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<pre>
The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Roadmender, by Michael Fairless
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Roadmender
Author: Michael Fairless
Release Date: February 5, 2013 [eBook #705]
[This file was first posted on November 6, 1996]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROADMENDER***
</pre>
<p>Transcribed from the 1911 Duckworth and Co. edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
<h1>The Roadmender</h1>
<p style="text-align: center"><span
class="GutSmall">By</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center">Michael Fairless</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">Author
of</span><br />
<span class="GutSmall">“The Gathering of Brother
Hilarius”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/p0b.jpg">
<img alt=
"Decorative graphic"
title=
"Decorative graphic"
src="images/p0s.jpg" />
</a></p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center">London</p>
<p style="text-align: center">Duckworth & Co.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">3 Henrietta Street, W.C.<br />
1911</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p>This series of papers appeared in <i>The Pilot</i> and is now
republished by permission of the Editor.</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center">A. M. D. G.</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">TO</span><br
/>
MY MOTHER:<br />
<span class="GutSmall">AND TO EARTH, MY MOTHER,</span><br />
<span class="GutSmall">WHOM I LOVE.</span></p>
<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
<table>
<tr>
<td><p> </p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Roadmender</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Out of the Shadow</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page61">61</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">At the White Gate</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page119">119</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>The
Roadmender</h2>
<h3><a name="page3"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 3</span>CHAPTER
I</h3>
<p>I <span class="smcap">have</span> attained my ideal: I am a
roadmender, some say stonebreaker. Both titles are correct,
but the one is more pregnant than the other. All day I sit
by the roadside on a stretch of grass under a high hedge of
saplings and a tangle of traveller’s joy, woodbine,
sweetbrier, and late roses. Opposite me is a white gate,
seldom used, if one may judge from the trail of honeysuckle
growing tranquilly along it: I know now that whenever and
wherever I die my soul will pass out through this white gate; and
then, thank God, I shall not have need to undo that trail.</p>
<p>In our youth we discussed our ideals freely: I wonder how many
beside myself have attained, or would understand my
attaining. After all, what do we ask of life, here or
indeed hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with
our fellowmen and with ourselves; and from the lap of earth to
look up into the face of God? All these gifts are mine as I
sit by the winding white road and serve the footsteps of my
fellows. There is no room in my life for avarice or
anxiety; I who serve at the altar live of the altar: I lack
nothing but have nothing over; and when the winter of life comes
I shall join the company of weary old men who sit on the sunny
side of the workhouse wall and wait for the tender mercies of
God.</p>
<p>Just now it is the summer of things; there is life and music
everywhere—in the stones themselves, and I live to-day
beating out the rhythmical hammer-song of The Ring. There
is real physical joy in the rise and swing of the arm, in the jar
of a fair stroke, the split and scatter of the quartz: I am
learning to be ambidextrous, for why should Esau sell his
birthright when there is enough for both? Then the
rest-hour comes, bringing the luxurious ache of tired but not
weary limbs; and I lie outstretched and renew my strength,
sometimes with my face deep-nestled in the cool green grass,
sometimes on my back looking up into the blue sky which no wise
man would wish to fathom.</p>
<p>The birds have no fear of me; am I not also of the brown
brethren in my sober fustian livery? They share my
meals—at least the little dun-coated Franciscans do; the
blackbirds and thrushes care not a whit for such simple food as
crumbs, but with legs well apart and claws tense with purchase
they disinter poor brother worm, having first mocked him with
sound of rain. The robin that lives by the gate regards my
heap of stones as subject to his special inspection. He
sits atop and practises the trill of his summer song until it
shrills above and through the metallic clang of my strokes; and
when I pause he cocks his tail, with a humorous twinkle of his
round eye which means—“What! shirking, big
brother?”—and I fall, ashamed, to my mending of
roads.</p>
<p>The other day, as I lay with my face in the grass, I heard a
gentle rustle, and raised my head to find a hedge-snake watching
me fearless, unwinking. I stretched out my hand, picked it
up unresisting, and put it in my coat like the husbandman of
old. Was he so ill-rewarded, I wonder, with the kiss that
reveals secrets? My snake slept in peace while I hammered
away with an odd quickening of heart as I thought how to me, as
to Melampus, had come the messenger—had come, but to ears
deafened by centuries of misrule, blindness, and oppression; so
that, with all my longing, I am shut out of the wondrous world
where walked Melampus and the Saint. To me there is no
suggestion of evil in the little silent creatures, harmless, or
deadly only with the Death which is Life. The beasts who
turn upon us, as a rule maul and tear unreflectingly; with the
snake there is the swift, silent strike, the tiny, tiny wound,
then sleep and a forgetting.</p>
<p>My brown friend, with its message unspoken, slid away into the
grass at sundown to tell its tale in unstopped ears; and I, my
task done, went home across the fields to the solitary cottage
where I lodge. It is old and decrepit—two rooms, with
a quasi-attic over them reached by a ladder from the kitchen and
reached only by me. It is furnished with the luxuries of
life, a truckle bed, table, chair, and huge earthenware pan which
I fill from the ice-cold well at the back of the cottage.
Morning and night I serve with the Gibeonites, their curse my
blessing, as no doubt it was theirs when their hearts were purged
by service. Morning and night I send down the moss-grown
bucket with its urgent message from a dry and dusty world; the
chain tightens through my hand as the liquid treasure responds to
the messenger, and then with creak and jangle—the welcome
of labouring earth—the bucket slowly nears the top and
disperses the treasure in the waiting vessels. The
Gibeonites were servants in the house of God, ministers of the
sacrament of service even as the High Priest himself; and I,
sharing their high office of servitude, thank God that the ground
was accursed for my sake, for surely that curse was the womb of
all unborn blessing.</p>
<p>The old widow with whom I lodge has been deaf for the last
twenty years. She speaks in the strained high voice which
protests against her own infirmity, and her eyes have the
pathetic look of those who search in silence. For many
years she lived alone with her son, who laboured on the farm two
miles away. He met his death rescuing a carthorse from its
burning stable; and the farmer gave the cottage rent free and a
weekly half-crown for life to the poor old woman whose dearest
terror was the workhouse. With my shilling a week rent, and
sharing of supplies, we live in the lines of comfort. Of
death she has no fears, for in the long chest in the kitchen lie
a web of coarse white linen, two pennies covered with the same to
keep down tired eyelids, decent white stockings, and a white
cotton sun-bonnet—a decorous death-suit truly—and
enough money in the little bag for self-respecting burial.
The farmer buried his servant handsomely—good man, he knew
the love of reticent grief for a ‘kind’
burial—and one day Harry’s mother is to lie beside
him in the little churchyard which has been a cornfield, and may
some day be one again.</p>
<h3><a name="page10"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
10</span>CHAPTER II</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">On</span> Sundays my feet take ever the
same way. First my temple service, and then five miles
tramp over the tender, dewy fields, with their ineffable earthy
smell, until I reach the little church at the foot of the
grey-green down. Here, every Sunday, a young priest from a
neighbouring village says Mass for the tiny hamlet, where all are
very old or very young—for the heyday of life has no part
under the long shadow of the hills, but is away at sea or in
service. There is a beautiful seemliness in the extreme
youth of the priest who serves these aged children of God.
He bends to communicate them with the reverent tenderness of a
son, and reads with the careful intonation of far-seeing
love. To the old people he is the son of their old age,
God-sent to guide their tottering footsteps along the highway of
foolish wayfarers; and he, with his youth and strength, wishes no
better task. Service ended, we greet each other
friendly—for men should not be strange in the acre of God;
and I pass through the little hamlet and out and up on the grey
down beyond. Here, at the last gate, I pause for breakfast;
and then up and on with quickening pulse, and evergreen memory of
the weary war-worn Greeks who broke rank to greet the great blue
Mother-way that led to home. I stand on the summit hatless,
the wind in my hair, the smack of salt on my cheek, all round me
rolling stretches of cloud-shadowed down, no sound but the shrill
mourn of the peewit and the gathering of the sea.</p>
<p>The hours pass, the shadows lengthen, the sheep-bells clang;
and I lie in my niche under the stunted hawthorn watching the to
and fro of the sea, and Æolus shepherding his white sheep
across the blue. I love the sea with its impenetrable
fathoms, its wash and undertow, and rasp of shingle sucked
anew. I love it for its secret dead in the Caverns of
Peace, of which account must be given when the books are opened
and earth and heaven have fled away. Yet in my love there
is a paradox, for as I watch the restless, ineffective waves I
think of the measureless, reflective depths of the still and
silent Sea of Glass, of the dead, small and great, rich or poor,
with the works which follow them, and of the Voice as the voice
of many waters, when the multitude of one mind rends heaven with
alleluia: and I lie so still that I almost feel the kiss of White
Peace on my mouth. Later still, when the flare of the
sinking sun has died away and the stars rise out of a veil of
purple cloud, I take my way home, down the slopes, through the
hamlet, and across miles of sleeping fields; over which night has
thrown her shifting web of mist—home to the little attic,
the deep, cool well, the kindly wrinkled face with its listening
eyes—peace in my heart and thankfulness for the rhythm of
the road.</p>
<p>Monday brings the joy of work, second only to the Sabbath of
rest, and I settle to my heap by the white gate. Soon I
hear the distant stamp of horsehoofs, heralding the grind and
roll of the wheels which reaches me later—a heavy
flour-waggon with a team of four great gentle horses, gay with
brass trappings and scarlet ear-caps. On the top of the
craftily piled sacks lies the white-clad waggoner, a pink in his
mouth which he mumbles meditatively, and the reins looped over
the inactive whip—why should he drive a willing team that
knows the journey and responds as strenuously to a cheery chirrup
as to the well-directed lash? We greet and pass the time of
day, and as he mounts the rise he calls back a warning of coming
rain. I am already white with dust as he with flour,
sacramental dust, the outward and visible sign of the stir and
beat of the heart of labouring life.</p>
<p>Next to pass down the road is an anxious ruffled hen, her
speckled breast astir with maternal troubles. She walks
delicately, lifting her feet high and glancing furtively from
side to side with comb low dressed. The sight of man, the
heartless egg-collector, from whose haunts she has fled, wrings
from her a startled cluck, and she makes for the white gate,
climbs through, and disappears. I know her feelings too
well to intrude. Many times already has she hidden herself,
amassed four or five precious treasures, brooding over them with
anxious hope; and then, after a brief desertion to seek the
necessary food, she has returned to find her efforts at
concealment vain, her treasures gone. At last, with the
courage of despair she has resolved to brave the terrors of the
unknown and seek a haunt beyond the tyranny of man. I will
watch over her from afar, and when her mother-hope is fulfilled I
will marshal her and her brood back to the farm where she
belongs; for what end I care not to think, it is of the mystery
which lies at the heart of things; and we are all God’s
beasts, says St Augustine.</p>
<p>Here is my stone-song, a paraphrase of the Treasure Motif.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/p15b.jpg">
<img alt=
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title=
"Music score: F# dotted crotchet, F# quaver, F# quaver, F# dotted
crotchet, D crotchet, E crotchet. This bar is then repeated once
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</a></p>
<p>What a wonderful work Wagner has done for humanity in
translating the toil of life into the readable script of
music! For those who seek the tale of other worlds his
magic is silent; but earth-travail under his wand becomes
instinct with rhythmic song to an accompaniment of the elements,
and the blare and crash of the bottomless pit itself. The
Pilgrim’s March is the sad sound of footsore men; the San
Graal the tremulous yearning of servitude for richer, deeper
bondage. The yellow, thirsty flames lick up the willing
sacrifice, the water wails the secret of the river and the sea;
the birds and beasts, the shepherd with his pipe, the underground
life in rocks and caverns, all cry their message to this
nineteenth-century toiling, labouring world—and to me as I
mend my road.</p>
<p>Two tramps come and fling themselves by me as I eat my noonday
meal. The one, red-eyed, furtive, lies on his side with
restless, clutching hands that tear and twist and torture the
living grass, while his lips mutter incoherently. The other
sits stooped, bare-footed, legs wide apart, his face grey, almost
as grey as his stubbly beard; and it is not long since Death
looked him in the eyes. He tells me querulously of a two
hundred miles tramp since early spring, of search for work,
casual jobs with more kicks than halfpence, and a brief but
blissful sojourn in a hospital bed, from which he was dismissed
with sentence passed upon him. For himself, he is
determined to die on the road under a hedge, where a man can see
and breathe. His anxiety is all for his fellow; <i>he</i>
has said he will “do for a man”; he wants to
“swing,” to get out of his “dog’s
life.” I watch him as he lies, this Ishmael and
would-be Lamech. Ignorance, hunger, terror, the exhaustion
of past generations, have done their work. The man is mad,
and would kill his fellowman.</p>
<p>Presently we part, and the two go, dogged and footsore, down
the road which is to lead them into the great silence.</p>
<h3><a name="page18"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
18</span>CHAPTER III</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">Yesterday</span> was a day of
encounters.</p>
<p>First, early in the morning, a young girl came down the road
on a bicycle. Her dressguard was loose, and she stopped to
ask for a piece of string. When I had tied it for her she
looked at me, at my worn dusty clothes and burnt face; and then
she took a Niphetos rose from her belt and laid it shyly in my
dirty disfigured palm. I bared my head, and stood hat in
hand looking after her as she rode away up the hill. Then I
took my treasure and put it in a nest of cool dewy grass under
the hedge. <i>Ecce ancilla Domini</i>.</p>
<p>My next visitor was a fellow-worker on his way to a job at the
cross-roads. He stood gazing meditatively at my heap of
stones.</p>
<p>“Ow long ’ave yer bin at this job that y’ere
in such a hurry?”</p>
<p>I stayed my hammer to answer—“Four
months.”</p>
<p>“Seen better days?”</p>
<p>“Never,” I said emphatically, and punctuated the
remark with a stone split neatly in four.</p>
<p>The man surveyed me in silence for a moment; then he said
slowly, “Mean ter say yer like crackin’ these blamed
stones to fill ’oles some other fool’s
made?”</p>
<p>I nodded.</p>
<p>“Well, that beats everything. Now, I
’<i>ave</i> seen better days; worked in a big brewery over
near Maidstone—a town that, and something doing; and now,
’ere I am, ’ammering me ’eart out on these
blasted stones for a bit o’ bread and a pipe o’ baccy
once a week—it ain’t good enough.” He
pulled a blackened clay from his pocket and began slowly filling
it with rank tobacco; then he lit it carefully behind his
battered hat, put the spent match back in his pocket, rose to his
feet, hitched his braces, and, with a silent nod to me, went on
to his job.</p>
<p>Why do we give these tired children, whose minds move slowly,
whose eyes are holden that they cannot read the Book, whose
hearts are full of sore resentment against they know not what,
such work as this to do—hammering their hearts out for a
bit of bread? All the pathos of unreasoning labour rings in
these few words. We fit the collar on unwilling necks; and
when their service is over we bid them go out free; but we break
the good Mosaic law and send them away empty. What wonder
there is so little willing service, so few ears ready to be
thrust through against the master’s door.</p>
<p>The swift stride of civilisation is leaving behind individual
effort, and turning man into the Dæmon of a machine.
To and fro in front of the long loom, lifting a lever at either
end, paces he who once with painstaking intelligence drove the
shuttle. <i>Then</i> he tasted the joy of completed work,
that which his eye had looked upon, and his hands had handled;
now his work is as little finished as the web of Penelope.
