UC-NRLF il|||l{!i||i||l!ll ll||l!l{|lllll 11 11 MINI lllll||l B 3 33^ 521 € 1^ 5«r k n %fe7?e^ and-: ms p' ■^^ U Ifl :~^ LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS' " BY AGNES & EGERTON CASTLE Authors of "A Little House in War Time," etc. Ourselves and every day and hour, One symphony appear ; One road, one garden — every flower, And every bramble, dear. R. L. Stevenson. LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD. CONTENTS page Prologue . . . • . 7 I Garden Friendships * 23 II Garden Failures 42 III The Little Friend of Man 62 IV The Widow Crump . 77 V Tommy to Tea . 93 VI The Soul of the Soldier 114 VII Mother .... 137 VIII The Good Physician . 154 IX " Vae Victoribus " . . 176 X Myself when Young * . 202 XI My Mother when Young * . 222 XII The Garden of My Youth * . 243 XIII October, 1918 . . 256 * Contributed by the Signora. 5 4957iG Prologue THE LAST DAYS OF THE YEAR 1918 Things of a day I What are we, and what not ? A dream about a shadow is man. Pindar. THE gardener's year starts, like that of the Church, in the late autumn. As under the old Christian dispensation, as still in monas- teries and convents, Advent ushers in the time of preparation for the coming of the Lord, so in humble material fashion, the husbandman proceeds to eradi- cate his weeds and cast away the rags and tatters of his outlived satisfactions ; to prune and harrow and cleanse and air ; and finally set seeds and seedlings for the quickening of the Lord's gracious promise of the Spring. The little house, after many vicissitudes, stands, even as the world stands to-day, upon a return to order and new kindly hopes. We have a gardener. The words ought to be written in large capitals and illuminated in royal blue and gold, vermilion and apple green, to represent the jubilation they express. We have passed through strange cycles 7 8 PROLOGUE oi vicissitude, and with every fresh turn of the wheel those ten acres, those borders, once our joy and pride, descended lower in the scale. When The Gardener came he pronounced sentence. " The place. Miss," he said to the daughter of the house, who was promenading him through paths of desolation, — " The place, Miss, to be candid, is simply choss." If he meant chaos, his definition was quite correct. It is a celestial attribute to be able to bring order out of chaos, and this our new broom is doing with the most deUghtful precision and rapidity. What a curious gift is the quality of having " a hand " over things ! The milUner, the horse- man or the cook who has " a hand " will do what they like, even with bad material ; whereas the best the world can pro\dde will be wasted under the heavy touch. Nowhere is it more noticeable than in the garden, as we know to our cost. There was one who shall be nameless, and the utmost of her exertions resulted in mud-pies. Our late treasure, Mullins, choked the beds with a kind of reckless clumsiness. At last we have an artist in the completest sense of the word ; tact character- izes his deahngs with all the charming, delicate lives confided to his care. We like looking out on our terrace where long rows of wallflowers, arabis and polyanthus are tucked in for the winter in the most cosy and symmetrical way imaginable. The mistress of the house has once again a brain teeming PROLOGUE 9 with spring plans. Mr. Wilson can scarcely cherish his League of Nations more tenderly than she does her next \'ear's scheme for the " Villino '* garu^ as we went down the hill again, " but it is a great comfort to know he is washed. A second wedding was that between Shaw, our young bachelor gardener, and a kitchenmaid. This was attended by more dramatic circumstances, for a very elderly, long-faced, plausible maid of my mother had tixed her virgin fancy upon him ; and though her years might easily have doubled his, she had succeeded in extracting a declaration of attachment and a blue stone ring from the promising youth — more promising in her case than fulfilling. She used to stand, gazing out of the window of my mother's bedroom, at his manly form below, busied about the pleasure grounds, in a kind of ''dwam" of sentimentality, ostentatiously protrud- MYSELF Vv'HEN YOUNG 207 ing the imitation turquoise token, much to my mother's exasperation. How the ill-fated betrothal was finaUy severed, was never made clear, but Mc- Carthy departed, unwed ; and one of the " shps " of little kitchen girls was promoted to the post of fiancee to Mr. Shaw — to the scandalized amazement of the household, where the contrast between an upper servant, with a cottage and high wages, and almost the lowest of the underUngs was regarded as a gross mis-aUiance. " Huthen, he might have done better for him- self," was the point of view generally expressed. Shaw, however, had his own ideas on the subject, which were not a whit more romantic. Two days before the wedding my mother paid a visit to the garden cottage to see whether it was in a fit state of preparation for the bride. In the Hving-room she discovered a mountainous bundle tied up in a soiled sheet. " \\Tiat is that, Shaw ? " she said. " It doesn't look at all nice. You had better take it away." " Take it away, is it ? " retorted the bridegroom indignantly. " Isn't that me washing ? Haven't I been saving it up for herself these three weeks ! " Another matrimonial episode is literally the last of my recollections on the subject. This was not connected wdth any one on the property, but wdth the occupants of the two best farms in the district. The owner of one had an elderly daughter and a rooted objection to the idea of marriage for her, 2o8 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS so that it was " as much as anybody's Ufe was worth to mintion the wurrd in his hearing " ; the owner of the other was a very respectable steady bachelor who possessed a comfortable property. After waiting in patience for something like twenty years till "the Da " should come to a different frame of mind (on this plane or another),— the parish priest, the curates and the friendly neigh- bours all taking a hand in vain in the business of persuasion,— the bride, now considerably over forty, braved the parental curse, with the concurrence of spiritual authority, and made a runaway match. Her progenitor kept up the curse, and used to stump into the httle chapel, kneel on the other side of it opposite his own daughter, and glare steadily at her through the sermon. Perhaps that was why she wore a lace veil so heavily patterned that a bunch of grapes completely obscured one eye. She had also yellow grapes on a yellow straw bonnet, with mauve ribbons ; and a dress of mauve striped silk that filled the Uttle edifice with rustlings. A very grand and pious lady ! We, from our japanned wood pew, used to watch her with great interest as the heroine of the most thrilhng local romance that had yet come our way. Other people must have wedded, of course. They were the handsome Condran girls, w^hose parents actually gave dances of the most select description for them,— to which no one connected with trade was ever admitted. MYSELF WHEN YOUNG 209 A certain well-to-do mason, who owned a tidy bit of land besides, was, according to our informa- tion, excluded ; the taint of " business " being regarded as nullif3dng other advantages. Children, at the time when I was one of them, took the world very much for granted. We did not criticize the regulations of grown-up people. We rather regarded them, I beheve, as part of the immutable laws of the Universe. In some ways we had a singularly happy childliood ; in others, there was a disciphne, a certain austerity with which the young generation is quite unacquainted now. But then the whole trend of hfe was simpler, less self-indulgent. Our nurseries were great, bare, sunshiny rooms, curtainless and carpetless. Bhnds and wooden shutters made a darkness at nights which no one knows in this century. There is — in parenthesis — nothing I lambent more than the ruthless fashion in which people have torn down their dehghtful old shutters ; or, in some instances, screwed them up ! Tmce a week these nurseries were scrubbed, to our great discomfort. None of us seem to have taken colds from wet boards, in spite of bare legs and httle socks, so I suppose due precautions were observed. Indeed, I can remember blazing fires in those vast grates, and the smell of the fresh soap and water steaming to dryness. Up to the age of seven years old we were, all six of us, clad in white, and every day clean clothes o 210 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS were given us. You can imagine that the big laundries were kept pretty busy. Nothing that was not washable, except our strapped, white kid shoes, was ever put on us. Even in winter weather our pelisses were made of quilted pique. Odd gar- ments these were, with deep capes. Our bare legs were covered with gaiters, which, strange as it sounds, were, I think, also made of pique, with something fleecy inside, buttoned. Our buttoned boots were also white. I don't suppose it ever dawned upon us that other children of our class ran about in black boots, and didn't have a fresh-washed frock every day ; no more than that it was possible for nursery fare to consist of anything besides bread and milk, alter- nating with porridge, which we called " stirabout," for breakfast and supper. Personally I detested both these forms of nutriment, and I can remember all the dodges with which a patient nurserymaid used to endeavour to coax me through my bowl of bread and milk. I remember sitting on her knee and being fed, deeply against the grain, while each spoonful was a fish, caught in a white lake, and I was implored not to be so cruel as to shut my mouth against " this httle dotey feller ! " A further dodge was to start an enthralHng fairy tale. " Another bit, Miss Aggie, and sure I'll tell ye what became of me brave Jack ! " ''Stirabout" was more interesting, because you could make inland lakes of butter and rivers of milk. MYSELF \^'HEN YOUNG 211 There was an irritating subterfuge practised upon us every morning in the promise of a cup of tea and a bit of bread and butter for the good child who had finished her portion. Of course one was never '' able for it." If one advanced as far as the first mouthful, that was difiicult to swallow. We children breakfasted and supped first in the nursery, later on in the schoolroom. The only meal we had in common with our mother was " dinner " — her lunch. Until we were nearly grown up we had no afternoon tea, or rather, tea became our last meal at half-past six. That was a curiously exiguous repast, considering the lavish character of the household, and one can only suppose that it was regarded as more salubrious ; large slices of bread, already buttered — in the winter salt butter — and extremely weak tea. The governess had shoes of cold meat in addition. I never remem- ber jam, fruit, cake, eggs, or any condiment. Nevertheless in the room where our nurses preferred to sit — it happened to be, for some unexplained reason, a large bathroom — there was always left an immense, hooped, china jug full of milk, in case any of us small things wanted a little sustenance between meals. The sister next to me was very fond of milk. I hated it. She used to stand on tiptoe and tilt the spout of the jug to her hps ; much after the fashion in which Dim Bowes refreshed himself from Ehza's pail. 212 LITTLE HOURS IX GREAT DAYS This sister had a peculiarly fair complexion, which was attributed in the nursery entirely to her favourite drink. The \'illage women were in admira- tion over her. " Glory be to God, will ye look at Miss Ellie ! Them two beautiful cheeks, as white as curds." In contradistinction to the spartan simphcity of our suppers and breakfasts, dinner was a notable spread ; for, though my mother was a firm believer in the wholesomeness of an alternating diet of leg of mutton, roast chicken and chops, for her growing half-dozen, we had nearly always four glorious sweets : not being attrained to milky pudding hke the present generation. Almond cheesecakes as large as saucers, bursting in beautiful frangipani out of their pastry cases, caramelled on the top, piping hot — I recall them with a re- trospective greed ; monster jellies, of the nourishing calves-foot kind, flavoured with brandy, sherry and lemon ; tipsy cakes that ii-ere tipsy cakes, fretful hke the porcupine with large