Good humour reigned in the family as we found it.
Though papa Sonderdonck had a bayonet thrust through his neck—he had been in the Garde Civique—and they had already had a battle-royal with the Belgian family who shared the house, they seemed to view the whole situation as a joke. As they had routed their fellow refugees—the latter only spoke Flemish, Madame Van Sonderdonck only French, and an interpreter had to be found to convey mutual abuse—and furthermore obtained in their place the sister-in-law and the two cousins, unaccountably left out of the batch, they had some substantial reasons for satisfaction.
Monsieur and Madame Deens are once more of the heart-rending order. She, a pathetic creature always balanced between tears and smiles, with pale blue eyes under her braided soft brown hair, looks extraordinarily young to be the mother of two strapping children. He is the typical Belgian husband, devoted but grinding.
Our first visit there was painful. Madame Deens was like a bewildered child, and the husband, a stalwart handsome fellow, who had been chief engineer on the railway at Malines, was torn between a very natural indignation at finding himself beggared after years of honest hard work, and bitter anxiety about his wife, who was in the same condition as Madame Van Heyst.
He beckoned us outside the cottage to tell us in a tragic whisper that he had good reason to believe that “all, all the family of my wife,” her father, mother, and the invalid sister, had been murdered by the Germans; and their farm burned.
“How can I tell her, and she as she is? It will kill her too! And she keeps asking me and asking me! I shall have to tell her!”
The tears rolled down his cheeks. Yet he was a hard man; it galled him to the quick to be employed as a common labourer and receive only seventeen shillings a week.
They had been given a gardener’s house: the most charming, quaint abode. It had an enormous kitchen, with a raftered ceiling, and one long window running the whole length of the room, opening delightfully on the orchard. The walls were all snowy white. He might have made himself very happy in such surroundings for the months of exile, with the consciousness of friends about him, the knowledge of safety and care for the wife in her coming trial, and the splendid healthy air for the children. But Deens was not satisfied.