living. To talk of the wastage of life is mere cant." Our hostess
rescued the teacup, and the Professor had now the free use of both his
hands. The one hand clutched his hair and the other made sundry
gestures clinching his arguments.
"Why should we rail at death?" said he; "for death has been the saviour
of humanity. It was death that made men of us. It was in the school
of death that man learned unselfishness, self-sacrifice, chivalry and
honour. There is nothing so ugly as the man whose heart is filled by
the world. It is death that has saved us all from that. Were man's
location here for ever, the world would be his god. A world without
death would be a world with no room for the Cross. Men climbed the
heights of nobility as they defied death. The crackling flames were
unable to silence the martyrs' song; the march of the hosts of
devouring tyranny could not move the hearts that chose death rather
than slavery; the generations sealed with their blood their testimony
that truth and loyalty to truth are more precious than life, and so met
death with a smile; it was through this wrestling with death that great
and noble character was forged on the anvil of life. Death was the
weapon which forged greatness of soul. Death cannot destroy what death
has created. That could only happen in an insensate world. What is
it--death--but just this--the slave of immortality?"
If I could only write it down as the Professor spoke, if I could only
make you see his eyes glowing with little darts of flame as he saw the
whole world transformed into a mighty workshop in which the "alchemy of
Providence" is transmuting the soiled substance of our humanity into
living souls (over whom death can have no dominion) fashioned for
heavenly destinies--then you, too, would believe. Since that day my
old friend has not spoken a word about the "waste of the flower of the
race."
***
The house with the drawn blinds stands at the cross-roads, and I must
come back to it. What is it that has happened to him who lies in a
nameless grave in France? The opportunity for winning glory and
earthly fame did not come his way; he just laid down his life along
with hundreds of thousands more. He has taken his place among the
undistinguished dead.
"O, undistinguished dead,
Whom the bent covers or the rock-strewn steep
Shows to the stars, for you I mourn--I weep,
O, undistinguished dead.
"None knows your name,
Blackened and blurred in the wild battle's brunt,
Hotly ye fell with all your wounds in front.
That was your fame."
Not a line in the records of time for him. But there are other
records--those of eternity. He has lost nothing of the thrill of life.
He is being borne on that tide of self-surrender and heroism which has
flowed through the ages, and bears those who embark on it to the very
feet of God. He would not himself have it otherwise. "It is better
far to go out with honour than survive with shame," wrote a comrade
from the trenches, now united with him in death. There is a place for
sorrow in our land, but its place is by the hearth-stones of those
whose sons choose to survive with shame. He has taken his place among
those who, unseen, are leading on the embattled hosts of his race to
victory. He has discovered the treasures in store for the brave and
the true. When, amid the flutterings of flags and the shouting of the
people rejoicing in their deliverance, the great army will return home
at last--he, too, will come.
At Kobe, when the bugles were welcoming the victorious Japanese home in
1895, Lafcadio Hearn spoke to an old man of those who would never
return. "Probably the Western people believe," answered the old man,
"that the dead never return. There are no Japanese dead who do not
return. There are none who do not know the way." It is a poor,
emasculated religion that does not believe that. When at the last the
bugles call in the quiet evening ... they will come back. They will
come crowned with glory and honour and immortality--with that victory
which overcometh the world. Let the blinds be rolled up, and the
windows be all flung open to the light.
VI
The Cities of the Plain
VI
It was the old clerk, of whose services and devotion to our parish I
have previously written, who gave the Biblical name to the little
village that lies near the boundary of the great city that is steadily
creeping towards us, and ever threatening to engulf us. Its own name
is singularly pleasant to the ear and redolent of the sound of running
waters, but it is unnecessary to burden the memory with it. Though it
is now many years ago, I remember, as it were yesterday, the first time
I heard the word on the old clerk's lips. I was sitting warming myself
by the fire in the ticket-collector's office. The ticket-collector was
ostensibly waiting to provide tickets, but as everybody in our parish
has a season ticket, that part of his duty is almost a sinecure.
