Chapter II: Part 2

We do not know whether the unknown Church dignitary, the mysterious Lady Abbess, or the nameless wirer from Hammersmith were responsible for the mistake. We do not think it can have been our high-minded but harassed friend of the Aldwych, as some six weeks later we received a secretarial document from that centre of activity, asking whether it was true that we had offered to receive Belgians, and if so: what number and what class would we prefer to attend to? By that time, we may mention, we had been instrumental in establishing about sixty of every variety in the environs.

However, we had reason not to regret the misunderstanding which brought Madame Koelen under our roof.

It was “Miss Marie,” the Villino’s Signorina, who went down to meet her, accompanied by those kindly neighbours. Madame Koelen descended from the railway-carriage in tears.

“Poor young thing,” we said, “it is only natural she must be heart-broken--flying from her home with her poor little children!”

The first bombardment of Antwerp had been the signal for a great exodus from that doomed city.

“We were living in cellars, _n’est-ce pas?_ and it was not good for the children, _vous savez_, so my husband said: ‘You must go, _vite, vite_; the last boats are departing.’ We had not half an hour to pack up.”

It was a piteous enough spectacle. She had a little girl not three, another not two, and a three-months-old baby which she was nursing. We thought of the poor distracted husband and father; and the forlorn struggle on the crowded boat; and the dreadful landing on unknown soil, herded together as they were, poor creatures! like a huddled flock of sheep; and our hearts bled.

Towards evening, however, when calm settled down again on the astonished Villino, and Madame Koelen, having left her children asleep, was able to enjoy Mrs. MacComfort’s choice little dinner, she became confidential to the young daughter of the house. She began by telling us that we must not imagine that because a name had a German sound that her husband’s family had the remotest connection with the land of the Bosch. On the contrary, he was of Italian extraction; descended, in fact, from no less a race than the Colonnas! Having thus established her credentials, she embarked on long rambling tales of the flight, copiously interlaced with the name of an Italian gentleman; “a friend of my husband”; a certain Monsieur Mérino.

“When my husband was putting us on the _remorqueur_ at Flushing, we saw him standing on the quay, _vous savez_, and then he said, _n’est-ce pas_: ‘Ah, Mérino, are you going to England? Then look after my wife!’”

And Monsieur Mérino had been so good, and Monsieur Mérino had amused the children, and Monsieur Mérino was so anxious to know how they were established, and Monsieur Mérino would probably come down to see for himself, and Monsieur Mérino was so droll!

We are very innocent people, and we accepted Monsieur Mérino in all good faith. We announced ourselves as happy to receive him; we were touched by his solicitude. Madame Koelen had surprisingly cheered, but there was yet a cloud upon her brow.

“Still,” she said, “I do not think it was right of my cousin to have accepted to dine alone with Monsieur Mérino, and to have passed the night in London in the same hotel with only her little brother to chaperon her--a child of eight, _n’est-ce pas?_--and she only eighteen, _vous savez_, and expected in Brighton.”

We quite concurred. Monsieur Mérino’s halo grew slightly paler in our eyes. Monsieur Mérino ought not to have asked her, we said, with great propriety.

Madame Koelen exploded.

“Ah, if you had seen the way she went on with him on the boat! She was all the time trying to have a flirt with him. Poor Monsieur Mérino! and God knows what _blague_ she has told him, for he was never at the station to see us off, and he had promised to be there, _n’est-ce pas?_ Oh, I was so angry! _Cette Jeanne_, she prevented him! I cried all the way down in the train.”

Certainly she had been crying when we first beheld her; and we who had thought!----

Madame Koelen was a handsome, sturdy creature, who would have made the most splendid model for anyone wishing to depict a _belle laitière_. Short, deep-chested, and broad-hipped, her strong, round neck supported a defiant head with masses of blue-black hair; she had a kind of frank coarse beauty--something the air of a young heifer, only that heifers have soft eyes, and her eyes, bright brown, were hard and opaque; something the air of a curious child, with a wide smile that displayed faultless teeth, and was full of the joy of life; the kind of joy the milkmaid would appreciate! We could quite understand that Monsieur Mérino should find her attractive.

Before the next day had elapsed we began to understand her view of the situation also. Like so many other Belgian women whom we have known, she had been married practically from the convent, only to pass from one discipline to another. The husband in high-burgherdom, as well as in the more exalted class, likes to pick out his wife on the very threshold of the world, so that he can have the moulding of her unformed nature; so that no possible chance can be afforded her of drawing her own conclusions on any subject. The horizon of the Belgian _nouvelle-mariée_ is rigidly bound by her home, and the sole luminary in her sky is her husband. She must bask on his smiles, or not at all. And if the weather be cloudy, she must resign herself and believe that rain is good for the garden of her soul. Presently the lesser luminaries appear in the nursery, and then her cup of happiness is indeed full; the fuller the happier!

“_Il ne me lâche pas d’une semelle!_” said an exasperated little lady to us one day, referring to the devoted companionship of a typical husband.

No wonder, when Monsieur Mérino flashed across the widening horizon of Madame Koelen with comet-like brilliancy, that the poor little woman should be thrilled and dazzled.

When, on the morning after her arrival, the papers announced an intermittent bombardment of Antwerp, she screamed: “Ah, _par exemple_, it is I who am glad not to be there!” without the smallest show of anxiety on the score of the abandoned Koelen. We realized that, to quote again our frank and charming friend: “_Ce n’était pas l’amour de son mari qui l’étouffait!_” And when she next proceeded to hang on to the telephone, and with many cackles and gurgles to hold an animated conversation with the dashing Mérino, we began to hope that that gentleman might not make his appearance at the Villino.

