Part 8

On the table was a pile of chairbacks in Venise, with figure centers and surrounding garlands of flowers all connected by the bars characterizing this lace—an order for a Brussels dealer, who had recently offered fifty-two francs each for them. The sisters were excited and happy over this new price, which was considerably more than anything Heckelgem has hitherto been able to command, one and a half francs a day having been the average wage of the best workers.

A little farther to the south and still in Brabant, tho it lies near the Flanders border, is the much better known convent of Liedekerke, which boasts an unbroken record of sixty years of lace-making, and which before the war received a yearly subsidy of 800 francs from the “Amies de la Dentelle.” As we walked beside the pretty orchard and vegetable garden, bright with purple cabbages, that form the entrance court, toward the rather impressive red-brick buildings, again with their odd miniature steeple, I saw the great arms of a Dutch windmill turning lazily somewhere in the rear. And nearer the door, off at the left in a side court, a war-kitchen with tiled floor and uncertain roof, where hundreds of the village poor still were coming for their daily pint of soup. Of the 4,000 inhabitants as many as 2,900 were forced on to the soup-line during the occupation.

This, then, was one of the important and successful convent schools of Belgium; but in January, 1919, it was in a much sadder plight than the little neighboring school at Heckelgem. There was no coal, not a class was in session, not a child at work with her bobbins. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon, on Monday, October 28, when there were between 800 and 900 children, among them 100 lace-workers, gathered in the various class-rooms, German officers had appeared to announce that by 7 o’clock the rooms must be cleared of both teachers and children. I had already had many demonstrations of what taking possession of school-rooms meant. It was not necessary that the sisters should lead me from room to room, pointing out this or that ruined wall, or casement torn away, or vacant space where the benches or chairs burned as firewood, once stood; but I followed them about for their own sakes. There was at least a kind of comfort in being able to furnish proof of these outrages to somebody.

One small room was undisturbed, but it was a sadder room than any of the others. The primary lace-class had occupied it, and several rows of little girls were learning to make their first flowers and leaves when the enemy drove them out. The baby chairs and the cushions were just as they left them, tho thick dust dulled the blue of the linen covers and the tiny unfinished white roses and tendrils held by the rusty pins. One would have liked to bring the enemy mothers into this room with its baby chairs, and its dust-covered unfinished roses.

In the large adjoining hall Sister M. kindly came to work at a table, on Application, one of the laces for which Liedekerke has been especially distinguished. Before the English invention, early in 1800, of machine-made tulle, which had an incalculable influence on the development of the lace-industry, all meshes had to be made either with the needle or with bobbins. The factory substitute for these difficult processes won instant favor, and with the general public the more swiftly made and cheaper tulle Application, supplanted the exquisite Point d’Angleterre, which it imitated. Liedekerke, for example, had begun its lace career with Point d’Angleterre, and in changing later to Application, was merely responding to popular demand. Its sixty years of lace-history reads: Point d’Angleterre, Application, Rosaline.

These things Madame Kefer-Mali explained, as Sister M. was placing her square of blue paper on the linen of the table cushion, and then the bobbin-made bouquet, wrong side up on the blue square, pinning it carefully and smoothly through the paper to the cushion. Over this she stretched her scarf length of tulle. I was surprized at the time and painstaking effort she gave to these simple operations, until I saw later the effect of the slightest carelessness on the finished flounce. Almost any clever needlewoman can join a flower to a piece of tulle—but only an artist can produce a beautiful scarf or veil in Application. Once the bouquet was properly placed and pinned, Sister M. began to sew, lifting the tulle lightly with each stitch, and smoothly attaching all the edges, for this bouquet was being appliquéd on the body of the scarf. Had it formed the border one edge would have remained free.

Liedekerke Convent, to which some 200 of the villagers bring their laces and which once made little else than Application (many beautiful robes and flounces and scarfs have gone out from the commune and the school), now makes comparatively little of it; for during the last six years Paris and other markets have asked for Rosaline. It is to be hoped that this small quantity may be continued, and that the lace world may still win at least a few pieces yearly of the earlier, more exquisite Point d’Angleterre.

