The falling of March rain upon the roof; sunshine, with the notes of the returning birds; the cawing of the rooks, and the soft ripple of the brook—even Madge was subdued by the majesty of it all and forgot to rail at the Kaiser, or to storm in misplaced aspirates at the Germans. A world beyond hate was with us, where it was good to be.
The end was hardly different from the days that went before; there was no motion, no outburst, only a quiet ceasing of that which had hardly been breathing. Our departing guest folded her wrinkled hands upon her breast herself, as if to save us trouble, and so I found her. Who was she? Who belonged to her? Where are the children and grandchildren who should have been gathered about her bed?
The doctor and the village nurse took charge of her; when she was ready for burial, more quiet than earth itself,—one never knows quiet until one sees it so,—I put roses beside her; one of the county ladies keeps me supplied from her conservatory. Yet I hesitated; it seemed wrong to recall in this presence any mere tangible and visible beauty, or aught from the world of things. The lovely contours and outlines, the perfume of the roses reproached me, as if I were pursuing her to bring her back to mere self, hampering her escape. With her we seemed to be swept away into some great consciousness that meant relief from individual sorrow,—sharing her rest, a repose so deep that it rested us for all the days to come.
Madge mourned over her as if it were her own mother,—I hardly know why: could it have been merely the three days of trying to care for her? Or was she touched, in some depth of her nature never reached before, by the grandeur of that loneliness?
There was a brief service in the little church on the hill, a sound of song, of praying; but nothing in the burial service could quite express the pathos of that moment when we buried some one's mother, not even knowing her name. We left her in the churchyard, within hearing of the stream, where deep shadows fall on grave after grave. This cold winter grass which grows above the other graves will soon, with the quickening of spring, cover hers also; already it is freshening, and crocuses peep out here and there.
There is no name to put on a stone at her head. It is perhaps at best folly to mark the resting-places of the dead, yet I had a feeling that no token of respect must be lacking, and I begged that an old grey tombstone, standing by the churchyard wall, a stone so old that all that was carved on it has been worn away, might be placed at her head. It has told the passing of one human soul, and shall tell that of another; in its grey, fine-worn beauty it symbolizes the vast impersonality of the end.
I come here now even oftener than I used. Surely death has never appeared so gentle, so much a member of the family, as in these English churchyards with their sweet hominess. It seems fitting that we meet "My sister, the Death of the Body" on these grass-grown paths which wear a look of every day and common happenings. The little river, the lichen-grown stones, the sense of long continuance, give one a feeling that there are no gaps, no fissures between life and death, that the sight of the eyes slips inevitably into the vision of the soul. The sky seems near in England, with the crumbling grey of old Norman tower and churchyard wall touching its veiled blue, and the low white clouds almost within reach; the old home-like look of the flat stones makes one feel as if the sleepers are still, as it were, sitting on the threshold, or on the old bench by the door. There is no sense of distance or separation, no feeling of far away.
It is not sad to leave her here, now when the whole earth seems one great family of the sorrowing, where the children and the grandchildren of many other folk are so near.
May 20. Spring, with the thawing of the icicles, and the sunshine growing warmer on the southern wall of the house,—spring comes back in the old and lovely way to a world never in such anguish before. What an April, to bring the cowardly murder of soldiers in the trenches by volumes of poisonous gas! What a May, to bring theLusitaniamassacre of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children at sea! What a Germany, quite, quite mad:
"O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown,The soldier's, scholar's——"
"O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown,The soldier's, scholar's——"
"O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown,
The soldier's, scholar's——"
but I am not quoting correctly and am too busy to look up the lines. I dare not even try to speak of my sense of these things; words are lacking to express it, but surely this marks the parting of the ways. To me it seems that the time has come for the nations of the earth—would that my own would join them—to band together once more in a holy crusade and do battle with the Pagan, not for the tomb of our Lord, but for the faith He taught.
