ON Sunday my little tree was limned in white and the sparrows were
craving shelter at my window from the blizzard. Now the mild thin air
brings a breath of spring in its wake and the daffodils in the garden
wait the kisses of the sun. Hand-in-hand with memory I slip away down
the years, and remember a day when I awoke at earliest dawn, for across
my sleep I had heard the lusty golden-throated trumpeters heralding the
spring.
[Illustration: The field-gate that leads to the lower meadows]
The air was sharp-set; a delicate rime frosted roof and road; the sea
lay hazy and still like a great pearl. Then as the sky stirred with
flush upon flush of warm rosy light, it passed from misty pearl to
opal with heart of flame, from opal to gleaming sapphire. The earth
called, the fields called, the river called--that pied piper to whose
music a man cannot stop his ears. It was with me as with the Canterbury
pilgrims:--
"So priketh hem nature in hir corages;
Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages."
Half an hour later I was away by the early train that carries
the branch mails and a few workmen, and was delivered at the little
wayside station with the letters. The kind air went singing past as I
swung along the reverberating road between the high tree-crowned banks
which we call hedges in merry Devon, with all the world to myself and
the Brethren. A great blackbird flew out with a loud "chook, chook,"
and the red of the haw on his yellow bill. A robin trilled from a
low rose-bush; two wrens searched diligently on a fallen tree for
breakfast, quite unconcerned when I rested a moment beside them; and a
shrewmouse slipped across the road followed directly by its mate. March
violets bloomed under the sheltered hedge with here and there a pale
primrose; a frosted bramble spray still held its autumn tints clinging
to the semblance of the past; and great branches of snowy blackthorn
broke the barren hedgeway as if spring made a mock of winter's snows.
Light of heart and foot with the new wine of the year I sped on again,
stray daffodils lighting the wayside, until I heard the voice of the
stream and reached the field gate which leads to the lower meadows.
There before me lay spring's pageant; green pennons waving, dainty
maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow trumpeters proclaiming
'Victory' to an awakened earth. They range in serried ranks right down
to the river, so that a man must walk warily to reach the water's edge
where they stand gazing down at themselves in fairest semblance like
their most tragic progenitor, and, rising from the bright grass in
their thousands, stretch away until they melt in a golden cloud at the
far end of the misty mead. Through the field gate and across the road I
see them, starring the steep earth bank that leads to the upper copse,
gleaming like pale flames against the dark tree-boles. There they have
but frail tenure; here, in the meadows, they reign supreme.
[Illustration: A host of joyous yellow trumpeters]
At the upper end of the field the river provides yet closer sanctuary
for these children of the spring. Held in its embracing arms lies an
island long and narrow, some thirty feet by twelve, a veritable untrod
Eldorado, glorious in gold from end to end, a fringe of reeds by the
water's edge, and save for that--daffodils. A great oak stands at the
meadow's neck, an oak with gnarled and wandering roots where a man
may rest, for it is bare of daffodils save for a group of three, and
a solitary one apart growing close to the old tree's side. I sat down
by my lonely little sister, blue sky overhead, green grass at my feet
decked, like the pastures of the Blessèd, in glorious sheen; a sea of
triumphant, golden heads tossing blithely back as the wind swept
down to play with them at his pleasure.
It was all mine to have and to hold without severing a single slender
stem or harbouring a thought of covetousness; mine, as the whole earth
was mine, to appropriate to myself without the burden and bane of
worldly possession. "Thou sayest that I am--a King," said the Lord
before Pilate, and "My kingdom is not of this world." We who are made
kings after His likeness possess all things, not after this world's
fashion but in proportion to our poverty; and when we cease to toil and
spin, are arrayed as the lilies, in a glory transcending Solomon's.
Bride Poverty--she who climbed the Cross with Christ--stretches out
eager hands to free us from our chains, but we flee from her, and lay
up treasure against her importunity, while Amytas on his seaweed bed
weeps tears of pure pity for crave-mouth Cæsar of great possessions.
Presently another of spring's lovers cried across the water "Cuckoo,
cuckoo," and the voice of the stream sang joyously in unison. It is
free from burden, this merry little river, and neither weir nor mill
bars its quick way to the sea as it completes the eternal circle,
lavishing gifts of coolness and refreshment on the children of the
meadows.