Point d’Angleterre, so named because of its great popularity in England, reached its height in beauty and in favor during the seventeenth century, when it occupied the talent and energy of all the lace-workers of Brussels. It differs from Needle Point, in which both flowers and mesh are made with the needle. It is one of the loveliest of all laces, combining in rare beauty, rich bouquets and arabesques and birds of finest bobbin work, with a frail transparent needle mesh, the flowers themselves becoming frequently more light and delicate through the introduction of charmingly varied needle-worked open spaces. Certain workers make the flowers, and others the connecting mesh. If one can imagine the softness of a kind of sublimated or diaphanous velvet, added to the fragility of an airy and cobwebby lace, one may have some idea of the effect of good Point d’Angleterre. And if one would possess a collar or a flounce, one should buy it quickly, for Point d’Angleterre is going the way of the other difficult and exquisite points. Such villages as Kerxken, Liedekerke, Destelbergen (near Ghent), and those of the Alost region still make occasional pieces.

The more ordinary Point de Flandres, or Flanders, so generally produced to-day, has the same composition as Point d’Angleterre, since in it bobbin-work flowers are joined by a needle-mesh. And even tho coarser and less complicated than Point d’Angleterre, Point de Flandres is also difficult to make, and should be much better paid. There are innumerable differences in quality, and many ways in which this lace may be employed. The Committee has used it chiefly in elegant table centers and cloths, in lamp-shades and in various articles to embellish a drawing-or dining-room. And this summer of 1919 it is being used with much success by important French houses as trimming for dainty _ninon_ underclothing. Nineteenth century Point de Flandres, then, is little more than a commercial name for a very coarse kind of Point d’Angleterre.

This Point de Flandres must not be confused with Old Flanders or Antik, the ancient bobbin-lace experiencing a happy revival at present. Old Flanders is, like Cluny, made entirely with bobbins and with uncut threads; in other words, in single lengths, and not in separate or cut details.

Liedekerke, then, first made Point d’Angleterre for which, after a certain time, it substituted Application, changing again about two years before the war to Rosaline, suddenly become a popular lace.

Rosaline is not very different in appearance from the finer varieties of Bruges; in fact, it employs much the same technique, and is made as is Bruges with bobbins, in small pieces, which are later joined by special workers. A dentellière who can make fine Bruges can usually make Rosaline. Each small piece is composed of elaborately interlacing flowers and leaves and arabesques, without a connecting mesh, but joined by _brides_ or bars, with a picot edge. Sometimes the tiny incrustations called pearls, common to Burano lace, are added, to further ornament the richly covered ground.

I watched a Rosaline cushion, on which the pattern of an arabesque detail was pinned, and Sister A., as she began to shift in pairs the fourteen bobbins needed to execute it; one pair, the _voyageurs_, were continually traveling from right to left and back again as she wove the flat parts of the leaves and blossoms. The Rosaline technique is particularly difficult, since the pins must be continually and rapidly changed as the worker, with a crochet-hook, lifts the thread to pass her bobbin through in the characteristic loop stitch. This delicate operation, constantly repeated, strains both eyes and nerves. The pins are placed along the outside edge of the flowers, instead of inside, as in Bruges, which produces the picot or looped-edge effect of Rosaline. In Bruges the flower edges are even.

I turned from the arabesques just beginning to grow on the cushion, to a lovely little finished detail, about four inches square, one of several in a box which was to hold them till they could be joined to make a scarf. It had taken seven days of thirteen hours each to make this four by four piece, which meant that the maximum a skilled worker could earn in executing it was about two francs a day.

The Liedekerke convent school does not accept children under twelve for more than two complete afternoons a week and for more than one hour each of the other days, these hours being lengthened gradually until the girl of sixteen gives her entire time to her lace. The sisters hope that once they find coal and thread and can put their class-room in order, they may again have 100 pupils, and that the village may continue to count at least 200 good dentellières.

X

HERZELE

_A Château of Refuge_

There are certain châteaux in Belgium that will be remembered throughout this century as harbors of refuge; they dared not flare beacons from their roofs, but during four dark years, people of the nearby communes knew that day and night lights burned there for them. The château of the Comte du Parc was such a one, a property lying on the edge of the village of Herzele, south of Alost, which, tho the house itself is unpretentious, embraces a lovely park and wood, and from which, incidentally, the Germans cut 1,000 trees. It is no longer only the estate of the du Parcs, it is the loved shelter of every villager accustomed to hurry toward it in sad or perilous hours. The morale of the entire region was sustained by the knowledge that the people of the château had not left, as they easily might have, for their safer Brussels home, in the zone of civil administration, where if not free, they would at least have been less imprisoned, but had chosen to remain in the military zone, utterly cut off from their relatives and the rest of Belgium.

