The Roadmender

I

I am no longer a roadmender; the stretch of white highway which leads to the end of the world will know me no more; the fields and hedgerows, grass and leaf stiff with the crisp rime of winter's breath, lie beyond my horizon; the ewes in the folding, their mysterious eyes quick with the consciousness of coming motherhood, answer another's voice and hand; while I lie here, not in the lonely companionship of my expectations, but where the shadow is bright with kindly faces and gentle hands, until one kinder and gentler still carries me down the stairway into the larger room.

But now the veil was held aside and one went by crowned with the majesty of years, wearing the ermine of an unstained rule, the purple of her people's loyalty. Nations stood with bated breath to see her pass in the starlit mist of her children's tears; a monarch – greatest of her time; an empress – conquered men called mother; a woman – Englishmen cried queen; still the crowned captive of her people's heart – the prisoner of love.

The night-goers passed under my window in silence, neither song nor shout broke the welcome dark; next morning the workmen who went by were strangely quiet.

Did they think of how that legend would disappear, and of all it meant, as they paid their pennies at the coffee-stall? The feet rarely know the true value and work of the head; but all Englishmen have been and will be quick to acknowledge and revere Victoria by the grace of God a wise woman, a great and loving mother.

Years ago, I, standing at a level crossing, saw her pass. The train slowed down, and she caught sight of the gatekeeper's little girl who had climbed the barrier. Such a smile as she gave her! And then I caught a quick startled gesture as she slipped from my vision; I thought afterwards it was that she feared the child might fall. Mother first, then Queen; even so rest came to her – not in one of the royal palaces, but in her own home, surrounded by the immediate circle of her nearest and dearest, while the world kept watch and ward.

I, a shy lover of the fields and woods, longed always, should a painless passing be vouchsafed me, to make my bed on the fragrant pine needles in the aloneness of a great forest; to lie once again as I had lain many a time, bathed in the bitter sweetness of the sun-blessed pines, lapped in the manifold silence; my ear attuned to the wind of Heaven with its call from the Cities of Peace. In sterner mood, when Love's hand held a scourge, I craved rather the stress of the moorland with its bleaker mind imperative of sacrifice. To rest again under the lee of Rippon Tor swept by the strong peat-smelling breeze; to stare untired at the long cloud-shadowed reaches, and watch the mist-wraiths huddle and shrink round the stones of blood; until my sacrifice too was accomplished, and my soul had fled. A wild waste moor; a vast void sky; and naught between heaven and earth but man, his sin-glazed eyes seeking afar the distant light of his own heart.

With years came counsels more profound, and the knowledge that man was no mere dweller in the woods to follow the footsteps of the piping god, but an integral part of an organised whole, in which Pan too has his fulfilment. The wise Venetians knew; and read pantheism into Christianity when they set these words round Ezekiel's living creatures in the altar vault of St Mark's: —

"Thou shalt have none other gods but me." If man had been able to keep this one commandment perfectly the other nine would never have been written; instead he has comprehensively disregarded it, and perhaps never more than now in the twentieth century. Ah, well! this world, in spite of all its sinning, is still the Garden of Eden where the Lord walked with man, not in the cool of evening, but in the heat and stress of the immediate working day. There is no angel now with naming sword to keep the way of the Tree of Life, but tapers alight morning by morning in the Hostel of God to point us to it; and we, who are as gods knowing good and evil, partake of that fruit "whereof whoso eateth shall never die"; the greatest gift or the most awful penalty – Eternal Life.

I then, with my craving for tree and sky, held that a great capital with its stir of life and death, of toil and strife and pleasure, was an ill place for a sick man to wait in; a place to shrink from as a child shrinks from the rude blow of one out of authority. Yet here, far from moor and forest, hillside and hedgerow, in the family sitting-room of the English-speaking peoples, the London much misunderstood, I find the fulfilment by antithesis of all desire. For the loneliness of the moorland, there is the warmth and companionship of London's swift beating heart. For silence there is sound – the sound and stir of service – for the most part far in excess of its earthly equivalent. Against the fragrant incense of the pines I set the honest sweat of the man whose lifetime is the measure of his working day. "He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?" wrote Blessed John, who himself loved so much that he beheld the Lamb as it had been slain from the beginning when Adam fell, and the City of God with light most precious. The burden of corporate sin, the sword of corporate sorrow, the joy of corporate righteousness; thus we become citizens in the Kingdom of God, and companions of all his creatures. "It is not good that the man should be alone," said the Lord God.

