Chapter III: Part 3

She tried to cheer the Signora up on these lines; and the Signora, on wakeful nights, has to force her mind away from the “humorous” memories. She infinitely preferred the story of Nurse McDermott’s love affairs. Like many ugly people, the young woman believed herself irresistible, and paid a great deal of attention to the conservation of her charms. Once, having settled her patient for the night, she reappeared unexpectedly _en robe de chambre_.

“I have just come to tell you how many creams I have put on myself,” she cried to the bewildered lady. “I know it will amuse you! There’s the pomade for my hair, and Valaze for my face, and the lanoline for my neck. I do hate the mark of the collar--for evening dress, you know--it gives one away so! And there’s the salve for my lips, and the cold cream for my hands, and the polish for my nails----”

She went away in a hurry to a bad case at Liphurst, jubilating because we were paying her journey, and she would get it out of the other lady also, and the doctor had offered to send her in his car.

Of quite another type was Nurse Vischet. No one could say that she was unaffected by her patient’s symptoms. They had the power of flinging her into frenzy. Capable enough when things were going fairly well with her charge, the first shadow of a change for the worse produced in her what can only be described as fury. Her face would become convulsed, her eyes would flame, she would knock the furniture about as she moved, and could barely restrain herself from insulting the sufferer.

At first the Signora, who was very ill and weaker than it is possible to describe, could not at all understand these outbursts. “What can have annoyed Nurse?” she would wonder feebly to herself. But presently she understood. It was really a mixed terror of, and repulsion from, the sight of suffering. Why such a woman should have become a nurse, and how she could continue in the service of the sick, feeling as she did, remains a mystery. The key to her extraordinary behaviour was given one day by a little dog, who happened to be seized with a very common or garden fit of choking through the nose; such as affects little dogs with slight colds in their heads. Nurse Vischet started screaming.

“He’s all right,” said the Signora. “He only wants his nose rubbed. Carry him over to me if you won’t do it yourself.”

“Ugh!” shrieked Nurse Vischet. “I think it’s dying. I wouldn’t touch it for the world!”

One of the symptoms of the human patient’s illness were agonizing headaches, during which she could scarcely bear a ray of light in the room. In spite of frequent requests, Nurse Vischet always seized the occasion to turn the ceiling electric light full on the bed, and when at last forbidden to do so, she declined to enter a room in which she could not see her way. The Signora gave her the name of her “ministering devil.” She was a rabid Socialist, and had peculiar theories, one of which we remember was that condemned criminals should be handed over to the laboratories for vivisection.

She had also to an acute degree the hospital nurse’s capacity for upsetting the household. Our butler, a hot-tempered man, happened to drop a stray “damn” in the hearing of the under-housemaid, and Vischet, hanging on the landing over the kitchen regions, as she was fond of doing, overheard the dread word. The whole establishment was turned upside down. Maggie was told that she “owed it to her womanhood” not to allow foul language in her presence. Maggie gave notice, but being, after all, an Irish girl with a sense of humour, was as easily soothed down as she had been worked up. Certainly, however, if we had kept Nurse Vischet, we should have lost, one by one, our excellent staff of servants. Besides playing on their feelings against each other, she had a horrible trick of telling them they were at the last gasp upon the smallest ailment. She did not like her patient to have symptoms; but she encouraged the domestics to fly to her with theirs.

Irish Maggie had an indigestion. Vischet declared her condition to be of extreme gravity. She rushed to the Signora with her tale. Maggie was ordered to bed. Vischet produced an immense tin of antiphlogistine with which to arrest “the mischief.”

The daughter of the house went up to visit the sick girl, and came down laughing to console her mother.

“You needn’t worry about Maggie,” she said, and gave a pleasant little description of the scene and the invalid’s remarks.

“Ah, sure I’m all right, miss. It’s all along of a bit of green apple. Sure, Mrs. MacComfort has just given me a drop of ginger, and it’s done me a lot of good already. Do you see what Nurse is after bringing me? God bless us all, wouldn’t I rather die itself than be spreading that putty on me! I’ll be up for tea, miss.”

“She looks as rosy as possible,” went on the comforter, “and ever so nice with her hair in a great thick plait tied with ribbons, grass green, for Ireland.”

Through one recollection Vischet will always remain endeared to the mind of her victim; and that was for her singular pronunciation. There was a story to which the Signora was fond of leading up relating to por-poises, (pronounced to rhyme with noises), and another connected with a tor-toise, which happened to be the pet of a recent “case.” There was also a little tale of a dog: “I was out walking on the embankment,” said Vischet, “and I saw a man coming along leading two dogs--one was a great bulldog, and the other was one of those queer creatures you call a dashun” (the Signora prides herself on her intelligence for instantly discovering that the narrator meant a dachshund). “And there was running about loose the queerest animal ever I saw,” went on the nurse; “it had the head of a bulldog and the legs of a dashun.”