It has its birth on the great lone moor, cradled in a wonderful
peat-smelling bog, with a many-hued coverlet of soft mosses--pale
gold, orange, emerald, tawny, olive and white, with the red stain of
sun-dew and tufted cotton-grass. Under the old grey rocks which watch
it rise, yellow-eyed tormantil stars the turf, and bids "Godspeed" to
the little child of earth and sky. Thus the journey begins; and with
ever-increasing strength the stream carves a way through the dear brown
peat, wears a fresh wrinkle on the patient stones, and patters merrily
under a clapper bridge which spanned its breadth when the mistletoe
reigned and Bottor, the grim rock idol, exacted the toll of human life
that made him great. On and on goes the stream, for it may not stay;
leaving of its freshness with the great osmunda that stretches eager
roots towards the running water; flowing awhile with a brother stream,
to part again east and west as each takes up his separate burden of
service--my friend to cherish the lower meadows in their flowery
joyance--and so by the great sea-gate back to sky and earth again.
The river of God is full of water. The streets of the City are pure
gold. Verily, here also having nothing we possess all things.
* * * * *
The air was keen and still as I walked back in the early evening, and
a daffodil light was in the sky as if Heaven mirrored back earth's
radiance. Near the station some children flitted past, like little
white miller moths homing through the dusk. As I climbed the hill the
moon rode high in a golden field--it was daffodils to the last.
V
THE seagulls from the upper reaches pass down the river in sober steady
flight seeking the open sea. I shall miss the swoop and circle of
silver wings in the sunlight and the plaintive call which sounds so
strangely away from rock and shore, but it is good to know that they
have gone from mudbank and murky town back to the free airs of their
inheritance, to the shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling crest of
the wind-beaten waves, to brood again over the great ocean of a world's
tears.
My little tree is gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of promise.
The sparrows busied with nest-building in the neighbouring pipes and
gutters use it for a vantage ground, and crowd there in numbers, each
little beak sealed with long golden straw or downy feather.
The river is heavy with hay barges, the last fruits of winter's
storehouse; the lengthening days slowly and steadily oust the dark;
the air is loud with a growing clamour of life: spring is not only
proclaimed, but on this Feast she is crowned, and despite the warring
wind the days bring their meed of sunshine. We stand for a moment at
the meeting of the ways, the handclasp of Winter and Spring, of Sleep
and Wakening, of Life and Death; and there is between them not even
the thin line which Rabbi Jochanan on his death-bed beheld as all that
divided hell from heaven.
"_Sphæra cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi_," was said of
Mercury, that messenger of the gods who marshalled reluctant spirits
to the Underworld; and for Mercury we may write Life with Death as
its great sacrament of brotherhood and release, to be dreaded only as
we dread to partake unworthily of great benefits. Like all sacraments
it has its rightful time and due solemnities; the horror and sin of
suicide lie in the presumption of free will, the forestalling of a
gift,--the sin of Eve in Paradise, who took that which might only be
given at the hand of the Lord. It has too its physical pains, but they
are those of a woman in travail, and we remember them no more for
joy that a child-man is born into the world naked and not ashamed:
beholding ourselves as we are we shall see also the leaves of the Tree
of Life set for the healing of the nations.
We are slowly, very slowly, abandoning our belief in sudden and
violent transitions for a surer and fuller acceptance of the doctrine
of evolution; but most of us still draw a sharp line of demarcation
between this world and the next, and expect a radical change in
ourselves and our surroundings, a break in the chain of continuity
entirely contrary to the teaching of nature and experience. In the same
way we cling to the specious untruth that we can begin over and over
again in this world, forgetting that while our sorrow and repentance
bring sacramental gifts of grace and strength, God Himself cannot, by
His own limitation, rewrite the Past. We are in our sorrow that which
we have made ourselves in our sin; our temptations are there as well
as the way of escape. We are in the image of God. We create our world,
our undying selves, our heaven, or our hell. "_Qui creavit te sine te
non salvabit te sine te._" It is stupendous, magnificent, and most
appalling. A man does not change as he crosses the threshold of the
larger room. His personality remains the same, although the expression
of it may be altered. Here we have material bodies in a material
world--there, perhaps, ether bodies in an ether world. There is no
indecency in reasonable speculation and curiosity about the life to
come. One end of the thread is between our fingers, but we are haunted
for the most part by the snap of Atropos' shears.
