Chapter IV: Part 4

Good Adam was ready to go, we know that; but can any man with a true sense of his own soul bring himself to wish to be taken in like manner? It is, after all, to wish for one’s self the death one would want for one’s dog. Without even belonging to a Church where the last stage is hallowed and made a culminating act of precious resignation and the highest virtue, it seems to us that the instinctive nobility of man should rebel against the craven doctrine that death is a thing to be huddled through, a step to be taken drugged and blindfolded, that the consciousness is to be chloroformed against the anguish of dissolution. It is to rob humanity of its supremest quality--the triumph of the spirit over the flesh, the noble acceptance of our lot, the dignity of the last renunciation.

Browning, the most virile of our poets, cries:

“I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forebore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old.”

Yet this curious evasion of the inevitable is only the natural outcome of a looseness of theology which, while it admits the dogma of right and wrong, of free will and human responsibility, hurls the perfect and the imperfect, the saint and the sinner alike, into the same heaven without an instant’s transition. As very few now believe in hell, it is no unfair conclusion to draw that the mere fact of death seems, in the eyes of most people, to qualify the soul for eternal bliss. It is idle to ask what becomes of the generally accepted doctrine of moral responsibility, why, if all are alike and certain to be saved, anyone should put himself to the disagreeable task of resisting temptation, much less strive after perfection here below; but failure to provide help for the dying is the direct consequence of the denial of future expiation.

“What man is there among you who, if his son shall ask bread, will he reach him a stone?”

The Viaticum, the bread of life, is denied to the passing soul, and the draught of comfort of devout prayer withheld from the beloved in the fires of expiation; but the tombstone will be considered with loving thought, and erected over the insensible dust.

The Old Faith shows a profound knowledge of and tenderness for the mere human side in its hour of anguish, even while providing for the paramount needs of the soul. There is one, one only comfort for the bereaved--to be able to help still, and of that they are deprived.

“It isn’t as if I could do any good,” said poor Mrs. Adam, when she turned away from her husband’s deathbed.

She had the power to do such infinite good if she had only known it. What prayer could be so far-reaching as that of the cry of the wife for the chosen one, from whom God alone reserved Himself the right to part her? What act of resignation could be so meritorious as that of her who was making the sacrifice of her all?

“I sent down to tell them to ring the passing-bell,” said the widow. She was eager to accomplish every detail of respectful ceremony that had been left to her.

The passing-bell! Touching institution of the ages of belief, the call for prayers for the soul in its last struggle, the summons to friend and stranger, kindly neighbour and stray passer-by, the cry of the mother for the last alms for her child!

“Oh,” exclaimed our daughter that night, reflecting on these things, “my heart burns when I think how the poor have been robbed of their faith!”

And the mighty lesson which the ancient Church taught by her attitude to the dying is that by calmly turning the eyes of the faithful towards the need for preparation, the duty of warning the sick in time, the immeasurable gain of the last Sacraments as compared to the loss of an unfounded earthly hope, she is giving the only possible comfort alike to the living and the dying; she is placing within reach of the mourners just the one factor that makes their grief bearable--the power of being of use.

Mrs. MacComfort, our Irish cook, who is as near a saint herself as one can ever hope to meet, said to us, the tears brimming in her soft eyes: “Oh, doesn’t it make us feel ashamed of ourselves when we see what our holy religion is, and how little we live up to it!”

And, indeed, that our poor fellow-countrymen are so good without these helps is at once a wonder and a rebuke to us. Mrs. Adam made her sacrifice with a most touching submission: “God must know best.”

“When they came down and told me there’d been an accident, my hands were in the washtub, miss,” she told one of us later, “and as I ran up the garden drying them in my apron, I was praying God all the while that he would give me strength to bear what I might have to see.”

God never refuses such a prayer as that. Adam was an example. It is astonishing the effect the death of this simple gardener has made in the district, and the testimonies of his worth keep coming in. It shows how wide the influence one good man can exercise in any class of life--

“The very ashes of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”

In a narrower sense we shall ourselves always feel that something of him has gone into the soil of our little garden, for which he worked so faithfully. Some of the fragrance of that humble soul will rise up from the violet beds and hang about the roses.

* * * * *

We have been the more disposed to draw these parallels between the Old Faith and its substitute because, by a curious coincidence, Adam’s was the second death to fling sadness over the Villino.

The first was not a personal loss, like that of a servant in the house. It concerned, indeed, a being whom only one of us had seen. It happened far away in the bloody swamps of the Yser; yet, none the less, the tidings filled the little household with mourning.

Among the many exiles flying to our shores from the horror of the advancing Hun were two young mothers with their children--two charming, delicately nurtured, high-born, high-minded women, whose husbands were, one, an officer in the Belgian army, the other, a volunteer working in the ambulance at Calais. The soldier’s wife, the niece of an old friend of ours, a gay, courageous creature, who twice had gone into the line of fire to see her husband, was never tired of speaking to us of “Charley.” He seemed in the end to have become almost a familiar among us. We knew by his photographs that he was handsome, and, by the portions of his letters which she read to us, that he was tender and deep-feeling and strong of courage.