The third nurse was very different. The daughter of an officer, who was seeking the most genteel way to make her living, she frankly handed over the chief of the attendance to the Signora’s own devoted maid; which, on the Signora becoming aware of her incapacity, she was on the whole glad that she should do. Nurse Fraser was a tall, handsome girl, who was fond of sitting on the sofa at the foot of the patient’s bed, her hands clasped round her knees, staring into space. She was by no means unamiable, but she was bored; and the Signora, who rather liked her, was not averse to screening her deficiencies. When the doctor inquired after the temperature that had never been taken, she herself would declare it had been normal; and she was amused when Nurse Fraser would next vouch for a “splendid breakfast.” She not having appeared in her patient’s room till noon.

She made no attempt to conceal her complete inefficiency in the treatment of the case.

“Oh, _do_ tell me what I’m to do,” she had cried on arrival to the district nurse who had come in as a stopgap. “I’m sure if I ever knew anything about the illness I’ve quite forgotten.”

One day--she, too, was garrulous--she informed her patient that her mother had shares in Kentish Mines. “If ever they work out, we may get a lot of money, and then,” she cried, quite unconscious of offence, “no more beastly sick people for me!”

She left us in tears. She had enjoyed herself very much.

It would seem as if our experience had been unfortunate, and yet it is not so; for surely to have known two perfect nurses one after another is sufficient to re-establish the balance. Chief of these, first and dearest, was Nurse Dove. She was the district nurse, called in, as we have said, in a moment of emergency. How Miss Nightingale would have loved her! Blessed little creature, it was enough to restore anybody’s heart to see her come into the sick-room, quiet, capable, tender, her eyes shining with compassion for the sufferer and eagerness to relieve. She was as gentle as she was skilful: to anyone who did not know her it would be impossible to convey the extent of the virtue contained in this phrase. The Signora would have placed herself, or, what means a great deal more, her nearest and dearest, with the completest confidence in her hands alone, in any dangerous illness.

Among the poor she was an apostle. It seemed to have been her fate that, during her brief stay in our village, several young mothers found themselves in mortal extremity. She never lost a life. We think now with longing of what she would have been among the wounded. Alas! we were not destined to keep such perfection with us. It was Cupid, not death, that robbed us of this treasure--if Cupid, indeed, it can be called, the dingy, doubtful imp that took her away from her wonderful work among us. Alas! charming, devoted, exquisite being as she was, she had a very human side. We fear there was a touch of “pike,” as the old gardener had it, in the business, but in spite of all our efforts a “coloured gentleman,” an invalid to boot, a shifty elderly fellow with an Oriental glibness of tongue, carried her off away with him back to India. She has since written to us describing her palatial abode on the borders of a lake with a horde of servants and a private steam-launch, but we strongly suspect that if the pen was the pen of Nurse Dove, the words were the words of the coloured gentleman.

The individual was a Baboo, a clerk in the Madras Post Office, and had already been invalided out of the service before he left England. We cannot believe that the pension of an underling in the Indian Civil Service runs to these Rajah-like splendours. Moreover, there was a tragic little postcard, sent to a humble friend, which did not at all correspond with the highflown letter above-mentioned: “The world is a very sad place; we must all be prepared for disappointments.”

There is one thing quite certain--wherever she goes she will be doing good.

Curiously enough, the second perfect nurse resembled her in dark pallor of skin, splendour of raven tresses, and thoughtful brilliance of brown eyes; but she was younger and more timid. She will want a few more years of experience and self-reliance before she can develop into a Nurse Dove.

But nevertheless, resembling her in countenance, she had the same deep womanly heart for her patients. Suffering in their sufferings, she would spare no pains to relieve them. And she had the touch of imaginative genius and the courage to act on her own responsibility which made her presence in a house of sickness a comfort and a strength. In fact, the life was to her a vocation. She nursed to help others, not herself. She had not grown callous through the sight of agonies, only more urgent to be of use.

God send many such to our men in their need to-day!

IV

“CONSIDER THE LILIES”

“For the first time the Lamb shall be dyed red....”

_Brother Johannes’ Prophecy._

“Consider the lilies, how they grow....”

The sad thing is that with us they decline to grow. When we bought the small, high-perched house and grounds on the Surrey hills there is no doubt that the thought of lilies in those terraced gardens was no unimportant part of the programme. Oddly, the little house had from the first an Italian look, which we have not been slow to cultivate.

Now we were haunted by a picture of an Italian garden: a pergola--vine-covered, it was--with two serried ranks of Madonna lilies growing inside the arches; flagged as to pathway, with probably fragrant tufts of mint and thyme between the stones. In the land of its conception this vision of shadowy green and exquisite white, cool yet shining, as if snow-fashioned, must have given upon some stretch of quivering, heat-baked country.

Without being able to provide such an antithesis, the garden-plotter--she means the dreadful quip--otherwise the mistress of the English Villino, with a vivid and charming picture in her mind’s eye, fondly imaged a very effective outlook upon the great shouldering moors that rise startlingly across the narrow valley at the bottom of her garden. But the lilies refused to grow.

