The Roadmender

“Two began, in a low voice, ‘Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake.’”

As I look round this room I feel sure Two, and Five, and Seven, have all been at work on it, and made no mistakes, for round the walls runs a frieze of squat standard rose-trees, red as red can be, and just like those that Alice saw in the Queen’s garden.  In between them are Chaucer’s name-children, prim little daisies, peering wideawake from green grass.  This same grass has a history which I have heard.  In the original stencil for the frieze it was purely conventional like the rest, and met in spikey curves round each tree; the painter, however, who was doing the work, was a lover of the fields; and feeling that such grass was a travesty, he added on his own account dainty little tussocks, and softened the hard line into a tufted carpet, the grass growing irregularly, bent at will by the wind.

The result from the standpoint of conventional art is indeed disastrous; but my sympathy and gratitude are with the painter.  I see, as he saw, the far-reaching robe of living ineffable green, of whose brilliance the eye never has too much, and in whose weft no two threads are alike; and shrink as he did from the conventionalising of that windswept glory.

The sea has its crested waves of recognisable form; the river its eddy and swirl and separate vortices; but the grass!  The wind bloweth where it listeth and the grass bows as the wind blows—“thou canst not tell whither it goeth.”  It takes no pattern, it obeys no recognised law; it is like a beautiful creature of a thousand wayward moods, and its voice is like nothing else in the wide world.  It bids you rest and bury your tired face in the green coolness, and breathe of its breath and of the breath of the good earth from which man was taken and to which he will one day return.  Then, if you lend your ear and are silent minded, you may hear wondrous things of the deep places of the earth; of life in mineral and stone as well as in pulsing sap; of a green world as the stars saw it before man trod it under foot—of the emerald which has its place with the rest in the City of God.

            “What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein,
Each to each other like, more than on earth to thought?”

It is a natural part of civilisation’s lust of re-arrangement that we should be so ready to conventionalise the beauty of this world into decorative patterns for our pilgrim tents.  It is a phase, and will melt into other phases; but it tends to the increase of artificiality, and exists not only in art but in everything.  It is no new thing for jaded sentiment to crave the spur of the unnatural, to prefer the clever imitation, to live in a Devachan where the surroundings appear that which we would have them to be; but it is an interesting record of the pulse of the present day that ‘An Englishwoman’s Love Letters’ should have taken society by storm in the way it certainly has.

It is a delightful book to leave about, with its vellum binding, dainty ribbons, and the hallmark of a great publisher’s name.  But when we seek within we find love with its thousand voices and wayward moods, its shy graces and seemly reticences, love which has its throne and robe of state as well as the garment of the beggar maid, love which is before time was, which knew the world when the stars took up their courses, presented to us in gushing outpourings, the appropriate language of a woman’s heart to the boor she delights to honour.

“It is woman who is the glory of man,” says the author of ‘The House of Wisdom and Love,’ “Regina mundi, greater, because so far the less; and man is her head, but only as he serves his queen.”  Set this sober aphorism against the school girl love-making which kisses a man’s feet and gaily refuses him the barren honour of having loved her first.

There is scant need for the apologia which precedes the letters; a few pages dispels the fear that we are prying into another’s soul.  As for the authorship, there is a woman’s influence, an artist’s poorly concealed bias in the foreign letters; and for the rest a man’s blunders—so much easier to see in another than to avoid oneself—writ large from cover to cover.  King Cophetua, who sends “profoundly grateful remembrances,” has most surely written the letters he would wish to receive.

“Mrs Meynell!” cries one reviewer, triumphantly.  Nay, the saints be good to us, what has Mrs Meynell in common with the “Englishwoman’s” language, style, or most unconvincing passion?  Men can write as from a woman’s heart when they are minded to do so in desperate earnestness—there is Clarissa Harlowe and Stevenson’s Kirstie, and many more to prove it; but when a man writes as the author of the “Love Letters” writes, I feel, as did the painter of the frieze, that pattern-making has gone too far and included that which, like the grass, should be spared such a convention.

“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess, “and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or, if you’d like to put it more simply—‘never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’”  And so by way of the Queen’s garden I come back to my room again.