He did, however, next day; and, under pretence of visiting houses, carried away the emancipated Madame Koelen for a prolonged motor drive, leaving the three-months-old baby to scream itself into fits in the attic room upstairs; she was tied into her crib while the little _bonne_ promenaded the other two in the garden.

The Villino is a tender-hearted place, and the members of the _famiglia_ vied with each other in endeavouring to assuage the agonies of the youngest Miss Koelen, but nobody could provide the consolation she required.

Madame Koelen and her _cavaliere servente_ returned for a late tea, no whit abashed; indeed, extremely pleased with themselves. He had a great deal to say in an assured and airy manner, and she hung on his words with her broad smile and many arch looks from those brilliant opaque red-brown orbs.

Monsieur Mérino was tall, quite good-looking; with a smooth olive face, fair hair, and eyes startlingly blue, in contrast to the darkness of his skin. He gave us a great deal of curious information. Summoned from Antwerp, where he had a vague business, he was on his way to join the Italian colours, but, calling on the Italian Ambassador in London, the latter had given him leave to defer his departure for another ten days. He was, therefore, able to devote his entire attention to the interests of Madame Koelen, which he felt would be most reassuring to her husband.

We rather wondered why the Italian Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s should occupy himself with the movements of a casual Italian merchant _en route_ from Antwerp; or by what curious intermingling of international diplomatic arrangements he should be able to give military leave to a reservist; but we were too polite to ask questions.

Monsieur Mérino departed with many bows and scrapes and hand-shakes; and Madame Koelen evidently found that existence by comet light was worth having.

In the course of the evening she was very communicative on the subject of this gentleman, and several anecdotes of his drollery on board ship were imparted to us. She had found out that he was married--that was a funny thing, _n’est-ce pas?_ She had always heard of him about Antwerp as a bachelor.

“We thought he was a friend of your husband’s,” we faltered.

“Oh, a friend--a coffee-house acquaintance, _tout au plus_!...

“It was very droll. It came about this way. He was playing with little Maddy, and I said to him: ‘Oh! the good Papa that you will make when you marry.’ Judge of my astonishment when he looks at me and says: ‘I am married already! Yes,’ he said, ‘I am married, and my wife lives at Sorrento; I see her once in six weeks when I make my voyage of business. _J’ai des idées sur le mariage,’ il dit, comme ça._”

These ideas she next began to develop.

“‘I do not think one ought to be bound,’ he says. ‘Do you not agree with me, Madame, a man ought to be free?’ Oh, he was comic!”

“But,” we said, “we do not think that is at all nice.” The Villino is very moral. Its shocked atmosphere instantly made itself felt on Madame Koelen. Her bright eye became evasive.

“Of course I made him _la leçon_ at once. Ah! I very well made him understand I do not approve of these _façons_. My husband teases me; I am so serious, so rigid!”

Before we separated that evening she told us in a disengaged voice that she would spend the next day in London. Monsieur Mérino could not rest, it transpired, knowing her in such dangerous surroundings; so far from a station, in a place so likely, from its isolated inland position, to be the objective of the first German raid. He was, therefore, going to occupy himself about another home for her; and at the same time he would take the opportunity of conducting her to the Consul, for “it seems,” she said, “that I shall have to pay a _grosse amende_ if I do not go immediately in person to register myself in London.”

“But the baby,” we faltered.

“Oh, the baby!”--she flicked the objection from her--“the baby will get on very well with Justine. Justine knows how to manage her.”

Justine was the minute _bonne_ who had tied the infant into the cot.

Then there was Monsieur Mérino. The more we thought of it, the less we felt that Monsieur Mérino was to be trusted. Luridly our imagination worked; we saw ourselves left with three small Koelens in perpetuity; we pictured that baby screaming itself into convulsions. We thought it quite probable that we might never hear of its Mama again. And poor Papa Koelen, the brave Anversois Garde Civique, dodging bombs in ignorance of the horrible happening!

The Master of the Villino was prevailed upon to speak; in fact, to put his foot down. Next morning he spoke, and crushed the incipient elopement with a firm metaphorical tread.

“Madame, this plan seems to be rash in the extreme. I cannot permit it to take place from under my roof. I feel, justly or unjustly, a mediocre confidence in Monsieur Mérino. You will, if you please, wire to him that you are prevented from meeting him.”

Madame Koelen became very white, and though her opaque eyes flashed fury, she gave in instantly; being a young Belgian wife, she was accustomed to yield to masculine authority.

Again she hung on the telephone. We were too discreet to listen, but radiance returned to her countenance.

After lunch she explained the cause. Next morning she and her whole family would depart. Monsieur Mérino would himself convey them to Brighton.

The mistress of the Villino is occasionally troubled with an inconvenient attack of conscience--sometimes she wonders if it is only the spirit of combativeness. In this instance, however, she felt it her duty to warn Madame Koelen.

It was a brief but thrilling conversation. Madame Koelen, her eldest little daughter on her knee, occasionally burying her handsome countenance in the child’s soft hair, was as cool and determined, as silky and evasive as a lusty young snake. She had a parry for every statement; that she ate up her own words and manifestly lied from beginning to end did not affect her equanimity in the least. It was the Signora who was nonplussed. There is nothing before which the average honest mind remains more helpless than the deliberate liar.

