| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: The Light Invisible
Author: Benson, Robert Hugh
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Light Invisible" ***
(This file was produced from images generously made
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Light Invisible
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“_She moves in tumult: round her lies
The silence of the world of grace;
The twilight of our mysteries
Shines like high noon-day on her face,
Our piteous guesses, dim with fears,
She touches, handles, sees, and hears._
* * * * *
“_A willing sacrifice, she takes
The burden of our Fall within;
Holy she stands; while on her breaks
The lightning of the wrath of sin:
She drinks her Saviour’s Cup of pain,
And, one with Jesus, thirsts again._”
THE CONTEMPLATIVE SOUL
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
-------
THE LORD OF THE WORLD
BY WHAT AUTHORITY?
THE KING’S ACHIEVEMENT
THE QUEEN’S TRAGEDY
RICHARD RAYNAL, SOLITARY
THE SENTIMENTALISTS
A MIRROR OF SHALOTT
-------
A BOOK OF THE LOVE OF JESUS
-------
SIR ISAAC PITMAN & SONS, LTD.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The
Light Invisible
By
Robert Hugh Benson
_Author of_
“The King’s Achievement,” “By What Authority?”
“The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary,”
“A Book of the Love of Jesus,” etc.
NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO
BENZIGER BROTHERS
PRINTERS TO THE HOLY APOSTOLIC SEE
1910
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Preface
_My friend, whose talk I have reported in this book so far as I am able,
would be the first to disclaim (as indeed he was always anxious to do)
the rôle of an accredited teacher, other than that which his sacred
office conferred on him._
_All that he claimed (and this surely was within his rights) was to be
at least sincere in his perceptions and expressions of spiritual truth.
His power, as he was at pains to tell me, was no more than a particular
development of a faculty common to all who possess a coherent spiritual
life. To one Divine Truth finds entrance through laws of nature, to
another through the medium of other sciences or arts; to my friend it
presented itself in directly sensible forms. Had his experiences,
however, even seemed to contravene Divine Revelation, he would have
rejected them with horror: entire submission to the_ _Divine Teacher
upon earth, as he more than once told me, should normally precede the
exercise of all other spiritual faculties. The deliberate reversal of
this is nothing else than Protestantism in its extreme form, and must
ultimately result in the extinction of faith._
_For the rest, I can add nothing to his own words. It is of course more
than possible that here and there I have failed to present his exact
meaning; but at least I have taken pains to submit the book before
publication to the judgment of those whose theological learning is
sufficient to reassure me that at least I have not so far misunderstood
my friend’s words and tales, as to represent him as transgressing the
explicit laws of ascetical, moral, mystical, or dogmatic theology._
_To these counsellors I must express my gratitude, as well as to others
who have kindly given me the encouragement of their sympathy._
_R. B._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
PAGE
THE GREEN ROBE 1
THE WATCHER 15
THE BLOOD-EAGLE 29
OVER THE GATEWAY 49
POENA DAMNI 65
CONSOLATRIX AFFLICTORUM 77
THE BRIDGE OVER THE STREAM 95
IN THE CONVENT CHAPEL 107
UNDER WHICH KING? 127
WITH DYED GARMENTS 145
UNTO BABES 159
THE TRAVELLER 181
THE SORROWS OF THE WORLD 203
IN THE MORNING 227
THE EXPECTED GUEST 241
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Green Robe
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.”
_Blake._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Green Robe
THE old priest was silent for a moment.
The song of a great bee boomed up out of the distance and ceased as the
white bell of a flower beside me drooped suddenly under his weight.
“I have not made myself clear,” said the priest again. “Let me think a
minute.” And he leaned back.
We were sitting on a little red-tiled platform in his garden, in a
sheltered angle of the wall. On one side of us rose the old irregular
house, with its latticed windows, and its lichened roofs culminating in
a bellturret; on the other I looked across the pleasant garden where
great scarlet poppies hung like motionless flames in the hot June
sunshine, to the tall living wall of yew, beyond which rose the heavy
green masses of an elm in which a pigeon lamented, and above all a
tender blue sky. The priest was looking out steadily before him with
great childlike eyes that shone strangely in his thin face under his
white hair. He was dressed in an old cassock that showed worn and green
in the high lights.
“No,” he said presently, “it is not faith that I mean; it is only an
intense form of the gift of spiritual perception that God has given me;
which gift indeed is common to us all in our measure. It is the faculty
by which we verify for ourselves what we have received on authority and
hold by faith. Spiritual life consists partly in exercising this
faculty. Well, then, this form of that faculty God has been pleased to
bestow upon me, just as He has been pleased to bestow on you a keen
power of seeing and enjoying beauty where others perhaps see none; this
is called artistic perception. It is no sort of credit to you or to me,
any more than is the colour of our eyes, or a faculty for mathematics,
or an athletic body.
“Now in my case, in which you are pleased to be interested, the
perception occasionally is so keen that the spiritual world appears to
me as visible as what we call the natural world. In such moments,
although I generally know the difference between the spiritual and the
natural, yet they appear to me simultaneously, as if on the same plane.
It depends on my choice as to which of the two I see the more clearly.
“Let me explain a little. It is a question of focus. A few minutes ago
you were staring at the sky, but you did not see the sky. Your own
thought lay before you instead. Then I spoke to you, and you started a
little and looked at me; and you saw me, and your thought vanished. Now
can you understand me if I say that these sudden glimpses that God has
granted me, were as though when you looked at the sky, you saw both the
sky and your thought at once, on the same plane, as I have said? Or
think of it in another way. You know the sheet of plate-glass that is
across the upper part of the fireplace in my study. Well, it depends on
the focus of your eyes, and your intention, whether you see the glass
and the fire-plate behind, or the room reflected in the glass. Now can
you imagine what it would be to see them all at once? It is like that.”
And he made an outward gesture with his hands.
“Well,” I said, “I scarcely understand. But please tell me, if you will,
your first vision of that kind.”
“I believe,” he began, “that when I was a child the first clear vision
came to me, but I only suppose it from my mother’s diary. I have not the
diary with me now, but there is an entry in it describing how I said I
had seen a face look out of a wall and had run indoors from the garden;
half frightened, but not terrified. But I remember nothing of it myself,
and my mother seems to have thought it must have been a waking dream;
and if it were not for what has happened to me since perhaps I should
have thought it a dream too. But now the other explanation seems to me
more likely. But the first clear vision that I remember for myself was
as follows:
“When I was about fourteen years old I came home at the end of one July
for my summer holidays. The pony-cart was at the station to meet me when
I arrived about four o’clock in the afternoon; but as there was a short
cut through the woods, I put my luggage into the cart, and started to
walk the mile and a half by myself. The field path presently plunged
into a pine wood, and I came over the slippery needles under the high
arches of the pines with that intense ecstatic happiness of home-coming
that some natures know so well. I hope sometimes that the first steps on
the other side of death may be like that. The air was full of mellow
sounds that seemed to emphasise the deep stillness of the woods, and of
mellow lights that stirred among the shadowed greenness. I know this
now, though I did not know it then. Until that day although the beauty
and the colour and sound of the world certainly affected me, yet I was
not conscious of them, any more than of the air I breathed, because I
did not then know what they meant. Well, I went on in this glowing
dimness, noticing only the trees that might be climbed, the squirrels
and moths that might be caught, and the sticks that might be shaped into
arrows or bows.
“I must tell you, too, something of my religion at that time. It was the
religion of most well-taught boys. In the fore-ground, if I may put it
so, was morality: I must not do certain things; I must do certain other
things. In the middle distance was a perception of God. Let me say that
I realised that I was present to Him, but not that He was present to me.
Our Saviour dwelt in this middle distance, one whom I fancied ordinarily
tender, sometimes stern. In the background there lay certain mysteries,
sacramental and otherwise. These were chiefly the affairs of grown-up
people. And infinitely far away, like clouds piled upon the horizon of a
sea, was the invisible world of heaven whence God looked at me, golden
gates and streets, now towering in their exclusiveness, now on Sunday
evenings bright with a light of hope, now on wet mornings unutterably
dreary. But all this was uninteresting to me. Here about me lay the
tangible enjoyable world––this was reality: there in a misty picture lay
religion, claiming, as I knew, my homage, but not my heart. Well; so I
walked through these woods, a tiny human creature, yet greater, if I had
only known it, than these giants of ruddy bodies and arms, and garlanded
heads that stirred above me.
“My path presently came over a rise in the ground; and on my left lay a
long glade, bordered by pines, fringed with bracken, but itself a folded
carpet of smooth rabbit-cropped grass, with a quiet oblong pool in the
centre, some fifty yards below me.
“Now I cannot tell you how the vision began; but I found myself, without
experiencing any conscious shock, standing perfectly still, my lips dry,
my eyes smarting with the intensity with which I had been staring down
the glade, and one foot aching with the pressure with which I had rested
upon it. It must have come upon me and enthralled me so swiftly that my
brain had no time to reflect. It was no work, therefore, of the
imagination, but a clear and sudden vision. This is what I remember to
have seen.
“I stood on the border of a vast robe; its material was green. A great
fold of it lay full in view, but I was conscious that it stretched for
almost unlimited miles. This great green robe blazed with embroidery.
There were straight lines of tawny work on either side which melted
again into a darker green in high relief. Right in the centre lay a pale
agate stitched delicately into the robe with fine dark stitches;
overhead the blue lining of this silken robe arched out. I was conscious
that this robe was vast beyond conception, and that I stood as it were
in a fold of it, as it lay stretched out on some unseen floor. But,
clearer than any other thought, stood out in my mind the certainty that
this robe had not been flung down and left, but that it clothed a
Person. And even as this thought showed itself a ripple ran along the
high relief in dark green, as if the wearer of the robe had just
stirred. And I felt on my face the breeze of His motion. And it was this
I suppose that brought me to myself.
“And then I looked again, and all was as it had been the last time I had
passed this way. There was the glade and the pool and the pines and the
sky overhead, and the Presence was gone. I was a boy walking home from
the station, with dear delights of the pony and the air-gun, and the
wakings morning by morning in my own carpeted bedroom, before me.
“I tried, however, to see it again as I had seen it. No, it was not in
the least like a robe; and above all where was the Person that wore it?
There was no life about me, except my own, and the insect life that sang
in the air, and the quiet meditative life of the growing things. But who
was this Person I had suddenly perceived? And then it came upon me with
a shock, and yet I was incredulous. It could not be the God of sermons
and long prayers who demanded my presence Sunday by Sunday in His little
church, that God Who watched me like a stern father. Why religion, I
thought, told me that all was vanity and unreality, and that rabbits and
pools and glades were nothing compared to Him who sits on the great
white throne.
“I need not tell you that I never spoke of this at home. It seemed to me
that I had stumbled upon a scene that was almost dreadful, that might be
thought over in bed, or during an idle lonely morning in the garden, but
must never be spoken of, and I can scarcely tell you when the time came
that I understood that there was but one God after all.”
The old man stopped talking. And I looked out again at the garden
without answering him, and tried myself to see how the poppies were
embroidered into a robe, and to hear how the chatter of the starlings
was but the rustle of its movement, the clink of jewel against jewel,
and the moan of the pigeon the creaking of the heavy silk, but I could
not. The poppies flamed and the birds talked and sobbed, but that was
all.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Watcher
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Il faut d’abord rendre l’organe de
la vision analogue et semblable à
l’objet qu’il doit contempler.”
_Maeterlinck._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Watcher
ON the following day we went out soon after breakfast and walked up and
down a grass path between two yew hedges; the dew was not yet off the
grass that lay in shadow; and thin patches of gossamer still hung like
torn cambric on the yew shoots on either side. As we passed for the
second time up the path, the old man suddenly stooped and pushing aside
a dock-leaf at the foot of the hedge lifted a dead mouse, and looked at
it as it lay stiffly on the palm of his hand, and I saw that his eyes
filled slowly with the ready tears of old age.
“He has chosen his own resting-place,” he said. “Let him lie there. Why
did I disturb him?”––and he laid him gently down again; and then
gathering a fragment of wet earth he sprinkled it over the mouse. “Earth
to earth, ashes to ashes,” he said, “in sure and certain hope”––and then
he stopped; and straightening himself with difficulty walked on, and I
followed him.
“You seemed interested,” he said, “in my story yesterday. Shall I tell
you how I saw a very different sight when I was a little older?” And
when I had told him how strange and attractive his story had been, he
began.
“I told you how I found it impossible to see again what I had seen in
the glade. For a few weeks, perhaps months, I tried now and then to
force myself to feel that Presence, or at least to see that robe, but I
could not, because it is the gift of God, and can no more be gained by
effort than ordinary sight can be won by a sightless man; but I soon
ceased to try.
“I reached eighteen years at last, that terrible age when the soul seems
to have dwindled to a spark overlaid by a mountain of ashes––when blood
and fire and death and loud noises seem the only things of interest, and
all tender things shrink back and hide from the dreadful noonday of
manhood. Some one gave me one of those shot-pistols that you may have
seen, and I loved the sense of power that it gave me, for I had never
had a gun. For a week or two in the summer holidays I was content with
shooting at a mark, or at the level surface of water, and delighted to
see the cardboard shattered, or the quiet pool torn to shreds along its
mirror where the sky and green lay sleeping. Then that ceased to
interest me, and I longed to see a living thing suddenly stop living at
my will. Now,” and he held up a deprecating hand, “I think sport is
necessary for some natures. After all, the killing of creatures is
necessary for man’s food, and sport as you will tell me is a survival of
man’s delight in obtaining food, and it requires certain noble qualities
of endurance and skill. I know all that, and I know further that for
some natures it is a relief––an escape for humours that will otherwise
find an evil vent. But I do know this––that for me it was not necessary.
“However, there was every excuse, and I went out in good faith one
summer evening intending to shoot some rabbit as he ran to cover from
the open field. I walked along the inside of a fence with a wood above
me and on my left, and the green meadow on my right. Well, owing
probably to my own lack of skill, though I could hear the patter and
rush of the rabbits all round me, and could see them in the distance
sitting up listening with cocked ears, as I stole along the fence, I
could not get close enough to fire at them with any hope of what I
fancied was success; and by the time that I had arrived at the end of
the wood I was in an impatient mood.
“I stood for a moment or two leaning on the fence looking out of that
pleasant coolness into the open meadow beyond; the sun had at that
moment dipped behind the hill before me and all was in shadow except
where there hung a glory about the topmost leaves of a beech that still
caught the sun. The birds were beginning to come in from the fields, and
were settling one by one in the wood behind me, staying here and there
to sing one last line of melody. I could hear the quiet rush and then
the sudden clap of a pigeon’s wings as he came home, and as I listened I
heard pealing out above all other sounds the long liquid song of a
thrush somewhere above me. I looked up idly and tried to see the bird,
and after a moment or two caught sight of him as the leaves of the beech
parted in the breeze, his head lifted and his whole body vibrating with
the joy of life and music. As some one has said, his body was one
beating heart. The last radiance of the sun over the hill reached him
and bathed him in golden warmth. Then the leaves closed again as the
breeze dropped, but still his song rang out.
“Then there came on me a blinding desire to kill him. All the other
creatures had mocked me and run home. Here at least was a victim, and I
would pour out the sullen anger that had been gathering during my walk,
and at least demand this one life as a substitute. Side by side with
this I remembered clearly that I had come out to kill for food: that was
my one justification. Side by side I saw both these things, and I had no
excuse––no excuse.
“I turned my head every way and moved a step or two back to catch sight
of him again, and, although, this may sound fantastic and overwrought,
in my whole being was a struggle between light and darkness. Every fibre
of my life told me that the thrush had a right to live. Ah! he had
earned it, if labour were wanting, by this very song that was guiding
death towards him, but black sullen anger had thrown my conscience, and
was now struggling to hold it down till the shot had been fired. Still I
waited for the breeze, and then it came, cool and sweet-smelling like
the breath of a garden, and the leaves parted. There he sang in the
sunshine, and in a moment I lifted the pistol and drew the trigger.
“With the crack of the cap came silence overhead, and after what seemed
an interminable moment came the soft rush of something falling and the
faint thud among last year’s leaves. Then I stood half terrified, and
stared among the dead leaves. All seemed dim and misty. My eyes were
still a little dazzled by the bright background of sunlit air and rosy
clouds on which I had looked with such intensity, and the space beneath
the branches was a world of shadows. Still I looked a few yards away,
trying to make out the body of the thrush, and fearing to hear a
struggle of beating wings among the dry leaves.
“And then I lifted my eyes a little, vaguely. A yard or two beyond where
the thrush lay was a rhododendron bush. The blossoms had fallen and the
outline of dark, heavy leaves was unrelieved by the slightest touch of
colour. As I looked at it, I saw a face looking down from the higher
branches.
“It was a perfectly hairless head and face, the thin lips were parted in
a wide smile of laughter, there were innumerable lines about the corners
of the mouth, and the eyes were surrounded by creases of merriment. What
was perhaps most terrible about it all was that the eyes were not
looking at me, but down among the leaves; the heavy eyelids lay
drooping, and the long, narrow, shining slits showed how the eyes
laughed beneath them. The forehead sloped quickly back, like a cat’s
head. The face was the colour of earth, and the outlines of the head
faded below the ears and chin into the gloom of the dark bush. There was
no throat, or body or limbs so far as I could see. The face just hung
there like a down-turned Eastern mask in an old curiosity shop. And it
smiled with sheer delight, not at me, but at the thrush’s body. There
was no change of expression so long as I watched it, just a silent smile
of pleasure petrified on the face. I could not move my eyes from it.
“After what I suppose was a minute or so, the face had gone. I did not
see it go, but I became aware that I was looking only at leaves.
“No; there was no outline of leaf, or play of shadows that could
possibly have taken the form of a face. You can guess how I tried to
force myself to believe that that was all; how I turned my head this way
and that to catch it again; but there was no hint of a face.
“Now, I cannot tell you how I did it; but although I was half beside
myself with fright, I went forward towards the bush and searched
furiously among the leaves for the body of the thrush; and at last I
found it, and lifted it. It was still limp and warm to the touch. Its
breast was a little ruffled, and one tiny drop of blood lay at the root
of the beak below the eyes, like a tear of dismay and sorrow at such an
unmerited, unexpected death.
“I carried it to the fence and climbed over, and then began to run in
great steps, looking now and then awfully at the gathering gloom of the
wood behind, where the laughing face had mocked the dead. I think,
looking back as I do now, that my chief instinct was that I could not
leave the thrush there to be laughed at, and that I must get it out into
the clean, airy meadow. When I reached the middle of the meadow I came
to a pond which never ran quite dry even in the hottest summer. On the
bank I laid the thrush down, and then deliberately but with all my force
dashed the pistol into the water; then emptied my pockets of the
cartridges and threw them in too.
“Then I turned again to the piteous little body, feeling that at least I
had tried to make amends. There was an old rabbit hole near, the grass
growing down in its mouth, and a tangle of web and dead leaves behind. I
scooped a little space out among the leaves, and then laid the thrush
there; gathered a little of the sandy soil and poured it over the body,
saying, I remember, half unconsciously, ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes,
in sure and certain hope’––and then I stopped, feeling I had been a
little profane, though I do not think so now. And then I went home.
“As I dressed for dinner, looking out over the darkening meadow where
the thrush lay, I remember feeling happy that no evil thing could mock
the defenceless dead out there in the clean meadow where the wind blew
and the stars shone down.”
We reached in our going to and fro up the yew path a little seat at the
end standing back from the path. Opposite us hung a crucifix, with a
pent-house over it, that the old man had put up years before. As he did
not speak I turned to him, and saw that he was looking steadily at the
Figure on the Cross; and I thought how He who bore our griefs and
carried our sorrows was one with the heavenly Father, without whom not
even a sparrow falls to the ground.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Blood-Eagle
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“And this I know: whether the one True Light
Kindle to Love or Wrath––consume me quite,
One glimpse of It within the Tavern caught
Better than in the Temple lost outright.”
