A LITTLE HOUSE IN WAR TIME
TO THE
REV. ST. GEORGE K. HYLAND, D.D.
“_Guide, philosopher, and friend_”
_September, 1915_
[Illustration: _The Little House_
CHARLES ROBINSON]
A LITTLE HOUSE
IN WAR TIME
BY
AGNES AND EGERTON CASTLE
AUTHORS OF
“THE STAR-DREAMER,” “INCOMPARABLE BELLAIRS,”
“OUR SENTIMENTAL GARDEN,” ETC.
“God gave all men all earth to love,
But, since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
So we, in God-like mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good.”
RUDYARD KIPLING
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
1916
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
PAGE
A FOREWORD vii
I. THE VILLINO IS PINCHED 1
II. OUR LITTLE BIT 29
III. OUR MINISTERING ANGELS 62
IV. “CONSIDER THE LILIES” 92
V. DEATH IN THE LITTLE GARDEN 119
VI. BABIES: CHINESE AND OTHERS 141
VII. OUR GARDEN IN JUNE 163
VIII. OUR BLUE-COAT BOYS 191
IX. IT’S A FAR CRY TO PERSIA 217
X. A THREE DAYS’ CHRONICLE 244
A FOREWORD
“... thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.”
RUPERT BROOKE.
A little chronicle of a great time may have an interest of its own
quite incommensurate from its intrinsic worth. These pages do not
pretend to any merit beyond faithfulness; but they are the true record
of the everyday life of an average family during the first year of
the war of wars; what we have felt, what we have seen; the great
anxieties; the trivial incidents and emotions which have been shared
by thousands of our fellow-countrymen. This home has been so far
exceptional that it has had few hostages to give to fortune, and that
it has mercifully been spared the supreme sacrifice demanded with such
tragic universality, and given with such a glorious resignation: but,
infinitesimal pulse, it has beaten with the great arteries, the whole
mighty heart of the British Empire.
Annals enough there are, and will be, of the soul-stirring events
of 1914: the proud rise of the nation, its struggles, its failures,
its appalling blunders, and the super-heroism that has saved the
consequences. If Armageddon be not the end of the world; if there be
generations coming after to carry the sheaves of that seed sown with
blood and tears to-day, there will be no dearth of evidence to enable
our children’s children to feed upon the story of England’s glory. They
will be able to read and learn and look back, out of the peace won for
them, to examples almost beyond the conception of idealism. Should,
by some freak of chance, this humble book survive, it may not then be
without an interest of its own.
This was how the quiet stay-at-home family felt and thought in the days
of the titanic conflict; these were the little things that happened in
a little country house. No great moral lesson certainly, no revelation
of out-of-the-way philosophy; just the way we hoped and feared; the way
we still laughed and talked, gardened and worked, the way we were led
on from day to day and made to find, after all, what seemed unbearable,
bearable, brought to see light where there was apparently no issue.
Being, as we say--so far--singularly unstricken in the midst of
so much mourning, we have been able to enjoy the lighter side of
existence, the humours, the quaintnesses, which relieve, blessedly for
poor humanity, the most complicated and the most desperate situations.
Perhaps, therefore, these random jottings, turned, many of them, to
the lighter side of life, may, in some stray hour of relaxation, amuse
here and there one actively engaged in the stern actions which the time
demands. Perhaps the breath of the garden may be grateful to a mind
upon which the wind from the trenches has blown so long.
There is a great deal of laughter about our country, even now. The
troops go singing down the roads in the early dawn, and come tramping
back to camp, with tired feet, but with joking tongues, after the long
days. We know there is much laughter in the fighting-line; innocent,
childish pleasantries, catchwords that run with grins from lip to lip.
There is no laughter so genuine as that which springs from a good
conscience. And so there is laughter in the hospitals also, thank God!
We trust our pages may add a little mirth more to the gallant spirit
abroad; beguile the fancy of one wounded man, or the oppression of one
anxious heart. Then, indeed, they will not have been written in vain.
Would only that through them we could convey an impression of the
surroundings in which we write; would we could bring our readers the
atmosphere of these Surrey heights; of the rolling moorland, of the
winds, sweet with heather, aromatic with the pine-woods, charged with
the garden scents that blow about us; then truly would they find
refreshment! Would we could show them our terraced borders where
now the roses are breaking into wonderful bloom, pink, crimson,
cream, fire-carmine, and yellow; where the delphiniums are arrayed,
noble phalanxes in every shade of enamel blue and purple--spires
marshalled together like some fantastic cathedral town, viewed in
impossible moonlight, out of a Doré dream; where the canterbury bells
are beginning to shake out their cups, tinted like the colours in a
child’s paint-box; and the campanulas, with their tones of mountain
wildness--of snow and blue distance--bring coolness into the hotter
tints of the border.
We look down on this July richness from the small white house with
its green blinds, which, though compact, round-windowed, comfortably
Georgian, has yet an absurd Italian look.
On the upper terrace wall the ornamental pots, each with its little
golden cypress, begin to foam with lobelia and creeping geranium;
between two clumps of cypress-trees, Verocchio’s little smiling boy
grips his fish against a tangle of blush rambler. And that’s a bit of
Italy for you, even with the ultimate vision of wild moor!