Socrates faced death with the magnificent calm bred of dignified
familiarity. He had built for himself a desired heaven of colour,
light, and precious stones--the philosophic formula of those who set
the spiritual above the material, and worship truth in the beauty of
holiness. He is not troubled by doubts or regrets, for the path of the
just lies plain before his face. He forbids mourning and lamentations
as out of place, obeys minutely and cheerily the directions of his
executioner, and passes with unaffected dignity to the apprehension of
that larger truth for which he had constantly prepared himself. His
friends may bury him provided they will remember they are not burying
Socrates; and that all things may be done decently and in order, a cock
must go to Æsculapius.
Long before, in the days of the Captivity, there lived in godless,
blood-shedding Nineveh an exiled Jew whose father had fallen from
the faith. He was a simple man, child-like and direct; living the
careful, kindly life of an orthodox Jew, suffering many persecutions
for conscience' sake, and in constant danger of death. He narrates the
story of his life and of the blindness which fell on him, with gentle
placidity, and checks the exuberance of his more emotional wife with
the assurance of untroubled faith. Finally, when his pious expectations
are fulfilled, his sight restored, and his son prosperously
established beside him, he breaks into a prayer of rejoicing which
reveals the secret of his confident content. He made use of two great
faculties: the sense of proportion, which enabled him to apprise life
and its accidents justly, and the gift of inseeing, which led Socrates
after him, and Blessed John in lonely exile on Patmos, to look through
the things temporal to the hidden meanings of eternity.
"Let my soul bless God the great King," he cries; and looks away past
the present distress; past the Restoration which was to end in fresh
scattering and confusion; past the dream of gold, and porphyry, and
marble defaced by the eagles and emblems of the conqueror; until his
eyes are held by the Jerusalem of God, "built up with sapphires, and
emeralds, and precious stones," with battlements of pure gold, and the
cry of 'Alleluia' in her streets.
Many years later, when he was very aged, he called his son to him
and gave him as heritage his own simple rule of life, adding but one
request: "Keep thou the law and the commandments, and shew thyself
merciful and just, that it may go well with thee. . . .. Consider
what alms doeth, and how righteousness doth deliver. . . . And bury
me decently, and thy mother with me." Having so said, he went his way
quietly and contentedly to the Jerusalem of his heart.
It is the simple note of familiarity that is wanting in us; that by
which we link world with world. Once, years ago, I sat by the bedside
of a dying man in a wretched garret in the East End. He was entirely
ignorant, entirely quiescent, and entirely uninterested. The minister
of a neighbouring chapel came to see him and spoke to him at some
length of the need for repentance and the joys of heaven. After he had
gone my friend lay staring restlessly at the mass of decrepit broken
chimney pots which made his horizon. At last he spoke, and there was a
new note in his voice:--
"Ee said as 'ow there were golding streets in them parts. I ain't no
ways particler wot they're made of, but it'll feel natral like if
there's chimleys too."
The sun stretched a sudden finger and painted the chimney pots red
and gold against the smoke-dimmed sky, and with his face alight with
surprised relief my friend died.
We are one with the earth, one in sin, one in redemption. It is the
fringe of the garment of God. "If I may but touch the hem," said a
certain woman.
On the great Death-day which shadows the early spring with a shadow of
which it may be said _Umbra Dei est Lux_, the earth brought gifts of
grief, the fruit of the curse, barren thorns, hollow reed, and the wood
of the cross; the sea made offering of Tyrian purple; the sky veiled
her face in great darkness, while the nation of priests crucified for
the last time their Paschal lamb. "I will hear, saith the Lord; I will
hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth, and the earth shall
hear the corn and wine and oil, and they shall hear Jezreel, and I will
sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had
not obtained mercy, and I will say unto them which were not my people,
'Thou art my people,' and they shall say 'Thou art my God.'"
[Illustration: In the distance rise the great lone heavenward hills]
The second Adam stood in the garden with quickening feet, and all
the earth pulsed and sang for joy of the new hope and the new life
quickening within her, to be hers through the pains of travail, the
pangs of dissolution. The Tree of Life bears Bread and Wine--food of
the wayfaring man. The day of divisions is past, the day of unity has
dawned. One has risen from the dead, and in the Valley of Achor stands
wide the Door of Hope--the Sacrament of Death.
Scio Domine, et vere scio . . . quia non sum dignus
accedere ad tantum mysterium propter nimia peccata mea
et infinitas negligentias meas. Sed scio . . . quia tu
potes me facere dignum.