It would take 40 workers about a half year to copy this veil
Remembering the glistening shelves and floors of other Flemish kitchens, I did not mind; happily not, for in the end Stéphanie was more to me than many villages. She was bending over an immaculate cushion, seventy-eight and unmarried, and all her person as scrupulously neat as her cushion, from her odd little peaked black crochet cap to the felt shoes she had made herself. She was weaving the flat surfaces of a dainty French bouquet, and as I stept toward her chair, looked up, delighted that some one was interested in what she was making. When I picked up a Bruges collar on the nearby table she tried in ejaculatory Flemish to make me understand, that even tho she had made parts of it, she disowned the whole as unworthy the name of lace, and she brought my eyes back to the delicate texture of the leaves and petals on her cushion.
I wished to know what Stéphanie was getting for a day’s work on her fine bouquets. She has been making lace for seventy years, is intelligent and quick, and her maximum wage is two cents an hour, a franc for a day of ten hours. I asked about the future—she has thought of that, not without anxiety, and is providing at seventy-eight for what she calls “old age” by trying hard to put by two cents a week. Madame C. has been kind to her, and gives her as much freedom and comfort as she can offer; for instance, when Stéphanie was ill for three days last week, she did not deduct her wages. She would gladly double her pay, or triple it, for she realizes there are few like Stéphanie left, but the Paris firm to whom she sells pays so little for her lace that she has never been able to offer more than a franc a day. “If I could give two francs, I could quickly gather a company of 1,000 contented lace-makers, I am certain,” she said. “But when my old workers fall ill or die, I find no young girls willing to come to me; they prefer the twenty francs a week they can make picking wool. When Stéphanie goes, I shall have no single artist to replace her.” “C’est un vrai cœur de dentelle” (she is a true heart of lace), she said affectionately, as she patted her on the shoulder.
And then she went to fetch a cardboard box and I took a chair by the table, to watch her unfold what it might contain. She spread three beautiful widths of Application on blue paper so that I might better see the tiny bouquets and scattered buds and leaves that blossomed from the fine quality of machine-made tulle; all these had come from Stéphanie’s bobbins, and she was having difficulty to continue at her cushion because of her eagerness to explain them. They were French designs, as their charming lines had made me suspect. In the box with the Application were two rolls of Point d’Angleterre, the lace one finds rarely at present. We held the first one, a length of four meters, six inches wide, against the light, and then Stéphanie could sit still no longer; she knew something about this piece, for she had made its first flower in 1911, and not finished its last until the war was half over. She pointed out the spaces where a special needle-worker had introduced almost microscopic open stitches into her leaves and blooms to give them even greater airiness, and showed how almost impossible it would have been to execute these needle-stitches with bobbins; and how difficult is the stitch made with a special crochet-hook required for the raised veins and outlines (brodes) of the petals and leaves, since the hook must catch and attach the thread each time beneath the surface. Finally, a needle-worker, again, as is always the case in Point d’Angleterre, had spun the clear web between the flowers, uniting them all into the finished flounce. Stéphanie pointed to a single detail. “It took me five days to make that tiny bouquet, and the needle-worker one and a half days more to add the open stitches.”
Since the snow-covered roads made traveling extremely hazardous, I decided that I could not stop longer, no matter how absorbing the Applications and Points d’Angleterre, or how endearing the personality and contagious the enthusiasm of Stéphanie. I said “Good-by,” explaining that I had yet that day to visit the needle-lace school at Zele, twenty kilometers away.
[XII]
ZELE
Stéphanie Visits the Trade Union Lace School
But I was not to have to part with Stéphanie. When her Flemish ears gathered from my French that I was starting for Zele and the school founded three years ago, which had been the talk of the region ever since, her eyes fairly spoke her eager desire. Seventy-eight and earning twenty cents a day, and yet consumed by a love for her art (for with her, lace-making is a true art), and a passion to learn more about it! I asked Mme. Coppens if Stéphanie might not come along in the car. In answer she began bustling about, tears in her eyes, to help get her ready, and Stéphanie in her odd little woolen cap could scarcely tie her long black-hooded cape because she was constantly throwing up her hands, and exclaiming, and pressing them together, as she tried to make me understand that in all her seventy-eight years she had only twice ridden in a wagon and never had she dreamed of being in an automobile before she died. What would the neighbors say? We bundled her into the corner of the car and were off, but she could not sit still, leaning forward to exclaim over the beauty of the snow, or a windmill, or the children skating in their sabots, or huddling down to cover her face with her hands in swift shyness if some one had seemed to see her; no spirit was ever so bubbling and gay and eager and timid all at once as Stéphanie’s as we rode through the snow toward Zele.
Nor so patient as hers after we arrived; for instead of going to the school, I had to leave her in the car while I went to the house of the director, Dr. Armand Rubbens, unfortunately ill with rheumatism, who is not only the founder of the school but the inspiration of all the unusual accomplishments of the lace-workers of this town, where his father is Burgomaster. After her long wait, Stéphanie’s only comment as she looked a little fearfully at the gathering dusk, was: “It is not yet too late to see the school.”