Once the reaper grasped the golden corn stems, and with dexterous
sweep of sickle set free the treasure of the earth. Once
the creatures of the field were known to him, and his eye caught
the flare of scarlet and blue as the frail poppies and sturdy
corn-cockles laid down their beauty at his feet; now he sits
serene on Juggernaut’s car, its guiding Dæmon, and
the field is silent to him.</p>
<p>As with the web and the grain so with the wood and stone in
the treasure-house of our needs. The ground was accursed
<i>for our sake</i> that in the sweat of our brow we might eat
bread. Now the many live in the brain-sweat of the few; and
it must be so, for as little as great King Cnut could stay the
sea until it had reached the appointed place, so little can we
raise a barrier to the wave of progress, and say, “Thus far
and no further shalt thou come.”</p>
<p>What then? This at least; if we live in an age of
mechanism let us see to it that we are a race of intelligent
mechanics; and if man is to be the Dæmon of a machine let
him know the setting of the knives, the rise of the piston, the
part that each wheel and rod plays in the economy of the whole,
the part that he himself plays, co-operating with it. Then,
when he has lived and served intelligently, let us give him of
our flocks and of our floor that he may learn to rest in the
lengthening shadows until he is called to his work above.</p>
<p>So I sat, hammering out my thoughts, and with them the
conviction that stonebreaking should be allotted to minor poets
or vagrant children of nature like myself, never to such tired
folk as my poor mate at the cross-roads and his fellows.</p>
<p>At noon, when I stopped for my meal, the sun was baking the
hard white road in a pitiless glare. Several waggons and
carts passed, the horses sweating and straining, with drooping,
fly-tormented ears. The men for the most part nodded
slumberously on the shaft, seeking the little shelter the cart
afforded; but one shuffled in the white dust, with an occasional
chirrup and friendly pressure on the tired horse’s
neck.</p>
<p>Then an old woman and a small child appeared in sight, both
with enormous sun-bonnets and carrying baskets. As they
came up with me the woman stopped and swept her face with her
hand, while the child, depositing the basket in the dust with
great care, wiped her little sticky fingers on her
pinafore. Then the shady hedge beckoned them and they came
and sat down near me. The woman looked about seventy, tall,
angular, dauntless, good for another ten years of hard
work. The little maid—her only grandchild, she told
me—was just four, her father away soldiering, and the
mother died in childbed, so for four years the child had known no
other guardian or playmate than the old woman. She was not
the least shy, but had the strange self-possession which comes
from associating with one who has travelled far on life’s
journey.</p>
<p>“I couldn’t leave her alone in the house,”
said her grandmother, “and she wouldn’t leave the
kitten for fear it should be lonesome”—with a
humorous, tender glance at the child—“but it’s
a long tramp in the heat for the little one, and we’ve
another mile to go.”</p>
<p>“Will you let her bide here till you come back?” I
said. “She’ll be all right by me.”</p>
<p>The old lady hesitated.</p>
<p>“Will ’ee stay by him, dearie?” she
said.</p>
<p>The small child nodded, drew from her miniature pocket a piece
of sweetstuff, extracted from the basket a small black cat, and
settled in for the afternoon. Her grandmother rose, took
her basket, and, with a nod and “Thank ’ee kindly,
mister,” went off down the road.</p>
<p>I went back to my work a little depressed—why had I not
white hair?—for a few minutes had shown me that I was not
old enough for the child despite my forty years. She was
quite happy with the little black cat, which lay in the small lap
blinking its yellow eyes at the sun; and presently an old man
came by, lame and bent, with gnarled twisted hands, leaning
heavily on his stick.</p>
<p>He greeted me in a high, piping voice, limped across to the
child, and sat down. “Your little maid,
mister?” he said.</p>
<p>I explained.</p>
<p>“Ah,” he said, “I’ve left a little
darlin’ like this at ’ome. It’s
’ard on us old folks when we’re one too many; but the
little mouths must be filled, and my son, ’e said ’e
didn’t see they could keep me on the arf-crown, with
another child on the way; so I’m tramping to N—, to
the House; but it’s a ’ard pinch, leavin’ the
little ones.”</p>
<p>I looked at him—a typical countryman, with white hair,
mild blue eyes, and a rosy, childish, unwrinkled face.</p>
<p>“I’m eighty-four,” he went on, “and
terrible bad with the rheumatics and my chest. Maybe
it’ll not be long before the Lord remembers me.”</p>
<p>The child crept close and put a sticky little hand confidingly
into the tired old palm. The two looked strangely alike,
for the world seems much the same to those who leave it behind as
to those who have but taken the first step on its circular
pathway.</p>
<p>“’Ook at my kitty,” she said, pointing to
the small creature in her lap. Then, as the old man touched
it with trembling fingers she went on—“’Oo
isn’t my grandad; he’s away in the sky, but
I’ll kiss ’oo.”</p>
<p>I worked on, hearing at intervals the old piping voice and the
child-treble, much of a note; and thinking of the blessings
vouchsafed to the simple old age which crowns a harmless
working-life spent in the fields. The two under the hedge
had everything in common and were boundlessly content together,
the sting of the knowledge of good and evil past for the one, and
for the other still to come; while I stood on the battlefield of
the world, the flesh, and the devil, though, thank God, with my
face to the foe.</p>
<p>The old man sat resting: I had promised him a lift with my
friend the driver of the flour-cart, and he was almost due when
the child’s grandmother came down the road.</p>
<p>When she saw my other visitor she stood amazed.</p>
<p>“What, Richard Hunton, that worked with my old man years
ago up at Ditton, whatever are you doin’ all these miles
from your own place?”</p>
<p>“Is it Eliza Jakes?”</p>
<p>He looked at her dazed, doubtful.</p>
<p>“An’ who else should it be? Where’s
your memory gone, Richard Hunton, and you not such a great age
either? Where are you stayin’?”</p>
<p>Shame overcame him; his lips trembled, his mild blue eyes
filled with tears. I told the tale as I had heard it, and
Mrs Jakes’s indignation was good to see.</p>
<p>“Not keep you on ’alf a crown! Send you to
the House! May the Lord forgive them! You
wouldn’t eat no more than a fair-sized cat, and not long
for this world either, that’s plain to see. No,
Richard Hunton, you don’t go to the House while I’m
above ground; it’d make my good man turn to think of
it. You’ll come ’ome with me and the little
’un there. I’ve my washin’, and a bit put
by for a rainy day, and a bed to spare, and the Lord and the
parson will see I don’t come to want.”</p>
<p>She stopped breathless, her defensive motherhood in arms.</p>
<p>The old man said quaveringly, in the pathetic, grudging phrase
of the poor, which veils their gratitude while it testifies their
independence, “Maybe I might as well.” He rose
with difficulty, picked up his bundle and stick, the small child
replaced the kitten in its basket, and thrust her hand in her new
friend’s.</p>
<p>“Then ’oo <i>is</i> grandad tum back,” she
said.</p>
<p>Mrs Jakes had been fumbling in her pocket, and extracted a
penny, which she pressed on me.</p>
<p>“It’s little enough, mister,” she said.</p>
<p>Then, as I tried to return it: “Nay, I’ve enough,
and yours is poor paid work.”</p>
<p>I hope I shall always be able to keep that penny; and as I
watched the three going down the dusty white road, with the child
in the middle, I thanked God for the Brotherhood of the Poor.</p>
<h3><a name="page30"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
30</span>CHAPTER IV</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">Yesterday</span> a funeral passed, from
the work-house at N—, a quaint sepulture without
solemnities. The rough, ungarnished coffin of stained deal
lay bare and unsightly on the floor of an old market-cart; a
woman sat beside, steadying it with her feet. The husband
drove; and the most depressed of the three was the horse, a
broken-kneed, flea-bitten grey. It was pathetic, this
bringing home in death of the old father whom, while he lived,
they had been too poor to house; it was at no small sacrifice
that they had spared him that terror of old age, a pauper’s
grave, and brought him to lie by his wife in our quiet
churchyard. They felt no emotion, this husband and wife,
only a dull sense of filial duty done, respectability preserved;
and above and through all, the bitter but necessary counting the
cost of this last bed.</p>
<p>It is strange how pagan many of us are in our beliefs.
True, the funeral libations have made way for the comfortable
bake-meats; still, to the large majority Death is Pluto, king of
the dark Unknown whence no traveller returns, rather than Azrael,
brother and friend, lord of this mansion of life. Strange
how men shun him as he waits in the shadow, watching our puny
straining after immortality, sending his comrade sleep to prepare
us for himself. When the hour strikes he comes—very
gently, very tenderly, if we will but have it so—folds the
tired hands together, takes the way-worn feet in his broad strong
palm; and lifting us in his wonderful arms he bears us swiftly
down the valley and across the waters of Remembrance.</p>
<p>Very pleasant art thou, O Brother Death, thy love is
wonderful, passing the love of women.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
<p>To-day I have lived in a whirl of dust. To-morrow is the
great annual Cattle Fair at E—, and through the long hot
hours the beasts from all the district round have streamed in
broken procession along my road, to change hands or to die.
Surely the lordship over creation implies wise and gentle rule
for intelligent use, not the pursuit of a mere immediate end,
without any thought of community in the great sacrament of
life.</p>
<p>For the most part mystery has ceased for this working Western
world, and with it reverence. Coventry Patmore says:
“God clothes Himself actually and literally with His whole
creation. Herbs take up and assimilate minerals, beasts
assimilate herbs, and God, in the Incarnation and its proper
Sacrament, assimilates us, who, says St Augustine, ‘are
God’s beasts.’” It is man in his blind
self-seeking who separates woof from weft in the living garment
of God, and loses the more as he neglects the outward and visible
signs of a world-wide grace.</p>
<p>In olden days the herd led his flock, going first in the post
of danger to defend the creatures he had weaned from their
natural habits for his various uses. Now that good
relationship has ceased for us to exist, man drives the beasts
before him, means to his end, but with no harmony between end and
means. All day long the droves of sheep pass me on their
lame and patient way, no longer freely and instinctively
following a protector and forerunner, but <i>driven</i>, impelled
by force and resistless will—the same will which once went
before without force. They are all trimmed as much as
possible to one pattern, and all make the same sad plaint.
It is a day on which to thank God for the unknown tongue.
The drover and his lad in dusty blue coats plod along stolidly,
deaf and blind to all but the way before them; no longer wielding
the crook, instrument of deliverance, or at most of gentle
compulsion, but armed with a heavy stick and mechanically dealing
blows on the short thick fleeces; without evil intent because
without thought—it is the ritual of the trade.</p>
<p>Of all the poor dumb pilgrims of the road the bullocks are the
most terrible to see. They are not patient, but go most
unwillingly with lowered head and furtive sideways motion, in
their eyes a horror of great fear. The sleek cattle, knee
deep in pasture, massed at the gate, and stared mild-eyed and
with inquiring bellow at the retreating drove; but these passed
without answer on to the Unknown, and for them it spelt
death.</p>
<p>Behind a squadron of sleek, well-fed cart-horses, formed in
fours, with straw braid in mane and tail, came the ponies, for
the most part a merry company. Long strings of rusty,
shaggy two-year-olds, unbroken, unkempt, the short Down grass
still sweet on their tongues; full of fun, frolic, and
wickedness, biting and pulling, casting longing eyes at the
hedgerows. The boys appear to recognise them as kindred
spirits, and are curiously forbearing and patient. Soon
both ponies and boys vanish in a white whirl, and a long line of
carts, which had evidently waited for the dust to subside, comes
slowly up the incline. For the most part they carry the
pigs and fowls, carriage folk of the road. The latter are
hot, crowded, and dusty under the open netting; the former for
the most part cheerfully remonstrative.</p>
<p>I drew a breath of relief as the noise of wheels died away and
my road sank into silence. The hedgerows are no longer
green but white and choked with dust, a sight to move good sister
Rain to welcome tears. The birds seem to have fled before
the noisy confusion. I wonder whether my snake has seen and
smiled at the clumsy ruling of the lord he so little heeds?
I turned aside through the gate to plunge face and hands into the
cool of the sheltered grass that side the hedge, and then rested
my eyes on the stretch of green I had lacked all day. The
rabbits had apparently played and browsed unmindful of the stir,
and were still flirting their white tails along the hedgerows; a
lark rose, another and another, and I went back to my road.
Peace still reigned, for the shadows were lengthening, and there
would be little more traffic for the fair. I turned to my
work, grateful for the stillness, and saw on the white stretch of
road a lone old man and a pig. Surely I knew that tall
figure in the quaint grey smock, surely I knew the face, furrowed
like nature’s face in springtime, and crowned by a round,
soft hat? And the pig, the black pig walking decorously
free? Ay, I knew them.</p>
<p>In the early spring I took a whole holiday and a long tramp;
and towards afternoon, tired and thirsty, sought water at a
little lonely cottage whose windows peered and blinked under
overhanging brows of thatch. I had, not the water I asked
for, but milk and a bowl of sweet porridge for which I paid only
thanks; and stayed for a chat with my kindly hosts. They
were a quaint old couple of the kind rarely met with
nowadays. They enjoyed a little pension from the Squire and
a garden in which vegetables and flowers lived side by side in
friendliest fashion. Bees worked and sang over the thyme
and marjoram, blooming early in a sunny nook; and in a homely sty
lived a solemn black pig, a pig with a history.</p>
<p>It was no common utilitarian pig, but the honoured guest of
the old couple, and it knew it. A year before, their
youngest and only surviving child, then a man of five-and-twenty,
had brought his mother the result of his savings in the shape of
a fine young pig: a week later he lay dead of the typhoid that
scourged Maidstone. Hence the pig was sacred, cared for and
loved by this Darby and Joan.</p>
<p>“Ee be mos’ like a child to me and the mother,
an’ mos’ as sensible as a Christian, ee be,”
the old man had said; and I could hardly credit my eyes when I
saw the tall bent figure side by side with the black pig, coming
along my road on such a day.</p>
<p>I hailed the old man, and both turned aside; but he gazed at
me without remembrance.</p>
<p>I spoke of the pig and its history. He nodded
wearily. “Ay, ay, lad, you’ve got it;
’tis poor Dick’s pig right enow.”</p>
<p>“But you’re never going to take it to
E—?”</p>
<p>“Ay, but I be, and comin’ back alone, if the Lord
be marciful. The missus has been terrible bad this two
mouths and more; Squire’s in foreign parts; and food-stuffs
such as the old woman wants is hard buying for poor folks.
The stocking’s empty, now ’tis the pig must go, and I
believe he’d be glad for to do the missus a turn; she were
terrible good to him, were the missus, and fond, too. I
dursn’t tell her he was to go; she’d sooner starve
than lose poor Dick’s pig. Well, we’d best be
movin’; ’tis a fairish step.”</p>
<p>The pig followed comprehending and docile, and as the quaint
couple passed from sight I thought I heard Brother Death stir in
the shadow. He is a strong angel and of great pity.</p>
<h3><a name="page40"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
40</span>CHAPTER V</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is always a little fire of
wood on the open hearth in the kitchen when I get home at night;
the old lady says it is “company” for her, and sits
in the lonely twilight, her knotted hands lying quiet on her lap,
her listening eyes fixed on the burning sticks.</p>
<p>I wonder sometimes whether she hears music in the leap and
lick of the fiery tongues, music such as he of Bayreuth draws
from the violins till the hot energy of the fire spirit is on us,
embodied in sound.</p>
<p>Surely she hears some voice, that lonely old woman on whom is
set the seal of great silence?</p>
<p>It is a great truth tenderly said that God builds the nest for
the blind bird; and may it not be that He opens closed eyes and
unstops deaf ears to sights and sounds from which others by these
very senses are debarred?</p>
<p>Here the best of us see through a mist of tears men as trees
walking; it is only in the land which is very far off and yet
very near that we shall have fulness of sight and see the King in
His beauty; and I cannot think that any listening ears listen in
vain.</p>
<p>The coppice at our back is full of birds, for it is far from
the road and they nest there undisturbed year after year.