Monsieur Mérino was her husband’s oldest friend. He was intimate with her whole family. She herself had known him for years. She was under his charge by her husband’s wishes. She had probably been aware of his marriage, but it had merely slipped her memory--not having his wife with him in Antwerp made one forget it. He was perfectly right to invite her young cousin to dine with him, since she had her brother to chaperon her. Certainly the brother was grown up and able to chaperon her! How extraordinary of us to imagine anything different!

“You are young, and you do not know life, my dear,” said the Signora at last, succeeding in keeping her temper, though with difficulty.

Madame Koelen bit into Maddy’s curls. It was quite evident she meant to know life. She had got her chance at last, and would not let it escape.

“I do not think,” said the unhappy hostess, firing her final shot, “that your husband would approve.”

The wife wheeled with a sudden savage movement, not unlike that of a snake about to strike.

“_Ah, voilà qui m’est bien égal!_ That is my own affair!”

There was nothing more to be said. We wondered whether the Garde Civique had ever had such a glimpse of the real Geneviève Koelen as had just been revealed to us. Even to us it was startling.

An extraordinary hot afternoon it turned out. The sun was too blazing for us to venture beyond the shadow of the house. We sat on the terrace, and Madame Koelen wandered restlessly up and down, biting at a rose. The master of the Villino suddenly appeared among us, all smiles.

“A telegram for you, Madame. I have just taken it down on the telephone. It is from your husband. He is coming here to-day.”

He was very glad; it was the burden of responsibility lifted. Not so, however, Madame Koelen.

“From my husband? How droll!”

She snapped the sheet of paper and walked away, conning it over.

We sat and watched her.

The garden was humming with heat. The close-packed heliotrope beds in the Dutch garden under the library window were sending up gushes of fragrance. In the rose-beds opposite, the roses--“General MacArthur,” “Grüss aus Teplitz,” “Ulrich Brunner,” “Barbarossa” (we hope these friendly aliens will soon be completely degermanized), crimson carmine, velvet scarlet, glorious purple--seemed to be rimmed with gold in the sun-blaze. It was a faultless sky that arched our world, and the moor, already turning from silver amethyst to the ardent copper of the burnt heather, rolled up towards it, like a sleeping giant wrapped in robes of state.

On such a day the inhabitants of the Villino would, in normal times, have found life very well worth living indeed; basking in the sun and just breathing in sweetness, warmth, colour--aspiring beauty, if this can be called living! But in war time the subconsciousness of calamity is ever present. Inchoate apprehension of bad news from the front is massed at the back of one’s soul’s horizon, so that one lives, as it were, under the perpetual menace of the storm.

The wonderful summer was being rent, laid waste, somewhere not so very far away; and the sun was shining, even as it was shining on these roses, on blood outpoured--the best blood of England! In the hot Antwerp streets, we pictured to ourselves some tired man going to and fro; the weight of the gun on his shoulder, the weight of his heavy heart in his breast; thinking of his wife and little children, hunted exiles in a strange country, while duty kept him, their natural protector, at his post in the fated city.

To have seen what we read on that young wife’s face would have been horrible at any time: it was peculiarly at variance with the peace of the golden afternoon, and the lovely harmony of the garden. But in view of her country’s desolation and her husband’s share in its splendid and hopeless defence, it was hideous. We do not even think she had the dignity of a _grande passion_ for the fascinating Mérino; it was mere vanity, the greed of a pleasure-loving nature free to indulge itself at last. She was only bent on amusing herself, and the unexpected arrival of her husband interfered with the little plan. Therefore she stood looking at his message with a countenance of ugly wrath.

“_Ah, ça, qu’il est ennuyeux!_... What has taken him to follow me like this?”

The thoughts were printed on her face.

“Is it not delightful?” said the guileless master of the Villino, who never can see evil anywhere.

“Ah, yes, indeed,” said she; “delightful!”

She could no more put loyalty into her tone than into her features.

“Heaven help Koelen!” thought the Signora, and was heartily sorry for the unknown, but how glad, how indescribably thankful, that the planned expedition had been prevented!

Dramatically soon after his telegram Monsieur Koelen arrived--an exhausted, pathetic creature. He had stood twelve hours in the steamer because it was so packed with exiled humanity that there was not room to sit down. He had exactly two hours in which to see his wife, having to catch the night boat again from Harwich. He had given his word of honour to return to Antwerp within forty-eight hours.

We did not, of course, witness the meeting, but it was a very, very _piano_ Madame Koelen who brought Koelen down to tea; and it was a cold, steely look which his tired eyes fixed upon her between their reddened eyelids. Whether he really came to put his valuables in the bank, whether he was driven by some secret knowledge or suspicion of his wife’s character, we shall never know. We naturally refrained from mentioning the name of Monsieur Mérino. The host deemed his responsibility sufficiently met by a single word of advice:

“Madame is very young; we hope you will place her with people you know.”

Monsieur Mérino was mentioned, however, by the husband himself. It transpired Madame owed him money. She wished to see him again to pay him.

“I will pay him,” said Monsieur Koelen icily; “I will call at his hotel on my way.”

Madame’s head drooped.

“_Bien, mon chéri_,” she murmured, in a faint voice.

In a turn of the hand, as they would have said themselves, her affairs were arranged. She was to go to Eastbourne, under the care of some elderly aunts, Monsieur Koelen presently announced.

