This is an artillery camp—a marvellous place which gives one a more vivid impression of England’s strength, of England’s new army, than any words can describe. These splendid, happy, vigorous, busy men; these rows of howitzer and ammunition carts; these thousands of sleek, lively horses; this untiring, determined movement of work and preparation ... all for the Dardanelles, we hear.
We get out of the dust and the noise and the gigantic stir, and along the green roads again; and then into another camp. A curious stillness here: the myriad huts are all shut up, the sheds empty, even the new shops seemingly untenanted; only here and there stands a stray khaki figure to emphasize the loneliness. They left for the front the day before yesterday. To-morrow twenty thousand new men are expected, like a new swarm of bees, to take their place in the vacated hives.
Home again in the Villino, with all the fur babies washed and waiting for us. Rather a silent group of dogs, a little offended because we went away. Loki, who generally screams with rapture, has certainly a reservation in the ecstasy of his greetings; but Mimosa clings to us with two little paws, like a child hugging a recovered treasure, and offers kisses, of which she is not generally prodigal. Plain Eliza is shy. She has grown perceptibly in three days.
The garden is full of sweet scents. The dawn, the coronation, and the crimson ramblers are bursting into lovely bloom beside the blue of the delphiniums.
There was always a special kind of joy in the old days about home-coming to the Villino. We used to go from room to room, taking stock of the dear, queer little place; greeting the serene, smiling Madonnas; the aloof angels folded into their prayers; pagan, pondering Polyhymnia in her corner of the drawing-room, brooding upon the glory of times that will never be again.... It is all just as it used to be: bowery, without and within, as usual.
Everything is scrubbed to the last point of daisy freshness and polished to spicy gloss against the Padrona’s return, and smiling damsels await compliments on the stairs. Other years, as we say, these were moments of unalloyed light-heartedness. It was always unexpectedly nicer than we had imagined.
“Isn’t it dearer than ever?” we would say, then, to each other. “Don’t you love it? Aren’t we happy here?”
This year it is another cry that rises to our lips.
“Oh, how happy we might be, if only——”