The father listened to him silently, except for that hard noise of breathing. When his son uttered those last words, the old man leaned forward in his chair, and his eyes glittered.
"Get out of my house, _Schweinhund!_ Do not come near me again, or I will denounce you as a traitor and shoot you like a dog."
He turned to Elsa with outstretched hand.
"Go up to bed, girl. If you were younger I would flog you with my hunting-whip."
For the first time he spoke to Brand, controlling his rage with a convulsive effort.
"I have not the power to evict you from the house. For the time being the German people of the Rhineland are under hostile orders. Perhaps you will find another billet more to your convenience, and more agreeable to myself."
"To-night, sir," said Brand, and he told me that he admired the old man's self-control and his studied dignity.
Elsa still clasped his hand, and before her family he kissed her.
"With your leave, or without leave," he said, "your daughter and I will be man and wife, for you have no right to stand between our love."
He bowed and left the room, and, in an hour, the house.
Franz von Kreuzenach came into his room before he left, and wrung his hand.
"I must go, too," he said. "My father is very much enraged with me. It is the break between the young and the old--the new conflict, as we were saying one day."
He was near weeping, and Brand apologised for being the cause of so much trouble.
In the hall Elsa came to Brand as the orderly carried out his bags.
"To-morrow," she said, "we will meet at Elizabeth von Detmold's--my true friend."
Her eyes were wet with tears, but she was smiling, and there was, said Brand, a fine courage shining in her face.
She put her hands on Brand's shoulders and kissed him, to the deep astonishment and embarrassment of the orderly, who stood by. It was from this man, Brock, that the news of Brand's "entanglement" spread, through other orderlies, to officers of his mess, as he knew by the cold shoulder that some of them turned to him.
I met Elsa and Franz von Kreuzenach at the house of Elizabeth von Detmold in the Hohenzollernring, which became a meeting-place for Brand and the girl to whom he was now betrothed. Dr. Small and I went round there to tea at Brand's invitation, and I spent several evenings there owing to the friendship of Elizabeth von Detmold, who seemed to like my company. That lady was in many ways remarkable, and I am bound to say that in spite of my repugnance to many qualities of the German character I found her charming. The tragedy of the war had hit her with an almost particular malignancy. Married in 1914 to a young officer of the Prussian Guard, she was widowed at the first battle of Ypres. Her three brothers had been killed in 1915, '16 and '17. Both her parents had died during the war, owing to its accumulating horror. At twenty-six years of age she was left alone in her big house with hardly enough money for its upkeep, and not enough to supplement the rigid war rations which were barely sufficient for life. I suppose there were thousands of young women in Germany--hundreds of thousands--who had the same cause for sorrow (we do not realise how German families were massacred in that blood-bath of war, so that even French and British losses pale in tragedy before their piled dead), but there were few, I am sure, who faced their grief with such high courage and such unembittered charity. Like Elsa von Kreuzenach, she devoted her days to suffering childhood in the _crèches_ and feeding-centres which she had helped to organise, and she spent many of her evenings in working-women's clubs, and sometimes in working-men's clubs, where she read and lectured to them on social problems. The war had made her an ardent pacifist, and, to some extent, a revolutionary of the Liebknecht school. She saw no hope for civilisation so long as the junker caste remained in Europe, and the philosophy of militarism, which she believed stood fast not only in Germany but in France and England, and other nations. She had a passionate belief, like many other German people at that time, in President Wilson and his League of Nations, and put all her hopes in the United States as the one power in the world who could make a peace of reconciliation and establish a new brotherhood of peoples. After that she looked to a social revolution throughout the world by which the working classes should obtain full control of their own destiny and labour.