across old Eliza! Me that drove her for more than three years. I knew
her at once, poor old girl! knocked about as she was; I’d have known
her anywhere, by the shape of her, knowing her in and out as I did
those years, every bit of her. She was a bit the worse for wear, but
she was fit for a lot yet; a trifle rattley; but there’s a deal of life
in her. I can’t tell you what I felt when I came across her so sudden.
There, I couldn’t help patting her and patting her! Poor old Eliza! To
think of her and me meeting again like that, both of us doing our bit,
like!”
* * * * *
This fourth day of July brings us the third of the rain and thunder
squalls which have followed the great drought.
Japhet says, relaxing to something approaching a smile, that he doesn’t
see why this should not end by being a nice garden, and that the earth
is in very good heart.
Dear English earth, it has need to be in good heart! Who knows what it
may yet have to bear and give?
The Villino garden wears the war-time stamp, at least to its owners’
eye! The Signora, who has always hitherto plunged at a horticultural
list the moment there was a gap in her borders that needed filling
or a mistake that needed repairing, which could not be done to her
sense of perfection “out of stock,” has had to teach economy to
wait on necessity, and ingenuity on both. The result is not really
gratifying. In all her long experience economy has never been
gratifying in any branch of life. But even if the money were there for
extravagance--which it isn’t--thrift has become a positive instead of
a negative virtue.
“Thou shalt not spend” is now nearly as urgent a commandment as “Thou
shalt not steal.”
It has set her mind to work more and more, however, upon the
desirability of permanence in the garden.
In the borders of the terraces round the house she has decided to put
a foot-deep edging of Mrs. Simkins pinks. These are adorable in their
time of bloom, and the grey-green foliage is tidy, and a pretty bit of
colour all the year round.
This year the lobelia, scantily planted, and the climbing geraniums,
pathetically subdivided, will take considerable time before forming
the show of flower and foliage without which the Villino garden is a
failure. But it is a very good thing for individuals as well as nations
to be forced to stop and examine their manner of life. Hideous as the
struggle is--dead loss of life and happiness and money--good comes out
of the evil at many points. Not the least beneficial lesson is that
which teaches us now what an extraordinary amount of money and energy
one has frittered away by easy-going ways, the amount of items one
can put down in a household without being the worse--rather, indeed,
the better! Even in a little household, what waste, what excess,
what follies of mere show! And if this seems a flat contradiction to
the remark upon economy passed a little while ago, let it be noted
that conscience and inclination are for ever waging war, and that
conscience, as is proper, must have the last word. Moreover, once the
domination of conscience is established, the results are, in nine cases
out of ten, surprisingly bearable. Frugality combines very well with
refinement, and simplicity with dignity. One can be as happy with a
three-course lunch and a three-course supper-dinner as one was with
an endless array of dishes--those dishes which took so much time and
material to prepare, and were so often barely touched! The contents
disappeared--thrown away, perhaps, or, what was certainly the case in
our household, disposed of as _hors d’œuvres_ between the dining-room
and the pantry.
“Why does your butler always come in chewing?” asked an observant
relative.
Juvenal, indeed, despite a certain foreign disregard for his
meal-times, made such a practice of snatching morsels in transit that
the sixteen-year old footman--chief of the many grievances which
determined our separation--who outstayed him, has had to be severely
reprimanded for making a clean sweep of the dishes that caught his
young fancy, with a special partiality for roast chicken.
The new regimen--agreeable this hot weather--of soup, one cold-meat
dish, salad, vegetable, sweet, and dessert--supper, in fact, instead
of dinner--has, besides its intrinsic economy, the further advantage
of diminishing the expenditure of kitchen coal to an almost incredible
degree.
We who have to render an account hereafter, even of every idle word,
shall we have to answer, we wonder, for all that unconscious waste
which mere convention has induced in our homes? How many poor families
might have been fed from the agglomeration of the Signora’s years of
housekeeping! She did not think. No one thought. It has taken this
scourge to make us stop in our easy course, to make us look into
ourselves, into our ways.
