Part 4
We had thought he looked like a hunted hare. He had that expression of mortal agony stamped on his face, which is often seen--more shame for us!--on some poor dumb creature in terror for its life; but he had still enough spirit in him to reduce Madame Koelen to abject submission.
We could see he was oppressed with melancholy: that his heart was bursting over the children. We understood that this parting was perhaps worse for him than those first rushed farewells.
He seemed scarcely to have arrived before he was gone again. The young wife must have had some spark of feeling left--perhaps, after all, under the almost savage desire for a fling she had a stratum of natural affection, common loyalty--for she wept bitterly after his departure, and, that night, for the first time, came into the little chapel and prayed.
We met the nurse with the children in the garden, just as the father was being driven away: a small, upright creature this, with flax-blue eyes and corn-coloured hair, which she wore in plaits tightly wound round her head. She did not look a day more than sixteen, but she had the self-possession of forty; and possessed resource also, as was demonstrated by her dealings with Baby.
“Monsieur is so sad. Madame is so sad, because of Antwerp, _n’est-ce pas?_” she said to us, and by the sly look in those blue eyes we saw that she was in her mistress’s confidence.
It was true that he was sad for Antwerp; if the word “sad” can be used to describe that bleak despair which we have noticed in so many Belgian men who have found shelter in this country.
“It is impossible that Antwerp should hold out,” he said to us; “the spies and traitors have done their work too well. The spies are waiting for them inside our walls. They know every nook in every fort, every weak spot better than we do ourselves.”
That was mid September, and we put his opinion down to a very natural pessimism. No one knew then of the concrete platform under the gay little villa outside the walls, built by the amiable German family who was so well known and respected at Antwerp; and we have since heard, too, of the shells supplied by Krupp and filled with sand; and the last Krupp guns made of soft iron, which crumpled up after the first shot.
Alas, he was justified in his gloomy prophecy! But we do not think that it was as much the sense of national calamity that overwhelmed him as the acute family anxiety. Yet, honest, good, severe, ugly little man--worth a hundred plausible, handsome, lying scamps such as Mérino--he was a patriot before all else! He would have had a very good excuse, we think, for delaying another twelve hours to place his volatile spouse in safety with the elderly relations at Eastbourne--but he had given his word. Had he arrived at the Villino only to find that she had tripped off to London, with that chance acquaintance of cafés, Monsieur Mérino (to whose care he had in a distraught moment committed her); had he thereafter been assailed by the most hideous doubts; had he believed, as we did, that she meant to abandon husband and babes at this moment of all others; or had he--scarcely less agonizing surmise!--trembled for her, innocent and lost in London, the prey of a villain, we yet believe that he would have kept his word.
“_J’ai donné ma parole d’honneur!_”
What a horrible, tragic story it might have been, fit for the pen of a Maupassant! We shall never cease to be thankful that it did not happen. That is why we are glad to have received Madame Koelen at the Villino.
* * * * *
Our next refugees came to us quite by accident, and then only for a meal. A home had already been prepared for them in the village, but the excellent Westminster Canon, who seemed to be the channel through which the stream of refugees was pouring to us, announced five, and casually added a sixth at the last minute, with the result that the party were not recognized at the station. The name of the Villino having become unaccountably associated with every refugee that arrives in this part of the world, the Van Heysts landed _en masse_ at our doors, demanded to have their cab paid, and walked in.
We all happened to be out, and Juvenal, our eccentric butler, acquiesced. Standing on one leg afterwards, he explained that, being aware of our ways, he didn’t know, he was sure, but what we might have meant to put them somewhere.
Weary, tragic creatures, we weren’t sorry, after all, to speed them on their road! The three fair-haired children were fed with bread-and-butter, and the young mother talked plaintively in broken French, while the old grandfather nodded his head corroboratively. But the father: he was like a creature cast in bronze--would neither eat nor speak. He sat staring, his chin on his hand, absorbed in the contemplation of outrage and disaster.
They were from Malines.
