A LITTLE HOUSE IN WAR TIME

TO THE
REV. ST. GEORGE K. HYLAND, D.D.
“Guide, philosopher, and friend”

September, 1915

A LITTLE HOUSE
IN WAR TIME

BY AGNES AND EGERTON CASTLE

AUTHORS OF
“THE STAR-DREAMER,” “INCOMPARABLE BELLAIRS,”
“OUR SENTIMENTAL GARDEN,” ETC.

“God gave all men all earth to love,

But, since our hearts are small,

Ordained for each one spot should prove

Beloved over all;

That, as He watched Creation’s birth,

So we, in God-like mood,

May of our love create our earth

And see that it is good.”

Rudyard Kipling

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
1916

Printed in Great Britain

CONTENTS

A FOREWORD

“... thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.”

Rupert Brooke.

A little chronicle of a great time may have an interest of its own quite incommensurate from its intrinsic worth. These pages do not pretend to any merit beyond faithfulness; but they are the true record of the everyday life of an average family during the first year of the war of wars; what we have felt, what we have seen; the great anxieties; the trivial incidents and emotions which have been shared by thousands of our fellow-countrymen. This home has been so far exceptional that it has had few hostages to give to fortune, and that it has mercifully been spared the supreme sacrifice demanded with such tragic universality, and given with such a glorious resignation: but, infinitesimal pulse, it has beaten with the great arteries, the whole mighty heart of the British Empire.

Annals enough there are, and will be, of the soul-stirring events of 1914: the proud rise of the nation, its struggles, its failures, its appalling blunders, and the super-heroism that has saved the consequences. If Armageddon be not the end of the world; if there be generations coming after to carry the sheaves of that seed sown with blood and tears to-day, there will be no dearth of evidence to enable our children’s children to feed upon the story of England’s glory. They will be able to read and learn and look back, out of the peace won for them, to examples almost beyond the conception of idealism. Should, by some freak of chance, this humble book survive, it may not then be without an interest of its own.

This was how the quiet stay-at-home family felt and thought in the days of the titanic conflict; these were the little things that happened in a little country house. No great moral lesson certainly, no revelation of out-of-the-way philosophy; just the way we hoped and feared; the way we still laughed and talked, gardened and worked, the way we were led on from day to day and made to find, after all, what seemed unbearable, bearable, brought to see light where there was apparently no issue.

Being, as we say—so far—singularly unstricken in the midst of so much mourning, we have been able to enjoy the lighter side of existence, the humours, the quaintnesses, which relieve, blessedly for poor humanity, the most complicated and the most desperate situations. Perhaps, therefore, these random jottings, turned, many of them, to the lighter side of life, may, in some stray hour of relaxation, amuse here and there one actively engaged in the stern actions which the time demands. Perhaps the breath of the garden may be grateful to a mind upon which the wind from the trenches has blown so long.

There is a great deal of laughter about our country, even now. The troops go singing down the roads in the early dawn, and come tramping back to camp, with tired feet, but with joking tongues, after the long days. We know there is much laughter in the fighting-line; innocent, childish pleasantries, catchwords that run with grins from lip to lip. There is no laughter so genuine as that which springs from a good conscience. And so there is laughter in the hospitals also, thank God!

We trust our pages may add a little mirth more to the gallant spirit abroad; beguile the fancy of one wounded man, or the oppression of one anxious heart. Then, indeed, they will not have been written in vain.

Would only that through them we could convey an impression of the surroundings in which we write; would we could bring our readers the atmosphere of these Surrey heights; of the rolling moorland, of the winds, sweet with heather, aromatic with the pine-woods, charged with the garden scents that blow about us; then truly would they find refreshment! Would we could show them our terraced borders where now the roses are breaking into wonderful bloom, pink, crimson, cream, fire-carmine, and yellow; where the delphiniums are arrayed, noble phalanxes in every shade of enamel blue and purple—spires marshalled together like some fantastic cathedral town, viewed in impossible moonlight, out of a Doré dream; where the canterbury bells are beginning to shake out their cups, tinted like the colours in a child’s paint-box; and the campanulas, with their tones of mountain wildness—of snow and blue distance—bring coolness into the hotter tints of the border.

We look down on this July richness from the small white house with its green blinds, which, though compact, round-windowed, comfortably Georgian, has yet an absurd Italian look.

On the upper terrace wall the ornamental pots, each with its little golden cypress, begin to foam with lobelia and creeping geranium; between two clumps of cypress-trees, Verocchio’s little smiling boy grips his fish against a tangle of blush rambler. And that’s a bit of Italy for you, even with the ultimate vision of wild moor!

The terraces run down the hill, tier below tier. On the other side of the valley the woods rise between the shouldering heather-clad hills, to the east; the wide, long view spreads to the south-west, where the hills begin to lift again, and distant pine-woods march across the sky.

Would we could but give to mere words the sense of altitude, of great horizons which our high-perched position gives us!

“You’re in a kind of eyrie,” says one visitor. And another: “Oh, I do like all this sky! It’s so seldom one really gets the sky about one.”

“You have,” said an exile—an old Belgian religious—after tottering solemnly along the terrace walk, “you have here an earthly paradise. A spot God has wonderfully blessed.”

Besides the startling contrasts and the fairness of its prospect, the little place has a special charm of its own, which is not possible to describe, yet which everyone feels who comes within its precincts. We quite wait for the phrase now, upon the lips of guests under the red-tiled roof: “It’s so extraordinarily peaceful.”