“What can we do? What can we do without?” These must be now the mottoes
written large round our house of life; and, indeed, the first includes
the second, for it takes considerable energy to abstain.
“There is none that thinketh in his heart, therefore they shall go down
alive into hell.”
A very disagreeable text, which comes disagreeably to the mind this
Sunday morning, for the _famiglia_ have just come back from church,
where what is vulgarly called a “hell-fire sermon” was delivered by a
Welsh preacher, who, though a Franciscan, is, one of his congregation
declared, a revivalist lost to his native hills.
“You ought to go down into hell in spirit every day, me brethren,” he
thundered, “or ye’ll very likely find yourselves there in the end. And
what an off-ful thing that ’ud be! And there’s thousands and thousands
of soa-ouls there this minute, better than you are!”
This was neither comforting, nor, we believe, theological, for the
congregation was small, and, on the whole, devout. But no doubt there
is a type of mind before which it is necessary to hold up a threat of
everlasting punishment; the type of person whom conscription alone can
move to serve his country before it is too late.
Not the least remarkable result of the German brutality is that the
great majority of its opponents find themselves forced back into the
old simplicity of belief. We can no longer afford to deny the existence
of demons and their power; and if reason is to keep her balance and the
soul her ultimate faith in Divine justice, acceptance of the doctrine
of hell and adequate punishment must logically follow.
A celebrated, if rather medievally minded, preacher, whom we once heard
lashing the vices of the day, cried sarcastically: “You’ll meet the
very best society in hell.”
Holy man, we doubt if he would have made the same remark to-day! The
resort in question must have become so overwhelmingly German.
_July 8._--The Signora had been a whole year at the Villino--perhaps
the longest time in all her life in one place--but circumstances
had summoned her family to London for a few days, and she could not
contemplate their being exposed to Zeppelins without her.
The little London house which was our home so long, and--to use nursery
parlance--the nose of which has been so completely put out of joint by
the Villino, seemed glad to see us again.
How curious is the atmosphere of place! These walls that enfold us,
that have seen our swift joys and our great sorrows, our merry hours
and our sad ones, become fond of us, as we of them. We are convinced
that there is a spirit in inanimate things, something that gives back,
that keeps. Do not old places ponder? Are they not set with memories?
Do they not know their own? Do they not withhold themselves and suffer
from the stranger? Who has not seen the millionaire striving to make
himself at home in the great house that will have none of him? Who has
not felt what an accident he is, how little he belongs, how little he
or his race will ever belong to the stones he has bought, and which he
will never own?
And even a little London house in a street may become individual to
oneself; and you may feel as the Signora did, that it has missed you,
that through long absence you have been unkind; that if you finally
separate yourself from it, it will always want you, and you it.
And, after all--it is with houses, as with people--the link is not
necessarily that of the blood relationship or long acquaintance. You
need not have inherited your affinity. You are in sympathy, or you are
not. The Villino claimed us upon our first meeting, but we impressed
ourselves upon the town dwelling. It is still home to us; not _the_
home, _a_ home.
We sat in the high-ceilinged drawing-room, with its rather delicate
Georgian air, and found old familiar emotions waiting for us. And we
thought of all the kind and dear friends we had seen between these
walls; of our gay little parties and the music-makers who had made
music to us; hours that seemed to belong to another life. Here the
great Pole, whose magic hands have refused themselves to the notes ever
since his people have been in anguish, made the night wonderful with
his incomparable art. We do not think the small London house can ever
forget the echoes of that music. It was always a feast for it when
he, with whose friendship we feel ourselves so deeply honoured, came
to its board. Loki--he was in his puppyhood then--decorated with the
Polish colours, would dance towards him on his hind-legs. The genius
would come in like sunshine, happy himself in the immense pleasure his
presence gave. Certainly this rare being seemed to give forth light.
