Part 6

By far the greater number working at home make Torchon, Cluny and Valenciennes, tho the Bruges district is celebrated, too, for Rosaline and Binche and Old Flanders, and above all for the Duchesse de Bruges, once so named because it was thought worthy to adorn a Duchess. Bruges lace has always been made entirely with bobbins, in separate flowers, or details that are united not by mesh, but by little picot-edged cords or bars. There are many varieties of this familiar lace; between the coarse, much marketed modern Bruges, with its well-known roses and trefoils, sometimes scarcely meriting the name of lace, and the Bruges of the robe presented in 1901 to Queen Elizabeth, then the Princess Elizabeth, there is a deplorable distance. The individual trefoils and arabesques and roses of the coarser kinds are made very quickly on the round cushion, which can be readily turned, and are produced in great quantities in many of the communes of the Bruges region, while fortunately in such a village as Saint Michel one can still see exquisite examples of the finer Bruges in the making.

Rather than be introduced to the lace-making of Bruges by the younger workers in the schools, or in one of the thousand homes given over to it, I preferred to go first to the place where probably more strangers, especially English and Americans, have been initiated into the mysteries of the cushion and its bobbins than anywhere else in the world. There have been other famous Béguinages in Belgium—congeries of houses maintained by private endowment, for women, who, while they object to taking the vows of the convent, yet wish to live in a kind of partial retreat from the world and under the protection of the church—but none lovelier than this one of Bruges, with its sixteenth century buildings of pure Flemish architecture, grouped about a wide green court shaded by elm trees. Naturally the Béguinage has not been a mecca for travelers and artists merely because several of the gentle old ladies in retreat there made beautiful lace; they have come in search of its quaint pignons and doorways, its inner gardens, the bridges that span the surrounding canals where the swans paddle peacefully. And they have been delighted to find included in the picture the white-capped women before their lace cushions, intent (doubtless unconsciously) on perpetuating other beauties, as old as those of the buildings encircling the court, the designs of Valenciennes that have been handed down by French and Belgian mothers to their children through generations. These ladies of the Béguinage may keep their private fortunes and pay for the privileges of the retreat. They are supposed, however, to live austerely; their charming brick houses are white inside—wall-papers (as being too gay) are forbidden—while the floors are covered with a kind of pretty, rude rush carpet. They may not go on journeys, and no man outside, except the clergy, may enter the sacred precincts of the court, the gates of which are closed at 8 o’clock. Can one imagine an atmosphere more encouraging to hours spent patiently in lace-making? It is recorded that in the Béguinage of Ghent, in 1756, there were as many as 5,000 women engaged in making the Valenciennes for which that city was famous. But the day of this particular kind of retreat has passed, and even at Bruges many of the houses are vacant; when the old die, there are few who wish to take their places. And it is only because those few who remain preserve the best traditions of the lace that they count in the lace-world of to-day; the quantity produced is negligible. Nevertheless, I was delighted that my first knowledge of Bruges lace should come through the few wide Valenciennes flounces of exquisite flower and vine pattern and firm and even workmanship that I found still pinned to the cushions of the Béguinage.

Curiously enough, in this retreat, pervaded by the sadness that inevitably reigns where the old order changes, I found the young and enthusiastic Vicaire, Professor Maertens, assistant director of the new Lace Normal School of Bruges. He lives with his aunt, who is the mother director of the Béguinage and called “Madame, la Grande Dame,” tho she is still Mademoiselle. The Béguinage may in one sense represent the despair of the lace, since what is happening there is happening throughout Belgium. But in the person of Professor Maertens of the Normal School, the Béguinage represents, too, the hope of the lace. In the plain little room of his charming Gothic house, he explained with admirable clarity the necessity which led to the founding of this Normal School by the State in 1911, and the system which it has developed. He then arranged that I should “assist” at the _réouverture_ of the school the following morning. There was to be a reopening because, in common with so many schools of Belgium, the Lace Normal had been driven from its quarters by the Germans, and tho after their eviction the teachers had persisted in continuing their classes in a convent, where their persecutors forced them to receive two Austrian pupils (from whom, however, they concealed much), they were in the true sense to begin again on January 7, 1919. That was fully four weeks after the invader had had to evacuate, for eager as they were to commence, with their best effort, they had not been able before this to prepare three school-rooms and a few smaller ones on the ground floor for use. We are accustomed to the pictures of the territories desolated by the Germans, but unless one goes from house to house in the districts supposed to be left unharmed, he can have no conception of the state in which they were left. However, by Thursday morning the few rooms on the ground floor had been disinfected and whitewashed, and the Lace Normal School of Belgium re-opened its doors at 8:30 o’clock. Poets have described the shining faces of children on their way to school—but after pupils and teachers have been ground under the heel of an implacable oppressor for four years there is still another light in their faces as they reassemble in a free school-room. It was generous of them to allow me to share their first morning.