_Omar Khayyam._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Blood-Eagle
ONE night when I went to my room I found in a little shelf near the
window a book, whose title I now forget, describing the far-off days
when the religion of Christ and of the gods of the north strove together
in England. I read this for an hour or two before I went to sleep, and
again as I was dressing on the following morning, and spoke of it at
breakfast.
“Yes,” said the old man, “that was one of my father’s books. I remember
reading it when I was a boy. I believe it is said to be very
ill-informed and unscientific in these days. My parents used to think
that all religions except Christianity were of the devil. But I think
St. Paul teaches us a larger hope than that.”
He said nothing more at the time; but in the course of the morning, as I
was walking up and down the raised terrace that runs under the pines
beside the drive, I saw the priest coming towards me with a book in his
hand. He was a little dusty and flushed.
“I went to look for something that I thought might interest you, after
what you said at breakfast,” he began, “and I have found it at last in
the loft.”
We began to walk together up and down.
“A very curious thing happened to me,” he said, “when I was a boy. I
remember telling my father of it when I came home, and it remained in my
mind. A few years afterwards an old professor was staying with us; and
after dinner one night, when we had been talking about what you were
speaking of at breakfast, my father made me tell it again, and when I
had finished the professor asked me to write it down for him. So I wrote
it in this book first; and then made a copy and sent it to him. The book
itself is a kind of irregular diary in which I used to write sometimes.
Would you care to hear it?”
When I had told him I should like to hear the story, he began again.
“I must first tell you the circumstances. I was about sixteen years old.
My parents had gone abroad for the holidays, and I went to stay with a
school friend of mine at his home not far from Ascot. We used to take
our lunch with us sometimes on bright days––for it was at Christmas
time––and go off for the day over the heather. You must remember that I
was only a schoolboy at the time, so I daresay I exaggerated or
elaborated some of the details a little, but the main facts of the story
you can rely upon. Shall we sit down while I read it?”
Then when we had seated ourselves on a bench that stood at the end of
the terrace, with the old house basking before us in the hot sunshine,
he began to read.
“About six o’clock in the evening of one of the days towards the end of
January, Jack and I were still wandering on high, heathy ground near
Ascot. We had walked all day and had lost ourselves; but we kept going
in as straight a line as we could, knowing that in time we should strike
across a road. We were rather tired and silent; but suddenly Jack
uttered an exclamation, and then pointed out a light across the heath.
We stood a moment to see if it moved, but it remained still.
“‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘There can be no house near here.’
“‘It’s a broomsquire’s cottage, I expect,’ said Jack.
“I asked what that meant.
“‘Oh! I don’t know exactly,’ said Jack; ‘they’re a kind of gypsies.’
“We stumbled on across the heather, while the light grew steadily
nearer. The moon was beginning to rise, and it was a clear night, one of
those windless, frosty nights that sometimes come after a wet autumn.
Jack plunged at one place into a hidden ditch, and I heard the crackling
of ice as he scrambled out.
“‘Skating to-morrow, by Jove,’ he said.
“As we got closer I began to see that we were approaching a copse of
firs; the heather began to get shorter. Then, as I looked at the light,
I saw there was a fixed outline of a kind of house out of which it
shone. The window apparently was an irregular shape, and the house
seemed to be leaning against a tall fir on the outskirts of the copse.
As we got quite close, our feet noiseless on the soft heather, I saw
that the house was built altogether round the fir, which served as a
kind of central prop. The house was made of wattled boughs, and thatched
heavily with heather.
“I felt more and more anxious about it, for I had never heard of
‘broomsquires,’ and also, I confess, a little timid; for the place was
lonely, and we were only two boys. I was leading now, and presently
reached the window and looked in.
“The walls inside were hung with blankets and clothes to keep the wind
out; there was a long old settle in one corner, the floor was carpeted
with branches and blankets apparently, and there was an opening
opposite, partly closed by a wattled hurdle that leaned against it. Half
sitting and half lying on the settle, was an old woman with her face
hidden. An oil-lamp hung from one of the branches of the fir that helped
to form the roof. There was no sign of any other living thing in the
place. As I looked Jack came up behind and spoke over my shoulder.
“‘Can you tell us the way to the nearest high-road?’ he asked.
“The old woman sat up suddenly, with a look of fright on her face. She
was extraordinarily dirty and ill-kempt. I could see in the dim light of
the lamp that she had a wrinkled old face, with sunken dark eyes, white
eyebrows, and white hair; and her mouth began to mumble as she looked at
us. Presently she made a violent gesture to wave us from the window.
“Jack repeated the question, and the old woman got up and hobbled
quietly and crookedly to the door, and in a moment she had come round
close to us. I then saw how very small she was. She could not have been
five feet tall, and was very much bent. I must say again that I felt
very uneasy and startled with this terrifying old creature close to me
and peering up into my face. She took me by the coat and with her other
hand beckoned quickly away in every direction. She seemed to be warning
us away from the copse, but still she said nothing.
“Jack grew impatient.
“‘Deaf old fool!’ he said in an undertone, and then loudly and slowly,
‘Can you tell us the way to the nearest high-road?’
“Then she seemed to understand, and pointed vigorously in the direction
from which we had come.
“‘Oh! nonsense,’ said Jack, ‘we’ve come from there. Come on this way,’
he said, ‘we can’t spend all night here.’ And then he turned the side of
the little house and disappeared into the copse.
“The old woman dropped my coat in a moment, and began to run after Jack,
and I went round the other side of the house and saw Jack moving in
front, for the firs were sparse at the edge of the wood, and the
moonlight filtered through them. The old woman, I saw as I turned into
the wood, had stopped, knowing she could not catch us, and was standing
with her hands stretched out, and a curious sound, half cry and half sob
came from her. I was a little uneasy, because we had not treated her
with courtesy, and stopped, but at that moment Jack called.
“‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we’re sure to find a road at the end of this.’
“So I went on.
“Once I turned and saw the little old woman standing as before; and as I
looked between the trees she lifted one hand to her mouth and sent a
curious whistling cry after us, that somehow frightened me. It seemed
too loud for one so small.
“As we went on the wood grew darker. Here and there in an open patch
there lay a white splash of moonlight on the fir needles, and great dim
spaces lay round us. Although the wood stood on high ground, the trees
grew so thickly about us that we could see nothing of the country round.
Now and then we tripped on a root, or else caught in a bramble, but it
seemed to me that we were following a narrow path that led deeper and
deeper into the heart of the wood. Suddenly Jack stopped and lifted his
hand.
“‘Hush!’ he said.
“I stopped too, and we listened breathlessly. Then in a moment more,––––
“‘Hush!’ he said, ‘something’s coming,’ and he jumped out of the path
behind a tree, and I followed him.
“Then we heard a scuffling in front of us and a grunting, and some big
creature came hurrying down the path. As it passed us I looked, almost
terrified out of my mind, and saw that it was a huge pig; but the thing
that held me breathless and sick was that there ran nearly the whole
length of its back a deep wound, from which the blood dripped. The
creature, grunting heavily, tore down the path towards the cottage, and
presently the sound of it died away. As I leaned against Jack, I could
feel his arm trembling as it held the tree.
“‘Oh!’ he said in a moment, ‘we must get out of this. Which way, which
way?’
“But I had been still listening, and held him quiet.
“‘Wait,’ I said, ‘there is something else.’
“Out of the wood in front of us there came a panting, and the soft
sounds of hobbling steps along the path. We crouched lower and watched.
Presently the figure of a bent old man came in sight, making his way
quickly along the path. He seemed startled and out of breath. His mouth
was moving, and he was talking to himself in a low voice in a
complaining tone, but his eyes searched the wood from side to side.
“As he came quite close to us, as we lay hardly daring to breathe, I saw
one of his hands that hung in front of him, opening and shutting; and
that it was stained with what looked black in the moonlight. He did not
see us, as by now we were hidden by a great bramble bush, and he passed
on down the path; and then all was silent again.
“When a few minutes had passed in perfect stillness, we got up and went
on, but neither of us cared to walk in the path down which those two
terrible dripping things had come; and we went stumbling over the broken
ground, keeping a parallel course to the path for about another two
hundred yards. Jack had begun to recover himself, and even began to talk
and laugh at being frightened at a pig and an old man. He told me
afterwards that he had not seen the old man’s hand.
“Then the path began to lead uphill. At this point I suddenly stopped
Jack.
“‘Do you see nothing?’ I asked.
“Now I scarcely remember what I said or did. But this is what my friend
told me afterwards. Jack said there was nothing but a little rising
ground in front, from which the trees stood back.
“‘Do you see nothing on the top of the mound? Out in the open, where the
moonlight falls on her?’
“Jack told me afterwards that he thought I had gone suddenly mad, and
grew frightened himself.
“‘Do you not see a woman standing there? She has long yellow hair in two
braids; she has thick gold bracelets on her bare arms. She has a tunic,
bound by a girdle, and it comes below her knees: and she has red jewels
in her hair, on her belt, on her bracelets; and her eyes shine in the
moonlight: and she is waiting,––waiting for that which has escaped.’
“Now Jack tells me that when I said this I fell flat on my face, with my
hands stretched out, and began to talk: but he said he could not
understand a word I said. He himself looked steadily at the rising
ground, but there was nothing to be seen there: there were the fir-trees
standing in a circle round it, and a bare space in the middle, from
which the heather was gone, and that was all. This mound would be about
fifteen yards from us.
“I lay there, said Jack, a few minutes, and then sat up and looked about
me. Then I remembered for myself that I had seen the pig and the old
man, but nothing more: but I was terrified at the remembrance, and
insisted upon our striking out a new course through the wood, and
leaving the mound to our left. I did not know myself why the mound
frightened me, but I dared not go near it. Jack wisely did not say
anything more about it until afterwards. We presently found our way out
of the copse, struck across the heath for another half-mile or so, and
then came across a road which Jack knew, and so we came home.
“When we told our story, and Jack, to my astonishment, had added the
part of which I myself had no remembrance, Jack’s father did not say
very much; but he took us next day to identify the place. To our intense
surprise the house of the broomsquire was gone; there were the trampled
branches round the tree, and the smoked branch from which the oil lamp
had hung, and the ashes of a wood-fire outside the house, but no sign of
the old man or his wife. As we went along the path, now in the cheerful
frosty sunshine, we found dark splashes here and there on the brambles,
but they were dry and colourless. Then we came to the mound.
“I grew uneasy again as we came to it, but was ashamed to show my fear
in the broad daylight.
“On the top we found a curious thing, which Jack’s father told us was
one of the old customs of the broomsquires, that no one was altogether
able to explain. The ground was shovelled away, so as to form a kind of
sloping passage downwards into the earth. The passage was not more than
five yards long; and at the end of it, just where it was covered by the
ground overhead, was a sort of altar, made of earth and stones beaten
flat; and plastered into its surface were bits of old china and glass.
But what startled us was to find a dark patch of something which had
soaked deep into the ground before the altar. It was still damp.”
When the old man had read so far, he laid down the book.
“When I told all this to the Professor,” he said, “he seemed very deeply
interested. He told us, I remember, that the wound on the pig identified
the nature of the sacrifice that the old man had begun to offer. He
called it a ‘blood-eagle,’ and added some details which I will not
disgust you with. He said too that the broomsquire had confused two
rites––that only human sacrifices should be offered as ‘blood-eagles.’
In fact it all seemed perfectly familiar to him: and he said more than I
can either remember or verify.”
“And the woman on the rising ground?” I asked.
“Well,” said the old man, smiling, “the Professor would not listen to my
evidence about that. He accepted the early part of the story, and simply
declined to pay any attention to the woman. He said I had been reading
Norse tales, or was dreaming. He even hinted that I was romancing. Under
other circumstances this method of treating evidence would be called
‘Higher Criticism,’ I believe.”
“But it’s all a brutal and disgusting worship,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” said the old man, “very brutal and disgusting; but is it not
very much higher and better than the Professor’s faith? He was only a
skilled Ritualist after all, you see.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over the Gateway
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“––For faith, that, when my need is sore,
Gleams from a partly-open door,
And shows the firelight on the floor––”
_A Canticle of Common Things._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over the Gateway
WE were sitting together one morning in the common sitting-room in the
centre of the house. There had been a fall of rain during the night, and
it was thought better that the old man should not sit in the garden
until the sun had dried the earth––so we sat indoors instead, but with
the great door wide open, that looked on to a rectangle of lawn that lay
before the house. Once a drive had led to this door through a gate with
pedestals and stone balls, that stood exactly opposite, about fifteen
yards away, but the drive had long been grassed over; although even now
it showed faintly under two slight ridges in the grass that ran from the
gate to the door. Otherwise the lawn was enclosed by a low old brick
wall, almost hidden by a wealth of ivy, against which showed in rich
masses of colour the heads of purple and yellow irises and tawny
wallflowers.
The old man had been silent at breakfast. He had offered the Holy
Sacrifice as usual that morning in the little chapel upstairs, and I had
noticed at the time even that he seemed pre-occupied: and at breakfast
he had talked very little, letting every subject drop as I suggested it;
and I had understood at last that his thoughts were far away in the
past; and I did not wish to trouble him.
We were sitting in two tall carved chairs at the doorway, his feet were
wrapped in a rug, and his eyes were looking steadily and mournfully out
across towards the iron-work gate in the wall. Tall grasses of the patch
of uncut meadow outside leaned against it or pushed their feathery heads
through it; and I saw presently that the priest was looking at the gate,
letting his eyes rove over every detail of climbing plant, iron-work and
the old brickwork––and not, as I had at first thought, merely gazing
into the dim distances of the years behind him.
Suddenly he broke the long silence.
“Did I ever tell you,” he asked, “about what I saw out there in the
garden? It looks ordinary enough now: yet I saw there what I suppose I
shall never see again on this side of death, or at least not until I am
in the very gate of death itself.”
I too looked out at the gate. The atmosphere was full of that “clear
shining after rain” of which King David sang––it was air made visible
and radiant by the union of light and water, those two most joyous
creatures of God. A great chestnut tree blotted out all beyond the gate.
“Tell me if you can,” I said. “You know how I love to hear those
stories.”
“Years ago, as perhaps you know, not long after my ordination I was
working in London. My father lived here then, as his father before him.
That coat of arms in the centre of that iron gate was put up by him soon
after he succeeded to the property. I used to come down here now and
then for a breath of country air. I hardly remember any pleasure so keen
as the pleasure of coming into this glorious country air out of the
smoke and noise of London––or of lying awake at night with the rustle of
the pines outside my window instead of the ceaseless human tumult of the
town.
“Well, I came down here once, suddenly, on a summer evening, bearing
heavy news. I need not go into details; it would be useless to do
that––but it will be enough to say that the news did not personally
affect me or my family. It was a curious series of circumstances that
led me to be the bearer of such news at all––but it was to a lady who
happened by the merest chance to be staying with my family. I scarcely
knew her at all––in fact I had only seen her once before. The news had
come to my ears in London, and I had heard that the one whom it most
concerned did not know it––and that they dared not write or telegraph. I
volunteered of course to take the news myself.
“It was with a very heavy heart that I walked up from the station––the
road seemed intolerably short. I may say that I knew that the news would
be heart-breaking to her who had to hear it. I came in by the gate at
the end of the avenue” (he waved his hand round to the right) “and
passed right down to the back of the house, behind us. This door at
which we are sitting had been the front door, but the drive had just
been turfed over, and we used the door at the back instead, and this
lawn here was very much as you see it now, only the drive still showed
plainly like a long narrow grave across the grass.
“As I came in through the door at the back, she was coming out, with a
book and a basket-chair to sit in the garden. My heart gave a terrible
throb of pain––for I knew that by the time my business was done there
would be no thought of a quiet evening in the garden, and that look of
serene happiness would be wiped out of her face––and all through what I
had to say. For a moment she did not recognise me in the dark entry and
stood back as I came in, and then––––
“‘Why it is you,’ she said; ‘you have come home. I did not know you were
expected.’
“I breathed a moment steadily to recover myself.
“‘I was not expected,’ I said; and then, after a moment: ‘May I speak to
you?’
“‘Speak to me? Why, certainly. In the garden or here?’
“‘In here,’ I answered, and went past her and pushed open the door into
this room.
“She came past me, and stood here by the door still holding the book,
with her finger between the leaves.
“Now you are wondering, I expect, why I did not get some other woman to
break the news to her. Well, I had debated that ever since I had
volunteered to be the bearer of these tidings: and partly because I was
afraid of being cowardly––call it pride if you will––and partly for
other reasons which I need not mention, I felt I was bound to fulfil my
promise literally. It might be, I thought too, that she would prefer the
news to be known by as few people as possible. At least, whether I
judged rightly or wrongly, here was my task before me.
“She stood there,” the old man went on, pointing to the doorpost on the
right, “and I here,” and he pointed a yard further back, “and the door
was wide open as it is now, and the fragrant evening air poured past us
into the room. Her face would be partly in shadow; but in her eyes there
was just a dawning wonder at my abruptness, with perhaps the faintest
tinge of anxiety, but no more.
“‘I have come,’ I said slowly, looking out into the garden, ‘on a very
hard errand.’ I could not go on. I turned and looked at her. Ah! the
anxiety had deepened a little. ‘And––and it concerns you and your
happiness.’ I looked again, and I remember how her face had changed. Her
lips were a little open, and her eyes shone wide open, half in shadow
and half in light, and there were new and terrible little lines on her
forehead. And then I told her.
“It was done in a sentence or two, and when I looked again her lips had
closed and her hand had clenched itself into the moulding of the
doorpost. I can see her rings now blazing in the light that poured over
the chestnut tree (it was lower then) into the room. Then her lips moved
once or twice––her hand unclenched itself hesitatingly––and she went
steadily across the room. There was a great sofa there then, and when
she reached it she threw herself face downwards across the arm and back.
“And I waited at the doorway, looking out at the iron gate. Sorrow was
new to me then. I had not learnt to understand it then, or to be quiet
under it. And as I looked I knew only that there was a terrible struggle
going on in the room behind. There in front of me was a garden full of
peace and sweetness and the soft glow of sunset light; and there behind
me was something very like hell––and I stood between the living and the
dead.
“Then I remembered that I was a priest, and ought to be able to say
something––just a word of the Divine message that the Saviour
brought––but I could not. I felt I was in deep waters. Even God seemed
far away, intolerably serene and aloof; and I longed with all my power
for a human person to pray and to bear a little of that strife behind
me, from which I felt separated by so wide a gulf. And then God gave me
the clear vision again.
“You see the iron gate,” the old man went on, pointing. “Well, right
between those posts, but a little above them, outlined clearly against
the chestnut tree, beyond, was the figure of a man.
“Now I do not know how to explain myself, but I was conscious that
across this material world of light and colour there cut a plane of the
spiritual world, and that where the planes crossed I could look through
and see what was beyond. It was like smoke cutting across a sunbeam.
Each made the other visible.
“Well, this figure of a man, then, was kneeling in the air, that is the
only way I can describe it––his face was turned towards me, but upwards.
Now the most curious thing that struck me at the time was that he was,
as it were, leaning at a sharp angle to one side; but it did not appear
to be grotesque. Instead the world seemed tilted; the chestnut tree was
out of the perpendicular; the wall out of the horizontal. The true level
was that of the man.
“I know this sounds foolish, but it showed me how the world of spirits
was the real world, and the world of sense comparatively unreal, just as
the sorrow of the woman behind me was more real than the beams overhead.