My heart’s affections are still centred on my old attic, with boarded floor and white-washed walls, where the sun blazoned a frieze of red and gold until he travelled too far towards the north, the moon streamed in to paint the trees in inky wavering shadows, and the stars flashed their glory to me across the years.  But now sun and moon greet me only indirectly, and under the red roses hang pictures, some of them the dear companions of my days.  Opposite me is the Arundel print of the Presentation, painted by the gentle “Brother of the Angels.”  Priest Simeon, a stately figure in green and gold, great with prophecy, gazes adoringly at the Bambino he holds with fatherly care.  Our Lady, in robe of red and veil of shadowed purple, is instinct with light despite the sombre colouring, as she stretches out hungering, awe-struck hands for her soul’s delight.  St Joseph, dignified guardian and servitor, stands behind, holding the Sacrifice of the Poor to redeem the First-begotten.

St Peter Martyr and the Dominican nun, gazing in rapt contemplation at the scene, are not one whit surprised to find themselves in the presence of eternal mysteries.  In the Entombment, which hangs on the opposite wall, St Dominic comes round the corner full of grievous amaze and tenderest sympathy, but with no sense of shock or intrusion, for was he not “famigliar di Cristo”?  And so he takes it all in; the stone bed empty and waiting; the Beloved cradled for the last time on His mother’s knees to be washed, lapped round, and laid to rest as if He were again the Babe of Bethlehem.  He sees the Magdalen anointing the Sacred Feet; Blessed John caring for the living and the Dead; and he, Dominic—hound of the Lord—having his real, living share in the anguish and hope, the bedding of the dearest Dead, who did but leave this earth that He might manifest Himself more completely.

Underneath, with a leap across the centuries, is Rossetti’s picture; Dante this time the onlooker, Beatrice, in her pale beauty, the death-kissed one.  The same idea under different representations; the one conceived in childlike simplicity, the other recalling, even in the photograph, its wealth of colour and imagining; the one a world-wide ideal, the other an individual expression of it.

Beatrice was to Dante the inclusion of belief.  She was more to him than he himself knew, far more to him after her death than before.  And, therefore, the analogy between the pictures has at core a common reality.  “It is expedient for you that I go away,” is constantly being said to us as we cling earthlike to the outward expression, rather than to the inward manifestation—and blessed are those who hear and understand, for it is spoken only to such as have been with Him from the beginning.  The eternal mysteries come into time for us individually under widely differing forms.  The tiny child mothers its doll, croons to it, spends herself upon it, why she cannot tell you; and we who are here in our extreme youth, never to be men and women grown in this world, nurse our ideal, exchange it, refashion it, call it by many names; and at last in here or hereafter we find in its naked truth the Child in the manger, even as the Wise Men found Him when they came from the East to seek a great King.  There is but one necessary condition of this finding; we must follow the particular manifestation of light given us, never resting until it rests—over the place of the Child.  And there is but one insurmountable hindrance, the extinction of or drawing back from the light truly apprehended by us.  We forget this, and judge other men by the light of our own soul.

I think the old bishop must have understood it.  He is my friend of friends as he lies opposite my window in his alabaster sleep, clad in pontifical robes, with unshod feet, a little island of white peace in a many-coloured marble sea.  The faithful sculptor has given every line and wrinkle, the heavy eyelids and sunken face of tired old age, but withal the smile of a contented child.

I do not even know my bishop’s name, only that the work is of the thirteenth century; but he is good to company with through the day, for he has known darkness and light and the minds of many men; most surely, too, he has known that God fulfils Himself in strange ways, so with the shadow of his feet upon the polished floor he rests in peace.

On Sunday my little tree was limned in white and the sparrows were craving shelter at my window from the blizzard.  Now the mild thin air brings a breath of spring in its wake and the daffodils in the garden wait the kisses of the sun.  Hand-in-hand with memory I slip away down the years, and remember a day when I awoke at earliest dawn, for across my sleep I had heard the lusty golden-throated trumpeters heralding the spring.

The air was sharp-set; a delicate rime frosted roof and road; the sea lay hazy and still like a great pearl.  Then as the sky stirred with flush upon flush of warm rosy light, it passed from misty pearl to opal with heart of flame, from opal to gleaming sapphire.  The earth called, the fields called, the river called—that pied piper to whose music a man cannot stop his ears.  It was with me as with the Canterbury pilgrims:—

“So priketh hem nature in hir corages;
Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.”