Through the still night I heard the nightingales calling,
calling, until I could bear it no longer and went softly out into
the luminous dark.</p>
<p>The little wood was manifold with sound, I heard my little
brothers who move by night rustling in grass and tree. A
hedgehog crossed my path with a dull squeak, the bats shrilled
high to the stars, a white owl swept past me crying his hunting
note, a beetle boomed suddenly in my face; and above and through
it all the nightingales sang—and sang!</p>
<p>The night wind bent the listening trees, and the stars yearned
earthward to hear the song of deathless love. Louder and
louder the wonderful notes rose and fell in a passion of melody;
and then sank to rest on that low thrilling call which it is said
Death once heard, and stayed his hand.</p>
<p>They will scarcely sing again this year, these nightingales,
for they are late on the wing as it is. It seems as if on
such nights they sang as the swan sings, knowing it to be the
last time—with the lavish note of one who bids an eternal
farewell.</p>
<p>At last there was silence. Sitting under the big beech
tree, the giant of the coppice, I rested my tired self in the lap
of mother earth, breathed of her breath and listened to her voice
in the quickening silence until my flesh came again as the flesh
of a little child, for it is true recreation to sit at the
footstool of God wrapped in a fold of His living robe, the while
night smoothes our tired face with her healing hands.</p>
<p>The grey dawn awoke and stole with trailing robes across
earth’s floor. At her footsteps the birds roused from
sleep and cried a greeting; the sky flushed and paled conscious
of coming splendour; and overhead a file of swans passed with
broad strong flight to the reeded waters of the sequestered
pool.</p>
<p>Another hour of silence while the light throbbed and flamed in
the east; then the larks rose harmonious from a neighbouring
field, the rabbits scurried with ears alert to their morning
meal, the day had begun.</p>
<p>I passed through the coppice and out into the fields
beyond. The dew lay heavy on leaf and blade and gossamer, a
cool fresh wind swept clear over dale and down from the sea, and
the clover field rippled like a silvery lake in the breeze.</p>
<p>There is something inexpressibly beautiful in the unused day,
something beautiful in the fact that it is still untouched,
unsoiled; and town and country share alike in this
loveliness. At half-past three on a June morning even
London has not assumed her responsibilities, but smiles and glows
lighthearted and smokeless under the caresses of the morning
sun.</p>
<p>Five o’clock. The bell rings out crisp and clear
from the monastery where the Bedesmen of St Hugh watch and pray
for the souls on this labouring forgetful earth. Every hour
the note of comfort and warning cries across the land, tells the
Sanctus, the Angelus, and the Hours of the Passion, and calls to
remembrance and prayer.</p>
<p>When the wind is north, the sound carries as far as my road,
and companies me through the day; and if to His dumb children God
in His mercy reckons work as prayer, most certainly those who
have forged through the ages an unbroken chain of supplication
and thanksgiving will be counted among the stalwart labourers of
the house of the Lord.</p>
<p>Sun and bell together are my only clock: it is time for my
water drawing; and gathering a pile of mushrooms, children of the
night, I hasten home.</p>
<p>The cottage is dear to me in its quaint untidiness and want of
rectitude, dear because we are to be its last denizens, last of
the long line of toilers who have sweated and sown that others
might reap, and have passed away leaving no trace.</p>
<p>I once saw a tall cross in a seaboard churchyard, inscribed,
“To the memory of the unknown dead who have perished in
these waters.” There might be one in every village
sleeping-place to the unhonoured many who made fruitful the land
with sweat and tears. It is a consolation to think that
when we look back on this stretch of life’s road from
beyond the first milestone, which, it is instructive to remember,
is always a grave, we may hope to see the work of this world with
open eyes, and to judge of it with a due sense of proportion.</p>
<p>A bee with laden honey-bag hummed and buzzed in the hedge as I
got ready for work, importuning the flowers for that which he
could not carry, and finally giving up the attempt in despair
fell asleep on a buttercup, the best place for his weary little
velvet body. In five minutes—they may have been five
hours to him—he awoke a new bee, sensible and
clear-sighted, and flew blithely away to the hive with his
sufficiency—an example this weary world would be wise to
follow.</p>
<p>My road has been lonely to-day. A parson came by in the
afternoon, a stranger in the neighbourhood, for he asked his
way. He talked awhile, and with kindly rebuke said it was
sad to see a man of my education brought so low, which shows how
the outside appearance may mislead the prejudiced observer.
“Was it misfortune?” “Nay, the best of
good luck,” I answered, gaily.</p>
<p>The good man with beautiful readiness sat down on a heap of
stones and bade me say on. “Read me a sermon in
stone,” he said, simply; and I stayed my hand to read.</p>
<p>He listened with courteous intelligence.</p>
<p>“You hold a roadmender has a vocation?” he
asked.</p>
<p>“As the monk or the artist, for, like both, he is
universal. The world is his home; he serves all men alike,
ay, and for him the beasts have equal honour with the men.
His soul is ‘bound up in the bundle of life’ with all
other souls, he sees his father, his mother, his brethren in the
children of the road. For him there is nothing unclean,
nothing common; the very stones cry out that they
serve.”</p>
<p>Parson nodded his head.</p>
<p>“It is all true,” he said; “beautifully
true. But need such a view of life necessitate the work of
roadmending? Surely all men should be
roadmenders.”</p>
<p>O wise parson, so to read the lesson of the road!</p>
<p>“It is true,” I answered; “but some of us
find our salvation in the actual work, and earn our bread better
in this than in any other way. No man is dependent on our
earning, all men on our work. We are ‘rich beyond the
dreams of avarice’ because we have all that we need, and
yet we taste the life and poverty of the very poor. We are,
if you will, uncloistered monks, preaching friars who speak not
with the tongue, disciples who hear the wise words of a silent
master.”</p>
<p>“Robert Louis Stevenson was a roadmender,” said
the wise parson.</p>
<p>“Ay, and with more than his pen,” I
answered. “I wonder was he ever so truly great, so
entirely the man we know and love, as when he inspired the chiefs
to make a highway in the wilderness. Surely no more fitting
monument could exist to his memory than the Road of Gratitude,
cut, laid, and kept by the pure-blooded tribe kings of
Samoa.”</p>
<p>Parson nodded.</p>
<p>“He knew that the people who make no roads are ruled out
from intelligent participation in the world’s
brotherhood.” He filled his pipe, thinking the while,
then he held out his pouch to me.</p>
<p>“Try some of this baccy,” he said; “Sherwood
of Magdalen sent it me from some outlandish place.”</p>
<p>I accepted gratefully. It was such tobacco as falls to
the lot of few roadmenders.</p>
<p>He rose to go.</p>
<p>“I wish I could come and break stones,” he said, a
little wistfully.</p>
<p>“Nay,” said I, “few men have such weary
roadmending as yours, and perhaps you need my road less than most
men, and less than most parsons.”</p>
<p>We shook hands, and he went down the road and out of my
life.</p>
<p>He little guessed that I knew Sherwood, ay, and knew him too,
for had not Sherwood told me of the man he delighted to
honour.</p>
<p>Ah, well! I am no Browning Junior, and Sherwood’s
name is not Sherwood.</p>
<h3><a name="page50"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
50</span>CHAPTER VI</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">Awhile</span> ago I took a holiday;
mouched, played truant from my road. Jem the waggoner
hailed me as he passed—he was going to the mill—would
I ride with him and come back atop of the full sacks?</p>
<p>I hid my hammer in the hedge, climbed into the great waggon
white and fragrant with the clean sweet meal, and flung myself
down on the empty flour bags. The looped-back tarpaulin
framed the long vista of my road with the downs beyond; and I lay
in the cool dark, caressed by the fresh breeze in its
thoroughfare, soothed by the strong monotonous tramp of the great
grey team and the music of the jangling harness.</p>
<p>Jem walked at the leaders’ heads; it is his rule when
the waggon is empty, a rule no “company” will make
him break. At first I regretted it, but soon discovered I
learnt to know him better so, as he plodded along, his thickset
figure slightly bent, his hands in his pockets, his whip under
one arm, whistling hymn tunes in a low minor, while the great
horses answered to his voice without touch of lash or guiding
rein.</p>
<p>I lay as in a blissful dream and watched my road unfold.
The sun set the pine-boles aflare where the hedge is sparse, and
stretched the long shadows of the besom poplars in slanting bars
across the white highway; the roadside gardens smiled friendly
with their trim-cut laurels and rows of stately
sunflowers—a seemly proximity this, Daphne and Clytie,
sisters in experience, wrapped in the warm caress of the god
whose wooing they need no longer fear. Here and there we
passed little groups of women and children off to work in the
early cornfields, and Jem paused in his fond repetition of
“The Lord my pasture shall prepare” to give them
good-day.</p>
<p>It is like Life, this travelling backwards—that which
has been, alone visible—like Life, which is after all,
retrospective with a steady moving on into the Unknown, Unseen,
until Faith is lost in Sight and experience is no longer the
touchstone of humanity. The face of the son of Adam is set
on the road his brothers have travelled, marking their landmarks,
tracing their journeyings; but with the eyes of a child of God he
looks forward, straining to catch a glimpse of the jewelled walls
of his future home, the city “Eternal in the
Heavens.”</p>
<p>Presently we left my road for the deep shade of a narrow
country way where the great oaks and beeches meet overhead and no
hedge-clipper sets his hand to stay nature’s profusion; and
so by pleasant lanes scarce the waggon’s width across, now
shady, now sunny, here bordered by thickset coverts, there giving
on fruitful fields, we came at length to the mill.</p>
<p>I left Jem to his business with the miller and wandered down
the flowery meadow to listen to the merry clack of the stream and
the voice of the waters on the weir. The great wheel was at
rest, as I love best to see it in the later afternoon; the splash
and churn of the water belong rather to the morning hours.
It is the chief mistake we make in portioning out our day that we
banish rest to the night-time, which is for sleep and recreating,
instead of setting apart the later afternoon and quiet twilight
hours for the stretching of weary limbs and repose of tired mind
after a day’s toil that should begin and end at five.</p>
<p>The little stone bridge over the mill-stream is almost on a
level with the clear running water, and I lay there and gazed at
the huge wheel which, under multitudinous forms and uses, is one
of the world’s wonders, because one of the few things we
imitative children have not learnt from nature. Is it
perchance a memory out of that past when Adam walked clear-eyed
in Paradise and talked with the Lord in the cool of the
day? Did he see then the flaming wheels instinct with
service, wondrous messengers of the Most High vouchsafed in
vision to the later prophets?</p>
<p>Maybe he did, and going forth from before the avenging sword
of his own forging to the bitterness of an accursed earth, took
with him this bright memory of perfect, ceaseless service, and so
fashioned our labouring wheel—pathetic link with the time
of his innocency. It is one of many unanswered questions,
good to ask because it has no answer, only the suggestion of a
train of thought: perhaps we are never so receptive as when with
folded hands we say simply, “This is a great
mystery.” I watched and wondered until Jem called,
and I had to leave the rippling weir and the water’s side,
and the wheel with its untold secret.</p>
<p>The miller’s wife gave me tea and a crust of home-made
bread, and the miller’s little maid sat on my knee while I
told the sad tale of a little pink cloud separated from its
parents and teazed and hunted by mischievous little airs.
To-morrow, if I mistake not, her garden will be wet with its
tears, and, let us hope, point a moral; for the tale had its
origin in a frenzied chicken driven from the side of an anxious
mother, and pursued by a sturdy, relentless figure in a white
sun-bonnet.</p>
<p>The little maid trotted off, greatly sobered, to look somewhat
prematurely for the cloud’s tears; and I climbed to my
place at the top of the piled-up sacks, and thence watched
twilight pass to starlight through my narrow peep, and, so
watching, slept until Jem’s voice hailed me from Dreamland,
and I went, only half awake, across the dark fields home.</p>
<p>Autumn is here and it is already late. He has painted
the hedges russet and gold, scarlet and black, and a tangle of
grey; now he has damp brown leaves in his hair and frost in his
finger-tips.</p>
<p>It is a season of contrasts; at first all is stir and bustle,
the ingathering of man and beast; barn and rickyard stand filled
with golden treasure; at the farm the sound of threshing; in wood
and copse the squirrels busied ’twixt tree and storehouse,
while the ripe nuts fall with thud of thunder rain. When
the harvesting is over, the fruit gathered, the last rick
thatched, there comes a pause. Earth strips off her bright
colours and shows a bare and furrowed face; the dead leaves fall
gently and sadly through the calm, sweet air; grey mists drape
the fields and hedges. The migratory birds have left, save
a few late swallows; and as I sit at work in the soft, still
rain, I can hear the blackbird’s melancholy trill and the
thin pipe of the redbreast’s winter song—the air is
full of the sound of farewell.</p>
<p>Forethought and preparation for the Future which shall be;
farewell, because of the Future which may never be—for us;
“Man, thou hast goods laid up for many years, and it is
well; but, remember, this night <i>thy</i> soul may be
required”; is the unvoiced lesson of autumn. There is
growing up among us a great fear; it stares at us white,
wide-eyed, from the faces of men and women alike—the fear
of pain, mental and bodily pain. For the last twenty years
we have waged war with suffering—a noble war when fought in
the interest of the many, but fraught with great danger to each
individual man. It is the fear which should not be, rather
than the ‘hope which is in us,’ that leads men in
these days to drape Death in a flowery mantle, to lay stress on
the shortness of parting, the speedy reunion, to postpone their
good-byes until the last moment, or avoid saying them altogether;
and this fear is a poor, ignoble thing, unworthy of those who are
as gods, knowing good and evil. We are still paying the
price of that knowledge; suffering in both kinds is a substantial
part of it, and brings its own healing. Let us pay like
men, our face to the open heaven, neither whimpering like
children in the dark, nor lulled to unnecessary oblivion by some
lethal drug; for it is manly, not morbid, to dare to taste the
pungent savour of pain, the lingering sadness of farewell which
emphasises the aftermath of life; it should have its place in all
our preparation as a part of our inheritance we dare not be
without.</p>
<p>There is an old couple in our village who are past work.