almonds ; open tarts (raspberries and currants or plums or peaches), cross-barred with pastry ; and that dish, so seldom seen now, sandwich pastry, acclaimed with shouts, for children hke amusement when they eat, and this the different kinds of jam, between the layers, pro- vided. There was another dish in its season which I have never tasted^ except in those bygone days at our own board : a tart — we called it a pie — made of the thinnings of the muscatel grapes in the vinery. MYSELF WHEN YOUNG 213 I recommend it to the gourmet for its strange and delicate flavour. Add to all this, plentiful helpings of cream ; rich crinkled yellow cream from our own dairy. Certainly we hved in a land flowing with milk and honey ; taking it all, as I have said, after the fashion of our years, as natural products like the leaves on the trees, or the daisies in the turf. There was a trio of old servants in the house, whom my mother called " the three duchesses " : housekeeper, nurse and head housemaid. They were re-christened by our infant hps, Mobie, Shuzzy and Dadgy : their original names being Mrs. O'Brien, Mrs. Hughes and Bridget. I never knew the latter 's surname. She was an adorable old woman who might have walked out of a farce ; a little quaint creature in a grey lace cap adorned with purple ribbons, from each side of which depended profuse grey ringlets after the fashion of our grandmothers. On Sunday she wore a huge poke bonnet, but for the matter of that, so did the others. It was still supposed to be indelicate for a lady to walk out without a curtain at the back of her bonnet to con- ceal her hair. Was it not about the time that Miss Yonge, writing "The Daisy Chain," makes Ethel, her heroine, be congratulated because she has not adopted the current immodest fashion of uncovering her brow ? When, following a change of fashion, my mother bought a httle turban hat, which indeed became her mightily, she regarded the act herself as one of daring. 214 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS To come back to Dadgy, she used to flit about the house like a bat. I never remember her without a fluttering duster. She was unmercifully teased by our brothers, but woman-like, infinitely preferred them to us Httle girls ; especially my youngest brother, who, hke his mother, had, from his earhest years, the talent of inspiring extraordinary attach- ments. Shuzzy, our nurse, who died early in my career, was a very strict old lady, for whom I had a positive dislike, though my mother thought very highly of her. My last memory of her is of penetrating into her room during the course of her fatal illness. I had been strictly forbidden to do so ; and though I went in terror of her at the best of times, some spirit of frightened curiosity pushed me to investigate — I think it was partly to reassure myself that nothing dreadful was happening to her, being a highly nervous and abnormally imaginative child. The result was far from reassuring. I beheld a figure in a dressing- gown, crowned with an awful flapping hnen cap, after the fashion of those depicted in Dickens as worn by Mrs. Squeers. She turned a grey angry face on me and told me fiercely to begone, for "a bold child " ; bold being Irish nursery parlance for naughty. I was awestruck when she died, and felt acutely the black shadow that had fallen over the house. But there was no mourning for her, as there would have been had Mobie left us : Mobie the first of MYSELF WHEN YOUXG 215 the duchesses, and incomparably one of the dearest memories of my childhood. There never was a sweeter picture of old womanhood, a nobler, a more Christian soul. She was tenderness itself to us children, and the linen-room, in which she sat, was a harbour of refuge for us in all our troubles We were all " Alannah " to her. I have never known her rebuke me but once, and that was when, at the age of six, she caught me reading the hues on a small sister's palm. She told me it was forbidden in the Bible and a great sin ; I was so deeply dis- comfited at hearing severe tones from those Hps that I howled uncontrollably, until she took me on her capacious lap and consoled me with brown sugar. The nurse who followed Shuzzy might well have opened my infant e3'es to the value of the departed. She was a 3'oung woman, of what her own class would term " genteel " appearance, who had taught needlework in the school of which her husband had been schoolmaster. She had been widowed in sad circumstances, as she was fond of narrating to us children. Her husband, God rest his soul, had had a bit of a cough, though a finer, stronger man j'ou couldn't have met with ; and there was a gentleman riding by one day, a " docthor " retired from practice, and he heard the cough on him as he sat by the porch. " ' And that's a terrible cough y^ have, Doyle.' says he, ' and what are ye taking for it ? ' 2i6 LITTLE HOURS IX GREAT DAYS " And me husband shows him the bottle of mixture he'd got at the infirmary, and the docthor he looks at it, and takes out the cork, and shakes a drop of it on to his finger and tastes it, and says he : ' That's no use to ye at all, at all ! I'll give him something that'll do him good, something that'll cut it,' he says. ' Send one of the httle lads up to my house for it. Give him a dose in the morning and I'll ride round and see how he is."* Michael, the eldest little boy, was duly sent for that mixture, the dose was administered in the morning before John got out of bed, " and no sooner was it down than he cries out that it's burning him terribly." " Good God," he cried out to the wife, " that's a terrible medicine," and after a while — a very little while it was ! — a fit of vomiting "come on him, and it nothing but blood. And when the docthor come round : ' How's Doyle ? ' he cries. " ' Oh 1 he's real bad, j'our honour,' says I. * Whatever was in the medicine at all, it's the sick- ness of the world come over him.' " ' Oh, that's right, that's right, that shows it's doing him good. That's cut the cold.' " ' Oh, docthor,' cries I, ' shure, it's blood ! ' " ' Blood ? ' says he, and snaps the basin from me hand. " My God, blood it is ! ' And he sets it do\va and he says, * I'm afeard it was too strong for him.' " Too strong for him indeed ; the man died that night. MYSELF WHEN YOUNG 217 This tragic tale made, as may well be imagined, a profound impression upon a mind so prone to picture-making as mine. But even then, a char- acteristic sense of anger at the injustice filled my soul beyond terrors. I used to a,-k " Doyle " — we never had an}^ pet name for her — again and again, how she could have allowed this crime to go un- punished ? All my life, to sit down under wrong- doing has been agony to me. Child as I was, not yet seven, I knew^ that murder could not be committed with impunity even with the best intentions. But the widow had only one answer : The docthor, poor gentleman, had been very much upset himself and had given her twenty pounds, and " sure wasn't it better to take them, since nothing would have brought poor John back to life ! " I have often w^ondered what drug in the whole Pharmacopeia could have produced such instantane- ous and dire results : or whether the schoolmaster died of common or garden lung trouble ? It will be seen from the above reminiscence how unfit our new nurse w^as to look after children. She was an irritable, indolent woman, whose idea of disciphne was to issue ghoulish threats which any youngster with a grain of common sense would have known were impossible of execu- tion. " If you don't behave. Master Baby," she would say, "I'll cut out your tongue." The jovial, sturdy child that my youngest brother 2i8 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS was, merely laughed. He would dance at her and mock, just out of reach. " Wait till I get my scissors," she would cry, and I have known her to brandish those implements at the little boy, without, I must own, making the shghtest impression upon him. But far otherwise was it with me. I went in secret agonies for him ; and the dreadful terror was increased by a dream, in whicli I thought I saw him unable to answer me and frothing at the mouth in the effort. The horror of that dream has haunted me all my Hfe. It was to come back to me in full force in those night watches when I knew him, most gallant, exposed to the unnamcable dangers of shell-fire. It is no wonder that when I lay in bed like to die of a dangerous malady — the time always referred to in the family as " Aggie's big illness "—I would start from delirium calling for Baby ; the five-year- old had to be lifted out of his cot to pacify me. Hospital nurses were things unknown then, and my dear mother generally sat by me day and night, on a high chair too, holding my hand over the rail of my cot ; for thus only could I find any peace. One evening she was forced by those about her to lie down ; her place was taken by Mrs. Doyle — the only time I was handed over — fortunately for me — to her ministrations. I don't know how such an illness as I had would be treated now, but one of the rules laid down by the country doctor was that I should be allowed nothing to drink save MYSELF WHEN YOUXG 219 half a teaspoonful of water every hour. Tortured \dth pain, hterally dried up with fever, I wailed for water steadily through the long hours, and my attendant spent them in scolding me. That night, I recollect, the pain had concentrated in my left side ; and when I mentioned the fact to Mrs. Doyle, she opined to me that my soul was separating from my bod}'. After the peritonitis I got gastritis. A speciahst was sent for from Dubhn ; none other than the kindly, gentle, cultivated physician. Sir Francis Cruise ; learned authority on Thomas a Kempis. He insisted on a trained nurse, the kind of trained nurse one had in Ireland in those days— a large, elderly, gampish-looking woman in a black stuff gown and a greasy black cap. I don't know that she had any particular idea of nursing, beyond not going to sleep when she sat beside my cot in the night. Keeping herself awake conscientiously ^^-ith prayers in a loud and ghastly whisper, she con- trived to keep me awake very successfully too. I remember the exasperation of hearing that mad- deningly audible undertone repeat— doubtless be- tween the nods : "In the Name of the Father- In the Name of the Father "—about sixty times in five minutes, \nthout once concluding the prayer I Not unkindly, she was certainly otherwise of the class of Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig. The first thing she did on entering the sick chamber v/as to march straight over to her tiny patient, strip all the 220 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS bedclothes off me and contemplate my feet, remark- ing loudly, " They're not swollen yet ! " — swelling of the feet was, rightly or wrongly, supposed to be an unmistakable symptom of dissolution. And my mother, knowing it, and knowing too that she had brought me round the w^orst corner, was very indignant. The old soul was good-natured, though, and used to play cards with me, — that enthralhng game, Happy Famihes, — when I got better. My mother was horrified, one day coming in accidentally, to hear me inquire, in the accents of my Florence Nightin- gale, whether — " Mr. Bull the butcher was at home ? " (Bull and butcher to rhyme with dull and Dutch.) I never told any one of my terrors ; of Doyle's threats ; of the sick-nurse's habit of whispered prayer in the night. I wonder why ? The mere fact of confiding to a grown-up would have done away instantly with the troubles. What is it that seals the hps of the most loved and cared-for child ? Another dream I had, which dogged my sleeping and waking thoughts for over a year. Could I but have breathed it to an elder, the phantom would have melted away hke a mist under sunshine. But I didn't ; and I remained in torment. The mis- chief originated in the fact that we were allowed to read as many fairy tales as we liked ; and my brain teemed with witches and enchantments, cruel queens, murdered princesses and ruthless stepmothers. MYSELF WHEN YOUXG 221 I must have been, I suppose, about six, for it was certainly before the " big illness." I dreamt one night that my mother beckoned ]\Iobie into the hnen- room and informed her that she had too many children ; that therefore the sister next to me, my special EUie, would' have to be sacrificed ; that