[Illustration: The crisp rime of winter's breath]
I
I AM no longer a roadmender; the stretch of white highway which leads
to the end of the world will know me no more; the fields and hedgerows,
grass and leaf stiff with the crisp rime of winter's breath, lie
beyond my horizon; the ewes in the folding, their mysterious eyes
quick with the consciousness of coming motherhood, answer another's
voice and hand; while I lie here, not in the lonely companionship of
my expectations, but where the shadow is bright with kindly faces and
gentle hands, until one kinder and gentler still carries me down the
stairway into the larger room.
But now the veil was held aside and one went by crowned with the
majesty of years, wearing the ermine of an unstained rule, the
purple of her people's loyalty. Nations stood with bated breath
to see her pass in the starlit mist of her children's tears; a
monarch--greatest of her time; an empress--conquered men called mother;
a woman--Englishmen cried queen; still the crowned captive of her
people's heart--the prisoner of love.
The night-goers passed under my window in silence, neither song nor
shout broke the welcome dark; next morning the workmen who went by were
strangely quiet.
'VICTORIA DEI GRATIA BRITANNIARUM REGINA.'
Did they think of how that legend would disappear, and of all it meant,
as they paid their pennies at the coffee-stall? The feet rarely know
the true value and work of the head; but all Englishmen have been and
will be quick to acknowledge and revere Victoria by the grace of God a
wise woman, a great and loving mother.
[Illustration: The aloneness of a great forest]
Years ago, I, standing at a level crossing, saw her pass. The train
slowed down, and she caught sight of the gatekeeper's little girl
who had climbed the barrier. Such a smile as she gave her! And then
I caught a quick startled gesture as she slipped from my vision; I
thought afterwards it was that she feared the child might fall. Mother
first, then Queen; even so rest came to her--not in one of the royal
palaces, but in her own home, surrounded by the immediate circle of her
nearest and dearest, while the world kept watch and ward.
I, a shy lover of the fields and woods, longed always, should a
painless passing be vouchsafed me, to make my bed on the fragrant pine
needles in the aloneness of a great forest; to lie once again as I had
lain many a time, bathed in the bitter sweetness of the sun-blessed
pines, lapped in the manifold silence; my ear attuned to the wind of
Heaven with its call from the Cities of Peace. In sterner mood, when
Love's hand held a scourge, I craved rather the stress of the moorland
with its bleaker mind imperative of sacrifice. To rest again under the
lee of Rippon Tor swept by the strong peat-smelling breeze; to stare
untired at the long cloud-shadowed reaches, and watch the mist-wraiths
huddle and shrink round the stones of blood; until my sacrifice too
was accomplished, and my soul had fled. A wild waste moor; a vast void
sky; and naught between heaven and earth but man, his sin-glazed eyes
seeking afar the distant light of his own heart.
With years came counsels more profound, and the knowledge that man was
no mere dweller in the woods to follow the footsteps of the piping
god, but an integral part of an organised whole, in which Pan too
has his fulfilment. The wise Venetians knew; and read pantheism into
Christianity when they set these words round Ezekiel's living creatures
in the altar vault of St Mark's:--
QUAEQUE SUB OBSCURIS DE CRISTO DICTA FIGURIS
HIS APERIRE DATUR ET IN HIS, DEUS IPSE NOTATUR.
"Thou shalt have none other gods but me." If man had been able to keep
this one commandment perfectly the other nine would never have been
written; instead he has comprehensively disregarded it, and perhaps
never more than now in the twentieth century. Ah, well! this world,
in spite of all its sinning, is still the Garden of Eden where the
Lord walked with man, not in the cool of evening, but in the heat and
stress of the immediate working day. There is no angel now with naming
sword to keep the way of the Tree of Life, but tapers alight morning
by morning in the Hostel of God to point us to it; and we, who are as
gods knowing good and evil, partake of that fruit "whereof whoso eateth
shall never die"; the greatest gift or the most awful penalty--Eternal
Life.
I then, with my craving for tree and sky, held that a great capital
with its stir of life and death, of toil and strife and pleasure, was
an ill place for a sick man to wait in; a place to shrink from as a
child shrinks from the rude blow of one out of authority. Yet here, far
from moor and forest, hillside and hedgerow, in the family sitting-room
of the English-speaking peoples, the London much misunderstood, I
find the fulfilment by antithesis of all desire. For the loneliness
of the moorland, there is the warmth and companionship of London's
swift beating heart. For silence there is sound--the sound and stir
of service--for the most part far in excess of its earthly equivalent.
Against the fragrant incense of the pines I set the honest sweat of the
man whose lifetime is the measure of his working day. "He that loveth
not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath
not seen?" wrote Blessed John, who himself loved so much that he beheld
the Lamb as it had been slain from the beginning when Adam fell, and
the City of God with light most precious. The burden of corporate sin,
the sword of corporate sorrow, the joy of corporate righteousness; thus
we become citizens in the Kingdom of God, and companions of all his
creatures. "It is not good that the man should be alone," said the Lord
God.
I live now as it were in two worlds, the world of sight, and the world
of sound; and they scarcely ever touch each other. I hear the grind of
heavy traffic, the struggle of horses on the frost-breathed ground, the
decorous jolt of omnibuses, the jangle of cab bells, the sharp warning
of bicycles at the corner, the swift rattle of costers' carts as they
go south at night with their shouting, goading crew. All these things
I hear, and more; but I see no road, only the silent river of my heart
with its tale of wonder and years, and the white beat of seagulls'
wings in strong inquiring flight.
Sometimes there is naught to see on the waterway but a solitary black
hull, a very Stygian ferry-boat, manned by a solitary figure, and
moving slowly up under the impulse of the far-reaching sweeps. Then
the great barges pass with their coffined treasure, drawn by a small
self-righteous steam-tug. Later, lightened of their load, and waiting
on wind and tide, I see them swooping by like birds set free; tawny
sails that mind me of red-roofed Whitby with its northern fleet; black
sails as of some heedless Theseus; white sails that sweep out of the
morning mist "like restless gossameres." They make the bridge, which is
just within my vision, and then away past Westminster and Blackfriars
where St Paul's great dome lifts the cross high over a self-seeking
city; past Southwark where England's poet illuminates in the scroll of
divine wisdom the sign of the Tabard; past the Tower with its haunting
ghosts of history; past Greenwich, fairy city, caught in the meshes of
riverside mist; and then the salt and speer of the sea, the companying
with great ships, the fresh burden.
At night I see them again, silent, mysterious; searching the darkness
with unwinking yellow stare, led by a great green light. They creep
up under the bridge which spans the river with its watching eyes, and
vanish, crying back a warning note as they make the upper reach, or
strident hail, as a chain of kindred phantoms passes, ploughing a
contrary tide.
Throughout the long watches of the night I follow them; and in the
early morning they slide by, their eyes pale in the twilight; while the
stars flicker and fade, and the gas lamps die down into a dull yellow
blotch against the glory and glow of a new day.