Looking down the vista of trees and houses from the slope of our
garden, W. V. saw the roof and spire of the church of the Oak-men
showing well above the green huddle of the Forest.
"It is a pretty big church, isn't it, father?" she asked, as she
pointed it out to me.
It was a most picturesque old-fashioned church, though in my
thoughtlessness I had mistaken it for a beech and a tall poplar growing
apparently side by side; but the moment she spoke I perceived my
illusion.
"I expect, if we were anywhere about on a Sunday morning," she
surmised, with a laugh, "we should see hundreds and hundreds of
Oak-girls and Oak-boys going in schools to service."
"Dressed in green silk, with bronze boots and pink feathers--the
colours of the new oak-leaves, eh?"
"Oh, father, it would be lovely!" in a burst of ecstasy. "Oughtn't we
to go and find the way to their church?"
We might do something much less amusing. Accordingly we took the
bearings of the green spire with the skill of veteran explorers. It
lay due north, so that if we travelled by the way of the North Star we
should be certain to find it. Wheeling the Man before us, we made a
North Star track for ourselves through the underwood and over last
year's rustling beech-leaves, till Guy ceased babbling and crooning,
and dropped into a slumber, as he soon does in the fresh of the
morning. Then we had to go slowly for fear he should be wakened by the
noise of the dead wood underfoot, for, as we passed over it with wheels
and boots, it snapped and crackled like a freshly-kindled fire. It was
a relief to get at last to the soft matting of brown needles and cones
under the Needle-trees, for there we could go pretty quickly without
either jolting him or making a racket.
We went as far as we were able that day, and we searched in glade and
lawn, in coppice and dingle, but never a trace could we find of the
sylvan minster where the Oak-people worship. As we wandered through
the Forest we came upon a number of notice boards nailed high up on the
trunks of various trees, but when W. V. discovered that these only
repeated the same stern legend: "Caution. Persons breaking, climbing
upon, or otherwise damaging," she indignantly resented this incessant
intrusion on the innocent enjoyment of free foresters. How much nicer
it would have been if there had been a hand on one of these repressive
boards, with the inscription: "This way to the North Star Church;" or,
if a caution was really necessary for some of the people who entered
the Forest, to say: "The public are requested not to disturb the Elves,
Birch-ladies, and Oak-men;" but of course the most delightful thing
would be to have a different fairy-tale written up in clear letters on
each of the boards, and a seat close by where one could rest and read
it comfortably.
I told her there were several forests I had explored, in which
something like that was really done; only the stories were not
fairy-tales, but legends of holy men and women; and among the branches
of the trees were fixed most beautifully coloured glass pictures of
those holy people, who had all lived and died, and some of whom had
been buried, in those forests, hundreds of years ago. Most of the
forests were very ancient--older than the thrones of many kingdoms; and
men lived and delighted in them long before Columbus sailed into
unknown seas to discover America. Many, indeed, had been blown down
and destroyed by a terrible storm which swept over the world when Henry
VIII. ruled in England, and only wrecks of them now remained for any
one to see, but others, which had survived the wild weather of those
days, were as wonderful and as lovely as a dream. The tall trees in
them sent out curving branches which interlaced high overhead, shutting
out the blue sky and making a sweet and solemn dimness, and nearly all
the light that streamed in between the fair round trunks and the
arching boughs was like that of a splendid sunset, only it was there
all day long and never faded out till night fell. And in some of the
forests there were great magical roses, of a hundred brilliant colours
crowded together, and as big as the biggest cart-wheel, or bigger.
These woods were places of happy quietude and comfort and gladness of
heart; but, instead of Oak-men, there were many Angels.
Here and there, too, in the silent avenues, mighty warriors and saintly
abbots, and statesmen bishops, and it might be even a king or a queen,
had been buried; and over their graves there were sometimes images of
them lying carved in marble or alabaster, and sometimes there had been
built the loveliest little chapels all sculptured over with tracery of
flowers and foliage.
"True, father?"
"True as true, dear. Some day I shall take you to see for yourself."
We know a dip in a dingle where the woodcutters have left a log among
the hazels, and here, having wheeled Guy into a dappling of sunny discs
and leaf-shadows in a grassy bay, we sat down on the log, and talked in
an undertone. Our failure to find the Oak-men's church reminded me of
the old legends of lost and invisible churches, the bells of which are
heard ringing under the snow, or in the depths of the woods, or far
away in burning deserts, or fathom-deep beneath the blue sea; but the
pilgrim or the chance wayfarer who has heard the music of the bells has
never succeeded in discovering the way that leads to the lost church.
It is on the clear night of St. John's Day, the longest day of the
year, or on the last hour of Christmas Eve, that these bells are heard
pealing most sweet and clear.
It was in this way that we came to tell Christian legends and to talk
of saints and hermits, of old abbeys and minsters, of visions and
miracles and the ministry of Angels. Guy, W. V. thought, might be
able, if only he could speak, to tell us much about heaven and the
Angels; it was so short a time since he left them. She herself had
quite forgotten, but, then--deprecatingly--it was so long and long and
long ago; "eight years, a long time for me."
The faith and the strange vivid daydreams of the Middle Ages were a new
world into which she was being led along enchanted footpaths; quite
different from the worldly world of the "Old Romans," and of English
history; more real it seemed and more credible, for all its wonders,
than the world of elves and water-maidens. Delightful as it was, it
was scarce believable that fairies ever carried a little girl up above
the tree-tops and swung her in the air from one to another; but when
St. Catherine of Siena was a little child, and went to be a hermit in
the woods, and got terribly frightened, and lost her way, and sat down
to cry, the Angels, you know, did really and truly waft her up on their
wings and carried her to the valley of Fontebranda, which was very near
home. And when she was quite a little thing and used to say her
prayers going up to bed, the Angels would come to her and just "whip"
her right up the stairs in an instant!
Occasionally these legends brought us to the awful brink of religious
controversies and insoluble mysteries, but, like those gentle savages
who honour the water-spirits by hanging garlands from tree to tree
across the river, W. V. could always fling a bridge of flowers over our
abysses. "Our sense," she would declare, "is nothing to God's; and
though big people have more sense than children, the sense of all the
big people in the world put together would be no sense to His." "We
are only little babies to Him; we do not understand Him at all."
Nothing seemed clearer to her than the reasonableness of one legend
which taught that though God always answers our prayers, He does not
always answer in the way we would like, but in some better way than we
know. "Yes," she observed, "He is just a dear old Father." Anything
about our Lord engrossed her imagination; and it was a frequent wish of
hers that He would come again. "Then,"--poor perplexed little mortal!
whose difficulties one could not even guess at--"we should be quite
sure of things. Miss Catherine tells us from books: He would tell us
from His memory. People would not be so cruel to Him now. Queen
Victoria would not allow any one to crucify Him."
I don't think that W. V., in spite of her confidence in my good faith,
was quite convinced of the existence of those old forests of which I
had told her, until I explained that they were forests of stone, which,
if men did not mar them, would blossom for centuries unchanged, though
the hands that planted them had long been blown in dust about the
world. She understood all that I meant when we visited York and
Westminster, and walked through the long avenues of stone palms and
pines, with their overarching boughs, and gazed at the marvellous
rose-windows in which all the jewels of the world seemed to have been
set, and saw the colours streaming through the gorgeous lancets and
high many-lighted casements. After that it was delightful to turn over
engravings and photographs of ruined abbeys and famous old churches at
home and abroad, and to anticipate the good time when we should visit
them together, and perhaps not only descend into the crypts but go
through the curious galleries which extend over the pillars of the
nave, and even climb up to the leaded roof of the tower, or dare the
long windy staircases and ladders which mount into the spire, and so
look down on the quaint map of streets, and houses, and gardens, and
squares, hundreds of feet below.
