Part 4 (1/2)
”Please G.o.d her'll break insh.o.r.e,” said Daddy Whiddon; and he shouted the news to the idle waiting men who hailed us.
In a moment all was stir, for the fis.h.i.+ng had been slack. Two boats put out with the lithe brown seine. The dark line had turned, but the school was still behind, churning the water in clumsy haste; they were coming in.
Then the brit broke in silvery leaping waves on the shelving beach. The threefold hunt was over; the porpoises turned out to sea in search of fresh quarry; and the seine, dragged by ready hands, came slowly, stubbornly in with its quivering treasure of fish. They had sought a haven and found none; the brit lay dying in flickering iridescent heaps as the bare-legged babies of the village gathered them up; and far away over the water I saw a single grey speck; it was the following bird.
The curtain of river haze falls back; barge and bird are alike gone, and the lamplighter has lit the first gas-lamp on the far side of the bridge.
Every night I watch him come, his progress marked by the great yellow eyes that wake the dark. Sometimes he walks quickly; sometimes he loiters on the bridge to chat, or stare at the dark water; but he always comes, leaving his watchful deterrent train behind him to police the night.
Once Demeter in the black anguish of her desolation searched for lost Persephone by the light of Hecate's torch; and searching all in vain, spurned beneath her empty feet an earth barren of her smile; froze with set brows the merry brooks and streams; and smote forest, and plain, and fruitful field, with the breath of her last despair, until even Iambe's laughing jest was still. And then when the desolation was complete, across the wasted valley where the starveling cattle scarcely longed to browse, came the dreadful chariot-and Persephone. The day of the prisoner of Hades had dawned; and as the sun flamed slowly up to light her thwarted eyes the world sprang into blossom at her feet.
We can never be too Pagan when we are truly Christian, and the old myths are eternal truths held fast in the Church's net. Prometheus fetched fire from Heaven, to be slain forever in the fetching; and lo, a Greater than Prometheus came to fire the cresset of the Cross. Demeter waits now patiently enough. Persephone waits, too, in the faith of the sun she cannot see: and every lamp lit carries on the crusade which has for its goal a sunless, moonless, city whose light is the Light of the world.
”Lume e la.s.su, che visibile face lo creatore a quella creatura, che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.”
Immediately outside my window is a lime tree-a little black skeleton of abundant branches-in which sparrows congregate to chirp and bicker.
Farther away I have a glimpse of graceful planes, children of moonlight and mist; their dainty robes, still more or less unsullied, gleam ghostly in the gaslight athwart the dark. They make a brave show even in winter with their feathery branches and swinging ta.s.sels, whereas my little tree stands stark and uncompromising, with its horde of sooty sparrows c.o.c.kney to the last tail feather, and a pathetic inability to look anything but black. Rain comes with strong caressing fingers, and the branches seem no whit the cleaner for her care; but then their glistening blackness mirrors back the succeeding sunlight, as a muddy pavement will sometimes lap our feet in a sea of gold. The little wet sparrows are for the moment equally transformed, for the sun turns their dun-coloured coats to a ruddy bronze, and cries Chrysostom as it kisses each s.h.i.+ny beak. They are dumb Chrysostoms; but they preach a golden gospel, for the sparrows are to London what the rainbow was to eight saved souls out of a waste of waters-a perpetual sign of the remembering mercies of G.o.d.
Last night there was a sudden clatter of hoofs, a shout, and then silence. A runaway cab-horse, a dark night, a wide crossing, and a heavy burden: so death came to a poor woman. People from the house went out to help; and I heard of her, the centre of an unknowing curious crowd, as she lay bonnetless in the mud of the road, her head on the kerb. A rude but painless death: the misery lay in her life; for this woman-worn, white-haired, and wrinkled-had but fifty years to set against such a condition. The policeman reported her respectable, hard-working, living apart from her husband with a sister; but although they shared rooms, they ”did not speak,” and the sister refused all responsibility; so the parish buried the dead woman, and thus ended an uneventful tragedy.