she, Mobie, would have to perform the deed. Mobie was then presented with a large knife, and httle Ellie was summoned. The next thing my dream showed me was a small wooden box in which a Dutch doll, clad in red and blue merino, was lying. This, I knew, was all that was left of my beloved little sister. Now it would seem that it would be impossible for a child who had never known anything but the utmost tenderness from her mother and actual spoihng from the old housekeeper, to become con- vinced that these two were conspiring to murder their youthful charges, unless she were half-witted, or suffering from some kind of mental aberration. But I was not mad or an idiot, and yet my nightmare became so living a reality to my imagination that I could not see my sister walk away with my mother without breaking into a cold sweat of anguish. I would not let her run into the linen-room alone. My heart used to stop beating when she was called away from me. The moral is, I suppose, that sensitive children should not be permitted free pasture, even in the lields of Grimm or Hans Andersen. XI My Mother when Young Here with her face doth memory sit Meanwhile, and wait the day's decUnc, Till other eyes shall look from it, Eyes of the spirit's Palestine, Even than the old gaze tenderer : While hopes and aims long lost with her Stand round her image side by side, Like tombs of pilgrims that have died About the Holy Sepulchre. D. G. Rossctti. MY mother was the centre of our childhood's existence. She made for us, as the French have it, rain or fair weather. It is not an exaggera- tion to say that she was the hfe and Hght of that big country house. I don't think there ever were children more passionately attached to their mother than we were ; and with reason. We thought her the most beautiful, the most perfect of human beings. She entered into all our pleasures with a zest which I look back on now v/ith amaze- ment, but which is partly explained by the fact that she kept to the last day of her long hfe an inexhaustible spring of youth, and that, by nature, her love was turned to the small, helpless things of this world — babies and birds and dogs. 222 MY MOTHER ^^'HEX YOUNG 223 Widowed while still in the thirties, by the un- timely death of a husband to whom she was devot- edly attached, she was left with six children, three properties, and a large country estabUshment en- tirely dependent on her management. It was only in after hfe that any of us reahzed the incomparable energy and the noble courage of the woman who was our mother. Except for her family — small in years though not in numbers: the eldest was under twelve — she was utterly alone in the world. She had lost father, mother and both brothers before her second child was born. She shouldered her burthen with a determination that never faltered. It must have been all the harder for her that, up to this, she had been so sheltered, so pecuUarly petted and taken care of. The only daughter of rich parents, the only child of a second marriage, her brothers called her their Httle queen and vied with each other in spoihng her. Her father early came to regard her as the sole heiress of his house and heart ; for one brother died when she was a child and the other concentrated his affections upon her so deeply that this tender fraternal tie became paramount and he never seems to have contemplated the forming of another. On the day of her marriage and her joyous depar- ture ^\ith the man of her choice, he turned from the \vindow through which he had watched the driving away of her bridal coach, and said to the trusted servant of the house, who stood beside him — no 224 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS other than our own :\Iobie— " This is the bitterest hour of my life." He did not long survive it. In spite of her grief for these losses, the first years of our mother's marriage were full to the brim with happiness and prosperity. She was rich, beloved, indulged ; she had a swift and clever mind, singularly open to the beauty and interest of the world wherever she found it. Her natural taste in art was the surest of any one I have ever known ; she was herself a brilUant musician, her singing and piano playing being above the average, even of our present standard. She travelled a good deal and in great state, after the custom of the time, with courier, maids and, later, her first-born son and the redoubtable " Shuz- zie " ; the baby (a very beautiful child, black- haired and blue-eyed) was — in white satin and feathers— the admired of all beholders. When he was carried out in state with his retinue behind him, Italian soldiers had been known to present arms to him. I wonder what has become of a Harlequin satin ball with which a Queen of Holland presented him ? We children used to gaze at it with rather awestruck eyes— Royalty never came our nursery way except in name ! We were not allowed to play with it. It wouldn't have bounced, anyhow, as it was stuped with cotton-wool. My mother was a daring horsewoman and always rode when she had the chance. A very happy, healthy, opulent, good existence she seems to have MY MOTHER WHEX YOUXG 225 led. with all her dresses from Paris, and nothing to do but to say her prayers, gaze at the wonders of the world, make music, and cuddle her baby 1 But children came quickly, and the purchase of, and setthng down in, a large country place was an amusing, if more laborious experience. She was hardly estabUshed in her new home before the clouds gathered across the bright sky. My father de- veloped symptoms of that insidious disease which is the pecuHar danger of athletic hves. My mother, who rarely spoke of what she most felt, did, never- theless, once tell us of a consultation — early in the days of the menace — with a noted Dubhn physician, and of seeing tears in that good man's eyes as he contemplated her husband's splendid and apparently vigorous figure : one, it would seem, in the prime of hfe and strength, already doomed ! Beholding those tears, the young wife caught an initial glimpse of the tragedy awaiting her. My father was ordered, after the enlightenment of the time, to pass his days like an invahd, more or less by the fireside ; to give up all violent exer- cise ; to go wrapped from chills and sit guarded from draughts. He would not buy two more years — that was all they gave him — at such a price. He hunted till he could no longer sit in the saddle. And in that rare burst of confidence I have men- tioned, our mother told us also how she had stood on the porch of our home one day — one bright, sun-steeped, mild- breathed, sweet-scented autumn p 226 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS day — and seen him ride away on his fine horse, looking so handsome in his red coat ; watched the elastic swing of his figure ; seen him turn in the saddle at the gate that led from the pleasure ground into the park and wave his hand, smiling, in all the vivid autumn light ; and known that he rode with death ; that literally his days were numbered. The sword of sorrow then pierced her heart. He died away from home. One of my earhest recollections is being brought by my godmother — a cousin of my father's and the nearest creature my mother had then to turn to — into the great green bed-chamber where the bereaved life was henceforth to be taken up alone. My young mother, a most unfamiUar figure, weighted with crape, wearing the overwhelming white cap, then the fashion, was sitting in an arm- chair, wiping her streaming eyes with a towel. It is this last fact which remains imprinted on my mind. No handkerchief could suffice for the flood of the widow's grief ! Another recollection — they are hke httle pictures flung on a screen out of the darkness of oblivion — is of my mother siill in the engulfing black, with the cap, to which we were already now accustomed, visiting us in our schoolroom : there seemed to be such a physical weakness upon her that she helped herself from chair to table with grasping hands. These are the only two pictures of break- down I remember in connexion with her MY MOTHER WHEN YOUNG 227 She devoured her bitter sorrow in secret : she never let the shadow of it fall on our young brightness. I have said that all her hfe she hid her deepest emotions. Perhaps the only way in which she was able to get along at all was by rigidly forbidding them expression. She swept out of sight every token of her dead beloved. Even we children had not a portrait of our father in any room. For years his name never crossed her hps : except in those daily prayers said in common with such faithfulness. If ever there was a vahant woman it was she ! She took up her hfe \nth a courage which fills me with admiration now that I know what it must have cost. It may seem a singular statement, but it is, nevertheless, true, that save for those two vi\dd mental pictures of uttermost woe, I have hardly any recollections of her during my childhood that are not tinged with her warm and genial mirth. I have never known any one with such a fund of high spirits, so apt to seize the ridiculous side of things, so ready to catch the passing enjoyment. Beneath this buoyancy there was stern foundation, for, indulgent to extravagant petting towards us, our mother observed a certain austerity in her own life, the austerity of the Christian woman who places service of God first ; makes of obedience to His commandments the ver>^ pavement to her feet. It w^as, no doubt, her perfect resignation to the Divine will in her sorrow that enabled her to take up her 228 LITTLE HOURS IX GREAT DAYS cross as she did. I think, reflecting now upon the memo^3^ that her extraordinary gaiety of spirit arose from the rectitude of conscience which was the mainspring of all her actions. Later, the multitudinous anxieties which every large family must bring to a mother's heart, some- thing, too, of its sweet and piteous jealousies at the in- evitable loss of the supreme place, made my dear mother's moods of joyousness more and more inter- rupted by depression ; until, indeed, they became rather the exceptions. Notwithstanding this, how- ever, to the last day of her long life she loved a laugh and a j oke. She could be made happy by the smallest trifle. The intelhgence or the prettiness of a caged canary would cheer her for a day. AU she asked of life, indeed, was to have us all about her. To the end, the sight of our faces round her bed was the sum of her happiness. In the big, sunny, nobly proportioned Georgian country house which was the home of my early years there was an oratory where IMass was said frequently ; and where, every afternoon, all the children and servants assembled for rosary. For our Sunday Mass we drove to a Httle chapel-of-ease : a poor, sad, damp place to bear so romantic a name as that of Ratheniska. A heated curate would ride the five long Irish miles from the county town ; and we and the neighbouring farmers and peasants formed the crowded congregation. So successfully did Cromwell's persecution destroy churches and MY MOTHER W HEX YOUNG 229 chapels in the Island of Saints ; so determinedly, up to comparatively recent times, did EngHsh rule crush all the efforts of the predominant Cathohc population to restore its worship, that to this day in Ireland, Cathohcs seem less well provided with missions than in the land of Protestantism. Five miles is certainly an average distance for the poor to walk to their obligatory Sunday ]^Iass. In wild places, less populous than ours, peasants have been known to tramp, carrpng their boots in their hands, eight or ten Irish miles in every weather and on any kind of road, for the privilege of attending the supreme sacrifice. Our Irish cook tells us how her mother, the wife of a well-to-do farmer in a Cathohc corner of " the black North," would take up her post in the porch of her home, with pails of warm water to wash the travel- worn feet of the pilgrims. The hght of an early Christian fervour shone bright in the Ireland of those days. The Ireland of to-day shouts a great deal about her past griev- ances, but, in spite of complete rehgious emancipa- tion and wide financial support, has she not lost much that made her rare and lovely ?