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Title: The Roadmender
Author: Michael Fairless
Illustrator: Will F. Taylor
Release Date: September 10, 2014 [EBook #46830]
Language: English
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THE ROADMENDER
[Illustration: Rolling stretches of cloud-shadowed down]
THE ROADMENDER
BY MICHAEL FAIRLESS
ILLUSTRATED WITH TWENTY
PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILL F. TAYLOR
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & CO.
1922
_Printed in Great Britain
by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_
A. M. D. G.
TO
MY MOTHER
AND TO EARTH, MY MOTHER
WHOM I LOVE
FOREWORD TO THIS EDITION
THE country amid which Margaret Fairless Barber ("Michael Fairless")
wrote "The Roadmender" is that central part of Sussex drained by the
river Adur, perhaps the least known of the three main rivers, Ouse,
Adur and Arun, which breach the South Downs. From Chanctonbury Ring to
Ditchling Beacon the Downs belong to the Adur, and this is the country
of the Roadmender. Here, from under the "stunted hawthorn," the eye
looks down on the one side to the "little church" on the Weald, and on
the other to the more distant "to and fro of the sea." Over all this
Wealden valley the "long grey downs" keep watch, and on the inland side
a constant companion of the roads is the spire of "the monastery where
the Bedesmen of St Hugh watch and pray."
Michael Fairless wrote Parts I and II of "The Roadmender" in a
farmhouse at Mock Bridge on the Adur near Henfield, and here in her
last days she lay writing "The White Gate," looking out over the
"pasture bright with buttercups where the cattle feed." Here she
died, and she was carried to the grave "under the firs in the quiet
churchyard" at Ashhurst, two miles away across the river.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE ROADMENDER 1
OUT OF THE SHADOW 47
AT THE WHITE GATE 91
ILLUSTRATIONS
ROLLING STRETCHES OF CLOUD-SHADOWED DOWN _Frontispiece_
TO FACE PAGE
THE WHITE WINDING ROAD 2
THE SOLITARY COTTAGE 6
THE LITTLE CHURCH AT THE FOOT OF THE GREY-GREEN DOWN 8
MY NICHE UNDER THE STUNTED HAWTHORN 10
ÆOLUS SHEPHERDING HIS WHITE SHEEP 12
A LITTLE LONELY COTTAGE WHOSE WINDOWS PEERED AND
BLINKED UNDER OVERHANGING BROWS OF THATCH 26
THE REEDED WATERS OF THE SEQUESTERED POOL 32
THE MONASTERY WHERE THE BEDESMEN OF ST HUGH WATCH
AND PRAY 34
THE SUN STRETCHED THE LONG SHADOWS IN SLANTING
BARS ACROSS THE WHITE HIGHWAY 38
THE GREAT WHEEL WAS AT REST 40
THE CRISP RIME OF WINTER'S BREATH 48
THE ALONENESS OF A GREAT FOREST 50
THE FIELD-GATE THAT LEADS TO THE LOWER MEADOWS 72
A HOST OF JOYOUS YELLOW TRUMPETERS 74
IN THE DISTANCE RISE THE GREAT LONE HEAVENWARD
HILLS 84
THE LINE OF THE UNTROUBLED HILLS STRONG AND
STILL IN THE BROAD SUNSHINE 94
BELOW THE LOW HEDGE LIES PASTURE BRIGHT WITH
BUTTERCUPS, WHERE THE CATTLE FEED 100
THE GREAT HORSES MOVING IN SLOW STEADY PACE
AS THE FARMER TURNS HIS FURROW 102
THERE IS A PLACE WAITING FOR ME UNDER THE
FIRS IN THE QUIET CHURCHYARD 104
THE ROADMENDER
[Illustration: The white winding road]
I
I HAVE attained my ideal: I am a roadmender, some say stonebreaker.
Both titles are correct, but the one is more pregnant than the other.
All day I sit by the roadside on a stretch of grass under a high hedge
of saplings and a tangle of traveller's joy, woodbine, sweetbriar, and
late roses. Opposite me is a white gate, seldom used, if one may judge
from the trail of honeysuckle growing tranquilly along it: I know now
that whenever and wherever I die my soul will pass out through this
white gate; and then, thank God, I shall not have need to undo that
trail.
In our youth we discussed our ideals freely: I wonder how many beside
myself have attained, or would understand my attaining. After all,
what do we ask of life, here or indeed hereafter, but leave to serve,
to live, to commune with our fellow-men and with ourselves; and from
the lap of earth to look up into the face of God? All these gifts are
mine as I sit by the winding white road and serve the footsteps of my
fellows. There is no room in my life for avarice or anxiety; I who
serve at the altar live of the altar: I lack nothing but have nothing
over; and when the winter of life comes I shall join the company of
weary old men who sit on the sunny side of the workhouse wall and wait
for the tender mercies of God.
Just now it is the summer of things; there is life and music
everywhere--in the stones themselves, and I live to-day beating out
the rhythmical hammer-song of The Ring. There is real physical joy in
the rise and swing of the arm, in the jar of a fair stroke, the split
and scatter of the quartz: I am learning to be ambidextrous, for why
should Esau sell his birthright when there is enough for both? Then the
rest-hour comes, bringing the luxurious ache of tired but not weary
limbs; and I lie outstretched and renew my strength, sometimes with my
face deep-nestled in the cool green grass, sometimes on my back looking
up into the blue sky which no wise man would wish to fathom.
The birds have no fear of me; am I not also of the brown brethren in
my sober fustian livery? They share my meals--at least the little
dun-coated Franciscans do; the blackbirds and thrushes care not a whit
for such simple food as crumbs, but with legs well apart and claws
tense with purchase they disinter poor brother worm, having first
mocked him with sound of rain. The robin that lives by the gate regards
my heap of stones as subject to his special inspection. He sits atop
and practises the trill of his summer song until it shrills above and
through the metallic clang of my strokes; and when I pause he cocks
his tail, with a humorous twinkle of his round eye which means--"What!
shirking, big brother?"--and I fall, ashamed, to my mending of roads.
The other day, as I lay with my face in the grass, I heard a gentle
rustle, and raised my head to find a hedge-snake watching me fearless,
unwinking. I stretched out my hand, picked it up unresisting, and put
it in my coat like the husbandman of old. Was he so ill-rewarded, I
wonder, with the kiss that reveals secrets? My snake slept in peace
while I hammered away with an odd quickening of heart as I thought
how to me, as to Melampus, had come the messenger--had come, but to
ears deafened by centuries of misrule, blindness, and oppression; so
that, with all my longing, I am shut out of the wondrous world where
walked Melampus and the Saint. To me there is no suggestion of evil in
the little silent creatures, harmless, or deadly only with the Death
which is Life. The beasts who turn upon us, as a rule maul and tear
unreflectingly; with the snake there is the swift, silent strike, the
tiny, tiny wound, then sleep and a forgetting.
[Illustration: The solitary cottage]
My brown friend, with its message unspoken, slid away into the grass at
sundown to tell its tale in unstopped ears; and I, my task done, went
home across the fields to the solitary cottage where I lodge. It is
old and decrepit--two rooms, with a quasi-attic over them reached by a
ladder from the kitchen and reached only by me. It is furnished with
the luxuries of life, a truckle bed, table, chair, and huge earthenware
pan which I fill from the ice-cold well at the back of the cottage.
Morning and night I serve with the Gibeonites, their curse my blessing,
as no doubt it was theirs when their hearts were purged by service.
Morning and night I send down the moss-grown bucket with its urgent
message from a dry and dusty world; the chain tightens through my hand
as the liquid treasure responds to the messenger, and then with creak
and jangle--the welcome of labouring earth--the bucket slowly nears the
top and disperses the treasure in the waiting vessels. The Gibeonites
were servants in the house of God, ministers of the sacrament of
service even as the High Priest himself; and I, sharing their high
office of servitude, thank God that the ground was accursed for my
sake, for surely that curse was the womb of all unborn blessing.
The old widow with whom I lodge has been deaf for the last twenty
years. She speaks in the strained high voice which protests against
her own infirmity, and her eyes have the pathetic look of those who
search in silence. For many years she lived alone with her son, who
laboured on the farm two miles away. He met his death rescuing a
cart-horse from its burning stable; and the farmer gave the cottage
rent free and a weekly half-crown for life to the poor old woman whose
dearest terror was the workhouse. With my shilling a week rent, and
sharing of supplies, we live in the lines of comfort. Of death she has
no fears, for in the long chest in the kitchen lie a web of coarse
white linen, two pennies covered with the same to keep down tired
eyelids, decent white stockings, and a white cotton sun-bonnet--a
decorous death-suit truly--and enough money in the little bag for
self-respecting burial. The farmer buried his servant handsomely--good
man, he knew the love of reticent grief for a 'kind' burial--and one
day Harry's mother is to lie beside him in the little churchyard which
has been a cornfield, and may some day be one again.
II
[Illustration: The little church at the foot of the grey-green down]
ON Sundays my feet take ever the same way. First my temple service,
and then five miles tramp over the tender, dewy fields, with their
ineffable earthly smell, until I reach the little church at the foot
of the grey-green down. Here, every Sunday, a young priest from a
neighbouring village says Mass for the tiny hamlet, where all are
very old or very young--for the heyday of life has no part under the
long shadow of the hills, but is away at sea or in service. There is
a beautiful seemliness in the extreme youth of the priest who serves
these aged children of God. He bends to communicate them with the
reverent tenderness of a son, and reads with the careful intonation
of far-seeing love. To the old people he is the son of their old
age, God-sent to guide their tottering footsteps along the highway
of foolish wayfarers; and he, with his youth and strength, wishes no
better task. Service ended, we greet each other friendly--for men
should not be strange in the acre of God; and I pass through the little
hamlet and out and up on the grey down beyond. Here, at the last gate,
I pause for breakfast; and then up and on with quickening pulse,
and evergreen memory of the weary war-worn Greeks who broke rank to
greet the great blue Mother-way that led to home. I stand on the summit
hatless, the wind in my hair, the smack of salt on my cheek, all round
me rolling stretches of cloud-shadowed down, no sound but the shrill
mourn of the peewit and the gathering of the sea.
The hours pass, the shadows lengthen, the sheep-bells clang; and I lie
in my niche under the stunted hawthorn watching the to and fro of the
sea, and Æolus shepherding his white sheep across the blue. I love the
sea with its impenetrable fathoms, its wash and undertow, and rasp of
shingle sucked anew. I love it for its secret dead in the Caverns of
Peace, of which account must be given when the books are opened and
earth and heaven have fled away. Yet in my love there is a paradox, for
as I watch the restless, ineffective waves I think of the measureless,
reflective depths of the still and silent Sea of Glass, of the dead,
small and great, rich or poor, with the works which follow them, and
of the Voice as the voice of many waters, when the multitude of one
mind rends heaven with alleluia: and I lie so still that I almost feel
the kiss of White Peace on my mouth. Later still, when the flare of
the sinking sun has died away and the stars rise out of a veil of
purple cloud, I take my way home, down the slopes, through the hamlet,
and across miles of sleeping fields over which night has thrown her
shifting web of mist--home to the little attic, the deep, cool well,
the kindly wrinkled face with its listening eyes--peace in my heart and
thankfulness for the rhythm of the road.
[Illustration: My niche under the stunted hawthorn]
Monday brings the joy of work, second only to the Sabbath of rest,
and I settle to my heap by the white gate. Soon I hear the distant
stamp of horsehoofs, heralding the grind and roll of the wheels which
reaches me later--a heavy flour-waggon with a team of four great gentle
horses, gay with brass trappings and scarlet earcaps. On the top of the
craftily piled sacks lies the white-clad waggoner, a pink in his mouth
which he mumbles meditatively, and the reins looped over the inactive
whip--why should he drive a willing team that knows the journey and
responds as strenuously to a cheery chirrup as to the well-directed
lash? We greet and pass the time of day, and as he mounts the rise he
calls back a warning of coming rain. I am already white with dust as he
with flour, sacramental dust, the outward and visible sign of the stir
and beat of the heart of labouring life.
Next to pass down the road is an anxious ruffled hen, her speckled
breast astir with maternal troubles. She walks delicately, lifting
her feet high and glancing furtively from side to side with comb low
dressed. The sight of man, the heartless egg-collector, from whose
haunts she has fled, wrings from her a startled cluck, and she makes
for the white gate, climbs through, and disappears. I know her feelings
too well to intrude. Many times already has she hidden herself, amassed
four or five precious treasures, brooding over them with anxious hope;
and then, after a brief desertion to seek the necessary food, she has
returned to find her efforts at concealment vain, her treasures gone.
At last, with the courage of despair she has resolved to brave the
terrors of the unknown and seek a haunt beyond the tyranny of man. I
will watch over her from afar, and when her mother-hope is fulfilled I
will marshal her and her brood back to the farm where she belongs; for
what end I care not to think, it is of the mystery which lies at the
heart of things; and we are all God's beasts, says St Augustine.
Here is my stone-song, a paraphrase of the Treasure Motif.
[Illustration: Music]
What a wonderful work Wagner has done for humanity in translating the
toil of life into the readable script of music! For those who seek
the tale of other worlds his magic is silent; but earth-travail under
his wand becomes instinct with rhythmic song to an accompaniment of
the elements, and the blare and crash of the bottomless pit itself.
The Pilgrims' March is the sad sound of footsore men; the San Graal
the tremulous yearning of servitude for richer, deeper bondage. The
yellow, thirsty flames lick up the willing sacrifice, the water wails
the secret of the river and the sea; the birds and beasts, the shepherd
with his pipe, the underground life in rocks and caverns, all cry their
message to this nineteenth-century toiling, labouring world--and to me
as I mend my road.
[Illustration: Æolus shepherding his white sheep]
Two tramps come and fling themselves by me as I eat my noonday meal.
The one, red-eyed, furtive, lies on his side with restless, clutching
hands that tear and twist and torture the living grass, while his lips
mutter incoherently. The other sits stooped, bare-footed, legs wide
apart, his face grey, almost as grey as his stubbly beard; and it is
not long since Death looked him in the eyes. He tells me querulously
of a two hundred miles tramp since early spring, of search for work,
casual jobs with more kicks than halfpence, and a brief but blissful
sojourn in a hospital bed, from which he was dismissed with sentence
passed upon him. For himself, he is determined to die on the road
under a hedge, where a man can see and breathe. His anxiety is all for
his fellow; _he_ has said he will "do for a man"; he wants to "swing,"
to get out of his "dog's life." I watch him as he lies, this Ishmael
and would-be Lamech. Ignorance, hunger, terror, the exhaustion of past
generations, have done their work. The man is mad, and would kill his
fellow-man.
Presently we part, and the two go, dogged and footsore, down the road
which is to lead them into the great silence.
III
YESTERDAY was a day of encounters.