The terraces run down the hill, tier below tier. On the other side of
the valley the woods rise between the shouldering heather-clad hills,
to the east; the wide, long view spreads to the south-west, where the
hills begin to lift again, and distant pine-woods march across the sky.
Would we could but give to mere words the sense of altitude, of great
horizons which our high-perched position gives us!
“You’re in a kind of eyrie,” says one visitor. And another: “Oh, I do
like all this sky! It’s so seldom one really gets the sky about one.”
“You have,” said an exile--an old Belgian religious--after tottering
solemnly along the terrace walk, “you have here an earthly paradise. A
spot God has wonderfully blessed.”
Besides the startling contrasts and the fairness of its prospect, the
little place has a special charm of its own, which is not possible to
describe, yet which everyone feels who comes within its precincts.
We quite wait for the phrase now, upon the lips of guests under the
red-tiled roof: “It’s so extraordinarily peaceful.”
Peace! Peace in the midst of the boom of the war tocsin, echoing all
round! Peace, in spite of the newspapers, the letters, the rumours, the
perpetual coming and going of troops, the distant reverberations of gun
practice, the never-relaxing grip of apprehension! Yes, in spite of all
the world being at war--there is peace in the Villino.
Some of us believe it wells out from a little chamber, where, before
the golden shrine, the Donatello angels hold up never-extinguished
lamps. Or a visitor may say wonderingly: “I think it must be because
you’re all so united.” Or, perhaps, as the old monk had it, there is an
emanation from the place itself: so beautiful a spot of God’s earth, so
high up, so apart between the moor and the valley! Whatever the reason,
we wish that some of the peace that lingers here may reach out from
these pages, and touch with serenity any unquiet heart or restless
spirit that comes their way.
And since the soldiers we have written about wanted toys, like sick
children, their mascot to hug--here comes a procession of our little
fur folk walking vividly before your mental eye.
Here is Loki, the first and oldest of the pets. Loki, growing grey
about the muzzle, elderly already by reason of his six years of life;
with his immense coat, tawny, tufted, plumed, fringed; with his
consequential gait; his “quangley” ways: so easily offended, in his own
strong sense of dignity; with his over-loving heart; his half-human,
half-lion eyes; Loki, with his clockwork regularity of habit; his
disdainful oblivion, except on certain rare occasions, of the smaller
fur fry; Loki, making windmill paws to the Master of the Villino, till
he has succeeded in dragging him away from his pipe and his arm-chair
for a walk on the moors; or yet frantically and mutely imploring the
mystified visitor to go away and cease from boring him.
And here is Mimosa, the most Chinese of little ladies, hued like a ripe
chestnut, with dark orbs so immense and protuberant as almost to seem
to justify the legend that Pekinese will drop their eyes about if you
don’t take care. Very sleek and sinuous and small is she, a creature
of moods and freaks, fastidious to the point of never accepting a meal
with the other dogs; with all kinds of tricksy, pretty ways of play,
shrilly barking and dancing for bread pills, which she will fling in
the air and catch again, throw over her shoulder and waltz round to
pounce upon, more like a kitten than a little dog.
And the puppy, Loki’s own contemned daughter, the colour of a
young lion cub--the puppy, with her irrepressible enthusiasms, her
unsnubbable demonstrations, her “pretty paws,” her coal-black muzzle,
her innocent countenance--“Plain Eliza”--whose heart, like her
father’s, is so much too big and tender and faithful, that happening
the other day to see, over the garden hedge, a member of the family in
whose house she was born, she rent the air with such shrieks of ecstasy
that the whole Villino establishment rushed to the spot, thinking she
was being murdered.
Then there is Arabella, the lavrock setter. “Perverse, precise,
unseasonable Pamela,” cries Mr. B. in Richardson’s celebrated novel,
when having pursued the virtuous damsel to her last refuge, she not
unnaturally misunderstands the purport of his next advance.
When she does understand she exclaims: “Mr. B. is the noblest of men,
he has offered me marriage.”
To come back to Arabella. We wish we could find a union of epithets
as telling as that of Mr. B. in the exasperation of his conscious
rectitude. Inane, inert, inconvenient Arabella, fairly well describes
our sentiments towards her. She is a bore and a burden. She feels the
heat and goes out and takes mud-baths, and comes in and shakes herself
in the drawing-room. She cannot understand why she should not lie in
our laps as well as the puppies. She howls mournfully outside the
kitchen door unless she is invited in to assist in the cooking. She has
destroyed three arm-chair covers in the servants’ hall, preferring that
resting-place to her basket. “Fond” is the word that might best be used
to qualify our feelings towards her. We don’t know what to do with her,
but we should not like to be without her.
Then there is the black Persian, “Bunny,” our kind dead Adam’s cat. You
will meet him circling round the garden. He will raise his huge bushy
tail when he sees you, and fix his inscrutable amber eyes upon you,
questioningly. Then he will pass on with a soundless mew. He is looking
for his master, and you can watch him slink away, superb, stealthy,
pursuing his fruitless quest.
The fur children come first, being the Villino’s own family, but
there are other kinds with us now. The little Belgians run about the
paths calling to each other with their quaint pattering intonation,
so that long before you hear the words you know by the sound of
the voices coming up the hill that these are the small exiles.