Peace! Peace in the midst of the boom of the war tocsin, echoing all round! Peace, in spite of the newspapers, the letters, the rumours, the perpetual coming and going of troops, the distant reverberations of gun practice, the never-relaxing grip of apprehension! Yes, in spite of all the world being at war—there is peace in the Villino.

Some of us believe it wells out from a little chamber, where, before the golden shrine, the Donatello angels hold up never-extinguished lamps. Or a visitor may say wonderingly: “I think it must be because you’re all so united.” Or, perhaps, as the old monk had it, there is an emanation from the place itself: so beautiful a spot of God’s earth, so high up, so apart between the moor and the valley! Whatever the reason, we wish that some of the peace that lingers here may reach out from these pages, and touch with serenity any unquiet heart or restless spirit that comes their way.

And since the soldiers we have written about wanted toys, like sick children, their mascot to hug—here comes a procession of our little fur folk walking vividly before your mental eye.

Here is Loki, the first and oldest of the pets. Loki, growing grey about the muzzle, elderly already by reason of his six years of life; with his immense coat, tawny, tufted, plumed, fringed; with his consequential gait; his “quangley” ways: so easily offended, in his own strong sense of dignity; with his over-loving heart; his half-human, half-lion eyes; Loki, with his clockwork regularity of habit; his disdainful oblivion, except on certain rare occasions, of the smaller fur fry; Loki, making windmill paws to the Master of the Villino, till he has succeeded in dragging him away from his pipe and his arm-chair for a walk on the moors; or yet frantically and mutely imploring the mystified visitor to go away and cease from boring him.

And here is Mimosa, the most Chinese of little ladies, hued like a ripe chestnut, with dark orbs so immense and protuberant as almost to seem to justify the legend that Pekinese will drop their eyes about if you don’t take care. Very sleek and sinuous and small is she, a creature of moods and freaks, fastidious to the point of never accepting a meal with the other dogs; with all kinds of tricksy, pretty ways of play, shrilly barking and dancing for bread pills, which she will fling in the air and catch again, throw over her shoulder and waltz round to pounce upon, more like a kitten than a little dog.

And the puppy, Loki’s own contemned daughter, the colour of a young lion cub—the puppy, with her irrepressible enthusiasms, her unsnubbable demonstrations, her “pretty paws,” her coal-black muzzle, her innocent countenance—“Plain Eliza”—whose heart, like her father’s, is so much too big and tender and faithful, that happening the other day to see, over the garden hedge, a member of the family in whose house she was born, she rent the air with such shrieks of ecstasy that the whole Villino establishment rushed to the spot, thinking she was being murdered.

Then there is Arabella, the lavrock setter. “Perverse, precise, unseasonable Pamela,” cries Mr. B. in Richardson’s celebrated novel, when having pursued the virtuous damsel to her last refuge, she not unnaturally misunderstands the purport of his next advance.

When she does understand she exclaims: “Mr. B. is the noblest of men, he has offered me marriage.”

To come back to Arabella. We wish we could find a union of epithets as telling as that of Mr. B. in the exasperation of his conscious rectitude. Inane, inert, inconvenient Arabella, fairly well describes our sentiments towards her. She is a bore and a burden. She feels the heat and goes out and takes mud-baths, and comes in and shakes herself in the drawing-room. She cannot understand why she should not lie in our laps as well as the puppies. She howls mournfully outside the kitchen door unless she is invited in to assist in the cooking. She has destroyed three arm-chair covers in the servants’ hall, preferring that resting-place to her basket. “Fond” is the word that might best be used to qualify our feelings towards her. We don’t know what to do with her, but we should not like to be without her.

Then there is the black Persian, “Bunny,” our kind dead Adam’s cat. You will meet him circling round the garden. He will raise his huge bushy tail when he sees you, and fix his inscrutable amber eyes upon you, questioningly. Then he will pass on with a soundless mew. He is looking for his master, and you can watch him slink away, superb, stealthy, pursuing his fruitless quest.

The fur children come first, being the Villino’s own family, but there are other kinds with us now. The little Belgians run about the paths calling to each other with their quaint pattering intonation, so that long before you hear the words you know by the sound of the voices coming up the hill that these are the small exiles. Brown-haired Marthe, with her childish ways and her serious mind, her ripe southern-tinted face, and Philippe, with his shock of fine hair, hazel-colour, cut medieval fashion, and his little throat, which bears his odd picturesque head as a flower-stem its bloom. And sturdy Viviane, stumping up with her solemn air, precisely naming the flowers as she comes:

“Sweet Will-li-yam! Del-phi-ni-um! Canterry bells!”

Soon Thierry, the schoolboy, will be here too. The garden is full of Easter holiday memories of him; a little perspiring boy, squaring a tree-trunk with boxing-gloves five times too large for him, under the grand-paternal tuition of the Master of the Villino. It would have been difficult to say who was the more pleased, child or man. And Thierry can box with a right good will; a very excellent little boy this, with a bursting patriot’s heart under his shy, reserved ways. No doubt he fancied he was hitting a German with each of those well-directed blows.

It is nice to have the children about the Villino; and that they are exiles adds pathos to the sound of their happy laughter in our ears, and a tenderness to the pleasure with which our eyes watch their unconscious gaiety.

Perhaps, however, if anyone wanted to have a really poetic impression of our little house, they should see it by moonlight, or—which, of course, nobody does except by accident—in the summer dawn. Whether it is because of an unconscious appreciation of the limits of our own intellect, or whether from some inherent vulgarity, human nature is prone to depreciate all that is laid out very plainly before it. We demand mystery in everything if it is to mean beauty to us.

