A Little House in War Time

by Agnes Castle; Egerton Castle

Cammaerts.

We asked them to tea; the Sister said that “the Matron said they couldn’t do that”; but they could come for morning lunch about half-past ten o’clock, and have bread-and-butter and see the garden. And they would like to come very much indeed, preferably next day. The Matron further opined about twelve would feel well enough to avail themselves of our hospitality.

It gave us very little time for preparation, and the baker declined to provide us with buns so early. But it was very hot, fortunately; so Mrs. McComfort set to work at dawn to prepare lemonade and fruit salad, and immense slices of bread-and-jam. And we were very glad she had been so lavish in her Irish generosity when we heard the sound of voices and the tramping of feet in the courtyard: it seemed as if there were a regiment of them! In reality there were only twenty—twenty smiling, stalwart “blue-coat boys.” Some with an arm in a sling; two or three limping along with the help of a stick; one with a bandaged head; three, in spite of a brave front, with that look of strain and tragedy in the eyes which stamps even those who have been only slightly “gassed.”

They are very much amused at the little outing, as pleased and as easily diverted as children, not anxious to talk about their experiences, but answering with perfect ease and simplicity any question that is made to them on the subject. They are chiefly excited over our little dogs. We wish that we had twenty instead of only three; or that we had borrowed from a neighbour’s household for the occasion. Every man wants to nurse a dog, and those who have secured the privilege are regarded with considerable envy by the others.

The younger members of the famiglia are in a desperate state of excitement, and there is a great flutter of aprons, and cheeks flame scarlet under caps pinned slightly crooked in the agitation of the moment.

Miss Flynn the housemaid, Miss O’Toole the parlourmaid, are stirred to rapture to discover an Irish corporal, wounded at Ypres. We think they talk more of Tipperary—it really is Tipperary—than of Flanders. Miss Flynn, a handsome, black-eyed, black-haired damsel, with a colour that beats the damask roses on the walls of the Villino, has been born and bred in England. She is more forthcoming than Miss O’Toole, who has the true Hibernian reserve; who looks deprecatingly from under her fair aureole of hair, and expects and gives the utmost respectfulness in all her relations with the opposite sex.

They say this lovely sensitive modesty of the Irish girl is dying out. The penny novelette, the spread of emancipation and education—save the mark!—facilities of communication, have done away with it. More’s the pity if this be true, for it was a bloom on the womanhood of Ireland no polish can replace; it added something incommunicably lovable to the grace of the girls, something holy, almost august, to the tenderness of the mothers.

When the Signora was a child in Ireland the peasant wife still spoke of her husband as “the master”; and in the wilds of Galway, quite recently, she has seen the women in the roads pull their shawls over their faces at the approach of a stranger. The humble matron of the older type will still walk two paces behind her husband. These are, of course, but indications of the austere conception of life which an unquestioning acceptance of her faith kept alive in the breast of the Irishwoman. When she promised to love and honour him, the husband became de facto “the master.” Yet the influence of the Irish wife and mother in her own home in no way suffered from this conception of her duty. She was as much “herself” upon the lips of her lord as he “himself” upon hers. It used to be a boast that the purity of the Irish maiden and the Irish mother was a thing apart, inassailable. The Signora’s recollections of Ireland, of a childhood passed in a country house that kept itself very much in touch with its poor neighbours and dependants, bring her back many instances of drunkenness among the men, alas! and the consequent fights and factions; of slovenliness among the women, and hopeless want of thrift and energy; in one or two instances, indeed, of flagrant dishonesty; but she never remembers a single occasion marked by the shocked whisper, the swift and huddled dismissal, or any of the other tokens by which a fall from feminine virtue is mysteriously conveyed to the child mind.

Among all the poor cottage homes, the various farms, great and small, prosperous or neglected, each with their strapping brood of splendid youth, never one can she recollect about whose name there was a silence; never a single one of these dewy-eyed, fresh-faced girls that did not carry the innocence of their baptism in the half-deprecating, half-confident looks they cast upon “the quality.”