incomprehensibly. She is just three and very friendly; something in
Adam’s appearance must have attracted her, for she left everything she
had been playing with to run to him the moment he appeared.
This is how the Signora will always remember him, standing, big and
gentle, looking down at the child with those kind, kind eyes.
There was never anyone so good to little animals. We used to say he was
a true if unconscious brother of St. Francis, and loved all God’s small
folk. Never was a sick cat or dog but Adam would have the nursing of it.
One would see him walking about the garden wheeling his barrow, with a
great black Persian coiled round his neck like a boa. Nearly two years
ago a little daughter was born to him here, to his great joy. She was
always in her father’s arms during the free hours of the day; and not
the least piteous incident of the tragedy was the way this baby, just
beginning to babble a few words, kept calling for “Daddy, daddy,” while
he lay next door in the tiny sitting-room he had taken such pleasure
in, like a marble effigy, smiling, beautiful, awful, for ever deaf to
her appeal.
He had been slightly ailing since an attack of influenza; but on the
morning of his death he said to his wife that he felt as if he could
do the work of six men that day. The kind of cruel light-heartedness
which the Scotch call “being fey” was upon him. Like Romeo before
the great catastrophe, “his bosom’s lord sat lightly on his throne.”
Strange freaks of presentiment never to be explained on this side of
the grave! There are those who feel the shadow of approaching fatality
cloud their spirits--we have heard a hundred instances of certain
forebodings of death during the present war--but this mysterious gaiety
of the doomed is rarer and more awful. Yet Adam must have had his
secret sad warnings too, for his poor wife found, to her astonishment,
his insurance cards, his accounts made up to the end of the week on the
Thursday of which he died, the ambulance badge he had been so proud
of--all laid ready to her hand. He had set his house in order before
the summons came. We have every reason to think that in a deeper,
graver sense he was equally prepared.
“‘Whatever time my Saviour calls me, I shall be ready to go....’ Often
and often,” Mrs. Adam told us, as her tears fell, “he has said those
words to me.”
Like many another active, hard-working man, the thought of failing
health, debility, old age, was abhorrent to him.
“He never could have borne a long illness.” Thus the widow tries to
console herself--pitiful scraps of self-administered comfort with which
poor humanity always attempts to parry the horror of an unmitigated
tragedy!
There are strange secrets between the soul and God. Among the many
wonders of the City of Light will be the simple solving of the riddles
that have been so dark and tormenting to our earthly minds. From the
very beginning of the war this honest Englishman had wanted to go
out and serve his country. He was over age. His wife and two children
depended on his labours, yet the longing never left him.
“I doubt but I’ll have to go yet,” was a phrase constantly on his lips.
He had joined the Ambulance Corps and, indeed, was on his way to that
errand of mercy when he was stricken. Did he in those inner communes
of the soul with God breathe forth his desire to give his life for his
country, and was it somehow mystically accomplished? For death smote
him and he fell and lay in his blood, as a soldier might. Who knows
that the sacrifice was not accepted?
It was terrible for us--it seemed an unbelievable addition to her
burthen of sorrow for the woman who loved him--but for him it may have
been the glory and the crown.
When all human aid is unavailing, when everything that science can do
to assist or relieve has been accomplished and fellow-creatures must
stand aside and watch the relentless law of nature accomplish itself,
then the value of religion is felt, as perhaps never before, even by
the most devout.
Had poor Adam but belonged to the Old Faith the call for the priest
would have been more urgent yet than the call for the doctor; we would
have had the consolation of hearing the last Absolution pronounced
over the unconscious form. The soul would have taken flight from the
anointed body, strengthened by the ultimate rites; the child of the
Church would have gone forth from the arms of the Church--from the arms
of the earthly mother, to the mercy and justice of the heavenly Father.
We did what we could, his own clergyman being away. Never were we more
impressed with the value of the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. It is
all very well to say that we must live so as to be ready to die; that
as the tree grows so shall it fall. Here are trite axioms that will
not stand a moment before the facts of life and the needs of humanity.