“And then, mademoiselle, it was all on fire, and the cannon were sending great bombs; and we fled as quick as we could, _n’est-ce pas?_ I with the littlest one in my arms, and the other two running beside me. For five hours we walked. Yes, mademoiselle, the two little girls, they went the whole way on foot, and that one there always crying, ‘_Plus vite, maman! plus vite, maman!_’ and pulling at my apron.”
The young husband sat staring. Was he for ever beholding his little house in flames, or what other vision of irredeemable misery? He remains inconsolable. Poor fellow! he has heart disease; he thinks he will never see his native land again. And there is yet another little one expected. Alas! alas!
* * * * *
Of quite another calibre are the Van Sonderdoncks; a very lively, cheery family this! There are, of course, a grandpapa, a maiden aunt, a couple of cousins, as well as the bustling materfamilias, the quaint wizened papa, the well-brought-up Jeanne, who can embroider so nicely, and the four little pasty boys with red hair and eyes like black beads. They are comfortably established in a very charming house lent by a benevolent lady, who also feeds them.
On the Signorina’s first visit she found Madame Van Sonderdonck in a violent state of excitement. She had received such extraordinary things in the way of provisions “_de cette dame_.” If mademoiselle would permit it, she would like to show her something--but something--she could not describe it; it was _trop singulier_. “One moment, mademoiselle.”
She fled out of the room and returned with--a vegetable marrow!
She was rather disappointed to find that mademoiselle was intimately acquainted with this freak of nature, which she surveyed from every angle with intense suspicion and curiosity. Politeness kept her from expressing her real feelings when she was assured of its excellence cooked with cheese and onion and a little tomato in a flat dish, but her countenance expressed very plainly that she was not going to risk herself or her family.
Having failed to impress with the marrow, she repeated the effect with sago. She had eaten it raw. Naturally, having thus become aware of its real taste, she could not be expected to believe it would be palatable in any guise. Nevertheless, she was indulgent to our eccentricities. If anyone remembers the kind of amused, condescending interest that London society took in the pigmies, when those unfortunate little creatures were on show at parties a few years ago, they can form some idea of Madame Van Sonderdonck’s attitude of mind towards England.
Good humour reigned in the family as we found it.
Though papa Sonderdonck had a bayonet thrust through his neck--he had been in the Garde Civique--and they had already had a battle-royal with the Belgian family who shared the house, they seemed to view the whole situation as a joke. As they had routed their fellow refugees--the latter only spoke Flemish, Madame Van Sonderdonck only French, and an interpreter had to be found to convey mutual abuse--and furthermore obtained in their place the sister-in-law and the two cousins, unaccountably left out of the batch, they had some substantial reasons for satisfaction.
* * * * *
Monsieur and Madame Deens are once more of the heart-rending order. She, a pathetic creature always balanced between tears and smiles, with pale blue eyes under her braided soft brown hair, looks extraordinarily young to be the mother of two strapping children. He is the typical Belgian husband, devoted but grinding.
Our first visit there was painful. Madame Deens was like a bewildered child, and the husband, a stalwart handsome fellow, who had been chief engineer on the railway at Malines, was torn between a very natural indignation at finding himself beggared after years of honest hard work, and bitter anxiety about his wife, who was in the same condition as Madame Van Heyst.
He beckoned us outside the cottage to tell us in a tragic whisper that he had good reason to believe that “all, all the family of my wife,” her father, mother, and the invalid sister, had been murdered by the Germans; and their farm burned.
“How can I tell her, and she as she is? It will kill her too! And she keeps asking me and asking me! I shall have to tell her!”
The tears rolled down his cheeks. Yet he was a hard man; it galled him to the quick to be employed as a common labourer and receive only seventeen shillings a week.
They had been given a gardener’s house: the most charming, quaint abode. It had an enormous kitchen, with a raftered ceiling, and one long window running the whole length of the room, opening delightfully on the orchard. The walls were all snowy white. He might have made himself very happy in such surroundings for the months of exile, with the consciousness of friends about him, the knowledge of safety and care for the wife in her coming trial, and the splendid healthy air for the children. But Deens was not satisfied.