Brown-haired Marthe, with her childish ways and her serious mind,
her ripe southern-tinted face, and Philippe, with his shock of fine
hair, hazel-colour, cut medieval fashion, and his little throat, which
bears his odd picturesque head as a flower-stem its bloom. And sturdy
Viviane, stumping up with her solemn air, precisely naming the flowers
as she comes:
“Sweet Will-li-yam! Del-phi-ni-um! Canterry bells!”
Soon Thierry, the schoolboy, will be here too. The garden is full of
Easter holiday memories of him; a little perspiring boy, squaring a
tree-trunk with boxing-gloves five times too large for him, under the
grand-paternal tuition of the Master of the Villino. It would have been
difficult to say who was the more pleased, child or man. And Thierry
can box with a right good will; a very excellent little boy this, with
a bursting patriot’s heart under his shy, reserved ways. No doubt he
fancied he was hitting a German with each of those well-directed blows.
It is nice to have the children about the Villino; and that they are
exiles adds pathos to the sound of their happy laughter in our ears,
and a tenderness to the pleasure with which our eyes watch their
unconscious gaiety.
Perhaps, however, if anyone wanted to have a really poetic impression
of our little house, they should see it by moonlight, or--which, of
course, nobody does except by accident--in the summer dawn. Whether
it is because of an unconscious appreciation of the limits of our own
intellect, or whether from some inherent vulgarity, human nature is
prone to depreciate all that is laid out very plainly before it. We
demand mystery in everything if it is to mean beauty to us.
Some such idea as this Mr. Bernard Shaw expresses--in one of
his uncanny leaps of the spirit out of his own destructive
philosophy--when he makes the Christian martyr retort to the Pagan who
accuses her of not understanding her God: “He wouldn’t be my God if I
could!”
To pass from the infinite to the atom: when the Villino garden and its
prospects are but imperfectly revealed on a moonlight night the view,
with mystery added to its fairness, becomes wonderful in its loveliness.
On such a night as this the valley holds mist in its bosom, and the
distant moor ridges in their pine-woods might be the Alps, for the air
of distance they assume, the remote dignity with which they withdraw
themselves, pale and ethereal, into the serene sky. It may be the moon
is rising over the great wooded hill in front of the Villino. The white
radiance pours full upon us. We know all that is revealed, and yet
all is different. Each familiar object has a strange and transfigured
face. The little cypress-trees, rimmed in silver, cast black shadows
on the grass, silver-cobwebbed. The great moors are exquisite ghost
wildernesses, their hollows full of cloudy secrets. And you can hear
the night-jar spinning out its monotonous, mysterious song, a song
which does not break the grand restfulness, but only accompanies it.
We have no running streams--there is nothing perfect here below, it is
a great want! But the song of the night-jar makes up a little for the
voice of water in the night-time. It is the hearing of some such sound,
lost in the turmoil of day, that emphasizes the incomparable silence.
Our heights in the sunrise show once again a world transfigured; a
sparkling, coloured, other-worldly world.
“Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”
The saffrons and yellows begin to gather over the moors, and the crests
of the hills and the tree-tops are tipped with light. Each flower has
its shimmering aureole; each has taken a hue never seen in the garish
fulness of the sunshine, enamel, stained-glass-window hues, difficult
to describe. There is a curious look of life about everything. It is
the exquisite hour of the earth, untroubled by man; garden and woods,
hill and valley, unfold their secrets to the sky and hold commune with
the dawn-angels. There is a freshness, a vividness, almost a surprise
about the world, as if all things were made new again. An immense
difference in the scene compared to the night’s grave mysteries. The
latter is a canto from the Divine Comedy as against Fra Angelico’s
dance of Paradise. And to this innocent joy of the waking earth
you have the songs of the birds. Some ecstatic thrush, or liquid
slow-chanting blackbird, will have begun the hymns at the first glimmer
of dawn, and hold the world spell-bound till the lesser chorus spreads
a tangled web of sound from end to end of the valley and the garden
heights, and the moor silence is reached.
Morning after morning of this glorious summer of the war, the pageant
of sunrise marches, for those who have eyes to see, and night after
night the mystery gathers in the moonlight. All England holds some
such fair visions. Does it not seem a dream that it should be so? The
horror, the devastation, the noise, the fire, the bloodshed, the agony,
the struggle, only a couple of hundred miles away, are they the only
realities in this red year? To us in England’s heart, still mercifully
unwounded, these sometimes seem the dream, the dream of evil, and our
peace the reality.
Dream, or reality, it is our peace we want to bring to you.
A LITTLE HOUSE IN WAR TIME
I
THE VILLINO IS PINCHED
“Prepare, prepare the iron helm of war,
Bring forth the lots, cast in the spacious orb;
The Angel of Fate turns them with mighty hands,
And casts them out upon the darkened earth!
Prepare, prepare!”
W. BLAKE.
The most usual remark that people make after a visit to our little
house on the hill is this: “How peaceful!”
Even in the ordinary course of life--those times that now seem
extraordinary to a world already accustomed to the universal
struggle--when everyone in England was in peace, except where their own
unquiet spirits may have marred it, even then this nest of ours seemed
peace within peace. We do not know now whether the contrast is not the
more acute. One of the thousands of homes dedicated to the quiet joys
and innocencies of life, where no one ever wanted to quarrel, because
all found the hours so full of sweet content, we do not flatter
ourselves that we are singular: only typical. The shadow of the great
cloud cast at first a hideous, unnatural darkness over our harmless
ways.