“And again, compared with the kneeling figure, the chestnut tree and the
gate seemed unsubstantial and shadowy. I know that men who see visions
tell us that it is usually the other way. All I can say is that it was
not so with me. This figure was kneeling, as I have said; his robe
streamed away behind him––a great cloak––drawn tightly back from the
shoulders, as if he were battling with a strong wind––the Wind of Grace,
I suppose, that always blows from the Throne. His arms were stretched
out in front of him, but opened sufficiently to let me see his face; and
his face will be with me till I die, and please God afterwards. It was
beardless, and bore the unmistakable character of a priest’s face.
“Now you know how close the intensest pain and the intensest joy lie
together. Their lines so nearly meet. In this man’s face they did meet.
Anguish and ecstasy were one. His eyes were open, his lips parted. I
could not tell whether he was old or young. His face was ageless, as the
faces of all are who look upon Him who inhabits eternity. He was
praying. I can say no more than that. He had opened his heart to this
woman’s sorrow. He had made it his own: and it met there, in petition if
you wish to call it so, or in resignation if you prefer that name for
it, or in adoration––you may call it what you will––all that is true,
but each is inadequate––but that sorrow met there with his own purified
will, which itself had become one with the eternal will of God. I tell
you I know it.
“I looked at him, and in my ears was a sobbing from the room behind; but
as I looked the glory of anguish deepened on his face, and the sobbing
behind me slackened and ceased, and I heard a whispering and the name of
God and of His Son, and then the sight before me had passed; and there
stood the chestnut tree again as real and as beautiful as before; and
when I turned the woman was standing up, and the light of conquest was
in her eyes.
“She held out her hand to me, and I stooped and kissed it, but I dared
not take it in my own, for she had been in heavenly places. I had seen
her sorrow carried and laid before the throne of God by one greater than
either of us, and something of his glory rested upon her.”
The old man’s voice ceased. When I turned to look at him he was looking
steadily again at the iron gate in the wall, and his eyes were shining
like the radiant air outside. “I do not know,” he said in a moment,
“whether she is alive or dead, but I offered the Holy Sacrifice this
morning for her peace in either state.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Poena Damni
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“All their sins stand before them, and produce in their essences
remorse, eternal despair and a hostile will against God. For such a
soul there is no remedy. It cannot come into the light of God....
Even if St. Peter had left many thousand keys upon earth, not a
single one of them could open Heaven for it.”
_A German Mystic._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Poena Damni
WE were sitting at dinner one evening when the priest, who had been
talkative, seemed to fall into a painful train of thought that silenced
him. He grew more and more ill at ease, and was obviously relieved when
I threw my cigarette away and he was able to propose a move to the next
room. Presently his distress seemed to pass; and then, as we sat near
the fireplace, he explained himself.
“I must ask your pardon,” he said, “but somehow I fell into a very
dreadful train of thought. It was suggested to me, I think, by the red
lamp on the table and the evening light through the windows, and the
silver and glass. (You know the power of association!) I went through
one of the most fearful moments of my life under just those
circumstances.”
I was silent, as the priest seemed to have more to say.
“It has affected my nerves,” he said, “and it would be rather a relief
to tell you. Would you mind if I did so?”
On my assurance that it would greatly interest me, he began.
“It is a fashion among those who do not really accept Revelation as
revelation to believe in a kind of Universalism. Quite apart from
authority, this doctrine contravenes, as you of course know, the reality
of man’s free will. The incident of which I wish to tell you concerns
the way in which I first caught a glimpse of that for myself.
“A good many years ago I made the acquaintance of a man in the West of
England, under circumstances that I need not describe further than
saying that he seemed to have confidence in me. He asked me to stay with
him in his country house, and I went down from London for the inside of
a week. I found him living the usual country life, fishing and so forth;
for it was summer when I visited him. It was a fine old house that he
lived in, surrounded by coverts. He had a charming wife and two or three
children, and at first I thought him extremely happy and contented.
“Then I thought that I noticed that things were not so well with him.
The cottages on his estate were ill-cared for, and that is always a bad
sign. From one or two small signs, such as you can guess, I found that
the tone among his servants was not what it should be; and one or two
horrid pieces of cruelty came under my notice. I know this sounds as if
I were a sort of spy, greedy for information; but all that I can say is,
that these signs were unmistakable and obvious, and came to me, of
course, unsought and unexpected. Then I saw that his domestic relations
were not right. I do not know how else to describe all this than by
saying that there seemed a kind of blight upon his surroundings. Nothing
was absolutely wrong, and yet all was just wrong.
“At first I thought that I myself was depressed or jaundiced in some
way; but at last I could not continue to believe that; and on the Friday
of my stay, the last day, I became finally certain that something was
horribly wrong with the man himself. Then that evening he opened his
heart to me, so far as it was possible for him to do so.
“His wife, with the two daughters, had left us after dessert and gone
into the garden, and we remained in the dining-room. The windows looked
to the west, across a smooth sloping lawn, with the lake at the end;
beyond that rose up a delicate birch wood, and beyond that again a soft
green sky, where the sun had set, deepening into a liquid evening blue
overhead, in which a star or two glimmered. I could see, as I looked
out, the white figures of his wife and daughters against the shining
surface of the lake at the end of the lawn.
“After he had lit his cigarette, and had a glass or two of wine,
suddenly he opened his heart to me, and told me an appalling story that
I could not tell you. I sat and watched his strong sinewy hand rise and
fall with the cigarette, under the red lamp-light; I glanced at his
quiet well-bred face with the downcast eyes and the long moustache, and
I wondered whether it was possible really for such a tale to be true;
but he spoke with a restrained conviction that left no room for doubt.
What I gathered from the story was this;––that he had identified
himself, his whole will, his whole life practically, with the cause of
Satan. I could not detect as he talked that he had ever seriously
attempted to detach himself from that cause. It has been said that a
saint is one who always chooses the better of the two courses open to
him at every step; so far as I could see this man had always chosen the
worse of the two courses. When he had done things that you and I would
think right, he had always done them for some bad reason. He had been
continuously aware, too, of what was happening. I do not think that I
have ever heard such a skilful self-analysis. Now and then, as I saw the
gulf of despair towards which his talk was leading, I interrupted him,
suggesting alleviations of the horror––suggesting that he was
pessimistic––that he had acted often under misconceptions––and the like;
but he always met me with a quiet answer that silenced me. In fact,”
said the priest, who was beginning to tremble a little, “I have never
thought it possible that a heart could be so corrupt and yet retain so
much knowledge and feeling.
“When he had finished his story he looked at me for a moment, and then
said:
“‘Lately I have seen what I have lost, and what I shall lose; and I have
told you this to ask if the Christian Gospel has any hope for such as I
am.’
“Of course I answered as a Christian priest must answer, for I honestly
thought that here was the greatest miracle of God’s grace that I had
ever seen. When I had finished I lifted my eyes from the cloth and
looked up. His fingers, while I was speaking, had been playing with an
apostle spoon, but as I looked up he looked up too, and our eyes met.”
As the priest said this, he got up, and leaned his head against the high
oak mantelpiece, and was silent a moment. Then he went on:
“God forgive me if I was wrong––if I am wrong now––but this is what I
think I saw.
“Out of his eyes looked a lost soul. As a symbol, or a sign, too, his
eyes shone suddenly with that dull red light that you may see sometimes
in a dog’s eyes. It was the _poena damni_ of which I had read, which
shone there. It was true, as he had said, that he was seeing clearly
what he had lost and would lose; it was the gate of heaven opening to
one who could not enter in. It was the chink of light under the door to
one who cried, ‘Lord, Lord, open to me,’ but through the door there came
that answer, ‘I know you not.’ Ah! it was not that he had never known
before what God was, and His service and love; it was just his
condemnation that he had known: that he had seen, not once or twice but
again and again, the two ways, and had, not once nor twice but again and
again, chosen the worse of those two; and now he was powerless.
“I tell you I saw this for a moment. There was this human face, so
well-bred, with its delicate lines, looking almost ethereal in the soft
red light of the lamp: behind him, between the windows hung a portrait
of an ancestor, some old Caroline divine in ruff and bands. Through the
windows was that sweet glory of evening––with the three figures by the
lake. Here, between us, was the delicate soothing luxury of cleanliness
and coolness and refreshment, such as glass and silver and fruit
suggest: and there for one second in this frame of beauty and peace
looked the eyes of one who desired even a drop of living water to cool
his tongue, for he was tormented in a flame.
“And I saw all this; and then the room began to swim and whirl, and the
table to tilt and sway, and I fell, I suppose, forward, and sank down on
to the floor. When I recovered there were the men in the room, and the
anxious face of my host looking down on me.
“I had to return to town the next morning. I wrote to him a long letter
the following week, saying that I had been ill on the evening on which
he had given me his confidence: and that I had not said all that I could
say: and I went on, giving the lie to what I had thought I had seen,
speaking to him as I should speak to any soul who was weary of sin and
desired God.
“Indeed I thought it most possible, as I wrote the letter, that I had
had a horrible delusion; and that all could be well with him. I got an
answer of a few lines, saying that he must apologise for having troubled
me with such a story; adding that he had greatly exaggerated his own
sin; that he too had been over-excited and unwell: and that he too
trusted in a God of Love––and begging me not to refer to the
conversation again.”
The priest sat down again.
“Now you may of course accept this version of it, if you will. I only
would to God that I could too.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Consolatrix Afflictorum”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Should it be burdensome for thee ... she will for thy sake herself
raise me up when I chance to fall, and console me when sorrowing.”
_St. Leander of Seville._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Consolatrix Afflictorum”
THE following letter will explain itself.
The original was read to me by my friend on one of those days during my
stay with him; and he allowed me, at my request, to make a copy. The
sermon referred to in the first sentence of the letter was preached in a
foreign watering-place on Christmas Day.
“VILLA––––
“_December 29, 18––_
“Reverend and Dear Sir,
“I listened with great attention to your sermon on Christmas Day; I
am getting on in years, and I am an invalid; so you will understand
that I have few friends––and I think none who would not think me mad
if I told them the story that I am proposing to tell you. For many
years I have been silent on this subject; since it always used to be
received with incredulity. But I fancy that you will not be
incredulous. As I watched you and listened to you on Christmas Day,
I thought I saw in you one to whom the supernatural was more than a
beautiful and symbolical fairy-story, and one who held it not
impossible that this unseen should sometimes manifest itself. As you
reminded us, the Religion of the Incarnation rests on the fact that
the Infinite and the Eternal expresses Himself in terms of space and
time; and that it is in this that the greatness of the Love of God
consists. Since then, as you said, the Creation, the Incarnation,
and the Sacramental System alike, in various degree, are the
manifestation of God under these conditions, surely it cannot be
‘materialistic’ (whatever that exactly means), to believe that the
‘spiritual’ world and the personages that inhabit it sometimes
express themselves in the same manner as their Maker. However, will
you have patience with me while I tell you this story? I cannot
believe that such a grace should be kept in darkness.
“I was about seven years old when my mother died, and my father left
me chiefly to the care of servants. Either I must have been a
difficult child, or my nurse must have been a hard woman: but I
never gave her my confidence. I had clung to my mother as a saint
clings to God: and when I lost her, it nearly broke my heart. Night
after night I used to lie awake, with the firelight in the room,
remembering how she would look in on her way to bed; when at last I
slept it seems to me now as if I never did anything but dream of
her; and it was only to wake again to that desolate emptiness. I
would torture myself by closing my eyes, and fancying she was there;
and then opening them and seeing the room empty. I would turn and
toss and sob without a sound. I suppose that I was as near the limit
that divides sanity from madness as it is possible to be. During the
day I would sit on the stairs when I could get away from my nurse,
and pretend that my mother’s footsteps were moving overhead, that
her door opened, that I heard her dress on the carpet: again I would
open my eyes, and in self-cruelty compel myself to understand that
she was gone. Then again I would tell myself that it was all right:
that she was away for the day, but would come back at night. In the
evenings I would be happier, as the time for her return drew nearer;
even when I said my prayers I would look forward to the moment, into
which I had cheated myself in believing, when the door would open,
after I was in bed, and my mother look in. Then as the time passed,
my false faith would break down, and I would sob myself to sleep,
dream of her, and sob myself awake again. As I look back it appears
to me as if this went on for months: I suppose, however, in reality,
it could not have been more than a very few weeks, or my reason
would have given way. And at last I was caught on the edge of the
precipice, and drawn lovingly back to safety and peace.
“I used to sleep alone in the night-nursery at this time, and my
nurse occupied a room opening out of it. The night-nursery had two
doors, one at the foot of my bed, and one at the further end of the
room, in the corner diagonally opposite to that in which the head of
my bed stood. The first opened upon the landing, and the second into
my nurse’s room, and this latter was generally kept a few inches
open. There was no light in my room, but a night-light was kept
burning in the nurse’s room, so that even without the firelight my
room was not in total darkness.
“I was lying awake one night (I suppose it would be about eleven
o’clock), having gone through a dreadful hour or two of misery,
half-waking and half-sleeping. I had been crying quietly, for fear
my nurse should hear through the partly opened door, burying my hot
face in the pillow. I was feeling really exhausted, listening to my
own heart, and cheating myself into the half-faith that its throbs
were the footsteps of my mother coming towards my room; I had raised
my face and was staring at the door at the foot of my bed, when it
opened suddenly without a sound; and there, as I thought, my mother
stood, with the light from the oil-lamp outside shining upon her.
She was dressed, it seemed, as once before I had seen her in London,
when she came into my room to bid me good-night before she went out
to an evening party. Her head shone with jewels that flashed as the
firelight rose and sank in the room, a dark cloak shrouded her neck
and shoulders, one hand held the edge of the door, and a great jewel
gleamed on one of her fingers. She seemed to be looking at me.
“I sat up in bed in a moment, amazed but not frightened, for was it
not what I had so often fancied? and I called out to her:
“‘Mother, mother!’
“At the word she turned and looked on to the landing, and gave a
slight movement with her head, as if to some one waiting there,
either of assent or dismissal, and then turned to me again. The door
closed silently, and I could see in the firelight, and in the faint
glimmer that came through the other door, that she held out her arms
to me. I threw off the bedclothes in a moment, and scrambled down to
the end of the bed, and she lifted me gently in her arms, but said
no word. I too said nothing, but she raised the cloak a little and
wrapped it round me, and I lay there in bliss, my head on her
shoulder, and my arm round her neck. She walked smoothly and
noiselessly to a rocking-chair that stood beside the fire and sat
down, and then began to rock gently to and fro. Now it may be
difficult to believe, but I tell you that I neither said anything,
nor desired to say anything. It was enough that she was there. After
a little while I suppose I fell asleep, for I found myself in an
agony of tears and trembling again, but those arms held me firmly,
and I was soon at peace; still she spoke no word, and I did not see
her face.
“When I woke again she was gone, and it was morning, and I was in
bed, and the nurse was drawing up the blind, and the winter sunshine
lay on the wall. That day was the happiest I had known since my
mother’s death; for I knew she would come again.
“After I was in bed that evening I lay awake waiting, so full of
happy content and certainty that I fell asleep. When I awoke the
fire was out, and there was no light but a narrow streak that came
through the door from my nurse’s room. I lay there a minute or two
waiting, expecting every moment to see the door open at the foot of
my bed; but the minutes passed, and then the clock in the hall below
beat three. Then I fell into a passion of tears; the night was
nearly gone, and she had not come to me. Then, as I tossed to and
fro, trying to stifle my crying, through my tears there came the
misty flash of light as the door opened, and there she stood again.
Once again I was in her arms, and my face on her shoulder. And again
I fell asleep there.
“Now this went on night after night, but not every night, and never
unless I awoke and cried. It seemed that if I needed her desperately
she came, but only then.
“But there were two curious incidents that occurred in the order in
which I will write them down. The second I understand now, at any
rate; the first I have never altogether understood, or rather there
are several possible explanations.
“One night as I lay in her arms by the fire, a large coal suddenly
slipped from the grate and fell with a crash, awaking the nurse in
the other room. I suppose she thought something was wrong, for she
appeared at the door with a shawl over her shoulders, holding the
night-light in one hand and shading it with the other. I was going
to speak, when my mother laid her hand across my mouth. The nurse
advanced into the room, passed close beside us, apparently without
seeing us, went straight to the empty bed, looked down on the
tumbled clothes, and then turned away as if satisfied, and went back
to her room. The next day I managed to elicit from her, by
questioning, the fact that she had been disturbed in the night, and
had come into my room, but had seen me sleeping quietly in bed.
“The other incident was as follows. One night I was lying half
dozing against my mother’s breast, my head against her heart, and
not, as I usually lay, with my head on her shoulder. As I lay there
it seemed to me as if I heard a strange sound like the noise of the
sea in a shell, but more melodious. It is difficult to describe it,
but it was like the murmuring of a far-off crowd, overlaid with
musical pulsations. I nestled closer to her and listened; and then I
could distinguish, I thought, innumerable ripples of church bells
pealing, as if from another world. Then I listened more intently to
the other sound; there were words, but I could not distinguish them.
Again and again a voice seemed to rise above the others, but I could
hear no intelligible words. The voices cried in every sort of
tone––passion, content, despair, monotony. And then as I listened I
fell asleep. As I look back now, I have no doubt what voices those
were that I heard.
“And now comes the end of the story. My health began to improve so
remarkably that those about me noticed it. I never gave way, during
the day at any rate, to those old piteous imaginings; and at night,
when, I suppose, the will partly relaxes its control, whenever my
distress reached a certain point, she was there to comfort me. But
her visits grew more and more rare, as I needed her less, and at
last ceased. But it is of her last visit, which took place in the
spring of the following year, that I wish to speak.
“I had slept well all night, but had awakened in the dark just
before the dawn from some dream which I forget, but which left my
nerves shaken. When in my terror I cried out, again the door opened,
and she was there. She stood with the jewels in her hair, and the
cloak across her shoulders, and the light from the landing lay
partly on her face. I scrambled at once down the bed, and was lifted
and carried to the chair, and presently fell asleep. When I awoke
the dawn had come, and the birds were stirring and chirping, and a
pleasant green light was in the room; and I was still in her arms.
It was the first time, except in the instance I have mentioned, that
I had awakened except in bed, and it was a great joy to find her
there. As I turned a little I saw the cloak which sheltered us
both––of a deep blue, with an intricate pattern of flowers and
leaves and birds among branches. Then I turned still more to see her
face, which was so near me, but it was turned away; and even as I
moved she rose and carried me towards the bed. Still holding me on
her left arm she lifted and smoothed the bedclothes, and then laid
me gently in bed, with my head on the pillow. And then for the first
time I saw her face plainly. She bent over me, with one hand on my
breast as if to prevent me from rising, and looked straight into my
eyes; and it was not my mother.
“There was one moment of blinding shock and sorrow, and I gave a
great sob, and would have risen in bed, but her hand held me down,
and I seized it with both my own, and still looked in her eyes. It
was not my mother, and yet was there ever such a mother’s face as
that? I seemed to be looking into depths of indescribable tenderness
and strength, and I leaned on that strength in those moments of
misery. I gave another sob or two as I looked, but I was quieter,
and at last peace came to me, and I had learnt my lesson.
“I did not at the time know who she was, but my little soul dimly
saw that my own mother for some reason could not at that time come
to me who needed her so sorely, and that another great Mother had
taken her place; yet, after the first moment or so, I felt no anger
or jealousy, for one who had looked into that kindly face could have
no such unworthy thought.
“Then I lifted my head a little, I remember, and kissed the hand
that I held in my own, reverently and slowly. I do not know why I
did it, except that it was the natural thing to do. The hand was
strong and white, and delicately fragrant. Then it was withdrawn,
and she was standing by the door, and the door was open; and then
she was gone, and the door was closed.