Some weeks ago Charley’s wife left to live with her sister; her cousin still remained with us. It was the latter who was sent for to the telephone that evening when the shadow of death rolled up suddenly and hung over the little house.

An unforgettable moment when she turned from the instrument, crying in accents that pierced one: “_Charley tué! Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, Charley tué!_”

It was when we afterwards learnt the details of the tragedy, which were piteous in the extreme as far as it affected the wife, that the noble consolations of our religion emerged in all their beauty.

The officer had announced an approaching leave, and the joyful anticipation of his little family was commensurate to the love they bore him. As one instance of that love, let it be noted here that his small son, only six years old, could never hear the name of his absent father without tears.

The wife was alone in the garden, resting from the fatigues of a morning spent in preparing for that visit, when a telegram arrived, badly transcribed, in French. She could at first only make out her husband’s name, her brother’s signature, and the words, “Shall be at Calais to-day.”

She danced into the house in ecstasy, crying to the children: “Papa is coming; papa and Uncle Robert are coming.”

And it was only on the stairs that a second glance at the sheet in her hand revealed the fatal word “_tué_.”

A cousin--another young exiled wife and mother--who lived in close proximity, was summoned by the distracted maid, and writes in simple language of the scene of agony: “As soon as I got into the little house,” she says, “I heard her dreadful sobs; I ran to her. ‘Charley is killed, Charley is killed!’ she cried to me. I have never seen anyone in such a state. She was almost in convulsions. I put my arms about her. ‘Make your sacrifice; offer it up for the good of his soul,’ I said to her. ‘No, no! I cannot,’ she said. At first she could not, but I held her close, and after a little I said to her: ‘Say the words after me: “O my God, I accept your will for the good of his soul.”’ And once she had said it she did not go back on it. From that moment she was calm.”

So calm, indeed, that the unhappy young creature had the strength of mind to go in to her children, terrified at the sound of her weeping, and smilingly reassure them, talk and play with them, till their bedtime. She meant to start that night for Calais, and did not wish her little ones to know of their loss till her return.

All her energies were strained to the single purpose--to see him once again before he was laid to rest. She had her desire. The journey was an odyssey of physical and mental pain, but by sheer determination she won through, and found her brother, who had obtained leave of absence from his regiment to meet her. By him she was conveyed to a little village at the back of the Belgian line, where, in a chapel belonging to a convent, the dead man lay.

It had been his last day in the trenches. The next was to begin his brief holiday. He had been posted in that celebrated Maison du Passeur, among the slimy waters, destined to be the scene of one more tragedy. There was an alarm that certain enemy snipers were lurking about, and a small patrol had been ordered to take stock of them.

“I will not,” said the young officer, “allow my men to go into danger without me.”

It was not his duty--it was scarcely even advisable--but he took up a soldier’s carbine and went forth with it. He was actually taking aim when the sergeant beside him saw him fail and slowly collapse. There was, perhaps, a noise of cannon to confuse the man’s senses, for he heard no shot. There was certainly no start or shock apparent. He called out: “_Mon lieutenant, qu’avez vous?_” believing it was a sudden attack of weakness. When he went to his lieutenant he found that he was dead. He had been struck by a bullet under the eye, so well and truly aimed that it had instantly ended the young, vigorous life, as far as this world is concerned. The only mark on his calm face, when his wife saw it, was that small purple spot, where the wound had closed again.

“’Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as
A church-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.”

We have seen a snapshot taken of him as he lay wrapped in his country’s flag. It is a noble, chiselled countenance, looking younger than the thirty-two years of his life, set in a great serenity, with yet that stamp of austere renunciation, of supreme sacrifice, measured and accepted, which we sometimes behold in the face of the dead.

The whole regiment congregated in the little chapel the afternoon of the day which brought the widow to her calvary. The building was decorated with groups of flags, and about the bier were heaped the wreaths of his brother officers, dedicated nearly all in the same words:

“To the comrade fallen on the field of honour,”

“To the comrade who has given his life for his country.”

In the midst of a profound silence the Colonel read _L’Ordre du Jour_, which, by King Albert’s command, conferred upon the fallen _Guide_ the Order of Leopold--for valour--and the bereaved wife was given the decoration to pin over the cold heart that had been so warmly hers. There was a muffled roll of drum, and all present sang the “Brabançonne.” So much for the comfort which the world could still give.

Next morning the funeral Mass was said at the altar. The bier lay at the foot of the step, so close that each time the priest turned round to say _Dominus vobiscum_, his hands were uplifted over the dead. And the widow and all the officers of the regiment kneeling round received Holy Communion for, and in memory of, the slain.

It is not possible--although we know her grief to be as ardent as was her attachment to him--that this widow can mourn as those who have no hope.

The chaplain of the regiment told her that her husband had been to Confession and Holy Communion the morning he had entered into the trenches, three days before. “Have no fear, my child,” said the priest, “he made his Confession as he did everything, with all his heart.”

Blessed religion, which across the deathbed shows us the heavens opening for the departed soul, and bids the holy angel guard even the grave where rests the body, hallowed for the resurrection!

VI

BABIES: CHINESE AND OTHERS

“In how several ways do we speak to our dogs, and they answer
us!”--MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.