First, early in the morning, a young girl came down the road on a
bicycle. Her dressguard was loose, and she stopped to ask for a piece
of string. When I had tied it for her she looked at me, at my worn
dusty clothes and burnt face; and then she took a Niphetos rose from
her belt and laid it shyly in my dirty disfigured palm. I bared my
head, and stood hat in hand looking after her as she rode away up the
hill. Then I took my treasure and put it in a nest of cool dewy grass
under the hedge. _Ecce ancilla Domini._
My next visitor was a fellow-worker on his way to a job at the
cross-roads. He stood gazing meditatively at my heap of stones.
"'Ow long 'ave yer bin at this job that y'ere in such a hurry?"
I stayed my hammer to answer--"Four months."
"Seen better days?"
"Never," I said emphatically, and punctuated the remark with a stone
split neatly in four.
The man surveyed me in silence for a moment; then he said slowly,
"Mean ter say yer like crackin' these blamed stones to fill 'oles some
other fool's made?"
I nodded.
"Well, that beats everything. Now, I '_ave_ seen better days; worked in
a big brewery over near Maidstone--a town that, and something doing;
and now, 'ere I am, 'ammering me 'eart out on these blasted stones for
a bit o' bread and a pipe o' baccy once a week--it ain't good enough."
He pulled a blackened clay from his pocket and began slowly filling it
with rank tobacco; then he lit it carefully behind his battered hat,
put the spent match back in his pocket, rose to his feet, hitched his
braces, and, with a silent nod to me, went on to his job.
Why do we give these tired children, whose minds move slowly, whose
eyes are holden that they cannot read the Book, whose hearts are full
of sore resentment against they know not what, such work as this to
do--hammering their hearts out for a bit of bread? All the pathos of
unreasoning labour rings in these few words. We fit the collar on
unwilling necks; and when their service is over we bid them go out
free; but we break the good Mosaic law and send them away empty. What
wonder there is so little willing service, so few ears ready to be
thrust through against the master's door.
The swift stride of civilisation is leaving behind individual effort,
and turning man into the Dæmon of a machine. To and fro in front of
the long loom, lifting a lever at either end, paces he who once with
painstaking intelligence drove the shuttle. _Then_ he tasted the joy
of completed work, that which his eye had looked upon, and his hands
had handled; now his work is as little finished as the web of Penelope.
Once the reaper grasped the golden corn stems, and with dexterous sweep
of sickle set free the treasure of the earth. Once the creatures of
the field were known to him, and his eye caught the flare of scarlet
and blue as the frail poppies and sturdy corn-cockles laid down their
beauty at his feet; now he sits serene on Juggernaut's car, its guiding
Dæmon, and the field is silent to him.
As with the web and the grain so with the wood and stone in the
treasure-house of our needs. The ground was accursed _for our sake_
that in the sweat of our brow we might eat bread. Now the many live in
the brain-sweat of the few; and it must be so, for as little as great
King Cnut could stay the sea until it had reached the appointed place,
so little can we raise a barrier to the wave of progress, and say,
"Thus far and no further shalt thou come."
What then? Tins at least; if we live in an age of mechanism let us see
to it that we are a race of intelligent mechanics; and if man is to be
the Dæmon of a machine let him know the setting of the knives, the rise
of the piston, the part that each wheel and rod plays in the economy of
the whole, the part that he himself plays, co-operating with it. Then,
when he has lived and served intelligently, let us give him of our
flocks and of our floor that he may learn to rest in the lengthening
shadows until he is called to his work above.
So I sat, hammering out my thoughts, and with them the conviction that
stonebreaking should be allotted to minor poets or vagrant children of
nature like myself, never to such tired folk as my poor mate at the
cross-roads and his fellows.
At noon, when I stopped for my meal, the sun was baking the hard white
road in a pitiless glare. Several waggons and carts passed, the horses
sweating and straining, with drooping, fly-tormented ears. The men for
the most part nodded slumberously on the shaft, seeking the little
shelter the cart afforded; but one shuffled in the white dust, with an
occasional chirrup and friendly pressure on the tired horse's neck.
Then an old woman and a small child appeared in sight, both with
enormous sun-bonnets and carrying baskets. As they came up with me
the woman stopped and swept her face with her hand, while the child,
depositing the basket in the dust with great care, wiped her little
sticky fingers on her pinafore. Then the shady hedge beckoned them and
they came and sat down near me. The woman looked about seventy, tall,
angular, dauntless, good for another ten years of hard work. The little
maid--her only grandchild, she told me--was just four, her father away
soldiering, and the mother died in childbed, so for four years the
child had known no other guardian or playmate than the old woman. She
was not the least shy, but had the strange self-possession which comes
from associating with one who has travelled far on life's journey.
"I couldn't leave her alone in the house," said her grandmother, "and
she wouldn't leave the kitten for fear it should be lonesome"--with a
humorous, tender glance at the child--"but it's a long tramp in the
heat for the little one, and we've another mile to go."
"Will you let her bide here till you come back?" I said. "She'll be all
right by me."
The old lady hesitated.
"Will 'ee stay by him, dearie?" she said.
The small child nodded, drew from her miniature pocket a piece of
sweetstuff, extracted from the basket a small black cat, and settled in
for the afternoon. Her grandmother rose, took her basket, and, with a
nod and "Thank 'ee kindly, mister," went off down the road.
I went back to my work a little depressed--why had I not white
hair?--for a few minutes had shown me that I was not old enough for the
child despite my forty years. She was quite happy with the little black
cat, which lay in the small lap blinking its yellow eyes at the sun;
and presently an old man came by, lame and bent, with gnarled twisted
hands, leaning heavily on his stick.
He greeted me in a high, piping voice, limped across to the child, and
sat down.
"Your little maid, mister?" he said.
I explained.
"Ah," he said, "I've left a little darlin' like this at 'ome. It's 'ard
on us old folks when we're one too many; but the little mouths must be
filled, and my son, 'e said 'e didn't see they could keep me on the
arf-crown, with another child on the way; so I'm tramping to N----, to
the House; but it's a 'ard pinch, leavin' the little ones."
I looked at him--a typical countryman, with white hair, mild blue eyes,
and a rosy, childish, unwrinkled face.
"I'm eighty-four," he went on, "and terrible bad with the rheumatics
and my chest. Maybe it'll not be long before the Lord remembers me."
The child crept close and put a sticky little hand confidingly into
the tired old palm. The two looked strangely alike, for the world seems
much the same to those who leave it behind as to those who have but
taken the first step on its circular pathway.
"'Ook at my kitty," she said, pointing to the small creature in her
lap. Then, as the old man touched it with trembling fingers she went
on--"'Oo isn't my grandad; he's away in the sky, but I'll kiss 'oo."
I worked on, hearing at intervals the old piping voice and the
child-treble, much of a note; and thinking of the blessings vouchsafed
to the simple old age which crowns a harmless working-life spent in
the fields. The two under the hedge had everything in common and were
boundlessly content together, the sting of the knowledge of good and
evil past for the one, and for the other still to come; while I stood
on the battlefield of the world, the flesh, and the devil, though,
thank God, with my face to the foe.
The old man sat resting: I had promised him a lift with my friend
the driver of the flour-cart, and he was almost due when the child's
grandmother came down the road.
When she saw my other visitor she stood amazed.
"What, Richard Hunton, that worked with my old man years ago up at
Ditton, whatever are you doin' all these miles from your own place?"
"Is it Eliza Jakes?"
He looked at her dazed, doubtful.
"An' who else should it be? Where's your memory gone, Richard Hunton,
and you not such a great age either? Where are you stayin'?"
Shame overcame him; his lips trembled, his mild blue eyes filled with
tears. I told the tale as I had heard it, and Mrs Jakes's indignation
was good to see.
"Not keep you on 'alf a crown! Send you to the House! May the Lord
forgive them! You wouldn't eat no more than a fair-sized cat, and not
long for this world either, that's plain to see. No, Richard Hunton,
you don't go to the House while I'm above ground; it'd make my good man
turn to think of it. You'll come 'ome with me and the little 'un there.
I've my washin', and a bit put by for a rainy day, and a bed to spare,
and the Lord and the parson will see I don't come to want."
She stopped breathless, her defensive motherhood in arms.
The old man said quaveringly, in the pathetic, grudging phrase of
the poor, which veils their gratitude while it testifies their
independence, "Maybe I might as well." He rose with difficulty, picked
up his bundle and stick, the small child replaced the kitten in its
basket, and thrust her hand in her new friend's.
"Then 'oo _is_ grandad tum back," she said.
Mrs Jakes had been fumbling in her pocket, and extracted a penny, which
she pressed on me.
"It's little enough, mister," she said.
Then, as I tried to return it: "Nay, I've enough, and yours is poor
paid work."
I hope I shall always be able to keep that penny; and as I watched the
three going down the dusty white road, with the child in the middle, I
thanked God for the Brotherhood of the Poor.
IV
YESTERDAY a funeral passed, from the workhouse at N----, a quaint
sepulture without solemnities. The rough, ungarnished coffin of stained
deal lay bare and unsightly on the floor of an old market-cart; a woman
sat beside, steadying it with her feet. The husband drove; and the most
depressed of the three was the horse, a broken-kneed, flea-bitten grey.
It was pathetic, this bringing home in death of the old father whom,
while he lived, they had been too poor to house; it was at no small
sacrifice that they had spared him that terror of old age, a pauper's
grave, and brought him to lie by his wife in our quiet churchyard. They
felt no emotion, this husband and wife, only a dull sense of filial
duty done, respectability preserved; and above and through all, the
bitter but necessary counting the cost of this last bed.
It is strange how pagan many of us are in our beliefs. True, the
funeral libations have made way for the comfortable bake-meats; still,
to the large majority Death is Pluto, king of the dark Unknown whence
no traveller returns, rather than Azrael, brother and friend, lord
of this mansion of life. Strange how men shun him as he waits in the
shadow, watching our puny straining after immortality, sending his
comrade sleep to prepare us for himself. When the hour strikes he
comes--very gently, very tenderly, if we will but have it so--folds
the tired hands together, takes the wayworn feet in his broad strong
palm; and lifting us in his wonderful arms he bears us swiftly down the
valley and across the waters of Remembrance.
Very pleasant art thou, O Brother Death, thy love is wonderful, passing
the love of women.
* * * * *
To-day I have lived in a whirl of dust. To-morrow is the great annual
Cattle Fair at E----, and through the long hot hours the beasts from
all the district round have streamed in broken procession along my
road, to change hands or to die. Surely the lordship over creation
implies wise and gentle rule for intelligent use, not the pursuit of
a mere immediate end, without any thought of community in the great
sacrament of life.
For the most part mystery has ceased for this working Western world,
and with it reverence. Coventry Patmore says: "God clothes Himself
actually and literally with His whole creation. Herbs take up and
assimilate minerals, beasts assimilate herbs, and God, in the
Incarnation and its proper Sacrament, assimilates us, who, says St
Augustine, 'are God's beasts.'" It is man in his blind self-seeking who
separates woof from weft in the living garment of God, and loses the
more as he neglects the outward and visible signs of a world-wide grace.
In olden days the herd led his flock, going first in the post of danger
to defend the creatures he had weaned from their natural habits for
his various uses. Now that good relationship has ceased for us to
exist, man drives the beasts before him, means to his end, but with no
harmony between end and means. All day long the droves of sheep pass
me on their lame and patient way, no longer freely and instinctively
following a protector and forerunner, but _driven_, impelled by force
and resistless will--the same will which once went before without
force. They are all trimmed as much as possible to one pattern, and all
make the same sad plaint. It is a day on which to thank God for the
unknown tongue. The drover and his lad in dusty blue coats plod along
stolidly, deaf and blind to all but the way before them; no longer
wielding the crook, instrument of deliverance, or at most of gentle
compulsion, but armed with a heavy stick and mechanically dealing
blows on the short thick fleeces; without evil intent because without
thought--it is the ritual of the trade.
[Illustration: A little lonely cottage]
Of all the poor dumb pilgrims of the road the bullocks are the most
terrible to see. They are not patient, but go most unwillingly with
lowered head and furtive sideways motion, in their eyes a horror of
great fear. The sleek cattle, knee deep in pasture, massed at the gate,
and stared mild-eyed and with inquiring bellow at the retreating drove;
but these passed without answer on to the Unknown, and for them it
spelt death.
Behind a squadron of sleek, well-fed cart-horses, formed in fours, with
straw braid in mane and tail, came the ponies, for the most part a
merry company. Long strings of rusty, shaggy two-year-olds, unbroken,
unkempt, the short Down grass still sweet on their tongues; full of
fun, frolic, and wickedness, biting and pulling, casting longing eyes
at the hedgerows. The boys appear to recognise them as kindred spirits,
and are curiously forbearing and patient. Soon both ponies and boys
vanish in a white whirl, and a long line of carts, which had evidently
waited for the dust to subside, comes slowly up the incline. For the
most part they carry the pigs and fowls, carriage folk of the road. The
latter are hot, crowded, and dusty under the open netting; the former
for the most part cheerfully remonstrative.
I drew a breath of relief as the noise of wheels died away and my
road sank into silence. The hedgerows are no longer green but white
and choked with dust, a sight to move good sister Rain to welcome
tears. The birds seem to have fled before the noisy confusion. I wonder
whether my snake has seen and smiled at the clumsy ruling of the lord
he so little heeds? I turned aside through the gate to plunge face and
hands into the cool of the sheltered grass that side the hedge, and
then rested my eyes on the stretch of green I had lacked all day. The
rabbits had apparently played and browsed unmindful of the stir, and
were still flirting their white tails along the hedgerows; a lark rose,
another and another, and I went back to my road. Peace still reigned,
for the shadows were lengthening, and there would be little more
traffic for the fair. I turned to my work, grateful for the stillness,
and saw on the white stretch of road a lone old man and a pig. Surely I
knew that tall figure in the quaint grey smock, surely I knew the face,
furrowed like nature's face in springtime, and crowned by a round, soft
hat? And the pig, the black pig walking decorously free? Ay, I knew
them.
In the early spring I took a whole holiday and a long tramp; and
towards afternoon, tired and thirsty, sought water at a little lonely
cottage whose windows peered and blinked under overhanging brows of
thatch. I had, not the water I asked for, but milk and a bowl of sweet
porridge for which I paid only thanks; and stayed for a chat with my
kindly hosts. They were a quaint old couple of the kind rarely met with
nowadays. They enjoyed a little pension from the Squire and a garden in
which vegetables and flowers lived side by side in friendliest fashion.
Bees worked and sang over the thyme and marjoram, blooming early in a
sunny nook; and in a homely sty lived a solemn black pig, a pig with a
history.
It was no common utilitarian pig, but the honoured guest of the
old couple, and it knew it. A year before, their youngest and only
surviving child, then a man of five-and-twenty, had brought his mother
the result of his savings in the shape of a fine young pig: a week
later he lay dead of the typhoid that scourged Maidstone. Hence the pig
was sacred, cared for and loved by this Darby and Joan.
