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“Prepare, prepare the iron helm of war,

Bring forth the lots, cast in the spacious orb;

The Angel of Fate turns them with mighty hands,

And casts them out upon the darkened earth!

Prepare, prepare!”

W. Blake.

The most usual remark that people make after a visit to our little house on the hill is this: “How peaceful!”

Even in the ordinary course of life—those times that now seem extraordinary to a world already accustomed to the universal struggle—when everyone in England was in peace, except where their own unquiet spirits may have marred it, even then this nest of ours seemed peace within peace. We do not know now whether the contrast is not the more acute. One of the thousands of homes dedicated to the quiet joys and innocencies of life, where no one ever wanted to quarrel, because all found the hours so full of sweet content, we do not flatter ourselves that we are singular: only typical. The shadow of the great cloud cast at first a hideous, unnatural darkness over our harmless ways.

All during the long golden summer, when we looked out across the moor basking in the radiance; when our roses bloomed and the garden rioted in colour, and the valley slowly turned from green to russet; when the harvest-moon went up like a huge brass platter in silver skies, the very beauty of it all clutched one’s heart the fiercer. How fares it with our boys over there in the heat and the stress? How much worse it must be for them that the sun should blaze upon them, marching, firing, rushing forward, lying wounded, wanting water!... Oh, dear lads of England, how we at home agonized with you!

The little house, bought in a light-hearted hour, furnished with infinite zest in happy days out of distant Rome, was a sort of toy to us from the beginning; and kind friends surveyed it with indulgent and amused, yet admiring, glances, such as one would bestow upon an ingenious and pretty plaything. We called it the Villino, partly in memory of the Italian sojourn, and partly because, though it is bounded by wild moors, it contrives a quaintly Italianate air. It stands boldly on the lip of the hill, and the garden runs down in terraces to a deep valley. Across the valley to the east the moors roll, curve upon curve. South, facing us, the trees begin their march; and westward the valley spreads, rising into moors again, where again the fir-trees sentinel the sky. The view from the terrace rather takes your breath away. It is unexpected and odd, and unlike anything, except Italy and Scotland mixed: the wildness, and the trim terraced garden with its calculated groups of cypress, its vases brimming with flowers, its stone steps, its secret bowery corners.

“Mount Ecstasy” an artist friend has dubbed it. “Is it possible,” she asked us in the middle of this radiant October of the war, “that the wind ever blows here? Do you ever hear it shrieking round the house?”

We gave her a vivid description of what the wind could do when it liked; when it came up the valley with the rain on its wings. She looked incredulous.

“Is it possible?” she repeated softly.

She had come straight from the great camp at Lyndhurst, where the 7th Division, gallant as ill-fated, had gathered in all its lusty strength before embarking for the bloody struggle in Flanders. She had just said good-bye to her eldest son; the call of the bugle, the march of thousands in unison, was in her ears; the vision of the crowded transport vivid in her mind. Yet here she would not believe that even the winds could break our peace.

This was very much what we felt ourselves when the Storm burst; it was incredible with this placidity all about us.

One tries to think what it would be had the Villino sprung to life in Belgian soil, or did the Hun succeed in landing, and come pouring, a noxious tide, across our country roads, taking the poor little place on its way. The first refugee from that heroic and devastated land who found shelter here was very smiling and brave until she came out into the garden. Then she began to cry.

“I had such pretty flowers too.”

All our moors are turning into camps; they grew like mushrooms in a day, it seems. We hear the soldiers marching by in the dead of the night, singing, poor boys! to give themselves heart—such nights, too, as they are this autumn, deluged with rain and blown through with relentless wind! We stand between two hospitals; and Belgian refugees overflow in the villages. We read of the bombardment of the coast and the dropping of bombs, and yet we do not realize. We still feel as in a nightmare from which we must wake up.

Yet the effects of war are beginning to stamp themselves, even in the Villino and in its garden. We are, some of us, naturally inclined to luxuries. The mistress of the Villino is certainly a spendthrift where bulbs and tubers and seeds are concerned; and for three out of the four years since she owned the little property, the spring garden has justified impenitence. Oh! the crocuses running through the grass of that third terrace called the Hemicycle! Oh! the scyllas making miniature skies under the almond-trees! Oh! the tulips swaying jewel chalices over the mists of blue forget-me-not: glories of the past, this coming spring, how shall the garden miss you!

