I found Eileen O’Connor refreshing and invigorating, so that it was good to be in her company. Most people in England at that time, at least those I met, were “nervy,” depressed, and apprehensive of evil to come. There was hardly a family I knew who had not one vacant chair wherein a boy had sat when he had come home from school or office, and afterwards on leave. Their ghosts haunted these homes and were present in any company where people gathered for conversation or distraction. The wound to England’s soul was unhealed, and the men who came back had received grave hurt, many of them, to their nervous and moral health.

This Irish girl was beautifully gay, not with that deliberate and artificial gaiety which filled London theatres and dancing halls, but with ah inner flame of happiness. It was difficult to account for that. She had seen much tragedy in Lille. Death and the agony of men had been familiar to her. She had faced death herself, very closely, escaping, as she said, by a narrow “squeak.” She had seen the brutality of war and its welter of misery for men and women, and now in time of peace she was conscious of the sufferings of many people, and did not hide these things from her mental vision or cry, “All’s right with the world!” when all was wrong. But something in her character, something, perhaps, in her faith, enabled her to resist the pressure of all this “morbid emotion” and to face it squarely, with smiling eyes. Another thing that attracted one was her fearlessness of truth. At a time when most people shrank from truth her candour was marvellous, with the simplicity of childhood joined to the wisdom of womanhood.

I saw this at the dinner-party for four arranged in her honour by “Daddy” Small. That was given, for cheapness’ sake, at a little old restaurant in Whitehall which provided a good dinner for a few shillings, and in an “atmosphere” of old-fashioned respectability which appealed to the little American.

Eileen knocked Brand edgewise at the beginning of his dinner by remarking about his German marriage.

“The news came to me as a shock,” she said, and when Wickham raised his eyebrows and looked both surprised and dismayed (he had counted on her sympathy and help), she patted his hand as it played a devil’s tattoo on the table-cloth, and launched into a series of indiscretions that fairly made my hair curl.

“Theoretically,” she said, “I hadn’t the least objection to your marrying a German girl. I have always believed that love is an instinct which is beyond the control of diplomats who arrange frontiers and generals who direct wars. I saw a lot of it in Lille—and there was Franz von Kreuzenach, who fell in love with me, poor child. What really hurt me for a while was green-eyed jealousy.”

“Daddy” Small laughed hilariously, and filled up Eileen’s glass with Moselle wine.

Brand looked blank.

“Jealousy?”

“Why, yes,” said Eileen. “Imagine me, an Irish girl, all soppy with emotion at the first sight of English khaki (that’s a fantastic situation anyhow!), after four years with the grey men, and then finding that the first khaki tunic she meets holds the body of a man she knew as a boy, when she used to pull his hair! And such a grave heroic-looking man, Wicky! Why, I felt like one of Tennyson’s ladies released from her dark tower by a Knight of the Round Tower. Then you went away and married a German Gretchen! And all my doing, because if I hadn’t given you a letter to Franz you wouldn’t have met Elsa. So when I heard the news, I thought, ‘There goes my romance!’”

“Daddy” Small laughed again, joyously.

“Say, my dear,” he said, “you’re making poor old Wickham blush like an Englishman asked to tell the story of his V.C. in public.”

Brand laughed, too, in his harsh, deep voice.

“Why, Eileen, you ought to have told me before I moved out of Lille.”

“And where would maiden modesty have been?” asked Eileen, in her humorous way.

“Where is it now?” asked the little doctor.

“Besides,” said Brand, “I had that letter to Franz von Kreuzenach in my pocket. I don’t mind telling you I detested the fellow for his infernal impudence in making love to you.”

“Sure now, it was a one-sided affair, entirely,” said Eileen, exaggerating her Irish accent, “but one has to be polite to a gentleman that saves one’s life on account of a romantic passion. Oh, Wickham, it’s very English you are!”

Brand could find nothing to say for himself, and it was I who came to the rescue of his embarrassment by dragging a red herring across the thread of Eileen’s discourse. She had a wonderful way of saying things that on most girls’ lips would have seemed audacious, or improper, or ‘high-falutin’, but on hers were natural with a simplicity which shone through her.

Her sense of humour played like a light about her words, yet beneath her wit was a tenderness and a knowledge of tragic things. I remember some of her sayings that night at dinner, and they seemed to me very good then, though when put down they lose the deep melody of her voice and the smile or sadness of her dark eyes.

“England,” she said, “fought the war for liberty and the rights of small nations, but said to Ireland, ‘Hush, keep quiet there, damn you, or you’ll make us look ridiculous.’”

“Irish soldiers,” she said, “helped England to win all her wars, but mostly in Scottish regiments. When the poor boys wanted to carry an Irish flag, Kitchener said, ‘Go to hell,’ and some of them went to Flanders... and recruiting stopped with a snap.”

“Now, how do you know these things?” asked “Daddy” Small. “Did Kitchener go to Lille to tell you?”

“No,” said Eileen, “but I found some of the Dublin boys in the prison at Lille, and they told the truth before they died, and perhaps it was that which killed them. That and starvation and German brutality.”

“I believe you’re a Sinn Feiner,” said Dr. Small. “Why don’t you go to Ireland and show your true colours, ma’am?”

“I’m Sinn Fein all right,” said Eileen, “but I hated the look of a white wall in Lille, and there are so many white walls in the little green isle. So I’m stopping in Kensington and trying to hate the English, but can’t because I love them.”

