nearest to her in age, who rent the air with her yells, Plain Eliza
instantly rose on her hind-legs and added her lamentations. One can
truly say that at the same time she wrung her paws in distress over her
playmate’s suffering. She has a very feeling heart.
These two adore each other, which is a very good thing, because Mimosa
is really a little Tartar. She is the first fur-child to bring discord
into the happy family at Villino Loki, and to break the Garden of Eden
spell by which cats and dogs of all sizes and tempers dwell together
in the most complete amity and sympathy. A small, imperious person of
a vivid chestnut hue, with devouring dark eyes and the most approved
of snub noses, we flatter ourselves that Mimosa will become a beauty
when she gets her full coat. But she will not stand cats, still less a
kitten, anywhere within the kitchen premises, and Mrs. MacComfort, the
queen of those regions, has actually banished the beloved Kitty and
her offspring to the greengrocer’s shop in order to pander to Mimosa,
who regarded them much as the honest Briton the alien Hun--something
darkly suspicious, to be eliminated from the community at all costs.
Mimosa, indeed, has taken matters into her own paws, as the man in the
street has done, and Mrs. MacComfort has acted like the Government.
Discovering the youngest kitten completely flattened under Mimosa--the
latter, her mane bristling, endeavouring to tear off all her victim’s
fur--it was decided to remove the alien element for its own benefit.
Harmony is now restored to kitchen dominions. The other morning
the young lady of the Villino found the two little dogs solemnly
seated each side of the hearth, their eyes fixed on an infinitesimal
earthenware pan which was simmering on a carefully prepared fire.
“They’re just watching me cooking their breakfast, miss,” said Mrs.
MacComfort in her soft voice. “They’re very partial to chicken liver.”
It was sizzling appetizingly in its lilliputian dish.
From the moment of Plain Eliza’s entrance upon the scene, squirming in
a basket, Mimosa showed a profound and affectionate interest in her. We
were, if truth be told, a little afraid to trust these demonstrations,
fearing they might be of a crocodile nature, but never was suspicion
more unjust. The elder puppy has completely adopted the younger one,
and is full of anxiety and distress if she is not in her company. She
will come bustling into the room, talking in her Peky way, saying as
plainly as ever a little dog did: “Has anyone seen Baby? It’s really
not safe to let the child go about by herself like that.”
When she discovers her, the two small things kiss and embrace; after
which Mimosa abdicates her grown-up airs, and romping becomes the order
of the day.
The name of Plain Eliza is the one which has stuck most distinctively
to the great Mo-Loki’s daughter. It seemed appropriate to her, in the
opinion of the mistress of the Villino, and arose out of a reminiscence
of her Irish youth. There happened to be in Dublin society in those
far-back days a young lady of guileless disposition, not too brilliant
intellect, and what Americans would call “homely” appearance.
Presenting herself at a reception at a house which boasted of a very
pompous butler, and having announced her name as Eliza Dunn, he
forthwith attempted to qualify her with a title.
“Lady Eliza Dunn?”
“No, no,” quoth she. “Plain Eliza.”
Rumour would have it that he thereupon announced in stentorian tones:
“Plain Eliza.”
It is not so much the uncomeliness of the Baby’s countenance as the
guileless trustfulness with which she turns it upon the world which
seems to make the name appropriate. Anyhow, it has come to stay.
The little children that run about Villino Loki these days--war-exiles,
most of them--have scarcely crossed the threshold before their voices
are uplifted, calling:
“Plain! Plain! Where is Plain Eliza?” And when the favourite is found
there is much cooing and fond objurgations of: “Darling Plain! My sweet
little Plain! Dear, darling, Plain Eliza!”
She is the only one of the Pekies that can be allowed with perfect
safety in the hands of the children. Mimosa is uncertain, and may turn
at any moment with a face of fury, her whole body bristling. She is
secretly very jealous of the children. And Loki is not uncertain at
all. He has never hidden his dislike of them, and his lip begins to
curl the instant a small hand is outstretched towards him. But Plain
Eliza, if bored, remains patient and gentle; and however “homely” she
may seem to her attached family, she is all beauty and charm in the
eyes of their little visitors.
