I
_On ne doit jamais écrire que de ce qu’on aime._ It is my happy fortune
that I love Michael Fairless; and although, before I began to write of
her, I thought the demand anything but happy that compelled me to break
the silence she desired, I have come to think even this a part of my
good fortune too. I have come indeed to feel that, since her wish to
remain unknown must be set aside in face of circumstances she could
never have foreseen, this may bring new fulfilment to a desire that lay
far nearer to her heart—the desire to give away all she had, to hoard
nothing, not even her own self.
Much that Mrs. Haggard says of her sister’s early childhood is new to
me; but all is congruous, as the bud is congruous with the rose. The
child with her pet animals I have seen in the woman for whom all
animals, even the very fierce, were friends, telling each its own secret
and able to receive something of the great human secret offered them in
her. They grew, these creatures, grew in spirit, under the magic of her
hands and in the stirring warmth of her heart. The wild ones knew her as
they knew the little poor man upon the Umbrian hills. Birds would perch
about her, rabbits play; even the ‘tramp cats,’ as she calls them in her
Christmas Idyll—cats who had taken to the woods and become worse than
wild—learnt from her the graces of home life and laid savagery down.
‘She had a way with her,’ as they say in Ireland. And this way stretched
beyond the kingdom of the beasts and bees and birds. When I first learnt
to know her she had a little cottage on a high road, the great Bath road
of many tramps. It had been the lodge of an abandoned manor house, and
was, of course, close to the gateway. There she tamed her tramp men and
made them friends. Every man who came had a table and chair under
shelter; the plainest, simplest food; materials for mending his clothes,
tea or cocoa to drink, her smile, her wonderful eyes upon his, her open
heart and word. Never a thing was stolen from her doors, her wide
windows; never a penny did she give; but many a man begged leave to chop
wood for her, to dig in her garden—some little thing to show what she
had done for him.
It seemed to me illuminating; it pointed me to the one great hope for
this world, the hope of the coming of the kingdom of God in the power of
man’s self-sharing, fearless, love for men.
Mrs. Haggard alludes very briefly to Michael Fairless’s ‘psychic’ gifts.
Of these I had said nothing; she herself made nothing of them. But they
were strong, too strong to be overlooked by anyone who knew her well. It
would lead me outside my province if I were to attempt here an adequate
discussion of the matter. I will say only that she was ‘telepathic’ in a
high degree, had that sympathetic insight which reveals actual facts
hidden from the physical senses. The connexion of this with power over
animals is a problem of great interest for which, again, there is no
place here. How far her insight—her interior vision—reached I cannot
say; that it went beyond animals, tramps, and her best friends I am
assured by my experience of her. There is an instance given in ‘A Modern
Mystic’s Way’ which is true to the letter. The account given there was
transcribed in every point from notes taken at the time and signed by
her as correct.
She was one whom we who knew her do not try to measure by ordinary
standards, the rules of everyday, in any of the relations of life. Need
I say that there were people whom she puzzled, bewildered? Or that there
were others who not only failed to understand, but wholly misunderstood
her? They always do it; they will do it still, no doubt, even when they
have read every word Mrs Haggard and I have written here.