It must be explained that our soil—green-sand—our position—high-perched—our general tendency—sloping down-hill—make us charmingly dry and healthy, but disagree with the bulb. It is impossible to naturalize anything less hardy than the daffodil. The snowdrop declines to live with us. Therefore our autumn bulb lists were copious and varied, and the results ephemeral and lovely. This year there has been no bulb list; who could think of this completely personal and selfish gratification when it is the flower of our manhood that is being mown down out yonder? when all that can be spared must be spared to help! There is so little one can do, and so appallingly much to be done.

And inside, too, we are being pinched; not badly, not cruelly, but just as if the war monster had reached out one of its myriad hands—quite a small and rather weak one—and had hold of us, enough to nip, not to strangle.

It will not surprise any garden owner to learn that this is the year of all others in which Adam, the Villino gardener, had an “accident” with the cuttings, and that therefore those bushes of chrysanthemums, which look so well on our grey and orange landings, have not been forthcoming. Another year it would not have mattered. We should have gaily replenished the Italian pots from the local nursery, where chrysanthemums are a speciality. But as it is—we go without.

In a hundred other items the nipping fingers produce the same paralyzing result. The footman, who, we regret to say, gibbered at the thought of enlisting, and avowed to a horrified kitchen circle that he might perhaps be able to help to carry a wounded man, but face a bullet—“Never, never!”—found his post untenable in a household chiefly composed of the fair and patriotic sex. We conceived that the times demanded of us to bring the garden-boy into the house, thus reducing our establishment without inflicting hardship.

Such, however, was not the opinion of Juvenal, our eccentric butler. This strange being, from certain aspects of his character, might have been, as the Italian prelate said of a distinguished Jesuit preacher, “born in a volcano.” He is devoted to the dogs, and has a genius for settling flowers; and he has become altogether so much a part of the establishment—the famiglia—that the Villino would lose half its charm without him. Nevertheless, he is volcanic! And though at first he took the substitution of four-foot in buttons for six-foot in livery with an angelic resignation, Vesuvius broke forth with unparalleled vigour and frequency after a couple of weeks of the regimen. Unfortunately, Juvenal is not sustained by patriotic ardour. He deliberately avoids afflicting himself with thoughts about the war. “I never could bear, miss, to see anything that was hurt! And as for anything dying, miss, even if it was only a little animal—why, there, I couldn’t as much as look at my poor old father!” Here is his point of view as expressed tersely to the Signorina of the Villino.

This being the case, he succeeds so thoroughly in blocking his mind against all facts connected with war time (except the entertaining of “a nice young fellow from the camp”) that he has found himself injured to the core by our attempts at economy. And when it came to our unexpectedly inviting a refugee lady into his dining-room, and his having to lay three extra places for her and her children, the lava overflowed into the upper regions. We with difficulty extricated “Miss Marie” from the burning flood.

We are all slightly overwrought these days, and instead of pretending not to notice, which is the only possible way where Juvenal is concerned, we suggested that he should look for another situation. It would be difficult to say whether outraged feeling or amazement predominated in him. Of course, we all deeply repented our hasty action, and then ensued four uncomfortable weeks of cross purposes in which neither side would “give in.” Finally the poor volcano departed in floods of tears, with twenty-four bird-cages and a Highland terrier.

“Don’t you take on, Mr. Juvenal,” said Mrs. MacComfort, the cook; “you’ll be back in no time!”

There ensued a dreadful interlude with an anæmic young butler unfit for military service, who promptly developed toothache and a bilious attack, and whom all the servants regarded as a spy for the convincing reasons that he sat and rolled his eyes and said nothing.

He was, however, non-volcanic, and placidly accepted Jimmy, the promoted garden-boy. This was not reciprocal, for Jimmy, who displayed a degree of conscientiousness, peculiar indeed in the light of after-events, could not reconcile himself to the change.