Half an hour later I was away by the early train that carries the branch mails and a few workmen, and was delivered at the little wayside station with the letters.  The kind air went singing past as I swung along the reverberating road between the high tree-crowned banks which we call hedges in merry Devon, with all the world to myself and the Brethren.  A great blackbird flew out with a loud “chook, chook,” and the red of the haw on his yellow bill.  A robin trilled from a low rose-bush; two wrens searched diligently on a fallen tree for breakfast, quite unconcerned when I rested a moment beside them; and a shrewmouse slipped across the road followed directly by its mate.  March violets bloomed under the sheltered hedge with here and there a pale primrose; a frosted bramble spray still held its autumn tints clinging to the semblance of the past; and great branches of snowy blackthorn broke the barren hedgeway as if spring made a mock of winter’s snows.

Light of heart and foot with the new wine of the year I sped on again, stray daffodils lighting the wayside, until I heard the voice of the stream and reached the field gate which leads to the lower meadows.  There before me lay spring’s pageant; green pennons waving, dainty maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow trumpeters proclaiming ‘Victory’ to an awakened earth.  They range in serried ranks right down to the river, so that a man must walk warily to reach the water’s edge where they stand gazing down at themselves in fairest semblance like their most tragic progenitor, and, rising from the bright grass in their thousands, stretch away until they melt in a golden cloud at the far end of the misty mead.  Through the field gate and across the road I see them, starring the steep earth bank that leads to the upper copse, gleaming like pale flames against the dark tree-boles.  There they have but frail tenure; here, in the meadows, they reign supreme.

At the upper end of the field the river provides yet closer sanctuary for these children of the spring.  Held in its embracing arms lies an island long and narrow, some thirty feet by twelve, a veritable untrod Eldorado, glorious in gold from end to end, a fringe of reeds by the water’s edge, and save for that—daffodils.  A great oak stands at the meadow’s neck, an oak with gnarled and wandering roots where a man may rest, for it is bare of daffodils save for a group of three, and a solitary one apart growing close to the old tree’s side.  I sat down by my lonely little sister, blue sky overhead, green grass at my feet decked, like the pastures of the Blessèd, in glorious sheen; a sea of triumphant, golden heads tossing blithely back as the wind swept down to play with them at his pleasure.

It was all mine to have and to hold without severing a single slender stem or harbouring a thought of covetousness; mine, as the whole earth was mine, to appropriate to myself without the burden and bane of worldly possession.  “Thou sayest that I am—a King,” said the Lord before Pilate, and “My kingdom is not of this world.”  We who are made kings after His likeness possess all things, not after this world’s fashion but in proportion to our poverty; and when we cease to toil and spin, are arrayed as the lilies, in a glory transcending Solomon’s.  Bride Poverty—she who climbed the Cross with Christ—stretched out eager hands to free us from our chains, but we flee from her, and lay up treasure against her importunity, while Amytas on his seaweed bed weeps tears of pure pity for crave-mouth Cæsar of great possessions.

Presently another of spring’s lovers cried across the water “Cuckoo, cuckoo,” and the voice of the stream sang joyously in unison.  It is free from burden, this merry little river, and neither weir nor mill bars its quick way to the sea as it completes the eternal circle, lavishing gifts of coolness and refreshment on the children of the meadows.

It has its birth on the great lone moor, cradled in a wonderful peat-smelling bog, with a many-hued coverlet of soft mosses—pale gold, orange, emerald, tawny, olive and white, with the red stain of sun-dew and tufted cotton-grass.  Under the old grey rocks which watch it rise, yellow-eyed tormantil stars the turf, and bids “Godspeed” to the little child of earth and sky.  Thus the journey begins; and with ever-increasing strength the stream carves a way through the dear brown peat, wears a fresh wrinkle on the patient stones, and patters merrily under a clapper bridge which spanned its breadth when the mistletoe reigned and Bottor, the grim rock idol, exacted the toll of human life that made him great.  On and on goes the stream, for it may not stay; leaving of its freshness with the great osmunda that stretches eager roots towards the running water; flowing awhile with a brother stream, to part again east and west as each takes up his separate burden of service—my friend to cherish the lower meadows in their flowery joyance—and so by the great sea-gate back to sky and earth again.

The river of God is full of water.  The streets of the City are pure gold.  Verily, here also having nothing we possess all things.

The air was keen and still as I walked back in the early evening, and a daffodil light was in the sky as if Heaven mirrored back earth’s radiance.  Near the station some children flitted past, like little white miller moths homing through the dusk.  As I climbed the hill the moon rode high in a golden field—it was daffodils to the last.

