FEBRUARY is here, February fill-dyke; the month of purification, of
cleansing rains and pulsing bounding streams, and white mist clinging
insistent to field and hedgerow so that when her veil is withdrawn
greenness may make us glad.
The river has been uniformly grey of late, with no wind to ruffle its
surface or to speed the barges dropping slowly and sullenly down with the
tide through a blurring haze. I watched one yesterday, its useless sails
half-furled and no sign of life save the man at the helm. It drifted
stealthily past, and a little behind, flying low, came a solitary
seagull, grey as the river’s haze—a following bird.
Once again I lay on my back in the bottom of the tarry old fishing smack,
blue sky above and no sound but the knock, knock of the waves, and the
thud and curl of falling foam as the old boat’s blunt nose breasted the
coming sea. Then Daddy Whiddon spoke.
“A follerin’ bürrd,” he said.
I got up, and looked across the blue field we were ploughing into white
furrows. Far away a tiny sail scarred the great solitude, and astern
came a gull flying slowly close to the water’s breast.
Daddy Whiddon waved his pipe towards it.
“A follerin’ bürrd,” he said, again; and again I waited; questions were
not grateful to him.
“There be a carpse there, sure enough, a carpse driftin’ and shiftin’ on
the floor of the sea. There be those as can’t rest, poor sawls, and
her’ll be mun, her’ll be mun, and the sperrit of her is with the bürrd.”
The clumsy boom swung across as we changed our course, and the water ran
from us in smooth reaches on either side: the bird flew steadily on.
“What will the spirit do?” I said.
The old man looked at me gravely.
“Her’ll rest in the Lard’s time, in the Lard’s gude time—but now her’ll
just be follerin’ on with the bürrd.”
The gull was flying close to us now, and a cold wind swept the sunny sea.
I shivered: Daddy looked at me curiously.
“There be reason enough to be cawld if us did but knaw it, but I he mos’
used to ’em, poor sawls.” He shaded his keen old blue eyes, and looked
away across the water. His face kindled. “There be a skule comin’, and
by my sawl ’tis mackerel they be drivin’.”
I watched eagerly, and saw the dark line rise and fall in the trough of
the sea, and, away behind, the stir and rush of tumbling porpoises as
they chased their prey.
Again we changed our tack, and each taking an oar, pulled lustily for the
beach.
“Please God her’ll break inshore,” said Daddy Whiddon; and he shouted the
news to the idle waiting men who hailed us.
In a moment all was stir, for the fishing had been slack. Two boats put
out with the lithe brown seine. The dark line had turned, but the school
was still behind, churning the water in clumsy haste; they were coming
in.
Then the brit broke in silvery leaping waves on the shelving beach. The
threefold hunt was over; the porpoises turned out to sea in search of
fresh quarry; and the seine, dragged by ready hands, came slowly,
stubbornly in with its quivering treasure of fish. They had sought a
haven and found none; the brit lay dying in flickering iridescent heaps
as the bare-legged babies of the village gathered them up; and far away
over the water I saw a single grey speck; it was the following bird.
* * * * *
The curtain of river haze falls back; barge and bird are alike gone, and
the lamplighter has lit the first gas-lamp on the far side of the bridge.
Every night I watch him come, his progress marked by the great yellow
eyes that wake the dark. Sometimes he walks quickly; sometimes he
loiters on the bridge to chat, or stare at the dark water; but he always
comes, leaving his watchful deterrent train behind him to police the
night.
Once Demeter in the black anguish of her desolation searched for lost
Persephone by the light of Hecate’s torch; and searching all in vain,
spurned beneath her empty feet an earth barren of her smile; froze with
set brows the merry brooks and streams; and smote forest, and plain, and
fruitful field, with the breath of her last despair, until even Iambe’s
laughing jest was still. And then when the desolation was complete,
across the wasted valley where the starveling cattle scarcely longed to
browse, came the dreadful chariot—and Persephone. The day of the
prisoner of Hades had dawned; and as the sun flamed slowly up to light
her thwarted eyes the world sprang into blossom at her feet.