Thus it happens that the ticket-collector has leisure, just before the
trains pass through, to give his friends the fruits of his researches
in the realms of philosophy. That particular day he was speaking of
the changes he had seen. "I was brought up," said he, closing his
argument, "on the Shorter Catechism and porridge. I dinna haud any
longer by the Catechism, but I havena lost my faith in porridge."
It was then that the clink of coppers was heard on the sill of the
ticket window. In the aperture was framed the face of the clerk, with
the trimmed grey beard and the small twinkling eyes. He held three
pennies deftly in his thumbless hand. "Return, Sodom," said he. The
ticket-collector pushed back his cap, stretched out his right hand as
if he were beginning to speak, then thought better of it. Out of his
case, without a word, he produced a return ticket for Sodom, clinked it
in his machine, and passed it through the window. The old clerk
received it with a grim chuckle.
Away below the bridge there came a rumble. "Train," said the
ticket-collector, closing the aperture with a snap, and making for the
door. And I have never forgotten the hoarse voice of the old clerk
with an acid edge to it as he clinked his three coppers, saying
"Return, Sodom."
***
It is an amazing thing how within the circuit of the same parish,
removed by one mile from one another, there can live together two eras
so remote from each other in the order of human development, as the
world of the red-roofed houses on the slopes of the hills, and the
village at their base where the gorge, worn by the little river through
the travail of immemorial centuries, debouches on the great central
plain that runs across Scotland.
Every morning the dwellers on the slopes are borne by the railway on a
great span of arches over the little village, and they look down on the
roofs of its houses. On the slopes there lies the world in which the
fringes of life are embroidered--a world where men and women talk of
books, pictures and plays. It is a world of hyphenated names. But in
all the village there is not so much as one hyphenated name. It is a
refuse-heap of humanity. Many diverse races are crowded in it. The
city fathers clean out slums without providing first for the
slum-dwellers, and, swept before the broom of so-called social
reformers, homeless men and women have drifted to the village, and
there reconstituted their slum.
From the glens of the north broken Highlanders, driven out to make room
for sheep, have drifted hither to work in the quarries, and the speech
of their children's children still bears the trace of their ancient
language pure and clean; over the sea Irishmen have come to reap the
harvest fields of the Lothians, and they have been deposited by the
tide in the village. Stray Poles have come hither and straggling
Czechs; a man from Connemara neighbours a shaggy giant from Lewis; and
a dour stone-cutter from Aberdeen is door by door with an Italian who
sells what looks like a deadly mixture from a hand-cart.
Here you can see humanity in its primitive state, before it began to
adorn the fringes of life, and make for itself sanctuaries of privacy.
Between the slopes and the base of the hill there yawns an invisible
chasm. Centuries separate them. Thus it comes that the slope-dweller
passes on the top of the arches, scanning his newspaper, without so
much as seeing the huddle of houses which constitute the village.
It is only a week ago that, like the old clerk, I took out a return
ticket for the "Cities of the Plain." (For the old clerk had a
two-fold formula. When he was going to one village he said, "Return,
Sodom," but when he meant to go to the quarries beside the village he
said, "Return, Cities of the Plain.") It was to visit an old soldier
that I thus descended into the plains. He lives in a rookery in which
many families are crowded one on the top of the other--a rabbit-warren
infested by many and strange odours. He used to come up the slopes and
do odd jobs, tidying up gardens, and he loved to talk of
"unhappy far-off things
And battles long ago,"
in a language which I also could speak. So I got to know him. And as
I sat by his bed I heard a moan from the adjoining room. It began in a
low cry, and then rose into a wail that seemed charged with all the
woes of humanity. The old man sat up in bed trembling. The cry of woe
now changed into a chorus; other voices swelled it. It was the act of
a moment to open the door, and in the dim landing find the door of this
other room.