The seagulls from the upper reaches pass down the river in sober steady flight seeking the open sea.  I shall miss the swoop and circle of silver wings in the sunlight and the plaintive call which sounds so strangely away from rock and shore, but it is good to know that they have gone from mudbank and murky town back to the free airs of their inheritance, to the shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling crest of the wind-beaten waves, to brood again over the great ocean of a world’s tears.

My little tree is gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of promise.  The sparrows busied with nest-building in the neighbouring pipes and gutters use it for a vantage ground, and crowd there in numbers, each little beak sealed with long golden straw or downy feather.

The river is heavy with hay barges, the last fruits of winter’s storehouse; the lengthening days slowly and steadily oust the dark; the air is loud with a growing clamour of life: spring is not only proclaimed, but on this Feast she is crowned, and despite the warring wind the days bring their meed of sunshine.  We stand for a moment at the meeting of the ways, the handclasp of Winter and Spring, of Sleep and Wakening, of Life and Death; and there is between them not even the thin line which Rabbi Jochanan on his death-bed beheld as all that divided hell from heaven.

“Sphæra cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibus,” was said of Mercury, that messenger of the gods who marshalled reluctant spirits to the Underworld; and for Mercury we may write Life with Death as its great sacrament of brotherhood and release, to be dreaded only as we dread to partake unworthily of great benefits.  Like all sacraments it has its rightful time and due solemnities; the horror and sin of suicide lie in the presumption of free will, the forestalling of a gift,—the sin of Eve in Paradise, who took that which might only be given at the hand of the Lord.  It has too its physical pains, but they are those of a woman in travail, and we remember them no more for joy that a child-man is born into the world naked and not ashamed: beholding ourselves as we are we shall see also the leaves of the Tree of Life set for the healing of the nations.

We are slowly, very slowly, abandoning our belief in sudden and violent transitions for a surer and fuller acceptance of the doctrine of evolution; but most of us still draw a sharp line of demarcation between this world and the next, and expect a radical change in ourselves and our surroundings, a break in the chain of continuity entirely contrary to the teaching of nature and experience.  In the same way we cling to the specious untruth that we can begin over and over again in this world, forgetting that while our sorrow and repentance bring sacramental gifts of grace and strength, God Himself cannot, by His own limitation, rewrite the Past.  We are in our sorrow that which we have made ourselves in our sin; our temptations are there as well as the way of escape.  We are in the image of God.  We create our world, our undying selves, our heaven, or our hell.  “Qui creavit te sine te non salvabit te sine te.”  It is stupendous, magnificent, and most appalling.  A man does not change as he crosses the threshold of the larger room.  His personality remains the same, although the expression of it may be altered.  Here we have material bodies in a material world—there, perhaps, ether bodies in an ether world.  There is no indecency in reasonable speculation and curiosity about the life to come.  One end of the thread is between our fingers, but we are haunted for the most part by the snap of Atropos’ shears.

Socrates faced death with the magnificent calm bred of dignified familiarity.  He had built for himself a desired heaven of colour, light, and precious stones—the philosophic formula of those who set the spiritual above the material, and worship truth in the beauty of holiness.  He is not troubled by doubts or regrets, for the path of the just lies plain before his face.  He forbids mourning and lamentations as out of place, obeys minutely and cheerily the directions of his executioner, and passes with unaffected dignity to the apprehension of that larger truth for which he had constantly prepared himself.  His friends may bury him provided they will remember they are not burying Socrates; and that all things may be done decently and in order, a cock must go to Æsculapius.

Long before, in the days of the Captivity, there lived in godless, blood-shedding Nineveh an exiled Jew whose father had fallen from the faith.  He was a simple man, child-like and direct; living the careful, kindly life of an orthodox Jew, suffering many persecutions for conscience’ sake, and in constant danger of death.  He narrates the story of his life and of the blindness which fell on him, with gentle placidity, and checks the exuberance of his more emotional wife with the assurance of untroubled faith.  Finally, when his pious expectations are fulfilled, his sight restored, and his son prosperously established beside him, he breaks into a prayer of rejoicing which reveals the secret of his confident content.  He made use of two great faculties: the sense of proportion, which enabled him to apprise life and its accidents justly, and the gift of in-seeing, which led Socrates after him, and Blessed John in lonely exile on Patmos, to look through the things temporal to the hidden meanings of eternity.