The war-baby was very dear and downy when we first saw her.

She is the daughter of a Chinaman (an important member of the household), and a neighbouring lady. The Chinaman was, in fact, so important that the usual matrimonial procedure was reversed in his case; and the family of the lady made unabashed and persevering advances for his favour before he could be induced to condescend to the alliance.

Anyone familiar with Oriental calm will not be surprised to learn that the potentate received with imperturbability the announcement that his lady wife was likely to present him with a family. It was, however, perhaps pushing Eastern reserve a little too far to walk away from his infants with every appearance of disgust, and to threaten to bite those officious friends who sought to extract some show of parental feeling from him by turning him round once more to confront the seething cradle-full.

The cradle was a flat basket, in which the babies maintained a ceaseless movement, crawling one over the other, with a total disregard of such sensitive portions of the anatomy as eyes and noses. They were extraordinarily ill matched as to size--we do not know if this is usual with triplets--looking more like a job lot of Teddy-bears than anything else. There was one as large as the other two put together; there was a very lively medium one; and a very small third, who lay and feebly squirmed under the others vigorous toes. They all had beautiful black noses and little cream-coloured tails tightly curled over their backs. The intelligent reader will by this time have perceived that we are not referring to mere humanity. The war-babies belong to the race of Pekinese, being, in fact, the offspring of the celebrated and priceless Loki, master of the Villino of that name, who fame has already spread far and wide.

His consort was Maud, a chestnut-haired lady, who, we regret to say, had already contracted a _mésalliance_ with a highlander, to the despair of her family. We are convinced that the union is regarded by Loki as a mere matter of politics, but what Western would ever dare to penetrate the barrier of relentless reserve which the Manchu raises between his domestic affairs and the foreign devil? We fear, by his expression and the looks of reproach with which he has since regarded us, that we have already gravely infringed his ideas of decorum by bringing his daughter to dwell in his house.

She is the only daughter of the trio, the two extremes having run to the masculine gender. We chose her on account of her perkiness and her engaging manner of waving her paws in supplication or allurement.

These little dogs have all of them more or less the gift of gesticulation. It is not necessary to teach them either to beg or pray. The puppy--Plain Eliza--will dance half the length of the room on her hind-legs, frantically imploring with her front paws the while, with a persistency and passion that would melt a heart of stone.

The other day, when the butler walked on the paw of Mimosa, the Peky nearest to her in age, who rent the air with her yells, Plain Eliza instantly rose on her hind-legs and added her lamentations. One can truly say that at the same time she wrung her paws in distress over her playmate’s suffering. She has a very feeling heart.

These two adore each other, which is a very good thing, because Mimosa is really a little Tartar. She is the first fur-child to bring discord into the happy family at Villino Loki, and to break the Garden of Eden spell by which cats and dogs of all sizes and tempers dwell together in the most complete amity and sympathy. A small, imperious person of a vivid chestnut hue, with devouring dark eyes and the most approved of snub noses, we flatter ourselves that Mimosa will become a beauty when she gets her full coat. But she will not stand cats, still less a kitten, anywhere within the kitchen premises, and Mrs. MacComfort, the queen of those regions, has actually banished the beloved Kitty and her offspring to the greengrocer’s shop in order to pander to Mimosa, who regarded them much as the honest Briton the alien Hun--something darkly suspicious, to be eliminated from the community at all costs. Mimosa, indeed, has taken matters into her own paws, as the man in the street has done, and Mrs. MacComfort has acted like the Government. Discovering the youngest kitten completely flattened under Mimosa--the latter, her mane bristling, endeavouring to tear off all her victim’s fur--it was decided to remove the alien element for its own benefit.

Harmony is now restored to kitchen dominions. The other morning the young lady of the Villino found the two little dogs solemnly seated each side of the hearth, their eyes fixed on an infinitesimal earthenware pan which was simmering on a carefully prepared fire.

“They’re just watching me cooking their breakfast, miss,” said Mrs. MacComfort in her soft voice. “They’re very partial to chicken liver.”

It was sizzling appetizingly in its lilliputian dish.

From the moment of Plain Eliza’s entrance upon the scene, squirming in a basket, Mimosa showed a profound and affectionate interest in her. We were, if truth be told, a little afraid to trust these demonstrations, fearing they might be of a crocodile nature, but never was suspicion more unjust. The elder puppy has completely adopted the younger one, and is full of anxiety and distress if she is not in her company. She will come bustling into the room, talking in her Peky way, saying as plainly as ever a little dog did: “Has anyone seen Baby? It’s really not safe to let the child go about by herself like that.”

When she discovers her, the two small things kiss and embrace; after which Mimosa abdicates her grown-up airs, and romping becomes the order of the day.

The name of Plain Eliza is the one which has stuck most distinctively to the great Mo-Loki’s daughter. It seemed appropriate to her, in the opinion of the mistress of the Villino, and arose out of a reminiscence of her Irish youth. There happened to be in Dublin society in those far-back days a young lady of guileless disposition, not too brilliant intellect, and what Americans would call “homely” appearance. Presenting herself at a reception at a house which boasted of a very pompous butler, and having announced her name as Eliza Dunn, he forthwith attempted to qualify her with a title.