We can never be too Pagan when we are truly Christian, and the old myths
are eternal truths held fast in the Church’s net. Prometheus fetched
fire from Heaven, to be slain forever in the fetching; and lo, a Greater
than Prometheus came to fire the cresset of the Cross. Demeter waits now
patiently enough. Persephone waits, too, in the faith of the sun she
cannot see: and every lamp lit carries on the crusade which has for its
goal a sunless, moonless, city whose light is the Light of the world.
“Lume è lassù, che visibile face
lo creatore a quella creatura,
che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.”
Immediately outside my window is a lime tree—a little black skeleton of
abundant branches—in which sparrows congregate to chirp and bicker.
Farther away I have a glimpse of graceful planes, children of moonlight
and mist; their dainty robes, still more or less unsullied, gleam ghostly
in the gaslight athwart the dark. They make a brave show even in winter
with their feathery branches and swinging tassels, whereas my little tree
stands stark and uncompromising, with its horde of sooty sparrows cockney
to the last tail feather, and a pathetic inability to look anything but
black. Rain comes with strong caressing fingers, and the branches seem
no whit the cleaner for her care; but then their glistening blackness
mirrors back the succeeding sunlight, as a muddy pavement will sometimes
lap our feet in a sea of gold. The little wet sparrows are for the
moment equally transformed, for the sun turns their dun-coloured coats to
a ruddy bronze, and cries Chrysostom as it kisses each shiny beak. They
are dumb Chrysostoms; but they preach a golden gospel, for the sparrows
are to London what the rainbow was to eight saved souls out of a waste of
waters—a perpetual sign of the remembering mercies of God.
Last night there was a sudden clatter of hoofs, a shout, and then
silence. A runaway cab-horse, a dark night, a wide crossing, and a heavy
burden: so death came to a poor woman. People from the house went out to
help; and I heard of her, the centre of an unknowing curious crowd, as
she lay bonnetless in the mud of the road, her head on the kerb. A rude
but painless death: the misery lay in her life; for this woman—worn,
white-haired, and wrinkled—had but fifty years to set against such a
condition. The policeman reported her respectable, hard-working, living
apart from her husband with a sister; but although they shared rooms,
they “did not speak,” and the sister refused all responsibility; so the
parish buried the dead woman, and thus ended an uneventful tragedy.
Was it her own fault? If so, the greater pathos. The lonely souls that
hold out timid hands to an unheeding world have their meed of interior
comfort even here, while the sons of consolation wait on the thresh-hold
for their footfall: but God help the soul that bars its own door! It is
kicking against the pricks of Divine ordinance, the ordinance of a triune
God; whether it be the dweller in crowded street or tenement who is proud
to say, “I keep myself to myself,” or Seneca writing in pitiful
complacency, “Whenever I have gone among men, I have returned home less
of a man.” Whatever the next world holds in store, we are bidden in this
to seek and serve God in our fellow-men, and in the creatures of His
making whom He calls by name.
It was once my privilege to know an old organ-grinder named Gawdine. He
was a hard swearer, a hard drinker, a hard liver, and he fortified
himself body and soul against the world: he even drank alone, which is an
evil sign.
One day to Gawdine sober came a little dirty child, who clung to his
empty trouser leg—he had lost a limb years before—with a persistent
unintelligible request. He shook the little chap off with a blow and a
curse; and the child was trotting dismally away, when it suddenly turned,
ran back, and held up a dirty face for a kiss.
Two days later Gawdine fell under a passing dray which inflicted terrible
internal injuries on him. They patched him up in hospital, and he went
back to his organ-grinding, taking with him two friends—a pain which fell
suddenly upon him to rack and rend with an anguish of crucifixion, and
the memory of a child’s upturned face. Outwardly he was the same save
that he changed the tunes of his organ, out of long-hoarded savings, for
the jigs and reels which children hold dear, and stood patiently playing
them in child-crowded alleys, where pennies are not as plentiful as
elsewhere.
He continued to drink; it did not come within his new code to stop, since
he could “carry his liquor well;” but he rarely, if ever, swore. He told
me this tale through the throes of his anguish as he lay crouched on a
mattress on the floor; and as the grip of the pain took him he tore and
bit at his hands until they were maimed and bleeding, to keep the ready
curses off his lips.
He told the story, but he gave no reason, offered no explanation: he has
been dead now many a year, and thus would I write his epitaph:—
He saw the face of a little child and looked on God.