in Campden Hill and fond of bead blinds--and the smell of joss-stick
floats upon the disgusted nostril from the doorway, you know the kind
of party you are going to have. Your hostess will have surrounded
herself with long-haired and dank-handed young men, the Postlethwaites
of the period, and brilliant young females who wear a mauvy powder over
rather an unwashed face, and curious garments cut square at the neck,
and turquoise matrix ear-rings, very much veined with brown! Besides
the joss-sticks there is cigarette smoke, and the atmosphere, morally
as well as physically, is fusty!
Then there is the female who produces a bottle of Eau-de-Cologne on
board ship. If it isn’t a German governess, it is a heated person with
something purple about her and kid gloves--why pursue the horrid theme!
Let us end this divagation by a little anecdote as true as it is
charming. It happened to a member of our own family. She was hurrying
along one foggy November morning to the Brompton Oratory rather
early; and the dreadful acrid vapour and the uncertain struggle of
a grimy dawn contended against the glimmer of the gas-lamps. As she
approached the steps of the church somebody crossed her, and instantly
the whole air was filled with an exquisite fragrance as of violets.
Involuntarily she started to look round, and her movement arrested,
too, the passer-by. For a second they stood quite close to each other,
and to our relative’s astonishment she saw only a small, meek-faced old
lady in an Early Victorian bonnet wrapped in a very dowdy dolman.
The old lady gave a little smile and went her way. There was certainly
no adornment of real violets about her, and to look at her was enough
to be assured that artificial scents could never approach her.
The incident seemed strange enough to be worth making investigations,
and the explanation was simple. The little old lady was very well
known; mother of priests, a ceaseless worker among the poor; nearly
eighty, and every day at seven o’clock Mass. Many people had remarked
the scent of violets about her, and her friends thought, laughingly, it
was because she was something of a saint.
This sweet-smelling saint died as she had lived. She had received the
Last Sacraments; she knew her moments were numbered, but she sat up,
propped by pillows, and went on knitting for the poor till the needles
fell from her hands.
If the story of the violets had not happened to a member of the family,
the Signora would be quite ready to believe it on hearsay, because
of the delicious simplicity and certain confidence of that placid
deathbed.
VIII
OUR BLUE-COAT BOYS
“Ils ont le bras en écharpe, et un bandeau sur l’œil,
Mais leur âme est légère et ils sourient ...
Ils s’en vont, grisés de lumière,
Etourdis par le bruit,
Traînant la jambe dans la poussière
Le nez au vent, le regard réjoui....”
CAMMAERTS.
We asked them to tea; the Sister said that “the Matron said they
couldn’t do that”; but they could come for morning lunch about
half-past ten o’clock, and have bread-and-butter and see the garden.
And they would like to come very much indeed, preferably next day. The
Matron further opined about twelve would feel well enough to avail
themselves of our hospitality.
It gave us very little time for preparation, and the baker declined
to provide us with buns so early. But it was very hot, fortunately;
so Mrs. McComfort set to work at dawn to prepare lemonade and fruit
salad, and immense slices of bread-and-jam. And we were very glad she
had been so lavish in her Irish generosity when we heard the sound of
voices and the tramping of feet in the courtyard: it seemed as if there
were a regiment of them! In reality there were only twenty--twenty
smiling, stalwart “blue-coat boys.” Some with an arm in a sling; two
or three limping along with the help of a stick; one with a bandaged
head; three, in spite of a brave front, with that look of strain and
tragedy in the eyes which stamps even those who have been only slightly
“gassed.”
They are very much amused at the little outing, as pleased and
as easily diverted as children, not anxious to talk about their
experiences, but answering with perfect ease and simplicity any
question that is made to them on the subject. They are chiefly excited
over our little dogs. We wish that we had twenty instead of only
three; or that we had borrowed from a neighbour’s household for the
occasion. Every man wants to nurse a dog, and those who have secured
the privilege are regarded with considerable envy by the others.
The younger members of the _famiglia_ are in a desperate state of
excitement, and there is a great flutter of aprons, and cheeks flame
scarlet under caps pinned slightly crooked in the agitation of the
moment.
