I saw very little of Brand in London after Elsa’s arrival in his parent’s house at Chelsea. I was busy, as usual, watching the way of the world and putting my nose down to bits of blank paper which I proceeded to spoil with futile words. Brand was doing the same thing in his study on the top floor of the house in Cheyne Walk, while Elsa, in true German style, was working embroidery or reading English literature to improve her mind and her knowledge of the language.

Brand was endeavouring strenuously to earn money enough to make him free of his father’s house. He failed, on the whole, rather miserably. He began a novel on the war, became excited with it for the first six chapters, then stuck hopelessly and abandoned it.

“I find it impossible,” he wrote to me, “to get the real thing into my narrative. It is all wooden, unnatural, and wrong. I can’t get the right perspective on paper, although I think I see it clear enough when I’m not writing. The thing is too enormous, the psychology too complicated for my power of expression. A thousand characters, four years of experience, come crowding into my mind, and I can’t eliminate the unessential and stick the point of my pen into the heart of truth. Besides, the present state of the world, to say nothing of domestic trouble, prevents anything like concentration... And my nerves have gone to hell.”

After the abandonment of his novel he took to writing articles for magazines and newspapers, some of which appeared, thereby producing some useful guineas. I read them and liked their strength of style and intensity of emotion. But they were profoundly pessimistic, and “the gloomy Dean,” who was prophesying woe, had an able seconder in Wickham Brand, who foresaw the ruin of civilisation and the downfall of the British Empire because of the stupidity of the world’s leaders and the careless ignorance of the multitudes. He harped too much on the same string, and I fancied that editors would soon begin to tire of his melancholy tune. I was right.

“I have had six articles rejected in three weeks,” wrote Brand. “People don’t want the truth. They want cheery insincerity. Well, they won’t get it from me, though I starve to death.... But it’s hard on Elsa. She’s having a horrible time, and her nerve is breaking. I wish to God I could afford to take her down to the country somewhere, away from spiteful females and their cunning cruelty. Have you seen any Christian charity about in this most Christian country? If so, send me word, and I’ll walk to it on my knees, from Chelsea.”

It was in a postscript to a letter about a short story he was writing that he wrote an alarming sentence.

“I think Elsa is dying. She gets weaker every day.” Those words sent me to Chelsea in a hurry. I had been too careless of Brand’s troubles, owing to my own pressure of work and my own fight with a nervous depression which was a general malady, I found, with most men back from the war.

When I rapped the brass knocker on the house in Cheyne Walk the door was opened by a different maid from the one I had seen on my first visit there. The other one, as Brand told me afterwards, had given notice because “she couldn’t abide them Huns” (meaning Elsa), and with her had gone the cook, who had been with Wickham’s mother for twenty years.

Brand was writing in his study upstairs when the new maid showed me in. Or, rather, he was leaning over a writing-block, with his elbows dug into the table and his face in his hands, while an unlighted pipe—his old trench pipe—lay across the inkpot.

“Thinking out a new plot, old man?” I asked cheerily.

“It doesn’t come,” he said. “My own plot cuts across my line of thought.”

“How’s Elsa?”

He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the door leading from his room.

“Sleeping, I hope.... Sit down and let’s have a yarn.”

We talked about things in general for a time. They were not very cheerful, anyhow. Brand and I were both gloomy souls just then, and knew each other too well to camouflage our views about the state of Europe and the “unrest” (as it was called) in England.

Then he told me about Elsa, and it was a tragic tale From the very first his people had treated her with a studied unkindness which had broken her nerve and spirit. She had come to England with a joyous hope of finding happiness and friendship with her husband’s family, and glad to escape from the sadness of Germany and the solemn disapproval of her own people, apart from Franz, who was devoted to her.

Her first dismay came when she kissed the hand of her mother-in-law, who drew it away as though she had been stung by a wasp, and when her movement to kiss her husband’s sister Ethel was repulsed by a girl who drew back icily and said, “How do you do?”

Even then she comforted herself a little with the thought that this coldness was due to English reserve, and that in a little while English kindness would be revealed. But the days passed with only unkindness.