Recently a most attractive child was for ten days, with her charming
young mother and baby brother, the guest of the Villino. To console her
on departure she was promised another Plain Eliza, should such a one
ever be vouchsafed the world. Her mother writes: “She prays and makes
me pray for the new Plain Eliza every day, and I think fully expects to
see her come shooting down from Heaven.”
A very dear child this, with a heart and mind almost too sensitive for
her four years. Many delicately pretty sayings are treasured of her.
She must have been about three when her first religious instruction was
given her. It made a profound impression. For months afterwards she
would date her experiences from the day of this enlightenment.
“You know, mammy, that was before Jesus was born to me!”
Her father is at the front. He has not yet seen his little son, the
arrival of whom was so much desired. This baby, an out-of-the-way
handsome, healthy child, is a prey to the terrors which it will be
yet mercifully many years before he can understand. He cannot bear to
be left alone a moment, and wakes from a profound sleep in spasms of
unconscious apprehension. Then nothing can soothe him but being clasped
very close, the mother’s hand upon the little head, pressing it to
her cheek. “He is nothing,” said the doctor, “to some of the babies I
have seen this year.” It is not astonishing; but how pathetic! These
little creatures, carried so long under an anguished heart, come into
the world bearing the print of the universal mystery already stamped on
their infant souls.
When will the dawn arise over a world no longer agonized and
disrupted? When will the wholesome joys and the natural sorrows
resume their preponderance in our existence? Surely every man’s own
span holds enough of trouble to make him realize that here is not our
abiding-place, and long for the security of the heavenly home. Perhaps
it was not so. Perhaps we had all fallen away too much from faith and
simplicity, and we needed this appalling experience of what humanity
can inflict upon humanity, when Christ and His cross are left out of
the reckoning.
“The world has become profoundly corrupt. There will surely come some
great scourge. It will be necessary to have a generation brought up by
mourning mothers and in a discipline of tears,” said a man of God in
what seemed words of unbearable severity, a year before the war broke
out.
So it may be that we are not only fighting for our children, to deliver
them from the intolerable yoke of the Hun, but that we are also
suffering for our children, to deliver them from the punishment of our
own sins.
* * * * *
We meant to call this chapter “War-babies,” only for the newspaper
discussion which has made even innocence itself the subject of
passionate and unpleasant discussion.
There have been a good many war-babies in the neighbourhood as well as
Plain Eliza. The Signorina of the Villino has already acted godmother
several times to infant exiles. These little ones, we thank Heaven,
have arrived surprisingly jolly and unimpressed. Yet the poor mothers
had, most of them, fled from the sound of the cannon and the menace
of the shells, happy if they saw nothing worse than the flames which
were consuming their homes and all that those homes held and meant for
them. The Signorina is very particular that the girls should be called
Elizabeth and the boys Albert, with due loyalty to a sovereignty truly
royal in misfortune.
“Mademoiselle,” writes one young woman, “I have the happiness to
announce to you that I have the honour to have become the mother of a
beautiful little daughter.”
She meant what she said--marvellous as it may seem not to regard the
event in such circumstances as an added anguish!
We have heard of the birth of a child to a widow of eighteen--a peasant
girl in Brussels--who was forced by the invaders not only to watch her
father and husband and both brothers struck down under her eyes, but to
assist in burying them while they were still breathing.
“It is a very ugly little baby,” writes the kind lady who is its
godmother, “and the poor mother is very ill. When she gets better it
will be a comfort to her.”
In these days, when the lid of hell has been taken off--as Mr.
Elbert Hubbard, one of the victims of the _Lusitania_, graphically
declared--when legions of devils have been let loose upon an
unsuspecting world, the case of the eighteen-year-old peasant woman in
the Brussels _asile_ is by no means the most to be pitied. Her child
will be a comfort to her. Not so will it be with the many unfortunate
Belgian village mothers--to whom children are being, we hear, born
maimed in awful testimony of the mutilations which the wives have been
forced to witness deliberately inflicted on their husbands. War-babies,
indeed! Stricken before birth, destined to bear through a necessarily
bitter existence the terrible mark of the barbarian foe.
