[Illustration: The white winding road]
I
I HAVE attained my ideal: I am a roadmender, some say stonebreaker.
Both titles are correct, but the one is more pregnant than the other.
All day I sit by the roadside on a stretch of grass under a high hedge
of saplings and a tangle of traveller's joy, woodbine, sweetbriar, and
late roses. Opposite me is a white gate, seldom used, if one may judge
from the trail of honeysuckle growing tranquilly along it: I know now
that whenever and wherever I die my soul will pass out through this
white gate; and then, thank God, I shall not have need to undo that
trail.
In our youth we discussed our ideals freely: I wonder how many beside
myself have attained, or would understand my attaining. After all,
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? All these gifts are
mine as I sit by the winding white road and serve the footsteps of my
fellows. There is no room in my life for avarice or anxiety; I who
serve at the altar live of the altar: I lack nothing but have nothing
over; and when the winter of life comes I shall join the company of
weary old men who sit on the sunny side of the workhouse wall and wait
for the tender mercies of God.
Just now it is the summer of things; there is life and music
everywhere--in the stones themselves, and I live to-day beating out
the rhythmical hammer-song of The Ring. There is real physical joy in
the rise and swing of the arm, in the jar of a fair stroke, the split
and scatter of the quartz: I am learning to be ambidextrous, for why
should Esau sell his birthright when there is enough for both? Then the
rest-hour comes, bringing the luxurious ache of tired but not weary
limbs; and I lie outstretched and renew my strength, sometimes with my
face deep-nestled in the cool green grass, sometimes on my back looking
up into the blue sky which no wise man would wish to fathom.
The birds have no fear of me; am I not also of the brown brethren in
my sober fustian livery? They share my meals--at least the little
dun-coated Franciscans do; the blackbirds and thrushes care not a whit
for such simple food as crumbs, but with legs well apart and claws
tense with purchase they disinter poor brother worm, having first
mocked him with sound of rain. The robin that lives by the gate regards
my heap of stones as subject to his special inspection. He sits atop
and practises the trill of his summer song until it shrills above and
through the metallic clang of my strokes; and when I pause he cocks
his tail, with a humorous twinkle of his round eye which means--"What!
shirking, big brother?"--and I fall, ashamed, to my mending of roads.
The other day, as I lay with my face in the grass, I heard a gentle
rustle, and raised my head to find a hedge-snake watching me fearless,
unwinking. I stretched out my hand, picked it up unresisting, and put
it in my coat like the husbandman of old. Was he so ill-rewarded, I
wonder, with the kiss that reveals secrets? My snake slept in peace
while I hammered away with an odd quickening of heart as I thought
how to me, as to Melampus, had come the messenger--had come, but to
ears deafened by centuries of misrule, blindness, and oppression; so
that, with all my longing, I am shut out of the wondrous world where
walked Melampus and the Saint. To me there is no suggestion of evil in
the little silent creatures, harmless, or deadly only with the Death
which is Life. The beasts who turn upon us, as a rule maul and tear
unreflectingly; with the snake there is the swift, silent strike, the
tiny, tiny wound, then sleep and a forgetting.
[Illustration: The solitary cottage]
My brown friend, with its message unspoken, slid away into the grass at
sundown to tell its tale in unstopped ears; and I, my task done, went
home across the fields to the solitary cottage where I lodge. It is
old and decrepit--two rooms, with a quasi-attic over them reached by a
ladder from the kitchen and reached only by me. It is furnished with
the luxuries of life, a truckle bed, table, chair, and huge earthenware
pan which I fill from the ice-cold well at the back of the cottage.
Morning and night I serve with the Gibeonites, their curse my blessing,
as no doubt it was theirs when their hearts were purged by service.
Morning and night I send down the moss-grown bucket with its urgent
message from a dry and dusty world; the chain tightens through my hand
as the liquid treasure responds to the messenger, and then with creak
and jangle--the welcome of labouring earth--the bucket slowly nears the
top and disperses the treasure in the waiting vessels. The Gibeonites
were servants in the house of God, ministers of the sacrament of
service even as the High Priest himself; and I, sharing their high
office of servitude, thank God that the ground was accursed for my
sake, for surely that curse was the womb of all unborn blessing.
The old widow with whom I lodge has been deaf for the last twenty
years. She speaks in the strained high voice which protests against
her own infirmity, and her eyes have the pathetic look of those who
search in silence. For many years she lived alone with her son, who
laboured on the farm two miles away. He met his death rescuing a
cart-horse from its burning stable; and the farmer gave the cottage
rent free and a weekly half-crown for life to the poor old woman whose
dearest terror was the workhouse. With my shilling a week rent, and
sharing of supplies, we live in the lines of comfort. Of death she has
no fears, for in the long chest in the kitchen lie a web of coarse
white linen, two pennies covered with the same to keep down tired
eyelids, decent white stockings, and a white cotton sun-bonnet--a
decorous death-suit truly--and enough money in the little bag for
self-respecting burial. The farmer buried his servant handsomely--good
man, he knew the love of reticent grief for a 'kind' burial--and one
day Harry's mother is to lie beside him in the little churchyard which
has been a cornfield, and may some day be one again.