They make no account of the mercy of the Creator on one side nor of the
weakness of the failing spirit on the other. They forget the penitent
thief on the cross, bidden to enter into Paradise upon the merit of
a single cry. If the Church of our ancestors watches anxiously over
the whole existence of her children; if she hovers about the cradle,
how does she not hang over the deathbed to catch the faintest sigh of
repentance; nay, how does she not “prevent” the least effort, pouring
forth graces and supplications, anointing, absolving, pursuing the
departing spirit beyond the very confines of the world, sublimely
audacious, to the throne of God itself!
She has caught the precious soul, for whom the Lord died, before the
infant mind was even aware of its own existence. She is not going to be
robbed of her treasure at the end, if she can help it.
But our poor, dying Adam was not of this fold, and could have no such
aid and sanctification for his passing. Even his afflicted wife quailed
from the fruitless agony of witnessing his last moments. “Since I
couldn’t do anything, ma’am, it’s more than I can bear.”
She went down to her cottage at the bottom of the garden to prepare a
fit resting-place for the body, while in the garage the soul of her
dearest accomplished its final and supreme act on earth.
We read the great prayers to ourselves--those wonderful prayers
commensurate in dignity and grandeur to the awful moment. We cried
upon the Angels and Archangels, upon the Thrones, the Cherubim and
Seraphim; we bade the Patriarchs and the Prophets, the Doctors and
Evangelists, the Confessors and Martyrs, the Holy Virgins and all the
Saints of God to rush to his assistance. We supplicated that his place
this day should be in peace and his abode in Holy Sion; we cast his
sins upon the multitudes of the Divine mercies, and strong through
the merits of Christ our appeal rose into triumph. With confidence we
summoned the noble company of the Angels to meet him, the court of the
Apostles to receive him, the army of glorious Martyrs to conduct him,
the joyful Confessors to encompass him, the choir of blessed Virgins to
go before him. We conjured Christ, his Saviour, to appear to him with
a mild and cheerful countenance. And, with this great name upon our
lips, we “compassed him about with angels, so that the infernal spirits
should tremble and retire into the horrid confusion of eternal night.”
All the household, except the very young servants, knelt round him
praying silently, since we did not dare obtrude our own tenets about
the deathbed of another faith. The Master stood with his hand on his
dying servant’s head; and so the end came very peacefully.
A belated curate appeared at the cottage as the daughter of the house
went down to tell Mrs. Adam that all was over; but he fled before the
sad burthen was carried in.
We had often noticed it before, but never so forcibly, this shying
away of some excellent religious people from any contemplation of the
immediate experience of the soul after death. Beyond sentences of
comfort as stereotyped as they are vague, which place the departed
“safe in the arms of Jesus,” one would almost believe that the average
man had no very vivid sense of the future life at all. How otherwise
explain the remarks, so frequently heard, that a sudden death is such a
desirable end; that it was “such a comfort so-and-so didn’t know he was
going”; how explain the attitude at the sick-bed, where the sufferer to
the last is deluded with false hopes that he may be spared--what? the
knowledge that he is summoned to the house of God, the last opportunity
of preparation.
Even when Mrs. Adam’s clergyman came to see her, chief among his
consolations was the remark, made in all sincerity: “That’s the kind of
death I should prefer to die.”
Good Adam was ready to go, we know that; but can any man with a true
sense of his own soul bring himself to wish to be taken in like manner?
It is, after all, to wish for one’s self the death one would want for
one’s dog. Without even belonging to a Church where the last stage is
hallowed and made a culminating act of precious resignation and the
highest virtue, it seems to us that the instinctive nobility of man
should rebel against the craven doctrine that death is a thing to be
huddled through, a step to be taken drugged and blindfolded, that the
consciousness is to be chloroformed against the anguish of dissolution.
It is to rob humanity of its supremest quality--the triumph of the
spirit over the flesh, the noble acceptance of our lot, the dignity of
the last renunciation.
Browning, the most virile of our poets, cries:
“I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forebore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old.”
