Title: The Roadmender
Author: Fairless, Michael, 1869-1901
Language: English
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Transcribed from the 1911 Duckworth and Co. edition by David Price, email
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                              The Roadmender


                                    By

                             Michael Fairless

                                Author of
                   “The Gathering of Brother Hilarius”

                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]

                                * * * * *

                                  London

                             Duckworth & Co.

                         3 Henrietta Street, W.C.
                                   1911

                                * * * * *

This series of papers appeared in _The Pilot_ and is now republished by
permission of the Editor.

                                * * * * *

                               A. M. D. G.

                                * * * * *

                                    TO
                                MY MOTHER:
                         AND TO EARTH, MY MOTHER,
                               WHOM I LOVE.



CONTENTS

                             PAGE
THE ROADMENDER                  1
OUT OF THE SHADOW              61
AT THE WHITE GATE             119

The Roadmender


CHAPTER 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, sweetbrier, 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 fellowmen 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.

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 carthorse 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.



CHAPTER II


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
earthy 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.

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 ear-caps.  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.

   [Picture: Music score: F# dotted crotchet, F# quaver, F# quaver, F#
 dotted crotchet, D crotchet, E crotchet.  This bar is then repeated once
                                  more]

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
Pilgrim’s 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.

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 fellowman.

Presently we part, and the two go, dogged and footsore, down the road
which is to lead them into the great silence.



CHAPTER 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?  This 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.



CHAPTER IV


YESTERDAY a funeral passed, from the work-house 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 way-worn 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.

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 mouths 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.



CHAPTER 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 footstool of God wrapped in a fold of
His living robe, the while night smoothes our tired face with her healing
hands.

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.

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.



CHAPTER 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?

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.

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 home-made 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


CHAPTER 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.

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 flaming 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.



CHAPTER 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 he 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 to the idle waiting men 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
threefold 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 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 thresh-hold
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.



CHAPTER 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 windswept 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 to 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 “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 white-washed 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.



CHAPTER 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.

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.

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—stretched 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.



CHAPTER 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 nullibus_,” 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 in-seeing, 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.’”

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.



CHAPTER 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 heart-beat
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 house-tops 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, act 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 Œdipus 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


CHAPTER 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.

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 child-birth 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 in
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.

“_Say unto your sisters Ruhamah_,” cries the prophet.

“_He shall come down like rain on 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 headlights 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.



CHAPTER 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 verify 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 eschseholtzias.  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.

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 caves; 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.

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 away 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.



CHAPTER 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 sustained 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.



CHAPTER 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 beads 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 medieval 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.





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