It was Dr. Small, dear “Daddy” Small, who gave me an intimate knowledge
of what was happening in Vienna a year after Armistice, and it was
Eileen O’Connor who still further enlightened me by taking me into the
babies’ _crèches_, the _Kinderspital_ and the working people’s homes,
where disease and death found their victims. She took me to these places
until I sickened and said, “I can bear no more.”
Dr. Small had a small office in the Kârtnerstrasse, where Eileen worked
with him, and it was here that I found them both a day after my arrival
in Vienna. Eileen was on her knees making a wood fire and puffing it
into a blaze for the purpose of boiling a tin kettle which stood on a
trivet, and after that, as I found, for making tea. Outside there was a
raw, horrible day, with a white mist in which those coffins were going
by and with those barefoot children with pallid faces and gaunt cheeks
padding by one’s side, so that I was glad to see the flames in the
hearth and to hear the cheerful dink of tea-cups which the doctor was
getting out. Better still, was I glad to see these two good friends, so
sane, so vital, so purposeful, as I found them, in a world of gloom and
neurosis.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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