As time goes on, I see more clearly what the real England stands for. My mind works slowly, for I am but a practical American; it isn't as if I were a thinker like yourself, who could reason things out on purely intellectual grounds. The war between my great love of England and my indignant sense of things that are wrong gives way to something more impersonal, as I have more chance to see the way in which her customs serve humanity. Complete fulfillment of her great purposes has not yet been achieved, yet surely the human race has got no further: liberty for the individual, fair play,—these watchwords of England are the hope of the human race. What other land could rule many alien peoples and make them so proudly content? As England has kept faith with the past, she has, barring some great mistakes, kept faith with humanity. The recent magnificent bravery of the Canadians in the battles with flaming gas only intensifies the splendour of the voluntary tribute of England's colonies to England in distress. Earth has not seen the like of this empire resting on the will of man; from the four quarters of the globe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, they come sailing swiftly home, counting it great gain to die for that for which she stands. It means that at the heart of England is something too precious to lose, a faith in the working possibility of human freedom. Crude races, races old and outworn, need to learn at her feet the practical way of making good this immemorial hope of the race. Under her rule, the individual has his chance of self-government; if he fails to take it, falling into the net of sloth and old habit as he often does in England, the fault is his own. His individual conscience is left him; he is not compelled to become a soulless cog in a gigantic conscienceless mechanism.
I do not care what Mr. Asquith has done wrong; what Mr. Joseph Chamberlain did wrong; what King George the Third and all the Georges have done or failed to do: I trust this people as I trust no other. Guilty of sins and blunders they may be and are, but the blunder is followed by the honest effort to find again and do the right; you come down always to a groundwork of character, sincerity, integrity. England has been in a way the conscience of the world. What other race-name is a word to conjure with? All over the earth where confusion comes, it is whispered: "The troubles are dying down; the English are drawing near." And in the councils of the world, her voice has been the great arbiter of right and wrong.
No one here now can doubt that England is going through that great anguish wherein the soul of a people is re-born. The unity, the calm, the quickening determination are part of a great spring-time that will lead, God grant, to harvest days of peace. There is slow knitting up of the sinews of war; more and more her sons respond to the call which still leaves them free to choose; old England is getting ready as ever, resolved, incredulous of defeat; the spring knows it; the rooks know it, busy in their elm tree parliament. The great sorrow and the great endeavour have turned the very soil of the country into holy ground. Among my bonfires of spring,—for I like to keep that old, religious rite of purification,—I burned half a dozen volumes of recent English fiction, decadent, erotic; a volume or two of flippant and sensational criticism; and one of affected futurist poetry, or some brand like unto it. They belong to the England whose follies and foibles are being burned in a great fire of affliction; they are not worthy of this great England that is emerging from the flame.
As I write, the tinkle of the English sheep bells from afar comes like the very sound of peace.
February, with the vanishing of the icicles, brought snowdrops and crocuses. All kinds of growing things of which I had not dreamed came peeping up in this old garden: crocuses, purple and gold, grow in a little clump where the wind just fails to reach them; royal daffodils nod and sway, or stand erect and golden, those from new planting outshining the rest. In March the violets were out, and primroses followed; the pony's meadow is full of them, deep in the grass; and these are only a part of the lovely procession of flowers,—bluebells, anemones, and unnumbered others.
To me it seemed that the birds came very early,—birds that are strangers to me, birds that I know; and we were glad once more in the companionship of wings. I was thankful when the swallows came, circling, flying high, flying low; wrens, old friends of mine, are building under my porch roof; a merry little blue tit, a friend quite new, disports himself among the leaves. I have heard the cuckoo calling, calling beyond the stream; you were the first to tell me that this was the cuckoo's note. English larks are very near neighbours; every day I can hear them singing at "heaven's gate."
We have all been as busy as bees since the melting of the snow, humans and animals alike. Back with the first suggestion of warmer sunshine Hengist and Horsa began to crow; alas for William the Conqueror, who will never crow again! and my many queens of the hen-yard began to lay and cackle as boastfully as in times of peace. Every living thing came crawling out of hole and hiding-place and took up its task; the little gingerbread woman came back to the lych gate to sit in the sun; Puck, once more one of the family, as he grazes beyond the stream, trotted merrily to Shepperton again and again to bring seeds and young plants, for I intend to have a garden that will astonish Peter when Peter comes back from the war. It seems to me that there is an added touch of determination in the pony's gait and in the toss of his shaggy head since he became a hero of the war, an upholder of the kingdom, a defender of the faith.