We had thought he looked like a hunted hare. He had that expression of mortal agony stamped on his face, which is often seen--more shame for us!--on some poor dumb creature in terror for its life; but he had still enough spirit in him to reduce Madame Koelen to abject submission.

We could see he was oppressed with melancholy: that his heart was bursting over the children. We understood that this parting was perhaps worse for him than those first rushed farewells.

He seemed scarcely to have arrived before he was gone again. The young wife must have had some spark of feeling left--perhaps, after all, under the almost savage desire for a fling she had a stratum of natural affection, common loyalty--for she wept bitterly after his departure, and, that night, for the first time, came into the little chapel and prayed.

We met the nurse with the children in the garden, just as the father was being driven away: a small, upright creature this, with flax-blue eyes and corn-coloured hair, which she wore in plaits tightly wound round her head. She did not look a day more than sixteen, but she had the self-possession of forty; and possessed resource also, as was demonstrated by her dealings with Baby.

“Monsieur is so sad. Madame is so sad, because of Antwerp, _n’est-ce pas?_” she said to us, and by the sly look in those blue eyes we saw that she was in her mistress’s confidence.

It was true that he was sad for Antwerp; if the word “sad” can be used to describe that bleak despair which we have noticed in so many Belgian men who have found shelter in this country.

“It is impossible that Antwerp should hold out,” he said to us; “the spies and traitors have done their work too well. The spies are waiting for them inside our walls. They know every nook in every fort, every weak spot better than we do ourselves.”

That was mid September, and we put his opinion down to a very natural pessimism. No one knew then of the concrete platform under the gay little villa outside the walls, built by the amiable German family who was so well known and respected at Antwerp; and we have since heard, too, of the shells supplied by Krupp and filled with sand; and the last Krupp guns made of soft iron, which crumpled up after the first shot.

Alas, he was justified in his gloomy prophecy! But we do not think that it was as much the sense of national calamity that overwhelmed him as the acute family anxiety. Yet, honest, good, severe, ugly little man--worth a hundred plausible, handsome, lying scamps such as Mérino--he was a patriot before all else! He would have had a very good excuse, we think, for delaying another twelve hours to place his volatile spouse in safety with the elderly relations at Eastbourne--but he had given his word. Had he arrived at the Villino only to find that she had tripped off to London, with that chance acquaintance of cafés, Monsieur Mérino (to whose care he had in a distraught moment committed her); had he thereafter been assailed by the most hideous doubts; had he believed, as we did, that she meant to abandon husband and babes at this moment of all others; or had he--scarcely less agonizing surmise!--trembled for her, innocent and lost in London, the prey of a villain, we yet believe that he would have kept his word.

“_J’ai donné ma parole d’honneur!_”

What a horrible, tragic story it might have been, fit for the pen of a Maupassant! We shall never cease to be thankful that it did not happen. That is why we are glad to have received Madame Koelen at the Villino.

* * * * *

Our next refugees came to us quite by accident, and then only for a meal. A home had already been prepared for them in the village, but the excellent Westminster Canon, who seemed to be the channel through which the stream of refugees was pouring to us, announced five, and casually added a sixth at the last minute, with the result that the party were not recognized at the station. The name of the Villino having become unaccountably associated with every refugee that arrives in this part of the world, the Van Heysts landed _en masse_ at our doors, demanded to have their cab paid, and walked in.

We all happened to be out, and Juvenal, our eccentric butler, acquiesced. Standing on one leg afterwards, he explained that, being aware of our ways, he didn’t know, he was sure, but what we might have meant to put them somewhere.

Weary, tragic creatures, we weren’t sorry, after all, to speed them on their road! The three fair-haired children were fed with bread-and-butter, and the young mother talked plaintively in broken French, while the old grandfather nodded his head corroboratively. But the father: he was like a creature cast in bronze--would neither eat nor speak. He sat staring, his chin on his hand, absorbed in the contemplation of outrage and disaster.

They were from Malines.

“And then, mademoiselle, it was all on fire, and the cannon were sending great bombs; and we fled as quick as we could, _n’est-ce pas?_ I with the littlest one in my arms, and the other two running beside me. For five hours we walked. Yes, mademoiselle, the two little girls, they went the whole way on foot, and that one there always crying, ‘_Plus vite, maman! plus vite, maman!_’ and pulling at my apron.”

The young husband sat staring. Was he for ever beholding his little house in flames, or what other vision of irredeemable misery? He remains inconsolable. Poor fellow! he has heart disease; he thinks he will never see his native land again. And there is yet another little one expected. Alas! alas!

* * * * *

Of quite another calibre are the Van Sonderdoncks; a very lively, cheery family this! There are, of course, a grandpapa, a maiden aunt, a couple of cousins, as well as the bustling materfamilias, the quaint wizened papa, the well-brought-up Jeanne, who can embroider so nicely, and the four little pasty boys with red hair and eyes like black beads. They are comfortably established in a very charming house lent by a benevolent lady, who also feeds them.

On the Signorina’s first visit she found Madame Van Sonderdonck in a violent state of excitement. She had received such extraordinary things in the way of provisions “_de cette dame_.” If mademoiselle would permit it, she would like to show her something--but something--she could not describe it; it was _trop singulier_. “One moment, mademoiselle.”

She fled out of the room and returned with--a vegetable marrow!