— the burning fidehty of her poor, the austere rectitude of her home hfe, the matchless modesty of her women. To come back to our Sundays. There was no second service in desolate Ratheniska, and every Sunday afternoon my young mother would ring the oratory bell and summon nursery, schoolroom 230 LITTLE HOURS IX GREAT DAYS and household, when she would herself read out a sermon. These sermons were of a rigid, Early Victorian type of piet}', in which sinfulness and justice were more insisted upon, perhaps, than mercy and con- fidence. I w^as so small that my legs stuck out straight in front of me when seated by that sweet lay-preacher — she always had the youngest by her side. The long words in her solemn voice made a deep impression on my infant mind ; I must con- fess, a gloomy, terrifying impression. Such con- siderations as The Last Judgment ; the soul brought face to face with its crimes ; the immeasur- able responsibility incurred when even an idle word would have to be accounted for — rang in my small brain like the tolling of a bell. I was oppressed with the consciousness of guilt. Curiously enough, although a succession of ignorant nursemaids regaled my ears with tales of devils and damnation that might have emanated from the most fanatic era of puritanism, it was never the punishments of crime that alarmed me, but the dread of crime itself. I was perpetually imagining myself guilty of unpardonable sin, and would crawl about the house loaded with inner chains of remorse, which an unconquerable timidity prevented my ever unlocking, even under the seal of confession. Our kindly white-haired old priest was certainly the last person to inspire panic. He had, indeed, a way of interrupting our lists of MY MOTHER WHEN YOUNG 231 peccadilloes with a good-humoured " That'll do, me dear, that'll do ! " which ought to have reassured the most sensitive ; his opinion being that too much zeal was not to be encouraged, even in the poHshing of consciences. His wholesome, breezy sanctity ; my mother's eminently sane and large-minded theories of religion — in spite of Dr. Murray's sermons — ought to have blown away the cobwebs that obscured and distorted my juvenile outlook, but I was shut off in a child's inviolable world. I could not break out of it. I would have died rather than try, poor atom ! I wonder if other nicely washed and brushed little children, coming down, shyly smiling, to be presented to visitors, hide away such mysterious deeps of misery in the bosom of their starched frocks. Besides the sickly terrors of my conscience, I was, no doubt, a prey to what — I must use the German word — can only be de- scribed as Weltschmerz. I remember sitting on a sofa, still too young to bend my knees over its edge, listening to my mother playing Chopin, while waves and waves of the most intense melancholy poured over me. I can truly say, knowing what the sorrow of life can be, that I have seldom had a more tragic hour ! Perhaps a good deal of a child's self-torment- ing reticencies arise from the sense of its inarticu- lateness. The child of my period, moreover, had a humble opinion of itself. It was desperately afraid of being laughed at. It is not an inconvenience which the present generation suffers from. 232 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS Like most mistresses of a large country house in a lonely district, ray mother was dispenser of advice, charity, and medicine to aU who came to seek it, whether they were under her own juris- diction or only of the tramping beggar class. When there was an accident in the hayfield, or yet when a quarrel passed beyond the bounds of vituperation, " the misthress " was instantly summoned. When the lad with the varicose veins had a haemorrhage, she hurried to the spot to superintend the bandaging. When a frenzied young harvester attacked the worker next to him, a girl, with a reaping hook and made a large gash in her leg, " the misthress " again appeared on the scene to administer succour and justice with equal unhesitancy. I happened to be a terrified httle witness of the drama, and I have not forgotten the sobbing girl, the clamouring crowd, each giving his or her own account of the incident, the sullen, abashed criminal. Neither have I for- gotten my mother's ringing tones of denunciation. She rated him up and down, and turned him off the premises, then and there ; discharging him from all future service on the property. I do not suppose the injury was severe, or the youth could not have escaped so Hghtly. What strikes me now was the utter fearlessness of the unprotected mistress of the large estate ; her absolute dominion over a community so excitable and undisciplined. I may here cite another instance of her personal courage. One night, about a week MY MOTHER WHEN YOUNG 233 after the arrival of a new, highly recommended, elderly butler, she was roused by strange sounds. She Ht her candle, got up, put on her dressing- gown, and saUied forth herself to discover their origin. One might have thought that she would at least have summoned some member of the numerous household to accompany her, but the idea never seems to have dawned upon her. It being summer- time, my mother wore a voluminous, white, washing dressing-gown, and always, then and in later years, a charming httle white lawn nightcap, trimmed with dehcate lace and tied under her chin with narrow strings of the same. It was vastly becoming to her. With a large, silver, fiat candlestick in her hand, she must have looked a quaintly domestic avenging angel as she descended into the stone kitchen regions from whence the clamour rose. In a kind of box-room she found Hamilton, the new pantry autocrat, indulging in a sohtary night orgy, in the middle of half -unpacked, newly arrived cases of \vine. The place was Uttered with straw and broken bottles. He was chanting and dancing, hold- ing a fiat candlestick — similar to that in my mother's hand, only of tin — upside down, the tallow from its flaming candle guttering over the litter of straw. Need it be added that he was roaring drunk ? My mother wrested the candlestick from his grasp, put it in safety, proceeded to arouse one of the footmen, and dehvered the reveller into his charge. x\ny one who has had anything to do with Irish 234 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS people can realize the good-will with which this youth marshalled his superior to his bedroom. I wonder whether in all his domestic life, afterwards, he ever tasted again such a moment of ecstasy as that in which he was able to kick the butler. My mother went calmly back to bed without disturbing any other inmate of the house. She was very indignant next morning ; amused, too, but not in the least aware that she had run any personal danger or displayed unwonted bravery for her sex. Yet if the drunkard, instead of being musical and maudUn, had had what the French call " le vin manvais," how would it have been ? My mother's physical strength was by no means equal to her spirit. She was a creature of the most dehcate constitution. Her satin-white skin would bruise, we children declared, with a look. Her health never recovered the shattering effects of her early grief. I always remember her fragile, walking slowly, with frequent rests, in some ways leading the hfe of an invahd, with breakfast in bed, and the hke pre- cautions. Yet her \dtality dominated her surround- ings, always, so long as she Uved. In the wide, bright passage between her own room and the oratory, there was a cupboard which con- tained shelves full of sensible and homely remedies : castor oil, black draught, iodine, packets of senna tea, and other drastic and admired drugs ; rolls of bandages made out of old Unen, the ointment of the period, whatever it was ; arnica, too, of course, of MY MOTHER WHEN YOUNG 235 which free use was made for bruises, apparently in ignorance of its danger in certain cases. There wure also (to us brats a spectacle of intense horror and interest mixed) two large jars of leeches. To apply leeches, sometimes as many as three or four, was a panacea more practised and beUeved in, in my extreme 3^outh, than would be perhaps credited now. A cut, symptoms of congestion after a bad fall, an inflamed eye, a contusion, a swelhng of any kind, was preferably treated by leeches, always apphed by the ladies of the household. I remember very w^ell gazing awestricken into the linen-room to behold our squat, rufous, freckled, whiskered coach- man, Coss, sitting in the armchair by the window, groaning heavily in the hands of Mobie. He had a large gash in his forehead after a fall from a horse ; and ]Mobie, without a shadow on her apple-blossom countenance, was calmly applying leeches to the neighbourhood of the w^ound ; the theory apparently being that the patient having shed a certain quantity of blood, you were to assist nature by enabhng him to lose some more. WTien any of us had to undergo the leech cure, we invariably howled over it, though I cannot remember even the initial nibble causing the least suffering. The rest of us made a thrilled semi- circle of observation. From the moment w^hen the slimy objects were apphed, to the moment when they dropped off — satiated or induced to rehnquish their hold by the application of a pinch of salt — 236 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS we were enthralled. Once there was a terrible scare when a jarful of leeches was upset and no trace of them could be found. I don t think they were ever found. Our lives were haunted by fears of the bloodsuckers in the dark. Horrible idea ! to wake up and find something hanging to your foot. The smell of that medicine cupboard is in my nostrils yet : a concentrated atmosphere of chemist's shop. Never a day passed but some hunched figure, wrapped in mud-coloured rags, would come steahng up the Ume-tree avenue, flit shamefacedly round the front of the house to ring at the back door. My mother would produce the necessary drug from her pharmacopoeia if it was a case of illness, food and clothing if it was one of poverty. She made it a rule seldom or never to give money to the ambulant beggar, and I remember once a tattered, elderly, bearded mendicant dancing with fury on the hunch of bread and substantial shoes of meat which had been pressed upon him, declaring in a falsetto of rage the while, " It's your money I want, an' not your vittles ! " On another occasion the sister next to me, aged about six at the time, allowed a specious person, also of the male persuasion, to walk away with four red flannel petticoats, the elaborate stitching of which was our nursery share of the Xmas charities. He fled down the avenue with his booty before the elders could intervene, and, no doubt, got the price of MY MOTHER WHEN YOUNG 237 many a drink out of their substantial scarlet breadths. Yet another time, there was a more poignant drama. In the absence of my mother and the rest of us, my elder brother happened to be the only member of the family left in the house to receive the plaint of a groaning old lady, highly dilapidated both as to garments and body, who demanded " in the name of God a drop of spirits to ease the terrible pain in her in'ards ! " The schoolboy was laughed at by butler and cook, to whom he applied for the stimu- lant. The Irish servant is very hard-hearted to the Irish beggar. But the sufferer would not take a refusal. Was there nothing his honour could give her out of a bottle ? Sure, God help her, a drop of anything out of a bottle was all she asked ! Thus goaded, he produced the only fluid he could lay his hands on. This was turpentine in a large black jar. "I'm afraid it won't be any use to you," he began, but she, seeing the flagon, clawed at it, and raining praises on Heaven and blessings on him, fell upon it. The first gulp produced, as might have been expected, a revulsion of feehng. The beldame first began to curse with even more energ}^ than she had blessed, then fell to rocking herself backwards and forwards on the doorstep, screaming lustily that she was poisoned. Thus it was that returning from our walk we found them, my brother plaintively explaining that he had warned her he didn't think it n'Oidd " agree with her." 238 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS Here was a situation where my mother's sense of humour was certain to overcome her. I beUeve half-a-crown prevented the beggar woman's instant dissolution ; but it remained a standing joke against the son of the house. It was very necessary for the " Lady of the Coort (as she was known in the district) to intervene in cases of sickness among the peasantry, for