The married daughter has made shift to take her mother and the
parish half-crown, but there is neither room nor food for the
father, and he must go to N—. If husband and wife
went together, they would be separated at the workhouse
door. The parting had to come; it came yesterday. I
saw them stumbling lamely down the road on their last journey
together, walking side by side without touch or speech, seeing
and heeding nothing but a blank future. As they passed me
the old man said gruffly, “’Tis far eno’;
better be gettin’ back”; but the woman shook her
head, and they breasted the hill together. At the top they
paused, shook hands, and separated; one went on, the other turned
back; and as the old woman limped blindly by I turned away, for
there are sights a man dare not look upon. She passed; and
I heard a child’s shrill voice say, “I come to look
for you, gran”; and I thanked God that there need be no
utter loneliness in the world while it holds a little child.</p>
<p>Now it is my turn, and I must leave the wayside to serve in
the sheepfolds during the winter months. It is scarcely a
farewell, for my road is ubiquitous, eternal; there are green
ways in Paradise and golden streets in the beautiful City of
God. Nevertheless, my heart is heavy; for, viewed by the
light of the waning year, roadmending seems a great and wonderful
work which I have poorly conceived of and meanly performed: yet I
have learnt to understand dimly the truths of three great
paradoxes—the blessing of a curse, the voice of silence,
the companionship of solitude—and so take my leave of this
stretch of road, and of you who have fared along the white
highway through the medium of a printed page.</p>
<p>Farewell! It is a roadmender’s word; I cry you
Godspeed to the next milestone—and beyond.</p>
<h2><a name="page61"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 61</span>OUT OF
THE SHADOW</h2>
<h3><a name="page63"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
63</span>CHAPTER I</h3>
<p>I <span class="smcap">am</span> no longer a roadmender; the
stretch of white highway which leads to the end of the world will
know me no more; the fields and hedgerows, grass and leaf stiff
with the crisp rime of winter’s breath, lie beyond my
horizon; the ewes in the folding, their mysterious eyes quick
with the consciousness of coming motherhood, answer
another’s voice and hand; while I lie here, not in the
lonely companionship of my expectations, but where the shadow is
bright with kindly faces and gentle hands, until one kinder and
gentler still carries me down the stairway into the larger
room.</p>
<p>But now the veil was held aside and one went by crowned with
the majesty of years, wearing the ermine of an unstained rule,
the purple of her people’s loyalty. Nations stood
with bated breath to see her pass in the starlit mist of her
children’s tears; a monarch—greatest of her time; an
empress—conquered men called mother; a
woman—Englishmen cried queen; still the crowned captive of
her people’s heart—the prisoner of love.</p>
<p>The night-goers passed under my window in silence, neither
song nor shout broke the welcome dark; next morning the workmen
who went by were strangely quiet.</p>
<blockquote><p>‘<span class="smcap">Victoria Dei Gratia
Britanniarum Regina</span>.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Did they think of how that legend would disappear, and of all
it meant, as they paid their pennies at the coffee-stall?
The feet rarely know the true value and work of the head; but all
Englishmen have been and will be quick to acknowledge and revere
Victoria by the grace of God a wise woman, a great and loving
mother.</p>
<p>Years ago, I, standing at a level crossing, saw her
pass. The train slowed down and she caught sight of the
gatekeeper’s little girl who had climbed the barrier.
Such a smile as she gave her! And then I caught a quick
startled gesture as she slipped from my vision; I thought
afterwards it was that she feared the child might fall.
Mother first, then Queen; even so rest came to her—not in
one of the royal palaces, but in her own home, surrounded by the
immediate circle of her nearest and dearest, while the world kept
watch and ward.</p>
<p>I, a shy lover of the fields and woods, longed always, should
a painless passing be vouchsafed me, to make my bed on the
fragrant pine needles in the aloneness of a great forest; to lie
once again as I had lain many a time, bathed in the bitter
sweetness of the sun-blessed pines, lapped in the manifold
silence; my ear attuned to the wind of Heaven with its call from
the Cities of Peace. In sterner mood, when Love’s
hand held a scourge, I craved rather the stress of the moorland
with its bleaker mind imperative of sacrifice. To rest
again under the lee of Rippon Tor swept by the strong
peat-smelling breeze; to stare untired at the long cloud-shadowed
reaches, and watch the mist-wraiths huddle and shrink round the
stones of blood; until my sacrifice too was accomplished, and my
soul had fled. A wild waste moor; a vast void sky; and
naught between heaven and earth but man, his sin-glazed eyes
seeking afar the distant light of his own heart.</p>
<p>With years came counsels more profound, and the knowledge that
man was no mere dweller in the woods to follow the footsteps of
the piping god, but an integral part of an organised whole, in
which Pan too has his fulfilment. The wise Venetians knew;
and read pantheism into Christianity when they set these words
round Ezekiel’s living creatures in the altar vault of St
Mark’s:—</p>
<blockquote><p><span class="smcap">Quaeque sub obscuris de Cristo
Dicta figuris</span><br />
<span class="smcap">His aperire datur et in his, Deus ipse
notatur</span>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Thou shalt have none other gods but me.” If
man had been able to keep this one commandment perfectly the
other nine would never have been written; instead he has
comprehensively disregarded it, and perhaps never more than now
in the twentieth century. Ah, well! this world, in spite of
all its sinning, is still the Garden of Eden where the Lord
walked with man, not in the cool of evening, but in the heat and
stress of the immediate working day. There is no angel now
with flaming sword to keep the way of the Tree of Life, but
tapers alight morning by morning in the Hostel of God to point us
to it; and we, who are as gods knowing good and evil, partake of
that fruit “whereof whoso eateth shall never die”;
the greatest gift or the most awful penalty—Eternal
Life.</p>
<p>I then, with my craving for tree and sky, held that a great
capital with its stir of life and death, of toil and strife and
pleasure, was an ill place for a sick man to wait in; a place to
shrink from as a child shrinks from the rude blow of one out of
authority. Yet here, far from moor and forest, hillside and
hedgerow, in the family sitting-room of the English-speaking
peoples, the London much misunderstood, I find the fulfilment by
antithesis of all desire. For the loneliness of the
moorland, there is the warmth and companionship of London’s
swift beating heart. For silence there is sound—the
sound and stir of service—for the most part far in excess
of its earthly equivalent. Against the fragrant incense of
the pines I set the honest sweat of the man whose lifetime is the
measure of his working day. “He that loveth not his
brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not
seen?” wrote Blessed John, who himself loved so much that
he beheld the Lamb as it had been slain from the beginning when
Adam fell, and the City of God with light most precious.
The burden of corporate sin, the sword of corporate sorrow, the
joy of corporate righteousness; thus we become citizens in the
Kingdom of God, and companions of all his creatures.
“It is not good that the man should be alone,” said
the Lord God.</p>
<p>I live now as it were in two worlds, the world of sight, and
the world of sound; and they scarcely ever touch each
other. I hear the grind of heavy traffic, the struggle of
horses on the frost-breathed ground, the decorous jolt of
omnibuses, the jangle of cab bells, the sharp warning of bicycles
at the corner, the swift rattle of costers’ carts as they
go south at night with their shouting, goading crew. All
these things I hear, and more; but I see no road, only the silent
river of my heart with its tale of wonder and years, and the
white beat of seagulls’ wings in strong inquiring
flight.</p>
<p>Sometimes there is naught to see on the waterway but a
solitary black hull, a very Stygian ferry-boat, manned by a
solitary figure, and moving slowly up under the impulse of the
far-reaching sweeps. Then the great barges pass with their
coffined treasure, drawn by a small self-righteous
steam-tug. Later, lightened of their load, and waiting on
wind and tide, I see them swooping by like birds set free; tawny
sails that mind me of red-roofed Whitby with its northern fleet;
black sails as of some heedless Theseus; white sails that sweep
out of the morning mist “like restless
gossameres.” They make the bridge, which is just
within my vision, and then away past Westminster and Blackfriars
where St Paul’s great dome lifts the cross high over a
self-seeking city; past Southwark where England’s poet
illuminates in the scroll of divine wisdom the sign of the
Tabard; past the Tower with its haunting ghosts of history; past
Greenwich, fairy city, caught in the meshes of riverside mist;
and then the salt and speer of the sea, the companying with great
ships, the fresh burden.</p>
<p>At night I see them again, silent, mysterious; searching the
darkness with unwinking yellow stare, led by a great green
light. They creep up under the bridge which spans the river
with its watching eyes, and vanish, crying back a warning note as
they make the upper reach, or strident hail, as a chain of
kindred phantoms passes, ploughing a contrary tide.</p>
<p>Throughout the long watches of the night I follow them; and in
the early morning they slide by, their eyes pale in the twilight;
while the stars flicker and fade, and the gas lamps die down into
a dull yellow blotch against the glory and glow of a new day.</p>
<h3><a name="page72"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
72</span>CHAPTER II</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">February</span> is here, February
fill-dyke; the month of purification, of cleansing rains and
pulsing bounding streams, and white mist clinging insistent to
field and hedgerow so that when her veil is withdrawn greenness
may make us glad.</p>
<p>The river has been uniformly grey of late, with no wind to
ruffle its surface or to speed the barges dropping slowly and
sullenly down with the tide through a blurring haze. I
watched one yesterday, its useless sails half-furled and no sign
of life save the man at the helm. It drifted stealthily
past, and a little behind, flying low, came a solitary seagull,
grey as the river’s haze—a following bird.</p>
<p>Once again I lay on my back in the bottom of the tarry old
fishing smack, blue sky above and no sound but the knock, knock
of the waves, and the thud and curl of falling foam as the old
boat’s blunt nose breasted the coming sea. Then Daddy
Whiddon spoke.</p>
<p>“A follerin’ bürrd,” he said.</p>
<p>I got up, and looked across the blue field we were ploughing
into white furrows. Far away a tiny sail scarred the great
solitude, and astern came a gull flying slowly close to the
water’s breast.</p>
<p>Daddy Whiddon waved his pipe towards it.</p>
<p>“A follerin’ bürrd,” he said, again;
and again I waited; questions were not grateful to him.</p>
<p>“There be a carpse there, sure enough, a carpse
driftin’ and shiftin’ on the floor of the sea.
There be those as can’t rest, poor sawls, and her’ll
be mun, her’ll be mun, and the sperrit of her is with the
bürrd.”</p>
<p>The clumsy boom swung across as we changed our course, and the
water ran from us in smooth reaches on either side: the bird flew
steadily on.</p>
<p>“What will the spirit do?” I said.</p>
<p>The old man looked at me gravely.</p>
<p>“Her’ll rest in the Lard’s time, in the
Lard’s gude time—but now her’ll just be
follerin’ on with the bürrd.”</p>
<p>The gull was flying close to us now, and a cold wind swept the
sunny sea. I shivered: Daddy looked at me curiously.</p>
<p>“There be reason enough to be cawld if us did but knaw
it, but I he mos’ used to ’em, poor
sawls.” He shaded his keen old blue eyes, and looked
away across the water. His face kindled. “There
be a skule comin’, and by my sawl ’tis mackerel they
be drivin’.”</p>
<p>I watched eagerly, and saw the dark line rise and fall in the
trough of the sea, and, away behind, the stir and rush of
tumbling porpoises as they chased their prey.</p>
<p>Again we changed our tack, and each taking an oar, pulled
lustily for the beach.</p>
<p>“Please God her’ll break inshore,” said
Daddy Whiddon; and he shouted the news to the idle waiting men
who hailed us.</p>
<p>In a moment all was stir, for the fishing had been
slack. Two boats put out with the lithe brown seine.
The dark line had turned, but the school was still behind,
churning the water in clumsy haste; they were coming in.</p>
<p>Then the brit broke in silvery leaping waves on the shelving
beach. The threefold hunt was over; the porpoises turned
out to sea in search of fresh quarry; and the seine, dragged by
ready hands, came slowly, stubbornly in with its quivering
treasure of fish. They had sought a haven and found none;
the brit lay dying in flickering iridescent heaps as the
bare-legged babies of the village gathered them up; and far away
over the water I saw a single grey speck; it was the following
bird.</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p>The curtain of river haze falls back; barge and bird are alike
gone, and the lamplighter has lit the first gas-lamp on the far
side of the bridge. Every night I watch him come, his
progress marked by the great yellow eyes that wake the
dark. Sometimes he walks quickly; sometimes he loiters on
the bridge to chat, or stare at the dark water; but he always
comes, leaving his watchful deterrent train behind him to police
the night.</p>
<p>Once Demeter in the black anguish of her desolation searched
for lost Persephone by the light of Hecate’s torch; and
searching all in vain, spurned beneath her empty feet an earth
barren of her smile; froze with set brows the merry brooks and
streams; and smote forest, and plain, and fruitful field, with
the breath of her last despair, until even Iambe’s laughing
jest was still. And then when the desolation was complete,
across the wasted valley where the starveling cattle scarcely
longed to browse, came the dreadful chariot—and
Persephone. The day of the prisoner of Hades had dawned;
and as the sun flamed slowly up to light her thwarted eyes the
world sprang into blossom at her feet.</p>
<p>We can never be too Pagan when we are truly Christian, and the
old myths are eternal truths held fast in the Church’s
net. Prometheus fetched fire from Heaven, to be slain
forever in the fetching; and lo, a Greater than Prometheus came
to fire the cresset of the Cross. Demeter waits now
patiently enough. Persephone waits, too, in the faith of
the sun she cannot see: and every lamp lit carries on the crusade
which has for its goal a sunless, moonless, city whose light is
the Light of the world.</p>
<blockquote><p>“Lume è lassù, che visibile
face<br />
lo creatore a quella creatura,<br />
che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Immediately outside my window is a lime tree—a little
black skeleton of abundant branches—in which sparrows
congregate to chirp and bicker. Farther away I have a
glimpse of graceful planes, children of moonlight and mist; their
dainty robes, still more or less unsullied, gleam ghostly in the
gaslight athwart the dark. They make a brave show even in
winter with their feathery branches and swinging tassels, whereas
my little tree stands stark and uncompromising, with its horde of
sooty sparrows cockney to the last tail feather, and a pathetic
inability to look anything but black. Rain comes with
strong caressing fingers, and the branches seem no whit the
cleaner for her care; but then their glistening blackness mirrors
back the succeeding sunlight, as a muddy pavement will sometimes
lap our feet in a sea of gold. The little wet sparrows are
for the moment equally transformed, for the sun turns their
dun-coloured coats to a ruddy bronze, and cries Chrysostom as it
kisses each shiny beak. They are dumb Chrysostoms; but they
preach a golden gospel, for the sparrows are to London what the
rainbow was to eight saved souls out of a waste of waters—a
perpetual sign of the remembering mercies of God.</p>
<p>Last night there was a sudden clatter of hoofs, a shout, and
then silence. A runaway cab-horse, a dark night, a wide
crossing, and a heavy burden: so death came to a poor
woman. People from the house went out to help; and I heard
of her, the centre of an unknowing curious crowd, as she lay
bonnetless in the mud of the road, her head on the kerb. A
rude but painless death: the misery lay in her life; for this
woman—worn, white-haired, and wrinkled—had but fifty
years to set against such a condition. The policeman
reported her respectable, hard-working, living apart from her
husband with a sister; but although they shared rooms, they
“did not speak,” and the sister refused all
responsibility; so the parish buried the dead woman, and thus
ended an uneventful tragedy.</p>
<p>Was it her own fault? If so, the greater pathos.