“Let my soul bless God the great King,” he cries; and looks away past the present distress; past the Restoration which was to end in fresh scattering and confusion; past the dream of gold, and porphyry, and marble defaced by the eagles and emblems of the conqueror; until his eyes are held by the Jerusalem of God, “built up with sapphires, and emeralds, and precious stones,” with battlements of pure gold, and the cry of ‘Alleluia’ in her streets.

Many years later, when he was very aged, he called his son to him and gave him as heritage his own simple rule of life, adding but one request: “Keep thou the law and the commandments, and shew thyself merciful and just, that it may go well with thee. . . . Consider what alms doeth, and how righteousness doth deliver. . . . And bury me decently, and thy mother with me.”  Having so said, he went his way quietly and contentedly to the Jerusalem of his heart.

It is the simple note of familiarity that is wanting in us; that by which we link world with world.  Once, years ago, I sat by the bedside of a dying man in a wretched garret in the East End.  He was entirely ignorant, entirely quiescent, and entirely uninterested.  The minister of a neighbouring chapel came to see him and spoke to him at some length of the need for repentance and the joys of heaven.  After he had gone my friend lay staring restlessly at the mass of decrepit broken chimney pots which made his horizon.  At last he spoke, and there was a new note in his voice:—

“Ee said as ’ow there were golding streets in them parts.  I ain’t no ways particler wot they’re made of, but it’ll feel natral like if there’s chimleys too.”

The sun stretched a sudden finger and painted the chimney pots red and gold against the smoke-dimmed sky, and with his face alight with surprised relief my friend died.

We are one with the earth, one in sin, one in redemption.  It is the fringe of the garment of God.  “If I may but touch the hem,” said a certain woman.

On the great Death-day which shadows the early spring with a shadow of which it may be said Umbra Dei est Lux, the earth brought gifts of grief, the fruit of the curse, barren thorns, hollow reed, and the wood of the cross; the sea made offering of Tyrian purple; the sky veiled her face in great darkness, while the nation of priests crucified for the last time their Paschal lamb.  “I will hear, saith the Lord; I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth, and the earth shall hear the corn and wine and oil, and they shall hear Jezreel, and I will sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy, and I will say unto them which were not my people, ‘Thou art my people,’ and they shall say ‘Thou art my God.’”

The second Adam stood in the garden with quickening feet, and all the earth pulsed and sang for joy of the new hope and the new life quickening within her, to be hers through the pains of travail, the pangs of dissolution.  The Tree of Life bears Bread and Wine—food of the wayfaring man.  The day of divisions is past, the day of unity has dawned.  One has risen from the dead, and in the Valley of Achor stands wide the Door of Hope—the Sacrament of Death.

Scio Domine, et vere scio . . . quia non sum dignus accedere ad tantum mysterium propter nimia peccata mea et infinitas negligentias meas.  Sed scio . . . quia tu potes me facere dignum.

“Anytus and Meletus can kill me, but they cannot hurt me,” said Socrates; and Governor Sancho, with all the itch of newly-acquired authority, could not make the young weaver of steel-heads for lances sleep in prison.  In the Vision of Er the souls passed straight forward under the throne of necessity, and out into the plains of forgetfulness, where they must severally drink of the river of unmindfulness whose waters cannot be held in any vessel.  The throne, the plain, and the river are still here, but in the distance rise the great lone heavenward hills, and the wise among us no longer ask of the gods Lethe, but rather remembrance.  Necessity can set me helpless on my back, but she cannot keep me there; nor can four walls limit my vision.  I pass out from under her throne into the garden of God a free man, to my ultimate beatitude or my exceeding shame.  All day long this world lies open to me; ay, and other worlds also, if I will but have it so; and when night comes I pass into the kingdom and power of the dark.

I lie through the long hours and watch my bridge, which is set with lights across the gloom; watch the traffic which is for me but so many passing lamps telling their tale by varying height and brightness.  I hear under my window the sprint of over-tired horses, the rattle of uncertain wheels as the street-sellers hasten south; the jangle of cab bells as the theatre-goers take their homeward way; the gruff altercation of weary men, the unmelodious song and clamorous laugh of women whose merriment is wearier still.  Then comes a time of stillness when the light in the sky waxes and wanes, when the cloud-drifts obscure the stars, and I gaze out into blackness set with watching eyes.  No sound comes from without but the voice of the night-wind and the cry of the hour.  The clock on the mantelpiece ticks imperatively, for a check has fallen on the familiarity which breeds a disregard of common things, and a reason has to be sought for each sound which claims a hearing.  The pause is wonderful while it lasts, but it is not for long.  The working world awakes, the poorer brethren take up the burden of service; the dawn lights the sky; remembrance cries an end to forgetting.