the reme- dies in vogue in the Ireland of the day were as pecu- har as they were purnicious. Passing three times under a donkey and then pricking the " bad place " with a gooseberry thorn was a favourite treatment for a stye in the eye. Hammering a nail into an aching tooth was another mediaeval practice. Applying cobwebs on a wound is popular to this day in all parts of the United Kingdom, we behove. A sister of mine, dangerously ill with scarlet fever, was given the stale contents of all the holy- water fonts in the house as a really certain specific, by Dadgie, the housemaid, who was wounded to the depths of her pious soul by my mother's subse- quent indignation. Moreover, we were five Irish miles from the nearest town, so that some home doctoring was necessary. Every spring a certain wile was practised upon us, quite superfluously as it happened, to make us partake of a medicament which was considered highly beneficial. A large jar of mixed black treacle and sulphur was placed at the corner of the table, with a spoon invitingly stuck in the compound ; MY MOTHER WHEN YOUNG 239 and we were strictly forbidden to partake of it, with the result that the contents promptly disap- peared. I beheve this remedy can be no other than Mrs. Squeers' Brimstone and Treacle, to which the pupils at Dotheboys Hall so strenuously objected. I recollect it as a most agreeable mixture. Far otherwise was it with the weekly cup of senna, made, with the mistaken idea that it would thereby prove more palatable, exactly like real tea, with milk and sugar, and brought to us steaming hot, by Mobie, with unflinching regularity. " Hold your nose, now, Alanna, and drink it down and you won't taste it a bit." But that, even, was better than castor oil, given, of all horrible ways, on brandy. It is fitting to draw a veil over reminiscences so acutely disagree- able, and to return to those others, all of sweetness and family love, which circle round our mother. There were the evenings in the Hbrary, when she would read to us — she had a lovely voice and a perfect method of reading aloud — the entrancing novels of Walter Scott. Her own thorough enjoy- ment of the stories added zest to ours. I remember with what fits of laughter she rendered the tipsy jocosities of Roger Wildrake, and of the extra point given to her merriment by the interjections of a mild, mooney old maid who happened to be staying with us at the time : " The naasty, naasty man ! " — she had a very flat brogue — '' To think of their being hke that, even in those days ! " There were 240 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS the long pottering walks round the farm and the stables ; my mother had the eye of a master for ever}^ detail, and the heart of a most compassionate woman for every sign of suffering in the dumb stock. I remember her flame of wrath when the bloodhound watch-dog was found without water. " Tanner " was a creature whom no one dared approach except herself, a stable-man and the head washerwoman, who adored him. She brought him the water herself, and stood patting and fondling him while he fawned upon her little hand. I remember her passing in review a long hne of sleek dairy cows in their stalls, and pausing before one who was coughing, declaring the animal was very ill ; a statement which was received with a respectful scoff by the dairyman. " Ah ! sure, not at all, me lady, me'am. It's a fly in her throat the creature's got. God bless her ! " But my mother insisted. The steward was sent for — a functionary known in England as the baihff, I believe — and upon examination my mother's diagnosis was found only too correct. The cow had inflammation of the lungs, and had to have a bottle of brandy poured down her throat to save her Hfe. No wonder that her folk respected her, that the word of the mistress was law in her own realm ! Just, kind, eminently unsentimental, she was the most individual woman I have ever met. There was never any one less influenced in her opinions than she. She formed them swiftly and unalter- MY MOTHER WHEN YOUNG 241 ably : a rigid Catholic, a strong Tory, she was a t}^e of an Eariy ^'ictorian gentlewoman that has almost passed away. But while she shared, no doubt, \nth many of her class, certain theories and sentiments, what was entirely her o\\ti was her charm, her spontaneity, her ready wit, her apprecia- tion of beauty in all its manifestations, whether in art or feehng. In the latter part of her UfC; long after she had given up her beautiful countr}^ home for a banal London house, she sought solace and recreation chiefly in music. She then made acquaintance with one of the greatest artists of the day ; and their mutual friendship was, it is not too much to say, the chief interest and pleasure of her dechning years. He had for her an affection half fihal, half romantic, that was altogether charming. Surrounded by the sycophantic adulation of multitudes as he was, it was singular to see what a few words of appreciation from her Hps meant for him. She was not a demon- strative woman, but a look of her great blue-grey eyes, and the phrase '' Ah, comma c'etait beau ! " in her pretty, half-timid French, would transport him. " How exquisite she is ! " he would cry, turning round to us, her children. " Listen to Maman ! How she has said that ! " Wlien faihng health confined her altogether to bed, he, on a brief \d5it to London, prepared a surprise for her, \vith the zest of a child and the devo- tion of a son. He hired a small piano, carefully Q 242 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS chosen by himself, had it transported with infinite precautions to the landing outside her bedroom, and there, with the door open between them, sat and played to her alone, as only he could play. The beloved woman was dehghted and Ustened in smiHng ecstasy ; though she was not perhaps so oven\^helmed and surprised as were her family. She took the attentions of others with a kind of queenly amenity, as her due. She said to a daughter, wlien he had gone, " I shall never see him again," and she was right. It was very shortly afterwards that she went out of hfe, with the same dignity that she had always shown. A man who, also, had been to her as a son, who loved her with the curious strength of attachment she had the power of inspiring, said : " She left us as gracefully as she did everything." She was eighty-five when she died. Her hearing, her sight, were perfect. She kept to the end the rose-leaf freshness of her complexion, the satiny whiteness of her hands, the briUiant gaze of her eyes, the row of white teeth hke that of a young girl. Her smile of welcome was, always, a thing of beauty. It marked her countenance in her last sleep so singularly and so touchingly that the final memory of her hnks back to that of my childhood, and is all, as far as she is concerned, of joy. XII The Gaxden of my Youth ... In life's first hour God crowned with benefits my childish head. Flower after flower, I plucked them ; flower by flower Cast them behind me, ruined, \vithered, dead. R. L. Stevenson. WHEN you stood upon the step of the Ionic granite porch in the front of my old Irish home, you looked down a sweep of gravel to a broad stretch of lawn, velvet turf of a deep emerald green compared to which the grass plots of my Vilhno on the sandy height become pathetic and ludicrous spectacles. In the centre of this curve of sward was a fountain where green-bronze herons with bent necks and joining wings were grouped. On either side great half-moon beds were filled with azaleas. Beyond the lawn was a sunk fence. The park swept away, with here and there stately clumps of trees to the distant belt of woodland that girdled the boundary walls. One of my surprises, on my first visit to England, was to find quite fine proper- ties enclosed by nothing better than fencing or hedges. The sense of rounding up and dignity given by a high boundary wall seems to me still the 243 244 LITTLE HOURS IX GREAT DAYS necessary finish to an estate. Nevertheless it is, I am well aware by my mother's account books, one of those counsels of perfection that spell heavy expense. Beyond the dark woods, then, was the lovely view of hills against the horizon ; hills high enough to be purple and blue, to be noble in rise and fall, but not high enough to rank as mountains. If you went down from the porch and turned to the left, and then again to the left by the north bow of the house, you passed a shrubbery slope — there was a weeping willow on it which made a fascinating green fair^'-house for us children — and you went up steps and, through a narrow doorway set in a great wall, into the walk that led to the garden ; a narrow, dark wall it was, with bushes of syringa and snowbeny^ tree on either side. I have always hated the snowberry tree because of its delusiveness. You felt you ought to hke it . Nurses and governesses drew 3^our attention to it as something pecuharly apt to entrance the infant mind. I was a docile child. I used to try to admire, to think squashing its fruits fun. The result was infinite boredom : I have banned it from the garden of my age. The way towards the garden was uphiU till you reached a space entirely overshadowed by an immense yew-tree. No matter how fierce the sun, it was always black under those layers of branches, and our governesses and nurses were fond, on hot days, of sitting on the rustic bench that encircled its massive trunk. We did not hke it. Children THE GARDEX OF MY YOUTH 245 hate gloom. It was also supposed to be haunted by Lady Tidd, the former owner of the property, as vouched for by one of our gardeners, whose hat, he declared, " riz off his head at the spectacle '' — though what the spectacle was, was not defined. Besides which we were strictly warned that the small squashy red berries of the yew were deadly poison and, after the fashion of juvenile Eves and Adams, could never resist surreptitiously tasting them on the sly ; afterwards anxiousl}^ awaiting symptoms, which, as we were careful only to nibble, never appeared. The one thing that was charming in the circle of Cimmerian shade was the view through the tall, narrow iron gate into the lovely many-hued bright- ness of the garden beyond. That garden wall must have been about ten feet high. The gate was always locked, but the gover- ness had a key. I can see still in mental vision two or three of us clinging to the rungs together and kicking violently, impatient to be admitted. I don't remember loving the garden for its beauty, yet it must have been the unconscious satisfaction produced on my undeveloped mind by the spacious- ness, the order, the colour and glory that makes my memory of it to-day so full of sweetness. Over each side of the narrow gate as you went in were large myrtles, and just behind one of them was a tap ; scene of our most vehement struggles with authority. The person in charge, if she was war}^ 246 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS would make a clutch at the small boy's shoulder, and steer him past. But it was often he managed evasion, and snatched instants of perilous joy, accom- panied by drenched clothes, — for it was a very explosive tap. Beyond the tap, against the wall, were big bushes of Corchorus Japonica ; its blossom we despised, then, because we were allowed to pluck it as much as we hked, but I love it now, not only for its associations but for itself. It is a plant with two names ; and a niece of mine declares that she has never gone into a nur- sery and asked its owner for Corchorus Japonica that he has not met her request with a broad stare of incomprehension ; nor, on the attributes of the article being described, has he ever failed to exclaim with the hp and accents of scorn, " Oh, Kerry-er, you mean." \Miether the scorn were for her ignor- ance or for the paltriness of the bush remains obscure. A gravel walk ran through the middle of this lower garden, which sloped decidedly upward. Each side of this walk, my mother, early in my recollections, estabUshed her rose garden. I have such struggles with my own rose garden that I look back as upon a fairy tale to that vision of green turf and beautifully fohaged trees, constellated with blossoms. Did they never have black spot, mildew, nor yet bhght ? But, besides the shelter provided b}^ high walls round a wide sunny slope, no doubt the possession of a very superior gardener THE GARDEN OF MY YOUTH 247 