Part 4

Before we reached the first, I saw two white heads near a window, bending over cushions; and once inside, on those cushions, lengths of snowy Valenciennes of the old round mesh, of an admirable regularity and loveliness. These two women were both over 70 years old, and they sat before their bobbins, twisting and braiding the eight threads of the mesh as they had twisted and braided them for over a half century, and still cheerfully hoping that they might some day win more than 15 or 20 cents a day for their work. “Now we must have more,” they said gently, “because thread and oil are so much more expensive than they were before the war.”

In the next house, the old woman whose sister was ill could afford no light at all; when dusk fell she had to leave her bobbin mounds and her mesh and flowers and go to bed—what else could she do without coal or oil?

It was the last day of 1918, and I decided that Mrs. Bayard Henry of Philadelphia, who had sent me a little money to use as I chose, would be happy to give to these sweet, faithful women and their thirteen neighbors, candles and oil as hope symbols for the New Year. I left her gift with Mlle. Mullie.

It was already very late, and I had not time to go to Wevelghem and Gulleghem, two of the most important lace-villages contributing to Courtrai. Mlle. Mullie was facing the future with courage. “I am sure,” she said, “that Peat, from whom I have bought thread for forty years, will not forget me, and that I may be able to count on a shipment from England at a just price as soon as anything can come through. That I have been cut off during four years will make no difference. I shall write, too, to a friend in France, and from Puy I may have a few skeins. The question of pins and bobbins is serious—they seem to have disappeared, and one can not start a worker on less than a dozen bobbins. Those I have thus far succeeded in finding cost 95 centimes the dozen, as against the 28 centimes of pre-war times. There seem literally to be no pins. However, despite everything, I, at least, hope to see my thousand women at some not too distant time again busy over their cushions. A few have already sought me out to let me know they are ready, waiting only for the precious thread. I regret infinitely the passing of the fine ‘Val,’ but we shall continue to produce as much as we can, and at any rate we shall try unceasingly to raise the standard of the Clunys and Torchons.”

III

THOUROUT-THIELT-WYNGHENE

_In the Important Bobbin Lace Area_

On a spring-like Saturday in early January, I left Bruges by the Thourout road for Thielt. As I turned beyond the Porte, I found myself speeding toward the great arms of one of those Dutch windmills that so frequently, in the lowlands, close the long vista. The farther I rode into the Thourout region, the more it seemed the loveliest bit of Western Flanders I had yet seen. The gentle outlines of the low red brick farmhouses followed with satisfying harmony the landscape contours. Farm succeeded farm in swift succession, small farms, where every square foot of soil was green with sprouting grain or vegetables, and in the morning sunlight the thickly sown cottages shone like jewels on the plain.

Pink and white geraniums blossomed behind many of the quaint windows, and I knew that near them grandmothers, or mothers, or daughters (or possibly all three together) were sitting before their cushions, and from pin to pin were twisting and braiding Cluny and Duchesse, the characteristic laces of this section. This was an excellent day for lace-making with its sunshine of summer.

To the south and east of the badly shelled town of Thourout, I visited the districts of Iseghem, Thielt and Wynghene, all celebrated for their guipures. Guipure, a rather vague commercial term covering two widely different groups of lace, may be loosely defined as bobbin lace without a mesh base. One group of guipures includes the Clunys (named after the Cluny museum in Paris because they employ many old Gothic designs) which are made in one length or piece. They closely resemble the more common Torchons, surpassing them, however, in fineness and firmness of execution, and in brilliancy of design—the distinguishing connecting bars of Cluny often throw the figures into conspicuous relief. While this one-piece lace is usually made of the coarser threads, fine linen or cotton, or even silk thread, is also employed. In the second group of guipures are those made in separate small bits, or details, which are afterward joined to make the flounce or piece, the most common of these varieties being Flanders and Duchesse. In the schools of Thielt and Wynghene all the kinds are taught. Because they are made of coarser thread and therefore more quickly than such laces as Valenciennes or Needle Point, are less taxing to the eyes, and pay better, these guipures have gained ground in almost every lace center in Belgium, and often threaten the very existence of the finer laces. If it had not been for the leadership of the “Amies de la Dentelle,” of a few of the more intelligent and disinterested dealers, and above all of certain convents to whom Belgium owes the preservation of many of her finest designs and varieties, it is a question if any but the few remaining old women, who for forty or fifty years have preferred to follow one pattern, would still produce the old meshes and points. Much hope now centers in the corrective influence of the recently founded Normal School at Bruges and of the other schools of Belgium, but, despite all the efforts of these combined groups, delicate laces like the Malines have been fast disappearing.