At first Lady Brand and her daughter maintained a chilly silence towards Elsa, at breakfast, luncheon, and other meals, talking to each other brightly, as though she did not exist, and referring constantly to Wickham as “poor Wicky.” Ethel had a habit of reading out morsels from the penny illustrated papers, and often they referred to “another trick of the Huns” or “fresh revelations of Hun treachery.” At these times Sir Amyas Brand said “Ah!” in a portentous voice, but, privately, with some consciousness of decency, begged Ethel to desist from “controversial topics.” She “desisted” in the presence of her brother, whose violence of speech scared her into silence.

A later phase of Ethel’s hostility to Elsa was in the style of amiable enquiry. In a simple, childlike way, as though eager for knowledge, she would ask Elsa such questions as “Why the Germans boiled down their dead?”

“Why they crucified Canadian prisoners?”

“Was it true that German school children sang the Hymn of Hate before morning lessons?”

“Was it by order of the Kaiser that English prisoners were starved to death?”

Elsa answered all these questions by passionate denials. It was a terrible falsehood, she said, that the Germans had boiled down bodies for fats. On the contrary, they paid the greatest reverence to their dead, as her brother had seen in many cemeteries on the Western front. The story of the “crucified Canadians” had been disproved by the English intelligence officers after a special enquiry, as Wickham had told her. She had never heard the Hymn of Hate. Some of the English prisoners had been harshly treated—there were brutal commandants—but not deliberately starved. Not starved more than German soldiers, who had very little food during the last years of the war.

“But surely,” said Lady Brand, “you must admit, my dear, that Germany conducted this war with the greatest possible barbarity? Otherwise, why should the world call them Huns?”

Elsa said it was only the English who called the Germans

Huns, and that was for a propaganda of hatred which was very wicked.

“Do I look like a Hun?” she asked, and then burst into tears.

Lady Brand was disconcerted by that sign of weakness.

“You mustn’t think us unkind, Elsa, but, of course, we have to uphold the truth.”

Ethel was utterly unmoved by Elsa’s tears, and, indeed, found a holy satisfaction in them.

“When the German people confess their guilt with weeping and lamentation the English will be first to forgive. Never till then.”

The presence of a German girl in the house seemed to act as a blight upon all domestic happiness. It was the cook who first “gave notice.” Elsa had never so much as set eyes upon that cross-eyed woman below-stairs who had prepared the family food since Wickham had sat in a high chair with a bib round his neck. But Mary, in a private interview with Lady Brand, stormy in its character, as Elsa could hear through the folding doors, vowed that she would not live in the same house with “one of those damned Germings.”

Lady Brand’s tearful protestations that Elsa was no longer German, being “Mr. Wickham’s wife,” and that she had repented sincerely of all the wrong done by the country in which she had unfortunately been born, did not weaken the resolution of Mary Grubb, whose patriotism had always been “above suspicion,” “which,” as she said, “I hope to remain so.” She went next morning, after a great noise of breathing and the descent of tin boxes, while Lady Brand and Ethel looked with reproachful eyes at Elsa as the cause of this irreparable blow.

The parlour-maid followed in a week’s time, on the advice of her young man, who had worked in a canteen of the Y.M.C.A. at Boulogne and knew all about German spies.

It was very awkward for Lady Brand, who assumed an expression of Christian martyrdom, and told Wickham that his rash act was bearing sad fruit, a mixed metaphor which increased his anger, as he told me, to a ridiculous degree.

He could see that Elsa was very miserable. Many times she wept when alone with him, and begged him to take her away to a little home of their own, even if it were only one room in the poorest neighbourhood. But Wickham was almost penniless, and begged her to be patient a little longer, until he had saved enough to fulfil their hope. There I think he was unwise. It would have been better for him to borrow money—he had good friends—rather than keep his wife in such a hostile atmosphere. She was weak and ill. He was alarmed at her increasing weakness. Once she fainted in his arms, and even to go upstairs to their rooms at the top of the house tired her so much that afterwards she would lie back in a chair, with her eyes closed, looking very white and worn. She tried to hide her ill-health from her husband, and when they were alone together she seemed gay and happy, and would have deceived him but for those fits of weeping at the unkindness of his mother and sister, and those sudden attacks of “tiredness” when all physical strength departed from her.

Her love for him seemed to grow with the weakness of her body. She could not bear him to leave her alone for any length of time, and while he was writing, sat near him, so that she might have her head against his shoulder or touch his hand, or kiss it. It was not conducive to easy writing or the invention of plots.

Something like a crisis happened after a painful scene in the drawing-room downstairs on a day when Brand had gone out to walk off a sense of deadly depression which prevented all literary effort.