"Ee be mos' like a child to me and the mother, an' mos' as sensible as
a Christian, ee be," the old man had said; and I could hardly credit my
eyes when I saw the tall bent figure side by side with the black pig,
coming along my road on such a day.
I hailed the old man, and both turned aside; but he gazed at me without
remembrance.
I spoke of the pig and its history. He nodded wearily. "Ay, ay, lad,
you've got it; 'tis poor Dick's pig right enow."
"But you're never going to take it to E----?"
"Ay, but I be, and comin' back alone, if the Lord be marciful. The
missus has been terrible bad this two months and more; Squire's in
foreign parts; and food-stuffs such as the old woman wants is hard
buying for poor folks. The stocking's empty, now 'tis the pig must
go, and I believe he'd be glad for to do the missus a turn; she were
terrible good to him, were the missus, and fond, too. I dursn't tell
her he was to go; she'd sooner starve than lose poor Dick's pig. Well,
we'd best be movin'; 'tis a fairish step."
The pig followed comprehending and docile, and as the quaint couple
passed from sight I thought I heard Brother Death stir in the shadow.
He is a strong angel and of great pity.
V
THERE is always a little fire of wood on the open hearth in the kitchen
when I get home at night; the old lady says it is "company" for her,
and sits in the lonely twilight, her knotted hands lying quiet on her
lap, her listening eyes fixed on the burning sticks.
I wonder sometimes whether she hears music in the leap and lick of the
fiery tongues, music such as he of Bayreuth draws from the violins till
the hot energy of the fire spirit is on us, embodied in sound.
Surely she hears some voice, that lonely old woman on whom is set the
seal of great silence?
It is a great truth tenderly said that God builds the nest for the
blind bird; and may it not be that He opens closed eyes and unstops
deaf ears to sights and sounds from which others by these very senses
are debarred?
Here the best of us see through a mist of tears men as trees walking;
it is only in the land which is very far off and yet very near that
we shall have fulness of sight and see the King in His beauty; and I
cannot think that any listening ears listen in vain.
The coppice at our back is full of birds, for it is far from the road
and they nest there undisturbed year after year. Through the still
night I heard the nightingales calling, calling, until I could bear it
no longer and went softly out into the luminous dark.
The little wood was manifold with sound, I heard my little brothers who
move by night rustling in grass and tree. A hedgehog crossed my path
with a dull squeak, the bats shrilled high to the stars, a white owl
swept past me crying his hunting note, a beetle boomed suddenly in my
face; and above and through it all the nightingales sang--and sang!
The night wind bent the listening trees, and the stars yearned
earthward to hear the song of deathless love. Louder and louder the
wonderful notes rose and fell in a passion of melody; and then sank to
rest on that low thrilling call which it is said Death once heard, and
stayed his hand.
They will scarcely sing again this year, these nightingales, for they
are late on the wing as it is. It seems as if on such nights they sang
as the swan sings, knowing it to be the last time--with the lavish note
of one who bids an eternal farewell.
At last there was silence. Sitting under the big beech tree, the giant
of the coppice, I rested my tired self in the lap of mother earth,
breathed of her breath and listened to her voice in the quickening
silence until my flesh came again as the flesh of a little child, for
it is true recreation to sit at the foot-stool of God wrapped in a fold
of His living robe, the while night smoothes our tired face with her
healing hands.
[Illustration: The reeded waters of the sequestered pool]
The grey dawn awoke and stole with trailing robes across earth's floor.
At her footsteps the birds roused from sleep and cried a greeting; the
sky flushed and paled conscious of coming splendour; and overhead a
file of swans passed with broad strong flight to the reeded waters of
the sequestered pool.
Another hour of silence while the light throbbed and flamed in the
east; then the larks rose harmonious from a neighbouring field, the
rabbits scurried with ears alert to their morning meal, the day had
begun.
I passed through the coppice and out into the fields beyond. The dew
lay heavy on leaf and blade and gossamer, a cool fresh wind swept clear
over dale and down from the sea, and the clover field rippled like a
silvery lake in the breeze.
There is something inexpressibly beautiful in the unused day, something
beautiful in the fact that it is still untouched, unsoiled; and town
and country share alike in this loveliness. At half-past three on
a June morning even London has not assumed her responsibilities, but
smiles and glows lighthearted and smokeless under the caresses of the
morning sun.
Five o'clock. The bell rings out crisp and clear from the monastery
where the Bedesmen of St Hugh watch and pray for the souls on this
labouring forgetful earth. Every hour the note of comfort and warning
cries across the land, tells the Sanctus, the Angelus, and the Hours of
the Passion, and calls to remembrance and prayer.
When the wind is north, the sound carries as far as my road, and
companies me through the day; and if to His dumb children God in His
mercy reckons work as prayer, most certainly those who have forged
through the ages an unbroken chain of supplication and thanksgiving
will be counted among the stalwart labourers of the house of the Lord.
Sun and bell together are my only clock: it is time for my water
drawing; and gathering a pile of mushrooms, children of the night, I
hasten home.
The cottage is dear to me in its quaint untidiness and want of
rectitude, dear because we are to be its last denizens, last of the
long line of toilers who have sweated and sown that others might reap,
and have passed away leaving no trace.
I once saw a tall cross in a seaboard churchyard, inscribed, "To the
memory of the unknown dead who have perished in these waters." There
might be one in every village sleeping-place to the unhonoured many who
made fruitful the land with sweat and tears. It is a consolation to
think that when we look back on this stretch of life's road from beyond
the first milestone, which, it is instructive to remember, is always a
grave, we may hope to see the work of this world with open eyes, and to
judge of it with a due sense of proportion.
[Illustration: The monastery where the Bedesmen of St. Hugh watch and
pray]
A bee with laden honey-bag hummed and buzzed in the hedge as I got
ready for work, importuning the flowers for that which he could not
carry, and finally giving up the attempt in despair fell asleep on a
buttercup, the best place for his weary little velvet body. In five
minutes--they may have been five hours to him--he awoke a new bee,
sensible and clear-sighted, and flew blithely away to the hive with his
sufficiency--an example this weary world would be wise to follow.
My road has been lonely to-day. A parson came by in the afternoon, a
stranger in the neighbourhood, for he asked his way. He talked awhile,
and with kindly rebuke said it was sad to see a man of my education
brought so low, which shows how the outside appearance may mislead the
prejudiced observer. "Was it misfortune?" "Nay, the best of good
luck," I answered, gaily.
The good man with beautiful readiness sat down on a heap of stones and
bade me say on. "Read me a sermon in stone," he said, simply; and I
stayed my hand to read.
He listened with courteous intelligence.
"You hold a roadmender has a vocation?" he asked.
"As the monk or the artist, for, like both, he is universal. The world
is his home; he serves all men alike, ay, and for him the beasts have
equal honour with the men. His soul is 'bound up in the bundle of life'
with all other souls, he sees his father, his mother, his brethren in
the children of the road. For him there is nothing unclean, nothing
common; the very stones cry out that they serve."
Parson nodded his head.
"It is all true," he said; "beautifully true. But need such a view of
life necessitate the work of roadmending? Surely all men should be
roadmenders."
O wise parson, so to read the lesson of the road!
"It is true," I answered; "but some of us find our salvation in the
actual work, and earn our bread better in this than in any other way.
No man is dependent on our earning, all men on our work. We are 'rich
beyond the dreams of avarice' because we have all that we need, and
yet we taste the life and poverty of the very poor. We are, if you
will, uncloistered monks, preaching friars who speak not with the
tongue, disciples who hear the wise words of a silent master."
"Robert Louis Stevenson was a roadmender," said the wise parson.
"Ay, and with more than his pen," I answered. "I wonder was he ever so
truly great, so entirely the man we know and love, as when he inspired
the chiefs to make a highway in the wilderness. Surely no more fitting
monument could exist to his memory than the Road of Gratitude, cut,
laid, and kept by the pure-blooded tribe kings of Samoa."
Parson nodded.
"He knew that the people who make no roads are ruled out from
intelligent participation in the world's brotherhood." He filled his
pipe, thinking the while, then he held out his pouch to me.
"Try some of this baccy," he said; "Sherwood of Magdalen sent it me
from some outlandish place."
I accepted gratefully. It was such tobacco as falls to the lot of few
roadmenders.
He rose to go.
"I wish I could come and break stones," he said, a little wistfully.
"Nay," said I, "few men have such weary roadmending as yours, and
perhaps you need my road less than most men, and less than most
parsons."
We shook hands, and he went down the road and out of my life.
He little guessed that I knew Sherwood, ay, and knew him too, for had
not Sherwood told me of the man he delighted to honour.
Ah, well! I am no Browning Junior, and Sherwood's name is not Sherwood.
VI
AWHILE ago I took a holiday; mouched, played truant from my road. Jem
the waggoner hailed me as he passed--he was going to the mill--would I
ride with him and come back atop of the full sacks?
[Illustration: The sun stretched the long shadows in slanting bars
across the white highway]
I hid my hammer in the hedge, climbed into the great waggon white and
fragrant with the clean sweet meal, and flung myself down on the empty
flour bags. The looped-back tarpaulin framed the long vista of my road
with the downs beyond; and I lay in the cool dark, caressed by the
fresh breeze in its thoroughfare, soothed by the strong monotonous
tramp of the great grey team and the music of the jangling harness.
Jem walked at the leaders' heads; it is his rule when the waggon is
empty, a rule no "company" will make him break. At first I regretted
it, but soon discovered I learnt to know him better so, as he plodded
along, his thickset figure slightly bent, his hands in his pockets,
his whip under one arm, whistling hymn tunes in a low minor, while the
great horses answered to his voice without touch of lash or guiding
rein.
I lay as in a blissful dream and watched my road unfold. The sun set
the pine-boles aflare where the hedge is sparse, and stretched the long
shadows of the besom poplars in slanting bars across the white highway;
the roadside gardens smiled friendly with their trim-cut laurels and
rows of stately sunflowers--a seemly proximity this, Daphne and Clytie,
sisters in experience, wrapped in the warm caress of the god whose
wooing they need no longer fear. Here and there we passed little groups
of women and children off to work in the early cornfields, and Jem
paused in his fond repetition of "The Lord my pasture shall prepare" to
give them good-day.
It is like Life, this travelling backwards--that which has been, alone
visible--like Life, which is after all, retrospective with a steady
moving on into the Unknown, Unseen, until Faith is lost in Sight and
experience is no longer the touchstone of humanity. The face of the son
of Adam is set on the road his brothers have travelled, marking their
landmarks, tracing their journeyings; but with the eyes of a child of
God he looks forward, straining to catch a glimpse of the jewelled
walls of his future home, the city "Eternal in the Heavens."
Presently we left my road for the deep shade of a narrow country way
where the great oaks and beeches meet overhead and no hedge-clipper
sets his hand to stay nature's profusion; and so by pleasant lanes
scarce the waggon's width across, now shady, now sunny, here bordered
by thickset coverts, there giving on fruitful fields, we came at length
to the mill.
[Illustration: The great wheel was at rest]
I left Jem to his business with the miller and wandered down the
flowery meadow to listen to the merry clack of the stream and the voice
of the waters on the weir. The great wheel was at rest, as I love best
to see it in the later afternoon; the splash and churn of the water
belong rather to the morning hours. It is the chief mistake we make in
portioning out our day that we banish rest to the night-time, which is
for sleep and recreating, instead of setting apart the later afternoon
and quiet twilight hours for the stretching of weary limbs and repose
of tired mind after a day's toil that should begin and end at five.
The little stone bridge over the mill-stream is almost on a level
with the clear running water, and I lay there and gazed at the huge
wheel which, under multitudinous forms and uses, is one of the world's
wonders, because one of the few things we imitative children have not
learnt from nature. Is it perchance a memory out of that past when Adam
walked clear-eyed in Paradise and talked with the Lord in the cool of
the day? Did he see then the flaming wheels instinct with service,
wondrous messengers of the Most High vouchsafed in vision to the later
prophets?
Maybe he did, and going forth from before the avenging sword of his
own forging to the bitterness of an accursed earth, took with him this
bright memory of perfect, ceaseless service, and so fashioned our
labouring wheel--pathetic link with the time of his innocency. It is
one of many unanswered questions, good to ask because it has no answer,
only the suggestion of a train of thought: perhaps we are never so
receptive as when with folded hands we say simply, "This is a great
mystery." I watched and wondered until Jem called, and I had to leave
the rippling weir and the water's side, and the wheel with its untold
secret.
The miller's wife gave me tea and a crust of homemade bread, and the
miller's little maid sat on my knee while I told the sad tale of a
little pink cloud separated from its parents and teazed and hunted
by mischievous little airs. To-morrow, if I mistake not, her garden
will be wet with its tears, and, let us hope, point a moral; for the
tale had its origin in a frenzied chicken driven from the side of an
anxious mother, and pursued by a sturdy, relentless figure in a white
sun-bonnet.
The little maid trotted off, greatly sobered, to look somewhat
prematurely for the cloud's tears; and I climbed to my place at the top
of the piled-up sacks, and thence watched twilight pass to starlight
through my narrow peep, and, so watching, slept until Jem's voice
hailed me from Dreamland, and I went, only half awake, across the dark
fields home.
* * * * *
Autumn is here and it is already late. He has painted the hedges russet
and gold, scarlet and black, and a tangle of grey; now he has damp
brown leaves in his hair and frost in his finger-tips.
It is a season of contrasts; at first all is stir and bustle, the
ingathering of man and beast; barn and rickyard stand filled with
golden treasure; at the farm the sound of threshing; in wood and copse
the squirrels busied 'twixt tree and storehouse, while the ripe nuts
fall with thud of thunder rain. When the harvesting is over, the fruit
gathered, the last rick thatched, there comes a pause. Earth strips
off her bright colours and shows a bare and furrowed face; the dead
leaves fall gently and sadly through the calm, sweet air; grey mists
drape the fields and hedges. The migratory birds have left, save a few
late swallows; and as I sit at work in the soft, still rain, I can hear
the blackbird's melancholy trill and the thin pipe of the redbreast's
winter song--the air is full of the sound of farewell.
Forethought and preparation for the Future which shall be; farewell,
because of the Future which may never be--for us; "Man, thou hast
goods laid up for many years, and it is well; but, remember, this
night _thy_ soul may be required"; is the unvoiced lesson of autumn.