“Lady Eliza Dunn?”

“No, no,” quoth she. “Plain Eliza.”

Rumour would have it that he thereupon announced in stentorian tones: “Plain Eliza.”

It is not so much the uncomeliness of the Baby’s countenance as the guileless trustfulness with which she turns it upon the world which seems to make the name appropriate. Anyhow, it has come to stay.

The little children that run about Villino Loki these days--war-exiles, most of them--have scarcely crossed the threshold before their voices are uplifted, calling:

“Plain! Plain! Where is Plain Eliza?” And when the favourite is found there is much cooing and fond objurgations of: “Darling Plain! My sweet little Plain! Dear, darling, Plain Eliza!”

She is the only one of the Pekies that can be allowed with perfect safety in the hands of the children. Mimosa is uncertain, and may turn at any moment with a face of fury, her whole body bristling. She is secretly very jealous of the children. And Loki is not uncertain at all. He has never hidden his dislike of them, and his lip begins to curl the instant a small hand is outstretched towards him. But Plain Eliza, if bored, remains patient and gentle; and however “homely” she may seem to her attached family, she is all beauty and charm in the eyes of their little visitors.

Recently a most attractive child was for ten days, with her charming young mother and baby brother, the guest of the Villino. To console her on departure she was promised another Plain Eliza, should such a one ever be vouchsafed the world. Her mother writes: “She prays and makes me pray for the new Plain Eliza every day, and I think fully expects to see her come shooting down from Heaven.”

A very dear child this, with a heart and mind almost too sensitive for her four years. Many delicately pretty sayings are treasured of her. She must have been about three when her first religious instruction was given her. It made a profound impression. For months afterwards she would date her experiences from the day of this enlightenment.

“You know, mammy, that was before Jesus was born to me!”

Her father is at the front. He has not yet seen his little son, the arrival of whom was so much desired. This baby, an out-of-the-way handsome, healthy child, is a prey to the terrors which it will be yet mercifully many years before he can understand. He cannot bear to be left alone a moment, and wakes from a profound sleep in spasms of unconscious apprehension. Then nothing can soothe him but being clasped very close, the mother’s hand upon the little head, pressing it to her cheek. “He is nothing,” said the doctor, “to some of the babies I have seen this year.” It is not astonishing; but how pathetic! These little creatures, carried so long under an anguished heart, come into the world bearing the print of the universal mystery already stamped on their infant souls.

When will the dawn arise over a world no longer agonized and disrupted? When will the wholesome joys and the natural sorrows resume their preponderance in our existence? Surely every man’s own span holds enough of trouble to make him realize that here is not our abiding-place, and long for the security of the heavenly home. Perhaps it was not so. Perhaps we had all fallen away too much from faith and simplicity, and we needed this appalling experience of what humanity can inflict upon humanity, when Christ and His cross are left out of the reckoning.

“The world has become profoundly corrupt. There will surely come some great scourge. It will be necessary to have a generation brought up by mourning mothers and in a discipline of tears,” said a man of God in what seemed words of unbearable severity, a year before the war broke out.

So it may be that we are not only fighting for our children, to deliver them from the intolerable yoke of the Hun, but that we are also suffering for our children, to deliver them from the punishment of our own sins.

* * * * *

We meant to call this chapter “War-babies,” only for the newspaper discussion which has made even innocence itself the subject of passionate and unpleasant discussion.

There have been a good many war-babies in the neighbourhood as well as Plain Eliza. The Signorina of the Villino has already acted godmother several times to infant exiles. These little ones, we thank Heaven, have arrived surprisingly jolly and unimpressed. Yet the poor mothers had, most of them, fled from the sound of the cannon and the menace of the shells, happy if they saw nothing worse than the flames which were consuming their homes and all that those homes held and meant for them. The Signorina is very particular that the girls should be called Elizabeth and the boys Albert, with due loyalty to a sovereignty truly royal in misfortune.

“Mademoiselle,” writes one young woman, “I have the happiness to announce to you that I have the honour to have become the mother of a beautiful little daughter.”

She meant what she said--marvellous as it may seem not to regard the event in such circumstances as an added anguish!

We have heard of the birth of a child to a widow of eighteen--a peasant girl in Brussels--who was forced by the invaders not only to watch her father and husband and both brothers struck down under her eyes, but to assist in burying them while they were still breathing.

“It is a very ugly little baby,” writes the kind lady who is its godmother, “and the poor mother is very ill. When she gets better it will be a comfort to her.”

In these days, when the lid of hell has been taken off--as Mr. Elbert Hubbard, one of the victims of the _Lusitania_, graphically declared--when legions of devils have been let loose upon an unsuspecting world, the case of the eighteen-year-old peasant woman in the Brussels _asile_ is by no means the most to be pitied. Her child will be a comfort to her. Not so will it be with the many unfortunate Belgian village mothers--to whom children are being, we hear, born maimed in awful testimony of the mutilations which the wives have been forced to witness deliberately inflicted on their husbands. War-babies, indeed! Stricken before birth, destined to bear through a necessarily bitter existence the terrible mark of the barbarian foe.