She tried them in border after border. She set clumps of Auratums under the dining-room between the heliotrope and the Nicotianas, which swing such gushes of fragrance into the little house all the hot summer days. She got monster bulbs of Madonnas from the first specialist in the kingdom, and put them singly between the red and white roses against the upper terrace wall. She ran amok upon luscious spotted darlings; Pardelinum and Monadelphum, Polyphyllum and Parryi, and had them placed in a cool, shady walk against a background of delphiniums. She thrust Harrisi under the drawing-room bow; and the glorious scarlet-trumpeted Thunbergianum where they would flame in the middle distance. They showed many varied forms of disapproval, but were unanimous in declining to remain with us. Some were a little more polite than the others. The great trumpets blew fiercely for one season, almost as with a sound of glorious brass, in their dim nook; and a single exquisite, perfect stem of Krameri rose intact amid a dying sisterhood, and swayed, delicately proud, faintly flushed, a very princess among flowers, one long, golden September fortnight. But such meteors only make our persistent gloom, where lilies are concerned, the more signal.

The pergola had to go the way of so many cherished dreams. Yet there is an exception. With just an occasional threat of disease, there is one border favoured by the tiger-lily. She is not a very choice creature, of course; she has neither the fragrance nor the mystic grace of her cousins; but such as she is, she is welcome in our midst. On our third terrace there is a stretch of turf, curved outwards like a half-moon, against a new yew hedge: we call it the Hemicycle. In spring it is a jocund pleasaunce for crocus and scylla and flowering trees--almond, _Pyrus floribunda_, and peach; in summer the weeping standards hold the field, set between the pots of climbing geraniums. That is on the outward curve. A rough wall, overhung with Dorothy Perkins, clothed from the base with Rêve d’Or, runs straightly on the inner side. It is in the border underneath this wall that the tiger-ladies condescend to us.

Last year, by a somewhat accidental development of seeds, we had a marvellous post-impressionist effect along the line, for all the stocks there planted, between the Tigrinum, turned out to be purple and mauve. They grew tall, with immense heads of bloom: drawn up by the wall, we think. Over the orange and violet row the Dorothy Perkins showered masses of vivid pink. A narrow ribbon of bright pale yellow violas ran between the border and the turf. To connect this mass of startling colour, an intermediate regiment of lavender-bushes and the cream hues of the Rêve d’Or roses against their grey-green foliage acted very successfully. It is not a scheme that one would perhaps have tried deliberately, but we could not regret it. It does one good sometimes to steep the senses in such a fine tangle of elementary colour. The shock is bracing, as of a sea wave; like the march of a military band, we could enjoy it, in the open air and sunshine, just where it was placed; away from the house, with its distant background of fir-trees and moors.

Yet it is a mistake to use the word “post-impressionist” in connection with our border; for that movement, with all its pretended revival of the old pagan spirit of joy, was only an effort to conceal fundamental misery. The tango is no dance of gods and nymphs, but a dreadful merry-go-round of lost souls. The post-impressionist painting is not a flag of radiant defiance--youth challenging the unbelieved gloom of life--but a kind of outbreak as of disease: something spotty, fungoid, shaped like germs under the microscope.

Let us come back to the lilies. Come out of the fever-room into the garden.

We once tried to make a field of lilies. Our lowest garden has a different kind of soil fortunately from the greensand which makes the upper terrace beds such rapacious devourers of manure and fertilizers, and all the other necessary and unfragrant riches. The Signora took thought with herself and made a kind of nursery plantation at one end of the vegetable garden, to the meek despair of our gardener, who, like all other gardeners, cherishes a cabbage-patch with a passionate preference. She invested in a good three thousand bulbs, among others, hundreds of Candidums. Was it a punishment for her extravagance? Many years of life and experience have taught her that where we sin we are punished, by as inevitable a law as that of cause and effect. Or was it just the cursed spite of those wandering devils who, Indian and Irish folk alike believe, are always hovering ready to pounce upon success? Whether justice or malice, it is immaterial; the result was disaster. They had sent up straight spikes of vivid green, untouched by a trace of the horrible bilious complexion that bespeaks the prevalent disease, when the May frost came and laid them flat and seared.

After all, they would hardly have been much use in that especial spot, as far as garden perspective is concerned; and except for the hall and staircase lilies are not indoor flowers. The Signora loves the warm fragrance to gush up diffused through the house, but in any room it becomes overwhelming, almost gross. She does not even care for them pictorially at close quarters, meaning here the larger kind, including Candidum. They are essentially open-air flowers; they need the sun and the wind about them, background and space. It seems almost blasphemous to say so, but on the nearer sight their appearance becomes like their scent, a little coarse.

On an altar, once again, they assume their proper proportions; and, carved in stone, they are decorative and satisfying. But the Arum lily, which is not a lily at all, long-stemmed, in a vase, with its own gorgeous leaves about it, is something to sit and gaze at with ever-increasing content!

The nearest thing to a field of lilies the Signora ever saw was a whole gardenful at the back of a little house in Brussels. She was only a child at the time, a weary, bored, depressed small person at that, in the uncongenial surroundings of a detested private school. But one Sunday morning, for some unremembered reason, she was taken after Mass by the second mistress (an ugly, angry woman, inappropriately baptized Estelle), and brought out of the dust of the scorching street into this, to all appearance trivial, not to say sordid, little house.

“Would Mademoiselle like to look at my garden?” said its owner.

She was old and wizened and yellow-faced; but she had kind eyes, and it was certainly a kindly thought.

The whole of that garden, some forty by twenty feet, was filled with Madonna lilies, growing like grass in a field, with only a narrow path whereby to walk round them.

“Consider the lilies how they grow.... Not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these!”