They might have considered several reasons sufficiently important to call them away (the Bourgmestre of Herzele had found at least one, his ill-health); among other things their château was as yet practically uninhabitable. It had been begun only a short time before the war broke out, and with the sounding of the first alarm the workmen had rushed out to report to their officers, leaving electric cords dangling, unmounted fixtures standing against the walls, and neither hot water nor heating systems installed. Madame told me later of her desperate and amusing efforts to fasten locks on the most important doors. As she and her husband were debating how they might arrange one large room in the left wing as their single general living-room they could already see the villagers coming anxiously along the tree-lined avenue and across the park to inquire if they were still there. “After the first troubled questions,” Monsieur said, “even if we had not already decided we must stay, it would have been quite impossible to go away.”

The soldiers of the village were leaving with scarcely time for good-bys; Madame understood the fears of the women who came to the château for comfort; her only son, too, a brave, handsome boy, was off to join the colors—her brave, handsome boy, who now lies buried not far from the Yser.

In October the victorious Germans pushed southward, and from the 14th to the 18th, shrapnel fell like rain on the park, but the château escaped unharmed. Then three officers of the occupying army rode up on horseback, revolvers in hand, demanding that the Comte present himself immediately. Madame followed her husband, not knowing what to expect. To their first threat, Monsieur replied calmly, “I do not like those objects,” and after a moment’s hesitation the officers lowered their weapons. Then they demanded guaranties that they would be absolutely safe from attack by any person, either of the château or the village. “I can, of course, speak for my château,” Monsieur answered, “but I can not be responsible for the villagers if they are pushed too far.” These villagers themselves told me later that they were convinced it was only the presence of the Comte (the bullies were frequently servile before titles and powerless before fearlessness) that saved Herzele from destruction. “We always expected the worst,” they said; “in the early days, when the Boches lighted a great fire in the wood, we rushed to the château, believing it was burning.”

From the beginning, Madame and her two daughters looked for some constructive aid they might give their women, something more than the general relief furnished by the Comité National.

Of the 2,500 inhabitants of the village, 1,700 were soon on the lists of the helpless or destitute; among these were many tuberculosis victims. The château living-room became first a clothing bureau, where daily all sorts of garments, sent from America, were distributed. Madame engaged some of the women of the village to patch and re-fashion these, and with certain sums of money that succeeded in reaching her from time to time from an American lady who had “adopted” Herzele, she was able to purchase new materials and offer further saving employment. I do not know the American lady, but if she could have seen Madame’s eyes as she told me of what it meant, imprisoned as they were, to receive these gifts from some one outside who remembered them, I do not doubt she would have felt sufficiently rewarded.

In 1916, when I was in Belgium as a member of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the Germans prevented my going near Herzele, or any point in the zone of direct military preparation, so I could follow the work of Monsieur and Madame only through the Brussels Lace Committee, which had itself great difficulty in keeping connected with them. They made their judgments from the ever increasing quantities and improved quality of the laces that somehow came through.

The room in the château was the lace office not only for Herzele, but for eleven additional villages, where between 2,500 and 3,000 girls and women, encouraged by the Committee support—its designs and thread and money—were busy with their needles and bobbins; for while this is chiefly a needle-work district, large quantities of bobbin laces are also made. To be sure, none of these laces is superior, but they are good, and marketable. They include Cluny, Duchesse de Bruxelles, a kind of coarse Flanders (where the flowers are made with bobbins and the mesh with the needle), Venise, and Rosaline; and of these the Flanders and Venise are most important. At times it was not difficult for the dentellières to take or send their finished lace to the château, at others they were threatened with fines and imprisonment if they were discovered trying to get it there. To refer to but one instance, the facteur of the village three miles distant was fined seventy-five francs when caught on the way with his pieces. The Germans were doing their utmost always, to attach lace-makers to their _Spitzen Centrale_, and despite the international agreement which engaged their protection of the work of the Brussels Lace Committee, they interfered with and obstructed its work again and again. At one point they insisted that all deliveries to the Committee should be made through them, and that they be paid 1 per cent. on the value, in gold, for transmission, where transmission, unfortunately, only too often spelled for them retention.

In the village Madame and her daughters went from house to house, instructing and comforting. The days of the deportations were more terrible than any others. In remembering that first hideous deportation night in Herzele, one remembers, too, that early in the war Cardinal Mercier said that while there was once a time, when to make people believe, we felt we must heighten, or embellish the cold facts, that now in order that they should believe, we must withhold part of the truth. That first night, men and boys were torn from their beds and herded into the school, from there to be carried off in cattle-cars to Germany. There was neither light nor heat, and in the cold and the darkness, the tortured little village broke into a great cry of lamentation, while the château was filled with wives and mothers seeking comfort.

