Page:Princess Mary's Gift Book.djvu/26

12 She was, so my wife told me, an amazingly rapid worker, and could turn out three shirts while any other woman in the village was making two. Her subscriptions were very generous. Gradually the whole activities of our village centred in the Manor House. Mrs. Mimms put up another flag-staff and flew a large Red Cross from it. Working parties went on in her dining-room from morning to night, and hardly a day passed without a committee meeting. The vicar, Colonel Challenger, Hankly, and I were the committee, and we met whenever Mrs. Mimms summoned us. The vicar was supposed to preside, but it was Mrs. Mimms who suggested the things we did. The Colonel objected, in private, to every suggestion she made, but he never succeeded in carrying a point against her. Once or twice she got us into trouble. There was, for instance, a lot of ill feeling when we sealed up the village pump and set my chauffeur to keep guard over it with a gun, only allowing people to draw water for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, Mrs. Mimms had a theory that a German might come in an aeroplane and poison our water supply. That would have been a horrible thing: but the people in the village made a fuss about not being able toe get at the pump. Tompkins, the innkeeper, who was particularly objectionable, said that he only used the water for washing and would rather have it poisoned than do without it.

We all began to get rather tired of being rushed into doing things we didn’t want to do; but we were none of us able to withstand Mrs. Mimms. The Colonel said that we ought to drive her out of the village altogether, but he never succeeded in suggesting any practical way of doing it.

Fortunately she got tired of making shirts and holding committee meetings after about a month. Then she said she was going up to London io get a few families of Belgian refugees. We were all greatly pleased, for we felt that her energies might be turned into a channel which would save us from making fools of ourselves. I saw her off at the station, and we waited with the greatest curiosity to see what would happen. I suppose the Belgian Consul felt doubtful about Mrs. Mimms when he met her. At all events she came back without a single refugee. Most women would have been a little disappointed at a failure like that, but Mrs. Mimms was as full of energy as ever. She had, it appeared, called at several public offices in London and had been immensely impressed by the Boy Scouts whom she saw waiting about the doors.

“They’re the cutest things I’ve seen in England,” she said, “and their bare knees are just sweet. I could kiss them all day. I simply