The lonely souls that hold out timid hands to an unheeding world
have their meed of interior comfort even here, while the sons of
consolation wait on the thresh-hold for their footfall: but God
help the soul that bars its own door! It is kicking against
the pricks of Divine ordinance, the ordinance of a triune God;
whether it be the dweller in crowded street or tenement who is
proud to say, “I keep myself to myself,” or Seneca
writing in pitiful complacency, “Whenever I have gone among
men, I have returned home less of a man.” Whatever
the next world holds in store, we are bidden in this to seek and
serve God in our fellow-men, and in the creatures of His making
whom He calls by name.</p>
<p>It was once my privilege to know an old organ-grinder named
Gawdine. He was a hard swearer, a hard drinker, a hard
liver, and he fortified himself body and soul against the world:
he even drank alone, which is an evil sign.</p>
<p>One day to Gawdine sober came a little dirty child, who clung
to his empty trouser leg—he had lost a limb years
before—with a persistent unintelligible request. He
shook the little chap off with a blow and a curse; and the child
was trotting dismally away, when it suddenly turned, ran back,
and held up a dirty face for a kiss.</p>
<p>Two days later Gawdine fell under a passing dray which
inflicted terrible internal injuries on him. They patched
him up in hospital, and he went back to his organ-grinding,
taking with him two friends—a pain which fell suddenly upon
him to rack and rend with an anguish of crucifixion, and the
memory of a child’s upturned face. Outwardly he was
the same save that he changed the tunes of his organ, out of
long-hoarded savings, for the jigs and reels which children hold
dear, and stood patiently playing them in child-crowded alleys,
where pennies are not as plentiful as elsewhere.</p>
<p>He continued to drink; it did not come within his new code to
stop, since he could “carry his liquor well;” but he
rarely, if ever, swore. He told me this tale through the
throes of his anguish as he lay crouched on a mattress on the
floor; and as the grip of the pain took him he tore and bit at
his hands until they were maimed and bleeding, to keep the ready
curses off his lips.</p>
<p>He told the story, but he gave no reason, offered no
explanation: he has been dead now many a year, and thus would I
write his epitaph:—</p>
<p>He saw the face of a little child and looked on God.</p>
<h3><a name="page83"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
83</span>CHAPTER III</h3>
<p>“<span class="smcap">Two</span> began, in a low voice,
‘Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have
been a <i>red</i> rose-tree, and we put a white one in by
mistake.’”</p>
<p>As I look round this room I feel sure Two, and Five, and
Seven, have all been at work on it, and made no mistakes, for
round the walls runs a frieze of squat standard rose-trees, red
as red can be, and just like those that Alice saw in the
Queen’s garden. In between them are Chaucer’s
name-children, prim little daisies, peering wideawake from green
grass. This same grass has a history which I have
heard. In the original stencil for the frieze it was purely
conventional like the rest, and met in spikey curves round each
tree; the painter, however, who was doing the work, was a lover
of the fields; and feeling that such grass was a travesty, he
added on his own account dainty little tussocks, and softened the
hard line into a tufted carpet, the grass growing irregularly,
bent at will by the wind.</p>
<p>The result from the standpoint of conventional art is indeed
disastrous; but my sympathy and gratitude are with the
painter. I see, as he saw, the far-reaching robe of living
ineffable green, of whose brilliance the eye never has too much,
and in whose weft no two threads are alike; and shrink as he did
from the conventionalising of that windswept glory.</p>
<p>The sea has its crested waves of recognisable form; the river
its eddy and swirl and separate vortices; but the grass!
The wind bloweth where it listeth and the grass bows as the wind
blows—“thou canst not tell whither it
goeth.” It takes no pattern, it obeys no recognised
law; it is like a beautiful creature of a thousand wayward moods,
and its voice is like nothing else in the wide world. It
bids you rest and bury your tired face in the green coolness, and
breathe of its breath and of the breath of the good earth from
which man was taken and to which he will one day return.
Then, if you lend your ear and are silent minded, you may hear
wondrous things of the deep places of the earth; of life in
mineral and stone as well as in pulsing sap; of a green world as
the stars saw it before man trod it under foot—of the
emerald which has its place with the rest in the City of God.</p>
<blockquote><p> “What
if earth<br />
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein,<br />
Each to each other like, more than on earth to
thought?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is a natural part of civilisation’s lust of
re-arrangement that we should be so ready to conventionalise the
beauty of this world into decorative patterns for our pilgrim
tents. It is a phase, and will melt into other phases; but
it tends to the increase of artificiality, and exists not only in
art but in everything. It is no new thing for jaded
sentiment to crave the spur of the unnatural, to prefer the
clever imitation, to live in a Devachan where the surroundings
appear that which we would have them to be; but it is an
interesting record of the pulse of the present day that ‘An
Englishwoman’s Love Letters’ should have taken
society by storm in the way it certainly has.</p>
<p>It is a delightful book to leave about, with its vellum
binding, dainty ribbons, and the hallmark of a great
publisher’s name. But when we seek within we find
love with its thousand voices and wayward moods, its shy graces
and seemly reticences, love which has its throne and robe of
state as well as the garment of the beggar maid, love which is
before time was, which knew the world when the stars took up
their courses, presented to us in gushing outpourings, the
appropriate language of a woman’s heart to the boor she
delights to honour.</p>
<p>“It is woman who is the glory of man,” says the
author of ‘The House of Wisdom and Love,’
“<i>Regina mundi</i>, greater, because so far the less; and
man is her head, but only as he serves his queen.”
Set this sober aphorism against the school girl love-making which
kisses a man’s feet and gaily refuses him the barren honour
of having loved her first.</p>
<p>There is scant need for the apologia which precedes the
letters; a few pages dispels the fear that we are prying into
another’s soul. As for the authorship, there is a
woman’s influence, an artist’s poorly concealed bias
in the foreign letters; and for the rest a man’s
blunders—so much easier to see in another than to avoid
oneself—writ large from cover to cover. King
Cophetua, who sends “profoundly grateful
remembrances,” has most surely written the letters he would
wish to receive.</p>
<p>“Mrs Meynell!” cries one reviewer,
triumphantly. Nay, the saints be good to us, what has Mrs
Meynell in common with the “Englishwoman’s”
language, style, or most unconvincing passion? Men can
write as from a woman’s heart when they are minded to do so
in desperate earnestness—there is Clarissa Harlowe and
Stevenson’s Kirstie, and many more to prove it; but when a
man writes as the author of the “Love Letters”
writes, I feel, as did the painter of the frieze, that
pattern-making has gone too far and included that which, like the
grass, should be spared such a convention.</p>
<p>“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess,
“and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would
seem to be’—or, if you’d like to put it more
simply—‘never imagine yourself not to be otherwise
than what it might appear to others that what you were or might
have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have
appeared to them to be otherwise.’” And so by
way of the Queen’s garden I come back to my room again.</p>
<p>My heart’s affections are still centred on my old attic,
with boarded floor and white-washed walls, where the sun blazoned
a frieze of red and gold until he travelled too far towards the
north, the moon streamed in to paint the trees in inky wavering
shadows, and the stars flashed their glory to me across the
years. But now sun and moon greet me only indirectly, and
under the red roses hang pictures, some of them the dear
companions of my days. Opposite me is the Arundel print of
the Presentation, painted by the gentle “Brother of the
Angels.” Priest Simeon, a stately figure in green and
gold, great with prophecy, gazes adoringly at the Bambino he
holds with fatherly care. Our Lady, in robe of red and veil
of shadowed purple, is instinct with light despite the sombre
colouring, as she stretches out hungering, awe-struck hands for
her soul’s delight. St Joseph, dignified guardian and
servitor, stands behind, holding the Sacrifice of the Poor to
redeem the First-begotten.</p>
<p>St Peter Martyr and the Dominican nun, gazing in rapt
contemplation at the scene, are not one whit surprised to find
themselves in the presence of eternal mysteries. In the
Entombment, which hangs on the opposite wall, St Dominic comes
round the corner full of grievous amaze and tenderest sympathy,
but with no sense of shock or intrusion, for was he not
“famigliar di Cristo”? And so he takes it all
in; the stone bed empty and waiting; the Beloved cradled for the
last time on His mother’s knees to be washed, lapped round,
and laid to rest as if He were again the Babe of Bethlehem.
He sees the Magdalen anointing the Sacred Feet; Blessed John
caring for the living and the Dead; and he, Dominic—hound
of the Lord—having his real, living share in the anguish
and hope, the bedding of the dearest Dead, who did but leave this
earth that He might manifest Himself more completely.</p>
<p>Underneath, with a leap across the centuries, is
Rossetti’s picture; Dante this time the onlooker, Beatrice,
in her pale beauty, the death-kissed one. The same idea
under different representations; the one conceived in childlike
simplicity, the other recalling, even in the photograph, its
wealth of colour and imagining; the one a world-wide ideal, the
other an individual expression of it.</p>
<p>Beatrice was to Dante the inclusion of belief. She was
more to him than he himself knew, far more to him after her death
than before. And, therefore, the analogy between the
pictures has at core a common reality. “It is
expedient for you that I go away,” is constantly being said
to us as we cling earthlike to the outward expression, rather
than to the inward manifestation—and blessed are those who
hear and understand, for it is spoken only to such as have been
with Him from the beginning. The eternal mysteries come
into time for us individually under widely differing forms.
The tiny child mothers its doll, croons to it, spends herself
upon it, why she cannot tell you; and we who are here in our
extreme youth, never to be men and women grown in this world,
nurse our ideal, exchange it, refashion it, call it by many
names; and at last in here or hereafter we find in its naked
truth the Child in the manger, even as the Wise Men found Him
when they came from the East to seek a great King. There is
but one necessary condition of this finding; we must follow the
particular manifestation of light given us, never resting until
it rests—over the place of the Child. And there is
but one insurmountable hindrance, the extinction of or drawing
back from the light truly apprehended by us. We forget
this, and judge other men by the light of our own soul.</p>
<p>I think the old bishop must have understood it. He is my
friend of friends as he lies opposite my window in his alabaster
sleep, clad in pontifical robes, with unshod feet, a little
island of white peace in a many-coloured marble sea. The
faithful sculptor has given every line and wrinkle, the heavy
eyelids and sunken face of tired old age, but withal the smile of
a contented child.</p>
<p>I do not even know my bishop’s name, only that the work
is of the thirteenth century; but he is good to company with
through the day, for he has known darkness and light and the
minds of many men; most surely, too, he has known that God
fulfils Himself in strange ways, so with the shadow of his feet
upon the polished floor he rests in peace.</p>
<h3><a name="page94"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
94</span>CHAPTER IV</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">On</span> Sunday my little tree was limned
in white and the sparrows were craving shelter at my window from
the blizzard. Now the mild thin air brings a breath of
spring in its wake and the daffodils in the garden wait the
kisses of the sun. Hand-in-hand with memory I slip away
down the years, and remember a day when I awoke at earliest dawn,
for across my sleep I had heard the lusty golden-throated
trumpeters heralding the spring.</p>
<p>The air was sharp-set; a delicate rime frosted roof and road;
the sea lay hazy and still like a great pearl. Then as the
sky stirred with flush upon flush of warm rosy light, it passed
from misty pearl to opal with heart of flame, from opal to
gleaming sapphire. The earth called, the fields called, the
river called—that pied piper to whose music a man cannot
stop his ears. It was with me as with the Canterbury
pilgrims:—</p>
<blockquote><p>“So priketh hem nature in hir corages;<br />
Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Half an hour later I was away by the early train that carries
the branch mails and a few workmen, and was delivered at the
little wayside station with the letters. The kind air went
singing past as I swung along the reverberating road between the
high tree-crowned banks which we call hedges in merry Devon, with
all the world to myself and the Brethren. A great blackbird
flew out with a loud “chook, chook,” and the red of
the haw on his yellow bill. A robin trilled from a low
rose-bush; two wrens searched diligently on a fallen tree for
breakfast, quite unconcerned when I rested a moment beside them;
and a shrewmouse slipped across the road followed directly by its
mate. March violets bloomed under the sheltered hedge with
here and there a pale primrose; a frosted bramble spray still
held its autumn tints clinging to the semblance of the past; and
great branches of snowy blackthorn broke the barren hedgeway as
if spring made a mock of winter’s snows.</p>
<p>Light of heart and foot with the new wine of the year I sped
on again, stray daffodils lighting the wayside, until I heard the
voice of the stream and reached the field gate which leads to the
lower meadows. There before me lay spring’s pageant;
green pennons waving, dainty maids curtseying, and a host of
joyous yellow trumpeters proclaiming ‘Victory’ to an
awakened earth. They range in serried ranks right down to
the river, so that a man must walk warily to reach the
water’s edge where they stand gazing down at themselves in
fairest semblance like their most tragic progenitor, and, rising
from the bright grass in their thousands, stretch away until they
melt in a golden cloud at the far end of the misty mead.
Through the field gate and across the road I see them, starring
the steep earth bank that leads to the upper copse, gleaming like
pale flames against the dark tree-boles. There they have
but frail tenure; here, in the meadows, they reign supreme.</p>
<p>At the upper end of the field the river provides yet closer
sanctuary for these children of the spring. Held in its
embracing arms lies an island long and narrow, some thirty feet
by twelve, a veritable untrod Eldorado, glorious in gold from end
to end, a fringe of reeds by the water’s edge, and save for
that—daffodils. A great oak stands at the
meadow’s neck, an oak with gnarled and wandering roots
where a man may rest, for it is bare of daffodils save for a
group of three, and a solitary one apart growing close to the old
tree’s side. I sat down by my lonely little sister,
blue sky overhead, green grass at my feet decked, like the
pastures of the Blessèd, in glorious sheen; a sea of
triumphant, golden heads tossing blithely back as the wind swept
down to play with them at his pleasure.</p>
<p>It was all mine to have and to hold without severing a single
slender stem or harbouring a thought of covetousness; mine, as
the whole earth was mine, to appropriate to myself without the
burden and bane of worldly possession. “Thou sayest
that I am—a King,” said the Lord before Pilate, and
“My kingdom is not of this world.” We who are
made kings after His likeness possess all things, not after this
world’s fashion but in proportion to our poverty; and when
we cease to toil and spin, are arrayed as the lilies, in a glory
transcending Solomon’s. Bride Poverty—she who
climbed the Cross with Christ—stretched out eager hands to
free us from our chains, but we flee from her, and lay up
treasure against her importunity, while Amytas on his seaweed bed
weeps tears of pure pity for crave-mouth Cæsar of great
possessions.</p>
<p>Presently another of spring’s lovers cried across the
water “Cuckoo, cuckoo,” and the voice of the stream
sang joyously in unison. It is free from burden, this merry
little river, and neither weir nor mill bars its quick way to the
sea as it completes the eternal circle, lavishing gifts of
coolness and refreshment on the children of the meadows.</p>
<p>It has its birth on the great lone moor, cradled in a
wonderful peat-smelling bog, with a many-hued coverlet of soft
mosses—pale gold, orange, emerald, tawny, olive and white,
with the red stain of sun-dew and tufted cotton-grass.