Later, when the activist troubles became acute, the two daughters held meetings even in the cabarets to urge loyalty to a united Belgium. They believe that not one person in their entire village can be said to have worked for the enemy, except when deported bodily, or otherwise coerced.

Somehow the years passed, and then one day, the 16th of September, 1917, bits of white paper fell like snow from the clouds. The family rushed out to gather them and found Lord Northcliffe’s celebrated posters, “The First Million,” representing a vast multitude on the march, the statue of liberty in the background, the fields of France in the foreground, and a continuous bridge of ships connecting them. This snowfall was followed by others, and each brought hope.

Finally, in October, 1918, the Germans, knowing the Allied Army of Liberation was almost upon them, again pulled their guns up into the château grounds, but in the final fighting, as in the earliest, the house somehow escaped.

When I reached Herzele, in January, 1919, the wide park was beautiful and still, green things were sprouting beneath the trees, there were a few birds; to a stranger there was little evidence of the terrible years. But inside, in the cold, unfinished hall, the electric cords still dangled; everything was as the Belgian workmen had left it four and a half years before. And in the single living-room at the left, rudely furnished, but including through large windows the beauty of the park, there were still the war-time desk and long table with the piles of trousers and shirts at one end, and the rolls of white lace at the other. I shook out a scarf of Duchesse de Bruxelles of flower and leaf pattern, with insets in needle work, and several wide flounces of Flanders lace, of the same pattern I had seen used in the charming lamp-shades on sale in the Committee room at Brussels. There were also rolls of Bruges, and Rosaline, Application, and Point d’Angleterre.

As I examined them, Monsieur got out his records and discust the future of his lace-workers. “I am convinced they will be happy to continue in this district, if only they can be sure of a living wage. And apart from other determining factors, to make that, they must learn to execute laces of better quality. We need, above all, a school which will offer along with its courses in practical lace-making, training in design. During the war we had many beautiful designs from the Committee, but each time we were cut off from them we realized our helplessness. In one of the villages the patterns are drawn by a furniture-maker. One reason for the wretched condition of the workers before the war was their entire dependence on the particular lace dealer who furnished them their patterns and their thread, and who, of course, protected his models by copyright. The old, unprotected designs, which may be copied by any one, are little in demand, and during the process of generations of recopying, many of them have so greatly deteriorated as to become scarcely recognizable. If our women were trained they could restore these, and, what is more important, some of them, at least, could invent new ones.”

I asked what it would cost to found a school and support it during its first year. “Perhaps 20,000 or 25,000 francs; we might hope that the State would undertake such a work, but with its present overwhelming burden, it is a question if the Government can occupy itself with lace needs. If it could be started by private initiative, and prove successful, I believe there is no doubt that the Government would be willing later to subsidize it.”

Madame brought a picture post-card from the mantel, of three brothers who had been deported, two of whom had not returned. Other men were drifting back from Metz, where most of the _déportés_ from Herzele had been for over two and a half years, but these two would not return, for they had been frozen to death. I understood at once, for I remembered the sixty-five men with black arms and legs who had been “returned” to the Brussels Hospital in 1917. “No”; Madame looked at the portrait of her boy, with the Belgian colors above it and a vase of flowers in front, and then again at the little post-card; “No,” she said simply, “I have no desire yet to go to Brussels. I prefer to remain here with my people, where we may still, from time to time, weep together.”

XI

GHENT

_A Lace Queen of Long Ago_

Of the cities I visited during three months’ continuous travel in Belgium following the armistice, Ghent appeared to me to be attacking her problems with greatest speed and vigor. Brave old Burgher city of canals and mellow buildings and bell-towers, this Flemish capital is at the same time an active, modern, commercial center; which explains why Bruges has been able to win from her the title she once proudly held of “Queen of Lace Cities.”

The lace history of Ghent begins with the lace history of Belgium, in the sixteenth century; but her great period dates from the seventeenth century and the introduction of the epoch-making mesh of Valenciennes. The activity of her women and girls, following the appearance of this new lace, surpassed anything she had hitherto known; it was not long before the music of 1,000,000 bobbins rose to meet the riotous pealing of her bells. In the sixteenth century Malines had undisputed first place in lace; Ghent now out-stript her. One wonders if part of the fascination of this city for the men the United States sent there in 1814, to make peace with England, and who, after six months’ lingering, had to be urged to return home, lay in its clicking bobbins and the joyous garlands that blossomed under them.