Was it her own fault? If so, the greater pathos. The lonely souls that hold out timid hands to an unheeding world have their meed of interior comfort even here, while the sons of consolation wait on the thresh-hold for their footfall: but G.o.d help the soul that bars its own door! It is kicking against the p.r.i.c.ks of Divine ordinance, the ordinance of a triune G.o.d; whether it be the dweller in crowded street or tenement who is proud to say, ”I keep myself to myself,” or Seneca writing in pitiful complacency, ”Whenever I have gone among men, I have returned home less of a man.” Whatever the next world holds in store, we are bidden in this to seek and serve G.o.d in our fellow-men, and in the creatures of His making whom He calls by name.
It was once my privilege to know an old organ-grinder named Gawdine. He was a hard swearer, a hard drinker, a hard liver, and he fortified himself body and soul against the world: he even drank alone, which is an evil sign.
One day to Gawdine sober came a little dirty child, who clung to his empty trouser leg-he had lost a limb years before-with a persistent unintelligible request. He shook the little chap off with a blow and a curse; and the child was trotting dismally away, when it suddenly turned, ran back, and held up a dirty face for a kiss.
Two days later Gawdine fell under a pa.s.sing dray which inflicted terrible internal injuries on him. They patched him up in hospital, and he went back to his organ-grinding, taking with him two friends-a pain which fell suddenly upon him to rack and rend with an anguish of crucifixion, and the memory of a child's upturned face. Outwardly he was the same save that he changed the tunes of his organ, out of long-h.o.a.rded savings, for the jigs and reels which children hold dear, and stood patiently playing them in child-crowded alleys, where pennies are not as plentiful as elsewhere.
He continued to drink; it did not come within his new code to stop, since he could ”carry his liquor well;” but he rarely, if ever, swore. He told me this tale through the throes of his anguish as he lay crouched on a mattress on the floor; and as the grip of the pain took him he tore and bit at his hands until they were maimed and bleeding, to keep the ready curses off his lips.
He told the story, but he gave no reason, offered no explanation: he has been dead now many a year, and thus would I write his epitaph:-
He saw the face of a little child and looked on G.o.d.
CHAPTER III
”TWO began, in a low voice, 'Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a _red_ rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake.'”
As I look round this room I feel sure Two, and Five, and Seven, have all been at work on it, and made no mistakes, for round the walls runs a frieze of squat standard rose-trees, red as red can be, and just like those that Alice saw in the Queen's garden. In between them are Chaucer's name-children, prim little daisies, peering wideawake from green gra.s.s. This same gra.s.s has a history which I have heard. In the original stencil for the frieze it was purely conventional like the rest, and met in spikey curves round each tree; the painter, however, who was doing the work, was a lover of the fields; and feeling that such gra.s.s was a travesty, he added on his own account dainty little tussocks, and softened the hard line into a tufted carpet, the gra.s.s growing irregularly, bent at will by the wind.
The result from the standpoint of conventional art is indeed disastrous; but my sympathy and grat.i.tude are with the painter. I see, as he saw, the far-reaching robe of living ineffable green, of whose brilliance the eye never has too much, and in whose weft no two threads are alike; and shrink as he did from the conventionalising of that windswept glory.
The sea has its crested waves of recognisable form; the river its eddy and swirl and separate vortices; but the gra.s.s! The wind bloweth where it listeth and the gra.s.s bows as the wind blows-”thou canst not tell whither it goeth.” It takes no pattern, it obeys no recognised law; it is like a beautiful creature of a thousand wayward moods, and its voice is like nothing else in the wide world. It bids you rest and bury your tired face in the green coolness, and breathe of its breath and of the breath of the good earth from which man was taken and to which he will one day return. Then, if you lend your ear and are silent minded, you may hear wondrous things of the deep places of the earth; of life in mineral and stone as well as in pulsing sap; of a green world as the stars saw it before man trod it under foot-of the emerald which has its place with the rest in the City of G.o.d.
”What if earth Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein, Each to each other like, more than on earth to thought?”
It is a natural part of civilisation's l.u.s.t of re-arrangement that we should be so ready to conventionalise the beauty of this world into decorative patterns for our pilgrim tents. It is a phase, and will melt into other phases; but it tends to the increase of artificiality, and exists not only in art but in everything. It is no new thing for jaded sentiment to crave the spur of the unnatural, to prefer the clever imitation, to live in a Devachan where the surroundings appear that which we would have them to be; but it is an interesting record of the pulse of the present day that 'An Englishwoman's Love Letters' should have taken society by storm in the way it certainly has.