Let us get back to the fur children. It is such a comfort to be able to turn one’s eyes upon something that can never understand the horror about one.

Plain Eliza’s only trick is to put her front paws together, palm to palm, in an attitude of prayer, and wave them. This is called in the family “making pretty paws.” When the children plunge for her and clasp her close, the first cry is always: “Plain Eliza, make pretty paws! Dear Plain Eliza, make pretty paws!”

She will not do it for them every day. Little dogs know very well that human puppies have no real authority over them. Perhaps it is because of the rarity of her condescension in this direction, or perhaps because of the wonderful emphasis of her supplication when she does so condescend, that the youngest of the small exiles, three-year-old Viviane, regards this accomplishment as the very acme of expression. She is a pious babe, and is fond of paying visits to the little Oratory in the Villino. One day her governess observed her wringing and waving her dimpled hands before the altar. When she came out she confided in tones of devout triumph: “I have been making pretty paws to little Jesus.”

Viviane, the most satisfactory type of sturdy childhood it is possible to imagine, combines a great determination, an understanding as solid as her own little person, with an extremely tender heart. She quite realizes the advantages of the good manners which her English governess inculcates, and she can be heard instructing herself in a deep _sotto voce_ when she sits at tea with grown-up entertainers.

“Vivi not speak with her mouth full. Vivi wait. Now Vivi can speak.”

“Good-bye, my little girl,” said her mother to her the other day, sending the child home in advance to her early supper. “I hope you will be good.”

“Vivi good,” was the prompt response, “good, obedient, nice manners at table.”

She walked out of the room with her peculiarly deliberate gait, murmuring the admonition to herself.

During the terribly dry weather in the beginning of May we had a great fire on our moor; whether caused by incendiarism or not remains a moot point. The first hill that rolls up from our valley is now charred half-way. Viviane was much concerned.

“Poor moor burnt! Poor moor burnt!” she lamented. Then, with a delicious impulse qualified by characteristic caution, “Vivi kiss it where it is not black; kiss it and make it well!”

When her cousin and playmate’s father was tragically killed on the Yser, the little creature, who is devoted to her own father, was deeply concerned. The latter is heroically devoting himself to ambulance work at Calais. For many nights after the news of the young officer’s death was received, Viviane would anxiously inform everyone who came into her nursery that Papa was quite safe, pointing out his photograph on the chimney-piece at the same time.

“Vivi got her Papa quite safe,” in a confused association of ideas.

Though she has only seen him once for a very short time all these nine months, the child’s affectionate memory of him remains as distinct as ever, and returning the other day from a morning walk with a scratched knee, she declared pathetically she wished it had been a wound, for then Vivi’s father would have had to come and nurse her.

The spirit of the Belgian children is one of the most remarkable things of the war. As soon as they can understand anything at all they seem to grasp the situation of present valiant endurance and future glory. They know what sacrifices have been demanded of their parents. There is not a child that we have seen but measures the cost and its honour.

Upon the arrival of the _Faire part_ of that same young officer above mentioned, with its immense black edge and unending list of sorrowing relatives, Viviane’s eldest brother, a boy of nine, asked to read it. When he came to the words: _Mort pour la patrie_, he looked up, his face illuminated.

“_Oh, Maman, comme c’est beau!_”

Not the least among the miscalculations of the Germans in Belgium has been their insane attempt to stifle the courage of the little country by ferocity. But Germany has never counted with souls, and it is by the power of the soul that this huge monster of materialism, with its gross brutality and gross reliance on masses and mechanism, will be overthrown. There is not a _gamin_ of the Brussels streets that does not mock the German soldiery, finely conscious that, by the immortal defiance of the spirit, Prussian brutality itself is already vanquished. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!...

There was humour as well as heroism in the heart of the oppressed Antwerp Belgian on that afternoon of his King’s birthday, when he sent the three little girls to walk side by side through the streets dressed in black, orange, and red. The Hun stood helpless before the passage of the living flag, not daring to face the ridicule which would fall upon him all the world over were the babes arrested and taken to the Commandatur. It was a superb defiance, flung in the face of the despot, flung by the little ones! The whole history of Belgium’s glory and Germany’s shame is in it.

* * * * *

It is just the feeling that they are blessedly ignorant of the universal suffering that makes the company of our pets so soothing to us now.

“My dog is my one comfort,” cried a friend to us, surveying her Peky as he sat, fat and prosperous, his lip cocked with the familiar Chinese smile, triumphant after the feat of having silently bitten his mistress’s visitor. “He is the only person that hasn’t changed!”

The bite of a Pekinese does not hurt, it may be mentioned, and the visitor quite shared his owner’s feelings.

It may be something of the same sensation that makes the wounded soldiers in the hospital near us long for the forbidden joy of something alive for a mascot. They picked up a very newly hatched pheasant in the grounds the other day, and carried it home to share their bed and board. It was fed on extraordinary concoctions, and after three days was discovered to have passed away. There was a strong suspicion of the matron, who had not approved from the beginning. They consoled themselves by a military funeral. A very handsome coffin having been made by an expert, they went in solemn procession to lay the infant pheasant to rest. Now there is always a wreath on the grave.