“I had just passed my examinations, _n’est-ce pas?_ monsieur, madame, and had received my advancement, and we had just got into the little house I had built with my savings. Now it is burnt--burnt to the ground. And these wages, for a man like me, mademoiselle, it is something I cannot bring myself to. _Je ne puis pas m’y faire, savez vous._”
“But Madame Deens is so well here, and we will look after her,” said Mademoiselle.
“Ah, but I could earn more money elsewhere! I might have something to bring back to my own country.”
Of course he has had his way. A bustling lady got him into a motor factory, and he dragged his weeping but resistless spouse to a townlet, where they are lodged in one room; where the only person we could think of to interest in their favour was the old parish priest, who turned out to be queer in his head, but where Deens is in receipt of thirty-two shillings a week. We are sure that what can be saved is being saved for the _retour au pays_, and meanwhile the poor little woman’s hour of trouble is approaching, and she must get through it as best she can, unbefriended. We feel anxious.
Before she left, with many tears, she gave the Signorina, who had sympathized with her, the only gift she could contrive out of her destitution. It was the youngest child’s little pair of wooden shoes!
III
OUR MINISTERING ANGELS
“Chi poco sa, presto lo dice!”
_Wisdom of Nations._
Of course we are not behindhand in our village in the Red Cross movement.
Nearly every woman, whatever her views, fancies herself nowadays in the rôle of ministering angel. It may be doubted whether an existence devoted to the Tango and its concomitants has been a useful preparation for a task which demands the extreme of self-devotion; and we have heard odd little tales of how a whole body of charming and distinguished amateurs rushed into the cellars at the whiz of a shell, abandoning their helpless patients; and how the fair chief of a volunteer ambulance staff fainted at the sight of the first wounded man.
Yet there may be many, even among what is odiously called “the smart set,” who only find their true vocation at such a moment as this, when unsuspected qualities, heroic capacities spring into life at the test. It is not enough to say that times of great calamity sift the good from the bad, the strong from the futile: they give the wasters in every class of life their chance of self-redemption--in numberless instances not in vain. While freely admitting, however, that there may be a good proportion of society women who are drawn to work among the wounded by a genuine desire to help, and have therefore taken care to qualify themselves for the task, who can deny that with others nursing is merely a new form of excitement, the last fashionable craze? It was the same in the South African War. Indeed, the episode of the wounded soldier who put up a little placard with the inscription, “Much too ill to be nursed to-day,” has, we see, been revived in connection with the present conflict. It may be taken as the classic expression of Tommy’s feelings towards this particular form of attention. We do not suppose, however, that the case of the tender-hearted but unenlightened lady who went about Johannesburg feeding the enteric patients with buns will be allowed to repeat itself at Boulogne or Calais. We well remember reading her letter to the papers, in which she innocently vaunted her fatal ministrations, inveighing against the monstrous fashion in which “our poor sick soldiers” were being starved. We believe eleven victims of her charity died.
A late distinguished general had a genial little anecdote anent the energies of a batch of fair nurses who landed in Egypt during the last campaign. Happening to go round the hospital one morning shortly after their arrival, he saw one of these enchanting beings, clad in the most coquettish of nursing garbs, bending over a patient.
“Wouldn’t it refresh you if I were to sponge your face and hands, my man?” she inquired, in dulcet tones.
The patient, who was pretty bad, rolled a resigned but exhausted glance at her.
“If you like, mum. It’s the tenth time it’s been done this morning!”
Perhaps, like the war itself, everything is on too tremendous a scale now to permit of such light-hearted playing with the dread sequels of combat. We can no more afford to make a game of nursing than a game of fighting in this world struggle. It is possible that only such of our _mondaines_ as have the necessary knowledge and devotion are permitted to have charge of those precious lives, and that the others confine themselves to post-cards and coffee-stalls, and dashing little raids into the firing-lines with chocolates and socks. We trust it may be so. We confess that what we ourselves beheld of the local amateur Red Cross fills us with some misgiving.