Miss Flynn the housemaid, Miss O’Toole the parlourmaid, are stirred to
rapture to discover an Irish corporal, wounded at Ypres. We think they
talk more of Tipperary--it really is Tipperary--than of Flanders. Miss
Flynn, a handsome, black-eyed, black-haired damsel, with a colour that
beats the damask roses on the walls of the Villino, has been born and
bred in England. She is more forthcoming than Miss O’Toole, who has the
true Hibernian reserve; who looks deprecatingly from under her fair
aureole of hair, and expects and gives the utmost respectfulness in all
her relations with the opposite sex.
They say this lovely sensitive modesty of the Irish girl is dying out.
The penny novelette, the spread of emancipation and education--save the
mark!--facilities of communication, have done away with it. More’s the
pity if this be true, for it was a bloom on the womanhood of Ireland no
polish can replace; it added something incommunicably lovable to the
grace of the girls, something holy, almost august, to the tenderness of
the mothers.
When the Signora was a child in Ireland the peasant wife still spoke
of her husband as “the master”; and in the wilds of Galway, quite
recently, she has seen the women in the roads pull their shawls over
their faces at the approach of a stranger. The humble matron of the
older type will still walk two paces behind her husband. These are,
of course, but indications of the austere conception of life which
an unquestioning acceptance of her faith kept alive in the breast of
the Irishwoman. When she promised to love and honour him, the husband
became _de facto_ “the master.” Yet the influence of the Irish wife
and mother in her own home in no way suffered from this conception of
her duty. She was as much “_herself_” upon the lips of her lord as he
“_himself_” upon hers. It used to be a boast that the purity of the
Irish maiden and the Irish mother was a thing apart, inassailable. The
Signora’s recollections of Ireland, of a childhood passed in a country
house that kept itself very much in touch with its poor neighbours and
dependants, bring her back many instances of drunkenness among the
men, alas! and the consequent fights and factions; of slovenliness
among the women, and hopeless want of thrift and energy; in one or two
instances, indeed, of flagrant dishonesty; but she never remembers a
single occasion marked by the shocked whisper, the swift and huddled
dismissal, or any of the other tokens by which a fall from feminine
virtue is mysteriously conveyed to the child mind.
Among all the poor cottage homes, the various farms, great and small,
prosperous or neglected, each with their strapping brood of splendid
youth, never one can she recollect about whose name there was a
silence; never a single one of these dewy-eyed, fresh-faced girls that
did not carry the innocence of their baptism in the half-deprecating,
half-confident looks they cast upon “the quality.”
Naturally there must have been exceptions; and naturally, too, this
state of affairs could not have applied to some of the more miserable
quarters of the towns. Nevertheless, the Ireland of a quarter of a
century ago had not forgotten she had once been called the Island of
Saints; and her mothers and daughters kept very preciously the vestal
flame alive in their pure breasts.
Times have changed, and more’s the pity, as we have said. But now and
again a flower blooms as if upon the old roots, and though Mary O’Toole
is transplanted to England, we trust that she may keep her infantile
innocence and her exquisite--there is no English equivalent--_pudeur_.
It was a picture to see her in her cornflower-blue cotton frock, with
her irrepressible hair tucked as tidily as nature would allow beneath
her white cap, staggering under the weight of a tray charged with
refreshments for the wounded. She is about five-foot nothing, with a
throat the average male hand could encircle with a finger and thumb,
but among the twenty soldiers, all of different ages, classes, and, of
course, dispositions, who visited us that day, there was not one but
regarded her with as much respect as if she had been six foot high and
as ill-favoured as Sally Brass--we hope, however, with considerably
more pleasure.
When the blue-coat boys have been duly refreshed, they wander out into
the garden. They remind one irresistibly of a school, and there is
something tenderly droll in their complete submission to the little
plump sister, who orders them about with a soft voice and certain
authority.
“No. 20, come out of the sun. No. 15, I’d rather you didn’t sit on the
grass.”
Then she turns apologetically to us: “It isn’t that I don’t know it’s
quite dry.” (We should think it was, on our sandy heights, after five
weeks’ drought!) “But I never know quite where I am with the gassed
cases. That’s the worst of them. They’re perfectly well one day, and we
say, ‘Thank goodness, _that’s_ all over,’ and the next day its up in
his eyes, perhaps!”
