HANDKERCHIEF AND JEWEL BOXES, FLANDERS AND VENISE OVER SATIN AND VELVET
Colette’s neighbor was making the same mesh, but as a background for bobbin-made clusters, sent here from a bobbin-lace village to make the rare Point d’Angleterre, a small quantity of which Kerxken still produces.
In the corner of this class-room were the shelves with the essential skeins of thread; cotton for the Needle Point, linen for the Venise. The linen is more and more difficult to obtain, and since it is hard to handle and breaks easily, has been largely supplanted by cotton thread. There were large cardboard boxes for the drawings and the pricked working patterns; others for the little bobbin-lace roses and leaves and vines that were to be worked into Brussels Point; and still more boxes for the finished meters and insets ready to be sold to the Committee, and later to the dealer who will replace the Committee. While we were examining the boxes a pretty, dark-haired dentellière of about sixteen came in, with work she had finished at home, two handkerchiefs with Brussels Point borders, and two and a half meters of Venise, on which she had worked five and a half months and for which she asked 160 francs, or $40.00.
In the “imitation” room we passed quickly by the lengths of inferior filet and the piles of cheap collars made by men; there was little temptation to linger there. The only defense against that room is more pay for the work across the hall.
We climbed the stairs shivering and looked into the neat little bedrooms with their white board floors, and into the icy chapel where Sœur Robertine declared she could be quite comfortable with only a small black woolen shawl over her shoulders.
We had brought our lunch, but were not allowed to eat it. Sister A., an excellent cook, had prepared hot soup, potatoes and meat, and a dried apple mousse which we persuaded Sœur Robertine to share with us. And after lunch, the orphan and refugee children came in to shake hands, also Janiken, the poor “idiote” who is forty-nine years old, but still a child, with a strange, animal-like expression on her face. Sœur Robertine held her hand for us to shake, otherwise little Janiken seemed able to direct her own movements. She smiled and chatted in Flemish, then waddled off quite happy with the candies and cakes we had brought. Janiken spends her days making bead collars and bracelets for the sisters, whom she loves, and when her bead boxes are empty she places them at the foot of the statue at the end of the narrow corridor upstairs, and prays the good Saint Anthony to refill them, that she may weave more necklaces. At night as the sisters pass silently by the statue, they snap the threads of their former gifts, letting the beads shower into the boxes, and in the morning Janiken is happy again.
Sœur Robertine had never ridden in a motor, and when we proposed that she accompany us to the Franciscaine convent at Erembodeghem, not very far away, her eyes shone. And I shall not forget the faces of the others, as after a further bustle of leave-takings and good wishes, they leaned from the green doorway in the rain, clasping their hands and laughing and nodding, while we tucked their beloved sister into our car. Sœur Robertine herself sat silently and ecstatically in a corner, determined to miss no part of this extraordinary experience.