Of course, as has been said, being a very enlightened community, we were not going to be left behind. A special series of lectures was announced almost within a week of the declaration of war. The daughter of the household determined to join.
On her arrival, a little late, at the village hall, she was met by the secretary of the undertaking; a charming and capable young lady, looking, however, at this particular moment distraught to the verge of collapse.
“Oh, _do_ you know anything about home nursing? _Do_ you think you could teach a little class how to take temperatures? You could easily pick up what you want to learn afterwards, couldn’t you? There are such a lot of them, and they’re all so, so----” She substituted “difficult to teach” for the word trembling on her lips. “Nurse Blacker doesn’t know which way to turn.”
“Oh, I can certainly teach them to take temperatures,” said the Signorina. Nurses, like poets, are born, not made; and she is of those who have the instinct how to help. Besides this she has had experience.
She was disappointed, however. She had come to learn, not to teach. It seemed to her, moreover, almost inconceivable that any female who had arrived at years of discretion and was of normal intellect should not be able to take a temperature; but she swallowed her feelings, after the example of the secretary, and went briskly in to begin her task.
She was provided with a jug of warm water, several thermometers, and a row of various women, ranging from the spinster of past sixty to the red-cheeked sixteen-year old daughter of the local vet--who ought to have known how to take a temperature, if it was only a dog’s! There were also two fluttering beribboned summer visitors from the neighbouring hotel; these were doing the simple life, with long motor veils and short skirts and a general condescending enthusiasm towards our wild moorland scenery, which they were fond of qualifying as “too sweet!”
“Perhaps,” said the secretary to the Signorina as she hurried away, “you could teach them to take a pulse also. They can practise on each other. It would be _such_ a help.”
The Signorina felt a little shy. It did seem somewhat presuming for anything so young as she was to be instructing people who were all, with the exception of the vet’s daughter, considerably older, and, therefore, obviously considerably richer in experience than herself. It added to her embarrassment that the summer visitors should fix two pairs of rapt eyes upon her with the expression of devotees listening to their favourite preacher.
However, she summoned her wits and her courage, and gave a brief exposition of the mysteries of thermometer and pulse, patiently repeating herself, while the students took copious notes. Certainly there was something touching in this humble ardour for useful knowledge. Then the thrilling moment of practice began.
The spinster first monopolized the instructress’s attention. Her white hairs and her years entitled her to precedence.
“Of course,” she remarked, with the air of one whose scientific education has not been altogether neglected, as she balanced her thermometer over the jug, “the water won’t really make it go up, will it, no matter how hot it is?”
The Signorina did not think she could have understood.
“I mean,” said the maiden lady, waving the little tube, “it’s not heat that will ever make the thermometer go up. It’s fever, isn’t it?”
“But fever is heat,” mildly asserted the “home-nurse.”
“Oh no, I don’t mean _that_” said the spinster loftily. “Of course, I know you’re hot with fever; but it’s something _in_ you, isn’t it, that affects the thermometer? It wouldn’t go up, even if I put it on the stove, would it?”
“Put it into the jug and try,” said the Signorina, who did not believe that language would be much use here.
“Oh, I think,” interpolated a summer guest who was much impressed by the spinster’s grasp of the situation, “I’d rather try my thermometer on my cousin, please! I think one would learn better. It would be more like hospital practice, wouldn’t it?”
The spinster turned from the jug with alacrity.
“I’m sure you are right,” she cried. Then wheeling on her neighbour: “Oh, would you mind?” she pleaded.
The neighbour, a tailor-made lady with a walking-stick, who looked on with a twisted smile--we suspect she was a suffragette, pandering to the weakness of a world distracted from the real business of life--submitted to be made useful. Her smile became accentuated.
“Shouldn’t mind if it was a cigarette,” she remarked in a deep bass, and thereafter was silent, while the spinster laboriously prepared to take two minutes on her watch.