I live now as it were in two worlds, the world of sight, and the world of sound; and they scarcely ever touch each other. I hear the grind of heavy traffic, the struggle of horses on the frost-breathed ground, the decorous jolt of omnibuses, the jangle of cab bells, the sharp warning of bicycles at the corner, the swift rattle of costers' carts as they go south at night with their shouting, goading crew. All these things I hear, and more; but I see no road, only the silent river of my heart with its tale of wonder and years, and the white beat of seagulls' wings in strong inquiring flight.

Sometimes there is naught to see on the waterway but a solitary black hull, a very Stygian ferry-boat, manned by a solitary figure, and moving slowly up under the impulse of the far-reaching sweeps. Then the great barges pass with their coffined treasure, drawn by a small self-righteous steam-tug. Later, lightened of their load, and waiting on wind and tide, I see them swooping by like birds set free; tawny sails that mind me of red-roofed Whitby with its northern fleet; black sails as of some heedless Theseus; white sails that sweep out of the morning mist "like restless gossameres." They make the bridge, which is just within my vision, and then away past Westminster and Blackfriars where St Paul's great dome lifts the cross high over a self-seeking city; past Southwark where England's poet illuminates in the scroll of divine wisdom the sign of the Tabard; past the Tower with its haunting ghosts of history; past Greenwich, fairy city, caught in the meshes of riverside mist; and then the salt and speer of the sea, the companying with great ships, the fresh burden.

At night I see them again, silent, mysterious; searching the darkness with unwinking yellow stare, led by a great green light. They creep up under the bridge which spans the river with its watching eyes, and vanish, crying back a warning note as they make the upper reach, or strident hail, as a chain of kindred phantoms passes, ploughing a contrary tide.

Throughout the long watches of the night I follow them; and in the early morning they slide by, their eyes pale in the twilight; while the stars flicker and fade, and the gas lamps die down into a dull yellow blotch against the glory and glow of a new day.

II

February is here, February fill-dyke; the month of purification, of cleansing rains and pulsing bounding streams, and white mist clinging insistent to field and hedgerow so that when her veil is withdrawn greenness may make us glad.

The river has been uniformly grey of late, with no wind to ruffle its surface or to speed the barges dropping slowly and sullenly down with the tide through a blurring haze. I watched one yesterday, its useless sails half-furled and no sign of life save the man at the helm. It drifted stealthily past, and a little behind, flying low, came a solitary seagull, grey as the river's haze – a following bird.

Once again I lay on my back in the bottom of the tarry old fishing smack, blue sky above and no sound but the knock, knock of the waves, and the thud and curl of falling foam as the old boat's blunt nose breasted the coming sea. Then Daddy Whiddon spoke.

"A follerin' bürrd," he said.

I got up, and looked across the blue field we were ploughing into white furrows. Far away a tiny sail scarred the great solitude, and astern came a gull flying slowly close to the water's breast.

Daddy Whiddon waved his pipe towards it.

"A follerin' bürrd," he said, again; and again I waited; questions were not grateful to him.

"There be a carpse there, sure enough, a carpse driftin' and shiftin' on the floor of the sea. There be those as can't rest, poor sawls, and her'll be mun, her'll be mun, and the sperrit of her is with the bürrd."

The clumsy boom swung across as we changed our course, and the water ran from us in smooth reaches on either side: the bird flew steadily on.

"What will the spirit do?" I said.

The old man looked at me gravely.

"Her'll rest in the Lard's time, in the Lard's gude time – but now her'll just be follerin' on with the bürrd."

The gull was flying close to us now, and a cold wind swept the sunny sea. I shivered: Daddy looked at me curiously.

"There be reason enough to be cawld if us did but knaw it, but I be mos' used to 'em, poor sawls." He shaded his keen old blue eyes, and looked away across the water. His face kindled. "There be a skule comin', and by my sawl 'tis mackerel they be drivin'."

I watched eagerly, and saw the dark line rise and fall in the trough of the sea, and, away behind, the stir and rush of tumbling porpoises as they chased their prey.

Again we changed our tack, and each taking an oar, pulled lustily for the beach.

"Please God her'll break inshore," said Daddy Whiddon; and he shouted the news at the idle men waiting who hailed us.