Several ladies had come to tea with Lady Brand and Ethel, and they gazed at Elsa as though she were a strange and dangerous animal.

One of them, a thin and elderly schoolmistress, cross-questioned Elsa as to her nationality.

“I suppose you are Swedish, my dear?” she said sweetly.

“No,” said Elsa.

“Danish, then, no doubt?” continued Miss Clutter.

“I am German,” said Elsa.

That announcement had caused consternation among Lady Brand’s guests. Two of the ladies departed almost immediately. The others stayed to see how Miss Clutter would deal with this amazing situation.

She dealt with it firmly, and with the cold intelligence of a high schoolmistress.

“How very interesting!” she said, turning to Lady Brand. “Perhaps your daughter-in-law will enlighten us a little about German psychology which we have found so puzzling. I should be so glad if she could explain to us how the German people reconcile the sinking of merchant ships, the unspeakable crime of the Lusitania with any belief in God, or even with the principles of our common humanity. It is a mystery to me how the drowning of babies could be regarded as legitimate warfare by a people proud of their civilisation.”

“Perhaps it would be better to avoid controversy, dear Miss Clutter,” said Lady Brand, alarmed at the prospect of an “unpleasant” scene which would be described in other drawing-rooms next day.

But Miss Clutter had adopted Ethel’s method of enquiry. She so much wanted to know the German point of view. Certainly they must have a point of view.

“Yes, it would be so interesting to know!” said another lady.

“Especially if we could believe it,” said another.

Elsa had been twisting and re-twisting a little lace handkerchief in her lap. She was very pale, and tried to conceal a painful agitation from all these hostile and enquiring ladies.

Then she spoke to them in a low, strained voice.

“You will never understand,” she said. “You look out from England with eyes of hate, and without pity in your hearts. The submarine warfare was shameful. There were little children drowned on the Lusitania, and women. I wept for them and prayed the dear God to stop the war. Did you weep for our little children and our women? They, too, were killed by sea warfare, not only a few, as on the Lusitania, but thousands and tens of thousands. Your blockade closed us in with an iron ring. No ship could bring us food. For two years we starved on short rations and chemical foods. We were without fats and milk. Our mothers watched their children weaken and wither and die, because of the English blockade. Their own milk dried up within their breasts. Little coffins were carried down our streets day after day, week after week. Fathers and mothers were mad at the loss of their little ones. ‘We must smash our way through the English blockade!’ they said. The U-boat warfare gladdened them. It seemed a chance of rescue for the children of Germany. It was wicked. But all the war was wickedness. It was wicked of you English to keep up your blockade so long after Armistice, so that more children died and more women were consumptive, and men fainted at their work. Do you reconcile that with God’s good love? Oh, I find more hatred here in England than I knew even in Germany. It is cruel, unforgiving, unfair! You, are proud of your own virtue and hypocritical. God will be kinder to my people than to you, because now we cry out for His mercy, and you are still arrogant, with the name of God on your lips but a devil of pride in your hearts. I came here with my dear husband believing that many English would be like him, forgiving, hating cruelty, eager to heal the world’s broken heart. You are not like him. You are cruel and lovers of cruelty, even to one poor German girl who came to you for shelter with her English man. I am sorry for you. I pity you because of your narrowness. I do not want to know you.”

She stood up, swaying a little, with one hand on the mantelpiece, as afterwards she told her husband. She did not believe that she could cross the floor without falling. There was a strange dizziness in her head, and a mist before her eyes. But she held her head high and walked out of the drawing-room, and then upstairs. When Wickham Brand came back she was lying on her bed very ill. He sent for a doctor who was with her for half-an-hour.

“She is very weak,” he said. “No pulse to speak of. You will have to be careful of her—deuced careful.”

He gave no name to her illness. “Just weakness,” he said. “Run down like a worn-out clock. Nerves all wrong, and no vitality.”

He sent round a tonic which Elsa took like a child, and for a little while it seemed to do her good. But Brand was frightened because her weakness had come back.

I am glad now that I had an idea which helped Brand in this time of trouble and gave Elsa some weeks of happiness and peace. It occurred to me that young Harding was living alone in his big old country house near Weybridge, and would be glad and grateful, because of his loneliness, to give house-room to Brand and his wife. He had a great liking for Brand, as most of us had, and his hatred of Germany had not been so violent since his days in Cologne. His good nature, anyhow, and the fine courtesy which was the essential quality of his character, would make him kind to Elsa, so ill and so desperately in need of kindness. I was not disappointed. When I spoke to him over the telephone he said, “It will be splendid for me. This lonely house is getting on my nerves badly. Bring them down.”