There is growing up among us a great fear; it stares at us white,
wide-eyed, from the faces of men and women alike--the fear of pain,
mental and bodily pain. For the last twenty years we have waged war
with suffering--a noble war when fought in the interest of the many,
but fraught with great danger to each individual man. It is the fear
which should not be, rather than the 'hope which is in us,' that leads
men in these days to drape Death in a flowery mantle, to lay stress
on the shortness of parting, the speedy reunion, to postpone their
good-byes until the last moment, or avoid saying them altogether; and
this fear is a poor, ignoble thing, unworthy of those who are as gods,
knowing good and evil. We are still paying the price of that knowledge;
suffering in both kinds is a substantial part of it, and brings its
own healing. Let us pay like men, our face to the open heaven, neither
whimpering like children in the dark, nor lulled to unnecessary
oblivion by some lethal drug; for it is manly, not morbid, to dare to
taste the pungent savour of pain, the lingering sadness of farewell
which emphasises the aftermath of life; it should have its place in
all our preparation as a part of our inheritance we dare not be without.
There is an old couple in our village who are past work. The married
daughter has made shift to take her mother and the parish half-crown,
but there is neither room nor food for the father, and he must go to
N----. If husband and wife went together, they would be separated at
the workhouse door. The parting had to come; it came yesterday. I saw
them stumbling lamely down the road on their last journey together,
walking side by side without touch or speech, seeing and heeding
nothing but a blank future. As they passed me the old man said gruffly,
"'Tis far eno'; better be gettin' back"; but the woman shook her head,
and they breasted the hill together. At the top they paused, shook
hands, and separated; one went on, the other turned back; and as the
old woman limped blindly by I turned away, for there are sights a man
dare not look upon. She passed; and I heard a child's shrill voice say,
"I come to look for you, gran"; and I thanked God that there need be no
utter loneliness in the world while it holds a little child.
Now it is my turn, and I must leave the wayside to serve in the
sheepfolds during the winter months. It is scarcely a farewell, for
my road is ubiquitous, eternal; there are green ways in Paradise and
golden streets in the beautiful City of God. Nevertheless, my heart
is heavy; for, viewed by the light of the waning year, roadmending
seems a great and wonderful work which I have poorly conceived of and
meanly performed: yet I have learnt to understand dimly the truths of
three great paradoxes--the blessing of a curse, the voice of silence,
the companionship of solitude--and so take my leave of this stretch of
road, and of you who have fared along the white highway through the
medium of a printed page.
Farewell! It is a roadmender's word; I cry you Godspeed to the next
milestone--and beyond.
OUT OF THE SHADOW
[Illustration: The crisp rime of winter's breath]
I
I AM no longer a roadmender; the stretch of white highway which leads
to the end of the world will know me no more; the fields and hedgerows,
grass and leaf stiff with the crisp rime of winter's breath, lie
beyond my horizon; the ewes in the folding, their mysterious eyes
quick with the consciousness of coming motherhood, answer another's
voice and hand; while I lie here, not in the lonely companionship of
my expectations, but where the shadow is bright with kindly faces and
gentle hands, until one kinder and gentler still carries me down the
stairway into the larger room.
But now the veil was held aside and one went by crowned with the
majesty of years, wearing the ermine of an unstained rule, the
purple of her people's loyalty. Nations stood with bated breath
to see her pass in the starlit mist of her children's tears; a
monarch--greatest of her time; an empress--conquered men called mother;
a woman--Englishmen cried queen; still the crowned captive of her
people's heart--the prisoner of love.
The night-goers passed under my window in silence, neither song nor
shout broke the welcome dark; next morning the workmen who went by were
strangely quiet.
'VICTORIA DEI GRATIA BRITANNIARUM REGINA.'
Did they think of how that legend would disappear, and of all it meant,
as they paid their pennies at the coffee-stall? The feet rarely know
the true value and work of the head; but all Englishmen have been and
will be quick to acknowledge and revere Victoria by the grace of God a
wise woman, a great and loving mother.
[Illustration: The aloneness of a great forest]
Years ago, I, standing at a level crossing, saw her pass. The train
slowed down, and she caught sight of the gatekeeper's little girl
who had climbed the barrier. Such a smile as she gave her! And then
I caught a quick startled gesture as she slipped from my vision; I
thought afterwards it was that she feared the child might fall. Mother
first, then Queen; even so rest came to her--not in one of the royal
palaces, but in her own home, surrounded by the immediate circle of her
nearest and dearest, while the world kept watch and ward.
I, a shy lover of the fields and woods, longed always, should a
painless passing be vouchsafed me, to make my bed on the fragrant pine
needles in the aloneness of a great forest; to lie once again as I had
lain many a time, bathed in the bitter sweetness of the sun-blessed
pines, lapped in the manifold silence; my ear attuned to the wind of
Heaven with its call from the Cities of Peace. In sterner mood, when
Love's hand held a scourge, I craved rather the stress of the moorland
with its bleaker mind imperative of sacrifice. To rest again under the
lee of Rippon Tor swept by the strong peat-smelling breeze; to stare
untired at the long cloud-shadowed reaches, and watch the mist-wraiths
huddle and shrink round the stones of blood; until my sacrifice too
was accomplished, and my soul had fled. A wild waste moor; a vast void
sky; and naught between heaven and earth but man, his sin-glazed eyes
seeking afar the distant light of his own heart.
With years came counsels more profound, and the knowledge that man was
no mere dweller in the woods to follow the footsteps of the piping
god, but an integral part of an organised whole, in which Pan too
has his fulfilment. The wise Venetians knew; and read pantheism into
Christianity when they set these words round Ezekiel's living creatures
in the altar vault of St Mark's:--
QUAEQUE SUB OBSCURIS DE CRISTO DICTA FIGURIS
HIS APERIRE DATUR ET IN HIS, DEUS IPSE NOTATUR.
"Thou shalt have none other gods but me." If man had been able to keep
this one commandment perfectly the other nine would never have been
written; instead he has comprehensively disregarded it, and perhaps
never more than now in the twentieth century. Ah, well! this world,
in spite of all its sinning, is still the Garden of Eden where the
Lord walked with man, not in the cool of evening, but in the heat and
stress of the immediate working day. There is no angel now with naming
sword to keep the way of the Tree of Life, but tapers alight morning
by morning in the Hostel of God to point us to it; and we, who are as
gods knowing good and evil, partake of that fruit "whereof whoso eateth
shall never die"; the greatest gift or the most awful penalty--Eternal
Life.
I then, with my craving for tree and sky, held that a great capital
with its stir of life and death, of toil and strife and pleasure, was
an ill place for a sick man to wait in; a place to shrink from as a
child shrinks from the rude blow of one out of authority. Yet here, far
from moor and forest, hillside and hedgerow, in the family sitting-room
of the English-speaking peoples, the London much misunderstood, I
find the fulfilment by antithesis of all desire. For the loneliness
of the moorland, there is the warmth and companionship of London's
swift beating heart. For silence there is sound--the sound and stir
of service--for the most part far in excess of its earthly equivalent.
Against the fragrant incense of the pines I set the honest sweat of the
man whose lifetime is the measure of his working day. "He that loveth
not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath
not seen?" wrote Blessed John, who himself loved so much that he beheld
the Lamb as it had been slain from the beginning when Adam fell, and
the City of God with light most precious. The burden of corporate sin,
the sword of corporate sorrow, the joy of corporate righteousness; thus
we become citizens in the Kingdom of God, and companions of all his
creatures. "It is not good that the man should be alone," said the Lord
God.
I live now as it were in two worlds, the world of sight, and the world
of sound; and they scarcely ever touch each other. I hear the grind of
heavy traffic, the struggle of horses on the frost-breathed ground, the
decorous jolt of omnibuses, the jangle of cab bells, the sharp warning
of bicycles at the corner, the swift rattle of costers' carts as they
go south at night with their shouting, goading crew. All these things
I hear, and more; but I see no road, only the silent river of my heart
with its tale of wonder and years, and the white beat of seagulls'
wings in strong inquiring flight.
Sometimes there is naught to see on the waterway but a solitary black
hull, a very Stygian ferry-boat, manned by a solitary figure, and
moving slowly up under the impulse of the far-reaching sweeps. Then
the great barges pass with their coffined treasure, drawn by a small
self-righteous steam-tug. Later, lightened of their load, and waiting
on wind and tide, I see them swooping by like birds set free; tawny
sails that mind me of red-roofed Whitby with its northern fleet; black
sails as of some heedless Theseus; white sails that sweep out of the
morning mist "like restless gossameres." They make the bridge, which is
just within my vision, and then away past Westminster and Blackfriars
where St Paul's great dome lifts the cross high over a self-seeking
city; past Southwark where England's poet illuminates in the scroll of
divine wisdom the sign of the Tabard; past the Tower with its haunting
ghosts of history; past Greenwich, fairy city, caught in the meshes of
riverside mist; and then the salt and speer of the sea, the companying
with great ships, the fresh burden.
At night I see them again, silent, mysterious; searching the darkness
with unwinking yellow stare, led by a great green light. They creep
up under the bridge which spans the river with its watching eyes, and
vanish, crying back a warning note as they make the upper reach, or
strident hail, as a chain of kindred phantoms passes, ploughing a
contrary tide.
Throughout the long watches of the night I follow them; and in the
early morning they slide by, their eyes pale in the twilight; while the
stars flicker and fade, and the gas lamps die down into a dull yellow
blotch against the glory and glow of a new day.
II
FEBRUARY is here, February fill-dyke; the month of purification, of
cleansing rains and pulsing bounding streams, and white mist clinging
insistent to field and hedgerow so that when her veil is withdrawn
greenness may make us glad.
The river has been uniformly grey of late, with no wind to ruffle
its surface or to speed the barges dropping slowly and sullenly down
with the tide through a blurring haze. I watched one yesterday, its
useless sails half-furled and no sign of life save the man at the helm.
It drifted stealthily past, and a little behind, flying low, came a
solitary seagull, grey as the river's haze--a following bird.
Once again I lay on my back in the bottom of the tarry old fishing
smack, blue sky above and no sound but the knock, knock of the waves,
and the thud and curl of falling foam as the old boat's blunt nose
breasted the coming sea. Then Daddy Whiddon spoke.
"A follerin' bürrd," he said.
I got up, and looked across the blue field we were ploughing into white
furrows. Far away a tiny sail scarred the great solitude, and astern
came a gull flying slowly close to the water's breast.
Daddy Whiddon waved his pipe towards it.
"A follerin' bürrd," he said, again; and again I waited; questions were
not grateful to him.
"There be a carpse there, sure enough, a carpse driftin' and shiftin'
on the floor of the sea. There be those as can't rest, poor sawls, and
her'll be mun, her'll be mun, and the sperrit of her is with the bürrd."
The clumsy boom swung across as we changed our course, and the water
ran from us in smooth reaches on either side: the bird flew steadily on.
"What will the spirit do?" I said.
The old man looked at me gravely.
"Her'll rest in the Lard's time, in the Lard's gude time--but now
her'll just be follerin' on with the bürrd."
The gull was flying close to us now, and a cold wind swept the sunny
sea. I shivered: Daddy looked at me curiously.
"There be reason enough to be cawld if us did but knaw it, but I be
mos' used to 'em, poor sawls." He shaded his keen old blue eyes, and
looked away across the water. His face kindled. "There be a skule
comin', and by my sawl 'tis mackerel they be drivin'."
I watched eagerly, and saw the dark line rise and fall in the trough
of the sea, and, away behind, the stir and rush of tumbling porpoises
as they chased their prey.
Again we changed our tack, and each taking an oar, pulled lustily for
the beach.
"Please God her'll break inshore," said Daddy Whiddon; and he shouted
the news at the idle men waiting who hailed us.
In a moment all was stir, for the fishing had been slack. Two boats
put out with the lithe brown seine. The dark line had turned, but the
school was still behind, churning the water in clumsy haste; they were
coming in.
Then the brit broke in silvery leaping waves on the shelving beach. The
three-fold hunt was over; the porpoises turned out to sea in search
of fresh quarry; and the seine, dragged by ready hands, came slowly,
stubbornly in with its quivering treasure of fish. They had sought a
haven and found none; the brit lay dying in the flickering iridescent
heaps as the bare-legged babies of the village gathered them up; and
far away over the water I saw a single grey speck; it was the following
bird.
* * * * *
The curtain of river haze falls back; barge and bird are alike gone,
and the lamplighter has lit the first gas-lamp on the far side of the
bridge. Every night I watch him come, his progress marked by the great
yellow eyes that wake the dark. Sometimes he walks quickly; sometimes
he loiters on the bridge to chat, or stare at the dark water; but he
always comes, leaving his watchful deterrent train behind him to police
the night.
Once Demeter in the black anguish of her desolation searched for lost
Persephone by the light of Hecate's torch; and searching all in vain,
spurned beneath her empty feet an earth barren of her smile; froze
with set brows the merry brooks and streams; and smote forest, and
plain, and fruitful field, with the breath of her last despair, until
even Iambe's laughing jest was still. And then when the desolation was
complete, across the wasted valley where the starveling cattle scarcely
longed to browse, came the dreadful chariot--and Persephone. The day of
the prisoner of Hades had dawned; and as the sun flamed slowly up to
light her thwarted eyes the world sprang into blossom at her feet.
We can never be too Pagan when we are truly Christian, and the old
myths are eternal truths held fast in the Church's net. Prometheus
fetched fire from Heaven, to be slain forever in the fetching; and
lo, a Greater than Prometheus came to fire the cresset of the Cross.
Demeter waits now patiently enough. Persephone waits, too, in the faith
of the sun she cannot see: and every lamp lit carries on the crusade
which has for its goal a sunless, moonless, city whose light is the
Light of the world.
"Lume è lassù, che visibile face
lo creatore a quella creatura,
che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace."
Immediately outside my window is a lime tree--a little black skeleton
of abundant branches--in which sparrows congregate to chirp and bicker.
Farther away I have a glimpse of graceful planes, children of moonlight
and mist; their dainty robes, still more or less unsullied, gleam
ghostly in the gaslight athwart the dark. They make a brave show even
in winter with their feathery branches and swinging tassels, whereas my
little tree stands stark and uncompromising, with its horde of sooty
sparrows cockney to the last tail feather, and a pathetic inability
to look anything but black. Rain comes with strong caressing fingers,
and the branches seem no whit the cleaner for her care; but then their
glistening blackness mirrors back the succeeding sunlight, as a muddy
pavement will sometimes lap our feet in a sea of gold. The little wet
sparrows are for the moment equally transformed, for the sun turns
their dun-coloured coats to a ruddy bronze, and cries Chrysostom as it
kisses each shiny beak. They are dumb Chrysostoms; but they preach a
golden gospel, for the sparrows are to London what the rainbow was to
eight saved souls out of a waste of waters--a perpetual sign of the
remembering mercies of God.
Last night there was a sudden clatter of hoofs, a shout, and then
silence. A runaway cab-horse, a dark night, a wide crossing, and a
heavy burden: so death came to a poor woman. People from the house went
out to help; and I heard of her, the centre of an unknowing curious
crowd, as she lay bonnetless in the mud of the road, her head on the
kerb. A rude but painless death: the misery lay in her life; for this
woman--worn, white-haired, and wrinkled--had but fifty years to set
against such a condition. The policeman reported her respectable,
hard-working, living apart from her husband with a sister; but although
they shared rooms, they "did not speak," and the sister refused all
responsibility; so the parish buried the dead woman, and thus ended an
uneventful tragedy.