and a good many underlings considerably facilitated the approaches to perfection. Flannigan, the autocrat in the Garden of my Youth, was a bearded personage of whom we went in considerable awe. The prizes he won at the big county flower shows testified to his skill. Of course, as every one knows, the gardener's excellence of those days consisted chiefly in his successes in bedding out, as w^ell as in the opulent show of the conservatories. Herbaceous borders were mere acci- dents ; with us they were relegated to the kitchen garden ; of which more anon. There was one very fine old conservatory. It was Georgian in style, with a centre dome and two long wings, Hke the orangery at Osterly Park. The central erection was filled by a mass of glow and fragrance which almost took your breath away when you entered : staged to the roof, tier upon tier, in the most vivid colouring : calceolarias, geraniums, fuchsias, hlies, heHotrope, begonias ; that is one recollection ! There is another, of the spring parade : hyacinths, azalea-indica, hly of the valley, cytisus, arums ; quantities of primula, cineraria in the old crude colourings. Is it only the magnifying property of childish impressions, or were these greenhouse treasures altogether finer than what one gets now-a-da^^s ? Certainly the primulas were, and I think the hyacinths ; huge waxen spikes, almost too sweet. The musk of my youth, too, is a lost gem ; its fragrance has 248 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS evaporated into the past, as, the master of the Villino declares, has the scent of the sweet-briar of his boyhood's first recollections. There was a climber, a kind of begonia, I suppose, that had bunches of blossoms the colour and shape of cooked lobster claws. I remember when it was a new and rare thing ; and my mother's interest in its first bloom. I know nothing by experience of hot-house cultivation, the two little Vilhno green- houses being entirely devoted to seedlings, cuttings, and the forcing of a few hardy flowering plants for the house ; it is, however, not " sour grapes " that makes me say that a conservatory kept up for show in the middle of a big walled garden is rather waste of energy. My dream is to have a succession of loveliness indoors. There is a house I know in Dorsetshire where, in pre-war days, in a golden drawing-room, great gilt baskets full of scarlet begonias used to be placed at the foot of the pillars that divide the beautiful room. It is a room that possesses furniture of the unattainable type ; one Indian cabinet being UteraUy set with emeralds on a gold inlay ; the kind of room which, a sister of mine declares, makes one recall one's own hitherto cherished surroundings, and feel hke a worm. Hot- house plants are almost demanded by the dignity of such an apartment ; but the last time I saw it, it contrived to look very effectively adorned by masses of evening primroses in the big gilt receptacles. THE GARDEN OF MY YOUTH 249 The rose gardens established by my mother were no doubt a great improvement, nevertheless I have a memory of an earher time when the beds on both sides of the long walk were set with breeder tuhps ; tuhps nearly as tall as myself. When I bent the stems towards me, I could just look over the rim into the chahce. I have had a special love for tulips always, perhaps because of this bab}^ rapture — such glorious things as they were to me, with the sun shining through their striped petals, glowing carmine and purple, bronze and green, black and orange, or yet the colour of sugar stick ! I have striven in vain, ever since I had a garden of my own, to recapture those superb giants. They were late-flowering, and grew out of a carpet of what, I think, was pink saponaria. The kitchen garden was our real playground. It was divided from the more pompous purheus by a bisecting wall, erected no doubt for the fruit trees which were trained against it. You entered it through a narrow gate up two steps, and right before you was the middle walk with the herbaceous borders, filled with flowers which w^e children might pluck as much as we hked ; and which, in consequence, we despised. With what rapture would I not hail such a possession now ! — a long gravel walk, steadily uphill, box-bordered, as were all the beds in the garden ; to right and left about six feet deep of rich brown earth up to espaher apple-trees, filled to overflowing with every kind of old-world flower ; 250 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS damask roses and pompom roses, and what is called the common blush ; immense clumps of (perennial) snapdragon, deep crimson, red and white, and yellow ; turk's cap lilies, darling Httle creatures, black, orange and scarlet, and even the white ; " globed peonies," the seeds of which entered largely into our games, as did, by the way, the flowers of snapdragon — we used to run at each other, making them bite; sw^eet Williams ; the uninteresting phlox of the day. In spring these borders were two dazzhng hues of the white narcissi. We could gather sheaves of them and make no impression. The May altar of the httle chapel at Rathcniska, which it was our yearly excitement to arrange, was one throne of pheasant-eye and bluebell down to the ground ; the incense of it would greet one from the blue-washed porch of the poor place where I never remember any other incense. There was a plot of polyantha primroses between the currant bushes and the cabbages ; spread for no reason save that we children might pluck the flowers. The polyantha of that day were hardly larger than cowshps ; all dull oranges and toneless blacks and browns, hke some people's eyes, the opacity of which conceals all expression. There used to be great enthusiasm when the first blossoms appeared, but I think that in our hearts we hated them ; perhaps because there were so much more entrancing flowers we might not pull : crocuses, to wit, in the beds in front of the house. I am perhaps THE GARDEN OF MY YOUTH 251 exaggerating the perverseness of our characters, for the primroses which sheeted the dell were always a dehrium of joy, and so were the snowdrops which pushed up ever^^where through the shrubberies and walks. The first snowdrop 1 I have not for- gotten being set to pluck it, \^ith little fingers stiff with cold in knitted gloves ; fingers still so small that the said gloves consisted of a bag and a thumb ! \Miat infinite precautions one had to take to pluck a delicate Kttle creature hke a snowdrop ! And, short as four years old may be, stooping is not so easy when one is buckled up in gaiters and woolly drawers and armoured in a caped peHsse. The sense of constriction was increased by the white satin rosettes over each ear, appertaining to the strings which tied the white beaver hat under the chin. The same tired woman who writes to-day was the funny, bunchy httle girl who trotted along the frozen paths and pulled the head off the snowdrop to hand it solemnly to the smihng, adored Mamma ! On winter days we were usually turned into the garden— followed by one governess, if not two, a nurse, and perhaps a nursemaid— to play \nth our hoops ; nevertheless my chief memories of the place are of autumn. When I think back on it, it is always as of a mild October dreaminess ; a yellow and grey day, \\ith honey rifts in the early sunset clouds— and the smell of the apples and burning weeds, and dead leaves ; the fragrance of the \iolets; a robin singing somewhere, bitter 252 LITTLE HOURS IX GREAT DAYS sweet. Yet it must have been loveliest in the late spring, with the huge Hlac trees (which Shaw, the false lover, cut down to our fury) ; with apple- blossom and narcissus-riot ; with tuhps and peony ; crown imperial and jonquil. Shaw was a whiskered 3'oung man, with free and easy manners ; a poor substitute for the magnificent Flannigan. Once coming across him dropping slugs into a large pail of salt and watching with some disquietude their effervescent dissolution, I remarked, in self-reassurance, " I don't suppose those kind of creatures suffer." " Quite the contrary, miss," he responded, at the same time dropping a particularly juicy monster into the compound ; " they have their httle feelings, jusi as we have." I do not think now that, as the owner of a garden, I would ever waste a pang over a slug ; and I wish I had the courage to tear a wasp neghgently in two, as Shaw was wont to do. He would perform this feat in the course of the conversation, in an unconscious kind of way, as one may knock ash off a cigarette. A sad turn of the wheel of fate brought about the desertion of the home of my childhood. The house was shut up, the property farmed out, the garden — the Garden of my Youth — was turned into a potato field. There was at last even a ques- tion that the estate might be sold. The condition of Ireland did not make of Irish land a particularly THE GARDEN OF MY YOUTH 253 attractive asset for the soldier who eventually inherited it. But my brother went to see the old place. He sat on the granite steps of the porch. The grass had grown up to them, and was waving to his knee above the gravel sweep that had been kept in such perfect trim under my mother's rule. The azaleas had spread into a wild tangle. The bent necks of the herons rose above the rough herbage which hid the rim of the marble basin from sight. He looked across the rolling parkland to the dark embrace of the woods, and beyond that to the purple line of hills against the tender Irish sky. The beauty and peace of it all entered into his soul. His own place ! He would not give it up, he could not. Every lover of Ireland knows the poetic qualities of the country ; how memories, exquisite and melancholy, seem to be hovering in the air. The land broods upon a past far distant from sordid party strife. She was the Island of Saints. From her, light came out into the darkness ; she was as the star of the northern hemisphere in the sky of Christendom when the clouds of Paganism obscured the world. It seems to me that if you listen you can stiU hear the bells of her cathedrals ; the chant of her monks and nuns ; perhaps, too, rumours from that lost cycle of glory when Tara was a wonder and a splendour, and her chieftains went in silver armour and cloaks of crimson dye ; when her Druids knew the secrets of Nature and had a power 254 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS that was not evil, but which sprang from some communion with Divine Wisdom vouchsafed to a pure and noble race. The spell of Ireland that Hes upon the spirit with an indescribable sweetness, it fell upon the soldier's soul, intensified by the appeal of early memories, the cry of the soil to its own. At that moment he had but one thought ; to get back to his own again ; somehow ! As a httle child, not old enough to speak articulately, he had had an invariable answer to the question which children are so fond of putting to each other : " What will you be when you grow up ? " — " A cunky gentleman ! " When the war should be over, that dream must be realized. Never was innocent wish more ardently cherished, more eagerly worked for ! Plans and estimates for the first necessary repairs were always in his hands ; the things he thought of and talked of even in the midst of preparations for the long, long journey. Beside the swift and awful waters of the Tigris, on those desolate mud fiats, burning by day and freezing by night, we know that the point of rest in his uncomplaining soul was the thought of his home. Our soldiers do not fight the less well, but rather the more nobly, because of their passionate yearning for their o\vn ; for the grey sky and the moist soft wind of a hunting morning ; the sight of the green fields ; the long good hours in the saddle, with the fire on the hearth to come back to. THE GARDEN OF MY YOUTH 255 The home of my childhood had always, to my earliest recollection, something of sadness in its beauty. The long hauntings that pursued my baby soul in its corridors ; that wailed in the music and fell on me in the watches of the night ; the breath out of the woods that sometimes made a blackness even of a primrose dell in the full glory of the sun- shine ; those hauntings have been fulfilled. Yet the place is all the dearer for them, and for the presence that must always be there for us now, as a passionate regret. The old place has come into the charge of the one whom the soldier most loved on earth. In