THE BELGIAN WIFE
Desolate advance-guard of the vast army so soon to invade the shores of Britain, how familiar the figure is now that was then so strange to us in the quaint old-world fashion of its homely garments, the thick white dust and travel-stains that covered it, from the linen coif to the wooden shoes.
She was not old, the woman who sat with her little flock gathered about her, on the Indian stool that had supported the superb person of von Herrnung, what time he had held forth to Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood upon the loftiness of German Kultur, the perfection of German female beauty, and the overwhelming mental and bodily superiority of the German Superman. A Walloon peasant from a village near Jodoigne where she and her husband had worked upon a tiny farm.
Perhaps a dozen words of French were hers: "Tout brûle!" and "En Angleterre où il n'y a pas de Boches!"
We were to learn to reap terrible meanings from that hoarse, faint parrot-cry. Truths that raised the hairs upon the flesh and chilled the blood were to be imaged for us in the blank vacuity of her unseeing stare. We were to learn why all her children squinted, from Vic, the sturdy man of seven, and Josephine, his junior, possibly by a year, down to Georgette of the chubby cheeks and crinkly, roguish eyelids, and Albert, of the round blue stare, the big white-haired head, and the marvellous bow legs.
In their dull stunned quietude and their clayey pallor, the mark of the Beast was branded upon them, down to the livid baby in its little cap of soiled linen, swaddled in the old red shawl, that bound down its arms. You might have thought it dead, but for the flutter of a muscle in the cheek, and the faint movement of its lips, feebly sucking at the breast that had been large and bounteous, and now was lax, and flabby, covered by a network of darkish violet veins.
"Who are they? ... What are they? ... Where do they come from? ... Why were they brought here? ... Does no one know? ... Will no one tell? ..."
The silence of amazement was now breaking. The mouths belonging to the faces under the nodding feathers, old and young, handsome and ugly, vacuous and clever, silly and intellectual, were all prattling interrogations like the above. Pride of Place and Joy of Life, Thirst of Pleasure, Lust of Power, Gaiety and Weariness, Wisdom and Folly, Humbug and Sincerity, Meanness and Generosity, ringed-in the dusty group of wooden-shod mysteries and most frightfully wanted to know! And nobody offered any solution of the puzzle. The piano-organ was playing half a dozen doors below the Club, the cracked old tenor quavering to its accompaniment:
"Nous le jurons tu vivras!
Tu vivras toujours grande el belle
Et ton invincible unité
Aura pour devise immortelle——"
The music suddenly broke off. A policeman had ordered the organ to move on....