The child that saw them was too unyeared and ignorant to apply these wonderful words if she had ever heard them. She could not feel her pleasure sharpened by the exquisite sensation of having the vision phrased in language as beautiful as itself. But she has carried away the memory, as sacredly as Wordsworth that of his daffodils--

“I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

“For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the Daffodils.”

Wordsworth, notably among poets, has the gift of expressing the inexpressible, of clothing in language some fleeting sensation which seems, of its exquisiteness and illusiveness, undefinable. There are lines of his that follow one like a phrase of music.

“The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion.”

“The light that never was on sea or land.”

“... Old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.”

The first effect of any sight of surpassing beauty, indeed of any strong emotion of admiration, is an instant desire of expression; then comes the pain of inarticulateness to most of us--there is a swelling of the soul and no outlet! That is why, when someone else may have perfectly said what for us is inexpressible, there is a double joy in discoveries.

To wander from our lilies to flowers of speech and description: the perfect phrase has in itself a delight that almost equals that of the perfect thought.

For those who, like ourselves, work in words, however humbly--poor stone-breakers compared to such as make the marble live--the mere art in the setting of the words themselves has a fascination of its own. It is not only the idea--it is sometimes not even the idea that enchants. There is a magic of cadence alone. Sometimes, indeed, just a conjunction of two words seems to make a chord.

To go further, a single word may ring out like a note upon the mind. The Italian _Amore_, for instance--who can deny that it echoes richly and nobly? It is a sound of gravity and passion mixed. It is like the first vibrating stroke of a master-hand on the ’cello. Did not the resonance of the word itself go as far as the meaning to inspire Jacopone with his ecstatic hymn wherein he plays upon it like a musician upon a note which calls, insists, repeats itself, for ever dominates or haunts the theme?--

“Amore, amore, che si m’hai ferito
Altro che amore non posso gridare:
Amore, amore, teco so unito....”

You could not take the word “love” and ring the changes in this way, not even upon the kindred-sounding _Amour_, losing in its “ou” exactly the tone of solemnity that makes the Italian equivalent so royal.

In a delightful series of musical sketches recently published, the author remarks, speaking of Tschaikowski’s “Symphonie Pathétique”:

“For those who have the score there is an added joy in the titles, ‘Incalzando,’ ‘feroce,’ ‘affretando,’ ‘saltando,’ ‘con dolcezza e flebile,’ ‘con tenerezza e devozione’; it makes most interesting reading. But the most splendid title of all is that of the last movement, ‘Adagio Lamentoso’--can’t you hear it? What a lot our language misses by the clipped and oxytone ‘lament’! Even ‘lamentation’ is a mere shadow beside the full roll of the Latin tongues, the ineffable melody that sounds in ‘lamentabile regnum.’”

We do not, however, agree with this pleasant writer on the subject of “clipped and oxytone lament.” To us the English word is infinitely keener reaching than any added vowel could make it! “Lamentable” we grant to be pompous and middle Victorian. It is eloquent of the conventional mourning of the funeral mute, while _lamentoso_ has to our ear a horrible wobble like the howl of a lonely dog.

We defy the most poetical and profound scholar to render in any other tongue the _guai_ of Dante. Who could give the value of the hopeless cry of sorrow culminating in that line of which _guai_ is the central wail!

“Cosi vid’ io venir, traendo guai
Ombre portate della detta briga.”

This is not to insist on the obvious that Italian is a musical language and Dante a star apart. Every language that has served literature will be found to hold its own words of magic. It is not the moment to quote German, but we think _Trauer_ tolls across the senses like the passing-bell, while the French _Glas_ falls upon the soul with a frozen misery indescribable outside itself.

Those fortunate scholars who have mastered as much of the secrets of Greek as the modern can master, tell us that it is impossible to convey in any other tongue the richness, the value, the wide meaning and exquisite shades of the ancient Greek language. We know that they had words in each of which a whole picture could be set before the mind. To read Gilbert Murray’s fascinating “Ancient Greek Literature” is, however, to find a revelation which severer and more extensive writings fail to convey. A poet, he alone has caught and interpreted the echo of those lyres still ringing across the ages. And he, too, computes his impressions in terms of music. “Many lovers of Pindar,” he says, “agree that the things which stay in one’s mind, stay not as thoughts but as music.”

Of course, the Greeks wedded words and music after a fashion unknown to us, who merely set words to be sung to music in our operas and songs. It is a lost art.

But it seems conceivable that there may be an actual music hidden in language itself, something that the senses of the mind apprehend, quite apart from the idea incorporated. The late Sir Henry Irving, just before his famous production of Macbeth, discussing his intention of introducing music at the moments of crisis, defended this much criticized point by saying: “I mean to do it, because music carries the soul beyond words, even beyond thought.”

We are not sure that he was right, except in so far as the appeal to the gallery was concerned, which, after all, every actor-manager, however artistic and perceptive, is bound to consider first of all. In fact, we are quite certain that he was wrong. The music of Shakespeare should not have been overlaid by any sound of violin or trumpet.

We can conceive no sorrow of muted strings which could intensify the poignancy of Macduff’s cry: “All my pretty ones, did you say all?” A cry, too, so spontaneous in its truth and simplicity that, according to a current phrase in the theatrical profession, the part of Macduff acts itself.