Was it her own fault? If so, the greater pathos. The lonely souls that
hold out timid hands to an unheeding world have their meed of interior
comfort even here, while the sons of consolation wait on the threshold
for their footfall: but God help the soul that bars its own door! It
is kicking against the pricks of Divine ordinance, the ordinance of a
triune God; whether it be the dweller in crowded street or tenement
who is proud to say, "I keep myself to myself," or Seneca writing in
pitiful complacency, "Whenever I have gone among men, I have returned
home less of a man." Whatever the next world holds in store, we are
bidden in this to seek and serve God in our fellow-men, and in the
creatures of His making whom He calls by name.
It was once my privilege to know an old organ-grinder named Gawdine.
He was a hard swearer, a hard drinker, a hard liver, and he fortified
himself body and soul against the world: he even drank alone, which is
an evil sign.
One day to Gawdine sober came a little dirty child, who clung to his
empty trouser leg--he had lost a limb years before--with a persistent
unintelligible request. He shook the little chap off with a blow and
a curse; and the child was trotting dismally away, when it suddenly
turned, ran back, and held up a dirty face for a kiss.
Two days later Gawdine fell under a passing dray which inflicted
terrible internal injuries on him. They patched him up in hospital, and
he went back to his organ-grinding, taking with him two friends--a
pain which fell suddenly upon him to rack and rend with an anguish
of crucifixion, and the memory of a child's upturned face. Outwardly
he was the same save that he changed the tunes of his organ, out of
long-hoarded savings, for the jigs and reels which children hold dear,
and stood patiently playing them in child-crowded alleys, where pennies
are not as plentiful as elsewhere.
He continued to drink; it did not come within his new code to stop,
since he could "carry his liquor well"; but he rarely, if ever, swore.
He told me this tale through the throes of his anguish as he lay
crouched on a mattress on the floor; and as the grip of the pain took
him he tore and bit at his hands until they were maimed and bleeding,
to keep the ready curses off his lips.
He told the story, but he gave no reason, offered no explanation: he
has been dead now many a year, and thus would I write his epitaph:--
He saw the face of a little child and looked on God.
III
"TWO began, in a low voice, 'Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here
ought to have been a _red_ rose-tree, and we put a white one in by
mistake.'"
As I look round this room I feel sure Two, and Five, and Seven, have
all been at work on it, and made no mistakes, for round the walls runs
a frieze of squat standard rose-trees, red as red can be, and just
like those that Alice saw in the Queen's garden. In between them are
Chaucer's name-children, prim little daisies, peering wideawake from
green grass. This same grass has a history which I have heard. In the
original stencil for the frieze it was purely conventional like the
rest, and met in spikey curves round each tree; the painter, however,
who was doing the work, was a lover of the fields; and feeling that
such grass was a travesty, he added on his own account dainty little
tussocks, and softened the hard line into a tufted carpet, the grass
growing irregularly, bent at will by the wind.
The result from the standpoint of conventional art is indeed
disastrous; but my sympathy and gratitude are with the painter. I see,
as he saw, the far-reaching robe of living ineffable green, of whose
brilliance the eye never has too much, and in whose weft no two threads
are alike; and shrink as he did from the conventionalising of that
wind-swept glory.
The sea has its crested waves of recognisable form; the river its eddy
and swirl and separate vortices; but the grass! The wind bloweth where
it listeth and the grass bows as the wind blows--"thou canst not tell
whither it goeth." It takes no pattern, it obeys no recognised law; it
is like a beautiful creature of a thousand wayward moods, and its voice
is like nothing else in the wide world. It bids you rest and bury your
tired face in the green coolness, and breathe of its breath and of the
breath of the good earth from which man was taken and to which he will
one day return. Then, if you lend your ear and are silent minded, you
may hear wondrous things of the deep places of the earth; of life in
mineral and stone as well as in pulsing sap; of a green world as the
stars saw it before man trod it under foot--of the emerald which has
its place with the rest in the City of God.
"What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein,
Each to each other like, more than on earth is thought?"
It is a natural part of civilisation's lust of re-arrangement that we
should be so ready to conventionalise the beauty of this world into
decorative patterns for our pilgrim tents. It is a phase, and will melt
into other phases; but it tends to the increase of artificiality, and
exists not only in art but in everything. It is no new thing for jaded
sentiment to crave the spur of the unnatural, to prefer the clever
imitation, to live in a Devachan where the surroundings appear that
which we would have them to be; but it is an interesting record of the
pulse of the present day that 'An Englishwoman's Love Letters' should
have taken society by storm in the way it certainly has.
It is a delightful book to leave about, with its vellum binding, dainty
ribbons, and the hallmark of a great publisher's name. But when we seek
within we find love with its thousand voices and wayward moods, its shy
graces and seemly reticences, love which has its throne and robe of
state as well as the garment of the beggar maid, love which is before
time was, which knew the world when the stars took up their courses,
presented to us in gushing outpourings, the appropriate language of a
woman's heart to the boor she delights to honour.
"It is woman who is the glory of man," says the author of 'The House
of Wisdom and Love,' "_Regina mundi_, greater, because so far the less;
and man is her head, but only as he serves his queen." Set this sober
aphorism against the school girl love-making which kisses a man's feet
and gaily refuses him the barren honour of having loved her first.
There is scant need for the apologia which precedes the letters; a
few pages dispels the fear that we are prying into another's soul.
As for the authorship, there is a woman's influence, an artist's
poorly concealed bias in the foreign letters; and for the rest a man's
blunders--so much easier to see in another than to avoid oneself--writ
large from cover to cover. King Cophetua, who sends his "profoundly
grateful remembrances," has most surely written the letters he would
wish to receive.
"Mrs Meynell!" cries one reviewer, triumphantly. Nay, the saints be
good to us, what has Mrs Meynell in common with the "Englishwoman's"
language, style, or most unconvincing passion? Men can write as
from a woman's heart when they are minded to do so in desperate
earnestness--there is Clarissa Harlowe and Stevenson's Kirstie, and
many more to prove it; but when a man writes as the author of the
"Love Letters" writes, I feel, as did the painter of the frieze, that
pattern-making has gone too far and included that which, like the
grass, should be spared such a convention.
"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess, "and the moral of that
is--'Be what you would seem to be'--or, if you'd like to put it more
simply--'never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it
might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not
otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise.'" And so by way of the Queen's garden I come back to my room
again.
My heart's affections are still centred on my old attic, with boarded
floor and whitewashed walls, where the sun blazoned a frieze of red and
gold until he travelled too far towards the north, the moon streamed
in to paint the trees in inky wavering shadows, and the stars flashed
their glory to me across the years. But now sun and moon greet me only
indirectly: and under the red roses hang pictures, some of them the
dear companions of my days. Opposite me is the Arundel print of the
Presentation, painted by the gentle "Brother of the Angels." Priest
Simeon, a stately figure in green and gold, great with prophecy, gazes
adoringly at the Bambino he holds with fatherly care. Our Lady, in robe
of red and veil of shadowed purple, is instinct with light despite the
sombre colouring, as she stretches out hungering, awe-struck hands for
her soul's delight. St Joseph, dignified guardian and servitor, stands
behind, holding the Sacrifice of the Poor to redeem the First-begotten.
St Peter Martyr and the Dominican nun, gazing in rapt contemplation
at the scene, are not one whit surprised to find themselves in the
presence of eternal mysteries. In the Entombment, which hangs on the
opposite wall, St Dominic comes round the corner full of grievous
amaze and tenderest sympathy, but with no sense of shock or intrusion,
for was he not "famigliar di Cristo"? And so he takes it all in; the
stone bed empty and waiting; the Beloved cradled for the last time on
His mother's knees to be washed, lapped round, and laid to rest as if
He were again the Babe of Bethlehem. He sees the Magdalen anointing
the Sacred Feet; Blessed John caring for the living and the Dead; and
he, Dominic--hound of the Lord--having his real, living share in the
anguish and hope, the bedding of the dearest Dead, who did but leave
this earth that He might manifest Himself more completely.
Underneath, with a leap across the centuries, is Rossetti's picture;
Dante this time the onlooker, Beatrice, in her pale beauty, the
death-kissed one. The same idea under different representations; the
one conceived in childlike simplicity, the other recalling, even in the
photograph, its wealth of colour and imagining; the one a world-wide
ideal, the other an individual expression of it.
Beatrice was to Dante the inclusion of belief. She was more to him
than he himself knew, far more to him after her death than before.
And, therefore, the analogy between the pictures has at core a common
reality. "It is expedient for you that I go away," is constantly being
said to us as we cling earthlike to the outward expression, rather
than to the inward manifestation--and blessed are those who hear and
understand, for it is spoken only to such as have been with Him from
the beginning. The eternal mysteries come into time for us individually
under widely differing forms. The tiny child mothers its doll, croons
to it, spends herself upon it, why she cannot tell you; and we who are
here in our extreme youth, never to be men and women grown in this
world, nurse our ideal, exchange it, refashion it, call it by many
names; and at last in here or hereafter we find in its naked truth the
Child in the manger, even as the Wise Men found Him when they came from
the East to seek a great King. There is but one necessary condition
of this finding; we must follow the particular manifestation of light
given us, never resting until it rests--over the place of the Child.
And there is but one insurmountable hindrance, the extinction of or
drawing back from the light truly apprehended by us. We forget this,
and judge other men by the light of our own soul.
I think the old bishop must have understood it. He is my friend of
friends as he lies opposite my window in his alabaster sleep, clad in
pontifical robes, with unshod feet, a little island of white peace in
a many-coloured marble sea. The faithful sculptor has given every line
and wrinkle, the heavy eyelids and sunken face of tired old age, but
withal the smile of a contented child.
I do not even know my bishop's name, only that the work is of the
thirteenth century; but he is good to company with through the day, for
he has known darkness and light and the minds of many men; most surely,
too, he has known that God fulfils Himself in strange ways, so with the
shadow of his feet upon the polished floor he rests in peace.
IV
ON Sunday my little tree was limned in white and the sparrows were
craving shelter at my window from the blizzard. Now the mild thin air
brings a breath of spring in its wake and the daffodils in the garden
wait the kisses of the sun. Hand-in-hand with memory I slip away down
the years, and remember a day when I awoke at earliest dawn, for across
my sleep I had heard the lusty golden-throated trumpeters heralding the
spring.
[Illustration: The field-gate that leads to the lower meadows]
The air was sharp-set; a delicate rime frosted roof and road; the sea
lay hazy and still like a great pearl. Then as the sky stirred with
flush upon flush of warm rosy light, it passed from misty pearl to
opal with heart of flame, from opal to gleaming sapphire. The earth
called, the fields called, the river called--that pied piper to whose
music a man cannot stop his ears. It was with me as with the Canterbury
pilgrims:--
"So priketh hem nature in hir corages;
Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages."
Half an hour later I was away by the early train that carries
the branch mails and a few workmen, and was delivered at the little
wayside station with the letters. The kind air went singing past as I
swung along the reverberating road between the high tree-crowned banks
which we call hedges in merry Devon, with all the world to myself and
the Brethren. A great blackbird flew out with a loud "chook, chook,"
and the red of the haw on his yellow bill. A robin trilled from a
low rose-bush; two wrens searched diligently on a fallen tree for
breakfast, quite unconcerned when I rested a moment beside them; and a
shrewmouse slipped across the road followed directly by its mate. March
violets bloomed under the sheltered hedge with here and there a pale
primrose; a frosted bramble spray still held its autumn tints clinging
to the semblance of the past; and great branches of snowy blackthorn
broke the barren hedgeway as if spring made a mock of winter's snows.
Light of heart and foot with the new wine of the year I sped on again,
stray daffodils lighting the wayside, until I heard the voice of the
stream and reached the field gate which leads to the lower meadows.
There before me lay spring's pageant; green pennons waving, dainty
maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow trumpeters proclaiming
'Victory' to an awakened earth. They range in serried ranks right down
to the river, so that a man must walk warily to reach the water's edge
where they stand gazing down at themselves in fairest semblance like
their most tragic progenitor, and, rising from the bright grass in
their thousands, stretch away until they melt in a golden cloud at the
far end of the misty mead. Through the field gate and across the road I
see them, starring the steep earth bank that leads to the upper copse,
gleaming like pale flames against the dark tree-boles. There they have
but frail tenure; here, in the meadows, they reign supreme.
[Illustration: A host of joyous yellow trumpeters]
At the upper end of the field the river provides yet closer sanctuary
for these children of the spring. Held in its embracing arms lies an
island long and narrow, some thirty feet by twelve, a veritable untrod
Eldorado, glorious in gold from end to end, a fringe of reeds by the
water's edge, and save for that--daffodils. A great oak stands at the
meadow's neck, an oak with gnarled and wandering roots where a man
may rest, for it is bare of daffodils save for a group of three, and
a solitary one apart growing close to the old tree's side. I sat down
by my lonely little sister, blue sky overhead, green grass at my feet
decked, like the pastures of the Blessèd, in glorious sheen; a sea of
triumphant, golden heads tossing blithely back as the wind swept
down to play with them at his pleasure.
It was all mine to have and to hold without severing a single slender
stem or harbouring a thought of covetousness; mine, as the whole earth
was mine, to appropriate to myself without the burden and bane of
worldly possession. "Thou sayest that I am--a King," said the Lord
before Pilate, and "My kingdom is not of this world." We who are made
kings after His likeness possess all things, not after this world's
fashion but in proportion to our poverty; and when we cease to toil and
spin, are arrayed as the lilies, in a glory transcending Solomon's.
Bride Poverty--she who climbed the Cross with Christ--stretches out
eager hands to free us from our chains, but we flee from her, and lay
up treasure against her importunity, while Amytas on his seaweed bed
weeps tears of pure pity for crave-mouth Cæsar of great possessions.
Presently another of spring's lovers cried across the water "Cuckoo,
cuckoo," and the voice of the stream sang joyously in unison. It is
free from burden, this merry little river, and neither weir nor mill
bars its quick way to the sea as it completes the eternal circle,
lavishing gifts of coolness and refreshment on the children of the
meadows.
It has its birth on the great lone moor, cradled in a wonderful
peat-smelling bog, with a many-hued coverlet of soft mosses--pale
gold, orange, emerald, tawny, olive and white, with the red stain of
sun-dew and tufted cotton-grass. Under the old grey rocks which watch
it rise, yellow-eyed tormantil stars the turf, and bids "Godspeed" to
the little child of earth and sky. Thus the journey begins; and with
ever-increasing strength the stream carves a way through the dear brown
peat, wears a fresh wrinkle on the patient stones, and patters merrily
under a clapper bridge which spanned its breadth when the mistletoe
reigned and Bottor, the grim rock idol, exacted the toll of human life
that made him great. On and on goes the stream, for it may not stay;
leaving of its freshness with the great osmunda that stretches eager
roots towards the running water; flowing awhile with a brother stream,
to part again east and west as each takes up his separate burden of
service--my friend to cherish the lower meadows in their flowery
joyance--and so by the great sea-gate back to sky and earth again.
