is, we are as little likely to discover; but here and there the two
principles seem to dwell together in amity. For Paganism believed in the
healthy and joyful body; and Christianism in the soul superior thereto.
And, where we were sitting that summer day, was the home of bodies
wrecked yet learning to be joyful, and of souls not above the process.
We moved from the grey-wood seat, and came on tiptoe to where house and
chapel formed a courtyard. The doors were open, and we stood unseen,
listening. From the centre of a square stone fountain a little bubble of
water came up, and niched along one high wall a number of white pigeons
were preening their feathers, silent, and almost motionless, as though
attending to the Service.
The sheer emotion of church sounds will now and then steal away reason
from the unbeliever, and take him drugged and dreaming. "Defend, O Lord,
this Thy child!...." So it came out to us in the dream and drowse of
summer, which the little bubble of water cooled.
In his robes--cardinal, and white, and violet--the good Bishop stood in
full sunlight, speaking to the crippled and the air-raid children in
their drilled rows under the shade of the doves' wall; and one felt far
from this age, as if one had strayed back into that time when the
builders of the old house laid slow brick on brick, wetting their
whistles on mead, and knowing not tobacco.
And then, out by the chapel porch moved three forms in blue, with red
neckties, and we were again in this new age, watching the faces of those
listening children. The good Bishop was making them feel that he was
happy in their presence, and that made them happy in his. For the great
thing about life is the going-out of friendliness from being to being.
And if a place be beautiful, and friendliness ever on the peace-path
there, what more can we desire? And yet--how ironical this place of
healing, this beautiful "Heritage!" Verily a heritage of our modern
civilisation which makes all this healing necessary! If life were the
offspring of friendliness and beauty's long companionship, there would
be no crippled children, no air-raid children, none of those good
fellows in blue with red ties and maimed limbs; and the colony to which
the Bishop spoke, standing grey-headed in the sun, would be dissolved.
Friendliness seems so natural, beauty so appropriate to this earth! But
in this torn world they are as fugitives who nest together here and
there. Yet stumbling by chance on their dove-cotes and fluttering
happiness, one makes a little golden note, which does not fade off the
tablet.
* * * * *
How entrancing it is to look at a number of faces never seen before--and
how exasperating!--stamped coins of lives quite separate, quite
different from every other; masks pallid, sunburned, smooth, or
crumpled, to peep behind which one longs, as a lover looking for his
lady at carnival, or a man aching at summer beauty which he cannot quite
fathom and possess. If one had a thousand lives, and time to know and
sympathy to understand the heart of every creature met with, one would
want--a million! May life make us all intuitive, strip away
self-consciousness, and give us sunshine and unknown faces!
What were they all feeling and thinking--those little cripples doing
their drill on crutches; those air-raid waifs swelling their Cockney
chests, rising on their toes, puffing their cheeks out in anxiety to do
their best; those soldiers in their blue "slops," with a hand gone there
and a leg gone here, and this and that grievous disability, all carrying
on so cheerfully?
Values are queer in this world. We are accustomed to exalt those who can
say "bo" to a goose; but that gift of expression which twines a halo
round a lofty brow is no guarantee of goodness in the wearer. The
really good are those plucky folk who plod their silent, often
suffering, generally exploited ways, from birth to death, out of reach
of the music of man's praise.
The first thing each child cripple makes here is a little symbolic
ladder. In making it he climbs a rung on the way to his sky of
self-support; and when at last he leaves this home, he steps off the top
of it into the blue, and--so they say--walks there upright and
undismayed, as if he had never suffered at Fate's hands. But what do he
and she--for many are of the pleasant sex--think of the sky when they
get there; that dusty and smoke-laden sky of the industrialism which
begat them? How can they breathe in it, coming from this place of
flowers and fresh air, of clean bright workshops and elegant huts, which
they on crutches built for themselves?