All during the long golden summer, when we looked out across the moor
basking in the radiance; when our roses bloomed and the garden rioted
in colour, and the valley slowly turned from green to russet; when the
harvest-moon went up like a huge brass platter in silver skies, the
very beauty of it all clutched one’s heart the fiercer. How fares it
with our boys over there in the heat and the stress? How much worse it
must be for them that the sun should blaze upon them, marching, firing,
rushing forward, lying wounded, wanting water!... Oh, dear lads of
England, how we at home agonized with you!
The little house, bought in a light-hearted hour, furnished with
infinite zest in happy days out of distant Rome, was a sort of toy to
us from the beginning; and kind friends surveyed it with indulgent
and amused, yet admiring, glances, such as one would bestow upon an
ingenious and pretty plaything. We called it the Villino, partly in
memory of the Italian sojourn, and partly because, though it is
bounded by wild moors, it contrives a quaintly Italianate air. It
stands boldly on the lip of the hill, and the garden runs down in
terraces to a deep valley. Across the valley to the east the moors
roll, curve upon curve. South, facing us, the trees begin their march;
and westward the valley spreads, rising into moors again, where again
the fir-trees sentinel the sky. The view from the terrace rather takes
your breath away. It is unexpected and odd, and unlike anything, except
Italy and Scotland mixed: the wildness, and the trim terraced garden
with its calculated groups of cypress, its vases brimming with flowers,
its stone steps, its secret bowery corners.
“Mount Ecstasy” an artist friend has dubbed it. “Is it possible,” she
asked us in the middle of this radiant October of the war, “that the
wind ever blows here? Do you ever hear it shrieking round the house?”
We gave her a vivid description of what the wind could do when it
liked; when it came up the valley with the rain on its wings. She
looked incredulous.
“Is it possible?” she repeated softly.
She had come straight from the great camp at Lyndhurst, where the 7th
Division, gallant as ill-fated, had gathered in all its lusty strength
before embarking for the bloody struggle in Flanders. She had just
said good-bye to her eldest son; the call of the bugle, the march
of thousands in unison, was in her ears; the vision of the crowded
transport vivid in her mind. Yet here she would not believe that even
the winds could break our peace.
This was very much what we felt ourselves when the Storm burst; it was
incredible with this placidity all about us.
One tries to think what it would be had the Villino sprung to life in
Belgian soil, or did the Hun succeed in landing, and come pouring, a
noxious tide, across our country roads, taking the poor little place
on its way. The first refugee from that heroic and devastated land who
found shelter here was very smiling and brave until she came out into
the garden. Then she began to cry.
“I had such pretty flowers too.”
All our moors are turning into camps; they grew like mushrooms in a
day, it seems. We hear the soldiers marching by in the dead of the
night, singing, poor boys! to give themselves heart--such nights, too,
as they are this autumn, deluged with rain and blown through with
relentless wind! We stand between two hospitals; and Belgian refugees
overflow in the villages. We read of the bombardment of the coast and
the dropping of bombs, and yet we do not realize. We still feel as in a
nightmare from which we must wake up.
Yet the effects of war are beginning to stamp themselves, even in the
Villino and in its garden. We are, some of us, naturally inclined
to luxuries. The mistress of the Villino is certainly a spendthrift
where bulbs and tubers and seeds are concerned; and for three out of
the four years since she owned the little property, the spring garden
has justified impenitence. Oh! the crocuses running through the grass
of that third terrace called the Hemicycle! Oh! the scyllas making
miniature skies under the almond-trees! Oh! the tulips swaying jewel
chalices over the mists of blue forget-me-not: glories of the past,
this coming spring, how shall the garden miss you!
It must be explained that our soil--green-sand--our
position--high-perched--our general tendency--sloping down-hill--make
us charmingly dry and healthy, but disagree with the bulb. It is
impossible to naturalize anything less hardy than the daffodil. The
snowdrop declines to live with us. Therefore our autumn bulb lists
were copious and varied, and the results ephemeral and lovely. This
year there has been no bulb list; who could think of this completely
personal and selfish gratification when it is the flower of our manhood
that is being mown down out yonder? when all that can be spared must be
spared to help! There is so little one can do, and so appallingly much
to be done.
And inside, too, we are being pinched; not badly, not cruelly, but just
as if the war monster had reached out one of its myriad hands--quite a
small and rather weak one--and had hold of us, enough to nip, not to
strangle.
It will not surprise any garden owner to learn that this is the year
of all others in which Adam, the Villino gardener, had an “accident”
with the cuttings, and that therefore those bushes of chrysanthemums,
which look so well on our grey and orange landings, have not been
forthcoming. Another year it would not have mattered. We should have
gaily replenished the Italian pots from the local nursery, where
chrysanthemums are a speciality. But as it is--we go without.
In a hundred other items the nipping fingers produce the same
paralyzing result. The footman, who, we regret to say, gibbered at
the thought of enlisting, and avowed to a horrified kitchen circle
that he might perhaps be able to help to carry a wounded man, but face
a bullet--“Never, never!”--found his post untenable in a household
chiefly composed of the fair and patriotic sex. We conceived that the
times demanded of us to bring the garden-boy into the house, thus
reducing our establishment without inflicting hardship.