Yet this curious evasion of the inevitable is only the natural outcome
of a looseness of theology which, while it admits the dogma of right
and wrong, of free will and human responsibility, hurls the perfect and
the imperfect, the saint and the sinner alike, into the same heaven
without an instant’s transition. As very few now believe in hell, it
is no unfair conclusion to draw that the mere fact of death seems, in
the eyes of most people, to qualify the soul for eternal bliss. It is
idle to ask what becomes of the generally accepted doctrine of moral
responsibility, why, if all are alike and certain to be saved, anyone
should put himself to the disagreeable task of resisting temptation,
much less strive after perfection here below; but failure to provide
help for the dying is the direct consequence of the denial of future
expiation.
“What man is there among you who, if his son shall ask bread, will he
reach him a stone?”
The Viaticum, the bread of life, is denied to the passing soul, and the
draught of comfort of devout prayer withheld from the beloved in the
fires of expiation; but the tombstone will be considered with loving
thought, and erected over the insensible dust.
The Old Faith shows a profound knowledge of and tenderness for the
mere human side in its hour of anguish, even while providing for the
paramount needs of the soul. There is one, one only comfort for the
bereaved--to be able to help still, and of that they are deprived.
“It isn’t as if I could do any good,” said poor Mrs. Adam, when she
turned away from her husband’s deathbed.
She had the power to do such infinite good if she had only known it.
What prayer could be so far-reaching as that of the cry of the wife for
the chosen one, from whom God alone reserved Himself the right to part
her? What act of resignation could be so meritorious as that of her who
was making the sacrifice of her all?
“I sent down to tell them to ring the passing-bell,” said the widow.
She was eager to accomplish every detail of respectful ceremony that
had been left to her.
The passing-bell! Touching institution of the ages of belief, the call
for prayers for the soul in its last struggle, the summons to friend
and stranger, kindly neighbour and stray passer-by, the cry of the
mother for the last alms for her child!
“Oh,” exclaimed our daughter that night, reflecting on these things,
“my heart burns when I think how the poor have been robbed of their
faith!”
And the mighty lesson which the ancient Church taught by her attitude
to the dying is that by calmly turning the eyes of the faithful towards
the need for preparation, the duty of warning the sick in time, the
immeasurable gain of the last Sacraments as compared to the loss of
an unfounded earthly hope, she is giving the only possible comfort
alike to the living and the dying; she is placing within reach of the
mourners just the one factor that makes their grief bearable--the power
of being of use.
Mrs. MacComfort, our Irish cook, who is as near a saint herself as one
can ever hope to meet, said to us, the tears brimming in her soft eyes:
“Oh, doesn’t it make us feel ashamed of ourselves when we see what our
holy religion is, and how little we live up to it!”
And, indeed, that our poor fellow-countrymen are so good without these
helps is at once a wonder and a rebuke to us. Mrs. Adam made her
sacrifice with a most touching submission: “God must know best.”
“When they came down and told me there’d been an accident, my hands
were in the washtub, miss,” she told one of us later, “and as I ran up
the garden drying them in my apron, I was praying God all the while
that he would give me strength to bear what I might have to see.”
God never refuses such a prayer as that. Adam was an example. It is
astonishing the effect the death of this simple gardener has made in
the district, and the testimonies of his worth keep coming in. It shows
how wide the influence one good man can exercise in any class of life--
“The very ashes of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”
In a narrower sense we shall ourselves always feel that something of
him has gone into the soil of our little garden, for which he worked so
faithfully. Some of the fragrance of that humble soul will rise up from
the violet beds and hang about the roses.
* * * * *
We have been the more disposed to draw these parallels between the Old
Faith and its substitute because, by a curious coincidence, Adam’s was
the second death to fling sadness over the Villino.
The first was not a personal loss, like that of a servant in the house.
It concerned, indeed, a being whom only one of us had seen. It happened
far away in the bloody swamps of the Yser; yet, none the less, the
tidings filled the little household with mourning.
