EARTH CHILDREN
I
Their house is a small russet cave of three dim compartments--part
of a farmhouse, the rest having fallen to ruin, and from human hands
to the starlings, the sparrows, and the rats. No one will live in
it again. Inside, it is held together by the solid poetry of their
lives, by gay-coloured, cheerful, tradesmen’s pictures of well-dressed
children and blooming horsewomen, and the dogs of gentlemen, memorial
cards of the dead, a few photographs, some picture post-cards pasted
over flaws in the wall, and the worn furniture of several disconnected
generations. The old man’s tools in the kitchen are noble--the heavy
wrought iron, two-toothed hoe, that falls pleasantly upon the hard clay
and splits it without effort and without jarring the hand, its ash
handle worn thin where his hand has glided at work, a hand that nothing
will wear smooth; the glittering, yellow handled spades and forks; the
disused shovel with which he boasts regretfully that he could dig his
garden when he lived on deep loam in a richer country than this; and
still the useless “hop-idgit” of six tynes--the Sussex “shim”--which he
retains to remind others, and perhaps himself, that he was a farmer
once. He had twenty or thirty acres and a few cows. The cows all died
in one year and he became a labourer.
His wife remembers those days. She was a tall woman and stooped at the
doorway thatch: now she cannot rise to it. For every day she went many
times to the sweet brook, a quarter of a mile away, rather than take
the grey liquor of the pond for her cows. That is how she came to be
bent like an oak branch on which children swing, or like a thorn that
knows the west wind on the hill or the shore. Now she cannot carry
a pail, for it would sweep the ground. She cannot see the apples in
autumn until they have fallen to her feet. Her flesh seems to have
assumed an animal sweetness, for her bees will cluster on the brown
hands. Birds and beasts take to her as to an old tree, though she has
pity for them, but no love. Sometimes as she sits at her door the
robins come fearlessly close to her--hedge-sparrows, too, if there
is nobody else near, and even the partridges that come for the ants
in the old dock roots. She watches them with her dull eye and seems
easily to have found a Franciscan friendliness when, as if angry with
the creatures for seeing her frailty, she stamps her feet and drives
them away. Then she relents and tries her power, as if she has half
persuaded herself that it is a happy talent. She will crush a mouse in
her fingers, and yet they still run over her in their merry business
night or day, as they would over a tree that has fallen, and proved
fatal to some of them in its death. Yet, in spite of her apparent
indifference, I think that she knows the animals more than we who
patronise them. Left alone with a cat, she shows, indeed, none of the
endearments of a civilised woman, but quietly concedes and demands
concessions very much as when a horse and some cows are sheltering from
the heat together in a limited shade.
She speaks hardly ever, except with animals. But in church her lips
move long after others are tired of “have mercy upon us.”
“Lord!” she says, “you are very kind, but your children are very many.
All the sparrows in my garden have to be tended, and I suppose the
mice, the moles, the worms, the lizards, the shining things that run
and fly and crawl, and all the flowers, trees and birds. Oh! Lord,
I had seventeen children and among so many you seemed not to notice
some, and they died just anyhow in their happiness, and perhaps then
you have forgotten me altogether, and I shall not even be taken away.
I have heard that the good shall prosper. You have said it yourself.
But I know not what is good or what is prosperity. For what am I? I
am willing to learn, yet I am not taught. Am I good? Am I prospering?
Lord! what am I to do? There are thousands and thousands of strong and
rich and beautiful and happy things in the world, but as for me, I seem
to crawl about among them in darkness like a mole. Nevertheless, glory
to God the father, Lord of all, though you have done some things that
I would not have done, and as to the weather ... but I know not your
designs. Glory to the Son though he has long been dead, he was a good
man. Glory to the Holy Ghost, which I do believe in, though they say
there are no ghosts really. I am a poor old woman, born in Scotland,
and a Scotswoman still. My name is Margaret Helen Page, and I live at
the Hoath Cottage in the wood, at the end of the lane, where you turn
up by ‘The Blue Anchor,’ in going to Horsmonden. There I shall abide
and am to be found there, except on Sunday evening in fine weather,
when I come to this holy place. Oh, come, Lord, when you have looked
after all the sparrows, some day, and take me.”
“If,” she said once, “if God’s a Christian man, I do not know what he
means by this weather.”
“I reckon he manages about as well as could be expected in such a funny
world,” replied her husband. “Remember old Farmer King who used to
swear at the weather so. One day when he had got his hay dry at last
and saw it coming on to rain, he picks up a handful and stuffs it into
his pocket, and says he will carry that much home dry at any rate, but
if he didn’t fall into the brook on his way back and get wet to the
skin. Such are the ways of God.”
But she was not convinced, for, with all her feebleness of body and
conversation, she proves that man is older than Christ and Buddha,
than Jehovah and Jupiter, and that not even such presences on the
earth have left behind footpaths in which he can wander in security.