Sometimes in the country on a night in early summer you may shut the cottage door to step out into an immense darkness which palls heaven and earth.  Going forward into the embrace of the great gloom, you are as a babe swaddled by the hands of night into helpless quiescence.  Your feet tread an unseen path, your hands grasp at a void, or shrink from the contact they cannot realise; your eyes are holden; your voice would die in your throat did you seek to rend the veil of that impenetrable silence.

Shut in by the intangible dark, we are brought up against those worlds within worlds blotted out by our concrete daily life.  The working of the great microcosm at which we peer dimly through the little window of science; the wonderful, breathing earth; the pulsing, throbbing sap; the growing fragrance shut in the calyx of to-morrow’s flower; the heart-beat of a sleeping world that we dream that we know; and around, above, and interpenetrating all, the world of dreams, of angels and of spirits.

It was this world which Jacob saw on the first night of his exile, and again when he wrestled in Peniel until the break of day.  It was this world which Elisha saw with open eyes; which Job knew when darkness fell on him; which Ezekiel gazed into from his place among the captives; which Daniel beheld as he stood alone by the great river, the river Hiddekel.

For the moment we have left behind the realm of question and explanation, of power over matter and the exercise of bodily faculties; and passed into darkness alight with visions we cannot see, into silence alive with voices we cannot hear.  Like helpless men we set our all on the one thing left us, and lift up our hearts, knowing that we are but a mere speck among a myriad worlds, yet greater than the sum of them; having our roots in the dark places of the earth, but our branches in the sweet airs of heaven.

It is the material counterpart of the ‘Night of the Soul.’  We have left our house and set forth in the darkness which paralyses those faculties that make us men in the world of men.  But surely the great mystics, with all their insight and heavenly love, fell short when they sought freedom in complete separateness from creation instead of in perfect unity with it.  The Greeks knew better when they flung Ariadne’s crown among the stars, and wrote Demeter’s grief on a barren earth, and Persephone’s joy in the fruitful field.  For the earth is gathered up in man; he is the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.  Standing in the image of God, and clothed in the garment of God, he lifts up priestly hands and presents the sacrifice of redeemed earth before the throne of the All-Father.  “Dust and ashes and a house of devils,” he cries; and there comes back for answer, “Rex concupiscet decorem tuam.”

The Angel of Death has broad wings of silence and mystery with which he shadows the valley where we need fear no evil, and where the voice which speaks to us is as the “voice of doves, tabering upon their breasts.”  It is a place of healing and preparation, of peace and refreshing after the sharply-defined outlines of a garish day.  Walking there we learn to use those natural faculties of the soul which are hampered by the familiarity of bodily progress, to apprehend the truths which we have intellectually accepted.  It is the place of secrets where the humility which embraces all attainable knowledge cries “I know not”; and while we proclaim from the house-tops that which we have learnt, the manner of our learning lies hid for each one of us in the sanctuary of our souls.

The Egyptians, in their ancient wisdom, act in the desert a great androsphinx, image of mystery and silence, staring from under level brows across the arid sands of the sea-way.  The Greeks borrowed and debased the image, turning the inscrutable into a semi-woman who asked a foolish riddle, and hurled herself down in petulant pride when Œdipus answered aright.  So we, marring the office of silence, question its mystery; thwart ourselves with riddles of our own suggesting; and turn away, leaving our offering but half consumed on the altar of the unknown god.  It was not the theft of fire that brought the vengeance of heaven upon Prometheus, but the mocking sacrifice.  Orpheus lost Eurydice because he must see her face before the appointed time.  Persephone ate of the pomegranate and hungered in gloom for the day of light which should have been endless.