“I have never seen her since, but I have never needed to see her,
for I know who she is; and, please God, I shall see her again; and
next time I hope my mother and I will be together; and perhaps it
will not be very long; and perhaps she will allow me to kiss her
hand again.
“Now, my dear sir, I do not know how all this will appear to you; it
may seem to you, though I do not think it will, merely childish.
Yet, in a sense, I desire nothing more than that, for our Saviour
Himself told us to be like children, and our Saviour too once lay on
His Mother’s breast. I know that I am getting an old man, and that
old men are sometimes very foolish; but it more and more seems to me
that experience, as well as His words, tells me that the great
Kingdom of Heaven has a low and narrow door that only little
children can enter, and that we must become little again, and drop
all our bundles, if we would go through.
“That, dear and Reverend Sir, is my story. And may I ask you to
remember me sometimes at the altar and in your prayers? for surely
God will ask much from one to whom He has given so much, and as yet
I have nothing to show for it; and my time must be nearly at an end,
even if His infinite patience is not.
“Believe me,
“Yours faithfully,
“–––– ––––.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bridge over the Stream
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Lo, I am free! I choose the pain thou bearest:
Thou art the messenger of one who waits;
Thou wilt reveal the hidden face thou wearest
When my feet falter at the Eternal Gates.”
_Old Foes._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bridge over the Stream
WE were at tea one afternoon on the little low, tiled platform that
marked the site of an old summer-house. Tall hurdles covered with
briar-roses on the further side of the path fenced off the rest of the
garden from us, and the sun had just sunk below the level of the house,
throwing both ourselves and the garden into cool shadow. The servant had
brought out the tea-things, but he presently returned with something of
horror on his face. The old man looked up and saw him.
“What is it, Parker?” he asked.
“There’s been an accident, sir. Tom Awcock at the home farm has been
drawn into some machine, and they say he must lose both arms, and maybe
his life.”
The old man turned quite white, and his eyes grew larger and brighter.
“Is the doctor with him?” he asked, in a perfectly steady voice.
“Yes, sir, and they’ve sent a message, Would you be good enough to step
down? The rector’s away, and Tom’s mother’s crying terrible. But not
yet, sir. About seven o’clock, they say. It won’t be over till then, and
there’s no immediate danger.”
“Tell them I will be there at seven,” said the clergyman.
Parker went back to the house, and presently we heard the footsteps of a
child running down the drive towards the farm.
“How shocking it is!” I said in a moment or two.
“Ah!” said the old man, smiling, “I have learnt my lesson. It is not
really so shocking as you think. Does that sound very hard?”
I said nothing, for it seemed to me that all the consolations of
religion could not soften the horror of such things. If such agonies are
necessary as remedies or atonements, at least they are terrible.
“I learnt my lesson,” the old man went on, “down the road there outside
the hedge––down by the bridge. Would you like to hear it? Or are you
tired of an old dreamer’s stories?” and he smiled at me.
“Now I know you think that I am hard––that I am a little apart maybe
from human life––that I cannot understand the blind misery of those who
suffer in ignorance; yet you would be the first, I believe, to think
that Mrs. Awcock’s consolations are unreal, and that when she tells me
that she knows there is a wise purpose behind, she is only repeating
what is proper to say to a clergyman. But that is not so; that old
threadbare sentence is intensely real to these people, and, I hope, to
myself too. For there is nothing that I desire more than to be a child
like them. It is the apparent purposelessness that distresses you: it is
the certainty of a deliberate purpose that comforts me. Well, shall I
tell you what I saw?”
I was a little distressed at what looked like callousness, but I told
him I would like to hear the story.
“I was standing one evening––it would be about five years ago––in the
field down there near the stream. You remember the bridge there, over
which the road goes, just outside the hedge. I love running water, and I
went slowly up and down by the side of the beck. There were children on
the road, coming back from school, and they stopped on the bridge to
look at the water, as children and old men will. They did not see me, as
the field is a little below the road, and besides their backs were
turned to me. I could see a pink frock or two, and a pair of stout bare
legs. Two girls were taking their brother home––he was between them, a
hand clasped by each of the sisters. I suppose the eldest girl would be
about nine, and the boy five. They were talking solemnly, and I could
hear every word.
“Why are children always supposed to be gay? There is no solemnity in
the world to be compared to the solemnity of a little boy, or of his
sister who has charge of him.
“One of the girls said, ‘Look, Johnny, there are little fishes down
there.’
“‘When I am a man’––––Johnny began, very slowly.
“‘Look, Johnny,’ said the other girl, ‘there’s a blue flower.’
“Up to this I remember every word. But then I began to watch Johnny.
“The girls went on talking, but they leaned over more, and I could not
hear them plainly. Johnny stealthily withdrew a hand from each of his
sisters, and began to look for a stone to throw at the fishes or the
blue flower, I suppose; for man is lord of Creation. I could see him
presently through the hedge digging patiently with his fingers and
loosening a stone that was firm in the road. And at that moment I heard
a far-away shout and the distant bark of a dog.
“The evening was wonderfully still: every leaf hung quiet: and there
were far-off clouds heaping themselves up in the west, tower over tower.
We had a thunderstorm that night, I remember. The brook was quiet, just
slipping noiselessly from pool to pool.
“Still Johnny was digging and the girls were talking. Then out of the
village above us came again far-off noises. I could hear a rumble and
the clatter of hoofs, then a cry or two more, and the nearer terrified
yelp of a dog. But the girls were intent on the brook––and Johnny on the
stone.
“Even now I did not understand what was happening: but I grew
uneasy––and with great difficulty, for I was an old man even then, tried
to scramble up the high bank by the bridge. As I reached the top I saw
that one of the girls had gone. She had run, I suppose, off the bridge
down by the side of the road. The other girl was still standing––but
looking in a frightened way up the hill. Down the hill came the loud
rumble of a cart and the clatter of hoofs, terribly near.
“The girl by the side of the road began to scream to her sister, who
darted off, and then remembered Johnny and turned. Johnny got up too and
ran to the parapet and stood against it.
“I was shouting too by now, through the hedge: but I could do nothing
more, nothing more, because the hedge was high and thick, and I was an
old man. Then in a moment I remembered that shouting would only distract
them, and I stopped. It was useless. I could do absolutely nothing. But
it was very hard.
“Then I saw the galloping body of a horse through the branches, with a
butcher’s cart that rocked behind him. There was no one on the cart.
“Now there was room for the cart to pass the boy safely. By the
wheelmarks, which I looked at afterwards, there were three clear
feet––if only the boy had stood still.
“The girls seemed petrified as they stood, one in act to run, the other
crouching and hiding her face against the hedge. The cart was now within
ten yards, as I could see, though I was still staring at Johnny. Then
this is what I saw.
“Somewhere behind him over the parapet of the bridge there was a figure.
I remember nothing about it except the face and the hands. The face was,
I think, the tenderest I have ever seen. The eyes were downcast, looking
upon the boy’s head with indescribable love, the lips were smiling. One
hand was over the boy’s eyes, the other against his shoulder behind. In
a moment the memory of other stories I had heard came to mind––and I
gave a sob of relief that the boy was safe in such care.
“But as the iron hoofs and rocking wheels came up, the hand on the boy’s
shoulder suddenly pushed him to meet them; and yet those tender eyes and
mouth never flinched, and the child took a step forward in front of the
horse, and was beaten down without a cry: and the cart lurched heavily,
righted itself, and dashed on out of sight.
“When the cloud of dust had passed, the little body lay quiet on the
road, and the two girls were clinging to one another, screaming and
sobbing, but there was nothing else.
“I was as angry at first as an old man could be. I nearly (may He
forgive me for it now!) cursed God and died. But the memory of that
tender face did its work. It was as the face of a mother who nurses her
first-born child, as the face of a child who kisses a wounded creature,
it was as I think the Father’s Face itself must have been, which those
angels always behold, as He looked down upon the Sacrifice of His only
Son.
“Will you forgive me now if I seemed hard a few minutes ago? Perhaps you
still think it was hardness that made me speak as I did. But, for
myself, I hope I may call it by a better name than that.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Convent Chapel
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“In her all longings mix and meet;
Dumb souls through her are eloquent;
She feels the earth beneath her feet
Vibrate in passionate intent;
Through her our tides of feeling roll
And find their God within her soul.”
_The Contemplative Soul._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Convent Chapel
ONE evening about this time, on coming indoors for tea, I found the old
man seated at the open door that looked on to the lawn, with a book on
his knees, and his finger between the pages. He held the book towards me
as I came near him, and showed me the title, “The Interior Castle.”
“I have just been reading,” he said, “Saint Teresa’s description of the
difference between the intellectual and the imaginative vision. It is
curious how she fails really to express it, except to any one who
happens to have had a glimpse already for himself of what she means. I
suppose it is one of the signs of reality in the spiritual world that no
one can ever describe so much as he knows.”
I sat down.
“I am afraid I don’t understand a word you are saying,” I answered
smiling.
For answer he opened the book and read Saint Teresa’s curious gasping
incoherent sentences––at least so I thought them.
“Still,” I said, “I am afraid––––”
“Oh,” he said almost impatiently, “surely you know now; indeed you know
it, but do not recognise it.”
“Can you give me any sort of instance?” I asked.
He thought for a moment or two in silence; and then––––
“I think I can,” he said, “if you are sure it will not bore you.”
He poured out tea for us both, and then began:
“Most of the tales I have told you are of the imaginative vision, by
which I do not mean that the vision is in any way unreal or untrue,
which is what most people mean by ‘imaginative,’ but only that it
presents itself in the form of a visible picture. It seems chiefly the
function of the imagination to visualise facts, and it is an abuse of
that faculty to employ it chiefly in visualising fancies. But it is
possible for spiritual facts to represent themselves vividly and clearly
to the intellect instead, so that the person to whom the intellectual
vision is given does not, so to speak, ‘see’ anything, but only
‘apprehends’ something to be true. However, this will become more clear
presently.
“Some years ago I took my annual holiday in the form of a solitary
walking tour. I will not tell you where I went, as there are others
concerned in this story who would dislike intensely to be publicly
spoken of in the way that I shall have to speak of them; but it is
enough to say that I came at last to a little town towards sunset. My
object in coming to this place was to visit a convent of enclosed nuns
whose reputation for holiness was very great. I carried with me a letter
of introduction to the Reverend Mother, which I knew would admit me to
the chapel. I left my bag at the inn, and then walked down to the
convent, which stood a little way out of the town.
“The lay sister who opened the door to me asked me to come into the
parlour while she told the Reverend Mother; and after waiting a few
minutes in the prim room with its bees-waxed floor and its religious
engravings and objects, a wonderfully dignified little old lady, with a
quiet wrinkled face, came in with my letter open in her hand. We talked
a few minutes about various things, and I had a glass of cowslip wine in
a thick-lipped wineglass.
“She told me that the convent was a very ancient foundation, that it had
been a country house ever since the Dissolution of the Religious Houses,
until about twenty years ago, when it had been acquired for the
community. There still remained of the old buildings part of the
cloisters, with the south transept of the old church, which was now the
chapel; the whole, with a wall or two, forming the courtyard through
which I had come. Behind the house lay the garden, on to which the
window of the parlour looked; and as I sat I could see a black cross or
two marking the nuns’ graveyard. I made inquiries as to the way the time
of the community was spent.
“‘Our object,’ said the old lady, ‘is perpetual intercession for
sinners. We have the great joy of the Blessed Sacrament amongst us in
the chapel, and, except during the choir offices and Mass, there is
always a nun kneeling before It. We look after one or two ladies
incurably ill, who have come to end their days with us, and we make our
living by embroidery.’
“I asked how it was that she could receive strangers if the order was an
enclosed one.
“‘The lay sisters and myself alone can receive strangers. We find that
necessary.’
“After a little more talk I asked whether I might see the chapel, and
she took me out into the courtyard immediately.
“As we walked across the grass she pointed out to me the cloisters, now
built up into a corridor, and the long ruined wall of the old nave which
formed one side of the quadrangle. A grave-faced and stout collie dog
had joined us at the door, and we three went together slowly towards the
door in the centre of the west wall of the restored transept. The
evening sun lay golden on the wall before us and on the ruined base of
the central tower of the old church, round which jackdaws wheeled and
croaked.”
The old priest broke off and turned to me, with his eyes burning:
“What a marvellous thing the Religious Life is,” he said, “and above all
the Contemplative Life! Here were these nuns as no doubt they and their
younger sisters are still, without one single thing that in the world’s
opinion makes life worth living. There is practically perpetual silence,
there are hours to be spent in the chapel, no luxuries, no amusements,
no power of choice, they are always rather hungry and rather tired, at
the very least. And yet they are not sacrificing present happiness to
future happiness, as the world always supposes, but they are intensely
and radiantly happy ‘now in this present time.’ I don’t know what
further proof any one wants of Who our Lord is than that men and women
find the keenest, and in fact their only joy, in serving Him and
belonging to Him.
“Well, I remember that something of this sort was in my mind as I went
across the courtyard beside this motherly old lady with her happy quiet
face. She had been over fifty years in Religion, my friend had told me.
“At the door she stopped.
“‘I will not come in,’ she said, ‘but you will find me in the parlour
when you come out.’
“And she turned and went back, with the collie walking slowly beside
her, his golden plumed tail raised high against her black habit.
“The door was partly open, but a thick curtain hung beyond. I pushed it
quietly aside and stepped in. It seemed very dark at first, in contrast
to the brilliant sunshine outside; but I presently saw that I was
kneeling before a high iron-barred screen, in which was no door. On the
left, in the further corner of the chapel, glimmered a blue light in a
silver lamp before a statue of our Lady.
“Opposite me rose up the steps before the high altar; but not far away,
because, as you remember, the chapel had once been the transept of a
church, and the east wall, in the centre of which the high altar stood,
was longer than both the south wall where a second altar stood, and the
modern brick wall that closed it on the north. A slender crucifix in
black and white and six thin tapers rose above the altar, and high above
stood the Tabernacle closed by a white silk curtain, before which
flickered a tiny red spark.
“I said a prayer or two, and then I noticed for the first time a dark
outline rising in the centre of the space before the altar. For a moment
I was perplexed, and then I saw that it was the nun whose hour it was
for intercession. Her back was turned to me as she knelt at the
faldstool, and her black veil fell in rigid lines on to her shoulders,
and mingled with her black serge habit below. There she knelt perfectly
motionless, praying. I had not, and have not, a notion as to her age.
She might have been twenty-five or seventy.
“As I knelt there I thought deeply, wondering as to the nun’s age, how
long she had been professed, when she would die, whether she was happy;
and, I am afraid, I thought more of her than of Him Who was so near.
Then a kind of anger seized me, as I compared in my mind the life of a
happy good woman in the world with that of this poor creature. I
pictured the life, as one so often sees it in homes, of a mother with
her children growing up about her, her hands busy with healthy home
work, her life glorified by a good man’s love; as she grows older,
passing from happy stage to happy stage, comforting, helping, sweetening
every soul she meets. Was it not for this that women––and men too, I
thought, rebuking myself––were made? Then think of the sour life of the
cloister––as loveless and desolate as the cold walls themselves! And
even, I thought, even if there is a strange peculiar joy in the
Religious Life––even if there is an absence of sorrows and anxieties
such as spoil the happiness of many lives in the world––yet, after all,
surely the Contemplative Life is useless and barren. The Active Life may
be well enough, if the prayers and the discipline issue in greater
efficiency, if the priest is more fervent when he ministers outside, and
the sister of charity more charitable. Yes, I thought, the active
Religious Life is reasonable enough; but the Contemplative––––! After
all it is essentially selfish, it is a sin against society. Possibly it
was necessary when the wickedness of the world was more fierce, to
protest against it by this retirement; but not now, not now! How can the
lump be leavened if the leaven be withdrawn? How can a soul serve God by
forsaking the world which He made and loves?”...
“And so,” said the priest, turning to me again, “I went on––poor
ignorant fool!––thinking that the woman who knelt in front of me was
less useful than myself, and that my words and actions and sermons and
life did more to advance God’s kingdom than her prayers! And
then––then––at the moment when I reached that climax of folly and pride,
God was good to me and gave me a little light.
“Now, I do not know how to put it––I have never put it into words
before, except to myself––but I became aware, in my intellect alone, of
one or two clear facts. In order to tell you what those facts were I
must use picture language; but remember they are only translations or
paraphrases of what I perceived.
“First I became aware suddenly that there ran a vital connection from
the Tabernacle to the woman. You may think of it as one of those bands
you see in machinery connecting two wheels, so that when either wheel
moves the other moves too. Or you may think of it as an electric wire,
joining the instrument the telegraph operator uses with the pointer at
the other end. At any rate there was this vital band or wire of life.
Now in the Tabernacle I became aware that there was a mighty stirring
and movement. Something within it beat like a vast Heart, and the
vibrations of each pulse seemed to quiver through all the ground. Or you
may picture it as the movement of a clear deep pool when the basin that
contains it is jarred––it seemed like the movement of circular ripples
crossing and recrossing in swift thrills. Or you may think of it as that
faint movement of light and shade that may be seen in the heart of a
white-hot furnace. Or again you may picture it as sound––as the sound of
a high ship-mast with the rigging, in a steady wind; or the sound of
deep woods in a July noon.
The priest’s face was working, and his hands moved nervously.
“How hopeless it is,” he said, “to express all this! Remember that all
these pictures are not in the least what I perceived. They are only
grotesque paraphrases of a spiritual fact that was shown me.
“Now I was aware that there was something of the same activity in the
heart of the woman, but I did not know which was the controlling power.
I did not know whether the initiative sprang from the Tabernacle and
communicated itself to the nun’s will; or whether she, by bending
herself upon the Tabernacle, set in motion a huge dormant power. It
appeared to me possible that the solution lay in the fact that two wills
co-operated, each reacting upon the other. This, in a kind of way,
appears to me now true as regards the whole mystery of free-will and
prayer and grace.
“At any rate the union of these two represented itself to me, as I have
said, as forming a kind of engine that radiated an immense light or
sound or movement. And then I perceived something else too.
“I once fell asleep in one of those fast trains from the north, and did
not awake until we had reached the terminus. The last thing I had seen
before falling asleep had been the quiet darkening woods and fields
through which we were sliding, and it was a shock to awake in the bright
humming terminus and to drive through the crowded streets, under the
electric glare from the lamps and windows. Now I felt something of that
sort now. A moment ago I had fancied myself apart from movement and
activity in this quiet convent; but I seemed somehow to have stepped
into a centre of busy, rushing life. I can scarcely put the sensation
more clearly than that. I was aware that the atmosphere was charged with
energy; great powers seemed to be astir, and I to be close to the
whirling centre of it all.
“Or think of it like this. Have you ever had to wait in a City office?
If you have done that you will know how intense quiet can coexist with
intense activity. There are quiet figures here and there round the room.
Or it may be there is only one such figure––a great financier––and he
sitting there almost motionless. Yet you know that every movement
tingles, as it were, out from that still room all over the world. You
can picture to yourself how people leap to obey or to resist––how lives
rise and fall, and fortunes are made and lost, at the gentle movements
of this lonely quiet man in his office. Well, so it was here. I
perceived that this black figure knelt at the centre of reality and
force, and with the movements of her will and lips controlled spiritual
destinies for eternity. There ran out from this peaceful chapel lines of
spiritual power that lost themselves in the distance, bewildering in
their profusion and terrible in the intensity of their hidden fire.
Souls leaped up and renewed the conflict as this tense will strove for
them. Souls even at that moment leaving the body struggled from death
into spiritual life, and fell panting and saved at the feet of the
Redeemer on the other side of death. Others, acquiescent and swooning in
sin, woke and snarled at the merciful stab of this poor nun’s prayers.”