The teachers’ course covers two years. In order to insure careful individual training the directors prefer to have no more than eight or ten earnest students in each year’s class; they prefer, too, that these shall not have been lace-makers before entering, and that they be between sixteen and thirty years of age. There are, then, two class-rooms, light and airy, and equipped with blackboards and charts, and the all-important large demonstration cushion with its gigantesque bobbins attached to heavy colored wool threads to aid the eye and brain. Each young woman records the steps of her progress in a series of copy-books so beautiful in their penmanship and their drawing as to recall at once the manuscripts of long ago.

What, then, is the instruction which they receive? Since there had never been a system of teaching lace-making in Belgium, the directors of the Normal School were obliged to develop one, and as it exists to-day, logical, comprehensive, far-seeing, it belongs exclusively to the School of Bruges. By the defective method employed before, a pupil was taught to make one kind of lace, then another, and another, but tho she might become proficient in the execution of thirty kinds, she might still be incapable of executing a new thirty-first variety if it were presented to her, because she had not been taught the underlying principles.

The Bruges directors found, after a long and careful analysis of the processes employed in all known laces, that they depend on but between twenty and thirty major operations, and that, in the final analysis, for the bobbin laces, these reduce themselves always to the simple question, “Does the thread pass from left to right, or does it pass from right to left?”

They chose specific colors, red, purple, green and others, to represent specific movements of the threads, thus establishing a symbolic color system of design which enables the pupil to read a blackboard drawing as he would a written page. And they realized that before the processes are portrayed by lines on the blackboard, they should be executed with the gigantesque bobbins and the colored wool cords.

They then outlined the two years’ work, which they made to include classes in practical lace-making, in design, in commerce and English, in the history of lace-making, and religion. Because the two years’ course was already over-crowded they did not attempt to teach the needle points, which, according to them, do not demand a system of instruction in the same sense that the bobbin laces require it. Besides, they look upon bobbin lace as more uniquely Belgian and as therefore more necessary to develop. Dr. Rubbens of Zele, farther east, plans soon to have a needle lace Normal School in operation in that town.

In the first year class, a demonstration of the use of the tools, the winding-wheel, the cushion and bobbins is followed at once by the study of the Torchons, which tho they are the commonest known laces, yet in all their varieties employ all the more important lace processes. The Torchons once thoroughly mastered, the student has traveled a considerable distance on the lace journey. The study of Torchon is succeeded by Cluny in all its varieties and Cluny is in turn followed by a kind of barbaric Russian lace, of baroque design, which is, like the Torchons and Clunys, made of linen thread, and resembles them closely in other ways. The finer laces, Valenciennes, Duchesse, Flanders, and others are taught only after these first three groups have been mastered.

Along with the actual lace-making, the students follow courses in design, where they begin first with simple studies in geometry and in drawing. They then execute geometric designs and adapt them to lace-making. From these studies they proceed to drawing from nature, and to what is more difficult, the adaption of the drawings from nature to lace designs, for it is one thing to create a beautiful flower and leaf arabesque, and quite another thing to draw it so that it may be exprest in thread.

The important classes in commerce and English and those in history and religion run parallel with the studies in lace-making and design.

Of great value to these future teachers of Belgium is the model practise school across the court from the main rooms, where at four o’clock each day the poorer children of the neighborhood come to be taught. Each has her cushion and bobbins and pins and thread furnished by the Normal, and enjoys all the advantages offered by its excellent system; while the coming teachers find here the opportunity to perfect their methods.

I asked if these teachers could look confidently to finding positions. Since only the initial class had graduated before the Germans were upon Belgium and since that class was composed almost entirely of women sent from the already existing convent schools, who sought to improve their methods, it is as yet impossible to answer this question. But as this is the single training-school in Belgium (the Brussels School, so capably directed by Mme. Paulis, being chiefly a school of design) there seems to be every reason to hope that once the country has risen from the chaos into which it has been plunged, the Bruges graduates will have no difficulty in securing places. Teachers are as yet very poorly paid, but as regards salaries, too, there is reason to hope. The ideal plan for a school would seem to be that it should be in charge of a graduate of the Normal School, while a specialist in design from the Brussels school should come once a week with her charts and drawings to give particular instruction in that branch. The vital decision as to the part lace-making should have in the curriculum of the communal or free public schools is still in abeyance.