Madge is the busiest of all living things and will not be idle for a moment for fear of "thinking long." Never was there such a be-scrubbed, be-polished, shining house as the little red house! I tremble for my own face when I see her with the soap and sand, the brass polish, the silver polish, the long-handled mop, and the wooden pail. It is Madge with a changed face, with deepening lines between the eyes, a worrying, anxious Madge, who steals the newspaper and reads it in the kitchen before she brings it to me. I cannot help noticing that she talks less and less of the glory of England and more and more about Peter. Laconic post cards with peculiar spelling tell us that Peter is alive and well in the trenches. Peter, because of his old experience as soldier, was allowed to go speedily to the front, and is now at close quarters with the enemy.
In earliest April, the little red house sheltered the grand adventure, the greatest adventure, for death seems safe and easy by the side of the great adventure of being born. I had a whole family quartered here, father, mother, and two small winsome children, boy and girl; we tucked them away where we could. And a wee man-child came into the world during their stay here, with much pomp and circumstance and attendance of mine hostess from the Inn, and of the village doctor, whose lot in life has evidently been to stand helpless and aghast, watching mortals who will venture into a world which seems to be no safe place for them. If it had rested with him, small Jean would have had no chance at all; but Madge and mine hostess came to the rescue, and all went well, on to that first little weird lonely cry.
It was little bigger than the Atom. It slept, during all its first days, a troubled, puckered sleep. Don worshipped it, and whenever it cried, gave an anxious whine or a sharp short bark. In the Atom's loft I unearthed a prehistoric cradle that may have been left by the Danes or the Saxons. Of course I know that rocking is most unhygienic, but I thought that if this little, frightened fugitive mother found any comfort in rocking her baby by the fireside, rock it she should. It isn't, I believe, supposed to injure anything except the brain, and the brain counts for so little nowadays in the contemporary ideal of development that I am sure small Jean will have enough left to play his part in the civilization of the future. He had, I noticed, square and sturdy little fists, and he may be some day one of the many who will fight for England, when England's guests defend the door so generously opened to shelter them. The Atom insisted upon sharing the cradle; why not? It had discovered the cradle in the first place and had a certain right to it. So it curled up in a corner, and Jean gurgled and grew fat and rosy in its companionship. It was a joy to have a real baby in the house while the birds were building, and the spring flowers budding, and the young ferns uncurling in the forest.
The father of the family was a farmer whose house and barns had been wiped out of existence within ten minutes one cruel winter day. Mine host has found a place for him; another man is needed on one of the farms belonging to the estate; a small house there was vacant, and thither they have moved, bag and baggage, baby and baby's cradle. They wanted the Atom, but the Atom and I have lived through such hard days together, cheek to cheek, that I could not let it go. The new house is not far, quite within Puck distance, and Don and I make frequent calls.
May 30. May, with its young leaves, its radiance of blossoming fruit trees, its spring greenness,—never have I known such green,—lingers yet, with its sweet spring chill and its ripple of slow English streams among the grasses. Such a world of beauty, and a world of sorrow! Petals of apple blossom drift even through the open doorway, and everywhere is the murmur of the little wind among the leaves. I sit in my garden, under my apple trees, or walk where the sunshine filters down, clear and still, through the lime trees in the lane, thinking of many things. Close by the stream, at my garden's edge, grow palest purple irises, and at times they seem spirit lilies, delicate as light, growing beside you in your far place.
A few days ago Don dug one of your books out of the case,—he loves to touch them with his faithful paw. It was Dante'sParadisoand as it fell open I saw that you had marked certain words with my name: "dolce guida e cara," "sweet guide and dear." That was too beautiful a thing to say of a mere mortal woman.