The priest was trembling now with excitement.
“Yes,” he said; “yes, and I in my stupid arrogance had thought that my
life was more active in God’s world than hers. So a small provincial
shopkeeper, bustling to and fro behind the counter, might think, if only
he were mad enough, that his life was more active and alive than the
life of a director who sits at his table in the City. Yes, that is a
vulgar simile; but the only one that I can think of which in the least
expresses what I knew to be true. There lay my little foolish narrow
life behind me, made up of spiritless prayers and efforts and feeble
dealings with souls; and how complacent I had been with it all, how
self-centred, how out of the real tide of spiritual movement! And
meanwhile, for years probably, this nun had toiled behind these walls in
the silence of grace, with the hum of the world coming faintly to her
ears, and the cries of peoples and nations, and of persons whom the
world accounts important, sounding like the voices of children at play
in the muddy street outside; and indeed that is all that they are,
compared to her––children making mud-pies or playing at shop outside the
financier’s office.”
The priest was silent, and his face became quieter again. Then in a
moment he spoke again.
“Well,” he said, “that is what I believe to have been an intellectual
vision. There was no form or appearance or sound; but I can only express
what was shown to me to be true, under those images. It almost seems to
me as I look back now as if the air in the chapel were full of a
murmurous sound and a luminous mist as the currents of need and grace
went to and fro. But I know really that the silence was deep and the air
dim.”
Then I made a foolish remark.
“If you feel like that about the Contemplative Life, I wonder you did
not try to enter it yourself.”
The priest looked at me for a moment.
“It would be rash, surely, for a little shopkeeper of no particular
ability to compete with Rothschild.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Under Which King?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“All such knowledge as this, whether it comes from God or not, can be
but of little profit to the soul in the way of perfection, if it
trusts to it: yea, rather, if it is not careful to reject it, ... it
will bring upon it great evil; ... for all the dangers and
inconveniences of the supernatural apprehensions, and many more, are
to be found here.”
_The Ascent of Mount Carmel_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Under Which King?
WITHIN a day or two of our conversation on St. Teresa, I asked the old
priest about what is called “Quietism.” A friend had given me an old
copy of Molinos’ _Spiritual Guide_, and I knew that the writer had been
condemned and imprisoned for life, and yet I could not understand in
what lay his crime.
“It is difficult to put into words,” said the priest, “or even to
understand, why certain sentences are condemned, since it is probably
possible to parallel them from other Catholic mystics whose names are
honoured. Yet the fact remains that the result of Molinos’ teaching was
neglect of the Sacraments and of external means of grace, which was not
so in the case of the schools of other mystics.”
“But I will tell you a story,” he went on, “to illustrate the effect of
certain kinds of mysticism; and I must leave you to judge whether my
friend was right or wrong in what he decided, for I must tell you first
that the incident did not happen to me. On the whole I may say that I
have my own opinion on the subject, but I will not tell you what it is,
as sometimes I am strongly inclined to change it. However, you shall
hear the story. Shall we take a stroll on the terrace?”
And when we had reached it, he began:
“My friend was a priest of about thirty years of age (this happened some
forty years ago). He was working in the country at the time, and had a
great deal of leisure for reading, and this he chiefly occupied in the
study of various mystics, and most of them of the Quietistic school. You
know, too, that one of their characteristic lines of thought lies in the
abandonment of all effort save that of adhering to God, and even that is
to be a passive rather than an active effort. The soul must lie still,
says one of them, and be drawn as if by a rope up the Mount of
Perfection. The slightest movement will check or divert that swift and
steady approach towards God.
“But my friend not only studied writers of this school intellectually,
but he put himself more or less under their spiritual direction. He told
me afterwards that it seemed to him that if he used the Sacraments
faithfully, and if he found that his devotion towards them did not cool,
he would be sufficiently protected against possible extravagances or
heresies in his spiritual reading. His daily meditation, too, he told
me, began to mean more to him than ever in his lifetime: the presence of
God seemed more real and accessible, and, above all, the guidance of God
in his daily life more apparent. The time that really matters, as he
said to me once, is the time between our religious exercises; and in
this time, too, God manifested Himself. In fact, from all that he said
to me, I have very little doubt that his character and spiritual life
were both deepened and purified, at any rate at first, by his devotional
study of these mystics.
“One word more before I begin the actual story.
“I said just now that the guidance of God began to be more apparent in
his daily life. There are two main ways of settling questions that come
up for decision, and both ways are possible to a religious man. One way
is to lay stress on the intellectual side, to weigh the arguments
carefully, and decide, as it were, by reasoning alone: the other is to
lay comparatively little stress on the arguments and the intellectual
side generally, and to make the main effort lie in the aspiration of the
will towards God for guidance. We may call them, roughly, the
intellectual and the intuitive. Now of course my friend’s mystical
studies inclined him more and more towards the latter. He told me, in
fact, that in the most ordinary questions––in his visiting his
people––in his preaching––in his dealings with souls––he began more and
more to refuse intellectual light, and to trust instead to the immediate
interior guidance of the Holy Ghost. More than once, for example, he
laid aside the sermon he had prepared, as he entered the pulpit, and
preached from a text that had seemed to be suggested to him. Of course
it was not so good from the literary point of view; but that, as he very
justly said, is not the most important question in judging of a sermon.
He seemed to find, he told me, that his spiritual power in every way
developed, both in his interior life and in his dealings with others.
“In his conversations, too, he would allow long silences to come, if it
did not seem to him that God moved him to speak; at other times he would
drop conventional modes of speech and say things that, humanly judged,
were calculated to do the very opposite of what he personally desired.
Sometimes in such a case his wish was attained, and sometimes not; but
in both cases he forced himself to regard it as if he had succeeded. In
short, he acted and spoke in obedience to this interior drawing, and
disregarded consequences entirely. And this, I need hardly say, is one
road to interior peace.
“And then at last a startling thing happened.
“There had been some crime committed: I have not an idea what it was.
Two men were involved in the consequences. One, whom we will call A.,
had committed the crime: but he could only be prosecuted if B., whom he
had seriously injured, consented to take action. Now my friend was
deeply interested in A., and he thought he knew that the one chance of
A.’s salvation lay in his being allowed to go unpunished. But Lord B.,
who, by the way, was an Irish peer, of no importance himself, though his
father had been well known, was a hard, vindictive man, and had publicly
announced his intention of ruining A. In this state of affairs my friend
was asked to intercede by A. and his friends.
“Lord B. lived in a large country-house some four or five miles from my
friend’s house. He was an unmarried man, but generally had his house
fairly full of his friends, who did not bear the best possible
reputation.
“My friend arrived at the house by appointment with B., whom he did not
personally know, towards the close of a rainy autumn afternoon. In spite
of his anxiety he had resolved to be guided as usual by the interior
monitor whom he had learnt to trust, and he had hardly thought of a
single argument which he could use. Yet he felt confident that he was
right in coming, and equally confident that he would know what to say
when the time came. As he got near the house this confident sense of
guidance increased to an extent that almost terrified him. It seemed to
him, as he walked under the dripping yellow branches, that a strong,
almost physical, oppression carried him forward. As if in a dream he saw
the manservant appear in answer to his ring, and heard, as from a great
distance, the man tell him that Lord B. had come in a little while
before, and was now expecting him in the smoking-room.
“On entering the house these curious sensations, which he hardly
attempted to describe to me, seemed to diminish a little, and he felt
cool and confident. He told me that the sense of oppression resting on
him was dispelled, as if by a breeze, as he passed along the corridor on
the ground floor on his way to the smoking-room in the west wing of the
house.
“The servant threw open the door and announced him, and my friend went
through, and the door closed behind him: but the moment he had crossed
the threshold he felt that something was wrong.
“There was a circle of men, some in shooting costume, and some as if
they had not been out all day, sitting in easy chairs round the fire,
which was to the right of the door. My friend could see most of their
faces, and Lord B.’s face among them, as he paused at the door; but not
one offered to move, though all looked curiously at him.
“There was silence for a moment, and then Lord B. said suddenly and
loudly:
“‘Well, here’s the parson at last, sermon and all.’
“And then two or three of the men laughed.
“My friend saw of course that Lord B. had arranged the interview in this
way simply in order to insult him, and that he would not be able to
speak to him in private at all, as he had hoped. There was, he told me,
just one great heave of anger in his heart at this offensive behaviour;
but he did his best to crush it down, and still stood without speaking.
He had not, he said, an idea what to say or do, so he stood and waited.
“Lord B. got up in a moment and lit a cigarette with his back to my
friend; and then turned and faced him, leaning against the mantelpiece.
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’re all waiting.’
“Still there was silence. One of the men beyond the fire suddenly
laughed.
“‘Now then,’ said Lord B. impatiently, ‘for God’s sake say what you came
to say, and go.’
“As this sentence ended my friend felt a curious sensation run over him,
like those he had experienced in the park, but far stronger. He could
never give me any description of it, except by saying that it seemed as
if a force were laying hold of him in every remote fibre of his bodily
and spiritual being. His own will seemed to give up the control into
some stronger hand, and he felt a sense of being steadied and quieted.
“Then he was aware that his own voice said a single sentence of some
half-dozen words; but though he heard each word, it was instantly
obliterated from his mind. In his description of it all to me
afterwards, he said it was like words that we hear immediately before we
fall asleep in a lecture-room or a railway carriage: each word is
English and intelligible, but the sentence conveys no impression.
“While his voice spoke for perhaps two or three seconds, his eyes were
fixed on Lord B.’s face, and in that momentary interval he saw a
terrible fear and astonishment suddenly stamped upon it. The mouth
opened in loose lines and the cigarette fell out, and B.’s hands rose
instinctively as if to keep my friend off. One of the men, too, at the
further end of the circle suddenly sprang erect, with the same kind of
imploring horror on his face.
“That was all that my friend had time to see; for the same power that
had laid hold of him turned him immediately to the door, and he opened
it and went out and down the corridor. As he went the strange sensation
passed, but he felt the sweat prick to his skin and then pour down his
face. He heard, too, as he reached the end of the corridor, a bell peal
violently somewhere. He passed out into the hall, and even as he opened
the front door a servant dashed past him through the hall and down the
corridor, up which he had just come.
“He went straight home, feeling terribly tired and overwrought, and had
to go to bed on reaching his house, tortured by neuralgia.
“Two hours later a note was brought by a groom from Lord B., written in
a shaking hand, with an abject apology for his reception in the
afternoon; an entreaty to him not to mention the subject again which he
had spoken of in the sitting-room, with a scarcely veiled offer of a
bribe, and an emphatic promise to withdraw all proceedings against A.
“On the following day he was told that Lord B. was supposed to be
unwell, and that the house-party had been hurriedly broken up the night
before.
“From that day to this he has never had an idea of what the sentence was
that his voice spoke that worked such a miracle.”
“That is a most curious story,” I said. “What do you make of it?”
The priest smiled.
“I will tell you what my friend made of it. He gave up his study of
mysticism, yet without in any sense condemning that line of thought of
which I have spoken. His reasons, which he explained to me after coming
to a decision, were that such a visitation might or might not be from
God. If it were not from God, then that proved that he had been meddling
with high things, and had somehow slipped under some other control. If
it were from God, it might be that it was just for that very purpose
that he had been brought so far, but that he dared not pursue that path
without some distinct further sign. ‘In any case,’ he said, ‘no soul can
be lost by following the simple and well-beaten path of ordinary
devotion and prayer.’ And so he returned to intellectual forms of
meditation, such as most Christians use. He died a few years ago, full
of holiness and good works.
“But for you there are several opinions open. Either that it was an
intensely strong case of hypnotic thought-transference from Lord B. to
my friend, and that the latter only spoke mechanically of something that
lay in the former’s mind; or you may decide that the whole affair was of
the Evil One, and that A. would have been all the better for
prosecution, and that an evil being somehow found entrance into the
strained nature of my friend, and used it for his own purposes; or that
the prophetic gift was bestowed on him, but that the ordeal was too
fierce and he too cowardly to claim it. And there are other solutions as
well, no doubt possible.
“For myself I think I have formed my opinion; but I would prefer, as
Herodotus says, to keep it to myself.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
With Dyed Garments
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Jesu, well ought I love Thee,
For Thou me shewest Thy rood-tree,
Thy crown of thorns, and nails three,
The sharp spear that piercéd Thee.”
_Swete Jhesu now wil I Synge._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
With Dyed Garments
WHEN the second post came in one morning I saw a letter addressed to the
priest, in the trembling large characters of an old man’s hand, lying
upon the slab in the hall. When I came in to lunch I found the old
clergyman with an open letter in his hand, and his face full of almost
childish happiness.
“I have heard from my oldest friend,” he said, making a little movement
with the letter. “It is months since he has written. I have known him
ever since we were boys.”
We sat down to lunch, but he kept on referring to his friend, and to the
pleasure the letter gave him.
“We are always planning to meet,” he said to me presently. “But we never
can manage it. We are both so old. He is much more active than I am,
however. He is full of good works, while I, as you know, lead an idle
life. I could not take charge of a church. It is all I can do now to
serve my own little chapel upstairs.”
“Where is he working?” I asked.
“I think perhaps you fancy he is in Holy Orders, but he is not. He has
been on the Stock Exchange till a few years ago, and now he is living in
the country, getting ready to die, as he tells me. But he is full of
good works; his letter here has news about the village, and of a man
whose acquaintance he has made in the reading-room there, which he
himself built a year ago; but he is full of plans too, and asks my
advice.”
“It is not often you come across a business man like that,” I said.
“No, he is wonderful, but he has been like that for years. He has done a
great deal all his life among poor people in London. For years he never
missed his two or three nights a week in some club, or on some
committee, or visiting sick people.”
I began to think that it might have been through the friendship of the
priest that this man had been such a worker. But presently he began
again.
“Perhaps the most wonderful thing was the way he first began to do such
work. Let me see, have I mentioned his name? No? Then I can tell you,
otherwise it would not be discreet; that is––” he added, “if you would
care to hear.”
I told him I should be very much interested.
“Then after lunch we will have coffee in the garden, and I will tell
you.”
When we had sat down under the shade of a wall, with the tall avenue of
pines opposite us making a dark tangled frieze against the delicate sky,
he began.
“What I am going to tell you now has been gathered partly from
conversations with my friend: and partly from letters he has written to
me. Years ago I jotted down the order of events, with names and dates,
but that, of course, I fear I cannot show even to you. However, I know
the story well, and you may rely on the main facts.
“I must tell you first that many years ago now, my friend, who was about
forty years old, had lately become a partner in his father’s firm: and
of course was greatly occupied with all the details of business. It was
a broker’s firm, well established and did a good steady business. My
friend at that time had no idea of doing any work outside his
occupation. I heard him say in fact, about this time, that his work
seemed to absorb all his energies and capacity. Then the first event of
the series took place.
“He was coming home one frosty afternoon in December, between three and
four o’clock, on the top of an omnibus. He was sitting in front and
looking about him. He noticed a poorly-dressed man standing on the
pavement on the right-hand side, as if he wished to cross. Then he began
to cross, and came at last right up to the omnibus on which my friend
was sitting, and paused a moment to let it pass. As he stood there, my
friend watching him with that listless interest with which a tired man
will observe details, a hansom cab moving quickly came in the opposite
direction. It seemed as if the horse would run the man down. It was too
sudden to warn him, but the man saw it, and to avoid the horse sprang
quickly forward, his head half turned away, and his feet came between
the front and back wheels of the omnibus. There was a jolt and a
terrible scream, and my friend horrified leant far over the side to see.
When the omnibus had passed the man stood for a moment on his crushed
feet, and then swayed forward and fell on his face. My friend started up
and made a movement to go to him, but several others had seen the
accident and ran to the man, and a policeman was crossing quickly from
the other side, so he sat down again and the omnibus carried him on.
“Now this horrible thing remained in my friend’s mind, haunted him,
shocked him profoundly. He could not forget the terrible face of pain
that he had seen upturned for an instant, and his imagination carried
him on in spite of himself to dwell on the details of those crushed
feet. He wrote me a long letter a week or two afterwards, minutely
describing all that I have told you.
“The following summer he was going down to the Kennington Oval one
Saturday afternoon to see the close of some famous cricket match. He
travelled by the Underground Railway as far as Westminster, and from
there determined to walk at least across the Bridge. He walked on the
right-hand side, and had reached the steps of St. Thomas’ Hospital. He
waited here a moment undecided whether to walk on or drive.
“As he waited, he half turned and saw a beggar sitting in the angle
between the steps and the wall. There was a white dog beside him. The
beggar’s face was partly bandaged; but what caught my friend’s attention
most were his two hands. They were lying palms downwards on the beggar’s
knees, bandaged like his face, but in the centre of each was a dark
spot, showing through the wrapping, as if there were a festering wound
that soaked through from underneath. My friend looked at him in disgust
for a moment: but terribly fascinated by those quiet suffering hands;
and then he passed on. But during all that afternoon he could not forget
those hands. I daresay he was overwrought and nervous. But his memory
too went back to the accident by the Marble Arch. That night too, as he
told me in a conversation afterwards, as he tossed about, his windows
wide open to catch the night air, half waking visions kept moving before
him of a man with crushed feet and bandaged hands, who moaned and lifted
a drawn face to the sky.
“Early that autumn he was alone, except for the servants, in his
father’s house in London. A maid was taken ill. I forget the nature of
the illness, but perhaps you will be able to identify it when I have
finished. At any rate the girl grew quickly worse. One morning just
before he started to the City the doctor, who had called early that
morning, asked to have a word with him, and told him he thought he ought
to operate immediately, and asked for his sanction.
“‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘of course I must speak to the girl about it.
Have you told her yet?’
“‘No,’ said the doctor, ‘I thought I should mention it to you first. I
understand that the girl has no relations in the world.’
“‘Can you tell me the nature of the operation?’ asked my friend.
“‘It is not really serious. It is an incision in the right side,’ and he
added a few details explaining the case.
“‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘we had better go upstairs together.’
“They went up and found the girl perfectly conscious and reasonable. She
consented to the operation, which was fixed for that evening.
“But all that day the picture floated before his eyes of the quiet room
at the top of the house, and the girl lying there waiting. And then the
scene would shift a little. And he would see the girl after it was over,
with a bandage against her side, and the knowledge of the little wound
beneath. When he reached home, late in the evening, the doctor was
waiting for him.
“‘It has been perfectly successful,’ he said, ‘and I think she will
recover.’
“Now, that evening, as my friend sat at the dinner-table alone, smoking
and thinking, his old experiences came to his mind again. In less than a
year he had seen three things, none of which seemed to have any very
close relation to him, but each of which had deeply affected him. He
told me afterwards that he began to suspect a design underlying them;
but he had not a glimmer of light, strange as it may seem to you and me,
as to the nature of that design. Within a month, however, I received a
letter from him, from some place in the country where he was staying,
describing the following incident.
“He had gone down from a Saturday to Monday to a friend’s house in
Surrey. On the Sunday afternoon he and his friend went for a walk
through some woods. Autumn was in full glory, and the trees were blazing
in red and gold: and the bramble branches were weighed down with purple
fruit. As they walked together along a grass ride they heard shouts and
laughter of children in the woods on one side. They could hear footsteps
pattering through dry leaves, and the tearing and trampling of
brushwood; and in a moment more a boy burst out of the thin hedge,
tripped in a bramble, and rolled into the grass walk. He was up again in
a moment laughing and flushed, but my friend saw across his forehead a
little thin red dotted line where a thorn had scratched him. As the boy
laughed up into their faces, he lifted his hand to his forehead.
