[VI]
KERXKEN
Sister Robertine
On a wet, cheerless day between Christmas and New Year’s, I started with Madame de Beughem and Madame Allard for the most important lace district of Eastern Flanders. The Alost region, which in 1896 counted 8,500 workers, is known throughout the lace world for its Needle Point and Venise.
We went first to Alost itself, the center of the area, where, however, modern industries have won their already oft-repeated victory over the lace. It was in Alost, the 16th of November, 1918, that my car had scarcely been able to push its way between the two lines of Belgian soldiers of deliverance holding back the smiling, tearful population, and where, too, I passed Burgomaster Max free after four years in prison in Germany, on his way to King Albert at the Army Headquarters near Ghent.
A short distance south of Alost we passed Haltaert, from which this lace section might more justly take its name, since in Haltaert there is scarcely a household without its needle or bobbin workers. And but a little farther south lay Kerxken, which even in the rain, looked a friendly village and where beside fully three-fourths of the windows women were plying their needles.
Before the war companies of the men of this region went to France to work in the harvest, as many as 40,000 migrating annually, because even before the war, France was short-handed agriculturally and the French fields offered higher wages than their own. The women and girls helped those who remained to gather the crops, and in the fall, when the men came back and the season for working the farms had passed, whole families turned to lace-making as a means of piecing out the gains of the summer. Sometimes the men cared for the children or assisted with the housework so that the women might sit uninterruptedly before their patterns, and in certain instances they themselves made lace—the census of 1896 lists 117 men lace-workers in Belgium. In Kerxken we found that thirty young men who had been silk weavers before the war had during the occupation been able to make lace—not true lace, but such imitations as filet, really a form of embroidery. They made, too, Application, not genuine Application where true lace details, made either with the bobbin or needle, are sewed upon the tulle base, but tulle ornamented with machine-made lacets, narrow braids of various sorts that come to the region from Calais. Lacets usually have a strong thread along one edge, which can be drawn so that the braid may be more swiftly fashioned into curving leaves or flowers. These distressing imitations, which unfortunately pay much better than the true laces, since they can be made with great speed and find a ready market, are a constant menace to them. “Voilà notre ennemie!” said Madame Allard, as we looked into a work-room where the table showed little piles of lacet collars. The only method of fighting this enemy is through higher wages for the genuine lace.
We could not see Adele Rulant, once with hardly a peer in Needle Point, to whom people from far and near had sent their old pieces, even shreds of their family treasure, for restoration, knowing that almost certainly her artist’s needle would recapture the lost mesh or flower. Adele Rulant had died and we realized again how surely one by one the famous dentellières of the last half of the 19th century are dropping out.
We turned down a lane and were soon at the green door of the convent of the black-robed Franciscaine Sisters, who dismayed, but smiling, hurried forward to greet us, very fresh looking in their white lined coiffes and collars. I say dismayed, because through an error they had expected us the day before and had kept a fire burning for hours, a supreme expression of hospitality in this bitter, coalless winter; this was Saturday afternoon, there was no fire, and the lace-workers were at home scrubbing their tiled floors and doorsteps. But they would light a fire at once, and send a Sister to the nearest houses to recall at least a few of the women; they would prepare lunch for us, a plate of little cakes and a bottle of wine had already been set on the table. Such an apologetic bustle of welcome was heart-warming on a cheerless day. Nothing less, I am certain, would have made it possible for me to drink an entire glass of sour red wine at 10:30 o’clock in the morning.
I wished particularly to visit the convent because I had known during the four years of Sœur Robertine’s successive victories over the Germans. After they refused to let laces pass except through their hands, which taxed and had frequently stolen from the parcels, time and again she outwitted them, crossing the forbidden village frontier and carrying the precious rolls herself to the office of the Committee at Brussels.
Beneath the calm of that office there was always tense expectancy; at any moment anything might happen, even the worst thing. One day after weeks of being entirely cut off from many of their lace sections, when the women were more strained and anxious than ever before, the door opened quietly and Sœur Robertine, of Kerxken, a prohibited district, stood before them. Fear for her quite overcame their joy at seeing her; they quickly turned the key and hurried her into a rear room. “But why have you come? We did not send for you—we should never have allowed you to take such risks!”
At first only Sœur Robertine’s twinkling, keen gray eyes answered, as she slowly threw off her long black cape and from beneath other garments began unwinding meter upon meter of lovely white lace, till the billowy lengths covered all the table. “It was very simple—I had to come. For weeks our thread has been exhausted; the women are suffering for need of their earnings. I found a way, and I’ll find a way back, never fear; we’ll all return safely to Kerxken—the thread and the money and I—even tho we may have to slip in under the very nose of the Boche!” She was still laughing and still producing lace, little packets now of square insets and bouquets, when I had to leave.