She compels us to realise, if we have not done so before, that if we
could isolate the child of Christian parents on a solitary island away
from all religious influences, he would grow into something curiously
different from a Christian, and something marvellously ancient too.
Her language, stripped of its tattered and scanty Christianisms, and
her acts, without that Sunday journey, reveal the multitude’s eternal
paganism, which religions ruffle and sink into again--the paganism
of the long-lived, most helpless, proudest and loneliest of animals,
contending with winter and bad weather, with accident and disease
and strange fears; rejoicing in fine weather, in strength, in the
appetites; hating decay; distrusting the inhumanity of the heavens
and animals and men from other climates; uncertain, troubled, and
thinking little, about the future. For her the world is a flat place,
decorated with a pattern of familiar and other fields, with hills,
rivers, houses, a sea, a London, a Highland valley of children and
old-fashioned ways, and infinitely far off towards the sunset, lands
of tigers, monkeys, snakes, strange trees and flowers and men, with
earthquakes, volcanoes, huge storms, all lit by sun and moon and
stars--and a heaven also and a hell. Very real to her is the snow
and the thaw-drip from the roof, the dry heat of summer, the apple
blossom, the coming of the swallows, the growth of carrots, potatoes,
cabbages and weeds, the coming home of her husband sober or drunk,
the use of a few silver coins week by week, the announcement that old
Mrs. Fuller is dead or that Mrs. Rixon has another child, the cold at
four o’clock on a January morning and the warmth all night in July
as she sits sleeping, because of her doubled back, like the corpse
of a caveman in his grave, the endlessness of days when she is alone
and has nothing to do but to remember and try to remember. She has no
hopes, no purposes. I have seen her picking up oak branches in May
after the fall of the great trees, and she will go on after her arms
are filled, adding to the pile from above, and at the same time losing
others from the sides, until at last it is dark and she goes home. Even
so she does in life, accumulating memories and affairs, and letting
them fall, until the end. Yet it is a little hard that there should be
no kindly god or goddess to deceive her and receive her prayers and
sanctify her little unnecessary acts, that the very wood at night,
round about the house, is merely dark and full of sounds and no home
for her. The beautiful Jewish stories told to her by clergymen of some
birth and education, though she will gladly listen to them, are little
better than ribands for oak faggots--for, though a Pagan, she has no
gods. The gods of this part of the earth have long been hurled into
Tartarus and bolted there in that grotesque company which the prophets
of the ages have gathered together. And so she goes through life, like
a child in a many-windowed house, looking on sea and barren land, and
full of corridors, resounding and silent by hours, with dim, enormous
apartments, bolted doors, and here and there a picture, a skeleton, an
old toy, a reminiscent voice....
II
Compared with Margaret Helen Page, her husband, Robert, is a citizen
of the world. He knows all the farmers in the neighbourhood, thatching
for one, haymaking for another, gardening, woodcutting, washing
or pole-pulling in the hop-garden for others. He can even make the
beautiful, five-barred gates, with their noble top bars, tapered and
shaped like a gun-stock and barrel. All the inns are known to him, and
the labourers and wayfaring men who resort to them. He will gossip, and
the rich do not disdain to listen to the fabrications and selections
which he mixes charmingly for them alone. The workhouse or death is
not more than a few years ahead of him, for he stoops with difficulty
and will make haste for no man; yet he will cheerfully quarrel with a
farmer in the middle of the winter, pick up his coat, take his wages
and go off to the inn and drink all that he has; if the farmer grumbles
in September that Robert has been taking merely an honest bushel of
hops from the pickers he will not give way to the extent of a handful.
No one can thatch as he can. His tall haystacks look like churches when
they are new, and so they remain. The roofs of his cornricks are shaped
like breasts, with convex curves that make the same lines against the
sky as you walk round. His vegetable plots are invariably as flat as
lawns, their sides evenly sloping to the paths. He stops in the midst
of his work and smokes and thinks; and he expects to be paid for his
thinking. In the spring he catches moles, hanging them up on the briers
or thorns with great care, twisting the twigs round them so that they
stay until fur and bone are indistinguishable and break up into dust.
At the inns he hears the gossip of the universe, heaping up as in a
marine store the details of murders, swindles, divorces, expensive
pictures of Venus, etc., horse races, cricket matches, letters from
archbishops and literary men, distant wars, new foods and diseases
and cures, automobiles, the cost of rich men’s dinners, how to live
happily, the extravagance of the poor, how to feed on a shilling a
week. These things are “in print” and therefore true. But he utters
no opinion of his own. He consents to exchange his recollections and
to accept others; then he sinks into the happy silence of those who
have not the gift of ratiocination. What dark, undisturbed depths of
personality are his--immense depths yielding to the upper world, now
and then, an ejaculation, as Gilbert White’s well yielded a black
lizard at times.
“I wonder,” he ejaculated once, “I wonder what God did with himself
before he made such a kettle of fish as this world.”