She turned to Wickham and said: “Will you take me for a row in Kensington Gardens the very next day the sun shines?”

“Rather!” said Wickham, “on one condition!’

“And that?”

“That you’ll be kind to my little Elsa when she comes.”

“I’ll be a mother to her,” said Eileen, “but she must come quick or I’ll be gone.”

“Gone?”

Wickham spoke with dismay in his voice. I think he had counted on Eileen as his stand-by when Elsa would need a friend in England.

“Hush now!” said “Daddy” Small. “It’s my secret, you wicked lady with black eyes and a mystical manner.”

“Doctor,” said Eileen, “your own President rebukes you. ‘Open covenants openly arrived at—weren’t those his words for the new diplomacy?”

“Would to God he had kept to them,” said the little doctor, bitterly, launching into a denunciation of the Peace Conference until I cut him short with a question.

“What’s this secret, Doctor?”

He pulled out his pocket-book with an air of mystery.

“We’re getting on with the International League of Goodwill,” he said. “It’s making more progress than the League of Nations. There are names here that are worth their weight in gold. There are golden promises which by the grace of God——”

“Daddy” Small spoke solemnly—“will be fulfilled by golden deeds. Anyhow, we’re going to get a move on—away from hatred towards charity, not for the making of wounds but for the healing, not punishing the innocent for the sins of the guilty, but saving the innocent—the Holy Innocents—for the glory of life. Miss Eileen and others are going to be the instruments of the machinery of mercy, rather, I should say, the spirit of humanity.”

“With you as our gallant leader,” said Eileen, patting his hand.

“It sounds good,” said Brand. “Let’s hear some more.”

Dr. Small told us more in glowing language, and in Biblical utterance mixed with American slang like Billy Sunday’s Bible. He was profoundly moved. He was filled with hope and gladness, and with a humble pride because his efforts had borne fruit.

The scheme was simple. From his friends in the United States he had promises, as good as gold, of many millions of American dollars. From English friends he had also considerable sums. With this treasure he was going to Central Europe to organise relief on a big scale for the children who were starving to death. Eileen O’Connor was to be his private secretary and assistant-organiser. She would have heaps of work to do, and she had graduated in the prisons and slums of Lille. They were starting in a week’s time for Warsaw, Prague, Buda-Pesth and Vienna.

“Then,” said Brand, “Elsa will lose a friend.”

“Bring her, too,” said Eileen. “There’s work for all.”

Brand was startled by this, and a sudden light leapt into his eyes.

“By Jove!... But I’m afraid not. That’s impossible.”

So it was only a week we had with Eileen, but in that time we had some good meetings and merry adventures. Brand and I rowed her on the lake in Kensington Gardens, and she told us Irish fairy-tales as she sat in the stem with her hat in her lap, and the wind playing in her brown hair. We took her to the Russian Ballet and she wept a little at the beauty of it.

“After four years of war,” she said, “beauty is like water to a parched soul. It’s so exquisite it hurts.”

She took us one day into the Carmelite Church at

Kensington, and Brand and I knelt each side of her, feeling sinners with a saint between us. And then, less like a saint, she sang ribald little songs on the way to her mother’s house in Holland Street, and said “Drat the thing!” when she couldn’t find her key to unlock the door.

“Sorry, Biddy my dear,” she said to the little maidservant who opened the door. “I shall forget my head one day.”

“Sure, Miss Eileen,” said the girl, “but never the dear heart of you, at all, at all.”

Eileen’s mother was a buxom, cheery, smiling Irishwoman who did not worry, I fancy, about anything in the world, and was sure of heaven. Her drawing-room was littered with papers and novels, some of which she swept off the sofa with a careless hand.

“Won’t you take a seat then?”

I asked her whether she had not been anxious about her daughter when Eileen was all those years under German rule.

“Not at all,” said the lady. “I knew our dear Lord was as near to Lille as to London.”

Two of her boys had been killed in the war, “fighting,” she said, “for an ungrateful country which keeps its heel on the neck of Ireland,” and two were in the United States, working for the honour of Ireland on American newspapers. Eileen’s two sisters had married during the war and between them had given birth to four Sinn Feiners. Eileen’s father had died a year ago, and almost his last word had been her name.

“The dear man thought all the world of Eileen,” said Mrs. O’Connor. “I was out of it entirely when he had, her by his side.”

“You’ll be lonely,” said Brand, “when your daughter goes abroad again.”

Eileen answered him.

“Oh, you can’t keep me back by insidious remarks like that! Mother spends most of her days in church, and the rest of them reading naughty novels which keep her from ascending straight to heaven without the necessity of dying first. She is never lonely because her spirit is in touch with those she loves, in this world or the other. And isn’t that the truth I’m after talking, mother o’ mine!”

“I never knew more than one O’Connor who told the truth yet,” said the lady, “and that’s yourself, my dear. And it’s a frightening way you have with it that would scare the devil out of his skin.”

They were pleasant hours with Eileen, and when she went away from Charing Cross one morning with Dr. Small, five hospital nurses and two Americans of the Red Cross, I wished with all my heart that Wickham Brand had asked her and not Elsa von Kreuzenach to be his wife. That was an idle wish, for the next morning Brand and I crossed over to France, and on the way to Paris my friend told me that the thought of meeting Elsa after those months of separation excited him so that each minute seemed an hour. And as he told me that he lit a cigarette and I saw that his hand was trembling, because of this nervous strain.