I opened it, and there I saw three children huddled before a grate
which contained nothing but ashes. On an iron bed, stretched on straw,
lay a woman sunk in sleep.... A foetid air was laden with the fumes of
alcohol.... There was no food.... A broken chair, a stool or two, and
a box that did duty for a table.... The old soldier told me what to
do, and I did it. A kindly woman brought coal and food, and the
wailing was silenced. The old man explained it all. The woman sunk in
the stupor is the wife of a soldier now in the trenches. She did not
belong to our parish; but only came a week or two before, swept before
the broom of the "social reformers" from the city. The mothers of the
Parish, the old soldier declared, were heroines. One such, when her
son asked her consent to enlist, said, "Eh, laddie, I dinna want ye to
gang; I dinna want ... but if I were ye I wud gang mysel'." Our own
wives and mothers were splendid--but those who came from the city,
flotsam and jetsam borne on the tide, staying for a little and then
carried away again, of whom there were three or four in the
village--these were different. They meet each other eager for news.
They are depressed, and feel the need for cheering. One suggests a
stimulant ... and the result is this.
He is no Puritan--the old soldier lying on his bed, his campaigning
done--and he spoke out of an understanding heart. It was only poor
human nature, overtaken by thick darkness and misery, trying to open a
window towards the realm of sunshine.
And I came out into the roadway and turned towards the station. I did
not see them before, but I saw them now. A few yards separating them,
I pass two shops licensed to sell the means for opening windows towards
this realm of happiness; and two houses with gaudy lights called the
villagers to enter the region where all cares and worries are
forgotten. In the street pale-faced, ill-clad children played at being
soldiers, marching with heads erect. The gorge was already dark with
the evening shadows, but the lamps in the village were lit.
When the village was passed I stood and looked back. In the west the
setting sun had thrown over the heavens a glow. A well of liquid fire
glowed over Torfionn, and its rays spread fan-like, so that they
spanned the horizon, and, touching the rounded mass of Corstarfin, went
forth over the firth. Against this background stood silhouetted the
great arches that carry the railway across the hollow, and behind these
the arches that bear the canal. The piers stood as a gigantic forest.
These mighty arches might have been the work of the Romans. A soft,
luminous haze fell on the village. Window after window was lit up.
The door of a cottage near me was opened, and a flood of light streamed
out. A woman stood in the door, and looking up the road shouted "Jim,"
and a little boy, leaving his fellow-soldiers, rushed to her, and she
clasped him in her arms and closed the door.... In that moment the
little village seemed to me as if it were an outpost of Paradise.
Nature threw as a benediction the mantle of its loveliness over it.
What nature meant to be a sanctuary of beauty, man had changed into
Sodom.
***
The ticket-collector stood at his post and scanned the passengers as
they went through. He knew them all, and had only a stray ticket to
collect. I was last, and duly gave up my "return" from the "Cities of
the Plain." But he did not let me through the gate. "I want to show
you something," said the ticket-collector, and he led me into his
office and produced a pamphlet.
"I got it from the man who goes to Keswick," said the ticket-collector;
"you know him." I knew him, the best of men.
"Nae doubt," went on the ticket-collector; "nae doubt. He was always
giving me tracts. Tracts--faugh!--poor stuff, nae style, nae logic,
and nae philosophee in them. But I aye took them and thanked him--for
he is a nice man, though a perfect babe in matters of understanding.
And I found them useful for spills. The other day he handed me
this..." and he waved a blue paper-covered booklet.
"Mahn," he exclaimed, pushing his peaked cap back from his grey head,
and sweeping his brass buttons down with his hand; "mahn, this has fair
hit me between the eyes." Then he opened the pamphlet and began to
read passages that he had heavily scored with blue pencil. The Czar
has abolished the sale of vodka for ever! What is the result?
"The old women in the villages," read the ticket-collector, "can hardly
believe their own eyes, so changed are their menfolk.... Everywhere
peace, kindness and industry. War is said to be hell; but this is like
a foretaste of heaven."
"Listen to this," cried the collector, his arm outstretched. "A
newspaper correspondent writes, since the sale of vodka stopped the old
night population (in the doss-houses) seems to have vanished." Every
passage he read bore the same testimony.
"And what are we doing?" he exclaimed. "We have stopped nothing; we
surround our soldiers with the old temptations, and we leave their
defenceless wives exposed to the same temptations; I know all about it.