Under the old grey rocks which watch it rise, yellow-eyed
tormantil stars the turf, and bids “Godspeed” to the
little child of earth and sky. Thus the journey begins; and
with ever-increasing strength the stream carves a way through the
dear brown peat, wears a fresh wrinkle on the patient stones, and
patters merrily under a clapper bridge which spanned its breadth
when the mistletoe reigned and Bottor, the grim rock idol,
exacted the toll of human life that made him great. On and
on goes the stream, for it may not stay; leaving of its freshness
with the great osmunda that stretches eager roots towards the
running water; flowing awhile with a brother stream, to part
again east and west as each takes up his separate burden of
service—my friend to cherish the lower meadows in their
flowery joyance—and so by the great sea-gate back to sky
and earth again.</p>
<p>The river of God is full of water. The streets of the
City are pure gold. Verily, here also having nothing we
possess all things.</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p>The air was keen and still as I walked back in the early
evening, and a daffodil light was in the sky as if Heaven
mirrored back earth’s radiance. Near the station some
children flitted past, like little white miller moths homing
through the dusk. As I climbed the hill the moon rode high
in a golden field—it was daffodils to the last.</p>
<h3><a name="page101"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
101</span>CHAPTER V</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> seagulls from the upper reaches
pass down the river in sober steady flight seeking the open
sea. I shall miss the swoop and circle of silver wings in
the sunlight and the plaintive call which sounds so strangely
away from rock and shore, but it is good to know that they have
gone from mudbank and murky town back to the free airs of their
inheritance, to the shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling
crest of the wind-beaten waves, to brood again over the great
ocean of a world’s tears.</p>
<p>My little tree is gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of
promise. The sparrows busied with nest-building in the
neighbouring pipes and gutters use it for a vantage ground, and
crowd there in numbers, each little beak sealed with long golden
straw or downy feather.</p>
<p>The river is heavy with hay barges, the last fruits of
winter’s storehouse; the lengthening days slowly and
steadily oust the dark; the air is loud with a growing clamour of
life: spring is not only proclaimed, but on this Feast she is
crowned, and despite the warring wind the days bring their meed
of sunshine. We stand for a moment at the meeting of the
ways, the handclasp of Winter and Spring, of Sleep and Wakening,
of Life and Death; and there is between them not even the thin
line which Rabbi Jochanan on his death-bed beheld as all that
divided hell from heaven.</p>
<p>“<i>Sphæra cujus centrum ubique</i>,
<i>circumferentia nullibus</i>,” was said of Mercury, that
messenger of the gods who marshalled reluctant spirits to the
Underworld; and for Mercury we may write Life with Death as its
great sacrament of brotherhood and release, to be dreaded only as
we dread to partake unworthily of great benefits. Like all
sacraments it has its rightful time and due solemnities; the
horror and sin of suicide lie in the presumption of free will,
the forestalling of a gift,—the sin of Eve in Paradise, who
took that which might only be given at the hand of the
Lord. It has too its physical pains, but they are those of
a woman in travail, and we remember them no more for joy that a
child-man is born into the world naked and not ashamed: beholding
ourselves as we are we shall see also the leaves of the Tree of
Life set for the healing of the nations.</p>
<p>We are slowly, very slowly, abandoning our belief in sudden
and violent transitions for a surer and fuller acceptance of the
doctrine of evolution; but most of us still draw a sharp line of
demarcation between this world and the next, and expect a radical
change in ourselves and our surroundings, a break in the chain of
continuity entirely contrary to the teaching of nature and
experience. In the same way we cling to the specious
untruth that we can begin over and over again in this world,
forgetting that while our sorrow and repentance bring sacramental
gifts of grace and strength, God Himself cannot, by His own
limitation, rewrite the Past. We are in our sorrow that
which we have made ourselves in our sin; our temptations are
there as well as the way of escape. We are in the image of
God. We create our world, our undying selves, our heaven,
or our hell. “<i>Qui creavit te sine te non salvabit
te sine te</i>.” It is stupendous, magnificent, and
most appalling. A man does not change as he crosses the
threshold of the larger room. His personality remains the
same, although the expression of it may be altered. Here we
have material bodies in a material world—there, perhaps,
ether bodies in an ether world. There is no indecency in
reasonable speculation and curiosity about the life to
come. One end of the thread is between our fingers, but we
are haunted for the most part by the snap of Atropos’
shears.</p>
<p>Socrates faced death with the magnificent calm bred of
dignified familiarity. He had built for himself a desired
heaven of colour, light, and precious stones—the
philosophic formula of those who set the spiritual above the
material, and worship truth in the beauty of holiness. He
is not troubled by doubts or regrets, for the path of the just
lies plain before his face. He forbids mourning and
lamentations as out of place, obeys minutely and cheerily the
directions of his executioner, and passes with unaffected dignity
to the apprehension of that larger truth for which he had
constantly prepared himself. His friends may bury him
provided they will remember they are not burying Socrates; and
that all things may be done decently and in order, a cock must go
to Æsculapius.</p>
<p>Long before, in the days of the Captivity, there lived in
godless, blood-shedding Nineveh an exiled Jew whose father had
fallen from the faith. He was a simple man, child-like and
direct; living the careful, kindly life of an orthodox Jew,
suffering many persecutions for conscience’ sake, and in
constant danger of death. He narrates the story of his life
and of the blindness which fell on him, with gentle placidity,
and checks the exuberance of his more emotional wife with the
assurance of untroubled faith. Finally, when his pious
expectations are fulfilled, his sight restored, and his son
prosperously established beside him, he breaks into a prayer of
rejoicing which reveals the secret of his confident
content. He made use of two great faculties: the sense of
proportion, which enabled him to apprise life and its accidents
justly, and the gift of in-seeing, which led Socrates after him,
and Blessed John in lonely exile on Patmos, to look through the
things temporal to the hidden meanings of eternity.</p>
<p>“Let my soul bless God the great King,” he cries;
and looks away past the present distress; past the Restoration
which was to end in fresh scattering and confusion; past the
dream of gold, and porphyry, and marble defaced by the eagles and
emblems of the conqueror; until his eyes are held by the
Jerusalem of God, “built up with sapphires, and emeralds,
and precious stones,” with battlements of pure gold, and
the cry of ‘Alleluia’ in her streets.</p>
<p>Many years later, when he was very aged, he called his son to
him and gave him as heritage his own simple rule of life, adding
but one request: “Keep thou the law and the commandments,
and shew thyself merciful and just, that it may go well with
thee. . . . Consider what alms doeth, and how righteousness doth
deliver. . . . And bury me decently, and thy mother with
me.” Having so said, he went his way quietly and
contentedly to the Jerusalem of his heart.</p>
<p>It is the simple note of familiarity that is wanting in us;
that by which we link world with world. Once, years ago, I
sat by the bedside of a dying man in a wretched garret in the
East End. He was entirely ignorant, entirely quiescent, and
entirely uninterested. The minister of a neighbouring
chapel came to see him and spoke to him at some length of the
need for repentance and the joys of heaven. After he had
gone my friend lay staring restlessly at the mass of decrepit
broken chimney pots which made his horizon. At last he
spoke, and there was a new note in his voice:—</p>
<p>“Ee said as ’ow there were golding streets in them
parts. I ain’t no ways particler wot they’re
made of, but it’ll feel natral like if there’s
chimleys too.”</p>
<p>The sun stretched a sudden finger and painted the chimney pots
red and gold against the smoke-dimmed sky, and with his face
alight with surprised relief my friend died.</p>
<p>We are one with the earth, one in sin, one in
redemption. It is the fringe of the garment of God.
“If I may but touch the hem,” said a certain
woman.</p>
<p>On the great Death-day which shadows the early spring with a
shadow of which it may be said <i>Umbra Dei est Lux</i>, the
earth brought gifts of grief, the fruit of the curse, barren
thorns, hollow reed, and the wood of the cross; the sea made
offering of Tyrian purple; the sky veiled her face in great
darkness, while the nation of priests crucified for the last time
their Paschal lamb. “I will hear, saith the Lord; I
will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth, and the
earth shall hear the corn and wine and oil, and they shall hear
Jezreel, and I will sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have
mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy, and I will say unto
them which were not my people, ‘Thou art my people,’
and they shall say ‘Thou art my God.’”</p>
<p>The second Adam stood in the garden with quickening feet, and
all the earth pulsed and sang for joy of the new hope and the new
life quickening within her, to be hers through the pains of
travail, the pangs of dissolution. The Tree of Life bears
Bread and Wine—food of the wayfaring man. The day of
divisions is past, the day of unity has dawned. One has
risen from the dead, and in the Valley of Achor stands wide the
Door of Hope—the Sacrament of Death.</p>
<blockquote><p>Scio Domine, et vere scio . . . quia non sum
dignus accedere ad tantum mysterium propter nimia peccata mea et
infinitas negligentias meas. Sed scio . . . quia tu potes
me facere dignum.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3><a name="page111"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
111</span>CHAPTER VI</h3>
<p>“<span class="smcap">Anytus</span> and Meletus can kill
me, but they cannot hurt me,” said Socrates; and Governor
Sancho, with all the itch of newly-acquired authority, could not
make the young weaver of steel-heads for lances sleep in
prison. In the Vision of Er the souls passed straight
forward under the throne of necessity, and out into the plains of
forgetfulness, where they must severally drink of the river of
unmindfulness whose waters cannot be held in any vessel.
The throne, the plain, and the river are still here, but in the
distance rise the great lone heavenward hills, and the wise among
us no longer ask of the gods Lethe, but rather remembrance.
Necessity can set me helpless on my back, but she cannot keep me
there; nor can four walls limit my vision. I pass out from
under her throne into the garden of God a free man, to my
ultimate beatitude or my exceeding shame. All day long this
world lies open to me; ay, and other worlds also, if I will but
have it so; and when night comes I pass into the kingdom and
power of the dark.</p>
<p>I lie through the long hours and watch my bridge, which is set
with lights across the gloom; watch the traffic which is for me
but so many passing lamps telling their tale by varying height
and brightness. I hear under my window the sprint of
over-tired horses, the rattle of uncertain wheels as the
street-sellers hasten south; the jangle of cab bells as the
theatre-goers take their homeward way; the gruff altercation of
weary men, the unmelodious song and clamorous laugh of women
whose merriment is wearier still. Then comes a time of
stillness when the light in the sky waxes and wanes, when the
cloud-drifts obscure the stars, and I gaze out into blackness set
with watching eyes. No sound comes from without but the
voice of the night-wind and the cry of the hour. The clock
on the mantelpiece ticks imperatively, for a check has fallen on
the familiarity which breeds a disregard of common things, and a
reason has to be sought for each sound which claims a
hearing. The pause is wonderful while it lasts, but it is
not for long. The working world awakes, the poorer brethren
take up the burden of service; the dawn lights the sky;
remembrance cries an end to forgetting.</p>
<p>Sometimes in the country on a night in early summer you may
shut the cottage door to step out into an immense darkness which
palls heaven and earth. Going forward into the embrace of
the great gloom, you are as a babe swaddled by the hands of night
into helpless quiescence. Your feet tread an unseen path,
your hands grasp at a void, or shrink from the contact they
cannot realise; your eyes are holden; your voice would die in
your throat did you seek to rend the veil of that impenetrable
silence.</p>
<p>Shut in by the intangible dark, we are brought up against
those worlds within worlds blotted out by our concrete daily
life. The working of the great microcosm at which we peer
dimly through the little window of science; the wonderful,
breathing earth; the pulsing, throbbing sap; the growing
fragrance shut in the calyx of to-morrow’s flower; the
heart-beat of a sleeping world that we dream that we know; and
around, above, and interpenetrating all, the world of dreams, of
angels and of spirits.</p>
<p>It was this world which Jacob saw on the first night of his
exile, and again when he wrestled in Peniel until the break of
day. It was this world which Elisha saw with open eyes;
which Job knew when darkness fell on him; which Ezekiel gazed
into from his place among the captives; which Daniel beheld as he
stood alone by the great river, the river Hiddekel.</p>
<p>For the moment we have left behind the realm of question and
explanation, of power over matter and the exercise of bodily
faculties; and passed into darkness alight with visions we cannot
see, into silence alive with voices we cannot hear. Like
helpless men we set our all on the one thing left us, and lift up
our hearts, knowing that we are but a mere speck among a myriad
worlds, yet greater than the sum of them; having our roots in the
dark places of the earth, but our branches in the sweet airs of
heaven.</p>
<p>It is the material counterpart of the ‘Night of the
Soul.’ We have left our house and set forth in the
darkness which paralyses those faculties that make us men in the
world of men. But surely the great mystics, with all their
insight and heavenly love, fell short when they sought freedom in
complete separateness from creation instead of in perfect unity
with it. The Greeks knew better when they flung
Ariadne’s crown among the stars, and wrote Demeter’s
grief on a barren earth, and Persephone’s joy in the
fruitful field. For the earth is gathered up in man; he is
the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.
Standing in the image of God, and clothed in the garment of God,
he lifts up priestly hands and presents the sacrifice of redeemed
earth before the throne of the All-Father. “Dust and
ashes and a house of devils,” he cries; and there comes
back for answer, “<i>Rex concupiscet decorem
tuam</i>.”</p>
<p>The Angel of Death has broad wings of silence and mystery with
which he shadows the valley where we need fear no evil, and where
the voice which speaks to us is as the “voice of doves,
tabering upon their breasts.” It is a place of
healing and preparation, of peace and refreshing after the
sharply-defined outlines of a garish day. Walking there we
learn to use those natural faculties of the soul which are
hampered by the familiarity of bodily progress, to apprehend the
truths which we have intellectually accepted. It is the
place of secrets where the humility which embraces all attainable
knowledge cries “I know not”; and while we proclaim
from the house-tops that which we have learnt, the manner of our
learning lies hid for each one of us in the sanctuary of our
souls.</p>
<p>The Egyptians, in their ancient wisdom, act in the desert a
great androsphinx, image of mystery and silence, staring from
under level brows across the arid sands of the sea-way. The
Greeks borrowed and debased the image, turning the inscrutable
into a semi-woman who asked a foolish riddle, and hurled herself
down in petulant pride when Œdipus answered aright.
So we, marring the office of silence, question its mystery;
thwart ourselves with riddles of our own suggesting; and turn
away, leaving our offering but half consumed on the altar of the
unknown god. It was not the theft of fire that brought the
vengeance of heaven upon Prometheus, but the mocking
sacrifice. Orpheus lost Eurydice because he must see her
face before the appointed time. Persephone ate of the
pomegranate and hungered in gloom for the day of light which
should have been endless.</p>
<p>The universe is full of miracle and mystery; the darkness and
silence are set for a sign we dare not despise. The pall of
night lifts, leaving us engulphed in the light of immensity under
a tossing heaven of stars. The dawn breaks, but it does not
surprise us, for we have watched from the valley and seen the
pale twilight. Through the wondrous Sabbath of faithful
souls, the long day of rosemary and rue, the light brightens in
the East; and we pass on towards it with quiet feet and opening
eyes, bearing with us all of the redeemed earth that we have made
our own, until we are fulfilled in the sunrise of the great
Easter Day, and the peoples come from north and south and east
and west to the City which lieth foursquare—the Beatific
Vision of God.</p>
<blockquote><p>Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas<br />
Cuius pax iugis et summa iucunditas;<br />
Ubi non prævenit rem desiderium,<br />
Nec desiderio minus est præmium.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2><a name="page119"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 119</span>AT
THE WHITE GATE</h2>
<h3><a name="page121"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
121</span>CHAPTER I</h3>
<p>A <span class="smcap">great</span> joy has come to me; one of
those unexpected gifts which life loves to bestow after we have
learnt to loose our grip of her. I am back in my own place
very near my road—the white gate lies within my distant
vision; near the lean grey Downs which keep watch and ward
between the country and the sea; very near, nay, in the lap of
Mother Earth, for as I write I am lying on a green carpet,
powdered yellow and white with the sun’s own flowers;
overhead a great sycamore where the bees toil and sing; and
sighing shimmering poplars golden grey against the blue.
