Back to Life. Philip Gibbs

must have seen bad things,” said Eileen. “Have you lost the gift of laughter?”

      “Almost,” said Brand, “and once for a long time.”

      Eileen put her hands to her breast.

      “Oh, learn it again,” she said. “If we cannot laugh we cannot work. Why, I owe my life to a sense of humour.”

      She spoke the last words with more than a trivial meaning. They seemed to tell of some singular episode, and Brand asked her to explain.

      She did not explain then. She only said some vague things about laughing herself out of prison and stopping a German bullet with a smile.

      “Why did the devils put you in prison?” asked Brand.

      She shrugged her shoulders.

      “In Lille it was bad form if one had not been arrested once at least. I was three weeks in a cell half the size of this, and twenty women were with me there. There was very little elbow-room!”

      She proved her sense of humour then by that deep-throated laugh of hers, but I noticed that just for a second behind the smile in her eyes there crept a shadow as at the remembrance of some horror, and that she shivered a little, as though some coldness had touched her.

      “It must have been like the Black Hole of Calcutta,” said Brand, measuring the space with his eyes. “Twenty women herded in a room like that!”

      “With me for twenty-one,” said Eileen. “We had no means of washing.”

      She used an awful phrase.

      “We were a living stench.”

      “Good God!” said Brand.

      Eileen O’Connor waved back the remembrance. “Tell me of England and of Ireland. How’s the little Green Isle? Has it done well in the war?”

      “The Irish troops fought like heroes,” said Brand.

      “But there were not enough of them. Recruiting was slow, and there was—some trouble.”

      He did not speak about the Irish Rebellion.

      “I heard about it vaguely, from prisoners,” said the girl. “It was England’s fault, I expect. Dear old blundering, muddle-headed England, who is a tyrant through fear, and twists Irish loyalty into treason by ropes of red tape in which the Irish mind gets strangled and awry. Well, there’s another subject to avoid. I want to hear only good things to-night. Tell me of London, of Kensington Gardens, of the way from Strand to Temple Bar, of the lights that gleam along the Embankment when lovers go hand-in-hand and see stars in the old black river. Are they all there?”

      “They are all changed,” said Brand. “It is a place of gloom. There are no lights along the embankment. They have dowsed their glims for fear of air-raids. There are few lovers hand-in-hand. Some of the boys lie dead round Ypres, or somewhere on the Somme, or weep out of blind eyes, or gibber in shell-shock homes, or try to hop on one leg—while waiting for artificial limbs—or trudge on, to-night, towards Maubeuge, where German machine-guns wait for them behind the ditches. Along the Strand goes the painted flapper, luring men to hell. In Kensington Gardens there are training camps for more boys ear-marked for the shambles, and here and there among the trees young mothers who are widows before they knew their wifehood. There is vice, the gaiety of madness, the unspeakable callousness of people who get rich on war, or earn fat wages, and in small stricken homes a world of secret grief. That is London in time of war. I hate it.”

      Brand spoke with bitterness and a melancholy that startled the girl who sat with folded hands below the crucifix on the whitewashed wall behind her.

      “Dear God! Is it like that?”

      She stared at the wall opposite as though it were a window through which she saw London.

      “Yes, of course it is like that. Here in Lille we thought we were suffering more than anybody in the world. That was our egotism. We did not realise—not in our souls—that everywhere in the world of war there was equal suffering, the same cruelty, perhaps the same temptation to despair.”

      Brand repented, I think, of having led the conversation into such abysmal gloom. He switched off to more cheerful things and gave some elaborate sketches of soldiers he knew, to which Eileen played up with anecdotes of rare comedy about the nuns—the fat nun who under the rigour of war rations became as slim as a willow and was vain of her new grace; the little French mm who had no fear of German officers and dared their fury by prophecies of defeat—but was terrified of a mouse in the refectory; the Reverend Mother, who borrowed a safety-razor from an English Tommy—he had hidden it in his shirt—to shave her upper lip, lest the Germans should think her a French poilu in disguise.

      More interesting to me than anything that was said were the things unspoken by Eileen and Brand. In spite of the girl’s easy way of laughter, her quick wit, her avoidance, if possible, of any reference to her own suffering, I seemed to see in her eyes and in her face the strain of a long ordeal, some frightful adventure of life in which she had taken great hazards—the people had told me she had risked her life often—and a woman’s courage which had been tested by that experience and had not failed, though perhaps at breaking-point in the worst hours. I supposed her age was twenty-six or so (I guessed it right this side of a year), but there was already a streak of grey in her dark hair, and her eyes, so smiling as a rule, looked as if they had often wept. I think the presence of Brand was a great pleasure to her—bringing to Lille a link with her childhood—and I saw that she was studying the personality of this newly-found friend of hers, and the strong character of his face, not unscathed by the touch of war, with curious, penetrating interest. I felt in the way, and left them together with a fair excuse—I had always work to do—and I was pleased that I did so, they were so obviously glad to have a more intimate talk about old friends and old times.