“‘Why it’s wet,’ he said, and then, looking at his fingers: ‘Why, it’s
blood! I’ve scratched myself.’
“Other footsteps came running through the undergrowth, and the boy
himself ran off down the road, and the footsteps in the wood stopped,
retraced themselves and died away in faint rustlings up the hill. But as
my friend had looked he had seen in his memory those other experiences
of the last year. And all seemed to concentrate themselves on one
Figure––with wounded feet and hands and side––and a torn forehead.
‘My friend stood quiet so long that his companion spoke to him and
touched his arm.
“‘Yes, I am ready,’ he said; ‘let us go home.’
“The end of the letter I cannot quote to you. It is too intimate and
personal. But it ended with a request to myself to give him an
introduction to some friend who would give him work to do in some poor
district. And work of that kind he has carried on ever since.”
The old priest’s voice ceased.
“There is one thing my friend did not know,” he said after a moment.
“When that particular operation on the side is performed, of which I
have spoken, there comes out blood and water. A doctor will tell you
so.”
And then:
“That is my friend’s story,” he said, “Do you not think it remarkable?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unto Babes
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Saint Bernard speaks of the words of Job that he says: ‘_Abscondit
lucem in manibus_’ (that is to say, ‘God has light hid in His
hands’)––‘Thou wot well, he that has a candle a-light between his
hands, he may hide it and shew it at his own will. So does our Lord
to His chosen.’”
_The Abbey of the Holy Ghost._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unto Babes
A FEW days after the conversation I have described my visit to the old
man came to an end, and my work drew me back to London; but I left
behind me a promise to return and spend Christmas at his house. He in
the meantime would, he promised me, try to put together some other
stories for me against the time that I should return. There were many
others, he said, that he had come across in his life which he hoped
would interest me, besides a few more personal experiences of his own.
And so I left him smiling and waving to me from his bedroom window that
overlooked the drive (for I had to go by an early train), with the
clean-shaven face of his old servant looking at me discreetly and
gravely from the clear-glass chapel window next to the priest’s room,
where he had been setting things ready before his master was dressed.
* * * * *
It was a dark winter afternoon when I returned, a week or so before
Christmas.
The coachman told me on my inquiry that his master seemed very much aged
during the autumn and winter, that he had scarcely left the house since
the leaves had fallen, except to sit for an hour or two in sunshiny
weather in the sheltered angle of the wall where was the tiled platform
that I have spoken of; and that he was afraid he had been suffering from
depression. There had been days of almost complete silence, at least so
Parker had told him, when the master had sat all day turning over
letters and books and old drawers.
I reproached myself with having troubled the old man with demands for
more stories; and feared that it had been in the attempt to please me
that he had fallen brooding over the past, perhaps dwelling too much on
sorrows of which I knew nothing.
As we passed under the pines that tossed their sombre plumes in the
wind, the sun, breaking through clouds in an angry glory on my right,
blazed on the little square-paned windows of the house on my left. The
chapel-window on the top story seemed especially full of red light
streaming from within, but the flame swept across the upper story as we
drove past, and left the windows blank and colourless just before we
turned the corner at the back of the house.
The old man met me in the hall, and I was startled to see the change
that had come to him. His eyes seemed larger than ever, and there was a
sorrow in them that I had not seen before. They had been the eyes of a
stainless child, wide and smiling; now they were the eyes of one who was
under some burden almost too heavy to be borne. In the stronger light of
the sitting-room as the candles shone on his face, I saw that my
impression had only been caused by a drooping of the eyelids, that now
hung down a little further. But it looked a tired face.
He welcomed me, and said several charming things to me that I should be
ashamed to quote, but he made me feel that he was glad that I had come;
and so I was glad too. But he said among other things this:
“I am glad you have come now, because I think I shall have something
further to tell you. I have had indications during this autumn that the
end is coming, and I think that if I have to pass through a dark
valley,––and I feel that I am at its entrance even now,––I think that He
will give me His staff as well as His rod. But I am an old man and full
of fancies, so please do not question me. But I am very glad,” and he
took my hand and stroked it for a moment, “very glad that you are here,
because I do not think that you will be afraid.”
During the following days he told me many stories, bringing out the old
books and letters of which the coachman had spoken, and spelling out
notes through his tortoiseshell glass, as he sat by the open fireplace
in the central sitting-room, with the logs crackling and overrun with
swift sparks as they rested on their bed of ashes. The door into the
garden where the old drive had once been was now kept closed, and a
heavy curtain hung over it.
We did not go out very much together––only in the early afternoons we
would walk for an hour or so, he leaning on my arm and on a stick, up
and down the terraced walk that lay next the drive under the pines, as
the sunset burned across the hills like a far-away judgment. Some day
perhaps I will write out some of the stories that he told me, although
not all. I have the notes by me.
Here is one of them.
We were walking on one of these dark winter afternoons very slowly
uphill towards the village that the priest might get a change from the
garden. The morning had been gusty and wet, with sleet showers and even
a sprinkle of pure snow as the sky cleared after lunch-time; and now the
weather was settling down for a frost, and the snow lay thinly here and
there on the rapidly hardening ground.
“It is remarkable,” the old man was saying to me, “how in spite of our
Lord’s words people still think that faith is a matter more or less of
intellect. Such a phrase as ‘intelligent faith’ is, of course, strictly
most incorrect.”
He stopped and looked at me as he said this, as if prepared for dispute.
I did not disappoint him.
“You are very puzzling;” I said. “I cannot believe that you do not value
intellect. Surely it is a gift of God, and therefore may adorn faith, as
any other gift may do.”
“Yes,” he said, walking on, “it may adorn it; but it has nothing more to
do with it really than jewels have to do with a beautiful woman. In
fact, sometimes faith is far more beautiful unadorned, and it is quite
possible to crush a delicate and growing faith with a weight of learned
arguments intended to adorn and perfect it. Christian apologetics, it
seems to me, are only really useful in the mouth of one who realises
their entire inadequacy. You can demonstrate nothing of God. You can, by
arguments, draw a number of lines that converge towards God, and render
His existence and His attributes probable; but you cannot reach Him
along those lines. Faith depends not on intellectual but on moral
conditions. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ said our Saviour, not
‘Blessed are the profound or acute of intellect’––‘for they shall see
God.’ It is certainly true of intellectual as of all other riches that
they who possess them shall find difficulty in entering into the kingdom
of God.”
“And so,” I said, “you think that intellectual powers are not things to
covet, and that education is not a very important question after all?”
“No more than wealth,” he answered, “at least so far as you mean by
education instruction in demonstrable facts or exact sciences. The point
of our existence here is to know God. Well, you know for yourself how
the race for wealth is ruining millions of souls to-day. No less surely
is keen intellectual competition ruining souls. Mr. ––––, for instance,”
he said, naming a well-known critic and poet; “was there ever a man of
keener and finer intellect, or of more unerring instinct in matters of
literary taste? Well, once I talked with that man most of a day on all
his own subjects; in fact, he did nearly all the talking, and I was
astonished, I must confess, at the perfection of the training of his
already brilliant powers. So much I could perceive, though of course I
could not follow him. And of course there were many delicate shades of
beauty, if not much more, invisible to me in his talk and criticism. His
scale of intellectual beauty ran up out of my sight altogether. But what
astonished me more was the coarseness and dulness of his spiritual
instinct. I will not call him a child in matters of faith, because that
would be high praise; but he was just an ill-bred boor. I have known
many a Sussex villager of far purer and finer spiritual fibre. No, no;
faith can and does exist quite apart from intellect; and to increase or
develop the one often means the decrease and incoherence of the other.
_Seigneur, donnez-moi la foi du charbonnier!_”
I must confess that this was a new point of view for me; and I am not
sure now whether I do not still think it exaggerated and dangerous; but
I said nothing, because it did seem to open up difficult questions, and
also to throw light on other difficult questions. The priest turned to
me again as he walked.
“Why, it must be so,” he said; “if it were not, clever people would have
a better hope of salvation than stupid people; and that is absurd––as
absurd as if rich people should be nearer God than poor people. No, no;
talents are distributed unevenly, it is true: to one ten and to another
five; but each has one pound, all alike.”
We had reached the top of the slope, and the towering hedges had
gradually fallen away, so that we could now see far and wide over the
country. Away behind us, as we paused for breath, we could see the misty
Brighton downs, while in the middle distance lay tumbled wooded hills,
with smoke beginning to curl up here and there from the evening fires of
hidden villages. The sky was clear overhead, but in the west, where the
sunset was beginning to smoulder, a few heavy clouds still lingered.
“And God sees all:” said the priest. “Can you put up with another story
as we walk home again? I think I ought to be turning now.”
We turned and began to retrace our steps downhill.
“This is not an experience of my own,” he said. “It was told me by a
friend of mine in Cornwall. He was the squire of a little village a few
miles out of Truro, and lived there most of the year except a few weeks
in the spring, when he would go abroad. He was a man of great learning
and taste, but had the faith of a little child. It was like a spring of
clear water to hear him speak of God and heavenly things.
“There was a boy in the village who was an idiot. His parents were dead,
and he lived alone with his old grandmother, who was a strict Calvinist,
and who regarded her grandson as hopelessly damned because his faith and
his expression of it were not as hers. There were evident signs, she
said, that God’s inscrutable decrees were against him. The local
preachers there would have nothing to do with the boy; and the clergyman
of the parish, after an attempt or two, had given the child up as
hopeless. I think my friend told me that the clergyman had tried to
teach him Old Testament history.
“Well, the boy was a terrible and disgusting case. I will not go into
details beyond saying that the boy’s head had the look of a mule about
it; his mother, I think, had had a fright shortly before his birth, and
the boy used to think sometimes that he was a horse or mule, and the
village children used to encourage him in it, and ride and drive him on
the green, for he was quite harmless. And so he grew up, neglected and
untaught, spending much of his time out of doors, and creeping home on
all fours in the evening, snorting and stamping and neighing when he was
much excited; and he would stable himself in a corner of the wide dark
kitchen, and munch grass; while his grandmother sat in her high chair by
the fire reading in her Bible, or looking over her spectacles at the
poor misshapen body in the corner that held a damned soul.
“Now my friend hated to see this child. It was the one thing that
troubled his faith. Those who have the faith of children have also the
troubles of children; and this living example before his eyes of what
looked like the carelessness of God, or worse, was a greater offence to
my friend’s faith than all infidel arguments, or the mere knowledge that
such things happened.
“On a certain Christmas Eve my friend had been a long tramp over the
hills with a guest who was staying with him for the shooting. They were
returning through his own property towards evening, and were just
dropping down from the hill. Their path lay along the upper edge of an
old disused stone-quarry, whose entrance lay perhaps a hundred yards
away from the valley-road that led into the village––so it was a lonely
and unfrequented place. The evening was closing in; and my friend, as he
led the way along the path, was trying to make out the outlines of
stones and bushes on the floor of the quarry, which lay perhaps seventy
feet below them. All at once his eye was caught by the steady glimmer of
light somewhere in the dimness beneath, and the sound of a voice. He
guessed at once that there were tramps below, and was angry at the
thought that they must have wilfully disregarded the notice he had put
up about making a fire so close to the wood: and he determined to turn
them out, and, if need be, to give them shelter for the night in one of
his own outhouses. So he stopped and explained to his friend which path
would take him home, while that he himself intended to make his way
along the lip of the quarry to the entrance, and then to go on into its
interior where the tramps had made their camp; and he promised to be at
the house five minutes after his friend.
“So they separated, and he himself soon found his way down a narrow
overgrown path that brought him to the opening of the quarry.
“It was a good deal darker here, as the hill shadowed it from the west,
and high trees rose on one side; but he was able to stumble along the
stony path which led to the interior, though it grew darker still as he
went. Presently he turned the corner of a tall boulder, and emerged into
the kind of semi-circus that formed the heart of the quarry: before him,
about a third way up the slope, burned the glimmer of light he had
noticed from above, but even as he saw it it went out: my friend stood
in the path and called out, explaining who he was, not threatening at
all, but offering, if it was any one who wanted shelter, to provide it
for the night. There was no answer, only the sound of scuffling in the
dimness in front, and then the confused sound of footsteps scrambling:
my friend ran forward, calling, and made out presently an oddly shaped
thing scrambling over the silt and stone towards a shoulder of rock that
stood out against the sky on his left (I think he said). He tried to
follow, but it was too dark, and after he had stumbled once or twice, he
gave up the pursuit. In a moment more the climbing figure stood out
clear against the sky for an instant, and then disappeared: and the
squire saw with a shock of disgust the mule-like head and tangled hair
rising from the high shoulders of the village idiot, and his hands
dangling on each side of him; and he heard a high-screaming neighing.
But at least, he thought to himself, he would go and see what the boy
had been doing.
“He made his way up the slope of silted gravel and mud that lay against
the face of the rock, and at last reached a little platform apparently
stamped and cut out at the top of the skree just where it touched the
quarry-side. It was too dark for him to distinguish anything clearly, so
he struck a match and held it in the still sheltered air while he looked
about him. This is what he saw.
“There was a short halter, with a kind of rude head-stall, fastened to a
rusty iron staple driven into the rock. There was a little pile of cut
grass below it. There was a kind of mud trough constructed against the
stone, with a little straw sprinkled in it and holly berries and leaves
in front of it; but this showed signs of having been hastily trampled
down, though parts of it survived: there were marks of hob-nailed boots
in it here and there. So much my friend had noticed when the match
burned his fingers: but just before he dropped it he noticed something
else which made him open his box and light another match: and then he
saw the end of a farthing taper sticking out of the ground into which it
had been pushed, and another crushed into a ball. He drew out the first
and lighted it, and then noticed this last thing. Quite plainly marked
on the soft edge of the mud-trough, in a place which the hob-nailed
boots had not touched, was the mark of a tiny child’s naked foot, as if
a baby had stood in the trough or manger, with one foot on the floor and
another on the edge.
“Now I do not know what you think of this, but I know what my friend
thought of it, and what I myself think of it. But before he went home he
went first to the cottage where the boy lived and found him as usual
tethered in the corner, with his grandmother nodding before the fire.
The boy would do nothing but snort and stamp: and the grandmother could
only say that ten minutes ago the boy had run in and gone straight to
his corner as usual. The squire asked whether the boy had been trusted
with a child by any one; but the grandmother said it was impossible. Nor
indeed did he ever after hear a word of a child having been missed on
that afternoon.
“Then, before he went home, he went to the little church, already
decorated for the festival, and there with the fragrance of the holly
and yew in the air about him, and the glimmer of a candle near the altar
where the church-cleaner was sweeping, he praised the Holy Child whose
Birth-night it was, and who had not disdained to lie in a manger and be
adored by the beasts of the stall.
“The following morning on his way back from church he went to the quarry
again with his friend to show him what he had seen; but the manger and
the holly-berries and crumpled taper were all gone, and there was
nothing to see but the iron staple and the platform beaten hard and
flat.”
We had reached the avenue of pines by now that led to the house, and
turned in by the little garden-gate.
“The story seems to show,” the priest added, “that intellect has not
much to do with the knowledge of God; and that the things which He hides
from the wise and prudent He reveals to babes.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Traveller
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“I am amazed, not that the Traveller returns from that Bourne, but
that he returns so seldom.”
_The Pilgrims’ Way._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Traveller
ON one of these evenings as we sat together after dinner in front of the
wide open fireplace in the central room of the house, we began to talk
on that old subject––the relation of Science to Faith.
“It is no wonder,” said the priest, “if their conclusions appear to
differ, to shallow minds who think that the last words are being said on
both sides; because their standpoints are so different. The scientific
view is that you are not justified in committing yourself one inch ahead
of your intellectual evidence: the religious view is that in order to
find out anything worth knowing your faith must always be a little in
advance of your evidence; you must advance _en échelon_. There is the
principle of our Lord’s promises. ‘Act as if it were true, and light
will be given.’ The scientist on the other hand says, ‘Do not presume to
commit yourself until light is given.’ The difference between the
methods lies, of course, in the fact that Religion admits the heart and
the whole man to the witness-box, while Science only admits the
head––scarcely even the senses. Yet surely the evidence of experience is
on the side of Religion. Every really great achievement is inspired by
motives of the heart, and not of the head; by feeling and passion, not
by a calculation of probabilities. And so are the mysteries of God
unveiled by those who carry them first by assault; ‘The Kingdom of
Heaven suffereth violence; and the violent take it by force.’
“For example,” he continued after a moment, “the scientific view of
haunted houses is that there is no evidence for them beyond that which
may be accounted for by telepathy, a kind of thought-reading. Yet if you
can penetrate that veneer of scientific thought that is so common now,
you find that by far the larger part of mankind still believes in them.
Practically not one of us really accepts the scientific view as an
adequate one.”
“Have you ever had an experience of that kind yourself?” I asked.
“Well,” said the priest, smiling, “you are sure you will not laugh at
it? There is nothing commoner than to think such things a subject for
humour; and that I cannot bear. Each such story is sacred to one person
at the very least, and therefore should be to all reverent people.”
I assured him that I would not treat his story with disrespect.
“Well,” he answered, “I do not think you will, and I will tell you. It
only happened a very few years ago. This was how it began:
“A friend of mine was, and is still, in charge of a church in Kent,
which I will not name; but it is within twenty miles of Canterbury. The
district fell into Catholic hands a good many years ago. I received a
telegram, in this house, a day or two before Christmas, from my friend,
saying that he had been suddenly seized with a very bad attack of
influenza, which was devastating Kent at that time; and asking me to
come down, if possible at once, and take his place over Christmas. I had
only lately given up active work, owing to growing infirmity, but it was
impossible to resist this appeal; so Parker packed my things and we went
together by the next train.
“I found my friend really ill, and quite incapable of doing anything; so
I assured him that I could manage perfectly, and that he need not be
anxious.
“On the next day, a Wednesday, and Christmas Eve, I went down to the
little church to hear confessions. It was a beautiful old church, though
tiny, and full of interesting things: the old altar had been set up
again; there was a rood-loft with a staircase leading on to it; and an
awmbry on the north of the sanctuary had been fitted up as a receptacle
for the Most Holy Sacrament, instead of the old hanging pyx. One of the
most interesting discoveries made in the church was that of the old
confessional. In the lower half of the rood-screen, on the south side, a
square hole had been found, filled up with an insertion of oak; but an
antiquarian of the Alcuin Club, whom my friend had asked to examine the
church, declared that this without doubt was the place where in the
pre-Reformation times confessions were heard. So it had been restored,
and put to its ancient use; and now on this Christmas Eve I sat within
the chancel in the dim fragrant light, while penitents came and knelt
outside the screen on the single step, and made their confessions
through the old opening.
“I know this is a great platitude, but I never can look at a piece of
old furniture without a curious thrill at a thing that has been so much
saturated with human emotion; but, above all that I have ever seen, I
think that this old confessional moved me. Through that little opening
had come so many thousands of sins, great and little, weighted with
sorrow; and back again, in Divine exchange for those burdens, had
returned the balm of the Saviour’s blood. ‘Behold! a door opened in
heaven,’ through which that strange commerce of sin and grace may be
carried on––grace pressed down and running over, given into the bosom in
exchange for sin! _O bonum commercium!_”
The priest was silent for a moment, his eyes glowing. Then he went on.
“Well, Christmas Day and the three following festivals passed away very
happily. On the Sunday night after service, as I came out of the vestry,
I saw a child waiting. She told me, when I asked her if she wanted me,
that her father and others of her family wished to make their
confessions on the following evening about six o’clock. They had had
influenza in the house, and had not been able to come out before; but
the father was going to work next day, as he was so much better, and
would come, if it pleased me, and some of his children to make their
confessions in the evening and their communions the following morning.