The little farmhouse, if one can call two rooms a house, I visited on the edge of Thielt demonstrated clearly what is happening. It was Saturday afternoon and the mother of the large family of boys at play on the neat brick path outside, was scrubbing the tiled floor, moving the small baskets of potatoes and heaps of tobacco leaves and sabots and the winter sled from place to place as she proceeded. The socks to be darned, each already a fantastic patchwork, were piled on the window-sill, where there was room beside for a geranium and a fern. The stove and the table were also crowded into this, the general living-room, which despite all attempts to arrange things, boasted scarcely one unincumbered foot of floor space. However, over near the window with its two plants, were the customary chair and the cushion, and the girl of sixteen, absorbed in her lace, quite oblivious of the water her mother was splashing about her feet.

The adjoining room was similarly crowded; it had to serve as bedroom for this large family. There was the mantel-piece with the familiar row of bright plates and vases,—the place where the family’s art sense finds concentrated expression. Fortunately, this room, too, had a window with other plants, and before it sat the grandmother in her black cap and shawl, who, as I entered, was just slipping her battered eye-glasses into the little side drawer beneath her cushion. She smiled a friendly greeting, and uncovered her lace, a filmy flounce of Valenciennes about four inches wide, firm and regular, and of a good old design. She had been making Valenciennes all her life; she would make it to the end. She was delighted to show me how she twisted four threads to form one side of the hexagon of the mesh, and four to form the opposite, and the union points where the eight met. Then she held up a length of her lace and told us that a facteur (neighborhood buyer for a large business house) had been there just before we arrived, to try to buy her flounce at nine francs the _aune_, which would be roughly, about $2.50 a meter. The committee has been giving her 19 fr. 50 c. ($3.90) for the same amount, and she asked anxiously, tho still smilingly, if she might not continue to hope for the committee price, even tho the war had stopt. It is pathetic, day after day, to hear that question repeated, and not yet to be certain of the answer. However, one can always reply truthfully, that the women of the “Friends of the Lace” will work unceasingly not only to hold wages where they are, but to advance them.

I turned from this delicate lace to the granddaughter’s cushion—she was making guipure de Cluny, of coarse linen thread. Marie’s pattern happened to be a good one and she was working swiftly and evenly, sure of a fair day’s wage.

Here, then, was a suggestive contrast, and however one may regret it, it exists in the large majority of lace-making households in Belgium, and is only to be expected. It is but the deserved penalty of a past and present economic blindness or callousness. Where they are not making Cluny, the younger women of this district give their time to ordinary varieties of guipure which they call Bruges and Milan, or Point de Bruges, and Point de Milan.

While I had been watching the Valenciennes and Cluny, the mother of the household, who had the mop of fuzzy dark red hair often seen in this region, had hurried her scrubbing to an end, and wiping her hands on her blue apron, was ready to uncover her own cushion. I looked at the chapped, rough skin and the hands used to pulling weeds and digging potatoes and scrubbing, and realized that they could not possibly hold a piece of fine sewing—the thread would catch with every stitch—and yet that she could turn from her scrubbing-brush to the little wooden bobbins (her fingers need not touch the thread) and proceed without difficulty on a snowy bit of Valenciennes—for happily she was following her mother in Valenciennes.

There are three schools in Thielt, of which the convent schools de la Charité and de l’Espérance are the more important. I went first to the Convent de la Charité, with Mlle. van der Graeht, who has throughout the war been devoted to the workers and the lace. Tho Thielt lay in the danger zone, she refused to choose a safer city, remaining to share the work of her father, who added to his arduous duties as administrator of the _arrondisement_, those of the representative of the Brussels Lace Committee. Two weeks before the end, however, the Germans drove these patriots from their house (three bombs from Allied aeroplanes had already fallen on it) and they were denied the experience they had been waiting for throughout all the years, that of seeing the Allied soldiers march into Thielt. One of the Germans was frank enough to tell them that they were being forced away chiefly to prevent their “assisting” at that deliverance.