Masters of British industry, and leaders of the men and women who slave
to make its wheels go round, make a pilgrimage to this spot, and learn
what foul disfigurement you have brought on the land of England these
last five generations! The natural loveliness in this Heritage is no
greater than the loveliness that used to be in a thousand places which
you have blotted out of the book of beauty, with your smuts and wheels,
your wires and welter. And to what end? To manufacture crippled
children, and pale, peaky little Cockneys whose nerves are gone; (and,
to be sure, the railways and motor cars which will bring you here to see
them coming to life once more in sane and natural surroundings!) Blind
and deaf and dumb industrialism is the accursed thing in this land and
in all others.
If only we could send all our crippled soldiers to relearn life, in
places such as this; if, instead of some forty or fifty, forty or fifty
thousand could begin again, under the gaze of that white windmill! If
they could slough off here not only those last horrors, but the dinge
and drang of their upbringing in towns, where wheels go round, lights
flare, streets reek, and no larks sing, save some little blinded victim
in a cage. Poor William Blake:
"I will not cease from fighting, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land!"
A long vigil his sword is keeping, while the clock strikes every hour of
the twenty-four. We have not yet even laid Jerusalem's foundation stone.
Ask one of those maimed soldier boys. "I like it here. Oh, yes, it's
very pleasant for a change." But he hastens to tell you that he goes in
to Brighton every day to his training school, as if that saved the
situation; almost surprised he seems that beauty and peace and good air
are not intolerable to his town-bred soul. The towns have got us--nearly
all. Not until we let beauty and the quiet voice of the fields, and the
scent of clover creep again into our nerves, shall we begin to build
Jerusalem and learn peacefulness once more. The countryman hates strife;
it breaks his dream. And life should have its covering of dream--bird's
flight, bird's song, wind in the ash-trees and the corn, tall lilies
glistening, the evening shadows slanting out, the night murmuring of
waters. There is no other genuine dream; without it to sweeten all, life
is harsh and shrill and east-wind dry, and evil overruns her more
quickly than blight be-gums the rose-tree or frost blackens fern of a
cold June night. We elders are past re-making England, but our children,
even these crippled children here, may yet take a hand....
We left the tinies to the last--all Montessorians, and some of them
little cripples, too, but with cheeks so red that they looked as if the
colour must come off. They lived in a house past the white mill, across
the common; and they led us by the hand down spotless corridors into
white dormitories. The smile of the prettiest little maid of them all
was the last thing one saw, leaving that "Heritage" of print frocks and
children's faces, of flowers and nightingales, under the lee of a group
of pines, the only dark beauty in the long sunlight.
XV
'A GREEN HILL FAR AWAY'
Was it indeed only last March, or in another life, that I climbed this
green hill on that day of dolour, the Sunday after the last great German
offensive began? A beautiful sun-warmed day it was, when the wild thyme
on the southern slope smelled sweet, and the distant sea was a glitter
of gold. Lying on the grass, pressing my cheek to its warmth, I tried to
get solace for that new dread which seemed so cruelly unnatural after
four years of war-misery.
'If only it were all over!' I said to myself; 'and I could come here,
and to all the lovely places I know, without this awful contraction of
the heart, and this knowledge that at every tick of my watch some human
body is being mangled or destroyed. Ah, if only I could! Will there
never be an end?'
And now there is an end, and I am up on this green hill once more, in
December sunlight, with the distant sea a glitter of gold. And there is
no cramp in my heart, no miasma clinging to my senses. Peace! It is
still incredible. No more to hear with the ears of the nerves the
ceaseless roll of gunfire, or see with the eyes of the nerves drowning
men, gaping wounds, and death. Peace, actually Peace! The war has gone
on so long that many of us have forgotten the sense of outrage and
amazement we had, those first days of August, 1914, when it all began.
But I have not forgotten, nor ever shall.
In some of us--I think in many who could not voice it--the war has left
chiefly this feeling: 'If only I could find a country where men cared
less for all that they seem to care for, where they cared more for
beauty, for nature, for being kindly to each other. If only I could find
that green hill far away!' Of the songs of Theocritus, of the life of
St. Francis, there is no more among the nations than there is of dew on
grass in an east wind. If we ever thought otherwise, we are
disillusioned now. Yet there is Peace again, and the souls of men
fresh-murdered are not flying into our lungs with every breath we draw.