Such, however, was not the opinion of Juvenal, our eccentric butler.
This strange being, from certain aspects of his character, might
have been, as the Italian prelate said of a distinguished Jesuit
preacher, “born in a volcano.” He is devoted to the dogs, and has a
genius for settling flowers; and he has become altogether so much a
part of the establishment--the _famiglia_--that the Villino would
lose half its charm without him. Nevertheless, he is volcanic! And
though at first he took the substitution of four-foot in buttons for
six-foot in livery with an angelic resignation, Vesuvius broke forth
with unparalleled vigour and frequency after a couple of weeks of the
regimen. Unfortunately, Juvenal is not sustained by patriotic ardour.
He deliberately avoids afflicting himself with thoughts about the war.
“I never could bear, miss, to see anything that was hurt! And as for
anything dying, miss, even if it was only a little animal--why, there,
I couldn’t as much as look at my poor old father!” Here is his point of
view as expressed tersely to the Signorina of the Villino.
This being the case, he succeeds so thoroughly in blocking his mind
against all facts connected with war time (except the entertaining
of “a nice young fellow from the camp”) that he has found himself
injured to the core by our attempts at economy. And when it came to
our unexpectedly inviting a refugee lady into his dining-room, and his
having to lay three extra places for her and her children, the lava
overflowed into the upper regions. We with difficulty extricated “Miss
Marie” from the burning flood.
We are all slightly overwrought these days, and instead of pretending
not to notice, which is the only possible way where Juvenal is
concerned, we suggested that he should look for another situation.
It would be difficult to say whether outraged feeling or amazement
predominated in him. Of course, we all deeply repented our hasty
action, and then ensued four uncomfortable weeks of cross purposes in
which neither side would “give in.” Finally the poor volcano departed
in floods of tears, with twenty-four bird-cages and a Highland terrier.
“Don’t you take on, Mr. Juvenal,” said Mrs. MacComfort, the cook;
“you’ll be back in no time!”
There ensued a dreadful interlude with an anæmic young butler unfit
for military service, who promptly developed toothache and a bilious
attack, and whom all the servants regarded as a spy for the convincing
reasons that he sat and rolled his eyes and said nothing.
He was, however, non-volcanic, and placidly accepted Jimmy, the
promoted garden-boy. This was not reciprocal, for Jimmy, who displayed
a degree of conscientiousness, peculiar indeed in the light of
after-events, could not reconcile himself to the change.
He would canter heavily, smothered to the chin in six-foot’s pantry
apron, into the drawing-room to announce with a burst of tears to the
young housekeeper:
“Please, miss, ’e won’t suit! ’E won’t do nuthin’ I tell him! Oh,
please, miss, he’s putting the cups--the mistress’s own cup--in the
wrong cupboard, and”--with a howl--“he ain’t washed it, miss! And when
I tell him, ’e says it doesn’t matter!”
We didn’t think he would suit, ourselves. We had all said so often that
Juvenal was perfectly dreadful, and couldn’t be endured another minute,
and every member of the _famiglia_ had so frequently declared with
tears that if Mr. Juvenal remained she could not possibly stay; she had
borne it as long as she could, not to make unpleasantness, but----
We were unanimous now in regrets.
“God be with poor Juvenal!” said Mrs. MacComfort, the dear, soft-spoken
Irish cook; and added darkly: She wouldn’t like to be saying what she
thought of the new butler.
However, _à quelque chose malheur est bon_, for had the following
incident taken place under Juvenal’s dog-loving eye, as Juvenal himself
subsequently remarked, there would certainly have been murder done. We
ourselves had been inclined to consider Jimmy an agreeable member of
the domestic circle. Nobody minded telling him to take out the dogs, no
matter how bad the weather was, and Jimmy always responded with that
smile of cheerful alacrity that so endeared him.
The tale which is here narrated may seem irrelevant to the share which
the Villino has had to take in the universal and terrible cataclysm,
but nevertheless the incidents therein set forth directly issued from
it; and, in spite of a dash of comedy, they were tragic enough for
those chiefly concerned, namely, the youngest “fur-child” and Jimmy
himself. If we had not taken Jimmy into the house, Jimmy would not have
been told to walk the dogs; and if Jimmy had not walked the dogs, the
singular drama of the phantom dog-stealers and the baby Pekinese would
never have occurred.
There were then three fur-children: Arabella, the Lavroch
setter--lovely, dull, early Victorian, worthy creature; Loki,
the beloved, chief of all the little dumb family, first in our
affections--a quaint, saturnine, very Chinese little gentleman, with
crusty and disconcerting ways, and almost a human heart; and Mimi, the
heroine of this adventure--Mimosa on solemn occasions--really a beauty,
with all the engaging Pekinese oddities and that individuality of
character which each one seems to possess; spoilt, imperious, vivid!
It was a very wet day, and Jimmy had been ordered to don his master’s
mackintosh cape and take the fur-children up the moor. The first
peculiar incident was that Mimi ran three times headlong from his
guardianship. As fast as she was coaxed down one stairs she was up the
other, with her tail between her legs. It might have made us pause,
but it didn’t. We said: “Poor Mimi doesn’t like getting her feet wet.”