“I’ll never be the same man again,” suddenly exclaims a short,
saturnine young Canadian, who has not--a marked exception to the
others--once smiled since he came, and who keeps a dark grudge in his
eyes. He seems perfectly well, except for that curious expression, to
our uninitiated gaze, but his voice is weak and there is a languor
about his movements extraordinarily out of keeping with his build,
which is all for strength, like that of a young Hercules.
“I’ll never be the same man again; I feel that. It’s shortened my life
by a many years. So it has with them over there.” He jerks his thumb
towards his comrades in misfortune. “They’ll none of them ever be the
same men again.”
The Signora tries feebly to protest, but the nurse acquiesces placidly.
It is the hospital way, and not a bad way either; misfortunes are not
minimized, they are faced.
The Signora has an unconquerable timidity where other people’s
reticences are concerned, and was far from emulating the amiable
audacity of a close relative--at present on a visit to the
Villino--whose voice she hears raised in the distance with query after
query: “Where was it? In your leg? Does it hurt? Do you mind? Do you
want to go back again?” But when she sees that the men indubitably like
this frank attack, and respond, smiling and stimulated, the silence of
her Canadian begins to weigh upon her. She tries him with a bashful
question:
“Is your home in a town in Canada?”
“No, not in a town. Three hundred and eighty miles away from the
nearest of any importance.”
“Oh, dear! Then it must take you a long time to hear from your people.”
The young harsh face darkens.
The post only comes to his home out yonder once a week, anyhow, but
he hasn’t heard but once since he left. Not at all since he came to
England wounded.
“Oh, dear!” exclaimed the Signora again, scenting a grievance. “But if
it’s so far away, you couldn’t have heard yet.”
The lowering copper-hued countenance--it is curiously un-English,
and reminds one vaguely of those frowning black marble busts in the
Capitol: young Emperors already savagely conscious of their own
unlimited power--takes a deeper gloom.
He could have heard. No. 9 had had a letter that morning, and _his_
home was forty miles further north.
“Had No. 9 a letter?” asks the little Sister.
She sits plump and placid in her cloak, and looks like a dove puffing
out her feathers in the sunshine. We have said she has a cooing voice.
“Yes, he had,” says the Canadian, and digs a vindictive finger into the
dry grass.
The Signora, fearing the conversation is going to lapse, plunges into
the breach.
“What was your work at home? Farming, I suppose.”
This remark meets with an unexpected success. The poor, fierce
eyes--that seem never to have ceased from contemplation of unpardonable
injury since that day at Ypres when the fumes of hell belched up before
them--brighten.
“Wa-al! I do sometimes this and sometimes that. I can do most things.
It’s just what I happen to want to put my hand to. I’m master of half a
dozen trades, I am. I’ve been on the farm, and I’m a blacksmith, and an
engineer on the railway; and a barber, and a butcher.”
“Dear me!” says the little Sister.
Her gaze is serenely fixed on the smiling green path. From the shadow
in which we sit, it leads to a slope out into the blaze of the
sunshine, where a cypress-tree rises like an immense green flame,
circled with a shimmer of light. But perhaps her tone conveys rebuke,
for our Canadian suddenly relapses into silence, from which we cannot
again entice him.
A little further away a friend who is staying with us, and the relative
above mentioned, are listening with intense interest to the talk of a
tall, black-moustached soldier. His face is very pale under its bronze;
he is the worst of the three gas victims who have come to-day. It is
only what are called the very slight cases that are treated in the
hospital close by.
A much older man this, who has been many years in the army and came
over with the Indian division. He has a gentle, thoughtful face. There
is no resentment in his eyes--only the look of one who has seen death
very close and does not forget--and a great languor, the mark of the
gas. He is talking very dispassionately of our reprisals.
“Oh yes, we have used our gas, the freezing-gas! But it don’t seem
hardly worth while. It draws their fire so.” Then, with an everyday
smile and no more emotion in his tone than if he were descanting on a
mousetrap, he goes on to describe the incredibly sudden effect of what
he calls the freezing-gas, which we suppose to be the French Turpinite.
“It freezes you up, so to speak, right off on the spot. You see a
fellow standing, turning his head to talk to a fellow near him. He
lifts his hand, maybe, in his talk like; then comes along the gas, and
there he stands. You think he’s going on talking. He’s frozen dead,
his arm up, looking so natural-like, same as might be me this minute.