Who would want to add more melody to the following

“That strain again--it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour....”

Will anyone deny that there is music in these lines, that the singular impression produced by them is due not only to the perfection of a thought perfectly expressed, to the scent of violets exquisitely and instantly evoked by the cunning of genius, but to the actual words? The phrase rises and falls. Read or heard, it is the same, a strain of melody.

To one of the writers the two words, “Scarlet Verbena,” have always produced the impression as of a trumpet blast. Hoffmann used to say that he never smelt a red carnation without hearing the winding of a horn.

No doubt the senses are indefinably intermixed.

“Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden thro’ the budded quicks,
O tell me where the senses mix,
O tell me where the passions meet”--

cries Tennyson to the nightingale.

Nevertheless, must one not believe that there are distinct senses of the soul and mind which are called into action by the spoken or written word? It is trite to say there are moments when one is gripped by the throat by a mere phrase, not, mind you, because of its dramatic force, but rather from some inherent spell of beauty or sorrow. There are others when one seems to lay hold of a set of words; as it were, to be able to touch and feel them as though they had been modelled.

And again, who has not felt an actual pain, as of a delicate blade being thrust into the heart, by some phrase of scarcely analyzable pathos. Heine had that weapon. The art of it, we suppose, is that of extreme simplicity combined with selection, but the emotion is quite incommensurate with the importance of the theme, the value of the expressed idea.

To use another simile, it is like a wailing air on some primitive instrument, which by its very artlessness pierces to the marrow of the consciousness.

“Ces doux airs du pays, au doux rythme obsesseur,
Dont chaque note est comme une petite sœur,”

as Rostand has it.

Think of the effect in “Tristran” of the shepherd’s pipe at the beginning of the last act.

It comes to this after all, that however one may study, however perfect the technique of writing, however one may inspire oneself from the springs of genius, it is artlessness, not art, that reaches home. It might be truer to say that it takes a consummate art to touch the right note of artlessness; yet we all know how curiously we can sometimes be affected by the words that fall from childish lips.

A Belgian babe of two, a dimpled, radiant creature, seemingly untouched by the storm which had flung her from her own luxurious nurseries into a bare English lodging, was found, two days after her arrival in exile, kissing and talking to the little crucifix which hung round her neck. Her mother bent to listen.

“Dear Jesus,” the child was saying, “poor wounded soldier!”

The profound and mystic consolation of the link between the human agony and the Divine had somehow dawned upon the infant mind, and found this tender expression.

A little boy we knew said to his mother one evening as she tucked him up in his cot:

“Oh, mammie, I die a little every night, I love you so.” Here, with an exquisite directness, the inevitable pain of a deep tenderness is laid bare by the lips of innocence.

* * * * *

It is this quality of simplicity and directness--yes, we are not afraid to say it, of innocence--which makes the stories of our soldiers so infinitely touching.

“Tell daddie and mammie,” said a dying Irish lad to the comrade who bent over him to take his last message, “’twas against their will I ’listed; tell them I’m not sorry now I did it.”

No fine-sounding phrase, no stirring oration, could more piercingly set forth the triumph of the ultimate sacrifice of patriotism. _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori._

Our men are like children in their gaiety--pleased with little things as a child with a toy; joking, making believe, making a game out of their very danger; unconscious of their own heroism, as the best kind of boy, who risks his neck for a nest; blindly confident in their leaders. If it had not been for this complete trust in what their officers told them, could the retreat from Mons have ended in anything but disaster? Yet we know that--like children--whole regiments burst into tears when ordered to give up the positions they had won.

A war correspondent ends a terrible account of the further withdrawal from Tournai by a description of a night in a barn where scatterers had taken refuge.

“And all night long,” he says, “there were the sobs of a big corporal of artillery, weeping for his horses.”

In the throes of the great struggle, this side of humanity--call it the childish, if you will, we have Divine authority for believing that it is akin to the spiritual--asserts itself, nay, becomes paramount. To be more precise, the real man is stripped of his conventions, sophistries, and pretences. Only the things that matter are the things that count.

When the Emperor Frederick was dying, his last message was this: “Let my people return to their faith and simplicity of life.”

If he had been spared to his own land, it would be a different world to-day. Under the dreadful test of war the German soldiery as a mass, indeed the whole people, have sunk below the level of the brute. It is the English who have come back to faith and simplicity.

The Rev. W. Forest, Catholic Chaplain of the Expeditionary Force, writes: “It is true to say that the German Kaiser is fighting a community of saints--converted, if you like--but with not a mortal sin scarcely to be found among them.” The special correspondent of the _Sunday Times_ has a touching testimony in a recent issue to men of all denominations: “To be at the front,” he declares, “is to breathe the air of heroes. The Church of England chaplains, in accordance with the general wish among the men, are giving Early Communion Services. It is a marvellous sight,” continues the journalist, “to see the throngs of soldiers kneeling in the dawn, the light on their upturned faces. They go forth strengthened, ready for anything, feeling that the presence of Christ is amongst them.”