The universe is full of miracle and mystery; the darkness and silence are set for a sign we dare not despise.  The pall of night lifts, leaving us engulphed in the light of immensity under a tossing heaven of stars.  The dawn breaks, but it does not surprise us, for we have watched from the valley and seen the pale twilight.  Through the wondrous Sabbath of faithful souls, the long day of rosemary and rue, the light brightens in the East; and we pass on towards it with quiet feet and opening eyes, bearing with us all of the redeemed earth that we have made our own, until we are fulfilled in the sunrise of the great Easter Day, and the peoples come from north and south and east and west to the City which lieth foursquare—the Beatific Vision of God.

Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas
Cuius pax iugis et summa iucunditas;
Ubi non prævenit rem desiderium,
Nec desiderio minus est præmium.

A great joy has come to me; one of those unexpected gifts which life loves to bestow after we have learnt to loose our grip of her.  I am back in my own place very near my road—the white gate lies within my distant vision; near the lean grey Downs which keep watch and ward between the country and the sea; very near, nay, in the lap of Mother Earth, for as I write I am lying on a green carpet, powdered yellow and white with the sun’s own flowers; overhead a great sycamore where the bees toil and sing; and sighing shimmering poplars golden grey against the blue.  The day of Persephone has dawned for me, and I, set free like Demeter’s child, gladden my eyes with this foretaste of coming radiance, and rest my tired sense with the scent and sound of home.  Away down the meadow I hear the early scythe song, and the warm air is fragrant with the fallen grass.  It has its own message for me as I lie here, I who have obtained yet one more mercy, and the burden of it is life, not death.

I remember when, taking a grace from my road, I helped to mow Farmer Marler’s ten-acre field, rich in ripe upstanding grass.  The mechanism of the ancient reaper had given way under the strain of the home meadows, and if this crop was to be saved it must be by hand.  I have kept the record of those days of joyous labour under a June sky.  Men were hard to get in our village; old Dodden, who was over seventy, volunteered his services—he had done yeoman work with the scythe in his youth—and two of the farm hands with their master completed our strength.

We took our places under a five o’clock morning sky, and the larks cried down to us as we stood knee-deep in the fragrant dew-steeped grass, each man with his gleaming scythe poised ready for its sweeping swing.  Old Dodden led by right of age and ripe experience; bent like a sickle, brown and dry as a nut, his face a tracery of innumerable wrinkles, he has never ailed a day, and the cunning of his craft was still with him.  At first we worked stiffly, unreadily, but soon the monotonous motion possessed us with its insistent rhythm, and the grass bowed to each sibilant swish and fell in sweet-smelling swathes at our feet.  Now and then a startled rabbit scurried through the miniature forest to vanish with white flick of tail in the tangled hedge; here and there a mother lark was discovered sitting motionless, immovable upon her little brood; but save for these infrequent incidents we paced steadily on with no speech save the cry of the hone on the steel and the swish of the falling swathes.  The sun rose high in the heaven and burnt on bent neck and bare and aching arms, the blood beat and drummed in my veins with the unwonted posture and exercise; I worked as a man who sees and hears in a mist.  Once, as I paused to whet my scythe, my eye caught the line of the untroubled hills strong and still in the broad sunshine; then to work again in the labouring, fertile valley.

Rest time came, and wiping the sweat from brow and blade we sought the welcome shadow of the hedge and the cool sweet oatmeal water with which the wise reaper quenches his thirst.  Farmer Marler hastened off to see with master-eye that all went well elsewhere; the farm men slept tranquilly, stretched at full length, clasped hands for pillow; and old Dodden, sitting with crooked fingers interlaced to check their trembling betrayal of old age, told how in his youth he had “swep” a four-acre field single-handed in three days—an almost impossible feat—and of the first reaping machine in these parts, and how it brought, to his thinking, the ruin of agricultural morals with it.  “’Tis again nature,” he said, “the Lard gave us the land an’ the seed, but ’Ee said that a man should sweat.  Where’s the sweat drivin’ round wi’ two horses cuttin’ the straw down an’ gatherin’ it again, wi’ scarce a hand’s turn i’ the day’s work?”

