The doctor told me of their work. It was life-saving and increasing in range of action. They had organised a number of feeding centres in Vienna, and stores from which mothers could buy condensed milk and cocoa and margarine, at next to nothing, for their starving babes. Austrian ladies were doing most of the actual work apart from organisation at headquarters, and doing it devotedly. From America and from England money was flowing in.
“The tide of thought is turning,” said the doctor. “Every dollar we get, and every shilling, is a proof that the call of humanity is being heard above the old war cries.”
“And every dollar and every shilling,” said Eileen, “is helping to save the life of some poor woman or some little mite who had no guilt in the war, but suffered from its cruelty.”
“This job,” said the doctor, “suits my peculiar philosophy. I am not out so much to save these babies’ lives——”
Here Eileen threatened to throw the teapot at his head.
“Because,” he added, “some of them would be better dead, and anyhow, you can’t save a nation by charity. But what I am out to do is to educate the heart of the world above the baseness of the passions that caused the massacre in Europe. We’re helping to do it by saving the children and by appealing to the chivalry of men and women across the old frontiers. We’re killers of cruelty, Miss Eileen and I. We’re rather puffed up with ourselves, ain’t we, my dear?”
He grinned at Eileen in a whimsical way, and I could see that between this little American and that Irish girl there was an understanding comradeship.
So he told me when she left the room a minute to get another tea-cup or wash one up.
“That girl!” he said. “Say, laddie, you couldn’t find a better head in all Europe, including Hoover himself. She’s a Napoleon Bonaparte without his blood-lust. She’s Horatio Nelson and Lord Northcliffe and Nurse Cavell all rolled into one, to produce the organising genius of Eileen O’Connor. Only you would have to add a few saints like Catherine of Sienna and Joan of Arc to allow for her spirituality. She organises feeding-centres like you would write a column article. She gets the confidence of Austrian women so that they would kiss her feet if she’d allow it. She has a head for figures that fairly puts me to shame, and as for her courage—well, I don’t mind telling you that I’ve sworn to pack her back to England if she doesn’t keep clear of typhus dens and other fever-stricken places. We can’t afford to lose her by some dirty bug-bite.”
Eileen came into the room again with another tea-cup and saucer. I counted those on the table and saw three already.