Some such idea as this Mr. Bernard Shaw expresses—in one of his uncanny leaps of the spirit out of his own destructive philosophy—when he makes the Christian martyr retort to the Pagan who accuses her of not understanding her God: “He wouldn’t be my God if I could!”

To pass from the infinite to the atom: when the Villino garden and its prospects are but imperfectly revealed on a moonlight night the view, with mystery added to its fairness, becomes wonderful in its loveliness.

On such a night as this the valley holds mist in its bosom, and the distant moor ridges in their pine-woods might be the Alps, for the air of distance they assume, the remote dignity with which they withdraw themselves, pale and ethereal, into the serene sky. It may be the moon is rising over the great wooded hill in front of the Villino. The white radiance pours full upon us. We know all that is revealed, and yet all is different. Each familiar object has a strange and transfigured face. The little cypress-trees, rimmed in silver, cast black shadows on the grass, silver-cobwebbed. The great moors are exquisite ghost wildernesses, their hollows full of cloudy secrets. And you can hear the night-jar spinning out its monotonous, mysterious song, a song which does not break the grand restfulness, but only accompanies it. We have no running streams—there is nothing perfect here below, it is a great want! But the song of the night-jar makes up a little for the voice of water in the night-time. It is the hearing of some such sound, lost in the turmoil of day, that emphasizes the incomparable silence.

Our heights in the sunrise show once again a world transfigured; a sparkling, coloured, other-worldly world.

“Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”

The saffrons and yellows begin to gather over the moors, and the crests of the hills and the tree-tops are tipped with light. Each flower has its shimmering aureole; each has taken a hue never seen in the garish fulness of the sunshine, enamel, stained-glass-window hues, difficult to describe. There is a curious look of life about everything. It is the exquisite hour of the earth, untroubled by man; garden and woods, hill and valley, unfold their secrets to the sky and hold commune with the dawn-angels. There is a freshness, a vividness, almost a surprise about the world, as if all things were made new again. An immense difference in the scene compared to the night’s grave mysteries. The latter is a canto from the Divine Comedy as against Fra Angelico’s dance of Paradise. And to this innocent joy of the waking earth you have the songs of the birds. Some ecstatic thrush, or liquid slow-chanting blackbird, will have begun the hymns at the first glimmer of dawn, and hold the world spell-bound till the lesser chorus spreads a tangled web of sound from end to end of the valley and the garden heights, and the moor silence is reached.

Morning after morning of this glorious summer of the war, the pageant of sunrise marches, for those who have eyes to see, and night after night the mystery gathers in the moonlight. All England holds some such fair visions. Does it not seem a dream that it should be so? The horror, the devastation, the noise, the fire, the bloodshed, the agony, the struggle, only a couple of hundred miles away, are they the only realities in this red year? To us in England’s heart, still mercifully unwounded, these sometimes seem the dream, the dream of evil, and our peace the reality.

Dream, or reality, it is our peace we want to bring to you.

A LITTLE HOUSE IN
WAR TIME

I
THE VILLINO IS PINCHED

“Prepare, prepare the iron helm of war,

Bring forth the lots, cast in the spacious orb;

The Angel of Fate turns them with mighty hands,

And casts them out upon the darkened earth!

Prepare, prepare!”

W. Blake.

The most usual remark that people make after a visit to our little house on the hill is this: “How peaceful!”

Even in the ordinary course of life—those times that now seem extraordinary to a world already accustomed to the universal struggle—when everyone in England was in peace, except where their own unquiet spirits may have marred it, even then this nest of ours seemed peace within peace. We do not know now whether the contrast is not the more acute. One of the thousands of homes dedicated to the quiet joys and innocencies of life, where no one ever wanted to quarrel, because all found the hours so full of sweet content, we do not flatter ourselves that we are singular: only typical. The shadow of the great cloud cast at first a hideous, unnatural darkness over our harmless ways.

All during the long golden summer, when we looked out across the moor basking in the radiance; when our roses bloomed and the garden rioted in colour, and the valley slowly turned from green to russet; when the harvest-moon went up like a huge brass platter in silver skies, the very beauty of it all clutched one’s heart the fiercer. How fares it with our boys over there in the heat and the stress? How much worse it must be for them that the sun should blaze upon them, marching, firing, rushing forward, lying wounded, wanting water!... Oh, dear lads of England, how we at home agonized with you!

The little house, bought in a light-hearted hour, furnished with infinite zest in happy days out of distant Rome, was a sort of toy to us from the beginning; and kind friends surveyed it with indulgent and amused, yet admiring, glances, such as one would bestow upon an ingenious and pretty plaything. We called it the Villino, partly in memory of the Italian sojourn, and partly because, though it is bounded by wild moors, it contrives a quaintly Italianate air. It stands boldly on the lip of the hill, and the garden runs down in terraces to a deep valley. Across the valley to the east the moors roll, curve upon curve. South, facing us, the trees begin their march; and westward the valley spreads, rising into moors again, where again the fir-trees sentinel the sky. The view from the terrace rather takes your breath away. It is unexpected and odd, and unlike anything, except Italy and Scotland mixed: the wildness, and the trim terraced garden with its calculated groups of cypress, its vases brimming with flowers, its stone steps, its secret bowery corners.