He would canter heavily, smothered to the chin in six-foot’s pantry apron, into the drawing-room to announce with a burst of tears to the young housekeeper:

“Please, miss, ’e won’t suit! ’E won’t do nuthin’ I tell him! Oh, please, miss, he’s putting the cups—the mistress’s own cup—in the wrong cupboard, and”—with a howl—“he ain’t washed it, miss! And when I tell him, ’e says it doesn’t matter!”

We didn’t think he would suit, ourselves. We had all said so often that Juvenal was perfectly dreadful, and couldn’t be endured another minute, and every member of the famiglia had so frequently declared with tears that if Mr. Juvenal remained she could not possibly stay; she had borne it as long as she could, not to make unpleasantness, but——

We were unanimous now in regrets.

“God be with poor Juvenal!” said Mrs. MacComfort, the dear, soft-spoken Irish cook; and added darkly: She wouldn’t like to be saying what she thought of the new butler.

However, à quelque chose malheur est bon, for had the following incident taken place under Juvenal’s dog-loving eye, as Juvenal himself subsequently remarked, there would certainly have been murder done. We ourselves had been inclined to consider Jimmy an agreeable member of the domestic circle. Nobody minded telling him to take out the dogs, no matter how bad the weather was, and Jimmy always responded with that smile of cheerful alacrity that so endeared him.

The tale which is here narrated may seem irrelevant to the share which the Villino has had to take in the universal and terrible cataclysm, but nevertheless the incidents therein set forth directly issued from it; and, in spite of a dash of comedy, they were tragic enough for those chiefly concerned, namely, the youngest “fur-child” and Jimmy himself. If we had not taken Jimmy into the house, Jimmy would not have been told to walk the dogs; and if Jimmy had not walked the dogs, the singular drama of the phantom dog-stealers and the baby Pekinese would never have occurred.

There were then three fur-children: Arabella, the Lavroch setter—lovely, dull, early Victorian, worthy creature; Loki, the beloved, chief of all the little dumb family, first in our affections—a quaint, saturnine, very Chinese little gentleman, with crusty and disconcerting ways, and almost a human heart; and Mimi, the heroine of this adventure—Mimosa on solemn occasions—really a beauty, with all the engaging Pekinese oddities and that individuality of character which each one seems to possess; spoilt, imperious, vivid!

It was a very wet day, and Jimmy had been ordered to don his master’s mackintosh cape and take the fur-children up the moor. The first peculiar incident was that Mimi ran three times headlong from his guardianship. As fast as she was coaxed down one stairs she was up the other, with her tail between her legs. It might have made us pause, but it didn’t. We said: “Poor Mimi doesn’t like getting her feet wet.” Anyone who had heard the boy cooing to his charges in tones of the most dulcet affection would have been as dense as we were.

That evening the dark adventure took place. Jimmy came running into the kitchen, more incredibly mud-encrusted than any living creature outside an alligator is ever likely to be again; and, bursting into loud wails, declared that he had been set upon by two men and robbed of Mimi.

“Run, run,” cried Mrs. MacComfort, “and tell the master!”

Jimmy ran, working himself up as he went, so that it was what our Irish nurse used to call “roaring and bawling” that he rushed into the library and poured out his dreadful news. The master dashed in pursuit of the miscreants, led by the hero, who cantered him uphill a good half-mile. He was followed by the cook and her Cinderella, valiantly brandishing sticks. Having reached the post-office, the chase was given up, and the master of the Villino was returning dejectedly when a yapping behind the hedge that skirted the road was recognized by Mrs. MacComfort as unmistakably Mimi’s voice.

Mimi was extracted, none the worse for her emotions, but with the remnants of a torn pocket-handkerchief tied round her neck.

Whether it was the abnormal layers of mud on Jimmy’s countenance; or the curious fact that, in spite of the horrible treatment which he vowed had been inflicted upon him in a hand-to-hand struggle with two men, under the mud there was not a scratch upon his ingenious countenance; or whether it was that, although the conflict was supposed to have taken place within our own courtyard, no sound reached anyone in the house—there and then Jimmy’s master came to this conclusion: “I believe he’s made it all up.” But he didn’t say so. The boy was only cross-examined.

“Why didn’t you shout?” asked Mrs. MacComfort.

“I couldn’t. They stuffed something soft into my throat—a handkerchief, I think it was.”

“Where did you get all that mud?” asked the gardener next morning. “You never picked that up in here. You couldn’t, not if you’d scraped the ground.”

It was then that Jimmy discovered that the assault had taken place outside the gates.

Jimmy’s mistress questioned him next, and she instantly saw that he was lying. To point the moral and adorn the tale she sent for the policeman.

“Why didn’t you ’oller?” said the policeman.

Jimmy’s knees shook together.

“I couldn’t ’oller,” he maintained doggedly. “They’d stuffed something down me throat.”

“Oh, indeed!” said the policeman. “Maybe it was this ’ankercher, was it?”

He produced a dreadful rag that had been picked up on the road. It fitted neatly with the other rag that had been round Mimi’s neck: awful pièces de conviction!

“I say it’s your ankercher. Don’t go for to deny it. I say it’s your ankercher; I ’appen to know it’s your ankercher. I say you did it all yerself!”

When a six-foot, black-moustached policeman, with boring eye, rolls out such an accusation in tremendous crescendo, what can a little criminal do but collapse? Jimmy collapsed. It was his ankercher. He ’ad done it. There never ’ad been no men. He never ’ad been knocked down. He ’ad rolled in the mud on purpose, in the ditch where it was thickest. He ’ad tried to ’urt Mimi.

“Why?—why?—why?”

Even our local Sherlock Holmes couldn’t extract anything like a plausible reason. Loki’s mistress had to piece one together for herself.

Jimmy hadn’t liked taking the dogs out on a wet day. He had therefore planned to strangle Mimi and throw her over the hedge, believing that if he showed himself unable to protect the dogs he would not be sent out with them any more.

The two immediate results of this event, extraordinary indeed in the annals of the Villino, where a St. Francis-like love of our little fur and feather brothers and sisters dominates, was the prompt restoration of Jimmy to the arms of Mrs. Mutton, his washerwoman mamma, and the summoning of Juvenal to the telephone. He was staying with his brother, a postmaster. We communicated the awful attempt. Juvenal averred, on the other side of the wire, that you could have knocked him down with a feather. Having thus re-established communications, we wrote, and, tactfully cloaking our own undignified yearnings with the innocence of the fur-children, we told him that the dogs missed him very much. He was swift to seize the “paw of friendship,” and, following our artful lead, responded by return of post that Betty had been “that fretted,” he did not know what to do with her—“wine she did from morning till night!”

It was obvious that anyone with a grain of decent feeling must instantly remedy such a state of affairs. Juvenal returned with the twenty-four bird-cages and Betty the terrier.

We have compounded with an assistant parlourmaid; it is by no means an economy, but four-foot in buttons is in such demand that Jimmy is irreplaceable.

After all, so little has that war-pinch nipped us, that, if it was not to laugh at them, one would be ashamed to set these infinitesimal bruises down at all. And, thank God! now one can laugh a little again; the days are gone by when it seemed as if every small natural joy had been squeezed out of life, that existence itself was one long nightmare of apprehension.

We do not yet know what the future may have in store for us; but, pray heaven, those mornings may never dawn again when one could scarcely open the paper for the beating of one’s heart.

It is not, we hope, that we are accustomed to agony, though no doubt there is something of habit that takes the edge off suspense and grief. We are also better prepared; we have got, as it were, into our second wind, and we are, after our English fashion, perhaps even a little more determined than we were to start with. When it all began, with what seemed merely an insensate crime in a half-civilized country, no one would have thought that England, much less our little house, would be affected. Though, indeed, personally, the murder of the Archduchess touched the mistress of the Villino a little more nearly than most, for as children they had played together. It was, and is, a very vivid memory.

She and her sisters had been brought to Brussels for their education, and Sophie was one of the youngest, if not the last, in the nursery of the Austro-Hungarian Legation in that city. The Chotek family used to come to the parc; a tribe of quaint, fair-haired children. They wore short black velvet coats and caps, and plaid skirts, rather long. The Signora can see little Sophie before her now; a Botticelli angel, with an aureole of fair curls, silver-gold, standing out all round her small, pale, delicate face; a serious child, with lustrous eyes and immense black lashes, and a fine, curling mouth. She thought her lovely and longed to cuddle her, with the maternal instinct early developed.

“Have you much sister?” said the tiny Austrian, addressing her English friend upon their introduction with great solemnity.

Who could have thought what a destiny lay before her, and in what a supreme act of self-devotion the soul, already luminous in that frail, exquisite little envelope, was to pass away? We have been told on some excellent authority that she was not popular in her anomalous position, at least in her own class. But her singular romance nevertheless was crowned by so true a married happiness that it can leave one in no doubt that she was worthy of the sacrifice made for her by the Imperial heir. He was—it is no uncharity to mention so well-known a fact—a man of bad life; she was his mother’s lady-in-waiting, appointed to that post because of destitution, no longer in the first freshness of her youth, supposed to be a person of small significance—one of those colourless shadows that haunt the chairs of the great. But she captivated the most important Prince in her country, barring the Emperor; and, what is more, her spell never lost its power. To that last breath, which, greatly favoured in their awful tragedy, they drew together, they adored each other. She made of him a model husband, a model father, a man of rectitude and earnestness. They had children, and these were all their joy. It was one of the reproaches cast upon her by the indignant royalties of the Vienna Court that the Duchess of Hohenberg was so economical she would go down to her kitchen and see the things given out. If she wanted to save money, it was for those children, cut off from their natural inheritance by the cast-iron laws that debarred their mother from a share in her husband’s rank.

An invited guest at the wedding of the present young hereditary Archduke to the Princess Zita has given us a description of an incident which well illustrates the treatment which the non-royal wife of the Heir Apparent received at the hands of her royal relatives. When the Duchess of Hohenberg entered, her long, narrow train caught in some projecting obstacle as she swept up the little chapel. The place was full of Archdukes and Archduchesses, in their wedding attire. Not one of these high-born beings budged. Each looked straight at the altar, absorbed in pious prayer. The ostracized lady had to disengage herself as best she could, and advance, blushing hotly, to her appointed place, unescorted. A few minutes after a belated Archduchess, entering swiftly, met with the same mishap. Instantly she was surrounded with politely assisting Hoheiten.

The friend to whom we owe the anecdote remarked that it had been “a dreadful moment,” and that one could not help feeling sorry for the poor Duchess. But it is to be remarked that she herself—delightful, cultivated, large-minded creature though she was—had been among the stony ones, and there had even been a glint of pleasure in her eyes under the compassion as she told the story.

Sophie was of those who are hated; but, after all, what did it matter? Was she not loved?

Our daughter’s Hungarian godmother—a most fairy and entrancing lady, with all the spirit of her race under the appearance of a French Marquise—like most Magyars, championed the cause of one whom they intended to make their future Queen. She gave us a pretty account of the great pleasure it was to the common people in Vienna to watch their Archduke and his wife at the theatre. They sat in the royal box, not formally, one at each end, as is the etiquette, but close, so close that everyone knew they were holding each other’s hands. They would look into each other’s faces with smiles, to share the interest and joy of what they beheld and heard. So the lesser folk were fond of her, though the fine Court circle could not forgive.

When she went to Berlin, the astute William received her with a tremendous parade of honour, which made him very popular with the Archduke, as well as with the multitude that espoused his cause. But it was only a hollow show of recognition after all—a banquet elaborately arranged with little round tables, so as to avoid any question of precedence under the cloak of the most friendly intimacy. Our simpler-minded court had to decline her visit at the Coronation on account of this same difficulty of precedence. Whatever might be done in Austria, this was insulting from England. “But she is of better family than many of your royalties,” said a Bohemian magnate to us across the table at a dinner-party, his blue eyes blazing. “She is of very good family. She is”—tapping his capacious shirt-front with a magnificent gesture—“she is related to me!”

The petty malice of those whose prerogatives had been infringed pursued her to her bloodstained and heroic grave. To the last she was denied all those dignities which appertained to her husband’s rank. Her morganatic dust could not be allowed to commingle with that of royalty in the Imperial vault. The two who had loved beyond etiquette were given a huddled and secret midnight funeral; and beside the Archduke’s coffin, covered with the insignia of his state, that of his wife was marked only by a pair of white kid gloves and a fan.

Such a pitiful triumph of tyranny over the majestic dead! Horrible juxtaposition of the ineptitude of pomposity and the most royal of consummations! Sophie and her mate must have smiled upon it from their enfranchisement.

