Part 6 (1/2)
The women joined us on the third day to begin haymaking, and the air was fragrant of tossed and sun-dried gra.s.s. One of them walked apart from the rest, without interest or freedom of movement; her face, sealed and impa.s.sive, was aged beyond the vigour of her years. I knew the woman by sight, and her history by hearsay. We have a code of morals here-not indeed peculiar to this place or people-that a wedding is 'respectable'
if it precedes child-birth by a bare month, tolerable, and to be recognised, should it succeed the same by less than a year (provided the pair are not living in the same village); but the child that has never been 'fathered' and the wife without a ring are 'anathema,' and such in one was Elizabeth Banks. She went away a maid and came back a year ago with a child and without a name. Her mother was dead, her father and the village would have none of her: the homing instinct is very strong, or she would scarcely have returned, knowing the traditions of the place.
Old Dodden, seeing her, grumbled to me in the rest-time.-”Can't think what the farmer wants wi' Lizzie Banks in 'is field.” ”She must live,” I said, ”and by all showing her life is a hard one.” ”She 'ad the makin'
of 'er bed,” he went on, obstinately. ”What for do she bring her disgrace home, wi' a fatherless brat for all folks to see? We don't want them sort in our village. The Lord's hand is heavy, an' a brat's a curse that cannot be hid.”
When tea-time came I crossed the field to look for a missing hone, and saw Elizabeth Banks far from the other women, busied with a bundle under the hedge. I pa.s.sed close on my search, and lo! the bundle was a little boy. He lay smiling and stretching, fighting the air with his small pink fists, while the wind played with his curls. ”A curse that cannot be hid,” old Dodden had said. The mother knelt a moment, devouring him with her eyes, then s.n.a.t.c.hed him to her with aching greed and covered him with kisses. I saw the poor, plain face illumined, transfigured, alive with a mother's love, and remembered how the word came once to a Hebrew prophet:-
Say unto your brethren Ammi, and to your sisters Ruhamah.
The evening sky was clouding fast, the sound of rain was in the air; Farmer Marler shook his head as he looked at the gra.s.s lying in ordered rows. I was the last to leave, and as I lingered at the gate drinking in the scent of the field and the cool of the coming rain, the first drops fell on my upturned face and kissed the poor dry swathes at my feet, and I was glad.
David, child of the fields and the sheepfolds, his kings.h.i.+p laid aside, sees through the parted curtain of the years the advent of his greater Son, and cries in his psalm of the hilltops, his last prophetic prayer:-
He shall come down like rain upon the mown gra.s.s.
Even so He came, and shall still come. Three days ago the field, in its pageant of fresh beauty, with s.h.i.+mmering blades and tossing banners, greeted sun and shower alike with joy for the furtherance of its life and purpose; now, laid low, it hears the young gra.s.s whisper the splendour of its coming green; and the poor swathes are glad at the telling, but full of grief for their own apparent failure. Then in great pity comes the rain, the rain of summer, gentle, refres.h.i.+ng, penetrating, and the swathes are comforted, for they know that standing to greet or prostrate to suffer, the consolations of the former and the latter rain are still their own, with tender touch and cool caress. Then, once more parched by the sun, they are borne away to the new service their apparent failure has fitted them for; and perhaps as they wait in the dark for the unknown that is still to come they hear sometimes the call of the distant rain, and at the sound the dry sap stirs afresh-they are not forgotten and can wait.
”_Say unto your sisters Ruhamah_,” cries the prophet.
”_He shall come down like rain on the mown gra.s.s_,” sang the poet of the sheepfolds.
”_My ways are not your ways_, _saith the Lord_.”
I remember how I went home along the damp sweet-scented lanes through the grey mist of the rain, thinking of the mown field and Elizabeth Banks and many, many more; and that night, when the sky had cleared and the nightingale sang, I looked out at the moon riding at anchor, a silver boat in a still blue sea ablaze with the headlights of the stars, and the saying of the herdsman of Tekoa came to me-as it has come oftentimes since:-
Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out upon the face of earth; the Lord is His name.
CHAPTER II
THIS garden is an epitome of peace; sun and wind, rain, flowers, and birds gather me into the blessedness of their active harmony. The world holds no wish for me, now that I have come home to die with my own people, for verify I think that the sap of gra.s.s and trees must run in my veins, so steady is their pull upon my heart-strings. London claimed all my philosophy, but the country gives all, and asks of me only the warm receptivity of a child in its mother's arms.