“Please, dear child,” cried one of the motor-veiled ladies in her impassioned tone of interest, “will you explain to me again, what is normal? _I’d better take it out, dear! There’s no use doing it wrong, is there?_ You said something about a little red line--or is that for fever? How silly I am--red would be for fever, wouldn’t it? No? _Red is normal, darling. Oh, I do hope you’re normal!_ What did you say, ninety-eight, point four? I never could do arithmetic and I’m so stupid. My husband always says--_doesn’t he, Angela?_--‘You won’t do much adding up, Birdie’--he calls me ‘Birdie,’--‘but I can trust you to subtract all right,’ dear, naughty fellow! He loves me to spend, you know, _doesn’t he, Angela?_ Oh dear, it hasn’t moved at all! Is that very bad? _Angela, darling!_”
“But you didn’t leave it in two minutes,” said the persevering teacher. “Supposing you were to put it in your mouth now, and your cousin were to take you?”
“Will you, Angela?” The summer visitor’s eyes became pathetic. “I’m sure I’ve been feeling quite dreadful with all this anxiety.”
“Your temperature,” said the spinster triumphantly to the suffragette, “is a hundred and twenty-eight.”
The Signorina started.
“But that’s quite impossible! Look here, let me show you. It won’t mark over a hundred and ten.”
For the first time the spinster was flustered.
“Oh, perhaps I read it wrong! Let me look again.”
After much fumbling and peering she became apologetic.
“I see I did make a mistake. It’s twenty-six.”
“Perhaps,” said the little lecturer hopelessly, “if I just went over the readings of the thermometer with you all once more----”
But she was interrupted.
“Would you mind”--the harassed secretary seized her by the elbow--“would you mind coming to superintend the bed-making? I’ve got to take the bandage class, and Nurse Blacker can’t really manage more than twenty with the compresses.”
The whole room was full of the clapper of excited female tongues. The Signorina was not sorry to leave the jug of warm water and the extraordinary fluctuating temperatures. She was followed by the summer visitors, motor veils and ribbons flying.
As she left, a cheerful, red-faced lady was heard to announce casually, as she dropped the fat wrist of the veterinary’s daughter, that there was no use her trying to take that pulse, as the girl hadn’t got any.
The clamorous group surrounded the camp-bed, upon which was stretched a sardonic boy-scout, fully clothed, down to his clumping boots. He was aged about twelve, and assisted in the education of the “lidies” by commenting from time to time on their efforts in hoarse tones of cynicism. After one impulsive neophyte had seemed to be practising tossing him in a blanket, he remarked into space: “Nurses are not suppowsed to move the pytient.”
And to another who jerked his heels up: “Down’t you forget, miss, I’m a bad caise!”
The Signorina had never been taught how to make beds in the true hospital fashion before, and was painstakingly absorbed in the intricacies of rolling sheets without churning the “bad caise,” when she was seized upon by one of the flutterers from the hotel.
“We’re going now; it’s been _so_ interesting, we _have_ enjoyed it. I shan’t forget all you told me about temperatures. I feel quite able to look after our dear fellows already. Oh! I _must_ tell you. You’ve got such a sympathetic face. I’m sure you will understand. I had a most _wonderful_ revelation the other day, in church--in London, you know. I had such an extraordinary feeling--just as if something came over me--and I thought the church was full of dead soldiers; and a voice seemed to say to me: ‘Pray.’ I felt quite uplifted. And then in a minute it was all gone. Wasn’t it wonderful? That kind of thing makes one feel so _strong_, doesn’t it? Oh, I knew you would understand. The last news is _very_ disquieting, isn’t it? What a darling little fellow!”
The “bad caise” scowled at her horribly; but the sweetness of her smile was quite unimpaired, as she fluttered out of the hall.
* * * * *
“It is very important,” said Nurse Blacker to the compress class, “that the nurse should wash her hands before touching the patient’s wounds.”
“Now, tell me, Sister,” interposed a meek voice, “is that precaution for the nurse’s sake or for the patient’s? I mean, I suppose it’s in case the nurse should incur any infection from the wound?”
This point of view--that of the White Queen in “Alice Through the Looking-Glass”--had not apparently struck Nurse Blacker before.