Again, “Now supposing that all these things in the Bible about Adam and
the beginning had never been written down, and we had not been told
that God did it, what should we have done? Should we have found out
these things for ourselves?”
Once he related a dream:--
“Sometimes when I am all alone, and my old girl says the same, it
seems to me that I am not of much account; it is as if I had been
forgotten and left off the register, and how will it be at the Judgment
Day? Sometimes I think to myself, It will be fine sleeping and never
hearing the blessed trumpet and getting into that crowd. But one
night I dreamed that I had died and was up above, and that an angel
woke me up and asked me to take his trumpet, because he wanted a bit
of sleeping after waiting ever since Adam’s time, and I was to blow
it at twelve o’clock and then it would be Judgment Day. Well, as he
looked like a gentleman, I said I would and I took the trumpet and
stared at it a bit, because it was that trumpet that was to wake the
dead for the Judgment Day. I was wide awake and I could see the dead
all round me, more of them than there are mangolds in twenty acres.
Close to me were the angels, and they were all asleep, worn out with
waiting so long, I suppose. They had wings like peacocks and owls and
orpingtons--beautiful! I enjoyed myself. But when it got near to twelve
o’clock I got a bit anxious. The angel was fast asleep and I did not
see why I should wake him up, or anybody else. Once or twice I put the
trumpet to my lips, but I thought--No, I would sleep myself and there
would be no Judgment Day. But I could not sleep for thinking of the
keeper who used to kill my old girl’s cats as fast as they grew up and
went into the woods at night; and, without thinking what I was at, I
blew the trumpet and what with the terrible noise and the sight of all
these poor people waking up I awoke myself and my old girl said that
I had made a noise like a trumpet in my sleep. But it did seem a pity
that they should all wake up just as if they had to go to ploughing and
all that again.”
But Bacchus is his only god, who has already given him many gifts.
On Friday nights he is as a child upon the throne, holding himself
wonderfully straight on the settle at the inn, never letting go of the
tankard except to have it filled, and smiling delicately with weary
eyes, as he drinks the six ale--
“Much more of price and of more gratious powre
In this, then that same water of Ardenne,
The which Rinaldo drunck in happie howre,
Described by that famous Tuscan penne:
For that had might to change the hearts of men
From love to hate, a change of evil choise:
But this doth hatred make in love to brenne,
And heavy heart with comfort doth rejoyce.
Who would not to this vertue rather yeeld his voice?”
At such times he speaks little, except a few words of nonsense to
strangers who come in; but he smiles continually, as if he had forgiven
all things, and even as if he silently preached forgiveness to all the
world. His tenderness to children and animals is wonderful. He would
pass as a saint, an angelic doctor, or even something higher. To some,
indeed, he might seem to be the original from which field artists
have everywhere modelled the scarecrow. The young men recognise the
resemblance and smile. The older men perhaps see in him an apotheosis
of themselves, more twisted, more starved, greener in the hat and coat,
and they do not smile. He has a lean, acorn-coloured face, adorned with
relenting blue eyes, small hawk nose, clear-cut shrivelled lips and
chin, and fresh brown hair hanging like a lion skin over his head and
neck, and curling sumptuously.
I can fancy him a lesser god in some mythology. To him come the weak
and ashamed; the shamefaced female tramp who went hungry, having asked
for a direction to Maidstone instead of for food, because the farmer’s
voice was hard and he was young and strong and her skirt was old and
her breast shrunken; and he who looked through the hedge at some fair
children playing and then, because one of them screamed at catching
sight of him in searching for a nest, raised a hideous cry and sent
them terrified away; the curst, scandalous lean maid who melts with
momentary tenderness over her starved and piebald cat, and calls him
“Prettiest”; all such as are foolish and slow of thought and slower of
speech, and laugh at what they love because others do and then weep
in solitude; those who, unable to care for anything much, grow ardent
in a simulated affection and blush when a cruel strong one finds them
out; those who know not what they desire except a little tranquillity
before the end and know that they shall not obtain it; the drunken and
obscene who are without graces, but also without repentance; those
who vainly complain and fret about the evils which they have deserved
and cannot endure; those who cannot keep up with life because of one
beautiful or terrible thing in the past; those who mourn, they know
not why; the little base ones who admire good and lovely things, and
fear to hurt them by approval. And they should come to this god,
Robert, as one in whom each saw his little unknown virtue and should
be lifted up thereat. They should bring to his altars sour bread and
rotten flesh and fruit fallen before its time, and worn-out, shattered
things; and his priests, leprous, and scrofulous, and squint-eyed
all, should rejoice then and tell the worshippers to be no more cast
down, because in this, their god, were to be found all their little
virtues, and behold! he endured for ever and looked upon them pitifully
and interceded continually with the high gods. Then would they drink
until they were thoroughly drunken, and the god would tell them that
death came soon, and that their sleep would be heavier than they could
dream of, for no king, or judge, or policeman, or clergyman, could ever
disturb their sleep, though armed with sharpest swords and most cruel
words.