I find myself thinking consciously less about you as the days go on; a touch in the darkness, a gleam across the stars, a whisper by the river,—so you come back to me; but the different things we said and did do not return with quite such sharp distinctness and sharp pain. Yet I exist more and more in you, living your life and mine too, spirit to spirit.
Loneliness seems forever impossible since you went out and left the gate ajar, and all the world came in, and all its sorrows. The griefs that enter, in some strange way solace my own, and this increasing sense of the anguish of the world is lightened and lifted by sharing it with other folk. It is good to feel so passionately and so utterly a part of all that lives and throbs and suffers. Though the life that goes on in the little red house must inevitably lack something of the human warmth and joy that we should have known together, more life and greater enters, I think, than would have been ours if our old dream of happiness had come true. One can bear whatever happens, so long as it makes one understand.
I started out in loneliness to tell my story, to you and to myself, for comfort in the long silences, and lo! I have no story; I do not seem to be merely I; I have gone out of myself and cannot find my way back. In this relieving greatness is, perhaps, dim foreknowledge of what is to come. I have nothing left to ask of life, no demands to make: a little service, work, and sleep,—and then?
June 15. Peter, can it be Peter, with that expression upon his face? He is really here, and a transfiguring look of suffering has worn away forever a something of earth and of stubbornness,—a Peter who seems to have gained greatly in strength and in stature, although one arm is gone, and an empty sleeve hangs by his side. If I had known how to salute I should have saluted Peter when I saw him home from the war; mentally I do it whenever I see him working with his one poor hand in my garden beds. One of the first things he said to me when he came home was that he was going to Shepperton to try to get work that a one-armed man could do, selling papers or something of the kind. But Peter, who has faced the enemy and the poisonous gases, flinched before my countenance when I heard this. Peter knows now that the little red house and the garden can never get on without him.
It is odd to see the animals with him; Don cannot be attentive enough, but you would expect a dog to understand. Puck is a wonder, standing as meekly as a lamb to let himself be harnessed by a one-armed man, though he used to dance an ancient British war-dance as the straps went on. The old racial love of fair fighting shines out in him; man to man it used to be, or man to pony, when both were able-bodied, but he will take no advantage of a handicap. He seldom shies now, even at a feather or a floating leaf, but he watches constantly in every direction, waiting for some great danger in which he can comport himself with perfect self-control for the sake of a one-armed man; defying the whole modern era to invent a mechanism that can frighten him. I should like an equestrian statue of Pucknotshying at a Zeppelin!
Madge is pathetic; she has lost her old moorings of prejudice and conviction and sails in an uncharted sea of life. Church and State are to her only a shade less reprehensible than the Germans, since Peter came home without an arm. While Peter, completely changed, and loyal to the government, for the country he has served so well is his country indeed, sits with her on the bench by the kitchen door in the twilight, full of affectionate talk of "Kitchener" and "Bobs"—his grief over Lord Roberts' death was both sincere and personal—Madge mutters fiercely against the 'Ouse of Lords for its selfishness and its incompetence. If women ruled, all would be different! Her condemnation of the government would suggest that she is in a fair way to become both an anarchist and a suffragette. She never would have let Peter go a step to war if she had supposed that he would be wounded.
Peter came home, not with a Victoria Cross, but with an Iron Cross, and I can never tell whether he is joking or in earnest when he explains his possession of it. When I asked him how he got it, he replied: "I bestowed it upon meself, Miss." It seems that he had taken it from a German with whom he had fought in a terrible bayonet charge.
"He was a man, he was," Peter says admiringly. "If I got the better of the man who had earned it, it stands to reason that I'm a better man than him and fit to wear it." So Peter wears his Iron Cross, to the wonder and admiration of the farmers baiting their horses at the Inn, the blacksmith's eleven children, and the inhabitants in general of our village. How much he tells those eager listeners of the horrors he has seen I do not know, but sometimes from that bench by the kitchen door, I hear fragments of his tales of suffering that make me sick and faint. Yet he is very reticent in regard to it, having evidently a feeling that he must protect others from knowing what he has known. As I make his acquaintance anew I realize that his great loss is truly exceeding gain; there is more of his real self in his wakened mind and soul than he lost in his arm.
