I
Michael Fairless was an artist, with the artist’s longing for creative
expression. But while she was able to move about among her fellows her
imaginative force, together with such strength of body as she had and
her fine intellectual endowment, was spent on their behalf. She gave
herself without stint and, it appeared, without regret for much that
must consequently stand aside. Men and their miseries, their poverty,
pleasures, joys and pain, seemed to take the place for her of the
artist’s material in language or clay or colour. The material she chose
was life, life in all its crudity or evasiveness, its stubborn
resistance, forbidding weakness, its failures and faults; and with the
far-reaching promise upon which only faith as strong as hers can keep a
constant hold. In each man she saw, through disfigurement and disguise,
his proper reflexion of the divine image, as a sculptor sees in the
block of marble the one beauty that he is to set free.
There were times when I thought this passion of hers would always be
enough. I thought the fountain of charity in her heart would never allow
her artistic longings to be carried into any field but that of life.
When the claims of human needs and suffering for the moment slackened, I
saw that there was always the attraction of a perennial love and
carefulness for every creature of the earth, even the very lowest. From
the blade of grass and the clod on which it grew, to every beast and
bird, all things entered her soul to become her own, to become centres
of the active, self-devoted interest that one gives only to one’s own. I
might well think that she would live and die without any disturbing
recognition of another longing unfulfilled. Moreover, her enjoyment of
the creative work of others was never tainted by self-pity, or by that
base alloy of envy which kills delight in many of us, whose gifts and
executive powers are far inferior to hers. It seemed reasonable to think
that her love of beauty would be satisfied with what her indomitable
eagerness and energy enabled her to absorb from literature, painting and
sculpture, from music and, above all, from the symbolism of religion in
its poetry of psalm and stately hymn, and in those lovely myths with
which the childlike heart of man has clothed his intuitions of divine
things. But I was wrong. The impulse to create, though often overborne,
was very masterful.
Out of that impulse sprang the crucifix now in St John Baptist’s church
in London (Pimlico Road). In this she shewed a promise of what might
have been had she been trained and practised in a plastic art. But I am
sure, nevertheless, that nothing short of inability to go out into the
highways of life, to seek and find, or at the least to be sought and
found by, troubled men and women, would have turned her finally to any
engrossing work other than that which she could do for them.
Twenty months before she died the opportunity came—as mortal sickness.
To most of us it would hardly have been an opportunity. Among our
writers only a few unconquerable spirits, of whom Robert Louis Stevenson
perhaps is chief, have been able to overcome flesh and its hindrances by
the governance of the soul, when the weight of Death’s heavy hand has
been laid upon them. For men of this rank, life, when it meets new
difficulty in a body nearing to the grave, rises against that difficulty
in a fresh uplifting of power. The men themselves are carried beyond the
atmosphere of oppression caused by the disabilities of mortal sickness;
and we watch them working miracles, as though these were trifles light
as air. Of that rare company was Michael Fairless. But she knew when and
how she was beaten; for there is another thing to be noted of that
company—an illuminated common sense. They work miracles, it is true; but
they are not often found trying impossibilities. Their faith is potent,
but it is neither superstitious nor absurd. Behind what looks to many of
us a reckless venture and a foolish hope it seems that there is, in
reality, something which takes the place of a prudent man’s prudent
calculation. It seems that where other men must calculate they _see_—yet
without knowing that they see. They know what they can and what they
cannot do; but it is as though by a concealed interior vision, not by
mere guess, that they make discoveries. Their decisions are, for the
most part, not to be justified by the maxims and habits of ordinary
usage in life, yet are very often crowned with good success and are
richly productive as ordinary ways are not. They have, as I said, their
common sense.
So, when Michael Fairless met defeat, she laid down her arms, the wonted
weapons of her charity, but took up others. And with these she made a
way, not only to hearts beyond any range of hers before, but also for
her artist-soul, frustrate in the years gone by. We who looked on
thought that but for the help she could give to friends able to come to
her bedside, most likely she would do nothing more. Again we were wrong.
We took her away from London to the Down country that she loved, hoping
for some recovery—against hope and against her own conviction. There, in
her ‘cool light room on the garden level’ with windows opening to the
ground, day after day she looked ‘across the bright grass—_il verde
smalto_—’ and beyond ‘the promise of coming lilies,’ to the Gate of her
symbolic fancy:—‘I know now,’ she says in “The Roadmender,” ‘that
whenever and wherever I die my soul will pass out through this white
gate.’
There, beside the gate, the roadmender was born. I suppose he was fully
grown in the spirit of her meditation before she spoke of him. Certainly
it was her own soul, mind, heart, and life’s experience that he
embodied. He was conceived of her, bone of her bone, spirit of her
spirit. Who knows him knows her; in following his life and death we
follow hers. His realized ideal is hers that was unrealized. But indeed
in him she touched realization. ‘I am a roadmender,’ she said to me,
‘there, by the white gate.’ As in all true artists, life passed from her
into her creation, virtue went forth from her, and she with virtue: she
_was_ that roadmender.