these days when Hfe and death are as comrades clasping hands on a dark night ; when youth and gallantry and splendour go down in waves into the valley of shadow, may one not feel as if one could pierce the mist and see the dear faces shining in the Hght of the hill-top ? They cannot be very far from us, our best and dearest, who have given themselves and their cherished dreams and their unfulfilled lives without so much as a complaining thought. From that happier home, that achieved peace, those green pastures, does not our soldier turn a serene gaze of blessing upon the haunt of his child- hood's best memories : his manhood's unrealized dreams ? XIII October, 1918 You are the storm that mocks Yourselves : you are the rocks Of your own doubt. Crashaw. PEACE, like the star of the morning, has begun to shine, a steady gleam in our dark night. We know that the dawn must yet come, and the sun rise, before the new day. But the star is there for all to see, hanging in the firmament. The pro- verb, " It is always darkest before the dawn," has justified itself as such catchwords of popular \nsdom have a way of doing. None of us are ever hkely to forget the black hours of the retreat of March, the fall of Kemmel, the drive on the Marne. Nevertheless, many there were who kept their indomitable hopefulness through it aU. "I thought better of you!" said a wounded soldier severely to us. " You've no call to be upsetting yourself. Wliat if we 'ave gone back ? If we'd gone back twice as far again, I wouldn't think nothing of it ! Why, I 'elped to dig them there trenches before Amiens myself. It's what we 256 OCTOBER, 1918 257 expected, and we're holding them up. What d'you want more ? Very good news I call it ! " " I am surprised,'' said a Canadian chaplain on leave, in much the same tone of rebuke, '' at the long faces I see about me in England. We're not like that at the front. Even the peasants from the evacuated villages are all smiles as they come along the roads. They know what's being got ready for the Germans. They know it won't be for long ! " Was it the inspiration of the good cause, some supernatural grace of confidence, or the impression of Foch's genius, combined with magnified stories of the reserves then under his control ? It is hard to say, but here were exhausted troops, a devas- tated country, the worst months of long years of appalHng warfare, and the certainty of victory never stood so high in France. Explain it as you hke ; but it seems to us that if you ehminate the manifestations of Divine protection during this war, you find yourself confronted with inexpUc- able problems. In one of those first months of 1914, when the soul was so buffeted by the evil tempest which ran shrieking and destroying over the world that it was httle wonder it seemed to be lost in chaos, Father Bernard Vaughan said these remarkable words : " The soldiers who go forward in a righteous cause, already carry the flame of victory on their foreheads." The thousands and thousands of our soldiers who carried this flame of victory on brows 258 LITTLE HOURS IX GREAT DAYS already shining, too, with the first radiance of the Light Eternal, as surely bought the triumph of righteousness for the world in their blood, as the martyrs the triumph of the faith. There are those who declare that the fact of such a war being per- mitted demonstrates the non-existence of God. but there is another way of looking at it. It is that this war has proved that there is no limit to the degeneration of humanity, once it has set itself to live without God. You might as well, it seems to us, deny all good, all justice, all mercy, because we have seen them brutally abused. Does not the very horror and indignation we feel at the \dolation of the Christian mandate prove its existence ? These are times for solemn thought ; to the beUever the}' are times of revelation. He will see written, as on a monster blackboard, the great essential lessons of faith, law and morals. Here is the logical outcome of the philosophy that denied the Divinity of Christ, and ipso facto, the principles of Chris- tianity. Here is the result of the apotheosis of might, the Xietzschean theory of the superman, the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest. The weak must go, because they are weak. The strong must triumph, because they are strong. There is no such thing as evil in the exercise of might, it is not merely a law of nature, it is a counsel of perfection. Doubters forget that the Founder of Christianity warned His disciples from the beginning what they OCTOBER, 1918 259 were to expect. They look to One Who said : " Take up thy cross and follow :\Ie." Who said : " My kingdom is not of this world." One W^ho said, too: " The gates of Hell shall not prevail against you"; and also : " Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after justice, for they shall have their fill/' and " Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted." Now, from the very beginning, if Christ taught anything, He taught that from defeat and disaster, from sacrifice and death, spring life and glory ; that the humble of the world shall confound the proud and rich ; that if there is one spirit abhorrent to Him and to His Heavenly Father, one mani- festation of human error certain to draw down visible vengeance, it is Pride, the gross pride of material might. The history of the world has shown us the tragedy which awaits every conqueror. Ruthless power has never sat in comfort on its ill-got- ten throne. From Hannibal deserted in the plains of Italy ; Caesar weltering in his blood in the forum ; Nero in the Cloaca, lacking courage to commit suicide ; Napoleon at St. Helena — to Bismarck, dis- missed by the royalty he had committed crime to serve, the end of the tyrant is surely humihation. Charles V saved himself by voluntary abnegation, and Charlemagne saw with dying eyes, in prophetic vision, the advance of the Barbarian horde which was to overthrow all his labours. What a series of starthng illustrations of the 26o LITTLE HOURS IX GREAT DAYS Christian tenet, the most obnoxious to rebellious humanity, yet the most sternly insisted upon : " He that exalteth himself shall be humbled ! " Its corollary, that the poor and the simple should confound the superb, is written on that blackboard too, set up before our eyes to-day, in great strokes — trampled and betrayed Belgium ; she has been as the net round the foot of the conqueror, even as Serbia, throttled by the predatory hand of Austria, that country that was to be exterminated, blotted from the map, is now knocking at the gates of a doomed empire ! The scrap of paper is the death warrant of the Hohenzollern. The seed of the contemptible little army has broken the Hindenburg Hne. The contemptible little army itself saved the world. The murdered children, the helpless women, the robbed and plundered poor, even to the little orchard closes, the humble village churches, the defenceless cathedrals, what power they have this day, out of their destruction, to destroy in their turn ! Every manifestation of German brutahty has been as a hammer stroke in the chain that is to bind her henceforth. There is not a martyred, tortured native in her Colonies that does not share in the welding of it. This day on which we are writing, the 28th of October, 191 S, there is in The Times an account of the condition in which the German U-boat ofhcers left a charming artistic house in Bruges. "It is not human work," says the eye-witness, "it is in OCTOBER, 1918 261 precisely the state in which a troop of Barbary apes would leave a mansion after four years' tenancy." Add to this the damage which is dehberate, scien- tific ; that what has not been defiled and destroyed in drunken orgies has been methodically laid waste with hammer and chisel. Yet the German is the perfection of the human animal ; the superman, as produced by the fight of his own trained intelfi- gence. First Christ and His ideals were obfiterated from minds so superior ; then these minds started a system of kultur — Heaven save the mark ! the word stinks in the nostrils — which was to be implanted by force upon the whole world. Admire the develop- ment of the natural intellect, ye philosophers, behold the doctrine of evolution in practice ; " Barbary Apes ! " or, as one of their own non-commissioned officers exclaimed, when he crossed the threshold of this particular house on its surrender before the evacuation : " Schweinerei ! " Let us turn our thoughts to the Engfish soldier as we know him. These chronicles of the Villino, written in the year of Victory, run very much to the panegyric of the soldier. Yet it is not bias. Ask the nurse of any big hospital throughout the kingdom, and she will tell you what she thinks of the simple lads, the quiet, thoughtful men under her care. " They are so nice. They have such extraor- dinary refined feefings. They are so easy to nurse, so grateful, so uncomplaining, such perfect gentlemen." 262 LITTLE HOURS IX GREAT DAYS And nearly always, if she who is speaking to you is one who makes of her profession a vocation, not merely an opportunity for herself, you will find oddly enough in this conjunction a unanimous ex- pression of feeling : " We would far rather nurse the men than the officers." See our soldiers with a httle dog, or any helpless thing, in their arms. Watch their expression when they look at a child. These are rough, unculti- vated men, they have never heard of the Higher Criticism. The spread of education has not reached them. Their untrained minds have not been dazzled with the brilliant intellectual fireworks of Mr. Wells. Many of them, indeed, can hardly spell at all. But they have souls unpoisoned by the miasma of unbelief. The inherited traditions of Christianity still colour every thought. You know they have been heroic beyond words in the front of danger. You find them nobly resigned, heroes still, mutilated and suffering in the hospital beds. War has not demoralized them. It has, on the contrary, brought out the most incredible splendour of the spirit. Such men fling the Christian gauntlet in the face of Unbehef, the face that wears many masks, all specious, but which, if you pluck from it its disguises, will meet you in the end with the grin of the ape. By the time this book is printed, perhaps, peace will be signed, and the Utopian Vision of the League of Nations become something more tangible than OCTOBER, 1918 263 the niirage on the Atlantic horizon. The best security for the worid would be a return to plain Christianity, and we hope some inspired apostle of zeal will attempt the re-conversion of Germany from the appalling cult of scientific monkeydom. We want a httle conversion at home, too. We want a great deal. If the emancipation, the new power given to women, are to benefit the human race, women them- selves must develop on the Unes of womanhood. They may claim, with justice, equal pay for equal work ; an equal voice in the management of affairs which their minds are as capable of understanding as those of men ; equal rights of citizenship, since they contribute to the citizen burden, but let them beware how they put into practice equaUty in hcense, in the sowing of wild oats, in the indulgence given to the baser instincts. Unhappy the day — and it is unfortunately already broadly glaring upon us — when womanhood steps down from that superior place she has always occupied in a Christian country, to fling herself , and all she means of home and ideal, of help and inspiration, to the more strongly tempted and coarser-fibred man, into that lower circle where evil sports under the names of Freedom and Pleasure ! Woman must not give up her most precious attri- bute, purity, and the modesty which was its bloom. She must bring a chaste mind, a high conception of the possibilities of human nature, to her new 264 LITTLE HOURS IX GREAT DAYS task. She must protect the sanctity of the home as the first jewel in her crown ; she must relentlessly stamp out the pandering to the baser instincts which drives a too easy trade in newspapers, cine- mas and books. It should not be to assist in the relaxation of all the wholesome austerities imposed by the Christian ideal, that she has come to power. It should be, on the contrary, to uphold them, and to set the Ten Commandments as her code. The security of home hfe, the education of children, the protection of the young