With our French Allies, too, the spirit of faith has reawakened. An English officer writes to the _Evening Standard_: “The French soldiers go into the trenches, each with his little medal of Our Lady hung round his neck--they pray aloud in action, not in fear, but with a high courage and a great trust.”

“On All Souls’ Day,” he adds, “I saw the village _curé_ come out and bless the graves of our poor lads. The graves, mark, of rough Protestant soldiers, decorated with chrysanthemums by the villagers. These poor dead were blessed, and called the faithful departed, and wept over and prayed for.”

“And thine own soul a sword shall pierce, that out of many hearts thoughts may be revealed.”

If one may reverently paraphrase Simeon’s prophecy to the mother of the Man of Sorrows, can one not say that the soul of the world is pierced to-day, and the thoughts of the nations revealed?

A neutral diplomat, recently arrived in England from Vienna, via Paris, has told us of the singular indifference of the Austrian capital to the tragedy in which her own sons are taking part. “Vienna,” he says, “has shown only one moment of emotion, and that was when the little breakfast rolls were condemned. No one cares in Vienna. Life is--how shall I say?--it is all one ‘Merry Widow.’ It is not that they have any confidence in their own army. They shrug their shoulders and spread out their hands, but in Germany--they have the faith of the hypnotized! Nothing can happen to Germany, therefore Austria is safe.”

Recently an order was issued to have the cafés closed at one o’clock in the morning. It was not agreeable to the public, but they have contrived a substitute for their _petits pains_ which is some slight compensation.

“I shall return,” he added pensively--“I shall return with how much regret to the indecent carnival that is Vienna!”

His impression of France was very different. He could not sufficiently express his astonishment at the change that had come over the country. The dignity of France, the quiet strength of France, the spiritual confidence of France! In the army was only one apprehension: lest they should not be upheld by the civilians in their determination to fight to the very end. The churches were crowded; men and women have alike returned to the faith of their fathers. There was no unseemly merrymaking there, no unworthy attempt in café or theatre to forget the agonizing struggle.

At a recent entertainment in a very poor quarter a pretty girl dressed as France appeared arm-in-arm with an actor got up like a British soldier, and there was immense applause; but when she started the tango with her companion she was hissed off the stage.

As for Paris: “Tenez,” said our friend, in conclusion, “I will give you a little instance. I was walking down the Rue de la Paix, when I heard a woman laugh out loud. Everyone in the street turned round to look at her.”

Of the thoughts of Germany what can be said? They need no pointing out. They are written in blood and fire from end to end of Belgium, and in a long stretch of once smiling France; in Servia, carried out by Hungarians and Austrians, under German orders; in Poland. They are written in the German Press for all the world to read: blasphemy, brag, bluster, hysterical hatred, insanity of futile threat, shameless asseveration of self-evident falsehood. “Do nations go mad?” an American paper has asked. Germany presents the appalling spectacle of a nation run to evil. It is not only the war party, the soldiery, the press, the learned professors. It is the very population itself. The soul of Germany is revealing its thoughts.

* * * * *

The lily-garden in the little Brussels by-street on the way to the Bois de la Cambre, if it is still in existence, must have ceased blooming before the Germans entered Brussels. Otherwise it is not likely that it should have escaped the fury of destruction which seizes them at the sight of anything pure and noble and beautiful.

“Consider the lilies.”

We know how the Uhlan officers deliberately rode backwards and forwards over the blooming flower-beds in the great _Place_ upon the day of their entrance march.

We know how they stabled their horses in the world-famous conservatories of the Palace of Laecken--a custom they have practised at nearly every château in the country; how in that orgy which will for ever disgrace the name of the Duke of Brunswick the portrait of the young Queen of the Belgians, that royal flower of courage and devotion, was unspeakably insulted.

We know how whole regiments have trampled over straggling children in the village streets--these little flower blossoms, as the Japanese call them.

And those humble lilies of the cloister that have fallen into sacrilegious grasp, we know how they have been considered; how Rheims, with its hawthorn porch, blossoming in stone flower of all the Christian shrines of all the world, stately lily of the days of faith, has fared at the hand of the German.

“_Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint_,” says the Spirit of Evil in Goethe’s “Faust.”

It has always seemed a marvellous definition; the negation of good, the spirit that ever denies. But the demon of present-day Germany comes from a deeper pit than Goethe’s intellectual mocking devil. It is the spirit that forever destroys.

The struggle has not brutalized but spiritualized our men. Through the appalling conditions in which they fight they reach out to the mystic side of things. When they speak of death they call it “going west.” It is the old, old Celtic thought of the Isle beyond the Sunset. They “talk of God a great deal,” as the soldiers’ letters tell us. The Irish Guards fell on their knees at Compiègne before making their famous attack up the hill. As they charged, “our men crossed the plain, hurrahing and singing, while many of them had a look of absolute joy on their faces.” They have their visions. A soldier lying wounded and helpless on the field and gazing agonized on the breach in our line, saw the Germans rush and then fall back; and beheld St. George standing in his armour in the gap; then heard the Lancastrians cry, as they dashed on: “St. George for England!”

What yet more august revelation did he have, that dying French sergeant, who, looking profoundly upon the surgeon who was ministering to him, replied to his encouragement:

“Mon Major, je suis déjà avec Dieu,” and instantly expired.

Every regiment must have its emblem; the minds of the men turn naturally to the symbolic.

“I’d like to look at the colours,” said a mortally wounded gunner to his Captain.

“Look at the guns, my man, those are the gunners’ colours!”

And the boy was uplifted to look, till his eye glazed.

We do not take the colours into action now, but we know what the Standard means to our Allies. It seems a pity that political revolution should have displaced the ancient lilies of France. There is something so grand in tradition. Dignity of noble ancestry is not confined to man alone. Houses possess it, and lands, and surely nations. Are not our soldiers to-day the heirs of the yeomen and bowmen of Agincourt?

“O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts!” is the prayer on the lips of all of us; and we feel through all, even as Harry the King, the same proud confidence in the good blood that cannot lie. Shall not those who stay at home “hold their manhoods cheap, whiles any speaks” of Mons, or Ypres, or--of those glories yet to come?

Thus, in a way, it seems to us that if France fights in her body under the Tricolour, in her soul she is fighting under the Lilies. It is the old France again, the France of the days of faith. In one of Joan of Arc’s visions she saw Charlemagne and St. Louis kneeling before the throne, pleading for the land they had loved and served. She who carried the Oriflamme may now form the third in that shining company and look down, perhaps, considering the lilies growing out of the field of blood. Perhaps she may say: “Not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.”

V

DEATH IN THE LITTLE GARDEN

“O Saul, it shall be
A face like my face that receives thee, a man like to me
Thou shalt love and be loved by for ever! A hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ
stand.”

ROBERT BROWNING.

_March._--We bought the small place on the Surrey highlands and furnished it out of Rome; and set statues and cypresses and vases overflowing with flowers about the quaint terraces that run down to the valley; and we have a bit of Italy between pine-woods and wild moorland. We have called it the Villino.

The idea started as a week-end cottage. Gradually, however, we came to pay the flying visits to the London house and spend the most of our time in the country. Since the war began we have settled altogether on the span of earth which has become so endeared to us. Never was any home established in such a spirit of lightheartedness.

The new property has been our toy; something to laugh at while we enjoy it. It is absurd and apart and beloved and attractive; and though the great shadow that rose in August overcast the brightness of the Villino garden and all its prospects, we could yet look out upon the peace and the fairness and take comfort therefrom; turn with relief to the growing things and all the innocent interests that surround and centre in a country life.

It never dawned upon us that the garden itself could become a point of tragedy; that every pushing spike of bulb and every well-pruned rose-tree would have their special pang for our hearts, yet so it is. Never again shall we be able to look with the eyes of pure enjoyment on terrace and border, rose-arch and woodland.

Adam, the kindly gardener of our special plot of earth, has been struck down; hurled, by an inscrutable decree of Providence in the zenith of his activities, from life to death.

He was as much a part of the Villino as we ourselves; a just and kindly man, not yet forty; one of the handsomest of God’s creatures, and the most gentle-hearted. We cannot see the meaning of such a blow; we can only bow the head.

“Doesn’t it seem hard,” cried the daughter of the Villino, “that in these days there should be one unnecessary widow!”

The last time the Signora saw him alive was about a week before the tragedy. He had come into the funny little Roman drawing-room--all faint gay tints and flamboyant Italian gilt carved wood--carrying a large pot of arum lilies. He scarcely looked like an Englishman with his dark, rich colouring and raven hair prematurely grey; though he was so all-English, of England’s best, in his heart and mind.

A little Belgian child, on a visit to us, rushed up to him, chattering incomprehensibly. She is just three and very friendly; something in Adam’s appearance must have attracted her, for she left everything she had been playing with to run to him the moment he appeared.

This is how the Signora will always remember him, standing, big and gentle, looking down at the child with those kind, kind eyes.

There was never anyone so good to little animals. We used to say he was a true if unconscious brother of St. Francis, and loved all God’s small folk. Never was a sick cat or dog but Adam would have the nursing of it.

One would see him walking about the garden wheeling his barrow, with a great black Persian coiled round his neck like a boa. Nearly two years ago a little daughter was born to him here, to his great joy. She was always in her father’s arms during the free hours of the day; and not the least piteous incident of the tragedy was the way this baby, just beginning to babble a few words, kept calling for “Daddy, daddy,” while he lay next door in the tiny sitting-room he had taken such pleasure in, like a marble effigy, smiling, beautiful, awful, for ever deaf to her appeal.

He had been slightly ailing since an attack of influenza; but on the morning of his death he said to his wife that he felt as if he could do the work of six men that day. The kind of cruel light-heartedness which the Scotch call “being fey” was upon him. Like Romeo before the great catastrophe, “his bosom’s lord sat lightly on his throne.” Strange freaks of presentiment never to be explained on this side of the grave! There are those who feel the shadow of approaching fatality cloud their spirits--we have heard a hundred instances of certain forebodings of death during the present war--but this mysterious gaiety of the doomed is rarer and more awful. Yet Adam must have had his secret sad warnings too, for his poor wife found, to her astonishment, his insurance cards, his accounts made up to the end of the week on the Thursday of which he died, the ambulance badge he had been so proud of--all laid ready to her hand. He had set his house in order before the summons came. We have every reason to think that in a deeper, graver sense he was equally prepared.

“‘Whatever time my Saviour calls me, I shall be ready to go....’ Often and often,” Mrs. Adam told us, as her tears fell, “he has said those words to me.”

Like many another active, hard-working man, the thought of failing health, debility, old age, was abhorrent to him.

“He never could have borne a long illness.” Thus the widow tries to console herself--pitiful scraps of self-administered comfort with which poor humanity always attempts to parry the horror of an unmitigated tragedy!

There are strange secrets between the soul and God. Among the many wonders of the City of Light will be the simple solving of the riddles that have been so dark and tormenting to our earthly minds. From the very beginning of the war this honest Englishman had wanted to go out and serve his country. He was over age. His wife and two children depended on his labours, yet the longing never left him.

“I doubt but I’ll have to go yet,” was a phrase constantly on his lips.

He had joined the Ambulance Corps and, indeed, was on his way to that errand of mercy when he was stricken. Did he in those inner communes of the soul with God breathe forth his desire to give his life for his country, and was it somehow mystically accomplished? For death smote him and he fell and lay in his blood, as a soldier might. Who knows that the sacrifice was not accepted?

It was terrible for us--it seemed an unbelievable addition to her burthen of sorrow for the woman who loved him--but for him it may have been the glory and the crown.

When all human aid is unavailing, when everything that science can do to assist or relieve has been accomplished and fellow-creatures must stand aside and watch the relentless law of nature accomplish itself, then the value of religion is felt, as perhaps never before, even by the most devout.

Had poor Adam but belonged to the Old Faith the call for the priest would have been more urgent yet than the call for the doctor; we would have had the consolation of hearing the last Absolution pronounced over the unconscious form. The soul would have taken flight from the anointed body, strengthened by the ultimate rites; the child of the Church would have gone forth from the arms of the Church--from the arms of the earthly mother, to the mercy and justice of the heavenly Father.

We did what we could, his own clergyman being away. Never were we more impressed with the value of the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. It is all very well to say that we must live so as to be ready to die; that as the tree grows so shall it fall. Here are trite axioms that will not stand a moment before the facts of life and the needs of humanity. They make no account of the mercy of the Creator on one side nor of the weakness of the failing spirit on the other. They forget the penitent thief on the cross, bidden to enter into Paradise upon the merit of a single cry. If the Church of our ancestors watches anxiously over the whole existence of her children; if she hovers about the cradle, how does she not hang over the deathbed to catch the faintest sigh of repentance; nay, how does she not “prevent” the least effort, pouring forth graces and supplications, anointing, absolving, pursuing the departing spirit beyond the very confines of the world, sublimely audacious, to the throne of God itself!

She has caught the precious soul, for whom the Lord died, before the infant mind was even aware of its own existence. She is not going to be robbed of her treasure at the end, if she can help it.

But our poor, dying Adam was not of this fold, and could have no such aid and sanctification for his passing. Even his afflicted wife quailed from the fruitless agony of witnessing his last moments. “Since I couldn’t do anything, ma’am, it’s more than I can bear.”

She went down to her cottage at the bottom of the garden to prepare a fit resting-place for the body, while in the garage the soul of her dearest accomplished its final and supreme act on earth.

We read the great prayers to ourselves--those wonderful prayers commensurate in dignity and grandeur to the awful moment. We cried upon the Angels and Archangels, upon the Thrones, the Cherubim and Seraphim; we bade the Patriarchs and the Prophets, the Doctors and Evangelists, the Confessors and Martyrs, the Holy Virgins and all the Saints of God to rush to his assistance. We supplicated that his place this day should be in peace and his abode in Holy Sion; we cast his sins upon the multitudes of the Divine mercies, and strong through the merits of Christ our appeal rose into triumph. With confidence we summoned the noble company of the Angels to meet him, the court of the Apostles to receive him, the army of glorious Martyrs to conduct him, the joyful Confessors to encompass him, the choir of blessed Virgins to go before him. We conjured Christ, his Saviour, to appear to him with a mild and cheerful countenance. And, with this great name upon our lips, we “compassed him about with angels, so that the infernal spirits should tremble and retire into the horrid confusion of eternal night.”

All the household, except the very young servants, knelt round him praying silently, since we did not dare obtrude our own tenets about the deathbed of another faith. The Master stood with his hand on his dying servant’s head; and so the end came very peacefully.

A belated curate appeared at the cottage as the daughter of the house went down to tell Mrs. Adam that all was over; but he fled before the sad burthen was carried in.

We had often noticed it before, but never so forcibly, this shying away of some excellent religious people from any contemplation of the immediate experience of the soul after death. Beyond sentences of comfort as stereotyped as they are vague, which place the departed “safe in the arms of Jesus,” one would almost believe that the average man had no very vivid sense of the future life at all. How otherwise explain the remarks, so frequently heard, that a sudden death is such a desirable end; that it was “such a comfort so-and-so didn’t know he was going”; how explain the attitude at the sick-bed, where the sufferer to the last is deluded with false hopes that he may be spared--what? the knowledge that he is summoned to the house of God, the last opportunity of preparation.

Even when Mrs. Adam’s clergyman came to see her, chief among his consolations was the remark, made in all sincerity: “That’s the kind of death I should prefer to die.”