Let us get back to the fur children. It is such a comfort to be able
to turn one’s eyes upon something that can never understand the horror
about one.
Plain Eliza’s only trick is to put her front paws together, palm to
palm, in an attitude of prayer, and wave them. This is called in the
family “making pretty paws.” When the children plunge for her and clasp
her close, the first cry is always: “Plain Eliza, make pretty paws!
Dear Plain Eliza, make pretty paws!”
She will not do it for them every day. Little dogs know very well that
human puppies have no real authority over them. Perhaps it is because
of the rarity of her condescension in this direction, or perhaps
because of the wonderful emphasis of her supplication when she does
so condescend, that the youngest of the small exiles, three-year-old
Viviane, regards this accomplishment as the very acme of expression.
She is a pious babe, and is fond of paying visits to the little Oratory
in the Villino. One day her governess observed her wringing and waving
her dimpled hands before the altar. When she came out she confided in
tones of devout triumph: “I have been making pretty paws to little
Jesus.”
Viviane, the most satisfactory type of sturdy childhood it is possible
to imagine, combines a great determination, an understanding as solid
as her own little person, with an extremely tender heart. She quite
realizes the advantages of the good manners which her English governess
inculcates, and she can be heard instructing herself in a deep _sotto
voce_ when she sits at tea with grown-up entertainers.
“Vivi not speak with her mouth full. Vivi wait. Now Vivi can speak.”
“Good-bye, my little girl,” said her mother to her the other day,
sending the child home in advance to her early supper. “I hope you will
be good.”
“Vivi good,” was the prompt response, “good, obedient, nice manners at
table.”
She walked out of the room with her peculiarly deliberate gait,
murmuring the admonition to herself.
During the terribly dry weather in the beginning of May we had a great
fire on our moor; whether caused by incendiarism or not remains a moot
point. The first hill that rolls up from our valley is now charred
half-way. Viviane was much concerned.
“Poor moor burnt! Poor moor burnt!” she lamented. Then, with a
delicious impulse qualified by characteristic caution, “Vivi kiss it
where it is not black; kiss it and make it well!”
When her cousin and playmate’s father was tragically killed on the
Yser, the little creature, who is devoted to her own father, was deeply
concerned. The latter is heroically devoting himself to ambulance work
at Calais. For many nights after the news of the young officer’s death
was received, Viviane would anxiously inform everyone who came into her
nursery that Papa was quite safe, pointing out his photograph on the
chimney-piece at the same time.
“Vivi got her Papa quite safe,” in a confused association of ideas.
Though she has only seen him once for a very short time all these nine
months, the child’s affectionate memory of him remains as distinct as
ever, and returning the other day from a morning walk with a scratched
knee, she declared pathetically she wished it had been a wound, for
then Vivi’s father would have had to come and nurse her.
The spirit of the Belgian children is one of the most remarkable things
of the war. As soon as they can understand anything at all they seem to
grasp the situation of present valiant endurance and future glory. They
know what sacrifices have been demanded of their parents. There is not
a child that we have seen but measures the cost and its honour.
Upon the arrival of the _Faire part_ of that same young officer above
mentioned, with its immense black edge and unending list of sorrowing
relatives, Viviane’s eldest brother, a boy of nine, asked to read it.
When he came to the words: _Mort pour la patrie_, he looked up, his
face illuminated.
“_Oh, Maman, comme c’est beau!_”
Not the least among the miscalculations of the Germans in Belgium
has been their insane attempt to stifle the courage of the little
country by ferocity. But Germany has never counted with souls, and it
is by the power of the soul that this huge monster of materialism,
with its gross brutality and gross reliance on masses and mechanism,
will be overthrown. There is not a _gamin_ of the Brussels streets
that does not mock the German soldiery, finely conscious that, by the
immortal defiance of the spirit, Prussian brutality itself is already
vanquished. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!...