girl, the blotting out of our social system of those heUish industries which work against the health of body and mind, here is her true mission ! The manhood of England has come through the four years' conflict refined as silver in the furnace. The womanhood seems, on the contrary, to have suffered an appalUng degeneration. Certainly the dross has risen to the top of the cauldron, and the pure metal sunk out of sight. The first task, there- fore, of the w^oman thinker is to drag her own sex out of the mire in which it is disporting itself in the mad behef that it is something delectable. It would be a thousand pities if the trend of female influence in legislation were to be wholly material. We want clean and comfortable homes for the work- ing classes ; but we want as much a clean spirit in those homes. It is tremendously important that children should have good and sustaining food ; but it is more important still that they should have the OCTOBER, 1918 265 best nourishment for their souls. We want the working mother's hfe to be made happy ; but she should be encouraged to find her happiness in her home, and discouraged to seek it in the cinema and the dancing hall. The modern wife and m^other of the poorer class buys wretched tinned food for her family to save the cooking ; spends her money on silk stockings and sports coats, and trails her wretched infants along the promenades and the shops in perambulators, on the look-out for pleasures. Trivial, futile pleasures, when they are not worse. I know of a case where the husband is at the front, the mother lives in a good house and home. She has plenty of money through munition works and allowances. Her sister-in-law has come to Hve with her. There are three httie children. Every even- ing the two women go out to pubhc-houses and places of entertainment, and leave the httle children locked up in the house. The women are nearty always drunk when they come in. There is a theory abroad that poverty is the source of crime, and that with a large wage and superior dwelhng- places the working population will become a model of all the \irtues. While, no doubt, extreme destitution lowers the moral standard, and much of the degradation of the sweated labouring class is produced by their material conditions, the sudden prosperity which has come to this very class by war conditions has not improved their standard of conduct ; far from it. While, therefore, it is advis- 266 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS able and salutary to insist on better conditions all round, it is evident that there is another and far more serious problem to tackle. We risk the attacks of a worse enemy than the Germans ; we are likely to be conquered by a far more insidious foe : the real danger is from within. We are slowly but inevitably becoming unchristianed. For many years a deadly propaganda has been at work ; and, from the theories of Mr. Wells that God does not require from us morahty of conduct, to the doctrines of Ferrer, so popular in certain parts of ^lanchester, that the great enemies of mankind are behef in God, in justice and in patriotism, there is a most terrifying negation of spirit in the youth of the manufacturing classes. We have seen what materialism in high places, backed up by the highest intelligence of \^ hich the human brain is capable, has produced in Germany ; we have seen what materiaUsm under the control of the wicked and the ignorant can become, in the sud- denl}- emancipated Russia : the first act of the Bolshevist was to deny all law, rehgious and civil. If there is to be a new England, a new era of the world, new hopes for the poor and new ideals for the rich, let them be carried out in the name of that law at once so mild and so austere, so generous and so rigid, so comforting and so exacting, the law of Christ. Women are passing through transition days, and there is nothing more difficult for the mature mind OCTOBER, 1918 267 than the adjusting of preconceived standards to modern developments. The young person who had a blushing cheek is a thing of the past. " She blushed, she knew not why." The new- time damsel knows everything that is to be known, and blushes at nothing. There is much, no doubt, for which no blushes are needed. Ignorance is not innocence. A frank acquaintance with, and acceptance of, the facts of life need not — God forbid that it should be so ! — perturb a pure mind. Only with this new emancipation of the maiden spirit, there is, alas ! a corresponding unnecessary and unholy emancipa- tion from the moral code. PhylHs in knickers and top-boots, with sufficient skirts to her coat, is quite a wholesome pleasant figure on the landscape, but the thing — often not more than sixteen — that swarms about the cinemas, the portals of the soldiers' clubs, the railway stations, the entrances to the camp ; that has cheeks raddled with paint and a dreadful sophistication in its eye ; the product of the new^ cultivation ; the tare that has crept in among the wheat, threatens to spoil the whole crop. Perhaps we elders look back with regret to the days when our daughters were kept unspotted from the world, protected even from the winds of reality. We may think that they did not make the less good waves or mothers because of their youth of angehc innocence ; but it ought not to prevent us from recognizing other qualities which have been developed by the changed dispensation. By all 268 LITTLE HOURS IX fxREAT DAYS means let the new girlhood grow up frank, fearless, clear-e3'ed and independent of spirit, much on the lives of the boyhood of the nation — there is no being more simply honourable and healthily clean- minded than the good EngUsh boy. It is the appalHng mixture of precocious feminine perversity with the sudden flinging off of all the restrictions hitherto deemed necessary to modesty, which has made chaos of so many poor children's souls. There is in the whole world nothing more likely to lead inexperienced youth of both sexes astray than bad comradeship. The goats are mixed in with the sheep, or rather I should say, the black kids are mixed in with the white lambs now-a- da^^s, with a serene disregard of consequences. Girls don't lose their characters, they " have a good time " ; those others who are kept back from the plunge into indiscriminate excitement are just the silly Httle fools who don't know how to enjoy themselves ! And some women who are already coming forth as lawmakers are actually preparing a legislation not for the remed}-, but for the further- ing of so vital an abuse. One of the pleas set forth for the facilitation and cheapening of divorce is that so many marriages have been contracted during the war " just for the fun of the thing," that it would be a cruel hardship were they to be regarded as permanent. If this is the way in which women are to use their right to legislate, then the franchise will have OCTOBER, 191S 269 brought confusion worse confounded to a distracted world. License is to be facilitated by further license, the solemn sacrament of marriage has been abused : happy thought, do away mth it ; sub- stitute a farcical contract of the kind most appreci- ated by Palais Royal audiences ! The statistics of illegitimacy are appalHngly on the increase : the best thing, apparently, is to make it rather a useful practice under State patronage. The case of the hard-working, respectable soldier's wife who could not obtain her separation allowance because it was officially granted to the woman who had supplanted her, broken up her home, and taken her husband away, is, we are quite sure, no isolated instance. If our Government is not Christian : if our rulers continue to be swayed by opportunism ; standing on no principle save the shifting sands of popular approval, then, in the name of God, let w^omen unite and save the country ! They can save the country ; the power has been given to them. Once again — it is impossible too often to repeat it — there will be no prosperity, no happiness, no wholesome expansion, no healthy home life ; no promise in the young, no peace for the old, unless it be under the law of Christ. Womanhood at its best has alw^ays stood for the Christian ideal ; now she can enforce it. What a vocation ; to be the turning-point of a nation's life, to bring an afflicted people back to their God, to look forward and see already the fulfilment of the promise given of old to those who shall 2 70 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS " have arisen and gone up to Zion "!..." And they shall flow together to the good things of the Lord, for the corn and wine and oil and the increase of cattle and herds. And their soul shall be as a watered garden : and they shall be hungry no more. Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance, the 3^oung men and old men together : and I will turn their mourning into joy and will comfort them and make them joyful after their sorrow." November 28/// A Uttle while ago the people who said the war would be over by Christmas were regarded with the pitying contempt born of the long failure of the optimist. Now the peace bells have actually rung. It was a very poor tinkle down here, if the truth must be told, and so far the only other rejoicings that have come to our knowledge have been the senseless destruction of the camp shops by maffick- ing soldiers. It has been much the same in London. The real note of gladness has been absent. ^^> can all remember out of our nursery times those hours when, seized by some spirit of idle silliness, we made a great noise, shouting with laughter and grimacing, knowing in our hearts that we were not enjoying ourselves, but only trying to be naughty. Thus did a section of London make merr^^ upon so great a dehverance. Higher in the social scale, a kindred section is now dancing and decking itself " over the graves of the dead." OCTOBER, 1918 271 And yet, as we set down these words, we are minded that we are wrong. There were other thanksgivings down here ; as no doubt elsewhere. From the moment the news of the armistice was known, the Httle R.C. camp chapel, so dear and famihar a spot to us, became crowded with soldiers. They filled the building ; they were kneeling right out into the open on the muddy waste. The move- ment was entirely spontaneous ; but when the chaplains saw it, they entered into it, exposed the Blessed Sacrament, and gave Benediction every hour to the crowds that succeeded each other. Our great London chiurches, the new Cathedral and the Oratory, must have been a wonderful sight on the afternoon of that strange day. There, and there only, could the overcharged heart reheve itself. So many who wanted to weep unnoticed for the beloved that no victory could restore to them ; others, holding a joy scarcely yet divided from agony over the preservation of the ineffably dear, the pathetically young ; some again, not daring to draw^ a breath or utter the prayer of gratitude, lest even at this last moment the life that trembled in the balance should have been snatched away ; and those w^ho will through all their days lead a bhnd man ; those who will see their noble sons go mutilated ; those who do not yet know if they are for ever bereft, and how, or if, they can venture to hope ; those haunted by the hell shadows of the German prison ; and the poor blessed gallant lads 272 LITTLE HOURS IN GREAT DAYS themselves, on crutches, with the hanging sleeve, the bandaged head, the patched-iip face. . . . Ah no, it is not a time for laughter ! The sound of it would be as the thorns crackling under the pot. It is a time for prayer. Suffering has gone too deep, the wounds are yet unhealed. The soul is still too profoundly steeped in the bitterness of dark night watches, too dismayed yet by its initiation into the cruelties of evil. There is only one place where we can find ourselves ii^the rightful spirit : before the Tabernacle. It is an infinite pity that we feel for such as have not got this refuge ; who in a scarcely realizable relief from pain have no thought but to shout and dance in the street ; or who, with sorrow waking up afresh, want to creep away hke animals to their holes in bhnd pain. Te Deum laudamus, Te Dominum confitemur. . . . In te, Domine, speravi ; non confimdar in cBternum, Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London. L^tt-'.e he xrii in ;;r3at 1 ciays ^^^H UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY