It is to be remarked that the angels were strangely like Patsy Mac Cann.
Their ideas of right and wrong almost entirely coincided with his. They
had no property and so they had no prejudices, for the person who has
nothing may look upon the world as his inheritance, while the person who
has something has seldom anything but that.
Civilisation, having built itself at hazard upon the Rights of Property,
has sought on many occasions to unbuild itself again in sheer
desperation of any advance, but from the great Ethic of Possession there
never has been any escape, and there never will be until the solidarity
of man has been really created, and until each man ceases to see the
wolf in his neighbour.
Is there actually a wolf in our neighbour? We see that which we are, and
our eyes project on every side an image of ourselves; if we look with
fear that which we behold is frightful; if we look with love then the
colours of heaven are repeated to us from the ditch and the dungeon. We
invent eternally upon one another; we scatter our sins broadcast and
call them our neighbours; let us scatter our virtues abroad and build us
a city to live in.
For Mac Cann and his daughter there was no longer any strangeness in
their companions. As day and night succeeded, as conversation and action
supplemented each other on their journeys, so each of them began to
unfold from the fleshy disguise, and in a short time they could each
have spoken of the others to an inquiring stranger, giving, within
bounds, reasonably exact information as to habit and mentality.
What conversations they had engaged in! Sitting now by a hedge close to
a tiny chaotic village, compact of ugliness and stupidity, now at
twilight as they camped in a disused quarry, leaning their shoulders
against great splintered rocks, and hearing no sound but the magnified,
slow trickle of water and the breeze that sung or screamed against a
razor edge of rock; or lying on the sheltered side of a pit of potatoes,
they stared at the moon as she sailed on her lonely voyages, or watched
the stars that glanced and shone from the drifting clouds; and as they
lifted their eyes to these sacred voyagers in whose charge is the
destiny of man they lifted their minds also and adored mutely that mind
of which these are the thoughts made visible.
Sometimes they discussed the problems of man in a thousand superficial
relationships. The angels were wise, but in the vocabulary which they
had to use wisdom had no terms. Their wisdom referred only to ultimates,
and was the unhandiest of tools when dug into some immediate, curious
problem. Before wisdom can be audible a new language must be invented,
and they also had to unshape their definitions and re-translate these
secular findings into terms wherein they could see the subject broadly,
and they found that what they gained in breadth they lost in outline,
and that the last generalisation, however logically it was framed, was
seldom more than an intensely interesting lie when it was dissected
again. No truth in regard to space and time can retain virtue for longer
than the beating of an artery; it too has its succession, its sidereal
tide, and while you look upon it, round and hardy as a pebble, behold,
it is split and fissured and transformed.
Sometimes when it rained, and it rained often, they would seek refuge in
a haystack, if one was handy; or they would creep into a barn and hide
behind hills of cabbages or piles of farming tools; or they slid into
the sheds among the cattle where they warmed and fed themselves against
those peaceful flanks; or, if they were nigh a town and had been lucky
that day, they would pay a few coppers to sleep on the well-trodden,
earthen floor of a house.
As for the ass, he slept wherever he could. When there was rain he would
stand with his tail against the wind sunken in a reverie so profound
that he no longer seemed to feel the rain or the wind. From these
abysses of thought he would emerge to the realisation that there was a
sheltered side to a wall or a clump of heather, and he also would take
his timely rest under the stars of God.
What did they say to him? Down the glittering slopes they peer and nod;
before his eyes the mighty pageant is unrolled in quiet splendour; for
him too the signs are set. Does the Waterman care nothing for his
thirst? Does the Ram not bless his increase? Against his enemies also
the Archer will bend his azure bow and loose his arrows of burning gold.
On their journeyings they met with many people; not the folk who lived
in the houses dotted here and there at great distances from each other
on the curving roads, for with these people they had nothing to do, they
had scarcely anything to say, and the housefolk looked on the strollers
with a suspicion which was almost a fear. The language of these was
seldom gracious, and often, on their approach, the man of the house was
sent for and the dog was unchained.
But for the vagabonds these people did not count; Mac Cann and his
daughter scarcely looked on them as human beings, and if he had
generalised about them at all, he would have said that there was no
difference between these folk and the trees that shaded their dwellings
in leafy spray, that they were rooted in their houses, and that they had
no idea of life other than the trees might have which snuff for ever the
same atmosphere and look on the same horizon until they droop again to
the clay they lifted from.
It was with quite other people they communed.
The wandering ballad singer with his wallet of songs slung at his ragged
haunch; the travelling musician whose blotchy fiddle could sneeze out
the ten strange tunes he had learned from his father and from his
father's generations before him; the little band travelling the world
carrying saplings and rushes from the stream which they wove cunningly
into tables and chairs warranted not to last too long; the folk who sold
rootless ferns to people from whose window-ledges they had previously
stolen the pots to plant them in; the men who went roaring along the
roads driving the cattle before them from fair to market and back again;
the hairy tinkers with their clattering metals, who marched in the
angriest of battalions and who spoke a language composed entirely of
curses.
These, and an hundred varieties of these, they met and camped with and
were friendly with, and to the angels these people were humanity, and
the others were, they did not know what.