“When he leaves the room,” said a friend of his to us, “it is as if the
light went out.”
If one had the gift of beholding auras, what a halo of fire would one
not have seen about that wonderful head? We once said this to him.
“Do you believe in it?” we asked.
He smiled. “I think everyone has got his flame to cultivate. I think I
have cultivated mine.”
Most truly, indeed, has he done so; and not only in the divine way of
his art, for year by year the selflessness and the magnanimity of his
character seem to deepen and extend; and so, too--inevitable tragedy
of years--the sadness. Impossible for any perfectly noble mind not to
gather melancholy as life goes on!--a melancholy culminating in his
case with the burthen of agony which the present sufferings of his own
race have laid upon his shoulders.
Therefore these memories of the days when he was as a young god, the
days when a celebrated painter could find no truer way of expressing
him than by flinging on the canvas the radiant vision of an Apollo, are
poignant memories. We are glad that we should have them, yet they bring
a stab of pain for that lost high spirit which life inevitably dashes.
With us all, the good ship Youth sets forth merrily with sails taut and
pennons fluttering, filling to the wind and breasting the waves! We
know that inevitably the storm winds must catch her; that she will be
beaten by breakers; drawn out of her course by false currents; that if
she become not a derelict, if she does not founder with all hands, she
must--too often--cast much of her treasure overboard, furl her white
wings, and come creeping into a cold harbour. Even those who, like our
rare and wonderful friend, have gathered glory and dignity and power,
as they plough a mighty course, have passed from under radiant skies
into the gloom of the storm. A sombre thing, the human span, at the
best, and most blest nowadays.
What can we say of the fair craft that founders almost as soon as
launched? Ah! the young ghosts in that London drawing-room! The
sound of the children’s voices yet ringing in our ears! There is
“Mustard-Seed,” the splendid little fair boy, who had been the
favourite of our Shakesperian revels nine years ago--not yet nineteen,
not a month a soldier--shot through the head on that Flanders field,
the graveyard of England’s choicest! And the little Scotch lad, who
used to prance about in his black velvet suit, with cheeks that shamed
the apple--no one knows where he lies to-day; only two or three saw him
fall. And his graver, gentler brother--a prisoner, even as we write in
the first agony of the grief which has befallen him in the loss of his
life-companion!
And out of a merry group of Irish children, irresponsible,
high-spirited, noisy, two brothers sleep in that alien earth--now for
ever English--“where their young dust lies,” as the poet who wrote so
prophetically of his own fate has beautifully said. And yet another
is wounded, and another invalided; and the once merry sister, whose
gallant husband was left wounded on the field and was missing long
weeks, still mourns him as a prisoner.
Of the rest of the company, those companions of our daughter’s own
unclouded childish days, some are widows; and some can scarce meet the
morning for apprehension of its news, or return to their homes for
fear of that orange envelope that may lie on the hall table, or sleep
in the night for listening for the sound of the bell. And some are in
the Dardanelles, under skies of brass, treading on earth of iron, and
some are in those trenches, deep-dyed and battered a hundredfold. Two
more brothers--the elder twenty and the younger nineteen--fell within a
month of each other. A few are still on English soil, light-heartedly
preparing for the great fray, straining like hounds at the leash,
staring with bright, impatient eyes towards that goal with its unknown
and terrible possibilities; cursing the slow flight of time. Of these
one thinks, perhaps, with a heart more tightened than of all the rest!
The reaper has come forth to reap out of season, and the young corn is
mown down in the green ear, and all the poppies and the pretty flowers
go down with it.
Sitting in rooms which we had not revisited since before the war, these
are sad thoughts that the crowded recollections bring.