There was humour as well as heroism in the heart of the oppressed
Antwerp Belgian on that afternoon of his King’s birthday, when he sent
the three little girls to walk side by side through the streets dressed
in black, orange, and red. The Hun stood helpless before the passage
of the living flag, not daring to face the ridicule which would fall
upon him all the world over were the babes arrested and taken to the
Commandatur. It was a superb defiance, flung in the face of the despot,
flung by the little ones! The whole history of Belgium’s glory and
Germany’s shame is in it.
* * * * *
It is just the feeling that they are blessedly ignorant of the
universal suffering that makes the company of our pets so soothing to
us now.
“My dog is my one comfort,” cried a friend to us, surveying her Peky
as he sat, fat and prosperous, his lip cocked with the familiar
Chinese smile, triumphant after the feat of having silently bitten his
mistress’s visitor. “He is the only person that hasn’t changed!”
The bite of a Pekinese does not hurt, it may be mentioned, and the
visitor quite shared his owner’s feelings.
It may be something of the same sensation that makes the wounded
soldiers in the hospital near us long for the forbidden joy of
something alive for a mascot. They picked up a very newly hatched
pheasant in the grounds the other day, and carried it home to share
their bed and board. It was fed on extraordinary concoctions, and after
three days was discovered to have passed away. There was a strong
suspicion of the matron, who had not approved from the beginning. They
consoled themselves by a military funeral. A very handsome coffin
having been made by an expert, they went in solemn procession to lay
the infant pheasant to rest. Now there is always a wreath on the grave.
Invited to the Villino this week to see our azaleas, they arrived, a
batch of twenty, at the odd hour of ten o’clock in the morning, to be
regaled with buns and lemonade, no tea-parties being allowed. They
enjoyed themselves very much, but the feature of the entertainment was
Mimosa, the small ruby Pekinese. She passed from embrace to embrace.
She licked them so much that they told the Sister they would not need
to have their faces washed any more. This is the kind of joke that is
really appreciated in hospitals. When Mimi returned to her devoted
Mrs. MacComfort in the kitchen, the latter remarked “she was so above
herself she couldn’t do anything with her.”
Unfortunately all little dogs are not happy and protected like ours.
Belgian friends who passed through villages and towns after the first
wave of the invader had spread over the country tell us of a horrible
and singular byway of wanton atrocity. The soldiery slaughter the dogs
wholesale, some said to eat them, but that seems hardly credible.
Most probably it was part of the scheme of general terrorism. To burn
the houses and slay the husbands and fathers, to spear and mutilate
and trample down the children, to insult the women, it was all not
enough. The finishing touch must be given by the murder of the humble
companion, the faithful watch-dog, the children’s pet. Piles and piles
of dogs’ heads were at the corners of the streets, our friend told us.
We know they laid hold of the poor dogs to experiment upon them with
their diabolical gas. But there was at least some reason in the latter
brutality.
One hears many stories about the dogs of war.
At the beginning of the conflict the trained ambulance dogs were
reported to have done splendid work in the French trenches. We do not
know if we have any such, but we do know that the men have pets among
them out there, whether mascots brought out from England or strays
picked up from the abandoned farms. The deserted dogs! A French paper
published an article upon these dumb victims, not the least pathetic
of the many side tragedies of this year of anguish. It was a poor
shop-keeper who described what he himself had seen in passing through a
devastated town within the conquered territory.
“The dogs have remained in the town, from whence the inhabitants have
fled. The dogs have remained where there is not left a stone upon a
stone. How they do not die of hunger I cannot imagine. They must hunt
for themselves far out in the country-side, I suppose, but they come
back as quickly as they can and congregate at the entrance of the
suburb on the highroad.
“There are two hundred, or three hundred perhaps--spaniels, sheep-dogs,
fox-terriers, even small ridiculous lap-dogs--and they wait, all of
them, with their heads turned in the same direction, with an air of
intense melancholy and passionate interest. What are they waiting for?