Mahn, it was Ruskin that said, 'There is no wealth but life,' and we
leave all our wealth of life at the mercy of every evil. It's a fair
scandal. Do you ken the conclusion I've come to! It is that the best
form of government is a benevolent despotism. Oor men are afraid of
this and that--losing votes--but an autocrat with a stroke of a pen can
sweep away the power of hell. If they would only make King George an
autocrat for a few years.... That would be grand!"
He insisted on lending me the blue-covered pamphlet, and it being his
hour off he walked with me across the bridge. The valley was now dark.
The snuff-manufacturer's house down below was wrapped in gloom. Lights
twinkled on the slopes. Below a lamp-post at the far end of the bridge
two men stood. When he saw them the ticket-collector stood fast.
"Mahn," said he, "I've come to a great resolution. I'm too old to
fight; and they canna get at me in ony way. No Income-tax for me; and
threepence on the tea is naething, for I never take it; I want to feel
that I am worth men dying for me; and I am going to be tee-total till
the end of the war. I'll give the money to help the soldiers' weans.
It's the weans that pull at my heart-strings."
And he turned on his heel and walked rapidly back across the bridge.
Under the lamp-post stood the roadman and the beadle, looking after
him. I spoke to them, for since the war began we all speak to each
other in our parish.
"Has he forgotten ony thin'?" asked the roadman, waving a hand towards
the retreating form of the ticket-collector.
"I don't think so," I answered, "he just said that he was going to be
tee-total till the end of the war."
"Tee-total!" echoed the roadman mournfully; "there gangs anither lost
soul!"
My two friends went sadly down the steep brae, and I turned up the long
flight of stone steps that leads to the road above. On the top of the
first flight I turned and looked after them. When they came opposite
the door of the village inn, they slowed down ... and then went
resolutely past, down into the hollow. The two of them have probably
resolved to join the company of the "lost souls."
***
I have read the ticket-collector's pamphlet, and I feel a little dazed.
It is such an odd world, and the strange thing is that I never realised
its queerness before. A Grand Duke is murdered in a place of which I
never heard before, and whose name I cannot even now trust myself to
write down correctly, and here, a thousand miles away, the result is
that I am brought face to face for the first time with the problem that
lay twice a day under my feet--the problem of the Cities of the Plain.
A flood of light seems to have fallen on things which were aforetime
hazy. Events stand out luridly and arrestingly. Here is one. I was
in a far Hebridean isle when war broke out. All of a sudden there
sounded the drum,
"Saying Come,
Freemen, come,
Ere your heritage be wasted! said the
quick alarming drum."
And the manhood of the island sprang to their feet. Mothers gave their
sons, sending them away with sobs and tears, but in the name of God.
On a drizzling morning the little steamer lay at the pier, crowded with
men and horses, going out to fight and die. The hawsers were loosed.
The steamer churned and backed and crept away. A girl stood near me
crying softly. A youth with clean-cut features, and the yearning no
tongue can utter shining in his eyes, leant over the taffrail and
called to her, "Not crying, Jessie?" And she wiped her cheek with the
moist handkerchief, and turned a smiling face to him and said, "No, I
am not crying." And the paddles churned faster, and they passed into
the drizzle and the haze. Weeks later I read how one man of that
regiment--the regiment of my own county--killed another ... and a few
days later I read that he had done so in a drunken brawl. He was not
from the island, that man, and I know not who he is. His mother
doubtless sent him forth to fight as a hero for his King, and he became
a murderer under the fostering of the State.
Out of the clean countryside they were taken, these men, and the State
that summoned them, and whose call they answered, surrounded them with
temptations. Away from the influence of mother and sister and
sweetheart, wearied and worn with the hard toil of preparation, the
State opened the canteen and said, "Take your ease thus," and they did
so. The Secretary of War made appeals to them. "Be sober," said he,
"avoid alcohol, that the State, through your self-denial, may live."