Immediately after the armistice they returned, and installed themselves comfortably once more on the first floor of their almost roofless house. When I arrived they had not yet come in from their first inspection trip of the communes just behind the lines, and I was welcomed by pretty, brown-haired Flavia and her six-year-old Albert. Flavia’s husband had been killed at the front during the first months of the war, and she had served in this household throughout all its terrible duration. As I looked from the windows of the drawing-room, still intact, across the rear garden, to the mass of wreckage that was once the neighboring house, I understood the feeling of the impotence of all effort produced by the casualness of these bombs, that spare here to strike there, and why in the war one inevitably becomes a fatalist. And as I looked across the garden, Flavia told me something of her experience with the thirteen Germans who took over the house when they drove her master out and of how whenever the shelling was severe they ran to the cellars, and several times tried to persuade her to go with them but she always refused. “I preferred,” she said, “to die alone with my little boy in the open, to risking being killed with them in the cellar.” On Sunday, October 13, between 11 and 2 o’clock, sixty shells fell on Thielt, and all day Monday and the following days they continued to fall, until on Saturday the 19th, the French marched into the town. To add to the horror of this period, people were dying in large numbers of influenza. Flavia told me of the street-sweeper who died at the corner with her broom in her hand. By some miracle she and her little boy escaped both shell and pestilence, and when Monsieur and his daughter returned they found her scrubbing and restoring as best she could after the flight of the enemy. This was one of the centers where during the four terror-years a bright beacon burned for all the surrounding territory, for it was here that the people of the villages and the convents could bring their laces for the committee, knowing they would be accepted and paid for. In 1916, the Baron van der Graeht was encouraging the work in no less than seventeen communes and of as many as 3,500 lace-workers. Flavia smiled as she remembered something—“What good luck, there will be a sister coming this very day about 2 o’clock, with her laces.” As she said this, the door opened—father and daughter were back from their pony-cart expedition to the front-lines.

Monsieur was still visibly moved by what he had seen, even after his own four years’ experience. “Madame,” he said, “I can not describe my emotion on going about in those little shattered villages just behind the lines, where the women have insisted on remaining, and where day by day, and year after year, they have sat calmly before their cushions making lace, while the shells burst before and behind them. After such a victory as theirs, the lace industry of Belgium must live.”

Mademoiselle gave me the list of the badly destroyed villages, and then the names of those which had suffered less and that, with Thielt, produced the most lace. Among them were Pittham and Ardois (which specializes in old Bruges); Ruysselede (with an excellent school for Valenciennes), Aerseele, and Maria Loop. Thielt, itself, had at the beginning of 1919 about 300 workers, of whom a hundred were in the school of the convent de l’Espérance, and about 60 in the Convent de la Charité. There had been times of great discouragement; in one particularly dark hour in 1917 many of the workers had turned back to the old facteurs, or village agents, for help, and unfortunately some of these sold to the Germans, who were constantly trying to win them by offering large sums for their laces. Since he was under no obligation to turn over a fixt wage to the workers, the facteur might reap any profit he could secure.

We abandoned this unpleasant subject to talk of the schools, the hope of the future, and after lunch I went with Mlle. to visit one of these, the Convent de la Charité, on the edge of the town, with its 60 girls, who have supplied the committee with much old Flanders and Cluny. Even tho this was a Saturday afternoon in winter, 45 of the 60 chairs were occupied by girls between 12 and 16. One rarely finds a girl over 18 in the schools; once she has learned her trade, she prefers to work at home with the mother and grandmother.

Unfortunately in this, which is considered a “good” school for Flanders, I found the longest hours I had yet met, that is, summer hours. In winter, because of the poor light, they are shorter. It seems unbelievable, but the sisters told me that in summer the children come at 5:30 o’clock and work until 8 at night—with only three half-hours for recreation—one at 8:30 o’clock, one at 12, and one at 4. A day of 13 hours for growing children, and girls who are maturing! It is such cruel conditions as these that the Committee have done their best to ameliorate. In this case, tho the hours are still criminal, the wages have been improved.

However, “improved wages” leave much still to be fought for. I talked with a girl of twelve in the front row, an apprentice, and found that she earns between 40 and 50 centimes a day, or about 10 cents for her 13 hours’ labor, which tho it is almost double what she could have earned before the war, is nevertheless only 10 cents per day. The Committee was able to add the war-time subsidy of 20 per cent. to this. Naturally, the learner can not yet make what is called good lace, and unfortunately her parents are often only too content to have her bring home 10 cents a day. The older, more experienced girls, were earning from one to two francs a day, or from 20 to 40 cents, that is, on a summer’s day or full day.

Monsieur told me later that in his region if the wage of the good worker can be raised to 50 cents per day, she will be able to live, and will be content to remain at home before her lace cushion rather than to go to the shoe and cotton factories of Thielt.

The advanced pupils were eager to uncover their treasure. Nearly all of them had protected their round cushions with a circular piece of thick blue glazed paper, with a hole in the middle. Through the hole they worked with their rather heavy cherry wood bobbins, on the meshless guipures of Cluny and Bruges and Flanders, which this school prefers. Several were finishing the collar and cuff sets of rather coarse but pretty Bruges with its characteristic rose and trefoil, seen so commonly in shop windows, and which are especially effective when worn with cotton or linen frocks. The Guipure de Flandres pupils were making square insets for table and tray-cloths of simple, geometric designs. Two girls were at work on what they called Guipure de Milan, of a wide spreading branch and flower pattern.

