I
WE sat on the churchyard wall, the Reverend and I, debating many things.
It was one of those silent, gloomy afternoons that would be cold but for
their exceeding stillness. A heavy grey pall of sky lowered overhead. A
multitude of noisy sparrows was going to bed in the thicket of ilex and
yew, denoting that the time was nearing sunset, although not a tinge of
sunset colour showed in the shrouded west. The same impulse, it seemed,
had brought us both out of doors, which, elementally, was nothing more
than a sudden realisation of the impossibility of remaining within. In
the whole year’s round, perhaps, there come only two or three days like
this. You become the prey of a conviction that something cataclysmic is
going to happen. There is a sense of the world slowing down in its
age-long, giddy race through the pathless ether; a feeling that its
momentum is almost spent, and that any instant it may come to a final
stop, to be followed by the Last Trump and dissolution of all things.
The mute house seems alive about you, and full of a sort of terror and
foreboding. You are seized with an apprehension that the ceilings and
roof are falling in; and, hurrying forth, a like doubt comes upon you as
to the stability of the sky: it looks so overburdened and unsafe. In
this easeless, impotent frame of mind, I came up into the churchyard as
being the most reassuring place I could think of, and found the Reverend
wandering there for a like reason and in much the same mood.
‘Wind and dirty weather coming,’ said he, ‘the sort of times to make
people think of home and fireside, the need for human peace on earth, and
good-will towards men—the very weather for me.’
As we sat on the wall, silent awhile, the bells in far-off Stavisham
began their chime, every note drifting over to us sharp and clear through
the miles of torpid air.
‘Winter coming,’ he went on; ‘the winter we all need once a year to knit
us closer together. Listen to Saint Barnabas practising his Christmas
carillons!—forging his link in the chain of bell-ringing that in a week
or two will stretch all round the world. It is my time coming, my own
time. For did you ever think how little eyesight matters at Christmas?
Blindness is nothing to a man then. Christmas is all glad sound; warm
heart-beats; faithful words. And, please God, when the day dawns, there
shall not be a cottage-nest in Windlecombe that does not overflow with
these.’
To see him so deeply moved, and hear him run on presently about his many
schemes of comfort and relief, the furtherance of joy and merriment,
good-will and good cheer, to be sown broadcast throughout his little
domain, was yourself to take the infection irresistibly. Whatever
Christmas has become in the great outer world, in Windlecombe he held us
year by year to all the old ideals and traditions. As I harkened to him,
the black sky, the sullen, miasmic air, lost their significance. I found
myself thinking only of the golden light and undimmed azure that must
eternally lie beyond and above it all. And now—though I might have heard
it long ago, if I had had but the heart to look up and listen—there, high
against the drab heaven, a lark soared and sang.