Oh, it’s quick! what you call instantaneous. But it ain’t ’ardly worth
while. The Germans, you see, it draws their fire so. Two or three times
we got it in among our own men--oh, by mistake, miss, of course!” This
in response to the horrified ejaculation of his interlocutor. “And that
didn’t seem ’ardly worth while.”
Beyond this group, again, the daughter of the house, seated on a
croquet-box, is surrounded by three sprawling blue soldiers. One of
them is talking earnestly to her. The others are so much engaged in a
game of “Beggar my Neighbour” with three-year-old Vivi, the Belgian
baby, that they do not pay the smallest attention to their companion,
and yet what he is saying is horrible enough, startling enough, God
knows! The speaker is a fair, pleasant-looking boy with a cocked nose,
tightly curling auburn hair, and an air of vitality and energy that
makes it difficult to think of him as in anything but the perfection of
health. He is a territorial, and evidently belongs to that thinking,
well-educated, working class that has made such a magnificent response
to the country’s call.
“No, miss, we are not taking many prisoners now. No, we’re not likely
to. Well, think of our case. Just one little bit out of the whole long
line. They caught our sergeant--the sergeant of my company. We were
all very fond of him. Well, miss, they put him up where we could all
see him--top of their trench--and tortured him. Yes, miss, all day
they tortured him in sight of us, and all day we were trying to get
at them and we couldn’t. And when in the evening we did get at them,
he was dead, miss. We were all very fond of him. We weren’t likely
to give much quarter after that. And our officers”--here he smiles
suddenly--“well, miss, we’re Territorials, you see. Our officers just
let us loose. We’re Territorials,” he repeated. “They can’t keep us
as they keep the regulars. Not in the same military way. No, miss, we
didn’t give much quarter!”
Our daughter groans a little. She understands, she sympathizes, yet she
regrets. She would like our men to be as absolutely without reproach as
they are without fear.
“But you wouldn’t bring yourself down to the level of the Germans,” she
says; “you wouldn’t cease doing right because they do wrong?”
He fixes her with bright blue eyes, and they are hard as steel.
“Your British blood will boil,” he says slowly.
It seems impossible to associate such a dark and awful tragedy with
this slim English boy and his unconquerable air of joyous youth. The
Signorina remembers the repeated phrase, “We were all very fond of
him,” and she sickens from the thought of that hellish picture of
cruelty and agony on one side, of the impotent grief and rage on the
other.
To change the subject, she says:
“How were you wounded?”
And then it transpired he had been carrying in the British wounded at
the end of that day. He had been hit in the leg without knowing it, and
just as he was starting off to help to carry in the German wounded, he
collapsed.
_To help to carry in the German wounded!_ Those Germans who had
tortured his own comrade all day! Dear Tommy! Dear, straight, noble,
simple British soldier! How could one ever have mistrusted your rough
justice or your Christian humanity?
Real boy that he is, he warms up to the glee of narrating his
audacities when out at night with a party on listening-post duty.
“Rare fun it was,” he declares.
He used to creep up to the enemy’s trench and bayonet what came handy.
“I couldn’t fire, you see, miss, nor do anything likely to make a
noise, so it had to be done on the quiet. But I got a good many that
way.”
Baby Vivi is tired of her game of cards. For a while past she has been
amusing herself by boxing the two sitting soldiers. Very well-delivered
vigorous thumps she applies on their chests with her little fists,
and they obligingly go over backwards on the grass. She now comes to
exercise her powers on the Territorial. He catches her in his arms.
The men all look at the little girl with strange, troubled, tender
eyes. One knows what is at the back of their thought. One of them
expresses it presently.
“To think that anyone could ever hurt a little creature like that!”
Vivi’s young mother sits with her small group further away. She has
told them how she has fled out of her castle in the Ardennes at dawn,
without having had time even to pack her children’s clothes. They had
thought themselves safe with the pathetic hopefulness that filled poor
Belgium from the moment when the French troops and the English appeared
in strength upon the soil. “Now all is well,” they said; “now we are
safe.”
A French General and his staff lodged in the château, and the men
camped in the park. On the vigil of the day fixed for their intended
advance, the General took her on one side. An old man, he had been
through the whole of the war of ’70. He solemnly warned her of the
folly of remaining in her home, as she intended.
“Madame, I know the Germans. I know of what they are capable. I have
seen them at work; I have not forgotten.”
Should the invader reach a certain point within ten miles of the
district she must fly.