Invited to the Villino this week to see our azaleas, they arrived, a batch of twenty, at the odd hour of ten o’clock in the morning, to be regaled with buns and lemonade, no tea-parties being allowed. They enjoyed themselves very much, but the feature of the entertainment was Mimosa, the small ruby Pekinese. She passed from embrace to embrace. She licked them so much that they told the Sister they would not need to have their faces washed any more. This is the kind of joke that is really appreciated in hospitals. When Mimi returned to her devoted Mrs. MacComfort in the kitchen, the latter remarked “she was so above herself she couldn’t do anything with her.”

Unfortunately all little dogs are not happy and protected like ours. Belgian friends who passed through villages and towns after the first wave of the invader had spread over the country tell us of a horrible and singular byway of wanton atrocity. The soldiery slaughter the dogs wholesale, some said to eat them, but that seems hardly credible. Most probably it was part of the scheme of general terrorism. To burn the houses and slay the husbands and fathers, to spear and mutilate and trample down the children, to insult the women, it was all not enough. The finishing touch must be given by the murder of the humble companion, the faithful watch-dog, the children’s pet. Piles and piles of dogs’ heads were at the corners of the streets, our friend told us.

We know they laid hold of the poor dogs to experiment upon them with their diabolical gas. But there was at least some reason in the latter brutality.

One hears many stories about the dogs of war.

At the beginning of the conflict the trained ambulance dogs were reported to have done splendid work in the French trenches. We do not know if we have any such, but we do know that the men have pets among them out there, whether mascots brought out from England or strays picked up from the abandoned farms. The deserted dogs! A French paper published an article upon these dumb victims, not the least pathetic of the many side tragedies of this year of anguish. It was a poor shop-keeper who described what he himself had seen in passing through a devastated town within the conquered territory.

“The dogs have remained in the town, from whence the inhabitants have fled. The dogs have remained where there is not left a stone upon a stone. How they do not die of hunger I cannot imagine. They must hunt for themselves far out in the country-side, I suppose, but they come back as quickly as they can and congregate at the entrance of the suburb on the highroad.

“There are two hundred, or three hundred perhaps--spaniels, sheep-dogs, fox-terriers, even small ridiculous lap-dogs--and they wait, all of them, with their heads turned in the same direction, with an air of intense melancholy and passionate interest. What are they waiting for? Oh, it is very easy to guess. Sometimes one of the old inhabitants of the town makes up his mind to come back from Holland. The longing to see his home, to know what is left of his house, to search the ruins, is stronger than all else--stronger than hatred, stronger than fear. And sometimes then one of the dogs recognizes him. His dog! If you could see it. If you could imagine it. All that troop of dogs who prick their ears at the first sight of a man coming along the road from Holland, a man who has no helmet, a man not in uniform; the instantaneous painful agitation of the animals who gaze and gaze with all their might--dogs have not very good eyes--and who sniff and sniff from afar, because their scent is better than their sight. And then the leap, the great leap of one of these dogs who has recognized his master, his wild race along the devastated road, ploughed with the furrows by the passage of cannons and heavy traction motors and dug with trenches; his joyous barks, his wagging tail, his flickering tongue! His whole body is one quiver of happiness. The dog will not leave that man any more, he is too much afraid of losing him. He will follow close to his heels without stopping to eat; one day, two days if needful; and in the end he goes away with him.

“But the others? They have remained on the road. And when they see this dog depart, having found at last what they all are seeking, they lift up their muzzles despairingly and howl, howl as if they would never stop, with great cries that fill the air, and re-echo until there is nothing more to be seen upon the road. Then they are dumb, but they do not move. They are there; they still hope.”

VII

OUR GARDEN IN JUNE

“Still may Time hold some golden space
Where I’ll unpack that scented store
Of song and flower and sky and face,
And count, and touch, and turn them o’er.”

RUPERT BROOKE.

_June 1._--The garden in early June! Like a great many other things the idea is very different from the reality. The first of June in the garden represents to the mind’s eye bowers of roses, exuberance in the borders, a riot of colour and fragrance. As a matter of fact, with us, in our late-blooming, high-perched terraces, it means a transition stage, and is annually very exasperating and disappointing to the impatient spirit of the Signora. It is the time when the azaleas look dishevelled, with their delicate blossom hanging depressingly from the stamens. The forget-me-nots have all been cleared away, and in those places where bulbs are preserved against the future spring, masses of yellowing tangled leaf-spikes are an eyesore. The bedding-out plants still look tiny on the raw borders. All our roses, except those climbers against the house, are yet in the bud. There are just the poppies that flaunt in the borders; and even their colour becomes an exasperation, because they would have done so much better to wait and join in the grand symphony, instead of blowing isolated trumpet flourishes, prepared to relapse into sulky silence when the delphiniums strike up their blue music.