Oh, it is very easy to guess. Sometimes one of the old inhabitants
of the town makes up his mind to come back from Holland. The longing
to see his home, to know what is left of his house, to search the
ruins, is stronger than all else--stronger than hatred, stronger than
fear. And sometimes then one of the dogs recognizes him. His dog! If
you could see it. If you could imagine it. All that troop of dogs
who prick their ears at the first sight of a man coming along the
road from Holland, a man who has no helmet, a man not in uniform;
the instantaneous painful agitation of the animals who gaze and gaze
with all their might--dogs have not very good eyes--and who sniff and
sniff from afar, because their scent is better than their sight. And
then the leap, the great leap of one of these dogs who has recognized
his master, his wild race along the devastated road, ploughed with
the furrows by the passage of cannons and heavy traction motors and
dug with trenches; his joyous barks, his wagging tail, his flickering
tongue! His whole body is one quiver of happiness. The dog will not
leave that man any more, he is too much afraid of losing him. He will
follow close to his heels without stopping to eat; one day, two days
if needful; and in the end he goes away with him.
“But the others? They have remained on the road. And when they see this
dog depart, having found at last what they all are seeking, they lift
up their muzzles despairingly and howl, howl as if they would never
stop, with great cries that fill the air, and re-echo until there is
nothing more to be seen upon the road. Then they are dumb, but they do
not move. They are there; they still hope.”
VII
OUR GARDEN IN JUNE
“Still may Time hold some golden space
Where I’ll unpack that scented store
Of song and flower and sky and face,
And count, and touch, and turn them o’er.”
RUPERT BROOKE.
_June 1._--The garden in early June! Like a great many other things
the idea is very different from the reality. The first of June in the
garden represents to the mind’s eye bowers of roses, exuberance in the
borders, a riot of colour and fragrance. As a matter of fact, with us,
in our late-blooming, high-perched terraces, it means a transition
stage, and is annually very exasperating and disappointing to the
impatient spirit of the Signora. It is the time when the azaleas look
dishevelled, with their delicate blossom hanging depressingly from the
stamens. The forget-me-nots have all been cleared away, and in those
places where bulbs are preserved against the future spring, masses
of yellowing tangled leaf-spikes are an eyesore. The bedding-out
plants still look tiny on the raw borders. All our roses, except those
climbers against the house, are yet in the bud. There are just the
poppies that flaunt in the borders; and even their colour becomes an
exasperation, because they would have done so much better to wait
and join in the grand symphony, instead of blowing isolated trumpet
flourishes, prepared to relapse into sulky silence when the delphiniums
strike up their blue music.
There is also another frightful drawback to this first week of leafy
June, and that is that it would be easier to separate Pyramus from
Thisbe than the gardener from the vegetables. A constant enervating
struggle goes on between us on the relative values of cabbages and
roses, beans and poppies. We want the roses sprayed, we want the
borders staked, we want sustenance in the shape of liquid manure and
Clay’s fertilizer copiously administered to our darlings; and he wants
to put in “that there other row of scarlet runners and set out them
little lettuces.” And when it comes to watering: he doesn’t know, he’s
sure, how he’s to get them cabbages seen to as they ought to be seen
to; a deal of moisture _they_ want, if they’re to do him any justice.
Meanwhile our terraces are panting. The climbing roses up the
house--and this year they would have been glorious--are pale and
brittle in petal and foliage, as if they had been actually blasted.
The master of the Villino, after due representations from the Padrona,
has seen the necessity of sacrifice, and assiduously waters the garden
every evening--and himself! The hose is defective; being war time we
cannot afford a new one. Two jets break out at the wrong angle and take
you in the eye and down the waistcoat at the most unexpected moments;
and though amenable to persuasion, the Padrone’s devotion has its
limits, and he positively declines the remanipulation of the tube which
will bring it--after having done service in the Dutch garden--to the
end of the Lily Walk. So that, as it is two yards short, the deficiency
has to be made up by hand watering, and two obsolete bath-cans are
produced out of the house, which seems, for some unexplained reason,
easier than using the proper garden furniture. These cans are generally
left, forgotten, where they were last used, unless the piercing eye of
the mistress of the Villino happens to dart in that direction.
Yesterday we had visitors--in eighteenth-century parlance, a General
and his Lady--and of course the two cans stood in the middle of the
path, confidingly, nose to nose. Being war time nobody minded. It is
the blessing and the danger of war time that nobody minds anything. And
the General’s Lady, being tactful, kept her eye on the buddleia.