She liked to hear how some of those miracles of stone had been
fashioned and completed--how monks in the days of old had travelled
over the land with the relics of saints, collecting treasure of all
sorts for the expense of the work; how sometimes the people came in
hundreds dragging great oaks and loads of quarried stone, and bringing
fat hogs, beans, corn, and beer for the builders and their workmen; how
even queens carried block or beam to the masons, so that with their own
hands they might help in the glorious labour; and poor old women gave
assistance by cooking food and washing and spinning and weaving and
making and mending; how when the foundations were blessed kings and
princes and powerful barons laid each a stone, and when the choir sang
the antiphon, "And the foundations of the wall were garnished with all
manner of precious stones," they threw costly rings and jewels and
chains of gold into the trench; and how years and generations passed
away, and abbots and bishops and architects and masons and sculptors
and labourers died, but new men took their places, and still the vast
work went on, and the beautiful pile rose higher and higher into the
everlasting heavens.
Then, too, we looked back at the vanished times when the world was all
so different from our world of to-day; and in green and fruitful spots
among the hills and on warm river-lawns and in olden cities of narrow
streets and overhanging roofs, there were countless abbeys and priories
and convents; and thousands of men and women lived the life of prayer
and praise and austerity and miracle and vision which is described in
the legends of the Saints. We lingered in the pillared cloisters where
the black-letter chronicles were written in Latin, and music was scored
and hymns were composed, and many a rare manuscript was illuminated in
crimson and blue and emerald and gold; and we looked through the fair
arches into the cloister-garth where in the green sward a grave lay
ever ready to receive the remains of the next brother who should pass
away from this little earth to the glory of Paradise. What struck W.
V. perhaps most of all was, that in some leafy places these holy houses
were so ancient that even the blackbirds and throstles had learned to
repeat some of the cadences of the church music, and in those places
the birds still continue to pipe them, though nothing now remains of
church or monastery except the name of some field or street or well,
which people continue to use out of old habit and custom.
[Illustration: _Women lived the life of prayer and praise_]
It was with the thought of helping the busy little brain to realise
something of that bygone existence, with its strange modes of thought,
its unquestioning faith in the unseen and eternal, its vivid
consciousness of the veiled but constant presence of the holy and
omnipotent God, its stern self-repression and its tender charity, its
lovely ideals and haunting legends, that I told W. V. the stories in
this little book. It mattered little to her or to me that that
existence had its dark shadows contrasting with its celestial light: it
was the light that concerned us, not the shadows.
Some of the stories were told on the log, while Guy slept in his
mail-cart in the dappled shelter of the dingle; others by a winter fire
when the days were short, and the cry of the wind in the dark made it
easy for one to believe in wolves; others in the Surrey hills, a year
ago, in a sandy hollow crowned with bloom of the ling, and famous for a
little pool where the martins alight to drink and star the mud with a
maze of claw-tracks; and yet again, others, this year,[1] under the dry
roof of the pines of Anstiebury, when the fosse of the old Briton
settlement was dripping with wet, and the woods were dim with the smoke
of rain, and the paths were red with the fallen bloom of the red
chestnuts and white with the flourish of May and brown with the catkins
of the oak, and the cuckoo, calling in Mosses Wood, was answered from
Redlands and the Warren, and the pines where we sat (snug and dry)
looked so solemn and dark that, with a little fancy, it was easy to
change the living greenwood into the forest of stone.
As they were told, under the pressure of an insatiable listener, so
have they been written, save for such a phrase, here and there, as
slips more readily from the pen than from the tongue.
Of the stories which were told, but which have not been written for
this book, if W. V. should question me, I shall answer in the wise
words of the Greybeard of Broce-Liande: "However hot thy thirst, and
however pleasant to assuage it, leave clear water in the well."
[1] The year of the happy hills, 1898.