She was rather disappointed to find that mademoiselle was intimately acquainted with this freak of nature, which she surveyed from every angle with intense suspicion and curiosity. Politeness kept her from expressing her real feelings when she was assured of its excellence cooked with cheese and onion and a little tomato in a flat dish, but her countenance expressed very plainly that she was not going to risk herself or her family.

Having failed to impress with the marrow, she repeated the effect with sago. She had eaten it raw. Naturally, having thus become aware of its real taste, she could not be expected to believe it would be palatable in any guise. Nevertheless, she was indulgent to our eccentricities. If anyone remembers the kind of amused, condescending interest that London society took in the pigmies, when those unfortunate little creatures were on show at parties a few years ago, they can form some idea of Madame Van Sonderdonck’s attitude of mind towards England.

Good humour reigned in the family as we found it.

Though papa Sonderdonck had a bayonet thrust through his neck--he had been in the Garde Civique--and they had already had a battle-royal with the Belgian family who shared the house, they seemed to view the whole situation as a joke. As they had routed their fellow refugees--the latter only spoke Flemish, Madame Van Sonderdonck only French, and an interpreter had to be found to convey mutual abuse--and furthermore obtained in their place the sister-in-law and the two cousins, unaccountably left out of the batch, they had some substantial reasons for satisfaction.

* * * * *

Monsieur and Madame Deens are once more of the heart-rending order. She, a pathetic creature always balanced between tears and smiles, with pale blue eyes under her braided soft brown hair, looks extraordinarily young to be the mother of two strapping children. He is the typical Belgian husband, devoted but grinding.

Our first visit there was painful. Madame Deens was like a bewildered child, and the husband, a stalwart handsome fellow, who had been chief engineer on the railway at Malines, was torn between a very natural indignation at finding himself beggared after years of honest hard work, and bitter anxiety about his wife, who was in the same condition as Madame Van Heyst.

He beckoned us outside the cottage to tell us in a tragic whisper that he had good reason to believe that “all, all the family of my wife,” her father, mother, and the invalid sister, had been murdered by the Germans; and their farm burned.

“How can I tell her, and she as she is? It will kill her too! And she keeps asking me and asking me! I shall have to tell her!”

The tears rolled down his cheeks. Yet he was a hard man; it galled him to the quick to be employed as a common labourer and receive only seventeen shillings a week.

They had been given a gardener’s house: the most charming, quaint abode. It had an enormous kitchen, with a raftered ceiling, and one long window running the whole length of the room, opening delightfully on the orchard. The walls were all snowy white. He might have made himself very happy in such surroundings for the months of exile, with the consciousness of friends about him, the knowledge of safety and care for the wife in her coming trial, and the splendid healthy air for the children. But Deens was not satisfied.

“I had just passed my examinations, _n’est-ce pas?_ monsieur, madame, and had received my advancement, and we had just got into the little house I had built with my savings. Now it is burnt--burnt to the ground. And these wages, for a man like me, mademoiselle, it is something I cannot bring myself to. _Je ne puis pas m’y faire, savez vous._”

“But Madame Deens is so well here, and we will look after her,” said Mademoiselle.

“Ah, but I could earn more money elsewhere! I might have something to bring back to my own country.”

Of course he has had his way. A bustling lady got him into a motor factory, and he dragged his weeping but resistless spouse to a townlet, where they are lodged in one room; where the only person we could think of to interest in their favour was the old parish priest, who turned out to be queer in his head, but where Deens is in receipt of thirty-two shillings a week. We are sure that what can be saved is being saved for the _retour au pays_, and meanwhile the poor little woman’s hour of trouble is approaching, and she must get through it as best she can, unbefriended. We feel anxious.

Before she left, with many tears, she gave the Signorina, who had sympathized with her, the only gift she could contrive out of her destitution. It was the youngest child’s little pair of wooden shoes!

III

OUR MINISTERING ANGELS

“Chi poco sa, presto lo dice!”

_Wisdom of Nations._

Of course we are not behindhand in our village in the Red Cross movement.

Nearly every woman, whatever her views, fancies herself nowadays in the rôle of ministering angel. It may be doubted whether an existence devoted to the Tango and its concomitants has been a useful preparation for a task which demands the extreme of self-devotion; and we have heard odd little tales of how a whole body of charming and distinguished amateurs rushed into the cellars at the whiz of a shell, abandoning their helpless patients; and how the fair chief of a volunteer ambulance staff fainted at the sight of the first wounded man.

Yet there may be many, even among what is odiously called “the smart set,” who only find their true vocation at such a moment as this, when unsuspected qualities, heroic capacities spring into life at the test. It is not enough to say that times of great calamity sift the good from the bad, the strong from the futile: they give the wasters in every class of life their chance of self-redemption--in numberless instances not in vain. While freely admitting, however, that there may be a good proportion of society women who are drawn to work among the wounded by a genuine desire to help, and have therefore taken care to qualify themselves for the task, who can deny that with others nursing is merely a new form of excitement, the last fashionable craze? It was the same in the South African War. Indeed, the episode of the wounded soldier who put up a little placard with the inscription, “Much too ill to be nursed to-day,” has, we see, been revived in connection with the present conflict. It may be taken as the classic expression of Tommy’s feelings towards this particular form of attention. We do not suppose, however, that the case of the tender-hearted but unenlightened lady who went about Johannesburg feeding the enteric patients with buns will be allowed to repeat itself at Boulogne or Calais. We well remember reading her letter to the papers, in which she innocently vaunted her fatal ministrations, inveighing against the monstrous fashion in which “our poor sick soldiers” were being starved. We believe eleven victims of her charity died.