When I lie in my cool light room on the garden level, I look across the bright gra.s.s-_il verde smalto_-to a great red rose bush in lavish disarray against the dark cypress. Near by, amid a tangle of many-hued corn-flowers I see the promise of coming lilies, the sudden crimson of a solitary paeony; and in lowlier state against the poor parched earth glow the golden cups of the eschseholtzias. Beyond the low hedge lies pasture bright with b.u.t.tercups, where the cattle feed. Farther off, where the scythe has been busy, are sheep, clean and shorn, with merry, well-grown lambs; and in the farthest field I can see the great horses moving in slow steady pace as the farmer turns his furrow.
The birds are noisy comrades and old friends, from the lark which chants the dew-steeped morning, to the nightingale that breaks the silence of the most wonderful nights. I hear the wisdom of the rooks in the great elms; the lifting lilt of the linnet, and the robin's quaint little summer song. The starlings chatter ceaselessly, their queer strident voices harsh against the melodious gossip of the other birds; the martins shrill softly as they swoop to and fro busied with their nesting under the caves; thrush and blackbird vie in friendly rivalry like the Meister-singer of old; sometimes I hear the drawling cry of a peac.o.c.k strayed from the great house, or the laugh of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r; and at night the hunting note of the owl reaches me as he sweeps by in search of prey.
To-day I am out again; and the great sycamore showers honey and flowers on me as I lie beneath it. Sometimes a bee falls like an over-ripe fruit, and waits awhile to clean his pollen-coated legs ere he flies home to discharge his burden. He is too busy to be friendly, but his great velvety cousin is much more sociable, and stays for a gentle rub between his noisy s.h.i.+mmering wings, and a nap in the hollow of my hand, for he is an idle friendly soul with plenty of time at his own disposal and no responsibilities. Looking across I can watch the martins at work; they have a starling and a sparrow for near neighbours in the wooden gutter.
One nest is already complete all but the coping, the other two are a-building: I wonder whether I or they will be first to go south through the mist.
This great tree is a world in itself, and the denizens appear full of curiosity as to the Gulliver who has taken up his abode beneath it. Pale green caterpillars and spiders of all sizes come spinning down to visit me, and have to be persuaded with infinite difficulty to ascend their threads again. There are flies with beautiful iridescent wings, beetles of all shapes, some of them like tiny jewels in the sunlight. Their nomenclature is a sealed book to me; of their life and habits I know nothing; yet this is but a little corner of the cosmos I am leaving, and I feel not so much desire for the beauty to come, as a great longing to open my eyes a little wider during the time which remains to me in this beautiful world of G.o.d's making, where each moment tells its own tale of active, progressive life in which there is no undoing. Nature knows naught of the web of Penelope, that acme of anxious pathetic waiting, but goes steadily on in ever widening circle towards the fulfilment of the mystery of G.o.d.
There are, I take it, two master-keys to the secrets of the universe, viewed _sub specie aeternitatis_, the Incarnation of G.o.d, and the Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the pantheistic little man of contemptible speech, that ”all things are ours,” yea, even unto the third heaven.
I have lost my voracious appet.i.te for books; their language is less plain than scent and song and the wind in the trees; and for me the clue to the next world lies in the wisdom of earth rather than in the learning of men. ”_Libera me ab fuscina Hophni_,” prayed the good Bishop fearful of religious greed. I know too much, not too little; it is realisation that I lack, wherefore I desire these last days to confirm in myself the sustaining goodness of G.o.d, the love which is our continuing city, the New Jerusalem whose length, breadth, and height are all one. It is a time of exceeding peace. There is a place waiting for me under the firs in the quiet churchyard; thanks to my poverty I have no worldly anxieties or personal dispositions; and I am rich in friends, many of them unknown to me, who lavishly supply my needs and make it ideal to live on the charity of one's fellow-men. I am most gladly in debt to all the world; and to Earth, my mother, for her great beauty.
I can never remember the time when I did not love her, this mother of mine with her wonderful garments and ordered loveliness, her tender care and patient bearing of man's burden. In the earliest days of my lonely childhood I used to lie chin on hand amid the milkmaids, red sorrel, and heavy spear-gra.s.s listening to her many voices, and above all to the voice of the little brook which ran through the meadows where I used to play: I think it has run through my whole life also, to lose itself at last, not in the great sea but in the river that maketh glad the City of G.o.d. Valley and plain, mountain and fruitful field; the lark's song and the speedwell in the gra.s.s; surely a man need not sigh for greater loveliness until he has read something more of this living letter, and knelt before that earth of which he is the only confusion.