The river of God is full of water. The streets of the City are pure
gold. Verily, here also having nothing we possess all things.
* * * * *
The air was keen and still as I walked back in the early evening, and
a daffodil light was in the sky as if Heaven mirrored back earth's
radiance. Near the station some children flitted past, like little
white miller moths homing through the dusk. As I climbed the hill the
moon rode high in a golden field--it was daffodils to the last.
V
THE seagulls from the upper reaches pass down the river in sober steady
flight seeking the open sea. I shall miss the swoop and circle of
silver wings in the sunlight and the plaintive call which sounds so
strangely away from rock and shore, but it is good to know that they
have gone from mudbank and murky town back to the free airs of their
inheritance, to the shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling crest of
the wind-beaten waves, to brood again over the great ocean of a world's
tears.
My little tree is gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of promise.
The sparrows busied with nest-building in the neighbouring pipes and
gutters use it for a vantage ground, and crowd there in numbers, each
little beak sealed with long golden straw or downy feather.
The river is heavy with hay barges, the last fruits of winter's
storehouse; the lengthening days slowly and steadily oust the dark;
the air is loud with a growing clamour of life: spring is not only
proclaimed, but on this Feast she is crowned, and despite the warring
wind the days bring their meed of sunshine. We stand for a moment at
the meeting of the ways, the handclasp of Winter and Spring, of Sleep
and Wakening, of Life and Death; and there is between them not even
the thin line which Rabbi Jochanan on his death-bed beheld as all that
divided hell from heaven.
"_Sphæra cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi_," was said of
Mercury, that messenger of the gods who marshalled reluctant spirits
to the Underworld; and for Mercury we may write Life with Death as
its great sacrament of brotherhood and release, to be dreaded only as
we dread to partake unworthily of great benefits. Like all sacraments
it has its rightful time and due solemnities; the horror and sin of
suicide lie in the presumption of free will, the forestalling of a
gift,--the sin of Eve in Paradise, who took that which might only be
given at the hand of the Lord. It has too its physical pains, but they
are those of a woman in travail, and we remember them no more for
joy that a child-man is born into the world naked and not ashamed:
beholding ourselves as we are we shall see also the leaves of the Tree
of Life set for the healing of the nations.
We are slowly, very slowly, abandoning our belief in sudden and
violent transitions for a surer and fuller acceptance of the doctrine
of evolution; but most of us still draw a sharp line of demarcation
between this world and the next, and expect a radical change in
ourselves and our surroundings, a break in the chain of continuity
entirely contrary to the teaching of nature and experience. In the same
way we cling to the specious untruth that we can begin over and over
again in this world, forgetting that while our sorrow and repentance
bring sacramental gifts of grace and strength, God Himself cannot, by
His own limitation, rewrite the Past. We are in our sorrow that which
we have made ourselves in our sin; our temptations are there as well
as the way of escape. We are in the image of God. We create our world,
our undying selves, our heaven, or our hell. "_Qui creavit te sine te
non salvabit te sine te._" It is stupendous, magnificent, and most
appalling. A man does not change as he crosses the threshold of the
larger room. His personality remains the same, although the expression
of it may be altered. Here we have material bodies in a material
world--there, perhaps, ether bodies in an ether world. There is no
indecency in reasonable speculation and curiosity about the life to
come. One end of the thread is between our fingers, but we are haunted
for the most part by the snap of Atropos' shears.
Socrates faced death with the magnificent calm bred of dignified
familiarity. He had built for himself a desired heaven of colour,
light, and precious stones--the philosophic formula of those who set
the spiritual above the material, and worship truth in the beauty of
holiness. He is not troubled by doubts or regrets, for the path of the
just lies plain before his face. He forbids mourning and lamentations
as out of place, obeys minutely and cheerily the directions of his
executioner, and passes with unaffected dignity to the apprehension of
that larger truth for which he had constantly prepared himself. His
friends may bury him provided they will remember they are not burying
Socrates; and that all things may be done decently and in order, a cock
must go to Æsculapius.
Long before, in the days of the Captivity, there lived in godless,
blood-shedding Nineveh an exiled Jew whose father had fallen from
the faith. He was a simple man, child-like and direct; living the
careful, kindly life of an orthodox Jew, suffering many persecutions
for conscience' sake, and in constant danger of death. He narrates the
story of his life and of the blindness which fell on him, with gentle
placidity, and checks the exuberance of his more emotional wife with
the assurance of untroubled faith. Finally, when his pious expectations
are fulfilled, his sight restored, and his son prosperously
established beside him, he breaks into a prayer of rejoicing which
reveals the secret of his confident content. He made use of two great
faculties: the sense of proportion, which enabled him to apprise life
and its accidents justly, and the gift of inseeing, which led Socrates
after him, and Blessed John in lonely exile on Patmos, to look through
the things temporal to the hidden meanings of eternity.
"Let my soul bless God the great King," he cries; and looks away past
the present distress; past the Restoration which was to end in fresh
scattering and confusion; past the dream of gold, and porphyry, and
marble defaced by the eagles and emblems of the conqueror; until his
eyes are held by the Jerusalem of God, "built up with sapphires, and
emeralds, and precious stones," with battlements of pure gold, and the
cry of 'Alleluia' in her streets.
Many years later, when he was very aged, he called his son to him
and gave him as heritage his own simple rule of life, adding but one
request: "Keep thou the law and the commandments, and shew thyself
merciful and just, that it may go well with thee. . . .. Consider
what alms doeth, and how righteousness doth deliver. . . . And bury
me decently, and thy mother with me." Having so said, he went his way
quietly and contentedly to the Jerusalem of his heart.
It is the simple note of familiarity that is wanting in us; that by
which we link world with world. Once, years ago, I sat by the bedside
of a dying man in a wretched garret in the East End. He was entirely
ignorant, entirely quiescent, and entirely uninterested. The minister
of a neighbouring chapel came to see him and spoke to him at some
length of the need for repentance and the joys of heaven. After he had
gone my friend lay staring restlessly at the mass of decrepit broken
chimney pots which made his horizon. At last he spoke, and there was a
new note in his voice:--
"Ee said as 'ow there were golding streets in them parts. I ain't no
ways particler wot they're made of, but it'll feel natral like if
there's chimleys too."
The sun stretched a sudden finger and painted the chimney pots red
and gold against the smoke-dimmed sky, and with his face alight with
surprised relief my friend died.
We are one with the earth, one in sin, one in redemption. It is the
fringe of the garment of God. "If I may but touch the hem," said a
certain woman.
On the great Death-day which shadows the early spring with a shadow of
which it may be said _Umbra Dei est Lux_, the earth brought gifts of
grief, the fruit of the curse, barren thorns, hollow reed, and the wood
of the cross; the sea made offering of Tyrian purple; the sky veiled
her face in great darkness, while the nation of priests crucified for
the last time their Paschal lamb. "I will hear, saith the Lord; I will
hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth, and the earth shall
hear the corn and wine and oil, and they shall hear Jezreel, and I will
sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had
not obtained mercy, and I will say unto them which were not my people,
'Thou art my people,' and they shall say 'Thou art my God.'"
[Illustration: In the distance rise the great lone heavenward hills]
The second Adam stood in the garden with quickening feet, and all
the earth pulsed and sang for joy of the new hope and the new life
quickening within her, to be hers through the pains of travail, the
pangs of dissolution. The Tree of Life bears Bread and Wine--food of
the wayfaring man. The day of divisions is past, the day of unity has
dawned. One has risen from the dead, and in the Valley of Achor stands
wide the Door of Hope--the Sacrament of Death.
Scio Domine, et vere scio . . . quia non sum dignus
accedere ad tantum mysterium propter nimia peccata mea
et infinitas negligentias meas. Sed scio . . . quia tu
potes me facere dignum.
VI
"ANYTUS and Meletus can kill me, but they cannot hurt me," said
Socrates; and Governor Sancho, with all the itch of newly-acquired
authority, could not make the young weaver of steel-heads for lances
sleep in prison. In the Vision of Er the souls passed straight
forward under the throne of necessity, and out into the plains of
forgetfulness, where they must severally drink of the river of
unmindfulness whose waters cannot be held in any vessel. The throne,
the plain, and the river are still here, but in the distance rise the
great lone heavenward hills, and the wise among us no longer ask of the
gods Lethe, but rather remembrance. Necessity can set me helpless on my
back, but she cannot keep me there; nor can four walls limit my vision.
I pass out from under her throne into the garden of God a free man, to
my ultimate beatitude or my exceeding shame. All day long this world
lies open to me; ay, and other worlds also, if I will but have it so;
and when night comes I pass into the kingdom and power of the dark.
I lie through the long hours and watch my bridge, which is set with
lights across the gloom; watch the traffic which is for me but so many
passing lamps telling their tale by varying height and brightness.
I hear under my window the sprint of over-tired horses; the rattle
of uncertain wheels as the street-sellers hasten south; the jangle
of cab bells as the theatre-goers take their homeward way; the gruff
altercation of weary men, the unmelodious song and clamorous laugh of
women whose merriment is wearier still. Then comes a time of stillness
when the light in the sky waxes and wanes, when the cloud-drifts
obscure the stars, and I gaze out into blackness set with watching
eyes. No sound comes from without but the voice of the night-wind and
the cry of the hour. The clock on the mantelpiece ticks imperatively,
for a check has fallen on the familiarity which breeds a disregard
of common things, and a reason has to be sought for each sound which
claims a hearing. The pause is wonderful while it lasts, but it is not
for long. The working world awakes, the poorer brethren take up the
burden of service; the dawn lights the sky; remembrance cries an end to
forgetting.
Sometimes in the country on a night in early summer you may shut the
cottage door to step out into an immense darkness which palls heaven
and earth. Going forward into the embrace of the great gloom, you are
as a babe swaddled by the hands of night into helpless quiescence. Your
feet tread an unseen path, your hands grasp at a void, or shrink from
the contact they cannot realise; your eyes are holden; your voice would
die in your throat did you seek to rend the veil of that impenetrable
silence.
Shut in by the intangible dark, we are brought up against those worlds
within worlds blotted out by our concrete daily life. The working of
the great microcosm at which we peer dimly through the little window of
science; the wonderful, breathing earth; the pulsing, throbbing sap;
the growing fragrance shut in the calyx of to-morrow's flower; the
heartbeat of a sleeping world that we dream that we know; and around,
above, and interpenetrating all, the world of dreams, of angels and of
spirits.
It was this world which Jacob saw on the first night of his exile,
and again when he wrestled in Peniel until the break of day. It was
this world which Elisha saw with open eyes; which Job knew when
darkness fell on him; which Ezekiel gazed into from his place among the
captives; which Daniel beheld as he stood alone by the great river, the
river Hiddekel.
For the moment we have left behind the realm of question and
explanation, of power over matter and the exercise of bodily faculties;
and passed into darkness alight with visions we cannot see, into
silence alive with voices we cannot hear. Like helpless men we set our
all on the one thing left us, and lift up our hearts, knowing that we
are but a mere speck among a myriad worlds, yet greater than the sum
of them; having our roots in the dark places of the earth, but our
branches in the sweet airs of heaven.
It is the material counterpart of the 'Night of the Soul.' We have left
our house and set forth in the darkness which paralyses those faculties
that make us men in the world of men. But surely the great mystics,
with all their insight and heavenly love, fell short when they sought
freedom in complete separateness from creation instead of in perfect
unity with it. The Greeks knew better when they flung Ariadne's crown
among the stars, and wrote Demeter's grief on a barren earth, and
Persephone's joy in the fruitful field. For the earth is gathered up
in man; he is the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.
Standing in the image of God, and clothed in the garment of God, he
lifts up priestly hands and presents the sacrifice of redeemed earth
before the throne of the All-Father. "Dust and ashes and a house of
devils," he cries; and there comes back for answer, "_Rex concupiscet
decorem tuam_."
The Angel of Death has broad wings of silence and mystery with which
he shadows the valley where we need fear no evil, and where the voice
which speaks to us is as the "voice of doves, tabering upon their
breasts." It is a place of healing and preparation, of peace and
refreshing after the sharply-defined outlines of a garish day. Walking
there we learn to use those natural faculties of the soul which are
hampered by the familiarity of bodily progress, to apprehend the truths
which we have intellectually accepted. It is the place of secrets
where the humility which embraces all attainable knowledge cries "I
know not"; and while we proclaim from the housetops that which we have
learnt, the manner of our learning lies hid for each one of us in the
sanctuary of our souls.
The Egyptians, in their ancient wisdom, set in the desert a great
androsphinx, image of mystery and silence, staring from under level
brows across the arid sands of the sea-way. The Greeks borrowed and
debased the image, turning the inscrutable into a semi-woman who
asked a foolish riddle, and hurled herself down in petulant pride
when Oedipus answered aright. So we, marring the office of silence,
question its mystery; thwart ourselves with riddles of our own
suggesting; and turn away, leaving our offering but half consumed
on the altar of the unknown god. It was not the theft of fire that
brought the vengeance of heaven upon Prometheus, but the mocking
sacrifice. Orpheus lost Eurydice because he must see her face before
the appointed time. Persephone ate of the pomegranate and hungered in
gloom for the day of light which should have been endless.
The universe is full of miracle and mystery; the darkness and silence
are set for a sign we dare not despise. The pall of night lifts,
leaving us engulphed in the light of immensity under a tossing heaven
of stars. The dawn breaks, but it does not surprise us, for we have
watched from the valley and seen the pale twilight. Through the
wondrous Sabbath of faithful souls, the long day of rosemary and rue,
the light brightens in the East; and we pass on towards it with quiet
feet and opening eyes, bearing with us all of the redeemed earth that
we have made our own, until we are fulfilled in the sunrise of the
great Easter Day, and the peoples come from north and south and east
and west to the City which lieth foursquare--the Beatific Vision of God.
Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas
Cuius pax iugis et summa iucunditas;
Ubi non prævenit rem desiderium,
Nec desiderio minus est præmium.
AT THE WHITE GATE
I
A GREAT joy has come to me; one of those unexpected gifts which life
loves to bestow after we have learnt to loose our grip of her. I am
back in my own place very near my road--the white gate lies within my
distant vision; near the lean grey Downs which keep watch and ward
between the country and the sea; very near, nay, in the lap of Mother
Earth, for as I write I am lying on a green carpet, powdered yellow and
white with the sun's own flowers; overhead a great sycamore where the
bees toil and sing; and sighing shimmering poplars golden grey against
the blue. The day of Persephone has dawned for me, and I, set free
like Demeter's child, gladden my eyes with this foretaste of coming
radiance, and rest my tired sense with the scent and sound of home.