A late distinguished general had a genial little anecdote anent the energies of a batch of fair nurses who landed in Egypt during the last campaign. Happening to go round the hospital one morning shortly after their arrival, he saw one of these enchanting beings, clad in the most coquettish of nursing garbs, bending over a patient.

“Wouldn’t it refresh you if I were to sponge your face and hands, my man?” she inquired, in dulcet tones.

The patient, who was pretty bad, rolled a resigned but exhausted glance at her.

“If you like, mum. It’s the tenth time it’s been done this morning!”

Perhaps, like the war itself, everything is on too tremendous a scale now to permit of such light-hearted playing with the dread sequels of combat. We can no more afford to make a game of nursing than a game of fighting in this world struggle. It is possible that only such of our _mondaines_ as have the necessary knowledge and devotion are permitted to have charge of those precious lives, and that the others confine themselves to post-cards and coffee-stalls, and dashing little raids into the firing-lines with chocolates and socks. We trust it may be so. We confess that what we ourselves beheld of the local amateur Red Cross fills us with some misgiving.

Of course, as has been said, being a very enlightened community, we were not going to be left behind. A special series of lectures was announced almost within a week of the declaration of war. The daughter of the household determined to join.

On her arrival, a little late, at the village hall, she was met by the secretary of the undertaking; a charming and capable young lady, looking, however, at this particular moment distraught to the verge of collapse.

“Oh, _do_ you know anything about home nursing? _Do_ you think you could teach a little class how to take temperatures? You could easily pick up what you want to learn afterwards, couldn’t you? There are such a lot of them, and they’re all so, so----” She substituted “difficult to teach” for the word trembling on her lips. “Nurse Blacker doesn’t know which way to turn.”

“Oh, I can certainly teach them to take temperatures,” said the Signorina. Nurses, like poets, are born, not made; and she is of those who have the instinct how to help. Besides this she has had experience.

She was disappointed, however. She had come to learn, not to teach. It seemed to her, moreover, almost inconceivable that any female who had arrived at years of discretion and was of normal intellect should not be able to take a temperature; but she swallowed her feelings, after the example of the secretary, and went briskly in to begin her task.

She was provided with a jug of warm water, several thermometers, and a row of various women, ranging from the spinster of past sixty to the red-cheeked sixteen-year old daughter of the local vet--who ought to have known how to take a temperature, if it was only a dog’s! There were also two fluttering beribboned summer visitors from the neighbouring hotel; these were doing the simple life, with long motor veils and short skirts and a general condescending enthusiasm towards our wild moorland scenery, which they were fond of qualifying as “too sweet!”

“Perhaps,” said the secretary to the Signorina as she hurried away, “you could teach them to take a pulse also. They can practise on each other. It would be _such_ a help.”

The Signorina felt a little shy. It did seem somewhat presuming for anything so young as she was to be instructing people who were all, with the exception of the vet’s daughter, considerably older, and, therefore, obviously considerably richer in experience than herself. It added to her embarrassment that the summer visitors should fix two pairs of rapt eyes upon her with the expression of devotees listening to their favourite preacher.

However, she summoned her wits and her courage, and gave a brief exposition of the mysteries of thermometer and pulse, patiently repeating herself, while the students took copious notes. Certainly there was something touching in this humble ardour for useful knowledge. Then the thrilling moment of practice began.

The spinster first monopolized the instructress’s attention. Her white hairs and her years entitled her to precedence.

“Of course,” she remarked, with the air of one whose scientific education has not been altogether neglected, as she balanced her thermometer over the jug, “the water won’t really make it go up, will it, no matter how hot it is?”

The Signorina did not think she could have understood.

“I mean,” said the maiden lady, waving the little tube, “it’s not heat that will ever make the thermometer go up. It’s fever, isn’t it?”

“But fever is heat,” mildly asserted the “home-nurse.”

“Oh no, I don’t mean _that_” said the spinster loftily. “Of course, I know you’re hot with fever; but it’s something _in_ you, isn’t it, that affects the thermometer? It wouldn’t go up, even if I put it on the stove, would it?”

“Put it into the jug and try,” said the Signorina, who did not believe that language would be much use here.

“Oh, I think,” interpolated a summer guest who was much impressed by the spinster’s grasp of the situation, “I’d rather try my thermometer on my cousin, please! I think one would learn better. It would be more like hospital practice, wouldn’t it?”

The spinster turned from the jug with alacrity.

“I’m sure you are right,” she cried. Then wheeling on her neighbour: “Oh, would you mind?” she pleaded.

The neighbour, a tailor-made lady with a walking-stick, who looked on with a twisted smile--we suspect she was a suffragette, pandering to the weakness of a world distracted from the real business of life--submitted to be made useful. Her smile became accentuated.

“Shouldn’t mind if it was a cigarette,” she remarked in a deep bass, and thereafter was silent, while the spinster laboriously prepared to take two minutes on her watch.