All that night the aviators kept coming with messages, and in the early
dawn they started. She was up and saw the cavalcade winding away
through the park. She stood in the porch to wish them God-speed. The
young men were full of ardour. They were going forth to meet the enemy.
The General was grave. When he had reached the public road, he sent
one of his aide-de-camps riding back at a gallop. Was it a premonition
of disaster, or had secret news reached him by some emissary from the
field of conflict? The message to her was, that she was to be gone at
once with her family. At once!
The young husband had already departed at break of day in their
automobile. He and his machine had been offered to the service of the
country and accepted. The mother, with her four little children--among
them the sturdy, two-year-old Viviane--had to walk to the station, with
what luggage could be got together and trundled down in a wheelbarrow.
Luckily it was not far--their own station just outside the park-gates.
They got the last train that ran from that doomed spot. The German guns
were within earshot as they steamed away.
In their hurry they had forgotten to bring any milk or water for the
baby girl. The heat was suffocating. The only thing that could be laid
hold of was a bottle of white wine which someone had thrust into a
bag. Vivi clamoured, and they gave her half a glassful in the end. She
enjoyed it very much, and it did not disagree with her at all.
The men in their blue garb listen to some of this story with profound
attention. They have a very touching, respectful, earnest way of
talking to the Belgian lady, and are very anxious to impress upon her
that soon they will have her country cleared of the enemy.
“You tell her that, miss. She do believe it, don’t she? We’re going to
sweep them out in no time. Tell her that, miss. That’s what we’re over
there for. She’ll soon be able to get back there--back in her own home.”
One of them gazes at her for a while in a kind of brooding silence, and
then says huskily:
“Isn’t it a mercy you got away, ma’am--you and your little children!”
He knows. He has seen.
Then Viviane is called upon to sing “Tipperary.”
Though only just three, this child, as has been said before, she looks
a sturdy four. The most jovial solid, red-cheeked, blue-eyed, smiling,
curly-haired little girl that it is possible to imagine. Her mother
says that she never lost her balance and tumbled down even when she
first began to toddle; and one can well believe it. There is a mixture
of strength and deliberation in everything she does that makes one
regret she is not a boy. But she has pretty, coaxing, coquettish ways
that are quite feminine.
She now puts her head on one side, and ogles with her blue eyes
first one soldier and another, and smiles angelically as she pipes
“Tipperary.”
This is a favourite song among the infant population these days. The
child of a friend of ours calls it her hymn, and sings it in church.
There is something really engaging in Viviane’s roll of the “r’s.”
Her Tipperary is very guttural and conscientious, and her “Good-bye,
Piccadeely” always provokes the laughter of admiration.
Encouraged by applause, she bursts into, “We don’t want to lose you,
but we think you ought to go.” And is quite aware, the little rogue,
of the effect she will presently produce when, upon an incredibly high
note, she announces, “We will _keess_ you.”
After this, she breaks into piety with, “Paradise, oh! Paradise.”
The little plump nurse gets up and shakes out her cloak. It is getting
quite late, and they must go back to the hospital. She marshals her
charges up on the terrace. They obey her just as if they were very good
little boys in charge of their schoolmistress.
“Now say good-bye, and thank you. I’m sure you’ve all enjoyed
yourselves. No. 20, where’s your hat? Go down and get your hat, No. 20.
No; his poor leg’s tired. You go down and get it, No. 13.”
“I seen it a while ago,” No. 13 announces obligingly.
They say “good-bye” and “thank you” with the conscientiousness of their
simple hearts. We shake, one after the other, those outstretched hands
that grip back so cordially.
A guest of the Villino--an honoured guest, who is not only one of the
most distinguished women artists of the day, but has lived all her
married life within sound of the drum; who has been always inspired
by the sights and scenes, the high glories and noble disasters of
warfare--expresses the feeling struggling in our hearts as she retains
the hand of the last of the file of blue-coats in hers: “What an honour
to shake the hand of a British soldier!”
We hear them troop away through the little courtyard, laughing and
talking. We think, as the small nurse said, that they have had a
pleasant time.
* * * * *
One of the small side amusements in life is to hear other people’s
reflections upon experiences that one has lived through together, and
to measure the distance that lies between different points of view. It
makes one realize how extraordinarily difficult it must be to obtain
reliable evidence.