination of peoples. Millions have been transferred into unnatural boundaries. There have been no open covenants openly arrived at. The Conference was within closed doors. The clauses of the Peace Treaty were kept secret from the world until an American journalist got hold of a copy and sent it to his paper. What has become of the equality of trade conditions and the removal of economic barriers among all nations consenting to peace? Sonny, Europe has been carved up by the spirit of vengeance, and multitudes of men, women and children have been sentenced to death by starvation. Another militarism is enthroned above the ruin of German militarism. Wilson was hoodwinked into putting his signature to a peace of injustice which will lead by desperation to world anarchy and strife. When he understands what thing he has done he will be stricken by a mortal blow to his conscience and his pride.”

“Doctor,” I said, “there is still hope in the League of Nations. We must all back that.”

He shook his head.

“The spirit has gone out of it. It was born without a soul. I believe now that the future welfare of the world depends upon a change of heart among the peoples, inspired by individuals in all nations who will work for good and give a call to humanity, indifferent to statesmen, treaties and Governments.”

“The International League of Good-will?”

He nodded and smiled.

“Something like that.”

I remembered a dinner-party in New York after the armistice. I had been lecturing on the League of Nations at a time when the Peace Treaty was still unsigned, but when already there was a growing hostility against President Wilson, startling in its intensity. The people of the United States were still moved by the emotion and idealism with which they had roused great armies and sent them to the fields of France. Some of the men were returning home again. I stood outside a club in New York when a darkie regiment returned its colours, and I heard the roars of cheering that followed the march of the negro troops. I saw Fifth Avenue filled with triumphal arches, strung across with jewelled chains, festooned with flags and trophies of the home-coming of the New York Division. The heart of the American people was stirred by the pride of its achievement on the way to victory and by a new sense of power over the destiny of mankind. But already there was a sense of anxiety about the responsibilities to which Wilson in Europe was pledging them without their full and free consent. They were conscious that their old isolation was being broken down, and that by ignorance or rash promise they might be drawn into other European adventures which were no concern of theirs. They knew how little was their knowledge of European peoples, with their rivalries, and racial hatreds, and secret intrigues. Their own destiny as a free people might be thwarted by being dragged into the jungle of that unknown world. In any case Wilson was playing a lone hand, pledging them without their advice or agreement, subordinating them, it seemed, to the British Empire, with six votes on the Council of the League to their poor one. What did he mean? By what right did he do so?

At every dinner-table these questions were asked before the soup was drunk; at the coffee end of the meal every dinner-party was a debating club, and the women joined with the men in hot discussion; until some tactful soul laughed loudly, and some hostess led the way to music or a dance.

The ladies had just gone after one of these debates, leaving us to our cigars and coffee, when “Daddy” Small made a proposition which startled me at the time.

“See here,” he said to his host and the other men. “Out of this discussion one thing stands clear and straight. It is that in this room, now, at this table, are men of intellect—American and English—men of goodwill towards mankind, men of power in one way or another, who agree that whatever happens there must be eternal friendship between England and the United States.”

“Sure!” said a chorus of voices.

“In other countries there are men with the same ideals as, ourselves—peace, justice between men and nations, a hatred of cruelty, pity for women and children, charity and truth. Is that agreed?”

“Sure!” said the other guests.

They were mostly business men, well-to-do, but not of the “millionaire” class, with here and there a writing-man, an artist and, as I remember, a clergyman.

“I am going to be a commercial traveller in charity,” said the little doctor. “I am going across the frontiers to collect clients for an international society of goodwill. I propose to establish a branch at this table.”

The suggestion was received with laughter by some of the men, but, as I saw, with gravity by others.

“What would be the responsibilities, doctor. Do you want money?”

This was from the manager of an American railroad.

“We shall want a bit,” said the doctor. “Not much. Enough for stamps and occasional booklets and typewriting. The chief responsibility would be to spot lies leading to national antagonism, and to kill them by exposure to cold truth; also, to put in friendly words, privately and publicly, on behalf of human kindness across the barriers of hate and malignity. Any names for the New York branch?”

The doctor took down twelve names, pledged solemnly to his programmes....

I remembered that scene in New York when I stood with the little man in Susy Whincop’s drawing-room.

“What about this crowd?” I asked.

“Sonny,” he said, “this place is reeking with humanity. The real stuff. Idealists who have seen hell pretty close, most of them. Why, in this room there’s enough goodwill to move mountains of cruelty, if we could get a move on all together.”

It was then that I saw Charles Fortune, though I was looking for Brand.

Fortune was wearing one of his special “faces.” I interpreted it as his soulful and mystical face. It broke a little as he winked at me.

“Remarkable gathering,” he said. “The Intellectuals come back to their lair. Some of them like little Bo-Peep who lost her sheep and left their tails behind them.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he answered. “We used to talk like that. I’m trying to grope back.”

He put his hand over his forehead wearily.

“God!” he said. “How terrible was war in a Nissen hut! I cannot even now forget that I was every yard a soldier!”

He began to hum his well-remembered anthem, “Blear-eyed Bill the Butcher of the Boche,” and then checked himself.

“Nay, let us forget that melody of blood. Let us rather sing of fragrant things of peace.” He hummed the nursery ballad of “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are!”

Susy Whincop seized him by the wrist.

“So the Fat Boy has escaped the massacre? Come and make us laugh. We are getting too serious at the piano end of the room.”

“Lady,” said Fortune, “tempt me not to mirth-making. My irony is terrible when roused.”

As he went to the piano I caught sight of Brand just making his way through a group by the door.

I had never seen him in civil clothes, but he looked as I had imagined him, in an old pre-war dinner-jacket and baggy trousers, and a shirt that bulged abominably. A tuft of hair stuck up behind—the tuft that Eileen O’Connor, had pulled for Auld Lang Syne. But he looked fine and distinguished, with his hard, lean face and strong jaw and melancholy eyes.

He caught sight of me and gripped my hand, painfully.

“Hullo, old man! Welcome back. I have heaps to tell you.”

“Good things?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Not good.... Damned bad, alas!”

He did not continue the conversation. He stared across my shoulder at the door as though he saw an apparition. I turned to see the object of his gaze. It was Eileen O’Connor, whom I had first met in Lille.

She was in an evening frock cut low at the neck, and her arms were bare. There was a smile in her dark Irish eyes, and about her long humorous mouth. The girl I had seen in Lille was not so elegant as this, not so pretty. The lifting of care, perhaps, had made the change.

Susy Whincop gave a cry of “Is that Eileen?” and darted to her.

“It’s myself,” said Eileen, releasing herself from an ardent embrace, “and all the better for seeing you. Who’s who in this distinguished crowd?”

“Old friends,” I said, being nearest to her. “Four men who walked one day of history up a street in Lille, and met an Irish girl who had the worship of the crowd.”

She took my hand and I was glad of her look of friendship.

“Four?” she said. “That’s too good to be true. All safe and home again?”

It was astonishing that four of us should be there in a room in London with the girl who had been the heroine of Lille. But there was Fortune and “Daddy” Small and Brand and myself.

The crowd gave us elbow-room while we stood round Eileen. To each she gave her hands—both hands—and merry words of greeting. It was only I, and she, perhaps, who saw the gloom on Brand’s face when she greeted him last and said: “Is it well with you, Wickham?”

Her colour rose a little at the sight of him, and he was paler than when I saw him first that night.

“Pretty well,” he said. “One still needs courage—even in peace.”

He laughed a little as he spoke, but I knew that his laughter was the camouflage of hidden trouble, at which he had hinted in his letters to me.

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.