Since factories have killed the lace industry in every other city in Belgium except Bruges and Turnhout, people often ask if it can persist much longer in Bruges. There seems to be good ground to believe it will. Under the Germans the port of Zeebrugge acquired a momentary prominence, but with Antwerp so near, there seems little chance that it will ever become important, or that Bruges herself may look forward to any large industrial development. Lovely, tranquil city guarding a beauty of long ago, it is probable that Bruges will maintain her right to the title “Queen of Lace Cities.” “Yes,” M. Gillemont de Cock would add, seeing the patterns and quality of the Valenciennes and the modern Old Flanders and Bruges, and Binche, pinned to her cushions to-day, and remembering the exquisite delicate webs of a few decades ago, “_Une Reine, Madame, c’est vrai, mais une Reine bien malade_”—“a Queen, Madame, it is true, but a very sick Queen.” The Lace Normal and other schools can help greatly to restore her.

VI

KERXKEN

_Sister Robertine_

On a wet, cheerless day between Christmas and New Year’s, I started with Madame de Beughem and Madame Allard for the most important lace district of Eastern Flanders. The Alost region, which in 1896 counted 8,500 workers, is known throughout the lace world for its Needle Point and Venise.

We went first to Alost itself, the center of the area, where, however, modern industries have won their already oft-repeated victory over the lace. It was in Alost, the 16th of November, 1918, that my car had scarcely been able to push its way between the two lines of Belgian soldiers of deliverance holding back the smiling, tearful population, and where, too, I passed Burgomaster Max free after four years in prison in Germany, on his way to King Albert at the Army Headquarters near Ghent.

A short distance south of Alost we passed Haltaert, from which this lace section might more justly take its name, since in Haltaert there is scarcely a household without its needle or bobbin workers. And but a little farther south lay Kerxken, which even in the rain, looked a friendly village and where beside fully three-fourths of the windows women were plying their needles.

Before the war companies of the men of this region went to France to work in the harvest, as many as 40,000 migrating annually, because even before the war, France was short-handed agriculturally and the French fields offered higher wages than their own. The women and girls helped those who remained to gather the crops, and in the fall, when the men came back and the season for working the farms had passed, whole families turned to lace-making as a means of piecing out the gains of the summer. Sometimes the men cared for the children or assisted with the housework so that the women might sit uninterruptedly before their patterns, and in certain instances they themselves made lace—the census of 1896 lists 117 men lace-workers in Belgium. In Kerxken we found that thirty young men who had been silk weavers before the war had during the occupation been able to make lace—not true lace, but such imitations as filet, really a form of embroidery. They made, too, Application, not genuine Application where true lace details, made either with the bobbin or needle, are sewed upon the tulle base, but tulle ornamented with machine-made lacets, narrow braids of various sorts that come to the region from Calais. Lacets usually have a strong thread along one edge, which can be drawn so that the braid may be more swiftly fashioned into curving leaves or flowers. These distressing imitations, which unfortunately pay much better than the true laces, since they can be made with great speed and find a ready market, are a constant menace to them. “_Voilà notre ennemie!_” said Madame Allard, as we looked into a work-room where the table showed little piles of lacet collars. The only method of fighting this enemy is through higher wages for the genuine lace.

We could not see Adele Rulant, once with hardly a peer in Needle Point, to whom people from far and near had sent their old pieces, even shreds of their family treasure, for restoration, knowing that almost certainly her artist’s needle would recapture the lost mesh or flower. Adele Rulant had died and we realized again how surely one by one the famous dentellières of the last half of the 19th century are dropping out.

We turned down a lane and were soon at the green door of the convent of the black-robed Franciscaine Sisters, who dismayed, but smiling, hurried forward to greet us, very fresh looking in their white lined coiffes and collars. I say dismayed, because through an error they had expected us the day before and had kept a fire burning for hours, a supreme expression of hospitality in this bitter, coalless winter; this was Saturday afternoon, there was no fire, and the lace-workers were at home scrubbing their tiled floors and doorsteps. But they would light a fire at once, and send a Sister to the nearest houses to recall at least a few of the women; they would prepare lunch for us, a plate of little cakes and a bottle of wine had already been set on the table. Such an apologetic bustle of welcome was heart-warming on a cheerless day. Nothing less, I am certain, would have made it possible for me to drink an entire glass of sour red wine at 10:30 o’clock in the morning.

