Back to Life. Philip Gibbs

the colonel. “It is only logical people who can go on hating. Besides, German music is so-good! So good!”

      Harding, who read no paper but the Morning Post, said that as far as he was concerned he would never speak to a German again in his life. He would like to see the whole race exterminated. But he was afraid of the Socialists with their pestilential doctrine of “brotherhood of man.” Lloyd George also filled him with the gravest misgivings.

      Dr. Small’s eyes twinkled at him: “There is the old caste that speaks. Tradition against the new world of ideas. Of course there will always be that conflict. … That is a wonderful phrase, ‘the pestilential doctrine of the brotherhood of man.’ I must make a note of it.”

      “Shame oh you, doctor,” said Fortune. “You are always jotting down notes about us. I shall find myself docketed as ‘English gentleman, grade 3; full-blooded, inclined to obesity, humorous, strain of insanity due to in-breeding, rare.’ ”

      Dr. Small laughed in a high treble, and then was serious.

      “I’m noting down everything. My own psychology, which alarms me; facts, anecdotes, scenes, words. I want to find a law somewhere, the essential thing in human nature. After the war—if there is any afterwards—I want to search for a way out of the jungle. This jungle civilisation. There must be daylight somewhere for the human race.”

      “If you find it,” said Brand earnestly, “tell me, doctor.”

      “I will,” said Dr. Small, and I remembered that pledge afterwards, when he and Brand were together in a doomed city, trying to avert the doom, because of that impulse which urged them to find a little daylight beyond the darkness.

      Young Clatworthy jerked his chair on the polished boards and looked anxiously at the Colonel, who was discoursing on the origins of art, religion, sex, the perception of form.

      Colonel Lavington grinned at him.

      “All right, Cyril. I know you have got a rendezvous with some girl. Don’t let us keep you from your career of infamy.”

      “As a matter of fact, sir, I met a sweet little thing yesterday——” Clatworthy knew that his reputation as an amorist did not displease the colonel, who was a romantic and loved youth.

      In a gust of laughter the mess broke up. Charles Fortune and the colonel prepared for an orgy of Bach over the piano in the drawing-room of that house in Lille. Those who cared to listen might—or not, as they pleased. Brand and I went out into the streets, pitch-dark now, unlit by any glimmer of gas, and made our way to the convent where the girl Eileen O’Connor lodged. We passed a number of British soldiers in the Boulevard de la Liberté, wearing their steel hats and carrying their packs.

      A group of them stopped under a doorway to light cigarettes. One of them spoke to his pals.

      “They tell me there’s some bonny wenches in this town.”

      “Ay,” said another, “an’ I could do wi’ some hugging in a cosy billet.”

      “Cosy billet!” said the third, with a cockney voice. “Town or trenches, the poor bloody soldier gets it in the neck. Curse this pack! I’m fed up with the whole damn show. I want peace.”

      A hoarse laugh answered him.

      “Peace! You don’t believe that fool’s talk in the papers, chum? It’s a hell of a long way to the Rhine, and you and I’ll be dead before we get there.”

      They slouched off into the darkness, three points of light where their cigarettes glowed.

      “Poor lads!” said Brand.

VIII

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      We fumbled our way to a street on the edge of the canal, according to Brand’s uncanny sense of direction and his remembrance of what the Irish girl had told him. There we found the convent, a square box-like building behind big gates. We pulled a bell which jangled loudly, and presently the gate opened an inch, letting through the light of a lantern which revealed the black-and-white coif of a nun.

      “Qui va là?”

      Brand told her that we had come to see Miss O’Connor, and the gate was opened wider and we went into the courtyard, where a young nun stood smiling. She spoke in English.

      “We were always frightened when the bell rang during the German occupation. One never knew what might happen. And we were afraid for Miss O’Connor’s sake.”

      “Why?” asked Brand.

      The little nun laughed.

      “She did dangerous work. They suspected her. She came here after her arrest. Before then she had rooms of her own. Oh, messieurs, her courage, her devotion! Truly, she was heroic!”

      She led us into a long corridor with doors on each side, and out of one door came a little group of nuns with Eileen O’Connor.

      The Irish girl came towards us with outstretched hands which she gave first to Brand. She seemed excited at our coming and explained that the Reverend Mother and all the nuns wanted to see us to thank England by means of us, to hear something about the war and the chance of victory from the first English officers they had seen.

      Brand was presented to the Reverend Mother, a massive old lady with a slight moustache on the upper lip and dark luminous eyes, reminding me of the portrait of Savonarola at Florence. The other nuns crowded round us, eager to ask questions, still more eager to talk. Some of them were quite young and pretty, though all rather white and fragile, and they had a vivacious gaiety so that the building resounded with laughter. It was Eileen O’Connor who made them laugh by her reminiscences of girlhood when she and Brand were “enfants terribles,” when she used to pull Brand’s hair and hide the pipe he smoked too soon. She asked him to take off his field-cap so that she might see whether the same old unruly tuft still stuck up at the back of his head, and she and all the nuns clapped hands when she found it was so, in spite of war-worry and steel hats. All this had to be translated into French for the benefit of those who could not understand such rapid English.

      “I believe you would like to give it a tug now,” said Brand, bending his head down, and Eileen O’Connor agreed.

      “And indeed I would, but for scandalising a whole community of nuns, to say nothing of Reverend Mother.”

      The Reverend Mother laughed in a curiously deep voice, and a crowd of little wrinkles puckered at her eyes. She told Miss O’Connor that even her Irish audacity would not go as far as that, which was a challenge accepted on the instant.

      “One little tug, for old times’ sake,” said the girl, and Brand yelped with pretended pain at the vigour of her pull, while all the nuns screamed with delight.

      Then a clock struck and the Reverend Mother touched Eileen (as afterwards I called her) on the arm and said she would leave her with her friends. One by one the nuns bowed to us, all smiling under their white bandeaux, and then went down the corridor through an open door which led into a chapel, as we could see by twinkling candlelight. Presently the music of an organ and of women’s voices came through the closed doors.

      Eileen O’Connor took us into a little parlour where there were just four rush chairs and a table, and on the clean whitewashed walls a crucifix.

      Brand took a chair by the table, rather awkwardly, I thought.

      “How gay they are!” he said. “They do not seem to have been touched by the horrors of war.”

      “It is the gaiety of faith,” said Eileen. “How else could they have survived the work they have done, the things they have seen? This convent was a shambles for more than three years. These rooms were filled