“Monday dawned, and I offered the Holy Sacrifice as usual, and spent the
morning chiefly with my friend, who was now able to sit up and talk a
good deal, though he was not yet allowed to leave his bed.
“In the afternoon I went for a walk.
“All the morning there had rested a depression on my soul such as I have
not often felt; it was of a peculiar quality. Every soul that tries,
however poorly, to serve God, knows by experience those heavinesses by
which our Lord tests and confirms His own: but it was not like that. An
element of terror mingled with it, as of impending evil.
“As I started for my walk along the high road this depression deepened.
There seemed no physical reason for it that I could perceive. I was well
myself, and the weather was fair; yet air and exercise did not affect
it. I turned at last, about half-past three o’clock, at a milestone that
marked sixteen miles to Canterbury.
“I rested there for a moment, looking to the south-east, and saw that
far on the horizon heavy clouds were gathering; and then I started
homewards. As I went I heard a far-away boom, as of distant guns, and I
thought at first that there was some sea-fort to the south where
artillery practice was being held; but presently I noticed that it was
too irregular and prolonged for the report of a gun; and then it was
with a sense of relief that I came to the conclusion it was a far-away
thunderstorm, for I felt that the state of the atmosphere might explain
away this depression that so troubled me. The thunder seemed to come
nearer, pealed more loudly three or four times and ceased.
“But I felt no relief. When I reached home a little after four Parker
brought me in some tea, and I fell asleep afterwards in a chair before
the fire. I was wakened after a troubled and unhappy dream by Parker
bringing in my coat and telling me it was time to keep my appointment at
the church. I could not remember what my dream was, but it was sinister
and suggestive of evil, and, with the shreds of it still clinging to me,
I looked at Parker with something of fear as he stood silently by my
chair holding the coat.
“The church stood only a few steps away, for the garden and churchyard
adjoined one another. As I went down carrying the lantern that Parker
had lighted for me, I remember hearing far away to the south, beyond the
village, the beat of a horse’s hoofs. The horse seemed to be in a
gallop, but presently the noise died away behind a ridge.
“When I entered the church I found that the sacristan had lighted a
candle or two as I had asked him, and I could just make out the kneeling
figures of three or four people in the north aisle.
“When I was ready I took my seat in the chair set beyond the screen, at
the place I have described; and then, one by one, the labourer and his
children came up and made their confessions. I remember feeling again,
as on Christmas Eve, the strange charm of this old place of penitence,
so redolent of God and man, each in his tenderest character of Saviour
and penitent; with the red light burning like a luminous flower in the
dark before me, to remind me how God was indeed tabernacling with men,
and was their God.
“Now I do not know how long I had been there, when again I heard the
beat of a horse’s hoofs, but this time in the village just below the
churchyard; then again there fell a sudden silence. Then presently a
gust of wind flung the door wide, and the candles began to gutter and
flare in the draught. One of the girls went and closed the door.
“Presently the boy who was kneeling by me at that time finished his
confession, received absolution and went down the church, and I waited
for the next, not knowing how many there were.
“After waiting a minute or two I turned in my seat, and was about to get
up, thinking there was no one else, when a voice whispered sharply
through the hole a single sentence. I could not catch the words, but I
supposed they were the usual formula for asking a blessing, so I gave
the blessing and waited, a little astonished at not having heard the
penitent come up.
“Then the voice began again.”
The priest stopped a moment and looked round, and I could see that he
was trembling a little.
“Would you rather not go on?” I said. “I think it disturbs you to tell
me.”
“No, no,” he said; “it is all right, but it was very dreadful––very
dreadful.”
“Well, the voice began again in a loud quick whisper, but the odd thing
was that I could hardly understand a word; there were just phrases here
and there, like the name of God and of our Lady, that I could catch.
Then there were a few old French words that I knew; ‘_le roy_’ came over
and over again. Just at first I thought it must be some extreme form of
dialect unknown to me; then I thought it must be a very old man who was
deaf, because when I tried, after a few sentences, to explain that I
could not understand, the penitent paid no attention, but whispered on
quickly without a pause. Presently I could perceive that he was in a
terrible state of mind; the voice broke and sobbed, and then almost
cried out, but still in this loud whisper; then on the other side of the
screen I could hear fingers working and moving uneasily, as if
entreating admittance at some barred door. Then at last there was
silence for a moment, and then plainly some closing formula was
repeated, which gradually grew lower and ceased. Then, as I rose,
meaning to come round and explain that I had not been able to hear, a
loud moan or two came from the penitent. I stood up quickly and looked
through the upper part of the screen, and there was no one there.
“I can give you no idea of what a shock that was to me. I stood there
glaring, I suppose, through the screen down at the empty step for a
moment or two, and perhaps I said something aloud, for I heard a voice
from the end of the church.
“‘Did you call, sir?’” And there stood the sacristan, with his keys and
lantern, ready to lock up.
“I still stood without answering for a moment, and then I spoke; my
voice sounded oddly in my ears.
“‘Is there any one else, Williams? Are they all gone?’ or something like
that.
“Williams lifted his lantern and looked round the dusky church.
“‘No, sir; there is no one.’
“I crossed the chancel to go to the vestry, but as I was half-way,
suddenly again in the quiet village there broke out the desperate gallop
of a horse.
“‘There! there!’ I cried, ‘do you hear that?’
“Williams came up the church towards me.
“‘Are you ill, sir?’ he said. ‘Shall I fetch your servant?’
“I made an effort and told him it was nothing; but he insisted on seeing
me home: I did not like to ask him whether he had heard the gallop of
the horse; for, after all, I thought, perhaps there was no connection
between that and the voice that whispered.
“I felt very much shaken and disturbed; and after dinner, which I took
alone of course, I thought I would go to bed very soon. On my way up,
however, I looked into my friend’s room for a few minutes. He seemed
very bright and eager to talk, and I stayed very much longer than I had
intended. I said nothing of what had happened in the church; but
listened to him while he talked about the village and the neighbourhood.
Finally, as I was on the point of bidding him good-night, he said
something like this:
“‘Well, I mustn’t keep you, but I’ve been thinking while you’ve been in
church of an old story that is told by antiquarians about this place.
They say that one of St. Thomas à Becket’s murderers came here on the
very evening of the murder. It is his day, to-day, you know, and that is
what put me in mind of it, I suppose.”
“While my friend said this, my old heart began to beat furiously; but,
with a strong effort of self-control, I told him I should like to hear
the story.
“‘Oh! there’s nothing much to tell,’ said my friend; ‘and they don’t
know who it’s supposed to have been; but it is said to have been either
one of the four knights, or one of the men-at-arms.’
“‘But how did he come here?’ I asked, ‘and what for?’
“‘Oh! he’s supposed to have been in terror for his soul, and that he
rushed here to get absolution, which, of course, was impossible.’
“‘But tell me,’ I said. ‘Did he come here alone, or how?’
“‘Well, you know, after the murder they ransacked the Archbishop’s house
and stables: and it is said that this man got one of the fastest horses
and rode like a madman, not knowing where he was going; and that he
dashed into the village, and into the church where the priest was: and
then afterwards, mounted again and rode off. The priest, too, is buried
in the chancel, somewhere, I believe. You see it’s a very vague and
improbable story. At the Gatehouse at Malling, too, you know, they say
that one of the knights slept there the night after the murder.’
“I said nothing more; but I suppose I looked strange, because my friend
began to look at me with some anxiety, and then ordered me off to bed:
so I took my candle and went.
“Now,” said the priest, turning to me, “that is the story. I need not
say that I have thought about it a great deal ever since: and there are
only two theories which appear to me credible, and two others, which
would no doubt be suggested, which appear to me incredible.
“First, you may say that I was obviously unwell: my previous depression
and dreaming showed that, and therefore that I dreamt the whole thing.
If you wish to think that––well, you must think it.
“Secondly, you may say, with the Psychical Research Society, that the
whole thing was transmitted from my friend’s brain to mine; that his was
in an energetic, and mine in a passive state, or something of the kind.
“These two theories would be called ‘scientific,’ which term means that
they are not a hair’s-breadth in advance of the facts with which the
intellect, a poor instrument at the best, is capable of dealing. And
these two ‘scientific’ theories create in their turn a new brood of
insoluble difficulties.
“Or you may take your stand upon the spiritual world, and use the
faculties which God has given you for dealing with it, and then you will
no longer be helplessly puzzled, and your intellect will no longer
overstrain itself at a task for which it was never made. And you may
say, I think, that you prefer one of two theories.
“First, that human emotion has a power of influencing or saturating
inanimate nature. Of course this is only the old familiar sacramental
principle of all creation. The expressions of your face, for instance,
caused by the shifting of the chemical particles of which it is
composed, vary with your varying emotions. Thus we might say that the
violent passions of hatred, anger, terror, remorse, of this poor
murderer, seven hundred years ago, combined to make a potent spiritual
fluid that bit so deep into the very place where it was all poured out,
that under certain circumstances it is reproduced. A phonograph, for
example, is a very coarse parallel, in which the vibrations of sound
translate themselves first into terms of wax, and then re-emerge again
as vibrations when certain conditions are fulfilled.
“Or, secondly, you may be old-fashioned and simple, and say that by some
law, vast and inexorable, beyond our perception, the personal spirit of
the very man is chained to the place, and forced to expiate his sin
again and again, year by year, by attempting to express his grief and to
seek forgiveness, without the possibility of receiving it. Of course we
do not know who he was; whether one of the knights who afterwards did
receive absolution, which possibly was not ratified by God; or one of
the men-at-arms who assisted, and who, as an anonymous chronicle says,
‘_sine confessione et viatico subito rapti sunt_.’
“There is nothing materialistic, I think, in believing that spiritual
beings may be bound to express themselves within limits of time and
space; and that inanimate nature, as well as animate, may be the
vehicles of the unseen. Arguments against such possibilities have
surely, once for all, been silenced, for Christians at any rate, by the
Incarnation and the Sacramental system, of which the whole principle is
that the Infinite and Eternal did once, and does still, express Itself
under forms of inanimate nature, in terms of time and space.
“With regard to another point, perhaps I need not remind you that a
thunderstorm broke over Canterbury on the day and hour of the actual
murder of the Archbishop.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Sorrows of the World
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“... quell’ ombre orando, andavan sotto il pondo
simile a quel che talvolta si sogna,
disparmente angosciate tutte a tondo
e lasse su per la prima cornice,
purgando le caligine del mondo.”
_Il Purgatorio._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Sorrows of the World
AS the days went on I became more reassured about my friend. Parker told
me there was an improvement since I had come: and the shadow in his eyes
seemed a little lightened. On Christmas Eve the Rector called, and they
were shut up together in the chapel for an hour after tea; and the old
man, I suppose, made his confession. He seemed brighter than ever that
evening, and told me story after story after dinner, old tales of when
he was a child.
On Christmas morning he celebrated the Holy Mysteries as usual in the
chapel, and I received the Communion at his hands. We went to church in
the brougham, and that was the last time the old priest was seen in
public. There was intense curiosity about him in the village, as well as
the greatest reverence and love for him, and I noticed a ripple of
interest along the benches as we passed up to the Hall pew.
On the evening of Christmas Day he had provided a Christmas tree in the
servants’ hall; but we only looked in for a moment when the shouting was
at its loudest, and he nodded at a child or two who caught sight of him,
and I saw his whole face kindle with joy and tenderness, and then we
went back to the fire in the sitting-room.
The morning of St. John’s Day broke dark and heavy. We had to have
candles at breakfast, and the old man seemed curiously changed and
depressed again. He hardly spoke at all, and looked at me almost
resentfully, like an overwrought child, when I failed to blow out the
spirit lamp at the first attempt.
All day long the gloom outside seemed to gather, the sun went down in a
pale sky barred with indigo, and the wind began to rise.
The old man, after a word or two, went to his room soon after dinner,
and I understood from Parker, who presently came in, that the master was
exceedingly sorry for his discourtesy, but that he did not feel equal to
conversation, and intended to go to bed early, and that he would be
obliged if I could manage to amuse myself alone that evening. But I too
went upstairs early, feeling a little uneasy.
On the top landing of the north end of the house there are three doors:
the central one is the chapel door; that on the right, approached by two
little steep steps of its own, was the priest’s room; that on the left
opposite was my own room. As I went in, I noticed that a light shone
from under the chapel door, and that his own door was wide open, showing
the flickering light of the fire within. As I paused I saw Parker pass
across the doorway, and called to him in a low voice.
“Yes, sir; he’s fairly well, I think,” he answered to my inquiry. “He is
in the chapel just now, and is coming to bed directly. He told me just
now, sir, too, to ask whether you would serve him to-morrow morning.”
“Certainly,” I said; “but are you sure he ought to get up? He has not
been well all day.”
“Well, sir,” said Parker; “I will do my best to persuade him to stay in
bed, and will let you know if I succeed, but I doubt whether the master
will be persuaded.”
As I crossed outside the chapel door to go to my own room I heard a
murmur from within, with a word or two which I cannot write down.
Before I was in bed I heard the chapel door open, and footsteps go up
the little steps opposite, and the door close. Presently it opened
again; and then a tap at my door.
“It’s only me, sir,” said Parker’s voice. “May I speak to you a moment?”
and then he came in with a candle in his hand.
“I’m not easy about him, sir,” he said. “But he won’t let me sleep in
his room, as I asked. I’ve come to ask you whether you will let me lie
down on your sofa. I don’t like to leave him. My own room is at the
other end of the house. Excuse me, sir, if I’ve asked what I shouldn’t.
But I don’t like to sleep on the landing for fear he should look out and
see me, and be displeased.”
Of course I assented, almost eagerly, for I felt a strange discomfort
and loneliness myself.
Parker went noiselessly downstairs and got a rug or two and a pillow,
and then, with many apologies, lay down on the sofa near the window. My
bed stood at the other end of the long narrow room under the sloping
side of the roof. I blew the candles out presently, and the room was in
darkness.
I could not sleep at first. I was anxious for my friend, and I lay and
listened for the slightest sound from the landing. But Parker’s face, as
I had seen it as he had stood with the candle in his hand, reassured me
that he too would be on the watch. The wind had half died down again.
Only there came gusts from time to time that shook the leaded windows.
Gradually I began to doze, then I suppose I dropped off to sleep, and I
dreamed.
In my dream I knew that I was still in my room, lying on my bed, but the
room seemed illuminated with a light whose source I could not imagine.
The curtains, I thought, were no longer drawn over the windows, but
looped back, and the light from my room fell distinctly upon the panes.
I thought I was sitting up in bed watching for something at the window,
something which would terrify me when it came. And then as I watched
there came a gust of wind, and lashed, to judge by the sound, a big
spray of ivy across the outside. Then again it came, and again, but the
sound grew more distinct. I could see nothing at the window, but there
came that ceaseless patter and tap, like a thousand fingers. Then a dead
leaf or two was whirled up, stuck for a moment on the glass, and whirled
away again. It seemed to me that the ivy-spray and the leaves were
clamouring to be admitted into shelter from that wild wind outside. I
grew terrified at their insistence, and tried in my dream to call to
Parker, whom I fancied to be still in the room, and in the struggle
awoke, and the room was dark. No; as I looked about me it was not quite
dark. There lay across the floor an oblong patch of light from the door.
I gradually realised that the door was open; there came a draught round
the corner at the foot of my bed. I sat up and called gently to Parker.
But there was no answer. I got out of bed noiselessly, and went across
the floor to where I saw the dim outlines of the sofa. As I drew near I
stumbled over a rug, and then felt the pillow, also on the floor. I put
my hands almost instinctively down, and felt that the sofa was still
warm, but Parker was gone. Then I looked out of the door. The landing
was lit by an oil-lamp, and its light fell upon the priest’s door. It
was almost closed, but I could hear a faint murmur of voices.
I put on my dressing-gown and slippers and went out. Almost
simultaneously the door opposite opened a little wider, and Parker’s
face looked out, white and scared. When he saw me, he came swiftly out
and down the stairs, beckoning to me; but as we met, a loud high voice
came from the priest’s room.
“Parker, Parker! tell him to come in––at once––at once. Don’t leave me.”
“Go in, sir: go in,” Parker said, in a loud whisper to me, pushing me
towards the door. I went quickly up the two steep steps and entered,
Parker close behind me, and I heard him close the door softly.
There was a tall screen on my left, and behind it was the bed, with the
head in the corner of the room: a fire was burning near the bed. I came
round the screen quickly, and saw the priest sitting up in bed. He wore
a tippet over his shoulders and a small skull-cap on his head. His eyes
were large and bright, and looked at me almost unintelligently. His
hands were hidden by the bedclothes. There was a little round table by
the head of the bed, on which stood two burning candles in silver
candlesticks. I drew up a chair by the table and sat down.
“My old friend,” I said, “what is it? Cannot you sleep?”
He made no answer to me directly, but stared past me round the room, and
then fixed his eyes at the foot of the bed.
“The sorrows of the world,” he said, “and the sorrows under the earth.
They come to me now, because I have not understood them, nor wept for
them.”
And then he drew out his old, thin, knotted hands, and clasped them
outside the rug that lay on the outside of the bed. I laid my own hand
upon them.
“You have had a greater gift than that,” I said. “You have known instead
the joys of the world.”
He paid no attention to me, but stared mournfully before him, but he did
not withdraw his hands.
There came a sudden gust of wind outside; and even in that corner away
from the window the candle flames leant over to one side, and then the
chimney behind me sighed suddenly.
The priest unclasped his hands, and my own hand fell suddenly on the
coverlet. He stretched out his left hand to the window as it still
shook, and pointed at it in silence, glaring over my head as he did so.
Almost instinctively I turned to the long low window and looked. But the
curtains were drawn over it: they were just stirring and heaving in the
draught, but there was nothing to be seen. I could hear the pines
tossing and sighing like a troubled sea outside.
Then he broke out into a long wild talk, now in a whisper, and now
breaking into something like a scream.
Parker came quickly round from the doorway, where he had been waiting
out of sight, and stood behind me, anxious and scared. Sometimes I could
not hear what the priest said: he muttered to himself: much of it I
could not understand: and some of it I cannot bring myself to write
down––so sacred was it––so revealing of his soul’s inner life hidden
with Christ in God.
“The sorrows of the world,” he cried again; “they are crying at my
window, at the window of a hard old man and a traitorous priest ...
betrayed them with a kiss.... Ah! the Holy Innocents who have suffered!
Innocents of man and bird and beast and flower; and I went my way or sat
at home in the sunshine; and now they come crying to me to pray for
them. How little I have prayed!” Then he broke into a torrent of tender
prayer for all suffering things. It seemed to me as he prayed as if the
wind and the pines were silent. Then he began again:
“Their pale faces look through the glass; no curtains can shut them out.
Their thin fingers tap and entreat.... And I have closed my heart at
that door and cannot open it to let them in.... There is the face of a
dog who has suffered––his teeth are white, but his eyes are glazed and
his tongue hangs out.... There is a rose with drenched petals––a rose
whom I forgot. See how the wind has battered it.... The sorrows of the
world!... There come the souls from under the earth, crying for one to
release them and let them go––souls that all men have forgotten, and I,
the chief of sinners.... I have lived too much in the sweetness of God
and forgotten His sorrows.”
Then he turned to a crucifix of ebony and silver that hung on the wall
at his side, and looked on it silently. And then again he broke into
compassionate prayer to the Saviour of the world, entreating Him by His
Agony and Bloody Sweat, by His Cross and Passion, to remember all
suffering things. That prayer that I heard gave me a glimpse into
mysteries of which I had not dreamed; mysteries of the unity of Christ
and His members, a unity of pain. These great facts, which I thank God I
know more of now, stood out in fiery lines against the dark sorrow that
seemed to have filled the room from this old man’s heart.