Each day this thought of Peace becomes more real and blessed. I can lie
on this green hill and praise Creation that I am alive in a world of
beauty. I can go to sleep up here with the coverlet of sunlight warm on
my body, and not wake to that old dull misery. I can even dream with a
light heart, for my fair dreams will not be spoiled by waking, and my
bad dreams will be cured the moment I open my eyes. I can look up at
that blue sky without seeing trailed across it a mirage of the long
horror, a film picture of all the things that have been done by men to
men. At last I can gaze up at it, limpid and blue, without a dogging
melancholy; and I can gaze down at that far gleam of sea, knowing that
there is no murk of murder on it any more.
And the flight of birds, the gulls and rooks and little brown wavering
things which flit out and along the edge of the chalk-pits, is once more
refreshment to me, utterly untempered. A merle is singing in a bramble
thicket; the dew has not yet dried off the bramble leaves. A feather of
a moon floats across the sky; the distance sends forth homely murmurs;
the sun warms my cheeks. And all of this is pure joy. No hawk of dread
and horror keeps swooping down and bearing off the little birds of
happiness. No accusing conscience starts forth and beckons me away from
pleasure. Everywhere is supreme and flawless beauty. Whether one looks
at this tiny snail shell, marvellously chased and marked, a very elf's
horn whose open mouth is coloured rose; or gazes down at the flat land
between here and the sea, wandering under the smile of the afternoon
sunlight, seeming almost to be alive, hedgeless, with its many watching
trees, and silver gulls hovering above the mushroom-coloured 'ploughs,'
and fields green in manifold hues; whether one muses on this little pink
daisy born so out of time, or watches that valley of brown-rose-grey
woods, under the drifting shadows of low-hanging chalky clouds--all is
perfect, as only Nature can be perfect on a lovely day, when the mind of
him who looks on her is at rest.
On this green hill I am nearer than I have been yet to realisation of
the difference between war and peace. In our civilian lives hardly
anything has been changed--we do not get more butter or more petrol, the
garb and machinery of war still shroud us, journals still drip hate; but
in our spirits there is all the difference between gradual dying and
gradual recovery from sickness.
At the beginning of the war a certain artist, so one heard, shut himself
away in his house and garden, taking in no newspaper, receiving no
visitors, listening to no breath of the war, seeing no sight of it. So
he lived, buried in his work and his flowers--I know not for how long.
Was he wise, or did he suffer even more than the rest of us who shut
nothing away? Can man, indeed, shut out the very quality of his
firmament, or bar himself away from the general misery of his species?
This gradual recovery of the world--this slow reopening of the great
flower, Life--is beautiful to feel and see. I press my hand flat and
hard down on those blades of grass, then take it away, and watch them
very slowly raise themselves and shake off the bruise. So it is, and
will be, with us for a long time to come. The cramp of war was deep in
us, as an iron frost in the earth. Of all the countless millions who
have fought and nursed and written and spoken and dug and sewn and
worked in a thousand other ways to help on the business of killing,
hardly any have laboured in real love of war. Ironical, indeed, that
perhaps the most beautiful poem written these four years, Julian
Grenfell's 'Into Battle!' was in heartfelt praise of fighting! But if
one could gather the deep curses breathed by man and woman upon war
since the first bugle was blown, the dirge of them could not be
contained in the air which wraps this earth.
And yet the 'green hill,' where dwell beauty and kindliness, is still
far away. Will it ever be nearer? Men have fought even on this green
hill where I am lying. By the rampart markings on its chalk and grass,
it has surely served for an encampment. The beauty of day and night, the
lark's song, the sweet-scented growing things, the rapture of health,
and of pure air, the majesty of the stars, and the gladness of
sunlight, of song and dance and simple friendliness, have never been
enough for men. We crave our turbulent fate. Can wars, then, ever cease?
Look in men's faces, read their writings, and beneath masks and
hypocrisies note the restless creeping of the tiger spirit! There has
never been anything to prevent the millennium except the nature of the
human being. There are not enough lovers of beauty among men. It all
comes back to that. Not enough who want the green hill far away--who
naturally hate disharmony, and the greed, ugliness, restlessness,
cruelty, which are its parents and its children.
Will there ever be more lovers of beauty in proportion to those who are
indifferent to beauty? Who shall answer that question? Yet on the answer
depends peace. Men may have a mint of sterling qualities--be vigorous,
adventurous, brave, upright, and self-sacrificing; be preachers and
teachers; keen, cool-headed, just, industrious--if they have not the
love of beauty, they will still be making wars. Man is a fighting
animal, with sense of the ridiculous enough to know that he is a fool to
fight, but not sense of the sublime enough to stop him. Ah, well! we
have peace!
It is happiness greater than I have known for four years and four
months, to lie here and let that thought go on its wings, quiet and free
as the wind stealing soft from the sea, and blessed as the sunlight on
this green hill.
1918.
_PART II_
OF PEACE-TIME
I
SPINDLEBERRIES
The celebrated painter Scudamore--whose studies of Nature had been hung
on the line for so many years that he had forgotten the days when, not
yet in the Scudamore manner, they depended from the sky--stood where his
cousin had left him so abruptly. His lips, between comely grey moustache
and comely pointed beard, wore a mortified smile, and he gazed rather
dazedly at the spindleberries fallen on to the flagged courtyard from
the branch she had brought to show him. Why had she thrown up her head
as if he had struck her, and whisked round so that those dull-pink
berries quivered and lost their rain-drops, and four had fallen? He had
but said: "Charming! I'd like to use them!" And she had answered: "God!"
and rushed away. Alicia really was crazed; who would have thought that
once she had been so adorable! He stooped and picked up the four
berries--a beautiful colour, that dull pink! And from below the coatings
of success and the Scudamore manner a little thrill came up; the stir of
emotional vision. Paint! What good! How express? He went across to the
low wall which divided the courtyard of his expensively restored and
beautiful old house from the first flood of the River Arun wandering
silvery in pale winter sunlight. Yes, indeed! How express Nature, its
translucence and mysterious unities, its mood never the same from hour
to hour! Those brown-tufted rushes over there against the gold grey of
light and water--those restless hovering white gulls! A kind of disgust
at his own celebrated manner welled up within him--the disgust akin to
Alicia's "God!" Beauty! What use--how express it! Had she been thinking
the same thing?
He looked at the four pink berries glistening on the grey stone of the
wall, and memory stirred. What a lovely girl she had been with her
grey-green eyes, shining under long lashes, the rose-petal colour in her
cheeks and the too-fine dark hair--now so very grey--always blowing a
little wild. An enchanting, enthusiastic creature! He remembered, as if
it had been but last week, that day when they started from Arundel
station by the road to Burpham, when he was twenty-nine and she
twenty-five, both of them painters and neither of them famed--a day of
showers and sunlight in the middle of March, and Nature preparing for
full Spring! How they had chattered at first; and when their arms
touched, how he had thrilled, and the colour had deepened in her wet
cheeks; and then, gradually, they had grown silent; a wonderful walk,
which seemed leading so surely to a more wonderful end. They had
wandered round through the village and down, past the chalk-pit and
Jacob's ladder, onto the field path and so to the river-bank. And he had
taken her ever so gently round the waist, still silent, waiting for that
moment when his heart would leap out of him in words and hers--he was
sure--would leap to meet it. The path entered a thicket of blackthorn,
with a few primroses close to the little river running full and gentle.