But Peter, invalided home, returned not alone. It seemed to me, as he came up the walk, that he was over-heavily weighed down by luggage, though he had a brother soldier to help him.
"If you please, 'm," said Peter diffidently, when our first greetings were over, "I've taken the liberty of bringing some one 'ome."
"Nothing could please me better," I said, holding out a welcoming hand to the tall soldier at his side.
"If you please, 'm," said Peter, grinning,—if heroes can be said to grin,—"she's inside."
He opened the big old-fashioned basket he was carrying, made of osier, a kind that I remember seeing in my grandmother's attic many years ago, and there—O Pharaoh's daughter, how I understand you now!—was a little child of perhaps ten months, asleep. She had soft dark hair, hands a bit too thin for a baby, eyes that proved to be, when she wakened and opened them, big and brown; and a mouth that had learned and not forgotten, like so many sorrowful mouths to-day, how to smile.
"Where did you find her?" Madge and I cried out in one breath.
"She was in the village where I was taken when I was wounded; you will hexcuse me, 'm, but I cannot say its name, I really cannot. A woman had taken charge of her for weeks; she had been found quite deserted by the roadside, I believe, 'm, earlier in the war, when people were trying to escape from the henemy. The nurse used to bring her into the 'ospital just to let the soldiers see her."
Peter was disappointed that I could not speak, but speak I could not.
"She's a French baby, 'm," he added. "I took a great fancy to her, and when I came away I told them——"
"What did you tell them, Peter?" I asked sternly. The little thing had grasped my finger and was trying to pull herself up. It was the first touch from any of my fugitives that seemed to come from my very own, and I knew that the French baby had come into my life to stay.
"Knowing your 'abits, Miss, I told them I thought I knew a good 'ome for her, so they sent her on with a nurse who was coming back, reserved for me, as it were. They kindly allowed me to bring her down from London meself, but I 'ad difficulty in 'olding her, so I took out me clothes and put them in a paper, and she fitted very nicely in the basket."
Peter still mistook my silence for hesitation.
"I thought if you didn't care to adopt her, I would, 'm; but from what they told me about her clothing and all and from the look of her, I fancy she's rather your class than mine, 'm."
"I couldn't aspire to your class, Peter," I said; "you belong among the heroes. We will all adopt her, you and Madge and I and Don and Puck and the Atom and our English queens. Among us all she will get a well-rounded training."
The stream is rippling past with its old music; the pony is grazing in the meadow; my June roses glow within my garden, yellow, white, and deep red; and still the vast sea of human sorrow breaks, breaks against my garden wall, and no one knows whither its tides may draw. Is it thus that the whole earth must gain the finer knowledge that comes alone through suffering and learn how false are the gods it has been following with swift feet?
I hardly dare confess my foolishness, but when I saw Peter that day of his return come down the village street with a tall khaki-clad figure beside him, I thought for one whole blissful, awful moment that he had found you, living, and had brought you home. Through many such moments I could not live; all the joy and the anguish of time and of eternity were crowded into it. Yet even in that flash I knew that no mere human contact could ever bring you so close as you are now to me. Separated by walls of mere flesh and bone, there could no longer be this entire one-ness of soul with soul. You, belovèd, are forever too near to touch. What death may be I know not, but it is something far different from what we mortals think.
Then I saw that Peter's companion was only another British Tommy, who needed my hospitality; and I helped make ready his beef and beer with great gladness in my heart.
… Content for you. Men from old time have died for the faith they held, and men have died for dreams. I know no faith, no dream better worth dying for than this for which you gave your life, the dream of human freedom. It is our race pride that a passion for liberty was kindled early in our remotest forebears; there is no nobler task than keeping this divine spark alive upon the human hearth. In my moments of insight I know that life has no greater boon than a chance to die for one's faith, and you have died for this. I would not take from you, even if I could, your hour of glory, your great hour of death.
THE END