There is also another frightful drawback to this first week of leafy June, and that is that it would be easier to separate Pyramus from Thisbe than the gardener from the vegetables. A constant enervating struggle goes on between us on the relative values of cabbages and roses, beans and poppies. We want the roses sprayed, we want the borders staked, we want sustenance in the shape of liquid manure and Clay’s fertilizer copiously administered to our darlings; and he wants to put in “that there other row of scarlet runners and set out them little lettuces.” And when it comes to watering: he doesn’t know, he’s sure, how he’s to get them cabbages seen to as they ought to be seen to; a deal of moisture _they_ want, if they’re to do him any justice.

Meanwhile our terraces are panting. The climbing roses up the house--and this year they would have been glorious--are pale and brittle in petal and foliage, as if they had been actually blasted.

The master of the Villino, after due representations from the Padrona, has seen the necessity of sacrifice, and assiduously waters the garden every evening--and himself! The hose is defective; being war time we cannot afford a new one. Two jets break out at the wrong angle and take you in the eye and down the waistcoat at the most unexpected moments; and though amenable to persuasion, the Padrone’s devotion has its limits, and he positively declines the remanipulation of the tube which will bring it--after having done service in the Dutch garden--to the end of the Lily Walk. So that, as it is two yards short, the deficiency has to be made up by hand watering, and two obsolete bath-cans are produced out of the house, which seems, for some unexplained reason, easier than using the proper garden furniture. These cans are generally left, forgotten, where they were last used, unless the piercing eye of the mistress of the Villino happens to dart in that direction.

Yesterday we had visitors--in eighteenth-century parlance, a General and his Lady--and of course the two cans stood in the middle of the path, confidingly, nose to nose. Being war time nobody minded. It is the blessing and the danger of war time that nobody minds anything. And the General’s Lady, being tactful, kept her eye on the buddleia.

Death having come to the little garden and taken Adam away; and greed of gain having deprived us of Reginald Arthur in favour of the post office; and patriotism having rendered the local young man as precious as he is scarce, we were five weeks--five invaluable, irreplaceable weeks--gardenerless, odd-manless at the Villino. Nothing this year will ever restore the lost time. No amount of pulling and straining will draw the gap together.

Japhet, Adam’s successor, is worn, as the Americans say, very nearly “to a frazzle.” He is a deeply conscientious man, and peas and beans and cabbages are to him the very principles upon which all garden morality is built up. He was much grieved the other day when someone “passed a remark” on the subject of weeds in the back-garden.

Weeds! We should think there were! It was so blatantly self-evident a fact that we wondered that anyone should have thought it worth while to pass a remark upon it. But Japhet was hurt to his very soul: considering his vocation, it would perhaps be more in keeping to say--his marrow.

Professional pride is a very delicate and easily bruised growth. When the Padrona was in her teens the whole of her mother’s orderly establishment was convulsed one June--a hot June it was too--because the professional pride of the family butler had been wounded by the footman’s presuming to hand a dish which it was not his business to touch. His sense of dignity was doubtless sharpened to a very fine edge by the fact that, the June weather being so hot, an unusual amount of cooling beer had been found necessary. This may seem a curious mixture of metaphors, nevertheless the facts are exact.

Reilly--that was his name--was very deeply and, in the opinion of the rest of the household, justifiably incensed when Edmund lifted the entrée dish with the obvious intention of offering it to his mistress; and though it was regarded as an exaggeration of sensitiveness for him to knock the footman down immediately after lunch in the seclusion of the pantry, to kneel upon his chest and endeavour to strangle him with his white tie; and though the cook deemed it incumbent upon her to draw the attention of the authorities to the drama by seizing a broom and brushing it backwards and forwards across the row of bells; all the sympathies of the establishment remained with Reilly, and “the mistress” was regarded as extremely hard-hearted for dismissing him from her service. The footman was a shock-headed, snub-nosed youth, and we will never forget his appearance when, released from his assailant, he burst into the dining-room, collarless, his white tie protruding at an acute angle behind his left ear, with a mixture of triumph, importance, and suffering upon his scarlet countenance.

So we were compassionate with Japhet when he waxed plaintive over his underling’s house duties, and even forbore having the windows cleaned for several weeks, and endured tortures at the sight of her spattered panes, out of regard for his difficulties.

The underling is aptly named Fox. He has red hair and long moustaches and a furtive eye and a general air of alertness and slyness which show that if he had ever belonged to the animal kingdom in a previous state of existence, Vulpus he certainly was. But we did not expect him to develop garden susceptibilities too. This, however, it seems he has done.

“I’ve very bad news for you,” said Japhet sombrely to his master last week, when he came into the long, book-lined room to receive his Saturday pay. He has naturally a lugubrious countenance.

His master’s thoughts flew to Zeppelins, spotted fever, and other national dangers.

“Indeed, Japhet. What is it?”

“Fox, he says, he can’t put up with the couch-grass and the docks in the lower garden. They seem to have got on his mind, like. He don’t see how he can go on dealing with them. They _’ave_ got a strong hold,” concluded Japhet with a sigh, as if he too were overwhelmed by the enemy.

Well, it was tragic enough, for the precious Fox had been caught after long hunting, and had made his own bargain--a foxy one--with every eye to the main chance. We want to keep him, but have a guilty sensation too, he being young and strong, and obviously the right stuff for enlisting; though, indeed, if docks and couch-grass daunt him, how would he stand shrapnel and gas?