“Mount Ecstasy” an artist friend has dubbed it. “Is it possible,” she asked us in the middle of this radiant October of the war, “that the wind ever blows here? Do you ever hear it shrieking round the house?”

We gave her a vivid description of what the wind could do when it liked; when it came up the valley with the rain on its wings. She looked incredulous.

“Is it possible?” she repeated softly.

She had come straight from the great camp at Lyndhurst, where the 7th Division, gallant as ill-fated, had gathered in all its lusty strength before embarking for the bloody struggle in Flanders. She had just said good-bye to her eldest son; the call of the bugle, the march of thousands in unison, was in her ears; the vision of the crowded transport vivid in her mind. Yet here she would not believe that even the winds could break our peace.

This was very much what we felt ourselves when the Storm burst; it was incredible with this placidity all about us.

One tries to think what it would be had the Villino sprung to life in Belgian soil, or did the Hun succeed in landing, and come pouring, a noxious tide, across our country roads, taking the poor little place on its way. The first refugee from that heroic and devastated land who found shelter here was very smiling and brave until she came out into the garden. Then she began to cry.

“I had such pretty flowers too.”

All our moors are turning into camps; they grew like mushrooms in a day, it seems. We hear the soldiers marching by in the dead of the night, singing, poor boys! to give themselves heart—such nights, too, as they are this autumn, deluged with rain and blown through with relentless wind! We stand between two hospitals; and Belgian refugees overflow in the villages. We read of the bombardment of the coast and the dropping of bombs, and yet we do not realize. We still feel as in a nightmare from which we must wake up.

Yet the effects of war are beginning to stamp themselves, even in the Villino and in its garden. We are, some of us, naturally inclined to luxuries. The mistress of the Villino is certainly a spendthrift where bulbs and tubers and seeds are concerned; and for three out of the four years since she owned the little property, the spring garden has justified impenitence. Oh! the crocuses running through the grass of that third terrace called the Hemicycle! Oh! the scyllas making miniature skies under the almond-trees! Oh! the tulips swaying jewel chalices over the mists of blue forget-me-not: glories of the past, this coming spring, how shall the garden miss you!

It must be explained that our soil—green-sand—our position—high-perched—our general tendency—sloping down-hill—make us charmingly dry and healthy, but disagree with the bulb. It is impossible to naturalize anything less hardy than the daffodil. The snowdrop declines to live with us. Therefore our autumn bulb lists were copious and varied, and the results ephemeral and lovely. This year there has been no bulb list; who could think of this completely personal and selfish gratification when it is the flower of our manhood that is being mown down out yonder? when all that can be spared must be spared to help! There is so little one can do, and so appallingly much to be done.

And inside, too, we are being pinched; not badly, not cruelly, but just as if the war monster had reached out one of its myriad hands—quite a small and rather weak one—and had hold of us, enough to nip, not to strangle.

It will not surprise any garden owner to learn that this is the year of all others in which Adam, the Villino gardener, had an “accident” with the cuttings, and that therefore those bushes of chrysanthemums, which look so well on our grey and orange landings, have not been forthcoming. Another year it would not have mattered. We should have gaily replenished the Italian pots from the local nursery, where chrysanthemums are a speciality. But as it is—we go without.

In a hundred other items the nipping fingers produce the same paralyzing result. The footman, who, we regret to say, gibbered at the thought of enlisting, and avowed to a horrified kitchen circle that he might perhaps be able to help to carry a wounded man, but face a bullet—“Never, never!”—found his post untenable in a household chiefly composed of the fair and patriotic sex. We conceived that the times demanded of us to bring the garden-boy into the house, thus reducing our establishment without inflicting hardship.

Such, however, was not the opinion of Juvenal, our eccentric butler. This strange being, from certain aspects of his character, might have been, as the Italian prelate said of a distinguished Jesuit preacher, “born in a volcano.” He is devoted to the dogs, and has a genius for settling flowers; and he has become altogether so much a part of the establishment—the famiglia—that the Villino would lose half its charm without him. Nevertheless, he is volcanic! And though at first he took the substitution of four-foot in buttons for six-foot in livery with an angelic resignation, Vesuvius broke forth with unparalleled vigour and frequency after a couple of weeks of the regimen. Unfortunately, Juvenal is not sustained by patriotic ardour. He deliberately avoids afflicting himself with thoughts about the war. “I never could bear, miss, to see anything that was hurt! And as for anything dying, miss, even if it was only a little animal—why, there, I couldn’t as much as look at my poor old father!” Here is his point of view as expressed tersely to the Signorina of the Villino.

This being the case, he succeeds so thoroughly in blocking his mind against all facts connected with war time (except the entertaining of “a nice young fellow from the camp”) that he has found himself injured to the core by our attempts at economy. And when it came to our unexpectedly inviting a refugee lady into his dining-room, and his having to lay three extra places for her and her children, the lava overflowed into the upper regions. We with difficulty extricated “Miss Marie” from the burning flood.

We are all slightly overwrought these days, and instead of pretending not to notice, which is the only possible way where Juvenal is concerned, we suggested that he should look for another situation. It would be difficult to say whether outraged feeling or amazement predominated in him. Of course, we all deeply repented our hasty action, and then ensued four uncomfortable weeks of cross purposes in which neither side would “give in.” Finally the poor volcano departed in floods of tears, with twenty-four bird-cages and a Highland terrier.

“Don’t you take on, Mr. Juvenal,” said Mrs. MacComfort, the cook; “you’ll be back in no time!”