London itself, however, seemed little changed; even that much-discussed
night-darkness hardly noticeable. Driving in the daytime we
instinctively counted, with frowning glance, the number of stalwart
young men out of uniform, and wondered how any girl could walk with
them, much less smile upon them. And our eyes followed the soldiers
with pride as they marched by, singing popular catches to inspire
themselves in default of the band which the stern necessities of this
war forbid. What fine fellows they are--so well set up, looking out
with such steady vision upon the future which they have chosen! And the
lilt of the merry tune, with what a deep note of pathos it strikes upon
the ear!
Of course there are a great many soldiers about London, yet no more
than in Jubilee time, and there is no greater excitement among them,
and a good deal less among those who watch them pass, than in the days
when it was all pomp and circumstance, and no warfare.
London does not carry the stamp of war about her, but we carry it each
one of us in our hearts. That is why we sicken from the music-hall
posters; why wrath and grief mingle in our minds at the sight of that
bold-eyed community with its whitened face, its vulgar exaggeration
of attire, and its unchecked and unashamed hunting of its prey; a
prey sometimes visibly unwilling, sometimes pathetically, innocently
flattered!
The Zeppelin menace has created no sense of apprehension in the town.
The first night of our arrival we conscientiously prepared amateur
respirators for ourselves and such of the _famiglia_ as accompanied us.
Pads of cotton-wool, soaked in a strong solution of soda, were placed
within easy reach of the bedside. The next night we said “Bother!”
and the third night we forgot all about it. Though the Signora, lying
awake, had occasionally a half-amused speculation whether the throbbing
passage of some more than usually loud traction-engine, or the distant
back-firing of a belated taxicab, might not be the bark of the real
wolf at last!
Our little white-haired housemaid, generally left alone to mind the
London house, possesses this philosophic indifference. She made herself
a respirator. We doubt whether she ever thinks of placing it handy. We
believe she shares the view of the old nurse of a friend of ours into
whose garden a bomb really and truly did drop during the recent raid on
Southend.
“Frightened, miss? Lord bless you, no! I knew it was only them Germans!”
Nevertheless, though London is neither alarmed nor depressed, we set
our faces towards the Villino again with a sense of relief. These days
it is better to be in one’s own place; and in London we feel only
visitors now. Yet, strangely, the country is far more full of the war
than the town.
Beginning at Wimbledon, we meet motorcars filled to overflowing with
bandaged, bronze-faced young men, who smile and wave their hands as we
whizz by. Dear lads! Some from that greater England beyond the sea,
more closely our brothers now than ever before, with ties cemented by
the shedding of blood. _Blut-Bruderschaft_, indeed, you have pledged
with us: a Teutonic rite put into practice after a fashion our enemies
thought out of the range of possibility.
And presently we come to the camps. Here, where the pine-woods solitary
marched, where the heather was wont to spread, crimsoning and purpling
to the line of blue distance--a wonderful vision of wild scenery--here
is a brown waste, peopled with a new town. Rows and rows of wooden
huts run in parallel lines. Where the trees stood you cannot even
guess; but once and again there is the smell of the raw wood, and you
see a giant lying lopped of his branches. And the whole place swarms
in activity. We pass hundreds of ammunition and gun carriages--the
two-wheeled carts for the new howitzers--some already with the guns
in place; long sheds where half a dozen smiths are busy shoeing, with
groups of patient horses, shoulder by shoulder, waiting outside; we
hear the clank of iron upon iron from within; we catch the vision of
red fire upon the sleek flank and the brawny arms wielding the hammer.
Horses everywhere, it seems--lines of them, picketed; horsemen coming
and going: detachments riding up and down among the thickest dust
that you have ever imagined; and waggons lumbering, some charged with
fodder, some, as we pass, with loaves fresh from the baking. And now a
traction-engine, filling the air with noise and smoke, driven by two
grimy Tommies who shout at each other as they throb and bumble along,
has to be dodged and left behind.
This is an artillery camp--a marvellous place which gives one a more
vivid impression of England’s strength, of England’s new army, than any
words can describe. These splendid, happy, vigorous, busy men; these
rows of howitzer and ammunition carts; these thousands of sleek, lively
horses; this untiring, determined movement of work and preparation ...
all for the Dardanelles, we hear.