“Please, dear child,” cried one of the motor-veiled ladies in her impassioned tone of interest, “will you explain to me again, what is normal? _I’d better take it out, dear! There’s no use doing it wrong, is there?_ You said something about a little red line--or is that for fever? How silly I am--red would be for fever, wouldn’t it? No? _Red is normal, darling. Oh, I do hope you’re normal!_ What did you say, ninety-eight, point four? I never could do arithmetic and I’m so stupid. My husband always says--_doesn’t he, Angela?_--‘You won’t do much adding up, Birdie’--he calls me ‘Birdie,’--‘but I can trust you to subtract all right,’ dear, naughty fellow! He loves me to spend, you know, _doesn’t he, Angela?_ Oh dear, it hasn’t moved at all! Is that very bad? _Angela, darling!_”

“But you didn’t leave it in two minutes,” said the persevering teacher. “Supposing you were to put it in your mouth now, and your cousin were to take you?”

“Will you, Angela?” The summer visitor’s eyes became pathetic. “I’m sure I’ve been feeling quite dreadful with all this anxiety.”

“Your temperature,” said the spinster triumphantly to the suffragette, “is a hundred and twenty-eight.”

The Signorina started.

“But that’s quite impossible! Look here, let me show you. It won’t mark over a hundred and ten.”

For the first time the spinster was flustered.

“Oh, perhaps I read it wrong! Let me look again.”

After much fumbling and peering she became apologetic.

“I see I did make a mistake. It’s twenty-six.”

“Perhaps,” said the little lecturer hopelessly, “if I just went over the readings of the thermometer with you all once more----”

But she was interrupted.

“Would you mind”--the harassed secretary seized her by the elbow--“would you mind coming to superintend the bed-making? I’ve got to take the bandage class, and Nurse Blacker can’t really manage more than twenty with the compresses.”

The whole room was full of the clapper of excited female tongues. The Signorina was not sorry to leave the jug of warm water and the extraordinary fluctuating temperatures. She was followed by the summer visitors, motor veils and ribbons flying.

As she left, a cheerful, red-faced lady was heard to announce casually, as she dropped the fat wrist of the veterinary’s daughter, that there was no use her trying to take that pulse, as the girl hadn’t got any.

The clamorous group surrounded the camp-bed, upon which was stretched a sardonic boy-scout, fully clothed, down to his clumping boots. He was aged about twelve, and assisted in the education of the “lidies” by commenting from time to time on their efforts in hoarse tones of cynicism. After one impulsive neophyte had seemed to be practising tossing him in a blanket, he remarked into space: “Nurses are not suppowsed to move the pytient.”

And to another who jerked his heels up: “Down’t you forget, miss, I’m a bad caise!”

The Signorina had never been taught how to make beds in the true hospital fashion before, and was painstakingly absorbed in the intricacies of rolling sheets without churning the “bad caise,” when she was seized upon by one of the flutterers from the hotel.

“We’re going now; it’s been _so_ interesting, we _have_ enjoyed it. I shan’t forget all you told me about temperatures. I feel quite able to look after our dear fellows already. Oh! I _must_ tell you. You’ve got such a sympathetic face. I’m sure you will understand. I had a most _wonderful_ revelation the other day, in church--in London, you know. I had such an extraordinary feeling--just as if something came over me--and I thought the church was full of dead soldiers; and a voice seemed to say to me: ‘Pray.’ I felt quite uplifted. And then in a minute it was all gone. Wasn’t it wonderful? That kind of thing makes one feel so _strong_, doesn’t it? Oh, I knew you would understand. The last news is _very_ disquieting, isn’t it? What a darling little fellow!”

The “bad caise” scowled at her horribly; but the sweetness of her smile was quite unimpaired, as she fluttered out of the hall.

* * * * *

“It is very important,” said Nurse Blacker to the compress class, “that the nurse should wash her hands before touching the patient’s wounds.”

“Now, tell me, Sister,” interposed a meek voice, “is that precaution for the nurse’s sake or for the patient’s? I mean, I suppose it’s in case the nurse should incur any infection from the wound?”

This point of view--that of the White Queen in “Alice Through the Looking-Glass”--had not apparently struck Nurse Blacker before.

It all seems too ridiculous to be true, but yet the facts are here set down as they actually occurred.

We think there are a good many women about the world of the type of the spinster and her sisters, and we are also convinced that it would be quite impossible to succeed in impressing upon such minds even the most rudimentary notions of nursing; yet it is likely enough they may all have been granted certificates eventually. Professionals are dreadfully bored in dealing with amateurs, and are often glad to take the shortest road to deliverance.

We were once witness, in pre-war days, of the examination of a Red Cross class in the north of England. There was a weary doctor on the platform with a bag of bones; and a retired hospital nurse, very anxious to be on good terms with the delightful family who were the chief organizers of the movement, had charge of the “show.”

The doctor gave a brief address upon dislocation. It ran somewhat in this fashion.

“Dislocation is the misplacement of a joint. It is indicated by the symptoms of swelling, redness, pain, and inability to move the limb. There is no crepitation as in a fracture. As to treatment: my advice to you, ladies, when you meet a case of this kind, is--ahem--to leave it severely alone and to send for a medical man.”

The class took copious notes. The doctor dropped the two bones with which he had been demonstrating into the bag again, leant back in his chair and closed his eyes. His part of the transaction was concluded. It had been most illuminating, the ladies agreed, and the Signorina’s chauffeur, who has a yearning towards general self-improvement, remarked to her on the way home:

“Ow”--like the boy scout, he has a theatrically cockney accent--“I am glad to know what to do for discollation. I’d never studied that, loike, before.”

While the doctor leant back and rested, the hospital nurse examined each student privately on the subject of the previous instructions. The Signorina happened to be quite close to a little old lady with bonnet and strings, and a small, eager, withered, agitated face under bands of frizzled grey hair--the kind of little old lady who is always ready to respond to the call of duty, and who is in the van of knitters for “our dear, brave soldiers” or “our gallant tars.”