Away down the meadow I hear the early scythe song, and the warm air is
fragrant with the fallen grass. It has its own message for me as I lie
here, I who have obtained yet one more mercy, and the burden of it is
life, not death.
I remember when, taking a grace from my road, I helped to mow Farmer
Marler's ten-acre field, rich in ripe upstanding grass. The mechanism
of the ancient reaper had given way under the strain of the home
meadows, and if this crop was to be saved it must be by hand. I have
kept the record of those days of joyous labour under a June sky. Men
were hard to get in our village; old Dodden, who was over seventy,
volunteered his services--he had done yeoman work with the scythe in
his youth--and two of the farm hands with their master completed our
strength.
[Illustration: The line of the untroubled hills strong and still in the
broad sunshine]
We took our places under a five o'clock morning sky, and the larks
cried down to us as we stood knee-deep in the fragrant dew-steeped
grass, each man with his gleaming scythe poised ready for its sweeping
swing. Old Dodden led by right of age and ripe experience; bent like
a sickle, brown and dry as a nut, his face a tracery of innumerable
wrinkles, he has never ailed a day, and the cunning of his craft was
still with him. At first we worked stiffly, unreadily, but soon the
monotonous motion possessed us with its insistent rhythm, and the grass
bowed to each sibilant swish and fell in sweet-smelling swathes at our
feet. Now and then a startled rabbit scurried through the miniature
forest to vanish with white flick of tail in the tangled hedge; here
and there a mother lark was discovered sitting motionless, immovable
upon her little brood; but save for these infrequent incidents we
paced steadily on with no speech save the cry of the hone on the steel
and the swish of the falling swathes. The sun rose high in the heaven
and burnt on bent neck and bare and aching arms, the blood beat and
drummed in my veins with the unwonted posture and exercise; I worked
as a man who sees and hears in a mist. Once, as I paused to whet my
scythe, my eye caught the line of the untroubled hills strong and still
in the broad sunshine; then to work again in the labouring, fertile
valley.
Rest time came, and wiping the sweat from brow and blade we sought
the welcome shadow of the hedge and the cool sweet oatmeal water with
which the wise reaper quenches his thirst. Farmer Marler hastened off
to see with master-eye that all went well elsewhere; the farm men slept
tranquilly, stretched at full length, clasped hands for pillow; and
old Dodden, sitting with crooked fingers interlaced to check their
trembling betrayal of old age, told how in his youth he had "swep"
a four-acre field single-handed in three days--an almost impossible
feat--and of the first reaping machine in these parts, and how it
brought, to his thinking, the ruin of agricultural morals with it.
"'Tis again nature," he said, "the Lard gave us the land an' the seed,
but Ee said that a man should sweat. Where's the sweat drivin' round
wi' two horses cuttin' the straw down an' gatherin' it again, wi'
scarce a hand's turn i' the day's work?"
Old Dodden's high-pitched quavering voice rose and fell, mournful as
he surveyed the present, vehement as he recorded the heroic past. He
spoke of the rural exodus and shook his head mournfully. "We old 'uns
were content wi' earth and the open sky like our feythers before us,
but wi' the children 'tis first machines to save doin' a hand's turn
o' honest work, an' then land an' sky ain't big enough seemin'ly, nor
grand enough; it must be town an' a paved street, an' they sweat their
lives out atwixt four walls an' call it seein' life--'tis death an'
worse comes to the most of 'em. Ay, 'tis better to stay by the land, as
the Lard said, till time comes to lie under it." I looked away across
the field where the hot air throbbed and quivered, and the fallen
grass, robbed already of its freshness, lay prone at the feet of its
upstanding fellows. It is quite useless to argue with old Dodden; he
only shakes his head and says firmly, "An old man, seventy-five come
Martinmass knows more o' life than a young chap, stands ter reason";
besides, his epitome of the town life he knows nothing of was a just
one as far as it went; and his own son is the sweeper of a Holborn
crossing, and many other things that he should not be; but that is the
parson's secret and mine.
We took rank again and swept steadily on through the hot still hours
into the evening shadows, until the sinking sun set a _Gloria_ to the
psalm of another working day. Only a third of the field lay mown, for
we were not skilled labourers to cut our acre a day; I saw it again
that night under the moonlight and the starlight, wrapped in a shroud
of summer's mist.
The women joined us on the third day to begin haymaking, and the air
was fragrant of tossed and sun-dried grass. One of them walked apart
from the rest, without interest or freedom of movement; her face,
sealed and impassive, was aged beyond the vigour of her years. I
knew the woman by sight, and her history by hearsay. We have a code
of morals here--not indeed peculiar to this place or people--that a
wedding is 'respectable' if it precedes childbirth by a bare month,
tolerable, and to be recognised, should it succeed the same by less
than a year (provided the pair are not living in the same village);
but the child that has never been 'fathered' and the wife without a
ring are 'anathema,' and such an one was Elizabeth Banks. She went away
a maid and came back a year ago with a child and without a name. Her
mother was dead, her father and the village would have none of her: the
homing instinct is very strong, or she would scarcely have returned,
knowing the traditions of the place. Old Dodden, seeing her, grumbled
to me in the rest-time.--"Can't think what the farmer wants wi' Lizzie
Banks in 'is field." "She must live," I said, "and by all showing her
life is a hard one." "She 'ad the makin' of 'er bed," he went on,
obstinately. "What for do she bring her disgrace home, wi' a fatherless
brat for all folks to see? We don't want them sort in our village. The
Lord's hand is heavy, an' a brat's a curse that cannot be hid."
When tea-time came I crossed the field to look for a missing hone, and
saw Elizabeth Banks far from the other women, busied with a bundle
under the hedge. I passed close on my search, and lo! the bundle was
a little boy. He lay smiling and stretching, fighting the air with
his small pink fists, while the wind played with his curls. "A curse
that cannot be hid," old Dodden had said. The mother knelt a moment,
devouring him with her eyes, then snatched him to her with aching greed
and covered him with kisses. I saw the poor, plain face illumined,
transfigured, alive with a mother's love, and remembered how the word
came once to a Hebrew prophet:--
Say unto your brethren Ammi, and to your sisters Ruhamah.
The evening sky was clouding fast, the sound of rain was in the air;
Farmer Marler shook his head as he looked at the grass lying in
ordered rows. I was the last to leave, and as I lingered at the gate
drinking in the scent of the field and the cool of the coming rain, the
first drops fell on my upturned face and kissed the poor dry swathes at
my feet, and I was glad.
David, child of the fields and the sheepfolds, his kingship laid
aside, sees through the parted curtain of the years the advent of his
greater Son, and cries in his psalm of the hilltops, his last prophetic
prayer:--
He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass.
Even so He came, and shall still come. Three days ago the field,
in its pageant of fresh beauty, with shimmering blades and tossing
banners, greeted sun and shower alike with joy for the furtherance of
its life and purpose; now, laid low, it hears the young grass whisper
the splendour of its coming green; and the poor swathes are glad at
the telling, but full of grief for their own apparent failure. Then
in great pity comes the rain, the rain of summer, gentle, refreshing,
penetrating, and the swathes are comforted, for they know that standing
to greet or prostrate to suffer, the consolations of the former and the
latter rain are still their own, with tender touch and cool caress.
Then, once more parched by the sun, they are borne away to the new
service their apparent failure has fitted them for; and perhaps as
they wait in the dark for the unknown that is still to come they hear
sometimes the call of the distant rain, and at the sound the dry sap
stirs afresh--they are not forgotten and can wait.
[Illustration: Below the low hedge lies pasture bright with buttercups,
where the cattle feed]
"_Say unto your sisters Ruhamah_," cries the prophet.
"_He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass_," sang the poet of
the sheepfolds.
"_My ways are not your ways, saith the Lord._"
* * * * *
I remember how I went home along the damp sweet-scented lanes through
the grey mist of the rain, thinking of the mown field and Elizabeth
Banks and many, many more; and that night, when the sky had cleared
and the nightingale sang, I looked out at the moon riding at anchor,
a silver boat in a still blue sea ablaze with the head-lights of the
stars, and the saying of the herdsman of Tekoa came to me--as it has
come oftentimes since:--
Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and
turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and
maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the
waters of the sea and poureth them out upon the face of
earth; the Lord is His name.
II
THIS garden is an epitome of peace; sun and wind, rain, flowers, and
birds gather me into the blessedness of their active harmony. The world
holds no wish for me, now that I have come home to die with my own
people, for verily I think that the sap of grass and trees must run in
my veins, so steady is their pull upon my heart-strings. London claimed
all my philosophy, but the country gives all, and asks of me only the
warm receptivity of a child in its mother's arms.
When I lie in my cool light room on the garden level, I look across the
bright grass--_il verde smalto_--to a great red rose bush in lavish
disarray against the dark cypress. Near by, amid a tangle of many-hued
corn-flowers I see the promise of coming lilies, the sudden crimson of
a solitary pæony; and in lowlier state against the poor parched earth
glow the golden cups of the eschscholtzias. Beyond the low hedge lies
pasture bright with buttercups, where the cattle feed. Farther off,
where the scythe has been busy, are sheep, clean and shorn, with merry,
well-grown lambs; and in the farthest field I can see the great horses
moving in slow steady pace as the farmer turns his furrow.
[Illustration: The great horses moving in slow steady pace as the
farmer turns his furrow]
The birds are noisy comrades and old friends, from the lark which
chants the dew-steeped morning, to the nightingale that breaks the
silence of the most wonderful nights. I hear the wisdom of the rooks in
the great elms; the lifting lilt of the linnet, and the robin's quaint
little summer song. The starlings chatter ceaselessly, their queer
strident voices harsh against the melodious gossip of the other birds;
the martins shrill softly as they swoop to and fro busied with their
nesting under the eaves; thrush and blackbird vie in friendly rivalry
like the Meister-singer of old; sometimes I hear the drawling cry of a
peacock strayed from the great house, or the laugh of the woodpecker;
and at night the hunting note of the owl reaches me as he sweeps by in
search of prey.
To-day I am out again; and the great sycamore showers honey and flowers
on me as I lie beneath it. Sometimes a bee falls like an over-ripe
fruit, and waits awhile to clean his pollen-coated legs ere he flies
home to discharge his burden. He is too busy to be friendly, but his
great velvety cousin is much more sociable, and stays for a gentle
rub between his noisy shimmering wings, and a nap in the hollow of my
hand, for he is an idle friendly soul with plenty of time at his own
disposal and no responsibilities. Looking across I can watch the
martins at work; they have a starling and a sparrow for near neighbours
in the wooden gutter. One nest is already complete all but the coping,
the other two are a-building: I wonder whether I or they will be first
to go south through the mist.
This great tree is a world in itself, and the denizens appear full of
curiosity as to the Gulliver who has taken up his abode beneath it.
Pale green caterpillars and spiders of all sizes come spinning down to
visit me, and have to be persuaded with infinite difficulty to ascend
their threads again. There are flies with beautiful iridescent wings,
beetles of all shapes, some of them like tiny jewels in the sunlight.
Their nomenclature is a sealed book to me; of their life and habits
I know nothing; yet this is but a little corner of the cosmos I am
leaving, and I feel not so much desire for the beauty to come, as a
great longing to open my eyes a little wider during the time which
remains to me in this beautiful world of God's making, where each
moment tells its own tale of active, progressive life in which there is
no undoing. Nature knows naught of the web of Penelope, that acme of
anxious pathetic waiting, but goes steadily on in ever widening circle
towards the fulfilment of the mystery of God.
There are, I take it, two master-keys to the secrets of the universe,
viewed _sub specie æternitatis_, the Incarnation of God, and the
Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the pantheistic
little man of contemptible speech, that "all things are ours," yea,
even unto the third heaven.
[Illustration: There is a place waiting for me under the firs in the
quiet churchyard]
I have lost my voracious appetite for books; their language is less
plain than scent and song and the wind in the trees; and for me the
clue to the next world lies in the wisdom of earth rather than in the
learning of men. "_Libera me ab fuscina Hophni_," prayed the good
Bishop fearful of religious greed. I know too much, not too little;
it is realisation that I lack, wherefore I desire these last days to
confirm in myself the sustaining goodness of God, the love which is our
continuing city, the New Jerusalem whose length, breadth, and height
are all one. It is a time of exceeding peace. There is a place waiting
for me under the firs in the quiet churchyard; thanks to my poverty I
have no worldly anxieties or personal dispositions; and I am rich in
friends, many of them unknown to me, who lavishly supply my needs and
make it ideal to live on the charity of one's fellow-men. I am most
gladly in debt to all the world; and to Earth, my mother, for her great
beauty.
I can never remember the time when I did not love her, this mother of
mine with her wonderful garments and ordered loveliness, her tender
care and patient bearing of man's burden. In the earliest days of my
lonely childhood I used to lie chin on hand amid the milkmaids, red
sorrel, and heavy spear-grass listening to her many voices, and above
all to the voice of the little brook which ran through the meadows
where I used to play: I think it has run through my whole life also, to
lose itself at last, not in the great sea but in the river that maketh
glad the City of God. Valley and plain, mountain and fruitful field;
the lark's song and the speedwell in the grass; surely a man need not
sigh for greater loveliness until he has read something more of this
living letter, and knelt before that earth of which he is the only
confusion.
It is a grave matter that the word religion holds such sway among us,
making the very gap seem to yawn again which the Incarnation once and
for ever filled full. We have banished the protecting gods that ruled
in river and mountain, tree and grove; we have gainsayed for the most
part folk-lore and myth, superstition and fairy-tale, evil only in
their abuse. We have done away with mystery, or named it deceit. All
this we have done in an enlightened age, but despite this policy of
destruction we have left ourselves a belief, the grandest and most
simple the world has ever known, which sanctifies the water that is
shed by every passing cloud; and gathers up in its great central act
vineyard and cornfield, proclaiming them to be that Life of the world
without which a man is dead while he liveth. Further, it is a belief
whose foundations are the most heavenly mystery of the Trinity, but
whose centre is a little Child: it sets a price upon the head of the
sparrow, and reckons the riches of this world at their true value;
it points to a way of holiness where the fool shall not err, and the
sage may find the realisation of his far-seeking; and yet, despite
its inclusiveness, it is a belief which cannot save the birds from
destruction, the silent mountains from advertisement, or the stream
from pollution, in an avowedly Christian land. John Ruskin scolded
and fought and did yeoman service, somewhat hindered by his over-good
conceit of himself; but it is not the worship of beauty we need so
much as the beauty of holiness. Little by little the barrier grows and
'religion' becomes a _rule_ of life, not life itself, although the
Bride stands ready to interpret, likened in her loveliness to the chief
treasures of her handmaid--Earth. There is more truth in the believing
cry, "Come from thy white cliffs, O Pan!" than in the religion that
measures a man's life by the letter of the Ten Commandments, and erects
itself as judge and ruler over him, instead of throwing open the gate
of the garden where God walks with man from morning until morning.