Old Dodden’s high-pitched quavering voice rose and fell, mournful as he surveyed the present, vehement as he recorded the heroic past.  He spoke of the rural exodus and shook his head mournfully.  “We old ’uns were content wi’ earth and the open sky like our feythers before us, but wi’ the children ’tis first machines to save doin’ a hand’s turn o’ honest work, an’ then land an’ sky ain’t big enough seemin’ly, nor grand enough; it must be town an’ a paved street, an’ they sweat their lives out atwixt four walls an’ call it seein’ life—’tis death an’ worse comes to the most of ’em.  Ay, ’tis better to stay by the land, as the Lard said, till time comes to lie under it.”  I looked away across the field where the hot air throbbed and quivered, and the fallen grass, robbed already of its freshness, lay prone at the feet of its upstanding fellows.  It is quite useless to argue with old Dodden; he only shakes his head and says firmly, “An old man, seventy-five come Martinmass knows more o’ life than a young chap, stands ter reason”; besides, his epitome of the town life he knows nothing of was a just one as far as it went; and his own son is the sweeper of a Holborn crossing, and many other things that he should not be; but that is the parson’s secret and mine.

We took rank again and swept steadily on through the hot still hours into the evening shadows, until the sinking sun set a Gloria to the psalm of another working day.  Only a third of the field lay mown, for we were not skilled labourers to cut our acre a day; I saw it again that night under the moonlight and the starlight, wrapped in a shroud of summer’s mist.

The women joined us on the third day to begin haymaking, and the air was fragrant of tossed and sun-dried grass.  One of them walked apart from the rest, without interest or freedom of movement; her face, sealed and impassive, was aged beyond the vigour of her years.  I knew the woman by sight, and her history by hearsay.  We have a code of morals here—not indeed peculiar to this place or people—that a wedding is ‘respectable’ if it precedes child-birth by a bare month, tolerable, and to be recognised, should it succeed the same by less than a year (provided the pair are not living in the same village); but the child that has never been ‘fathered’ and the wife without a ring are ‘anathema,’ and such in one was Elizabeth Banks.  She went away a maid and came back a year ago with a child and without a name.  Her mother was dead, her father and the village would have none of her: the homing instinct is very strong, or she would scarcely have returned, knowing the traditions of the place.  Old Dodden, seeing her, grumbled to me in the rest-time.—“Can’t think what the farmer wants wi’ Lizzie Banks in ’is field.”  “She must live,” I said, “and by all showing her life is a hard one.”  “She ’ad the makin’ of ’er bed,” he went on, obstinately.  “What for do she bring her disgrace home, wi’ a fatherless brat for all folks to see?  We don’t want them sort in our village.  The Lord’s hand is heavy, an’ a brat’s a curse that cannot be hid.”

When tea-time came I crossed the field to look for a missing hone, and saw Elizabeth Banks far from the other women, busied with a bundle under the hedge.  I passed close on my search, and lo! the bundle was a little boy.  He lay smiling and stretching, fighting the air with his small pink fists, while the wind played with his curls.  “A curse that cannot be hid,” old Dodden had said.  The mother knelt a moment, devouring him with her eyes, then snatched him to her with aching greed and covered him with kisses.  I saw the poor, plain face illumined, transfigured, alive with a mother’s love, and remembered how the word came once to a Hebrew prophet:—

Say unto your brethren Ammi, and to your sisters Ruhamah.

The evening sky was clouding fast, the sound of rain was in the air; Farmer Marler shook his head as he looked at the grass lying in ordered rows.  I was the last to leave, and as I lingered at the gate drinking in the scent of the field and the cool of the coming rain, the first drops fell on my upturned face and kissed the poor dry swathes at my feet, and I was glad.

David, child of the fields and the sheepfolds, his kingship laid aside, sees through the parted curtain of the years the advent of his greater Son, and cries in his psalm of the hilltops, his last prophetic prayer:—

He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass.

Even so He came, and shall still come.  Three days ago the field, in its pageant of fresh beauty, with shimmering blades and tossing banners, greeted sun and shower alike with joy for the furtherance of its life and purpose; now, laid low, it hears the young grass whisper the splendour of its coming green; and the poor swathes are glad at the telling, but full of grief for their own apparent failure.  Then in great pity comes the rain, the rain of summer, gentle, refreshing, penetrating, and the swathes are comforted, for they know that standing to greet or prostrate to suffer, the consolations of the former and the latter rain are still their own, with tender touch and cool caress.  Then, once more parched by the sun, they are borne away to the new service their apparent failure has fitted them for; and perhaps as they wait in the dark for the unknown that is still to come they hear sometimes the call of the distant rain, and at the sound the dry sap stirs afresh—they are not forgotten and can wait.

“Say unto your sisters Ruhamah,” cries the prophet.

“He shall come down like rain on the mown grass,” sang the poet of the sheepfolds.

“My ways are not your ways, saith the Lord.”