Anyone who had heard the boy cooing to his charges in tones of the most
dulcet affection would have been as dense as we were.
That evening the dark adventure took place. Jimmy came running into the
kitchen, more incredibly mud-encrusted than any living creature outside
an alligator is ever likely to be again; and, bursting into loud wails,
declared that he had been set upon by two men and robbed of Mimi.
“Run, run,” cried Mrs. MacComfort, “and tell the master!”
Jimmy ran, working himself up as he went, so that it was what our
Irish nurse used to call “roaring and bawling” that he rushed into the
library and poured out his dreadful news. The master dashed in pursuit
of the miscreants, led by the hero, who cantered him uphill a good
half-mile. He was followed by the cook and her Cinderella, valiantly
brandishing sticks. Having reached the post-office, the chase was given
up, and the master of the Villino was returning dejectedly when a
yapping behind the hedge that skirted the road was recognized by Mrs.
MacComfort as unmistakably Mimi’s voice.
Mimi was extracted, none the worse for her emotions, but with the
remnants of a torn pocket-handkerchief tied round her neck.
Whether it was the abnormal layers of mud on Jimmy’s countenance; or
the curious fact that, in spite of the horrible treatment which he
vowed had been inflicted upon him in a hand-to-hand struggle with
two men, under the mud there was not a scratch upon his ingenious
countenance; or whether it was that, although the conflict was supposed
to have taken place within our own courtyard, no sound reached anyone
in the house--there and then Jimmy’s master came to this conclusion: “I
believe he’s made it all up.” But he didn’t say so. The boy was only
cross-examined.
“Why didn’t you shout?” asked Mrs. MacComfort.
“I couldn’t. They stuffed something soft into my throat--a handkerchief,
I think it was.”
“Where did you get all that mud?” asked the gardener next morning. “You
never picked that up in here. You couldn’t, not if you’d scraped the
ground.”
It was then that Jimmy discovered that the assault had taken place
outside the gates.
Jimmy’s mistress questioned him next, and she instantly saw that he was
lying. To point the moral and adorn the tale she sent for the policeman.
“Why didn’t you ’oller?” said the policeman.
Jimmy’s knees shook together.
“I couldn’t ’oller,” he maintained doggedly. “They’d stuffed something
down me throat.”
“Oh, indeed!” said the policeman. “Maybe it was this ’ankercher, was
it?”
He produced a dreadful rag that had been picked up on the road. It
fitted neatly with the other rag that had been round Mimi’s neck: awful
_pièces de conviction_!
“I say it’s your ankercher. Don’t go for to deny it. I say it’s your
ankercher; I ’appen to know it’s your ankercher. I say you did it all
yerself!”
When a six-foot, black-moustached policeman, with boring eye, rolls out
such an accusation in tremendous crescendo, what can a little criminal
do but collapse? Jimmy collapsed. It was his ankercher. He ’ad done it.
There never ’ad been no men. He never ’ad been knocked down. He ’ad
rolled in the mud on purpose, in the ditch where it was thickest. He
’ad tried to ’urt Mimi.
“Why?--why?--why?”
Even our local Sherlock Holmes couldn’t extract anything like a
plausible reason. Loki’s mistress had to piece one together for herself.
Jimmy hadn’t liked taking the dogs out on a wet day. He had therefore
planned to strangle Mimi and throw her over the hedge, believing that
if he showed himself unable to protect the dogs he would not be sent
out with them any more.
The two immediate results of this event, extraordinary indeed in the
annals of the Villino, where a St. Francis-like love of our little fur
and feather brothers and sisters dominates, was the prompt restoration
of Jimmy to the arms of Mrs. Mutton, his washerwoman mamma, and the
summoning of Juvenal to the telephone. He was staying with his brother,
a postmaster. We communicated the awful attempt. Juvenal averred, on
the other side of the wire, that you could have knocked him down with
a feather. Having thus re-established communications, we wrote, and,
tactfully cloaking our own undignified yearnings with the innocence of
the fur-children, we told him that the dogs missed him very much. He
was swift to seize the “paw of friendship,” and, following our artful
lead, responded by return of post that Betty had been “that fretted,”
he did not know what to do with her--“_wine_ she did from morning till
night!”
It was obvious that anyone with a grain of decent feeling must
instantly remedy such a state of affairs. Juvenal returned with the
twenty-four bird-cages and Betty the terrier.
We have compounded with an assistant parlourmaid; it is by no means
an economy, but four-foot in buttons is in such demand that Jimmy is
irreplaceable.
After all, so little has that war-pinch nipped us, that, if it was
not to laugh at them, one would be ashamed to set these infinitesimal
bruises down at all. And, thank God! now one can laugh a little again;
the days are gone by when it seemed as if every small natural joy had
been squeezed out of life, that existence itself was one long nightmare
of apprehension.
We do not yet know what the future may have in store for us; but, pray
heaven, those mornings may never dawn again when one could scarcely
open the paper for the beating of one’s heart.
It is not, we hope, that we are accustomed to agony, though no doubt
there is something of habit that takes the edge off suspense and grief.