There ensued a dreadful interlude with an anæmic young butler unfit for military service, who promptly developed toothache and a bilious attack, and whom all the servants regarded as a spy for the convincing reasons that he sat and rolled his eyes and said nothing.

He was, however, non-volcanic, and placidly accepted Jimmy, the promoted garden-boy. This was not reciprocal, for Jimmy, who displayed a degree of conscientiousness, peculiar indeed in the light of after-events, could not reconcile himself to the change.

He would canter heavily, smothered to the chin in six-foot’s pantry apron, into the drawing-room to announce with a burst of tears to the young housekeeper:

“Please, miss, ’e won’t suit! ’E won’t do nuthin’ I tell him! Oh, please, miss, he’s putting the cups—the mistress’s own cup—in the wrong cupboard, and”—with a howl—“he ain’t washed it, miss! And when I tell him, ’e says it doesn’t matter!”

We didn’t think he would suit, ourselves. We had all said so often that Juvenal was perfectly dreadful, and couldn’t be endured another minute, and every member of the famiglia had so frequently declared with tears that if Mr. Juvenal remained she could not possibly stay; she had borne it as long as she could, not to make unpleasantness, but——

We were unanimous now in regrets.

“God be with poor Juvenal!” said Mrs. MacComfort, the dear, soft-spoken Irish cook; and added darkly: She wouldn’t like to be saying what she thought of the new butler.

However, à quelque chose malheur est bon, for had the following incident taken place under Juvenal’s dog-loving eye, as Juvenal himself subsequently remarked, there would certainly have been murder done. We ourselves had been inclined to consider Jimmy an agreeable member of the domestic circle. Nobody minded telling him to take out the dogs, no matter how bad the weather was, and Jimmy always responded with that smile of cheerful alacrity that so endeared him.

The tale which is here narrated may seem irrelevant to the share which the Villino has had to take in the universal and terrible cataclysm, but nevertheless the incidents therein set forth directly issued from it; and, in spite of a dash of comedy, they were tragic enough for those chiefly concerned, namely, the youngest “fur-child” and Jimmy himself. If we had not taken Jimmy into the house, Jimmy would not have been told to walk the dogs; and if Jimmy had not walked the dogs, the singular drama of the phantom dog-stealers and the baby Pekinese would never have occurred.

There were then three fur-children: Arabella, the Lavroch setter—lovely, dull, early Victorian, worthy creature; Loki, the beloved, chief of all the little dumb family, first in our affections—a quaint, saturnine, very Chinese little gentleman, with crusty and disconcerting ways, and almost a human heart; and Mimi, the heroine of this adventure—Mimosa on solemn occasions—really a beauty, with all the engaging Pekinese oddities and that individuality of character which each one seems to possess; spoilt, imperious, vivid!

It was a very wet day, and Jimmy had been ordered to don his master’s mackintosh cape and take the fur-children up the moor. The first peculiar incident was that Mimi ran three times headlong from his guardianship. As fast as she was coaxed down one stairs she was up the other, with her tail between her legs. It might have made us pause, but it didn’t. We said: “Poor Mimi doesn’t like getting her feet wet.” Anyone who had heard the boy cooing to his charges in tones of the most dulcet affection would have been as dense as we were.

That evening the dark adventure took place. Jimmy came running into the kitchen, more incredibly mud-encrusted than any living creature outside an alligator is ever likely to be again; and, bursting into loud wails, declared that he had been set upon by two men and robbed of Mimi.

“Run, run,” cried Mrs. MacComfort, “and tell the master!”

Jimmy ran, working himself up as he went, so that it was what our Irish nurse used to call “roaring and bawling” that he rushed into the library and poured out his dreadful news. The master dashed in pursuit of the miscreants, led by the hero, who cantered him uphill a good half-mile. He was followed by the cook and her Cinderella, valiantly brandishing sticks. Having reached the post-office, the chase was given up, and the master of the Villino was returning dejectedly when a yapping behind the hedge that skirted the road was recognized by Mrs. MacComfort as unmistakably Mimi’s voice.

Mimi was extracted, none the worse for her emotions, but with the remnants of a torn pocket-handkerchief tied round her neck.

Whether it was the abnormal layers of mud on Jimmy’s countenance; or the curious fact that, in spite of the horrible treatment which he vowed had been inflicted upon him in a hand-to-hand struggle with two men, under the mud there was not a scratch upon his ingenious countenance; or whether it was that, although the conflict was supposed to have taken place within our own courtyard, no sound reached anyone in the house—there and then Jimmy’s master came to this conclusion: “I believe he’s made it all up.” But he didn’t say so. The boy was only cross-examined.

“Why didn’t you shout?” asked Mrs. MacComfort.

“I couldn’t. They stuffed something soft into my throat—a handkerchief, I think it was.”

“Where did you get all that mud?” asked the gardener next morning. “You never picked that up in here. You couldn’t, not if you’d scraped the ground.”

It was then that Jimmy discovered that the assault had taken place outside the gates.

Jimmy’s mistress questioned him next, and she instantly saw that he was lying. To point the moral and adorn the tale she sent for the policeman.

“Why didn’t you ’oller?” said the policeman.

Jimmy’s knees shook together.

“I couldn’t ’oller,” he maintained doggedly. “They’d stuffed something down me throat.”

“Oh, indeed!” said the policeman. “Maybe it was this ’ankercher, was it?”

He produced a dreadful rag that had been picked up on the road. It fitted neatly with the other rag that had been round Mimi’s neck: awful pièces de conviction!