The daughter of the house, who is extremely tactful, and who is generally trusted with delicate situations, interviewed him on the spot. She found him in a condition only to be described as one of nerve-shock. His long, red moustaches quivered. All he could reply, in a broken voice, was:

“It don’t do me no credit. It won’t never do me no credit.”

Japhet, consulted, gave it as his opinion that it was not a question of his subordinate’s bettering himself; but said “Fox had always been a sensitive worker.” Nevertheless, we should not be surprised to hear that war prices have something to do with it.

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It is only now, after nearly five years, that we are beginning to reap some benefit of our constant planting. The Signora wonders if her irritable mind had allowed her to leave undisturbed those divers perennials and bushes which she had rooted up after a year’s trial from beds and borders, how might she not now be gathering the reward of longanimity.

The Léonie Lamesche roses, for instance. She hunted them out of the middle of the Dutch garden; out of the beds before the entrance arches into the rose-garden; into that corner of the kitchen-garden where the derelicts gather. And just now the child of the house has brought into her bunch after bunch of little orange-crimson pompoms, delicious and quaint to look at, and delicious and quaint to smell, with their faint tartness, as of apples, mixed with an aromatic herbiness as of myrtles.

“There’s quantities more,” says the Signorina. Poor little things! they have been allowed to settle and spread their roots, and one would not know them for the nipped, disreputable, guttersnipe objects that hitherto called down the master of the Villino’s scorn.

We do not regret them in the Dutch garden after all. It is too near the house not to have its garland for every season; and the forget-me-nots, hyacinths, and tulips are too precious and beautiful in the spring. But under the rose-arches now there are gaps; and this year, between the loss of our poor Adam and war scruples, these gaps have not been filled.

If the Signora had left Léonie Lamesche where she was, all those nice varnished green leaves and all those darling rosettes of bloom with their odd colour and fragrance would be in their right place, instead of in the waste ground from which Japhet, with the zeal of the new broom, is already preparing to sweep them next autumn--not, be it said, with any special disapprobation for Léonie, but because he declares he wants to get rid of all that there stuff which hadn’t no right to be in a vegetable garden at all.

The moral is--as has been said long ago in the “Sentimental Garden”--that chief among the many virtues a garden inculcates is patience. If the Signora had had patience, she would not have turned all the Standard Soleil d’Or and Conrad Meyers out of the Lily Walk, because the shadow of the buddleias interfered with their bloom. For behold! this winter’s snow has cast the great honey-trees sideways, and the united efforts of Japhet and Fox, who pulled and propped and strained in vain, have left them sideways, and sideways, in the opinion of these experts, they will for ever after remain. And the Lily Walk is in full sunshine. Had we but left the standards, who, of course, will be sulky in their new positions for a couple of years more!

_June 15._--The complaint begun in the first week of our transitional garden has already been reproved by the mid-month’s splendours. In spite of the drought and the desiccating south-east winds (which by some inscrutable decree of Providence have been sent to us this year when so much depends upon field, orchard, and garden), the roses are magnificent and of unusual promise.

Our peony beds--the mistress of the garden did know that peonies are slow ladies and will take their time--are beginning to reward her forbearance. Such a basketful as came into her bedroom to-day with the Polyantha roses!--those large, pink, scented beauties which are so satisfying to settle in big bowls. We have put them in the chapel against boughs of the service-tree. The effect is all one could wish.

The service-tree bloomed this year as never it bloomed before. It looked like the bridal bouquet of a fairy giantess! We trust this daring hyperbole will enable our readers to represent to themselves something at once immense and ethereal, misty grey, and delicate silver-white. It is of huge size and beautiful shape, and grows a little higher on the slope than the greater of the two beech-trees. For colour effect we know nothing more soul-filling than the way it stands between the ardent tawny glories of the Azalea Walk and the young jewel green of its cousin--the beech above mentioned. Put the shoulder of the moor at the back in its May mantle of coppery mauve heather not yet in bud--that is a picture to gaze upon under a blue sky, thanking God for the loveliness of the earth!

This last May, which will be ever memorable as one of the most tragic months of the war, hazard--or that _slithy tove_, the alien Hun--provided us with a background approximately _macabre_ for the radiant youthful joy. Our moor has been burnt--five fires started simultaneously one day of high east wind, and the first great swelling hill is covered with a garment as of hell. The scattered fir-trees here and there are of a livid, scorched brown. To look out on the scene and see them stand in the slaty black, casting mysterious shadows under the dome of relentless brightness we have had of late, is like looking upon a circle of Dante’s Inferno, out of one of the cool, bowery regions of his upper Purgatorio. Our daughter finds a wilder beauty in our blossom and verdure against the savage gloom beyond; but not so the Padrona. She laments the tapestry of her peaceful, rolling heights. Now, past mid-June, bracken is creeping slowly through the charred roots of the heather, and she does not want a bracken hill. It is spreading democracy, taking the place of some royal line; the rule of the irresponsible, the coarse, the mediocre; though she grants there will be beauty in the autumn when it all turns golden. And perhaps there’s a lesson to be drawn somewhere, but she will have none of it, for there is nothing so tiresome as the unpalatable moral.

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