We are also better prepared; we have got, as it were, into our second
wind, and we are, after our English fashion, perhaps even a little more
determined than we were to start with. When it all began, with what
seemed merely an insensate crime in a half-civilized country, no one
would have thought that England, much less our little house, would be
affected. Though, indeed, personally, the murder of the Archduchess
touched the mistress of the Villino a little more nearly than most,
for as children they had played together. It was, and is, a very vivid
memory.
She and her sisters had been brought to Brussels for their education,
and Sophie was one of the youngest, if not the last, in the nursery
of the Austro-Hungarian Legation in that city. The Chotek family used
to come to the _parc_; a tribe of quaint, fair-haired children. They
wore short black velvet coats and caps, and plaid skirts, rather long.
The Signora can see little Sophie before her now; a Botticelli angel,
with an aureole of fair curls, silver-gold, standing out all round her
small, pale, delicate face; a serious child, with lustrous eyes and
immense black lashes, and a fine, curling mouth. She thought her lovely
and longed to cuddle her, with the maternal instinct early developed.
“Have you much sister?” said the tiny Austrian, addressing her English
friend upon their introduction with great solemnity.
Who could have thought what a destiny lay before her, and in what a
supreme act of self-devotion the soul, already luminous in that frail,
exquisite little envelope, was to pass away? We have been told on some
excellent authority that she was not popular in her anomalous position,
at least in her own class. But her singular romance nevertheless was
crowned by so true a married happiness that it can leave one in no
doubt that she was worthy of the sacrifice made for her by the Imperial
heir. He was--it is no uncharity to mention so well-known a fact--a
man of bad life; she was his mother’s lady-in-waiting, appointed to
that post because of destitution, no longer in the first freshness
of her youth, supposed to be a person of small significance--one of
those colourless shadows that haunt the chairs of the great. But she
captivated the most important Prince in her country, barring the
Emperor; and, what is more, her spell never lost its power. To that
last breath, which, greatly favoured in their awful tragedy, they drew
together, they adored each other. She made of him a model husband, a
model father, a man of rectitude and earnestness. They had children,
and these were all their joy. It was one of the reproaches cast upon
her by the indignant royalties of the Vienna Court that the Duchess of
Hohenberg was so economical she would go down to her kitchen and see
the things given out. If she wanted to save money, it was for those
children, cut off from their natural inheritance by the cast-iron laws
that debarred their mother from a share in her husband’s rank.
An invited guest at the wedding of the present young hereditary
Archduke to the Princess Zita has given us a description of an incident
which well illustrates the treatment which the non-royal wife of the
Heir Apparent received at the hands of her royal relatives. When the
Duchess of Hohenberg entered, her long, narrow train caught in some
projecting obstacle as she swept up the little chapel. The place was
full of Archdukes and Archduchesses, in their wedding attire. Not one
of these high-born beings budged. Each looked straight at the altar,
absorbed in pious prayer. The ostracized lady had to disengage herself
as best she could, and advance, blushing hotly, to her appointed
place, unescorted. A few minutes after a belated Archduchess, entering
swiftly, met with the same mishap. Instantly she was surrounded with
politely assisting Hoheiten.
The friend to whom we owe the anecdote remarked that it had been “a
dreadful moment,” and that one could not help feeling sorry for the
poor Duchess. But it is to be remarked that she herself--delightful,
cultivated, large-minded creature though she was--had been among the
stony ones, and there had even been a glint of pleasure in her eyes
under the compassion as she told the story.
Sophie was of those who are hated; but, after all, what did it matter?
Was she not loved?
Our daughter’s Hungarian godmother--a most fairy and entrancing lady,
with all the spirit of her race under the appearance of a French
Marquise--like most Magyars, championed the cause of one whom they
intended to make their future Queen. She gave us a pretty account of
the great pleasure it was to the common people in Vienna to watch their
Archduke and his wife at the theatre. They sat in the royal box, not
formally, one at each end, as is the etiquette, but close, so close
that everyone knew they were holding each other’s hands. They would
look into each other’s faces with smiles, to share the interest and joy
of what they beheld and heard. So the lesser folk were fond of her,
though the fine Court circle could not forgive.
When she went to Berlin, the astute William received her with a
tremendous parade of honour, which made him very popular with the
Archduke, as well as with the multitude that espoused his cause.
But it was only a hollow show of recognition after all--a banquet
elaborately arranged with little round tables, so as to avoid any
question of precedence under the cloak of the most friendly intimacy.
Our simpler-minded court had to decline her visit at the Coronation on
account of this same difficulty of precedence. Whatever might be done
in Austria, this was insulting from England. “But she is of better
family than many of your royalties,” said a Bohemian magnate to us
across the table at a dinner-party, his blue eyes blazing. “She is of
very good family. She is”--tapping his capacious shirt-front with a
magnificent gesture--“she is related to me!”
The petty malice of those whose prerogatives had been infringed pursued
her to her bloodstained and heroic grave. To the last she was denied
all those dignities which appertained to her husband’s rank. Her
morganatic dust could not be allowed to commingle with that of royalty
in the Imperial vault. The two who had loved beyond etiquette were
given a huddled and secret midnight funeral; and beside the Archduke’s
coffin, covered with the insignia of his state, that of his wife was
marked only by a pair of white kid gloves and a fan.