I took them down in a car two days later. It was a fine autumn day with a sparkle in the air and a touch of frost on the hedgerows. Elsa, wrapped up in heavy rugs, lay back next to Brand, and a little colour crept back into her cheeks and brought back her beauty. I think a shadow lifted from her as she drove away from that house in Chelsea where she had dwelt with enmity among her husband’s people.

Harding’s house in Surrey was at the end of a fine avenue of beeches, glorious in their autumn foliage of crinkled gold. A rabbit scuttled across the drive as we came, and bobbed beneath the red bracken of the undergrowth.

“Oh,” said Elsa, like a child, “there is Peterkin! What a rogue he looks!”

Her eyes were bright when she caught sight of Harding’s house in the Elizabethan style of post-and-plaster splashed with scarlet where the Virginia creeper straggled on its walls.

“It is wonderfully English,” she said. “How Franz would love this place!”

Harding came down from the steps to greet us, and I thought it noble of him that he should kiss the girl’s hand when Brand said, “This is Elsa.” For Harding had been a Hun-hater—you remember his much-repeated phrase, “No good German but a dead German!”—and that little act was real chivalry to a woman of the enemy.

There was a great fire of logs burning in the open hearth in the hall, flinging a ruddy glare on the panelled walls and glinting on bits of armour and hunting trophies. Upstairs, also, Brand told me, there was a splendid fire in Elsa’s room, which had once been the room of Harding’s wife. It wanned Elsa not only in body but in soul. Here was an English welcome and kindness of thought. On her dressing-table there were flowers from Harding’s hot-houses, and she gave a little cry of pleasure at the sight of them for there had been no flowers in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. That night she was strong enough to come down to dinner, and looked very charming there at the polished board, fit only by candlelight, whose soft rays touched the gold of her hair.

“It is a true English home,” she said, glancing up at the panelled walls and at portraits of Harding’s people in old-fashioned costumes which hung there.

“A lonely one when no friends are here,” said Harding, and that was the only time he referred in any way to the wife who had left him.

That dinner was the last one which Elsa had sitting at table with us. She became very tired again. So tired that Brand had to carry her upstairs and downstairs, which he did as though she weighed no more than a child. During the day she lay on a sofa in the drawing-room, and Brand did no writing now nor any kind of work, but stayed always with his wife. For hours together he sat by her side, and she held his hand and touched his face and hair, and was happy in her love.

A good friend came to stay with them and brought unfailing cheerfulness. It was Charles Fortune who had come down at Harding’s invitation. He was as comical as ever, and made Elsa laugh with ripples of merriment while he satirised the world as he knew it, with shrewd and penetrating wit. He played the jester industriously to get that laughter from her, though sometimes she had to beg of him not to make her laugh so much because it hurt her. Then he played the piano late into the afternoon, until the twilight in the room faded into darkness except for the ruddy glow of the log fire, or after dinner in the evenings until Brand carried his wife to bed. He played Chopin best, with a magic touch, but Elsa liked him to play Bach and Schumann, and sometimes Mozart, because that brought back her girlhood in the days before the war.

So it was one evening when Brand sat on a low stool by the sofa on which Elsa lay, with her fingers playing in his hair or resting on his shoulder, while Fortune filled the room with melody.

Once or twice Elsa spoke to Brand in a low voice. I heard some of her words as I lay on a bearskin by the fire.

“I am wonderfully happy, my dear,” she said once, and Brand pulled her hand down and kissed it.

A little later she spoke again.

“Love is so much better than hate. Then why should people go to war?”

“God knows, my dear,” said Brand.

It was some time after that, when Fortune was playing softly, that I heard Elsa give a big, tired sigh and say the word “Peace!”

Charles Fortune played something of Beethoven’s now, with grand crashing chords which throbbed through the room as the last glow of the sunset flushed through the windows.

Suddenly Brand stirred on his stool, made an abrupt movement, then rose and gave a loud, agonising cry. Fortune stopped playing with a slur of notes. Harding leapt up from his chair in a dark corner and said, “Brand!... what’s the matter?”

Brand had dropped to his knees and was weeping with, his arms about his dead wife.