However, the most interesting lace was not the guipure but the Point de Flandres or Old Flanders, with its elaborate mesh base, just now experiencing an interesting and encouraging revival, in which the zealous Baron van der Graeht felt Thielt should assist. A half-dozen older girls were executing doily and table center rounds in this lace, after the Committee’s very popular Swan pattern. They were using a fairly coarse linen thread, and working the rich, solid mesh with eight bobbins. “Whoever would make the Old Flanders mesh must be willing to play a game of patience,” Madame had once said to me. The dull, plain woven parts of the pattern are brilliantly outlined by a still coarser thread, and in the “jours” or open-work spaces are the much loved snow-balls characteristic of Binche lace. Because of its combined strength and beauty, there could hardly be a more successful lace for general use than this Old Flanders, sometimes called Antik.

While it was once the most generally made and most celebrated of Flemish bobbin laces (it was known in every part of Flanders in 1500), it had been almost forgotten for generations, but even tho it has been little remembered for some time, Old Flanders may be said never to have died. In certain regions, that of Antwerp for instance, it is found continuously on the garments of priests. It is the lace that remained always at the base and from which the other bobbin laces, from time to time, sprang. It is to be hoped that the Committee’s laudable effort to revive it will bear increasing rewards.

Tho they could understand no French, and I knew only a few words of Flemish, these little and big girls found much amusement in my visit, and in my inability to follow their swift fingers. These were fingers accustomed, too, to weed the fields and to dig potatoes, for there is practically no lace made here during the weeks of August and September when the potato-crop is gathered. The Sisters of Charity, teachers in this school, were poor themselves, as their surroundings testified. They had no fine carved oak armoire for their laces, but brought from some safe place a tin box, like an ordinary bread-box, in which were the dainty white packets ready to be sent to the Committee at Brussels. As they were exhibiting piece after lovely piece, they unfolded the swan pattern doily rounds of Old Flanders, and after a moment’s hesitation, Sister A. ventured, “There is one thing you might do for us, Madame; when you return to Brussels, could you not tell the Committee that while the small swan doily rounds are sufficiently paid, this large centerpiece round is not? It is our fault in estimating; we did not realize how long it would take to make it.” I could not resist teasing them a little and replied that I should be delighted to carry the message were it not for the fact that it was precisely this set of swan doilies (as it was) that the Committee had given me for Christmas. “Should you like me to tell them,” I asked, “that they had not paid enough for my present?” They were covered with confusion, as I expected they would be, and then how they laughed, those frail little sisters. “_Mais_, Madame, that would indeed be difficult; we will write; we had forgotten. _Non_, Madame, you certainly could not tell them that! But we can write letters now whenever we wish—can we not? One loses the habit in four years.” And then they laughed again all together.

It was already late when I reached Wynghene. The shell-pitted roads of western Flanders had made all my traveling difficult and I could not see Mlle. Slock, one of the rare lace dealers who has looked beyond her immediate purse and has taken time to revive old models and invent new ones, seeking in every way to raise the standard of the present production in all her region, which is chiefly devoted to Cluny. I had not time to stop in the village, but hurried on beyond it to a cheerful red brick manor house set in a forest, the home of the Burgomaster of Wynghene, whose wife has been the untiringly devoted representative of the Committee for this section.

As we sat at tea together, near the conservatory windows, where we could look through the naked garden trees across a meadow to the forest beyond, the Burgomaster told me of the morning when they stood at these windows, after the shells had been falling for days all about them, waiting and watching, scarcely daring to breathe, and of how as they watched, he saw through the trees of the forest what looked like a brown shadow, but the brown shadow moved, and then running across the meadow, where he had always believed they must break through, came the Belgian soldiers, the soldiers of deliverance. “I know our hearts stopt beating; we stood choking, incapable of motion, as we watched them come—still unable to believe after four years of waiting.”

We were silent for a few minutes, then we began to talk of the lace. As his wife turned to get the list of her villages, I asked if the Germans had attempted to get her workers away from her. “They had their agents here, as everywhere,” she answered, “and I regret to admit that one of their most successful ones was a Belgian woman, who had been a facteur, or lace gatherer for larger houses, before the war. When the Germans offered her large prices, she consented to serve them. If she had been sacrificing herself for what she believed to be the good of the workers, we might have forgiven her, but it was obvious that she was not—she is pretty and likes pretty clothes—_Voilà tout!_ Along with several other disloyal citizens, she was imprisoned the other day, but unfortunately after only twenty-four hours, succeeded in freeing herself. However, the people will never forget that she trafficked with the enemy.”