The day of Persephone has dawned for me, and I, set free like
Demeter’s child, gladden my eyes with this foretaste of
coming radiance, and rest my tired sense with the scent and sound
of home. Away down the meadow I hear the early scythe song,
and the warm air is fragrant with the fallen grass. It has
its own message for me as I lie here, I who have obtained yet one
more mercy, and the burden of it is life, not death.</p>
<p>I remember when, taking a grace from my road, I helped to mow
Farmer Marler’s ten-acre field, rich in ripe upstanding
grass. The mechanism of the ancient reaper had given way
under the strain of the home meadows, and if this crop was to be
saved it must be by hand. I have kept the record of those
days of joyous labour under a June sky. Men were hard to
get in our village; old Dodden, who was over seventy, volunteered
his services—he had done yeoman work with the scythe in his
youth—and two of the farm hands with their master completed
our strength.</p>
<p>We took our places under a five o’clock morning sky, and
the larks cried down to us as we stood knee-deep in the fragrant
dew-steeped grass, each man with his gleaming scythe poised ready
for its sweeping swing. Old Dodden led by right of age and
ripe experience; bent like a sickle, brown and dry as a nut, his
face a tracery of innumerable wrinkles, he has never ailed a day,
and the cunning of his craft was still with him. At first
we worked stiffly, unreadily, but soon the monotonous motion
possessed us with its insistent rhythm, and the grass bowed to
each sibilant swish and fell in sweet-smelling swathes at our
feet. Now and then a startled rabbit scurried through the
miniature forest to vanish with white flick of tail in the
tangled hedge; here and there a mother lark was discovered
sitting motionless, immovable upon her little brood; but save for
these infrequent incidents we paced steadily on with no speech
save the cry of the hone on the steel and the swish of the
falling swathes. The sun rose high in the heaven and burnt
on bent neck and bare and aching arms, the blood beat and drummed
in my veins with the unwonted posture and exercise; I worked as a
man who sees and hears in a mist. Once, as I paused to whet
my scythe, my eye caught the line of the untroubled hills strong
and still in the broad sunshine; then to work again in the
labouring, fertile valley.</p>
<p>Rest time came, and wiping the sweat from brow and blade we
sought the welcome shadow of the hedge and the cool sweet oatmeal
water with which the wise reaper quenches his thirst.
Farmer Marler hastened off to see with master-eye that all went
well elsewhere; the farm men slept tranquilly, stretched at full
length, clasped hands for pillow; and old Dodden, sitting with
crooked fingers interlaced to check their trembling betrayal of
old age, told how in his youth he had “swep” a
four-acre field single-handed in three days—an almost
impossible feat—and of the first reaping machine in these
parts, and how it brought, to his thinking, the ruin of
agricultural morals with it. “’Tis again
nature,” he said, “the Lard gave us the land
an’ the seed, but ’Ee said that a man should
sweat. Where’s the sweat drivin’ round
wi’ two horses cuttin’ the straw down an’
gatherin’ it again, wi’ scarce a hand’s turn
i’ the day’s work?”</p>
<p>Old Dodden’s high-pitched quavering voice rose and fell,
mournful as he surveyed the present, vehement as he recorded the
heroic past. He spoke of the rural exodus and shook his
head mournfully. “We old ’uns were content
wi’ earth and the open sky like our feythers before us, but
wi’ the children ’tis first machines to save
doin’ a hand’s turn o’ honest work, an’
then land an’ sky ain’t big enough seemin’ly,
nor grand enough; it must be town an’ a paved street,
an’ they sweat their lives out atwixt four walls an’
call it seein’ life—’tis death an’ worse
comes to the most of ’em. Ay, ’tis better to
stay by the land, as the Lard said, till time comes to lie under
it.” I looked away across the field where the hot air
throbbed and quivered, and the fallen grass, robbed already of
its freshness, lay prone at the feet of its upstanding
fellows. It is quite useless to argue with old Dodden; he
only shakes his head and says firmly, “An old man,
seventy-five come Martinmass knows more o’ life than a
young chap, stands ter reason”; besides, his epitome of the
town life he knows nothing of was a just one as far as it went;
and his own son is the sweeper of a Holborn crossing, and many
other things that he should not be; but that is the
parson’s secret and mine.</p>
<p>We took rank again and swept steadily on through the hot still
hours into the evening shadows, until the sinking sun set a
<i>Gloria</i> to the psalm of another working day. Only a
third of the field lay mown, for we were not skilled labourers to
cut our acre a day; I saw it again that night under the moonlight
and the starlight, wrapped in a shroud of summer’s
mist.</p>
<p>The women joined us on the third day to begin haymaking, and
the air was fragrant of tossed and sun-dried grass. One of
them walked apart from the rest, without interest or freedom of
movement; her face, sealed and impassive, was aged beyond the
vigour of her years. I knew the woman by sight, and her
history by hearsay. We have a code of morals here—not
indeed peculiar to this place or people—that a wedding is
‘respectable’ if it precedes child-birth by a bare
month, tolerable, and to be recognised, should it succeed the
same by less than a year (provided the pair are not living in the
same village); but the child that has never been
‘fathered’ and the wife without a ring are
‘anathema,’ and such in one was Elizabeth
Banks. She went away a maid and came back a year ago with a
child and without a name. Her mother was dead, her father
and the village would have none of her: the homing instinct is
very strong, or she would scarcely have returned, knowing the
traditions of the place. Old Dodden, seeing her, grumbled
to me in the rest-time.—“Can’t think what the
farmer wants wi’ Lizzie Banks in ’is
field.” “She must live,” I said,
“and by all showing her life is a hard one.”
“She ’ad the makin’ of ’er bed,” he
went on, obstinately. “What for do she bring her
disgrace home, wi’ a fatherless brat for all folks to
see? We don’t want them sort in our village.
The Lord’s hand is heavy, an’ a brat’s a curse
that cannot be hid.”</p>
<p>When tea-time came I crossed the field to look for a missing
hone, and saw Elizabeth Banks far from the other women, busied
with a bundle under the hedge. I passed close on my search,
and lo! the bundle was a little boy. He lay smiling and
stretching, fighting the air with his small pink fists, while the
wind played with his curls. “A curse that cannot be
hid,” old Dodden had said. The mother knelt a moment,
devouring him with her eyes, then snatched him to her with aching
greed and covered him with kisses. I saw the poor, plain
face illumined, transfigured, alive with a mother’s love,
and remembered how the word came once to a Hebrew
prophet:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Say unto your brethren Ammi, and to your sisters
Ruhamah.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The evening sky was clouding fast, the sound of rain was in
the air; Farmer Marler shook his head as he looked at the grass
lying in ordered rows. I was the last to leave, and as I
lingered at the gate drinking in the scent of the field and the
cool of the coming rain, the first drops fell on my upturned face
and kissed the poor dry swathes at my feet, and I was glad.</p>
<p>David, child of the fields and the sheepfolds, his kingship
laid aside, sees through the parted curtain of the years the
advent of his greater Son, and cries in his psalm of the
hilltops, his last prophetic prayer:—</p>
<blockquote><p>He shall come down like rain upon the mown
grass.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even so He came, and shall still come. Three days ago
the field, in its pageant of fresh beauty, with shimmering blades
and tossing banners, greeted sun and shower alike with joy for
the furtherance of its life and purpose; now, laid low, it hears
the young grass whisper the splendour of its coming green; and
the poor swathes are glad at the telling, but full of grief for
their own apparent failure. Then in great pity comes the
rain, the rain of summer, gentle, refreshing, penetrating, and
the swathes are comforted, for they know that standing to greet
or prostrate to suffer, the consolations of the former and the
latter rain are still their own, with tender touch and cool
caress. Then, once more parched by the sun, they are borne
away to the new service their apparent failure has fitted them
for; and perhaps as they wait in the dark for the unknown that is
still to come they hear sometimes the call of the distant rain,
and at the sound the dry sap stirs afresh—they are not
forgotten and can wait.</p>
<p>“<i>Say unto your sisters Ruhamah</i>,” cries the
prophet.</p>
<p>“<i>He shall come down like rain on the mown
grass</i>,” sang the poet of the sheepfolds.</p>
<p>“<i>My ways are not your ways</i>, <i>saith the
Lord</i>.”</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p>I remember how I went home along the damp sweet-scented lanes
through the grey mist of the rain, thinking of the mown field and
Elizabeth Banks and many, many more; and that night, when the sky
had cleared and the nightingale sang, I looked out at the moon
riding at anchor, a silver boat in a still blue sea ablaze with
the headlights of the stars, and the saying of the herdsman of
Tekoa came to me—as it has come oftentimes
since:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion,
and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the
day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the sea and
poureth them out upon the face of earth; the Lord is His
name.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3><a name="page132"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
132</span>CHAPTER II</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">This</span> garden is an epitome of peace;
sun and wind, rain, flowers, and birds gather me into the
blessedness of their active harmony. The world holds no
wish for me, now that I have come home to die with my own people,
for verify I think that the sap of grass and trees must run in my
veins, so steady is their pull upon my heart-strings.
London claimed all my philosophy, but the country gives all, and
asks of me only the warm receptivity of a child in its
mother’s arms.</p>
<p>When I lie in my cool light room on the garden level, I look
across the bright grass—<i>il verde smalto</i>—to a
great red rose bush in lavish disarray against the dark
cypress. Near by, amid a tangle of many-hued corn-flowers I
see the promise of coming lilies, the sudden crimson of a
solitary pæony; and in lowlier state against the poor
parched earth glow the golden cups of the eschseholtzias.
Beyond the low hedge lies pasture bright with buttercups, where
the cattle feed. Farther off, where the scythe has been
busy, are sheep, clean and shorn, with merry, well-grown lambs;
and in the farthest field I can see the great horses moving in
slow steady pace as the farmer turns his furrow.</p>
<p>The birds are noisy comrades and old friends, from the lark
which chants the dew-steeped morning, to the nightingale that
breaks the silence of the most wonderful nights. I hear the
wisdom of the rooks in the great elms; the lifting lilt of the
linnet, and the robin’s quaint little summer song.
The starlings chatter ceaselessly, their queer strident voices
harsh against the melodious gossip of the other birds; the
martins shrill softly as they swoop to and fro busied with their
nesting under the caves; thrush and blackbird vie in friendly
rivalry like the Meister-singer of old; sometimes I hear the
drawling cry of a peacock strayed from the great house, or the
laugh of the woodpecker; and at night the hunting note of the owl
reaches me as he sweeps by in search of prey.</p>
<p>To-day I am out again; and the great sycamore showers honey
and flowers on me as I lie beneath it. Sometimes a bee
falls like an over-ripe fruit, and waits awhile to clean his
pollen-coated legs ere he flies home to discharge his
burden. He is too busy to be friendly, but his great
velvety cousin is much more sociable, and stays for a gentle rub
between his noisy shimmering wings, and a nap in the hollow of my
hand, for he is an idle friendly soul with plenty of time at his
own disposal and no responsibilities. Looking across I can
watch the martins at work; they have a starling and a sparrow for
near neighbours in the wooden gutter. One nest is already
complete all but the coping, the other two are a-building: I
wonder whether I or they will be first to go south through the
mist.</p>
<p>This great tree is a world in itself, and the denizens appear
full of curiosity as to the Gulliver who has taken up his abode
beneath it. Pale green caterpillars and spiders of all
sizes come spinning down to visit me, and have to be persuaded
with infinite difficulty to ascend their threads again.
There are flies with beautiful iridescent wings, beetles of all
shapes, some of them like tiny jewels in the sunlight.
Their nomenclature is a sealed book to me; of their life and
habits I know nothing; yet this is but a little corner of the
cosmos I am leaving, and I feel not so much desire for the beauty
to come, as a great longing to open my eyes a little wider during
the time which remains to me in this beautiful world of
God’s making, where each moment tells its own tale of
active, progressive life in which there is no undoing.
Nature knows naught of the web of Penelope, that acme of anxious
pathetic waiting, but goes steadily on in ever widening circle
towards the fulfilment of the mystery of God.</p>
<p>There are, I take it, two master-keys to the secrets of the
universe, viewed <i>sub specie æternitatis</i>, the
Incarnation of God, and the Personality of Man; with these it is
true for us as for the pantheistic little man of contemptible
speech, that “all things are ours,” yea, even unto
the third heaven.</p>
<p>I have lost my voracious appetite for books; their language is
less plain than scent and song and the wind in the trees; and for
me the clue to the next world lies in the wisdom of earth rather
than in the learning of men. “<i>Libera me ab fuscina
Hophni</i>,” prayed the good Bishop fearful of religious
greed. I know too much, not too little; it is realisation
that I lack, wherefore I desire these last days to confirm in
myself the sustaining goodness of God, the love which is our
continuing city, the New Jerusalem whose length, breadth, and
height are all one. It is a time of exceeding peace.
There is a place waiting for me under the firs in the quiet
churchyard; thanks to my poverty I have no worldly anxieties or
personal dispositions; and I am rich in friends, many of them
unknown to me, who lavishly supply my needs and make it ideal to
live on the charity of one’s fellow-men. I am most
gladly in debt to all the world; and to Earth, my mother, for her
great beauty.</p>
<p>I can never remember the time when I did not love her, this
mother of mine with her wonderful garments and ordered
loveliness, her tender care and patient bearing of man’s
burden. In the earliest days of my lonely childhood I used
to lie chin on hand amid the milkmaids, red sorrel, and heavy
spear-grass listening to her many voices, and above all to the
voice of the little brook which ran through the meadows where I
used to play: I think it has run through my whole life also, to
lose itself at last, not in the great sea but in the river that
maketh glad the City of God. Valley and plain, mountain and
fruitful field; the lark’s song and the speedwell in the
grass; surely a man need not sigh for greater loveliness until he
has read something more of this living letter, and knelt before
that earth of which he is the only confusion.</p>
<p>It is a grave matter that the word religion holds such away
among us, making the very gap seem to yawn again which the
Incarnation once and for ever filled full. We have banished
the protecting gods that ruled in river and mountain, tree and
grove; we have gainsayed for the most part folk-lore and myth,
superstition and fairy-tale, evil only in their abuse. We
have done away with mystery, or named it deceit. All this
we have done in an enlightened age, but despite this policy of
destruction we have left ourselves a belief, the grandest and
most simple the world has ever known, which sanctifies the water
that is shed by every passing cloud; and gathers up in its great
central act vineyard and cornfield, proclaiming them to be that
Life of the world without which a man is dead while he
liveth. Further, it is a belief whose foundations are the
most heavenly mystery of the Trinity, but whose centre is a
little Child: it sets a price upon the head of the sparrow, and
reckons the riches of this world at their true value; it points
to a way of holiness where the fool shall not err, and the sage
may find the realisation of his far-seeking; and yet, despite its
inclusiveness, it is a belief which cannot save the birds from
destruction, the silent mountains from advertisement, or the
stream from pollution, in an avowedly Christian land. John
Ruskin scolded and fought and did yeoman service, somewhat
hindered by his over-good conceit of himself; but it is not the
worship of beauty we need so much as the beauty of
holiness. Little by little the barrier grows and
‘religion’ becomes a <i>rule</i> of life, not life
itself, although the Bride stands ready to interpret, likened in
her loveliness to the chief treasures of her
handmaid-Earth. There is more truth in the believing cry,
“Come from thy white cliffs, O Pan!” than in the
religion that measures a man’s life by the letter of the
Ten Commandments, and erects itself as judge and ruler over him,
instead of throwing open the gate of the garden where God walks
with man from morning until morning.</p>
<p>As I write the sun is setting; in the pale radiance of the sky
above his glory there dawns the evening star; and earth like a
tired child turns her face to the bosom of the night.</p>
<h3><a name="page141"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
141</span>CHAPTER III</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">Once</span> again I have paid a rare visit
to my tree to find many things changed since my last sojourn
there. The bees are silent, for the honey-laden flowers of
the sycamore are gone and in their place hang dainty two-fold
keys. The poplar has lost its metallic shimmer, the
chestnut its tall white candles; and the sound of the wind in the
fully-leaved branches is like the sighing of the sea. The
martins’ nests are finished, and one is occupied by a
shrill-voiced brood; but for the most part the birds’
parental cares are over, and the nestlings in bold flight no
longer flutter on inefficient wings across the lawn with
clamorous, open bill. The robins show promise of their
ruddy vests, the slim young thrush is diligently practising
maturer notes, and soon Maid June will have fled.</p>
<p>It is such a wonderful world that I cannot find it in my heart
to sigh for fresh beauty amid these glories of the Lord on which
I look, seeing men as trees walking, in my material impotence
which awaits the final anointing. The marigolds with their
orange suns, the lilies’ white flame, the
corncockle’s blue crown of many flowers, the
honeysuckle’s horn of fragrance—I can paraphrase
them, name, class, dissect them; and then, save for the purposes
of human intercourse, I stand where I stood before, my world
bounded by my capacity, the secret of colour and fragrance still
kept. It is difficult to believe that the second lesson
will not be the sequence of the first, and death prove a
“feast of opening eyes” to all these wonders, instead
of the heavy-lidded slumber to which we so often liken it.