Among the many exiles flying to our shores from the horror of the
advancing Hun were two young mothers with their children--two charming,
delicately nurtured, high-born, high-minded women, whose husbands were,
one, an officer in the Belgian army, the other, a volunteer working
in the ambulance at Calais. The soldier’s wife, the niece of an old
friend of ours, a gay, courageous creature, who twice had gone into
the line of fire to see her husband, was never tired of speaking to us
of “Charley.” He seemed in the end to have become almost a familiar
among us. We knew by his photographs that he was handsome, and, by the
portions of his letters which she read to us, that he was tender and
deep-feeling and strong of courage.
Some weeks ago Charley’s wife left to live with her sister; her cousin
still remained with us. It was the latter who was sent for to the
telephone that evening when the shadow of death rolled up suddenly and
hung over the little house.
An unforgettable moment when she turned from the instrument, crying in
accents that pierced one: “_Charley tué! Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, Charley
tué!_”
It was when we afterwards learnt the details of the tragedy, which were
piteous in the extreme as far as it affected the wife, that the noble
consolations of our religion emerged in all their beauty.
The officer had announced an approaching leave, and the joyful
anticipation of his little family was commensurate to the love they
bore him. As one instance of that love, let it be noted here that his
small son, only six years old, could never hear the name of his absent
father without tears.
The wife was alone in the garden, resting from the fatigues of a
morning spent in preparing for that visit, when a telegram arrived,
badly transcribed, in French. She could at first only make out her
husband’s name, her brother’s signature, and the words, “Shall be at
Calais to-day.”
She danced into the house in ecstasy, crying to the children: “Papa is
coming; papa and Uncle Robert are coming.”
And it was only on the stairs that a second glance at the sheet in her
hand revealed the fatal word “_tué_.”
A cousin--another young exiled wife and mother--who lived in close
proximity, was summoned by the distracted maid, and writes in simple
language of the scene of agony: “As soon as I got into the little
house,” she says, “I heard her dreadful sobs; I ran to her. ‘Charley is
killed, Charley is killed!’ she cried to me. I have never seen anyone
in such a state. She was almost in convulsions. I put my arms about
her. ‘Make your sacrifice; offer it up for the good of his soul,’ I
said to her. ‘No, no! I cannot,’ she said. At first she could not, but
I held her close, and after a little I said to her: ‘Say the words
after me: “O my God, I accept your will for the good of his soul.”’ And
once she had said it she did not go back on it. From that moment she
was calm.”
So calm, indeed, that the unhappy young creature had the strength of
mind to go in to her children, terrified at the sound of her weeping,
and smilingly reassure them, talk and play with them, till their
bedtime. She meant to start that night for Calais, and did not wish her
little ones to know of their loss till her return.
All her energies were strained to the single purpose--to see him once
again before he was laid to rest. She had her desire. The journey was
an odyssey of physical and mental pain, but by sheer determination she
won through, and found her brother, who had obtained leave of absence
from his regiment to meet her. By him she was conveyed to a little
village at the back of the Belgian line, where, in a chapel belonging
to a convent, the dead man lay.
It had been his last day in the trenches. The next was to begin his
brief holiday. He had been posted in that celebrated Maison du Passeur,
among the slimy waters, destined to be the scene of one more tragedy.
There was an alarm that certain enemy snipers were lurking about, and a
small patrol had been ordered to take stock of them.
“I will not,” said the young officer, “allow my men to go into danger
without me.”
It was not his duty--it was scarcely even advisable--but he took up a
soldier’s carbine and went forth with it. He was actually taking aim
when the sergeant beside him saw him fail and slowly collapse. There
was, perhaps, a noise of cannon to confuse the man’s senses, for he
heard no shot. There was certainly no start or shock apparent. He
called out: “_Mon lieutenant, qu’avez vous?_” believing it was a sudden
attack of weakness. When he went to his lieutenant he found that he was
dead. He had been struck by a bullet under the eye, so well and truly
aimed that it had instantly ended the young, vigorous life, as far as
this world is concerned. The only mark on his calm face, when his wife
saw it, was that small purple spot, where the wound had closed again.
“’Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as
A church-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.”
We have seen a snapshot taken of him as he lay wrapped in his country’s
flag. It is a noble, chiselled countenance, looking younger than the
thirty-two years of his life, set in a great serenity, with yet that
stamp of austere renunciation, of supreme sacrifice, measured and
accepted, which we sometimes behold in the face of the dead.