As I write the sun is setting; in the pale radiance of the sky above
his glory there dawns the evening star; and earth like a tired child
turns her face to the bosom of the night.
III
ONCE again I have paid a rare visit to my tree to find many things
changed since my last sojourn there. The bees are silent, for the
honey-laden flowers of the sycamore are gone and in their place hang
dainty two-fold keys. The poplar has lost its metallic shimmer, the
chestnut its tall white candles; and the sound of the wind in the
fully-leaved branches is like the sighing of the sea. The martins'
nests are finished, and one is occupied by a shrill-voiced brood; but
for the most part the birds' parental cares are over, and the nestlings
in bold flight no longer flutter on inefficient wings across the lawn
with clamorous, open bill. The robins show promise of their ruddy
vests, the slim young thrush is diligently practising maturer notes,
and soon Maid June will have fled.
It is such a wonderful world that I cannot find it in my heart to sigh
for fresh beauty amid these glories of the Lord on which I look, seeing
men as trees walking, in my material impotence which awaits the final
anointing. The marigolds with their orange suns, the lilies' white
flame, the corncockle's blue crown of many flowers, the honeysuckle's
horn of fragrance--I can paraphrase them, name, class, dissect them;
and then, save for the purposes of human intercourse, I stand where I
stood before, my world bounded by my capacity, the secret of colour and
fragrance still kept. It is difficult to believe that the second lesson
will not be the sequence of the first, and death prove a "feast of
opening eyes" to all these wonders, instead of the heavy-lidded slumber
to which we so often liken it. "Earth to earth?" Yes, "dust thou art,
and unto dust thou shalt return," but what of the rest? What of the
folded grave clothes, and the Forty Days? If the next state be, as it
well might, space of four dimensions, and the first veil which will
lift for me be the material one, then the "other" world which is hidden
from our grosser material organism will lie open, and declare still
further to my widening eyes and unstopped ears the glory and purpose of
the manifold garment of God. Knowledge will give place to understanding
in that second chamber of the House of Wisdom and Love. Revelation is
always measured by capacity: "Open thy mouth wide," and it shall be
filled with a satisfaction that in itself is desire.
There is a child here, a happy quiet little creature holding gently
to its two months of life. Sometimes they lay it beside me, I the
more helpless of the two--perhaps the more ignorant--and equally
dependent for the supply of my smallest need. I feel indecently large
as I survey its minute perfections and the tiny balled fist lying in
my great palm. The little creature fixes me with the wise wide stare
of a soul in advance of its medium of expression; and I, gazing back
at the mystery in those eyes, feel the thrill of contact between my
worn and sin-stained self and the innocence of a little white child.
It is wonderful to watch a woman's rapturous familiarity with these
newcomers. A man's love has far more awe in it, and the passionate
animal instinct of defence is wanting in him. "A woman shall be saved
through the child-bearing," said St Paul; not necessarily her own, but
by participation in the great act of motherhood which is the crown and
glory of her sex. She is the "prisoner of love," caught in a net of her
own weaving; held fast by little hands which rule by impotence, pursued
by feet the swifter for their faltering.
It seems incredible that this is what a woman will barter for the right
to "live her own life"--surely the most empty of desires. Man--_vir_,
woman--_femina_, go to make up _the_ man--_homo_. There can be no
comparison, no rivalry between them; they are the complement of each
other, and a little child shall lead them. It is easy to understand
that desire to shelter under the dear mantle of motherhood which has
led to one of the abuses of modern Romanism. I met an old peasant
couple at Bornhofen who had tramped many weary miles to the famous
shrine of Our Lady to plead for their only son. They had a few pence
saved for a candle, and afterwards when they told me their tale the
old woman heaved a sigh of relief, "Es wird bald gut gehen: Die
da, Sie versteht," and I saw her later paying a farewell visit to
the great understanding Mother whom she could trust. Superstitious
misapprehension if you will, but also the recognition of a divine
principle.
It was Behmen, I believe, who cried with the breath of inspiration,
"Only when I know God shall I know myself"; and so man remains the last
of all the riddles, to be solved it may be only in Heaven's perfection
and the light of the Beatific Vision. "Know thyself" is a vain legend,
the more so when emphasised by a skull; and so I company with a
friend and a stranger, and looking across at the white gate I wonder
concerning the quiet pastures and still waters that lie beyond, even as
Brother Ambrose wondered long years ago in the monastery by the forest.
The Brother Ambrose was ever a saintly man approved
of God and beloved by the Brethren. To him one night,
as he lay abed in the dormitory, came the word of the
Lord, saying, "Come, and I will show thee the Bride,
the Lamb's wife." And Brother Ambrose arose and was
carried to a great and high mountain, even as in the
Vision of Blessed John. 'Twas a still night of many
stars, and Brother Ambrose, looking up, saw a radiant
path in the heavens; and lo! the stars gathered
themselves together on either side until they stood as
walls of light, and the four winds lapped him about as
in a mantle and bore him towards the wondrous gleaming
roadway. Then between the stars came the Holy City with
roof and pinnacle aflame, and walls aglow with such
colours as no earthly limner dreams of, and much gold.
Brother Ambrose beheld the Gates of Pearl, and by every
gate an angel with wings of snow and fire, and a face
no man dare look on because of its exceeding radiance.
Then as Brother Ambrose stretched out his arms because
of his great longing, a little grey cloud came out
of the north and hung between the walls of light, so
that he no longer beheld the Vision, but only heard a
sound as of a great multitude crying 'Alleluia'; and
suddenly the winds came about him again, and lo! he
found himself in his bed in the dormitory, and it was
midnight, for the bell was ringing to Matins; and he
rose and went down with the rest. But when the Brethren
left the choir Brother Ambrose stayed fast in his
place, hearing and seeing nothing because of the Vision
of God; and at Lauds they found him and told the Prior.
He questioned Brother Ambrose of the matter, and when
he heard the Vision bade him limn the Holy City even
as he had seen it; and the Precentor gave him uterine
vellum and much fine gold and what colours he asked for
the work. Then Brother Ambrose limned a wondrous fair
city of gold with turrets and spires; and he inlaid
blue for the sapphire, and green for the emerald, and
vermilion where the city seemed aflame with the glory
of God; but the angels he could not limn, nor could he
set the rest of the colours as he saw them, nor the
wall of stars on either hand; and Brother Ambrose
fell sick because of the exceeding great longing he
had to limn the Holy City, and was very sad; but the
Prior bade him thank God, and remember the infirmity of
the flesh, which, like the little grey cloud, veiled
Jerusalem to his sight.
As I write the monastery bell hard by rings out across the lark's song.
They still have time for visions behind those guarding walls, but for
most of us it is not so. We let slip the ideal for what we call the
real, and the golden dreams vanish while we clutch at phantoms: we
speed along life's pathway, counting to the full the sixty minutes of
every hour, yet the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the
strong. Lying here in this quiet backwater it is hard to believe that
the world without is turbulent with storm and stress and the ebb and
flow of uncertain tides. The little yellow cat rolling on its back
among the daisies, the staid tortoise making a stately meal off the
buttercups near me, these are great events in this haven of peace. And
yet, looking back to the working days, I know how much goodness and
loving kindness there is under the froth and foam. If we do not know
ourselves we most certainly do not know our brethren: that revelation
awaits us, it may be, first in Heaven. To have faith is to create; to
have hope is to call down blessing; to have love is to work miracles.
Above all let us see visions, visions of colour and light, of green
fields and broad rivers, of palaces laid with fair colours, and gardens
where a place is found for rosemary and rue.
It is our prerogative to be dreamers, but there will always be men
ready to offer us death for our dreams. And if it must be so let us
choose death; it is gain, not loss, and the gloomy portal when we reach
it is but a white gate, the white gate maybe we have known all our
lives barred by the tendrils of the woodbine.
IV
RAIN, rain, rain: the little flagged path outside my window is a
streaming way, where the coming raindrops meet again the grey clouds
whose storehouse they have but just now left. The grass grows greener
as I watch it, the burnt patches fade, a thousand thirsty heads are
uplifted for the cooling draught.
The great thrush that robs the raspberry canes is busy; yesterday he
had little but dust for his guerdon, but now fresh, juicy fruit repays
him as he swings to and fro on the pliant branches. The blackbirds
and starlings find the worms an easy prey--poor brother worm ever
ready for sacrifice. I can hear the soft expectant chatter of the
family of martins under the roof; there will be good hunting, and they
know it, for the flies are out when the rain is over, and there are
clamorous mouths awaiting. My little brown brothers, the sparrows,
remain my chief delight. Of all the birds these nestle closest to my
heart, be they grimy little cockneys or their trim and dainty country
cousins. They come day by day for their meed of crumbs spread for them
outside my window, and at this season they eat leisurely and with
good appetite, for there are no hungry babies pestering to be fed.
Very early in the morning I hear the whirr and rustle of eager wings,
and the tap, tap, of little beaks upon the stone. The sound carries
me back, for it was the first to greet me when I rose to draw water
and gather kindling in my roadmender days; and if I slip back another
decade they survey me, reproving my laziness, from the foot of the
narrow bed in my little attic overseas.
Looking along the roadway that we have travelled we see the landmarks,
great and small, which have determined the direction of our feet. For
some those of childhood stand out above all the rest; but I remember
few notable ones, and those few the emphatic chord of the universe,
rather than any commerce with my fellows. There was the night of my
great disappointment, when I was borne from my comfortable bed to see
the wonders of the moon's eclipse. Disappointment was so great that
it sealed my lips; but, once back on my pillow, I sobbed for grief
that I had seen a wonder so far below my expectation. Then there was
a night at Whitby, when the wind made speech impossible, and the seas
rushed up and over the great lighthouse like the hungry spirits of the
deep. I like better to remember the scent of the first cowslip field
under the warm side of the hedge, when I sang to myself for pure joy
of their colour and fragrance. Again, there were the bluebells in the
deserted quarry like the backwash of a southern sea, and below them the
miniature forest of sheltering bracken with its quaint conceits; and,
crowned above all, the day I stood on Watcombe Down, and looked across
a stretch of golden gorse and new-turned blood-red field, the green of
the headland, and beyond, the sapphire sea.
Time sped, and there came a day when I first set foot on German soil
and felt the throb of its paternity, the beat of our common life.
England is my mother, and most dearly do I love her swelling breasts
and wind-swept, salt-strewn hair. Scotland gave me my name, with
its haunting derivation handed down by brave men; but Germany has
always been to me the Fatherland _par excellence_. True, my love is
limited to the southern provinces, with their mediæval memories; for
the progressive guttural north I have little sympathy, but the Rhine
claimed me from the first, calling, calling, with that wonderful voice
which speaks of death and life, of chivalry and greed of gold. If you
would have the river's company you should wander, a happy solitary,
along its banks, watching its gleaming current in the early morning,
its golden glory as it answers the farewell of parting day. Then, in
the silence of the night, you can hear the wash and eddy calling one
to another, count the heart-beats of the great bearer of burdens, and
watch in the moonlight the sisters of the mist as they lament with
wringing hands the days that are gone.
The forests, too, are ready with story hid in the fastness of their
solitude, and it is a joy to think that those great pines, pointing
ever upwards, go for the most part to carry the sails of great ships
seeking afar under open sky. The forest holds other wonders still.
It seems but last night that I wandered down the road which led to
the little unheeded village where I had made my temporary home. The
warm-scented breath of the pines and the stillness of the night wrapped
me in great content; the summer lightning leapt in a lambent arch
across the east, and the stars, seen dimly through the sombre tree
crests, were outrivalled by the glow-worms which shone in countless
points of light from bank and hedge; even two charcoal-burners, who
passed with friendly greeting, had wreathed their hats with the living
flame. The tiny shifting lamps were everywhere; pale yellow, purely
white, or green as the underside of a northern wave. By day but an
ugly, repellent worm; but darkness comes, and lo, a star alight. Nature
is full for us of seeming inconsistencies and glad surprises. The
world's asleep, say you; on your ear falls the nightingale's song and
the stir of living creatures in bush and brake. The mantle of night
falls, and all unattended the wind leaps up and scatters the clouds
which veil the constant stars; or in the hour of the great dark, dawn
parts the curtain with the long foregleam of the coming day. It is hard
to turn one's back on night with her kiss of peace for tired eye-lids,
the kiss which is not sleep but its neglected forerunner. I made my
way at last down to the vine-girt bridge asleep under the stars and up
the winding stairs of the old grey tower; and a stone's-throw away the
Rhine slipped quietly past in the midsummer moonlight.
Switzerland came in its turn, unearthly in its white loveliness and
glory of lake and sky. But perhaps the landmark which stands out
most clearly is the solitary blue gentian which I found in the short
slippery grass of the Rigi, gazing up at the sky whose blue could
not hope to excel it. It was my first; and what need of another, for
finding one I had gazed into the mystery of all. This side the Pass,
snow and the blue of heaven; later I entered Italy through fields of
many-hued lilies, her past glories blazoned in the flowers of the field.
Now it is a strangely uneventful road that leads to my White Gate. Each
day questions me as it passes; each day makes answer for me "not yet."
There is no material preparation to be made for this journey of mine
into a far country--a simple fact which adds to the 'unknowableness'
of the other side. Do I travel alone, or am I one of a great company,
swift yet unhurried in their passage? The voices of Penelope's
suitors shrilled on the ears of Ulysses, as they journeyed to the
nether-world, like nocturnal birds and bats in the inarticulateness of
their speech. They had abused the gift, and fled self-condemned. Maybe
silence commends itself as most suitable for the wayfarers towards the
sunrise--silence because they seek the Word--but for those hastening
towards the confusion they have wrought there falls already the sharp
oncoming of the curse.
While we are still here the language of worship seems far, and yet
lies very nigh; for what better note can our frail tongues lisp than
the voice of wind and sea, river and stream, those grateful servants
giving all and asking nothing, the soft whisper of snow and rain eager
to replenish, or the thunder proclaiming a majesty too great for
utterance? Here, too, stands the angel with the censer gathering up
the fragrance of teeming earth and forest-tree, of flower and fruit,
and sweetly pungent herb distilled by sun and rain for joyful use.
Here, too, come acolytes lighting the dark with tapers--sun, moon, and
stars--gifts of the Lord that His sanctuary may stand ever served.
It lies here ready to our hand, this life of adoration which we needs
must live hand in hand with earth, for has she not borne the curse
with us? But beyond the white gate and the trail of woodbine falls the
silence greater than speech, darkness greater than light, a pause of "a
little while"; and then the touch of that healing garment as we pass to
the King in His beauty, in a land from which there is no return.
At the gateway then I cry you farewell.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Page 79, "Sphoephera" changed to "Sphæra" (Sphæra cujus centrum)
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