“Earth to earth?” Yes, “dust thou art,
and unto dust thou shalt return,” but what of the
rest? What of the folded grave clothes, and the Forty
Days? If the next state be, as it well might, space of four
dimensions, and the first veil which will lift for me be the
material one, then the “other” world which is hidden
from our grosser material organism will lie open, and declare
still further to my widening eyes and unstopped ears the glory
and purpose of the manifold garment of God. Knowledge will
give place to understanding in that second chamber of the House
of Wisdom and Love. Revelation is always measured by
capacity: “Open thy mouth wide,” and it shall be
filled with a satisfaction that in itself is desire.</p>
<p>There is a child here, a happy quiet little creature holding
gently to its two months of life. Sometimes they lay it
beside me, I the more helpless of the two—perhaps the more
ignorant—and equally dependent for the supply of my
smallest need. I feel indecently large as I survey its
minute perfections and the tiny balled fist lying in my great
palm. The little creature fixes me with the wise wide stare
of a soul in advance of its medium of expression; and I, gazing
back at the mystery in those eyes, feel the thrill of contact
between my worn and sustained self and the innocence of a little
white child. It is wonderful to watch a woman’s
rapturous familiarity with these newcomers. A man’s
love has far more awe in it, and the passionate animal instinct
of defence is wanting in him. “A woman shall be saved
through the child-bearing,” said St Paul; not necessarily
her own, but by participation in the great act of motherhood
which is the crown and glory of her sex. She is the
“prisoner of love,” caught in a net of her own
weaving; held fast by little hands which rule by impotence,
pursued by feet the swifter for their faltering.</p>
<p>It seems incredible that this is what a woman will barter for
the right to “live her own life”—surely the
most empty of desires. Man—<i>vir</i>,
woman—<i>femina</i>, go to make up <i>the</i>
man—<i>homo</i>. There can be no comparison, no
rivalry between them; they are the complement of each other, and
a little child shall lead them. It is easy to understand
that desire to shelter under the dear mantle of motherhood which
has led to one of the abuses of modern Romanism. I met an
old peasant couple at Bornhofen who had tramped many weary miles
to the famous shrine of Our Lady to plead for their only
son. They had a few pence saved for a candle, and
afterwards when they told me their tale the old woman heaved a
sigh of relief, “Es wird bald gut gehen: Die da, Sie
versteht,” and I saw her later paying a farewell visit to
the great understanding Mother whom she could trust.
Superstitious misapprehension if you will, but also the
recognition of a divine principle.</p>
<p>It was Behmen, I believe, who cried with the breath of
inspiration, “Only when I know God shall I know
myself”; and so man remains the last of all the riddles, to
be solved it may be only in Heaven’s perfection and the
light of the Beatific Vision. “Know thyself” is
a vain legend, the more so when emphasised by a skull; and so I
company with a friend and a stranger, and looking across at the
white gate I wonder concerning the quiet pastures and still
waters that lie beyond, even as Brother Ambrose wondered long
years ago in the monastery by the forest.</p>
<blockquote><p>The Brother Ambrose was ever a saintly man
approved of God and beloved by the Brethren. To him one
night, as he lay abed in the dormitory, came the word of the
Lord, saying, “Come, and I will show thee the Bride, the
Lamb’s wife.” And Brother Ambrose arose and was
carried to a great and high mountain, even as in the Vision of
Blessed John. ’Twas a still night of many stars, and
Brother Ambrose, looking up, saw a radiant path in the heavens;
and lo! the stars gathered themselves together on either side
until they stood as walls of light, and the four winds lapped him
about as in a mantle and bore him towards the wondrous gleaming
roadway. Then between the stars came the Holy City with
roof and pinnacle aflame, and walls aglow with such colours as no
earthly limner dreams of, and much gold. Brother Ambrose
beheld the Gates of Pearl, and by every gate an angel with wings
of snow and fire, and a face no man dare look on because of its
exceeding radiance.</p>
<p>Then as Brother Ambrose stretched out his arms because of his
great longing, a little grey cloud came out of the north and hung
between the walls of light, so that he no longer beheld the
Vision, but only heard a sound as of a great multitude crying
‘Alleluia’; and suddenly the winds came about him
again, and lo! he found himself in his bed in the dormitory, and
it was midnight, for the bell was ringing to Matins; and he rose
and went down with the rest. But when the Brethren left the
choir Brother Ambrose stayed fast in his place, hearing and
seeing nothing because of the Vision of God; and at Lauds they
found him and told the Prior.</p>
<p>He questioned Brother Ambrose of the matter, and when he heard
the Vision bade him limn the Holy City even as he had seen it;
and the Precentor gave him uterine vellum and much fine gold and
what colours he asked for the work. Then Brother Ambrose
limned a wondrous fair city of gold with turrets and spires; and
he inlaid blue for the sapphire, and green for the emerald, and
vermilion where the city seemed aflame with the glory of God; but
the angels he could not limn, nor could he set the rest of the
colours as he saw them, nor the wall of stars on either hand; and
Brother Ambrose fell sick because of the exceeding great longing
he had to limn the Holy City, and was very sad; but the Prior
bade him thank God, and remember the infirmity of the flesh,
which, like the little grey cloud, veiled Jerusalem to his
sight.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I write the monastery bell hard by rings out across the
lark’s song. They still have time for visions behind
those guarding walls, but for most of us it is not so. We
let slip the ideal for what we call the real, and the golden
dreams vanish while we clutch at phantoms: we speed along
life’s pathway, counting to the full the sixty minutes of
every hour, yet the race is not to the swift nor the battle to
the strong. Lying here in this quiet backwater it is hard
to believe that the world without is turbulent with storm and
stress and the ebb and flow of uncertain tides. The little
yellow cat rolling on its back among the daisies, the staid
tortoise making a stately meal off the buttercups near me, these
are great events in this haven of peace. And yet, looking
back to the working days, I know how much goodness and loving
kindness there is under the froth and foam. If we do not
know ourselves we most certainly do not know our brethren: that
revelation awaits us, it may be, first in Heaven. To have
faith is to create; to have hope is to call down blessing; to
have love is to work miracles. Above all let us see
visions, visions of colour and light, of green fields and broad
rivers, of palaces laid with fair colours, and gardens where a
place is found for rosemary and rue.</p>
<p>It is our prerogative to be dreamers, but there will always be
men ready to offer us death for our dreams. And if it must
be so let us choose death; it is gain, not loss, and the gloomy
portal when we reach it is but a white gate, the white gate maybe
we have known all our lives barred by the tendrils of the
woodbine.</p>
<h3><a name="page150"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
150</span>CHAPTER IV</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">Rain</span>, rain, rain: the little
flagged path outside my window is a streaming way, where the
coming raindrops meet again the grey clouds whose storehouse they
have but just now left. The grass grows greener as I watch
it, the burnt patches fade, a thousand thirsty beads are uplifted
for the cooling draught.</p>
<p>The great thrush that robs the raspberry canes is busy;
yesterday he had little but dust for his guerdon, but now fresh,
juicy fruit repays him as he swings to and fro on the pliant
branches. The blackbirds and starlings find the worms an
easy prey—poor brother worm ever ready for sacrifice.
I can hear the soft expectant chatter of the family of martins
under the roof; there will be good hunting, and they know it, for
the flies are out when the rain is over, and there are clamorous
mouths awaiting. My little brown brothers, the sparrows,
remain my chief delight. Of all the birds these nestle
closest to my heart, be they grimy little cockneys or their trim
and dainty country cousins. They come day by day for their
meed of crumbs spread for them outside my window, and at this
season they eat leisurely and with good appetite, for there are
no hungry babies pestering to be fed. Very early in the
morning I hear the whirr and rustle of eager wings, and the tap,
tap, of little beaks upon the stone. The sound carries me
back, for it was the first to greet me when I rose to draw water
and gather kindling in my roadmender days; and if I slip back
another decade they survey me, reproving my laziness, from the
foot of the narrow bed in my little attic overseas.</p>
<p>Looking along the roadway that we have travelled we see the
landmarks, great and small, which have determined the direction
of our feet. For some those of childhood stand out above
all the rest; but I remember few notable ones, and those few the
emphatic chord of the universe, rather than any commerce with my
fellows. There was the night of my great disappointment,
when I was borne from my comfortable bed to see the wonders of
the moon’s eclipse. Disappointment was so great that
it sealed my lips; but, once back on my pillow, I sobbed for
grief that I had seen a wonder so far below my expectation.
Then there was a night at Whitby, when the wind made speech
impossible, and the seas rushed up and over the great lighthouse
like the hungry spirits of the deep. I like better to
remember the scent of the first cowslip field under the warm side
of the hedge, when I sang to myself for pure joy of their colour
and fragrance. Again, there were the bluebells in the
deserted quarry like the backwash of a southern sea, and below
them the miniature forest of sheltering bracken with its quaint
conceits; and, crowned above all, the day I stood on Watcombe
Down, and looked across a stretch of golden gorse and new-turned
blood-red field, the green of the headland, and beyond, the
sapphire sea.</p>
<p>Time sped, and there came a day when I first set foot on
German soil and felt the throb of its paternity, the beat of our
common Life. England is my mother, and most dearly do I
love her swelling breasts and wind-swept, salt-strewn hair.
Scotland gave me my name, with its haunting derivation handed
down by brave men; but Germany has always been to me the
Fatherland <i>par excellence</i>. True, my love is limited
to the southern provinces, with their medieval memories; for the
progressive guttural north I have little sympathy, but the Rhine
claimed me from the first, calling, calling, with that wonderful
voice which speaks of death and life, of chivalry and greed of
gold. If you would have the river’s company you
should wander, a happy solitary, along its banks, watching its
gleaming current in the early morning, its golden glory as it
answers the farewell of parting day. Then, in the silence
of the night, you can hear the wash and eddy calling one to
another, count the heart-beats of the great bearer of burdens,
and watch in the moonlight the sisters of the mist as they lament
with wringing hands the days that are gone.</p>
<p>The forests, too, are ready with story hid in the fastness of
their solitude, and it is a joy to think that those great pines,
pointing ever upwards, go for the most part to carry the sails of
great ships seeking afar under open sky. The forest holds
other wonders still. It seems but last night that I
wandered down the road which led to the little unheeded village
where I had made my temporary home. The warm-scented breath
of the pines and the stillness of the night wrapped me in great
content; the summer lightning leapt in a lambent arch across the
east, and the stars, seen dimly through the sombre tree crests,
were outrivalled by the glow-worms which shone in countless
points of light from bank and hedge; even two charcoal-burners,
who passed with friendly greeting, had wreathed their hats with
the living flame. The tiny shifting lamps were everywhere;
pale yellow, purely white, or green as the underside of a
northern wave. By day but an ugly, repellent worm; but
darkness comes, and lo, a star alight. Nature is full for
us of seeming inconsistencies and glad surprises. The
world’s asleep, say you; on your ear falls the
nightingale’s song and the stir of living creatures in bush
and brake. The mantle of night falls, and all unattended
the wind leaps up and scatters the clouds which veil the constant
stars; or in the hour of the great dark, dawn parts the curtain
with the long foregleam of the coming day. It is hard to
turn one’s back on night with her kiss of peace for tired
eye-lids, the kiss which is not sleep but its neglected
forerunner. I made my way at last down to the vine-girt
bridge asleep under the stars and up the winding stairs of the
old grey tower; and a stone’s-throw away the Rhine slipped
quietly past in the midsummer moonlight. Switzerland came
in its turn, unearthly in its white loveliness and glory of lake
and sky. But perhaps the landmark which stands out most
clearly is the solitary blue gentian which I found in the short
slippery grass of the Rigi, gazing up at the sky whose blue could
not hope to excel it. It was my first; and what need of
another, for finding one I had gazed into the mystery of
all. This side the Pass, snow and the blue of heaven; later
I entered Italy through fields of many-hued lilies, her past
glories blazoned in the flowers of the field.</p>
<p>Now it is a strangely uneventful road that leads to my White
Gate. Each day questions me as it passes; each day makes
answer for me “not yet.” There is no material
preparation to be made for this journey of mine into a far
country—a simple fact which adds to the
‘unknowableness’ of the other side. Do I travel
alone, or am I one of a great company, swift yet unhurried in
their passage? The voices of Penelope’s suitors
shrilled on the ears of Ulysses, as they journeyed to the
nether-world, like nocturnal birds and bats in the
inarticulateness of their speech. They had abused the gift,
and fled self-condemned. Maybe silence commends itself as
most suitable for the wayfarers towards the sunrise—silence
because they seek the Word—but for those hastening towards
the confusion they have wrought there falls already the sharp
oncoming of the curse.</p>
<p>While we are still here the language of worship seems far, and
yet lies very nigh; for what better note can our frail tongues
lisp than the voice of wind and sea, river and stream, those
grateful servants giving all and asking nothing, the soft whisper
of snow and rain eager to replenish, or the thunder proclaiming a
majesty too great for utterance? Here, too, stands the
angel with the censer gathering up the fragrance of teeming earth
and forest-tree, of flower and fruit, and sweetly pungent herb
distilled by sun and rain for joyful use. Here, too, come
acolytes lighting the dark with tapers—sun, moon, and
stars—gifts of the Lord that His sanctuary may stand ever
served.</p>
<p>It lies here ready to our hand, this life of adoration which
we needs must live hand in hand with earth, for has she not borne
the curse with us? But beyond the white gate and the trail
of woodbine falls the silence greater than speech, darkness
greater than light, a pause of “a little while”; and
then the touch of that healing garment as we pass to the King in
His beauty, in a land from which there is no return.</p>
<p>At the gateway then I cry you farewell.</p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROADMENDER***</p>
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