Such a pitiful triumph of tyranny over the majestic dead! Horrible
juxtaposition of the ineptitude of pomposity and the most royal of
consummations! Sophie and her mate must have smiled upon it from their
enfranchisement.
Perhaps if the doomed pair had not yielded themselves to those Berlin
blandishments their fate might have been less tragic. There are
sinister rumours as to whose hand really fired the revolver. We in
England to-day may well have come to believe that those whom the
Kaiser most smiles upon are his chosen victims. The laborious grin of
the crocodile to the little fishes is nothing to it; but England is
rather a big mouthful.
Already one is able to say that any death has been merciful which has
spared an Austrian the sight of his country’s dissolution. We are glad
that our fairy godmother has not lived to have her heart torn between
England, her adopted country, and her passionately loved Hungary.
The cloud no bigger than a man’s hand in the clear sky--shadow of
the mailed fist--we looked at it from over here with that stirring
of surface emotions that is scarcely unpleasant! How horrible! we
said. How wicked, how cruel! The little bloodstained cloud! it hung
in horizons too far off to menace our island shores. We were very
sorry for the old Emperor, pursued to the last, it seemed, by the
inexplicable, unremitting curse. “I have been spared nothing,” he is
reported to have said when the news of the Archduke’s murder was broken
to him. Was he then in his own heart sheltering the deadly spark that
was to kindle the whole world? We thought of the playmate of Brussels
days with a romantic regret, and envied her a little. Since one must
die, what a good way it was to go with one’s only beloved! And then, in
the full summer peace, the clouds suddenly massed themselves, darkened,
and spread.
“Austrian Ultimatum to Servia! World’s Peace Threatened!” so read the
newspaper headlines, like the mutter of thunder running from pole to
pole. We saw without conviction. It seemed too inconceivable that such
a crime could be committed in our century; and the folly of it too
manifest in face of the Slav menace. And next came the crack and the
lightning glare--hideous illumination over undreamt-of chasms!
Will any of us ever forget that Saturday to Monday? War was declared
on Russia; war on France. Luxemburg territory was violated, and rumour
raced from one end of England to the other: “We are going to stand
aside; the peace party is too strong!... We are not bound by deed to
France, only by an understanding. England means to let her honour go
down on a quibble....”
We had guests in the house--a brother, retired after hard service in
the army; a slow-spoken, gentle-eyed man of law, who hid the fiercest
fire of British pugnacity under this deliberately meek exterior. They
were both pessimistic, the soldier angrily so in his anxiety. “I’ll
never lift my head again in England!--I’ll never go into a foreign
country again! I’d be ashamed!--Upon my word, I’ll emigrate!”
And the other gloomily: “From my experience of this Government, it’s
sure to do the worst possible thing. I haven’t the least hope.”
In our own hearts we had resolved, with the soldier, that we would give
up home and country. Our thoughts turned to Canada.
The relief was proportionate to the hideousness of the doubt. What
though the cloud had spread and spread till it reached right across the
sky, there was brilliant sunshine over England--the light of honour.
Two ardent young patriots had visited us unexpectedly in their car that
Sunday night. They brought small items of consolation. They had been
to Portsmouth. It was ready for war. Fixed bayonets gleamed at every
corner; the port was closed. Both these youths were full of martial
plans. One was hurrying to the London Scottish, the other northwards
to put all affairs in order before joining too. The London Scottish boy
obligingly kept us _au courant_ of the turn of events by telephone.
During the length of Sir Edward Grey’s speech perverted extracts
reached us and plunged us into ever deeper gloom: “We are only to
intervene if French ports are bombarded....”
Then at midnight on Monday the bell rang. “Belgian neutrality had been
violated; general mobilization was ordered.” It was war. And we slept
on the tidings with a strange peace.
Perhaps the universal feeling was most impressively voiced by a
Franciscan monk, who said to us later (during the agonizing suspense
between Mons and the Marne): “Nothing can be so bad as those days when
we did not know what the Government would do. Whatever happens now,
nothing can compare to that. Shall I ever forget how we prayed?”
Little Brothers of Peace and Poverty, humble, self-despoiled servants
of the rule most rigid in its tenderness, clamouring at the throne
of God for a thing of pride, a priceless possession--their country’s
honour! Paradox can scarcely go further, it would seem. Yet, even
before Mr. Chesterton pointed it out, most of us had long ago accepted
the fact that the deeper the truth the more breathless the paradox. Is
there an Englishman among us who would lift his voice to-day against
the sacred precept: _He that loses his life shall save it_?
II
OUR LITTLE BIT
“‘J’entends des paroles amies
Que je ne comprends pas.
Je me sens loin, bien loin, de la patrie....
D’où vient que ces voix me semblent familières?’
‘Mon père, nous sommes en Angleterre.’”
CAMMAERTS.
It is frequently said in letters from the front, by the officer
praising his men, or _vice versa_: “A dozen things are being done every
day that deserve the Victoria Cross.” But if you speak to one of these
heroes of their own deeds, you will invariably get the same answer: “I
just did my little bit.”
How immense a satisfaction it must be to feel you’ve done your little
bit! And how out of it are the stay-at-homes! Yet we also have our part
to play--infinitesimal in comparison, but still, we hope, of use--the
minute fragment that may be wanted in the fitting together of the great
jigsaw puzzle.