Then suddenly he turned to me, and his eyes so searched my own that I
looked down, while his words lashed me.
“You, my son,” he said, “what have you done to help our Lord and His
children? Have you watched or slept? Couldst thou not watch with me one
hour? What share have you borne in the Incarnation? Have you believed
for those who could not believe, hoped for the despairing, loved and
adored for the cold? And if you could not understand nor do this, have
you at least welcomed pain that would have made you one with them? Have
you even pitied them? Or have you hidden your face for fear you should
grieve too much? But what am I that I should find fault?” Then he broke
off again into self-reproach.
At this point Parker bent over me and whispered:
“He will die, sir, I think, unless you can get him to be quiet.”
The old man overheard, and turned almost fiercely.
“Quiet?” he cried, “when the world is so unquiet! Can I rest, do you
think, with those at my window?” Then, with a loud cry, “Ah! they are in
the room! They look at me from the air! I cannot bear it.” And he
covered his face with his old thin hands, and shrank back against the
wall.
I got up from my seat, and looked round as I did so. It seemed to my
fancy as if there were some strange Presence filling the room. It seemed
as I turned as if crowding faces swiftly withdrew themselves over and
behind the screen. A picture on the wall overhead lifted and dropped
again like a door as if to let something escape. The coverlet, which was
a little disarranged by the old man’s movement, rippled gently as if
some one who had been seated on the bed had risen. I heard Parker, too,
behind me draw his breath quickly through his teeth. All this I noticed
in a moment; the next I had bent over the bed towards the priest and put
my hand on his shoulder. Either he or I was trembling, I felt as I
touched him.
“My dear old friend,” I said, “cannot you lie down quietly a little? You
cannot think how you are distressing us both.”
Then I added a word or two, presumptuously, I felt, in the presence of
this old man, who knew so much about the Love of God and the Compassion
of our Saviour.
Presently he withdrew his hands and looked at me.
“Yes, yes,” he said; “but you do not understand. I am a priest.”
I sat down again. I tried hard to control a great trembling that had
seized me. Still he watched me. Then he said more quietly:
“Is it nearly morning?”
“It is not yet twelve o’clock, sir,” said Parker’s voice steadily behind
me.
“Then I must watch and pray a little longer,” said the old man. “Joy
cometh in the morning.”
Then quite quietly he turned and lifted the crucifix from its nail,
kissed it and replaced it. Then he put his hands over his face again and
remained still.
The wind outside seemed quieter. But whenever it sighed in the chimney
or at the window the priest winced a little, as if a sudden pain had
touched him.
He was supported by pillows behind his back and head, against which he
leaned easily. After a few minutes of silence his hands dropped and
clasped themselves on his lap. His eyes were closed, and he seemed
breathing steadily. I hoped that he would fall asleep so. But as I
turned to whisper to Parker, I suppose I must have made a slight noise,
for when I looked at the servant he paid no attention to me, but was
looking at his master. I turned back again, and saw the old man’s eyes
gazing straight at me.
“Yes,” he said; “go and sleep; why are you here? Parker, why did you
allow him to come?”
“I woke up and came myself,” I said. “Parker did not disturb me.”
“Well, go back to bed now. You will serve me in the morning?”
I tried to say something about his not being fit to get up, but he waved
it aside.
“You cannot understand,” he said quietly. “That is my one hope and
escape. Joy cometh in the morning. There are many souls here and
elsewhere that are waiting for that joy, and I must not disappoint them.
And I too,” he added softly, “I too look for that joy. Go now, and we
will meet in the morning.” And he smiled at me so gently that I got up
and went, feeling comforted.
After I had been in bed a little while, I heard the priest’s door open
and close again, and then Parker tapped at my open door and came in.
“I have left him quiet, sir. I do not think he will sleep, but he would
not let me stay.”
“Have you ever seen him like this before?” I asked.
“Never quite like this, sir,” he said; and as I looked at the old
servant I saw that his eyes were bright with tears, and his lips
twitching.
“Well,” I said, “we have both heard strange things to-night. Your master
whom you love is in the hands of God.”
The old servant’s face broke into lines of sorrow; and then the tears
ran down his face.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “I am not quite myself. Shall I put the
candle out, sir?” Then he lay down on the sofa.
“One word more, Parker. You will wake me if you hear anything more. And
anyhow you will call me at seven if I should be asleep.”
“Certainly, sir,” answered Parker’s voice from the darkness.
I slept and woke often that night. Each time I woke I went quietly to
the door and looked across the landing and listened. Each time I was not
so quiet but that Parker heard me and was by me as I looked, and each
time there was a line of light under the priest’s door; and once or
twice a murmur of one voice at least from the room.
Towards morning I fell into a sound sleep, and awoke to find Parker
arranging my clothes and setting ready my bath. The rugs and the pillow
were gone from the sofa, and there was no sign on the servant’s face
that anything unusual had happened during the night.
“How is he?” I asked quickly. “Have you seen him?”
“Yes, sir,” said Parker; “he is dressing now, and will be ready at
half-past seven. It is a little before seven now, sir.”
“But how is he?” I asked again.
“I scarcely know, sir,” answered Parker. “He does not seem ill, but he
is very silent again this morning, sir.”
Then, after a pause, “Is there anything I can do for you, sir?”
“There is nothing more, thank you,” I said, and he left the room.
I got up presently and dressed. The morning was still dark, and I
dressed by candlelight. When I drew the curtains back the sky had just
begun to glimmer in the reflected dawn from the other side of the house;
but it was too dark to see to read except by artificial light.
I went out on to the landing, paused a moment, and heard a footstep in
the priest’s room. Then I opened the door of the oratory and went in.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Morning
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“At the end of woe suddenly our eyes shall be opened, and in
clearness of light our sight shall be full: which light is God, our
Maker and Holy Ghost, in Christ Jesus our Saviour.”
_Mother Julian._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the Morning
THE oratory is a little room, white-washed, crossed by oaken beams on
the walls. The window is opposite the door; and the altar stands to the
left. There is a bench or two on the right.
When I entered on this morning the tapers were lighted, the vestments
laid out upon the altar, and all prepared. I went across and knelt by
the window. Presently I heard the priest’s door open, and in a moment
more he came in, followed by Parker, who closed the door behind him and
came and knelt at the bench. I looked eagerly at the old man’s face; it
was white and tired-looking, and the eyebrows seemed to droop more than
ever, but it was a quiet face. It was only for an instant that I saw it,
for he turned to the altar and began to vest: and then when he was ready
he began.
It was strange to hear that voice, which had rung with such intensity of
pain so few hours before, now subdued and controlled; and to watch the
orderly movements of those hands that had twisted and gesticulated with
such terrible appeal. I felt that Parker too was watching with a close
and awful interest what we both half feared would be a shocking climax
to the scenes of the night before, but which we half hoped too would
recall and quiet that troubled spirit.
Dawn was now beginning to shine on the western sky. There was a tall
holly tree that rose nearly to the level of the window. As I looked out
for a moment my eye was caught by the outline of a bird, faintly seen,
sitting among the upper branches.
Now I will only mention one incident that took place. I was in such a
strange and disordered state of mind that I scarcely now can remember
certainly anything but this. As the Priest’s Communion drew near there
came a sudden soft blow against the window panes....
When the priest began to unvest, I left the chapel and went downstairs
to await him in the breakfast room. But as he did not come, I went
outside the house for a few minutes, and presently found myself below
the chapel window. It seemed to me that I was in a dream––the very earth
I trod on seemed unreal. I was unable to think connectedly. The scene in
the chapel seemed to stand out vividly. It seemed to me as if in some
sense it were a climax, but of what nature, whether triumphant or full
of doom, I could not tell.
As I stood there, perplexed, downcast, in the growing glimmer of the
day, my eyes fell upon a small rumpled heap at my feet, and looking
closer I saw it was the body of a thrush; it was still limp and warm,
and as I lifted it I remembered the sudden blow against the window
panes. But as I still stood, utterly distracted, the chapel window was
thrown open, and Parker’s face looked out as I gazed up. He beckoned to
me furiously and withdrew, leaving the window swinging.
I laid the thrush under a bush at the corner of the house as I ran
round, and came in quickly and up the stairs. Parker met me on the
landing.
“He just reeled and fell, sir,” he said, “up the stairs into his room.
I’ve laid him on the bed, and must get down to the stables to send for
the doctor. Will you stay with him, sir, till I come back?” And without
waiting for an answer he was gone.
That evening I was still sitting by my friend’s side. I had food brought
up to my room during the day, but except for those short intervals was
with him continually. The doctor had come and gone. All that he could
tell us was that the old man had had a seizure of some kind, and he had
looked grave when I told him of the events of the night before.
“His age is against him, too,” the doctor had said; “I cannot say what
will happen.”
And then he had given directions, and had left, promising to return
again, at any rate the next morning.
I had been trying to read with a shaded lamp, looking from time to time
at the figure of the old man on the bed, as he lay white and quiet, with
his eyes closed, as he had lain all day.
At about six o’clock, I had just glanced at my watch, when a slight
movement made me turn to the bed again, and I could see in the dim light
that his eyes were open and fixed upon me, but all the pain was gone out
of them, and they were a child’s eyes again. I rose and went to his
side, and sat down in the same chair that I had occupied the night
before. Immediately I had sat down he put out his hand, and I took it
and held it. His eyes smiled at me, and then he spoke, very slowly, with
long pauses.
“Well,” he said, “you have been with me and have seen and heard, last
night and this morning; but it is all ended, and the valley is
lightening again at its eastern end where the sun rises. So it was not
all dreams and fancies––those old stories that you bore with so
patiently to please me. Now tell me what you heard and saw. Did you see
them all in the room last night? and––and”––his eyes grew wide and
insistent––“what did you see this morning?”
Now the doctor had told me that he must not be over-excited, but
soothed; and honestly enough, though some who may read this may not
agree with me, I thought it was better to speak plainly of those things
so strange to you and me, but so dear and familiar to him. And so I told
him all I had heard and seen.
“Ah!” he said when I had finished, “then we were not quite as one. But
still you saw and heard more than most men. Now will you hear one more
story? I will not tell you all I saw last night, because the Lord has
been gracious to me, and is rising with healing in His wings on me and
on many other poor creatures. But the wounds are aching still, and if
you will spare me, I will not speak much of the shadows of last night,
but only of the joys that came in the morning. Will you hear it?”
“My dear old friend,” I said, “are you sure it will not be too much for
you?”
He shook his head; and then, still holding my hand in his, his fingers
tightening and relaxing as he told his tale, with many pauses and
efforts, he began:
“Last night the sorrows of death came to me,” he said, “and all the
blood and agony and desolation of the whole world seemed to be round me.
And I have had so little sorrow in my life that I was ill prepared to
meet them. Our Lord has always shown me such grace and given me so much
joy. But He warned me again and again this autumn. That was why I spoke
to you as I did when you came before Christmas.
“Well, last night, all this came to me. And it seemed as if I were
partly responsible. Years ago I was set apart as a priest to stand
between the dead and the living. It was meant that I should be the
meeting-place, as every priest must be, of creation’s need and God’s
grace––as every Christian must be in his station. That is what
intercession and the Holy Sacrifice both signify and effect. The two
tides of need and fulfilment must meet in a priest’s heart. But all my
life I have known much of fulfilment and little of need. Last night the
first was almost withdrawn, and the second deepened almost beyond
bearing. But I knew, as I told you last night, that with the morning
would come peace––that I should be able to carry up the burden laid on
me, and make it one with Him on Whom the iniquities of us all are laid.
But I need not say more of that now. This morning when I went to the
altar a lull had come in the storm. But it was all in my heart still. I
felt sure that I should have the clear vision once more: and as I lifted
up the Body of our Lord, it came.
“As I lifted It up It disappeared; as those tell us who look in
crystals. And this is what I saw. I do not know how long I saw it, it
seemed as if time stood still, but you told me there was no perceptible
pause. Well”––and the old man raised himself slightly in the
bed––“between my hands I saw a long slope running as it seemed from me
downhill. On the nearer higher end of the slope were men going to and
fro, and I knew they needed something––and yet many of them did not seem
to know it themselves––but they were all in need. One there was who
walked quickly, clenching and unclenching his hands, and I knew he
fought with sin. And there was a woman with a dead child across her
knees; and there was a blind child crying in a corner.
“Then further down the slope were wounded creatures of all kinds, and
lonely beasts seeking a place to die, and the very grass of the field
seemed to be in sorrow, and there were blind sea-creatures gasping. They
were not small, as you might think, but I saw them as if I looked
through a hole in a wall.
“And they stretched down, rank on rank, heaving and striving, men and
beasts warring and trampling down the flowers. There was a thrush I saw,
too, shivering in a tree; and the thought of the story I have told you
came to my mind, and there were a thousand things that I forget.
“Now when I saw all this my hands trembled, but what I saw did not
tremble, so I knew that it was real. And then very far away and faint at
the foot of the slope was a level silvery mist, like a sea-fog, with
delicate currents and lines, now swift and piercing, now slow; and in
the mist moved faces; but I could not distinguish the features. And
these were the souls that waited until their sins should be done away.
“And then with something like terror I remembered that I held in my
hands the Body of the Lord. And I was puzzled and distracted, but I
knelt to adore, and as I lowered the Holy Thing, the clouds closed and
the light died out. And it may be that I was cowardly––and I think God
will pardon an old man for whom the light was too strong––but when I
consecrated the chalice, I dared not look at it. At the Communion, too,
I closed my eyes again.” The old man paused a moment and then continued.
“I heard no sound such as you describe. As I unvested and went to my
room I was still perplexed at what I had seen, and could not understand
it, and then on a sudden I understood it, and it was then I suppose that
I fell down.”
There was a silence for a moment: then I answered.
“I cannot understand even now.”
The priest smiled at me, and his hand closed again on mine.
“I think there is no need for me to tell you that. It will be plain to
you soon. Remember what it was that I saw, and where I saw it, and all
will be easy.
“You can leave me now for a little,” he went on. “I am perfectly free
from pain, and I wish to think. Would you send Parker to me in about an
hour’s time?” And then, as I went towards the door, he added:
“One word more. I had forgotten something. I have yet one more clear
vision to see before I die. I have seen, you remember, what you too have
seen, how all things need God; but there is yet one more thing to see
which will make all plain, and I think you can guess what that is. And I
pray that you will be with me when I see it.”
Then I turned and went quietly out.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Expected Guest
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Jhesu! Jhesu! Esto michi, Jhesu!”
_Old Prayer_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Expected Guest
AS day after day went by and the old man seemed no worse, I began to
have hopes that he might recover, but the doctor discouraged me.
“At the best,” he said, “he may just linger on. But I do not think the
end is far off. You must remember he is an old man.” And so at last the
end came.
During these days, since Parker was of course too much occupied with his
master, a boy waited on me. On the last evening, as the boy came in for
the second time at dinner, he looked white and frightened.
“What is it?” I asked.
“We don’t like it, sir, in the servants’ hall. Two children ran in just
now and said they had seen something, and we are all upset, sir. The
maids are crying.”
“What was it the children thought they saw?” I asked. The boy hesitated.
“Tell me,” I repeated.
The boy put down the dish he held and came closer to me.
“They say they saw the master himself, sir, on the front lawn, at the
gate.”
“Where were the children?” I asked.
“Passing round from the house, sir, in front, under the chestnut. They
had been sent by the Rector to inquire.”
I got up from the table.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“In the servants’ hall, sir.”
“Bring them into the sitting-room.” And I followed him out and waited.
Presently the swing-door opened and the children looked in. Behind them
were the pale faces of the servants, whispering and staring.
“Come in,” I said to the children, “and sit down. Don’t be afraid.”
They came timidly in, evidently very much frightened. The door closed
behind them.
This was their story.
They had been to the house to inquire how the old man was, and were
returning to the Rectory. But they had hardly started, in fact had only
just reached the chestnut-tree in front of the house, when both of them,
who were looking towards the lighted windows, had seen quite plainly the
figure of the old priest standing just inside the gate. He was
bareheaded, they said, dressed in black, but they could only see his
head and shoulders over the bank, as the road is a little lower than the
grass which borders on it and runs up to the gate. He seemed, they said,
to be looking out for some one. When I asked them how they could
possibly see any one at that distance on such a dark night, they had no
sort of explanation; they could only repeat that they did see him quite
plainly. At last I took them out myself, and made them point out to me
the place where they had seen it; but, as I expected, all was dark, and
we could not even make out the white balls on the pedestals. I took them
on to the end of the drive, as they still seemed upset; and they told me
there that they would not be frightened to go the rest of the way alone.
Fortunately, however, as we waited a man passed in the direction of the
village, and he consented to see them as far as the Rectory gate.
When I entered the house again the maids with the boy were standing in
the hall. They looked eagerly towards the door as I opened it, and one
of them cried out.
“What is it now?” I asked. One of the elder servants answered:
“Oh sir, the master’s worse. Parker’s afraid he’s going. He’s just run
downstairs for you, sir; and now he’s gone back.”
I did not wait to hear any more, but pushed past them, through the
sitting-room, and ran upstairs.
The door of the old man’s room was open, and I heard faint sounds from
within. I went straight in without knocking, and turned the corner of
the screen.
Parker, who was kneeling by the bed, supporting his master in his arms,
turned his head as I came in sight, and made a gesture with it. I came
close up.
“He’s going fast, sir, I’m afraid,” he whispered.
The old man was sitting up in bed looking quite straight before him. His
lips were slightly parted; and his eyes were full of expectancy. He kept
lifting his hands gently, half opening them with a welcoming movement,
and then letting them fall. Now he leaned gently forward, as if to meet
something with his hands extended, then sinking a little back upon
Parker’s arm. He paid no attention to me, and it seemed as if his eyes
were focused to an almost infinite distance.
I too knelt down by the bed and waited watching him. Then there came
soft footsteps at the door, but it was not for that he waited. Then a
whispering and a sobbing: and I knew that the servants were gathering
outside.
Still he waited for that which he knew would come before he died. And
the expectancy deepened in his eyes to an almost terrible intensity; and
it was the expectancy that feared no disappointment. It was perfectly
still outside, the servants were quiet now, and the old man’s breathing
was inaudible. Once I heard the far-off bark of a dog away somewhere in
the village.
As I watched his face I saw how wrinkles covered it, the corners of his
eyes and his forehead were deeply furrowed, and the lines deepened and
shifted as his face worked. And then suddenly he cried out: “He is
coming, my son, He is coming far away.” And then silence.
I heard a sudden movement outside and then stillness again. Then a maid
broke out into sobbing: and I heard footsteps, and then the door of my
room across the landing open and shut: and the sobbing ceased. But the
old man paid no heed. Then suddenly he cried out again:
“Behold He stands at the door and knocks.”
He made an indescribable gesture with his hands. Then I was startled,
for there came a loud pealing at the bell downstairs.
Parker whispered to me to send one of the servants downstairs: and I
went to the door for an instant and told the boy to go: then I came
back. The boy’s footsteps died away down the staircase. I knelt down
again by the bed.
Then once more the old man cried out:
“He is coming, my son. He is here:” and then, “Look!”
As he said this across his face there came an extraordinary smile; for
one moment, as I started up and looked, his face was that of a child,
the wrinkles seemed suddenly erased, and a great rosy flush swept from
forehead to mouth, and his eyes shone like stars. I noticed too, even at
this moment, for I was almost facing him as I sprang up, that the focus
of his eyes was contracted to a point at the foot of his bed where the
screen stood.
Then he fell back; and Parker laid him gently down.
A moment after footsteps came up the stairs: and the boy whispered from
the doorway that the Rector had come.
THE END
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcribe’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Light Invisible" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.