The last drops of a shower were falling, but the sun had burst through,
and the sky above the thicket was cleared to the blue of speedwell
flowers. Suddenly she had stopped and cried: "Look, Dick! Oh, look! It's
heaven!" A high bush of blackthorn was lifted there, starry white
against the blue and that bright cloud. It seemed to sing, it was so
lovely; the whole of Spring was in it. But the sight of her ecstatic
face had broken down all his restraint; and tightening his arm round
her, he had kissed her lips. He remembered still the expression of her
face, like a child's startled out of sleep. She had gone rigid, gasped,
started away from him; quivered and gulped, and broken suddenly into
sobs. Then, slipping from his arm, she had fled. He had stood at first,
amazed and hurt, utterly bewildered; then, recovering a little, had
hunted for her full half an hour before at last he found her sitting on
wet grass, with a stony look on her face. He had said nothing, and she
nothing, except to murmur: "Let's go on; we shall miss our train!" And
all the rest of that day and the day after, until they parted, he had
suffered from the feeling of having tumbled down off some high perch in
her estimation. He had not liked it at all; it had made him very angry.
Never from that day to this had he thought of it as anything but a piece
of wanton prudery. Had it--had it been something else?
He looked at the four pink berries, and, as if they had uncanny power to
turn the wheel of memory, he saw another vision of his cousin five years
later. He was married by then, and already hung on the line. With his
wife he had gone down to Alicia's country cottage. A summer night, just
dark and very warm. After many exhortations she had brought into the
little drawing-room her last finished picture. He could see her now
placing it where the light fell, her tall slight form already rather
sharp and meagre, as the figures of some women grow at thirty, if they
are not married; the nervous, fluttering look on her charming face, as
though she could hardly bear this inspection; the way she raised her
shoulder just a little as if to ward off an expected blow of
condemnation. No need! It had been a beautiful thing, a quite
surprisingly beautiful study of night. He remembered with what a really
jealous ache he had gazed at it--a better thing than he had ever done
himself. And, frankly, he had said so. Her eyes had shone with pleasure.
"Do you really like it? I tried so hard!"
"The day you show that, my dear," he had said, "your name's made!" She
had clasped her hands and simply sighed: "Oh, Dick!" He had felt quite
happy in her happiness, and presently the three of them had taken their
chairs out, beyond the curtains, on to the dark verandah, had talked a
little, then somehow fallen silent. A wonderful warm, black, grape-bloom
night, exquisitely gracious and inviting; the stars very high and white,
the flowers glimmering in the garden-beds, and against the deep, dark
blue, roses hanging, unearthly, stained with beauty. There was a scent
of honeysuckle, he remembered, and many moths came fluttering by towards
the tall narrow chink of light between the curtains. Alicia had sat
leaning forward, elbows on knees, ears buried in her hands. Probably
they were silent because she sat like that. Once he heard her whisper to
herself: "Lovely, lovely! Oh, God! How lovely!" His wife, feeling the
dew, had gone in, and he had followed; Alicia had not seemed to notice.
But when she too came in, her eyes were glistening with tears. She said
something about bed in a queer voice; they had taken candles and gone
up. Next morning, going to her little studio to give her advice about
that picture, he had been literally horrified to see it streaked with
lines of Chinese white--Alicia, standing before it, was dashing her
brush in broad smears across and across. She heard him and turned round.
There was a hard red spot in either cheek, and she said in a quivering
voice: "It was blasphemy. That's all!" And turning her back on him, she
had gone on smearing it with Chinese white. Without a word, he had
turned tail in simple disgust. Indeed, so deep had been his vexation at
that wanton destruction of the best thing she had ever done, or was ever
likely to do, that he had avoided her for years. He had always had a
horror of eccentricity. To have planted her foot firmly on the ladder of
fame and then deliberately kicked it away; to have wantonly foregone
this chance of making money--for she had but a mere pittance! It had
seemed to him really too exasperating, a thing only to be explained by
tapping one's forehead. Every now and then he still heard of her, living
down there, spending her days out in the woods and fields, and sometimes
even her nights, they said, and steadily growing poorer and thinner and
more eccentric; becoming, in short, impossibly difficult, as only
Englishwomen can. People would speak of her as "such a dear," and talk
of her charm, but always with that shrug which is hard to bear when
applied to one's relations. What she did with the productions of her
brush he never inquired, too disillusioned by that experience. Poor
Alicia!