“I say it’s your ankercher. Don’t go for to deny it. I say it’s your ankercher; I ’appen to know it’s your ankercher. I say you did it all yerself!”

When a six-foot, black-moustached policeman, with boring eye, rolls out such an accusation in tremendous crescendo, what can a little criminal do but collapse? Jimmy collapsed. It was his ankercher. He ’ad done it. There never ’ad been no men. He never ’ad been knocked down. He ’ad rolled in the mud on purpose, in the ditch where it was thickest. He ’ad tried to ’urt Mimi.

“Why?—why?—why?”

Even our local Sherlock Holmes couldn’t extract anything like a plausible reason. Loki’s mistress had to piece one together for herself.

Jimmy hadn’t liked taking the dogs out on a wet day. He had therefore planned to strangle Mimi and throw her over the hedge, believing that if he showed himself unable to protect the dogs he would not be sent out with them any more.

The two immediate results of this event, extraordinary indeed in the annals of the Villino, where a St. Francis-like love of our little fur and feather brothers and sisters dominates, was the prompt restoration of Jimmy to the arms of Mrs. Mutton, his washerwoman mamma, and the summoning of Juvenal to the telephone. He was staying with his brother, a postmaster. We communicated the awful attempt. Juvenal averred, on the other side of the wire, that you could have knocked him down with a feather. Having thus re-established communications, we wrote, and, tactfully cloaking our own undignified yearnings with the innocence of the fur-children, we told him that the dogs missed him very much. He was swift to seize the “paw of friendship,” and, following our artful lead, responded by return of post that Betty had been “that fretted,” he did not know what to do with her—“wine she did from morning till night!”

It was obvious that anyone with a grain of decent feeling must instantly remedy such a state of affairs. Juvenal returned with the twenty-four bird-cages and Betty the terrier.

We have compounded with an assistant parlourmaid; it is by no means an economy, but four-foot in buttons is in such demand that Jimmy is irreplaceable.

After all, so little has that war-pinch nipped us, that, if it was not to laugh at them, one would be ashamed to set these infinitesimal bruises down at all. And, thank God! now one can laugh a little again; the days are gone by when it seemed as if every small natural joy had been squeezed out of life, that existence itself was one long nightmare of apprehension.

We do not yet know what the future may have in store for us; but, pray heaven, those mornings may never dawn again when one could scarcely open the paper for the beating of one’s heart.

It is not, we hope, that we are accustomed to agony, though no doubt there is something of habit that takes the edge off suspense and grief. We are also better prepared; we have got, as it were, into our second wind, and we are, after our English fashion, perhaps even a little more determined than we were to start with. When it all began, with what seemed merely an insensate crime in a half-civilized country, no one would have thought that England, much less our little house, would be affected. Though, indeed, personally, the murder of the Archduchess touched the mistress of the Villino a little more nearly than most, for as children they had played together. It was, and is, a very vivid memory.

She and her sisters had been brought to Brussels for their education, and Sophie was one of the youngest, if not the last, in the nursery of the Austro-Hungarian Legation in that city. The Chotek family used to come to the parc; a tribe of quaint, fair-haired children. They wore short black velvet coats and caps, and plaid skirts, rather long. The Signora can see little Sophie before her now; a Botticelli angel, with an aureole of fair curls, silver-gold, standing out all round her small, pale, delicate face; a serious child, with lustrous eyes and immense black lashes, and a fine, curling mouth. She thought her lovely and longed to cuddle her, with the maternal instinct early developed.

“Have you much sister?” said the tiny Austrian, addressing her English friend upon their introduction with great solemnity.

Who could have thought what a destiny lay before her, and in what a supreme act of self-devotion the soul, already luminous in that frail, exquisite little envelope, was to pass away? We have been told on some excellent authority that she was not popular in her anomalous position, at least in her own class. But her singular romance nevertheless was crowned by so true a married happiness that it can leave one in no doubt that she was worthy of the sacrifice made for her by the Imperial heir. He was—it is no uncharity to mention so well-known a fact—a man of bad life; she was his mother’s lady-in-waiting, appointed to that post because of destitution, no longer in the first freshness of her youth, supposed to be a person of small significance—one of those colourless shadows that haunt the chairs of the great. But she captivated the most important Prince in her country, barring the Emperor; and, what is more, her spell never lost its power. To that last breath, which, greatly favoured in their awful tragedy, they drew together, they adored each other. She made of him a model husband, a model father, a man of rectitude and earnestness. They had children, and these were all their joy. It was one of the reproaches cast upon her by the indignant royalties of the Vienna Court that the Duchess of Hohenberg was so economical she would go down to her kitchen and see the things given out. If she wanted to save money, it was for those children, cut off from their natural inheritance by the cast-iron laws that debarred their mother from a share in her husband’s rank.

An invited guest at the wedding of the present young hereditary Archduke to the Princess Zita has given us a description of an incident which well illustrates the treatment which the non-royal wife of the Heir Apparent received at the hands of her royal relatives. When the Duchess of Hohenberg entered, her long, narrow train caught in some projecting obstacle as she swept up the little chapel. The place was full of Archdukes and Archduchesses, in their wedding attire. Not one of these high-born beings budged. Each looked straight at the altar, absorbed in pious prayer. The ostracized lady had to disengage herself as best she could, and advance, blushing hotly, to her appointed place, unescorted. A few minutes after a belated Archduchess, entering swiftly, met with the same mishap. Instantly she was surrounded with politely assisting Hoheiten.