I think she would have been content with giving him life thus, within
her own artistic cognizance, but for another thing. She wanted to earn
money, little or much; had a hundred uses for it; saw that perhaps some
would come into her hands this way. So she demanded of me pencil and
paper, and wrote down (with her left hand, the right being disabled; and
without being lifted up in bed) the first chapter of ‘The Roadmender.’
She wrote easily, it appeared, and as well and clearly, almost as
quickly, as before this last disabling sickness. She hardly ever paused
for thought or word, and made small correction. To the best of my
present memory the second chapter was written next day and with the same
swift facility.
Neither of these, nor any that followed, was thought of by her (or for
that matter by me) as a chapter; each was no more than a sketch, a
little paper telling of the roadmender she was. Not until much later, in
fact just before the end, did it occur to either of us that she had been
writing a book.
We sent those sketches, the first and second, to Mr Lathbury, the editor
of _The Pilot_, who accepted them with encouraging, and to her
surprising, readiness. They were published; and from that time to this
their readers, in a fast increasing number, have asked for news, facts,
about the writer. Unquestionably The Roadmender’s appeal, whatever it
was, went home there and then and has never ceased to find response. But
this is not the place in which that appeal should be discussed; it shall
be dealt with later. Here I only allude to it in passing, as a
significant piece of the short history of an all too short literary
life.
For anyone who knew the previous life of the author, the fitness of her
roadmender to present herself and her ideals was obvious. ‘After all,’
he says for her in that opening chapter, ‘what do we ask of life, here
or indeed hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with our
fellow-men and with ourselves; and from the lap of earth to look up into
the face of God?’ That aspiration to service and communion had been in
her no affair of mere aspiration; it had been a burning force, not a
quietistic scheme. Yet always her heart and soul rested gladly in ‘the
lap of earth’; and she turned her face towards the face of God as she
discerned that vision everywhere, in earth and earth’s little ones, and
in the face of man. But a new peacefulness came with the laying down of
arms, and she could picture herself quietly at work on the common road,
serving ‘the footsteps of her fellows’; indeed joining with contentment
‘the company of weary old men who sit on the sunny side of the workhouse
wall and wait for the tender mercies of God.’
Death it is that in truth she waits for in the pages of ‘The
Roadmender.’ You will find death everywhere, a friend, a ‘strong angel’
and, as here, ‘the tender mercies of God.’ The road, too, although the
common road of service and of the common labour of man, is the one that
leads into the great silence; the mysteries of God and man cast shadows
in the sunshine of its ‘white highway.’ This is the background, or the
chorus if you will, even of the first part of the book, where she is
giving a picture of the man and herself, and furnishing his experience
from her own experience in past days. There is the snake, bringing in
Melampus and the revealing of secrets by the fatal kiss; there is the
old widow, waiting, as she herself was waiting, for death and a ‘“kind”
burial’ in ‘the little churchyard which has been a cornfield, and may
some day be one again.’ The sea brings memories of ‘its secret dead in
the caverns of Peace,’ and of ‘the still and silent Sea of Glass’ and
‘the Voice as the voice of many waters.’ But withal there is love, the
constant love of earth’s fair face, and its living adornment; the love
for which she thanks God as ‘the Brotherhood of the Poor’; even the
bitter-sweet love of death itself:—‘Very pleasant art thou, O Brother
Death, thy love is wonderful, passing the love of women.’
‘“Surely all men should be roadmenders,”’ the parson says. ‘O wise
parson, so to read the lesson of the road!’ That is her heart-felt
comment.
The first part of the book ended with the ending of autumn, when we
brought her back to London—to our house, 91 Cheyne Walk. She was borne
to the station on a mattress laid in the bottom of a covered cart, the
tilt thrown open at the back. As the cart went on, she watched through
this opening, the receding lane—‘lay as in a blissful dream,’ she says.
‘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.’ ‘It is like Life,’ she
goes on, ‘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.’
I believe she thought, then, that she would never come back to her road,
to the green fields she loved so well, the garden that was ‘an epitome
of peace,’ the sycamore-tree that made a microcosmic world for her as
she lay beneath it, caressed by the sunlight scattered through its
leaves. She thought, I believe, that Brother Death would meet her among
the close-set houses of the town, while she lay isolated in the great
city. So she said farewell, not only with the roadmender to roadmending,
but to the country of her love. Yet she says it with a characteristic
qualifying:—‘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 truth 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.
‘Farewell! It is a roadmender’s word; I cry you Godspeed to the next
milestone—and beyond.’ In her mind, I am sure, these words were the last
she was to write.