“What,” said the hospital nurse tenderly, “would you do for a bed-sore?”

The little old lady began to twitter and flutter:

“I would first wash the place with warm water, and--oh, dear me, dear me, I _did_ know, I knew quite well a minute ago--with, with something to disinfect.”

“It is something to disinfect, quite right,” approved the nurse.

“A salt, I think--I’m sure it was. I could get it at the chemist----”

“Certainly,” said the nurse, as if she were speaking to a child of two years old, “the chemist would be sure to keep it. It’s quite a simple thing. But you would have to know what to ask for, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, dear me, yes. P--p-- or did it begin with an I?”

“Perchloride of mercury,” said the nurse, smothering a yawn.

“Oh yes,” cried the little old lady, delighted, “that’s it.”

“Well, now you know it, don’t you,” said the nurse brightly, wrote “Passed” in her notebook, and turned to the next.

“How much liquid nourishment would you give a typhoid patient at a time?”

This to a village girl, who looked blank, not to say terrified, and wrung her hands in her lap.

“I mean,” helped the questioner, “if the patient were put on milk--a milk diet, very usual in typhoid cases--how much milk would you give at a time?”

The girl’s face lit up.

“Two quarts, miss,” she said with alacrity.

“Not at a time, I think,” corrected the examiner, quite unruffled. “Two quarts, perhaps, in the twenty-four hours, if you could get the patient to take it--that would be splendid. Typhoid is a very weakening malady. It’s a good thing to keep the strength up--if you _can_, you know.”

The Signorina heard this optimist make her report a little later to the charming daughter of the charming family, who had herself studied to good purpose, but was too modest to undertake the instructions.

“They’ve all answered beautifully. Look at my notebook----”

It was “Passed,” “Passed,” to every name.

“That _is_ good,” said the gratified organizer. “We _have_ done well to-day.”

* * * * *

No doubt one occasionally comes across odd specimens even among professionals. Certainly, during a long illness with which the Signora was afflicted a couple of years ago, three of the five nurses who succeeded each other in attendance upon her cannot be said to have lightened the burthen.

The first, sent for at eleven o’clock at night, distinguished herself by instantly upsetting a basin of hot water into the patient’s bed. As she repeated the process next night, and greeted the accident with shrieks of laughter, it could scarcely be regarded as the exceptional breach which proves the rule of excellence.

The Signora, who was not supposed to be moved at all, has, fortunately, the sense of humour which helps one along the troublesome way of life, in sickness as in health. She laughed too. The nurse, who was an Irishwoman, immediately thought herself rather a wag. She was a little, vivacious creature, ugly, but bright-eyed. She was extremely talkative, and perhaps the most callous person the Signora has ever come across. It is our experience that all nurses are talkative. If the patient wants to make life endurable at all, the talk must be guided into the least disagreeable channels.

The Signora’s dread is the tale of operations--“of practice in the theatre,” which one of the nurses of her youth told her she considered “an agreeable little change.”--This particular Dorcas’s favourite topic was deathbeds. The patient was quite aware that the supreme experience was a not at all impossible event for herself in the near future, so she had a certain personal interest in the matter. Anyhow, she permitted the discourse.

She heard at full length the narration of Nurse MacDermott’s first deathbed in private nursing. It was a horrible anecdote, which might have formed a chapter in a realistic novel. “A gentleman at Wimbledon it was,” evidently of the well-to-do merchant class, and he seemed, poor man! to have been the unhappy father of a family as cold-blooded and heartless as the wife in Tolstoi’s painful story of death. But here there was no one to care, not even a poor servant lad--not even the nurse whose vocation it was to help him through the final agony. She arrived at ten o’clock, and at eleven the doctor warned the family that the patient would not pass the night. Thereupon everyone--the wife, two daughters, and a son--retired to bed, and left the dying man in charge of the newly arrived attendant, who sat down to watch, reading a novel. About two o’clock the moribund began to make painful efforts to speak.

“Charlie, Charlie,” he kept saying.

“Ah, the poor fellow!” said the little nurse, as she recounted the story, “he had a son who was a scapegrace, it seems, off away somewhere, and he wanted to send him a message. I ran and called the wife out of her bed--what do you think? She’d put her hair in crimpers! Upon my word, she had; they were bristling all round the head of her. Well, I didn’t want to have him die on me while I was out of the room, so I rushed back. And he made signs to me. The power of speech was gone from him. He wanted to write. I had a bit of pencil, but there wasn’t a scrap of paper that I could see, so there was nothing I could give him but the fly-leaf of the book I was reading; and ah! the poor fellow, it was only scrawls he could make after all. And sure, he was dead before his wife came in. And she just gave one look at him, and, ‘I’m going back to bed,’ says she, and back to bed she went. But it was the hair-curlers that did for me. I never can forget them.”

She was sitting at the end of the Signora’s bed, and doubled herself up with laughter as she spoke. We have no doubt but that she went back to her novel, scrawled with the dying father’s last futile effort.

We never knew anyone quite so frankly unmoved by the awful scenes it was her trade to witness. She found vast amusement in the wanderings of delirious patients. Whenever she wanted to cheer the other nurses up, she informed us, in the Home where they dwelt together, she could always make them laugh with little anecdotes from the typhoid ward; and the “wanderings” from the different beds.