The whole regiment congregated in the little chapel the afternoon
of the day which brought the widow to her calvary. The building was
decorated with groups of flags, and about the bier were heaped the
wreaths of his brother officers, dedicated nearly all in the same words:
“To the comrade fallen on the field of honour,”
“To the comrade who has given his life for his country.”
In the midst of a profound silence the Colonel read _L’Ordre du Jour_,
which, by King Albert’s command, conferred upon the fallen _Guide_
the Order of Leopold--for valour--and the bereaved wife was given
the decoration to pin over the cold heart that had been so warmly
hers. There was a muffled roll of drum, and all present sang the
“Brabançonne.” So much for the comfort which the world could still give.
Next morning the funeral Mass was said at the altar. The bier lay at
the foot of the step, so close that each time the priest turned round
to say _Dominus vobiscum_, his hands were uplifted over the dead. And
the widow and all the officers of the regiment kneeling round received
Holy Communion for, and in memory of, the slain.
It is not possible--although we know her grief to be as ardent as was
her attachment to him--that this widow can mourn as those who have no
hope.
The chaplain of the regiment told her that her husband had been to
Confession and Holy Communion the morning he had entered into the
trenches, three days before. “Have no fear, my child,” said the priest,
“he made his Confession as he did everything, with all his heart.”
Blessed religion, which across the deathbed shows us the heavens
opening for the departed soul, and bids the holy angel guard even the
grave where rests the body, hallowed for the resurrection!
VI
BABIES: CHINESE AND OTHERS
“In how several ways do we speak to our dogs, and they answer
us!”--MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.
The war-baby was very dear and downy when we first saw her.
She is the daughter of a Chinaman (an important member of the
household), and a neighbouring lady. The Chinaman was, in fact, so
important that the usual matrimonial procedure was reversed in his
case; and the family of the lady made unabashed and persevering
advances for his favour before he could be induced to condescend to the
alliance.
Anyone familiar with Oriental calm will not be surprised to learn that
the potentate received with imperturbability the announcement that his
lady wife was likely to present him with a family. It was, however,
perhaps pushing Eastern reserve a little too far to walk away from his
infants with every appearance of disgust, and to threaten to bite those
officious friends who sought to extract some show of parental feeling
from him by turning him round once more to confront the seething
cradle-full.
The cradle was a flat basket, in which the babies maintained a
ceaseless movement, crawling one over the other, with a total disregard
of such sensitive portions of the anatomy as eyes and noses. They were
extraordinarily ill matched as to size--we do not know if this is usual
with triplets--looking more like a job lot of Teddy-bears than anything
else. There was one as large as the other two put together; there was
a very lively medium one; and a very small third, who lay and feebly
squirmed under the others vigorous toes. They all had beautiful black
noses and little cream-coloured tails tightly curled over their backs.
The intelligent reader will by this time have perceived that we are
not referring to mere humanity. The war-babies belong to the race of
Pekinese, being, in fact, the offspring of the celebrated and priceless
Loki, master of the Villino of that name, who fame has already spread
far and wide.
His consort was Maud, a chestnut-haired lady, who, we regret to say,
had already contracted a _mésalliance_ with a highlander, to the
despair of her family. We are convinced that the union is regarded by
Loki as a mere matter of politics, but what Western would ever dare to
penetrate the barrier of relentless reserve which the Manchu raises
between his domestic affairs and the foreign devil? We fear, by his
expression and the looks of reproach with which he has since regarded
us, that we have already gravely infringed his ideas of decorum by
bringing his daughter to dwell in his house.
She is the only daughter of the trio, the two extremes having run to
the masculine gender. We chose her on account of her perkiness and her
engaging manner of waving her paws in supplication or allurement.
These little dogs have all of them more or less the gift of
gesticulation. It is not necessary to teach them either to beg or pray.
The puppy--Plain Eliza--will dance half the length of the room on her
hind-legs, frantically imploring with her front paws the while, with a
persistency and passion that would melt a heart of stone.