Perhaps if the doomed pair had not yielded themselves to those Berlin blandishments their fate might have been less tragic. There are sinister rumours as to whose hand really fired the revolver. We in England to-day may well have come to believe that those whom the Kaiser most smiles upon are his chosen victims. The laborious grin of the crocodile to the little fishes is nothing to it; but England is rather a big mouthful.

Already one is able to say that any death has been merciful which has spared an Austrian the sight of his country’s dissolution. We are glad that our fairy godmother has not lived to have her heart torn between England, her adopted country, and her passionately loved Hungary.

The cloud no bigger than a man’s hand in the clear sky—shadow of the mailed fist—we looked at it from over here with that stirring of surface emotions that is scarcely unpleasant! How horrible! we said. How wicked, how cruel! The little bloodstained cloud! it hung in horizons too far off to menace our island shores. We were very sorry for the old Emperor, pursued to the last, it seemed, by the inexplicable, unremitting curse. “I have been spared nothing,” he is reported to have said when the news of the Archduke’s murder was broken to him. Was he then in his own heart sheltering the deadly spark that was to kindle the whole world? We thought of the playmate of Brussels days with a romantic regret, and envied her a little. Since one must die, what a good way it was to go with one’s only beloved! And then, in the full summer peace, the clouds suddenly massed themselves, darkened, and spread.

“Austrian Ultimatum to Servia! World’s Peace Threatened!” so read the newspaper headlines, like the mutter of thunder running from pole to pole. We saw without conviction. It seemed too inconceivable that such a crime could be committed in our century; and the folly of it too manifest in face of the Slav menace. And next came the crack and the lightning glare—hideous illumination over undreamt-of chasms!

Will any of us ever forget that Saturday to Monday? War was declared on Russia; war on France. Luxemburg territory was violated, and rumour raced from one end of England to the other: “We are going to stand aside; the peace party is too strong!... We are not bound by deed to France, only by an understanding. England means to let her honour go down on a quibble....”

We had guests in the house—a brother, retired after hard service in the army; a slow-spoken, gentle-eyed man of law, who hid the fiercest fire of British pugnacity under this deliberately meek exterior. They were both pessimistic, the soldier angrily so in his anxiety. “I’ll never lift my head again in England!—I’ll never go into a foreign country again! I’d be ashamed!—Upon my word, I’ll emigrate!”

And the other gloomily: “From my experience of this Government, it’s sure to do the worst possible thing. I haven’t the least hope.”

In our own hearts we had resolved, with the soldier, that we would give up home and country. Our thoughts turned to Canada.

The relief was proportionate to the hideousness of the doubt. What though the cloud had spread and spread till it reached right across the sky, there was brilliant sunshine over England—the light of honour.

Two ardent young patriots had visited us unexpectedly in their car that Sunday night. They brought small items of consolation. They had been to Portsmouth. It was ready for war. Fixed bayonets gleamed at every corner; the port was closed. Both these youths were full of martial plans. One was hurrying to the London Scottish, the other northwards to put all affairs in order before joining too. The London Scottish boy obligingly kept us au courant of the turn of events by telephone. During the length of Sir Edward Grey’s speech perverted extracts reached us and plunged us into ever deeper gloom: “We are only to intervene if French ports are bombarded....”

Then at midnight on Monday the bell rang. “Belgian neutrality had been violated; general mobilization was ordered.” It was war. And we slept on the tidings with a strange peace.

Perhaps the universal feeling was most impressively voiced by a Franciscan monk, who said to us later (during the agonizing suspense between Mons and the Marne): “Nothing can be so bad as those days when we did not know what the Government would do. Whatever happens now, nothing can compare to that. Shall I ever forget how we prayed?”

Little Brothers of Peace and Poverty, humble, self-despoiled servants of the rule most rigid in its tenderness, clamouring at the throne of God for a thing of pride, a priceless possession—their country’s honour! Paradox can scarcely go further, it would seem. Yet, even before Mr. Chesterton pointed it out, most of us had long ago accepted the fact that the deeper the truth the more breathless the paradox. Is there an Englishman among us who would lift his voice to-day against the sacred precept: He that loses his life shall save it?