The friend to whom we owe the anecdote remarked that it had been “a dreadful moment,” and that one could not help feeling sorry for the poor Duchess. But it is to be remarked that she herself—delightful, cultivated, large-minded creature though she was—had been among the stony ones, and there had even been a glint of pleasure in her eyes under the compassion as she told the story.

Sophie was of those who are hated; but, after all, what did it matter? Was she not loved?

Our daughter’s Hungarian godmother—a most fairy and entrancing lady, with all the spirit of her race under the appearance of a French Marquise—like most Magyars, championed the cause of one whom they intended to make their future Queen. She gave us a pretty account of the great pleasure it was to the common people in Vienna to watch their Archduke and his wife at the theatre. They sat in the royal box, not formally, one at each end, as is the etiquette, but close, so close that everyone knew they were holding each other’s hands. They would look into each other’s faces with smiles, to share the interest and joy of what they beheld and heard. So the lesser folk were fond of her, though the fine Court circle could not forgive.

When she went to Berlin, the astute William received her with a tremendous parade of honour, which made him very popular with the Archduke, as well as with the multitude that espoused his cause. But it was only a hollow show of recognition after all—a banquet elaborately arranged with little round tables, so as to avoid any question of precedence under the cloak of the most friendly intimacy. Our simpler-minded court had to decline her visit at the Coronation on account of this same difficulty of precedence. Whatever might be done in Austria, this was insulting from England. “But she is of better family than many of your royalties,” said a Bohemian magnate to us across the table at a dinner-party, his blue eyes blazing. “She is of very good family. She is”—tapping his capacious shirt-front with a magnificent gesture—“she is related to me!”

The petty malice of those whose prerogatives had been infringed pursued her to her bloodstained and heroic grave. To the last she was denied all those dignities which appertained to her husband’s rank. Her morganatic dust could not be allowed to commingle with that of royalty in the Imperial vault. The two who had loved beyond etiquette were given a huddled and secret midnight funeral; and beside the Archduke’s coffin, covered with the insignia of his state, that of his wife was marked only by a pair of white kid gloves and a fan.

Such a pitiful triumph of tyranny over the majestic dead! Horrible juxtaposition of the ineptitude of pomposity and the most royal of consummations! Sophie and her mate must have smiled upon it from their enfranchisement.

Perhaps if the doomed pair had not yielded themselves to those Berlin blandishments their fate might have been less tragic. There are sinister rumours as to whose hand really fired the revolver. We in England to-day may well have come to believe that those whom the Kaiser most smiles upon are his chosen victims. The laborious grin of the crocodile to the little fishes is nothing to it; but England is rather a big mouthful.

Already one is able to say that any death has been merciful which has spared an Austrian the sight of his country’s dissolution. We are glad that our fairy godmother has not lived to have her heart torn between England, her adopted country, and her passionately loved Hungary.

The cloud no bigger than a man’s hand in the clear sky—shadow of the mailed fist—we looked at it from over here with that stirring of surface emotions that is scarcely unpleasant! How horrible! we said. How wicked, how cruel! The little bloodstained cloud! it hung in horizons too far off to menace our island shores. We were very sorry for the old Emperor, pursued to the last, it seemed, by the inexplicable, unremitting curse. “I have been spared nothing,” he is reported to have said when the news of the Archduke’s murder was broken to him. Was he then in his own heart sheltering the deadly spark that was to kindle the whole world? We thought of the playmate of Brussels days with a romantic regret, and envied her a little. Since one must die, what a good way it was to go with one’s only beloved! And then, in the full summer peace, the clouds suddenly massed themselves, darkened, and spread.

“Austrian Ultimatum to Servia! World’s Peace Threatened!” so read the newspaper headlines, like the mutter of thunder running from pole to pole. We saw without conviction. It seemed too inconceivable that such a crime could be committed in our century; and the folly of it too manifest in face of the Slav menace. And next came the crack and the lightning glare—hideous illumination over undreamt-of chasms!

Will any of us ever forget that Saturday to Monday? War was declared on Russia; war on France. Luxemburg territory was violated, and rumour raced from one end of England to the other: “We are going to stand aside; the peace party is too strong!... We are not bound by deed to France, only by an understanding. England means to let her honour go down on a quibble....”

We had guests in the house—a brother, retired after hard service in the army; a slow-spoken, gentle-eyed man of law, who hid the fiercest fire of British pugnacity under this deliberately meek exterior. They were both pessimistic, the soldier angrily so in his anxiety. “I’ll never lift my head again in England!—I’ll never go into a foreign country again! I’d be ashamed!—Upon my word, I’ll emigrate!”

And the other gloomily: “From my experience of this Government, it’s sure to do the worst possible thing. I haven’t the least hope.”

In our own hearts we had resolved, with the soldier, that we would give up home and country. Our thoughts turned to Canada.

The relief was proportionate to the hideousness of the doubt. What though the cloud had spread and spread till it reached right across the sky, there was brilliant sunshine over England—the light of honour.

Two ardent young patriots had visited us unexpectedly in their car that Sunday night. They brought small items of consolation. They had been to Portsmouth. It was ready for war. Fixed bayonets gleamed at every corner; the port was closed. Both these youths were full of martial plans. One was hurrying to the London Scottish, the other northwards to put all affairs in order before joining too. The London Scottish boy obligingly kept us au courant of the turn of events by telephone. During the length of Sir Edward Grey’s speech perverted extracts reached us and plunged us into ever deeper gloom: “We are only to intervene if French ports are bombarded....”