I wished particularly to visit the convent because I had known during the four years of Sœur Robertine’s successive victories over the Germans. After they refused to let laces pass except through their hands, which taxed and had frequently stolen from the parcels, time and again she outwitted them, crossing the forbidden village frontier and carrying the precious rolls herself to the office of the Committee at Brussels.

Beneath the calm of that office there was always tense expectancy; at any moment anything might happen, even the worst thing. One day after weeks of being entirely cut off from many of their lace sections, when the women were more strained and anxious than ever before, the door opened quietly and Sœur Robertine, of Kerxken, a prohibited district, stood before them. Fear for her quite overcame their joy at seeing her; they quickly turned the key and hurried her into a rear room. “But why have you come? We did not send for you—we should never have allowed you to take such risks!”

At first only Sœur Robertine’s twinkling, keen gray eyes answered, as she slowly threw off her long black cape and from beneath other garments began unwinding meter upon meter of lovely white lace, till the billowy lengths covered all the table. “It was very simple—I had to come. For weeks our thread has been exhausted; the women are suffering for need of their earnings. I found a way, and I’ll find a way back, never fear; we’ll all return safely to Kerxken—the thread and the money and I—even tho we may have to slip in under the very nose of the Boche!” She was still laughing and still producing lace, little packets now of square insets and bouquets, when I had to leave.

It was a delight to meet her again here freely directing her convent—she who had so bravely held her right to freedom. Her parents had been shop-keepers and she had brought to the Order a goodly store of practical knowledge and a general alertness and good sense, which added to her unselfishness and swift sympathy and ever-ready laugh, easily explained the admiration and affection generally felt for her.

While we were sitting in the large, cold reception room, waiting for the workers to reassemble, I asked Sœur Robertine about a painting over the door—a striking portrait which proved to be that of the Curé Van Hoeimessen, who, in 1857, founded the convent in an attempt to relieve the misery of the village. A short time before this, greatly distrest by the idleness and poverty of his parishioners, he had asked that a teacher be sent to Kerxken to instruct a few girls in the art of lace-making, and since there was no building in which to start a school, he called the class of five or six girls together in his own house. Then, later, as the experiment succeeded, he invited a group of sisters to come and founded for them the convent of the Franciscaines, which from that day has held unswervingly to the traditions of its foundation in teaching and executing the fine needle laces. There are at present 15 sisters, and about 150 true lace-workers in their lace school. In addition, 300 makers of filet and “imitation” are connected with the convent.

From the salon we went to the work-room, which looks on a deep walled-in garden, a treasure-plot for potatoes and cabbage during the famine years. About a dozen girls and women had dropt their brushes and brooms and hurried through the rain in their wooden shoes to take up their patterns and go on with the delicate traceries of Needle Point and Venise. It was easy to pick out their leader—a beautiful-faced, white-haired woman wearing a black crochet cap, at work on a Venise insertion. She was Sidonie, the best piqueuse, or interpreter of design, in the convent. There were no cushions here, as in the bobbin-lace classes, and the workers held the small, shining, black cloth pattern in their hands, following the pricked holes with their needles; there were fewer of these guiding pin-pricks than in the bobbin-lace picqués. The patterns for Venise and Needle Point are usually small because most women object to large details, as difficult to turn in the hand. Later in a neighboring convent I noticed that the patterns were considerably larger than those at Kerxken, and Sœur Robertine, pointing to them said, “I should have to cut those in two for my girls.” Fortunately a detail can usually easily be separated and later rejoined. To protect her lace, the worker covers it with thick blue paper, cutting a hole about the size of a twenty-five-cent piece through which the needle and thread may move freely. Here it was not the marvel of the flying fingers, as in the bobbin-rooms at Turnhout, that most won our admiration, but the skill in directing the fine threads in complicated designs of incredible delicacy. I chose to sit beside fifteen-year-old Colette who held the partly finished section of a handkerchief square beneath her needle. She explained that it was Point de Gaze, gauze point, a name more recently given the old Needle or Brussels Point. And the fragile hexagonal mesh she was weaving between two beautiful full-blown roses, whose raised petals curved outward from elaborately worked centers, seemed most appropriately named. Her cotton, for Needle Point is made with cotton thread, was so fine that I could not, despite her amused reiterations, believe it did not break with every second stitch. A heavier thread had been used to make the flat, closely woven portions of the flowers, and a still heavier one to outline each finished petal or leaf with the _cordonnet_ (cord) or _brode_, produced by an extremely firm and regular buttonhole stitch. This cord throws the flowers into very brilliant relief.