In a moment all was stir, for the fishing 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 three-fold 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 the 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.

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 tassels, whereas my little tree stands stark and uncompromising, with its horde of sooty sparrows cockney 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 shiny 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 God.

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 threshold for their footfall: but God help the soul that bars its own door! It is kicking against the pricks of Divine ordinance, the ordinance of a triune God; 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 God 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 passing 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-hoarded 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 God.

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 grass. This same grass 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 grass was a travesty, he added on his own account dainty little tussocks, and softened the hard line into a tufted carpet, the grass growing irregularly, bent at will by the wind.

The result from the standpoint of conventional art is indeed disastrous; but my sympathy and gratitude 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 wind-swept glory.

The sea has its crested waves of recognisable form; the river its eddy and swirl and separate vortices; but the grass! The wind bloweth where it listeth and the grass 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 God.

It is a natural part of civilisation's lust 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.

It is a delightful book to leave about, with its vellum binding, dainty ribbons, and the hallmark of a great publisher's name. But when we seek within we find love with its thousand voices and wayward moods, its shy graces and seemly reticences, love which has its throne and robe of state as well as the garment of the beggar maid, love which is before time was, which knew the world when the stars took up their courses, presented to us in gushing outpourings, the appropriate language of a woman's heart to the boor she delights to honour.

"It is woman who is the glory of man," says the author of 'The House of Wisdom and Love,' "Regina mundi, greater, because so far the less; and man is her head, but only as he serves his queen." Set this sober aphorism against the school girl love-making which kisses a man's feet and gaily refuses him the barren honour of having loved her first.

There is scant need for the apologia which precedes the letters; a few pages dispels the fear that we are prying into another's soul. As for the authorship, there is a woman's influence, an artist's poorly concealed bias in the foreign letters; and for the rest a man's blunders – so much easier to see in another than to avoid oneself – writ large from cover to cover. King Cophetua, who sends his "profoundly grateful remembrances," has most surely written the letters he would wish to receive.

"Mrs Meynell!" cries one reviewer, triumphantly. Nay, the saints be good to us, what has Mrs Meynell in common with the "Englishwoman's" language, style, or most unconvincing passion? Men can write as from a woman's heart when they are minded to do so in desperate earnestness – there is Clarissa Harlowe and Stevenson's Kirstie, and many more to prove it; but when a man writes as the author of the "Love Letters" writes, I feel, as did the painter of the frieze, that pattern-making has gone too far and included that which, like the grass, should be spared such a convention.

"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess, "and the moral of that is – 'Be what you would seem to be' – or, if you'd like to put it more simply – 'never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'" And so by way of the Queen's garden I come back to my room again.

My heart's affections are still centred on my old attic, with boarded floor and whitewashed walls, where the sun blazoned a frieze of red and gold until he travelled too far towards the north, the moon streamed in to paint the trees in inky wavering shadows, and the stars flashed their glory to me across the years. But now sun and moon greet me only indirectly: and under the red roses hang pictures, some of them the dear companions of my days. Opposite me is the Arundel print of the Presentation, painted by the gentle "Brother of the Angels." Priest Simeon, a stately figure in green and gold, great with prophecy, gazes adoringly at the Bambino he holds with fatherly care. Our Lady, in robe of red and veil of shadowed purple, is instinct with light despite the sombre colouring, as she stretches out hungering, awe-struck hands for her soul's delight. St Joseph, dignified guardian and servitor, stands behind, holding the Sacrifice of the Poor to redeem the First-begotten.

St Peter Martyr and the Dominican nun, gazing in rapt contemplation at the scene, are not one whit surprised to find themselves in the presence of eternal mysteries. In the Entombment, which hangs on the opposite wall, St Dominic comes round the corner full of grievous amaze and tenderest sympathy, but with no sense of shock or intrusion, for was he not "famigliar di Cristo"? And so he takes it all in; the stone bed empty and waiting; the Beloved cradled for the last time on His mother's knees to be washed, lapped round, and laid to rest as if He were again the Babe of Bethlehem. He sees the Magdalen anointing the Sacred Feet; Blessed John caring for the living and the Dead; and he, Dominic – hound of the Lord – having his real, living share in the anguish and hope, the bedding of the dearest Dead, who did but leave this earth that He might manifest Himself more completely.