But the State said, "See, I have made ample provision for you, so that
you may disregard the noble advice my servant gives you." They came in
their thousands across the Atlantic from the far North-West at the call
of their mother--clean and sober--and their mother opened the canteen
for their benefit on the plain. Such a world as that dwelt in the
imagination of Dean Swift--I never imagined that it could exist here
and now. And in that world of the cities of the plain, what reward are
we preparing for the men who are baring their breasts to the arrows,
standing between us and death? When they come back, war-worn, to what
will they return? To homes in which the fires are extinguished, the
candles burnt down to the socket; the cupboards bare, the children
famished and neglected? Is that to be the guerdon of their sacrifice;
is it for that that they have gone down into hell? Surely it cannot be
for that! A wave has passed over us, raising us to the realisation of
the higher values of things. Words live for us now which were dead
yesterday. A beam of light has fallen into the chamber of imagery, and
the word _Temperance_ has risen from the couch on which it lay dying,
and it claims us for its own. Through it we can make the world know
that we are worth fighting for--worth that the young, the strong, and
the brave should take everything they hold dear--their ideals, their
love, their little children unborn--and throw them into the trench, and
there give themselves and their dreams to death for us. We must see to
it that we are worthy the sacrifice.
***
It seemed to me hitherto that I was a citizen of the country endowed
with the greatest freedom on earth. But the ticket-collector has
proved to me that that was a dream. Here in our parish I have no power
to control this thing that matters so vitally in the Cities of the
Plain. We have a Parish Council and a County Council, and I don't know
how many other dignified and honourable authorities, whom we elect.
But we elect nobody to control this. A body of unelected Justices, of
whom we know nothing, settle for us that down yonder in the Cities of
the Plain there shall be half a dozen State-regulated places for the
manufacturing of paupers and criminals. (The laws change with such
kaleidoscopic swiftness in those days that I may be wrong.) And here
am I, newly awakened by the ticket-collector to that enormity, and I am
not free to do anything. It is surely a mad world. We needed to be
awakened; and we have been awakened with the shriek of shells and the
crying of the perishing! And the result of the awakening will be
regeneration for the Cities of the Plain.
***
The ticket-collector has deprived me for the time being of my peace of
mind. My conversion is so recent that I am afraid of falling into the
fanaticism of the newly converted. I followed the General the other
day into the railway carriage, and as we were passing over Sodom, lying
there under our feet, I spoke to him about it. He looked at me with
cold eyes.
"Do you want to sacrifice the freedom of the individual?" he asked in
his curt military tones; "do you think that you can make saints of
people by Act of Parliament? They would be mere plaster-saints."
I was reduced to silence. My new-born zeal seemed to ooze out at every
pore. There was a touch of amused scorn in the General's eye as he
glanced at me. The General is a man of experience, and he is quite
right. Acts of Parliament will never make saints of the people. But
the State can see to it that the people are not surrounded by
temptations through the operations of Acts of Parliament; that, if the
State is impotent to make saints, it shall not, on the other hand, set
itself deliberately to make devils. That, it seems to me, is what the
State is now doing in the Cities of the Plain.
In ten thousand schools the State sanctions that its children be taught
to pray--"Lead us not into temptation," and that same State encircles
the path of its children by legalised temptations at every corner. It
is the maddest of worlds. I may be wrong and the General wholly right.
But as the ticket-collector said the last time I saw him--"I would like
to see the man who could convince me that I am wrong." And I don't
know whether to be grateful to the ticket-collector or not. He has
deprived me of some of my sleep; he has made my head ache with thinking
of problems which I am not fit to cope with; and, most unlooked for of
all, he has made a tee-totaler of me till the end of the war. There is
a plaintive note in the ticket-collector's voice, which strikes a chord
in my heart, when he invariably adds: "I hope the war won't last long."
For, if it does, there will be the danger of the ticket-collector and
myself becoming teetotalers for altogether. And it is such an ugly
word--tee-totaler! If only the ticket-collector would coin a new and
beautiful word to connote his new and beneficent state of mind! It is
a pity that great causes should be burdened by the weight of ugly words.
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.