We get out of the dust and the noise and the gigantic stir, and along
the green roads again; and then into another camp. A curious stillness
here: the myriad huts are all shut up, the sheds empty, even the new
shops seemingly untenanted; only here and there stands a stray khaki
figure to emphasize the loneliness. They left for the front the day
before yesterday. To-morrow twenty thousand new men are expected, like
a new swarm of bees, to take their place in the vacated hives.
* * * * *
Home again in the Villino, with all the fur babies washed and waiting
for us. Rather a silent group of dogs, a little offended because we
went away. Loki, who generally screams with rapture, has certainly a
reservation in the ecstasy of his greetings; but Mimosa clings to us
with two little paws, like a child hugging a recovered treasure, and
offers kisses, of which she is not generally prodigal. Plain Eliza is
shy. She has grown perceptibly in three days.
The garden is full of sweet scents. The dawn, the coronation, and the
crimson ramblers are bursting into lovely bloom beside the blue of the
delphiniums.
There was always a special kind of joy in the old days about
home-coming to the Villino. We used to go from room to room, taking
stock of the dear, queer little place; greeting the serene, smiling
Madonnas; the aloof angels folded into their prayers; pagan, pondering
Polyhymnia in her corner of the drawing-room, brooding upon the glory
of times that will never be again.... It is all just as it used to be:
bowery, without and within, as usual.
Everything is scrubbed to the last point of daisy freshness and
polished to spicy gloss against the Padrona’s return, and smiling
damsels await compliments on the stairs. Other years, as we say, these
were moments of unalloyed light-heartedness. It was always unexpectedly
nicer than we had imagined.
“Isn’t it dearer than ever?” we would say, then, to each other. “Don’t
you love it? Aren’t we happy here?”
This year it is another cry that rises to our lips.
“Oh, how happy we might be, if only----”
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND
Transcriber's Note:
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
possible.
Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
The following is a list of changes made to the original.
The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one.
Page 13
by Mrs. MacComfort as umistakably Mimi’s
by Mrs. MacComfort as unmistakably Mimi’s
Page 21
surrounted with politely assisting Hoheiten.
surrounded with politely assisting Hoheiten.
Page 46
“_Ah, voilà qui m’est bien egal!_ That is my own
“_Ah, voilà qui m’est bien égal!_ That is my own
Page 70
up, Birdie’--he calls me ‘Birdie,’--but I can
up, Birdie’--he calls me ‘Birdie,’--‘but I can
Page 130
ontclusion to draw that the mere fact of death
conclusion to draw that the mere fact of death
cheem, in the eyes of most people, to qualify
seems, in the eyes of most people, to qualify
ses soul for eternal bliss. It is idle to ask whaf
the soul for eternal bliss. It is idle to ask what
becomes of the generally accepted doctrine fo
becomes of the generally accepted doctrine of
certain to be saved, anyone should put himselt
certain to be saved, anyone should put himself
Page 151
of a beautiful little daughter.
of a beautiful little daughter.”
Page 178
Artist, in all reverence be it said. “He hath
Artist, in all reverence be it said: “He hath
Page 191
Trainant la jambe dans la poussière
Traînant la jambe dans la poussière
Page 197
there is a langour about his movements extraordinarily
there is a languor about his movements extraordinarily
Page 206
To think that anyone could ever hurt a
“To think that anyone could ever hurt a
Page 224
the swine!”
the swine!’”
Page 225
blazing. All the langour, the unacknowledged
blazing. All the languor, the unacknowledged
Page 240
terrible there just now
terrible there just now.
Page 265
It is still home to us; not _the_ home, _a_ home
It is still home to us; not _the_ home, _a_ home.
Page 269
bell. And some are in the Dardenelles, under
bell. And some are in the Dardanelles, under