Then at midnight on Monday the bell rang. “Belgian neutrality had been violated; general mobilization was ordered.” It was war. And we slept on the tidings with a strange peace.

Perhaps the universal feeling was most impressively voiced by a Franciscan monk, who said to us later (during the agonizing suspense between Mons and the Marne): “Nothing can be so bad as those days when we did not know what the Government would do. Whatever happens now, nothing can compare to that. Shall I ever forget how we prayed?”

Little Brothers of Peace and Poverty, humble, self-despoiled servants of the rule most rigid in its tenderness, clamouring at the throne of God for a thing of pride, a priceless possession—their country’s honour! Paradox can scarcely go further, it would seem. Yet, even before Mr. Chesterton pointed it out, most of us had long ago accepted the fact that the deeper the truth the more breathless the paradox. Is there an Englishman among us who would lift his voice to-day against the sacred precept: He that loses his life shall save it?

II
OUR LITTLE BIT

“‘J’entends des paroles amies

Que je ne comprends pas.

Je me sens loin, bien loin, de la patrie....

D’où vient que ces voix me semblent familières?’

‘Mon père, nous sommes en Angleterre.’”

Cammaerts.

It is frequently said in letters from the front, by the officer praising his men, or vice versa: “A dozen things are being done every day that deserve the Victoria Cross.” But if you speak to one of these heroes of their own deeds, you will invariably get the same answer: “I just did my little bit.”

How immense a satisfaction it must be to feel you’ve done your little bit! And how out of it are the stay-at-homes! Yet we also have our part to play—infinitesimal in comparison, but still, we hope, of use—the minute fragment that may be wanted in the fitting together of the great jigsaw puzzle.

Our first little bit at the Villino when we woke to activity after the stunning of the blow, was obviously to house refugees. We wrote to a friend prominent among the receiving committee, and offered, as a beginning, to undertake twelve peasants out of the thousands of unfortunates flying from the face of the Hun. From that charming but harassed lady we received a grateful acceptance, announcing the arrival of our families that afternoon—hour to be fixed by telegram. We feverishly prepared for their reception. We were ready to shelter five; kind neighbours proposed to take in the other seven. We had a fleet of motor-cars in readiness, and Mrs. MacComfort, our cook, concocted large jars of coffee and other articles of food likely to be relished of the Belgian palate. No telegram arrived; but to make up for it, our telephone rang ceaselessly with anxious inquiries from the assisting neighbours—inquiries which very naturally became rather irate as the hours went by, while we took upon ourselves the apologies of the guilty.

Next day we ventured to address an inquiry to the harassed lady. That was Saturday. On Monday we received a distraught telegram: “Will wire hour of train.” It reminded us of the overdriven shop-assistant in the middle of a seething Christmas crowd: “Will attend to you in a minute, madam.” We felt the desire to oblige; but it left us just where we were before.

On Wednesday an unknown Reverend Mother telegraphed from an unknown convent: “Are you prepared to receive two Belgian families five o’clock to-day?”

This message was supplemented by another from an equally unknown Canon of Westminster Cathedral: “Sending twelve Belgians to-day. Please meet four-twenty train.”

We had scarcely time to clutch our hair, for it was already past three when a third despatch reached us, unsigned, from Hammersmith: “Two Belgian ladies seven children arriving this afternoon five-five train. Please attend station.”

The question was, were we to expect twelve or thirty-six?

We rang up the devoted neighbours. We increased our preparations for refreshment. We spread out all the excellent cast-off garments collected for the poor destitutes; and we “attended” at the first train.

Before proceeding any further with the narration of our thrilling experiences, we may mention that eighteen Belgians appeared in all, whom we succeeded in housing after singular developments; the most unexpected people showing a truly Christian charity, while others, ostentatiously devoted to good works, bolted their doors and hearts upon the most frivolous excuse.

A neighbour of ours, in precarious health, with a large family, a son lost in Germany, a son-in-law at the front, and an infant grandchild in the nursery, would, we think, have given every room and bed in her house to the exiles.

“Only, please, do let me have a poor woman with a baby,” she said. “I’d love to have something to play with our little Delia.”

Another, a widow lady, with a large house and staff of servants to match, and unlimited means, was horrified at the idea of admitting peasants anywhere within her precincts; and as to a small child—“I might be having the visit of a grand-nephew, and he might catch something,” she declared down the telephone, in the tone of one who considers her reason beyond dispute.

About five-thirty the Villino opened its portals to its first refugees. The two ladies with the seven children were fed, and half the party conveyed farther on, we undertaking a mother and three children, under three, and a sprightly little bonne. The Villino is a small house, and we had prepared for peasant women. A bachelor’s room and a gay, double-bedded attic—it has a paper sprawling with roses and big windows looking across the valley—were what we had permanently destined for the sufferers. Matters were not facilitated by discovering that our guests belonged to what is called in their own land the high-burgherdom; and that they, on their side, had been told to expect in us the keepers of a “family pension.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madame Koelen exploded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, a friend—a coffee-house acquaintance, tout au plus!...

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

These ideas she next began to develop.

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

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

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

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

“But the baby,” we faltered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“From my husband? How droll!”

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

We sat and watched her.

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

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

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

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

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

The thoughts were printed on her face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madame’s head drooped.

“Bien, mon chéri,” she murmured, in a faint voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“J’ai donné ma parole d’honneur!”

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

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

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

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

They were from Malines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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